Harp

[cdybedahl]

Had another harp lesson today. This time I brought my own harp, since my teacher asked me to last time. It was kind of interesting to hear her played by someone who actually knows how. She doesn't sound any worse than the big-ass concert monster at all, just different. More, well, perky is the best word I can think of for it. Got a small bit of music theory as an answer to a couple of questions I had, and was fascinated. The human hearing apparatus is deeply weird.

Comments

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

Music theory always does my head in, to the point that I've managed to pick up practically none. I know it all makes sense if you get into the mathematics - cadence works because of shared Nth-order harmonics, for example (IIRC) - but the basic stuff, with notes, scales, keys, etc. just seems entirely arbitrary without any of that backing, so it never sinks in.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

A fair part of it seems to be simply terminology ("When we play like this, we call that a fnurgle."). That makes sense to me, mostly. The thing that boggled me the hardest today was the fact that if you end a melody on the same note you started it, that's heard as a satisfactory ending. End one note higher and it just sounds wrong. This is, apparently, an effect that's embedded in the brain's hearing firmware. And that's just weird.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

fnurgles never make sense to me...

...but as it happens, I tend to think of the endings of stories in the same manner as the endings of pieces of music: depending on the piece, you need the sudden ending, all of a repeated refrain, a long sustain, etc. Otherwise it just sounds wrong, too.

In the 13th Ed of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, Brian May says of The Beatles' _I Want To Hold Your Hand_:

"[It] has a brutally exciting and arresting opening which defies to locate the 'I' for the first few listens. The end of the middle eight, of course, gives the clue later in the song. What appears to be the 'I' is actually half a beat early."

He then waffles on for a bit about lyrical harmonies.

Amusingly, a few pages earlier, John Peel is going on about _Teenage Kicks_: "Brevity, simplicity, exuberance, honesty. There's nothing you could add to or subtract from it to improve it."