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>I recall as a student learning a piece by Salzedo which used the harmonic at the twelfth, but I have no memory of which piece it was.
Poem of the Little Stars?
Argenta, the double-columned cross-strung harp is a Greenway (maybe Greenaway), not a Pleyel. It’s in “The Harp; Its History, Technique and Repertoire” but I don’t have a copy at hand right now.
A chaconne is a musical form, not the name of a tune:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaconne
There are hundreds and thousands of chaconnes.
But who could reach the levers? I can think of several American makers, like Webster, who make very attractive harps (i’d love his little pseudo-Erard) but I can’t reach the levers below middle C.
>a lever-sized pedal harp had been tried before
Just in the interest of accuracy, the L&H Prelude and the 85P are exactly the same height and very nearly the same width. Only the weight is very different.
>But just to remind that the idea was not new completly..it’s original from John Egan at the 19. century.
Yes, I’ve always thought the Royal Portable definitely beats the Dilling harp on aesthetics, but I can see that the curve of the neck is a more practical location for levers/ditals for both the maker and the player.
Carl, you make an excellent point.
>”Moorish Garden” from “Magic Road” is good, although the rest of the book is much simpler.
Perhaps, but many years ago I was playing one of those endless New Year’s Eve dinner jobs and decided I’d better play through the Minuet from that book, since I had to teach it the next day. Nelson Riddle was at the table next to the harp and he got up and came over to ask what that piece was.
Was Harp Museum rude or just silly? Not sure, myself.
Anyway, you’d need to think about what the demand for such an instrument would be. The Dilling harp was never especially popular, and there was an attempt made at a harp with a mechanically controlled pedal mechanism a few years ago and that idea was received in the harp world with a resounding silence. Pretty nearly any established harp maker is so busy doing what they do now that it’s pretty difficult to get them interested in new ideas, and the problem for someone starting from scratch is that it would also have to be a pretty darned good instrument to draw market share from the established makers. Not saying it couldn’t be done, but it’s a pretty big problem, one that definitely brings Victor’s “economy of scale” front and center.
There are many variations on this. My own publisher uses Safari (http://safari.oreilly.com/), but this sort of thing is really only economically feasible for those who sell many thousands of copies. The cost/income ratio is prohibitive for stuff like harp music where the margins are infitesimal. I’m pleased to have my tech books available this way, but it would sooo not be worth it for the music I publish, unfortunately, and I think that would be true for most harp music publishers. The market is just too small.
BTW, these custom publications are only worthwhile for t students in the larger world when you’re talking about combining, say, a couple of chapters each from 6 textbooks that would have cost $150 apiece. A single book for $90 to 100 is a bargain then, but again, it’s kind of hard to find a workable model for sheet music, alas. Perhaps in time, as POD becomes more common.
Yes, but you are comparing apples and oranges. The fixed costs for tooling up for a lever harp maker are infinitesimal compared to that of gearing up to make pedal harps (I’m sure Carl can weigh in here), and lever harp makers mostly only make however many harps they feel like making. I don’t see this as a useful comparison at all, really, Victor. There’s a huge difference between something you can do, and do well, in your own garage, and an undertaking that requires a staffed factory. The investment/risk is so much lower for the lever harp maker that it’s really not comparable. Dusty is the only maker I can think of who operates at a factory level.
>I don’t buy anything with the intention of helping economies of scale, and yet we can make a difference by encouraging those interested in playing the harp to actually do so.
Again, I don’t see your point. Of the students who start with a lever harp, a fairish number will want to go on to a pedal harp. You know, there are a heck of a lot of pedal harp owners out there today who would never have owned a harp or played one at all if they had had to start with a pedal harp.
I certainly don’t encourage or discourage my own students from playing a pedal harp if they want to, as long as they understand what they are in for, economically. I do have pedal harp students, you know. You seem to be arguing based on the premise that I’m saying nobody should play the pedal harp, and that would be as silly as encouraging *all* my students to play a pedal harp just to prop up the bottom line at L&H.
Okay, I see, but I personally don’t feel inclined to lug a huge instrument around just to keep up the profit margin at L&H. Each to his own.
>the same is true for lever harps,
Actually, this it isn’t, really. Most lever harp makers are very small shops, just one guy and his assistant, and they don’t aspire to international corporate status.
>Live is very hard for pedal harpists so we should as a community be careful about drawing work away from that instrument or soon no-one will be able to afford them at all
I totally don’t follow you here, Saul? Are you operating on the assumption that a lever harpist commands a lower fee? They should not. My clients hire *me*, not a particular harp.
If that’s not what you mean, I don’t follow at all. Can you explain?
Well, unless you have a lever harp designed for this it will be uncomfortable. You’ll have a face full of tuning pins with most pedal harps, for instance.
FWIW, many great harpists, like Tournier, have been left-handed, but they played the harp normally, just as left-handed pianists don’t need a backwards keyboard.
