“Love is in the Air” Harp Concert
February 12, 2026
35 Winans Street, East Orange
Life as a public school music teacher has taught Robbin Gordon-Cartier to deal with the unpredictable. Three days before the harp concert at East Orange’s Cicely Tyson Community School, things were not going as planned. The auditorium was occupied, delaying their first rehearsal, and a couple students had pulled out of the show at the last minute.
“It isn’t where I want it to be but you can see most of the students are “off book,” she said as the students in the final class of the day plucked an arrangement of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”
But this year, life threw her the ultimate curveball when her mother, Dee Gordon, passed away in November. The two were inseparable, she said.
“If you saw me, you saw mom,” Gordon-Cartier said. “I’m trying not to think of it too much, because I think I would lose my mind.”
Her mother was a major reason the harp program got started in the first place. Gordon was working as a secretary for the school district under superintendent Dr. John Howard who convinced Gordon-Cartier to leave a job in Elizabeth and bring her talents to the Cicely Tyson School in 1997.
The harp program is one year shy of three decades. It is an impressive span considering the never-ending threat to arts education. Out of the public schools that offer music classes, it is rare to find harp lessons because the initial investment can be steep. One instrument can cost five figures and it costs $700 just to re-string one.
In 1997, the school district stocked the Cicely Tyson School with 8 pedal harps and 15 folk harps in the first year. But those initial 23 instruments, which are still in use today, have gotten a lot of mileage since then. She now trains around 60 students and the high school students come to her twice a day for lessons. Some stay after class for lessons and she even volunteers private lessons to five of her most talented students.
Gordon-Cartier also runs a program called Harps for Life in which she rehomes donated instruments to students who might not be able to afford a $25,000 harp, giving parents a chance to see if their children show promise.
“People donate these harps because they want them to be played,” she said. “And if they don’t, I take them back. I tell them, ‘If things change and you have more time to play, you can have it back.”
Growing up in East Orange, Gordon-Cartier’s parents — Dee and Dallas Gordon — required her and two brothers to learn a musical instrument. She still remembers the fear that her parents might not fork over the money for such an expensive instrument and that is part of the motivation behind loaning them to students.
But her parents agreed and her lessons with South Orange musician and composer Leone Paulson, who taught at her home at 71 Ralston Avenue, changed the course of her life. Paulson had trained under one of the masters, Carlos Salzedo, who created one of two schools of playing.
“In the harp world, there was Carlos Salzedo or Marcel Grandjany — these were the two big schools back in the 60s,” Cartier said. “Fast forward, more than 50 years later people will ask me if I’m Salzedo or Grandjany.”
Playing the harp gave Cartier a sense of freedom as a young girl. When she was old enough, her parents would let her take the bus to her lessons in South Orange. Paulson showed her a bigger world accompanying her teacher to places like the Royal Irish Academy to further her education. Now that she is a teacher, Cartier is trying to recreate that experience with her students by bringing them on trips to the Somerset Folk Harp Festival.
Vickilda Ramon, the mother of high school sophomore, Gary, 16, said that the harp lessons have helped her autistic son flourish independently. “He found in the harp a way to regulate himself,” Ramon said.
“Robbin has been an amazing mentor,” Ramon said. “She has opportunities outside of school and he’s always willing to go with her.”
Even though 16-year-old Jazlyn left the Cicely Tyson School to attend Essex County Vocational-Technical School, she continues her harp classes with Gordon-Cartier and will attend Thursday’s concert. “She really enjoys playing — it moves her,” said Jazlyn’s mother Tameaka Gordon. “We don’t have the means to have a harp so I really appreciate that we do have the loaner harp inside the house so she can play whenever she wants.”
After class on Monday, Gordon-Cartier visited the empty auditorium to visualize the upcoming concert. Faculty at the school embraced her and gave her their condolences, sensing the weight of the circumstance.
In years past, Gordon-Cartier’s late mother would make the concert programs, decorate the auditoriums, and run the concessions. Although these tasks have been taken over this year by friends and students, there is still a feeling that someone important will be missing from the audience at Thursday’s concert. But the show, as they say, must go on.
