Subject: [Harp-L] Symphonies & Harmonica

[JON KIP <jonkip@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

there is one piece by Gyorgy Kurtag, called, I believe ".. quasi una fantasia ...,” a piano feature, that uses five chromatic  harmonicas. Here's a link to a description of one performance of it. And I'll repeat the link below in case things work better that way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/arts/music/philharmonic-opens-season-at-avery-fisher-hall.html?_r=0

The only way I know about this is because I played it about eight years ago, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic..... really fun to do... if you read the description you'll see that parts of the orchestra were placed all around the venue ( in my case, Los Angeles' Disney Hall), and the 5 harmonica players were dressed as concert-goers and sat in audience seats. Lots of weird time signatures, I think I used four different keyed instruments, to play all the chords that were written. 
The players for that gig were Tommy Morgan, me, Bill Barrett, Michael Burton, and Ron Kalina.

a fun time, to be sure.

I think there are not enough compositions that use multiple harmonicas to warrant keeping a harmonica section on the payroll of any orchestra, since most orchestras these days can't even afford a normal count of players.

jk

http://jonkip.com





On Jul 11, 2013, at 7:10 PM, harp-l-request@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Subject: [Harp-L] Symphonies & Harmonica
> 
> 
> I'm curious--I've seen a few examples of harmonica used as a solo instrument backed by a symphony (I think Boris just posted a recent example), but are there any symphonies that employ more than one harmonica player at a time as a regular part of the musical ensemble (I guess it would be something like a harmonica "section" or part of a "reeds" section)? If so, is this simply because the harmonica is not a traditional symphonic instrument? Would it be drowned out without amplification of some sort? I know very little about symphonies and classical music ensembles, so I'm sure many of these questions are over simplified or just ignorant, but I was curious about the historical, social, or harmonic reasons why the harmonica is usually only featured solo with symphonies.