Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Disappointingly few pedal harpists “get” the lever harp at all, Jerusha.
I find an awful lot of pedal harpists who say about the lever harp exactly what pianists used tosay about the pedal harp back when I started playing: “Why do you want to play that? It’s such a limited instrument! The piano can do so much more so much more easily.”
Of course the lever harp is limited. So is the pedal harp, the flute, the violin, the piano. Every instrument there is has limitations. The difference is that harpists tend to obssess about them. I never found a flutist who’s annoyed because she can’t play four note chordal passages as a solo.
>thought I’d learned how to deal with the HTML but obviously not)
It’s not your fault, Bonnie. This site enforces a very restricted encoding on web browsers–most annoying. Hugh says he’ll look into it one of these days.
S.S. You are amazingly talented if you can play this one and sing it at the same time. There’s an awful lot going on.
Just a note to say that I don’t believe this program, while unquestionably useful, is fully compatible with 10.4.8. After installing it, I completely lost the ability to launch applications and wound up having to do an archive/install to get back to normal.
The only other time I’ve had that much trouble from a mac program was an alpha version of a photoshop noise reduction plug-in which caused me to lose video completely, but one expects these things from beta software.
Thanks, Ann Marie. I hadn’t heard of this before and it does seem to be an excellent program, but far too complex both musically and computer-wise for the students I have in mind. I’m talking about the kind of students who need lots of drill on stuff like “which note is higher?” and the names of the notes.
I can find a ton of stuff with little bunnies or the Baby Einsteins, but nothing that isn’t either just for kids or totally keyboard oriented.
Hi, Leigh. Thanks. On my computer and my student’s computers, the Win version runs, but the audio keeps dropping out, and most of them aren’t musically sophisticated enough to know when they should be hearing something.
AFAICT from their site, no attempt has been made to do anything to this program since it was released in 2002. I emailed them a while ago about the mac version and basically got told to take a hike (in very polite terms). They don’t seem to be interested in this side of things anymore, which makes me wonder if Musition or something has stolen their user base away. That’s why I started this thread.
>And I hope that composers and arrangers nowadays send their final versions of music out as PDFs
Very few publishers will take PDFs, since they almost always need to reformat the music to their own template and this is about a million times easier to do with a finale or sib file. FWIW, I know a lot of professional engravers who sigh for the days when they got simple manuscript copy from composers/arrangers, because they think that’s actually faster to set up than trying to fix all the oddities that can creep into files that are typeset by people who really don’t know what they’re doing.
That’s kind of a weird answer (didn’t he get a chance to proof it?). It looks to me like Sibelius output, so if the publisher doesn’t have the maestro harp engraver font, that would explain it. Still, doesn’t say much for the publisher that nobody questioned that!
Anyway, I’m glad you got an answer. FWIW, the composer is right–those characters in Engraver would create a standard pedal diagram.
>Is there a way to upload a file here? I can scan in the symbols. It’s frustrating!
No, there’s way to embed a link, though.
But the easiest thing would be to post it on pixentral.com if you don’t have any webspace of your own, and copy the URL of the image into a new post. (You don’t have to register or sign up to use pixentral and it’s free).
The Dilling Harp is made by Arslaan Fay (was made, I should say, since he lost his workshop to Hurricane Charley). It is a smallish Irish-style harp, but instead of levers on each string it has a single action type mechanism, controlled by seven levers in the neck of the harp. So there is one lever that moves all the A strings, one that controls the D-line, etc.
Emily Mitchell and Jocelyn Chang are probably the best-known performers on this harp.
Katie, do you have a concert grand? I’ve been waiting for the Matrix to go hybrid, but if the Prius works….
(I currently have an escort wagon, which takes up to a semi-grand fairly comfortably. I *can* move my 11 in it, but I wouldn’t want to do that more than once a year or so.)
>Because four hurricanes in one year in Florida destroyed the workshop of the maker and patent holder of Dilling Harps
Well, only Charlie got Arslaan, but one was enough.
>two rows of levers so it can be tuned in c-flat and make naturals and sharps?
Actually, I think Salvi investigated the idea of a double action lever back in the 80’s, but really the technical difficulties would seriously outweigh the advantages. I play lever harp all the time (and for classical music, too) and I can’t say that not being able to play in C-flat has ever been an issue. Even double action levers wouldn’t make modulating a whole harp any faster, and that’s the main difficulty about levers.
Yes, Julieanne, these sound very much like the histories of many of my friends from Eastman. I was far from the most talented/able student there, but I’ve been been very fortunate to have been a harpist during the good years. Even in the 80’s you couldn’t get a gig playing ‘Misty” down at the Holiday Inn if you were a bassoonist.
Diane, I don’t follow the logic that lots of Music Majors must mean lots of jobs. There have been hundreds of thriving career fields that got wiped out over the years by changes in society/technology, and not just in the 20th/21st centuries.
Yes, some people will thrive as musicians in the new order. Those who are clever and canny about marketing themselves and using the amazing new tools available now. (I know one harpist who makes an amazing income by sheer self marketing of his CDs.) But on the whole, there’s no question that live music is not very valued in our current society, and that the guerdon is likely to go to the best promoters rather than the best musicians.
I’ve been amazed at how quickly it’s gone from, “My mom thinks I’m crazy, but I really want a harp at my wedding,” to “My mom says I have to have a harp at my wedding.” That’s not a good sign for the future.
>I have tremendous respect for anyone who has obtained a degree in music performance!
So do I, Jerusha. I don’t want to masquerade under false pretences. I did all the work for a BM in performance except for one post tonal theory class and the senior recital, but I just couldn’t afford to lose another year’s income (and the theory class was two semesters that had to be taken sequentially), so I don’t have one. But I know what it’s like to go back again.
Another point of clarification: The reason I gave librarianship as my example is not because I think it’s easier, but because it’s more flexible, being more academic. You can study on the train, in the cafeteria, at 3 AM–lots of situations where practicin g (especially on the harp!) just isn’t feasible.
