3 Bach Pieces Every Harpist Should Know and Why - PHH 154

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about, showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

Welcome to the show. Johann Sebastian Bach is a name every musician knows. He's revered as a composer whose music defined musical practices in the Baroque era and whose compositions still influence music and musicians today. Learning about his music and learning to play his music is required study for any music major, but we harpists do feel a little neglected. We play one of the instruments that Bach did not write any music for. Of course, that doesn't stop us from borrowing extensively from his keyboard music, his violin and cello sonatas and partitas, and his lute music and and more. Much of Bach's music is well suited to the harp, with rippling scale passages or rich chords. Now, my first in depth encounters with Bach's music were in my piano lessons when I was about 12 years old. My teacher was insistent about how those preludes and inventions that I was studying should be played, how long each note should be, how the music was made up of melodies played together, or how the harmonies moved in progression. It was my first exposure to the real building blocks of music besides simple key signatures and chords. Somehow, Bach's music seemed to define and explain much of the rest of the music I encountered. Later in my studies in college at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, I learned much more about the inner workings of Bach's compositions and the lasting impact they have had, not just in terms of the wealth of beautiful music he wrote, but also in the effects his music had on every composer since his time. What I want to share with you today is not simply how learning more about Bach will make you a better harpist. And all around musician, but specifically how three familiar pieces by Bach can work together to help you improve your finger agility and evenness, your chords, your melodic flow, and your understanding of a couple of key musical concepts. You probably already know and play at least one of these pieces, and possibly all three. What I want you to come away with today is a new understanding of how these pieces are constructed and how to use this information to become an even better harpist. We've got a lot to talk about today, but I do want to mention a couple couple of quick things. First of all, our Fall Retreat registration is open, so this is the time to make those plans for October. And I certainly hope that you can make your plans to join us at our Fall retreat in the Orlando area in Florida in October. So the link is in the Show Notes, or you'll find it on our events tab@heartmastery.com Take a look, see what you think. They are always a lot of fun and they fill up pretty quickly. So we've got registration open well in advance so you can take a look and make your plans. Also in the Show Notes, a couple of things that will help you with the topics that we're talking about today. There's a link to a podcast episode that I did a while back on why Musicians Study Bach, and that's podcast episode 109. So you can search for that in your podcast app, or you can just use the link in the Show Notes and find it that way. And I've also linked to a blog post that I did quite a while back about a good friend and colleague of mine who was one of the most amazing Bach musicians and scholars that I ever knew. And so you might find that interesting as well. And that link is there in the Show Notes. And just one last thing. At the end of today's episode, going to have sort of a special announcement and an interesting little opportunity for you to show off your playing of music by Bach. So I'll tell you about that as we get to the end of the podcast, but right now, let's get started. First of all, I want to tell you why this topic is so important to me and why I think it's important for you too.

All the time I see students struggle with creating flow and smooth fingering. I see them confused sometimes by how music looks. Why are some stems up or down when I'm not playing them with a different hand? And why should a harp arranger or composer go to so much trouble to write them in a way that's hard to read? I know Many harpists want to understand chords better and write in what chord is which, and they don't know how to account for extra notes that don't seem to belong to a chord. They want to play hymns in church. They want to be better at sight reading them. They want to understand more about how to play a melody beautifully with legato and flow. All of these are important topics, and you could study them by studying, you know, chord theory or harmony. You could practice from hymn books, and you probably should, and I'll tell you how to do that in a minute. You could do lots of pedal or lever practice and finger drills, and that's not to say you shouldn't, but the pieces that I'm going to talk about today are musical masterpieces that will help you learn the best practices for melody and harmony and give you experience at all those other things. These three pieces will give you all that and more. So even if your tastes run more to contemporary or folk music, you should enjoy learning and playing these. So now we'll get started. The first piece I want to talk about is the very famous Prelude in C from the well Tempered Clavier. Now let's just take a moment and explore that for a second. Well tempered is really meaning, in this case, well tuned. The harpsichord practice in Bach's time had been to tune in whatever keys you were going to play in. And that end result was that some notes would be tuned slightly high or low to make the key sound more brilliant. And the result was that the harpsichord would sound out of tune when you played in other keys. So this particular volume of works was meant by Bach to show that by creating this equal spacing between all 12 notes in the scale, you could play in any key and the harpsichord would sound reasonably in tune. Technically, that means it's a little bit out of tune, but it's out of tune the same way in every key. So that that's how we now define in tune. In fact, our tuners that we use are all set up this way to be tempered. Lots of tuners that are more sophisticated allow you to change this. I don't recommend that, because the tempering is what allows you to play in tune with yourself in all different kinds of keys and to play in tune with somebody else. So that's where the well tempered part comes in. But that's not necessarily important to really what we're talking about today. So let's start by just listening to the prelude.

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If you've played this piece already, you know that it's a really different kind of a piece to work on because it's composed just these. Of these beautiful legato arpeggios. There's not that sort of typical melody that we think of. And this minimalist texture means that your expression needs to be created in more subtle ways. It's not about dramatic chords or flashy glissandos that can help you create the music here. It's all about phrasing. And phrasing is all about the melodic flow, the melodic arch, about creating breath in the music. So this piece has this expression of the harmony without chords and of a singing melody without a typical kind of a melody. So to express this well and to make it musical, we don't just want the notes to be.

We need it to have a flow. We need it to have an arch, a legato. And one of the ways to work at this is to practice breathing. It's to sing it. I know there's not a melody to sing, and I would not sing the usual Ave Maria that Guno wrote, the Ave Maria melody that Gouno wrote to go with it. Just immerse yourself in the Bach part of it. Right. What you might try is thinking about breathing in for a four count and then out for a four count. You can even do this without the music. I mean. Here's what I mean. So you're going to breathe in, and as you breathe in, you're counting to yourself, 1, 2, 3, 4. And now let it out. 1, 2, 3, 4. You can try that a couple times. Don't hyperventilate. But the idea here is that as you breathe in, you're creating the upward trajectory of that melodic arch. And as you breathe out, you're releasing that tension and letting the melody relax. So you can see how just in, you know, measure by measure, or over two measures, or four measures, depending how you like it. In this particular prelude, that's the way you're going to find that melody, that flow, that arch, that legato, by letting it breathe in.

And then out.

Or you could stretch it over more measures, but that's the idea. And learning to create that melodic architect is really key. And this is a wonderful piece to try it with. Now, of course, there are other wonderful things you're going to learn when you. When you play this piece, like pedal or lever technique, because there are a number of those. Not too many, but just enough to make sure that you need to work at it. It's great training for evening up your fingers and making sure that each finger is working really well. There are lots of good versions available. Whether you're looking for a pedal version or a lever version, there are all kinds, versions that you can find. So I would recommend that you do that. But this is a wonderful piece for really exploring how melody and harmony work when they don't look like we expect them to look. No left hand chords, no right hand single notes, that kind of thing. And yet we can create music from it. It's a wonderful way to work at flow and expression. And of course this is also useful as an accompaniment to that Guno Ave Maria melody and as a piece on its own. It's a great all purpose piece. You can play it for happy occasions, sad occasions. You can play it at church as background music. It's recognizable. So it's a very useful piece to learn for sure, but a very good one to study that beautiful way to express your music. And now here's our second piece.

That piece is a chorale titled O Haupt Volblut und Wunden. In English it's usually translated as O Sacred head now wounded. It's played often just before Easter time at the end of Lent, but it's a very famous tune and certainly a beautiful one.

This particular chorale was a melody that Bach used five separate times in the St. Matthew Passion, each time with a slightly different harmonization, meaning that the melody line was the same each time, but the notes that the other voices sang were not exactly the same. So it sounded ever so slightly different. Now remember that a chorale is a vocal piece. It's meant for a choir to sing and it's meant to be sung usually in four voice parts. This one certainly was a soprano, alto, tenor and bass. So when it's played on a single instrument, you don't get quite the same effect. Doesn't mean it's not still beautiful. Also know that of all the 400 some chorales that Bach wrote, he didn't actually write those melodies, or certainly not most of them. He harmonized them, he added the chords that he wanted to, had the voice parts sing exactly what he wanted, didn't necessarily change the melody because, but you know, sort of tweaked it. He did his own arrangement, if you will. And what musicians recognize today is that Bach had a particular genius for what we call voice leading. So that the voice parts, I mean soprano singing the melody, but the alto, the tenor and the bass lines weren't just sort of dull kinds of I'm filling in the chords kind of lines. They had their own melodic character, their own value. You know, I don't know about You. But I've sung in a lot of choirs, and when I sing alto, lots of times I'm stuck on one note.

You know, that's sort of a typical alto line. It's not very interesting. Bach's alto lines, his tenor lines, his bass lines, have all kinds of melodic interest, and this is his genius. And once again, we call that voice leading. So if I use that term again while we're talking today, you'll know what I'm talking about. But what's important here for us is that the chords that are created are created not by just sort of slapping down. I'm going to use the I chord, then a two chord, then a IV chord, whatever it is. But they're created by the different melodies that the voices are singing. So that it's this combination of horizontal melodic lines, right? What the sopranos are singing and what the altos are singing and what the tenors are singing and what the basses are singing. And it's those voice parts that create the chords. It's not just a chord. And then he assigns the notes to the various voice parts. It's very different. So harmony here is a creation of those four melodic lines. Now, why is this useful or important for us? Well, understanding how sometimes harmony is created, understanding the melodic nature of music is something that's a little bit challenging for us harpists. Not that we don't understand melody. We don't get it. That's not what I mean at all. But we don't have a true legato. I mean, we can't actually connect the sound of one note to the sound of the next one. Right. When we play a string, that sound starts decaying immediately. We can't connect it to the next note. We don't have what I call a true legato. A flutist does, a violinist does. Right. Any of those kinds of instruments, they can take that one note and spin it out until they get to the next note. We can't. We play it and it already starts to decay, starts to die away before we can get to the next one. So our understanding of music physically at the harp really relies on this beat by beat, sort of vertical nature. And it's easy for us to fall into the idea that here's a chord and here's the next chord and the one after that, and sort of ignore that melodic dimension. And so sometimes we don't recognize it when we see it. So here's an example. I was working with my Gold Circlers, and at. At our retreat in February, and we came across a passage in music that they were having a little bit of a question about how to decipher it. And there was this line, and there were these notes with stems down and. And what was really happening. And so I took some time and explained that these were like different voice parts. This was. There was a top line and there was a middle line, and there was a bottom line, and this middle line was sort of going back and forth between the left hand and the right hand. And we looked at how those lines worked together, and you could see the light bulbs go off. So a chorale like this or like any of those other 400 chorales that Bach wrote or corralled by other composers can help us understand more about the melodic nature of music. And we can learn to recognize it in other music that we play because it is there. We just have to look for it, and we have to know what it is when we see it. So the observational aspect of this is important. But the chorales are also really good training for note reading, because when you look at the chorale picture a hymnal, you'll find lots of chorales in a hymnal, and most hymns in any hymnal are written in those same four voice parts. So if you can find that, it's ideal. Well, you're going to take a hymn or a chorale and look at those voice parts separately. And I would suggest that you start by making sure you can figure out where those voice parts are. Can you follow them line by line? Usually in a hymnal, you'll find the soprano and alto voices are written in treble clef, and the soprano stems go up, and the alto stems go down, and the bass clef has the tenor and the bass voices, and the tenor stems go up and the bass stems go down. So that's usually how you can tell them apart. But you can practice your note reading and, of course, your melodic playing by taking that hymn, that chorale, whatever it is, and practice the bass line and the soprano line together. This will help you hear the melody and the harmony, because the bass line is really the driver of the harmony. So play that pair of voices together and listen to what is there. This is also a great idea for any chord passage that you have in your music. And similarly, working at a chorale like this one, in this kind of a system, will help you see the different arrangement of voices in a chord passage that you play, and it will help you learn to hear those different voices as well. So after you've played the bass line together and the soprano line together, and then look at the other pairs of voices, maybe the bass and the tenor, maybe the bass and the alto, maybe the soprano and alto, maybe the soprano and tenor. Look at those other pairs of voices, play them together, hear how they work, learn how they fit together. This is great for practicing a piece that you have to learn, but it's also really good practice for your note reading. It's very useful if you want to play along with hymns at church, or you expect that maybe some church choir director is going to ask you to do that at some point. It's very useful for that. It's great practice for learning to read chords and for creating a smoothly flowing line from a series of chords, because you're thinking about it melodically, horizontally, not just vertically. Also, by looking at the chords in this way, you'll be able to see some of the notes that don't seem like they fit with the chord, but you'll be able to see how they fit with the melody of that particular voice. And it's a very different way to look at the structure of a piece, and you'll be able to understand more about where some of those notes come from. Here's just a snippet from our third piece.

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I'm sure you recognize that as the very famous Yezu Joy of Man's Desiring. It's been played by every instrument, every combination of instruments. And what I like about this piece and why I've included it here is that it's a lovely blending of the. The fingerwork similar to what we saw in the Prelude in C and a chorale, because the Yaesu is a chorale. That's the slow part that shows up here, right? This part.

That's the chorale. The rest of the stuff, the fun stuff, the stuff that's really hard to play, this part.

That'S just like a little introduction, interlude kind of thing that Bach wrote to make it extra beautiful. So this is a combination of that. That wonderful melodic kind of thing that works in the beautiful triplets.

And the very stately sort of chorale that is in that much slower note value in the dotted quarters. This is in 9, 8, time. And so we have the. The eighth note, triplets, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 kind of thing. And then we've got the slower notes that are just those bigger beats, and the chorale is on the bigger beats. And the melody stuff takes up the. This, the eighth notes, those shorter note values. So this piece is a really nice blend of a chorale and what we call figuration, all those busy notes and what's tricky about this piece is that you have to switch between those techniques. You're playing the figuration one moment and you're working on the chorale another moment. And you need to be able to hear that chorale and project the melody when you're playing that. And of course, keep track of your right hand fingering when you're doing all that fancy stuff. It's about creating flow, it's about balancing the melody and the bass. So all of this is to say that this piece fits in that category of harder than it looks. It's a pretty challenging piece to play, but once again, there are a lot of versions out there. There are really, you know, tricky concert versions that have all kinds of stuff for pedal harps and everything. And there are plenty of easier versions for pedal or lever harp that are more pared down and really accessible. I'm thinking about one that Sylvia woods has in her, you know, teach yourself to play the Folkheart book. It's not easy, but thank goodness it's short and it's manageable. So this is a piece that's really worth studying for all those different reasons. It gives you a chance to really work at some right hand dexterity. And by the way, I suggest that when you're learning that right hand melody, this kind of thing.

Well, have your left hand learn it too, an octave lower, just because it's good for your left hand. Yeah, we know your left hand won't have to play it, but it might as well learn it too. Right? So you're going to work at that right hand fingering. And once again, this is a place where you want to think about that melodic arch, where maybe it takes one measure to go up, then another measure to go down. So think about breathing in and breathing out. Don't hyperventilate, but let the breath of the piece pull it along. That will help you with the flow. There's no one ideal fingering for this. It's not a heart piece, so it doesn't fit totally beautifully under our fingers, but it really can be playable. Just settle on a fingering that works for you and then try to stick with it because that will make it easier to play. Find a version that works for your particular level. How complicated do you want this to be? How long do you want it to be? As I said, there are plenty of arrangements out there. But what this piece will do, aside from giving you a really beautiful piece that you can play just about anywhere and people will recognize, is it's going to give you a way to work at flow, to work at continuity, to work at melodic expression and then switch the techniques around where you have a very nice chordal structure in other sections of the piece. So I highly recommend it as a great technical exercise, a great musical exercise, and a wonderful piece to play. In a minute I will play the whole piece for you, but I wanted to tell you about something that I will be officially announcing for you next week on the podcast. I'm going to be releasing my own arrangement of the chorale that I played for you today, the Sacred Head. I have a an arrangement that I have made. We're going to be releasing that next week and we're going to be promoting a little contest around that arrangement and I'd love for you to participate. I'll be giving you all the details on next week's podcast. That's the podcast coming out on Monday, May 6, so be on the alert for all those details. Next week on the podcast we will be talking about how to have a trustworthy technique. So it's all about technique on next week's podcast. As always, I want to remind you that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play, which is what I'm going to do for you right now. I'm going to share with you my recording of Yezu Joy of Man's Desiring, the one that I recorded for my break fourth cd. So I'm going to share that with you now. And I do want to thank you so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you on next week's podcast. So here is Yezu Joy of Man's Desiring Sa.