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The question of ‘noise’ is an odd one. A very good friend of mine(whose name absolutely everyone here knows) was moving into an apartment in New York many years ago. She was wheeling her harp down the corridor towards her new apartment when a man came up behind her and said,” You’re not going to be playing that in here are you?” “It’s very quiet,” she said,”Really, you won’t hear it.” He continued down the corridor until he got to his own apartment door. As he put the key in the lock, she heard, coming from his apartment, the sound of 3 or 4 Chihuahuas barking furiously!
Rosemary- I’m terrible at self promotion too, but I have noticed that the people who are good at it are, above and beyond every other quality they have, persistant. They NEVER give up. I think that that’s the main reason they are successful at it. There’s no magic secret. They just keep at it relentlessly.
I read you post and i tinking, dis some kind of crazy idoit who tinking of teach harp. But what da hell, hwo mush damage can you does?
Honest, it’s not me. I really haven’t been following his posts very much. I’ll have to go back and read them.
Wurlitzers were made between 1906 and 1936. So the youngest of them are at least 65 years old. There were some things, like the action, that were much better than any action that any other company ever built. Some parts of their woodworking, mainly the body shell construction, had problems, and I’ve finally figured out why they had problems and how to fix it perminantly. In the end, they were really great harps.
I’ve heard Madam Butterfly refered to as Madam Butterball by Marilyn Horne no less. I always heard The Bartered Bride called The Battered Broad.
Wurlitzer harps were wonderful instruments. The Wurlitzer action was the best that was ever built, which is why I copied it when I created my Swanson Harps.
Remember the joke from Mash? Where someone got a recording of the Mahler song cycle ‘Kindergarten teacher.’ (kindertotenlieder)
Rosemary- I’m not sure how many of them have string parts. Erica Goodman has a whole CD of Tournier Image with the string parts. They really are great.
Rosemary- I guess I’m a little touchy about amateurs at the moment. I had two really gorgeous natural 23’s for sale on my company web site(the pictures of them are still there) and one of the calls I got was from a woman who wanted me to rent one of them to her(half way across the country) for a month and then let her decide if she wanted to buy it or not. I told her she was welcome to come to Boston and play the instrument as long as she wanted, but it wasn’t leaving my house until it was sold. To make a long story short, she hounded me for weeks about renting that instrumentm, THEN told me that she has bought and sold three harps in three years because she was so finicky about the sound. Turns out, her measure for judging the quality of the sound was(and I swear she told me this) the number of compliments she got at the end of the church service. She wanted me to send her this harp so she could play it in church and if she(not the harp) got lots of compliments, then she’d buy the harp. If there were few compliments then it must be a bad harp and she would send it back to me. Honest to God I’m not making this up.
Rosemary- I’m sure the harp part is exactly the same. Unless you’ve got some compelling reason to do this with strings, my own feeling is that the strings don’t really add anything to the piece. It works better as a solo piece. Now, the Tournier Images are another story. The strings parts that he wrote for those are wonderful and turn the solo piece into a real chamberwork.
Roselind- I didn’t mean to imply that I can make a Daphne 40 string sound like an old 23. Not at all. What I’m saying is that if I play 5 different 23’s, I don’t really care that much about the individual qualities of each one, (unless one has a serious dead spot for instance), because my technique can even out small inconsistancies and can warm up(to some extent) a cold bright sound for example.
Bravo Rosemary. You exactly described the dilema of sound. Everybody wants the sound of a 40 year old harp on a brand new instrument, but the only way to get that, and I mean THE ONLY WAY, is to make the board too thin. And in a couple of years it is pulled up.
Also, a lot of people mistakenly confuse BIG sound with GOOD sound. Harps with a big boomy sound are muddy to play. A good sound to me is one with a clear, full and rich attack, followed by a quick decay. The other thing about sound is that a great deal of it comes from the harpist, not the harp. I’m not particularly finicky about the sound of a harp, because the sound when I play it comes from me and my technique(as well as my fat fingers!). These harpists who are constantly finding fault with the sound of every instrument they play drive me nuts. If they knew how to produce a good sound, they could do it on any instrument. By the way, almost 100% of the time, the most finicky harpists are the amateurs. I never hear these endless complaints from good professionals.
