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If you’re currently playing a troubadour you have a big ol’ set of sharping levers on that. Given that you say your teacher doesn’t know what they are, do you just ignore them and play everything in the key of C (or e-flat if the harp hasn’t had the tuning changed) or retune the whole harp every time you need a different key? If so, I wouldn’t worry about having them on a lap harp, either.
>Now I’m about to relearn the piece using the correct hand position
Don’t be discouraged if you find this very hard to do right now, Fiona. It’s usually easier to put those pieces aside and come to them a bit later when what you’ve been doing isn’t so hardwired anymore.
Just thought: there are also those new levers, the ones that have the colored metal ring for a handle, but those are just a nightmare to try to grab and move, in my limited experience trying them. It’s a good concept if the handle were a different shape.
Another thing that occurs to me: if the levers have the old style notation of “F# III” or Sylvia Woods’s notation of “high C#”, mark the lever changes in on the staff so you know right away which note they mean.
Elaine, can you clarify? I thought you meant you have trouble with pieces with marked lever changes?
Her suggestion for the Concert Etude seems to indicate that she thinks a lever harp should play the scale glisses.
Okay, it must be Moonlight. You can either transpose it or play scale glissandos, but frankly, I don’t use that one for lever students, myself.
I meant a key you can play in with the harp tuned in E-flat. If you want to play several pieces later on, are you going to stop and retune the whole harp in-between? If you have a teacher, she should be able to figure out what to do, if you don’t know how. Remember you can substitute a glissando with G# and D#, for example.
Donna, for future reference, it’s going to be easier in the long run to transpose the piece to a key you can play in in E-flat.
>I am truly curious why would anyone want an E# or a B#
You don’t have those unless you tune in C, Liam. Full levers means the ability to raise each note one half step by raising the lever, or to lower it by lowering a raised lever. That means you would have Bb/B natural and Eb/E natural.
