Re: [Harp-L] limited instrument?

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Iceman wrote:
<blues bends are unstable or hard to hit on pitch if the player is unstable. Can be done with confidence by many.

Maybe.  I have yet to hear anyone who really hits the bends, overblows, etc. with the same precision in pitch and timbre as un-altered notes.  The examples just posted by Winslow pretty much illustrate the point--the differences between altered and unaltered pitches are sometimes more subtle, sometimes, less, but they're almost always there.

I've been working on this very issue for a very long time, and I remain very, very careful about how I use altered pitch notes in a line, with good reason.  It's almost always possible to detect exposed notes that are played by altering the natural pitch of a reed, either because the pitch wavers, or the attack stands out against the rest of the line.  I tend to stay away from altering pitches when the notes involved are exposed in the line, as opposed to passing tones that don't carry a lot of musical and emotional weight in the piece.

Sometimes the musicality of the player can overcome these issues, Howard Levy being a prime example--the inconqruity of the altered pitches is less and less noticeable in his work over time.  But for most players--the vast majority of players--the incongruity is pretty intense.  I saw a video recently of a student in his early twenties playing diatonic harp with a classical ensemble, and the altered notes stuck out like red flags.  The guy had technique, but it wasn't enough to overcome the basic physics of the situation.

Those physics are as follows: when you use a different process to get a note, you get a different product, and the difference is noticeable. Bending and overblowing are important expressive techniques, and I'm glad I have them in my toolbox.  But of course they have limits.  Everything in the material world has limits.  To think otherwise is to indulge in magical thinking.  

I'm not ruling out the potential for a major breakthrough here.  I'd just like to point out that I've been following this issue since I met and heard Howard Levy in 1973, and it hasn't been thoroughly resolved in those 40 years. So maybe it can't be resolved within the current state of the art.  So if you want dead-on accurate changes in pitch, maybe it's time to try a pitch shifter.

I'm not very much interested in trying Bill Price's technique of coupling two diatonic harps tuned a whole step apart, because pitch accuracy is only one of the musical issues I need to address in my work, and I get everything I want in that regard by using altered tunings.  But I think Bill is absolutely correct when he says that his approach will produce more accurate pitching, with more consistent attack and timbre, than an approach based on bending and overblowing.  How could it not?

Regards, Richard Hunter