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I have used a system based on dance classes in which the student prepays for a certain number of lessons to be used up within a certain amount of time, say 4 lessons within a 5-week period, after which it expires. We each have a card on which I can mark off each lesson as it is given. I find it difficult to get adults to pay for more than that in advance, and many don’t want to even pay one week in advance. It is difficult. If you are in a position to turn them away, you have more leverage. Any dance studio, if not by the semester, will sell a ten-class card with an expiration date. If you look at one, you will see how you might design one of your own and print it on card stock so it is durable. The alternative is to simply write out a receipt when you receive payment, keeping a copy, and noting the number of lessons it covers. It is easy to get confused. Week-by-week students have no incentive to make up missed lessons, unfortunately, and care little for your time having been set aside.
I have started on such a project, but it will be a long time in finishing it. I haven’t seen anything I would really recommend. I think composers should start with Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and perhaps Puccini; and make sure of what they know will work, and start from there. Most orchestration books give bad examples it seems, like in Walter Piston’s, every example is an exception, like Stravinsky’s Orpheus, and not a good example of writing for the harp. But even in Tchaikovsky and Debussy there are errors of judgement. I think Rimsky did the best overall, and has many pages of wonderful writing. Ravel, also, took some chances and made some errors, as well as Strauss, so I think composers should be guided carefully through those scores. I think they should be required to take a full-semester course in writing for the harp only, as it would seem to require at least that much study. I might suggest they try writing parts for existing works such as Rite of Spring, which should have had harp and certainly could. There’s nothing like walking in another composer’s shoes.
I meant to say, that specifically, Miss Lawrence taught me to open/release my left hand after playing the
There is more to this than is meeting the eye, so to speak. The basic gesture is what you describe, rising up in relation to the floor, not the strings, so at an angle to the strings (forward). The idea is to draw the sound with you, to sustain it more. The advanced player may release the closed hand back to the position it was in and draw upward and down. It is not about making a fist and keeping it at all times. That is for beginners, to develop a good habit. It depends on the music when you would want to release the hand and how much. You want the hand to be relaxed, not clenched. You don’t want to release as you hit the top of the gesture because that looks like something else. The only teachers I know of to teach releasing were Lucile Lawrence and Edna Phillips. Salzedo may not have continued to teach that in later years, or no-one stayed around long enough. If you watch the video of Lucile Lawrence, or have the one where she performs with the Firestone Orchestra, you can see some of this in action. Professional technique can be different from what is taught. You see here not necessarily closing her fingers, but the movement is still there and complete, very controlled and very strong. I don’t think the fingers should ever be extended straight out, except perhaps an elegant pinkie. You should be so connected to the sound you just played that if you shake your hand, the sound will beat/vibrato. (This is not impossible.) I like to think of falling, not raising, that you want to fall effortlessly onto the next note, which causes, perforce, a preceding raise that is equally effortless.
I think I am getting very uncomfortable with where this thread has gone, and perhaps we should give it a rest, dry our eyes, put away the tissues and move on to other topics.
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.
