Karen Mueller
Karen Mueller is one of the top autoharp and mountain dulcimer players performing and teaching today. Her exciting and innovative performing style, featuring Appalachian, Celtic and contemporary music, has been applauded by critics and audiences from LA to Boston. Bluegrass Unlimited magazine has said "Karen Mueller's touch, timing and taste make her a true virtuoso. Her talent and clarity...deserve a wide audience." Karen won the 1986 International Autoharp Championship and was a National Dulcimer finalist in 1985, both at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. In 2006 she was inducted into the Autoharp Hall of Fame. A native of Winfield, she first attended the festival while in high school and was inspired to learn to play the autoharp and dulcimer by the performers she saw there.
She has appeared at major dulcimer, autoharp, and folk music events across the US as well as in the UK, including Walnut Valley, Augusta Heritage Center, Dulcimer U, Swannanoa, Kentucky Music Week, the Ozark Folk Center, John C. Campbell Folk School, the Mountain Laurel Autoharp Gathering, California Autoharp Gathering, Seattle Autoharp Week, Mount Dora, the Cranberry Gathering, Dulcimer Week in the Wallowas, and many more. She also teaches around 40 private students, now all online, and offers Zoom workshops for all levels on both instruments. One workshop student wrote that “Karen is a skilled, articulate teacher who is both focused and goal oriented. She has the ability to help students achieve a high level of competence in a short time frame.”
Karen’s dulcimer playing bridges many mountain dulcimer traditions to formulate her own dynamic style. She started playing the dulcimer in 1979 by learning the innovative tunes on the Pacific Rim Dulcimer Project record, featuring Neal Hellman and Force & d'Ossche. From there she began adding traditional Appalachian and Celtic music to her repertoire and developed her own arrangements of these styles, as well as pop, jazz, and original material. Her techniques range from rhythmic flatpicking and strumming to sensitive fingerpicking.
Karen has released six solo recordings and authored three music books, including Celtic Autoharp published by Mel Bay Publications, and her self-published Favorite Dulcimer Arrangements. She has also contributed selections to numerous anthology recordings, including two volumes of Masters of the Mountain Dulcimer, and Autoharp Legacy.
Her website is karenmueller.com.