Five Fingering Rules You Need to Break - PHH 044

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.

Ask a group of harpists what the hardest part of playing the harp is and you'll get a lot of different answers. Might be the technique, or playing hands together, or reading the notes, or playing chords or putting on a new string. Maybe even moving the harp. Every harpist has his or her own personal bugaboo a particular challenge in their playing. But all of us agree that one of the trickiest parts of playing the harp is the fingering. From the first day we started the harp, it was impressed on us that we need to follow the printed fingering. Placing our fingers accurately and in the right order, whether all at once or one at a time, helps us battle gravity and stay physically connected to the strings. I like to think of it as think of us as musical acrobats, right? Only without the death defying aspect. So much of what our instrument demands of our technique requires us to be airborne. We have to lift our hands to prolong a sound, to relax our hand, to move from one octave to another. And unlike pianists, we're working against gravity, holding our hands and and arms in the air all the time we play. So our fingering is important. And learning the finger patterns that we play most often is important too. And if you're a harpist who has been following the fingering in your music, you get your gold star.

But there's a next level of fingering and you might never have been told about it. I can just about guarantee that you've had glimpses of it. Your first glimpse may have come when you began to encounter more advanced music that didn't have the fingering written in. Or perhaps you've noticed that you need less fingering written into Your music as you've progressed in your playing.

Well, today I want to reveal to you some of the secrets of next level fingering. Fear not. Those secrets aren't new patterns you need to practice. They're just different ways of working with fingering, ways that make use of the technique that you have developed since those very first days when you started the harp. Remember those days? Your playing has grown a lot since then. Right. And so should your fingering habits. We're going to look at five of the basic rules you were taught about fingering and show you how to break them and why you absolutely should. Or, looking at it another way, why hanging on to them will cost you practice time and possibly keep you from getting to that next level of playing. But before we dig into this more deeply, I want to share this thought from Rick Wakeman. If you recognize that name, he is the keyboard player of the rock band. Yes. Now, in this particular quote, Rick wasn't talking about harp fingering, obviously, but his words are still a great start to our discussion. He said, I always say that it's about breaking the rules, but the secret of breaking rules in a way that works is understanding what the rules are in the first place. So that's where we're going to start talking about the rules and then talking about why and how to break them. So get ready to break some rules. All right, before we get started, I wanted to invite you. You know, I read every one of the emails that comes in to our podcast email inbox, and I love to get your feedback, I love to receive your questions, because we'll be bringing those listener questions to you on one of our upcoming shows. So please don't hesitate. If you have one of those questions or comments, something you would like to hear me talk about on the podcast, just email me@podcastartmastery.com and I will be happy to take a look at that. And, and as I said, it's always lovely to hear from you. So I just wanted to drop that little idea into your head. And now going to be time to talk about breaking those fingering rules. So let's start by talking about the rules. All right. I mentioned that the first thing that we learn to do as beginning harpists is to follow the printed fingering. And why do we do that? Well, first of all, it's like reading a roadmap, isn't it? Only a little bit more confusing sometimes, but it tells you what, which finger you should put on the string. And this is great, because first of all, it lets us put More than one finger on the string at a time, which helps us stay connected to the harp. So that makes it a little bit easier for us to play. Because as you know, half the trouble is finding your way around the instrument, right? So staying connected to it is great. It also teaches us to learn to use all our fingers. Imagine if we just played with second fingers and, you know, if you've been somewhere or had someone over to your house and they know nothing about the harp, what do they do? Well, they take their index finger and they try a few strings, right? And that's nice for trying a few strings. But obviously it wouldn't work for playing most pieces of music. And so following the fingering in a piece of music as we're learning helps us learn to use all our fingers and learn to use them in the most common and harpistic kind of ways. It teaches us those characteristic patterns and the way we would normally and most of the time use our fingers to play those patterns. For instance, if you see an interval of a third, like from a C to an E, usually that would be a thumb and a second finger or a three note chord with 3, 2, 1, or an octave with 1 and 4, or a scale passage, 4, 3, 2, 1, if you're going up, right? So those characteristic fingerings help us learn the patterns that we're going to do that we're going to be playing for most of our harp career. And what's important about that is that it gives your fingers their vocabulary. It lets your fingers learn what that particular pattern of notes means for them. Now picture something for a second. So picture a piece with all the fingering in and you dutifully learn it with all the correct fingering and you get all your fingers in the right place. Now, ideally, if we took that same piece of music and took out all of the fingering, just erased it from the music, there was no fingering in it at all. But you've been playing and practicing it. Your fingers should still know where to go. They've learned those patterns. And that's what's so valuable about learning the correct fingering, whether that fingering is written in or not. Our fingers get a certain sense of what they're supposed to do. I like to call it finger smarts, right? Your fingers are learning what they're supposed to do, whether the fingering is written in or not. Now, of course, you may have been, you may have experienced this too, that there's a danger point where when we're learning the fingering, we end up reading the little numbers instead of the notes. Right. So that we're following the fingers, but maybe not really reading the notes that are there. And so that's sort of a, you know, a dangerous kind of thing. We don't want to not write the fingering in, especially in beginning pieces or, you know, pieces early on, because your fingers aren't knowledgeable enough to play on their own, Right. To make their own automatic choices. And as a very beginning harpist, you don't have the information you need to know what the best and most useful fingering is going to be.

So that's why the fingering is written in, and it's very helpful. We need it. It's a great thing. So when does it stop becoming a great thing? When we start reading the numbers instead of the notes. Exactly. And when we don't trust our fingers to do what we have trained them to do. So there's part A. And so what are the. What are the rules that we're talking about? Well, those normal patterns, right, where an Octave is always 1 and 4. Well, you've probably been playing long enough, you know that an octave isn't always 1 and 4. Those things don't always happen the same way. Another one of those rules, and this is a pretty strong one, is that when you're placing your fingers, you place them on the strings on only as far as they're going to play in one direction, right? So that if the notes go up and then they go down, you're only going to place the notes that are going up and then wait till you get to the top and start down. Then you place the fingers going down. So I call this, you know, placing in one direction you don't want to place around the corners is what I like to say. And most of the time that's true. There are instances where placing around the corners makes sense. But most of the time that's just a way to sort of confuse your. Confuse your fingering. So there are a couple examples of, you know, sort of rules and things that we have about fingering. But I'm going to talk about five specific rules that seem really sensible and that you might have been told. You might even have told them to your students. I know I have. But these are the kinds of rules that the more you learn, the more advanced you get, the further down this harp road you go, the more likely you are to need to learn to break them. And that's what we're talking about right now. So here's the first rule. It's the one I just talked about a moment ago, the rule is always follow the printed fingering. Well, generally the printed fingering is really helpful. It can make learning easier, right? And it will help your fingers learn those good pattern habits.

In music. For harp students, especially, early on, there's usually a lot of fingering written in. And of course, as a teacher, I know that I'm as firm as most teachers, you know, saying that our students need to follow that printed fingering because it's going to develop those correct habits. But as you move to more advanced pieces, there is less fingering printed in the music. And this can actually deter some students from looking at that, right? They get so used to playing music with all the fingering written in that they, they shy away from a piece that doesn't have as much written in.

But we need to know that we can play the music and not just the fingering. So ideally, if you see a piece of music with no fingering written in, let's not start by writing in every finger. Let's start by writing in only as much fingering as you really need.

For instance, when I see a long sort of passage or a one handed arpeggio in a piece of music, I won't write in every fingering or every finger, but I will write in the ones I need to know where I need to cross under or over. So that if I know that I'm going to play all four fingers, I'll make sure that I put in a four and maybe put in my thumb where that ends. But you know, I'll just. That way I can look at the music and glance and say, okay, all right, look, that's a, that's a group of four, a group of three, a group of four. And I'll know what I need without having to write in every finger.

That's sort of, it's sensible when you think about it, right? But think about it this way. What if you were really used to reading the fingering, somebody gave you a piece of music to sight read that had no fingering written in.

It would feel very difficult because you're not used to reading the notes as much as you are used to reading the fingering. And of course, if they gave you a piece of music to sight read that did have the fingering in, it's easy to get tangled up in the fingering and stop reading the notes.

I have found that when my students are reading the fingering instead of the notes, they learn more slowly.

Because they're not trusting their fingers to do what they've trained them to do. They're not letting their fingers see the patterns on the page. Now, I know your fingers don't really see it. Your eyes do. Right. But they're not looking at the patterns of the notes. They're looking maybe at the patterns of the numbers. So when the fingering is printed. Yeah. It's not a bad idea to follow it. But don't read it right. Train yourself to do it and then train, you know, wean yourself away from it.

With a piece that you've been practicing for a long time. See what would happen if you played from a clean copy that didn't have the fingers written in. How much of it would you still know? If you try that experiment, what you will find is that most of the fingering will be ingrained from your practice. But there might be one or two places where you need a particular finger placed and you need a reminder about that. And that's fine. Go ahead and write that in. That's where we want you to get with your fingering, to a place where you don't have to have everything written in.

So follow the printed fingering. Well, yeah, but you don't need of it, as much of it as you think you do. All right, here's rule number two. There is one best fingering for a piece or passage.

Now, I realize that you might have just listened to me say that and said, well, of course there's not one best fingering for a piece or passage.

But so many times I will have a student ask me, well, is this the right fingering? I don't know. Does it work for you or, you know, well, what's the right fingering for something like this? Depends on the situation.

I mean, there's no one right fingering because some fingerings work better and at one tempo than they do at another. Some fingerings are easier for one person's hand than another. So while there might be one that's a typical fingering, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best.

Now. But let's think about one of those sorts of passages. And how would you go about figuring out what fingering might work? Well, this is when your fundamental drills come into play. Your scales, your arpeggios, your chords, your intervals, your finger patterns. Because the purpose of those drills is to get you and your fingers used to those idiomatic, those characteristic, those most common fingerings for the most common patterns. And this will help your fingers develop that automatic response. But in any given piece or passage, you may want to make a different Choice, it may be about fitting the phrasing better or to suit your own hand to make a big stretch easier, to prevent buzzing, any of those sorts of things. So is there one best fingering? Probably not. There may be the most common fingering, but that may not work for you. So don't be afraid to alter a fingering that's not working. And how would you know this? Well, if you're practicing a passage and practicing it and practicing it and doing it, you know the right way, and the fingering still isn't working, you're still tripping over something. Well, let's look for another option. There is almost always at least one other option that's going to work just as well. You know, I was working with a student the other day, and we were looking at a passage that had a thumb slide.

And the thumb slide was working for me, not working for her.

So we came up with another fingering that works beautifully and it sounds much better for her, works much more easily. And now she's not struggling with that particular measure anymore. So, you know, you have to be willing to be flexible. Kind of going back to maybe not following the printed fingering, huh? All these fingering rules are related. And here's another one that is related.

And this is. This is one of those rules that I know people want to stick to. It's, you know, sort of the ironclad Bible kind of rule. Here it is. The rule is this. Choose your fingering and then practice it the same way each time.

So, okay, you finally found the right fingering and you're going to practice it the same way every time.

This is.

It has the appearance of being really sensible, right? Because if you play something the same way each time, then you're developing that habit, and hopefully that will keep you from making mistakes. And it seems really sensible and it's a good thing to do. However.

What'S the use of training your fingers to be independent, to be flexible, to be agile, and then asking them to play a passage only one way?

Let's think about when you might want to have a different fingering. Well, if you're sight reading a piece, for instance, right. Then you can't be wedded to one fingering because you're trying to get around a bunch of strange notes. All right, so you say you don't sight read. Well, listen to this one. Suppose you're playing a piece and you make a mistake.

Maybe it's not just a wrong note. Maybe you put a finger on the wrong string or the wrong finger on the right string.

When your fingers are trained to be independent, which is the purpose of your technique work, then you can use whatever finger happens to be available to help you recover from that mistake, right? So you have your fingers trained that any one of them can jump in and do another finger's job.

That's a completely different way to look at fingering.

And I think what's at the core of this is this interesting little nugget.

If your playing depends on you playing the right fingering.

Then what's the point of all this technique work? What's the point of the independent fingering?

And in addition, you're not practicing the kind of playing that's going to lead you to confident performing. Because if you've made a mistake in the fingering, you're telling yourself there's no, no recovery from that. So what I'd like to suggest is that, sure, you choose your fingering and try to do it the same way each time, because we know that's going to happen. But. But if you make a fingering mistake when you're practicing, you know, like, oh, shoot, I was supposed to put my other finger there, right? I was supposed to put my thumb there. Well, go on. Don't stop to correct it, right? Then let yourself keep playing and just get whichever finger you can on that string that you need to, you know, the next string, right? Allow your fingers to play past that mistake.

Think about what that will do. Anytime you want to play something in front of people, it will mean that if you make a mistake, play a wrong note or play the right note with the wrong finger or whatever it happens to be.

You will be able to recover from that mistake and possibly nearly seamlessly because your fingers will jump in and save the day. You won't be stymied by, oh, well, I can't put my third finger there now, so I have to stop and fix it.

That kind of flexibility starts in your practice. You need to try not stopping to correct a fingering mistake so that if you put the wrong finger on there, just keep on going, keep on going with whatever finger you can for as long as you can, right? I mean, it might be that you absolutely needed to have your fourth finger on that string because you have no other notes to play. Well, jab at it with your second finger and, you know, see what you can do to get back on track. If you can't and you have to stop, that's okay.

But if you can ask your fingers to jump in and save the day for you.

Think how freeing that is to think that you won't have to stop to try to fix that kind of mistake, but you can recover from it because your fingers. You are letting your fingers do what you have trained them to do.

I guarantee that if you try this, you will discover that your fingers know more than you think. They are quite willing to, to jump in and play with, with anything, any, you know, any pattern that they can to try to save you and try to keep that music going if you let them. So, yes, practicing the same fingering is valuable, but so is letting your fingers recover for themselves if they have to. Right? Learning to be independent, learning to, you know, to meet the situation with the notes instead of through the numbers is a big thing. There are plenty of times when I'll have a piece and I'll play the passage differently every time, with a different fingering every time. Nothing wrong with that. Nobody's judging you on your fingering. Do remember, this would be a good time to remind you of this. Let's remember why your fingering is there. Right? Fingering is important, especially early on in our harp playing, to keep us connected to the instrument. But ultimately, our fingering is there to serve the music, to make the music sound the way it's supposed to sound. So that, for instance, if we have something that's staccato and crisp, well, maybe we want a very disconnected fingering, like a lot of second fingers. But if we want something legato and smooth, we're going to use a very connected fingering. So the fingering is there to serve the music, not the other way around.

And that's the basis for the fingering choices that we make. So that when we make, you know, we want to change a fingering because it's not working for us, well, what's going to serve the music? What's going to help prevent buzzing? That serves the music for sure. What's going to make that melodic line sound smooth? What's going to allow us to accent the notes that need to be accented in that line?

So you can change the fingering. You can play whatever fingering you want, but it's got to serve the music. Okay, I digress just a little bit. But let's get on to the fourth rule.

And this is a. This is a biggie. This is one I, you know, remind my students of all the time. Place your fingers all at once, right? All of us teachers drill it into our students. You know, when you have notes connected by a placing bracket or notes in an arpeggio or chord, get all Those fingers on the string, place all those notes at once. And that's usually the best policy.

And I advocate it. I do it. I have seen in my students playing it in my own, that remembering to place all my fingers at once is sometimes critical for playing a passage accurately and at tempo. So, you know, that's. It's a good rule. But.

There are times when. When you will not want to do that. Now, don't forget, right? We're only placing in one direction at a time, not around the corners. Although even that rule is broken. You know, occasionally I'm thinking of, like, a. A four, two, three, one kind of finger pattern. But.

In some instances, you may want notes to ring longer. And so instead of placing all the notes of an arpeggio, say, at once in each hand, maybe you want those notes to ring a little bit longer. So you're only going to place those fingers one finger in advance, one at a time, instead of all at once.

So once again, we're making a musical choice. There are times not to place all your fingers. Now, obviously, these are skills that you're going to use at the more advanced levels of your playing. But even playing at an intermediate level, you will need to develop the finger and mental flexibility to place in a different way. So this is a different kind of placing. Extremely valuable and worth practicing. So try your arpeggios where you're placing them all at once. And then try placing just one finger at a time, like 4, 3, 2, 1. Just get that next finger on. Listen to the difference in the sound. You know, play that arpeggio over and listen to how it sounds different, because it does. And there might be a time that you want that. So placing your fingers all at once, absolutely essential. But there's also another way to place, and that's one at a time, and you need to learn how to do that, too.

So maybe it's not breaking a rule. Maybe it's just adding another concept, Right? Does that make you feel better? I know sometimes it makes me feel better. All right, let's get on to rule number five, which is to connect everything you can. Now, this is kind of similar to placing your fingers all at once, but maybe not connecting or not can be an option rather than a rule. Yes, mostly connecting helps us to be more efficient, which is why we learn it right away in our harp playing. But it can also be a musical choice, like lifting your hand between notes can create more ring in the sound, just like I was talking about with the placing. Right. So there might be a really Beautiful lyrical melody, and you want a little bit more resonance and freedom in that sound. So you lift your hand off between those long notes. Now, you're not going to lift it off between those shorter eighth notes perhaps, unless you want a very detached sound, in which case you're also not connecting everything you can.

So, but so lifting your hand is going to be a musical choice where you're either looking for maybe a little bit more resonance that comes from lifting your hand or a little bit more melodic freedom, a little bit more life to that sound. And of course, it will also help you relax your hand. One of the things you can do about to help you think about how this works is you can think of it as releasing the sound.

But whatever it is, you need to get over the fear of being airborne, right? Get over the fear of not being connected to your harp. All you will need to do, of course, is practice the landing.

Now, I've told you all these things and given you this information, and I realized that I've run the risk of just confusing you about what you should do with your fingering. So let me see if I can try to make sense of what I was just talking about here. Following the printed fingering is a good idea. Just remember that it's not the only idea.

Having fingering written in can be helpful, but having too much fingering written in isn't helpful because you're stopping from reading the music and playing the music and you're just playing the fingering numbers. So we don't need everything written in. It becomes a distraction. Your exercises, your etudes, your scales and arpeggios, all of those things are training your fingers to play independently and you have to let them. So don't think that you need every single fingering written in your music. And then remember that your fingering choices are essentially musical choices. That whether you're placing them all at once or connecting them all or not.

Is a choice that needs to be made with the music in mind and not just your coordination or comfort. There are plenty of fingerings that might seem really comfortable, but don't serve the music at all or don't work at the tempo that you really want to play the music at. So just be a little bit flexible, be a little bit.

A little bit forward looking in your thinking about fingering, right? You need less fingering on the page than you think you do. And the choices that you make are going to be all about the music, not necessarily about what fingering looks helpful for you. There's a blend. There's a place to to where those things intersect and you'll find it for yourself.

One more little caveat. Don't think that just because you've practiced one fingering in you're stuck with that. Your fingers are smarter than you think. Change the fingering. Practice the new one. If it's a good fingering that you're changing to, your fingers will adapt quickly. If they don't adapt quickly, it's probably not worth making the change. Okay, enough about fingering for today. Now, next week we're talking about the difference between practicing to practice or practicing to play. So it's the gap there between practicing and performing and why your practice goes really well. And yet when you go to play it for someone, even in a lesson, it doesn't work. We're going to be talking about how to bridge that gap so that you are actually practicing in a way that's going to help you play your music instead of just help you keep practicing. It sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? Okay, so that's next week on the show. Thank you again for being here. And remember that I always look forward to reading your emails, which you can send to podcastartmastery.com I look forward to talking with you next week. And until then, have a terrific week and go play some wonderful music this week. All right, I will talk to you next week right here on the show. Bye. 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.