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DS sells a little clamp thing that you can use to anchor the pickup, I think.
http://manufacturing.dustystrings.com/harps/accessories/amplification/pickup-jack-clamp/
You know, I found the harp as a kit on their website here:
Might you be able to buy a new neck for it and have it installed? Maybe the company can sell you just a neck, and you can bring the harp and the neck to a repair shop.
One thing I also do something is to have sort of automatic things in my back pocket that I can do if I’m having a truly crappy day. I’m at too low a level on the harp at the moment to worry overmuch about that instrument, but on the piano for instance, if I’m having a really off day, I will often have some things that I can work on that don’t require a lot of top-level awareness — relatively simple etudes, or just reinforcing a particularly sticky part using glacially slow practice. Those are things that I can do decently even on an off day, so the time doesn’t go entirely to waste.
It’s similar to how I think of handcrafts. I like to have a variety of active projects around, maybe a lace project where I need to pay mind to what I’m doing, and another brainless things like a sweater in all stockinette or a garter stitch blanket, where I can just switch off my brain if I don’t feel like thinking too deeply that day.
I’d be very suspicious, only because there is simply no way that anyone can know whether a crack is stable or not, and it seems like a seller would of course say that it’s just cosmetic and doesn’t affect the sound. Unless the harp was placed into a CT scanner, there isn’t any way to tell.
In your shoes, I’d talk to a repair shop first on the assumption that the crack would have to be repaired or stabilized. If the cost of this harp plus a good repair is still less than a brand new (uncracked) harp, it may be worth buying. But I’d definitely talk to someone who repairs harps, send them the pictures, and see what they would charge to repair something like that. That will give you an idea of what you should be willing to pay for it.
I have to admit though, I’d be skeptical. I wish more people made historic and gothic harps, though. They seem difficult to chase down, and early music harps are interesting to me as well.
I have no idea how they did it either, but there are so many unbelievably gifted blind pianists in the world like Stevie Wonder, Diane Schuur, and Ray Charles, that I just don’t wonder about how blind people do things anymore. They seem to be able to hack out ways to do damned near anything. I don’t even know how they get up and down stairs without breaking their necks, but they manage it. The more I learn about people the more I think that most (not all, but most) of the limitations on what we’d think of as “disabled” people are created not by their disabilities but by their being embedded in a culture that just does things differently.
A single-action pedal is what my grandfather (and probably great-grandfather) played. It wasn’t from the Tyrol — although we don’t know who built it, really — but it was functionally identical to that sort of harp. I would truly love to own a tyrolean harp as a result, just a simple, plain wooden one without any of the little cherubs or angels or gold leaf all over everything.
Thanks — the piano experience is really helping with the harp. It’s mostly a matter of writing an idea down with the peculiarities of the instrument in mind, and knowing where its “sweet spot” is. On the harp, ascending things fall most easily to hand, and the pleasantest part of the instrument seems to be that three-octave compass starting on the viola C.
At any rate, I did manage to clean this up from the rough version I linked above — especially the last few measures which were really mixed up — and I uploaded the finished, polished version on my profile. Feel free to grab that. 🙂
Maybe it’s just due to the fact that harpists are often the only ones in the orchestra on their instrument, so they can single them out if anything’s not to their liking. It’s a little bit like being a goalie. A jerk like that might have a harder time ganging up on a violinist because they come in herds.
He’s probably a legend among horn players, too. That’s another instrument where (if you play first) your butt’s sort of hanging out all the time. (Lovely instrument, but I have no idea how they handle that sort of pressure.)
Whoops! Found a mistake — the chord in the bass in measure 12 should be an EM chord. Fixed it. 🙂
ETA: Still tweaking it … it’s fun, though. Thickening it up with some chords.
It is fun to not need the score, but it just allowed me to rest on another (im)pediment: looking at my hands. Not looking does cause me to crash eventually, but there are also times when I can feel something “catch” someplace in my head and suddenly I can hear with infinitely more finesse when my eyes aren’t hogging my brain’s processing power. And once you can really hear yourself, you can play so much better. Phrasing, musicality, expression … it all just explodes and feels amazing.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a musician who can do everything instinctively well, not when our best assets are the same as our best liabilities. My skill at memorizing quickly without effort was a huge gift … and a huge burden when it got in the way of another skill, playing without looking. I think we’re all like that in the end. (Sight-reading just happens to be a talent that I don’t really want to have since I don’t play chamber music or do session work. Playing without looking though … that’s something where I can sense the huge difference it can make and want to be able to do it.)
It’s worth considering actually — we look at the things we can’t do and wonder why our inability gets in our way. I wonder how often it’s not inability that stops us, but an ability we have that simply interferes with developing another. I.e.: what is it that I can do that keeps me from wanting or needing to learn this other thing?
Julie, do they know how harps work? Can you give them a look at yours while you walk them through what had to be done to make the thing chromatically capable?
One of the most illustrative videos I’ve ever seen on how harps work was actually a Harp Tuesday show about pedal changes. You can find it on YouTube if you look for “harp tuesday pedal changes.” The whole video is good as a guideline on what pedals do and how they work, but there’s one particular useful spot.
About 8:45 in, Layne plays a very chromatic piece by Bach with the camera on his feet instead of his hands, and he’s practically running a steeplechase on the pedals at one point. Just watching that should give a composer new to the harp an idea of what they are asking a player to do when they swap key signatures willy-nilly.
ETA: Here it is, about 9 minutes in:
Mae, my piano playing also goes off the rails when I don’t look as well … except when it doesn’t. I can sense that there is something wonderful waiting for me on the other side of that barrier, which makes it more frustrating. I am also noodling around a bit on trumpet (a genuwyne bag o’fun for someone with an overbite), and one of the absolute best things about it is that I can play with my eyes closed.
I also have no clue how one can not look at a harp. I guess it takes longer to be able to do it; the prospect of surface noise on a piano is almost nil, and while pianists’ hands anticipate the next note as much as anyone’s, there definitely is a distinct difference in how much attention must be paid to placing on a harp.
Balfour, I think the biggest double-edged issue I had as a kid was that I could memorize a piece after playing it through about … oh, once. Short pieces of course — I’ve never truly had to test this ability with a very long work. But even something like a short sonatina (those Clementis that every piano student learns) would be pretty much in my hands after one run-through. Not perfectly of course, but there. And at that point, the score became more of a rabbit’s foot, just something on the piano that came in handy in the very unlikely event that I had a memory lapse. To me, I think there was nothing else for my eyes to do but look at my hands because the sheet music rapidly became useless. Any admonishment to keep my eyes on the score would have made as much sense to me as keeping my eyes on the wallpaper. (And of course now, my brain actively rejects any attempt to look at other people’s dots since I started writing my own.)
