twang twang twang - MUNICH

those were the days

Tee hee!  Jessica writes:

"A post at Sequenza 21 about Palestrina takes me back twenty years to heady (and chillier than now) days at Cambridge University, where all music students had to learn to write 16th-century counterpoint... it kept us out of all-night parties, dangerous drugs and, worst of all in the faculty's eyes, daring to practise our musical instruments."

You see, had Jessica done English, all she'd've had to do was write the odd book review and pretend to understand Anglo Saxon before skipping through the dappled parks to all-night parties ivory hours of harp playing. 

Schadenblogging

If any of my ex-lovers are reading this...

en danger

Andrew Adler of the Louisville KY Courier Journal has sent me this press release from Harps Etc:

"Once considered an "endangered species" of the music world, one of civilization's most ancient instruments is making a comeback.  Harp sales, lessons and rentals are up nationwide and new harp music is being published at a rapid pace.  Popular musicians such as Joanna Newsom are helping to rekindle interest in the instrument, as are the renewed popularity of Celtic and Appalachian Music and old Blues. In the past, few people had exposure to the harp unless they saw it at the symphony, in the movies, or at a wedding or party.  Finding a harp and a harp teacher were daunting tasks... harps have become more affordable and that harp teachers are more available. ...Parents report that playing the harp helps their child feel unique and special...The instrument provides a constructive outlet which builds self esteem, self confidence, improves academic achievement and engages the student in a worthwhile recreational and social activity."

How about that?  Perhaps, had I not spent my youth at the harp, I would be a delinquent by now, selling drugs out of a black Bon Jovi rockin' merc;  instead, praise be, I'm selling harp music out of a navy Bon Jovi, etc, subaru with dents on it where I crashed it into the Barbican artists' entrance. 

Seriously though, it's great that more people want to learn, and it is nice to be unusual.  And my thanks to Andrew for this press release, for it has jogged my thoughts on the harp's position in a professional context, too. 

As "endangered species", though, we have to watch out - not for fear we'll die out, as it seems there are many infant harpists, hurrah - but to guard against insularity, which is the enemy of high standards.  There are places, for example, where the harp teaching is shocking - but still the students win local prizes because the examiners suppose this is what good harp playing is:  they have no other yardstick.  There are tart things one could say about what is going on in plenty of music colleges across the world - because the professors don't know, or don't bother to find out, or don't care how the level is in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Indiana. 

Assuming you wind up in an excellent conservatoire where you are trained to the highest international level, you have to present yourself on the concert platform.  And what do you play?  Before you is a violinist with the Spring Sonata.  Afterwards, a singer with Winterreise.  Are you going to play the Parish-Alvars Voyage d'un Harpiste en Orient?  Or some Welsh Victoriana by John Thomas, a composer never forgotten by anyone who's read Lady Chatterley's Lover?   

We have wonderful, searching repertoire;  but we also have a lot of rubbish.  Because our repertoire is smaller than a fiddle's, we are both always on the look-out for lesser-played music - this is good - and more likely to be convinced that Dans la Forêt du Charme et de l'Enchantement is a really major work, sadly neglected:  that is deluded.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing lesser-known music, but it has to be good, rigorously judged:  the 1959 Ben-Haim Poeme, for example, is a devastating work, although it is not much performed.  And the way we play all our music, famous or not, has to be equally rigorous, with the sort of musicianship no violinist could get away without. 

We are musicians, after all, as well as harpists.  We will always be unusual, and that will be enough to attract some people.  It is better still to be unusually good. 

straw poll

Tom, finding me downloading Bon Jovi on Itunes, is not sure our relationship can continue.

AND WHAT EXACTLY IS WRONG WITH BON JOVI?

Answers in the comment box, please.

auf dem Resonanzboden

Harrison Birtwistle's new solo harp work, Crowd, is richly made.   It has the sort of aggressive emotional force still too often lacking in the harp repertoire - if I want fairies, I will search among the fag-ends at the bottom of my garden.  Alongside the drama are finely woven textures, so touching because they are at once ethereal and well-made:  like Eliot's Chinese jar, moving perpetually in its stillness.

Birtwistle's powerful contrasts are deliberately composed modally, to involve very few pedal changes.   Harps are like pianos, a bit, with a similar range and stave,  but every time we need a black note, we have to change our pedals - and then we also have to damp, to avoid the changing slide being heard.  It is a mechanical process, both at odds with the of-the-moment absorption that is most musical (even at our most ecstatic moments, we have at the back of our minds, "and in a minute I must apply the D#"), and with the primal resonance of the harp.  Unless we damp the strings artificially, they resonate beyond our control:  not exactly for a minim, or a breve, but for some time after we have set the note in motion, until the vibrations slacken off and the music dies. Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden." 

Crowded as the work is, many-coloured, the title also refers to the Old English crowd, a generic term for plucked stringed instruments.  According to Birtwistle, the title mirrors the harmonic structure's interest in the essential, the fundamental:  the resonance at the harp's heart, and the earliest instruments. 

Birtwistle's concept, of resonance being the harp's most important aspect, has been playing about my mind as I work on Faure's Une Chatelaine en sa Tour, one of our best pieces.  It is also one of the most difficult, with pianistic figurations that require an outstanding hand to sound well on the harp, and famously fiendish pedalling (some people have totted up the pedal changes.  I have always been too busy doing important other things, like, I don't know, finding rose-patterned folders to store my tax returns in, but anyway, there are a lot;  even twang twang twang has been known to cock them up very occasionally). 

Difficulties aside, though, Une Chatelaine is also so much to do with resonance, full of long lines, harmonic echoes, and half-damped twilight connections.  If you can pull them off, they create ethereally noble music, refined, so fine:  romantic and impassioned too, at the wild denouement where you have to pull the harp to its limit without once twanging it too far. 

You need so much control (in Crowd, too) to allow these resonances to sing:  to give exactly the right amount of tone to each string, or to create resonating dialogues (between treble and bass, or  different notes within the hand).  This is what moves me, the control of the resonance.  The harp'll resound, after all, if I fall over it and knock the soundboard;  a baby at a wedding can make the bass wires sound OK by strumming them fistily.  It is only though tight control that the resonances can become complex, or deep:  Paul Lansky's "symphony of resonance", where "Things we do and experience have resonance. It can die away quickly or last a long time; it can have a clear center frequency or a wide bandwidth; be loud, soft or ambiguous. The present is filled with past experience ringing in various ways."

 

poor Tom

Tom is back off the NYC red-eye and staggering about his office before going off to work this afternoon.

He:  Helen, there is a harp in my office
She:  A teeeeny one, yes
He:  I thought all extra harps and harpists were leaving by 2pm
She:  I need you to carry it down the stairs...

Every so often, I feel guilty.   

triplet

Three harply moments to heave twang twang twang back into the swing:

• Something I didn't expect to come across in Cieszyn was one of Munich-based harpist Evelyn Huber's Tango Lyrico concerts, with Mulo Franco on saxophones and clarinets.  Imaginative, wide-ranging and immaculately performed:  order the Tango Lyrico CD, or better still, catch one of their dates.
• Harrison Birtwistle has written a great new work for harp solo:  Antonia Schreiber and I went down to see him today before Antonia premiers it in Rostock on Friday.  Toi toi toi - more  nach der Auffuhrung. 
• If you can get down to the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff tomorrow night, catch Isabelle Moretti's stunning solo recital, also heard at the RAM on Monday.  Olympic technical mastery aside, such fine musicianship applied to the harp, such power and drama and imagination, make one feel glad to be alive.