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My pedal harp maintenance book, A GUIDE FOR HARPISTS, has such a diagram. But it’s under copyright. Why don’t they just get the book so they have a reference for maintaining their harps close at hand!
Sam- What kind of strings do you have up there? Gut or nylon? That could be one issue. The other is that that area of the instrument gets played much less than other areas and may not have broken in the same way. Why don’t you try playing up there a few minutes each day and see if that makes a difference. You could just stand at the harp and play chords and scales in the top two octaves. The third possibility is that the soundboard is just a little too thick up there and so what you have now is all you’re going to get.
I’ll let you know Steven. I should be getting it sometime this week. I’m praying right now that what’s wrong with it is what they said was wrong with it.
Steven- I haven’t received it yet. I had to put in a bid to do the work and to be honest I assumed from the beginning that they were asking me to do this just because they were required to get several bids and they had already decided who was going to do this. But that turned out not to be the case. I’m in the process of arranging the shipping now and I should have the harp here in the next week or so. it’s about 20 years old and was made by a major manufacturer.
I’m not aware of any edition out there other than the original. It’s too bad, because it means that each person who wants to play this piece has to do hours and hours of the same work.
Can you give us more details? What is she playing? She’s playing in the big Carnegie Hall? or one of the smaller recital halls?
Margareet- I don’t have nearly enough information to advise you on what is going on. Where are you? Who told you the mechanism was in poor condition? A master harp rebuilder? Or a store clerk trying to sell you something else? What exactly is wrong with the mechanism? To simply say that it is in poor condition doesn’t tell me anything. Ask the person who told you this for a list of specific problems. The list should include anything and everything that this person feels is wrong with the instrument. And I also want to know what the qualifications are of the person who told you this.
I recently was asked to submit a proposal to do major repairs to a harp belonging to one of the military bands(here in the United States). The harp was too far away from me to simply go see it myself. The person who read me the list of things wrong with the instrument was a finance person, and probably had never even seen a harp. As he read the list, I thought to myself, this harp was examined by a regulator who does not rebuild harps. The man reading me this list didn’t know where the information came from, so I asked him to have the band harpist call me. She did, and sure enough, the harp had been examined by a traveling regulator who, while he’s a good regulator for whom I have a lot of respect, does not and never has rebuilt a harp. The point here is that it is important to know who made this judgement on your harp and what their qualifications are. The person may have insufficient knowledge to make such a judgement or appraisal, or is just feeding you a line of *&(* trying to make you buy something else.
In the case of the military harp, I gave the harpist a very specific list of questions I wanted answers to. She called me while she was standing in front of the instrument and we went over it on the phone. After that, I submitted my proposal, and got the job!
Yeh, but I’m worried that the 40K limit may not be enough for the longer gut strings and wires. When I have a minute I’ll look around on the internet and try to find something.
Tayce- I just had a thought. I’m wondering if I could make up a jig that would have a scale on it that could be clamped onto the neck of a harp. The string to be measured, right on the instrument, would bypass the tuning pin and be hooked instead onto a scale on the jig. A tuning pin on the jig, connected to the scale which was connected to the string, would then do the tuning. The string tension would then be measured right where it is on the instrument and under exactly the same conditions. Now, can you suggest some kind of scale that is as short as possible? Maybe 3 or 4 inches long, with a hook on one end and something to anchor it at the other?
What does BB refer to? Bow Brand? Your question makes me curious as to how consistent testing these strings on a monochord would be. In other words, If I tested 4 gut 4th octave C strings on a monochord, would I get, within a pound or so, the same reading for all 4 strings?
It seems to me that a variation of 2 to 3 kilos(approximately 4 to 6 pounds) is quite a lot. Multiply that by 47 and you’ve got a significant range in overall tension on the instrument. If I wanted for example to compare the variation in tension between 2 4th octave C strings, one being standard gauge and the other thinner by .006 inches, and the margin of error was 4 to 6 pounds, then the information would be useless. This is why I keep coming back to the monochord. I would be able to see, to the ounce, what the tension was.
Tacye- I don’t have any figures at all and I don’t know anyone who does. That makes this a gaping hole in the understanding of the harp. All of the harp makers are basically making seat-of-the-pants decisions about soundboard thickness, string gauge, etc. without any hard facts. And new products, like carbon fiber strings, are being introduced without anyone knowing how much additional stress they are causing the soundboard and neck. Ursula Holliger told me this past weekend that she has been measuring the thickness of the strings she has been using for the last 40 years, and the strings just keep getting thicker and thicker.
Maybe the first step is to do mathematical calculations on a sampling of strings, and then check the answer against a test on a monochord to see if they match. If they do, then the equation works. If not, then it needs to be reexamined and fiddled with until it does.
Thank you for the offer. I really appreciate it. I’d love to pursue this further.
Thank you Tayce-Your post leaves me with some questions. Firstly, how do you weigh a string? What kind of scale? It would have to be extremely sensitive and accurate. After all, how much of a difference in weight can there be between a nylon and gut string? Who has such a scale?
I understand the issue of ‘feel.’ But you said it’s related to tension and other relevant factors. What are the other relevant factors? Also, isn’t it possible that gut being made of strands of fiber and nylon being a simple extruded solid would have an effect on the resistance of the string irrespective of weight and volume, and therefore cause the gut to reach pitch at a different tension than the nylon? And let’s not leave out carbon fiber strings too. They also are made up of strands of fiber. But their resistance is much higher than gut or nylon and so reach pitch at a much higher tension then either gut or nylon. For anyone involved with the harp, but in particular repairmen and builders, it is critically important to have an accurate measurement of the actual tension exerted on the instrument. I would like to add to my list of questions in a previous post that of asking what the difference in tension is for a standard gauge gut, and one .006 to .008 thinner of the same length and pitch?
To be perfectly honest, I just don’t trust mathematical formulas to figure out this stuff. It’s possible that the mathematical formula doesn’t take into consideration everything that needs to be considered and as a result the practical application could come up with very different results. Let me give you an example of this.
All harp actions have to have the natural and sharp discs at a very specific distance apart in order to raise the pitch exactly 1/2 step from flat to natural and exactly 1/2 step from natural to sharp. There’s a formula for figuring that out, and it involves shortening the string length something like 10.17% of the of the total vibrating length. I’m sure you know the exact number. So the engineers got out their calculators and figured out the distance that the natural disc had to be from the stationary or adjustable stud to get the natural pitch, and then calculated again to find the distance, slightly shorter this time, to locate the sharp disc.
The problem is, those calculations don’t work in the first and second octaves. And do you know why? I know why. I’d like to hear your explanation.
The work situation in the classical end of the harp(symphony, opera, ballet, etc.) is a disaster and has been for a long time. To win one of the rare openings the harpist today has to be an unbelievable harpist. Jessica Zhou went through a grueling audition process that would have killed most other harpists, which I explained in a post two years ago. The current fill-in harpist with Boston Lyric is Ina Zdorovitch, who a year ago took the top prize in Israel. Frankly, it’s much much harder to win a job today than it is to play the job. But that’s the way it is.
A friend of mine at a major music school told me that a very fine harpist there has decided to go into nursing because she doesn’t see any future in the harp.
