[Harp-L] Learning, Grammar and Theory

["sam blancato" <samblancato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was the guy who posted all that stuff about being a left brained player.
I'm sorry if I left people with the impression that I don't appreciate
theory.  I do.  I know a little theory too.  I've just never had an 'aha'
moment where the theory behind what I was trying to do really seemed to help
me.  I wish I could find a learning space wherein I could process both but I
seem to be really resistant to it and it might be because I'm not too good
on the right side of my brain.  

As for communicating with other players you won't hear any argument from me
that music literacy is a must.  I have a band and it's pretty for me to
communicate what I want and I'm sure it slows us down a lot.  

The idea of someone giving a talk at SPAH about the importance of theory in
becoming a better player is interesting.  But if it goes anything like this
discussion it won't be much good.  What I mean is that simply listing the
reasons theory is so important isn't very helpful.  What a guy like me needs
is to see/hear examples of situations wherein the notes (scales) from
different modalities are demonstrated so that I can "see" the theory in
practice.  I'm not suggesting that anybody do this here; I realize that
would make for a rather tedious post and without audio examples it would be
too hard.  

A couple of years ago I bought a David Barret book called Scales, Patterns
and Bending Exercises that I hoped would help me in my effort to get a
handle theory.  It didn't help much.  Here's what the problem was.  The book
laid out every scale in every mode and the CD demonstrated them using the
piano instead of a harp.  The book showed the scales in all their modes with
notations showing the notes that were not available on a short harp - pretty
boring stuff.  At the end of the CD Barret played harp over a REALLY COOL
progression that I'm sure I would never be able to come up with on my own.
But it was only a teeny-weeny taste of what this book should have been all
about.  Simply listing all the scales, one in isolation from the other is
pretty worthless except for use as a reference.  What was needed was a
demonstration of how different modal scales can work over different
progressions.  Another angle would have been to demonstrate, on the CD,
differences from one scale to the next by giving them a context for
comparison.  This is the kind of thing what would make me care about what
scale I was working with, what chords were available in a given position,
etc.  This might make theory substantial enough for me that I might want to
hang on and internalize it.  

I posted about this book a couple of years ago.  David Barret read the post
and emailed me, saying that he too was not happy, ultimately, with this
particular book in his series for essentially the same reasons as I
mentioned above. The shame of it is that there is the germ of some really
great instruction there at the end.

My point here is that for you folks, Richard Hunter, et al, who understand
and use theory to inform you playing and performance experience, it may be
hard for you to design instruction ( and I know this probably isn't what you
want to do anyway) the works for musically illiterate adults because you
already get it.  

As for simply expressing your contempt for harp players who don't know any
theory you're off base.  Obnoxious harp players aren't obnoxious because
they're musically illiterate; they're obnoxious because they have really bad
manners and are basically obnoxious to begin with.

Sam Blancato, Pittsburgh