Wednesday 26 January 2011

sold loads of tickets :)

Next concert at Clayton Village Hall (BD14 6QN) on Saturday 5th February - 8 pm
with Eddie Lawler http://www.eddie-lawler.co.uk/
Tickets £5 in advance and £6 on the door. info@tripleharps.com or tel 01535 642581

I have just returned from a wonderful place, hidden on the second floor of an old Mill in Keighley! They call themselves The Big Soup Theatre Group and have a cafe and a huge stage with gorgeous purple velvet curtains, purple chairs, purple window curtains and big purple plastic daisies stuck on the wall ... My sort of place. Should have taken my harp 'Purp-Al' but it is undergoing a re-furb at present!

I was greeted in the corridor and the concert started before I had taken my coat off. In fact - I never did take it off!!! I was having 'one of those days' and had exactly 12 minutes to get changed and ready for stage ... which I did ... I scraped my hair back into 'spanish' style with a black net bow, amazing ceramic earrings - a gift from Brazil, red taffetta bustier and black leggins. A wrap round long 'flamenco' style matching skirt was to go on after I had carried the harp in! It stayed, draped over the back of my chair throughout!

Such enthusiasm and rousing applause from the audience - the years of 'all-nighters' making harps on the kitchen table were worth it. I have still to fit the mechanism for bells alas. They are spread out in the kitchen, taking up most of the worktop - but having tried a few different ideas I have at least worked out HOW to do it ...!

Friday 21 January 2011

of mouses (mice)

For next concert details please see next blog down!

Having a problem with 'mouses' at the moment. They sneaked into the house in the cold weather and have settled all over the place. To my horror I discovered evidence of one in the grand piano. The top of the piano is covered with bits of paper, sometimes manuscript, but usually old receipts and anything I can grab when a tune comes into my head. This can be anywhere - at the shops or on a walk across the moors. I try and hold the tunes in my head but past experience has shown that writing notes down is the best way.

A mouse ignored all the chocolates I received at Christmas and decided instead to chew my notes on some Arabic music I heard at the proms. Little bits of paper are now stuck inside the piano. Todays job is to slide the action out and using very soft dusters, lengths of wire, tweezers and pliers, to totally clean out the inside.

My daughter decided to use a humane mouse trap in the cold weather then got soft when it was time to release it ... yes she did actually let it go outside the back door so it came straight back in and ate through her ski trousers ...!

Dave stayed up to the early hours mending my computer so I am indebted to him right now - it sprang into life at the touch of a button - WOW! I am taking lessons from him. My computer skills are minimal and my children haven't stopped laughing yet for ringing them up, literally in tears of frustration, because I couldn't get anything to work. It never occurred to me that you put the palm of your hand on top of the mouse so I was using it upside down ..... whoops!

Monday 17 January 2011

Ang-Al and Dav-Al

Next concert - Sat 5th Feb 2011 - 8 pm - Clayt0n Village Hall, BD14 6QN - £5 in advance/email us on info@tripleharps.com or tel 01535 642581
with Eddie Lawler, www.eddie-lawler.co.uk There is a bar!

I have just had an hour's practice. I have a lot on my mind so ended up playing 'the blues'! I am still sat looking at un-finished harps. The phone keeps ringing and there is generally so much to do. I am not sure how I ever managed to build so many in the past! Hopefully tomorrow ... I have, however, managed to get the extra string on Ang-Al so I can play a new tune! I have spent a long time getting this tune together (it was written in the 9thC by a Roman) and tonight I finally played it right through and was happy with it. I started playing it in another key but struggled at speed to dig my fingers into the inner strings (like the 'black' notes). I changed the key and ended up with one note short at the top! The great thing about making your own harps is you can get the drill out and add another string!

You may be wondering about the names of the harps. All the names end in 'Al' - my kids idea after they ate and did their homework under the first harp made of Aluminium. Ang-Al is actually for Angel and has names written down the back of people who are sadly missed - it starts with 'Dad'. Dav-Al is finished in jet black/glitter car paint so it reflects different colours in the light. It has been constructed with fibreglass, has no strings on it yet but I can't wait to hear what it sounds like!

Friday 14 January 2011

Yorkshire Ridings

Next concert February 5th, Clayton Village Hall (BD14 6QN), with Eddie Lawer (The Bard of Saltaire) - 8 pm - £5 in advance - info@tripleharps.com or 01535 642581 (there is a bar)

'Didn't know farmers listened to harps' - This was the greeting at the hotel the other night. 'They do now' - I replied. It struck me that they actually had no choice as I was the booked 'Speaker'. Nearly a hundred farmers came down the fells and valleys to attend the dinner. I must admit I got a few 'looks'. Once I turned up to give the after-dinner speech and the Chairman (who hadn't booked me) took one look and decided he would 'take the stage' and give a very long introduction with a lot of very bad jokes ... I brought the house down with the 10 minutes I was left with. 'Leave them wanting more' - oh yes!!!

I proudly announced that this was the fourth time I had been booked to speak at Farmers Supper Clubs to which the reply was 'What, didn't they listen the first time?' - We had a good laugh and there was a brilliant attempt at Pachelbel's Canon when I handed out some small table-top harps.

Today we got a call from Roy. His article had been published in the Yorkshire Ridings magazine. By dinnertime I had already taken a booking - thank you Roy! (page 38 if you want to read more ...)

Monday 10 January 2011

from Russia ...

Next concert with Eddie Lawler on 5th February in Clayton Village Hall. (with a bar!) 7.30 pm and £5 a ticket in advance.

Greetings to the several hundred people in Russia who checked out the website yesterday, and the person from Korea. Amazing! I love checking the website stats! Russia was one of the few places in the world who had the skills to make the Orchestral Harp right up until the 70s. I used to do a workshop for visiting children from Chernoble and they were always amazed at how 'small' my harps were! They had never heard of anything other than the large pedal harp and treated it with awe. They all knew of a small stringed instrument which we call a psaltry or cimbala. It is triangular and sits flat on a table-top. All you need is a sheet of paper with 'blobs' on that slips under the strings. Follow the 'blobs' and it guides you up and down the right strings to make a tune.

They also told me of the radio stations in Russia. Apparantly there's no separate station for different music - you get Tchaikovsky followed by U2 - a mixed bag all the time.

I managed to get a bit done on the harps today. I have been learning a tune from 9thC Armenia and needed one more string in the treble ... so I got the drill out and put another on ...

Friday 7 January 2011

guido fawkes

Next concert - Clayton village Hall, nr Bradford, 5th February

We have awoke to snow again ... Supposed to be in Clitheroe this evening but we haven't been stuck in yet, fingers crossed!!! It does mean squashing the harp into a small suzuki jeep though and I am limited to one harp at a time! Over Christmas I had to call upon a neighbour for help and the harp ended up sticking out the back window - brrrrr, freezing. Not only that but I was playing in a shop and the door kept being left open. Amazingly there is a video on Facebook and You-Tube (Cobbles and Clay, Haworth 12th December) showing no signs of the frozen fingers! I was at the limit of coldness that night.

Over Christmas my sister and husband surprised us all by booking 3 rooms at the Inn where Guy Fawkes was born. The staff were very proud of their ghost - hmmm - they didn't realise we lived in a house dubbed 'the most haunted house ever' by West Yorkshire Paranormal Society ...! We wandered round York in the snow and watched the ducks huddled under the bridge in the only small patch of unfrozen river water. My sons set off to find St Mary's car park and nearly drove through open gates straight onto the river thinking it was the car park. A small sign of a car toppling into water was spotted last minute!

Off to get some harps finished - Hand-Al sounds so sweet already but needs decorating and 3 more strings! (The trouble with trying to make a small, transportable harp, that can deliver my repertoire.)

Monday 3 January 2011

Minus 20 below

The temperatures on the car dashboard varied considerably between Malham and Haworth - we spent most of Christmas week travelling between the two. I think Haworth had it colder - we clocked -20 on a regular basis. Most of the houses near us in Haworth had no water for 10 days but we managed to stave off a disaster. My husband and three sons worked round the clock for 3 days to stop it freezing. The pipes in the house were slowly freezing, creeping closer and closer towards the kitchen. Heating, Rayburn ovens, log fires etc did nothing to stop it. We had one toilet still working and one bath. A tap would work and we left it running only to find 10 minutes later that it had frozen up. We had heat lamps, electric heaters, hair dryers, duvets - you name it. In the end we had to put pipes overland lagged with 'muck' and hay and left the water running on full. Pipes we mended and lagged in the morning were burst by lunch.

Tragedy occurred in the hen house. They have lived in the same hut for about 4 years but this year we went in and they were all sat on the perch frozen ... Very sad. Only 4 survived.

The roads near us were beautiful - totally white. The trees coated with frost. My daughter has a huge choice of photos to use as Christmas cards next year but I think the best was the pheasants and moorhens in the garden taken through the frosted window.