Beyond Independence: How Your Hands Really Work Together - PHH 269

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions, the same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. This past weekend was a big one for us in the United States. Not only were we celebrating our July 4th Independence Day, as we do every year, but it was an anniversary year for us, our 250th. So the parties were more festive, the fireworks more explosive, and all of the celebrations focused on freedom and independence. Now, independence is always a topic here on the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I talk about it often, but of course I'm usually talking about independence of our fingers or our hands in our harp playing. Now, a key focus of every harpist's technical practice is developing more independent motion of the fingers and more independent playing of the hands. We want our fingers to be able to be equally strong, capable, flexible, and expressive, and we want our hands to be able to work together to create the music. But today I'm going a slightly different direction. I want to talk not about the independence of our hands, but about the interdependence of our hands. It's not a battle where each of our hands is fighting for independence from the other, even if it feels like that physically at times. But I think it's more to the point to consider the way our hands make music together. This goes beyond trying to figure out how one hand will do one kind of fingering while the other hand does something entirely different. This is about the role that each hand plays at any given moment in a piece of music. How each hand fits into the overall musical picture. So what I'd like to explore with you today is a more musical approach to our two-hand coordination. One that goes beyond the usual hands separately, hands together practice plan. I'd like to show you 3 distinct ways our right and left hands work together in a piece of music. You'll see how this could completely change the way you practice, with the result that you'll get to the expressive quality of the music much more quickly, and I believe with much less struggle. Now, there's a lot of practical information that we'll cover today, but remember, this is really just about putting the music first, about seeing a little, just a little beyond the notes to the bigger musical concepts. Don't think this doesn't apply to you because you're just a beginner or you only play a specific kind of music. Wherever you are in your harp journey, if you haven't learned this way of looking at your music before now, and I'm betting you haven't, you're going to be so glad you listened to this episode today. I think this is a great time. In fact, I think summertime in general is a great time to be thinking about different ways of doing things, about doing things differently. We have a little bit more focus time in the summer. We can think about alternatives that we perhaps don't want to explore during the busier part of the year. We just don't have time to rethink systems and think big ideas. We've got our heads down, we're, you know, moving forward quickly. So that's one of the reasons that I wanted to put this idea in front of you now to give you some time to sort of mull it over, play with it, think about it, and have the leisure to work with these ideas. They're not huge concepts, but it could be a huge change for you. It's also why I'm so excited about the different twist that we've put on our Christmas in July celebration this year. At Harp Mastery, we usually do something special for Christmas in July, whether it's working on new pieces or working on a review challenge, but this year we have something a little bit different, and I'm calling it Compose for Christmas. It's a 3-day arranging challenge. So this is about arranging music. Now before you say, "Well, I'm not a composer, I'm not an arranger, I have enough trouble playing the notes that are on the page," I want you to consider this. Think about the time that you spend looking for the perfect Christmas arrangement. You know, I like this version of Silent Night, but it's not quite what I want, and it's got these things that are too hard, and it's got too many lever changes, or whatever it is. It's, you know, it's okay, it's right. Maybe it's too easy, you know, maybe it's not quite special enough. Whatever it is, you have ideas about how music should sound, and I think that there's no music that we have more ideas about than holiday music. It's very personal to us, and we want it to be the way we want it to be. And we want to be able to play it well when it comes to holiday time, which is why we often think about preparing Christmas music in July. First of all, it's kind of fun to think about doing Christmas music when the weather is different than our usual Christmas weather. And this is also a time when things are just a little bit easier, things are a little bit slower, and we can use this time to sort of Ease into music and avoid the holiday rush. But here's the deal with this challenge: what I want to help you do is take A Christmas Carol, Christmas tune, and we're going to arrange it together so that's exactly what you want. I have had some people say, "Well, is this, you know, a lever-friendly challenge, or do I have to play pedal harp, or what?" And the thing is that this is about making the music yours. If you want to make it for lever harp, it's going to be for lever harp. If you want it to have a bazillion lever changes, we can put that in. If you wanted to have none, we can put that in too. It's about making the music the way you want it. And what I expect that you'll get out of this— well, you'll get a few things, right? You'll get A Christmas Carol arranged for you by you so that you're going to have it exactly the way you want it for this holiday season. Which I know is still a ways away, but this will give you time to really dig into it and perfect it if you want. Second, you'll get an arrangement of A Christmas Carol that I am doing because I'm arranging right alongside you, and I'm going to be working on a completely different Christmas Carol. So you'll have a free arrangement by the time we get to the end of this that I promise will be lever and pedal friendly as well. So that will work for you. Also, you'll have a more in-depth understanding of what writing music down is like. We learn so much more about music, about how it's constructed, about how to read it from actually writing it down. And so this is going to give you some ideas. Now we're going to be using the MuseScore app on our computers to write it down, but you can write it by hand if you want. You can use your own shorthand if you want. This is about music for you. It's not— it doesn't have to be a particular way, and I promise it's going to be easy and it's going to be fun. And what's going to be even more fun is that if you get in on this challenge— ooh, this week is the last week to be able to do this— if you get in this week, you'll be able to vote for 3 carols that will be included in the challenge because we're going to work on 3 different ones. You'll pick the one you want, but I don't want us all to be working on the same carol if that doesn't appeal. So we're gonna take a poll. We've got the poll right there so that when you register, you'll get a link to it and you can say, oh, look, from this list of Christmas carols, these are the 3 that I think I would like to work on. And the top 3 will be the ones we include in the challenge. Now you can register for the challenge, you know, up until the challenge starts, which is that 3rd week in July. So we'll be starting on Monday, July 20th. But you'll be able to get in on the poll only this week. So we're working on this this week, and on Friday this week, which would be Friday, July 10th, if you're listening to this when this episode— when it goes live— if you get in by Friday, July 10th, on July 10th, we're going to be doing a special pre-workshop which will be recorded, so you'll be able to access it as we go, on how to get started with MuseScore, because I want to make sure that we've got all the technical glitches out of the way before we start on our course. So Compose for Christmas is our Christmas in July challenge this year, and I certainly hope you do it. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Don't be intimidated by it. I promise that you'll have an arrangement that you enjoy, and you'll learn so much from it. So give this one a shot. We're not actually asking you to compose, we're actually just asking you to arrange a little bit, but it'll be a nice way to bring some creative activity to your harp playing and personalize your Christmas repertoire at the same time. So that's Compose for Christmas. You'll find the link on our website at harpmastery.com, and you'll also find the link, of course, in the show notes for today's episode. So you can register and we'll get that started coming up soon. All right, but as I promised, we're talking about independence and interdependence of your hands today, and this is some really useful information. So Let me start sharing it with you. Now let me help you understand where I'm coming from with this. I think when we usually talk about independence of our hands, we think about our hands working together. We think about them in terms of what we're doing. We're doing hands separately practice. We're doing hands together practice. And it's all about what we're doing. I know that that's our basic practice focus. We're trying to do things better, right? But that's where we go down the rabbit hole as well. I think that's where we can lose the real perspective that we need to make those notes turn into music. And I think so many of us get stuck because we're still trying to make it right instead of looking beyond to what the music is trying to do, what the music is trying to say, not just getting the notes out. And if you have gotten stuck in the notes, it can be really difficult to pull yourself back up, pick up your head, look far enough ahead to say, "Wait a second. It's not about that note. That note might fall into place if I remember what it is it's trying to do." And that's kind of how I want to look at the interplay of our hands today. Not just what they're trying to do in terms of fingers and notes, but what those fingers and notes mean to the music. And that's where we start to understand how interdependent our hands are and how they need to work together, whatever it is they're actually doing, how they need to work together to create the music. So from that musical perspective, I've pulled out 3 different kinds of hand interdependence. And I think if you pull every piece of music off your music stand right now and you were to look at it, you could identify in each piece where one of these methods of hands— interdependence method is the wrong word— but where one of these types of hand interdependence comes into play. So we're going to talk about each one, and just to make it easy for you, to make it easy to remember, I've described them all with the letter C. So we've got the 3 C's of hand interdependence here, and we'll talk a little bit about pieces of music where you might find them or what it might look like. We'll talk about the characteristics of each and how to direct your practice to the musical result that we're looking for. So much more than just hands separately or hands together. So here's our first C, our first type of hand interdependence, and I like this one because we're calling it cooperation. Now, this is the type of hand interdependence where your hands work together as maybe one big hand. It's not that they're playing the same notes, but they're part of the same musical texture. Think about an arpeggio that goes just from the bottom of your left hand up to top of your right hand, right? Now, like 4-3-2-1, 4-3-2-1. One single arpeggio. Your hands are cooperating. They're working together to create that single arpeggio. Think about a piece of music like Little Fountain, where you have all those arpeggios going down bit by bit. That is the kind of cooperative texture I'm talking about, where your hands are doing one thing and we need both hands to do it. Something with big chords would be another example of this. Another famous example, although it's not a piece of music that was originally written for harp, is that famous Bach Prelude in C. It's got a single texture, and both hands are working together to create that texture. They're not playing at the same time, they're working as kind of one giant hand to make this texture work. You know the piece, it's this one. Right? We don't hear a separate left hand and right hand. We hear one continuous musical texture. When your hands are working together to create that single arpeggio or that single big chord from bottom to top, what is it that we really need to work on? We need equality, right? We want our hands to sound equal, our fingers to sound equal. We're looking for equality in tone and dynamics. This is what's going to make those arpeggios sound fluid or the chords sound like they have all the notes in them instead of maybe just the top and the bottom ones. We need our technique at this point, and this is a time to think about technique. We need our technique to be able to pull this one out, to say, all right, we've got all 8 fingers and they're working evenly. They're— they sound the same. If we need some to be accented, we could add that on, right? But we're looking for that fluid, even sound. That's what's going to make this kind of piece or this kind of passage sound the way it's supposed to sound. We need even rhythm and we need smooth articulation, particularly if it's a scale or an arpeggio passage. We don't want there to sound like there are any bumps in here. So that's what we're listening for. We're listening for smooth, fluid, equal sound. And of course, that's what you're going to practice for. So we want those transitions from hand hand to sound smooth and unbroken. So as you practice, that's what you're going to listen for. You know, are those, those middle notes— is there a bump as I go from hand to hand? You're going to practice those transitions to make them sound smooth. Now you may or may not have a piece that you're working on right now that has this kind of interdependence as part of it. But I know you've played these pieces, whether it's Little Fountain or the Bach Prelude I just played. Maybe the, um, Solfeggio by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, another example of this. Anytime that your hands are working one after the other in an arpeggio or scale kind of idea, they're working one after another to create a single line. That's this kind of cooperation that I'm talking about. Or if you're playing big chords involving both hands, that's the same kind of thing too. So when you see that happening, you know that your hands need to cooperate. But that's just one of our 3 C's. The second of our 3 C's is probably the one we see most often, and I'm calling this one complementary. This is where our hands have different roles and they have to complement each other and they have to coordinate to present the musical idea, whatever that is. The most usual version of complementary independence would be where you have your right hand playing a melody and your left hand playing an accompaniment. Yeah, that's right. Now you know what I'm talking about, right? Think about that. Just about any piece that you know that has a right-hand melody and a left-hand accompaniment— this is complementary. Our hands are doing different things. They're working together to create sort of a single idea, which is a little bit like the cooperation, except that they're doing different things at the same time to make that happen. Any piece that has a melody and an accompaniment, that's complementary. Now, I did say, you know, right-hand melody, left-hand accompaniment, but it could be the reverse. And I am aware that sometimes that kind of change is a little bit tricky, to have a left-hand melody and a right-hand accompaniment. So it's one of those things that you want to practice. But think about what the real characteristics are of a texture that's that simple. An idea, melody, and accompaniment. So basic. But there are certain things we want from it, aren't there? We want a clear distinction between those two roles. We want our melody to sound like a melody. In other words, to sound like it's connected, like it has a flow and a pace and a movement, like it's telling a story or singing a song. So that's where we talk about phrasing. We sometimes talk about legato, not that every melody is completely legato, but this is the idea where that melody has to sound like one phrase, like a sentence, like a song. So it needs to have that beautiful flowing quality. The accompaniment might be something quite different. It could be something with chords, something a little bit bouncy, something arpeggiated and smooth. It's serving to support the melody, to add dimension to it, but it's usually in a slightly subordinate role. Naturally, that doesn't mean that the notes are any easier because sometimes they're not, but it's, it's there to support the melody. So you might have different dynamics or slightly different tone between your two hands, and they're certainly doing different kinds of things. Your melody hand might be working at something very legato and smooth, and your accompaniment hand might have a lot more jumps, a lot more disconnected sort of notes to play. I know I don't have to explain this kind of texture to you because we see it all the time. And one of the challenges of something like this is that your hands are doing things that are very different, and we want them to be able to work together and sound like it's just one musical idea. That's not easy. They need to sound unified, and they need to sound complementary. As basic as complementary playing is to so much of the music that we play, as common as it is, it's still not easy. It requires a higher level of hand independence to create this interdependence and interplay between the hands because your hands are doing different things at the same time. And they have very different purposes. They may have different dynamics. So this is where some of the hands separately practice is going to come into play. You need to be sure that your melody hand is working on a phrased and expressive melody, and that it knows how to do that, and that your accompaniment hand is supportive, that it's strong when it needs to be, and it's dynamically unobtrusive when that's appropriate. All of those things. So They need to be both hands capable of doing the thing that each one is supposed to do, but then they have to work together. And of course, that's not always easy, so that's what we practice. But as you do this, as you start to put those hands together and making sure that they're working together, I want you to think about what their complementary roles are. So much of the time we get wrapped up in trying to get the right fingers on the right strings and have them play, and we're all about just the, the technical mechanical stuff that goes on. We can make things so much easier for ourselves if we think about the roles that each hand is playing, if we think about making that singing melody and then lightening up the accompaniment so that it can go with that melody. If we stay in that just, just play the notes mindset, we lose some of the value that can come into our practice and some of the ease that we can find by working at the role of each hand, at the musical idea we're trying to get across. Those musical ideas are not something to be put on later. They are something to be worked on from the beginning when you're learning notes. I know that seems hard, But I wanted to make that point here. I've made it often in the past. I make it often with my students. But when you are thinking about what the music is trying to do, it can make your practice easier. Changes your focus from the one little note that we know you want to get right, and you will, to what that note really means. So this is the beginning of that kind of practice. And I want you to, to take a look at the pieces you're working on now that have that melody-accompaniment kind of structure and think about the roles of the hands and how they need to complement each other. You'll find it's a very different way of looking at it. But I did promise you 3 C's, so here's the third one. I'm calling the third one counterpoint. Now, if counterpoint is not a word you're real familiar with, in music, counterpoint really means against note. And so this is a note against note kind of texture, and I don't mean that to sound adversarial, but what it really is is think about sort of two melodies going at the same time. Maybe think about a two-voice choral texture where you've got one line singing and then another line singing along with it, and it's hard to know whether one is melody or one is accompaniment because it sounds kind of like like two melodies that are just working together. That's counterpoint. And this conjunction of two melodies is sometimes most easily thought of or recognized in the music we play as something sort of conversational or like a dialogue. So in this kind of texture that I'm talking about now, your two hands are doing 2 different things, but they're more or less equal parts, kind of like 2 people having a conversation. They're not necessarily one subordinate to the other. They're pretty equal. They don't necessarily happen at the same time. And I'm not really talking even about contrary motion per se, where your hands are just doing things going in opposite directions, but each hand in this kind of a texture, this kind of a style has its own musical direction and its own musical intent. It has its own reason for being there. This perhaps is a less common texture or style for us to come across. We see it in Baroque music a lot, like music by Bach. In fact, if you've ever played a Bach two-part invention, you will have discovered a terrific example of this where the two hands are really quite conversational. Each one has a time when it speaks in a melody and each time when it relaxes itself into an accompaniment. There are lots of examples of that in music from that era, but it's not exclusive to that era. And I just pulled out a real quick example from contemporary harp literature. This is from La Gemblère, by Bernard Andres. And one of the variations in that piece— it's a theme and variations— and one of the variations has exactly this kind of counterpoint texture. It's got the right-hand line that, that's, it's very pretty melody all on its own. But guess what? The left hand has a melody too. And while you could think of this as a right-hand melody and a left-hand accompaniment, I think it's much more appropriate and truer to the music to think of this as a little dialogue where the right hand and left hand are exchanging roles. Because when you put the hands together, it goes like this. Do you see how the two hands, they're cooperating, but they're very conversational? It's very much a dialogue between the right hand and the left hand where neither one has a subservient or subordinate role, right? It isn't, "I'm the melody hand and I'm the accompaniment hand." They switch back and forth. And this is true interdependence, I think, where each hand needs to step up and be the star at its own particular moment. And of course, because of that, it has some more demanding technical requirements because you have to realize that each hand has its own dynamic profile, right? Which may be the same between as you're switching hands, or it may not. There may be times when, okay, this hand is the, is the star, and then it's maybe louder but then softer while the other hand is speaking, if you will. So you need to be able to have that flexibility in both hands, and each hand needs to be really completely confident in its own notes and its own role and expressive in its own way. So practicing for that That balance and that interplay is really what you're looking for. And be aware as you're looking at a piece of music, is that left hand truly accompaniment? Maybe 90% of the time it will be, but maybe it's really its own thing, or maybe the left hand has those moments where it's going to shine for just a measure, and you want to be able to bring that out so that it rises above the level of just I'm supporting the right hand to— wait, I have something important to say. So this is a conversational give and take, not, you know, one hand superior over the other all the time. So that's my third C: counterpoint. So let's do a quick review. We have cooperation, where the hands are working together to create a single musical gesture, a big arpeggio or a chord or a scale kind of a passage. We have the more usual sort of setup, which I'm calling complementary, where you have a melody and an accompaniment. It's all about balance in that kind of situation. And then we have the third form of interdependence, which I feel is truly interdependent, and that's counterpoint, where the hands have— they're sharing the melodic role and there's interplay going back and forth, very conversational, very much like a little dialogue. And each hand needs to be able to step up and and use its voice when it's needed. But I wanted to give you one more little thought here. This is a very musical way to approach the technical challenges of hands-together playing. As I started saying earlier on in this episode, this goes beyond just working out notes and coordination. This is really creating the music, and I hope you can see why it's important not not just to get stuck in that 'I can do this hand separately and I have to put them together, argh,' but we're looking at the musical result that you're aiming for. And that makes every decision in your playing simpler and clearer, and it gives your practice a direction that you might not have noticed before. So as you look at the music that you're working on, take a look at how the music in any particular part of the music is divided between the your hands. It may change during the piece, right? You may have a complementary texture there and a contrapuntal texture there, and, and your hands may be cooperating in a different part of the piece. Take a look at that and use that to guide you in your practice. Remember that practice isn't solely about drill or about being correct. Your practice is about the music, and everything you do in your practice needs to be directed toward the way you know the music should sound. Your hands can truly be interdependent, and the music needs your practice to be focused on that result so that the music is informing what you're trying to do, not the other way around. And if that isn't a mic drop moment, I don't know what is. And that may help you as you're working on your Christmas in July music and And to go along with that, I wanted to offer you next week on the podcast my Christmas in July prep plan. This is what I call my 5-4-4-3 plan, and it's about how to get your music ready now and keep it ready as much as you need to without getting sick to death of it so that you'll have it ready for the holidays. Because Christmas in July is not enough, right? You can get your music ready now, but how do you know you'll have it ready in December? So we're going to go over my 5-4-4-3 plan on the podcast next week. And of course, I would love it if you signed up for our Compose for Christmas, uh, arrange your own Christmas carol challenge that is coming up in just a couple weeks. You can find the link to learn more about it, uh, in the show notes or at heartmastery.com. It's fun, it's going to be a blast. So, um, working on composing for Christmas, I mean, how cool to have your very own Christmas carol arrangement that you get get to play this year. I think you will love this. So that is coming up soon. Next week on the podcast, we'll, we'll get you started on your own Christmas in July review plan with my 5-4-4-3 plan. And in the meantime, remember 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. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.