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I got a friendly harp technician to fit wheels to the front feet of my L&H – like the ones that are on Salvis – and am really glad I did!
Lyn, I don’t feel that stopping every time you make a mistake and going back to the beginning is a good way of practicing. Firstly, You end up with the beginning of the piece much more practiced than the end. Secondly, you have practiced in the habit of stopping at every mistake which you don’t want to do in performance. If you are playing piece through in pracice play it through – and then go back and work on all the corners than need extra attention.
Sarah, I think you probably have high standards, and also second and subsequent instruments are much faster to learn than the first. Probably you are uncomfortable performing the pieces you are currently learning – but look back to easier things from six to nine months ago. Is there anything you learnt then you could relearn and play for others? To answer your question, I would say I became moderately comfortable performing for others after about eight years of learning.
I don’t know the make/model – what sort of levers and how many does it have? If it is a nice harp in good condition that seems a good price if it has full levers of any decent sort but would attract me less if it had, for instance, partial levers of a variety that is no longer made so would need replacing if you wanted to add more.
Roger, I thought of these two old threads which you might find useful, or entertaining.
http://musicstand.harpcolumn.com/forums/professional-harpists/posts/51367
http://musicstand.harpcolumn.com/forums/professional-harpists/posts/50714I would expect the Erard 345 to have been made in 1800 (or very close). Hopefully the register will have enough of a description to confirm it is an Erard.
I have got the impression, Carl, that you don’t much like orchestral playing. I enjoy it, and would think it a great pity if composers got scared off and wrote more pieces without harp. There are too many nice pieces I don’t get to play in as it is!
Carl, I don’t think anyone is resisting the idea that a composer should know about the harp. I, at any rate, am resisting the idea that the only way, or even the best way, for a composer to know about an instrument is to be able to play it him or herself. How many orchestral composers have indeed played every instrument in the orchestra? As you say yourself, working in close collaboration with an instrumentalist has a long and honourable history. I think that having a good composer (with an ear for reality and an academic understanding of an instrument’s technical potential) being kept in order by a good instrumentalist may well give superior results to a good composer with basic ability to play the instrument working alone.
That Schoenberg was in 2004 and has faded rather in my recollection but the main things wrong with it were too many notes in patterns which were not harp friendly at the speed, too many pedal changes and too heavy orchestration. Which boils down to just about everything, doesn’t it! This is what I wrote at the time:
“My first thought was that despite being already pedalled this was a *really* bad idea as the part had me in hysterics. 12 note chords far to fast to do hand over hand, 9 against 8 (tutti ff), 10 pedal changes a bar, all runs written as octaves… This piece has the distinction of being the only one I have ever come across where the published hire parts also came with a redivision of the two harp parts for four harpists to make them more manageable, of course we only had two harpists. (I was particularly impressed with the bar in the edited parts which contained both A sharp and B flat below the range of the harp!!!)”
ETA what do you hear of the harps when listening to the piece with the score in hand and how could Schoenberg have got the same effect with easier parts?
I don’t find Wagner harp parts that bad any more – my first encounter, immolating Brunhilde with my youth orchestra, was very daunting but now I have played the entire Ring and they do have their own effectiveness. Admittedly they could do with a bit of practice and I don’t often give them that. Then there is the problem with concert organisers who seem to think 1+1=6, but that isn’t Wagner’s fault.
Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Mellisande, now there are harp parts illustrating how not to do it!
There must be even more piano compositions which justifiably have faded away – I wonder if the proportion of ‘good’ ones is any higher?
Personally, I doubt how useful a beginning ability to play the harp is when composing advanced music for it – listening attentively to harp pieces and parts while following the score is a start to developing an ear for real harp playing. [It strikes me that this may be related to all the harp parts which seem to me to be effectively written for the sound of the instrument, but then slip up and insert 10 note chords or something.] Then as mentioned finding a local harpist who will collaborate, play different things for you and discuss the effect you really want.
(Hasslemans and Faure anyone? Or, I understand, Zabel and Tchaikovsky.)
It seems to me that a large part of the art of being an orchestral composer is writing for instruments you don’t play.
A composing friend told me of a trick – draw out a 7 x 3 grid and label it up for the notes x flat, natural and sharp, then put seven pennies down for the available notes. Everytime you move a penny to get a different note write in a pedal change. How many pedal changes you can use depends on how difficult you want the piece to be for the harpist, and the easier you make it the more likely it is to be played, and played well.
Yes you do need to put the pedals in. Noting that a harpist only has two feet: one a left and the other a right. Not so much for the sake of the harpist (we all have different ideas about them), but as a learning tool for you because you need to take them into account when writing and it appears you haven’t. Bluntly, it does not look like you have written a harp part – it looks like you have maybe written a part to be played on a keyboard synthesising a ‘harp’ sound. How, for instance, is a harpist supposed to play a sustained Ab in the bass clef agains an Anat in the treble in bar 4 followed by the same problem with Bb and B nat? If you had put in the pedals this should have stood out as impossible. To write chromatically for the harp you need to develop the sort of mind that knows you need Gsharp, Asharp in the bass there.
The division between the hands is not how I would play it – harpists rely on linking between notes so I would probably first attempt the first 5 bars all in one hand. You also seem to be underestimating the sustain on harp strings, especially in the bass which will muddy up your vision at that speed.
There are several guides to writing for the harp written by harpists -both online and books by Stanley Chaloupka and Darhon Rees-Rohrbacher. I am sorry I can’t give you a specific recommendation as I have not read them.
I hope your daughter loves playing it! If you are collecting it in person you might ask for a quick lesson in tying string knots – it is easier to be shown and only use the diagrams as a reminder.
This is a picture of the inscription on a later Erard single action – the address on yours is missing its ‘great’ too and I doubt the typeface.
http://www.eagleharps.com/images/Erard_Black_Single_1269/pages/DSC_0790_s.htm
