Has anybody tried or heard about the harp pedal display unit?

[Marco Hilgeman]

Hi all,

I came across this article on the Harp Spectrum website and I was wondering if anybody has experience with this thing called the harp pedal display unit? I couldn’t find any info on this in the forums…it is developed by a female South African harpist and an electronic engineer. It looks like a handy tool, but I wonder if it can be a valuable addition to knowing ‘where you are’ on the pedal harp. I’d like to share opinions.

Check out the link and the pic I attached:

http://www.harpspectrum.org/pedal/harp_pedal_display_unit.shtml

All the best,
Marco

[paul-knoke]

Actually, this is not a new idea. Dizi made at least one harp, in the early 19th century, with seven little windows on the side of the action, in easy view of the player. Each window showed the setting of the corresponding pedal. If you do an image search on “Dizi harp” it should appear. The harp is dark blue with gilt scrolls, and the windows are just visible at the lowest curve of the neck. In practice, I don’t expect any visual display would provide the desperately needed information any faster than a foot-check of the pedals, unless the electronic display could somehow be mounted on the music stand. Otherwise the harpist would have to look away from the music or conductor for too long, which could lead to other problems!

[Marco Hilgeman]

Hi Paul,

Hey that’s cool info there; I didn’t do any further research on this ‘tool’ yet, but it was likely somebody came up with this idea before. The South African harpist who invented the display didn’t mention this Dizi harp…maybe she didn’t know that her idea had already been invented somehow. So this harp display unit is somehow a modern version of that window system, that’s funny.

I’m not sure if I agree that a foot-check would be faster than the display though. After all, a quick glance at the display unit (reasonably comfortable at the base of the harp) tells you which pedals are in what slot and before you have that info by looking at the pedals, you have to either lean back or tilt the harp forward to get a good look at ALL the pedals, especially E,F,G and A. And don’t forget dim-lit stages where you can hardly see the pedals…in these settings, the display would be quite handy I think.

The idea of mounting the display on a music stand is a good idea. The same display unit, but with a remote controlled connection to the pedals must be possible with the current technology if you ask me.

[Tacye]

You don’t look at your pedals – run your feet over them and feel. If you want to see something glance at the disks and see what position they are in.

[Marco Hilgeman]

That’s my point as well Tacye; looking at the pedals is what we avoid in the first place, and also with this display. Of course the display won’t make your actual pedal changes easier, it’s just there to let you know where the pedals are. And I think it just takes more time to run over all the pedals and feel what position they’re in than to look at that display. A glance at the disks can give you the info of course, but then you’d still have a bit more ‘calculating’ to do if you ask me.

One could also say that an experienced harpist won’t need a display like this because he/she is supposed to be familiar with the pedals and their positions at any given moment, but during music pieces with lots of pedal changes a display like this could really come in handy I guess…

[carl-swanson]

Marco- Running your feet over the pedals to check their positions, which all advanced harpists do, takes at most 1.5 seconds. And in that time, if a pedal is wrong, you just automatically fix it. Our knowledge of pedal positions is to a large extent a muscle memory issue. In other words, we depend very much on what the pedals and their positions feel like to keep them under control. I can’t see that a visual display would help here, or would make the process of checking and/or correcting pedals faster.

[Marco Hilgeman]

Hi Carl, what you’re saying is more or less what I mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous post…and the more I’m coming to think of it, the more I agree with you. Practically spoken it’s also quite an expensive little apparatus, plus you have to drill a hole in the base of the harp to connect it…. But when I came across the website where I saw this, it seemed like it could be a handy tool and I was just wondering if it had found its way to contemporary harpists; apparently not 😉

[carl-swanson]

Marco- Harpists keep track of pedals in basically two different ways. One is to simply memorize pedal positions at critical places throughout a piece, since on many pieces the pedals are not in any key. The best example of that is Faure’s Une Chatelaine en sa Tour… The pedals are never in a key and the result is that every harpist in the world has, at one time or another, had a serious problem with the pedals in that piece. The great Zabeletta made a mess of it at one concert and afterwards told someone “Well, the Chatelaine fell out of her tower tonight!” The other way of keeping track of pedals, and which most pop and jazz harpists do, is to keep the pedals in the key of the piece all the time. Say the piece they are playing is in E flat. The pedals are kept in E flat throughout the piece and any accidentals that are needed, the harpist moves the needed pedal, say a G sharp, to it’s sharp position and then immediately moves it back to natural, even if it could have stayed there for another 3 G sharps coming up. That’s why pop and jazz harpists are so incredible at moving pedals. By staying in the home key for say a Gershwin piece, they probably have a couple hundred pedal changes in one piece. But it’s the only way for them to KNOW where the pedals are. The point is, the standard way of keeping track of pedals is a combination of brain activity-knowing intellectually where the pedals should be, or what key the piece is in at that point- and muscle memory, where the feet, just like the fingers, memorize the sequence of pedal moves. i simply can’t see adding a third element-a visual readout- as replacing or helping to reinforce those other two elements, and frankly I see it as more of a distraction that could get in the way.

[eliza-morrison]

If I need to check on the positions of my pedals, I run my feet along them from the outer ones to the inner ones, both feet simultaneously. It barely takes a sec. I think it would take me longer to read the display. Also, it’s not a good idea to become dependent on a piece of equipment which could malfunction. Another thought I had is that I have enough to watch already: music on the stand, the strings, often a conductor, or my fellow players in a chamber music situation. Adding a fourth would feel overloading, I think.

[Marco Hilgeman]

OK thanks for all your input everyone, I appreciate it. It’s interesting to read the arguments against the use of this display unit, while the harpist who developed this tool is so full of praise about it…I have to say I’m on your side, the more I think of it.

I play celtic harp for many years now and I made the switch to pedal harp since last year so I have to develop some more muscle memory regarding the pedals, but it’s getting there. One thing’s for sure: the pedal harp definitely adds new dimensions to my compositions.

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