Re: [Harp-L] re: Take five

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With all the talk about this piece, I thought I'd spend a little time last night playing it on the C chromatic.  When I did, I was surprised to find that I'd forgotten that my preferred approach to this piece is to use corner switching (playing out of both corners of the mouth, shifting tongue position to open or close the corner) to cover the various leaps.  The corner switching approach minimizes the difficulty of those leaps, of course.

That may be why I said in a previous post that "Take 5" doesn't have a lot of leaps in it. Actually, it does, and if you play those leaps with a single-sided approach on the harp, whether via puckering for single notes or tonque-blocking, it's not all that easy.  So I withdraw my comment to the effect that it's a great tune for a diatonic player to start with on the chromatic.  (I'll say instead that it's a great tune for practicing corner switching on the chromatic.)

That said, I still think the chromatic is the preferred instrument for this tune.  Any problems you might have with leaps on the chromatic are going to be present on the diatonic, too, and even more difficult if you have to jump to an accurate bend (or double bend), which you certainly do if you want to play this piece in 3rd position.  As an added bonus for the chromatic player, in Eb minor on a C chromatic you have a huge variety of chords to play with in every octave, so you can get a lot of textures that just aren't there on the diatonic.

Regards, Richard Hunter