Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It was Alyson who mentioned good tone needing good tuning and regulation – and certainly if you haven’t got those any sort of strings will sound off.
I was advised when I bought a new harp to keep the top in nylon for a year to let the string breaking settle down before I changed them to gut.
One difference between nylon and gut which hasn’t been mentioned is the care in tying the knot not to crease the sounding bit of the stirng. If you kink a new gut string (or probably a bit of the broken one) it will go white and less stiff- you don’t want that in the middle of the string where you are playing.
I used to play it quite a bit as a duet – with only a little tweaking several of the variations work really well played two at a time.
It would be great if you can find the theme in the Lefebvre score – but I suspect the manuscript may be wrong about the title, rather than the published version. Dalvimar published a different piece from the Noces de Gamache ballet, a Fandango, and whoever copied the music may have got in a muddle.
The Lefebvre score is here if anyone feels like looking through for the theme.
The harp repertoire is far less limited than it sometimes seems. I think that because the harp is seen as being unusual and variety by itself people tend to reach for the same old pieces, because they tend not to have been done to death by other people as much as the most popular piano pieces. And not just the harpists – concert organisers and conductors can be guilty of not feeling a need to look beyond the Mozart and Handel concerti and Ravel and Debussy for chamber music.
Saul mentioned harp pieces that were published as harp or piano for commercial reasons. The classic example for me is the Prokofiev Prelude in C (the dedicatee is a harpist) but also no 7 in his Mimoletnost/Fugitive Visions which has been so pinched by the pianists that many harpists don’t know we can claim it https://archive.org/stream/mimoletnostsoch207prok1#page/n0/mode/2up The Haydn D major keyboard concerto was published in his lifetime for harp (in C, only the first violin part survives) and there has been speculation about five of his keyboard sonatas.
I have no difficulty accepting that what works best on a modern harp, with all its tension and resonance and the harpist playing both solo line and continuo, is different to the most historically informed performance in many ways. As musicians we have the full scope available to us from what we believe Bach would have heard through to fully modernised versions and neither end of the spectrum is innately better than the other.
Historical performance does need to take account of how different our harps are from their predecessors. Even on a late single action speed just ripples out of my fingers as it never does on my modern CG, and the contemporary harp would have been even lighter strung, while dividing the top line between hands would help with speed too.
I would believe both that scholarship says the original was played slow fast fast(er), and that modern musicians have decided it works better for them as fast slow fast.
Your mention of too many lever changes to be practical made that irresistable – sometimes impracticality is fun.
I don’t know if she plays the fugue, I can only say she didn’t in the concert last week.
Renie transcribed ten of the Preludes http://www.creighton-griffiths.co.uk/acatalog/js_bach_solo_harp.html and more recently Laura Sherman has published a number of them http://www.wickedharp.com/index.php/gotham-harp-publishing/ghp-store/bach-well-tempered-clavier-detail
It wouldn’t call it a handle – it’s a ‘handle’ with definite quotation marks because I was taught never to attempt to move a harp by one. I wouldn’t trust my harp to something held on with two rather small screws.
When trying a harp I suggest you check the sound and ease of playing the very top and bottom strings (sometimes playing higher or lower on the bottom strings rather than exact middle gives a sound I prefer) and how does the harp sound with levers all open or all engaged – it will sound different, do you like both sounds? Play both chords and tunes and try playing with different amounts of pressure to see what the harp responds too. Ask someone to play the harps you are keenest on so you can listen to get another idea of the sound as it will be different by your ear and across the room.
It is likely that no harp will be totally perfect, but you will decide which aspects you care about most – you might put up with a few plunky strings at the top for a glorious middle, for instance.
I may see you and Jennifer there – but I’m sorry I am already not quite sure if I will fit a pedal harp, a lever harp and two friends in my car.
Exactly as Balfour says, it is nice we don’t all like the same harps. There are lots of lovely, good quality harps out there, each of which is the right harp for somebody. So enjoy the Festival, try lots of harps and see if one declares it is coming home with you. They do that sometimes and it isn’t always the one you thought you would get.
The trick for stairs is making sure your thigh muscles do all the work. If you are standing upright trying to pull the harp up your legs have nothing to do, and are the strongest muscles around. Step another step or two upwards with bent legs and then straighten them, leaning slightly backwards. Try with the trolley without harp, or with just a sack of concrete first.
The original has a few differences from Le Dentu’s arrangement -including occasional F sharps and harmonics – I find it more interesting than the Le Dentu version but so hard not to play what I learnt first. I am unconvinced it is Mozart – the printed Dalvimar edition calls it Pas de trois introduced in Achille et Deidamie but doesn’t credit a composer and I couldn’t find it in the Campra score of A&D so either it was a different A&D, a stray dance introduced (which happened) or I just missed it.
When did harps start using bushing cloth rather than leather on the pedals? I wonder if it was linked to the stonger springs in the pedals mechanism.
I had exactly the same question years ago and replaced my felts with leather wraps. They have long finished compacting and the regulation is very stable. Having less cushioning there can lead to noiser pedals – which did wonders for my pedal technique and moving them precisely rather than crashing them around. I suspect I would no longer wear through felt as fast.
The downside of the harp having such stable regulation is of course the temptation not to give it any servicing. How is that for a conspiracy theory? The pedals felts are designed to have a short lifetime and pack down or wear through, prompting the harpist to call the servicer more often, leading to more well maintained older harps…
