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Whatever piece I am playing, I let the piece find it’s own tempo. Tempo is very dependent on your approach to the music, how you perceive it. So what sounds fine for one harpist may sound off for another. I never really pay much attention to metronome markings or how other harpists play a piece. I also usually take tempos that are at the slower end of what will work, simply because I can do more with the music at a slower tempo. I play for example Posse’s Concert Etude no. 7, and I’ve heard several recordings of it that are faster than what I play. But my view of that piece is that it is a lovely, melodic, and lyrical piece, and it looses something by playing it too fast. So you need to just learn the piece, think about how you want to interpret it, and then let that approach find the tempo.
I think the reason you are hearing so many different tempos from different harpists is because he didn’t specify what that tempo should be. You need to decide what sounds best to you for those measures, and then figure out how you are going to get to that tempo.
Intriguing question! In fact, Debussy doesn’t tell you clearly where the tempo stabilizes. 8 measures before rehearsal 1, he says “sans lenteur” which basically says “speed up a little.” Then at rehearsal 1 (en animant peu à peu) he says little by little, get faster. I think the tempo stabilizes 4 measures after rehearsal 1, where the octave melody starts. So you need to decide what your tempo will be starting at 4 after rehearsal 1 and use the 4 measures before it to get to that tempo. The tempo you start at 4 after rehearsal 1 should be more or less consistent until the Retenu, 2 measures before rehearsal 2.
All of us who play musical instruments know that usually, one hand is the dominant hand and the other is much less coordinated, less comfortable at technical things, etc. And so most of us have worked very hard to get the non-dominant hand to work as well as the dominant one. I am very right handed. But I worked very very hard to learn to use my left hand on the instrument, and the result is that I have an excellent left hand. For certain activities I’m really ambidextrous. I’m very comfortable using my left hand on the harp and also in my shop handling woodworking tools. I can’t write anything with my left hand, but I don’t need to. The point of this is that you need to work very hard to make your right hand as comfortable and dextrous as your left, and it can be done. You need to play lots of scales and etudes with both hands separately. On the piano, there was a whole industry in the 19th century of writing etudes and pieces for left hand alone for exactly this reason. Schumann even joked that writing a piano piece for one hand was as ridiculous as creating a ballet for one foot.
If you work systematically on strengthening your right hand, it will get better. Much better. The harp is a very right handed instrument, with most of the difficult technical work in the right hand. Emily Mitchell is left handed, and she won the Israel Competition in 1979. My good friend Catherine Michel is also left handed, and had a brilliant career with the harp. It can be done!
I remember years ago, Ray Pool told me that he went out west each year to teach his theory classes to the students of a “certain teacher” who shall remain nameless. She was a Suzuki teacher, and had an enormous number of students. But she would start legions of students around 8, 9, or 10 years old, and then, once they got into high school, they would drop the harp because they couldn’t play in any high school ensembles (orchestra, concert band, etc.) because they couldn’t read music! They couldn’t do anything with the instrument with other players. Ray told me that most of them didn’t even know the names of the strings. The teacher was trying, with Ray’s teaching, to fill in the enormous gap that was the logical outcome of the Suzuki method.
Hi Molly,
When students first start the harp, the melodies they are playing are very simple and easy to memorize. But unless you are a very good reader and understand music theory very well, my advice is to force yourself to read the music you are playing and not to play from memory at this stage. I don’t allow lower level students to play from memory for this reason. Once your reading ability has improved (a lot) then you can memorize. What you might do in addition to playing from the music when you practice is to take the music to the kitchen table, away from the harp, and study it and analyze how it is constructed. Look at the chords and figure out what they are and in what inversion. You could also do this with your teacher, away from the harp. If you could take a music theory course, that would help to. Good luck
Jon- You need to take 4 to 6 months of harp lessons! That is the only way to understand how the harp works, and how notes sound on the harp. I didn’t try your harp part on the harp, but I can tell you that it is very awkward. Repeated notes never sound good on the harp. Also, your chords are piano chords, not harp chords. They are too thick for the harp. The harp sounds better with fewer notes than you would use on a piano, and more spaced out voicings than you would use on piano.
Hi Gregg,
The gist of the type of humidifier I am talking about is that there is a reservoir of unheated water that is absorbed into some kind of absorbent material, and there is a fan blowing on that soaking wet material, thereby evaporating the water into the air. I have a large living room and I keep two such humidifiers running all winter. Each one holds about 7 gallons of water, and there is an absorbent belt that rotates through the reservoir of water and then comes up in front of the fan. When it is really cold out and very dry, I have to fill both humidifiers every two or three days. The two that I have are both at least 30 years old! I have to put a couple of drops of sewing machine oil in each motor at the beginning of each season, and then they run fine all winter long. Charles and Bill are much more versed in this than I am. I would look for the type of machine they each talk about.
You need to humidify the whole room, not just the harp, which would be very difficult to do. You don’t need to cover it when you are not using it. The humidifier you use should put out invisible humidified air. It should not look like steam or vapor. If the air coming out of the humidifier is invisible, then you can put the humidifier right next to the harp and have it blowing directly on the harp. It won’t cause any damage, and the humidity will be highest close to the humidifier. The farther you get from the humidifier the lower the humidity will be. Harps don’t dry out instantly. It takes time, and the damage that can occur from too dry air usually shows up at the end of the winter. If the room where the harp is is fairly large, I would buy a humidifier that holds 6 gallons of cold water or more and keep it running all the time.
I rent harps in the northeastern United States. Contact me through my web site:
http://www.swansonharp.comI think you could try to remove as much of the grease as you can, using paper towels maybe wrapped around a table knife to try to get it off. After all, any lubricant that you can see, oil or grease, is not lubricating anything! You could also try oiling those joints that had grease on them with a thin machine oil. That might dilute the grease over time and work down into the area that really needs the lubrication.
Harp actions, as well as harp pedal mechanisms, need lubrication, and that lubrication can be in the form of oil or grease. But oil and grease function in two completely different ways and are not interchangeable. In moving metal parts, oil is used when you want it to creep into the moving metal joint that you can’t reach directly, such as the riveting of the linkage. Grease will not creep anywhere. It sits where you put it. Grease is used in places where moving parts can be reached directly and where there is pressure to squeeze it out. It is used for example in the holes in the front action plate where the spindles are tightly fit into those holes. Grease is also used in the main action blocks where the main action mechanism, which takes the movement from the pedal rod and divides it between the natural and sharp chains, is tightly fit. Grease will sit for a very long time (many years) without being squeezed out or drying out the way oil would.
The grease in your mechanism, while not doing any harm, is also not doing any good, because it cannot reach or lubricate the joint where two metal parts (the rivet and the link) are moving. It’s an idiotic and pointless attempt to lubricate the linkage. Oil would have been much better there because it would have crept into the joint where it is needed.
It would be nice if the major companies understood this. At least one of them sticks a blob of grease on each of the pedal fulcrums (where the steel pedal bar is riveted to a metal piece that is screwed into a bracket at the bottom of the harp to hold it in place. Grease down there 1) does not lubricate anything, and 2) the lack of oil where the rivet, steel pedal bar, and fulcrum all move causes this joint to seize up. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to remove those rivets and put new ones AND OIL in so that they move properly. In the case of the oil in your mechanism, the presence of grease there may actually prevent oil from reaching the moving parts if you or a technician were to oil those joints. So in that way, the grease might actually cause damage.
Dear Charles, Balfour, et al: I know I’m going to sound incredibly snotty with what I have to say, but I need to say it. I have read or skimmed over all of the posts in this thread, and this is what happens when well meaning (I think) but totally unknowledgable people(where harps are concerned) try to “repair” harps. Over my career I have, a number of times, had to repair instruments that someone else, who had no knowledge of the harp or harp construction, had worked on. It always involves ripping out everything that they did and then doing the correct surgery that the instrument needed. This instrument is a classic case of this. He had no understanding at all of how the harp has to function, and no knowledge or understanding at all of the stress on the instrument. In addition, he didn’t even know how to take the harp apart. He has destroyed this instrument beyond repair. And he clearly was so sure of himself and confident in his ability that he didn’t even try to consult with anyone who does know this.
Three years ago I decided that I wanted to train several people to repair harps. The first one was a young man(19 at the time) who was in a cabinet making course in Boston. He is now 23 and has more or less completely taken over my business. He is a master craftsman and a far better woodworker than I ever was. I can’t wait to show him this video! He has already had to undo the damage that other people have done to good instruments, and I had warned him early on that my biggest fear was that, if I didn’t train people to do major harp repair, then that would leave the door open for catastrophes like this.
Balfour- Thank you for the kind words. I wrote A GUIDE FOR HARPISTS because of the dearth of information in Sam Pratt’s book. I think his book was the first time that anyone had tried to write about harps and harp maintenance, and so it was groundbreaking. But I felt that it was really written for a knowledgeable technician to read, not your average harpist who knows nothing about how the harp works. When I was writing each of the chapters, I had two professional harpists here in Boston read the draft I had written and then do the repair or adjustment while I just watched. I asked them to “think out loud” so I could see how they were interpreting what I had written. Because of that experimental feedback, I re-wrote several of the chapters 4 or 5 times before I was satisfied that an unknowledgeable harpist could understand what I was explaining and do the work.
Concerning the issue of having qualified technicians available: There are quite a few trained regulators around, thanks to Lyon & Healy’s training program. But not one of them does major harp repairs, such as replacing necks, soundboards, repairing baseframes, re-riveting, etc. Right now, as far as I can tell, there is just Tom Bell(who is a very good friend of mine) and my workshop. My understanding is that Lyon & Healy will only work on Lyon & Healy and Salvi harps. That leaves out Wurlitzer, Venus, Swanson, Horngacher, etc. During my career I worked mostly on Lyon & Healy harps, but also worked on other makes as well. For that reason, I have started to train harp repairmen who can do the major surgery that harps eventually need. My fear is that, without trained rebuilders around (who know what they are doing) there will be no one who is able to work on all makes of harps, and that will leave the door open for well meaning woodworkers who know nothing about harps to make catastrophic mistakes attempting these repairs, and also complete charlatans trying to make a quick buck. Of course, the people I train have to know how to regulate. But I am not interested, nor do I have the time, to train people just to regulate. I’m focusing totally on creating a new generation of harp rebuilders who can repair and restore harps to their best condition.
I’m on my 5th Dodge Grand Caravan in a row! I can carry 4 pedal harps at a time in this car(and I frequently have to). This one I think is a 2018, and all the seats fold flat into the floor. It’s the high end version this time, with built in GPS, a CD player, and a hard drive that I can load CD’s on to. I currently have about 325 CD’s on the hard drive! I understand they don’t make the Caravan any more, and I don’t know if the Pacifica is the replacement vehicle. Each of my Caravan’s I drove to about 140,000 miles without any repairs. It’s a great car.
