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Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear. Zingel claimed that the original Handel work was in the conservatory library in Leipzig and was then destroyed in one of the wars. Otherwise, there’s nothing anywhere to prove that Handel wrote it. Modern Handel scholars don’t think he did. At least they sure didn’t about fifteen years ago, the last time I really looked into it.
The Schott/Zingel edition doesn’t pretend to be an urtext, so it may have been heavily edited by Zingel from whatever source he had. I wasn’t saying that the plates are missing; just the original source to prove that it was by Handel, if it ever did exist. At least that is what they were saying back when I was in music school several millennia ago.
But it’s still a nice piece, whoever originally wrote it.
Handel’s music was played on the triple harp during his lifetime.
Gretchen, is that the same piece?
EDIT I see that it is. FWIW, it’s considered spurious in most of the listings of Handel’s work (see Groves, for one). Supposedly the only copy was in the library at Leipzig where Zingel found it and then it was destroyed in the war.
I was always told that they were just suggested optional fills. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and since the original is no more (if indeed it ever existed), I don’t suppose anyone can know now.
EDIT I mean, suggestions by Zingel on fills for a fuller sound. Sorry, I see that wasn’t clear.
Becky and Ernie Brock have an arrangement of this for flute and harp in their Opera Favorites book, but it’s also not quite what you’re looking for.
No. That is a completely different kind of insurance, and not readily available for musicians. I think Anderson did offer that kind of insurance once, but they stopped and AFAIK, nobody else does now, except on a venue-specific basis. It keeps a lot of harpists out of a lot of places they used to play these days, since more and more venues require that kind of insurance. So you either spend way more than you could hope to make on gigs there, or have to work through an agent with insurance that would cover you, which frequently makes you unaffordable.
And what you have to provide for regular insurance varies a bit. Some companies just require the current pricelist for a harp model that is still in production, not photos. Others want a letter from the harp maker if possible. For an out of production harp, they often want a letter of appraisal specifying what the current replacement equivalent model would be.
FWIW, there have been several well-known pedal harpists, like Tournier, who were left-handed, but they played right shoulder. He got his revenge by writing demanding left hand parts in most of his compositions. 🙂
I’ve heard that they are made differently than the other L&H harps
To the best of my knowledge this was only true for the early versions of the 30, which had a three-sided soundbox instead of the usual curved body shape. The idea was to create a stronger sound projection, but in practice it just made the harp uncomfortable for many players (those corners!) and was dropped many years ago in favor of the usual style.
As far as I know they are just like any other concert grand made by L&H today, except for the column style.
Why not ask Salvi US directly?
That’s the actual action itself, inside the brass plates, the bars that move the discs on the outside.
I have a 2007 Matrix, and there’s no way I could get a passenger into it along with my Style 11. The passenger seat has to be all the way forward to allow enough room for the kneeblock when you angle the harp. I agree with Janet that the 2008 and up look a lot less harp friendly.
Will the brightness of the key change ?
Yes, that’s a good point. E is a bright, pushy kind of key, even on piano, and an enharmonic transposition might lose that quality.
Or do you mean that you’d do it so that the violin plays in E and you would play it in flats? So that the first measure, which is basically E major chords, would be played f-flat, C-flat, A-flat, etc? I guess you could do that, but the piece is so chromatic I’m not at all sure that overall it would be that much of a tonal improvement on a well-regulated harp.
EDIT To clarify, I mean that you’re going to be pedaling all over the darned place either way. I think mostly you’d just be shifting where the pedals are up vs down, not getting all that many more notes in flats, although it’s been years since I last played it, so I’m just going from what I remember.
Yes, but I’ll tell you what Ray Mooers said to me about that when I said something similar. He said that one reason pedal harpists tend to like the sound of the flat back is that the sound envelope is more around the player, like what we’re used to with the pedal harp, while with the stave back it’s further out in front of the instrument so when you’re playing one it doesn’t seem as full-sounding, and you should listen to someone else playing them to decide on which you prefer.
