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Thank you Jerusha. Such kind words! These pieces are something that I stumbled on while trying to find some other pieces by Tournier that I did know existed. These will be published in 3 volumes, so this is the first volume right now, with 8 pieces in it. The next volume, with 9 pieces in it, I’m hoping will be released next March, and the last one, with 10 pieces in it, I’m hoping for a year from now.
They are all charming short pieces, 3 to 4 pages long, and in the late romantic style that Tournier learned at the Paris Conservatory in the 1890’s.
There’s a piece by Daniel Pinkham, in 7 movements, called Company at the Cresche. It’s for two part treble voices(Soprano and alto) with harp, organ, and handbells. It’s a lovely small piece, I think less than 10 minutes. Maybe you could get some adult women to sing with them, and add a little electronic keyboard. I think the bell part can be played on glockenspiel.
I just got a call from someone else who has a broken rod on her Venus harp. She had contacted a number of technicians and was told there was nothing they could do. I told her she would need to send me the broken rod with the coupler so that I could probably make her a replacement rod. I need to know the diameter of the rod, the length, the threadings at both ends, and I need to be able to extract the broken piece of rod from the coupler so that I can re-use it. Any technician should be able to do that for you.
Lily,
If you can use a digital download of the book, go to the Carl Fischer web site and type in my name, Carl Swanson, in the search bar. That will bring up all of my publications. There, you can by a printed copy OR a digital download of any of my editions.
Hi Lily,
Your description what you are looking for is EXACTLY what Bochsa Revisited is. Bochsa’s original 40 Easy Etudes is a wonderful set of simple etudes with a different pattern in each one. By the time you have learned that etude, you will have committed to muscle-memory that pattern. Once you have learned 20 of these etudes, you will have a very solid technique at that level. It will enable you to learn pieces easily and quickly, because you will have already learned the technique.
The problem with many sets of etudes is that 1) they often use the same patterns over and over again in the set, and 2) they are very right hand oriented, with little or nothing for the left hand. That is why I published Bochsa Revisited. It has all of the first 20 Bochsa etudes, printed in an easy-to-read format, with pedals, fingerings, etc. But then there is a left hand version of the same etude. So both hands get the same workout.
Hi Elizabeth,
I used dance or theatrical shoes. They have a very soft leather sole and can be fit very snug to the contours of the feet, without a pointy toe that sticks out way too far. I noticed when I saw Alexander Boldachev in concert a while back that he uses the same kind of shoe. When I say dance shoes, I mean shoes that ballet dancers use for modern dance.
Harry,
If the harp is still available, it is about a 2 hour drive from me. I could inspect it and make sure that it is in good structural condition. If you decided to buy it, I can pick up the harp, crate it, and arrange shipping to Australia. I can’t deal with Australian authorities for import duties. You’d have to do that.
Harry,
There may be a used Aoyama harp, in excellent condition, available in the United States. The owner was willing to sell it very inexpensively. If you are interested, and the harp is still available, it would be an excellent buy. I believe it is a Monarch in a natural finish (not gilded). If you are interested, email me privately and I’ll see if it is still available. Carl Swanson: swansonharp@gmail.com
When you are playing, all of the strings, particularly the lower strings and particularly those in the overtone sequence for the note you are playing, will be vibrating to one degree or another. On a lever or pedal harp, there will always be a slight “shadowing” of the note that the lever or disc is closing on, whether you are playing or not. So all you can do is camouflage the sound by moving the lever or pedal at exactly the same moment that another string is being played. We do the same thing when we muffle or place a finger on a vibrating string. We do those things at exactly the moment that we play another note. Playing the harp involves a lot of camouflage and slight-of-hand!
The reason that there are never any discs on the lowest strings(2 on concert grands, 1 on semi-grand models) is that those last strings are right over the main action, which takes the up and down movement of the pedal rods and divides it between the natural and sharp chains. There just isn’t any room for the parts needed to put discs on those strings. But I also think that the swing of the vibrating string down there is so large that it would cause a lot of buzzing problems.
Molly- There are two ways of focusing on and building technique. One is with exercises, and the other is with etudes. Exercises are simply patterns that you play over and over again. LaRiviere is a good example of that. It may be a 4 finger pattern, and you just repeat it and repeat it, paying attention to using your fingers correctly. Scales are another type of exercise. I use exercises, particularly scales for teaching technique. But I find their use is limited. They are so static and removed from actual music that often the student really can’t connect what he or she has learned in the exercise to a piece of music.
The other way of building technique is through etudes. The word etude means study, and teaching etudes are like short pieces of music where a technical pattern is the musical motif. So one etude might focus on playing 3 note chords for example, and the entire etude will be three note chords in all their various positions and inversions, sometimes in different places on the instrument, sometimes with jumps, so the player learns to easily feel and find the shape of a three note chord. By the time you have learned that etude, three note chords, wherever you find them, will be a piece of cake. Etudes are usually written in sets or series, with each etude focusing on a different pattern. One might be octaves, another simple arpeggios, etc. To me, the etudes written by Bochsa, and there are about 5 sets of them, offer the most variation in patterns, which is what you want.
Years ago, I gave a lecture at an American Harp Society national conference on using etudes to build technique. Many people came up to me in the days that followed to talk about what I had said. The most interesting one to me was a young woman who told me that her teacher had her play etudes as part of each lesson. But when this young woman graduated from college as a harp major and started teaching, she “got lazy”(her description) and taught without bothering to use etudes. After a while, she felt guilty at not using etudes and decided that each new student she started would use etudes to learn technique. There came a point where half her students were playing etudes regularly, and half were not. “The students that were learning using etudes” she said “learned their pieces faster and more solidly than the students that were not using etudes.” That to me is the best endorsement of using etudes to build technique.
William-I have two of the “Wagner bust models” but I never thought of them as style 22’s. I didn’t know what model they were.
Balfour,
There is another reason for the demise of semi-grand harps. From the manufacturing standpoint, there is little if any difference between the production costs of making a semi-grand or a concert grand. But the buying public expects the semi-grand to cost less, virtually eliminating the profit margin for the sale of semi-grands. Because of this, I’m amazed that any harp manufacturer makes a semi-grand harp.
I just read through all of the posts in this thread. All the suggestions are good, but my approach as a teacher would be to work on the underlying technical issues so that Molly would not be trying to work them out as she learns repertoire. Good technique on the harp is a matter of learning different patterns and working on them until the muscle memory for that pattern is formed. That way, any time the player encounters that pattern, they will automatically play it correctly without having to work on it technically. Developing muscle memory for one pattern or another is a matter of repeating the pattern (correctly) many times. The best way to do this is with etudes. A good series of etudes, such as one of the Bochsa series, is made up of many different patterns-one pattern per etude-which is then worked on in many different ways over the course of the etude. By the time the student has learned that etude, they have learned and developed the muscle memory for that pattern. If the student learns a whole series of etudes within one set, they will have developed a solid technique for that level of difficulty. I’m not saying that the student should play only etudes, but rather that etudes should be a part of each lesson, and the choice of pieces the student is playing should be chosen according to what the student is learning in the etude.
The 19th century was the age of great teaching etudes on all instruments. On the harp, they tend to be very right hand oriented, with very few focused on left hand technique. That is why I published my Bochsa Revisited edition, where I wrote a companion etude for each one of the original Bochsa Etudes. The companion etude throws all of the technical material of the original etude into the left hand, so that both hands develop equally. Learning technique primarily through etudes and scales frees the player to focus on everything else when learning a piece of music: musical phrasing, dynamics and tempo changes, velocity, etc. We should not be laboring over technique when we are learning repertoire!
