Bring More Dimension To Your Music: A 3D Approach - PHH 078

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. I have to admit, I am fascinated with 3D printers. Now. I don't have one. I don't see that I will ever need to have one. Although we would have said the same about a smartphone just a few years ago. The idea though, that a computer file which seems less than tangible to begin with, can be turned into a solid three three dimensional object fascinates me. And 3D printing is used virtually everywhere now to produce eyeglasses and furniture, scale models, medical devices, reconstruction of ancient artifacts, and the list goes on. The process itself is also interesting. It requires special software to read the design file and then to slice it into hundreds or thousands of cross sections of the end product, which are then created one by one until that end product is complete.

What I find so intriguing is that this process is an additive process where those slices, those cross sections, are added together to create the object. Consider how this is the reverse of more traditional processes where material is taken away or subtracted from an initial block of material to reveal the object. This subtractive process is the sculptor's process, right? Taking away the clay or the stone that is unnecessary for the finished figure. 3D printing, however, is about adding, about looking at the slices of the whole and putting them together. I started thinking about what an additive process for learning music would be like. I know you were wondering when I was going to tie this in, right? Well, what would be the essential slices, those cross sections that we need to combine in order to get the complete musical result, rather than focusing on taking away the elements. We don't want, you know, wrong notes, whatever. And in itself those are worthwhile, right? To take those away. But what are the elements or the dimensions? If you Will that we need to build the music from the inside out. And that's the idea behind this show. Today we'll look at three dimensions of music that, if we consider them, will help shape our music from the very first moment we begin a new piece all the way to its first performance and beyond. It's a different point of view and one which I hope will engage your creativity and spark your inner musicality. Engage your creativity, spark your musicality. You might be thinking right now that you just don't have the energy for that. I know, I get it. We're just upon the holidays here, right? With just days left to Thanksgiving. And so the countdown is on. And you might already be feeling that holiday pinch, that sense that there isn't enough time for everything. Well, I don't want you to lose traction in your harp playing just because it's the holidays. After all, what more appropriate instrument for the holidays at this time of year than the harp to add that, that little bit of sparkle and that little bit of serenity and peace to the holidays. But at the same time, I get it. I've been there. You don't have time to practice. You have so much other stuff that you need to get done for the holidays, and those are things that you really want to have as priorities in your holiday planning. And the harp, it may be very tempting to say, okay, harp playing, I'm just going to put you on hiatus for a little while, but I'd rather not have you do that. And I know you would really rather not do that either.

Besides, you might have places you've promised to play this holiday season. Or at least if you haven't been promising anybody else you would play for them. Maybe you just want to be able to play for yourself or your family. And so you really don't want to not play, right? You want to be sure that you can do that, but you don't have any practice time. Well, I want you to take a deep breath, let it out, calm down, because I have a very special call that I would love to invite you to. It's a webinar. It's called Crush the rush 15 ways to banish holiday harp stress and actually enjoy your playing. Now, this is a totally stress free webinar. There's not going to be any kind of sales pitch. We're not going to go over an hour, I promise you. So you'll be able to fit this into your holiday schedule. I, I just want to make your holidays filled with harp happiness along with everything else. So we're going to be working through some very practical things. So, for instance, maybe you have music you've been planning or even have committed to playing over the holidays, but you don't have enough practice time to actually get it ready. And it's starting to make you really nervous and stressed. I can show you how to fix that. Maybe you just, you have these Christmas carols and you wanted to play them, but you're tired of practicing them. Maybe you've been practicing this Christmas music since summer and you can't bring yourself to spend any more time practicing it. But you know, you have to keep it fresh. We can fix that too. Or maybe your music just has this one spot that won't fix and you need to have it ready to play in just a few weeks. We can fix that too. And on top of that, we can talk about how your harp playing can serve you over this holiday season. It's a webinar that I taught. I taught a version of this anyway, quite a number of years ago. And when I was just going through some old files, I found this material and thought, you know, it's time to share this. We're out of the pandemic crunch that we had a couple years ago. People are starting to play more. That holiday rush is starting to set in again. And let's talk about how to defeat that holiday rush before it has time to set in. So this webinar is called Crush the Rush Free webinar. All you have to do is either use the link in the show notes to register for it, or you can go to heartmastery.com and you'll find the all the information you need on the Events tab of our website. The webinar is Tuesday, November 22, and that's 2022 if you're listening to this in the future. So in which case you've already missed the webinar. But Tuesday, November 22nd at 7:30pm Eastern Time. It's gonna be one hour. It's gonna be short, sweet. It will be fun. And I think you'll really enjoy and be able to use some of these tips because the last thing we need is a stressed out harpist. We're strung out enough, right? I know. Little joke. All right, well, let's get back to talking about the dimensions of music. Imagine if you were a composer and you wanted to write a piece of music.

Well, you'd probably have a basic idea of what you were going to write. Although all basic ideas are subject to change and evolution, Right? And maybe you have a motif Maybe you have a few notes that you think might be a great little nugget to start with and to work from.

But probably you have this overarching idea, this concept that is going to guide the development of your piece. So you start working and the piece grows and it takes on its own personality. And of course, part of that is you, the composer, your own personality as well, because you're making the choices that create that piece, and the piece becomes the result of those choices that you make. And the choices have to do with the very piece. Basic elements of music.

Now, switch hats for a second, and you're the performer and you're looking at a finished piece of music. Most often, the first things we look at are not those big overarching kind of concepts or those big ideas of how those elements of music are used. Usually we're looking, saying, oh, look, arpeggio, scales, notes, fingering. We're starting from the little details.

It's not a bad point of view, and it's certainly a practical one. But when we take a moment and step back into the composing space and take a look at what is there in sort of a bigger picture way, we get a completely different idea, and one that frees us from the tyranny of the notes and fingering, but allows us to express those notes in.

A more holistic way, right? A way that considers the piece of music as an entirety and not just as a collection of sections and notes and all that decomposition that we do in order to practice it and play it well.

So what are those basic elements? They're not going to be surprises to you. They're ones we know very well, but ones we often forget to consider just for their own sake. And I've called them dimensions here because it's a helpful way, at least for me, to think about what they really mean. And the first dimension that I need us to consider is the horizontal dimension. Ooh, horizontal is kind of a scary word for harpist. Not because we think about, you know, having to be flat on our back, weighed down with all these notes, but because we don't often think horizontally, at least not the way many other instrumentalists do, or singers, for that fact. Right? Think about a violinist or a flutist or a soprano. Their concern is the melodic line of how the music flows horizontally, how that melody develops and arches and comes back.

We often talk about the legato of a line. We harpists don't even have, a true legato where we can actually sustain between notes. We play it and hope it rings long enough to get us to the next note. And that's pretty much it. But the fact is that most music has a melody that needs to sing and flow.

But what do we get wrapped up in? We get wrapped up in hands together, right? We're so busy trying to get our hands to work together that we often see our music and think of it and practice it this way, maybe even hear it in our ear as this string of verticalities, for lack of a better word. They're maybe not chords, maybe they are, but we often think of our music in terms of, okay, top to bottom, or bottom to top, if that's what you like. But they're vertical things that progress one after the other. And that vertical dimension of music is important, and we're going to go there next. But I really want to start with melody, with that horizontal dimension, because it came first. One of the things that music students study when they go to a music conservatory, they study counterpoint, specifically 16th century counterpoint. Now, the interesting thing about this is that this study is a study of music in its purest form, or for all practical purposes anyway, for study purposes, its purest form. And it comes from a set of. Of not exactly rules, but principles that were developed in the 16th century. And it's mostly a study of melody. I know when we think of counterpoint, the idea, of course, is that point is, is the word for note, and counter is against. And counterpoint is how notes are.

Combined, put against each other in time. But the study of counterpoint begins with the study of melody. And the rules of 16th century species counterpoint study are very exacting, very particular about how this thing that doesn't even really sound like a melody is developed. But all the principles of what we understand as melody, you know, five centuries later, are still there. So it has a flow, it has a high point, it has a clear beginning and ending, so that it has a progression over time. And that horizontal dimension is something that all composers study as well. And it's very interesting to think about those concepts from 500 years ago still influencing the way we think about melody today.

But it does come down to those things that we still understand about melody, that it must flow. And so of course, we practice in things that allow us to make sure to. To make our own melodies flow, Things that provide technical security for that, like scales, like patterns, things that give us the dexterity we need to help that melody flow. But sometimes we forget how that that melody is important in our harp playing.

So we'll talk about how you can be aware of that and use that in your heart. Playing in just a moment as we talk about these other dimensions as well. But take a look at harp music that you have. Even if it's a piece of music that doesn't seem to have a lot of melody, because it's got a lot of arpeggios. Something like.

The Little Fountain, perhaps, or moonlight, another piece like that. There's a melody in there.

And it's, you know, soaring above all those arpeggio notes, or maybe interwoven in between them. But our job is not just to play those arpeggios well, but it's also to play the melody well. Now, if you're interested, some composers who are well known for their beautiful melodies, there are oodles, of course, but here are just a few. Schubert is one who is always considered a master of melody. And some pieces you might know by him, his Ave Maria, the Serenade. Beautiful pieces, beautiful melody. And of course, Schubert wrote hundreds of songs called Leader and the Melody. The way he develops the melody and the way.

They progress and take you through the musical thought, just lovely. Puccini, another master of melody. And he's, of course, the famous opera composer. You might know his Omeo Babino Caro from Gianni Schicki, or maybe, you know, beautiful melodies from La Boheme or Madame Butterfly. Once again, the melodies that just can touch your heart in popular music. Jerome Kern was one of those who wrote beautiful melodies. You'll know him as the composer of Showboat or songs like Smoke Gets in your Eyes or All the Things yous Are, and many of the songs from Fred Astaire. Ginger Roger's musicals like the Way youy Look Tonight is one of his. So, you know, beautiful, beautiful melodies. So just some examples if you want to be inspired that way. So if melody is the horizontal dimension, then quite obviously the vertical dimension is going to be harmony.

We get this one. We harpists understand this. We're all about chords. They may be tough to play, but we know that they happen. The hands together thing, as I mentioned before, we're all about that. We got that. But harmony in musical terms didn't really come into play until the 17th century. Back in the 16th century, we're dealing with one melody, and then we might put another melody with it. But their big considerations there weren't the chords that were formed by the melodies, but just sort of how the melodies worked together.

But 100 years later, all of a sudden, harmony was becoming its own thing, its own dimension of music. And of course, here in the 21st century, we've got a completely different idea about harmony, but the way we understand it still comes from conventions from the 17th and 18th century. Once again, we know this is all about hands together, but we also think of our harmony in terms of progression, how one chord moves to the next.

Now, you might be used to thinking about this in very practical terms, Things you need to be able to do in order to play a chord progression, which is the word we use, right? A chord progression. Well, you know. Okay, well, here are fingers that stay the same between chords. Here are the shapes of my fingers. Here's what moves from one chord to another. Here's what stays the same.

But the chords themselves have a progression that goes beyond.

Just the practicalities for us harpists, but actually has an order. And some of the composers who are associated with harmony are known for their specific personality that they injected into chord progressions, because, of course, they changed over time. If you think about the way that Bach used harmony, thinking about the Bach chorales, very smooth. You may know these from church hymns. But then a couple hundred years later, we've got Debussy.

Who'S all of a sudden using chords in a way that Bach never would have. He's known for his progressions of seventh chords, so beautiful to our modern ears, but very different from what had gone before. Other composers that we have that we associate with beautiful harmonic progressions. Tchaikovsky, all the music from his ballets, you probably know, the Romeo and Juliet Overture, some of those chords and the way they move, just incredibly beautiful. Rachmaninoff, another more modern composer. That variation from the Paganini Variations for Piano and Orchestra. Ooh, just so scrumptious, right? Or think about the way George Gershwin used harmony in his compositions like Rhapsody in Blue or American in Paris or all the popular songs he write, he wrote, right, Someone to Watch Over Me, I got rhythm, all those kinds of things. So harmony, the vertical dimension, as I said, we get this one. So the third dimension I want us to consider is time. Because both harmony and melody, both the vertical and the horizontal, rely on time. Melody progresses over time. It develops, it grows, and it rises and falls over time.

Harmony progresses, right? That's the word we use. It moves through time. Time determines how a piece sounds, the mood, the affect of that piece. We often talk about that in terms of pacing. Both harmony and melody push towards something we call a cadence. A cadence is a conclusion, whether it's sort of a final conclusion of a piece or just a temporary ending to a phra. The word cadence, by the way. Comes from the Latin word cadere, which means to fall. And it refers to the falling off of energy and tension in the phrase as the melody concludes its thought or as the harmony concludes its progression. So that's what the word cadence means. And it's useful to think about that as the. As the goal of the movement of a melody or the movement of harmony. Now, of course, time is another factor, right, because the pacing of the piece itself, if it's fast or slow, slow could mean sad or melancholy or reflective.

A happy mood might require a fast tempo. If you put a lot of rubato in a piece, it could be pensive or expressive. But perhaps you want an accelerando in there that just brings passionate energy to the phrase as it progresses, as it moves. So time is an important thing. It's not just about the rhythm and the steady beat, but it's about the sense of development over time of the melody and the harmony and how they carry us through the.

A change.

That where the melody and the harmony start at the beginning of the piece. By the time we get to the end of the piece, we have changed, the thought has been developed, the mood has altered or completed its thought. So the time is important in that sense. Yeah, I know you were afraid I was going to tell you to use the metronome. Well, that's not exactly what we're talking about today.

So you're relieved of that for right now. But the harmony and the melody happen over time. Now how can you use these ideas? Well, let's talk about that. So I'm going to give you some suggestions. They're not practice techniques, at least not in the sense of do this ten times a day. But they're going to help you understand your music in more depth and to play it more expressively. They're also going to be those sort of inside out techniques, kind of like the way the 3D printer works. They're going to be those inside. They're going to give you that inside look at the music so you know that you're creating the flow, the energy, the mood of the music from its actual substance rather than just from the outside in. Right. And we talk about flow all the time as being, you know, in terms of our fingers not stumbling, playing the right notes, playing smoothly, all that kind of stuff. And that's important. But when you know what the flow of the music is, it can allow you to work and to practice and to play more confidently and securely because you are so certain of the end result that you want so very simply Here are a few ideas. Find the melody in your piece. I know that's kind of like one of those duh things, right? But look for it. That melody may be hidden at the top of, or even in the middle of arpeggios. That melody may be in the left hand. Find that melody and don't just say, oh, yeah, okay, the melody's right there. The notes with the stems going up. I get it. That's the melody. Don't just look for it, and don't just play through it, but really listen to how the melody sings. Let it find its voice. So if you need to find the melody in your piece, go ahead, find it. And then do play through the melody. But not just so that you can say, okay, yeah, A, G, E, F, whatever the notes are. But really listen to how that melody sounds. How it's arched. Where does the melody breathe? If you were a singer, how would you sing that melody?

I have worked with musicians from time to time. Not lately, but I've worked with some other instrumentalists who, when we're playing a piece of music that's actually usually sung, you know, something like the Ave Maria, for instance, and they're not familiar with it, lots of times they will phrase the piece in a way that a singer would never phrase it. And if you know the piece of music, you're thinking, well, nobody would breathe there. That just doesn't sound right. And when you know how the words are supposed to go, you would. You phrase it a little bit differently. So this is the same idea. You want to find what that melody is really supposed to do. It doesn't mean you have to do research necessarily to say, okay, well, you know, how does this go? Although if it's a song, it might be helpful to hear someone sing it, or if it's a violin piece, for instance, how would a violinist play it? How would they phrase it? Because on the harp, we don't have to phrase the same way because we don't have to breathe or because we can't really sustain the melody. That doesn't mean we can forget how it's supposed to be. It means we just have to work a little bit harder to be more intentional and more aware of what the melody is really doing. So play through it. Listen to it. Find out how it needs to be paced so that it conveys its own melodic message. All right, so if that's the melody, what about the harmony? Well, listen to the progression of chords or arpeggios that form the harmony. That piece. This doesn't Mean you have to be a theory wizard. You don't even have to identify them, theory wise. You don't have to go through with your Roman numerals, let's see, 1, 4, 5. That's actually not even what I'm talking about. I want you to hear them, to listen to them, to listen to how those chords move through. This might be something where you take all the melody notes away and you just play through a piece, or maybe even just a section of a piece, a particular phrase perhaps, and listen to what the harmony sounds like, how those chords and harmonies move, how they change, how they take you from one starting place through a little journey to a cadence to that falling off or ending place. How do they do that? Listen to them. As I said, you don't have to identify them. This isn't about being a theory whiz. This is about listening to the chords. They will start somewhere, move toward a goal, create and release tension on their way.

Only takes a couple of minutes, but it's a voyage of exploration into your piece that is fun and will be enlightening, I guarantee it. And of course, we have to consider time, right? How, when you put the melody and harmony together, how does your choice of tempo or your pacing of the piece support the mood that you want for the piece? So do some hands together work here and feel the melody move. Think about how that melody needs to pace itself and how the harmony is going to support that. Put them together, feel them move and breathe together and think about what you need to do. Most often, of course, our steady tempo is what's going to allow the melody and the harmony to unfold in a way that makes sense for the piece and for the listener. But perhaps there's a little bit of rubato that can be used to emphasize a particular harmony or melody note. You've heard singers do this, I know, right? When they get to that high note and they just want to stretch it a little bit, slow their way up to it and express it and then move on with the piece. You can do that too.

When the melody and the harmony are telling you to do it, that's something you can do. Absolutely. So think about what these elements of music really need and then let that third element, that third dimension, time, support the life that the melody and the harmony bring to those little dots on the page right. Now, obviously these aren't the kinds of practice techniques that you need to repeat, as I said before, but what you can do, you can do this with an entire piece once you have it ready to do that you can do this way, do this for sections of your piece, at least sections that are whole phrases. I know sometimes we choose practice sections that are a little smaller, right, so that, you know, we can really, really work on notes. But this is a chance to think of your piece in phrases, to think of the form of the piece rather than just those practice sections. So look for those. And you can do these same kinds of little techniques with those sections in mind. So this will help you make your music a little bit more three dimensional. Now I hope this was an interesting look for you at what your music really is and a different way to think about it rather than just grinding through some of the of the notes and putting in the expression and all that sort of stuff. A little, you know, inside out additive process, if you will, toward making your music.

Next week here on the podcast we're going to be talking about something that is really important to me, especially at this time of year as we're approaching Thanksgiving here in the United States.

And that is playing from an attitude of gratitude. As many of our Play it with Confidence Intensive students discovered playing is very different when you take yourself out of the equation and consider the gift that you have to share with others. And it's even more powerful when you grasp and incorporate the idea that your playing can be filled with gratitude. Yes, it's a mindset, but it's also something that you can be very practical about. And the insights and tips that I'm going to share on this episode may profoundly change your attitude not just towards your playing, but to your practice as well. So it's all about gratitude on our next show. I urge you again to take the time. It won't take that long. Take the time to join us on our Crush the Rush webinar where we are going to get all the tips and tools we need to combat holiday harp stress. It will be fun and fast paced and you'll get a lot out of it. I promise you our free webinar. You'll be able to sign up using the link in the show notes for this episode or just go to heartmastery.com to our events tab and you can sign up there. So until I see you next week, 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 joining me and I look forward to talking with 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.