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Tony- I don’t play jazz or pop music(except for written out arrangements). But my understanding is that jazz players always keep the pedals in the key of the piece. If it’s in E flat for example, then the pedals are always in E flat. If a G sharp is needed, then the player moves the G pedal to sharp but then immediately moves it back to natural, even if G sharp is needed again 3 measures later.
I’ve noticed that those harpists who have written out some of their arrangements(Paul Baker, Stella Castellucci, John Escosa, Jack Nebergal to name a few) put the pedals in the way they do them, creating log jams of pedals. I know a few classical harpists that do the same thing. But most classical harpists prefer to plan out the pedals so that you don’t have 4 pedals on one beat. That’s what would happen in the Faure without very careful planning. So I understand why you probably don’t use diagrams very often. Your pedals are always in the home key.
What an interesting question Cathy. What’s left of my memory tells me that using lines to indicate pitch started with Gregorian Chant. So maybe we’re talking 5th century. It started with one line. As time went on more lines were added until there were so many it was like looking at striped wallpaper. So the original line was eliminated. This was the C which is the ledger line below the treble staff and the ledger line above the bass staff, thus separating all these lines into two staves. Where the flat, natural, and sharp symbols came from I have no idea.
The next time I get back to practicing I’m going to make trill practice a part of my routine. In French method, it’s called oscillation of the wrist, and when Catherine Michel demonstrated her one handed trill for me,(21212121) the fingers were virtually immobile and the wrist was oscillating but only very slightly. The trill was fast and very even. She did it for perhaps 6 or 7 seconds and could have gone on longer I’m sure.
Tony- There are some pieces that are so complicated key-wise that you just have to have pedal diagrams all through the piece in order to practice in efficiently. The one that takes the cake on that score is Faure’s Une Chatelaine en sa Tour… The pedals are almost never in a key and when I first learned that I put pedal diagrams at the beginning of every line of the piece! When I published my edition of that I left them in there. In that case, they also helped with the memorization process, because I could visualize the pedal arrangement at very specific points.
One more thing occurred to me. Concerning the pedal diagrams: The diagram should reflect the pedal arrangement at the START of the measure, or stated another way, at the end of the previous measure. If there are any pedal changes within the measure where the pedal diagram is, they should not be reflected in the diagram, because they occur after the start of the measure.
I generally agree with Cathy. Somewhere here there was a thread that dealt with writing pedals. You might try to find that. Here is as much as I can remember from that thread.
1) Pedal diagrams should be put in occasionally at places that would be logical starting points when practicing. They shouldn’t be put in every time there is a pedal change. Diagrams(the Salzedo type diagram is what I’m talking about) should be put above the staff.
2) If she is going to put in actual pedal changes, make absolutely sure that they are exactly where they should be. Someone should learn these pieces before they go to print to make sure the pedals are in the correct place. Often what looks correct will cause an unintended pedal slide or buzz and has to be moved slightly one way or the other. The only way to find this out is to actually learn the piece.
3) Make the pedal letters as big as is feasible. I hate most printed pedal markings because they are too small to see easily.
4) Put right foot above left and be consistent about it.
5) If a pedal is changed and then changed again within a measure or two with no other pedal in the same foot, then put a line from the first change to the next one and just put the change(a flat, natural, or sharp sign) at the end of the line.
6) If a pedal is changed and then changed again more than 2 measures away or on another line with no other pedal change in that same foot, then put a short line AFTER the first change and put a short line BEFORE the next change. Write the second change out completely(i.e., the first change is B flat and the second one is B natural, then write B both times).
7) As much as is possible, the pedal changes should be written below the bass staff. Sometimes that’s not possible and they can be written between the staves. They can be written in both places within one piece, as the need dictates.
Sherry-There is also an Orff method of teaching musical fundamentals. I don’t know how it compares to the Kodaly method. In the United States, musical instrument instruction tends to take place exclusively in the context of the instrumental lesson. That means the teacher has to not only teach the student how to play the instrument, but also how to read notes and rhythm, which is a completely separate skill. It would be nice if, like the French, students took their instrumental lesson from one teacher, and learned everything else-solfege in the case of French students- with another. But we don’t usually do that here.
So with that being the case, I’m curious to know how Suzuki students fare in the long haul when they are learning to play the harp by ear and are not getting theory until much later. Is it a hindrance or does everything come out even in the end?
Mel- I think it was Xavier who told me that Catherine does it that way. Either Xavier or Emmanuel Ceysson. But I think it was Xavier, because he studied with her.
I’ve been told that Catherine Michel plays the opening trills of the Boildieu exactly as you describe, using the enharmonic note as well as the actual lower note to play the trill 312131213121. I’ve never played the Boildieu and I don’t have it in front of me right now so I can’t tell you much more than that.
All of these (4) ways of playing a trill(5 if you count the one just mentioned) require work and a lot of practice. It all comes down to muscle memory. I tried Xavier’s way of strumming the strings and got nowhere with it. I too would have to devote a lot of practice time to learning it. My sense when I tried it was-and I think this is true of most of the ways of playing a trill-that you have to learn to articulate the notes in a completely different way from how you normally play. In all but one of these ways, the fingers barely move, and most of the movement is in a rapidly oscillating wrist. In Xavier’s strumming technique, the finger articulation is very short and not at all down towards the palm. So I got the sense that if I really wanted to learn these trill techniques, I would have to work on developing a new muscle memory just for trills. And that takes time.
Mel- I used to be a slave to metronome markings. In my student days, if there was a metronome markingby Grandjany, Renie, Salzedo, whoever) I felt I HAD to achieve that speed or I’d be a complete failure. Most of the time the markings were out of reach.
After a hiatus of more than 20 years of not playing, I got back to it again, practicing a lot and working entirely on my own(i.e. no teacher). One of the things I decided was that I was not going to pay attention to metronome markings. I would let each piece find its own tempo. Without that hanging over my head I could focus entirely on how I wanted the piece to sound. When I’ve heard recordings made of my recitals, I’m sometimes surprised that the tempos are faster than I thought they were. But I think that happens to everybody. The point is, I came to realize that the tempo of a piece is bound to the rest of the interpretation. What you want to do with the piece will often dictate the tempo, and the faster the tempo the less you can do interpretatively. I can think of only one piece that I wish I could play but I just can’t play it at the speed that I believe it should go, and that is La Rossignol of Liszt/Renie.
Mel- For most harpists, repetitive patterns are difficult and tiring. The longer they go on, the more the hand wants to seize up. In that Mozart passage, most people, by the time they get to the top of it doing 212121, are slowing down because the hand and fingers are getting tired. Alternating 2 and 3 eliminates that problem. I’m not sure what you are referring to about the left hand. I don’t have the music in front of me, but my memory is that the left hand is written in broken octaves which everyone plays as octaves. I’m guessing that you play the left hand part there as a scale which would be a little more confusing. Read my post on the trill thread, which will explain the physiology of some of this.
