Fwd: [Harp-L] Legatto:Slide or breath pattern?

["Winslow Yerxa" <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's really situational. 

But to back up for a moment, the whole question of breath pattern and 
its connection to legato is not as straightforward as you might 
imagine.

It's true that the most straightforward way to create legato is to 
play a sequence of notes without interrupting the breath flow. 
Changing between blow and draw puts the brakes on the airflow and 
slams it into reverse. How can you do that and still play legato? 
There are ways of doing it, and there need to be - not everything can 
be played without changing breath direction.

But that's a separate discussion. Let's go back to the C/F question, 
and assume that for legato purposes, maintaining a breath direction 
is desirable.

Consider these three note sequences involving F:

D-F-A  (all draw)

E-F-G (all blow)

But then we find situations where the choice is not so obvious:

Eb-F-G

Do we phrase Eb and F together as draw notes, or F and G together as 
blow notes. Which are the two most important to connect in the 
context. Where do the strongest rhythmic emphases lie in the 
underlying meter, beat, and beat subdivisions, and where are the 
accents in the melody itself? Do we want to phrase strong-to-weak or 
weak-to-strong?

Now look at some contexts for C:

A-B-C-D-Eb

Bb-C-D-F

All the above - and shorter fragments of them - can be played all 
draw.

But what about:

Bb-C-Db

Again, do we phrase Bb-C as draw, or C-Db as blow. Once again, where 
are the strongest rhythmic emphases in the underlying meter, beat, 
and beat subdivisions, and where are the accents in the melody itself?

As to the other question about which is easier to "compensate for": 
if you mean which is easier to execute physically, it's a tradeoff.

Moving the harp to a neighboring hole and/or the slide between in and 
out requires small movements and small muscles of small objects (hand 
msucles, the harp itself, the slide button). Changing the breath 
direction involves very large muscles, the large gasbags called your 
lungs, and the considerable weight of about a gallon of air.

But two other considerations come into play. First, the most complex 
combinations of motions will be the hardest to coordinate. A breath 
change all by itself may be easier to execute than some combination 
of hole and slide change, despite the greater physical effort. Also, 
slide-and-hole change combinations sometime just feel slippery and 
hard to nail down in time while breath changes can have the feeling 
of concrete points easily grabbed.

Winslow

--- In harp-l-archives@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, r_mcgraw@... wrote:

Interesting discussion of Toots, corner switching, etc...here's a 
question,especially for  Bonfiglio, Winslow, Rob P, etc..
Can a generalization be made about  how to play  C and  F in terms of 
playing legatto or is it always situational? In other words is breath 
pattern or slide usage eaiser to compensate for? [Hope my question 
makes sense?]
WVa Bob
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