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Mae, I have the same issue with the piano as well. I’m sure I could play without looking, but I’ve gotten so used to using that crutch. The really irritating thing is that when I play without looking, I play so much better. I mean leaps and bounds better. When my brain isn’t distracted by processing visual information, I can hear everything with infinitely greater finesse.
But it’s almost impossible to squash that instinct to look. It’s very frustrating, especially since I’m busy composing at the moment and don’t really have the time to devote to a pure technical challenge. And it would take time — I’m quite sure that I would have to devote a few months to just playing with my eyes closed (even covered) to make myself confront this.
Mae, if that’s the case, it seems like the very first thing you may want to do is to try a simple Alberti bass in the left hand — I, IV, V, I, rinse, lather, repeat — and just do it while staring into space. It doesn’t seem to be sight-reading that’s the real obstacle for you. The pre-obstacle is, as you said, not looking at the harp. So knock down that obstacle first. Write some simple common bass lines, and practice playing them without looking. Don’t add sheet music to the mix yet.
MallyG, we’re not really talking about notation though, but about sight-reading, which isn’t the same thing. Use of notation != sight-reading.
I’m just pointing this out because there is a huge difference, and often conversations about sight-reading and improvisation often get derailed into playing by ear versus using notation, as if the two are in opposition to one another. It’s a mistake to conflate:
1) sight-reading AND improvisation, two separate unpolarized skills with
2) notation VERSUS playing by ear, two skills that are also separate and unpolarized.
Not only are they all four <i>completely different</i> skills, but there is no benefit at all to setting them against one another.
FWIW, I also learn sheet music by heart (when I played other people’s music, and when I woodshed my own). I am in the strange position of being unable NOT to memorize music after a few repetitions, which you may do also. If I play a piece a few times, I don’t see how to avoid it going into my head fairly quickly, upon which point my eyes just start to tune out the dots. I don’t need them anymore.
If you’re the worst sight-reader ever, I’m next to you on that podium. Not only can I not do it, I actively detest even trying. I have no idea why. (I’m talking about the piano — I’m finding that harp is as you said worse, since one has to place before playing.)
Listening to people try to tell me why I can’t sight-read or talk me into it has never been revealing. It’s an experience listening to people telling me that I can’t because I’m not good with words (speak three languages, pick them up like people pick up colds), can’t do math (MS in physics), can’t think in three dimensions (think only in three dimensions, knit cabled sweaters without patterns), have bad pattern recognition (not possible in someone who picks up languages quickly) …
Honestly, I can’t do it because I can’t stand it. That’s about it.
I do however, write music. I arrange, I reimagine pieces in various different styles … none of which most classical teachers can do. And the more I’ve done it, the less and less I care about anyone else’s dots. I have a feeling your brain simply enjoys the “leaping off a cliff and flying” feeling of improvising and being only with your instrument and nothing else so much that it just rejects any imposition of dots. Your brain is interpreting the paper as … well, as a piece of unwanted latex, and your brain is going get that out of the way!
Now, the people I know who like sight-reading LOVE it, as much as I love sitting in front of the piano or the harp with nothing whatsoever but me and the device. It’s certainly a good skill for an accompanist or chamber musician to have. One woman I know who is amazing at it does it for fun. She’ll crack open Mozart piano concerti and sight-read them live in Ustream for the hell of it. She just gets off on it.
I’m going to take a heretical position here: forget about sight-reading. It’s a skill that, in your position, you don’t need. And you don’t have to be able to do EVERYTHING as a musician. If Mother Nature gave you mad improv skills, then go ahead and do that. I’m going with my composition skills. It’s what I’ve wanted the piano (and now the harp) to be since I fell in love with it at age 6.
Yeah — it sounds like a decision made by someone unfamiliar with harps and thinking of them as propped up piano guts, which is unfortunate. Whoever this person is, he needs to be made aware of the correct term.
That seems like a bad idea; they should stick with the jargon used by the rest of the harp community.
Also, being left-handed on a piano/harp can be a good spur for composing. I am often surprised when I stop and think of how many times I write music that requires real expression in the left hand or that ping-pongs the melody back and forth between the hands. I doubt that any competent pianist would find anything I wrote challenging, but a left-handed one would probably find that the pieces are a comfier “fit” for that reason. And I do recall once when a righty played a piece I had written that I had to tell her to ease up on the right hand and put more emphasis in the left since the melody was actually down there, and nothing interesting was going on up top.
I’ve often noticed that when I visualize myself at the piano — and the harp is becoming much the same — that I only “see” the left side of the thing. This is partly due to the jobs that the hands have to do: the right hand does a lot of close-quarters quick work, and the left does a lot of wide-spacing jumps and things, and you need your eyes more for the jumps and broadly spaced stuff. But I still just don’t “see” my right side, or pay attention to it. I often feel like I live in the left side of my body, and the right side just has a lung, a liver, and some guts in there to keep the left side going. 🙂
I very much encourage you to compose after you get your feet under you technique-wise. It’s very liberating in general, and especially as a left-hander since you can put the heart of the music where you want it.
They are … but speaking as a lefty, they are the least biased against us IMO since the method of producing sound is the same in both hands (pluck string, strike key), and in both cases, the functional load carried by the left hand is immense if you are comping or playing continuo.
On all string instruments, the note is merely prepared on the finger/fretboard. The dominant hand executes it. The left does the digital work, but the voice and the interpretation is in the bow hand. Intonation is a challenge, but it’s really the low-hanging fruit. It’s the bigger challenge in the early days of learning, but after that the bow hand becomes what governs the entire rest of your life. One master pedagogue said that, “The bow hand is master, the fingers of the left hand are but his servants.” I mean, if it were better to put the dominant hand on the fingerboard, righties would already be doing it and playing on the other shoulder, you know?
At any rate, I did fall away from the viola to some extent because of this issue. Classical string players can be … well, sort of rigid and nasty about it, and even though my teacher was great, I didn’t feel like playing an instrument that would require close proximity to them. (Folk fiddlers are much more laid-back about it, but that’s not my idiom.) Violists have a little more leeway because that instrument is SO unkind to the body that they figure you can play it with your toes as long as it doesn’t screw up your neck. Besides, violists are also a bit rarer, and most amateur string quartets consist of two violins and a cello looking for a viola. If they are too snippy to you, you can just leave and let them make do — and there’s not a lot of good music written for two violins and cello. O:-)
Moving merrily along! 😀
With a harp, I think being a left-hander would actually be an advantage in continuo playing and accompaniment, since the juice of your playing in those situations is in the bass. I sometimes wonder if that’s not why so many Celtic harpers who comped themselves while singing played on the left shoulder — to give the right hand access to the more functionally important part of the harp, the lower strings. I’ve poked around a bit looking at Italian Baroque continuo, and some folks who do that advise that you don’t go any higher ever than whatever instrument your comping; the whole harp becomes one giant left hand at that point.
Rambling on a Friday afternoon …
*raises left hand*
Yep. Although I’ve been a pianist for most of my life, so I’ve developed some facility with my right hand by this point. The only real thing I’ve noticed is that rolling chords in my left hand is about 1000% easier than the right, and that lever-flipping is not challenging (or doesn’t seem to be at this point; I’m a harp newbie).
Putting the thing on my right shoulder does however feel … awkward. My initial desire is still to pull it onto my left. I can’t even carry a cat or dog on my right side.
BTW, Harpo Marx was a left-hander, and he also initially pulled the harp onto his left shoulder. The “tilt” of the strings is slightly asymmetrical though, and playing treble with the left hand would be difficult on a conventional pedal harp on the left shoulder. For me, I opted to play it as normal because I’ve already built a lifetime of habits revolving around playing treble with the right hand and bass with the left. Swapping that would have made my brain cramp.
Other instruments I noodle on include a viola and a pocket trumpet, neither of which I play in the typical right-handed way. The viola especially is so horribly asymmetrical that I either use a mirror viola and bow with my left hand or it doesn’t happen at all. On trumpet, I use both hands on the valves — first two fingers on the left, and index on the right. So I am open to being flexible in terms of which hand does what, and I recognize that for some people, that can be a brick wall — and that all left-handers are not the same.
That’s interesting to know the proper order — that also tends to be how I do things, but not for any thought-out reason, just because I tune while sitting at the thing, and reaching the bass strings with the tuning key is a pain, so I leave them until last. 🙂
Yes, I’ve listened to and watched a few pieces featuring Finch and Keita — magnificent work. The kora is perhaps the most Baroque sounding instrument I’ve ever heard. It’s such an old instrument, I wonder if they also have their HIPP-vs.-modern debates regarding use of nylon or gut and tuning systems?
I remember watching a BBC harp documentary online (which everyone here has doubtless seen) that featured a little bit of back-and-forth between Paul Dooley on a wire-strung clarsach and Catrin Finch on a modern lever harp. I recall being struck immediately by the difference in how they were tuned. The lever must have been in ET and the clarsach sweetened for the particular key it was in. I am not a Tuning Dogmatist — music is at heart a compromise — but it was interesting to hear them side by side like that.
Is there one particular way to spell that, BTW? I keep wanting to write “clairseach,” and I know that Irish has … well, all the vowels that escaped from Wales apparently floated across the Irish sea and washed up there.
Charlie, it’s certainly stretch tuning but if the rest of the world does it by fixing the bottom end on typical pitches and stretching the top, then that’s probably the best way to do it rather than to fix on the top pitches and stretch the bottom. I’m stretching, but not in the same direction. 🙂
Wind/string instruments also usually don’t play in a super-wide range, nor more than one note at a time. Tuning, in my opinion at least, is about compromise. When you have more than one note sounding at a time, you have compromise; that goes for ensembles as well of course.
Pianos and harps have such a huge range, and can play GOBS of notes at once, especially the piano. A single-note instrument can dance around the Pythagorean comma like a sort of moving land mine and almost pretend it’s not there; when you are playing handfuls of notes six octaves apart, the only really stone-cold proof against that moving land mine is to chop it into fine powder and dust it evenly all over the landscape. (At least, if you want to be able to modulate wherever you want in the middle of a piece.)
There’s some experimentation going on around this in the world of virtual pipe organs that fascinates me — where one can set stops to move the “sweet key” around as one plays. That would be fascinating — to start a piece in C Major and wander off to F#, and be able to adjust the tuning to sound great in both would be amazing!
In general though, I’m agnostic on the topic of tuning. It’s like speaking two languages with different ways of pronouncing an R. In French, you do it their way and it sounds good. In Welsh, you do it differently, but it sounds good in that context.
FWIW, I’m also interested in this whole “stretch” thing as well, because I noticed that I tend to like the sound of my harp better when I tune the bottom end somewhat flat and the top end dead-on. I suppose that has the same result as long as I’m the only person playing.
