(Tip no. 70 from “100 Orchestration Tips,” Part 4: Harp)
(and if you tl:dr this tip, it’s on your own head)
(*ahem*) The harp is NOT a piano! Do not assume what works on a piano will work on harp – much of the time, it won’t!
This is the biggest error I see in early attempts at orchestration. The composer writes out a very complex, hard-to-play part for the harp, which is essentially piano music. In order to learn it, the harpist would have to spend long hours of work, and probably cut a lot of the notes. Then the orchestrator will likely as not bury the part in the texture where it can’t be heard – not much of a reward for the harpist’s sweat and toil!
Things that are exceptionally hard for a harpist that are natural for pianists: arpeggiated left hand where the position changes frequently while the right hand plays an intricate melody. Intensely contrapuntal music, like a fugue in 3 or four parts. Music where both hands shift position frequently.
Harp is a naturally arpeggiated instrument. Things that work very well are strummed chords, patterns, big rolled chords across strings, and harmonics. Writing in which the hands share melody and accompaniment is always the most effective for harp solo, rather than having these elements in separate hands. As to harp in the orchestra, never include it in more than 20-30% of the piece, and even within that limitation make much of the part sparing – bits of color, stray plucks and chords, and odd support of punctuation of a phrase. Overuse of harp is such a danger for developing orchestrators that Rimsky-Korsakov mentioned it in his manual of over a century ago as one of the predictable phases most young composers go through. DON’T be predictable!
Harpists have gotten extremely jaded about contemporary music, mostly because composers don’t seem to appreciate the work it takes harpists to prepare a piece, and even worse, that often the harpist gets little in return for such efforts. The matter is actually made worse by the enormous amount of contemporary scores, most of which has no shelf life. A harpist would like to put her star over a piece that she’ll be able to play for a lifetime, not just in one obscure concert which will never be repeated nor remembered. So study the best of harp music, and develop new instincts about what makes for a great harp part that harpists will want to support and play many times.
The two excerpts below illustrate that even the greatest orchestrators with the deepest understanding of the craft (for their times) could still make very clunky errors. The top sample is the infamous bit of harp torture from the end of Wagner’s Das Rheingold – such a complex part that the full score puts it in the back as an addendum. Here, the harpists are being asked to change back and forth over two positions over and over again, as they do not have the five fingers (the pinky finger is never used) in which to span the part. This is one of several samples that harpists will quote when they point out that Wagner for all his greatness didn’t know beans about scoring for harp. He himself admitted as much, telling the harpists for the premiere. “You know what I want gentlemen, play that!” – in other words, fake it – which harpists have been doing ever since.
The other example contains the first few bars of the Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto. Mozart almost never used harp in any of his music, so he had little experience with it – and to make matters worse, he composed this piece for a novelty harpist, who was interested in performing piano-like figures to intrigue her audience. The result is a piece that’s often very hard for harpists, and not always rewarding on a bar-by-bar basis – in other words, some very difficult passages don’t have the most startling and enchanting effect on the audience. But hey, it’s Mozart, and it’s a concerto, so harpists have to learn it. The first few bars are exactly what I’m talking about – an Alberti bass pattern in the left hand while the right does a little fast melody. It sounds incredibly cute, but it’s not very comfortable or idiomatic for the harp. In that way, it’s the opposite of Mozart’s usual approach, which was to get into the soul of the instrument, and then make demands that increased the definition of what the instrument meant. That’s not what happens here.
Mozart actually gets it right a lot of the time. In most of the rest of this excerpt, look at the way the hands share the music, playing melody off of pattern. That’s first-rate harp scoring, and probably one of the reasons harpists haven’t tried to quietly bury this piece – despite stretches of extremely aggravating clunkiness, there are Mozart-perfect passages like these.
