Harp Bitching

[aprilstarchild]

harp pisses me off sometimes. Some high school girl mentioned that she "graduated from a lever harp to a pedal harp..." aka she went from the (usually) smaller "folk/celtic" version of the harp, which I play, to the orchestra/symphony kind of harp. Most of the time, to me those sound too...dry? Technical? Precise? Which makes sense for classical style music, I suppose.

But ....gah!! As if the pedal harp were automatically better! You can easily make the lever harp a lifetime investment where you're always learning new things. There's certainly a hell of a lot more variation in sound and tone and size and whatnot in lever harps, as there are (last I checked) exactly two companies that make pedal harps, and I know people who've played lever harp for all of a year before building one for themselves from scratch that sounds wonderful and shows their personality.

Try taking your goddamn pedal harp to a friend's house or a party or a festival for a planned performance or impromptu concert. Try busking with that $20,000 lyon and healy, which btw, I keep hearing you guys bitch about spending tens of thousands of dollars on pedal harps only to have to send them back because they're built shoddily. Interesting how you can't share your music with your friends unless you invite them over or they buy tickets to the symphony. Or how you can't skip a day's practice or you get blisters from the high tension. You'll have to practice for years before you can play in public in anything but a school performance, and after several months I was playing simple tunes for my friends and they were enjoying the hell out of it. And I didn't need a station wagon to get my harp anywhere, I just hauled the dang thing up the hill.

I know people with more than one lever harp so they can play different styles or in different places or for different people. I've taken a Dusty Strings Allegro harp on the goddamn commuter train. Lever harps are accessible--you can buy a plinky but okay one for $500, or save up and buy a professional lever harp for $6,000. You can rent a very good one for $50. I know of people who've bought one $2,000 harp and taken it everywhere and been very satisfied and had it last for years and years.

I don't know...if I had a pedal harp in front of me I'd certainly play around with it, just out curiousity. But for fuck's sake, I'd never try to buy one or decide to have that be my main harp. And the idea that only pedal harps are Real Harps (which seems to be a common attitude on harp), is irritating beyond belief.