Silent in the Corner

I've just realized that I have not sat down and actually played my harp, really played, for over a year. Um, where did the time go? How sad is that?? In point of fact, I actually have a broken harp string, 3rd octave B, and I have yet to change it (even though I did order the replacement string from Vanderbilt and it has been sitting there on the corner shelf for about two months).



At least my music stand is there. Most of my music is still disorganized and packed away in a box somewhere in our cottage (not part of the house). I have plenty of exercises that I could be doing to get my fingers back in shape...I'm pretty sure my Fruh book is sitting over there. I actually even ordered some Christmas sheet music, because I really do want to play this year at church for Christmas. However, I am being realistic and giving myself seven months to learn it and practice!



I miss my harp teacher. She was a bit acerbic but she knew darn well when I hadn't been playing and would rap my knuckles (figuratively speaking) when she knew I was flubbing along and just making my best effort, having not practiced my pieces for a week. She even had a gold pair of nail clippers and if my fingernails were too long and hitting the strings as I played she would say, 'Ahem' and hand them to me, and wait patiently while I clipped the offending nails, the remnants disappearing into her carpet. (As an aside, she was a very tidy person so I don't know how she stood having students clipping their fingernails over her carpet all the time but I guess she must have vacuumed a lot!)



I do miss playing. I feel somewhat disconnected from it now, and I look at my harp, which is really quite beautiful, and it seems almost surreal that I can actually, you know, play it. Sort of like something I did in a fairy land and now that I'm a grown up and SAHM I couldn't possibly have time for THAT. Well, I want to have time for that.



Part of the difficulty of course is that my darling daughter is intrigued by it, so whenever I have the cover off she is right there, twanging the strings and wanting to stand on the pillar and 'play'. If I start playing, she rushes over and starts twanging along with me, which frankly I can't have while I am trying to remember to hold my hands properly on the strings and also sight read music (which I still suck at) and figure out the tempo and oh yeah remember there is a pedal change there oops...yeah. I can't have anyone distracting me, or it just gets incredibly frustrating and fruitless really quickly.

I wish I could figure out a solution here. My life right now does not lend itself to regular practice at the same time every day, and even with naptimes the problem is that I might well wake up the kiddos if I were to start playing. It doesn't sound exactly melodious when I'm learning a piece! I don't even know where my tuner is, and I'm using my back-up tuner with a metal clip that I have to clip to the tuning pins. Hmmmmm. I bought this great book of Selah music, and it has this awesome song, "Rose of Bethlehem", that I would love to play for Christmas. But it's arranged for piano (yeah, good luck finding stuff arranged for the harp...don't even get me started on that, even with Sylvia Woods' catalog it's like a needle in a haystack) so I will probably have to do some changes to make it work for the harp. And that is work, and time, and well, I'm sort of short on those two things nowadays. Suggestions, anyone?