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There is a 2nd hand Tim Hampson Ossian advertised at the moment… If you like that then you might also get on with Frank Sievert’s harps, but unfortunately he hasn’t been at EIHF for the last couple of years. What did you think of Pilgrim’s Ashdown and Skylark?
I have a niggling memory of Berlioz advocating triple action to Erard. I can’t remember the reference – Harps and Harpists perhaps.
And speaking of death wishes, should anyone ever risk an encounter with the Schoenberg P&M parts my considered advice is to ensure you are several miles away!
Salvi advise to try a slightly damp cloth
http://www.salviharpsinc.com/Salvi_Technical_Services_Guide.pdfUnison for movements 1,2 and 4 – the 3rd is marked solo and changes from harpes to harpe. Much more fun to have a companion – especially if there are other pieces to play in and not turning up just for those 3 movements.
The continuous tightening causes too much tension on the harp. That sounds to me like a myth to encourage non-scientific harpists to change their strings! The tension on the string is fixed by the mass of the string, its length and its pitch. I suppose if the string has stretched, to require continuous tightening, there will be less material between the soundboard and bridgepin so the tension on the harp will have gone minutely down. If continuous tightening is because the harp has changed shape and the soundboard come up then the age of the string is not a factor. Continuous tightening will change the angle of the force slightly – more windings on the tuning pin will mean a tighter angle at the bridge pin.
The number of winds on my tuning pegs is much the same when strings are old as when they are new, so any effect from winding on will be tiny.
Or do you think he was talking about about pushing the tuning pin in to the neck too hard?
Wonderful news! (Will you be at Edinburgh this year?)
I can’t remember if I mentioned the relevance of the strings being developed for tiny bowed strings – 1/32 double bases or cellos. I wonder what titanium windings would do for a harp string?
New wires do have a different sound – I usually call it metallic. I am not very fond of the sound of the wires when I have just changed them, but the guts do sound lovely with new wires to resonate.
Yes, it is fine to change them all on the same day.
Most of the answer is practicalities, not a matter of copyright. The libraries that take part in large scanning projects own scores, but fewer libraries have collections of parts – and Verdi operas are less likely parts for them to have. The more copies of the parts exist the sooner an owner is likely to scan them.
I am sure the harp will really open up and break in with more time too – but I am not always a very patient person!
I have a couple of thoughts, one is that ‘wirey’ is a word I could use to express my opinion of new bass wires every time I change them. The other is that as well as breaking the harp in to your playing there is the process of breaking your playing in to the harp. Just as I talk about breaking new shoes in but know much of it is getting my feet used to the shoes. When I got my L&H CG moving from a straightboard Salvi I had to change my playing – one obvious aspect was putting more damping in as the new harp didn’t shut up. There were a couple of effects that were easy on my old harp and harder on the CG, including a rather bell like bass when playing open hand and medium low in the strings. In a similar musical point on the CG I may play quite high in the string with a very conscious squeeze before release in the articulation.
Do you have a teacher? Play your own harp in lessons? Asking to spend a lesson on variations of bass tone on the Salzedo might be useful.
Do you mean that they aren’t legally public domain, or that you can’t find copies to download over the internet?
I come from the other side – notes go from the page to my fingers and if you take my music away I am pretty much helpless. I know I could work to improve this, but don’t want it enough to make the effort.
A few maybe useful ideas for playing without looking:
Placing on the harp for me is all relative – as you say there are no tactile guides. What you do have is the position of the note you just played. So a different way of reading music from see an A, finger an A – perhaps closer to sightsinging. I don’t have perfect pitch so if someone transposes in giving me the pitch for sightsinging I transpose in playing. Same with the harp, if I slip a note then the patch that follows will also be out. Does it help at all to think of sightsinging the music and then playing the harp by ear?I divide note finding into two – the spacing within your hand or placing and the spacing between chords or unplaced groups.
For the first close your eyes and place an octave without worrying about which one (and all the other intervals and chords/inversions). Do you have the feeling and the spacing in your hands? In sightreading this lets you read faster as you are not trying to translate every note individually to the harp, but a whole group. If your 5ths are sometimes 4ths or 6ths then you want to think about consistent fingering and exercises on chord shapes.
Another exercise is to place a chord of whatever size, shut your eyes and play the same chord a few times at different volumes and arpeggiation. If this is a problem think about how much you are moving your arms. Expand this first by moving the chord up the harp a note at a time and then down for an octave or two. Then run up the inversions of a given chord.
Another trick I spent a while doing was relying on my laziness – I would just practice my exercises without turning the lights on, or do all my practice with only a stand light so I couldn’t really see the string colours. Try playing pieces you know in the dark – or sightreading studies and exercises with only a little clip on light. Very useful if you get inflicted with interesting stage lighting.
The other thing you mention as being an issue is fingering. For sightreading you don’t have time for trial and error. What you need to do is work out on the fly a plain vanilla fingering which works with only glancing ahead a bar or so for the outline structure. You can practice this away from the harp too. Obviously when studying in a piece you will refine this and change a fingering in the theme because something works better when it is restated later, but for sightreading you need something basic which works. Consistency is a big help – for instance a CGC chord will have 2 in the middle, but if a CFC comes up I will change the middle finger to 3. That is the fingering rule I was taught (3rd as default on a 5th) and my hand knows the spacing from all the 2nd inversion chords I have practiced. In a melody line the top notes are good markers for the thumb, and then working out where to turn for longer runs. When there are lots of options I try to group notes according to the beats when sightreading (so 6/8 in quavers would have groups of 3 rather than 4+2 or 2+4). This is very useful for orchestral sightreading as it helps hit the beats and when I mess up the end of a grouping it is more likely to be unaccented.
As Cheryl says sightreading etudes is really useful for this sort of pattern spotting – Grossi, Bochsa etc. Good for your technique too as well as more interesting than playing the same exercises everyday.
Psychology was someone else’s error where I had written physics – I am amused at the places that crops up.
One of my points was that the good sounding percentages for ST need not carry across precisely between string materials and changes which leave the %TS essentially unchanged can be worth trying. I admit I didn’t do the calculations, but some of the odder things I have put on as strings behaved very differently from my gut experience. (I can report that an 8 string ‘playable’ Pakistan made harp was improved by rubber bands.)
I am sorry for letting my enthusiasm for finding people with some interest in the science of strings take me too far in a direction you are not interested in. I can get overenthusiastic about things – in this case the boundary between scientific theory and craft knowledge or ability and delineating which is which. I apologise for questioning you – but you seemed to be completely missing the point I was trying to make, and I couldn’t see why – maybe the issue is ‘two countries divided by a common language’ and the flavour of our scientific experience is different. I respect your craft knowledge of having designed harps from scratch that work (I have never done that though I have changed stringings and must someday finish the one I put a new soundboard on) but can’t stop using my physics training (PhD) and questioning the deeper reasons behind effects.
