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It depends on where you are likely to perform. You may find that it will close some doors to you for clients who are looking for something more conservative, but open others for people who like the idea of a harpist at their event, but who also like the added flash.
In general, never work too hard to suppress your own expression of yourself. Like I said, you may find that it opens more doors than you realize, having a unique look. I could easily see a few coffeehouses and hipster events that would find it very interesting to have a harpist with a more unique fashion look.
Consider that if you stick with a traditional look, you will be competing with every other woman with long hair in a formal dress who plays harp for weddings. If you look a little unique or hipster, you will probably get gigs from places who would never even have considered a harpist before they saw you, and for whom you may be the only such harpist. Maybe you can cultivate an atypical repertoire without going too far afield of the standards (Britten’s opening to his harp suite, Song in the Night) or just play normal classical music with odd pedal settings. I’ve known odd venues who would like that sort of thing — odd downtown shops, modern art galleries, coffeehouses, warehouse concerts … Stick with the alternative venues you’ve talked about — less competition for those.
I’d say to give it a shot, maybe look further afield than you normally would for places to play, and if it doesn’t work for you, you can always go back to your natural color.
“But pedal markings for piano are so much simpler than pedal markings for harp.”
Total agreement here. 🙂 Also agreed on the business about enharmonics. One of the things I’m still struggling with when I arrange music for harp is whether to spell things “correctly” — putting the sharp 5 in place when you’re moving into the relative minor, for example — or spelling it as a flat 6 if it would make the pedaling easier to grasp. I’m only just beginning to bump up against it myself, as opposed you someone like yourself who has done this for a lot longer at a much higher level.
A few on my blog:
https://italianfolkharp.wordpress.com/tag/daphne/
It’s just a cute little Daphne 40 — it was sold as well-used but structurally sound, which is fine for me. The VA Harp Center did a nice job on it; it’s been freshly regulated and strung.
This was basically my one and only opportunity to ever own a pedal harp, so I went for it, and I’m glad I did. The finish is checked and has some dings, but it plays and behaves great, and I’m so happy with it. 🙂
What a charming video! I have to admit that the first thing that struck me was that that boy has a really good sense of rhythm, though. I mean, the whole thing sounded great, but his sense of rhythm and phrasing is incredibly mature and very well evolved, and at such a young age. He has a great road ahead.
I also have to add in that the whole way the thing reads seems fishy to me. “It’s MY BABY!”
“Who made it?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“It’s your baby but you don’t know who made it?”
*silence*
“How’d it get dinged up?”
*silence*
“Why are you selling it?”
*silence*
“If it’s your baby, that implies you’ve had it for a while — yet it’s brand new?”
*silence*
In addition to the general problems of buying a potentially poor-quality harp with condition problems, the whole thing just smells funny to me for other reasons as well. I tend to run to cynicism though, so I may be reading more into this than I should.
Seriously — wait until the summer.
If you read all the way through that thread, you’ll find a link to a gallery of photos — I suspect that this is the one you’re talking about:
http://music.lib.byu.edu/IHA/DonationPhotos/Dilling/pages/PrattBox21Item0004.html
Here’s what I suspect is the writing on the back:
http://music.lib.byu.edu/IHA/DonationPhotos/Dilling/pages/PrattBox21Item0011.html
I would strongly encourage you to hold out until the summer. The last thing you want is to have one underperforming harp that needs repair and end up with another underperforming harp that needs repair. Then, you’ll have doubled your problem and have to wait even longer to buy a new, good-quality harp because of the money you spent on the second one.
If you are in New York, there must be rental options for you, or your teacher might be able to help you find a rental. Otherwise, I really encourage you to sit tight until the summer so you don’t end up even further in the financial hole and stuck with two poor-quality harps.
ETA: Can you take the train or drive down to the VA Harp Center in Haddonfield, NJ by any chance? They might have some nice used 34-string lever harps for sale. The NJ Turnpike should pretty much get you right there.
There’s certainly some application for it, I have no doubt. But as a pianist, I really have to doubt its usefulness as anything that could be played like a typical piano at least. One of the big advantages of the piano is the sheer scope of what you can do on it — gobs and gobs of notes at once. As an example, Liszt scored all of the Beethoven symphonies just for that one instrument. That’s music typically requiring 100 people to realize that can be made by only one person.
When you do that sort of thing, you do have to kind of put the notes in one place and leave them there. A trumpet player or a violinist who plays one note at a time can adjust intonation finely for that one note, but that’s only because they only play one note at a time, or at most two in the case of strings. (Strings can only play more by playing a fast arpeggio.) When you do that sort of thing, you can focus on just that one note and get its tuning dead on.
When you could be playing as many as ten notes at once with a compass of seven octaves, it’s not really manageable to make exceptionally fine adjustments in tuning with the fineness and rapidity you’d need to play even an intermediate piece — and you’d have to make the adjustments with your hands when your hands are already busy.
What I can see being useful is something that works a little differently — a computerized piano that dynamically adjusts the tuning in real time depending on automatic sensing of the key of the piece or how the piece modulates. Virtual pipe organs can already do this — play in just intonation and move the “sweet key” around on the keyboard so that you are always dancing around the weirdnesses of equal temperament. The organist has to do that consciously, though.
A piano that can somehow tell by the struck keys where the player has modulated to and just adjust the tuning to sweeten that key automatically might be fascinating. I imagine it could get confused, though — I’ve written pieces that had major chords played against relative minors in the left hand, and I can imagine dynamic tuning software not being able to suss out what key I’m in in a situation like that.
Now, it might work for simple pieces, just by detecting tonic and dominant in the left hand. I mean if you keep returning to D-A-D or a D-F#-A-D arpeggio in the left hand, you could write some kind of software that could guess you were playing something in D Major and then sweeten that key automatically. You could also conceivably run through a piece slowly and set adjustment point in it where you basically tell the piano, “Okay, at this point, optimize the tuning for G Major, then at this point as I play, optimize it for C Major.”
That’s very different from this, though. I guess I’m envisioning this sort of thing where the little slides inside the piano move around automatically, either by chugging on real-time data or by virtue of presets.
Patricia, I’ve been curious about the Douglas/Dilling for some time, although I didn’t realize until I went back and searched for Arsalaan Fay’s name on the forums that you actually had one. I’m loathe to think seriously about buying anything unless I’ve heard real first-hand information about the technology in question, so I was very pleased to learn that you had one and thought positively of it.
How much maintenance does a harp like that need in terms of regulating or maintaining the action? Can a typical harp technician handle it, or will they not know how to cope with it or refuse to touch it? What strings do you use with it — gut or nylon? If nylon, what set do you buy? Have you really found that the single-action lever mechanism has made a big difference in ease/possibility of playing certain types of pieces that wouldn’t be possible with a garden-variety lever harp?
For all I know, I’ve asked all this already — I have the short-to-long-term memory switching ability of a turnip. Apologies if I’ve peppered you with these questions already. 🙁
Most times, people will throw the lever with their left hand, but every now and then if you need to reach over the neck and use your right, that’s fine, too. Basically, the “right way” is however it can be done most easily.
Good luck — it’s such a wonderful, fun, beautiful instrument. I’ve been a lifelong pianist and have only recently come to the harp (a little over a year ago), and am having a fantastic time with it. It’s a subtle instrument, and gives you a nice middle-ground between the enormous scope of a piano and a greater closeness to the sound production. It’s the ONLY instrument that I practice where I don’t need headphones and don’t mind the sound of it early in the morning.
FWIW, I’m a left-handed lever harpist, and I’ve found that the added ability in my left hand has made throwing levers a lot easier in mid-piece.
Lefties all tend to be very different, though. I’m middle-of-the-road on a lot of things: play a lefty viola, but I knit right-handed. It depends on what you feel comfortable with, but if you are a lefty, don’t assume you can’t use a standard harp, and that it might not make certain things easier.
Flipping levers mid-piece is always a pain, but can be made better. The thing is to practice it as if it’s just part of the music — look ahead to the lever changes. It’s easy to play along, and then look up like “What? Oh, that’s right … ” every single time you need to flip a lever, when what you need to do is think ahead. If you know the lever change is coming up, you need to anticipate it.
Other than that, if you’ve just been playing for 3 weeks, it’s normal for it to be hard and a bit overwhelming. Just keep noodling, see if you can’t sit down and watch Josh Layne’s “Harp Tuesday” videos on YouTube, and focus on staying relaxed and keeping your hands, arms, and shoulders supple. You’ve got a lot of enjoyment ahead!
Yeah — and there are certainly some ergonomic issues that can punk you that even knowing another instrument won’t help with. I’m thinking of how knowing the piano did NOT help me with the physical fundamentals of the viola, granted that’s one of the most awkward instruments ever invented. On any instrument, there are ergonomic gotchas lurking that could interfere with progress or outright damage you if you don’t have someone there who can warn you around the potholes.
