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Edide I had a quick look and there is a 38 stringed harp for sale in/near Birmingham UK so I wondered if you could get a flight into Birmingham – it looks okay but you must see it yourself, consider the price and check the condition and that the neck isn’t unduly twisted etc and you’d have to devise a way of packing it to protect it on the flight home, or arranging separate shipment – all things are possible, a wooden crate perhaps, so ask for measurements/dimensions and weight in kg. Geraldine herself is nearer Luton airport. If not just take it slowly there will always be another one!!
Have you investigated Gothenburg/Stockholm and Oslo/Bergen, surely they have many harpists and instruments in these cities. Also there are some harp makers near Edinburgh and Celtic harp players abound in Scotland and the very north of England. email me and I’ll send you a UK based list and if by the summer you are still looking then consider buying second hand in the UK. There is big festival around Easter in Edinburgh but really that’s for new purchases. If you need travel advice just ask.Delayed response…. I haven’t bought any yet but I have something similar and am madly doctoring my Flothius/Tombee d’Orphee with it as so many pedal corrections prevented me from ever finishing the piece, too many for whitener/tippex… the clarity is a godsend, already making a difference My brother is an architect so always thought I’d seen masking tape on his drawing board… anyway he says he buys various supplies of it.
I would say that a 34 stringed instrument is okay to rent but given your age and height, try to afford a instrument with 38 strings, you won’t regret it. The more you spend on rent the less capital you have for a purchase, so limit yourself to 3 months rental…. Check out affairsoftheharp.co.uk and call Geraldine.
Don’t think it’s fingered particularly but Fabrice Pierre’s 2006 transcription, 30 euros, is much better, accuracy wise, by which I mean he has corrected unnecessary enharmonic changes and extranious pedalling inserted by Renie. Renie made the first transcription for pedal harp from Debussy’s score, published by Durand. Any references to Salzedo in the forum entries concerns the 8 or so bars in the dreaded Animez. Also, Renie and Debussy split figures and simple runs of notes between staves, in order to indicate hands/fingering but I found this makes it harder to read, digest and finger oneself especially when the hands are ‘wrong’. Check out the original score on the imslp site, as it’s a free pdf file so worth printing it to study. Probably time someone did a crib sheet on this piece but there are better players /teachers than me here on this forum and so far I have only rehearsed it with the strings.
Anyway the least obvious cheat when opening the Profane is to use the Fb set for later, makes those fast chords in both hands easier to place.Surely beginner pieces would have only 2 or 3 note chord at mosts. I think my pupils have placed bottom note first when first finding their way through a piece with 3 fingered chords, and near enough together for 2 note chords, but what’s relevant is how they read the chord. For example I mentally see the top note of chords on the page and get the rest below as harmony, but one pupil (guitar player) said she saw the chord from the bottom note upwards – you’d have to ask individuals. Lazy pupils will try to use 1 and 2 when they should be using 1 and 3 for anything more than a fourth.
All this is puzzling! Perhaps children make choices based on the conditioning acquired during theirpre-school years development and therefore the parents’ influence carries some weight and like the colour pink, a lot of this comes from TV advertising with sweet music and ballet/princesses etc. It might also be that the age at which children start, 8-10, say, is when they are ‘compliant’ with the perception of a bias although the woodwind and bowed instruments appeal to both sexes. Perhaps the harp and brass are at opposite extremes, noise level wise and that influences their appeal. My parents never presented a restrictive or narrow choice to me and so I never related my choices to gender biases. Today the research from Philadelphia reports evidence of a difference in hard-wiring in the brain.
Well good luck, hope you can sight read thro’ most of it by now, maybe you can lock your harp away in their office, but you have to choose somewhere with a consistent temperature, & you could weave a sheet of some paper into the strings and see if it moves, or don’t take your best harp.
BTW wonderful graphic Jimmy !!I can’t see the point of trying to continue with harp whilst one arm is in plaster, you can’t even move or manage it properly with one hand so you risk damaging the harp, and really the left hand has to attend to the levers, so give it a rest, it is slow progress but once out & physio and swimming starts the harp is a surprisingly useful tool and motivator… but difficult with a stiff weak forearm. I write from experience.!!
Well I have met Catrin several times, she’s pragmatic so I doubt she’d take offence… and BTW what you call architect’s tape is probably our “masking” tape.
Sid – on second thoughts we could ask Catrin if she would liaise with the composer herself and send her the link for this posting…. I mean it’s not as if we’d have to explain it to her…… she has a professional relationship with the composer..
Maybe non-harpists assume pedals are arranged C-B left to right.
Sid, Why not put this down in writing – there are several points here, take it offline and we can send the request onto Catrin to put to him, so there’s only 3 of us in the loop. John Rutter is a prolific composer so it would improve matters going forward, assuming Catrin hasn’t already shown/nudged him, when they worked together last year on “Blessing”.
I’ve just had a request for the Requiem so I got the part out and I see what you mean about the way it’s been pedalled by the composer, I presume. Somehow I don’t think it’s the copyist.
I live so near to Oxford it’s tempting to contact them but I think we have a protocol here to do these things thro’ the UKHA. From the promotional video with Catrin Finch last year I noted that the composer learnt about the mechanics of the harp as a boy when rehearsing Ceremony of Carols but obviously he doesn’t DO the footwork, so as they say…”a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” – he seems very approachable why not write (to) him to explain the preferred conventions & the basis for left/right pairs and sequences.
Perhaps he has always assumed we read pedal changes horizontally, whereas we use vertical pairs in split-second slots along with the music and since pedals are NOT arranged CDEFGAB left to right, we’d really prefer a pedal diagram under glissandos.
(NB – a timpanist asked me to identify the pedals for him and he too asked me to show him which pedals were CDEF… and of course I said “No, no it’s not like that” etc.)I don’t think my harp nerves would tolerate a man-eating cat so close, nor it’s breath – that’s too difficult – do you have a facecious get-out clause (children /animals).
Harp/piano stools are just a little too high to be very comfortable for extended periods so I often find a normal chair in a rehearsal but not a concert, unless it were in a church and there was seating to the side . Sometimes you just have to sit quietly through other pieces, especially to ‘get your eye in’ prior to playing or damp the strings and staying close to the harp helps, more so if the next piece starts promptly. Jumping in and out of position as you describe sounds a little strange….. maybe they were in the way of the percussion… or the horns were too loud.
