Etudes: What You Never Knew They Could Do For You - PHH 198

I was frustrated as a teacher with students who would come to me saying, oh, well, I've been working on this etude. Terrific, that's great. How long have you, have you been working on it? Well, three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, two months. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what you need right now. And it may not be what you need right now either.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to EMP.

To experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us. Just go to harpmastery.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Okay, here's fact number one. Harp technique is hard. That's a given. Making our fingers steady, stable, and strong enough to play in midair, defying gravity with every pluck is very challenging. That's a fact. Fact number two. Our technique is a major factor in our playing. It enables us to play the music we want to play, or it limits us. If our fingers can't play it, we can't play it. It's that simple. And here's fact number three. If you feel like your technique is holding you back, there are ways to to fix that. And today I want to suggest two ways you might not have explored. These are two ways to use Etudes. And I think you will find what we're talking about today is not the usual etude practice. I often talk about etudes as the missing link between the exercise drills that we do and the music we play. They provide a way to use a single technical skill, like a specific fingering pattern, in a musical context that's not as complicated as a regular repertoire piece. Practicing etudes in this way allows you to add expression, rhythm, and other musical elements that aren't usually present in finger drills to the skill you've been practicing, but without all the challenges that show up in a quote, unquote, real piece. This doesn't mean that etudes are easy, not by any means. But they do provide a way to step up a little more gradually to more intricate music. You practice your arpeggio exercise, then you practice an etude that uses those same arpeggios. Then you're ready to tackle the piece that has those arpeggios in it. But that's not the way I'm looking at etudes today. Today I want to tell you about two different ways to use Etudes that will give you additional benefits. Benefits like playing with more speed, more flow, and helping you learn music faster. If you're the kind of harpist who loves etudes, you're going to absolutely love these ideas. And if you've been lukewarm at best about Etudes, you might find yourself dusting off that etude book. Because now you'll understand why etudes have been part of every musician's studies for hundreds of years simply because they work. Now, I love things that work. I love solutions. I love helping harpists find the right solutions for them. And that's why, before we dive into our topic for today, I want to remind you about a couple of things we have happening at Harp Mastery that just might work for you. One, of course, is our Harp Mastery certified Coaching program. Our coaching program, specifically our Lessons with a Heart Mastery Certified Coach program is, is open now. You can join and work with a Heart Mastery certified coach. We've made the program even more flexible so it fits your schedule better and so you can be more in charge of your program. The pacing for it, how many lessons you have, the frequency of your lessons, all that kind of stuff is up to you. But I have to tell you that you will get such incredible benefit from working with one of our coaches. These coaches are master teachers, very experienced, and they love to work with harpists who need to get something done. Not necessarily achieve a goal, but maybe just get to that next level. And if you're. If you're feeling stuck, feeling like you don't know where that next level is, they can help you find that too. They're expert performers. They're experts, excellent people, wonderful to work with. And I would suggest that if you're looking for someone to get you to where you want to go, working with one of our certified coaches in our lessons program would be the right thing for you to try. You will find a link to the program page in the Show Notes. It's also at harpmastery. Com, just go to the programs tab and you'll see the coaching program listed there. And of course, we have our March seminar series that we are just getting ready to start. It kicks off today, but it's not too late to join, of course. And this month our seminar course is called Variations on Bendemeer's Stream. This is an arrangement I have made of the Irish ballad Bendemeer's Stream, and it's a set of variations. So we're going to be working on some technique, working on some practice techniques and working through the piece and bit by bit over the next four weeks. And so of course, as part of the seminar, you not only get the live calls or the recordings if you can't make them live with the coaches as they teach this course, but you'll also have the PDF of the piece itself. So you'll have all that plus a study guide that goes with each week as well. So there's lots to do in that and I hope that you join us for that. Remember that our seminar courses are just a little taste of the My Heart Mastery membership that we have. And our My Heart Mastery members will of course be on the call. They're the very same calls, but as a My Heart Mastery member, they have access to so much more, so many courses that they can choose for whatever they want to work on. In their playing at the moment, dozens of pieces, just like the Variations on Bendemer Stream that come with the. The instructions, the courses, all that stuff. So there's so much there, not to mention our own little curriculum, the Scale of Success curriculum. And I'll tell you more about that another time. But there's so much in that membership. So if you've been enjoying our seminar series, I would encourage you to step up to the next level and take a look at everything my Heart Mastery membership has to offer. Once again, something easy to find. You'll find all the information on the homepage@heartmastery.com or you can use the link in the show Notes to find out more as well. But right now it's time to get back to our discussion of Etudes. And I want to start with just one more item for clarity's sake. I'm really talking today about the kinds of Etudes that are relatively short and not terribly complicated studies. These are the kinds of etudes that show up on one, maybe two pages, and they're all about a particular single skill. Usually when you look at the etude, you could tell, oh, this one's all about scales, or this one's all about intervals or trills or whatever it is. You can usually see the technique that you're working on at a single glance. Now, this is in contrast with the pieces that we call concert etudes. And these are the pieces that are very flashy, very difficult, multi pages that go on for a while, and they often have a other names like La Source or Au Matin. So concert etudes are at a whole different level. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about your basic everyday etudes. You find them in books by Bochse. That's the kind of etude that I'm talking about. The Pozzoli Etudes are another set of Etudes you might know. So just wanted to start with that little bit of clarity there. So I want you to think about something that you can use for more than one function, because that's our look at Etudes. Today we can use them for more than one thing. And the thing that occurs to me right away is the classic Swiss army knife. I mean, when I was growing up, the Swiss army knife was the multi tool of choice. If you had a Swiss army knife, you were, you know, big stuff. So the Swiss army knife is, you know, pretty uncomplicated, at least in its basic form. The basic form, I think, has, well, the knife, obviously, and then it's got seven tools. So it's got that the small blade, it's got scissors, it's got a nail file, it's got a screwdriver, it's got a key ring, it's got a toothpick and tweezers, I think. So, you know, that's your basic Swiss army knife. I was in a Swiss army knife store over the summer, a store in. In Vienna, and as a matter of fact, I picked up some nail clippers there for my Gold Circle students. But we had some fun looking at all the different kinds of knives. I mean, I think they have over a hundred different kinds of knives there with all different kinds of variants and different kinds of tools. And I think the most expensive one we saw was probably about $400 or so, and it had 73 different functions. Now, when I'm talking about an etude as a multi tool, I am not talking about 73 different functions, maybe not even seven functions. It depends. But etudes can be a multi tool. I mean, certainly we can use them to fill in that gap. You know, to have that to be that practice technique that's the missing link right in between exercises and etudes, and that's really, really great. But there are other ways that they can help fill in practice gaps, or we can even use them to gain experience points. The idea here is that if you're spending time practicing an etude, you want as much bang for your practice minute as possible. You don't just want to say, okay, well, I'm practicing my scales, and now I'm in the etude, and I'm practicing my scales again, and now I'll do the piece. No, we want to use that etude very intentionally to move your playing forward in the biggest possible way that we can. So that's what I'm talking about today. The first idea that we're going to talk about is filling in the gap. Now, this is not the missing link kind of gap that I was talking about before, but it's really answering the question, what. What is it that you need to work on? What do you need to improve? What is a gap in your playing that you want a chance to work on? Remember that some of these things, like dynamics, perhaps, or tempo, like playing faster, or flow, all these kinds of things are things that are part of the pieces we work on, right? They become elements of any repertoire piece that we're learning. We don't usually, although we certainly could and probably should include some of those things in our regular exercise drills. We tend in those exercise drills to focus on the mechanics, on exactly how our fingers are Moving and what they're doing on the strings, that's what we're looking for. But in the pieces we play, we have all these other considerations. We want it to flow, we want it to sound expressive. And. And how do we work on that? Well, we work on it in the context of the piece. But if you think about the etudes that we're learning, possibly at the same time, if you think about that etude, the very reason that it's useful for technique, practice makes it useful for practicing these kinds of skills too. Because the musical context is simpler. The piece is usually shorter, Right? The etude is shorter than the piece. So it's helpful that way. You don't have to practice so much. The notes are usually easier because they're based around that single pattern. And it's not going off and changing keys and doing all kinds of other stuff. It's a relatively simple context. So take an etude like that. If you're not working on one of those, go find one that's not very complicated. If you're looking for easier etudes, I love the ones that are at the back of the Grossi book. They're Pozzoli etudes, and they're at the back of the Grossi method for the harp book. They're musical, they're short, and they're pretty simple. And what you can do with these etudes is use them not just for technique, although of course they're great for that, but for all these other things as well. You're going to focus on a particular skill that you want to develop. So, for instance, these are good for working on things like control or flow or speed or legato or dynamics. Let me explain that just a little bit. Suppose you want to develop more technical control in your playing. Control is one of those things that I talk about in my Kaleidoscope practice book. It's one of those five focus areas. And control shows up in a couple different ways. I mean, we often think about it as technical control. But what I like to focus on is tempo control and dynamic control. So that you are controlling these two big aspects of music. Right. When we're playing something, we want to keep the tempo in control. We don't want it to speed up or slow down in places we don't intend it to. We want to be able to maintain a steady tempo from beginning to end, assuming that's what the piece is calling for. And the same with dynamics. We want to know that a piano dynamic in the beginning of the piece is kind of related to a piano dynamic at the end of the piece that we can grade a crescendo or a decrescendo so that it really sounds like one. So that our fortes sound different from our pianos. All those kinds of things. That's all dynamic control. And of course, another aspect of control is stamina. Physical stamina. Yes. Being able to play from the beginning of a piece to the end of the piece without, you know, feeling like your fingers are going to fall off the strings at the end and focus stamina as well. Can you keep your mind in the music as you go? All of these control things are things you can work on with an etude more easily than you can with a piece. And it comes down again to that simplified musical context. Not so much going on. There's a lot less in the way of notes. So this makes the etude a perfect way to a perfect vehicle, if you will, for practicing these kinds of things. You could practice flow. If your pieces aren't flowing well. Try it with an etude. Try playing past your mistakes. Think about your pacing of a piece. That's an important element of music that we play. Does it feel like it tells a story from beginning to end? How do we pace that journey? Try it in an etude. Once again, everything's a little simpler, and it's going to make practicing that skill easier, perhaps, and this is certainly true for a lot of us. You want to learn to play faster. You want to develop some speed in your playing. We tend not to practice speed until we need a piece to go faster. Certainly we should be practicing our exercises at different tempos so that we're building speed in our exercises. But. But you can do that with an etude as well. Build tempo. Use that tempo pyramid that I talk about all the time so that you're building your speed not too gradually. Gradually enough that it's not going to exhaust you, but not in such tiny increments. You don't actually make progress. Once again, the simple character of an etude is going to help you do that more easily than a piece. So it's filling in that gap for you. You can use an etude to work on legato. Practice that etude that has scales and arpeggios. Make them smooth. Practice your relaxation. So practice the relaxed sound and of course, the physical relaxation that produces that sound. This is a great time to think about your tone as well. Etudes are great vehicles for this, and you can practice dynamics. Now, some etudes come with dynamics written in. In which case you can. And be sure that you're working on those dynamic differences as you go. Some do not have those dynamics written in. So this is a great opportunity for you to exercise your own musical creativity and step in and put some dynamics in, see what you like, do it and really do those dynamics. And you can again, practice your range of dynamics as you go. So you see, just about any sort of musical skill that you want to develop is going to be practiced more easily with an etude than with a more complicated piece. And it's going to give you the experience, it's going to give you the practice that you need to go and do it in a piece. One way to think about these strategies is sort of like a team, like a football team, for instance. They practice all their skills, right? They're going to go practice the passing and catching and all that stuff that they practice. Blocking, tackling, everything. So they're going to go practice those skills. And they don't just go from practicing those skills to playing the game on Sunday. In between, then they have practice games. Part of their practice is going to be playing it in a game, even if it's a game against their other teammates. They're going to be putting those skills in, into action in sort of a simulated game environment. Not like a real game, exactly, because the two teams are part of the same team. But it's close enough that they can get the experience of doing it. That's what we're talking about here. The etude may not be the piece that you're working on, but it's close enough to a real piece that you're going to be able to practice the skills that you need in pretty much the way you're going to need them. So this is a great way to do it. You don't want to have to just learn those skills while you're trying to learn the notes of the piece. That makes things that much harder. So take that etude. It doesn't have to be a complicated one either. Look for those simpler etudes, if you need, and practice those skills there. But as you go on in your harp journey and you're playing more complicated etudes, be sure that that's part of your etude practice. Okay, I'm working on now for technique, but now let me work on it at a faster tempo. Let me practice my tempo now. Let me work on it for dynamics or for control or for legato or for tone. That's going to give you more benefit. But there's still more that you can get from an etude. And this is what I call experience points, actually you aren't going to gain experience points from and etude. You're going to gain it from lots of etudes. Let me explain.

Quite a while back, many years ago, I did a course called Etude today, and then it became called Etud, and we've now retired it. The My Heart Mastery members still have access to it, but we haven't offered that for a while, just because it's kind of old. And I would like to offer something a little fresher and newer for you, and someday that'll be coming along. But. But the point of this course was to walk you through an Etude a day. I mean, the first time I did this course, even before I published it as a standalone course, I did it as a Facebook challenge, and we did a different Etude every day. And the reason I did this course was because I was frustrated as a teacher with students who would come to me saying, oh, well, I've been working on this etude. Terrific. That's great. How long have you been working on it? Well, three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, two months. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what you need right now. And it may not be what you need right now either. There's a time when you want to really focus on making an etude. Pretty much letter perfect note perfect, finger perfect, if you will. But a lot of the time, there's benefit to going through more etudes more quickly. And the benefit is what I call experience points. One of the things we need our fingers to do is to be able to play a lot of different note patterns. That makes sense. We have lots of different music. It all does different things. We would love it if we could look at the music and our fingers would respond automatically. We see it, and then they know what to do, and they play it a lot of the time. What happens instead is we end up looking at the notes and trying to figure out the right fingering, and it takes us a long time to learn those patterns. Now, sight readers, good sight readers, fast sight readers, aren't born that way. They get to become fast sight readers because they've read a lot of music and they learn to recognize the patterns that they see. Your fingers essentially work the same way. You will recognize the patterns, and your fingers will know how to respond if they've played that pattern before or if they can sort of, you know, find the similarity and automatically play the part of it that they've known before. Sure. Lots of pieces have different things in them that you have to kind of scratch your Head for a second and say, all right, now how am I going to do that? Oh, okay. And you'll figure it out. But really, 90% of what we play and what's on your music stand today, you have already played before. It just hasn't been put together quite this way because the piece sounds different from the other piece. Right. But most of what is in any piece of music is stuff you already know. Your fingers have already done it. You just have to know that they have done it. They have to know they've done it, and you sort of have to trust them to just go ahead and play it. And when you work through etudes as quickly as we did in that Etude A Day challenge, you get a lot of experience points very quickly. Your fingers get a little bit of experience at a lot of different patterns. In that particular challenge, we did 25 etudes in 25 days. Now, that doesn't mean that every etude was finished, but we got through the idea of each one of those etudes and then you can go back and work on them. But the idea is that you've exposed your self, your fingers, your musical knowledge. You've learned, experienced all these different kinds of patterns. It's that experience that we want to gain quickly. Think about when you were a new harp player. If you can remember that time, particularly if you started the harp as an adult and you had played another musical instrument. I've run into this with pianists who take up the harp. Later, they discover that they've got all this musical knowledge and they can read well and they understand music theory and they understand how music works and everything's really good. They think, all I have to do is get my fingers around the strings. Pianists in particular, they think, okay, I've got this right hand, left hand, hands together thing down. This is going to be a piece of cake. And then they find out how different the harp technique really is from piano technique, and it puts the brakes on. And so the struggle for fine musicians who are new to the harp is ratcheting up their technique fast enough to satisfy their musical desires. They don't want to play baby pieces. They know how to play grown up pieces, but their fingers aren't ready for that yet. So we want to get through a lot of technique quickly because that's building up the repertoire of patterns that your fingers are used to playing. Now, if you want to use your etudes to gain experience points, you don't have to do one etude today, but I would encourage you to work your way through an entire book of Etudes, you know, skip any that you really don't want to work on. There's no harm, no foul there. But go through that entire book and give yourself no more than a few days or a week at the outside to experience each one of those etudes. If you want to play through the whole thing and just sort of get a feel for it, and that's fine. But maybe you just want to take even the first few lines of that etude and say, okay, I'm just going to do this much, but I'm going to see if I can't get it, get it hands together, whatever the point of the Etude is, get it to flow, do that for just a few days, then I'm going to move on. I mean, if you can do two etudes a week, that would be great. And imagine how much your technique would improve from doing that much technical work. And it's not just technical work, right? It's got that musical component, too. So it really is a fabulous ground on which to begin to develop a fluid and flexible technique, one that can respond to different situations, one that doesn't just know one way to do things, but has a whole repertoire of fingerings and techniques in it. That's what I mean by experience points. The more you play, the more you are able to play one of those sort of circular statements that is just so true. So don't limit yourself. In fact, if I could make sure that you walked away from this podcast, or maybe you're walking while you're listening to the podcast, but that you took from this podcast one particular thing, that's what I would want you to take away, that I don't want you to limit yourself. And that etudes can be a wonderful vehicle for moving yourself forward. You can use them, as we spoke before, in that missing link way to help you step into a piece when you're trying to work on a new technique that is part of that piece. Or you can use them in the fill in the gap way that I described to you, where you've got a skill that you want to develop. And the etude can be that practice field for you, where you get some chance to try out that playing faster, or playing with more dynamics, or playing with more relaxation in an easy, less musically challenging form than a regular repertoire piece might present. Or you can use many etudes to help you gain experience points, move your technique forward faster, which means you get to play more music earlier, you get to play more music and learn it more quickly. You just get to play more music and enjoy it. More. Ah, sounds like a harp happiness moment, doesn't it? Okay, well, that's the idea with my etudes for today. Next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about demystifying phrasing. What exactly constitutes a phrase? What is a phrase? Why should we care about phrasing? And how can we make our phrases more musical and expressive on the harp? It's not so easy on the harp as it is on some other instruments, so we're going to be talking about that next week. An interesting aspect of musicianship we don't always think about as harpists. Please. Once again, we've got our certified coaching program open so that you can get in and get some lessons from one of our certified coaches. And of course, our March seminar course, My Variations on Bendemer Stream, is open for you as well. Look for those on the Heart Mastery page in the Show Notes or on the app. And we've got so much going on and I want you to be able to enjoy it all. So thank you so much for being here today. And until I talk to you next week, remember, every day is a great day and one you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.