Harpblog

MIDI harp day at the Royal Academy of Music, London

On January 26th, Camac's MIDI harp will be travelling to London again for a day at the Royal Academy of Music.  At 2PM, Jakez François and Dominic Murcott will present the MIDI harp.  They will explain the instrument and explore it from the perspectives of both composers and harpists, take questions from the floor, and finish with a performance-improvisation for MIDI harp and laptop.

Admission:  free!

photo:  Yvonne White

 

 

You can read about  the creation of Camac's MIDI concert harp in the following interview with Jakez François.  This interview originally appeared in the Spring-Summer 2009 edition of our quarterly magazine, Harpseasons. 

Florence Ledi:  When and how did you hit upon the idea of making a MIDI harp?

Jakez François:  It was when I was a teenager, and my parents gave me my first electric Camac harp. This was a lever harp, one of Joël Garnier's famous electroharps. At the time, I was playing synthesizers a lot, and I was always going to music shops to try new instruments. It was also around then that Yamaha brought out their famous DX7, one of the first synthesizers with a "dynamic touch" (meaning at last dynamics could be played on it, pp and ff, like on a piano). Above all, it was a MIDI instrument! Thanks to MIDI technology, we could control synthesizers from other synthesizers. This meant we could play ten or more synthesizers simultaneously from one master keyboard, extending the range of available sounds still further. But the biggest revelation was the of the first Roland guitar synthesizer. What a shock I had, when I realised that you could convert the audio signal from a string into a MIDI signal - thereby controlling all the sounds from the synthesizers which fascinated me. So I began to dream of a MIDI harp. It was exactly twenty-five years ago...

transformations

Amazingly, on the same day as the Midi Harp launch, Jakez received the following quote from Cristina Braga.  She had found it in Tournier's La Harpe (1959):

"Progress transforms so many things! What sensational musical metamorphosis will emerge one day...Could not the violin, the harp, the flute become as powerful as trumpets, while retaining the individual expressiveness of their tone quality?"

Midi sneak preview

This is the first prototype of Camac's new Midi Harp, which is going to be launched at the Camac Harp Days in London on April 1st, 2009, 630pm.   It's

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Camac’s Blue Harp is both an acoustic instrument (with a soundbox;  unamplified, it sounds like a normal concert harp), and an electric one with a pickup on every string.  Camac’s Midi Harp is similarly both an electric harp – its first output is for normal amplified harp sound – and a midi instrument capable of 500 different sounds at the touch of a string.  It is also possible to mix the two, layering harp sound with piano, or trombone, or rock guitar, or percussion.  168 sounds can be programmed within the harp at any one time (removing the need to connect the harp to a computer until you want to change the settings). Midi frequencies also allow for amazing new effects – a tuning key glissando can be set to produce a pitch bend, as on a normal acoustic harp, but also to produce a perfect chromatic scale.

The harp’s musical possibilities really do seem greater than ever before.