Future harpest who's blind.

[Biagio]

Questions are good!! I really really REALLY wish more beginners would ask them, especially the technical ones, before plunking down a lot of money!

Chris’ family has not taken down the website for some reason but as far as I know they are out of business. It’s pretty rare to see a used Caswell for sale too – those that have them love them too much! He was an amazing harp maker and an amazing musician.

OK more on design. When a harp maker sits down to a new design, he/she decides first of all on what the strings will be within the overall physical limitations: height, weight, range, purpose, etc. Once that is done, the diameters and tensions are known so he/she goes to his drafting board, CAD program, or whatever, and lays out a (hopefully) exact full scale blueprint. Or they may just copy an existing design.

So in principle, spacing may be slightly different between the string on one side of our initial reference (which is actually usually the A above middle C) and the one on the other side. And so on down and up the whole range. Just measuring a full octave in the middle is a quick and dirty way to get an idea of the overall spacing design. We’re assuming here that the designer knows his or her business of course!

All of the Dusty’s are “concert spacing” – close to what you would find on a pedal harp with those strings.

There are many good books on music theory, some for harps and some more general. Finding them in Braille may be a bit tougher but I’m sure there are some. To keep things brief here for now….

A full chord (we’ll choose a C here) would be C E G and the next C. Counting from and including that first C you have a third a fifth and an 8th (E G and the next C). There are so many types of chords (and scales for that matter) that it can get pretty mind boggling, especially if you are a jazz guitarist! I sure as heck don’t know most and really don’t want to haha.

Most beginning instruction for the lever harp assumes a C major scale since there are no sharps nor flats (no levers up) and your first chords will probably be C F and G. Volumes of tunes have been composed with just those three.

This is the point where I’ll bow out and ask more experienced players and teachers to dive in!! I know a fair amount about design but consider myself an advanced beginner at playing:-)

Biagio

[CelticKnot]

Hello, Biagio. You wrote:
A full chord (we’ll choose a C here) would be C E G and the next C. Counting from and including that first C you have a third a fifth and an 8th (E G and the next C).
Huh? Lol I can tell that It’s going to take me a while to get my head around that.

Sad to hear that Caswell has gone out of business.

Can you recommend some good music theory books for harp? I’ll find them; I actually do a lot of my reading on my iPhone, so ebooks would be more preferable, actually. Lol Braille is big and bulky. There are also Braille transcription services available if it would be better to read these books in hardcopy Braille, do to a mix of straight text and music notation. If they’re all just straight text, however, I can read them on my Braille display, which is a piece of tech that raises and lowers pins which are layed out in a row of rectangles, with 8 pins to each little rectangle; each rectangle consists of 4 rows of 2 pins each. Anyhow, the display raises and lowers these pins based on what is written, say, on a computer screen. Of course, you need to be running a piece of software called a screen reader, which talks to you and tells you what’s on the screen. The screen reader can also be silenced, so that the only way you know the output on the screen is to read the Braille display. The screen reader drives the Braille display–if you weren’t running a screen reader, the computer wouldn’t know what the heck to make of the display. I can also connect the display to my iPhone, which is awesome! Anyhow, that’s a little beyond this topic.

Thanks for the answer about the spacing on the DS harps. Good to know. 🙂

Thanks,
CelticKnot

[Biagio]

Hi Celticknot,

We number an octave (in any key) from the first note of the scale up to the eighth – one full octave. In our C chord case a low C (the root) is 1 D is 2 E is 3….. so the full chord would be notes 1 3 5 and 8 (C E G C). This holds true for any key and any eight note scale. Still in the key of C an F chord would be F A C F – the C scale intervals would now be 4 6 8 and 10. Confusing? Not so much because as harperists we also number the four fingers with the thumb being a 1.

Back to a C chord: we’d play the with fingers 4 3 2 and 1 – ring finger (#4) on the first C, next finger on the E, index finger on the G and thumb (#1) on the next C up.

How about that F chord? It’s the same shape, just different notes: F A C F. A G chord – still same shape but notes are G B D G. Let’s not complicate things any more for now which would be pretty easy to do!

Some easy beginning harp books that many use are Teach Yourself to Play the Folk Harp (Sylvia Woods) Basic Harp for Beginners (Laurie Riley) and Play the Harp Beautifully (Pam Bruner volumes 1 2 and 3). Some of these have CDs or DVDs. Of course they all have pictures and scores so that may not be entirely helpful. Some others are Ray Pool’s 3’s a Chord, Yolanda Kondonassis On Playing the Harp, Sylvia Woods Music Theory and Arranging for the Folk Harp.

I think that when you have your new harp or even before at this point you should start looking for a teacher, preferably one who is comfortable playing and teaching by ear. Some teach using Skype or something similar. I studied that way for awhile with Laurie until she moved to the same Island; incidentally she almost always plays by ear.

Skype is useful but it will not replace a good teacher, even for those of us who are sighted.

Hope that helps!

Biagio

When you get our harp or even before

[wil-weten]

This is what I would buy (in hindsight) to make a start on the harp.
* Music Music Theory and Arranging Techniques for Folk Harps (Sylvia Woods).
* Play the Harp Beautifully (1-3) Pamela Bruner.

I love Sylvia Woods’ book Music Theory and Arranging Techniques for Folk Harps.

It guided me in a easy and fun way to the core concepts of music theory and to learning to make one’s own simple harp arrangements. It contains lots of folk songs to immediately apply the new learnt theory and accompaniment patterns on. Even now, a lot of years later, this book is still of great use to me.

I am also fond of Pamela Bruner’s book series Play the Harp Beautifully, part 2 and 3 (I don’t own part 1, as I had some harping experience when buying part 2 and 3). I wonder though whether you can make sense of the book when the pictures are not visible to you. I wonder whether the optional DVD for the parts 1 and 2 might be helpful for you. Here you can download a 3 minute fragment of her DVD: http://pamelabrunermusic.com/bruner_chap3web.mov

I wholeheartedly agree with Biagio on the useful and nice books he mentions to learn the harp! Hopefully at least some of them are available in braille or can otherwise be made accessible.

Further on, you may like to have a look at the youtube clips of Ray Pool. Here: http://raypool.com/video.html you find a list of this clips. There are other great people teaching through video, like Josh Layne (many instructional video’s!), but I would start with Ray Pool as he explains in a clear way what you need to think of while learning the basics of the harp.

Edit: I read Biagio’s post after I wrote mine, so I edited my post a bit.

[CelticKnot]

Hello Will and Biagio. Thanks for all the great advice! I definitely plan to get a teacher. Sylvia’s Teach Yourself to Play the Folk Harp book has been transcribed in Braille, but it’s quite pricey lol! There’s also a set of books out there designed to help your teacher teach you Braille music. Those are quite expensive as well, but I’ve heard good things about them. I think I’ll need to learn Braille music before diving into any theory books. I plan to look for Sylvia’s theory book, as well.

Thanks,
CelticKnot

[wil-weten]

Hi CelticKnot,
You may be interested in the following free online courses of music theory, consisting mainly of videoclips:
* https://www.coursera.org/course/musicianship (6 weeks; just started again; you can still subscribe; great course!)
* https://www.coursera.org/course/musictheory (5 weeks. It will start in August. I followed this course last year and I still wonder why it was called ‘fundamentals’ as it was clearly not a beginner’s course…Yet, if you folow the ‘building your musicianship’ first, you will have a great foundation for the second course.

By the way, all this goes much further than you have to know for starting to learn the harp, but it does make playing the harp more fun and when one recognizes the musical patterns it all becomes more simple!

[CelticKnot]

Hello, Wil,

While that course sounds great, I’m worried that they’ll be using the staff to demonstrate things–and the staff is of little use to me–because Braille music is liniar, not … well, however the staff is written–I think it’s sort of like a tree? Lol see? 😀 I have absolutely no concept of what the staff looks like. Is the course free? Maybe I’ll get something out of it, but I’m worried about paying for it and then finding out that it will be useful, but only in theory. Lol I so did not mean to use that pun.

Thanks,
CelticKnot

[wil-weten]

Hi CelticKnot, all coursera courses are completely free and no strings attached! Even a (non-verified) certificate is completely without any costs! And yes, I’m proud of having earned several of these certificates myself. Just for fun….
These courses only cost something when you want a verified degree.

It’s a great way for lifelong learners like myself to keep learning new things on all kinds of subjects. When you wonder how it can be possible for Coursera to offer these online courses for free: the universities that offer them hope you will be so enthousiastic about them that you will take a normal paid course from them…

If you can’t find out how to subscribe to a free course, let me know and I will try to help you to get subscribed.

Just try and find out whether these free videoclips are interesting for you. Even without being able to see scores, you may benefit from most of them, I think. There’s also a great Coursera course on the history of music. This course was given a few months ago, so will probably appear again later in the year, I hope.

[CelticKnot]

Oh, wow! I’ll definitely check them out, then! Now I’m excited! 😀 Thanks for the info!

Thanks,
CelticKnot

[Elizabeth Webb]

I know this thread is old, but having just seen it I wanted to chime in. I am a harp teacher (playing 20 years) and also a TVI with multiple braille certifications (I am currently on the committee that is editing the update to the Braille Music Transcription Manual to align with the UEB changes). I know several blind harpists and have taught students who are blind to read braille music. CenticKnot, if you have questions about the braille music, especially specific to harp music, I’d be more than happy to help.

Just to give you an overview, braille music is written linearly, similar to how fractions are written in braille. The symbols you are likely to need first in beginning braille music are the octave sign, note value, and duration. Each line of music will start with an octave sign. For example, middle C is in the 4th octave, which is represented by dot 5. Immediately after that cell will be your first note. The note values are represented by using the top 2 sets of dots (dots 1,2,4,5) and the bottom 2 dots (dots 3,6) tell how long the note is held (the duration). As another person (I think it was Sylvia) said earlier in this thread, braille music uses the solfege system (makes sense since braille was created in France), meaning they do not call middle C “C” but instead call it “Do” (think Sound of Music Do Re Me).

So in braille, middle C would be notated as dot(5) to tell you the octave, then dots(1,4,5). Braille letter D is music note C (Do), Braille E is music note D (Re), Braille F is music note E (Mi), Braille G is music note F (Fa), Braille H is music note G (So), Braille I is note A (La), Braille J is note B (Ti), then back to Braille letter D for music note C (Do).

For the note duration, the letter by itself is an eighth note. For now, just think of that as lasting for 1/2 beat (counting 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, playing a note on both the numbers and the “and’s”). When you add dot(6) it becomes a quarter note. So a quarter note C would be written as dots(1,4,5,6), like a th sign. A quarter note is held for one whole beat (counting 1 2 3 4 and playing on each number). A half note adds dot 3. So a half note C is written as dots (1,3,4,5), like an N. A half note is held for 2 beats, so counting is 12, 34, playing only on beats 1 and 3. A whole note is written with both dots 3 and 6 added, so a whole note C is dots (1,3,4,5,6) like a letter Y. A whole note is held for 4 beats, or a “whole measure.” Also, not to confuse or overwhelm you, but a 16th note (think fractions, cutting an 8th note duration in half) reuses the symbol for a whole note. It is obvious that it is a 16th note, because there are a bunch of them in the measure, whereas a whole note will be by itself in a measure. Oh, also, the measures are separated by a space in braille music. In print they are separated by a bar line, but it’s important to understand that in braille music it is a space. So every symbol touching each other is all part of 1 measure.

Other symbols are added in a specific order (sharps and flats, accent marks, dots, ties, rests, glissandos, …). You will start with reading only 1 line, which you can do on a refreshable braille display, but eventually it will be preferable to have it hard copy so you can better see the layout. The right hand will be written on the top line and the left hand on the bottom line. Lever changes will be written on a third line.

I could go on all day, but too much info out of context will probably be counterproductive. I hope I have not confused you too much. I recommend you get your hands on a book or course on how to read braille music and start working on that even before you save up enough money to buy your harp. If you have a friend with a keyboard that you could borrow, I do think it would be very helpful with understanding the music reading, especially with where the half steps are versus whole steps. You don’t have to learn how to play piano, just mess around with the keys while reading the book on music braille and/or music theory books/courses. There are some good videos on youtube on reading music braille that you might want to check out.

And one more suggestion. Some harpists paint a small dot to serve as a place marker somewhere on the harp, either on the sound board or directly on the string. I am personally not a fan of paint on the soundboard, and I think you said you don’t want to permanently alter the harp either. But putting a dot of puffy paint or a little nail polish on a string is not permanent, because strings are changed frequently and easily (so if you hate it, just replace the string). Lay the harp on its side so it does not drip down, and make sure the paint is in the middle where your fingers play so you will easily feel it (your harp teacher or a Dusty Strings rep can show you exactly where that is on the string). Another option is a tiny strip of tape wrapped around middle C. It has been helpful for some of my students who were renting and could not make any permanent changes.

Please contact me if you have questions that I might be able to help with. Two of my favorite things are harp and braille, so when the 2 collide I’m in my happy place!

[CelticKnot]

Hi, Elizabeth! Thank you so much for your post! I’m sorry it’s taken me so darn long to respond! I came back to post one day, and the sight was super different to what I remembered! I couldn’t figure out how to log in! Anyhow, I finally got everything sorted out now.

I really appreciate you chiming in, even if it has been a while since this topic was first started! 🙂

Wow! I had no idea that the Braille Music code was being updated to match the UEB standards, as well. I learned the BANA literary code, so I have some transitioning to do with the UEB update. I have one of those free guides on the changes from BANA to UEB in hardcopy Braille.

Do you think I should go ahead and learn the Braille Music code as it is right now, or wait until the updated code is released? I was thinking of starting the Braille Music Reading course that Hadley offers sometime soon. They require you to have a keyboard with 61 keys. I have a friend who wants to get rid of an old 61-key keyboard of hers, so that works out well for me.

Thanks for your suggestions on how to mark the harp! I think I’ll use tape. Or maybe those sticky-backed dots, like Bump Dots. Do you think those would damage the finish, if I ever wanted to remove them? I don’t know what sort of glue or whatever they use to make them sticky. The last thing I want to do is leave a mark on my awesome instrument, so maybe the tape would be a better idea in the long-run.

Thank you so much for your info on Braille Music! It was super helpful!
I have a few questions.

1. What happens if you come to the end of a line, and you’re in the middle of a measure?
2. If you have more than one line for the left-hand part, how do you know when the left-hand part is actually starting? Are there signs for left-hand and right-hand parts?
3. How do you know which lever-changes correspond with which notes/hand part?
4. Not Braille Music-related, but where is the soundboard? Let’s say I’m sitting at the harp, for purposes of your answer, so we both have a relative position with which to work. I know the neck is the wood running from front to back, from the back to the piller; it’s where your levers and tuning pins are. I also know that the piller is the wood running perpendicular to the floor, opposit to the back, which is where the sound holes (I think that’s what those ovil-shaped holes are called) are–and at a 90-or-so angle to the neck. So, where the heck is the soundboard? 🙂

Sorry for all these questions–they must seem silly to you. 🙂

Thanks,
CelticKnot

[Elizabeth Webb]

Hadley courses are great! I did their UEB transition course this summer. I definitely think you should borrow that keyboard and take the Hadley course. And no, I do not think you will need to wait for the UEB changes before learning music braille. The key components are not changing. By the time you get to the more complex sections, the new edition will be ready.

I would not use Bump Dots on the harp if you think you may remove them eventually. Painters tape is a pretty good option as it sticks well but comes off without causing any damage.

To address your questions:

1. Think of the measures like words. Most of the time, if a measure does not fit on a line, you move the whole thing to the next line. Occasionally a measure can be split, just like words can be split with a hyphen, but we try to avoid that as much as possible. You should not run into this in beginning music, so don’t worry about it at this point.

2. Yes, there are right and left hand signs. Right hand sign is dots(4,6)(3,4,5) and left hand sign is dots(4,5,6)(3,4,5). I’m afraid it will get confusing to go into too much detail. The lines of music for instruments like piano and harp are transcribed in parallels (called bar over bar format), so you always know what goes with what, because corresponding measures will be right over each other. If one hand is not playing in a certain measure, the music will show a whole note rest, just like it does in print.

3. The lever changes will be marked clearly as to what lever you are putting up or down, and it will be directly under the measure where you need to do the change. The one disadvantage is that there is not currently a way (that I know of at least) to notate what specific beat of the measure to change the lever. However, in most cases you will know what to do it either because that’s the only chance you have when you are not playing, or because you have it have it changed by a certain beat so you can play that note correctly. You will not be changing levers within the music for quite some time, so don’t worry about this too much yet.

4. The sound board is the wood that the strings go down into. It is the top piece of the sound box. And you are correct about the ovals on the back of the harp being called sound holes.

I am happy to answer any questions you have. As I said, I love harp and I love braille, so it’s a fun topic to discuss. If you want to save my email address in your contacts it is elizabeth@tucsonharpmusic.com. As you get farther along in your braille music course and/or in learning the harp and you come across questions that need to be answered by someone who knows both harp and braille, feel free to email me. I can also give you my phone number, though not over a public forum. 🙂 Send me an email if you would like to get it. Also, anyone else reading this with questions about harp and braille music, feel free to email me.

Most importantly, keep pursuing harp! You can learn braille music and you can learn to play the harp beautifully and with excellence, so don’t let anyone or anything tell you that you can’t!

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