Are You Taking Too Long to Learn That Piece? - PHH 080

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan, and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I, although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show.

How long should it take to learn a piece? I'm asked that question so many times, and every time my heart sinks. Why? Well, first of all, there's that word should. There are no shoulds in the learning process. The word should leads us to the idea that there's one standard against which we'd be able to judge our efforts and which we could use to plan our music. Learning an objective standard such as this piece will take any harpist three months to learn is absolutely impossible. So the word should isn't helpful. But even if we reframe the question in very specific terms, how long will it take me to learn this particular piece? We still run into difficulties trying to come up with an answer. That's because each harpist is unique, bringing a unique set of skills and experiences to their music. And each piece has challenges that are specific to that piece, which may test an individual harpist's skills differently. Plus, anyone's progress on any piece will be affected by their practice time and their practice habits, by their learning style, even by how much they like the piece.

Then there's the question of what we mean by learning a piece. Do we mean performance ready? Do we mean memorized? Or do we mean that we only have the notes fairly reliable but maybe not up to tempo? Or do we merely mean that we've spent enough time working on it already that we are ready to call it done? Well, even if we accept the fact that there's no definitive timeline or clear endpoint for learning a piece, at least not objectively, then we can still explore the various factors in the process. After all, once we know what affects our learning speed, we can work at developing the skills we need to help us learn faster. So on today's show, I'm going to share the timeline that professional harpists use for learning their repertoire and talk about how you can adapt that for yourself. Plus, I'll review my famous conveyor belt system that helps you see the stages of development that any piece goes through as you learn it. And I'll even give you some timelines that you can experiment with to discover how you learn best. Plus, there's an extra bonus for you too here, right when you learn a piece faster, you often play it better too. Well, that sounds good to me. And I'll bet it sounds good to you too. Now, we're all about learning a piece faster today, and I have a special opportunity that goes right along with that to talk about. Now, if you've been around harp mastery for a while, you might know that the past couple of years we've done a 12 days of harp happiness event for the first 12 days of December in each of these past two years. And I've made sheet music arrangements that I've made available on a day by day basis as we go through those 12 days. Well, this year we're doing something a little different. It's still a 12 days of harp Happiness event, but this time it's centered around learning one particular piece. So in this year's 12 Days of Harp Happiness event, I'm going to share my brand new Christmas piece that I have written, Meditation on Silent Night. It's an original composition that sets a very peaceful mood around a new arrangement of Silent Night. So it's kind of like a little Silent Night sandwich. We've got the original parts that I have composed on the outside and a nice arrangement of Silent Night on the inside. It's very peaceful, feel very calm. And I've created the arrangement so that there's a more intermediate version that's playable on lever or pedal harp. Lever harp with a couple small adaptations and then there's a simplified arrangement as well. Easily workable on lever or pedal harp with all the appropriate markings. So you have two different ways you can choose to play it. Plus I'll show you how to personalize it even a little bit further if you need to. Now, this arrangement you get free as part of our 12 days event. And along with this arrangement, I'm going to be sharing 10 video tutorials and two live workshops that are going to help you learn the piece, make it enjoyable, make it easy. We'll get all those questions answered, plus I'll share some fun promotions with you as we Go. But the cool thing about this is that our 12 days event is happening inside our My Heart Mastery community. So if you are a My Heart Mastery member, you're going to be going through this, this 12 days learning process with me. And we'll show you all the techniques about learning a piece quickly, getting those questions answered and getting this, getting this piece learned in those 12 days.

But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you can still take part in this. Yeah, it's like the season of giving. So we've got a little gift for you here too. So you can get your free sheet music. You can have access to all the special deals we're doing during these 12 days, all the video tutorials and those live calls. And we're offering all this to you for just $12, like 12 days. So you'll have the access to the My Heart Mastery community for this 12 days promotion, plus all the stuff that goes with that. So it's really kind of quite a deal. And you will find the link to join us for this 12 days event in the show notes for this episode or if you go to events on heartmastery.com you will find it there as well. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. And as I said, it just builds right on what we're talking about today, which is all about the best way to, to learn a piece of music faster. I know, it sounds great, right? Well, that's what we're going to be talking about on that event, that 12 days event. And we're going to talk about it today too. So let's get started. I'm going to start with a little confession. I have always been a fast learner when it comes to music. I've always been a good sight reader and I learn music quickly. And it takes me a long time, like it takes everyone a long time to polish my music. Right? To get it really ingrained and truly performance ready. That takes a while because it's a function of time, so you can't really speed up that end of the process. It just takes a while. But I have always been good at getting music off to a really fast start. But just because I've been good at that, please don't think that the tips I'm going to share with you only work if you're a good sight reader and a fast music learner too. These are things that I have learned because of my work with my students. You see, one of the things that happens when you become a professional musician is that you Discover that all of a sudden you have a lot more music to learn than you did when you were a student. And you have to learn it very quickly, right? When you're a music student, you know, you're doing more or less a version of what you did when you were a kid, which is you've got that one piece, you know, and you prepare it for the teacher's recital and you play it, you know, and you've got it. And that's the big thing you're working on. It's not generally about amassing a large repertoire of a lot of pieces of music. And even in a college or conservatory setting, there's so much focus on that junior and that senior recital that it's still sort of a slightly stepped up, or maybe much stepped up version of that same idea. And of course, at one of those music schools, at the same time, you're also working with orchestra music and ensemble music, and there's a lot of other stuff. And so you learn to balance a lot of different musical responsibilities all at once. So the thing, the skill that is absolutely essential for a professional musician is being able to learn music quickly, because there's always something new coming up, particularly if you're playing in an orchestra or if you're doing a lot of freelance work with various groups. You've got the music for this week, the music for next week, the music for the week after. There's a lot of stuff that you have to get going and learn how to balance.

What I discovered in my teaching was that the way a lot of people approach music learning is just about the exact opposite of the way a professional would and of the way that I personally was comfortable learning music. Right. Fast learner. So that's off to a fast start. Now, don't think of this like the tortoise and the hare. This is not, you know, if you start quickly, then you're going to slow down later and you'll take a nap and you'll lose the race. Just like in the old fable, right? This is just. We want to not spend time on things we don't have to spend time on. And if you work too much in detail at the very beginning of learning a piece, you sometimes slow yourself down because you forget to get out of detail mode to get where you need to go. So what a professional does is cut down the learning time at the front end of the process. Remember I said just a moment ago that that end stage of learning music, that's the part that's going to go slowly, that Part that's, well, you know, it's really good today and it's not so good tomorrow, and it's not memorized yet, or it's not, you know, it still has little glitches. It's not really in my fingers. It's not in my bones. It's, you know, however you want to. To describe it. That is a function of time. And you need to give a piece time to really mellow like that. And so if a professional is preparing music for a recital, where that music has to be really, you know, ingrained to that level, then they need a long time frame, just like any other musician. Now, if it's music that they're learning for an ensemble thing that's gonna be, you know, a once and done, I'm playing it in two weeks and, you know, whatever they. Then that's a slightly different approach. But if this is something that they're learning to play for a recital or a chamber music thing, something that really requires a lot of detail and, you know, and a lot of learning time, they allow for the length of the end stage. They allow for all that polish time. And where they speed up the process is in the beginning so that they learn the notes very quickly. Now, once again, it depends on the kind of piece and how long the piece is. But that first stage of learning the notes could go very quickly. It could go in just a week, maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a few weeks if it's a, you know, a much longer piece. But that first stage of really just getting the notes down goes very, very quickly, so that in a short period of time, the note, they can play the notes at a steady pace, even if it's not up to tempo, because tempo can come over time and just to the point where it's, you know, kind of mostly correct most of the time. And after that, then we have some of the detail work that creeps in, and we have what I like to call marination time, right when it marinates. And it just takes time where you polish it, you make it comfortable, you make it secure, you make it yours. So a professional who is planning to play an entire solo recital or a concerto or something, they might learn it very, very quickly and then give it a whole year to mellow and marinate before they perform it so that their performance is really secure. Now, I'm not saying that you have to spend a year on a piece, and I'm not saying that you have to learn the notes to your piece in a week. We can make the time frame More comfortable for you. But what I am trying to help you see is that if we spend less time with learning the notes right up front, less time working on those details right in the very beginning, but we work on the overview, we work at that big picture a little bit more, then we can get a handle on things early on and get some of that detail work in the process later. It also gives you a time. A time.

Frame for the whole thing. There you go. That would be the word, a time frame. So it gives you sort of this scheme where you can figure, all right, I'm going to spend three months getting comfortable with the piece, but I'm going to spend three weeks learning the notes. It's a much more predictable way to look at the time frame of your piece by saying, okay, I'm going to learn these notes in this number of weeks, but. But I'm going to give it this many weeks or months, more likely to really become secure and performance ready. That doesn't mean you have to spend months on every piece. It depends on what you're going to do with the piece. Right. If you just want to sort of get a handle on it and, you know, learn it and kind of say, okay, well, that's good, I kind of kind of got that. I can put it away until I'm ready to bring it out and play it somewhere. Then you don't have to put in all that marination time at the end, so your timeframe will be shorter. But if you have an occasion that you want to perform a piece for, you have to build in that time at the end. And so we want to cut down the time at the beginning so that by the time you get around to performing it, you're not sick to death of it. Right? You don't need a year to do it, unless it's the kind of piece that really is going to take that long. But let's cut down the time frame and in the beginning. All right, so how do you do that? Well, I tried to lay that out a while back in a system I called the conveyor belt system. And I'm going to talk with you about that right now, and we'll go over the stages. But right now I want to want you to picture a conveyor belt, right? So the conveyor belt is moving along, and it's nice and steady. It's, you know, it's going to get. You get whatever it is from one place to another. It's just moving right along like a moving sidewalk in the airport. Right. And that's what we want for your piece. We want your piece to keep moving right along. But what my little conveyor belt system does, it is help you to identify where your piece is on the conveyor belt and how it's working out. So picture that conveyor belt, and then let's talk about those conveyor belt stages. I like to divide the learning process, when you're talking about learning a piece of music, into three stages. The first one I call first sight. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean sight reading, but it means that time when you, you know, you take out the piece, you put it on your music stand, and you're ready to start working on it. And the first sight stage is that short stage that I was talking about, at least for more experienced musicians. Right. The first site is basically when you're getting the overview of the piece, you want to plunge in, you want to find everything out that you can about the piece, look at all the notes. Don't just start with, you know, one line at a time. Let's see what is there, and then figure out what we're really going to need to work on and what we can kind of play through. So the first sight stage can be very, very short. You're not going to make everything perfect at that first sight stage. We're going to just sort of get an idea of everything that's there. Then there's the messy middle stage. This is where we do all that focus work, all that work on detail. We're developing familiarity with it. We're, you know, checking out the fingering and the. The petals or the levers. We're working on all those focus areas that I talk about.

In kaleidoscope practice, particularly. Right. Those focus areas of detail, expression, continuity, control, and connection. By the way, if you want to review those focus areas, I talk about that whole Kaleidoscope practice system and those focus areas in podcast episode number 38. So you can always go back to our podcast archives and take a look at episode number 38, and you will. You'll reacquaint yourself with all those focus areas. So. But that's the messy middle, and that's the part that takes a long time because you're going to get everything figured out and work on all those things. But the messy middle is also the part where a lot of people lose energy. So I like you to move on from the messy middle before you think you're ready. And that's what I described a moment ago, where the professionals get out of that messy middle by saying, okay. It doesn't have to be up to tempo yet. It just needs to be mostly steady and mostly correct most of the time. It's a pretty flexible guideline, Right. But the fact is that you don't have to work every detail until it's correct every time to start thinking about polishing your piece. Those details, those, you know, the. The notes that are hard to get, the fingering that still kind of won't come, the tempo that you can't get it up to. You don't have to wait until all those things are done to begin polishing your piece. They will come along during the polishing process because that third stage, the finish stage, is. It's another. Is another big picture stage. And this is where we're working on the marinating time, right? So you're going to consolidate all this, going to put all that stuff together. You're going to really get the sense for playing the piece, and you're going to let all those details start sorting themselves out in the real context of the piece. This is where you'll develop that confidence. This is where that piece will start to feel comfy, start to feel like you own it. So getting out of the first sight as quickly as possible and figuring, okay, yes, I've. I've seen all these notes and notice how different this is from an approach where you might say, well, all right, I'll really work until I have these first two lines really, really good, and then I'll move on to the next two lines. That takes a long time. But if you can figure out, okay.

This is how the piece is going to go, even if you're getting through the entire piece at a snail's pace and stopping and starting, getting that big picture overview of the piece and getting through everything that you can early in the learning process is going to speed everything up. The messy middle is going to take a while because that's where you're going to have to make it start sounding the way it's supposed to sound, but get out of that as soon as you can. Don't wait for it to get up to tempo. Don't wait for it to be a hundred percent correct, because all that will happen as you polish the piece. So that's the conveyor belt in a nutshell. So here's the next question, or maybe it's the same question, right? And that is, how can you use that system to help you learn a piece of music faster? Well, you'll speed up that first sight stage by reading through the piece, even if it's hand separately, read through the piece, beginning to end. You can stop and start as many times as you want, but during this process, you're going to find the sections of the piece you're going to see, oh, look, this is the same thing that I just played on the page before. Oh, this is a middle section. Oh, this is an introduction. This is an ending. Look, this is the same thing as at the beginning, but it's just a little bit different, or those two measures are different. Or this is the same thing that happened at the beginning, but now it's. It's the same melody, but it's starting on a different note. So being able to make those observations, being able to mark in the sections and make sure that you're, you know, you have those levers and pedals, you can sort of start to figure those out. Working hands alone is great. Working as much hands together as you can is even better. Even if it's, well, okay, I can play these first couple lines, I can struggle through them hands together. And then after that I've got to go back to hands separately. But then I can go back to hands together over here. That's fine. I know it may not feel comfortable to you, it might feel like a real patchwork way to work through things, but it's going to get the most.

That you can learned or, or at least experienced in the piece in the shortest amount of time. So speed up that first sight by being sure that in that first week of looking at a piece, you get all the way from the beginning to the end, one way or another. Doesn't have to be pretty yet, it just has to be complete so that you get that complete picture. It will help shape your practice too, because you'll be able to understand a little bit more about where the piece is going. And you cannot do this just by listening to a recording or watching a video. Your fingers need to be involved. You need that tactile experience of what the whole piece is going to be like. It's very, very different to play it than it is just to listen to it and read through the music. So think about it like.

If you had to read a chapter of a book for school, like maybe when you were in junior high or high school, and there were always those points at the end of the chapter that summarized the chapter. And of course, the lazy kids, and I know this wasn't you, the lazy kids would just look at those points at the end of the chapter and figured they would know enough to pass the quiz. And of course they didn't, but the smart ones, and I'm sure this was, you looked at the, those points at the end of the chapter and then went back to read the chapter, knowing what it was they were going to be reading about. And it helped it all make more sense. This is that you're going to get all the big ideas sorted out and then you can start putting things together. So I highly recommend this as a way to go. And I, you know, I understand that it's goes against the grain for some of you, but do give it a try because it's, it's very freeing and it will speed up your, your piece learning. How do you speed up the messy middle? Well, I mentioned this to you just a moment ago. Just get out of the messy middle before you think you're ready. Start playing the piece. Start giving yourself the, the, the experience of playing through some of those sections that are still messy and still not quite right. Put them back in their context. Because sometimes the things that you think are the issue really aren't once you get them put back in the, in the context of the piece. I've had students many times struggle or feel like they need to struggle with a particular passage and then they discover when we start working on it in the lesson that, oh, look, but when I put this in the piece, it actually has a little bit of room to breathe there. I have time to place my, whatever finger it is. You know, I can do that cross under because there's enough time. This is the way the piece is going to go. And I don't have to have those notes right up to tempo. And so struggling with them doesn't make sense and is not an efficient use of practice time. So speed up that messy middle by getting to the finish stage a little bit faster. Trust your fingers, trust the process. And how do you speed up the finish stage? Well, it does take time. That, as I said, learning a piece to that in your bones stage is absolutely a function of time. And the more you do it, the more time you spend at it, the better it will get. But that doesn't mean that you have to wait months or years before you play the piece. Know that part of that finished process is taking a piece out for a walk, as it were. Right. You don't have to make that most important performance of the piece, the one that you're practicing for the very first time that you take it out in public. And in fact, it shouldn't be right. Professionals preview their pieces all the time so that if there's that that concerto that they're trying to learn when they're playing it with the orchestra, that's not the first time that they've played it for an audience. They've taken it out, maybe had a pianist accompany them, and they've done it in this person's house and for this extra teacher and for this small group of people, and played a couple movements in this program and that program, and they've given it those dry runs, those preview performances, because that's part of the Polish process. You learn from that too.

So don't wait until you think it's ready to move it right along.

So this brings us back to our original question. How long does it take to learn a piece?

While there is no one right answer for this, I think there's a pretty good answer, and I think it's this. Learning a piece is not a short process, but it can be much shorter than you think. It can be much shorter than you're happy about, right? Sometimes people want it to be a long process because it makes them feel comfortable. But if you want to learn a piece faster, you need to be willing to take it to the end, process a little bit faster, work through the notes faster. That doesn't mean you have to play them up to tempo faster. Right. Tempo can be one of the last things that you get to with a piece, and that's okay. Although we can. We have ways of getting you there faster, too. But I think that you will learn your own timeline. But if you can cut out some of the time right in the beginning that you learn a piece, you'll find that you'll stop asking yourself the question. You won't be worried about how long it takes to learn it, because you'll be getting to the point, good stuff faster, right to the part where you can start to actually play the piece instead of think, well, if I spend long enough learning these notes at this really slow tempo, it will somehow magically finish. That is what doesn't happen. You make the piece finish. So how long does it take to learn a piece? As long as you give it.

So let's give it a little less time. Take it out for that first. Walk a little bit sooner and get through that just a little bit faster. Now, if you want to see some of these techniques in action, then please join me for the 12 days of harp happiness. Remember, those of you who are in the My Heart Mastery Membership community. That's what we're doing. That's our theme for this month, for December, at least it's not quite December yet. But that is our theme for December, so you will be experiencing all of that with me. And remember that it's, you know, we're going to have daily videos or those two live calls on our Monday nights when we can work through it. You can ask questions, but I'll give you step by step instructions on how to learn this and make sure that you have a plan for playing it. So it's a great way to work through some of these techniques, figure out what that conveyor belt system is all about. And of course, the 12 days thing is just going to be fun. We'll have the extra promotions to go along with that. And if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, remember, we're making all of this available to you exactly the same as we do for the My Heart Mastery members for the whopping sum of $12. That's a dollar a video.

That's pretty, pretty good deal. So I really hope you join us for this because it's going to be fun. So there's that coming up. Now, next week here on the podcast, we're talking about music for a peaceful season. I will be sharing with you some of the tips people loved from my crush the Rush webinar, plus some musical suggestions that will help make your holiday calm and bright. Ones you can listen to, ones you can play, and I might even play a little bit for you. So that is next week on the podcast. But for right now, remember that every day is a day you can add more calm, peace and 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.