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I would suggest the following:
1) Your name in big letters
2) a description. Harpist. Or Harpist and harp teacher. Something like that.
3) A picture of a harp, either a drawing or a photograph, with or without you in it.
4) A phone number, but no address.
5) if there is room, a list of things you can do. Music for weddings, parties, private functions, funerals. Whatever type of event you can play.
6) A web address if you have a web site.Don’t bother putting your degrees or diplomas. Nobody cares.
Actually, if you’re going to travel to see harps, I would wait and go to a major harp conference, like the American Harp Society or the World Harp Congress. During those conferences, all the major harp builders have harps on display and you can try them all, in one room. It’s like a harp department store for 3 days.
Buy a pedal harp and wait until you can try out various instruments and pick out the one you like. That’s your best shot at getting exactly what you want.
Nina- I taught English as a foreign language to French businessmen for two years when I lived in France. The course was intensive-8 hours a day for two weeks, 6 days a week. The men were generally in their 30’s to 50’s. I saw a whole range of ability there, from men who picked it up very fast to men who could hardly learn anything in that two weeks. The best student I ever had was a North African man who was maybe 30 years old when I taught him. Every word he learned he could pronounce without a trace of accent immediately. He grasped sentence structure right away and was a delight to teach. The worst student I had, and he had already worn out 5 or 6 teachers before me, was a self made millionaire who was probably in his early 60’s. I didn’t do any better with him than any of the other teachers.
The point is, I believe there are stages of life when certain things can be learned more easily than at others. Once someone has reached adulthood, then the ability to learn something is very individual, with some doing very well, like your mother, and others doing not so well. Children, especially very young children, pick up language much faster in general and at about the same speed as a group than adults. This isn’t surprising. In physical terms, there are windows of opportunity through childhood. If a child is born with a wall eye, the eye has to be repaired before the age of 4 or it will never see correctly, even if operated on later on. So maybe there are stages of life when certain skills can be learned in general easier than at other stages.
Nina-Your story about the study of primary/elementary school children reminded me of something I was told many years ago by a woman who was a real mentor to me. She had worked in the administration of what was then called a trade school in Brooklyn from 1926 to 1964. At that time, trade schools were mostly for kids who had behavioral problems or were not doing well in a regular high school. Every time a student was transferred to this trade school, my friend took it upon herself to interview the new student. She would have the student’s transcripts in front of her as she did this. She told me that very often, at the end of the interview, she would simply erase the IQ number in the student’s records and raise it 10, 15, or more points. She knew, she told me, that if the teachers saw the low IQ they simply would not make an effort. One of these students went on to become a college professor, and several others became electrical engineers. So your point is well taken.
It sounds like the black rubber pads that the harp sits on when you play could be causing that. You may have to try a solvent, like alcohol or paint thinner.
There’s a sontata by J.S. Bach for flute and continuo in E flat major that works very well on harp. A nice way to perform it is to have a ‘cello double the bass line.
Liam- The wood on a harp doesn’t dry out immediately. It takes time. In fact, several months for damage to show up. So it’s usually around the end of the winter that a harp that has not been humidified shows signs of checks in the finish, cracks in the wood, and joints opening up. If your harp is traveling between two good environments and spending the bulk of its time in one place or the other, then the few hours that it is out of that humidified environment is not going to do any damage. Your soap dish dampits won’t do any harm, but they are not the main reason your harp has not had any problems. Even harps that are moved constantly for gigs, if they then spend time in a controlled environment between moves, will be protected from the damage caused by low humidity.
Sam- I was 16 when I started playing the harp and at that time I lived in rural Connecticut and went to a regional high school. During my senior year(my first year of harp studies) I played at the school several times for student assemblies or evening programs put on for both students and their parents. I never once received a rude or derogatory comment from anybody. Not the school jocks, vocational agriculture guys, the misfits, no one. The whole school was fascinated with what I was doing. After that one year of study I was off to college as a harp major.
Karin- To be honest, I haven’t played it in a while and I haven’t done any harmonics on it. So I’m not sure. But I suspect they are great. I’ll let you know. I wonder if harmonics are affected by tension on the string. Some instruments require more tension on the string to get it up to the designated pitch. I suspect that the higher the tension, the less the harmonics speak. The lower the tension, within reason, the better they sound.
JP- Aren’t you sweet! I too find that harmonics are easier on one of my harps. But of course I wasn’t going to say that.
I’m not sure what it is that makes harnomics easier on one instrument or the other. I keep for myself a very old Lyon & Healy semi-grand that I completely rebuilt about 23 years ago. It’s a gorgeous instrument with a gorgeous clear sound. But I don’t get very clear and bell like harmonics on it. I don’t know why. I was thinking of recording the Parish-Alvars Serenade a few years ago, And I was going to record it on that instrument, but record the whole first page(all harmonics in chords!) on another instrument that had better harmonics and then splice the two parts together.
Left hand harmonics can be played just like right hand harmonics in the higher ranges. At the end of the Parish-Alvars Serenade the left hand harmonics go so high that you have to switch the left hand position and play them just like a right hand harmonic. But in general harmonics seem to work best if there is as much distance as possible between the thumb plucking the string and the knuckle or heal of the hand stopping it. One thing that nobody has mentioned yet is the harp itself. Some instruments produce much better harmonics than others. Don’t ask me why. So if you are constantly frustrated with the quality of the harmonics you play, it could have to do with the instrument.
Christian- That’s just AWFUL! What’s really amazing to me is how long this kind of musical drivel has been going on. I can remember as an undergraduate A LONG TIME AGO hearing pieces just like this. And they all got played once and that was it. Modern music proponents have always bragged about how modern composers have thrown off and abandoned the constraints that “limited” past composers. But the reality is, nothing could be further from the truth. They are all straight jacketed into writing junk like this. And if it sounds in any way appealing, then the composer is not taken seriously by these people. To paraphrase Adlei Stevenson, composers seperate the wheat from the chaff and then use only the chaff.
Laura- There’s a wonderful 10 minute film that was made in the early 1940’s of Mildred Dilling playing 3 pieces. It was transfered onto DVD and the owner of the film gave me a copy. I’m hoping that it becomes commercially available at some point because it shows Mildred at the peak of her playing abilities. There are very few people around today who remember her at that time in her life. She was a marvelous harpist with a great technique.
