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If you are taking lessons through a school where you pay the school and they pay the teacher, tipping is a great idea, because as a rule, the teacher is getting less than half of what you are paying for lessons, and what you are paying is most likely already less than they would get for private lessons. It should be done discreetly. It is not common though, maybe in other societies, and some teachers might be offended. An annual gift might be a more suitable approach, at the end of the year like a bonus. The other thing to be conscious of is breaks for holidays and vacations where the teacher will not get paid, and you should definitely consider paying the amount they would otherwise be earning, so holidays are not gloomy. When I’ve worked for caterers who negotiated a low fee, then gave me a generous tip, like the waiters, I was offended by that, rather than being paid my proper fee.
I love it with flute and harp. I have recordings by Beecham and Stokowski, and they certainly liked to hear the harp. Some harpists just don’t project or don’t try to. Bizet writes beautifully for the harp. Don’t be put off by the part.
Druzinsky’s recordings are indeed exemplary. A good piece for comparison is Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. He also did a great Stravinsky Orpheus, which has major harp parts. If I want to learn a part, I like to find a Chicago recording. More recently, you can hear San Francisco harps pretty clearly, and Milwaukee. If you can find the Balanchine collection with the New York City Ballet Orchestra, you’ll hear the awesome Cynthia Otis playing a lot of exposed music. Minnesota’s Peter Grimes Incidental Music under Marriner is wonderful. It would be interesting to compare the various harpists who have played under Stravinsky and Robert Craft.
Chicago: Druzinsky
Minnesota: Joan Mainzer
San Francisco: Doug Rioth
Milwaukee: Danis Kelly
other players I like to hear: Dotian Levalier, National Symphony; Ann Pilot, Boston Symphony; Lise Nadeau Harmon, New Jersey Symphony; Reinhardt Elster and Florence Wightman, Metropolitan Opera; Lucile Lawrence, Stokowski and His Symphony Orchestra; Alice Chalifoux, Cleveland Orchestra; and others. And we should remember the wonderful second harpists, too.
Listen to real harps, not a synthesizer. Software will totally mislead you. We can plays glissandi as scales or as chords. We generally double the tonic and the third to make a chord, sometimes other tones depending what is possible.
To my ears, it is a major harp part, and the harp leads the other instruments. They are doubling the harp, not the other way around. I would think of it as classical rather than pianistic. I love to play it as a solo. It’s a bit like Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique: hard to learn, but worth it in the end. The harp also seems to carry pretty well.
All harps, it seems, have gotten heavier. When I was young, they weighed a mere 78 pounds or less. The necks are bigger, the bases are heavier.
That’s a great idea, Elenor, but it wouldn’t have worked on the teen I had recently. It’s a tough call.
That’s a great idea, Elenor, but it wouldn’t have worked on the teen I had recently. It’s a tough call.
I would practice up to two hours, and spend some time on your solos for work. I would recommend slow, easy exercises done with much repetition for as much relaxation and improvement of suppleness and control as possible. I would use LaRiviere and the Lawrence/Salzedo method exercises and repeat each one at least ten times. I would practice different types of arpeggios in four tempi,
