Chocobo Harpy

If you love shopping for sheet music, you will love MusicNotes. It is priceless to be able to see the sheet music and hear a soundbyte before purchase. I think it saves money not to have to buy a whole songbook, and the selection is evergrowing like Wikipedia. It's one of life's joys that a largish amount of piano music can be used as harp music--my funnest find recently is a two pager called "Chocobo's Theme." It is from the video game Final Fantasy. Hear it on YouTube. I can't play it this well yet but on the harp it sound light, sweet, and whimsical.

Tab

Performing for children needs to be a good experience from the get-go. Ellery sang a solo at her baptism and I wanted to make sure she had every chance to have a good time. We prepared for months, sang in front of whoever happened to be sitting in the music room at any given time, and I made her sheet music user friendly. To turn the page easily, I taped a file label to the pages which I soft bound. Keep the music as much like it is during prep--she was used to looking at the sheet music so I didn't retype just the lyrics for her or put the music in glossy page protectors (both things I was tempted to do). The best thing we did is to focus on how fun it is to do music and when some nervousness comes, just sing to Dad in the audience. It worked and she had a good first time.

Collections

The Nativitiy Exhibit is coming up. I have a love/hate relationship with this event--too labor intensive but the finished product is so nice. Several LDS congregations in our area compile and display nativities from all over the world and open it to the public. Some ladies have around 80 (or more!) sets they have collected through the years. What do you collect? Email me a pic and I'll post it. I would like to collect harps--the one above has been added to the top of my wishlist. I also would collect Havanese dogs if I had hired help to groom them. 'Tis a chore!

This one can play! The Israeli harp competition is the cream of the crop.

Performance Day

Since Grail doesn't fit. . . in this. . .
we borrowed our friends SUV so I could play at church. I knew I had a good husband when he tipped the harp on its side, slid it carefully in the back, angled it and said, "She'll be alright just like this." Watching a harp laid on its side is like looking at a horse lying on its side. It's not totally uncommon, but you want to make sure it can get up again and it shouldn't be like that for very long.

The piece went well with no mess ups and good expression--and my friend said my face looked like I was in my happy place. Now, Ellery and I will work on a piece she wants to sing for her baptism, also Grandjany's 'Automne' and after that is Christmas music. Fun!

Here is my list of positive affirmations I used this time:
*Everyone loves to hear harp music, especially all the children
*I know this piece so well
*I am calm and happy
*It's ok if I am slow and careful
*I can see all the notes on the page and all the strings clearly
*I can breathe easily all the way through the piece
*After I play so well, I will swim in my pool

Performance Ready?

Sometimes if there is a piece that is haunting, in a minor key or has a mystical quality, and there are no key changes or lots of incidentals, I will play that piece transposed a half step down just by leaving pedals in flat. I sharp the F pedal since this piece is in the key of G which brings it to natural (was about to say neutral--I'm not driving a car, jeez). It will sound different to the audience but they won't know why. This is one of the hidden cool things about a harp.

In the space of 5 lines, the piece wants me to dampen the strings 4 times. Since I have to dampen them more on pg2, I took one out so it's not so choppy.

On pg2 the piece calls for both hands in the treble clef except for a 4 measure foray into the bass. Since this is a solo piece, I think staying at the throat of the harp for so long is boring. People like to hear a build up and that can happen in the belly of the harp. Sooo, add octaves and extra notes in the top hand, and bigger broken chords in the bottom.

The end of the piece is haunting with the harmonics. Rolling the final chord seemed to juvenalize it too much, so I'm opting for a solid chord. If playing in a larger space, this many notes may sound jumbled (learnt this from them gregorian chants that use large interval (5ths) to make clear haunting sound). So I take out the G# in the bottom hand. I think the soft, solid ping at the end works better after the harmonics. Instead of X'ing things out, harpies might like to use white out--like if I were less lazy, I would white out the lever change prompts--see 'em in those parentheses there?-- and make a neater copy. I play in 2 weeks--wish me luck.

Strung Up Too

Your can ask your harp tech next time he/she's in town (mine is the one and only Peter Q Wiley) to give you some spare anchors. They are great to have around. If "knot," cut 5th octave strings 1 1/4".

The two knots that then you knot again.

Slide the anchor in and pull hard on the string going towards the harp.

Pull it through the hole--as you pull, the knot will tighten around the anchor--a flashlight is helpful since most harps are kept out of direct sunlight.

The Spiney Neck.

I like to use my teeth to keep the long end out of the way while I am wrapping the pin. That way, one hand can turn the tuner and the other can guide the string into the hardware on this side.

Tune to full on correct pitch, the string can handle it. Pass by it 2-3 a day and tune. Leave the tuner on your bench and leave the extra string long to remember which one it is. If you don't have early onset Alzheimer's like me, cut it and be grateful for your short term memory. It is an amazing instrument--thousands of pounds of pressure on each string. I guess I feel an affinity toward things that are high strung--Arabs (the horses not the people-although they seem high strung as well), harps, artistic geniuses. Tension this way makes something beautiful. My "string" broke at CubScout Daycamp after Soren slept in and made us late, which made me late setting up (in the wrong spot-not his fault), which made the first group unable to finish the DaVinci parachute craft I had for them. Then Soren said, "You should be grateful I'm here helping you." (Hence, breakdown #1) 300 boys came through my station. I taped, talked loud, took questions, tried to keep paper from blowing away in the wind, and tied about 1200 pieces of string (which I should have done the day before). When we got home, Ellery very calmly told me that since I was in such a hurry to leave, she was not able to go back to get the father's day gift she had made for Cyler at the totlot, and that's why it's hard for her to breathe without crying now. (Hence breakdown #2).

Strung Up

Grail already has a G string (raise eyebrows twice, then wink) but her B string finally came in the mail today. The knot is the thing I always forget. Check here if you do too.

How Do I Harp

Let me count the ways. When I want to learn a harp piece and get it ready to perform, I first take a trip here. I am playing a piece in August, an English Melody my religion knows as "If You Could Hie to Kolob," and for Christmas, "Bring a Torch Jeannette, Isabella." Thanks Mom for the sheet music for both of these. How to get great sheet music should be a topic of future discussion. Copying your music gives you license to mark away during practice with fingering numbers, reminders about dynamics, changes in chords/notes if you want, and of course, pedal changes. And then you always have a perfectly clean original to copy for others, or to look nice in your repetoire book.

I copy each sheet separately (one sided), then overlap them side by side and tape them so they stay together on the stand and fold together easily. So then I run through the piece and pinpoint where it gets messy (pretty easy to figure out early on). Either there is tricky fingering, pedal changes, tempo/rhythm issues, tough intervals or busy work in both hands. In this piece I have two messy parts.

Above is where the RH fingering gets tricky, the tempo is quick and the LH is busy.

Above is messy part #2. I have to pedal change from 2 sharps to 3 flats within one measure. I can't change the C and A and E (jeez!) too early as they appear in the measure right before the key change. On my copied piece I can work out the hairy details, erasing and changing my mind to my heart's content. And these parts are the parts where I start practicing--not ever at the beginning. That will come in time.

PS'd: Grail broke a string today--the same one I changed a month ago. I think it was me, not her. So a tutorial in string changing would be useful!