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Thank you! This is all really helpful. I should have mentioned that, on top of the first page, it specifies that piano and harp are specially tuned to meantone E scale. Frequencies are tuned to multiples of the following scale: E3 = 330.500 hz, F3=352.799 hz., F#3 = 352.700 hz., G3 = 394.700 hz., G#3 = 412.799 hz., A3 = 441.899 hz., B flat 3 = 472.799 hz., B3 = 494.700 hz., C4 = 528.799 hz., C#4 = 553.599 hz., D4 = 590.400 hz., E flat 4 = 632.000hz., E4 = 661.000hz.
It would be one thing if I had an hour of silence to tune, but I have to tune between pieces while the audience sits and waits!
Another Adams piece we have played is “Dharma at Big Sur”, which requires “just intonation”. Again, I had other pieces on the program, which meant that I had to re-tune twice per concert.My favourite bit of advice from Judy Loman was “Engage your brain!” The point she was making is that you will learn everything a lot more securely if you know exactly what you are doing and are making conscious decisions about the music. Alice Chalifoux used to remind her students that the orchestra wouldn’t wait for them, so they had to keep up, even if it meant dropping a note or two.
I saw a harpist playing with Paul Shaffer’s band on Stephen Colbert’s show on June 19, 2017. It looked like it may have been Mariku Anraku, but I couldn’t get a good enough look to be certain. Anyone know who it was?
The funny thing was, when I channel-surfed the same night, there was another harpist playing in a scene in Modern Family!<span style=”color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;”>We just discovered that the second harp is missing a bass clef in three bars before 190. Clinton has already forwarded this to Kalmus and it is being corrected.</span>
Albeniz’s Sonate en re is a delightful short encore piece. A great show-off piece is Spohr’s Fantaisie, but you need really strong technique. Another good one is the Fantasy on Themes from the opera Eugene Onegin by E. Walter-Kuhne. The final movement of Mozetich’s Songs of Nymphs is lovely, and very showy.
I would suggest doing rhythm drills, clapping, not playing. I highly recommend working from The Logical Approach to Rhythmic Notation by Phil Perkins. It’s best to count out loud while clapping, using the words recommended in the book. (One and two and, one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a, etc.)
Thanks, Elizabeth! I had written out something myself, years ago, but it is in handwriting. This is much neater.
I change my strings regularly, but, as many of you have attested, they can break even when they are only a day or a week old. This is usually what has happened when one has broken in a concert. I change any string that shows signs of wear, but sometimes the weak spot is invisible. Still, it’s a very good suggestion, Sylvia.
Most college dormitories don’t allow practising, so you would have to practise in a music school room anyway. You are better off to save your money and buy a good harp when you graduate. There are some excellent deals on second-hand harps, too.
I have had strings break during performances and rehearsals, so I always keep my bag of spare strings at my side. (It’s black, so that it looks good onstage.) If there is time, I replace the string and do my best to get it up to pitch quietly by putting my ear up against the back of the sound chamber. I tune it up whenever there are some bars of rest.
If there is an enharmonic alternative, (such as a D flat for a C#), then I will use that string, if possible. If there is no alternative, such as a D natural, then I either omit the note entirely, or put the whole phrase up or down an octave.
If you are playing solo, then you have the luxury of stopping and fixing it while joking with the audience. In an orchestra, you are out of luck.
I find that gut strings tend to hold their pitch sooner than nylon strings.
It may be helpful to keep an eye on the condition of your strings. Any strings that look frayed or chipped should be replaced. However, sometimes there is no obvious damage and the string breaks anyway.
There seems to be a lot less activity on this site than in the old format. I used to love the “Professionals” forum. I wonder if it would help to bring back some of the old forum titles.
Hi, Samantha! When I used to do a lot of gigs, I would assemble the music in my binder to go with the type of job it was. I liked to mix it up, so that I would go from one genre to another. If you use different-coloured tabs inside the binder, you can label these with whatever categories you want, so that you can flip back and forth from Celtic to contemporary pop, to classical, to old standards, etc. If something straddles the categories, you could have multiple copies, one with each tab. I hope this helps!
