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Alexandra- Renee Hansen was Pierre Jamet’s wife. She taught theory and harmony at the Paris Conservatory and was the first harmony teacher of Pierre Boulez. Let me email Marie-Claire Jamet, Pierre Jamet’s daughter and see if she knows when it was composed.
Tournier wrote two pieces that are drop-dead gorgeous. One is called Offrande, and it’s not terribly difficult. The other is called The Eternal Dreamer, and is from his collection of Images called Au Hasard des Ondes. It’s more difficult technically and is a mine field of delicate nuance, but it’s really worth the effort.
I’m really surprised that no one has mentioned the principal reason that piano is more popular than harp: At the lower levels, piano is much easier to play than harp, and even at the lower levels, the piano is more versatile than harp. At the lower levels of technique, it’s easier to hold onto basic technique and mobility on the instrument. I think the same is probably true for guitar as well. Again, I’m only talking about the lower levels of technical competence. By comparison to both piano and guitar, the harp is far more difficult to learn to a moderately competent level, and it’s far more difficult to retain technique on the harp than on piano. Trust me, I know. I go years without playing a single note on the harp or piano, which I studied to a moderate level many years ago. I can go back to the piano and easily play simple things immediately, whereas on the harp after a long absence my hands feel stiff, I can’t immediately feel distances or intervals, and of course, I have no calluses.So I think the main reason some instruments are much more popular than others has to do principally with how easy it is to learn to a moderately competent level.
In 2001 I wrote an article on Beta Blockers that was published in the Harp Column. The article is called A PRESCRIPTION FOR SUCCESS. If you go to my company web site, http://www.swansonharp.com, you can read the whole article. Just click on the ARTICLES TAB on the home page.
Sylvia,
In the link below, which was put on the other thread(Wedding gig rates…) by Tacye, the prices mentioned are called “minimums.” That’s exactly what I have been advocating all along. Minimums.
Price fixing is when everyone in an industry agree to charge exactly the same price for exactly the same product or service, and yes, that is illegal.
“Dumping” is selling a product or service, usually in a foreign country from the source of the product, at a lower price than it is sold in the country of origin, or is sold below cost. And that too is illegal.
A musician’s union, like the one whose link appear above, do not “fix” prices, but rather set “minimums.”
Anyone who is charging money for playing an instrument should be setting their prices as if that is their sole source of income, even if they have a trust fund or a husband or wife who pays most of the bills.
Andelin-That’s a curious question! I hadn’t thought about it. But my first reaction is that you’re comparing apples and oranges. Teachers are dealing with a different and much more knowledgable clientele, and they are dealing with a client(the student) over a much longer period of time. If the teacher’s hourly fee is say $50, the student has to think in terms of that as a weekly cost, not a one off charge like a wedding gig. And there is a level of fame with certain teachers. So a well known orchestra harpist or conservatory teacher is going to charge much more for lessons than your average teacher.
As I said in a previous post, it’s not a question of making everyone charge the same thing. It’s a matter of setting minimums below which no one will go. Any freelance harpist is free to charge as much as they want according to what the market will bear. But there is a minimum charge below which the harpist is loosing money. That’s the only thing that I am really adamant about. That it is unfair to the larger community of working harpists to have one or more harpists charging fees that are too low to cover expenses.
Kathleen-Do the group in your area who earn their living elsewhere have any idea of the damage that they are doing 1) to the professionals who HAVE to earn their living playing the harp, and 2) to the going rates in the area? When someone plays a job for much less than anyone else, word gets around and everyone expects that as the standard fee. If these people want to do this for fun, then they should be playing for free. There are plenty of places where they would be welcomed for free and would not be hurting the professional musical community. But again, if they are going to play for money, then it should be at the same rate as the professionals.
Please show these people this thread. Tell them that if they don’t need the money, play for the standard professional fee and give the money to charity. But whether it is intentional or not, these people are undercutting you.
Apprenticeship is one of the best ways of learning anything. I think that if a starting out professional harpist did this with several harpists, he/she would get a feel for how different harpists deal with different situations, and would see what was the same and what was different about how the professionals played their jobs. It does not however deal with the issue of very untrained beginners going out and playing jobs. I don’t know what anyone can do about that.
First off, thanks Kim for setting up the separate thread. I never meant to hijack the original discussion. To me it is, like it or not, a major factor in what the market will bear in any given area. But maybe it’s better to handle it as a separate topic.
Victoria, in reference to your sentence, quoted here: “But I think if the client gets an average quote of say $300 and gets one for $100, surely they won’t blindly immediately hire the cheaper one?” I go back to what I said in my post, that 99% of people who are hiring a harpist are doing it for the first time, and they literally cannot hear the difference between a rank beginner and a highly trained professional. They simply assume that any harpist that is available to play their function plays the same as everyone else who is available. This statement sounds ridiculous to us harpists, but I can assure you it is true. Frankly, all of us do the same thing with medical doctors. We assume that a doctor is a doctor is a doctor.
Alyson-I don’t agree with any discounting of price for any reason. You’re either hiring yourself out or your not. I want to add here that Jan Jennings set me straight on this. She insists that if any of her students take paying gigs, they charge what a professional charges, because they are competing with other professionals at that point. The problem with this whole discussion is that most everyone here is looking at it from the perspective of the harpist. Force yourself to see it from the perspective of the client, who doesn’t know anything about the harp or professional musicians and doesn’t care. They want a service, and they want it as cheap as they can find.
Years ago Felice Pomeranz and Carol Kulzer would have a meeting once a year to which all professional harpists in the Boston area were invited. The point of the meeting was to set minimums for various type of services(wedding ceremonies, receptions, background music, etc.). The point was not to tell everyone what to charge(i.e., fix prices), but rather to set a minimum below which no one would go. That frankly is what unions do, and it’s called collective bargaining. It was emphasized at each of these meetings that anyone could charge whatever they wanted and whatever the market would bear, so long as they didn’t go below these minimums. I think that is fair.
As far as a person new to gigs is concerned, I would suggest another way, and that is for the new person to go out on a couple of jobs with an established harpist, possibly sharing the job (but not the pay), to learn what goes into playing one type of job or another. It could even involve the new person paying the established harpist something for doing this,(like harp lessons!).
Here’s another way at looking at this question. Look at it from the perspective of the client. The client(bride, bride’s mother, groom, etc.) is hiring a musician, probably for the first and only time in his/her life. Whoever is doing the hiring is going to call around and ask about fees. The client, knowing nothing about professional music, can’t tell the difference between someone who has had 4 lessons and someone with a Master’s degree from Juilliard. To the client, every harpist out there is the same, and it’s just a question of finding the cheapest one. So he/she calls 9 harpists and gets quotes of $325 for the ceremony. Then he/she calls the 10th harpist and the quote is $125. Which one do you think is going to get hired?
I don’t agree that if you are new or less experienced to giging(weddings, background music. etc.) that you should charge less.
Being a professional means doing something for money, and if you are playing the harp for money, then you charge the going rates. If you don’t, you are undercutting everyone else. If you get asked to do a gig that you feel you are not ready for yet, then pass it on to another harpist who IS up to it. But if the going rate in your area for a wedding is $325, then anyone who is playing weddings for money, regardless of their level of playing, should be charging $325. Stated another way, you either charge the same rates as everyone else, or you play for free. There is nothing in between.I don’t play for a living. But as a harp technician and rebuilder, I have had conversations about this with many harpists over the years. The bane of all working harpists, and there is one of these in every city in the country, is the dilettante harpist who has had 4 lessons and hires herself out for $75 per wedding. There are also professionally trained harpists who will make a point of undercutting everyone else and play weddings or functions for $150.
On the surface, you may say that people have a right to charge what they want, and if they want to play a wedding for $75 or $150, that’s their business and their right. But at those rates, these people are literally loosing money by charging those rates. When the costs are added up-the harp, the insurance, the harp mobile, the cart, the music, the gas, possibly parking, the clothing, and all the other related expenses-then the person who is undercutting everyone else is making nothing on the job. In the commercial world, there are foreign companies that will sell their product in the U.S. for less than it costs to make the product, in order to put their competition out of business. This is called “dumping” (because they are simply dumping their product on the market) and it’s illegal. In the harp world, someone who is undercutting everyone else is in fact “dumping” and that too should be illegal. These people do this because they have money coming in from somewhere else, either a husband or family money, and therefore don’t have to turn a profit themselves. But this is grossly unfair to the larger harp community and devalues the service that these musicians provide.
The right hand is playing the chant that opens the whole thing. So it must be the same mode as that.
Biagio- I don’t know if your remarks about pedal versus non-pedal were directed at me. Nothing I said had anything to do with one type of instrument or the other. The point I was making is that Carbon fiber strings are higher tension. The average harpist, and that means 99.9% of the harp community, is going to take on faith what the label on the string envelop says. They are not going to do any kind of math or calculation to figure out what the have to do to change from one type of string to another. Trust me, they are not. Most of them don’t even grasp the fact that the string diameters are graduated, and that if you have to replace a first octave A and you don’t have one, then the best substitution is first octave G or B. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I have found a second octave string in the first octave, because these people think that a second octave A is the best substitution for a first octave A. Many 19th century instruments are being ruined because people are putting modern strings on an instrument that, even when new, was not built for that kind of tension. But to nearly all harpists, a C string is a C string, is a C string. So I stick to my initial comment. The lowest tension strings are nylon. Gut are higher tension than that and carbon fiber, (as labeled) are much higher tension than gut.
