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Disclaimer: NOT a professional musician, but I am going on what I’ve seen from the ones I’ve known.
1) Do not specialize. Be willing to play anything for anyone.
2) Play for plays, dancers, performance artists, sci-fi fans — anything.
3) Take a business class; as a freelance musician, you are a self-employed business owner.
4) NEVER spend more than you must. If you so much as smoke, stop. That adds up to a few hundred bucks a year. Trim your expenses as much as possible.
5) If you must get away from it for a while to earn reliable money, NEVER STOP PLAYING.
6) Never compare your career to people with high-earning spouses or monied elder relatives.Again, I am not a professional musician. I’ve seen what the ones I know have done, though. This is a business, and they approach it like one.
It is indeed lovely to see so much acceptance. I got a very rude shock from the classical string community when it became evident that I bowed with my left hand; they were unbelievably hostile, beyond what I could ever have imagined in this century. And that was for an instrument where, as long as it is also mirror-image, there is absolutely no change whatsoever in bowing, finger, or anything else at all.
I think I said this elsewhere here, but I’ve found this forum to be the nicest, pleasantest places on the web so far. I’m sure there are jerks everywhere, but there seem to be far fewer of them among harpists. 🙂
I imagine mirror harps may be hard to find, though. 🙁
This is interesting to me. I’m left-handed, and the natural urge to put a harp on my left shoulder is very, very strong. Unfortunately, I’ve been a pianist since I was a kid and the idea of reading the clefs in the opposite hands would make my eyes cross. It’s a right pain being a left-handed musician; it was much easier when I got a viola because you can find lefty stringed instruments easily and just go at everything in a mirror image without any changes whatsoever in bowing or fingering (only one clef).
I suppose I’ll just put in on the right shoulder so my right hand can stick with treble clef, but my instinct is definitely to put in on my left shoulder. 🙁
Teach her as much as you can — she may soften her stance in the future. I had nails when I studied piano as a teenager, which sounds ridiculous and was. However, at 48, I’ve got those buggers trimmed as far as I can get them and play/compose a great deal as an amateur. One of the strange things about teaching is that you’re almost planting a tree without any distinct knowledge of how long it will take before you’ll be able to enjoy the shade. I can see how it would be frustrating, and as tempting as it would be to say, “Trim those claws or get out,” you may have to sit tight and let her arrive at that realization herself.
She may not, upon which point she’ll probably end up like Kay’s student and just end things herself. Even then, she may let the idea marinate for a bit, and if she really does want to learn, she may declaw herself and come back to it in a little bit.
Quick reply seconding the comment about how pleasant people are here. I’m a (pretty good) pianist and a (lousy) violist, and I stay off of the piano and string forums. The most pleasant places I’ve seen so far are this place and fiddle forums. Very, very nice people.
Thanks everyone for the information. 🙂 I’ve set myself a savings deadline and hope to be back here shortly afterwards.
Have you noticed any large-scale fingering principles at work on the cross-strung? On the piano, most of the fingerings for the scales are done in a way that centers 2-3 or 2-3-4 over the two groups of black keys, meaning that on the way down, you will cross over with 4 onto the Bb, and 3 onto the Eb (usually).
Do you find that you have to play more softly to prevent the strings from buzzing against one another at the cross-over?
ETA: Hand independence shouldn’t trouble me much; I’ve been on the piano since I was a kid, so different fingerings for each scale are par for the course for me. 🙂 Thanks everybody for your information and encouragement!
A lot of people have said that the only real cure for performance nerves is to simply perform ALL THE TIME. Can you busk, and for extended periods as a matter of course? You may already perform a great deal; I don’t know. Another good resource is a fellow named Don Greene who teachers performance psychology at Juilliard. He’s a great source of how to handle the shakes like that. Good luck — I’ve always hated performing terribly and now that I’m more of a composer, I’m finding it infinitely nicer since I get to make music in private, and in the peace and quiet of my own mind instead of on a stage. This isn’t an option for everyone, though.
ETA: Carl, I just went to your website and read your article, and this sentence — “It occurred to me after one of these concerts that this was the first time in my life that anyone had heard how I could really play.” — was incredibly moving. I’m glad you found a solution.
Possibly Marilyn Costello?
It’s worth remembering that wind instruments in general don’t make noises because of the volume of air that’s blown through them. They make noise, like blowing over the top of a jug, when the air inside them is set to vibrating. And that can be done with quite small puffs of air, generally. In order to get a good, big sound out of a tuba, one need not blow a tuba’s worth of air through it at any time.
Think of the jug: the bottom is actually closed, so NO air can pass through it, really. And yet it can make a sound.
I’ve heard that the chiefest reason why both (large) harps and pianos were originally gendered female was because they were non-portable. As a result, they were used exclusively for domestic music-making, and were not the sort of thing you could bring out into the world or heaven forbid, into a tavern. Even the celtic bardic harps were small enough to tuck under an arm.
And brass instruments got into the modern orchestra via military bands, which has more to do with why they are associated with men than lung capacity. As Kreig said, blind auditions have pretty much put that one to bed permanently.
I’ve been going through the same back-and-forth. A pedal harp is not a possibility unless I hit the lottery, and the lever harps feel too constraining for me, especially since I also love Western classical music (and writing my own) and have been a pianist since I was a little kid, and so am used to being able to modulate with total freedom.
I’ve begun mulling a triple harp, just as a possibility. It’s laid out much the same as a piano keyboard in a way, and it was specifically designed to allow complete freedom of modulation. It doesn’t have the same depth of sound as a pedal harp does (I suppose it would rip the neck off if it were made to take that kind of tension on so many strings) but it seems like a harp for pianists in some ways. It is expensive but much less so than pedal harps, and it has many times fewer moving parts. And I admit to loving the Welsh connection, given that I’m a bit of a Cymrophile. 🙂
If they’re gut, they’re protein. If they’re protein, you can use Manic Panic, which comes in every color under the sun. 🙂 Would having the G string be G-colored trip you up if you had to use it to stand in for an Fx?
From the way that picture looks, I’m wondering if the loose length of the strings isn’t buzzing against the strings themselves or the soundboard. Of course the part of the string between the hole and the nail shouldn’t be moving at all, but in general there are a lot of vibrating things down there, and the loose tails could be zinging against any of them.
Maybe you could get a narrow strip of felt and sort of weave it in among the afterlengths and string tails and see if that banishes the zing.
