—by Liana Alpino
On a seemingly normal Saturday night, I showed up to a wedding to perform for a ceremony. I set up, tuned, warmed up, and was ready to begin the prelude music. As I began to settle into the beautiful opening of “A Thousand Years,” I heard a wrong note. I checked to see if I played the wrong chord—nope. I checked to see if I had the wrong pedal setup—nope. I then noticed that my F pedal was looking a little off and upon further inspection realized it wasn’t moving properly. Either a mechanism on my pedal had come apart or I had broken a pedal rod!
Frantic, I alerted the wedding coordinator, because frankly, at that moment, I didn’t know what else to do. The wonderful wedding venue staff came over to crowd around me so I wasn’t alone in my state of panic. We finally found a tiny screw on the ground that had come off of my harp, but I didn’t know from where. The staff helped me tip my harp over and try several ways to fix it in on the spot. I am so thankful to them for helping me to remain calm. This has never happened to me in my 20-plus years of harp playing.
Ultimately, it just wasn’t repairable on the spot. Luckily, they hadn’t let guests in yet, so not that many people saw my struggle. I ended up only playing a few minutes of prelude music and fudged a bunch of well-known melodies that the couple had chosen—“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Stand by Me,” and “Over The Rainbow”—for the ceremony by omitting all my F notes. My recessional for the couple was in the key of F, so at the last minute I asked the DJ to play it over the speakers. Literally one of my worst harp fears and nightmares became a reality, but somehow I made it through. Looking back, I wish I had tried to play some things enharmonically. I think my brain was so frantic that the thought didn’t even cross my mind.
Later, I was coached by my amazing friend on how to fix the problem. I had never even so much as removed the base of my harp before, so I was quite nervous. Luckily, I could do the fix myself—I just had to get my pedal rod coupling to line back up (forcefully) and to get the screw back into place. It was a bit difficult, and I had to use the tiniest screwdriver ever, but was able to fix it. What was maybe more difficult for me was getting the base back on my harp. I lost several pedal slot felts in the process, but in the grand scheme of things, I am happy and my harp is back to normal. •
