choose your instrument

Today I squelched my way on around the back garden, spreading my last three bags of soggy mushroom compost on the ditch bed, and pulling up an enormous number of stems of ivy.  The ivy lurks at the perimeter, outside the rabbit fence, and sends invading tentacles in through the netting.  They pull up in a highly satisfying manner, provided they aren't left so long that they thicken beyond snapping size and root along their length, but it requires a degree of contortion to wriggle in among the shrubs to reach them without trampling too badly on the emerging snowdrops.

I had to drag myself away from the delights of the garden an hour earlier than usual to go to the music society's concert.  A young flute and harp duo were playing in the village hall.  Not our village, you understand, which doesn't run to anything as exotic as a music society, but one I borrow for social purposes.

The full blown concert harp is an impressive instrument, and its owner told us a little about it in the second half, before performing some Faure.  It has seven foot pedals, used to alter the tuning, which are connected by rods running inside the post to a mechanism inside the bridge across the top which contains over two thousand moving parts.  It is extremely heavy, she moves it herself, it will fit in a large estate car but not on the train.  There are only two manufacturers of classical harps in the world, in Germany and Chicago, though there are a few UK manufacturers of Celtic harps, smaller and lacking foot pedals, which is what everybody starts learning on.

I suppose you take up playing the harp because you like it.  She began lessons when she was six.  It's in the lap of the gods, which instrument is going to seize a musician's imagination and become their life's work, but the gods gift some people an easier life than others.  Suppose they gave you a passion for the clarinet, a portable and versatile instrument, capable of being carried around in a small bag and handy for a bit of jazz or klezmer on the side.  Or the violin, portable and allowing you to augment your income playing in the string section on pop records.  But no, some are gifted with a passion for the harp, or the double bass.

If you play the piano you aren't usually expected to bring one with you, though the music society's next visitor is doing just that, importing his own 1828 Georgian piano in a special temperature controlled van.  The flip side is that your hosts have to provide one, so you probably end up playing on some terrible instruments, and your opportunities are constrained by whether they can afford a piano.  When the music society committee is planning the year's programme one of the factors taken into account is whether or not we'll need to hire one.  There again, if you opt for a chamber music career with your violin most organisers aren't brave enough to programme an entire evening of solo Bach partitas, so they are going to have to stump up for piano accompaniment or book an entire quartet.