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Years ago I played a gig in a restaurant from 6:30 pm to 10 pm with two 15-minute breaks. Watch that you are seated on the front half of the stool. Take many sips of water. Use your breaks off of the harp to walk around, do yoga stretches, totally relax but with movement to improve your circulation, and add more potassium to your diet, apricots, bananas, etc. The “little” break needs to be a full fifteen minutes and you deserve every minute of it. Hope it goes away! If there is an MD on board, consult with him/her.
What a wonderful thing to do! I have given numerous harp demonstrations in three states, for pay and as a volunteer, in various libraries, schools and churches. Years ago, our school year in Fairfax County, I was a CAPS artist.
Suggestions:
Make sure the harp(s) that you bring is/are insured if you move it/them outside of your home for this purpose. Contact The American String Teachers Association or the American Harp Society.
Smile in the front office and be prepared to wear a name tag or necklace to identify you as a volunteer on the campus. Be prepared to show identification. Leave yourself ample time to set up and tune.
Have each student wash and dry his/her hands before the demonstration with no application of hand lotion. Keep as many adults as possible in the room to keep order.
Once you have the routine established, practice it in front of a mirror or some guinea pig students so that the words flow smoothly and to time it. Use index cards for reminders of all of the points to cover. Smile with lots of eye contact.
If possible, find and bring a simple hunting bow. You do not need any arrows, and they would not be allowed on school property. The bow was the ancestor of all modern stringed instruments. Mention from our culture, King David, Biblical references to stringed instruments very briefly, OT and NT, harps in stained glass windows in houses of worship, the harp in use in Ireland in Christian worship since the six-hundreds, the destruction of harps and harpsichords in the French Revolution, President Adams’ wife as harpist, the uses of harps in Western culture today. Show pictures of simple harps that still resemble bows from other cultures, if you can obtain any. Mention why the third side of the triangle was eventually added. Tell the students of museums in their country with good musical instrument collections.
Bring as many harps as possible, if you own them in multiple sizes. Keep them covered and out of sight until you talk about each one, to pique the students’ interest.
Tell the kids who made your harp, its strings and of what materials, woodworking as a craft and art. Mention the need for woods to be aged, weathered, or properly kiln-dried to prevent cracking. Mention the qualities of wood and strings, expanding and contracting with changes in temperature and humidity levels. A bit of physics: sound waves, pitch and string length, intervals, scales. Demonstrate the pedals/levers. Consider a brief fun”quiz” on half and whole steps. No looking at your feet or the strings!
Talk about the production of the sound, how raising allows the sound waves to move through the air, not physically blocked by your hands and forearms. Placing before plucking, the fleshy part of the finger, how short your nails are, etc, why playing with pinky fingers does not work, how to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, etc. Define: work ethic. Describe: practice.
By this point, you are an asset to the science department, the music program, the history teacher, the shop class, and the principal.
Perform a short recital. Explain how to know when a harpist is finished with a piece and demonstrate placing the harp in upright position so that the audience knows the work is over to cue the students to clap. Let everybody know that utter silence is expected during a recital, no coughing, etc. Include music from different historical periods and last on the program a piece the students will recognize. If you own a tambourine, bring it for the Renaissance dance. Select a student with a good sense of rhythm to accompany you on that one. Hand out the tambourine. Collect it back as soon as you complete that piece. Have everybody clap for the rhythm section, too. Give country of origin and full names of composers. Define what a composer and an arranger are. Define: transcription.
At the end, with their clean washed hands with no hand lotion or French fry grease, waiting in line, each student gets to play a glissando, which you will define, and mention how Italian is the language of music. Rattle off other Italian words.
Plan well and have fun! Make sure you really practice this number! Your handout at the end could contain a summary of all of the information you have presented, plus your name and how to contact you.
Karl Oberthuer’s “Play of the Waves” is very pretty, with two melodies intertwined, one in the RH and one in the LH. The RH melody is in the thumb. It’s in the album “Wedding Cake” with the green cover.
You might check with harpist Constance Whitesides in Virginia. She may know something about a data base of old harps, if my memory from a conversation a decade ago serves me well.
R/G trolls are to be ignored, and likewise, if a harpist plays R/G method and the Salzedo trolls start taking verbal cheap shots, it’s a reflection of their own sick souls, not you! Make music for the JOY of it, and just keep your technique strong and consistent and to YOU inner standard, no matter what the trolls have to say!
In the music world, too many musicians would rather misuse their limited God-given time to belittle others, rather than working hard and long on their own art. Just let the whirling dervishes whirl, and enjoy what you do and get out there and do it!
Greetings, all!
I was also going to suggest Jackie Bartlett on the phone, if the inquirer had picked up the phone and called. I got a chance, several years ago, to listen to and observe the students of multiple teachers in the Charlotte area performing, and was impressed by those of Ms. Bartlett.
What I suggest music-loving families should do, if they are in a remote place with no harp teacher, is to find a safe place, a classroom in a church or community center, drum up the other families with harps, perhaps getting the word out through church music directors and school teachers, and the local paper, and then invite a good harp teacher to travel there one day a week and teach for several hours. Perhaps the church or community center could offer the annual recital of the teachers’ students as a public event, and the cultural arts could be strengthened in smaller places in the USA.
In these times we need more serious study of music, which develops the aesthetic sense and is a skill for life, and less involvement with hand-held no-think gadgets among our young people. If our far-flung places had itinerate teachers of violin, harp, banjo, classical guitar, trumpet, how much different our musical future as a country could be…
The Salzedo method leads to a strong tone that will carry over and through an orchestra without amplification, which can distort the sound. It is not the only school of harp playing in the USA, but one that is definitely worthy of respect.
Hello, again!
It might be wise to contact Laura Byrne over in the Research Triangle and discuss your needs with her.
Best wishes,
Susan Abken
Dear Laura,
Call (704) 542-2728 to discuss this matter. I have a recommendation, and have seen the lady’s students perform and am impressed.
Sincerely yours,
Susan Abken
Charlotte, NC
Dear Sherry,
Is it possible to use the gas logs only once in a while, to move the harp to another location in the house, to let laundry hang dry (drip dry) somewhere in your home and to keep a pot of hot water steaming on the stove on low? What about opening a window a tiny crack to allow some fresh, damper air in? In some countries, the double-paned glass windows come with a tiny extra window for allowing fresh air in.
Perhaps a guitar humidifier could be placed carefully in the soundbox hole of your harp. It is a small rubber tube with a wet core inside.
A portable, digital, battery-operated humidity gauge is a nice tool to have. We keep one level of our home at 65-66 F, no hotter, with various instruments around, and just wear woolens and lots of layers.
Sincerely yours,
Susan Abken
I’m glad I’m not alone in wondering whatever happened to American manners. Several years ago, playing the prelude on Christmas Eve at my own church in Charlotte, some young, perhaps drunken young man shouted, “Bring out the bass!” (It was just fine, thank you.)
Another time I played an Advent event for a large church gathering of women in Charlotte while quite physically ill, losing a pound a day without trying and fighting short-term memory losses, but my name was already printed in the expensive programs, so I kept the engagement. One tall, thin, older man appeared at this event and made a running nasty commentary during the entire performance of background music, at one time getting up from his seat and leaning over me to deliver nasty remarks.
This same “gentleman” had mocked my husband and me, formerly avid concert-goers, right after we moved here when we attended our first ticketed early music concert in this town, saying aloud to all of the other concert-goers, “WHO are THEY???!” Needless to say, I hardly felt welcomed and quit subscribing. We have a CD collection, and can receive public radio.
I suspect the stalker has a major character defect such as Tourette’s Syndrome and have forgiven him, but I’ve learned to choose my audiences very carefully and do not attend AHS meetings here because the attitude there is the same. Who chooses to be a victim? That “gentleman” is the type one has to forgive, and forgive, and forgive yet again.
The best audiences I’ve seen were in the Washington, DC, area, and Atlanta was mannerly, but Charlotte is the pits. It has to do with education levels and what people learn at home and in school, and also with what a city expects of its citizens, or doesn’t. When we moved here, I was met with two phone calls, three days apart, from some young woman who claimed to be a friend of an established harpist and hissed at me that I “dare not gig in this town.” Those nasty calls were nine years ago. They like to fight here.
The musicians here, and too many locals, really lack manners, but they are simply a symptom of a larger national problem, a reflection of a society in steep decline.
I know this response is late. I was just going through the postings, but if you have the opportunity again, by all means play Eleanor Fell’s humorous “Harpy Birthday!” If you ham it up, the audience will be in stitches!
Amazing Grace is indeed appropriate for an infant baptism, or for a person’s baptism at any age. In Christian theology, sins are forgiven and one is born into the faith at baptism, and just the word “grace”–God’s undeserved, unearned and unmeasurable love poured out for the human race–is enough to make this hymn appropriate in a Christian service. Pluck away, smile and have fun! To keep the baby calm, you might consider playing in the upper octaves of the harp, like chimes in the child’s nursery.
Yes, the theme from the movie “Babe” about the pig! I arranged it myself, after renting the video to find out what the bride was talking about and purchasing the organ concerto score by Camille S-S! It was an outdoor Episcopal wedding, and went well.
Mean girls are usually mean girls because they learned the bullying behavior on their mother’s knee and were never corrected. The behavior was accepted by the parent, encouraged by her, and passed on to the next generation. Sad, but true.
The best way to deal with bullying women, whether it’s the twisted gossip of a neighbor or nastiness in harp circles, is a policy of total avoidance. Sooner or later, the truth will get out.
The older I get, the more I have been able to “thank God in all things.” There are no bullies in the Kingdom of Heaven, and if by God’s grace I manage to land there, there are certain people I will not have to put up with any longer when that fast-growing cancer or whatever strikes, and in that release of this world’s bullies is a real sense of peace, somewhere off in the future, when the battle is over. One can then smile again, with a sense of relief.
I garden, and have had great outcomes with bulbs at the four houses in three states we’ve owned since 1989. My peonies have poked their heads out of the ground out at our mailbox; the daffodils in the front and back have already bloomed. It’s time to braid the green tops.
On my deck I have mint, parsley, Italian oregano and thyme in containers, a few steps away from the kitchen, and in the backyard I’ve put in three dwarf, self-pollinating apple trees and three Kadota figs, just to see what happens!
On our front stoop is rosemary.
In an egg carton in our living room, my pet butternut squash has poked its cute little head above the ground. It will go outside in a few weeks, and we hope to eat its offspring! (Why only one seed out of twelve has germinated is beyond me, perhaps I purchased old seed stock, don’t know.) Next to the egg carton is a pet miniature lemon tree with blossoms.
Pretty soon I’ll be putting in tomatoes in large wooden barrels, a good way to water them in an area with watering restrictions.
Best wishes to all other gardeners out there!
-Susan Abken, Charlotte, NC
