Last week, after some truly ridiculous stuck-in-Texas, too-high-winds, unfortunate-words-with-airline-personnel, eff-this-I’m-getting-in-the-effing-car, disaster-areas-in-Connecticut moments for janus, Beth and I met with Cornell composer Kevin Ernste to record sounds for a piece he’s working on (To be premiered on April 28th at Cornell!). We had a pretty good time, as his approach to the harp is totally fresh. Essentially, it is what it is, a huge box with vibrating strings on it. And all the strings work the same way-you can pluck them, bow them, rub them, hit them, even blow on them (although it takes a pretty gusty wind) and they produce tone and overtone (see Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ for a lesson on vibration (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTM48pwoXAo)…um, ok, so on watching that for the first time in…15 years?...it is not exactly how I remember it. But yes, that is essentially what you see when I play the harp. HA!)-you can find various harmonics by dividing the string into equal parts (called nodes) Anyway, after getting some notated passages from both the viola and the harp, that is exactly what we did. Beth was kind enough to allow the use of her bows to play around with overtones, and we set up the harp in a yoga studio with some resonant wood floors, after which we stomped and yelled and tried all sorts of crazy shite to get the instrument vibrating. Kevin let out some pretty impressive full range yells into the back of the sound box, which was surprisingly effective with a close mic. All in all, a sort of fantastic exploratory experience into an instrument I thought I knew pretty well, but haven’t even started to discover…can’t wait for the results!
