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Your explanation of the Salzedo raise may make sense to Salzedo players, but it makes absolutely no sense to non-Salzedo players. In advanced repertoire, there is simply no room or time to make a gesture that carries the hand and fingers away from the strings. Advanced Salzedo players have figured this out. They don’t raise. Yolanda Kondonasis, Alice Giles, Judy Loman, and Ann Hobson Pilot are a few of the names that come to mind. They don’t raise. And for very good reason. There’s no time in the music they play, and its a totally superfluous and useless gesture. And yet I believe that they teach raising, and that baffles me. I simply cannot understand a teacher teaching something that they don’t do themselves. To say that the raise has an effect on the sound is absurd. Does that mean that you cannot get any sound if you don’t raise??
At the top of my list would be Lily Laskine playing the Pierne Concertstuck. Zabaleta playing the two Divertissements of Caplet. Suzanne McDonald playing the big Renie pieces as well as the Liszt/Renie Nightingale. Naoko Yoshino playing the Debussy first and second Arabesques as well as Salzedo’s Variations in the Old Style. I don’t pretend to know every recording out there, but these are just a few that come immediately to mind.
John- I’m not sure what you mean by a landmark recording. There are certain recordings that I consider the definitive recordings of specific pieces. There are certain players that I feel are the best at a certain type of repertoire. But all of that of course is subjective, and someone else might take strong issue with my choices.
Rosemary- I think we all second your terrific post.
I think a distinction needs to be made between the abusive personality type of teacher, who is always going to be mean-spirited, domineering, rigid, controlling, etc., in virtually all situations and with virtually all students, and the occasional frustration that all teachers go through with students who are not getting anywhere, not listening, coming to lessons(consistantly) unprepared, etc.
I’m not sure what the solution is to the second situation, except to tell the student that, since you are not getting anywhere with them, and they are not learning anything from you, that you can no longer teach them but can recommend other teachers. It’s not worth teaching a student with whom you are always frustrated and angry.
Let me start by saying that I have NOT read every single word of this long thread. I’ve skimmed it and read bits and pieces, and I think I have the jist of what everyone is saying and feeling.
I’m kind of mystified by the original question, because I never had any teacher who drove me to tears and, while I am a very demanding teacher, I have never had a student near or in tears. I think that a teacher who drives a student or numerous students to tears has a personality problem, not a teaching one.
Having grown up with a parent who was a brutal emotional batterer, I am hyper sensitive to misplaced criticism. That is, criticism that attacks who the student is rather than what he/she has done. My particular area of interest in teaching harp is taking students who have come to me from other teachers(please, I didn’t steal them!) and fixing technical problems as well as moving them into more and more difficult repertoire. To do that I have to be very demanding and persistant, but at no time am I ever demeaning, sarcastic, destructive, or vindictive. In the first place, that would accomplish nothing. In the second place, it will create more problems than I am supposedly trying to fix, by making the student do worse rather than better.
A teacher who is mean, angry, demeaning, sarcastic, extreemly negative, is that way because of his own personality and not because he has to be that way to get the best results. A student who studies with such a teacher, even for a short time may take years to recover from the damage a person like that does.
Saul- You should read my article on the subject. Jamet worked with Debussy himself on this issue and this is what they came up with. The whole article is on my company web site, http://www.swansonharp.com. Click on the ‘Articles’ page. The quote from Jamet that still rings in my ears is, in referring to Debussy, Jamet said,”He didn’t want the chords played flat, but he didn’t want them rolled either. It was something in between, but something closer to flat than rolled.” I wrote the article because I felt that the information in it, well known to most harpists in France, should be written down lest it eventually disappear or get distorted, and also to disperse it to a wider public.
When I play the Danses, I do them they way I describe in that article, with an occasional longer ‘roll’ at the end of a phrase.
The opening of the Danses is the only example I can think of where the melody is on the bottom of the chord and so the roll, with a little emphasis on the first note, starts on the beat. But whole roll is so quick, (or should be) that the chord does not feel late.
Maybe she was a French harpist whose teacher used the term. I studied in France with Pierre Jamet, and I don’t remember him ever using a term for a specific type of rolled chord.
The French word ‘serrer’ means to squeeze, grip, or push. On highways in France for example you’ll see a sign that says ‘serrez a droit,’ meaning, move to the right. In music, serre is another term fo accelerando(basically, to squeeze the notes together). It has nothing to do with rolling chords.
Good heavens, this thread is longer than the Academy Awards show! I have read some of the posts(I’ll read them all tonight) and skimmed others. I do have one comment though. A serious student who goes to a serious teacher has to lay himself/herself at the teachers feet and tell the teacher at the first lesson that he/she will do whatever that teacher wants. Any good teacher can only teach what works for them. The student, during the time that they are with that teacher, has to do without questioning whatever that teacher says. Once that student has left that teacher, then he/she can decide what is to be kept and what is to be discarded. Picking and choosing, and particularly arguing with the teacher is an enormous waste of time and is counter productive. One very inportant teacher in the USA hates and detests teaching American students because they spend so much time arguing. Her foreign students do exactly what she says and as a result make enornous progress.
At my first lesson with Pierre Jamet, I told him that I was there to overhaul my technique and that I would play whatever he wanted me to. I said that my only request was that I not work on any pieces that I had already done. I wanted a fresh start. He absolutely loved that, and he told me that so many American harp students had come to him over the years and put the Danses on the stand, saying that they wanted to learn them from him. He would then have to tell them that if they were not willing to do the technical work first, that he could not teach them.
There is blame on both sides of the equation. Teachers at all levels(including college) who can’t teach keeping students, sometimes for years, and doing more harm than good. Students who argue, don’t listen to the teacher, or insist on playing repertoire that is beyond them.
To the student I would say, are you making progress with your current teacher? Are you playing noticeably better now than you did this time last year? Are you working on, and learning pieces appropriate to your level? How long does it take you to learn a piece? If you are working on a 5 page piece for 10 months, then the piece is not right for you and the teacher is showing bad judgement. My general rule of thumb is that any piece should take about 2 weeks per page of music to learn. 5 page piece? 10 weeks. If it is taking significantly longer, you need another, easier piece, and perhaps another teacher.
As I think I mentioned in the other thread, you should have many ways of rolling a chord, and the way you roll the chord should then be appropriate to the musical context of the piece. You can roll a chord very very fast, starting on the beat, as in the opening chords of the Danses(read my article on that subject), or roll much slower and more lush, ending on the beat, as in the opening statement of the Faure Impromptu. In the final chord of the Serenade of Parish-Alvars, I start the roll slowly and do a quick accelerando to the top as well as making a crescendo over the roll. In the harp cadenza to Brittens Young Persons guide… the opening chords are usually rolled as you mentioned above, both 4th fingers together, both 3rd, etc.
I once attended a ‘cello masterclass given by Rostropovitch(I don’t play the ‘cello!) and he told one of the students that you should have many ways of making the vibrato. I think it’s the same thing with rolled chords.
