Conquering Cantique de Noel - PHH 030

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. The musical centerpiece of many religious Christmas celebrations or concerts is the song O Holy Night or Cantique de Noel. Now, it's a showcase for any vocal soloist or choir, and it's perhaps the most requested Christmas devotional piece. It's instantly recognizable, of course, with those gently undulating opening arpeggios and the melody that starts so simply, setting up a mood of serenity, yet tinged with expectation. Then the harmony swells and we're swept into the drama and the deeper emotion of the work. Now, listening to your favorite version of oh Holy Night likely brings some goosebumps. I know it does. For me, whether you celebrate Christmas or in its way, it is a musical masterpiece. And with those flowing arpeggios, it seems like it should be the perfect heart piece. Well, and it is, but there are some complications. And today we're going to discuss how to make O Holy Night into your perfect heart piece, how to make it easier to play, how to practice it, and how to make it crash proof on Christmas Eve. So I have some suggestions for you for practice and for performance. And you may want to have your copy of oh Holy Night with you for reference. Now, if you're in the car or on the treadmill, you know you can review your music later. But if you want to pause this podcast and grab your copy so you can follow along as we talk, you may find that helpful. But before we start, I want to say this. Last week's podcast on adult learners generated some emails that really touched me from people who had begun their study of the harp later in life and were persevering and loving their journey despite.

Some of the struggles that they've had. And I just want to applaud the courage of all of you who study and play the harp. No matter when you started or no matter what your skill level or your ambition is.

Studying the harp is hard. And just the fact that you are pursuing it and determined to do what you would like to do with the harp, that, that is an inspiration to those of us like me, who did have an early start and sometimes take that for granted. Keep up the good work, keep that harp happiness flowing, and I'll do everything I can to support you in your journey. Bravo to all of you. I also have a special thank you to those of you who followed along with our 12 days of Christmas Duos sheet music extravaganza that we run every year, the first 12 days of December. So there are 12 new Christmas sheet music arrangements. And this year, of course, the focus was that every arrangement came as a harp solo with an optional second part either for a second harp or for a flute or a violin. And we've had such a great response to that. And so thank you very much if you missed any of those arrangements, they are of course still available in our shop and they'll be available as long as we have a shop. So if you go to heartmastery.com and click in the header where it says shop, you'll go right on over and you can see all those arrangements that came out this year, as well as all the other Christmas music and other music that we have on our website. So thank you again for those who participated in that. Also remember that registration for our certified coaching program is now open. The coaching lessons will be starting in January, but this is the time to register. We have registration open for about another week. Our certified coaches are wonderful at doing what we at Heart Mastery do best. That's creating harp happiness by helping you set goals and achieve them. And so I would love for you to work with a Heart Mastery certified coach. Most of our coaching students find that this is way more powerful and way more fun than they expected. So do pop over to the coaching page and register for a planning call with me and we'll get you started. So the link to that is in the show notes, but I don't want to take any more time today talking about those things. I. I want to get right to talking about O Holy Night. One of the interesting things I learned about the Cantique de Noel was that it was written and first performed in 1847. Not interesting in and of itself, but this is just a few months before the 1848 French Revolution. So when you consider that political backdrop. And you listen to the beauty of the cantique de Noel. You can listen with sort of new ears. At least I did. So sort of an interesting thing to keep in mind. Now, the piece was commissioned to celebrate the renovation of a church organ. It had been moved from Avignon, France to a church in a smaller town. Required a lot of renovation. And so to celebrate its completion, the parish priest commissioned the local town poet to write a poem for the occasion, which he called the poet called Menu Christian or Midnight Christians. And then that poem was set to music by the composer Adolphe Adam. Now, a lot of people don't know anything else that Adam wrote, but he was actually a very prolific composer. And as well as being an organist, he wrote over 53 operas and ballets and countless smaller works. One of my favorite works of his is the ballet Giselle, which is of course a staple of every ballet company's repertoire. So he was scarcely an unknown composer, even if he sort of seems like a one hit wonder to us. But. So this is the background of O Holy Night. But as a harpist, the background is only so informative, right? It only takes us so far. We really need to figure out how we're going to play it. So I'd like to start by talking about the arpeggiated accompaniment. This is the sort of thing that seems like it should work so well on the harp. And it does, but. But we have different ways of working around it. So let's go through some of those right now. Now, when I say working around the arpeggios, that's actually pretty much what we have to do. The original arpeggios, of course, are part of an accompaniment, an accompaniment that does not include a melody. So if you were going to be playing for a singer, the arpeggios would be less of a problem than if we have to incorporate a melody. So now the original arpeggiation is something that's just a little bit twisty. It's not, you know, straight up and down and it's this kind of a pattern.

Which is just beautiful but not easy to play if you have to play the melody as well. If you're just accompanying a singer, it's less, you know, less difficult. But because it's really difficult to play everything here and keep that beautiful arpeggiation exactly this way and try to get the melody in, it's difficult, very awkward for us. So we have to make some adaptations if we're going to play a solo arrangement. And whatever arrangement you have, you will likely Find that there have been some suitable adaptations made. One of the most common is just a one direction arpeggio. Just like a 4, 3, 2, 1. It lets you.

Play all the arpeggios in the left hand and play the melody with the right hand. It works out quite nicely and it might sound something like this.

Much simpler to play and totally lovely. I am all in favor of simple to play and totally lovely. So as you're thinking about your version of oh Holy Night, I urge you to think about keeping it simple and making sure that that's what's going on. So that's one thing, right? Just 4, 3, 2, 1. But what if we want a few more notes in there? Well, we can have those arpeggios go up and down this way.

So that gives you an idea too, right? This pretty simple arpeggio is just 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1- 2, 3. And it gives you a much more constant flow of arpeggios. Which brings us to the idea of what do you want the arpeggios to do? Well, they're going to be the texture of the piece. And so we're going to talk in just a moment about how to make that texture sound the way you want it. Whether you're playing just arpeggios going up or arpeggios up and down or something a little bit more complicated, and that would be this. Lots of arrangements have those arpeggios distributed between the hands so that you're going to play some of it with your left hand, but some of it with the melody in the right hand. And of course, some of the directions of the arpeggios can change and the patterns can be more complex. Let me demonstrate for you.

You can hear how those arpeggio patterns turn around, how they aren't straight up and straight down and. And the melody is sometimes above the arpeggio, sometimes in the middle of it. What you can't hear, of course, is the fact that sometimes my right hand is taking those arpeggio notes and sometimes my left hand, but it all comes together. By the way, that's just a little couple of measures from my own arrangement of Cantique de Noel that, that I play. So you can tell it's just a little bit more twistier, a little bit more complicated to play. And this kind of arpeggio pattern is not necessary. It's lovely. But don't feel that you have to play something this complicated to have oh Holy Night sound beautiful, because you don't. What you do have to do. No matter what version of O Holy Night you play is, think about what your left hand arpeggios, or left hand and right hand arpeggios, how they need to sound. And the biggest consideration here is about placing. So if you're playing an arpeggio that just goes straight up and down.

In general, your placing would be that you're going to place all the notes going up at once and all the notes going down at once. That may not be the best consideration for these arpeggios. We may need to use the other kind of fingering, which is more of a one at a time fingering. You'll have to experiment a little bit. But what we're looking for is a texture of the arpeggio that is calm and is fairly noise free, sounds fluid and gentle and murmuring. So we don't want a lot of finger noise.

Right?

We don't want a lot of that replacing noise. Let me see if I can.

Right, you can hear those buzzes. So that's not what we want. And if you're very correct, placing all those fingers at once is getting you that kind of noise, then what you're going to want to try is sort of placing one finger at a time.

Whoops. My third finger made some noise there.

But that's actually my right hand playing the arpeggios because that's how I can reach the harp and talk to you at the same time. So my right hand's not quite used to playing in that register. However, what you want are the arpeggios to sound as noiseless as possible and as gentle as possible. You want that beautiful rolling sort of a sound. And if that means going to placing option B, you're not doing something incorrect, you're making a different choice and it's a musical choice. So getting your fingers on at the last second may make those arpeggios sound a little bit better. So experiment with the placing the. That's going to be a critical decision.

Just as you work on those arpeggios, you may find that most of the arpeggios don't give you a problem no matter how you place them. But there may be some. Maybe if you're playing an arpeggio on the wire strings, where you need to be a little bit more careful about your placing. So that's one thing to watch. But really the arpeggios are important.

But they're not the critical importance, are they? Because it's the melody of the piece that has to come across. So let's Talk about how you balance those two things. The melody of this song needs to sound like a song and think about phrasing it the way the words go. Whatever language you want to think of is fine. But think about how those words are phrased and then make that melody have that same beautiful kind of arch and that same long flowing line, as if a singer were actually singing it. How do you do that? Well, you're going to think about the arch of the melody so that it has. It grows and then it falls down in the course of a phrase, so.

It moves.

To the high point of the line. It comes back.

And comes to rest at the end of the phrase. So those considerations sound complicated. But you're musical, you know how to do this. But I would urge you to spend a little bit of time with working on that melody. If it's all in the right hand, then this is easy because it's hands separately practice. But perhaps the right hand moves between. Or the melody rather, moves between the right hand and the left hand. So find those melody notes and be sure that you're getting all the melody notes to sound like the song. So the melody is important. Now, the arpeggios are likely the harder part of the piece to play. At the same time, they need to be a little bit less important in terms of listening their texture, their background. We want them to be clean and we want them to be even, but we want them to murmur gently in the background, at least until we get to that dramatic fall on your knees part, where everything is a little bit louder and more insistent, at least in lots of arrangements. Right? So think about the sound that you're using for those arpeggios. And I know that you're going to concentrate hard on them. And so it's going to, you know, you're going to be working at every finger, really playing nicely. But sometimes that can be a little bit too accented and a little bit too forward in terms of what we want to hear with the melody. So think about your tone being gentle, your fingers being relaxed.

And this just being background. We don't want to hear that. You're working very hard at those arpeggios, Right? Think about, you know, the. The swan swimming, right? It just glides over the surface. Those feet are pedaling under the water, but we don't see them. And that's what we want for these arpeggios. We don't want them to sound busy or difficult. They need to sound relaxed. So tempo can play a role in this, too. If you're playing by yourself, the tempo is not so critical as if you were playing with a singer. So choose a tempo that you can manage well and then keep it steady.

One of the things I like to think about with the arpeggios here when I'm playing them is that I don't want them to sound pointed like icicles. I want them to sound round and rich, more like. Like. Like a blob of jelly, right? They're, they're gooey and they're sticky and they're. They're. Fluffy would be another word for it. But they're, they're, they're rich and thick and syrupy. They're not, they're like.

So think about how those sound and let your fingers relax into them a little bit softer and much more gently still. Close your fingers. Play with proper technique, but be relaxed and don't work so hard at the arpeggios, because that's going to work against the sensibility that you want in the music. So let's talk about some specific learning tips here for working on this piece. I've already given you a couple of good ideas, but I want to start with reviewing the learning tip that I think is the most important of all. Choose your arrangement wisely. This piece is complicated, so be sure to choose a version which is closest to. To your abilities. And unless you have a lot of time to devote to this one piece, choose a piece that maybe even is a little too easy for you. Why would you want to do this? Well, it's going to help you learn the piece faster. And despite I speak from my personal experience, despite my best intentions, I often don't start my Christmas music as early as I would like. So, you know, if you're time frame for learning the piece is a little compressed, you might want to have a piece that's pretty easy and quick to learn. So, you know, so that's one big advantage right there. But you will also be able to learn the piece better, and it's going to be easier for you to move up to a challenging version later, right? Rather than trying to start with the hardest one, start with one that gives you an idea of how to play this piece well, and then move up to another, more complicated version as you get more comfortable with the piece. You don't have to start with the hardest one, even if that's where you want to end up, right? So choose wisely. Choose for you.

Then, after you've settled on your arrangement and you're ready to start to learn it, the first Thing I suggest you do is find the melody. Now, sometimes it's very clear and we can say, all right, yes, the melody is all in the right hand. I see it. It's right there. But often in arrangements of this piece, it's hidden, it's divided, distributed between both hands. And it can be a little bit tricky to know where the melody notes are.

If this is the case, if it's distributed between both hands, sometimes you'll see that the arranger will have put in extra stems on the notes to show you which are the melody notes. But in case those aren't there, I would take a highlighter and I would find the melody notes and highlight them. If you have any question about where they are. Because you want to know what it is you're trying to play. You want to know where that melody is. So find it. And then be sure to practice that melody by itself with the fingerings that you are planning to use, and practice it at the tempo that you're trying to achieve with the piece so that you can start finding the flow of it right away. Now, just because you're practicing the right hand by itself doesn't exempt you from any lever or pedal changes that you need. So be sure you're practicing, practicing those at the same time. But it's going to help you find the flow of the melody and get your ear accustomed to what you really want to project to a listener. You're going to be finding that first. So start with the melody. And I'll say it one more time. Remember, this doesn't necessarily just mean the right hand. So find the melody. Then we want to practice the arpeggios. So once again, sometimes this is just left hand, but sometimes the right hand has part of the arpeggios. So think about not practicing hands separately as much as you're practicing. Function separate. Right. Where the one function we're going to practice is the melody, and then the accompaniment is the other one. So look for those arpeggios, look for that accompaniment, whatever hand it happens to be in, and then practice that separately. And, of course, when it comes to practicing arpeggios, there are any number of practice techniques that are useful here, and you probably have your favorite ones. But the most important thing is to practice those arpeggios so that they're smooth. They're smooth as far as tempo goes, they're smooth as far as dynamic, and they're smooth as far as tone. Right? Nice. And legato. You can let that dynamic be softer, be relaxed, because you want to Be able to keep that sense of reflection and calm in the music. Be sure to think about it as being legato and make those petals or levers seamless at the same time. It's really important to get those in place too. It's also important to get those arpeggios and all the accompaniment up to the tempo that you want as quickly as you can, because the success of the entire piece depends on your ability to play those. So let's get those to tempo quickly. All right? Now, when you're putting the hands together.

Don'T worry so much about tempo. You can slow that tempo way down. But I would also use the metronome to help prevent hesitations. Right? You want this to be smooth and continuous sounding, not to have breaks in the line, right? So be sure that you can use the metronome here to help keep you or help you achieve that. Smoothness and evenness is a better way to put that. So that I think is excellent. If you're having trouble putting your hands together, work In Small Sections, 2 Bars, 4 Bars, Whatever your. Whatever works for the version of, of the piece that you're playing. And do that basic section work, right? Work on that one section, Play it three times, Play the next section three times. Play those two sections together three times. That's one easy way to do it. And that will help you achieve that hands together fluidity that you're looking for. Then we have the all important spot prevention. Now, I often talk about how to practice tricky spots. What I'd like to do is prevent those tricky spots from showing up or from being a problem further down the road. So this is spot prevention as opposed to spot removal. It is most likely that as soon as you start this piece, you're going to be able to identify which measures are the most complicated or. Or are most likely to cause you trouble. Now, you might find out later on that those aren't problematic and that other ones are. But let's make that educated guess right up front and start practicing them immediately. Even if you're not up to that part of the piece, let's take those tricky measures and work on them right away. Right away, hands together.

And even if those measures are still very slow, that's okay. But you want those tricky measures to have extra time to come together so that they're not holding the whole piece back. And in order to do that, we'll just start that spot practice kind of stuff early. So get going on those right away. Now, as you're working on this piece, as with most Pieces. I generally recommend that you don't spend more than a week at the outside on hands separately practice. You want to get those hands together right away because it's just that different from hands separately, right? It's considerably different, as we all know. So putting the piece together hands together will also show you exactly where those difficulties are going to be and it will give you the extra practice time you need so that you can get used to them and start working on them and make them the way you want to play them.

Now, a couple quick tips here for crash proofing. If you are going to be playing oh Holy Night and maybe it's, you know, on your stand and you've been working on it because you're going to be playing it at a Christmas Eve service somewhere.

Remember to choose an easy version, right? Christmas Eve is hard enough. By the time we get to Christmas Eve, we're all tired. We've done the preparations and the baking and the shopping and the decorating and, and we're all tired. So don't choose your hardest version to play on Christmas Eve. Even if you can do it, choose an easier one. I learned this lesson years ago so that when I'm playing on Christmas Eve, I never play my hardest repertoire because by the time I get to Christmas Eve, I'm tired. Especially if I'm going to end up playing a midnight service, I'm going to be even more tired. So I try to keep my Christmas Eve solos manageable and simple so I don't have to worry about them. Be sure also that you plan for low light, right? If you're playing a Christmas Eve service or lots of Christmas concerts do this, all of a sudden it'll be candlelight and the light will be dim. So be sure you're. You have a stand light with you. Be sure that, that if you have a battery powered stand light, you've got extra batteries or the batteries are charged up. If you're playing from a tablet, that's even better because they're, they have built in backlight, right? So that's fabulous. But be sure that you're, you have a way to see your strings. You might want an extra stand light to point at your strings so that you can see them. It's amazing how those f strings can disappear when the light gets low. So, you know, plan for that as well. Practice in that performance space if you can, and then prepare your piece and prepare you to play it right. You know, do some previews, record yourself, practice performing, not just practice practicing. It will make a difference so if this is on your plate for Christmas Eve, what I suggest is that you stop practicing it quite so much and start playing it now, because playing is what you're going to have to do. So let's get that done. One other little tip. If, especially if you happen to be accompanying a vocal soloist, the original arrangement of this piece is in 4, 4 time, or 12, 8, if you want to look at it that way. It's got an eighth note, triplet, on every quarter.

But the introduction for the singer is not the length we all expect. We sort of would expect that there would be one measure, and the oh Holy Night comes in at the end of that first measure, right? There's sort of a.

And then.

So 1, 2, 3, 4, and oh, holy. Well, it could be that way, but in the regular arrangement, it's not. There's an extra half a measure. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3.

And if you're accompanying a vocal soloist, sometimes they will jump ahead on you and come in early, or sometimes you'll wonder why they haven't come in because they're counting it correctly and it's just not what we expect. So just be aware of that and pay attention to whatever your arrangement actually does, because it's an easy place to get tripped up. And who wants to get tripped up at the beginning of this piece right now? I love playing this piece. I think it's beautiful and I love playing it, and I hope you do, too. And I hope you have found these tips helpful. So just remember that it's all about the beauty of the piece, right? And what's more appropriate for a piece this beautiful than to be played on an instrument as beautiful as yours? I hope you enjoy playing O Holy Night as well. Now, next week on the podcast, we will be talking about a holiday practice plan. I know the holidays are coming. We have no time to practice, and sometimes practice can be more stressful than it usually is over the holidays. So we're going to be talking about how to relax, how to put your practice into total mini mode so that you can get enough done in way less time. So no matter how many cookies you have to bake or anything else, we'll make sure that you can get your practice done. And so I've got a practice plan for your holidays that'll see you through all your celebrating to the end of the year. But remember, as we're getting into 2022, scary thought, you might want to consider working with one of our Harp Mastery certified coaches. This is the best way to get your harp plank to that next level next year. And the registration is open now for about another week or so. So the lessons will start with your coach in the beginning of January. So you need to get on board now. Don't delay. You will find the link to our coaching page in the show notes and can register there. In the meantime, have a wonderful week this week and make some more beautiful harp music. Spread that harp happiness everywhere you can, my friend. Talk to you next week. Bye Bye. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.