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This is not the place to carpet bomb the harp world with free advertising. If anything, your intrusive way of promoting this book has turned me off to it.
This is not the place to carpet bomb the harp world with free advertising. If anything, your intrusive way of promoting this book has turned me off to it.
What’s the floor made of? Cement? Wood? Is it just vibrations coming through the floor that the neighbor is complaining about? Or is it just generally that you are practicing and the sound is coming through everywhere(open windows, through the floor, etc.)?
Try as much as possible to work with the neighbor. When are they not there? Ask them when are the best times of the day or evening for you to practice? Tell them how much time you need to practice each day and then ask when would be the best times to do that? You may have to put sound absorbing material and carpeting on the floor, but also on the walls near the harp to minimize the sound.
I never counted the harps in her apartment, but there were a lot of them. I think that number counts everything, including the little tiny harps as well as larger pedal harps.
The Mildred Dilling blog starts in March of ’06. At the top of that page is part III. So you have to scroll down past part II to get to I. The last part, part IV, is on the April ’06 page.
Stan- You might want to go into the archives here and read the 4 part blog that I wrote a few years back on Mildred Dilling. If you have trouble finding it let me know. I can email you the whole thing. If you do find it, make sure you read the sections in correct order, which means that you have to scroll way down to get the first one. They are in the archives in reverse order, meaning that the most recent entry(the last part) is at the top of the thread.
Tony- That’s a perfect explanation of why everyone should practice scales and arpeggios on the harp. For the student trying to improve their technique, it’s important to practice both in endless variations: uneven rhythms, accenting one finger out of 4 and changing the accent, practicing arpeggios as block chords, and practicing both looking away from the harp.
Scales at a very fast tempo are difficult on the harp, but for different reasons than on the piano. One of the many reasons to play scales and arpeggios on the harp is that they help to develop the ability to ‘feel’ ones way around the instrument. After all, unlike the piano, we don’t have an arrangement of black and white keys to help us orient ourselves to the instrument. There is just a plane of strings and we have to be able to feel specific distances to get around the instrument easily without looking constantly at our hands. Scales and arpeggios, in all their variations, are a good way of learning those distances.
I’m not really qualified to discuss the rest of your post. Trying to form a list of the ‘best’ soloists is subjective at best. Also, many times a soloist can have a great career in one part of the world and be completely unknown elsewhere. There was an American harpsichordist named Scott Ross who had a great career in Europe but was completely unknown here. The Amnerican pianist Daniel Pollack won second prize in the Tchaikovski competition the year Van Cliburn won first. Pollack was enormously popular in Russia for years, but never had a great career elsewhere. Much of the success and fame of soloists and ensembles has a lot to do with their concert management and the people who run those agencies. They can make or break a career. Just read “WHO KILLED CLASSICAL MUSIC?” by Norman Lebrecht to see what I mean. it’s not a pretty picture.
In the case of orchestras, there are many European orchestras that are wonderful but which don’t tour, or don’t tour often. They are state supported and run organizations who perform a service for their particular city or country and don’t record or tour. That doesn’t make them inferior ensembles.
I just reread my post and wanted to make one clarification. In the paragraph about playing scales at 132, I meant that I got so I could do it on both piano and harp. Barely, but I could do it.
Dale-This is actually quite an explosive question. You’ll see why as the commentary comes in. Here is the situation. It was Salzedo who decided that scales, arpeggios, and etudes were not necessary for learning to play the harp, in spite of the fact that he himself was a virtuoso harpist who had studied with Alphonse Hasselmans at the Paris Conservatory, who made vigorous use of scales, arpeggios, and etudes. So it has been primararily Salzedo’s disciples,(but not exclusively) who have carried this torch.
Regardless of who is teaching that way now(without using scale and arpeggio exercises, and etudes), the theory behind that position makes no sense. Why would the harp be excluded from a form of technical study that clearly works and which is embraced by every other musical instrument? International harp competitions are a good barometer for who is producing the most technically proficient players, and consistently it is the French and the Russians, who both make extensive use of the above mentioned material, who make it to the final stages.
A friend of mine, currently president of an important music conservatory, told me that in his former job, one of his duties was to audition music students(on all instruments) for an advanced level summer student orchestra. He told me that for the 20 or so years that he did this, he “always had to lower the bar for the harpists.” He said that it didn’t matter what school of playing they had been trained in, they were all equally deficient.
There is no excuse for this. Harp students need to be held to the same standards as everyone else, and the harpists who are play much better for it.
My piano teacher in high school was on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music, and he told me that a requirement for Piano students at that school was that they be able to play scales, 4 notes to the beat, at 132 on the metronome. I made that my goal as a student and got to the point where I could do it. Barely, but I could.
The point of this is that any student on any instrument has to learn to play at a fast tempo, and scales, arpeggios, and etudes are the best way to start building a technique at that level. If you depend solely on playing fast pieces to learn this, you will not develop a technical basis that can be applied to other fast and hard pieces. It will only apply to the one piece you learned. More importantly though, if you don’t work out the technique for playing fast on scales, arpeggios, and etudes, I find that the result is always somewhat lumpy and uneven, and the player sounds like he/she is struggling.
I think this question was asked a while back here and if I remember correctly nobody knew who it was. Were there 2 harps in Fantasia? Or only one?
I knew Mildred quite well and I was never aware that Mildred Dilling had a nephew. I’m also not aware that she left him anything in her will. All her harps went to her secretary, Geraldine Ruegg, and her lawyer.
The solfege system taught in France produces awesome results. When I was living there, I lived with a French family for a while, and their 12 year old daughter was studying harp and taking solfege classes at the Paris Conservatory prep division every Saturday morning. She came to me one day and asked me to help her with her solfege assignment. It consisted of a two or three page piece with a vocal line and piano accompaniment, and the girl wanted me to play the piano part while she sang the vocal line.
The piece was written specifically for solfege study, and the vocal line used 15 clefs; the G clef on all 5 lines, the C clef on all 5 lines, and the F clef on all 5 lines. A different clef was used on each measure of the piece(the piano accompaniment was written entirely the usual way). This 12 year old girl, who I can tell you was no prodigy, read this piece with no trouble. I was dumbfounded at her ability. Those are the results that you can get when you study theory separately from the instrument.
