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Balfour- Do you mean to tell me that if I don’t have cell phone service, the Peterson ap on my phone won’t work? I thought once you downloaded it, it was on your phone.
Us old folks remember the days when we had to tune entirely by ear. I can remember carrying a tuning fork around with me. The saying then was: Harpists spend half their life tuning, and the other half playing out of tune!
Annie Challan would have been 31 in 1971. I think the woman in the video is quite a bit older than that.
Years ago, a piano tuner friend who had a large collection of important pianos lent me, for about 10 years, a 1904 Steinway with a Carpathian burl elm case and carved cabriole legs. It was a glorious piano with a sumptuous sound. Once it was delivered, my friend tuned it for me. About a year or two later, it needed tuning, so I asked my friend, who didn’t live near me, for a recommendation. He recommended a former student of his. I had the man come over and tune the piano. When he left, I tried the piano. It sounded perfectly in tune, but it had lost something tonally. It sounded bland. The next time my friend, the owner of the piano, came to visit, I told him about this. He went to the piano, played a few chords, and said, “he didn’t stretch the octaves. I’ll go over it after dinner.” My friend worked on it for about 25 minutes, and when he was done, the glorious sound was back. So stretching the octaves actually has an effect on the sound production.
I’m an absolute caveman when it comes to anything involving computers or cell phones. But the young men who I am training convinced me to get the Peterson ap for my cell phone and it’s fantastic. It reads everything really clearly, and you can set it to “stretch” the octaves, the way piano tuners do, and the harp sounds fantastic when tuned like that. There is another Peterson tuner (not an ap) that costs about $180 which for some people would be even better. It has a sensor wired to the tuner. You put the sensor on the soundboard (it comes with slightly sticky clay that adheres it to the board) and the machine reads the vibrations, and doesn’t “listen” to the pitch. The huge advantage to that is that if you are an orchestra harpist and have to tune when other musicians are warming up, you can easily tune the instrument extremely accurately without any problem. One of the young men I trained bought that and prefers it to the Peterson ap.
Is there a photo of the harpist? At that time, it could be Marie-Claire Jamet, who would have been 38 at the time, or Catherine Michel, who would have been 23, or perhaps Martine Geliot, who would have also been about 23.
Stravinsky, because he was Russian, did not have copyrights on any of his early music, in particular the three ballets. For this reason, he went back to these pieces, I think in the 1940’s, and made new orchestrations, which he could then copyright. I believe that the main thing he did to the harp parts is reduce them from two harps to one. This made them more problematic to play.
I have never seen that. Maybe it is something that the lever harpists do. It’s never done on pedal harp.
I don’t know what you are asking. Are you talking about a scale-like passage where the 3rd or 4th finger crosses under the thumb? There is no notation for that. You just put the fingering if you need to and the harpist knows what to do.
Drill it out with a drill bit that is small enough to fit into the string hole in the tuning pin. You could use an electric drill or an eggbeater hand drill. Whatever is convenient.
Thank you so much Jerusha and Balfour. Very kind words. These pieces are such a surprise and revelation. Who knew that there could be so many pieces by Tournier that had never been published? Everyone who hears them tells me that they love them.
Hi Lily,
The thing that I love about the Bochsa etudes is the variety of patterns. Each etude is built on a different pattern, and playing different patterns until you have muscle memory for that pattern is how you build technique. The one deficiency- and this is true of virtually all 19th century etudes- is that they are all very right handed. The left hand can phone in its notes! That’s why I wrote an “etude variation” for each of the original etudes that puts all the technical material into the left hand, thus giving both hands an equal workout.
Dear Lily-White,
If you want an etude book that is spiral bound, look at my Bochsa Revisited, published by Carl Fischer Music. You can find it in a number of places, including my web site http://www.swansonharpcompany.com. You can even print out examples of a number of the etudes and try them out to see if they fit your level of playing. Lastly, there is a version for pedal harp and another version for lever harp. Both are spiral bound.
Carl Swanson
There’s too much here that raises more questions. I would have to examine the harp in person to tell you what the condition of the instrument is and what needs to be repaired. I can tell you that all those 3 digit serial number Lyon & Healy harps have the same problem with the body shell, which you alluded to in your post. It took Lyon & Healy 22 years, from their start selling harps in 1889, to figure out how to build the body shell so that it would last. In their earliest version, which is present on all the 3 digit instruments, the body shell was made from two very thick layers of veneer with the grain direction the same on both layers. These body shells develop cracks, often big cracks, which really cannot be repaired. The body needs to be replaced. Beyond that, I don’t know exactly what is going on so can’t advise you. Try to get a good technician to look at it sometime.
