I am a total harp enthusiast and believe we are so very lucky to be playing and enjoying this fantastic instrument. I hope this book will first and foremost provide you with new music to enjoy. I also hope that the exercises will help you work on challenges and technique, and enable you to move forward playing the pieces with flow and beauty.
Suggestions on how to use this book
As you are already aware, there is no shortcut when learning the harp, if you want to learn to play with flow, control and a beautiful sound you have to work on your technique! Whilst quite often we can ‘pick out a tune’ on the harp relatively easily, to really enjoy playing with flow and flourish as musicians we must spend time learning how to place, hold our fingers and squeeze the strings to really create music.
For each piece in this book you will find a page of music to look at before you start. I have taken small snippets of the music and turned them into exercises to help create the time and space for us to focus on good posture, technique and sound production before we get engrossed in playing the full piece.
If you practice these first, each time you practice before exploring the whole piece, then it should enable you to learn the pieces faster and with a great technique! Hurray!
For each exercise, you will find a brief explanation of what to focus on. There are brackets to show the placing in the first example each time, that can be copied for the rest of the exercise. Please follow the brackets very carefully and play them at a slow comfortable speed so you can really saturate your brain and fingers with what you need to be doing to play with the most beautiful sound.
A note on fingering
“How many harpists does it take to change a lightbulb? Six. One harpist to change the light bulb and the other five to make suggestions about their technique!”
The fingering in this book is there to provide you with initial ideas and suggestions. Please do not feel you must follow what is written. There are, in places, some particularly unusual choices of fingering, as the intention of this book (and my “START HARP” online learning program where the materials originate from) is to help develop and explore different ideas and possibilities. For example, you will find in this book fourth finger slides that could easily be removed and played 321-21, they are simply there to provide practice on that technique. Feel free to change anything that does not work for you and follow the advice of your teacher.
Contents
Welcome
How to use this book
A note on fingering
Four-Thought
Hazel’s Harmonics
Waltz it all about?
One in a Trill-ion
The Keel Row
* Scarborough Fair
* Shepherd’s Prayer
* Procrastination Blues
* Skye Boat Song - Including “10 left hand accompaniment ideas to get you started”
** Bryn Melyn
At Kingcombe
* A Cheerful Goodbye
BONUS PIECE! * Seren Fach