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Anderson is a major instrument insurer. They don’t only insure harps. FWIW, for about $60K in coverage I pay around $320 a year.
The easiest way to find the method is to do a search on their site for Watkins, then click the methods and studies link at the top of the results. It pops right up.
You can order the Watkins at harp.com. As for the duo, there are many pieces arranged for harp and keyboard. (some might be piano or organ, but usually they can be made to work, as can duo harp arrangements)
If you don’t get any other responses here, you might contact Kelly Yousoufian at
michiganharpcenter.com and ask her if she has anything or knows anyone closer who might be able to help you.No, none taken, but I don’t think anyone can help you at all with that. You’ll just have to grapple it out for yourself, I’m afraid.
>the only thing that troubled me is young sheep make the best strings
Yes, but they make the best meat, too, so I’m not sure why this is a consideration? Nobody is letting sheep (or cattle, for that matter) live out their natural life span and then willingly buying tough old mutton or beef from the meat case, you know.
It’s not like people are saying, “Let’s kill that lamb now because it will make better strings.”
>What harpists of the day did, as you would expect, is buy the double action harp and use it like a single action instrument, because that’s what they were used to. They would tune it in E flat and then use half of the mechanism. Even Berlioz complained about this in his treatise on orchestration.
But that kind of proves what I’m saying. Why did they buy them at all, then? It’s not like single-action harps disappeared from the market. They bought ’em because they saw the advantages of the sturdier harps, whether or not they wanted two rows of discs.
That’s not the same as someone who had no financial stake in it, Carl.
Naderman Pere didn’t say, “Let’s keep those hooks!”, did he?
The closest thing I can think of would be Dorette Spohr supposedly giving up the harp after the double action harp came out because she found it too hard to move from the single action pedal harp, but supposedly she said it was because she could see the superiority of the new harps but was just too frustrated. I’ve always been a little agnostic about that story, myself. I think it more likely that she had other reasons and found a good premade justification.
Because people are (often justifiably) not always eager to jump up and down about the latest technological advance these days, it’s become axiomatic that people have always taken this attitude towards everything, but it’s just not the case.
I can’t think of a single recorded anecdote of anyone looking at the early pedal harps and getting all bent out of shape about the idea. Anyone else know of one?
Thanks, Tony. I’ve done that and restored my ipod and all and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Ah well, I have cleartune, too.
But I do remember being told in my early days, I don’t know how accurately, that it took the intestines of 14 sheep to string a concert grand. I think they’ve just changed what they use. Probably around the time the coated strings came out would be my guess.
Phoebe, there was a long detailed article about the Bow Brand factory and the whole icky process a couple of years ago in either Harp Today or maybe the AHJ, and they only talked about beef, not a mention of sheep.
They are made from the byproducts of animals bred for meat, etc. Sheep used to be the string source of choice, but in recent years most gut strings are from cattle. Nothing is killed just for string-making, if that concerns you.
(Although an old name for string gut is catgut, kitties aren’t involved.)
