¤ milky moon ¤

Finch - that's completely right! Depending on what instrument you were "raised" on, your conception of music changes. The breaks on a clarinet are totally different than the ones on a trombone, and something like oboe has a couple fingerings that are actually the reverse of the clarinet.

You could take the same piece of music and show it to a clarinetist, violinist, a pianist, and a trumpeter, and they will all perceive it differently - different spots for breaks, different places of difficulty, etc. But that's what I love about it nothing is ever the same depending on how you look at it!

last one for now i promise - on the way a harpist would think about key signatures and accidentals. closer than anything, perhaps, to the way a singer would.

Yes, you're right - a singer will play the tonic chord to find the starting pitch, but they don't have to really think about accidentals if everything is diatonic.

I'm not sure I understand your last post. Bridges & Balloons is in G-flat major, and there ARE F-naturals in that key.

Now, in Sprout & the Bean, which is in C-flat, there are a couple of D-flat major chords. In C-flat, all the Fs are flat, but in a D-flat major chord, the Fs are natural, so there is some pedal action there, but it's only that one pedal that moves.

If you listen to it on MEM, you can actually hear the string change from F-flat to F natural right after she sings "When you go away." On a related but confusing note, this also reveals that Joanna was not trained in the Salzedo harp method (but I already knew that from watching her play), because Salzedo teaches you to change pedals right on the beat where the changed note appears - but in S&tB, she does it BEFORE that note, which is why you hear the string change.

Actually this make me want to start another thread about accidental harp noises in JNew songs.

Long story short, when JNew first started writing songs, she left the pedals set in their most resonant key - the key of C-flat - without regard to the best range of her voice. As she wrote more music and dealt with vocal nodes and became an all-around more practiced singer, she learned what fits her voice best, and started setting her songs into those keys. When she first started out, she wrote songs that fit the harp best; over time, she started writing songs that her voice the best.

Although it still doesn't explain her preference for D major on her piano songs. Even the original Peach Plum Pear from Walnut Whales is in D (minor in this case, though it drops a half-step to C-sharp minor on MEM and down another step to C minor when she plays it on harp).

I'm pretty sure - 100% actually - that there are no F-flat in Bridges & Balloons. However, there are no Fs AT ALL in the song, so we don't really know WHAT the F pedal is set at. it could be flat, it could be sharp. However, based on the tonality in general, I highly doubt that Fs would be flat if there were in the song - it doesn't fit the key AT ALL, although she does this in Cassiopeia - which has a totally different feel in terms of overall tonality, even though both use G-flat as the tonic pitch.

I understand what you are asking, and you are right - it's impossible. You can't do a chromatic scale glissando either for the very same reason. This also reveals how little composers actually know about the harp (Debussy and Copland, I am looking at you).

100% you reckon? how about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv4A6_EPo9o (1m35)

(i only know this because it was part of what she was doing with the song - incorporating that f♭ rather more, i mean - when i saw her a couple of years ago and it really surprised me for exactly the reason you cite! i looked up some other versions when this one didn't load for me for a bit and it seems it was a passing phase, so i understand!)

I think that's just a mistake on her part. She is playing on both the E and G string around that particular F string, she only hits the F string twice, and the second time she hits it, it twangs - my guess is she missed it the first time and tried to correct it for the second time but missed slightly, hence the twang. She doesn't play it again after that.

It DOES reveal, though, that she leaves the F pedal alone, but I still think the piece implies G-flat major (with the assumption that the F would be TECHNICALLY natural, but since it's never played she just left it flat).

There are other places where she does this - the only example I can think of from the top of my head is in Have One On Me, during the "Ooh ooh" section. It's tonic is technically a B major chord, but because the progression is B major - D major (as opposed to D-sharp) - A major (as opposed to A-sharp), a couple things are implicated:
-the only time an A is played is during the A major chord, so the A pedal will be set to natural the entire time and not moved - this is also useful since all the As in the preceding and following sections are natural
-the D is natural for the D chord, but must be sharp for the B chord, so the D pedal is toggled
-F pedal is sharp for both the D and B chords and from the last chord of the previous section, so the F pedal is set to sharp and doesn't move
-C pedal is sharp for the A chord, and all Cs in the following section are sharp, so it is set to sharp and doesn't move
-No G is played in this section, but it is played as natural in the last chord before this and in the first chord after this section, so it is left in natural position
-Also, the flatted seventh (the A chord) implies B mixolydian mode, but the flatted 2 for the D major chord suggests either B dorian (except the Ds are sharp in the B chord), or that the D major chord is really V/bVI - not that that matters, but analysis is fun, and I think it is borrowed!

SOOO... knowing all those things - where you are going, where you are coming from, what notes are present at what aren't, the "Ooh ooh" section of Have One On Me is TECHNICALLY grounded in B mixolydian (because of the A naturals) with a borrowed chord (because of D major chord), but the PEDALS are set to D major - F# and C# only, with a toggling D pedal. This makes the most sense since the section after it, the swoopy arpeggios, is in D major and it would be the easiest pedal change to make, AND the chord just before this section starts is a Cadd#4 (C major chord with an F-sharp). That means that all she has to do is kick the D pedal to sharp for the first chord and kick the C pedal to sharp sometime before the A chord - which she has 8 beats to do. And after that, it's just a movement of the D pedal and nothing more. And when she gets to the swoopy section again, all she has to do is take the D pedal back to natural.

I love puzzles : ) But it's also convincing me that the F-flats in that Bridges & Balloons video are just an accident, and were probably left flat because there was no need to change the pedal (though maybe after this little accident, she started setting it correctly JUST IN CASE... ).

hehehe. i'm super glad you're nerding as much as me. wish i had a recording of the gig i heard - i swear, but i can't be certain, that 'catenaries and dirigibles' was definitely and deliberately built round the flat 7th!

it's fab though, the idea that there's a different way of thinking about modulations in harp music, really (for a pianist it's about shifting the 'pedal' in your mind, using different scale positions if you see what i mean - remembering where your new accidentals are - but for harp it's all externalised, you send your foot to the pedal and work round that).

so i'd've imagined that wanton modulation (!) on the harp is pretty rare and you'd choose to modulate to keys which involve as little movement as possible - except in monkey & bear i'm always stunned how thick-and-fast the modulations (and pedal changes) are! pragmatically they MUST move to 'nearby' keys of some sort, i know, since you've only got two feet and probably only one at a time ( ) but it still stuns me that someone would write in so many pedal changes one after another! harmonically it messes iwth my brain too...

If you get into real harp repertoire, it's terrifying - the Krenek Sonata has like 300+ pedal changes. Most videos of harp rep on YouTube only show the harpist's hands, but they are practically tap-dancing down below. It's NUTS to watch!

Cosmia has some wicked pedal changes in it, and although she does it cleanly on Ys, you can hear a lot of mistakes on the Ys Street Band EP - during the "Why've you gone away?" section, everytime it changes from B minor to B flat major (every four measures, or four beats since it's in 3/8) you can hear her miss a pedal/be late on a change. But I don't blame her - you have to change three pedals, which means one foot has to move two in less than the span of a second. I only got the hang of it for a little while before I left school and lost harp access (sad day).

Yes, of course! And Joanna totally ISN'T, but I don't think her style of music would work as well if she were (you can't prepare if you're just making stuff up the whole time!).

For those of us in the uneducated masses...What does it mean to be "Salzedo"?

Salzedo was a harpist from the early/mid 20th century who developed his own method of teaching and playing, and it basically revolutionized everything about the harp (with the exception of construction, though there is a "Salzedo model" harp which is just boxy and art deco). He also invented 37 extended techniques (non-standard ways of playing or producing strange sounds), standardized notation for compositions, and almost every major American orchestra employed one of his students.

As far as playing technique goes, he had a very particular approach to hand position and how to move around the harp as while playing. If you are trained in the Salzedo method and watch Joanna, it's clear that she doesn't follow it. Of course, she could very well have been trained in Salzedo and that her playing style is just the result of other circumstances - I don't know - but my initial assumption is that Diana Stork is from the other school of harp teaching, which isn't standardized and varies from teacher to teacher. Like I said before, Joanna improvises a LOT so that could change things - though I still suspect that she wasn't trained in Salzedo.

Thanks.