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I don’t recommend shipping any harp in its trunk. They are not adequate protection. The carton from Lyon & Healy has much more padding all around the harp and is infinitely safer. The bigger problem is local transfer people, so rather than have door-to-door pickup, you should drop it off at their main shipping office, and try to pick it up yourself. I don’t think one company will be better. Unless there are specialists in moving instruments or antiques, and you can find one, I wouldn’t do it.
You don’t need nine notes when one of them is doubling. Leave out the repeated pitch and you will have 4 notes for each hand. It does go fast, too fast to reliably cross over and over again. That’s how we do it, as I was trained. Miss Lawrence would say, “speculate on the harmony”, meaning, read the chord and play the notes you can reach well, rather than read each note and try to get what is written exactly. It’s either not practical oftentimes, or badly written. As a rule, if you have the fundamental in the bass and the third above, leave out the third so you have an open fifth on the bottom. Unless you are playing third, fourth, fifth intervals chords, as in f, a, d, a.
Jewish music is usually in d minor or a minor, so you might have a transposing cantor. And there are some who transpose while singing.
I can quote or paraphrase my teacher, Lucile Lawrence, who frequently stated, it’s equally as important what you do NOT transcribe, is it is what you DO transcribe. Not all music is suitable to the harp. Many pieces are 96% suitable, but that other 4% is going to kill it. So, you might look at what sorts of pieces you don’t find transcribed, as well as which ones you do.
It’s one way to have it stolen. I wonder, if I am traveling, which is safer, the car or the motel room? I guess if you would bring in your baggage, then harps go in too.
I don’t think they survived moving to Michigan, as I never heard of them before. And once Henry Ford starting making his Model G Harp-mobiles, it definitely put them under.
I have observed him performing on it. It had a bar across the wire strings covered in felt, like a piano, just under the neck, and when he pressed the pedal, it would abruptly dampen the strings. He could not use it often, as you can’t be pedaling pitches and operate it at the same time. It is much more abrupt and total than muffling by hand, and I found it startling. I didn’t like the effect it had on the sound. The 8th pedal was in the middle of the right and left pedals, I believe. I suppose he could operate it with either foot. If the bar were round instead of flat, it might have had a more natural sound, if you could apply it delicately, like a pianist. I don’t know of any other harp being built with one. It was built for him by Obermayer, I believe. The harp did not have a great tone quality, overall, so I wouldn’t think of it as a great object of desire. Perhaps his family still owns it. I believe they live in Puerto Rico.
The Concerto for Harp by Boris Tishchenko is for pedal harp and a scordatura troubador harp. Very interesting piece.
Some of the movements of Hovhaness’s Suite can be played on a nonpedal harp. Perhaps the most outstanding work of all is Alexandre Tcherepnin’s Quatre Caprices Diatoniques. Lou Harrison composed several pieces for nonpedal harp. Salzedo has many that can be played on nonpedal harps, especially a larger one, such as a Prelude.
The Salzedo model was designed by artist Witold Gordon, upon ideas or sketches by Carlos Salzedo. The harp suits his esthetic and embrace of art deco/moderne principles of streamlining, classical proportion and elegance with fine craftsmanship. The Salzedo model was only designed to be made in natural finish. The original design, especially in comparison to other contemporary models, had the widest sounding board at the bass, and with its straightened sides, had great projection. It actually combined the qualities of a traditional French straight-sounding board harp with the width of the lovely pear-shaped 23 and its pear-shaped tones.
That puts me in mind of the exceedingly rare Himmelhelfer Harp, that had miniature fingers instead of discs. The pedals were actually shaped like narrow feet, so they were especially easy to pedal. They had a ram’s head on the columns of their deluxe model, and the next-lower-priced model had a row of angels strumming, for some reason, zithers, not harps. The harps were unusually tall for their time, over six feet, yet not very big in any other respect, so they had an unfortunate tendency to tip over when left unattended. I believe Carl Swanson may have restored one of these, or so I heard. They were made in Cincinatti, by Ludwig von Heffelfinger and his partner, Karl Himmelfarb-von Liederkranz. It is believed that the harps were nearly named Heffelfarb-Liederkranz. Probably a good thing they were not. They manufactured as many as 150 of these harps, before going bankrupt over warranty repairs. (They used soft pine in construction.) If you find one, you’ll be the first to know it.
