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Diane- I always love your posts because they are always so well thought out. (There are many other people whose posts I love too, but I’m directing this at Diane right now).
I asked the question about what comes after the beginner stuff exactly because of the response you gave. I think teachers are kind of stuck and end up moving the student much too fast into repertoire for which they have no technical foundation because there is not enough transitional material, or they are not familiar with it. And the end result is a student who struggles hopelessly, gets discouraged, and quits.
Everyone who has responded to my original question has had some good answers, but I still feel that there is a gap between what the rank beginner is playing and most of the pieces that have been mentioned. I think Sam Pratts Little Fountain is a good one to give right after that beginner stage. There is also a short piece by Damase(the name escapes me right now) which is all three note chords in both hands. It’s easy, and very pretty. That is another one that might be added to the just-after-the-beginner phase.
Esmeralda- I’ve taught many of those pieces and agree, they are good music and are basically intermediate level. My question to you though is this: What easier pieces do you use to get a beginner student out of the beginner phase and up to the level technically that he/she can play those pieces?
I love the Bochsa op. 318, 40 easy etudes, as a foundation for good basic technique. They do favor the right hand, but it’s easy enough to have the student play the right hand line with the left hand, either where written or an octave lower. And I think they can be started right after that lines-and-spaces-bunny-hopped-down-the-road phase.
Let me state this in a slightly different way. Once your beginner student can read lines and spaces and can play THE BUNNY HOPPED DOWN THE ROAD, where do you go from there? And what exercises do you give at that level? I find that it’s very difficult to avoid giving a beginner student pieces that are just too big a jump from the little rank-beginner things that they’ve been playing.
Don’t overlook the little Renie pieces either. Au Bord du Ruisseau, Invention in the old style, etc.
I agree. I just want to point out that Emily Mitchell is left handed, and she won the Israel competiton in 1979. I’m very right handed normally, but I’ve got a great left hand when I play the harp because I worked so hard at it. And I’m very ambidextrous when I use tools too. I think, weighing the pluses and minuses of either playing the harp with it on your left shoulder, or playing it with it on your right shoulder and working hard on your right hand, I think I’d go for working hard on the right hand.
I’ve heard this one before on this site. If your question is whether or not bananas can calm stage freight, I’ll say the same thing I said to the other person who mentioned this. There aren’t enough bananas in Massachusetts to calm my nerves.
I was out in California in September and paid a visit to Dale Barco. While we were talking in his workshop(for hours), I kept looking at the harps in there and wondered what the cord looped around the neck and mechanism and attached to a beam in the ceiling was for. I thought maybe he had some way of working on harps that I had not thought of! Then I finally asked him about it. He smiled and said it was earthquake protection. He advised all California harpists to do that. The cord is attached to a hook in the ceiling and is just long enough to loop once around the neck and mechanism(between two strings. It has a metal latch on it to hook onto the cord coming from the ceiling.
I was at the San Diego conference years ago when there was an earthquake that lasted 42 seconds!! It happened around 5 in the morning, and I woke up to the sound of coat hangers banging together in the closet and pictures banging on the wall. Being from Boston, it didn’t occur to me that this was an earthquake. I remember thinking as I woke up to all this noise, What the %$^@ are they doing in the next room?!?
I would love it if one of the German speakers here would put all of the German terms Hindemith used in this sonata up here with their English equivalents. That would be a big help to anyone wanting to play this wonderful work. We could all print that list out and stick it in the front of our copies. Thanks.
Well Pat- the beta blockers you are already taking should help some. Did you start them recently? Have you tried performing since starting them?
Saul-The most important, and destructive people in the history of arts management, especially in the 20th Century, were people you never heard of. Mark McCormack was, and maybe still is, one of the worst. Another was Walter Legge, Elizabeth Schwartzkopf’s husband. And one of the all time smarmiest artists was Herbert Von Karajan.
Elizabeth- In many many instances, managers of arts organizations are former, or even worse, current employees of artist management agencies. And you’re wondering why they don’t want to get a handle on the artists fees???
Elizabeth- I just finished the above mentioned book. I’m not going to even attempt to sumarize it. It’s so packed with information I feel like I should go back to the begining right now and read the whole thing again. But I hope you can find a copy and read it. It is not the arts organizations themselves of course that are the problem. It’s the agents, and agencies that manage the artists and both directly and indirectly, manage the arts organizations, for their own profit of course.
What burns me though is that, while arts organizations worldwide are constantly struggling for funds, the agencies are there ready to plunder those donations for their own benefit. And because of years of manipulation on the part of these agencies, the fees for the top artists are totally out of proportion with the amount of money available. Do you know for example that at the height of his career, Jasha Heifitz’s fee for playing a concerto was half again as much as the concertmaster’s fee for the concert. Today the soloist’s fee might be anywhere from 10 to 40 times the concertmaster’s fee. There is a greater and greater disparity in income between working musicians in the classical music field, and it’s getting worse, not better.
Elizabeth- I would like to add to your post that I have found with all of the students I have taught that musical expression is just as much a part of technique as hand position, finger motion, velocity, etc. Students who are learning the basics of musical expression don’t have the technical control to execute smoothly what they are trying to do. So the first few times they make a crescendo, the first few notes are soft and then suddenly everything gets loud. The same thing goes for making a ritard, where the first notes in that section are at one tempo and then suddenly they switch to a slower tempo. I also find that they have just as hard a time controlling these changes over varying lengths of time. For example, a crescendo can take place over 4 measures or over 3 beats, and the student has to learn how to do each one as a seperate technical issue. Their first attempts are more than likely going to make all crescendos the same length and the same change in volume. So I think initially the teacher not only has to impose a musical interpretation, but then teach the student how to execute each of the interpretative changes. Once the student has these techniques under control, then I try to listen for how that student hears the piece, how he thinks about the piece, and guide the interpretation rather than imposing something that the student doesn’t feel.
