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I know two harp students at UBC who kept their harps in their rooms in residence. I imagine they had to negotiate the hours when they could practise without distrubing people.
I don’t know if there are pedals harps designed to be played with the left hand. Some lever harps can be custom-made for this, though. Nothing is stopping you from trying it, but I think the way the neck is carved, it might be difficult to get comfortable.
Interesting point here: what is easy for some people is very difficult for others, based on the size and shape of different hands and fingers. Some people just cannot do this octave passage comfortably because their hands are just the wrong shape for it. They can practise until they are blue in the face but, if their fingers are too short or their palms too narrow, there is a risk of an over-use injury. Some piano manufacturers actually make 3/4 size piano keyboards for people who want to play Rachmaninoff, but have not got hands the size of dinner plates. The harps in Boildieu’s day were smaller, with narrower spacing, if I’m not mistaken. Since it makes no difference to the musical intent of the piece, I see no reason why the octaves can’t be broken between the hands if it is painful for the harpist to accomplish them. Another analogy is in ballet. Dame Margot Fonteyn never felt comfortable with certain choreography in Swan Lake, so she just re-choreographed those parts so that she would always look her best and entertain the audience. She was a great ballerina, but she knew her limits and show-cased her strengths.
One of my students was having trouble with breaking strings, and it turned out that she had the harp by a sunny window. Once she moved the harp to a shadier spot in the house, the strings settled down.
Ach! Es tut mir leid! “Verklingen” does mean “to die away”. “Klingen” means “to tinkle, sound, or clink”, and “klingeln” means “to ring”.
I realize you are probably seeing the German double “s” that comes out as a sort of stylized capital B. My four years of German have finally come in handy! What looks like “mabig” is actually “massig”, with an umlaut over the “a”. It sounds like “messy” with a “g” at the end. Also, “Hauptzeitmass” has the same double-S. “Zuruckhalten” means “holding back” and “verklingen” means “ringing”. “Ruhiger” means “quieter” as in “calmer”, but not softer. “Perdendosi” is Italian for getting quieter (direct translation: getting lost).
Saul, I am looking at my music right now and I just play it exactly as written, with the 24 13 fingerings all the way up. To avoid stopping the A flat, I just pull my hand back so that my knuckles clear the strings, and I place at the exact moment when I play. This also mitigates that “choppy” sound. I studied this piece with Miss Chalifoux during my year in Cleveland, and also with Judy Loman after I got back to Toronto (1970’s). The movement is marked “Lebhaft” which means “lively” or “full of life”. I think of the ascending pattern as spritely and energetic, so I don’t want it too legato. Here’s a bit of heresy: if the knuckles are banging into the strings, and you want a smoother sound, just let them go straight so that they don’t hit. Curved fingers are fine in many instances, but there are always exceptions to every rule. Sometimes you have to pull the left shoulder back a little bit to give your left hand room to execute a maneuver in an upper register. I never thought of it before, but you could also try reversing the hands at the beginning of that upward arpeggio and see if that solves the problem of hitting the A.
As for the last movement, I have it marked in my part that the beat remains the same; in other words, the previous quarter equals the new dotted quarter. Since both Judy and Alice were Salzedo’s students, they may have gotten that marking from him.
Often we are in a hurry to learn a piece because a deadline is looming. So we don’t take the time to play every note perfectly and slowly in order to burn the correct patterns into our brains. If we practice mistakes, lo and behold, we learn mistakes. The biggest mistake is to practice tensely! However, with all the most careful preparation in the world, brain cramps can still occur, but they are less frequent. The trick is to know how to recover, without broadcasting to the audience that you are mortified and forever disgraced. As long as our correct notes vastly outnumber our errors, a mistake is not the end of the world.
Oh, you are preaching to the choir here! Absolutely true, and it’s outrageous. I have gone to conferences and asked management people why they can’t put up a united front and tell the agencies what they CAN afford, then hold that line. It saddens me that many symphony musicians are struggling to get by at below-poverty wages while the soloist walks in and, in some rarefied cases, makes more in one evening than they make all year. Sure, the soloists should make a good living, but not to the point that the musicians are put out of work or face huge pay cuts. Interestingly, when a soloist from the ranks of the orchestra is asked to perform exactly the same concerto, they are offered a much smaller remuneration than a visitor, and it doesn’t matter if they play brilliantly, note-perfectly, from memory. Even more insultingly, they get much less publicity. Is it because they assume that audiences won’t be large, so they don’t want to risk spending a lot of money? Have they bought into the Hollywood concept of paying huge salaries to the stars, while excellent actors and brilliant writers wait on tables all over L.A.?
Sounds like a great read! I always wondered about the “game” of classical music; why some artists get all the grants, the prizes, the reviews, etc., while similarly-gifted artists get totally ignored. I am convinced that there are many back-room deals going on between managers and agents. And then there’s the issue of the same music being played over and over again on radio stations, while you never hear some great “indie” bands. In Canada, at least we have the CBC, which has special programming for local artists, such a “West Coast Performance”, but they don’t broadcast it over the whole country! The future for musicians seems to be in getting their stuff onto the Internet and promoting it that way, bypassing the record companies and agents entirely. Still, don’t give up on performing arts organizations; we need all the help we can get! The VSO has a new “Horizons” series which spotlights seldom-heard music, we are commissioning a lot of new Canadian composers, and we are getting more and more new, up-and-coming soloists.
Excellent points, Carl! To refer back to that thread about talent, I have found that some of my students have had a natural gift for being expressive and musical and knowing how much ritardando is just right, etc., while others take much longer to get to that stage. I am always delighted when a student comes to a lesson with a really great idea about a piece that I have not thought of myself. One thing that amazes me: adult harpists who religiously cling to practices because that’s how they were taught, whether or not these techniques are working for them. If they went back to the same teacher twenty years later, they probably would find that the teacher has moved on and changed some of the things they taught back then. You have to keep thinking and dissecting what you’re doing to grow as a person and as a musician.
I think it’s best to tailor your teaching to the students’ abilities and preferences, but I believe the first few years are most efficacious if the teacher uses the “old-school” approach. Then, once the student has (hopefully) mastered technical problems and come to some understanding of musical styles, then they can be encouraged to branch out and create their own interpretations. But the teacher should never totally abdicate their responsibility to guide the student. If the student makes a really bad choice of tempo or style, I don’t think it would be good to just stand back and let them play the piece poorly for the sake of individuality. I would encourage every student to go to lots of concerts of different artists, take master classes with as many teachers as possible, and think for themselves! The more influences they get from really great artists, the better they will be at determining their own style of music-making.
