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But could you play right to the finish a nocturne on the strings of a snow-white harp? I plagiarized Mayakovsky’s poem purely to dive into a subject I know so little about. Namely, music. Today I am writing about harps and the fingers of harpists. It is completely a non-core subject for me.
It turns out that harpists should not stay without playing the instrument for a long time. Their fingers begin to ache without contact with the strings, and their blisters start bleeding.
That is why until recently harp was a solely male instrument. The most famous performers were also men.
However, this instrument is too poetic and divine for heiresses of the glory of Calliope, the Greek goddess of muses (incidentally, Orpheus' mother) to endure this horrible wrong.
Women could not stand it, and in the 20th century, they started playing harm, too. The harmony of music finally merged with the harmony of beauty. Who would argue that women are more beautiful than men?
A couple of days ago, I evaluated the result of this victory, looking at this charming harpist. Her name is Aidana Kadasheva. She is Kazakh, but she lives in Moscow.
I listened to her performance in the first row during a musical evening candlelight by in the Anglican Church on Voznesensky Lane in Moscow. I listened to the melodies and suddenly it hit me that it would be wrong if the music dissolved into the walls of the church and only the people who came to the concert and I would hear it. I automatically pressed the button on my smartphone to record the video.
In addition to the recording, I will tell you that Aidana's inlaid harp weighs 45 kilograms. To get these divine sounds from the strings, one has to bend it on a shoulder and knees and hold it so during the entire concert. The harp has 7 pedals by the number of notes and 47 red and blue strings.
God knows how and at what moment a musician has to move fingers along one of them, or several or all at once. God arranged everything so delicately and intelligently that Aidana's fingers slipped easily and gently over the strings, and charming sounds went into the hall.
Alas, all glamour tends to give way to the drabness of daily life.
As Aidana told me after the concert, the most unhappy people in the world of music are the husbands of harpists. They have to drag beautiful but cumbersome instruments for their muses, put them on special carts and carry them to the car.
However, I am not going to write about this mundane prose. “The beautiful must be majestic,” said Alexander Pushkin. As always, he got a really good point, conveying in four words what I have spent hundreds of words on.