Gliss Fest

A day off for me today, and a chance for my fingers to recover!

I've just spent the last two days rehearsing and playing in a concert with the RLPO consisting solely of music by legendary film composer, John Williams.

Great music, and great harp writing. Fun to play, but - a very hard slog to play a whole programme of his music, and with some very tricky passages of harp writing thrown in too.... Close Encounters symphonic suite, Schindlers List, ET and then of course there are loads of glisses, and loads of different types of glisses.

Who knew there were so many?

Scary glisses - low circular gliss on the bass wires at the beginning of Jaws.

Spooky glisses - Harry Potter

Irregular big solo glisses - my least favourite, as you need to keep counting like mad to stay in the right place in the score but still play a gliss that is not in tempo - ET

And then you have everything in between. Slushy romantic glisses - Superman, to big strident glisses - Raiders of the Lost Ark. Making sure that they don't all sound the same, but are in the right character, right key and the right place.

Hats off to the Hollywood harpists who do this sort of thing all the time!

I'm pooped and having a day off from playing before doing it all again on a repeat concert in Liverpool on Saturday.

trio42

I should be doing my accounts right now, but instead just found this great YouTube video of dutch harpist Remy van Kesteren's trio42 playing César Franck - Trio op 1, no 1, Andante con Moto

Brilliantly arranged and played music for harp, saxophone & violin.

Can't wait to get the CD!

I think the easiest way to get hold of it is to download it from CDBaby here

Practice timetables for young students

A new year, a new start. This week it's all been about practice timetables with my students.

I'm a big fan of less and more often, rather than a big splurge of practice a day before a lesson.

I find with many of the young people I teach, harp is just one of many instruments and extra-curricular things that they learn. It's genuinely a bit of a nightmare trying to fit practice in with everything else they do.

Once someone has "the bug" then you'll never be able to get them off of whatever they are doing. My son has the music bug, and can be playing his bass all day if he didn't have to go to school.

But how many people ever really get "the bug?"

So, until then - practice timetables.

I recommend 3 practice sessions a week, plus a harp lesson, and 4 practice sessions a week if there is no harp lesson that week.

A practice session is 20 minutes and consists of

• 5 minutes warm up exercises / scales / arpeggios
• 10 minutes work set by teacher
• 5 minutes FUN! This can be anything: improvising, trying out different sound effects, playing through some pop songs, or just playing through some solo pieces previous learnt. Whatever is found to be fun by the student, and is not set by the teacher.

This can be scaled up into longer practicing sessions but it should remain near enough in the same time proportions and order.

Exercises, scales and work set by the teacher are easy to do when practicing but it's the "fun" stuff that can sometimes can be left out of daily practice.

Why do people want to learn an instrument? Because they want to have fun.

Fun = Enjoyment = wanting to play / self motivation, and it's that self-motivation that will lead to improvement.

20 minutes may not seem a lot of time to recommend, but it's do-able to fit into a young person's schedule and won't frighten them off from practicing more regularly. Personally I think it's better than that quick burst of practice the day before the next lesson!

And you never know, they might get the bug.......

summing up

Well, how was 2011 for you?

I've found it a pretty interesting year harp work wise, not quite as doom and gloom as I thought it would be at the beginning of 2011..... Lots of very last minute work came in, and I continue to do as many different different harp projects as possible in a bid to continue making an income from being a musician. Fingers crossed it doesn't all go pear shaped in 2012!!!

After my rant about the price of petrol in a previous post, my brother-in-law did some calculations for me and worked out I would be saving a massive £250 a month if I bought a diesel estate car. So I'm going to do something creative with my finances and try and raise some money to get a new car asap.

I've got a tour coming up starting mid January with Katherine Jenkins and I must get a new car sorted before then, otherwise I won't be able to afford to pay the petrol bills for all the travelling.

So far the most economical MPG estate car that I have found is a Skoda Octavia, but I don't think I'll find a cheap enough one second hand. My Volvo does only 24.9 MPG so quite frankly anything diesel with 4 wheels is probably going to be cheaper to run.

At least I don't have to find a car to transport this harp (-;

Double chromatic harp, ca. 1890

Here's to good health and cheaper petrol in 2012!

Merry Kissing aka advanced lever harp rep

I've been teaching harp for years and years, and until about 5 years ago I always found that my students once they got to about grade 4-5 standard they moved from a lever harp to a pedal harp. I'm ashamed to say I didn't really know any of the high intermediate to advanced lever harp repertoire at all.

So for the past few years I've started exploring the advanced lever harp repertoire and there are some really good books out there! I particularly like Kim Robertson's book Treasures of the Celtic Harp. Brilliant arrangements that cover from Grade 5 to Grade 8 with some really fun tricky ones thrown in as well.

This one, Merrily Kiss the Quaker is one of favourites.

student minor key charts

Thanks to a cancelled rehearsal and some unexpected hanging around time...... finally - here is the minor key chart for setting harp levers. Covers harmonic and natural minors Grade 1-5.

As with the majoy key charts, double click on images to get large version.

Also a chart for helping students to locate the correct octave name for ordering replacement strings on their harp.

Don't you wish you played the piccolo?

For the past 20 years the answer to this most quoted question to harpists has always been a polite chuckle.

But with my local petrol station now selling fuel at 135.9 pence per litre, perhaps it's time to rethink my usual answer to that "piccolo" question with a "yes".

I'm based in the North West UK, but am currently doing a couple of days work in Scotland. The very nature of my work takes in a wide geographical area and I rely on my gas guzzling volvo estate car to travel around the country.

Without my car, I cannot transport my harp. Without my harp, I cannot work.

Simple equation.

Before that other old chestnut saying trips off the tongue - "Why don't you get a proper job..." I (like every other professional musician) am highly trained and skilled and, in my case, have been doing this as my job for twenty years. It is not a hobby, it's what pays the mortgage and feeds and clothes my kids.

It would be nice (in theory) to swap the harp for a piccolo, which you could pop in your pocket and just jump on a train after a gig, somehow avoiding the crippling cost of petrol which now is barely covered by the fees for the work you have just done.

Except of course, unless you live in London, there are no trains that run across the rest of country late at night when the majority of gigs finish.

So in answer to the "piccolo" question, it would still be a "no".

I do however really wish I could afford to replace my gas guzzling volvo estate with a new fuel-economic hybrid estate car. Except of course I can't afford a new car.

Maybe I should prop up the economy and buy one on credit?

This blog was inspired by listening to some idiot economist on Radio 4 actually arguing for an increase in petrol prices as it was a "fair tax" that would only affect "rich people who drove gas guzzling cars when they could be using the bus".

Wicker Harp

Nice harp, shame about the string tension!

Recently spotted in lobby of Venue Cymru whilst I was doing some work with Ensemble Cymru a few weeks back, which involved a lot of last minute learning of hard chamber music - Bax Concerto for Oboe, Flute & Harp (with string quartet) and Gareth Glyn's Gig (for same instrumentation as Ravel Septet). Great music, and a lovely bunch of musicians to work with.

The original strap on harp

Wow - that's way to go for more gigs..... tap dancing shoes!

this plus lots of really crazy harp photos - including victorian nude playing a Pleyel chromatic harp and Cary Grant playing a Lyon & Healy (yes really!!) on blog by Australian harpist here

alimandolin

One year on....

a much missed friend and musician passed away on this day; a very sad and poignant anniversary.

Over £16,000 has so far been raised for the Alison Stephens memorial fund to set up a prize in her name at her alma mater for the next generation of musicians to benefit from. A rather lovely and fitting tribute to a very special musician who touched so many lives.

Never forgotten x