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Well then, you may attribute it to the Salzedo School then, that he wanted chords to always be played with the top note on the beat, because he felt the harp always needed to be especially rhythmically precise, and perhaps that was another innovation of his. I don’t like hearing chords played otherwise because they do lack energy and pulse and are especially confusing to hear in an orchestral context. Only in a soupy, vague kind of music like thickly orchestrated Wagner or Strauss might it make sense to me to be less precise. It would depend on the expressive function of the chord. Sometimes, like at the conclusion of a piece, the upper tones may be an afterthought. The notation should hopefully indicate that.
But then, if every note has to have a rhythmic function of some sort, then how can you play them after the beat? What are they? They don’t belong to anything. If they are leading up to the beat then they have a purpose and direction. If they are after the beat, are they even leading to the next beat? I think not, and that is why this other approach was needed. Every note has to have a place in relation to the other notes in terms of rhythm as well as melody and phrasing. Perhaps there are some stylistic exceptions to this, like in schmaltzy Viennese music, but I haven’t been there, so I don’t know for absolute certain. I am not personally very comfortable in overly rubato environments. Perhaps we can identify some of those cases.
Well, I think I have to say that labeling the kind of teaching I described briefly as emotional violation is not justifiable as I did not present a complete “case study” for psychological determination. People have not changed, I think, only their expectations. Music has not changed, either. There is nothing robotic about what I described. There are different levels of emotions. For instance, I attended a vocal class where they were doing cabaret songs, and a singer sang a song like Why Did I Choose You, or a real torch song and she started crying. Well, the teacher did not indulge her in that. He rightly identified it as a selfish approach and a failure. Why? Because she was crying, not the audience. She made it too personal, and failed to communicate anything to the audience. Her proper goal is to make the audience cry, if that is what the song calls for. Music operates on deeper levels and more intellectual levels in that the ideas and emotional ideas are what need to be communicated, not how bad you feel that day.
This was not a sadistic or oppressive lesson. That being said, you will encounter conductors and teachers who may seem or actually be sadistic in a sense or reality. Especially if they were trained in Vienna. If you are a professional, you have to be able to deal with it, and perhaps the best way is to focus on the music and ignore everything else. That takes training to be able to do. It may seem wrong, but you can’t always do anything about it, and sometimes it may be the only way a conductor or director can get any worthwhile results. The performers may be lazy, uninvolved, shallow or cold. They have to do what it takes to get the needed performance, that is their job. So don’t be so quick to judge.
I think it is a bit different when you look at schoolteachers who have a class for a whole day and a whole year at a time, with children who are in formation. I was certainly not addressing dealing with children.
As for the idea of dwelling on emotional upsets in lessons, I think it may
Carl, if you look again at the Danses, you’ll see that the melody note is ocurring in three octaves, so I don’t see why you are picking the bottom note as the melody. Each one needs to ring out clearly, and the ear naturally hears top notes as melody, with the bottom and middle notes supporting the top. Playing the bottom note on the beat makes the upper notes seem irrelevant, which they are not. It does not prevent you from stretching out the beat where you want a slower roll so the chord sustains for four beats (talking quarter-notes). I urge you to re-think that interpretation. That is almost like a jazz player who plays behind the beat.
Thank you, Carl. It is very difficult to try to help a student if they continue doing what they have already done. It is a muddled atmosphere. I have a problem with a student who says they want me to be their master, and then reject everything I do, or accuse me of being controlling, not indulging them, not being “sensitive” enough.
This brings up another question, which I will post separately.
I don’t know of a name for rolling the chords simultaneously, but the difference in notation is that the squiggle is in two pieces, one for each hand, instead of one long one covering both hands. You see it in the Mozart Concerto, and in the Pierne Impromptu-Caprice. Sloppy publishers will use it instead of the long squiggle also.
Playing broken chords with the beat on the bottom note deprives the top note of its meaning and will sound sloppy. The top note is the melody and in order to sing out, it has to be on the beat it belongs to. If a chord should be broken in another fashion, such as a slow arpeggio, or with the melody note in the middle, then it should be written out spacially to indicate the sequence exactly, and it turns the other notes into grace notes. There are examples of this, but I would have to go look for them. While some styles of music, particularly German Romantic, call for or allow a certain degree of vagueness about rhythm, and other situations of arpeggios where you need to finish at the right time, but have latitude up until then give some freedom, this is much less tolerated now, and it is easy to hear the difference between rhythmic and nonrhythmic playing.
I was quite impressed by Gretchen Van Hoesen’s sense of rhythm in her recording of the Gliere and Moreno-Buendia Concerti, and she spelled out chords very slowly and expressively in the Gliere, much more than I would have dared, and it is very effective. It forced me to start thinking about the rhythmic values of every note in every arpeggiated chord and to think about exactly how much to anticipate the beat. This is also very useful for ensemble, if you can say I will play these chord tones with the rhythmic value of 32nd or 64th notes, it makes it very much easier to be together.
My experience was limited to this: I was booked by the New York office of Cunard to perform on the QE2, transatlantic round trip. I had the choice of that or the Nova Scotia route up and down the coast.
Gee, what generation have I turned into now? I am the younger generation, or at least I was until these last two or three have come along with their “unique
point of view. I am old enough to have a hard time remembering why the war in Vietnam had any impact on any other country but ours and France, and Canada as a haven.I guess what this all boils down to is that students will hear what they want to hear, regardless of what or how the teacher says it. And then they’ll probably repeat it to someone else. So go reputations. If they would just be more open to learning. I hear it over and over from professors, nobody asks questions, nobody has any curiousity.
Does teaching require control? Some of you seem to question this. Well, a teenager came for a lesson, and she starting talking about her frustration and anxiety, and before you know it, she turned an hour-and-a-half lesson into more than an hour of chat, and very little lesson, all because she really didn’t want to work on that particular piece. Well, I have to control the time and how it is spent, and if he or she is going to compete as my student, I am responsible in part for his/her preparation, so I have to make sure the lesson is spent practicing that piece, if nothing else. Miss Lawrence was always in control, you did what she wanted, and you had better be prepared or face real embarassment. Did that make her a monster or ogre? No, it made her a truly great teacher, and the quality of her students has proved it over and over. A teacher has an agenda if they have thought about what they are teaching. I want to determine what harpists my students are listening to if they are in a formative stage of learning what the harp is, what its literature is and how it should sound. Students are very vulnerable for many years until they reach a reasonably complete conception of the harp and how to use it. Miss Lawrence excelled in teaching how to use it artistically, how to sculpt the sound, to control every bit of its color, to have a fulsome tone. For example, listen to the sound clips on Faye Seeman’s website, kitharatrio.com. You may hear a familiar piece, but there is so much more body and definition of detail in her playing. This is the result of her teaching. If you go to someone who studied elsewhere, you will hear a very different result in many cases. The harp is terribly difficult to make real music on. It is constantly in a state of diminuendo, which you have to work against to make crescendo. You have to simulate legato and other qualities of touch and articulation. You have to be very rhythmical because of the constant ringing. You have to know how to play arpeggiated chords very rhythmically, which you can hear a lot of harpists don’t do well. It is very difficult to play a piece in one tempo and to break the chords within the beat in a whole other subdivision, changing from beat to beat from five notes to seven, to eight or more.
I don’t think I agree with the thought that any technique will feel natural and comfortable. My students who have come with poor technique feel that it is wrong, but don’t know how to fix it. They haven’t had pain from adjusting. Pain is likely from playing too much while adjusting. I have seen many “techniques” that are so full of tension and distortion, it shocks me, seeing a harpist in her debut recital (I typed degut-a Freudian slip) wringing her hands between pieces to stretch out her hands, which were visibly swollen, red and irritated. You’d be shocked at who I mean. Some have gone on to be more relaxed and very successful, and some had to stop playing due to injury.
That post was quite the ironic one, because it illustrates so cogently the kind of attitude that seems to be cropping up, and it is pretty literal. Yes, it is necessary to buy from stores or they cease to exist, and buying from websites is
Following up on that, a couple of more thoughts. It is interesting how the interaction between people, in any circumstance, can be shaped by predetermined attitudes, intentions, values, any ingredients of a person’s makeup, regardless of how the interaction is conducted, the outcome is destined by these other factors in some cases.
A generation gap issue, perhaps, is the one of entitlement. It seems like the young folks today feel entitled to many things, due to the internet making or seeming to make them available. How do you convince a student that they have to buy music from a store when they can download it? How do you gain their cooperation in whom they buy from? How do you tell them the things you can’t tell them about the relationships between colleagues, dealers and other factors larger than one student and one teacher, that their actions have a much larger impact? How do you place appropriate limits around their activities when they are used to none, or do not think there should be any? How do you cause them to accept responsible payment plans and not to cancel lessons the night before without making them up? So many difficulties in teaching.
This is a big mistake in my book. There is no way that I am “serving” or “servicing” my students. I am not selling a product. I am not cleaning a house. That is crass, disrespectful and egotistical. I am choosing to share my knowledge and expertise with appropriate people. I set aside my time in the expectation that they will honor it by showing up on time, by paying as agreed, and by doing their best to apply what I am teaching. The student is in my studio, in my home, in my headspace and intersecting with my own work. That is a privilege. That being said, my integrity demands that I do the most I can to help said student, and if they fail to grasp my lessons, it is their problem, not mine. My “product” does not have to be adjusted to fit a student’s demands. A student who is demanding is one who is not learning what is being taught. Of course it is a two-way dance, but it is the teacher who leads and the student who follows. A student who is not happy with their instruction may have been misleading in communicating what they are looking for or experiencing. Apropos of whatever it applies to, as the old saying goes, water seeks its own level.
I like lever harps with a full, sweet sound. But an electric lever harp with the sound of a crappy South American harp is poison to my ears, no matter what you do with it.
But how can you teach effectively if you do not have, to some degree, control over the student? If you are offering a progression of ideas, they are dependent on consistency, and other input interferes with that consistency, even input from past teachers. A lesson requires controlling the experience, what is worked on and when and how much, and that is as much what we are paid for as our knowledge. It takes a lot of skill. Students who come in thinking they know it all have an attitude that prevents them from learning. Even if they simply have a preconceived notion as to how the teacher should be teaching them in particular, it does a disservice as it is not allowing the teacher to develop their approach. And then, with the ideas you are trying to instill in the student, if they go out an meet other harpists and pick up their ideas, then your work gets polluted, and you have to start over again on many things. Control is an essential element of teaching, however benign or passive or discreet. Or overt. Even determining what your student listens to is part of helping the development of what their conception of the harp is to be. Why? Because all of the art in playing the harp is in how you listen to it and what you expect from it. And the student needs to give the teacher the gift of time to let their work unfold and grow. It should be
I was having second thought about the whole thread. It’s my story, and I tried to disguise it poorly. It wasn’t scrounging for necessity, but for the usual old musical/political reasons, and it wasn’t anyone really famous, either. Which thread discussed the enrollment? I missed that. The student had injuries due to bad habits, to which he/she reverted when changing to the other teacher, and ended up with severe tendonitis, as I understand.
Here’s a question, then: do you think it is possible to create a code of ethics for harpists that covers all kinds of situations and that we can actually expect everyone to agree to? I noticed that the musicians union had some rules deep in their bylaws regarding gossip and slander, and there is some recourse possible in the union situation. Teachers aren’t necessarily in the union, though, and we don’t have accreditation to teach harp, either.
