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I think to some extent it also depends on whether you have experience learning another instrument. I’m a self-starter on harp, but I’ve been a pianist for most of my life, with 8 years of classical-flavored lessons as a child. As a result, I don’t have to spend time learning theory or how to read music, and I’m familiar with the general approach of learning how to manipulate a musical device (go slowly, do mental practice, get as many perspectives as possible, make sure you are doing things in a healthy manner, do your exercises, etc.).
I can’t tell you how many things I gained from my piano background that were helpful for the harp, including keeping the long bones of the hand aligned with the long bones of the arm, going slowly and maintaining suppleness, being automatically aware of tension, understanding how tiny changes in posture affect ability and how to optimize for that …
As a result, I think that a person who already has some experience learning one instrument at a high level might be a better candidate as an autodidact with another. There’s learning an instrument, and learning how to learn an instrument; if you can generalize your knowledge from learning Instrument A to Instrument B, you can give yourself a substantial leg-up.
However, learning as a complete adult newcomer to the world of music would be a pretty big challenge. You don’t know the instrument, but neither do you know how one goes about learning an instrument.
A guitar tech is your best bet — I suspect he’ll discover a grounding problem. They often cause buzzing.
Sadly, there are a lot of people in the classical music world who think that their job is not to encourage people to play classical music, but to keep the “wrong sort” from doing it. They pat themselves on the back more for scaring people off because if they can be scared off, then they didn’t “belong” there or something. (I suppose they belong in the audience coughing up ticket money, though.) It’s a strange world where a 99% failure rate is considered to be better than a 95% failure rate.
The Vocalise, although I think it can be arranged for pedal harp and may well have been. I’m finding to my exceptional disappointment that it can’t be arranged for lever harp no matter how hard I try. 🙁 Neither can Grieg’s two elegaic pieces — again though, I suspect a pedal harp is doable but that’s not a financial possibility.
You’re the second person I’ve encountered to fall in love with the Finzi Eclogue. (The first is a marvelous accompanist pianist Erica Ann Sipes.) I need to look into the piece …
Having grown up in what I’ll euphemistically refer to as a “financially struggling” family, I can tell you exactly why the harp is rare, at least in my experience:
I know of no one who can afford a pedal harp. Not one single person within my immediate sphere, even after years and years making good money in a white-collar job. Even a used one costs as much as a car, and not one person in my family could have dropped that much money on anything. Even a car itself. I still can’t.
Few people know about the existence of lever harps, and if you were to float the idea to a teacher, the first thing many of them would say is, “Well, you can’t play anything but folk music on that.”
Pianos are more plentiful, the digitals that you can find will put any craigslist acoustic to shame, and there is more music written for them — plus you can find a decent used digital for about a thousand dollars. Sure, you can’t audition for Juilliard on one of those — which everyone and their sister-in-law is quick to point out — but you can get a pretty long ways on one, and at least get a talented kid started on piano and inserted into the world of that instrument. That way, they can get their feet wet and become part of that social circle, which they can then use after a few years to maybe hook them with up a good acoustic.
Simply put, there are very, very few people who can drop twenty grand for something that is not a life necessity. And unfortunately, there is no way to make pedal harps cheaper than that since they are extremely complex mechanisms. People will always point out that they know someone who knew someone who knew someone who found a used L&H Style 23 for two hundred dollars once, but that is just not the sort of story that can be applied reliably, and it takes a long existence networking within the rarefied world of the harp before you can even hope to find that sort of deal without being taken for a ride. Financially struggling people on the outside looking in would not even know where to start.
The lever harps that are more affordable are less well known and to this day are (wrongly) believed to have a very narrow compass of Irish folk music and nothing else. If you can even find a harp teacher in your area (there are very few), asking them if you can use a lever harp is often like asking a piano snob if you can use a digital. You get looked at as if you just stepped in something.
This is a big part of why I’m eager to clear out my current “Haendel aria intros” project on the piano and get started on the “Rachmaninoff for lever harp” project, precisely because I’d like to strike a bit of a blow in favor of showing that it is indeed possibly to play complex classical music on an instrument that costs two grand … which again, is still far, far more money that my parents could have dreamed of having lying around when I was younger.
Someday, I’d like to work on arranging the Grieg elegaic pieces for harp, but they require a pedal, and as someone who comes from poor circumstances and does not yet own a house, it will not happen for a long time if ever — and I have a looooong history of good-paying jobs in the white-collar sector.
Anyhow … a bit of a ramble. 🙂
I’ve used staff text in the past with the WingDings or WebDings fonts. I think it’s either a lower case “u” or a lower case “n” that will give it to you. I’m a bit irked because my new laptop doesn’t have that font on it, actually — I can’t make my little diamonds anymore! 🙁
A quick note about the piano — Biagio, a big advantage of the piano for someone with low or nonexistent vision is that one can run one’s hands over the keys without making any sound. The fingers can run over them and feel their way around in a manner that doesn’t exist on the harp.
Height-wise, I’m 5’8″ and I use the 8″ legs on my Ravenna. For a bench, I just use a piano bench. I’m a pianist, so I’m used to sitting on them, and I bought one from Amazon that has storage in it as well, which is nice.
Maybe you can use the rubber marker rings in a slightly different way — put one ring on each C lever, two on each F, and three on each A. You’d need to buy a couple packs of rings, but you could probably tell the difference between each lever by touch, and every lever will either be uniquely marked, or at most one lever away from one that is uniquely marked. You’d probably need to work at it a bit to learn how to move your hand up there and tell quickly which lever you had to throw, but with time I don’t doubt you could get good at it.
Over time, I’ve learned that sighted people really don’t have a good idea of what blind people are capable of, which makes sense. You’re the expert at being blind here, not me. 🙂 If you want to do this, then do it, and I’m positive you will figure out a way to be successful.
However, I would hesitate to carry a 34-string harp on my back. I have a Ravenna 34, and I would drop over if I ever tried to use the case as a backpack. I’m not small (5’8″) but I’m also fairly thin and not strong. I truly wish that DS would build a case for their harps that has wheels built into the bottom part of the case, so that it could just be pulled up by the far end and rolled over the ground.
That’s what my grandfather used to do before WWII — a freelance harpist with an old Nth-hand Erard knockoff, who carried it from gig to gig on his back. (With my other grandfather, it was a sewing machine on his back, up and down the mountains of Abruzzo. I don’t want to turn into one of those “back in the day, people knew how to work” types, but OY.)
I would hope that young kids are being taught using pieces of music that allow them both to get the right notes AND use proper technique. I’d say that a comfortable, healthy handshape would be the most important thing, because if that isn’t reinforced as habit, it could outright damage them.
When I learned piano, I started out with typical student pieces that fit a growing hand. I did shoot up quickly and was soon playing pieces that required full-handed, large chords, but not until my teacher judged that my hands could handle them.
One of the members was a pianist. Or I should say, that the band wasn’t on the forum — this one dude was who played piano in the band.
I remember someone on the old piano forum I used to participate in remarking that when his band played a wedding, he always told the bride and/or planner that they were being paid to haul their stuff back and forth to the event, and that while there, they played for free. Otherwise, he said they used to get dinged by people saying, “We paid you to play for TWO HOURS, and you only played for 104 minutes,” and stuff like that. o_O Telling the bride that they were on the clock from the second they started loading the car and right up until they unloaded their gear at home forestalled that sort of nonsense.
