The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has made all six programs of its MozartFest concert series available on YouTube until March 3, 2017. That’s over eight hours of music available for your viewing and listening enjoyment. Here’s the link for the “Mo-Fest BingeFest playlist.”
You can also see works by Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Bruckner, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and more on the Detroit Symphony Orchestra channel. Click the Videos tab to see what’s available.
What a fantastic lineup! There will be a preconcert presentation, “Mozart from Practical to Sublime” at 7:00PM EST. And if you’d like to brush up on how a harp works before hearing the delightful Concerto for Flute and Harp, you can read my harp post here.
Jageurs has set up a website called 15secondharp.com. She also posed a challenge: she would create a video of any notated harp music that anyone composed and submitted, and post the video the next day. However, the music can only be 15 seconds long (Instagram limit).
This is brilliant! You can see the submissions on the website, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Jageurs comments on the submissions, explaining what works well, which components might cause difficulties, and why.
It has been so successful, she has had to limit the number of recordings that would be produced per day, but all submissions in the queue will be recorded.
Add this to the quartweet (the 140-note string quartet) as an achievable and accessible way to encourage composing.
Ready to try but need to know how a harp works? Jageurs has also posted brief videos on the range of the harp, how the pedals work, and how chords and glissandi are played. Useful articles on composing for the harp may also be found here, here, and here.
If you submit a harp composition, let us know! I’m sure everyone would love to hear it.
Music of angels.
If I make it to heaven,
I’ll need harp lessons!
You can see the harp there, at the edge of the orchestra, ornate, gleaming, golden, a serene harpist seated there, adding those key elements that make the music glisten. On rare occasions, you’ll find the harpist center stage.
So many strings! How do they tell them apart? If you look at the strings of a harp, some are red, some black, some white. The red ones are the note of C, the black ones are F. Still, there are six and a half octaves on a concert harp to keep track of. But wait, there’s more.
Now that I’ve learned how a harp is played I’m reminded of a saying:
Be like a duck: appear calm on the surface, and paddle like hell underneath.
That serene harp player is pedaling intensely where you can’t see. At the foot of a concert harp are seven pedals (one for each note of the scale) that can change the pitch of the strings as needed. A mechanism shortens the length of the string to raise the note by a half step or whole step. So, like an organist, the harpist is using hands and feet to create those golden tones. Sort of like driving a vehicle with manual transmission while typing from a manuscript and trying to thread a needle at the same time. Oh, and you should probably look up at the conductor every now and then too! In the video below, Amy Turk offers an quick inset video so you can see what her feet are doing as she’s playing (at times 3:55 and 6:10)
Catapulting into Classical 