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Hasselmans studied with a variety of people, including Kruger. My teacher, Pierre Jamet, who had studied with Hasselmans, told me that it was Hasselmans who really codified modern harp technique. Before him there were various hand positions, various ways of articulating(pulling) the fingers, various arm positions. But it was Hasselmans who figured out what worked and what didn’t. Hasselmans had no use for the chromatic harp and I think regularly stole promising students from that class at the Paris Conservatory, including my teacher Pierre Jamet. Hasselmans best student, Henriette Renie, wrote her Methode to document the principals of Hasselmans technique. So you can read all about this in Renie’s book.
Dear Byouke,
Here is the explanation of why you should tune a lever harp in E flat, meaning that with no levers engaged with the strings(levers down), the harp is in E flat.
You only have a certain number of keys available to you on a lever harp. In order to have about the same number of flat and sharp keys, you tune the harp in E flat. That way you have available to you the keys of E flat, B flat, F major(all on the flat side of the circle of 5ths), C, G, D, A, and E( all on the sharp side of the circle of 5ths). If you tune in the key of C major, then you only have sharp keys available and no flat keys.
Nolan- It looks like someone did a partial restoration on it already. It looks like the soundboard is a replacement and that whoever did it used the old center strip on the new board. I don’t understand why there are no top strips on the board to cover the screws, or why the baseboard(the board the column sits on) does not have cutouts to accommodate the usual top strips.
The horizontal cracks in the soundboard are of no importance and do not weaken the board. If there were, or are, vertical cracks, running parallel to the center strip, then that’s another story. It’s of course impossible to tell from pictures how the action functions. It’s a very time consuming and expensive project to restore these old harps, and it’s probably better to just appreciate it as a decorative object.
Those “fiberglass” trunks, which I don’t think are really fiberglass but just plastic, are really old now and the material they are made of, whatever it is, is very brittle and shatters easily. I wouldn’t use one to ship a harp.
I would also stay away from any wheel transport system that clips onto the rear feet or into the pedal slots. You’d be amazed at how little is holding the pedestal onto the instrument, and many instruments have frames that have shifted and some of the base bolt bushings that hold the pedestal on are loose or have pulled out.
Biagio- Do you start by scanning the printed music you have into the program and then tell it to change it to another key?
For me, this is deja vu all over again! This is what I went through when I was proof reading the Durand Sonate pour flute, alto, et harp against the manuscript. Not only did I find tons of discrepancies between the full score(what the harpist plays from) and the manuscript. But I also found discrepancies like what you mention between the full score and the individual flute and viola parts. Sometimes the individual parts were correct(matched the manuscript) and the full score was wrong, and other times the full score was correct and the individual parts were wrong.
I’m in the process of proof reading the Debussy Danses against the manuscript. So far, it looks like the conductor’s score is correct. I have found about 35 discrepancies in the harp part.
So, to answer your question, the real answer is to find the original manuscript and see what is there.
I would try to do it in as friendly way as possible. Who knows, maybe down the line you will want to study with this teacher again. At the very least, you may run into her occasionally and you want it to be friendly. Tell her that because you’re so new to the harp you’d like to try a couple of different teachers to see if one is a better fit than another. Something like that. And thank her for all the great work she did with you during the time you studied with her.
There are a number of “versions” of the cadenza from Lucia di Lammermoor, that greatly extend the length of the cadenza, turning it really into a solo piece. There was a reason why these were written. There apparently is a big scenery change at that point, and the conductors or directors, I’m not sure who, wanted the harp cadenza to be longer so there wouldn’t be a long silence between scenes.
My teacher Pierre Jamet, who had been the principal harpist in the Paris Opera orchestra from 1937 to 1959, told me a very sweet story. He was playing Lucia when Lilly Pons was singing. He played the cadenza and by the time he got to the end, the curtain was up and Pons was on stage to begin the scene. Before starting, she walked to the edge of the stage and motioned for him to stand up and take a bow. She waited for him to take a bow and for the applause to die down before starting the scene.
Romola- You didn’t say if you are learning lever harp or pedal harp, and you don’t say if you have any musical background, like the ability to read music. These are important factors in deciding where to start.
Fun from the First and Levers up, Thumbs up are probably good books if you are a rank beginner. Once you can read lines and spaces, and can get around playing very simple melodies, you might take a look at my new publication from Carl Fischer Music, Bochsa Revisited. These are easy etudes that are great for building a technical foundation, and there is a version for pedal harp, and another for lever harp. If you go to my web site, http://www.swansonharp.com, you can read more about it there and even order it. In the next couple of weeks it will be available at all the usual harp music outlets(Harp Connection, Vanderbilt, Melody’s Traditional Music, Amazon, sheetmusicplus, etc.).
Kynkari- I’m assuming you are talking about decals for a lever harp. I’ve got Celtic decals that I used on my lever harps. If you go to my web site you can see them. If they interest you, contact me privately. Mine are made for a specific size soundboard. So I don’t know if they would fit your soundboard.
The orchestra is going to want to pay one fee for the harp rental and all other related expenses, mainly transportation. They will want to show up at the concert hall and have the harp sitting there ready to go. And when the concert is over, they will just leave and have you deal with picking it up.
The fee depends on how much transportation is involved. Is this a one day rental? Rehearsal in the afternoon and concert in the evening? You will probably have to attend the concert so that the second it is over, you are there to remove the harp. I would say, depending on how much time this involves for you and how much driving you have to do, that the fee should be a minimum of $400.
I used to rent a harp to the traveling Frank Sinatra show when he came to the Boston area. He traveled with a 35 piece orchestra, including a harpist. But his manager would rent a harp in each location. So I had to deliver the harp to the orchestra pit by 4:30. The orchestra would arrive soon after and there was a sound check from 5 to about 6:30, then a dinner break for the orchestra, then the show at 8. There wasn’t enough time for me to go home after delivering the harp and then come back around 10 to pick up the instrument. In addition, had I gone home, I would have been returning as 15,000 people were leaving! So they always gave me a back stage pass and I could just hang out, listen to the sound check and the concert, have dinner with the orchestra, and stand backstage as Frank and his guest artist walked out at the end of the concert. This was all 25 years ago, and at that time I charged something like $200, possibly $250. I can’t remember exactly.
It is! I can send you some pictures if you like. I’d love to sell it to someone who is interested in it as a playable instrument and not a decoration.
Amy- What a great outcome! I’d love to know what you said, because it was obviously very effective. It may be that this teacher just didn’t realize how her words were coming out. Hard to believe, but sometimes that is the case.
As an occasional teacher myself, I would never presume that any student I am teaching is destined for a professional career. The only expectation I have is that they make progress. If they are not making progress, either because they never practice, or they are abysmally untalented, then I don’t want to teach them. I don’t want to waste my time or their money. But that happens only rarely. It’s so great that you found the perfect solution.
I just wanted to give everyone an update on the BOCHSA REVISITED FOR LEVER HARP. Because it is so close to the end of the fiscal year, Carl Fischer is going to wait until January for the official release. BUT, I received some copies yesterday and it is now available on my web site, http://www.swansonharp.com. You can see samples of the lever version there too. After the official release it will be available at all the usual places that harp music is sold.
If I may, I’d like to tell you, from a teacher’s standpoint, why it is so important to work with a teacher from the beginning. First, Biagio is right: unlearning bad habits is so much more time consuming than learning the right ones in the first place.
But what constitutes “good” and “bad” technique? I always tell students, and I say this again in my Bochsa Revisited publication, that in the early stages of learning an instrument, when the melodies are simple and slow, you can get away with murder as far as technique is concerned. Your hands can roll all over the place, your fingers can move in odd and inconsistent ways, your hands and arms can reposition in a different way for each finger you use, and because the music is so slow, there is time to recover and continue on. But as the music becomes faster and more difficult, there simply is no time for inefficient movement. Without a stable and consistent way of using the fingers, hands, and arms, progression into more difficult pieces becomes impossible. At that point, the player either gives up the instrument, or looks for a teacher to help. And the first task of the teacher is to take inventory of what the student is doing and spend months changing bad technique into good.
I personally don’t see how it is possible to teach a lesson over Skype. I need to see the student’s hands from different angles, and need to be able to touch the student’s fingers, hands, or arms as needed to make corrections. I also need to be able to sit at the harp to demonstrate a point for the student, and the student needs to see that from different angles. In addition, a Skype lesson means you are hearing a recording of the sound, not the sound the student is making. So how do you work on sound production when you are not hearing what the student is actually doing? How can you hear the variations in sound production, or a weak finger, by listening to a recorded sound?
So the takeaway here is: get a teacher as soon as possible!
