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I wasn’t sure if they would be an appropriate difficulty for you, but if you’re enjoying Trois Pieces Facilies and Aquatintes (I recently worked on one and am now working on the other), you might also like Nancy Gustavson’s The Magic Road. They’re a similar difficulty level. The first few have an Eastern sound and use a lot of nail and close to the soundboard effects to imitate Japanese instruments, though the final piece (probably the most difficult) has an Andalucian/Moorish sound. Since they’re in non-western keys (no lever changes) they really have an “I didn’t know my harp could play this music” effect the first time you read them. I found them enjoyable to play and a nice break from other pieces. If you don’t know the sound effect symbols you’ll need to look them up in a method book or ask another harpist. I know Yolanda Kondonassis’ book On Playing the Harp has them.
I think of bright as having a lot of “aaaaah” and “eeeeeee” sound in the tone, and darker as having more of the “ooooh” and “oooooo.” That’s the best I can do.
Even if people didn’t know just what it did, perhaps they thought a double action must be better than a mere single action. Sort of how we buy razors with four blades, when we were shaving perfectly fine with three blades, or even a mere two, before that.
Here’s a random question I’ve asked myself: if someone does make a harp where the body is made of a very strong but lightweight materials, and the action stays the same on top, could the harp become top-heavy and prone to tipping without some additional weight put back in for balance?
David, my first thought was you wanted the arrangement of the 80s song by Human League. You can imagine my horror.
If you look at this 1999 newsletter
Practice helps with making small adjustments. When I first started, it was so easy to turn too far, especially in the top 4 or 5 notes. Now I can make tiny corrections with no problem. After a while your hands develop a better touch with the tuning key.
Old thread, but for the question on the changing EPA ratings, in 2008 the EPA changed how it calculates fuel economy to try to more accurately reflect the mileage under normal driving. If a model’s numbers changed significantly for a model, that’s probably why.
And just to clarify, my toggles fell out before switching to the knot Sylvia Woods shows. She also shows the third loop, which I’ve done for the tiny ones before. I want to make sure nobody thinks I’m dissing her knot – it saved my sanity!
Sylvia Woods has a video on YouTube of tying a string. She ties the knot a little differently from how I used to. I’d put the toggle through the top loop, and she puts it through the middle of the knot itself. My toggles almost never slip while tying, and before they would fall out a lot while I tried to tighten the string.
Another way is to use “site” on Google to only search on Harp Column.
The below should do the trick pretty well:
weddings -“harpists wanted” site:harpcolumn.com
Copy and paste that into your search box, and Google will look for mention of weddings, except where the thread also has the phrase “harpists wanted” (to get rid of all the posts in that forum of people looking for wedding harpists).
I used to play flute and viola, but I guess they weren’t quite large and heavy enough, and I hated only having 4 strings to tune.
This is it, really: I was playing viola in a community orchestra, thinking how tired I was of going to rehearsal every week and not knowing what else to do with my viola, and I was thinking how I used to play piano very well, and with piano you can play solo, with groups, accompany, and all kinds of stuff. And then something went off in my head and thought “you can do most of that on the harp too.” So I started Googling, and the next thing I knew there was a rental harp in my living room and Sylvia Woods in my DVD player.
