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These days my gig bag is much lighter thanks to the addition of an IPad. I have put almost all my music in there, it has an electronic tuner, several apps that can record, and the ability to look up almost any reference material I need.
Some of the other things I carry I haven’t seen mentioned are a small flashlight, a bottle of water, a Swiss army knife, and a small first aid kit.
I can’t help it, I was a boyscout once.
Plus all the typical stuff, including strings. Lot and lots and lots of strings.
I don’t know if there is any etiquette about it. There are basically two reasons for using picks or pads.
One is if it is hurting your fingers when you play. There are some pieces that have many glissandi in them, and if you are learning or playing pieces like that a lot it can wear on your fingers, so picks or pads can save you a lot of hurt.
Second is to get a specific sound. Sometimes you want a very specific tone that your fingers can’t produce but that picks made out of various materials can.
It isn’t a matter of etiquette. It is simply a matter of using the best tools to produce the results you are trying to achieve.
Although anti discrimination laws don’t protect you in this case, consider that if you were being hired by a company with 15 or more employees it would be illegal to refuse to hire you just because you were pregnant.
Even though in your situation as basically a contract worker being hired by a private individual that law doesn’t cover you, the ethics of it are the same. So long as you have a reasonable expectation of being able to perform the work you are being hired for then not only is your pregnancy status not their business, but if they didn’t want to hire you just for being pregnant then THEY would be the ones acting unethically (even if technically legal in this particular instance).
No, you aren’t obliged. So long as your contracts are clear and your backup is included in that so they know what will happen if you can’t be there for any reason, you have covered all your own ethical obligations.
Think of it this way. If I had an engagement to play one weekend and the previous weekend I had plans to go skiing, am I obligated to tell that to the person hiring me? After all, I probably have as much chance of falling and breaking my leg skiing the weekend before and being unable to play the engagement as you have of going into labor three weeks early.
I have to agree with Kreig. At least as far as Jazz goes which is what I primarily play. I have never met a jazz musician who couldnt read music. I have never met a jazz musician who didnt have at the very least a strong foundation in fundamental music theory.
Sure, you have to be able to feel the music. But you don’t play jazz if you don’t understand exactly what you are doing. At least not well.
LOL, Ray is a very perceptive guy.
These comments remind me of an episode of Cheers where Cliff is trying to tell a harpist that the harp was once played like a guitar, because those old time troubadours had hands the size of small dogs.
People rarely refrain from commenting on things just because they don’t know what they are talking about.
I was thinking the same thing as Kreig. Basically just comment that yes, they come in all sizes and that the smaller sized ones can often do the job and are easier to transport.
Put it into practical terms that make the size an practical advantage and they will get it.
My take:
Women’s Instrument: I always heard the Marie Antoinette explanation as well. Historically the harp was an instrument associated with men. The Druids and bards have the association with the harp. At the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, which is famous because it is when Bunting began notating the harp repertoire of Ireland, out of the 11 competitors there was only one woman.
But around that same time Marie Antoinette took up the harp, and as was typical in those days, what the queen did the women of the court followed, and so the harp became an instrument that became associated with women.
I don’t know if that is “urban legend” or if it is actually fact, but I have read it in a few different sources and it does not sound unreasonable to me.
However, I think there are far more male harpists than most people realize. Not a majority, but still a lot more than the public tends to think about. And besides, what really makes an instrument a man’s or woman’s instrument? Gender doesn’t play a part in making music on any instrument I know of.
While the image that might jump into most people’s minds when they think of the harp is a woman in a gown playing a gilded harp, I don’t think that it is all that surprising to people to see a man playing the harp.
I know I have never received any negative comments about it, or suggestions that I shouldn’t be playing the harp because I am male.
I think it might help that, although if you mention the harp people might first imagine a woman playing it, if you ask the average person to name the first famous harpist they can think of more times than not they are going to say Harpo Marx.
While the female association with the harp probably does put off some potential male students, I think that is happening less and less these days. I think more and more boys are choosing the harp, and that the stigma of being a male harpists is mostly in people’s heads and doesn’t translate to the real world as often as people think. Not that it doesn’t ever. Some brides just have the image of walking down the isle to a harp, with the very specific image of the gold gilded harp played by a long haired woman in a flowing gown.
But I think far more often than not it is the music that matters more to them and while it happens I don’t think it happens often enough to be considered a serious problem.
It is also worth noting that in some parts of the world, specifically South and Central America, the harp is still primarily an instrument associated with men, with far fewer women playing.
You have to be rich to play one: Clearly a misperception. You can get a decent lever harp for under $3000. While not cheap, and while that may put it out of the reach of someone who is poor, it is not out of reach for the average middle class family. While it is more expensive to start on harp than many instrument (a student flute starts at around $500), almost any high end instrument gets into the same range as a high end harp (high end professional violins and flutes can easily hit $20,000).
So the cost of becoming a professional with a professional quality instrument might be high for harp, it is no more so than with many other instruments. But starting costs do tend to be higher than for other student beginners, and I am sure that discourages many. Even if they can afford the cost they might not be willing to shell out that much money without knowing if the child is really going to follow through with it. Few options to rent than with other instruments also probably contributes to limiting the number of people who consider it a possible option.
All harps are gold: Clearly not. Personally I don’t care for gold harps. Aside from the fact that I don’t really like the look of them it is just that much more expense on the harp and gives you that much more to have to take special care and worry about on the harp. I see lots of harps these days used by professionals that are not gold gilded, from more contemporary use in things like jazz, to more traditional settings like in orchestras. The local symphony uses Salzedo model harps, which I think look fantastic in an orchestral setting (not to mention sound great).
For those who like them, great. But I, for one, am glad that these days there are plenty of options that don’t involve gold or other excessive adornment.
Weddings: Sure, harps are a common choice for providing the music at weddings. But they are far from limited to just weddings and symphonies. If anyone needs their perception of the harp as being limited to those settings broken just bring them to see Deborah Henson-Conant or Park Stickney, or Monica Stadler, or Edmar Castaneda, or Athy or any number of other contemporary harp performers, most of whom probably haven’t played a wedding since their student days, if ever.
Good point. Also a larger harp simply is more versatile and there is much more arranged music that is playable on them. On a lap harp you often have to make alterations to the music to make everything fit, such as inversions of chords in the bass. That’s fine if you understand how to do it, but for a beginner who may not be familiar with the music theory necessary to effectively adjust the arrangement to fit a smaller harp it could be a road block.
I have never heard anyone ever complain about having too many strings, but I have about having too few.
Lap harp just refers to a harp small enough to sit in your lap. It may or may not have levers. These usually range from about 19 to 25 strings depending on the size.
Lever harps are harps that have levers on the neck of the harp under the bridge pins that can be engaged to raise the tone of the string a half step. Using the levers you can change keys (although not to every key), and play some accidental notes.
A lever harp can be a lap harp, or it can be a floor harp (a harp that stands on the floor). It can be virtually any number of strings, but the largest typically are around 40 strings, and on average most are around 34 strings or a little less.
Lap and floor harps can be made without levers at all, in which case you need to manually retune the strings to change keys, so no modulating keys at all while playing, and the music you play needs to be diatonic (no accidental notes, only the notes that exist in the key).
A pedal harp is a harp that has seven pedals along the base of the harp that the player engages with their feet. The most common type of pedal harp is the double action pedal harp, which has two different levels of engagement for each pedal. Each pedal corresponds to one string in the octave. Engaging a pedal to the first notch raises all the strings of that note one half step. Engaging it to the second notch raises another half step.
The pedal harp allows you to play in any key without retuning, and also allows you to play very chromatic music that is hard to impossible on a lever harp.
What kind of harp to chose depends on many things, from your budget to the kind of music you want to play. The smallest pedal harps are around $10,000 US. Lever harps can cost anywhere from a few hundred to $10,000 if you want something custom made with hand carvings and tons of extras.
You can get a decent floor lever harp of about 34 strings for between two and three thousand, and a really good one for between four to six thousand US dollars.
Levers add an fair bit to the cost, so if you know you will be playing styles of music that use limited keys and few to no accidentals you can always get a
What the others said. If it is not an issue retuning to get into the right key to begin with, there are actually a lot of books of music that is diatonic. A very large chunk of Celtic and traditional folk music is diatonic.
You can try Sylvia Woods books of Celtic music. She has books of Scottish music, Irish Songs and Irish dance tunes. Most of them have two versions, one easier than the other, so they can accommodate both beginners and intermediate players.
I have an 85P. I don’t know how significantly different it sounds from the GP or the extended, but it sounds great. I have had a few professional harpists, including one of the harpists from the San Francisco Symphony, tell me it has a really nice tone and a big voice.
I’m very happy with
I think “emotion” is as good a thing to call it as anything, although some of it might not necessarily be emotion specifically but, lets say, environment or context, such as isolation or wistfulness (maybe that counts as an emotion, but I always considered it more a state of mind).
It is about having a message, and often that message is emotional in nature, at least for the performer. The composer can more easily put other elements into a piece. Ultimately the message of a piece of music is the message that the composer is trying to convey, which is why it is important as a performer to understand the music.
But there is that part of the music that requires the musician to put in something else other than the notes in order to put that message in an emotional or experiential context so that it can truly resonate with the listener.
Singing is a very good example. I think that most audiences can tell when a singer is emotionally connected to what they are singing, or when they are just phoning it in. With out the intermediary of an external instrument the content of the singer’s performance is very raw and stark before the audience, and it is hard for a singer to fake their way through a performance.
But the same applies to other instruments other than the voice.
Passion may be there, but passion is just one emotional context. The musician has the full color palate of emotional context to work with, from the blatant to the subtle, and being able to evoke anything along that spectrum is what makes the greatest musicians so great.
Already done. The Camac DHC Blue Light
http://www.camac-harps.com/camac-harps-eng/dhcbluelight.html
But because it is a solid body it is still not lighter than the carbon fiber floor harps (just as the wood solid body electrics aren’t lighter than the wooden floor harps). It weighs in at about 11 lbs.
Still, I held Deborah’s at a concert a year or so ago and it is significantly lighter than my wood bodied 30 string Camac baby blue electroharp.
