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Jerusha- I think it is important for the consumer to know where parts were manufactured, even if the company says the product was made(or assembled) in the US. Chinese manufacturing is notorious for using unsuitable materials to make products that are then sold in other parts of the world, often with disastrous consequences. We’ve already seen recalls of toothpaste and dog food that were contaminated and potentially poisonous. There is another much bigger disaster looming in the building trade. Thousands of houses were built in the 1990’s using Chinese made plaster board(also called wall board). These houses now have toxic fumes in them that turn the copper pipes black and corrode the air conditioning units. They also make people very sick and many have had to move out of their homes because of this. I think that ultimately these homes(probably 10’s of thousands of them) will have to be torn down. In any event they will be impossible to sell.
Several years ago I got a very long email from a man in Norway. He had bought a brand new 23 and now, 6 months later, one of the steel pedal bars(inside the pedestal, to which the actual brass pedal is attached) had broken into 2 parts! In my whole career I have never heard of this happening, because those pedal bars are supposed to be made out of cold rolled steel, which couldn’t possible do this. The man then went on to say that he had ordered and gotten a replacement pedal bar and whoever packed it had inadvertently included a little note from the box of pedal bars at the factory that said “bad steel. Do not use.” Since that email I have been made aware of two other harps that have had exactly the same problem. Now, I don’t know where those pedal bars were made, but it is obvious that whoever made them substituted a cheaper unreliable steel. The final product looked OK, but failed in a short amount of time when used. So my questions to the company would be, 1) where are your metal parts made? 2) what other parts have you had fail? I mean, would you want to be playing a performance wondering if some metal part on the instrument was going to break and leave you with an unusable instrument? It’s unfortunate that these questions even have to be asked. But failures like that indicate that the company is not watching closely how it’s parts are manufactured.
Maybe the next time someone takes a tour through the L & H factory they can look to see if The parts for this particular line are being made there. It’s the price that is the red flag. It’s just not possible to make a pedal harp at those prices in the United States. At the very least, the action(which is the most expensive part of a pedal harp) is probably being made entirely in China.
I’m only guessing on this, but because of the super low price for a pedal harp, I’m guessing that these harps(the Chicago line) are the first harps to be built completely in Lyon & Healy’s China factory.
Proper temperature takes a back seat to proper relative humidity. When the temperature changes then so does the relative humidity. I would say as a rule of thumb that colder is better than warmer, because lower temperatures RAISE relative humidity, and higher temperatures LOWER relative humidity.
Big changes in temperature are not good for the instrument, particularly very low temperatures(below 40 degrees F for example) that are then changed to much higher temperatures. Let’s say for example that your harp is in the back of the car in winter, where the temperature is maybe 40 degrees. If the harp is left there long enough, say over night, or on a 3 or 4 hour drive, then the whole harp descends to 40 degrees. There is nothing wrong so far. But, if you then take your 40 degree harp into a room that is say 70 degrees F, condensation will form on the instrument, including inside the action. This could do serious damage to the finish, metal parts and heaven knows what else. So it’s probably a good idea to try to keep the harp at a consistent temperature.
I don’t know where you got any of these numbers, but they are completely wrong. There is no way to predict how long a new instrument or a rebuilt instrument is going to go before needing major work. A new harp used say in a full time symphony orchestra or by a busy free lance harpist is going to get moved around a lot, be moved in and out of different temperature and humidity environments, and this takes its toll on the life of the instrument. A new harp might belong to a music school, and be played 14 hours a day by students who don’t have their own instrument at school. That action will age 80 years in 5 actual years. In addition, there could be engineering defects built into a new instrument that are going to require attention in as little as 7 or 8 years. Half of my career has been spent repairing one of these defects made by a specific harp company for the last 50 years. I usually see the instrument 10 to 15 years after it was built.
The instruments that last 80 years or more without any rebuilding do so because they were not used for the bulk of that time. They were bought new, played for a few years by a kid who eventually gave it up, and then sat in the corner unused and unstrung until the descendants decide to sell grandma’s harp. I’ve bought many harps over the years that fell into this category.
So the bottom line is: Don’t base your decision to buy either a new or used harp based on false information. If the harp is built or rebuilt correctly, and you take very good care of it, making sure it is properly humidified year round, then there should be no difference between the durability of a new or used harp.
Oh my God Saul, one could write a HUGE book about this. That’s far too complicated a question for a Harp Column post.
Sylvia- Probably the best approach would be to carefully choose music that keeps the fingers connected to the strings as much as possible. Like Bach.
I believe there are still some players of chromatic harp in Belgium. You might contact a teacher there and go from time to time for lessons.
I believe there are still some players of chromatic harp in Belgium. You might contact a teacher there and go from time to time for lessons.
The McMansions went in a long time ago, while Alice was still there. She told me that she was actually happy to have more houses down there. For years there was no one near her on that road, and she felt safer having in particular the house directly across the street.
The man who bought the house from her seems to have done a beautiful restoration on the house. He changed the driveway around so that you no longer pull in directly in front of the house. Even Alice got tired of people turning around in the driveway all the time. The current owner put in a tall hedge across the old driveway and lawn right at Marine Avenue so it’s hard to see the house now.
If these people are really your friends, they will say, at the time that they ask you to play the wedding, that they insist on paying for this. If they ask you to play and don’t say anything about money, then my guess is that they think this is going to be a freebee, which is rude, insulting, and very presumptuous. So it’s then up to you to make it clear, in a diplomatic way, what your charges are and what, if anything you will discount or throw in for free.
I have been working as a harp technician/rebuilder/builder in the harp world for a long time now, and many of my clients have become really good friends. But if they want my services, they pay for them. Friends are friends, and business is business.
If one of your friends is a dentist or lawyer, would you expect them to give you their services for free just because they are friends?
The most likely reason for having difficulty getting any pedal into the sharp position is that the rod is too short, and so the action is at the end of its movement and has to be forced into sharp position. I would try unscrewing the pedal coupler one full turn and then trying it again. This may leave you with a whisper of overmotion, but you may not have any choice. Lyon & Healy harps in particular really have this problem if you try to remove absolutely all of the overmotion. The problem is that the sharp slot in the pedestal is about 1/16th inch too far from natural. So you have to have a very slight amount of overmotion in order to get all of the pedals into sharp position without feeling any resistance.
Peter- Thank you so much for that. it must be particularly hard for you and your wife who knew her and spent time with her. Did she have a husband and children? About how old was she? She apparently studied at Indiana University, but I don’t know how long ago. This would be a tragedy under any circumstance, but for the small harp community in Turkey to loose one of its brightest stars magnifies the loss even more.
Those cork pads I suppose will work fine as anchors for the gut and nylon strings. The reason those strings don’t come pre-knotted is that it’s often easier to thread the string into the hole from the top and then knot the string. The very top strings in the 1st octave can only be installed that way.
