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Charles- Do you know if anyone has done any tests to see what the tension is on these carbon strings, as compared to gut and nylon? I would love to see a table where nylon, gut, and carbon strings have been tested to see exactly what the tension is for each one on any particular string. Nylons have the lightest tension, and gut has more tension. But how much more? And how “light” for nylons? And do carbon strings have significantly more tension than gut strings? If they do, then this could cause structural problems over the long term for the neck and soundboard.
I just found out that the Deuxième Fantaisie de Concert has been chosen as one of the required pieces for the next Anne Adams Competition in 2026. For anyone reading this who is planning on entering that competition, the Carl Fischer edition is the only one available. No other company publishes it.
Thanks Balfour,
I’m so glad this piece got rediscovered and is available to the harp community. It’s funny for me to watch Catherine Play this piece. She occasionally uses a fingering here or there that I wouldn’t use. But I learned when she and I were working on editing this piece that she is left handed! She finds certain right hand fingerings to be very awkward (for her) because of this. I’m just dumbfounded that someone who is left handed could become such a great harpist, because the harp is such a right-handed instrument. Another really great left handed harpist is Emily Mitchell. She won Israel in 1979 and had a great career after that.
Hi Jerusha- Thank you so much. Slight correction though. This is not a transcription, but rather an original piece for harp that Tournier wrote in 1900 when he was 21 years old. The piece is 18 pages and about 8 minutes long. Because of the speed, it is high intermediate level technically. It’s a wonderful concert piece.
I have no idea why it was never published. I worked from old photocopies of the manuscript that were found in Germany. The owner of the photocopies couldn’t remember where she got them (many years ago). She very generously sent me photos of all the pages. When I was preparing this for publication we didn’t know where the original manuscript was. We know now! She did some detective work and found it!
Here is a link to a video of Catherine Michel playing the piece.
I didn’t realize that that quote was from Debussy. How perceptive composers are… Another composer quote I love came from Stravinsky. When he was told that Vivaldi wrote 220 concertos, his response was: “No he didn’t. He wrote one concerto 220 times!”
Balfour- Do you mean to tell me that if I don’t have cell phone service, the Peterson ap on my phone won’t work? I thought once you downloaded it, it was on your phone.
Us old folks remember the days when we had to tune entirely by ear. I can remember carrying a tuning fork around with me. The saying then was: Harpists spend half their life tuning, and the other half playing out of tune!
Annie Challan would have been 31 in 1971. I think the woman in the video is quite a bit older than that.
Years ago, a piano tuner friend who had a large collection of important pianos lent me, for about 10 years, a 1904 Steinway with a Carpathian burl elm case and carved cabriole legs. It was a glorious piano with a sumptuous sound. Once it was delivered, my friend tuned it for me. About a year or two later, it needed tuning, so I asked my friend, who didn’t live near me, for a recommendation. He recommended a former student of his. I had the man come over and tune the piano. When he left, I tried the piano. It sounded perfectly in tune, but it had lost something tonally. It sounded bland. The next time my friend, the owner of the piano, came to visit, I told him about this. He went to the piano, played a few chords, and said, “he didn’t stretch the octaves. I’ll go over it after dinner.” My friend worked on it for about 25 minutes, and when he was done, the glorious sound was back. So stretching the octaves actually has an effect on the sound production.
I’m an absolute caveman when it comes to anything involving computers or cell phones. But the young men who I am training convinced me to get the Peterson ap for my cell phone and it’s fantastic. It reads everything really clearly, and you can set it to “stretch” the octaves, the way piano tuners do, and the harp sounds fantastic when tuned like that. There is another Peterson tuner (not an ap) that costs about $180 which for some people would be even better. It has a sensor wired to the tuner. You put the sensor on the soundboard (it comes with slightly sticky clay that adheres it to the board) and the machine reads the vibrations, and doesn’t “listen” to the pitch. The huge advantage to that is that if you are an orchestra harpist and have to tune when other musicians are warming up, you can easily tune the instrument extremely accurately without any problem. One of the young men I trained bought that and prefers it to the Peterson ap.
Is there a photo of the harpist? At that time, it could be Marie-Claire Jamet, who would have been 38 at the time, or Catherine Michel, who would have been 23, or perhaps Martine Geliot, who would have also been about 23.
Stravinsky, because he was Russian, did not have copyrights on any of his early music, in particular the three ballets. For this reason, he went back to these pieces, I think in the 1940’s, and made new orchestrations, which he could then copyright. I believe that the main thing he did to the harp parts is reduce them from two harps to one. This made them more problematic to play.
I have never seen that. Maybe it is something that the lever harpists do. It’s never done on pedal harp.
