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I agree that fingering is extremely important! And Carl is absolutely right about how a different hand shape can make one person’s fingering unsuitable for another’s. The crucial thing is to teach students to think logically and plan what they are going to do, because a good fingering plan can transform a choppy, difficult passage into a smooth, easy one. It can really affect phrasing and pulse as well, so students should practice bringing out weak fingers if they are on strong beats. Orchestra fingering can be different than solo in some cases; in orchestra, you have to be able to keep your eye on the conductor, so your fingering has to facilitate that, whereas, as a soloist, you can watch the strings more.
That is great information! I am so glad these experiments have been done! I think we must not be dogmatic. I raise when there’s time; so if there is a long pause, I would take up that time with a gesture that gets me from Point A to Point B in an efficient but esthetically pleasing way. I gesture more if I’m a soloist, and less if I’m in the orchestra, and not at all if I’m in the pit. As Carl points out in another post, we are entertainers as well as musicians, so when you’re the star of the show, it is important to look marvelous, because when you look marvelous, you feel marvelous (pace Billy Crystal).
In my years with the National Ballet Orchestra, we played “Sleeping Beauty” so many times that, when a blackout occurred in mid-performance, we just kept going (like the Energizer bunny, but perhaps not as cute). The cadenza is not my favourite of the three, with a rather unappealing repeat of a seventh chord, with left-hand turnarounds. It’s not as difficult or notey as Nutcracker or Swan Lake, but there are tricky bits here and there. Re: Britten: I’ll have to go have a look at that again! I think I just played the left hand straight and the right cracked, but simultaneously. Is the left hand supposed to come after the right?
Yes, in that section of the Swan lake cadenza, it is common to start slowly and accelerate, then put on the brakes as you get close to the top of it. I’ve never been rear-ended, at least not so far.
Are the chords marked “serrer” in the Lilac Fairy part of Sleeping Beauty? These inversions are in a moderato 6/8, and they do have to be squeezed together. (By the way, the spelling would indeed be “serrer”, since there is no “serres” in French.) I imagine that translates to “cracked” or, in other words, very rapidly broken. I play the left hand straight and the right hand barely broken, just to get that “fairy” sound but keep the tempo clear. If it’s really fast, then I turn them into triad inversions instead of 4-note chords. I know it’s cheating, but once the tempo steps over that line, it’s every man for himself.
I hope I haven’t told this story before, but here goes: A really long time ago, I was having a lesson on raising. My teacher was trying to get me to loosen up and get away from the strings. She exhorted me to raise higher, so I obliged, just as she was leaning in to look more closely. I hit her right in the face with my fist!! I was mortified. Luckily, I didn’t do any damage, being a bit of a weakling at the time.
Re: new music for the lever harp: I have just finished compiling a book of music for either lever or pedal harp, which will be available this month from The Avondale Press in Vancouver, BC. I threw in some humorous general advice and more specific tips as well, listed under each piece’s title. It ranges from intermediate to advanced in difficulty, and all the pieces are no more than three pages long. The longer pieces will have pages which fold out, so that buyers will not have to photocopy in order to turn the pages!
Victor, you bring up an interesting point! “If you want to know how good a teacher is, don’t examine the teacher, but his or her students”: You would have to see all of the students to get an overall view, because let’s face it, all of us teachers have had a few students who really don’t represent our teaching. Either they had such a mind of their own that they play completely differently than you taught them to, or they didn’t listen, or they went to so many different teachers, etc., etc. It reminds me of the story about a famous violin teacher (Kreisler, maybe?) who heard a piece of his being played very badly by a busker. He went over to the man, took his violin, saying,”No! You idiot! It goes like this!” and played it correctly for him. The next day, he walked by the busker, who now had a huge sign beside him, with the words “PUPIL OF KREISLER”.
Interesting thread! I would add that every aspiring harpist (or musician of any type) should know something about how their muscles and tendons work, and try to work with their body, not against it. If something feels painful, uncomfortable or tight, even after they have been playing that way long enough to be “used to it”, then they should really analyze what is happening in their hands, shoulders, neck, jaw, back, everywhere. I have seen harpists with their necks strained forward, their shoulders hunched up, their elbows way too high or way too low, fingers coming up and over, detouring far away from the note they’re approaching, every tortuous inefficiency there is. Athletes have coaches who watch and analyze every move they make, but we are often so absorbed with the music (which of course we should be!) hat we forget about our poor bodies until it’s too late and we’re injured.
I was just teaching this piece, and I have come up with an idea for the harmonics: I play them where they sound until the second beat C of the third bar of that variation. I play that C and the rest of the notes until the end of bar 4 (the low E flat) where they’re written. In bar 5, I go back to playing them where they sound. This allows you to keep that octave jump to the low E flat, and the phrase comes out nicely as well. Has anyone else ever done this?
The old adage “Caveat emptor” comes to mind. If a student has switched to a teacher who is causing them to feel discomfort when they play, should they not re-think their decision and go back to the teacher who encouraged a healthier hand position? That’s why you don’t want to burn your bridges! It doesn’t bother me if a student wants to have an occasional lesson with another teacher, just to get some different feedback, and I don’t mind “team-teaching” as well, as long as the two teachers are not contradicting each other. Tayce brings up a dilemma: what to do if you see someone who is not getting the help they need from their
Re: Pines of Rome impossible section: Tayce, the part I was referring to is in I pini del Gianicolo, the second and fifth bars after rehearsal #16. I was taught to just finger those notes instead of doing the harmonics, since it goes so fast. I think the harmonics you are remembering might be those at the end of that movement. I do them in flats, but I wonder if your conductor wanted the more muted sound that is produced by the sharps.
Parts of Nutcracker are impossible, for example, just after the opening of the second act. I do that part the same way as the cadenza, one hand, then the other, double speed. I suspect that Tchaikowsky expected the two harpists to sort it out between them, but nowadays, it’s usually done by one beleagered harpist. La Forza del Destino has a figure where you need five fingers to play it, but most of us leave out a bass note so that we can use the left thumb to get the bottom note of that figure. (See Bea Rose’s book.) Respighi’s got a series of impossible harmonics passages in The Pines of Rome. The Walton Violin Concerto has another very fast harmonics passage that just barely works. Britten’s War Requiem has unplayable sections…actually, this list couold go on for pages.
