Dealing With Accidentals as a Lever Harpist

If you play a lever harp, then no doubt you’re familiar with the experience of trying to play sheet music that’s not written for lever harp. Maybe it’s piano, maybe it’s pedal harp, and it has way too many accidentals. Sharps, flats, and naturals all over the place.

And what are you even supposed to do with that?

I’m very familiar with this struggle and I’ve even made a course all about how to arrange the songs you want to play on your harp, and that includes making something lever harp friendly.

So today, I’m going to show how to deal with those pesky accidentals and make that sheet music actually playable.

Requirements for a lever change

When you see an accidental in your sheet music, that means you have to change the pitch of that string by flipping a lever on your harp. In order to be able to do that, the note must meet 3 requirements:

1. It must be a note that you can access with your current tuning. So take note of all the notes you can play with the levers, and all the notes you can play with levers up.

   If the note you need doesn’t fall in that group, you might be able to use an enharmonic spelling.

   Enharmonics are notes with the same pitch, but a different name, and in this case, they’ll be played on a different string. For the most part, a sharp and the flat note name above are enharmonics. So F# is the same as Gb, A# is the same as Bb, etc. The exceptions to this are B and C, and E and F which are separated by a semitone, so B# becomes C and Cb becomes B. You don’t need to memorize the theory though, you can just reference this list of enharmonic equivalents.

   If you can’t play the pitch on your harp, and you can’t use an enharmonic, you might want to consider transposing the piece to a different key.

2. There has to be enough time for the left hand to reach up and change the lever, so there needs to be a rest or a long enough note in the arrangement.

3. You must be able to change the lever at a time when it’s not going to interfere with any notes before the notated accidental, and be able to change it back before it can interfere with any notes notes after it.

So if I need to change from a B natural to B flat in measure 5, but there’s a B natural I need to play in measure 4, then I can’t change the lever before I play that B natural. If I need a B natural again in measure 6, I have to be able to change it back before then or else take measures to alter the B natural in bar 6 that I’ll outline next.

This might also prevent you from using enharmonics - if you need an A sharp and a B natural one right after the other in the same phrase, you might not be able to use a B flat string in place of the A sharp.

If your note fits those requirements, great, you can just change the lever and no problem.

But if it doesn’t that’s still okay - you can still make your piece playable on your harp, you just have to get creative.

Getting Creative With "Problem" Accidentals

So when you’ve got a problem accidental, you’ve got a few options.

1. If there’s not enough time in the left hand part to change the lever right before it’s needed, look back and find a place where there is. This also means you have to make sure you’re not interfering with any other notes on the same string leading up to the accidental.

2. If you can’t find a place like that, you can change the left hand part to make time for the lever change. So if there a bunch of eighth notes in the left hand, you could replace some of them with a long note, such as a half note or whole note, at the start of the bar so you can have the rest of the bar to change the lever.

3. Sometimes you can also change the octave that the accidental note is in, so that you can change it at a time that works with the left hand but will no longer interfere with other notes.

   Or, you can simply reduce the number of levers that need to be changed overall.

4. If you can’t find any way around it, you can remove the accidental note. Or even if you just don’t want to deal with having to change levers, don’t play it, and write around it. Is it going to sound a little different? Sure. But sometimes, in a lever harp arrangement, sacrifices have to be made for it to be playable.

And so with that, you can make a lot of songs with accidentals playable on the lever harp. There’s definitely a limit, but I always say never say never and if you’re creative enough, you might be able to find a way.

Now if you want to go deeper and learn how to arrange the songs you love the most for YOUR harp, without needing to know a bunch of complicated music theory, checking out my Arranging for Harpists course here.