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Rüdiger Opperman will be playing a concert with Park Stickney and bassist Ricardo Medeiros at the WHC in Vancouver. He builds these harps himself. Mariano Gonzalez also builds pitch-bend harps. He and Brenda Dor-Groot will be playing on pitch-bend harps at the WHC as well. It should be fascinating to hear all the different styles of playing using this kind of system: world music, Paraguayan, and blues. The Chinese konghou players who are coming also are able to bend the pitch, but I believe they do it with their fingers.
I have tried teaching by Skype, and find that it works well for some things. You can see hand position well enough to correct it, and you can demonstrate hand position and fingerings to the student if you have your harp set up in front of the web cam. Phrasing and evenness are a little hard to judge unless your speakers and their mics are of excellent quality. You can always say that it sounds uneven to you and ask if it really is. Most students will acknowledge if it is indeed uneven.
If the technology on both ends is quite good, then obviously your result will be better. I tried giving master classes via a very high-tech set-up at UBC Telestudios, and that worked extremely well. It was like they were in the same room with me.
It certainly beats having no lessons at all if they are in a remote location where there are no teachers. I charge the same per hour, since it is still the same amount of time that I am devoting to that student, and they are still learning.
Your teacher is the best person to help you decide this, since he or she is familiar with your abilities and what would show you off to your best advantage. If you are about to take this examination, I assume you have already learned your pieces. Are you trying to decide in which order to play them? We can’t help you here without knowing what you’re playing.
I never took ATCL exams, but I did take RCM exams in piano. The ATCL syllabus should have explanations about how their examinations are run and whether you or the examiners chooses the order of the programme.I recently played a piece by Golijov called Zhang Zhou’s Dream. It was quite beautiful, but the harp part was not written in a very practical way. Lots of note clusters that involved growing an extra foot to change three pedals at a time. If you need my edited version, I can send it to you, if this is the piece.
Labels just get in the way of working with various hand and finger shapes and sizes. No two harpists’ hands are going to look exactly alike on the strings, unless the harpists are identical twins. I love the story about Grandjany’s bemusement at the attempt to copy his thumbs.
In the past, University of British Columbia has allowed non-music majors to pay a small fee to have their lessons in the music building, if the teacher has time to fit them in. If there is a shortage of that instrument, sometimes they even get to perform in the symphony orchestra. (There is no shortage of harp majors right now, though.) There are various community orchestras around town as well.
From Florence Sitruk: Just a quick answer: the foundation and I will work on a new edition, but to this point, the date for publishing is unknown, certainly more than a year from now. ) There are wrong things which concern dynamics, pedals (i.e. notes), etc..
Florence Sitruk will be giving a lecture and demonstration of this great piece at the World Harp Congress. She was able to put her hands on the original manuscript, and discovered that there are errors in some editions.
If you want back copies of the World Harp Congress Review, I suggest you go to the website http://www.worldharpcongress.org/review/index.html and get in touch with the editor, Ann Yeung. You would have to pay for a membership to get the journal.
Yes, I teach in Vancouver. The technique that I teach is a mix of what I studied with Judy Loman, and what I have learned from master classes with various international harpists who have come through Vancouver (i.e. Russian thumb). I also use Renié’s Method book along with Salzedo’s books, to give a broad range of strategies for accomplishing musical goals. I hope that, since this is an old posting, the problem has been solved, and a teacher has been found.
I learned to count in this way: “one-ee-and-a” for sixteenth notes, “one-and-a” for triplets, “one-and” for eighths. These syllables roll off the tongue easily and are easy to remember. A great book for learning hot to read and count rhythm and also to recognize conducting patterns is Phil Perkins’ book “A Logical Approach to Rhythmic Notation”.
