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Also, Rhett Barnwell’s Serenade for the Soul is very nice for religious funerals. Some pieces work for any sort.
However, you need to be aware that people want all sorts of weird things for funerals these days–don’t assume, ask. One of the last funerals I did they wanted all cowboy music.
>but the problem I have is that the older CG harps (L&H are what I am looking at right now, and the harp I’m borrowing is a L&H 23, which was built around 1940) are smaller than the newer ones!
Just curious as to why this is a problem? If the sound is there I’d consider it a bonus, myself. 🙂
>bridge pin is the tuning pin?
Hi, Michael. The bridge pin is the small pin on the action/lever side of the neck over which the string passes before it goes to the tuning pin. Good illustration here:
http://www.harpconnection.com/LapHarpFAQs.html
(Not all harps have them, but all harps that can use any kind of bow brand string will have them.)
>I am being paid double, though……
Sometimes, double (or even triple) isn’t enough!
Good luck with the performance, David.
You have my sympathy, David. Not recently (I’m smart enough not to take these gigs now), but a similar occurrence a few years back. Day before performance the harpist backed out (she actually was ill) and suggested me. I expressed my dubious feelings to the music director, who said, “Oh, it’s basically just doing what the piano does.”
“Fine,” thought I. Although I’m a lousy sight reader I can double the piano and maybe think up an ornament here or there. It was one of those dress followed by dinner break followed by concert situations.
I get there, and what she had actually meant by “doing what the piano does” was that there is NO piano part at all and the harp has to carry the entire ensemble for all 169 pages of the score, most of which is fast running patterns at tempi like Presto, allegro molto, etc.
Afterwards, she said, “Well, Dorothy Remsen didn’t have any trouble with it.” Duh!
Well, it varies a bit from app to app, but with forScore you can either tap to see your whole library and then scroll to the piece you want, or you can make a set list of the tunes for a gig.
In a set list tunes automatically appear in whatever order you chose–turn the last page of piece one and piece two will pop up–but you can also tap a tune in the set list menu to jump to any tune, and there’s a navigation button at the bottom of the screen that you can slide to go to any page in a longer piece, or to any tune in a set list.
The one thing forScore lacks this way that I would like to have is a Bride Button–for those times when the wedding planner has told you it will be ten minutes more, and you look up 30 seconds later and suddenly there they are. I’d like to be able to have a button that would float over the screen throughout the set list pieces that I could tap and immediately go to a particular piece. Another app, UnrealBook, is supposed to be able to do this, but I never could figure out how.
No, I don’t think for most people that there would be any real trouble even in the US, Adam, although I for sure wouldn’t show up for something like one of performance exams or an audition with an ipad (or a copy on paper, either), but I thought it was right to mention it.
(For anyone who has any of my arrangements: pdf away, as long as it’s for your own use and not for all your friends, too.)
> Its no different to taping up copies and have all the pages on view in one go is it?
No, indeed, but there are plenty of folks in the music industry who don’t like that, either. Of course the exact law varies from country to country. In the US I believe you are allowed to make one copy for “study purposes” but beyond that it is technically a violation.
Well, Christian, unfortunately one difficulty with that is that this is all changing so much so fast it’s hard to keep up, even online. 🙂
Georgina, one thing I should have mentioned is that scanning in printed bought music probably has all sorts of copyright ramifications. It’s not a problem for me since I mostly play my own arrangements, and they exist in Finale, which makes very nice pdfs very easily. But I have a few important things I did in MusicTime Deluxe before I got finale, and getting those pieces into PDF (since I can no longer open the original files on the computer) is time-consuming and labor intensive, even on a mac, where you can easily make a pdf from any file in any program.
>So have I got this right – you scan all your music and put it on the ipad (is that easy to do?) and there is some application that means a swipe of the hand turns the page??
Well, it’s very easy to put any music that’s in pdf form onto it. Creating PDFs is another story, really. There are several apps for musicians where you turn a page just by tapping the screen once, but they’ve also just come out with a bluetooth foot pedal, which sold out so fast I didn’t get into the first batch, so I’m still waiting on that. I think it will be fine for lever harp, probably not so convenient for pedal harp.
Personally, I don’t like the ipad much for ensemble music, because even with the enlarging feature in forScore (the app I use) it’s still smaller than print size, and if there are cue lines it either gets really small or you have far too many page turns and scrolls. Don’t forget the ipad only displays one page at a time, so for all music you have more turns, and turns where you aren’t used to them, to begin with. On the other hand, a tap is a lot faster than an actual turn, especially when it’s breezy.
I’m going to be doing a fairly extensive review of the ipad for acoustic musicians soon, and I’ll post a link to that here when it starts, if you’re interested.
