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No way are you too old to learn the harp. However, as for your symphony aspirations, that depends on what you mean. Yes, you can probably get to the point where you could play with a community-type orchestra and enjoy it.
However, realistically, even if you were seven instead of 23, becoming the harpist in a regional or national level orchestra is an almost impossible goal these days. The competition is unbelievably fierce, and even local-level professional orchestras have no trouble finding exceptionally good harpists who are willing to fly in and play for a pittance when they need a harpist, and the number of symphonies is very much on the decrease in the US, particularly. Only a few harpists ever made all their income from orchestral work, and the number is dropping all the time, unfortunately.
I don’t like orchestra playing myself (much rather do chamber music), and I’m glad, because I’m seeing a lot of very good harpists who’ve played for years in local symphonies being pushed out because it’s possible to get an amazingly good harpist to come in on a per-service basis at a personal loss to herself/himself, just to have a chance to play. And a lot of the old standbys like ballet are moving more and more to recorded music/synthesized music rather than live, further limiting the options for orchestral playing.
So yes, by all means you can learn to play, but I don’t think it’s realistic for any harp student these days to view an orchestral career as a given or likely to happen. It’s a very dicey thing for anyone, now.
Do not buy a harp. Most especially do not buy a harp on ebay. Look around for a teacher in your area and if at all possible rent to start with. There are many places that offer a rent to own option and also many teachers have rentals for their students to use as starter harps.
At the time that the ramshead designs were most popular, harps were single action. There are a very few early double action harps with that kind of ornamentation, but Erard (the maker of the majority of the surviving harps from that period that you see in the US and UK) needed to alter things because column capitals got longer to accommodate the wider action plate necessitated by the extra row of discs on a double action mechanism, and also styles were changing, too, starting to move away from the extreme simplicity of the early Empire period, just as the Empire styles were a reaction against the more extravagant styles of the 18th century (when elaborate scrolls were the thing).
The most popular early motif for Erard double actions was the so-called Grecian design, with a row of Nikes (the winged goddess, not the shoe) around the capital:
http://www.hbryan.com/restored/bigkirihrp.jpg
This in turn was followed by the famous Erard Gothic design (for the larger double-action harps which succeeded the Grecian), very much in tune with the trend for all things gothic in the early Victorian era.
>If only it weren’t so big (for a lever harp)!
Yeah. I went all the way to the ISFHC conference in Galveston to see it, and it was so nearly perfect for what I wanted, except that I couldn’t reach the low bass levers sitting down. 🙁
> Is that style called something?
Not really. It’s just a simpler attempt to give the effect of a more complicated style (the scroll).
The madame cadillac is a scroll top style harp. I don’t in the least understand what you mean by ‘French style.’
Look at the capital on Howard’s harp again. It’s called a ramshead harp because it has little sheep’s heads around the top.
Don’t understand. Both ramshead harps and scroll tops were French designs, although both styles were used by German, English, and other nationalities at the time as well. But at that period, France was the style leader for most things in Europe.
Here’s a classic ramshead harp from Howard Bryan (click capital photo for larger image:
The Dauphine doesn’t have an actual scroll, but it was intended to give the impression of one of the old scroll tops in the way the ornament was applied.
Ditto with the Bryan Marie Antoinette: it’s not really a scroll, just applied stuff over the usual beak, but both harps are meant to look like scroll top harps.
Webster’s Madame Cadillac (hate that name) is an actual rams head harp as the harp world in general understands the term.
If you can find a copy of Gildas Jaffrenou’s book “Folk Harps” (older, out of print a long time now, I think) he has a good discussion of volutes (scrolls) and how to create them.
>nd for scroll-headed harps that have the general shape of a ram’s head but do not necessarily depict one
No. A ram’s head harp has a decoration of rams’ heads on it. A harp with a scroll is not at all the same thing (at least not in general parlance–there are a couple of folks here who seem to use the term that way, but nobody in the rest of the harp/antique world would understand the term to include scrolltops).
One time when you might get figured veneer under ebony would be when the harps are being done assembly line style and they just go ahead and make up x number of bodies and x number of necks, using the same veneer on all of them, because it’s just simpler to have everything work with everything and not worry about what’s going to happen when it gets to the spray booth.
So you might well find something interesting under the ebony, although on the recent L&H ebony harps I’ve seen there’s a kind of red gesso-like undercoat that’s usually what you see when there’s a minor finish accident, rather than the wood itself.
> Besides, I thought that most pedal harps were veneered anyway?
Yes, the body and neck are, and builders aren’t going to waste the cost of figured veneer on something they plan to paint, at least not usually. The inside of the neck is something like piano pin block and the column is glued up from maple. In the case of an instrument like the Style 30 with simple flat planes, the column may also be veneered–L&H offered a bunch of luscious exotic wood veneered 30s for a while. Not with carved harps.
It used to be that L&H charged more ($500 when I bought my 23, which was substantial back then) for the natural finish and some harp teachers used to say to buy a natural harp not for looks but because there was no place to hide a flaw or major mineral deposit that way. They stopped the natural finish surcharge many years ago. I don’t know that it ever really did make a difference in the quality of the instrument.
