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There may be something else going on here with adult amateurs. Carl is talking about a one-time lesson, perhaps at a conference, or associated with a workshop, not a student who will be coming back week after week. Adults usually want to get the most out of an experience and in some cases, I wonder if their desires get in the way of a realistic view of their abilities? They are either taking a one-off lesson because they want to take advantage of a master harp teacher, they do not have a regular teacher, or they want to work on something that their regular teacher has not offered them. Either of the last two reasons might explain why they show up with inappropriate music.
Adult amateurs are different from adult beginners. “Pro-ams”, or amateurs who play at a professional level, as Barbara Conable calls them in an Internet article on What to Do About Performance Anxiety, rarely suffer from performance anxiety. They play a lot of chamber music and there are no bad consequences if they do not play well, like loss of a job, scorn from colleagues and so on. I can see people like this getting out of touch with a realistic assessment of their skill levels. They may be “playing” more than they are “practicing.”
For me, I believe that the bottom line is the technical work is necessary and having a strong background in music before you start learning the harp is helpful. If you have a good regular teacher that you follow, and you practice instead of playing, it is possible to make steady progress, even for us “oldsters” who started harp after our children were grown and out on their own.
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There may be something else going on here with adult amateurs. Carl is talking about a one-time lesson, perhaps at a conference, or associated with a workshop, not a student who will be coming back week after week. Adults usually want to get the most out of an experience and in some cases, I wonder if their desires get in the way of a realistic view of their abilities? They are either taking a one-off lesson because they want to take advantage of a master harp teacher, they do not have a regular teacher, or they want to work on something that their regular teacher has not offered them. Either of the last two reasons might explain why they show up with inappropriate music.
Adult amateurs are different from adult beginners. “Pro-ams”, or amateurs who play at a professional level, as Barbara Conable calls them in an Internet article on What to Do About Performance Anxiety, rarely suffer from performance anxiety. They play a lot of chamber music and there are no bad consequences if they do not play well, like loss of a job, scorn from colleagues and so on. I can see people like this getting out of touch with a realistic assessment of their skill levels. They may be “playing” more than they are “practicing.”
For me, I believe that the bottom line is the technical work is necessary and having a strong background in music before you start learning the harp is helpful. If you have a good regular teacher that you follow, and you practice instead of playing, it is possible to make steady progress, even for us “oldsters” who started harp after our children were grown and out on their own.
My fourth fingers on both hands are longer than my index fingers, both of which are shorter than my middle fingers. I once had a teacher who had fingers that were a full inch longer than mine. Many of the fingerings she suggested just didn’t work for me.
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You can tune a harp just fine tuning in octaves and fifths as mentioned in your book, but if you want to play a large harp (40+
I have heard the same pedal harp strung at different times with gut and then with nylon strings. The only way I can describe the difference is that the gut sounded warm and mellow and the nylon sounded brighter and more penetrating. Whether this is typical of all harps, I don’t know.
—– Alice in windy Wyoming, U.S.A.
