Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
FWIW, I don’t know many musicians who are hobby scientists (amateur astronomers and the like), but when I was in my graduate program for physics, there were tons of very high-level musicians in the department — and I mean classically trained who could play at a high level. And among each graduate class, there were always enough amateur musicians to make a fairly good “guitarists-and-keyboards” band. The last salon I went to was an impromptu one at the home of one of my old math professors. And it’s old hat that there are always a ton of musicians working at any of the NASA research locations (JPL, Johnson, Ames, etc.), and tons of musician-astronauts.
So I don’t know if music and science are always found together, but at least where science is found, music is invariably found as well. The reverse doesn’t seem to be the case, though.
The “only” is a false polarization. As a musician, one need not be forced to choose between being mute or illiterate. The persistent belief that one must do only one OR the other is painfully damaging.
Think of it as learning a language. First you learn to speak, then after a titch, you learn to read. Maybe, if the person is keen on notation and writing, you might be able to present them with both at the same time.
At the end of the day, one must be able to speak extemporaneously and also write one’s ideas down and read others’ ideas in order to live fully.
I cannot fathom doing only one or the other. If I couldn’t play by ear, I would be completely unable to compose or arrange and totally mute on my instrument without someone else telling me what to say. If I couldn’t read music, I would have millennia of music closed to me without someone else able to communicate it to me directly, not to mention being totally unable to write down my own compositions and arrangements.
No musician should have to choose between being mute or illiterate.
Anyhow … I know this can be a somewhat fraught topic, and I hope I haven’t stirred anything up. 🙂 I’m sure we all share the same ultimate goal: of being able to say what we want on our instruments, when we want, fluently and to have fun doing it and sharing it.
There’s only 24 hours in a day, though. Don’t waste time kicking irrelevant asses that won’t get you to your goal. You only need to kick the asses that are between you and what you want to accomplish.
Placing ahead doesn’t have an equivalent on a piano, so there shouldn’t be any pre-existing instincts to get in the way on that. I think regarding placing, the greatest obstacle will likely be the student’s tendency to maybe work too fast sight-reading the music and figure, “Okay, I’ve got this, easy as pie.” This is part of where I think exercises and etudes will help, so that the student doesn’t just figure that grasping the MUSIC means that they’ve gotten what they are supposed to learn out of the piece.
Basically, placing and plucking are so different from the physical action of playing a piano that I don’t think there will be any reflexes to interfere with them physically. The tendency to think, “That piece was easy, next!” may be the biggest issue.
Not using all five fingers would be an adjustment, as well as just not being at the level you want to be at on a new instrument. As a pianist, I can sight-read beginner harp music trivially, and this will probably make me want to rush more than I should, and hence not develop the fundamentals of technique that I will need. I’d recommend exercises and etudes, possibly more than pieces.
It’s also tempting to want to play pianistic music on a harp, but the fact that there are no dampers on the strings makes that really problematic. What works in the bass on a piano will sound like mud on a harp. A pianist would need to exert real effort to keep aware that this thing isn’t just piano innards turned on its side but a different device with different “sweet spots.” So I think most of your main obstacles will be getting this pupil to slow down, to grasp that they ARE a beginner even if the music looks brainlessly easy to them, and to grasp the instrument’s unique quirks apart from a piano.
Also, I am a bit jittery about the prospect of developing calluses. 🙂 Your pupil may be concerned about this as well.
There’s a Canadian fellow on YouTube whose videos I’ve been following; his name is Josh Layne, and he’s a great musician, as well as being incredibly knowledgeable, and he explains things very well. One of his videos presented techniques for making “scary” sounds on the harp that you might find useful, things like rubbing the bass wires to make a whistling noise or pressing a pedal only partway to make a hair-raising rattle. Even buzzing a string against the back of your nail is a possibility for a good, creepy noise.
For an instrument that can sound like heaven when played, the harp sure can make some amazingly horrible sounds sometimes. 🙂
Compose compose compose, and arrange arrange arrange. With all that experience you have, you have got to have fantastic ideas of precisely what’s wrong with a lot of poorly written harp rep and how to adjust it for playability, not to mention how to write well for an instrument that’s really taken off as a soloist device. And vast amounts of compositional/arranging work can be done without even being near the instrument, if you are familiar with how it feels to play it. I can’t tell you how much composing/arranging work I’ve gotten done as I am lying in bed dropping off to sleep — then I get up the next day, sit at the piano, work out those ideas, and write them down.
Even if your body isn’t cooperating at the moment, you have a brain that has been scrupulously well-trained for harp music, and that’s the most important ingredient for a musician.
Don’t know if any of you guys have seen this video, but it made the rounds on the piano boards a while back:
Jon Nakamatsu is a previous winner of the Van Cliburn competition who has a fairly nice career for himself now, and has some interesting things to say about losing competitions and being a “loser.”
Heard back from a few people on the Yahoo list, and their information makes sense to me. Apparently, there were many unknown makers throughout Europe back in the early 1800s, and many of the harps they made ended up finding their way second- and third-hand to jobbing harpists in the late 1800s and early 20th century. One fellow did feel that it was probably French in origin since it was mimicking a French harp (the Erard ram’s head), and recommended looking inside the soundbox on the back side of the soundboard to see if anything had been written there, perhaps a name or date. It was probably already around a century old when it was sold in Philadelphia as a used instrument.
This actually answered a question that I hadn’t really articulated to myself, which was how on Earth a family of southern Italian peasant sharecroppers had managed to obtain what was always a crazy-expensive, aristocratic instrument — and how so many such people had managed it. Harps have always been ridiculously expensive; how had poor jobbing musicians gotten their hands on them to the point where sharecropper-harpists were such a major Italian export in the 1800s?
Turns out that while everyone knows about gilded Erards and whatnot, there were and are many more harps from unknown makers all throughout Europe, and they just got handed down over and over. I like the idea that the pedal harp has a proletarian history in Europe as well, especially in Italy, and I’d like to learn more about that side of the instrument.
So there’s the mystery most likely solved: Unknown maker, probably French, early 1800s (amazing!), might be more clues inside the soundbox.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe they are made anymore. I understand that the fellow who created them, Chris Caswell, passed away from some significant health challenges some time ago. A great loss — many people found his harps to be excellent.
Thanks, Bonnie. I’ve joined the list and written to them; hopefully I’ll have more information to share with my cousin soon. 🙂
Honestly, you know what would be a fantasy harp for me is an arpicedda from Basilicata, ideally Marsicovetere but Viggiano more likely. Since learning about how so many harpists came from the area of Italy where my grandfather’s family was from, and how many harpists are in that side of my family, I’d love to have a fully levered arpicedda from that part of Basilicata. An Hermes is I think as close as I could get, though.
A Salvi Hermes and a Blevins Xena. The Hermes is probably not an aspirational harp for many people, though.
Most competitions allow one to speak to introduce oneself and one’s piece, so I wonder if it wouldn’t be permissible to take 30 seconds before starting to play to just explain to the judges how a pedal harp works. Not a long disquisition, just, “My name is Mary Jones, and I’m going to play Bocsha Etude Number Whatever for you. By the way, for people who are unfamiliar with how a pedal harp works, these pedals at the bottom aren’t sustain pedals like a piano has. They are how a harpist changes key.” Then maybe pluck a D string, and show how it changes the sound from Db to D# before diving into the piece.
I’m not a mother, but I’ll repeat some advice I’ve heard other musician parents of youngsters give: GET THEM THEIR OWN INSTRUMENT SO THEY LEAVE YOURS ALONE. 🙂 If you can get her her own little Ravenna 26 or something when she’s old enough to be mobile, fast, and employ the word “no!” it may help her leave mom’s harp alone.
