Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.
My own headline brought up another subject as I was looking at it: students who steal their teacher’s music. I have had them take mine by accident along with their own as they leave, and they bring it back. My teacher loaned out so much music, she couldn’t keep track of who had what, and some never returned what they had, and still have her copies of this or that piece.
I had a “student”, a beginner who only took lessons for a few weeks, steal the harp I found for her to rent from Salvi.
Have you had students steal anything from you?
I have had a student come to a lesson so deprived of food, he had no energy to play. I did my best to make sure he was eating (this was at a music camp), but I couldn’t force him, and he had plenty of excuses, as did his mother. It was sad and kind of pathetic. In the end, he didn’t do very well with his studies or amount to much of a harpist after finishing studies. The moral of this tale is, if you want to be a harpist, you can’t be worrying about fashion and image and get caught up in eating disorders. You have to become immune to peer pressure anyway, because who has peers that are also harpists? You have to be healthy, that you do.
To follow up on the thoughts about repertoire quality, I think I have isolated a distinguishing factor between the music composed by harpists and the music composed for harp by composers: I am working on a sonata, and mostly using the piano to write, keeping in mind what should work on the harp and checking the voicing; where I would work on the harp much more extensively normally, and only use the piano for back-up. The result is quite different. It is more pianistic, could be a piano piece nearly as much as a harp piece, and as a result it sounds so much more like what composers write for the harp. I think their lack of intimacy with the harp gives them more freedom, as using a piano certainly gives great harmonic freedom. Writing from the harp point of view builds in more limitations, partly because of what has come before, and also the awareness of what we tend to want it to do. But the choices made by the composers broaden our horizons and enrich us as often as they dismay, distort and disrespect our instrument.
Miss Lawrence used to say: speculate upon the harmony. Meaning, read the chords and play the notes that are possible, and forget the rest. We had a performance of the Schoenberg when I was in school, and fortunately for me, I didn’t have to play it, but I believe I may still have her edited parts.
One thing is clear, that most harp manufacturers have been improving the quality of their harps over the years. We have more models to choose from, more sizes, and a wider price range. They are to be applauded.
I hope that all harp manufacturers realize that our art is very much dependent upon their practices and their decisions affect deeply what we are able to do. Discontinuing an accessory can have serious ramifications for our music, even if it was not a best-selling item. I hope they realize that they cannot be solely business-people, but participants in our art. Don Henry always realized this, I think, and made music available to us at little or no profit, by publishing it and stocking the rare and unusual.
Historically, the desire to support Lyon & Healy has been strong in order to maintain a standard of sound and appearance, and to always have their best harps available to us. Now, other manufacturers have similar support for their achievements. As we strive to maintain our standards, they must also strive to maintain and better their standards.
I think that the confusion over what harp to buy has increased with the increase in brands and models. It would help if they were clearly labeled as to their projected use: student model, compact professional, much
Another issue is chord spacing. Part of teaching a composer is giving him a list of chord spacings that are playable and those that aren’t. This thread makes me think of that old Magic Fire Music. It’s Salzedo’s solo version that is barely playable, more than the original with its multiple parts. Funny that they use it for Metropolitan Opera auditions when they have the harps to play the original. I nailed it at full speed when I auditioned for them, to their evident surprise, but I played a wrong note in another excerpt for misreading a chord in a badly handwritten part from Andrea Chenier, so I got booted over that tiny gaffe. Jerks.
Okay, there’s a lot to say here. Obviously, I meant e-natural and f-flat, or e-sharp and f-natural. Or should have.
I think Salzedo would have been the same. His influence from Edgard Varese may have been there as he was also in Paris before New York, and the other influence I know of, Dane Rudhyar, was also in Paris. Salzedo’s composing developed from the chromatic academic style similar to Pierne’s early work, as seen in its apotheosis in his Ballade, where he expanded the tonal harmony, the voicings and nature of his chord progressions to introduce hints of polytonality, earlier than Milhaud. His Poetical Studies and works of that time are decidedly impressionistic. His next vein, like Quietude and similar pieces, were possibly influenced by Rudhyar and prefigure new-age music and all kinds of things yet to come. His scales in Flight were created long before Messaien did similar work. He increased the angularity and purity of his sounds, including harsh and percussive colors new to the harp, yet remained tonal, though his line tends to be more and more angular and hyperkinetic, as in his concerti. He invents deconstructive thought in his paraphrases on American folk songs, like Traipsin through Arkansaw, long before Derrida and other philosophers caught up to him. He did like to find the forefront in every path, including his hobby of photography. A man of his times. He followed the fertile path of acoustically based harmony and tonality that I feel is the strongest and most legitimate path through the 20th century and into the future. He, in accordance with the acoustic nature of the harp, emphasizes open intervals, and wider chord spacings. You frequently find fourths, fifths, sixths and sevenths in his pieces, and his chord voicings are usually wide, and the chords regularly incorporate the tones of the 9th, 11th and 13th degrees, as early as Ballade. He was not the first perhaps, looking at Stravinsky, but right apace with the others in the forefront. Stravinsky’s Svezdoliki is the first piece I know of in the 20th c. to be based entirely on 4ths, 4ths and acoustic harmony, but I’m sure the elemets of that go at least as far back as Musorgsky. If only we knew what concerts he attended in his youth. He was active in Monte Carlo, I haven’t matched up the dates yet, but if he overlapped with the Ballets Russes, he would have encountered Stravinskyisms.
De Falla, Villa Lobos, Turina, Rodrigo, Martin, Hindemith, and many more great European composers followed the acoustic harmony path, as do I, and I think Esme’s dismissal of modern European composers should be far more restricted to the atonalists and postwar trendites. Henze stands out, a little. I respect Dutilleux and Jolivet, and Rodrigo was a great who died only recently. Many, many great Spanish composers we barely know, like Espla, Gerhard, Halffter and others. The Concerto by Moreno-Buendia is one of the best I have heard. I have not heard the works by Montsalvatge, the solo and the concerto. They may be as great as his Cinque Cancions de Negras, if we are fortunate.
Busser and Pierne went on to write some interesting work as they got older, and there is Cras, Zbinden and others. The avant-garde succeeded in suppressing much work by more traditional composers, so we must dig to find it. I am flattered that Esma thinks American composers did so much great work.Now, a list of some pieces we would not have as they are but for Salzedo’s precedents:
Ginastera Concerto
Caplet Divertissements
Persichetti Serenade and Parable
Somers Suite
Wagenaar Four Vignettes
Riegger Divertissement
Koutzen Trio
many more.
If more composers knew his notations, how much clearer their music would be to learn.Actually, Salzedo totally takes into account the overtones in his compositions, and composers who emulated him have also done so. It may be more common in American music. You might enjoy Panufnik’s music for harp in that regard. This is a very valuable and significant thread.
Yes…BUT the strings are different sizes, and moreover, with or without discs touching the strings which changes the tone quality, and I was always taught that an e-sharp should be slightly sharper than an f-flat. An open string has a bigger, rounder tone than one in the natural position, and the sharp position has a very pinched quality, and the tension of the string is tightened considerably, so there is a very real difference between an f-flat and an e-sharp.
As for neatness, Salzedo was by nature very meticulous. For example, he could not abide having extra string length curled up along the top of the harp. Miss Lawrence would say, probably quoting him, ‘your harp needs a haircut.’ So for his notation to be meticulous is a natural extension of that trait. Unfortunately, it didn’t extend so far as to his study of baroque music ornamentation in his early days, though he did work on it later on. I think his peers were just messy about everything, when to pedal, how your harp looks, inconsistent. But aren’t the French supposed to be so very logical, conceptual and rational? Why only him? Who knows. What would have happened if he had not emigrated to the United States? Think about that, shall we?
