Agile Arpeggios: How to Make Yours Ripple - PHH 140

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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. If I had to choose one finger pattern that I could count on to almost always show up in a piece, it would be an arpeggio. Arpeggios and the harp go together like peanut butter and jelly. In fact, the Italian word for harp is harpoon arpa, a rpa, which obviously has the same first three letters as arpeggio. That's because the word arpeggio comes from the Italian word arpeggiare, which means to play on a harp. See what I mean? Peanut butter and jelly. So whether the arpeggios in harp music show up as full sweeps of sound over the entire range of the harpoon, or simply a left hand accompaniment pattern, or anything in between. Arpeggios are everywhere in harp music, so it's essential to learn to play them well. The first time a student comes across an arpeggio, they're shown how an arpeggio is really a chord in which all the notes are played one after the other instead of simultaneously. They're taught the rules of placing for arpeggios and given exercises to learn to read them quickly and play them fluidly. But often, when the arpeggios get faster or more complex, those basic skills are not enough. We don't simply want to play them cleanly. We want them to sound even and clear. We don't want to play them only at exercise speed. We need to be able to control the fingers over the full range of tempo possibilities. We don't want them to sound clunky or plunky. We want them to be beautiful, arching gestures in short, we want them to ripple. So today we'll talk about the finer points of arpeggios. Naturally, we will go over all the basics of placing and playing, but we'll dive deeper into how to shape your arpeggios, how to have them sound relaxed and flowing, and yes, to make them ripple. As always, I want to recommend that you check out the show notes for the this episode. I always recommend a blog post that sort of extends the topic that we're talking about on the podcast today. I'm recommending a blog post that I wrote quite a while ago, but it's called 12 Great Arpeggio Pieces that Aren't the Little Fountain. So we'll be talking about a couple of those pieces in the course of the podcast today, but you might want to check that out just to have some more ideas for pieces that would help you play your arpeggios or help you demonstrate how beautiful your arpeggios are once you get them really rippling. Also remember, we are doing our 2024 harp happiness challenge in the Harp Mastery Hub. We are in the home stretch. It is the last week of that challenge and at the end of this week, beginning of next week, I'll be looking at all the entries and we'll be drawing a random winner from people who have participated all the Way challenge for a $25 gift certificate to the Harp Mastery Shop. So I've been participating too. Not that I'll win a gift certificate, but I've been participating and having a lot of fun with it. I love looking at the entries and seeing all the different things that you all are doing to bring more harp happiness into your life or into someone else's. It can, you know, ranges from practicing or playing to organizing music to all different kinds of things. So it's a lot of fun things. So. And of course it's free because it's in the Hub. So I'd love to have you join us there. You will find the link, guess where in the show notes. So with all those things being said, it's time to start talking more about arpeggios. I don't want this to be just a discussion about arpeggios. I want to be sure you have a chance to really try the techniques and tricks that we're going to be talking about, the strategies for making your arpeggio smooth and beautiful. And so I have created a that's actually an arpeggio drill that's going to help you practice all those different things. All these things we're talking about with arpeggios today. So that link is also in the Show Notes to the Agile Arpeggios PDF. So we'll be talking about that more a little bit later in the episode. But you can go to the Show Notes and download that. Of course, it's totally free. You just need to download it and we will email it to you. Easy peasy. So I wanted to start by just talking about my first real big experience with arpeggios. And it wasn't even my playing. I've talked about this a little bit before, but just in case you haven't heard it, I'm going to remind you my teacher was Marilyn Costello, the first harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra for many years, and she was a student of Carlos Salzato. She studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with. And in fact, that's where I studied with her many years later. So Ms. Costello had the most beautiful liquid sound of just about any harpist I've ever heard. It was pure gold. And her arpeggios were really just amazing. So beautiful and just. Oh, they just. They went beyond ripple, for sure. I can hardly describe them. But on the rare occasion when she came to my house for something, maybe my parents had invited her for dinner or she was coming for another reason.

She would sit at my harp and, you know, it's always a thrill to have your teacher play your harp. But the thing that she would do, she sat down at the harp and she would play the Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza from the Nutcracker Ballet. And it is all arpeggios. And it was just astounding. So amazing. Just. You just melted to hear this cadenza. And it was always my mother's favorite thing to hear. She just loved to hear my teacher play that. She liked to hear me play it. But I always had the sneaking suspicion that she really liked to hear Ms. Costello play it more. And frankly, I don't blame her. It was wonderful. But that was really my first introduction to. To arpeggios and how amazingly beautiful and just glorious they could be, how they pulled out the richness of the sound of the harp and they created this energy that just sort of rolled along and rolled over you like a beautiful giant and very gentle wave. Right. It didn't bowl you over unless it was meant to, I suppose, but just washed over you with this amazing sound. So that's the sound in my head when I play an arpeggio or hear an arpeggio or think about an arpeggio. I'm Remembering that sound that my teacher used to get, and that's the sound that I want to try to get. I can't claim that my sound equals hers. It just doesn't. Hers was really, really remarkable. But I can share what she taught me and what I have subsequently learned about how to make your arpe beautiful, how to make them flowing and even and just gloriously rich. And that's what we're talking about today. There are three basic elements that go into making your arpeggios sound just like that. Just as beautiful and warm and rich as we want, and even and flowing. So the three things that we're looking for, number one, I think, is that evenness. And it comes from even fingers played at an even rhythm. So that your fingers need to be able to match each other with equal dynamic and equal weight and equal tone. And they need to be able to play evenly so that you don't have rhythm stops and starts and stutters in your arpeggio. Right. We want that arpeggio to be.

You understand what I mean? So that rhythm needs to be even and your fingers need to be even. Then the second consideration is that we need to have that kind of control, that kind of evenness and even rhythm at all kinds of different speeds and at all different kinds of places on the harp. And whether we're going up or going down, upward arpeggios and downward arpeggios sometimes feel very different. So we want to develop that control at different tempos so that we know that we're not just playing arpeggios at the same speed all the time, but we can play them faster or slower, as the case may be, and that we can play them equally well going up and going down. So that kind of tempo control is really important. And then the third thing is phrasing of the arpeggios so that they don't sound clunky or noty. So that they don't sound.

But they sound.

Don't you love that? It's kind of a funny sound, isn't it? But we don't want it to sound like those separate notes. We want those notes to be clear and clean. But we want the entire arpeggio to be a single gesture to sound phrased.

And not.

I know you can hear the difference. So what's interesting is that I can see the difference. Let me tell you, while I'm recording this, the recording software that I'm using is showing me a graph of what my voice is doing, whether it's loud or soft. And I Can see it. You've seen these sorts of things, right? You have those little spikes. And what's very interesting is that when I do that lovely flowing arpeggio that's phrased.

I get a very lovely little graph that starts lower and goes higher, and it looks all connected and lovely, but when I do the other very separate sound.

It looks like little spikes in the soundtrack. So that's a visual way to consider the difference and to understand the difference that I'm talking about. So, once again, there are the three things we're looking for. Evenness, the even fingers and even rhythm. Then we're looking for the tempo control, the control at different speeds, and the control going up. Arpeggio and down arpeggio, the same kind of control there. And then we're looking for phrasing, for the shaping, the dynamics that keep your arpeggio sounding smooth and flowing instead of very noty or choppy. The basic elements of playing an arpeggio are the ones that we learn first, and they're always the most important. No matter how beautiful our arpeggios are, no matter how advanced we become as players, we always have to come back to the basics to remind ourselves what is at the core of playing an arpeggio. So one of the first things to consider, of course, is placing. In an arpeggio. You want to place all your fin rather than just one at a time. This has to do with speed in your arpeggio. You'll be able to play your arpeggio faster if all your fingers are on the string and you're not searching with that second finger, because the third finger is about to play and your second finger isn't on the string. So when you place, you want all those fingers to go on at once.

It's really good to be able to visualize it as a chord. Think about placing it as a chord. Also, if you're looking at the arpeggio on a piece of music, look at it, group it in your. I mean, it may already be grouped on your page, where you can see all three or four notes that your hand is going to place all at once. If it's not grouped for you, like with beams that connect the notes or something, then you might want to draw a little bracket or a phrase marking or something right over that group so that you can see it EAS and know exactly what fingers you need to place. This will give you practice at reading the entire group at once, so that you're not reading note by note by note by note, but that you're looking at that entire group of notes and placing your hand on the strings. Quick, efficient, clean placing is really key to playing arpeggios. I know we play the notes one after the other, but we don't place them that way. Okay? Simple enough. The first step then is all about placing. The second step as you play. Remember that even if your arpeggio is a hand over hand arpeggio and you're going all over the harp, you need to play the arpeggio by closing your fingers, not by pulling your hand away, not twisting it so that it comes up or goes down, whichever direction the arpeggio is going. Your hand and your arm, your wrist, and need to stay steady. The only thing that happens when you play that arpeggio is you close your fingers. It makes it very simple to keep your place on the harp, and it makes it much easier to keep your fingers sounding even and playing in an even rhythm. Consider for a second what happens when you have your hand on the strings and you just close your fingers, your fingers close one after the other. Your hand and your arm are steady, so they're supporting your fingers and your fingers are in the optimal playing position. That's what we want. Now compare that to what might seem like a very gesturally lovely way to play an arpeggio. You might consider an upward arpeggio, where your hand is sort of rolling toward you. It could look very pretty, but every time you twist your hand, you put your fingers that are on the strings into an awkward playing position.

You're twisting them, you're turning them so they don't have the opportunity to play with that full sound that you're training them to do when you do your technique work. So we want your wrist and your arm to stay steady so that your hand can be calm and, and in one place. And all you have to do to play is to close your fingers. It sounds pretty simple. It sounds very elementary, I know, but it's not so easy to actually do. It's very easy to sort of fall into the habit of letting your hand follow the arpeggio instead of keeping your hand steady and just playing the arpeggio. Trust me, even if your hand has to jump to the next placing, you'll have time to do it. And it will be easier to find it if you know where you're starting. If your hand is nicely closed and relaxed for the first group, it'll be easier to find the second one. The other basic element is also easy to talk about and not so easy to do. And that is to keep your fingers and your arm relaxed, so that even if you're practicing your arpeggios slowly, you're not practicing them with force.

We're not accenting the notes. You can practice them with a full sound, but keep your fingers relaxed. A tight finger or a tight hand will not have the sound that you're looking for to make your arpeggios sound supple and fluid. And your fingers need to be supple and relaxed as well. So as you're practicing your arpeggios, let your fingers be relaxed. Your arm and your wrist will support your hand. All your fingers have to do is close and practice closing them without adding tension. You can practice this softly at a medium dynamic and at a full dynamic as well. But just think about closing your fingers. You can think about using sort of the fleshy part of your fingers so that you're not playing close to the tip, where the sound might be a little bit harder and a little bit firmer. You can think about making those arpeggios a little bit meatier with just a little bit more warmth to them. That's one way to get that beautiful, rich sound. But your fingers have to be relaxed in order to do it. So full motion, they're going to close into your hand, but they need to be nicely relaxed to do that. This is something that is best practiced at a really slow tempo so that you can feel.

Exactly how your fingers are feeling and you're not trying to get to that next set of notes. So you can practice this slowly. Give yourself time to relax in between each note and make that relaxation a habit. So once you're paying attention to your placing, to your closing, keeping your wrist and arm steady and your fingers relaxed, then you're actually ready to practice the arpeggio to work at your even fingers and your even rhythmic playing. One of the best practice techniques is to practice your arpeggios in a long, short rhythm. Now, there are other practice rhythms as well. I love long, short because it really gives you time to think about what you're doing. So I know it seems counterintuitive. I just talked about a nice, even rhythm. And what we're going to do is skew the rhythm. So instead of practicing your arpeggio note, note, note, note, note, you want to practice it long, short, bum, ba dum ba dum ba, dummy. It's going to help make the distinction between your fingers when they're actually playing. It's going to give you a little bit more control. Be sure to stay relaxed, and it's going to help clarify things. It also can help to speed up an arpeggio. Another rhythm that works very well is long, short, short.

And you can turn this around to short, short, long.

These are rhy work really well for evening out your fingers. Do them at all different kinds of dynamics, do them at different speeds. And if you have a particular arpeggio in a piece that you want to spend some extra time on, these rhythms are perfect for working on that. Now, I also suggest that if you want to develop more speed and think about playing your arpeggios faster, then put your metronome on, put it on a nice slow speed and choose an arpeggio to practice. And start by playing that arpeggio as essentially quarter notes, one note to every click of the metronome. So your metronome might be click, click, like this, and you're going to play note, note, note, note. Play the arpeggio that way, thinking about beautiful sound and staying relaxed. Then play the arpeggio again, keeping that same metronome click. But play your arpeggio twice as fast as if they were 8th notes. So bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And think again about that relaxed sound, keeping your hand steady, your fingers relaxed. Then same metronome, same metronome tempo. Play them as triplets, bump, bump.

And then again as sixteenths.

And this will help you speed up your arpeggios. And of course, you can go even further. You could play them as sex templates and 30 second notes and all that stuff, or just move the metronome up and play them faster that way. But working at different speeds, really important. After all, sometimes we play arpeggios that are beautiful and leisurely, and maybe even have a retard at them in them, like at the end of a piece. But sometimes we play arpeggios that need to be fast and dramatic, so you need to practice that too.

But that's just the basic stuff. There's the other dimension, the musical dimension to arpeggios, and that that's the level that we really want to get to. And that's what we'll talk about right now. Of course, when we're talking about musicality, that's when the real complexity sets in. Because there's no one way to express an arpeggio musically. The meaning of the arpeggio, the musical import that you want to put into it, is dependent on. On the situation in which the arpeggio is used, right? No, arpeggio is used in a vacuum. So There are a few different ways that we usually see arpeggios. Arpeggios can be part of the fabric of the piece. Think of a piece like Little Fountain or La Source or the Walls of the Flowers Cadenza. There are a few biggies that use pretty much exclusively arpeggios to be the entire piece.

When those are the kinds of arpeggios you're talking about, then that evenness and that flow is going to be paramount, and the dynamics that you use are going to be the dynamics that express the entire piece. So this is where control for your fingers is so important, because you want to be able to get that dynamic range. But when arpeggios are part of the fabric of the piece, the musicality of it is pretty easy to grasp, because we know what we want to do with them. But arpeggios have a way of showing up in other places as well. And we can think of them in a couple of big buckets, you know, a couple big categories. One is what I call the filler category, where an arpeggio is filling in a musical moment. Like maybe it's a moment between phrases. You know, the melody has come to an end, and it's sort of holding a note, and we use an arpeg to fill that in. Or sometimes we use arpeggios to fill in individual beats where it gives us this nice texture in the background underneath or supporting a melody. Maybe the melody goes in quarter notes, and there's an arpeggio accompaniment to that melody that goes in 8th notes or triplets or 16th notes or something like that. So there are a couple of those filler things. And then the other big bucket is the dramatic effect bucket, where an arpeggio shows up at a big moment in a piece. Now, it may be a big, loud, dramatic moment. It may be a very soft dramatic moment. It might be as part of the introduction to the piece. It might be part of the ending to the piece. But it serves that sort of purpose of creating the moment rather than just filling in between other moments. So when you're thinking about how you want to play an arpeggio, the first thing you need to consider is its musical purpose. Is it, you know, just filling in a moment? Is it creating motion, creating a direction that's going to take you from one place to another? Is it just there to be beautiful? Is it an accompaniment? Is it a little murmur? So think about what it's trying to do in the pie. All your decisions stem from that. Now, you don't have to get super detailed about this. And you don't have to do a lot of research. Your own musical instinct will be enough to tell you what it is. You don't have to get very theoretical about it. Just saying, okay, well, this is an accompaniment pattern, or this is an ending. And it's a beautiful ending that's going to end very quietly. So I want my arpeggios to taper away. That's the kind of thing that we're talking about, just very general. Then once you've determined its purpose, then you can decide on affect. I love the word affect. It means so much. It's a sensibility, right? It's the emotion that you're imbuing into your music. And it's dynamic, certainly, but it's more than dynamics, it's tone, it's articulation. So that, you know, this is where you decide if the arpeggio is going to be rich, if it's going to be airy and light, if it's going to be gentle or smooth or accented or crisp or hurried or slowing down or all those things. You get to decide it's musical emotion would be a great way to talk about that. As I said, affect is one of those words that I really like. But that's the same idea.

Then when you've decided what you want your arpeggio to sound like, then you can decide if it needs a direction. Now, some arpeggios, particularly ones that are more accompaniment oriented, will just have maybe a little up and down arch, you know, not a lot of dynamic gradation in them. They'll be sort of murmuring and just sort of textural. But sometimes the arpeggio needs to be.

Something that's part of the motion of the music. It's carrying us forward or it's holding us back. So does it need a crescendo to the top? Does it need a decrescendo? Whether it's going up or down, that dynamic could work either way. You can have an arpeggio that goes up, that has a crescendo to the top, or you can have an arpeggio that goes up, that has a decrescendo to the top. So direction and dynamic on aren't necessarily the same thing. And similarly, you want to look at what might happen with the energy of that arpeggio. Does it need an accelerando to push things forward, or a retard to slow things down? Or does it just stay the same tempo, but maybe with that dynamic change to it? So all these are the decisions that you have. Don't get bogged down in the number of decisions. Just realize that you have these choices and in your practice, experiment with those choices. Looking at the context of the piece and how the arpeggio fits into it, and thinking about what that arpeggio might do so that you're not thinking about it just as a collection of notes that you have to play well, but that it's an effect, it's part of the musical expression of the piece. And that's what you want to determine. So you get to make these choices. So, you know, don't over complicate. Give yourself some ways to experiment with it in your practice. Say, okay, well, what would happen with this arpeggio if I put a crescendo in it, or if I put a decrescendo in it, or if I don't use any dynamic at all, if I make it loud, if I make it soft, if I speed it up, if I slow it down, what would happen? How does it serve the music? How does that fit with the idea? That's the essence of working with different types of arpeggios and finding their musicality. But I want to give you some examples. For our examples, I have chosen Esquisse, a piece by Henriette Regnier. And Esquisse means sketch. It's a beautiful piece. It's just two pages long, but it's filled with musical richness and it has many arpeggios. And I just wanted to pull out a few excerpts from this piece to show you different examples of the way arpeggios are used and some choices that you have with them. The first example I wanted to pull out, actually, if you have the music and you want to look at it, it comes from the fourth line of the piece. It's the middle section of the piece. We've already heard the theme and. And now we're getting into a section where there's some left hand melody and some right hand filling in in between the left hand melody notes with guess what? Little arpeggios. So what I wanted to demonstrate for you is how this particular right hand pattern supports the left hand melody and how it really needs to blend with the melody. So here's that short excerpt for you. It's just a few measures.

This is one of those instances when balance in this filler pattern is so important. The right hand has to be supporting the left hand, not the other way around. And of course, this is a little bit easier often when it's the left hand supporting the right Hand, Hand. But here we've got the right hand. Filler arpeggios really need to be that filler. And let me just play it for you for a moment. With the right hand being a more equal dynamic and a more equal tone to the left hand. It's not nearly the effect that I imagine Rainier want.

And here's the first way again, so you can contrast and compare them.

The other short part of this piece that I wanted to demonstrate for you, just the last three measures. This piece ends quite softly. She gives us a piano dynamic and she tells us at these last few measures that there's to be a rollentando and a pianissimo chord. So at the very end, so there are a couple beautiful arpeggios. And then that pianissimo chord. And if you follow her directions, it sounds more or less something like this.

It's a beautiful and delicate ending. And the arpeggios served to bring this piece to this gentle conclusion. That's their purpose, that's their function. So the diminuendo and the rollentando all help to make that happen. But what if we didn't do that? What if Rainier had chosen a different way to end the piece and she had done a crescendo all the way to the end? It would have sounded very different, not appropriate for the piece, which is why she didn't do it, but certainly a possibility in another piece. So here's how that would be with the same last three measures, but the totally reverse musical feeling.

Not at all the same idea. A nice ending, not for this piece, but certainly another way to look at shaping those arpeggios. What if we did them with almost no affect at all? What if we did them much more evenly and simply? What would that sound like?

Okay. I couldn't resist doing a little bit of shaping at the end. This piece is just too lovely to leave those arpeggios just unshaped at all. But just to wrap this up, let me play that ending more or less the way Ms. Rainier intended it. One more time for you.

Now, so you can work on your arpeggios and get them polished and rippling and beautiful. I have created a little Agile Arpeggios PDF. It's a three page PDF with some instructions for helping you practice it. It's just a simple arpeggio drill that you can do for working on your arpeggios. It's that easy. And you can work on it. I suggest three different ways. Practice it slowly with a full relaxed sound so you can think about your placing and your accuracy. You can practice it also at a faster tempo with a slightly lighter dynamic so that you can, you know, focus on a seamless sort of a flow and shaping those arpeggios with little crescendos or decrescendos or whatever you like. And then also just to develop more evenness, go ahead and practice it in a long, short rhythm or one of the other rhythms that we talked about to help you develop that technical control. So that PDF Agile Arpeggios PDF is linked in the Show Notes. If you go to the Show Notes, click on that link, you'll be able to download it and it's yours for free. Just to make your arpeggios as ripply as you like. Next week here on the podcast, we'll be talking about starting a piece that first, you know, how do you start the piece? And we'll be talking about three great ways to start a piece and one way that, oh, it's a terrible way. One thing that I think you should not be doing if you want to start the a piece with the idea of actually finishing it. So that's what we'll be talking about next week on the podcast. Remember, in the meantime, 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 into 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.