Expression from the Ground Up - PHH 028

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. On a recent webinar, I shared a quote from composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky where the heart does not enter, there can be no music.

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it, playing from your heart. But what do you do if you're not confident about your ability to express music? Your heart may be all in, but that doesn't mean that you're automatically playing as beautifully as you would like. It's pretty common to have doubts about what your expression really sounds like to someone else. How does it come across to a listener? Do they hear your dynamics? Do they feel what you feel when you play it? In short, your heart is in it. But is the music coming out? Now, I've met harpists who tell me that they have been told that they just aren't musical. Ouch. Now, I do believe that sometimes a teacher has told them that their playing isn't musical, and the student personalizes that comment to mean that the fault is in their own lack of expressive ability. But in every case I've ever seen, the actual fault is not in the student, but in in their not knowing where to start, how to discover the musicality that is inherent in the piece. And of course, then you need to have and to be able to use the expressive tools at your fingertips, literally to breathe life into it.

On episode 10 of this podcast, I talked about a slightly different aspect of musicality. That show was about how to practice the different elements of expression. Now, it would be a great listen after this show if you haven't already heard it or if you want to go back and review was very practical. But today we're talking about what is already in the piece, waiting for you to discover it. Because once you find the essence of expression that is already there, then you have the information you need to make expressive choices. And of course, you know me, I love a step by step approach. So today we're going to break that down into clear, actionable steps. I used just a part of this process in the Walls of the Flowers Cadenza Challenge that just finished. But today I will talk you through the entire system. But before I do that, I want to remind you that we are winding up our semi annual My Heart Mastery Membership Enrollment PC period. My Harp Mastery is my membership community. It's a paid subscription and it's my favorite group of harpists anywhere. And they are everywhere we are, all over the world. Now, I often have trouble describing My Heart Mastery because there are so many components of the program that I love. It's kind of funny, but my husband asked me the other day, what exactly is everything? You know, what is my Heart Mastery? What's in it? And considering that I started this program in 2014, you'd think he would know. But here's what I told him. Well, my Heart Mastery is. It's all those Monday night calls, seminars, workshops, Q and A calls. It's the 60 plus courses that members have anytime access to. It's also the challenges, the Kaleidoscope Practice ebook, the Etude course, all those things that come free with their membership. It's the Sounding Board groups that are informal ways that they can meet together and play for each other. It's the fifth Monday Musicals where members can play for the entire group and test out pieces that they're working on. It's the Scale of Success curriculum that members can work through if they choose. It's the discounts that the members get on our coaching programs and our retreats. It's the private member forum where they can keep the conversations going. Now if I were to price all these things separately, it would be out of reach for most of us. But all of this is included for just $47 a month, which is way less than the cost of even just one HARP lesson. Now, we open membership to My Heart Mastery twice a year, and our fall enrollment period ends at midnight tomorrow. If you're listening to this podcast when it comes out, it's tomorrow, November 30th at midnight. Now there's a link in the show notes here for you to learn more about it and to join us. But you need to act before December 1st. In fact, if you want to pause this podcast, go sign up and then come back here. I am perfectly okay with that, but I'D love for you to join us. It's the easiest way to stay connected to your harp playing, to know that you're part of a community of harpists that share your same interests, and to know that you've got built in support and encouragement for whatever it is you're trying to do with the harp. So I'd love to see you there. But if you're ready to get going with this podcast, then let's do that now.

So let's start our discussion with the understanding that musical expression is simply about choices. The composer made choices when he or she wrote the piece, and you make choices when you play the piece. But how do those choices connect? Well, the composer didn't just put dots on the page. She wrote the music that she heard in her head. And the end product, what we hear when we hear someone play the piece is the composer's idea brought to life, brought to life and filtered through the performer's own musical lens. So what we're talking about with expression here is not about necessarily creating expression out of nothing, but more revealing it through our own understanding of what the composer has written. And so you might want to think about it at first here in terms of stop, look, and listen, because I don't want you diving into the dots, starting to learn those notes as your first step in learning a piece. When we start learning a piece by focusing on the notes and the fingering and then layering on the expression, we're actually working in reverse. Of course, it's the easy way to approach a piece when you're a beginning music student, but once you have any sort of musical experience under your belt, it's much more interesting and more musically rewarding to follow a process that's more similar to the composer's creative path. We won't be trying to create the piece out of thin air, but what we will do is to start from the composer's end result. So for your first step in finding the expression that the composer embedded in the music, I want you to stop practicing. You can look at the score if you like, but I want you to listen. And we're going to be listening to the piece in three different ways. First, I would like you to listen to the piece with an audience member's ear. Now, quick side note here. This whole system obviously is going to be based on your ability to find a recording of the piece. For pieces you can't find a recording of, you're going to have to work just from what you see on the page. But if you start this process with pieces, you can find recordings of the. The page will start to reveal more of these elements to you, and you'll be less dependent on listening to a recording. But let's assume for our purposes today, that you can listen to a recording of the piece. So the first time you listen, I want you to listen to it as an audience member would. Listen all the way through, and then take a moment to describe how the piece made you feel. Did it remind you of anything? Did it bring a picture to your mind? Write a sentence or two, or maybe just a few simple words that will help you be clear about how the piece connected with you? Don't skip this writing part. You're going to want these notes later on when you're deep in the messy middle of learning these things. So just think about how the piece made you feel. You don't have to get really detailed, just enough to think about what your experience was. Listening to the piece.

Now, once you've done that, go back and listen to the piece again. And this time I want you to listen with a musician's ear. Now, this is a little bit different. We're going to be listening with a little bit more understanding of exactly what is happening in the piece. When you're listening as an audience member, the piece flows over you and you get an impression, you get the emotion, you get the feeling, the big picture of the piece. When you listen with a musician's ear, you can still experience that, but what you're going to listen for are the important elements in the music, things like the melody and the harmony, the phrasing, the tempo, the rhythm, whether the piece is in major or minor, the big sections of the piece, so that you'll hear with a little bit more musical understanding. Now, you can use those items that I just named, if you like, as a kind of a checklist. And there are, of course, many more things that you might hear. And in fact, the more you follow this process, the more you will hear. At first, you might only notice a couple of things, and you might find them difficult to put into words. That's part of the learning process here, too. You might hear a section that repeats over and over, or possibly it's just at the beginning and the end of the piece. That's part of the form, the structure of the piece. You might hear a melody being smooth and singing a legato melody, or it may be accented, or possibly the piece doesn't have a lot of melody at all, but it's mostly chords. That's an element of Texture. Texture could also be complex, where the piece is busy with a lot of notes. Or it could be a simple texture with a clear melody and a plain style of accompaniment. You could describe the harmony in different ways. The harmony could be diatonic, meaning that it mostly sticks to the key signature. Or it might be very chromatic, meaning it has lots of accidentals, which will, for us, of course, translate into pedal or lever pushing. Right. So do you hear a simple harmony or do you hear something that seems to change key a lot? Phrases could be long or short. You might have. You might be able to identify sections like the theme, the development, the recapitulation, or the coda. Now, you don't have to know these technical terms. Use your regular old vocabulary. You know words like long, short, complicated, simple, big chords, high notes, low notes, repeats. But the more you try to describe in whatever words you choose, the more you will notice as you go forward. You might want to make notes in your music so you can remember what struck you and seemed important when you listened to it. As with your earlier descriptions when you were the audience member, it's going to be helpful to have these observations in front of you as you practice.

Why is this important? Well, because these are the elements of the piece that you actually want to express. They tell the story of the piece. They're part of the personality of the piece and how the piece gets from the beginning to the end. What you listened for that first time you listened was essentially the personality of the piece. Every piece has one, right? You know what the personality is the first time you hear it. That's the idea behind what you wrote down on that first hearing. You described how it made you feel or what it made you think of. Perhaps it was sad, perhaps it made you think of a sunset, perhaps it made you think of a picnic that you went on, or you see a beautiful seascape, or perhaps it reminded you of a particular event. That's all part of your experience of the piece. And that's what. What all your expression is going to be aimed at reproducing musically that idea, that feeling, what you heard is what you're going to play, and it's what you're going to practice. But because that's sort of a tall order to just say, well, okay, so it reminded me of a sunset. So how do I play a sunset? We have to look a little closer. And that's where that second hearing comes in, when you're listening with that musician's ear. Because once you've described that personality of the piece, Then your musician's ear is listening for those compositional elements that help reveal that personality.

For instance, that. That middle section that gets all dramatic, that may be an important part of what you experienced when you heard the piece, right? So we're listening for the section that does that, or we're listening for the phrasing that does that, or how the composer revealed that picture or that story to you. So once you've identified at least some of those musical elements, whichever ones you notice, then it's time to think about the dynamic and tempo choices that you want to make. And at this point, it should feel pretty easy. I mean, probably there are already some notations about these things in the music, right? I mean, they've got some dynamics for you and that sort of thing. But even if there aren't, the ideas that you formed about the piece can be your guide. You're going to choose dynamics that reflect what you feel the piece is saying at that particular moment. Now, you don't need to make these choices before you start practicing the notes, but having those ideas in mind at first is going to save you a lot of time. Later, you'll be automatically thinking about the intention of the notes, and that's going to keep you involved in the music, not just caught up in making things correct. There is nothing that contributes to slow learning more than just working at correct notes without working at the meaning of the notes. I know it seems counterintuitive, but because it feels like you're layering on another thing to focus on. But when you put your focus on what you want the notes to say, there are some problems of, you know, some technical problems that just seem to disappear. There may be others that come up, but you're going to be creating the piece the way you want it to go, not just by what you see on the page. And that's a really important difference. So we've listened as an audience member, we've listened as a musician. Guess what? Before you start practicing the piece, I want you to listen to it one more time, and this time with a harpist's ear. Now, okay, this is yet another focus for your listening. The first time, as an audience member, you listened to what the piece is. The second time, you listened for the elements that make it that particular way. How the composer gave the piece its personality. This time, this third time, you're listening for what you will have to do as a harpist to play the piece. Are there a lot of chords, A lot of arpeggios? Do the hands do the same thing or completely different things? Do you hear passages that sound like the fingering will be complicated or techniques that you're going to need to refresh, like harmonics or glissandi or trills? Well, this third time, this is your early warning system for any technical skill that you're going to want to practice. It's also a good time saver, as you may be able to identify and start woodshedding trouble spots right from the start, instead of finding them as you go along.

So we've done our listening and now we're ready to practice. So how does all this come together? Obviously, the things that we do when we play have to reflect the musical elements that the composer put in.

But there's more to it than that. We need to create the flow of the piece. And flow is one of those words. We know what we mean when we talk about it, but it's really hard to describe and hard to articulate exactly how. How to make it happen. But flow happens when we tell the story of the piece, when we're able to create that seamless narrative from beginning to end. And despite what you might think, it is not dependent on tempo. In other words, flow doesn't have to be fast. Flow begins with the form, the structure of the piece. So we're back to those musical elements again. So where do you hear the sections of the piece change? Almost like new paragraphs or chapters in a story? And how can you help a listener hear those paragraphs, too? Lots of times. Truthfully, all we need to do is to remember to take a breath.

But I'd like to deal with flow and tempo for just a moment. We know that a piece needs a certain kind of a tempo, but rarely does it need a particular metronome mark. Sometimes a piece just needs to be fast enough to project the feeling that we want to have. But that doesn't mean that it has to be at a quarter note equals any particular number. It needs to have the right feel. And the right feel is not the same for every person.

Let alone every harpist. Every listener wants to hear it differently. If you take any famous piece of music, and I would say just to avoid prejudices, don't. Don't make it a harp piece. Listen to half a dozen different violinists play, oh, I don't know, a famous concerto or a famous solo, or listen to half a dozen pianists play the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

As many pianists as you listen to, you will hear that many different tempos, that many different interpretations, and that doesn't mean that any one of them isn't good. You may have your favorite, but that's the point. You get to interpret music with the same freedom that you have to choose which performance you like. So don't get all wrapped up in the number.

Flow requires your tempo to be pretty steady, but at the same time, it requires your pacing to be flexible. So where you will work with a metronome to make sure that you're being accurate and precise in your practice and knowing where that pulse needs to be.

As you get more accustomed to those notes, you're going to be thinking about that structure that you identified. You're going to be thinking about the phrases and thinking about what the piece says. Where are those musical sentences or paragraphs? Right? Where are those places where the piece just needs to breathe? Now, if you're not quite sure what I mean, think about this. We've all heard this, right? The elementary school child that gets up to recite something for the class, something that they've memorized, and whatever it is, they say it much too fast and with absolutely no attempt to convey any understanding of the words. Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers wrote on this continent a new name, right? The Gettysburg Address, with no inflection. So we've heard that, and we smile at it, but that's not the way we want to play. And what that recitation is missing.

Is the flexibility of pacing that allows us to hear what the piece is trying to say, what the poem, the Gettysburg Address, whatever is trying to say. And the same thing happens in music. We need to create time. Time for the listener to hear what we are conveying. Remember that when we play, our sense of time is very distorted because we are, in the piece, in a completely different world, with a completely different set of perceptions than an audience member.

For a great example of this, think about the times you might have tried public speaking, where you start and you think you're saying whatever it is you're trying to say at a perfectly intelligible speed. And someone yells at you as you're rehearsing to slow down. You're talking too fast. The same thing can happen here. When we listen, we need time to process what we have just heard. The performer already knows what's coming next. They've done this so many times that they don't need that time to process. But we still. So the performer needs to make those points of articulation clear for us. Those commas, those periods where the phrases end, where the music would breathe. Think about the melody. Of your piece the way a singer would if they were singing it, where would they breathe? And let those breaths be there. Your piece needs a little bit of flexibility, which is why while practicing with the metronome is great. It's perfect for the earlier stages of practice, so you can be sure that you're getting the right habit and the right idea of the pacing.

But beyond a certain stage, we need to practice without the metronome, too, so that we can find those breathing points and practice putting them in. Sometimes it's a rollen tondo or an accelerando. Sometimes it's an actual pause. Sometimes it's just a moment, a lift. Sometimes it's a little diminuendo. That helps us understand the end of a phrase. But the listener needs time, and you need to remember to create it. This is, by the way, also why sometimes tempos sound faster to an audience than they really are. You know, the audience might. Might think you're playing at lightning speed, but we have a totally different perception of that speed because we're playing it and time slows down for us.

So remember that you have more time than you think. And it's important to take the time so that the audience can hear what you want them to hear. So don't be afraid to go un metronomic, right? To create rubato. All the great singers, if you think about it, sometimes it's easy to hear in singers, right? All the great singers used rubato. Frank Sinatra is one of those ultimate cases where his rubato would get kind of, you know, wild and wacky. He always ended up in the right place, but those words didn't always go exactly where they were written in the music. So, as I said, that's kind of an extreme example of rubato. But that kind of flexibility is something that is necessary because we feel the peace flow when we can understand where it's going, what it just said to us, right? The end of a phrase is how we interpret what we've just heard. It allows us to sort of put a period at the end of that musical sentence and be ready for the next thing. It allows us to hear it intelligently, to hear it and understand it and connect with it. So the flexibility in your pacing is part of flow. Then the other big part of flow is that your presentation of the piece needs to present the entire piece, the entire progression from the first note to the last note. It's the plot, it's the story, it's the cycle of the piece. But it includes the beginning and the middle and the end and whatever else happens in your particular piece. But we need to move through those sections and we need to hear the differences between them. Dynamics can be part of that. Pacing and phrasing can be part of that. And what you do is up to you. And almost certainly the choices that you're going to make, the dynamics that you're going to choose, the things that you're going to want to do, will come naturally to you. The natural choices, the ones you want to make, will be good ones because you're thinking about them. Not from, oh, I don't know, should I be loud here, should I be soft here? But you're thinking about them from the idea of the piece that you started with, that first descriptive sentence that you wrote, that the piece made you feel happy. So the choices that you make are going to tell the story of that happy feeling that the piece gave you. You're going to reveal that through what you do. And you don't have to overthink it. In fact, the more you overthink it, the, you know, the more time you're probably spending than you need to. These are choices that you are perfectly capable of making. So don't overthink them, just do them. But just think about them from the. From the point of what you want the end result to be.

And then you can play the piece.

I mean, in my experience, once a harpist takes the time to describe the story or the big picture or the personality or the mood of any particular piece, then it's a pretty simple next step to bring it to life. Because all the choices that you've made make sense. They have a purpose and they have a meaning. They turn those notes, those dots on the page, they turn it into music, and it really is that simple.

So we started with listening with your audience ear for the way the piece makes you feel. Then we focused on the listening for the musical elements of the piece. Those sections, those phrases, the, the, you know, whatever you can hear about the piece. And then those technical elements that are such a necessary part of our actually playing the piece. Then we put all those things together to create the flow, the story, the progression of the piece, and make it speak to the listener the way it speaks to us. So we've recreated that whole story that we started with. It's a beautiful cycle and it makes beautiful music.

One last thought before we wrap up.

I wonder if you noticed the difference in how I asked you to listen to the piece and choose what you were going to make decisions about from what you likely Do I know that a lot of people will listen to a piece of music with the idea that they're going to inform their playing just the way we were talking about today. But what they listen for is where the performer gets soft and loud and what tempo they play and how they do it. What I asked you to listen for was something totally different. What I asked you to listen for was what the piece said to you through that performer's interpretation, for sure, but what was your idea of the piece? And then we listened for not those, those details of dynamics, those top level sort of things they did, but we listened for the musical elements that spoke to them, that informed their expression. So we listened for the fundamentals, the underpinnings, and then we were able to add the dynamic details for ourselves. But listening to the underpinnings rather than just the louds and the softs is, I think, a really critical difference, not only in terms of the depth of your listening, but also if in the understanding with which you approach a piece when you practice it. To think about the end result, not in terms of I'm loud here, I'm soft here, I slow down, I speed up here, but in terms of this is what the piece is doing, therefore, I could play this more softly, therefore I could use some rubato here, therefore I could make a big crescendo here. That's the difference. And I hope that you find that freeing and that it brings you a little bit more energy and creativity and confidence as you practice your music. Because hearing the music.

And hearing everything that's built into it through your own particular connection to the piece.

Hearing that is the most important first step in doing it. So I certainly hope that you give this a try with any piece that you are working on, or a piece even that you know well, think about it, listen to it with new ears, all those different kinds of ways of listening that we talked about, and see if it gives you a different understanding of how you can create and reveal the story of that piece for a listener.

By the way, if you do that, be sure to send me an email. You can email me directly through the podcast. Email that would be podcastartmastery.com and I will be thrilled to hear what you experience working through this system. Let me also issue one more invitation. If you're listening to this in a timely manner when it first comes out. My Heart Mastery membership is still open. It's open through November 30th. December 1st, we close the doors for another six months.

But I would love to see you working in the community with us. It's just, it's a great, wonderfully supportive group of harpists. And I know that you will get a lot of, a lot of energy and a lot of inspiration through everything that we do. At my Heart Mastery, just a little sneak peek coming up in December. We do a different theme every month. And coming up in December, our theme is called Finishing Touches. And it's all about the steps you need to take to finish any piece so you can play it confidently for yourself or for others. So that's what we're going to be working on in December. It's a short but appropriate theme, I think, to finish up the year. So that's, that's all coming up. We start that on Wednesday and I hope by that time you are in there and joining us, you will find the link to join my Heart Mastery in the show notes. So please do check that out. Now, next week right here on the podcast, we'll be talking about adult harp beginners. Now, I know I have worked with a lot of adult students, students who started the harp as an adult. And naturally, and you know this, if you're one of them, they regret not having started when they were children because, boy, those young harpists, they just stuff comes so much more quickly to them. They learn so much faster. They're so much farther ahead. Well, you know what? On next week's show, I'm going to be giving you three good reasons to be happy that you started as an adult and three distinct advantages that it gives you. Yes, I know.

They'Re critical advantages and I want to show you how you can use those to help you learn faster, make progress faster. Maybe not with the speed of, you know, a 12 year old, but that's okay because you, it's gonna be your journey. So, so no regrets here about starting the harp later in your lifetime. We're just gonna work with what we've got. And as I said, there are some distinct advantages and that's gonna be the subject of next week's podcast. So I certainly hope you join me for that. I look forward to talking with you then. And, and please don't forget to check out my heart mastery because I'd love to work with you in that group as well. So. All right, I'll see you next week. Have a wonderful week. Until then, 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.