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She’s been playing Broadway shows for years. Very fine harpist. And yes, an incredible name, and it’s real.
I should add one more thing here. If you have a choice between buying a bond or paying all the fees up front, even if you are planning to remove the harp from the country after a certain amount of time, buy the bond. In the long run it’s cheaper. Also, the consulate of the country you are going to will tell you that upon removing the harp from their country you will have to fill out paperwork to get a refund, they make it as difficult as possible to get the money back. So the best is to not pay it out in the first place.
You didn’t say what country you are sending the instrument to, or for what reason. Most countries make the assumption that you are sending the instrument there to sell it, and they want to make sure they will get their money(import duty, VAT tax, et.). So they will charge you accordingly up front. Telling them it’s only temporary or you’re planning to take it back out of the country means nothing to them. You will have to pay all fees as if you are selling the instrument there. So you need to research this carefully BEFORE sending the instrument off. You may have to buy a bond, which is basically a contract with a bond company that tells the country in Europe that all fees will be paid by the bond company if you don’t take the instrument back out of the country. At the very least you will probably have to pay about 25% of the value of the instrument for the import duty and VAT tax that will be due immediately.
Ina’s first teacher here in the U.S. was Cynthia Price-Glynn. I believe she got at least one degree with her.
Sam-YOU CAN’T REMEMBER THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY POSTS AND SAUL’S????? PHILISTINE!!! Saul and I have been at each other’s throat’s for…5 years? 10 years?? And you can’t remember which one of us endlessly, constantly, adamantly,annoyingly, promotes etudes???? OH MY GOD! I can feel one of my spells coming on….
Sam-Screens are used for a variety of reasons. They are almost always used in orchestra auditions and sometimes in competitions. One reason is to prevent anyone from even thinking that there was prejudice of any kind involved: against a style of playing, appearance of the player, race, etc. Screens also help the jury(orchestra or competition) to focus entirely on what they are hearing. A screen was used when I was a judge for the Ann Adams, and I’m very glad it was. It is an intriguing thought to use a screen for a major international harp competition, right through the final stage.
I received the following email this morning from an important American harp teacher. I changed a few details that would give away her identity, but other than that, this is what she sent me:
I checked out the harp column forum this morning and read
your post about french/russian training vs american. And I absolutely
agree. A french student of mine told me that first year students
spend the entire first semester on the Faure Impromptu only, and the
second semester on the Britten Suite. Sometimes a month on the first
page chords of the Faure! Wild, huh? But they can play chords at the
end of it. Plus etudes, of course. Anyway, obviously you can see it
when these kids play. The ease of execution, the security…I’m so
sick of kids at the college level having groped from piece to piece
with technical problems that were never fundamentally solved.
Sam
A) And also Julie Smith, Liz Hainen, and Jessica Zhaou. They all took grand prizes at recent competitions. And there may be other names we haven’t mentioned.
B) Preparing for a competition is certainly as important as being a very good harpist. It’s a bit like the difference between learning a piece, and learning to perform a piece. My article, The Big Day, published in the Harp Column several years ago, goes into that.
It would certainly be possible, and in fact has happened, that a slightly lesser harpist who was a better performer and competitor could win a competition over a more musical and highly skilled harpist who got a bad case of the nerves. But harp competitions have been around long enough to be able to see trends and patterns. The Israel competition started 51 years ago, and the USA I think 24. There will always be bickering about individual competitions and competitors. But it’s hard to argue with a pattern of one nationality or method consistently producing winners. Competition juries provide professional, unbiased reviews of the players.
Dearest Saul- I don’t think that any of your post explains why European trained harpists consistently play better than American harpists and win competitions more often. You’re confusing two issues: preparing for a competition, and, learning to play the harp well(very well). They are completely separate issues.
The system that I touched on in my post is the standard way of teaching in France and Russia and perhaps other European countries as well. It’s a very nuts-and-bolts approach to teaching the technical aspects of the harp, and raising the technical standard of the student to the highest possible level. Does it turn every student into a world class virtuoso? Of course not. But for the talented and dedicated student who is willing to put in the time and make the effort, it does produce better results overall than the current way of teaching harp in the United States. And while you can argue endlessly with me over the truth of my statement, you cannot argue with the competition results.
I wasn’t able to find what I wrote about this before, but I thought it would not hurt to repeat my thoughts here.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with Salzedo or Grandjany technique per se, which is just a matter of hand position, finger articulation, etc. The real problem is the process, over years, that is used to train harpists and to get the ones with the most natural talent to play well at the most advanced level. The countries that consistently produce grand prize winners(1st, 2nd, or 3rd prize) have a rigorous and very systematic format for teaching technique. And by technique, I mean the ability to play fast and accurately, and to play any note or passage at any dynamic level. I don’t know of anyone in the United States who does that.
The teaching(and learning) of technique has to be focused on as a part of each lesson from beginner on up, and repertoire is never used to advance technique. That is done with etudes and exercises. Let me give you an example.
If you are going to teach a student to play scales, then the ultimate goal should be up and down 4 octaves, hands separately, 4 notes to the beat, at approximately 126-132 to the beat. You start by teaching a low level beginner to play scales up and down three or 4 octaves, and work with them on endless variations to get the scale smooth and even, get all 8 fingers to produce the same sound, completely stabilize the hand position, and then over time speed the whole scale up until you have reached the goal of the previous paragraph. If the student can do that, then playing something like the Handel B flat Concerto, with running 16th notes at 88 to the quarter is a piece of cake. If the student can’t do that, then he/she is going to struggle to get the same piece up to tempo.
By the same token, if the student over several years, plays through sets of etudes and plays them fast and accurately, then any piece of music he/she encounters will, again, be easy to master, because the student will have a whole encyclopedia of muscle memory patters at his/her disposal.
But that’s not the way most American harp students are trained. They simply work on pieces, and more often than not, pieces that are way beyond them technically. Even if they can manage to play all of the notes, they don’t have the technical control to play with total evenness, with technical ease, with two or three dynamic levels simultaneously, or even with total control over crescendos and decrescendos, ritards and accelerandos. And the result translates directly into the results you mentioned in your original posts.
It wasn’t always like this. In the first 20 years of the Israel competition for example, plenty of Americans took grand prizes. Susan McDonald, Nancy Allen, Barbara Allen, Lynn Turner, Emily Mitchell, Grace Wong to name a few. Many of them studied with Grandjany, or in Europe with Marissa Robles or Pierre Jamet. Those teachers are gone now. In the realm of orchestra auditions, students of McDonald, Nancy Allen, Kathy Bride, and Sarah Bullen have had success.
A friend of mine who had studied with Renie told me that her favorite harp had a bunch of horizontal cracks in the board that you could see light through.
Horizontal cracks are caused by the movement in the soundboard wood, which happens over the course of the year from changes in humidity. Some wood pieces move more, some less. Ideally an unveneered soundboard should be installed at the driest time of the year when it has shrunk as much as it’s going to. But that’s still no guarantee that it will not crack later. Again, it has to do mostly with how much a particular piece of wood expands and contracts with changes in humidity over the course of the year. There is no way I would blame the builder for those cracks.
The cracks that you describe do not compromise the life of the soundboard at all. They are not an indication that the board is weakening. This type of cracking also has no effect whatsoever on the sound. It is only vertical cracks that run parellel and close to the center strip on the soundboard that are ominous signs that the soundboard may need to be replaced soon.
OK. Here’s how to clean your harp. First off, if it’s a gold harp, DON’T DO THIS TO THE GOLD.
Mix some Dawn dishwashing soap with water as if you were going to do the dishes. Soak a sponge in the liquid and wring it out as much as you can. Use the sponge to wipe down all of the natural wood parts of the instrument: the soundboard and body, the neck, etc. You can really rub in those areas where your hands constantly touch the instrument, mainly the upper part of the body and soundboard. You may have to re-soak the sponge and wring it out several times if the harp is really dirty. You can dry the instrument off with paper towels or a cloth towel. This should be done every few weeks to a month if you are playing the instrument regularly. After cleaning it, put a coat of paste car wax on the areas you just cleaned. I use something called California Gold. Again, don’t do any of this on gilding or on any metal parts.
