May 2000: Adapting Music For Harp:

Unit 2: Choosing A Piece That Will Work For Harp

Much as we would like them to, not all pieces will adapt well for our instrument. In the popular genre, most of the music is designed to be played with a different instrument taking responsibility for the various parts of the piece. For example, bass carries the bass line, drums carries foundation rhythm, guitar fills in the chordal sequences and voice or a solo instrument carries melody. Sometimes, it is simply not possible to combine enough of each of the elements necessary to get a piece to sound even close to what was intended by the composer or the original arrangement. So how do you choose?

FIRST CONSIDERATION: What type of harp do you play? If it is a lever harp your first problem will be key signature and then accidentals. If the music is in an accessible key, fine. If not it will have to be transposed and that is yet another lesson. If there are a lot of accidentals in the melody, or a lot of complex chord changes, you may need a pedal harp (no offense, but that is why they were developed) and even then if the nature of the material is very chromatic (lots of accidental changes) it might pose too many problems for harp. I recently did an arrangement of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Girl From Ipanema" - wow what a challenge. There were places where the chord changes simply could not be achieved without omitting some moves and without them the thing just does not sound right. Fancy foot work is fine but too much simply detracts from the ease necessary to the style.

SECOND CONSIDERATION: Look over the melody to see if there are a lot of repeated notes. Melodies are often written to accommodate words thus the notes may repeat according to the syllabification of the text. For example think of the tune that accompanies the following nursery rhyme:

Mary had a lit-tle lamb, lit-tle lamb, lit-tle lamb----etc.

The notes that accompany "lit-tle lamb"" are repeated to fit the words.
This would not be as comfortable a melody for harp as the one in the following lullaby:

Rock-a-bye ba-by on the tree top ---etc.

...which has a flowing melodic line and would play more easily.

THIRD CONSIDERATION: Look over the chords. These are usually noted above the melody line as guitar chords. It is not always necessary to use all of the chords. Some serve as passing tones and might not be missed. But if your instrument cannot accommodate the chords that are essential to the harmonization of the piece, you have two choices. First, if using a lever harp, can you play the problem chords omitting perhaps one element (the one that requires an impossible lever change)? Sometimes you can set up your harp so that an accidental is played only in one region of the strings but not in another. You avoid that particular string throughout the piece and hit it only when it is needed for the problem chord. Admittedly this is complicated and should be done later on after you have become familiar with setting easier pieces.

See you next month.

Stephanie

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