A Recipe for Creativity: How to Arrange Anything - PHH 171

The art of music lies at the intersection of intuition and intention. It's the creativity and it's the discipline. Both of those things play into it, and without either one of them, your music is going to sort of fall flat.

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.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us. Just go to harpmastery.com join now. That's harpmastery.com joinharp hyphen now. Welcome to the show. Do you think of yourself as creative? From time to time, a harpist will tell me that she doesn't feel she's very creative, at least not in a musical way. Now, I instinctively challenge this because I believe that anyone who persists in studying the harp for more than a few months is nurturing a gift and desire that is, at its very essence, creative. I also believe, though, that much of our practice and our pedagogy shifts us away from that creative spirit. This is unfortunate, to say the least, because we risk drowning our enthusiasm for the joy of creating music in the hard work that is part of studying it and learning to do it well. Now there are endless ways to add more creativity into your harp playing. Certainly, musical expression is creative, but that's just scratching the surface. Now, I've linked in the show notes to a blog post in the Heart Mastery archives that outlines just a couple ways to add creativity to your practice. But there are so many ways that the harp can not only be an outlet for for our creativity, but can actually help our creativity develop. And one of those ways is arranging music.

Today, we're going to explore arranging music as a creative exercise. Maybe you've never tried arranging music, at least not beyond adapting a piano piece for the harp. Maybe you've arranged lots of pieces and even published your arrangements. Whichever group you fall into, the approach we're going to take today will help you stretch your creative powers in a logical, step by step but still creative way. And if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it is. But that's where the artistic process of music lies, at the intersection of intuition and intention.

If arranging sounds like something you'd like to do but haven't tried because you're not sure how to go about it, you're going to love this simple step by step approach, which will work with classical pieces, folk tunes, hymns, pop songs, any kind of music. If you've done arrangements before, you'll find this approach may really simplify your creative process and give you some new ideas to try as well. That contrast between creativity and a more disciplined feeling artistic process, that intuition and intention, that duality, is something I've been playing a lot with lately. I'm working on an intensive that will appear later this fall that plays with that. And it's also going to be the focus of the workshops at our October retreat. We're talking about mindset and method. It's total performance preparation. It's not just preparing your music, it's not just preparing your mindset, but it's also how both of those work together to allow you to enjoy your playing. Whether you're just playing for yourself or whether you're playing for others. We're going to be doing three workshops based on mindset and method. This is me and my certified coach, Candice Lark, who will be joining me at the retreat. We're going to be talking about making your practice, your preparation. Not just your preparation for playing the music, but your preparation for the act of playing the music. Right? Not just preparing the music, but preparing yourself and how to make your practice always preparing you for that. Not just when you have a performance coming up, but all the time. It's not pressure if you do it a little bit all the time, right? We don't. We want to take the pressure out of performance. We want to make sure that performance is fun, that playing music for other people, if that's what you have any aspiration to do, is fun for you. Because it's fun for me, it's fun for a lot of people. It's why we do this. And I want it to be fun for you too. Second workshop is going to be I'm going to sound sort of the reverse. It's making performances. You, your practice, the performance is not an end in itself, it's part of who you are. And we'll be talking about how to use performances to help you improve, not just to be the proving ground for the work you've already done. And lastly, we're going to talk about playing with pleasure, how to enjoy your playing, how to make sure that you are pleasing an audience, your listeners, and allowing yourself to be pleased by what you play. So those three workshops, making practice, your preparation, making performances, your practice, and playing with pleasure, are part of our mindset and method workshop series that we will be teaching at the October Retreat. We've never taught these before. I can't guarantee that they'll show up anywhere else. So if these workshops interest you, the retreat is the perfect way to experience them because we get to talk about them, we get to live with them over the course of a few days. So please check them out and join us at the October Retreat. We'd love to have you there talking about mindset and method and of course doing lots of fun playing one on one coaching. Because we can do that at the retreat. It's wonderful to do in person. We'll be doing some group ensemble stuff as well. So it's going to be a lot of fun and I hope you can join us. As always, you'll find the link to the registration page right in the show notes or you can go to heartmastery.com and look up under upcoming events and you'll see it there as well. Back in the 1970s, I read a book called Drawing on the Right side of the Brain by artist Betty Edwards, now at its most basic. And I'm doing her book a Big injustice here. But Dr. Edwards premise, which is based on research carried out in the 1950s at California State University, her premise is that we can learn to utilize the more creative right side of our brain, even if we are very strongly biased toward perceiving things with the more logical left side of our brain. Now, this book is a result of her search for a way to teach drawing, which came so naturally and easily to her. And she wanted to be able to teach drawing to her students who found it difficult. The question she had kept asking herself was, well, why should it be so hard for them? Because it's so easy for me. And her own investigations and observations led her to explore how it's possible to tap into the more intuitive mode which the right side of the brain uses by learning to shift your cognitive perception. And the book itself is filled with exercises based all around drawing, of course, but exercises that really show you this way to shift your perception from the way the very logical left side of your brain looks at things to the way you're more creative, intuitive right side of your brain looks at them. It's a fascinating book, and if you've never looked at it, I think it's now in its, I don't know, 12th edition or something. Drawing on the Right side of the Brain now in a very skim the surface way, that's kind of what we're doing today. We're exploring how the discipline of a process can free you to explore how a checklist can unleash your creativity, if you will. So I'm going to remind you of what I said just a moment ago and expand on it just a little. The art of music. Whether you're doing your daily practice or playing for fun, playing for an audience, composing, arranging, any of that, learning, playing or writing stuff, the art of music lies at the intersection of intuition and intention.

It's the creativity and it's the discipline. Both of those things play into it. And without either one of them, your music is going to sort of fall flat. What we want, of course, is to be able to have both of those inspire our music all the time, right? The creativity part of it and of course that discipline part, that part where we have to practice and we have to improve, we have to make things better. But if all you're doing Is, is working at that improvement. You might think of it as the technical side. You're missing out on all the fun. And if all you're doing is the fun stuff, you probably could do it a little bit skillfully with more mastery if you added some of the technical stuff. Right. So it's not just about technique and it's not just about expression. It goes way deeper than that. But today we're going to talk about it in terms of making an arrangement of a piece because I think it's a great way to look at process. It's a great way to look at process when it comes to something that is really a very creative kind of a thing. And the most important part of this is that it's really going to help you understand the music that you play. Even if you never really thought about creating an arrangement, just going through this process is going to help you really get a much more inside, back behind the curtain kind of view of what is in a piece of music, which is going to help you with learn it faster and play it better. So this is a win across the board. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I used to do a lot of embroidery. I did crewel, I did cross stitch and I would use patterns and, you know, buy all my different color yarns and the patterns told you what colors to use and where. I know many of you are more familiar with this than I am, but it's been a long time. But the thing is that sometimes you just had a couple strands of one color of yarn that you were going to use, and those few strands created just a hint of a shadow in one little place in the design. Just those few stitches created, in essence, a whole, you know, three dimensional look to an object. Right. I was fascinated by this because it hadn't really occurred to me. I'm not a visual person in that way. And it hadn't occurred to me until I was paying attention in the embroidery that, oh, that's how that shadow is created. If I were somebody with a, an, a painter's eye, for instance, I would be looking at that and seeing that change of color that create, that was part of that shadow.

But I didn't see that without the stitches there. Once somebody, you know, said, okay, well you want three stitches of that other color here because that's going to lead you into the shadow. It was just sort of like, oh, this is an aha moment. I learned a little bit about how a painting, a work of art is created just by how that color was used in the embroidery.

Creating an arrangement, looking at an arrangement, the way we're going to look at it today is going to help in the very same way it's going to help you look at a piece differently. You'll see things that you didn't see before. It's that, as I said, that glimpse behind the curtain. So that's where we're going. And we're going to start by talking about the most basic part of any arrangement. We're talking about the foundation. The foundation is the actual piece itself. It's the, the most basic ingredients that go into any piece of music. It's the melody, it's the harmony, it's the rhythm, probably in that order, but that's okay. It's what makes the piece, that piece. Melody, harmony, rhythm. Now, you can tweak these in your own arrangement, of course, either maybe because you need to for a lever or pedal kind of consideration, or because you want to, you can decide how far afield you want to go. But in essence, if you don't retain enough of the original melody and a little bit of the original harmony and the rhythm, it's not going to sound like that piece anymore. This is kind of like baking a cake where you start with the cake. You can make a very fancy cake. It can have lots of layers, it can have icing, it can have jimmies on the top and all kinds of stuff. But, but it's gotta have the cake. And we can start with a very plain cake. Just the melody, the harmony and the rhythm. That's where you can start. But you've gotta start there. Because if you don't have that, you don't have the, the piece. Right? You just don't have that. So one easy way to do this is to find a, a very easy, maybe a very simple piano arrangement of it. If you don't have a simple harp arrangement of it that you wanna embellish, that's okay too. But start with something very simple that you can see those basic ingredients, that basic probably right hand melody, probably left hand accompaniment, where you can see the chords that are there and you can see the basic rhythm. If you can discern that for yourself and you don't need another, you know, a written version of the piece, that's great. But finding a very simple one, where all those other things are taken aside, that gives you sort of a clean slate to work with and that gives you that foundation. So that's where you're going to start. Now we're going to make some decisions about our cake in the original recipe, if you want to look at it that way. The cake has one particular flavor. I'm thinking about my Aunt Floss's pound cake. She liked her pound cake very, very plain. Other people like pound cake with more of a vanilla flavor or more of a lemon flavor or more of an almond flav. So it's still the cake, but it has a particular flavoring that gives it its essence. Now, in a piece of music, those ingredients, the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, are usually arranged into a structure. And that's sort of where we are now. We're looking at the structure of the piece. This would be the sections. You might look at it in terms of verses or choruses, maybe an introduction, maybe a coda at the end. Maybe there are sections that repeat. Depends on how the piece is arranged. But it generally comes in those particular sections, things you can identify. Oh, look, this part comes back. You can find those. Look for those sections, those structures. That's the essential nature of the piece. And now you can change this. This can be part of the choice that you make in an arrangement. You can say, all right, well, you know what? I don't know that I want to have a verse and then another verse and then the chorus. I might just want to do one verse and then the chorus. I mean, you've probably heard a version of a. Of a song or a hymn or another piece that starts with a different kind of introduction, or maybe it even starts with the chorus and then goes to the verse. Right. This is an arranger's choice. So it's like, oh, yeah, it could be lemon, it could be almond, could be vanilla, but it's still the cake. So we're going to take those parts of this structure. We're going to take the verses, take the sections that repeat, the A sections, the B sections, whatever it is, and either leave them in the original order, nothing wrong with that, or if we feel like it, change it around a little bit. You can do that, too.

Now, I admit, so far, this is more like system than creativity. We started with some bare bones in. And then, okay, we looked at whether or not we wanted to keep those bare bones in exactly the same order or maybe mix it up a little bit. We haven't gotten extremely creative yet. And if you're an expert arranger, those are steps you probably don't even think about very much anymore. You cut right to the chase here. But the fact is that without considering the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, and the structure, you. You don't really have the bones, the foundation for Your own arrangement. So everybody starts here. Whether or not that's a really quick and almost unconscious part of your process or not. But now we do get to the good stuff. We're going to color in the lines here. We've got the outline for our arrangement and we're going to start just making it a little bit more special. So we're going to start putting in the fun stuff. We're going to not, not get too carried away at first. But right now we want it to be more than, okay, a melody line and a harmony line. All right, great. We want it to be filled in a little bit. So we're going to be filling in the left hand and the right hand using chords, patterns, extra notes to add richness where you want it. Now, there are a couple of considerations here. First of all, realize that what you're really doing is just creating the texture of the piece. Now you're not getting all fancy yet. We're just sort of adding in the notes that make it sound more like a piece of music than just the, the, you know, the big note, very easy version of a piece of music. Right? We want it to sound like something you would play. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to look at pieces that you like to play, pieces that you play often. Go back to those pieces that you play and see what's there. See what the left hand does. Take a look at options and say, oh, okay, look, this is a left hand pattern that I've played in this piece and I really like it. And I bet it would sound right in this kind of a piece. Or oh, look, here are how to add some extra right hand notes. And I remember that in this piece I used a whole bunch of these three note chords or I used the right hand melody in sixths there and I played a whole lot of sixths. Or I did this. Or you know, look at the pieces you already play. And this is for a couple of reasons. One is it's going to give you some choices to choose from. Right. If you're not used to just pulling music and notes out of thin air, as it were, the easiest thing to do is to look at pieces that you've already played and get your ideas from there. That's not stealing. You can call it benchmarking if you will, but the fact is that for a more experienced arranger who's pulling those ideas out of thin air, they're not out of thin air either. They're from their own experience. This is using your own experience to inform your. Your set of options for this particular arrangement. So go back and look at what you've played, find what you like to play, and bring that over to your new arrangement. This has a couple big advantages. Not only do you have those choices written down, but you know that since this is in a piece that you can play, you know how to play that already. It's going to be within your ability.

An interesting fact is that many of us who arrange pieces, and I include myself in this group, arrange them to be too hard. We hear possibilities and we think they'd be great, and we write them down. And then we discover later that, gosh, I know I wrote this down, but I have to practice it. It's really hard. And at that point.

We may decide that it's worth simplifying things just a little bit and, you know, going back to the drawing board and erasing some of the complexity that we put in. And that's great. But when you're choosing from pieces that you know you can play, you're probably choosing things that you can play. So not bad. So this gives you those kinds of choices that you can add ways you can add extra notes. But remember, you also get to make artistic choices. That's part of of what this is. We're not just taking notes and sticking them in. You can decide in terms of what you want the music to sound like. Consider the mood of the piece, what you want from this piece. Do you want it to sound dreamy and reflective? Do you want it to sound energetic? Think about how the notes that you choose and the patterns that you choose are going to help with your interpretation of that piece. If the piece is dreamy and reflective, maybe you want more arpeggiated things. Maybe you want something more legato. Maybe you don't want as many notes because you want it to sound very simple and peaceful. On the other hand, if your piece is fast and energetic, you probably don't want to put too many notes in there because you're going to make the. Make it harder to play, for one thing. But you may very well obscure the melody or the harmony. And you want some extra clarity. So think about what you want the piece to sound like. Those are your artistic choices. And then bring over some of the things that you know. You can play some of those ideas from pieces you have played before and bring those to help you color in those lines. So does that make sense? We've got the foundation, we've got the structure, and now we've colored it all in. And by this point, you should have a piece that sounds pretty good. It sounds like a piece you could play. Sounds like the original piece, but maybe with a couple little tweaks. You know, maybe you've arranged some of the, rearranged some of those sections, and you've certainly harpified it. You've gotten it to a point that you know where it's a piece that you want to play that fits in your fingers. And now we get to the last stage, we get to add what I call the harp bling. Simply, the harp bling is the fun stuff. It's the special effects. It's the glissandos or the harmonics. It's all those different sounds that we harpists can do. Things that make harp music sound special, things that are different from something a piano could do. For instance, we can do glissando's harmonics. We can play near the soundboard. We can play with our fingernails. We can tap on the soundboard. There are so many different sounds that we could make. Salzato's book, Modern Study of the Harp has a glossary of sounds that he used. Andres Bernard Andress. His notation is filled with even more sounds like the sans pense, the pinched sounds, right. The harp has such a rich variety of sounds effects that we can make. Use them to add atmosphere to your arrangement. Make your glissandos ethereal, if that's what you want. Make them dramatic if that's what your piece needs. Use these. You don't have to use a lot of them, right? They're like accessories we don't want to over accessorize. You can use them sparingly, but use them to make your piece special. Special to the harp, special to you. After all, what good is your arrangement if it doesn't sound like you? These are the choices that you get to make with your arrangement. Now, following these steps will give you a framework to stretch your creativity. It's a little like that needlework pattern I was talking about. By following the pattern, you learn more about what is possible. And so you feel freer to experiment and make your own choices. But it's not only a creativity framework, it's also a learning framework because it's going to help increase your awareness of musical structure and patterns, which of course will help you learn your music faster and see these in any other piece that you start to learn. So it's truly a very powerful framework, whether you're being intuitive or intentional or both. Now, one last thing. You might have realized that I have ignored a really important element Here. If you're going to be making your own arrangement, you have to figure out how to write it down. There are plenty of music writing programs around and you can just quickly google them and see which one works for you. There are a few that are are pretty complicated, but some of the easier and less expensive ones are Notion. Like an Idea Notion, Musescore and Note Flight. They are pretty easy and pretty inexpensive. Dorico D O R I C O Dorico is more fully featured and only a little bit more expensive. Something like Sibelius. It's very full featured and it is pretty expensive and it comes with a really steep learning curve. If you've never done this before, do one of the easier ones. Muse Score is pretty easy to use, so is Notion, so try those. But I would urge you to try handwriting your music because this is really the best way to learn how music looks and why it looks right or why it looks wrong. Think about how when we learn language, we learn to read it and write it. Those two skills go together. Music language works the same, so get yourself some manuscript paper. You can download free manuscript paper. Just look anywhere online and try writing your own music. It's an education in itself and one that is very helpful even if it does have a slightly steep learning curve of its own. Next week on the podcast I'm going to be talking about the importance of role models, what they really teach you, and how to find the right role model for you. I'd also like to remind you about the October Retreat and especially our Mindset and Method Total Performance Preparation Workshops that I'll be giving with my friend Candice at the retreat. I would love for you to join us there. I'm so excited about these workshops. I love things that are brand new and teach important skills in a new way and I think these are going to be very powerful. For those of you who are able to come to the retreat until I talk to you next week, Remember, 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. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.