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I recently ran into another problem concerning reading that I have not seen discussed here. About 6 months ago I was asked to teach a 12 year old beginner. When her mother told me she already had 3 years of piano, I thought to myself Thank God! I don’t have to teach her to read. Boy was I wrong on that one. After three years of piano lessons, this kid was still counting lines and spaces to find notes. As soon as I realized this, I started working with her on reading and theory. After a couple of weeks I assumed we were beyond that and I focused more on playing. Wrong again! As soon as the pieces got beyond one note at a time, we hit a brick wall. She was calculating to find all of the notes, in a chord for example. And this vertical way of reading prevented her from seeing blocks of 3 or 4 notes and therefore being able to place 3 or 4 fingers at a time.
After struggling with this for several months, I happened to deliver a repaired harp back to its owner, a professional harpist who also taught. Over a cup of coffee I told her about the problems I was having with this student. Turns out she also had a 12 year old student who was doing exactly the same thing. “I keep telling her, just memorize the lines and spaces. But she has this elaborate way of finding notes which she invented, and she won’t stop doing that,” the teacher said.
I finally sent my student to another harp teacher in Boston whose real speciality is teaching theory at all levels, beginner to professional conductors.
The girl is now making some progress. But it’s very slow, because her default system is to revert to the ‘calculating’ that she has depended on for the past 3 years, and that’s very difficult to overcome. The parents want me to start teaching her again in 2 weeks and I’ve already decided that for the next few months I’m going to spend 20 to 30 minutes(of the 1 hour lesson) on reading exercises. I’m not going to assume anything this time around. I’m going to use flash cards, first with a single note on each one and make her identify the note in 1 second or less. When she can do that, I’ll have cards with 2 notes in a row, then 3 and finally 4, so that she learns to read horizontally and read blocks of notes. With all of these exercises, I’m going to use pennies or marbles to drop into a bowl to indicate a right or wrong answer. Wrong means either naming the note incorrectly, or taking more than 1 second to name it. The importance is speed, which prevents ‘calculating’ or counting lines and spaces.Has anyone else run into this problem? Any suggestions for overcoming it?
I didn’t realize that L & H was going to reissue the 12 back in the ’80’s. The ones that I have seen from the ’20’s and ’30’s had carved decoration.
I’ve got a style 12 here that I will be putting up for sale at some point. First though I have to replace the neck and clean the action. They were the smallest pedal harps that Lyon & Healy made. I believe they were made in the 1920’s and ’30’s and probably stopped at WWII when Lyon & Healy stopped harp production for several years. I’ll look at mine sometime today and tell you how many strings it has.
I don’t know that the comparison between harp and clavichord is valid. The clavichord was really a home practice instrument, never intended for concert work. As Dan Pinkham said to me once, the Clavichord has a dynamic range that goes from the softest pianissimo to inaudibility.
I think that, as Saul says, the chromatic limitations of the early harps had something to do with the lack of repertoire. But also, there were just more pianos around and a lot of piano manufacturers and therefore, a lot more interest in the piano and its repertoire. Just look at how it eclipsed the harpsichord and to a large extent, the organ.
When learning any musical instrument, the teacher has to teach, and the student has to learn, two different things. 1) They have to learn to play the instrument. 2) they have to learn to read music. Many harp teachers really prefer students who have had some piano before starting harp so that they don’t have to teach the music theory and teach the student to read music. I don’t think too much of the hand coordination and muscle skills learned on piano carry over to harp. So if you want to study harp, then study harp. And help yourself and your teacher by taking a theory course or theory lessons with someone else so that your harp teacher can spend the whole lesson teaching you to play the instrument.
You can also try http://www.affairsoftheharp.com. Geraldine McMahon runs that and you can find rental harps through her. She’s in St. Albans just outside of London.
Tacye- Thanks. I haven’t looked at it in years. That makes sense too, because all of the allusions are to female images.
I understand why the above posters like to have no pedals written in at all. I’m a harpist too, and it can be a major pain in the %$# to undo pedals that just don’t work. On the other side though, I would say that if the pedals were put there, or at least corrected and checked by a good professional harpist, who has played the piece in performance and KNOWS the the pedals written in really work, then I’d prefer to have them there, if only as a starting point.
When I learned Faure’s Une Chatelaine en sa Tour… the only copy available was the original, with absolutely no pedals written in. It took me close to a month of real labor to get all the pedals written in, enharmonics figured out, and planning which hand would play what. just to get a working copy so I could actually start learning the piece. Over the next several years, every time I performed it, harpists came up to me afterwards and told me that they had started learning that piece, but got so bogged down in the unwieldy pedaling and other issues, that they just gave up and put it away. That is why I published my edition, which has all the pedals written in, suggested fingering in places where it is not clear what will work, and with enharmonics that help to avoid pedal slides. I insisted on including a forward to explain what I had done and why I had done it and I said in that forward that I did not expect anyone to play it exactly as I had edited it. But even changing some of what I wrote in would save weeks of work in planning out the piece.
Before it went to press, I asked Emily Mitchell, who had just recorded it, if she could send me her copy and if she would look at mine. I told her that I didn’t want to find that I was doing anything that most harpists would find very awkward or unplayable. We exchanged copies and then had a telephone conference comparing the two versions.
As we went through the piece, she would point out here and there that something that I had stuck in the right hand she had put into the left. “But you have to remember,” she would say, “I’m left handed.” The biggest compliment she paid me was in the middle of the piece at the listesso Tempo. The pedals there are JUST AWFUL. My solution at that place was to rewrite a great deal of it enharmonically, making the pedals much safer and easier to remember. “Your listesso tempo is pure genius,” she said. “I’m going to relearn that page using your solution.” “Your kidding!” I said. “No I’m not!” she answered.
I’m telling you all of this to simply point out that this piece is one of the worst in the repertoire for ornery pedals, and many harpists would just give up on it in it’s original unedited form. I think that even making substantial changes to my edits is much easier than starting from scratch.
One final little story about this piece. The title comes from a poem by Paul Verlaine. When Emily was preparing the liner notes for her recording, she did what I had done, which was to go to the public library, get a copy of Verlaine’s poetry, and look for the poem that the line comes from. And like me the first time around, she couldn’t find the poem. She called me in total frustration saying that she had gone through the book twice and couldn’t locate the poem, and did I know where the poem was? I told her she didn’t find the poem because the line Une Chatelaine en sa Tour… is the second line, not the first.” Oh for Pete’s sake!” she said. It’s poem number 7 or 8 (I can’t remember any more) from the series called La Bonne Chanson. The first line is Un ange en son auriole(an angel in his halo).
Thank you so much for posting that. It’s too bad the sound quality is so poor. She’s actually a pretty good harpist. My own personal opinion is that she plays it faster than I would. I think I’d prefer to hear the theme more like a choral and not a march. But that’s just me.
Bonnie- Nice post. Thank you. I think there may be several reasons that 18th century composers did not write for the harp. It may be that it had too small a sound, even by 18th century standards. Also, composition was advancing enormously and exploring many different keys within one composition, which the harp could not do. I’m guessing that in general child prodigies were generally pushed to the piano, which was taking center stage throughout this period. Lastly, composers and musicians of the 18th century did not think twice about using something written for a different instrument on their own. But that doesn’t always work on the harp. The harp resonates differently from a piano.
I often play one of the Posse etudes, I think it’s number 7, when I perform recitals. It’s a gorgeous piece, and the only one of the 8 etudes that is really appropriate for concert use. Several times serious pianists have asked me for a copy of that etude. But I tried it on piano myself once and it sounds thin. it would have to be freely transcribed by a pianist/composer to work well on the piano. That’s just a small example of the problem of moving repertoire back and forth between piano and harp.
Somewhere I read a funny story about the Duc de Guines, who commissioned the Flute and Harp Concerto from Mozart. He was an important diplomat in the French court, and he was very fat. He decided at one point that he looked thinner by wearing tighter fitting clothes, but when he did that, he couldn’t sit down or he’d split the pants. So he had two wardrobes of clothes in two different sizes. Each morning his valet would come in to get him up and lay out his clothes for the day, and would ask “Will his excellency be sitting or standing today?”
CC- Its wonderful that you recognize the need for more than merely learning notes and technique. But there is only so much time in a lesson and the teacher has to “choose her battles.” I would suggest you consider taking other music related courses to fill out your knowledge. Take a theory course, or private theory lessons in order to improve your ability to read and understand what’s printed on the page. Take a music history course, or read books on music history. Most importantly, listen to all kinds of music. Listen to good singers to learn how to phrase and interpret music. Listen to orchestras, chamber music, instrumental soloists(other than just the harp). Over time, you will absorb ideas and ways of interpreting what you play. There’s a lot that you can do on your own so that when you spend time with your teacher, he/she can maximize the lesson time by helping you bring out the things that you have already internalized on your own.
