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If you take the first three letters off the word “contemporary’, as in contemporary music, you get a description of it’s place in the history of music.
Last year Michel LeGrand was in Boston to play a few nights at a jazz club in Cambridge. His wife is Catherine Michel, who is one of my oldest friends. She called me a day or so in advance of their arrival to tell me they were coming and said she would have two tickets waiting for me at the first show. I went alone and she and I sat in the back of the room catching up. At the end of the show she said that she and Michel were going to have dinner in the hotel restaurant and could I join them? Of course i said yes, and spent a wonderful evening listening to Michel tell stories about his incredible career.
It’s obvious from what you’ve said that you’ve gone as far as you can on the technique you now have. If you are going to move into more difficult pieces, you will need skills that you don’t have now. So you need to look for a teacher who can teach you those skills. Forget about issues of schools of playing. Just look for a teacher who can move you, in an organized and systematic fashion, into harder pieces.
Sherry- I think it’s 40 Progressive etudes in two volumes by Bochsa, not 50. There is a much more advanced set of 50 etudes in two volumes by Bochsa. But it sounds like that would be too advanced for her.
If you include exercises, scales, and etudes in your practice routine, you will develop muscle memory for patterns and distances(2nd’s, 3rd’s, 4th’s, etc.) which will help you to feel your way around the instrument. If you can’t do that now, then you have not yet developed sufficient muscle memory for these things. The only thing you should have to look at the strings for is jumps. Try to stay connected to the strings as much as you can, i.e., have at least one finger anchored to the strings at any time and try to connect as much as possible. Another thing you can do is to play thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. as an exercise without looking at the strings so you learn to feel those intervals.
There will be a very slight difference in thickness between any two adjacent strings. But a substitution one string away is OK. Don’t go further than that though, i.e., don’t use a B for a G or visa versa.
Thanks Kreig. If you make a trip to Boston be sure and call me anyway. It would be nice to meet one of the other regulars here.
The weakest part of any neck is the treble end where the action plates end. The action plates give critical reinforcement to the neck, and when necks break, it is right at that top end. That’s why my own Swanson harps have the front action plate extended into the knee block. I reinforce my neck blanks, both for my own harps and for all replacement necks that I build, with carbon fiber, which I believe adds to the strength of the neck without adding extra weight.
You need a tapered reamer, not a tapered drill. Take a tuning pin to a machinist and ask him to make you a tapered reamer. The best would probably be a straight flute reamer. But you could also use a spiral flute. If you could get both, you could start the hole with the spiral flute reamer and finish it with the straight flute. If you finish it with the spiral flute, the cut lines will draw the tuning pin into the hole tighter and tighter until you can’t turn the tuning pin.
Basel- I breathed a sigh of relief seeing your post. I hadn’t heard from you for so long. Thank God you are OK.
Is there any way that you can ship the harps out of the country for safe keeping? Do you have the wood trunks as well as the harps? If you can get someone to ship them out of the country, I have a friend in Dubai who has already agreed to store them until your life is settled wherever you will be. Can you get to Dubai yourself? She may be able to help you get a job there. Not playing the harp, but something. If you can find a way of getting the harps shipped to her, maybe we can start a fund here to pay the shipping. That would be a big start to the next stage of your life.
Practicing for me has always been a refuge from unhappiness. Maybe it can be that for you now too.
A regulator must be able to get the same pitch out of a string every time he plays it. So if you are planning on having your harp regulated, plan on changing strings at least 2 weeks in advance of the regulation, and then tune it many times and play the strings so they are absolutely stable when the regulation is done. Nylon strings take much more time to stabilize than gut strings, especially in the lower octaves. If you change nylon strings in the third, fourth, or fifth octaves, I would do that a month before the regulation.
Many pianos are not worth very much in terms of market price because there are way too many of them for the market. If you had to pay someone to make that piano for you it would cost thousands of dollars to make. The price of used harps is closer to the actual cost of making them because there is a higher demand for the number available. Even then, most used harps go for less than it would cost to make them.
Sylvia- L & H is right. A new foot would have to be fitted. I don’t think that the board you are talking about, which I call a cleat, is glued to the actual foot. It usually isn’t. The actual foot is screwed to the pedestal and the cleat is screwed to the underside of the pedestal floor and then held to the foot with one screw. If you remove all of the screws for that foot, the cleat should come off as well as the foot itself.
The best way to repair it is to have a cabinet maker make a new cleat and fit it to the foot, which is easy to do. You don’t need a harp repairman to do this kind of repair. Alternately, the cabinet maker could remove the cracked cleat, glue it back to gather again, and put it back on. That is if it’s not too badly damaged. A repair like that should take no more than 2 or 3 days.
