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I keep having to remind myself of this as well. When we play, we’re listening not only to the instrument itself, but to the idealized version of it we WANT to get, playing silently for us alone in our heads. What we think of as a “mistake” is sometimes just a deviation from that mental image of what we think of as perfect.
The thing is, the audience can’t hear that idealized mental image of the sound, so they aren’t comparing what they hear to anything. They’re taking what comes into their ears and judging it on its own merits. Once again, comparison is the birthplace of dissatisfaction.
I have to say that the Douglas/Dilling sounds like a dream come true for a LOT of people. If they were more common, they’d be a strong contender for me. As it is, they feel too much like an old rotary-engine car where it might work well, but it might also be hard to have it maintained by a mechanic that understood how it worked.
Angela, to judge from the music I’ve heard, probably you’ll head for the Eb. Every time I play anything like that, I always somehow end up with Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” as an earworm for the next few days. 🙂
Are you talking pedal harps? I actually know … well, zero people who could afford one without major contortions, if at all.
Good quality digital pianos that will outstrip any upright can be had for two grand, if you’re willing to buy used. A decent used pedal harp will cost five times that plus string and maintenance cost.
If you’re talking lever harps, then absolutely I agree with the premise that harps are less costly and more convenient. That’s definitely got a lot to do with the recent and current lever harp renaissance, I have no doubt.
Pedal harp sales will probably always hold a little flat, just because of the cost of the things. And piano sales are only declining if one doesn’t consider the takeoff of sale rates for high-quality digitals, which in all honesty, are getting better and better. A good Avant Grand for example, will beat the pants off of ANY upright, and all but the very best and most fussily maintained acoustic grands, neither of which the vast majority of people can afford.
When it comes to devices that are so very expensive, and difficult to move and maintain, those considerations will trump all others. Over the past two centuries, pianos have grown gradually less and less costly and more and more apartment-friendly, and over the same period of time, harps unfortunately went the other direction. 🙁
I’m waiting for the day when someone somewhere will come up with a mass-produced electronic geegaw that will replace the pedal mechanism and make fully modulation-friendly harps achievable for most people.
BTW, for pentatonic, assuming you’re turned to Eb with levers down, you should want the following levers up: C, D, F, G. The strings you’ll play are C, D/E, F, G/A, B. I theeeenk this should give you a pentatonic scale, where the D/E strings and the G/A strings are tuned the same, but I’m at work and thinking about other things, so someone may want to sanity-check me on this.
Best thing for a middle-eastern sound is to play in Phrygian with a major third. If you’re tuned to Eb with all levers down, that means playing G-to-G with the B levers up.
ETA: Another name for this scale is “freygish,” and you’ll find a ton and a half of klezmer music played using it.
Biagio — thanks for the resources! I’m glad they’re out there! I’ve been relying on what I know from my previous musical training thus far, which has been a great benefit, but it does mean that I’ve gotten most of my “harp training” in effect from the piano and not the lever harp. I’m thrilled to see that there are materials out there that approach it all from a lever-harp perspective, and that treat the instrument as its own endpoint!
(I should also say that I did find Ray Pool’s stuff as well, and he sure qualifies as someone who’s not scared of lever flips as a matter of course.)
I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to see more of a continuum of materials for lever harp that don’t assume that:
1) if you’re playing one, you don’t really care about getting good, and
2) if you do care, you’ll graduate to a pedal harp.There are no easy or hard instruments, only instruments with high or low expectations. Even the humble ukulele has gone within the last fifteen years from being a cheap toy to something that you might get good at if you play for a decade or so. (Even the fiddle used to have the same expectations around it in the middle ages.) The lever harp isn’t much different — it seems held back by low expectations and the belief that it’s not an endpoint in itself. You start on that, and if you want to be “good,” you graduate to the next harp up. When the next harp up can cost as much as three Mercedes sedans and is completely out of the question for the majority of society, that’s … well, it’s not good.
I’d definitely like to see a series of materials (and more of an expectation in the harp world) that assume the lever harp is an instrument with the capacity for virtuoso play and that run from beginner to intermediate to advanced materials, allowing the student to determine for themselves how far they want to go on it.
As someone who is just learning and might like to find etude books, I truly, truly wish that instructional materials approached the occasional mid-piece lever flip as simply a normal activity instead of something frightening. The attitude seems to be that pedal harps allow for modulation, and therefore lever harps must allow for none whatsoever, which I’m not finding to be true at all.
This leaves a big gap in materials: whole books of pieces with ZERO lever flips at all, and pieces like Pool plays, which involve a ton of them. I haven’t found instructional materials so far that introduce mid-piece lever-flipping in a beginner-intermediate-advanced sort of way and that assumes it’s something that just needs to be mastered, period. Sure, I can get a lot of good information on hand position and string manipulation from the many pedal harp books, but of course they say nothing at all about that entire row of device controls lined up atop the neck that are just begging to be messed with as well.
However, as a newbie, these books might be out there and I just haven’t found them yet. 🙂 (Update: Angela, thanks for mentioning that lever drills book. I’m off to find a copy!)
Just a minor comment here that, speaking AS a pianist, pianists have zero right to defend sacred cows. We play an instrument a huge chunk of whose job is to stand in for all other instruments. Any pianist who feels differently is cordially invited to recall Liszt’s Beethoven transcriptions, Rachmaninoff and Lutoslawski’s magnificent Paganini ripoffs, and the zillions of orchestra reductions that are the bread and butter of any working pianist — not to mention all that yummy Baroque stuff that was written before our instrument was even invented.
In short, you paid for that harp and you are the one who put years into learning how to manipulate it. You have every right to make ANY SOUND YOU WANT on it.
I feel a bit strongly about this. Some Chopin wouldn’t work well since it’s so pianistic, but some probably would and some would work with some nudges. I for one would LOVE to hear him on a harp. I’d love to hear Scott Joplin’s Bink’s Waltz on a harp. I’ve been working for the last year or so on a project to take the introductions of various Haendel arias that I like a lot and rework them into various genres. So far, I’ve managed swing, jazz, Impressionist, tango, gospel rock, a Mozartean etude, late Romantic, ragtime, and something vaguely Asturias-like.
If you can play it, you can play it. Anyone who doesn’t like it can stop their ears or go listen to something they like more.
*clears throat* Sorry for the thesis. It’s just that, while there is certainly good and bad taste in music, strict dogmatism turns me off. I love to hear people move things from one instrument, genre, or setting to another. It’s terrific fun and a wonderful way to learn about a piece.
Because I already play the piano and hey, why not play two large, inconvenient pieces of furniture? 🙂
Gretchen, I’m so glad people like it and are finding that it sits well on the instrument. As a newbie, it really means a lot to me that people with far more experience than I think that it works well and enjoy it. 🙂 Thanks for the kind words!
Did you see the PDF in the post that I linked to? I’ll direct-link it here:
https://italianfolkharp.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/in_the_bleak_midwinter_noleverflip.pdf
I also put up a video of me playing it (and experiencing an episode of “Bzuh? Oh, that’s right, I’m playing the harp!” forgetfulness near the middle).
Glad you liked it!
