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Darhon Rees- Rohrbacher’s two Christmas books are wonderful. As I recall, there are some pieces in each book that are printed separately, one arrangement for pedal, then the same arrangement for lever.
Teva you may find after playing a bunch of harps that it won’t matter to you whether a harp is staved or a flat back. You just have to get the opportunity to play lots of harps. Please keep searching for them….!
I heard the Triplett Shanti at Somerset and liked it very much. It has a very pleasant sound and plenty of dynamic variation.
I bought a Serenade as my first harp. I don’t know how to say enough good things about it. It sounds absolutely wonderful, and when I bought it, that was my only thought, but if you go to the website you will find that you can get wonderful inlay and also flashy new colors, and still stick to your budget.
The Serenade is not just a student harp. It is a wonderful instrument.
Please check out the Thormahlen website. Hopefully you will be able to play a Serenade before you make your final decision.
Sorry I said “wonderful” so many times, so just sub in “terrific” and “fabulous” a couple times and my prose will sound a lot better.
Wow- in a parallel universe, many many years ago, I was you! Have you given the academic field of music therapy a look? If not, acquaint yourself with it. It is a fascinating co-therapy with communication therapy.
I have a BA in music ed. And my MA in speech therapy, and spent most of my professional life as a public school speech therapist.
I’ve only been playing the harp for a little over four years, but I love it more all the time. I take lessons with a wonderful teacher, and I’ve recently discovered, to my own great surprise, that I dearly love Irish harp.
There are SO many things to do to using the harp. This is a great place to do your informal research, and the deeper into this you get, the more fun you will have.
If you continue as an SLP, I promise you that a harp can be an incredible tool as you work with your clientele. There is something unique about the tone of a harp that allows you to reach people that you could reach n no other way.
There is also the field of bedside musician, an area that is still very young, in which many harpists participate. There is a small but growing body of research available, although most of the pragmatic, double blind research using live music to elicit specific therapeutic responses is still in the area of music therapy per se.
So START DIGGING! You’re in for some great surprises! Harps are great, speech therapy is great, music therapy is great, bedside music is great, and a mix of the whole bunch is both doable and beneficial!
My mother was a feisty independent powerhouse until she was almost ninety, when two weeks after 9-11, she fell and broke her hip.
At the same time, I was working a hard, unpleasant, unforgiving job and had lost a social and spiritual connection that I valued deeply.
Practically overnight, my life was upended by my Mother’s injury, and this was the beginning of a five year stretch of nursing homes, paperwork, a new job, physical problems caused by seemingly endless stress, and fatigue, fatigue, and more fatigue.
Toward the end of her long life I had started to look for some simple tricks to soothe my mother as the dementia caused her to become more and more restless and anxious. I had always been fascinated by the use of music therapy and its scientifically researched outcomes, and while reading about music topics, I ran across the use of live music to increase
the comfort level of bed borne seniors.I immediately began my search for information about harps as a conduit to
better health, and almost as soon as I began, I was able to connect with a
dynamic teacher and start the search for a harp.My mother passed away peacefully before my first lesson, but I quickly realized that the harp was an immediate spirits lifter for me.
As Jennifer said, I was also probably depressed. With everything that was whirling around i didn’t ha e time to think about that. Playing the harp allows you to turn off the depressed part of your thoughts, if only for a moment or two, but after while you begin to find that you’re able to go to
your harping zone more and more, while you play and when you have a minute or two to be thinking about number of strings, styles of harp music,
Practice time, etc. Etc. Etc……….I don’t jump for some of the aspects of playing that I too think of as “new age”, but there’s so much about harps there’s something that will pluck the strings of every heart, believe me! If you are anywhere near any of the harp stores on the advertiser’s list, go and see their harps. If possible, rent a harp with at least 30 strings and ,levers. Look for a teacher. It’s all part of the experience.
To begin, let your goal be enjoying what you do and seeing where it takes you. Although I have hit a bump or two along the way, I get more and more excited about what i’m doing after four and a half years, and I won’t stop playing until someone has to pry my gnarled hands off the strings.
Of course you’ll play songs!
My mother
I had wonderful instruction in both high school and college. My band director, who passed away recently, was fastidious and ultra demanding.
Many of my college teachers taught at both Julliard and my college, so I took several courses with Arthur Christmann and Jack Sacher, voice lessons with Benjamin Wilkes, who could make a crow sing bel canto, and Dorothy Morse.
I have not had a musical experience since, until beginning harp lessons, that could compare to the lessons of those wonderful people.
Hi Saul- if you are speaking of developing as in intermediate students, Etude 47 from Bochsa’s Fifty Etudes is great. It’s a very familiar Mozart melody with enough chromaticism to make planning a must and the need for precise pedal changes an essential.
I get enormous satisfaction from making progress with it. No doubt there are many good students who could handle it after a couple years of instruction. It’s taken me a little over four years but worth every minute.
This was a wonderful episode that continued from a Christmas episode that began a raging conflict between Cam and another musician.
There are actually two harps shown very briefly near the end of the half hour episodes. I think I recall one gilded one and one plainer in a darker wood.
Both this episode and the Christmas one are full of musician jokes and very very funny.
Why don’t you want to rent? Some companies will rent to own, so you get the best of having something nice to play AND avoiding making a mistake.
When I bought my Thormahlen Serenade, I didn’t have the chance to have inlay on it, but now there are inlaid Serenades on the Thormahlen site.
Since then I have played all three of the harps you’ve mentioned, and they are all just wonderful instruments.
I played a 34 string Dusty at Somerset that had a huge beautiful sound.
Because I’ve had such a great experience with Thormahlen, I lean in that direction, but I’d also be glad to try the other two brands.
Another complication is that you may find yourself changing your mind about the kind of repertoire you want to play as you continue, and then you may need something completely different from what you originally thought you wanted.
Since I am probably being more confusing and not less, I’m going to stop.
I’m hoping that all here got through the worst of it and are able to get back to business today.
Our house is in the center of a bunch of very old scrub oaks, and that was an immediate concern to us, but we were very lucky.
There is severe flooding locally and the water is not expected to crest until Wednesday, so there will still be problems until then and after.
At least one wedding here was performed Saturday, but I don’t know anything about it other than the fact that the wedding party was all in oversized emergency vehicles when they came through town.
