international harp competition winners

[carl-swanson]

Sam-Screens are used for a variety of reasons. They are almost always used in orchestra auditions and sometimes in competitions. One reason is to prevent anyone from even thinking that there was prejudice of any kind involved: against a style of playing, appearance of the player, race, etc. Screens also help the jury(orchestra or competition) to focus entirely on what they are hearing. A screen was used when I was a judge for the Ann Adams, and I’m very glad it was. It is an intriguing thought to use a screen for a major international harp competition, right through the final stage.

I received the following email this morning from an important American harp teacher. I changed a few details that would give away her identity, but other than that, this is what she sent me:

I checked out the harp column forum this morning and read

your post about french/russian training vs american. And I absolutely

agree. A french student of mine told me that first year students

spend the entire first semester on the Faure Impromptu only, and the

second semester on the Britten Suite. Sometimes a month on the first

page chords of the Faure! Wild, huh? But they can play chords at the

end of it. Plus etudes, of course. Anyway, obviously you can see it

when these kids play. The ease of execution, the security…I’m so

sick of kids at the college level having groped from piece to piece

with technical problems that were never fundamentally solved.

[unknown-user]

And also to your point, Carl, now that I think about it one probably COULD call the juries the impartial, as any biased-ness over the years probably evens out.

But anyway, I do agree that etudes are a massive help. I don’t remember who wrote it in this thread, (I think it was Saul or Carl)

[carl-swanson]

Sam-YOU CAN’T REMEMBER THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY POSTS AND SAUL’S????? PHILISTINE!!! Saul and I have been at each other’s throat’s for…5 years? 10 years?? And you can’t remember which one of us endlessly, constantly, adamantly,annoyingly, promotes etudes???? OH MY GOD! I can feel one of my spells coming on….

[unknown-user]

LOL – I usually just absorb all the opinions without categorizing them by who said them 😛

~Sam

[Misty Harrison]

A couple things.

Figuring out why some people win competitions and others don’t is helpful. The approach here is not helpful though because it is not well-thought out.

The idea that Carl seems to committ to is about etudes and preparation and maybe it’s true but

[unknown-user]

This is

[carl-swanson]

Ina’s first teacher here in the U.S. was Cynthia Price-Glynn. I believe she got at least one degree with her.

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Before I read the new posts, I want to say that there is one more factor: travel. I know several Americans who went to Israel, but got sick on the way over. It is not nearly so far from Europe, and how far you have to travel, how long you can stay would seem like factors.

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

Misty touches on some very important points. I don’t agree at all that you can go only by results. I’m sure most competitions tell the entrants that it is not about winning, but doing your best and gaining experience. Americans have been turning against competitions for several reasons. Many do not want to learn the repertoire that is required. We don’t always find out about the competition right away. There are some that routinely did no publicity in the U.S. until perhaps a year before. Israel was the only one to do clear announcements well in advance, even though the contemporary piece was usually not announced at the same time. Not having a full three years to prepare is not good. There was a perception of bias in some competitions, if not most. I know that Miss Lawrence came to hate competitions and mostly discouraged her students from entering. One was supposedly voted down in Israel merely for tuning the harp before playing. That would be very discouraging. She preferred her students be judged against other musicians or on their own merits, and they did extremely well in those circumstances.

Knowing the repertoire already is a great advantage. Not that Sivan did not deserve winning in any case, but that surely gave him more calm.

I believe Ina also did a degree with Miss Lawrence before moving on to Miss Pilot. Am I wrong?

I don’t think there is any question of American harpists not playing as well as European harpists. I think exercises are far more effective than etudes. The only effect I see in doing etudes for years is perhaps more confidence, but just having more years in which to play does that as well.

Learning advanced repertoire is not a problem if you are able to play it well. Having gaps in your technique can expose problems. That comes from starting late, most likely. Each teaching system has its pluses and minuses. Miss Lawrence, for example, used the Conditioning Exercises, Method, and Daily Dozen exercises almost exclusively. Beyond that, she used orchestra parts and repertoire as etudes. She did not use LaRiviere, as Chalifoux did. She did teach sight-reading. She did teach advanced repertoire, so we worked on the most sophisticated music, in general, usually more difficult than what other teachers used. We grew tremendously from that rather than being held back by taking only baby steps and never getting to learn the important repertoire. It is very different when a student starts young, but a lot of Salzedo students start later and have less time, so it is a more condensed course. That said, I think the results speak for themselves.

Beyond everything else, winning competitions must also have to do with personality type, the competitiveness, amount of drive or ambition, the winning “spirit”, focus, approach to music, etc. A sensitive artist would have a difficult time of it, I would think.

I do think we need other ways for artists to build their careers, to win recognition. I think we all need to look beyond the surface and give people a chance. If we should support winners, maybe we should equally support those who don’t win, or didn’t enter. A competition only reflects who is accepted to it, and the people/organization running it. It will be interesting to see if Remy Kesteren’s approach will continue and produce different results. But he still has age limits in his competition.

I want to see one with no age limits, and no required music or very little, to judge each performer on what they play as well as how they play it. Too many careers have been warped by having only contest material as repertoire. So it seems to me.

If the etudes available were designed to equally develop both hands, deal with more than just nineteenth-century musical ideas, and were first-rate music like Chopin’s etudes, then I would be much more in favor of using them. I think Bochsa is pretty much a waste of time as he does so little for the left hand. Only his most advanced etudes for the most part are good music. Practice time is too precious to waste on music that can’t be performed. There are so many orchestra parts to master, and they are full of arpeggios and tricky patterns, big chords and all that we need to practice.

There are many solo pieces that make good etudes, such as: Caplet’s Divertissement, Faure’s Impromptu, Salzedo’s Ballade, Variations, Preludes; Tournier’s Au Matin, Busser’s solos, the Mozart Concerto and most of the other classical concerti,

[Misty Harrison]

if you find an etude that you like and think is actually good can you play it in performance even though we’re not really supposed to play etudes in performance? I ask because pianists (even really accomplished ones) do it all the time

[Misty Harrison]

in fact some make recordings of them and there’s also Marie Pierre Langlamet’s recording of concert etudes

[unknown-user]

Firstly – Ina hold degrees from BoCo, BU, and NEC with Cynthia Price-Glynn and Ann Hobson-Pilot. She also studied in Romania with Ivan Ion Roncea (I hope I didn’t get his name wrong!) but I’ve never heard that she studied with Miss Lawrence. Just checked her webpage!

There is a fine line between etudes and concert etudes. Pieces such as Tournier’s Au Matin and Godefroid’s Etude de Concert are both concert etudes, which means they are etudes that were written to be sufficiently musical to

[patricia-jaeger]

Misty, I agree. And harpist Willy Postma(Norway) recorded some Pozzoli etudes on her CD The Golden Harp. Steven Staryk, distinguished violinist, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1932

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

An exercise would merely repeat a particular figure, a scale or arpeggio sufficient time to result in a perceived improvement. Look at the difference between the Conditioning Exercises and the Poetical Studies, or Czerny/Hanon and Chopin’s Etudes for piano. A concert-worthy etude does not have a particularly obvious form, and may not even have a particularly obvious challenge. The technical challenge is deployed in purely musical terms. Thus, an etude in parallel thirds would use them as melody and/or accompaniment and in long phrases that might use the whole range of the instrument. A Bochsa-type etude would use them in only one octave and be rather repetitive. A Nadermann etude would do the same only with very few changes of harmony. A concert-worthy etude would go harmonically far beyond I-IV-V-I in any period. It might have suspensions, pedal points, sequences, etc. Bochsa’s most advanced etudes, who can remember what opus, are much more like that than those in the Universal Method.

Chopin’s Etudes are very expressive of distinct moods, are at an extremely high technical level, and are great music. Posse’s etudes are that technical, and I think only Salzedo’s are nearly as expressive, of all the ones I know. The Godefroid ones I’ve heard are expressive and pretty, but tend to lack clarity and freshness, which Chopin abounds in, and are basically pretty conventional. I always found Hasselmans technical pieces preferable, like Follets and La Source, perhaps because he makes use of added tones so well. The 19th-century etudes seem very pianistic to me, perhaps because the composers were trying to keep up with the advances in piano playing. It is a pity that the composers who did write well for harp, like Spohr and Dussek, did not write us etudes as well. The Spohr Fantaisie and Variations are very good as etudes, however. There is another Spohr Fantaisie out there somewhere. There is so much music to be located in Europe, I wish that would get done.

[Julietta Anne Rabens]

Saul’s post 24 is remarkably insightful. Have you written an article to expand on those ideas? Competition is a complex process with underlying assumptions, many of which you deconstruct in that post.

Evaluating relative skill levels in professional musicians is necessary for careers, but it is worth questioning if the systems in place are the most effective, and what can be done to revise or reinvent these systems.

Leonard Mlodinow wrote an interesting work, “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives” which examines the human mind’s limitation in accurately perceiving and intuiting probabilistic outcomes. On a few pages in the book he demonstrates mathematically that the sample sizes used in the sports competitive process are not plentiful enough to make the outcomes significantly different from random processes. This is quite revolutionary and goes against long-cherished assumptions that our favorite teams win the Super-bowl based on superior skill alone. It makes me wonder how that relates to many of our assumptions and processes established to measure relative skill. The issue is not one of the existence of relative levels of skill, but of the sample size required to get an accurate outcome, a sample size which far exceeds the requirements of established competitive processes.

[Author]

Posts