Freedom to Fly: Four Keys to Finger Facility - PHH 095

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. We all know that making music is more than playing the right notes at the right time. It's about the heart and soul of the music, the feeling we put into it and the feeling that we communicate through it. Unfortunately, no matter how much feeling we put into the music, the actual communication of that feeling relies on our technique. It's one of those apparent paradoxes in music study, right? The beauty of your music depends on the fluency of your technical performance. But a technically perfect performance may or may not be a beautiful one. So we spend, or should be spending a significant proportion of our practice time strengthening and securing our technical skills. We practice the notes of our pieces slowly and correctly. Correctly. But often we still miss the connection between slow, technically careful playing and the facility we need to let our music flow. That connection, the missing link between slow and correct and fluid and musical, is what we will be talking about today. So here's the thing. Basic technique patterns are exactly that basic. Now, don't get me wrong. They're important, even vital, for your harp playing. Those fundamental skills like scales, intervals, chords, and arpeggios are the bedrock for every harpist technique practicing these patterns is not optional. The great harpists of every generation have advocated them. I myself practice them every day. But by themselves, those patterns aren't enough to make your technique everything you want it to be, particularly if what you want your technique to be is fluid, flashy, and, dare I say it, fast.

There are four important ingredients in the recipe for creating flexible, facile fingers, ones that do your bidding. And instead of slowing your music down, it's likely that these aren't things you even consider in your technique practice. In fact, you may not never even have thought of them as skills you could or should practice, but I promise you they will help you focus less on your fingers and more on the music each time you play. And if you want to pick up the tempo for a piece, these strategies will help your fingers play faster too. Now, just to pique your interest a little, I will tell you that our discussion will begin with my three word phrase that is the guiding principle for finger facility. That's right, just three words that may totally change your thinking about what your technique work needs to do for you and your fingers. Now, while you try to second guess me and figure out what those three words can be, I don't think you will. I will make sure you know about some extra free resources that we have for you at Harp Mastery. First, at the end of every podcast episode, we have extra resources for you. Links to things that I've talked about in the podcast, or links to a blog post or a previous podcast episode that's on a related topic to help you learn a little bit more about what we speak about here on the podcast. So those extra resources are always there for you in the show notes. Now, you may have heard me refer to them and not know where to find them. Every podcast app is a little bit different. So if you're not sure where to find the show notes on your podcast app or you can't figure it out, the easy thing to do is to come back over to heartmastery.com go to our podcast page, click on the episode, the podcast episode that we're talking about. And by the way, this episode today is episode 95. So you can click on episode 95 and scroll to the bottom of that page and you'll see the show notes with all the links right there. Now sometimes if you see the show notes in your podcast app, the links may not work for you. So at the bottom of those show notes you'll find a direct URL that you can cut and paste and put in your browser whether you're on your phone, your iPad, or your computer. And you can put that in and it will take you directly to our Harp Mastery podcast page. So you can see the the the show notes and have all the links and click on them. So that's how to find the show notes. I know you hear me refer to it and from time to time I get people asking, I don't see the show notes. Well, this is the easy way to find them. Go to our podcast pages@heartmastery.com you'll find podcast right in the navigation bar at the top of the page. Click on that and you'll see the most recent episodes right in front of you. Also, if you want to sort of scroll through the past episodes of the podcast, if you go down our podcast page just a little bit, scroll down a little bit, you'll see that we have our podcasts organized into three categories. A Technique and Musicianship category, a Music and Meaning category, and a Practice and Performing category. So you can click on one of those categories and we've sort of curated the episodes for you already, and you can find some more things and search the episodes from those pages when you get there. So that's one resource that we have for you that you might not have thought of taking advantage of now. For instance, at the end of this episode, you're going to find some resources related to what we're talking about today. There's a link to a podcast episode that I did before on spicing up your scales for technique, flexibility and speed. That's episode 64 of this podcast, Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, and there's a link to that in our show Notes. Plus we also have a link to a free PDF that is a scale fingering refresher. And it's not so much about correct fingering for scales as about sort of slightly crazy or wacky fingering that will help you bring some new life and interest to your scales. So that PDF is linked at the end of this episode in the show Notes, and you'll find it there. Also, a free resource that we've been trying to tell you a lot about recently, and hopefully you've heard that and taken some action on it is our new Harp Mastery Hub. Right? This is our place for harp conversation and community. It's free and it is also social media free. So whatever you don't like about social media, it's is probably not here.

We're not about trolling, for your information. We're not about advertising things to you. This is purely about conversation, community, tips, all kinds of things. Right now we have a challenge going in the Hub. This is a free challenge and it's a pretty simple, pretty fun one. We have a lot of people who have been participating. This is called the One Small Step Challenge series and we started a couple weeks ago with a focus on one spot. You might remember from a couple podcast episodes before. We talked about having a single priority. And that's what each of the challenges in this particular series of challenges is all about. So the first week we I gave you some techniques for focusing on one spot, one Tricky spot. And I just love some of the responses we've gotten from people who took and followed through on that challenge, talking about, you know, okay, I was working on these eight measures, and I was working on fingering stuff. But then all of a sudden, she was able to use these techniques to get a little bit more comfortable with these measures, not freeze up when she sees them coming. And she now knows she can get through them. So simple little steps that help you focus on one thing. So that was the first week's challenge, and you can still participate in that. That's fine. And then last week's challenge was all about painting a picture. So I challenged you to choose a short piece or a passage of a piece that you play well. And if you were to paint a picture for that particular passage of music that that music would accompany, what would the picture look like? What would the scene be? And then I give you a few ideas for trying that out in your practice. And we have some beautiful responses about sunrises and sunsets and lullabies with cradles, all kinds of beautiful things, beautiful imagery. And this is one of those small steps that can help take your music a long way. So that's a fun one to try. The challenge that we have starting this week, the step in that series is to be drilling one skill, so taking one particular technical skill, giving it some laser focus. So these challenges, challenges are easy. They're quick, totally free. You just click on the word join when you see the challenge, click on the word join. And then when you're ready to complete the challenge, you just click on the word complete and. And enter. You know what? Enter your post saying, yep, I did it, and this is what I experienced. All the directions are there for you. Easy, and it's fun. And so this is just one of the things you'll find in the Hub. I encourage you to come on over and join. It's totally free. We've got that link to join in. You guessed it in the show notes. Okay, enough of that. So let's get back to our topic and start talking about finger facility. It's a little bit ironic that I was just talking about a challenge that was laser focusing on one particular technical skill. When we're talking about exercises and moving your fingers forward, and you might be thinking about all those exercise books that you have. If you're like me, you have a big collection of exercise books, and some of them are pretty daunting. I recently decided to try an exercise book that I collected. It's an older one, collected a Long time ago. And I thought, you know, it's time I looked through this. And it's a collection of 51 daily exercises. Now, you know, you've heard of the daily dozen. Well, this is one harpist who, who took this to an extreme. So it turns out that those 51 daily exercises take me about two hours to complete. Now that's not something I can do every day. I don't have that kind of time to spend solely on exercises. And I'm sure you don't either. I know that when I was a young harp student, one of the books my teacher gave me to develop my technique was the Exercises and Etudes edited by Lariviere. A terrific book, but so many exercises and so repetitive and they were just way too boring for me as a young harpist. I see the value in them now in a way I didn't then. But what I'm talking about at the moment is that those exercise books have a purpose. Certainly a purpose I did not discern as a young person. But there is a reason for that. Now I think you can get the same results or similar results without being quite so. Thorough might be a good word for that. But this is the point, and this is that three word phrase that I told you I would give you. In order to create finger facility, a strong, dependable, fast, fluid technique, there's just a three word goal. And that's the goal of all these exercises. In all these exercise books, the goal is to create, here it is, every finger response. That's my three word phrase, every finger response. So for me, this is the ultimate definition of finger facility. So what do I mean by every finger response? Well, it's the idea that it doesn't matter what kind of a pattern you have to play or what the rhythm of that pattern is. You could use a variety of fingerings for that pattern and have it all sound the same, or B, pretty much as facile or easy as any other fingering. The ability of each of your fingers to step up to the blade and do a particular job at a particular time is real freedom in your technique. When you don't have to worry so much about your third fingers being weak or the fact that your fourth finger is out of shape because you don't use it so much. That makes a huge difference in your practice and in your playing. I mean, just imagine for a second if you were playing a piece for someone and as you're playing it, you made a mistake with the fingering.

So just think about that for a second. You know Sort of marinate in that moment. And you're thinking, I've screwed up the fingering and now I'm not sure what I need to do.

In an ideal world, one of your other fingers would step up to the plate and essentially rescue the situation. Say, okay, no problem, I know you meant to put your thumb there and we're on a second finger. But guess what? We have another fingering pattern that's going to let you move forward. And the fingering will be wrong, but the notes will still happen. Doesn't it sound great to be at a point where you're not a slave to your fingering solely because you know if you screw up and you put the wrong finger there, there's going to be another finger that'll step into the breach. Right. That's what finger facility is all about. So it's not just about speed, although that's part of it. And it's not just about those twisty kinds of patterns, although that's a good way to practice it. But it's about every finger response.

Now, I love that idea, and I'll be interested to hear from some of you what you think of every finger response. Because it's a very different way to look at those exercises that we play. It's a different way to consider.

The fingering that you write into your music. How much fingering do you really need?

That's just a portion of it, too. Right. But it puts your emphasis back on playing the notes instead of playing the fingering numbers. It's a very different way to look at things. So that's where we're going with this. We're creating every finger response.

So here are the ingredients that really go into that sort of the nitty gritty. Before we get to any specific sort of exercises or drills you can do or techniques for working on this, Obviously the simplest technique is going to be to go through every exercise in one of those extremely thorough exercise books. But I want to tell you, I want to be sure that you know what you're looking for. Conversely.

Now you can see why working on those very basic patterns, the scales, the arpeggios, the chords and the intervals, and doing them always the same way is not going to develop that every finger response. That's going to give you the freedom you want. Right? And I think that's an important point as well. Okay, so onto these ingredients, there are four of them I want to talk about today.

The first one is that your fingers really need to play with a relaxed, full motion. Your fingers need to Relax. The tighter you hold them, the more you try to control them through tension, the less control you will have over them. Right.

It's one of those oddball sorts of things. But the harder we work to try to make them do something, the less we enable them, empower them even to be able to do that, they need to be relaxed so that they can move, so that they can respond. And so to do that, we have to practice letting that go.

And by full motion, I'm talking about bringing your fingers all the way back into your palm. They need to close all the way. Are these things you need to think about every moment you're working on a piece or playing a piece of music? No. Although the more you incorporate them in your thoughts as you practice, the more automatic they will be and the easier it will be to adjust on the fly, you know, so that if you feel your fingers getting tense, you can remind yourself to relax them. And closing your fingers fully is one way to keep them relaxed. Right. The. If you try to hold them stiffly and not let them move very much, they're going to be very stiff and they're going to get more tense. If you let them move, you will keep them relaxed. That makes total sense, right?

Also, bear in mind that the faster you play, the more relaxed you need to be. Once again, this is one of those things that's sort of obvious, as a statement goes, and it's extremely difficult to do because when we need to go fast, what do we do? We sort of hold our breath, we tense everything up. It's like, okay, here goes. And we try to get it done. But this is one of those things you can practice in. In an exercise, sort of a setting, even if that exercise means taking a few measures from your piece and speeding them up, maybe even one hand at a time, speeding them up and letting yourself be more relaxed each time you play it. A trick here is also to help you relax. You can bring that dynamic back, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. But. But the faster you play to help you stay relaxed, you can bring that dynamic back and be softer, and that may help you stay more relaxed. Okay, so the first ingredient here in finger facility of relaxed full motion, what's the second one? Finger independence. And with finger independence, we're talking about all your fingers having an equal tone and a range of sounds, right? From sharp and accented to rich and legato, that kind of thing. So an equal tone, an equal dynamic range where all of them can play softly and medium and loudly, all of that, right? They all need to be able to do that. And here's that. That tricky word again. They need to be. They need to each have an equal level of control.

And this is the control that you exercise over them, not by tensing up and making them do it, but by practicing the skill. Let letting your fingers practice. How's that? Letting them practice so that they can develop the skill. They need to have equal control.

And this would mean. So that you know when you're playing these two fingers, this other one doesn't fire accidentally and play accidentally. Right. Or that you don't have a scale that sounds like da da, da da with an unintended accent in the middle.

So that's the kind of control we're talking about. And all of those things are part of finger independence. Now, if you want to sort of see how your fingers will stack up on this, right now, here's an interesting experiment. Try taking a melody from one of your pieces, or even just a simple song melody, and play it with just one finger. So obviously, fingering is not an issue. You're going to be playing everything with two, and then play it again with only third finger and again with only fourth finger and again with only thumb, using each finger in turn like that. Can you make that melody sound the same no matter which finger you're using? And taking that to the next level, can you make it sound the same as if you were using all your fingers?

That's where you'll really find out where your fingers have, you know, learned what they need to learn and where their strong suits are and also where they may need a little bit more work in terms of their independence. It's an interesting experiment. I urge you to give that one a try. Okay. Third ingredient in finger facility. I define that. This. Any finger, anytime, any job. Kind of like every finger response, right? We don't want your fingers to be dependent on fingering written into the music. Right? We don't want to have to read the numbers. We want them to all be emergency responders. We want them to be any finger, anytime, any job. You need me to do that, I'm right there. You know, fourth finger steps up or third finger steps up or second finger steps up. It's all the same. And we're going to look at some exercises that will help you develop that in just a moment. Fourth ingredient in finger facility. And believe it or not, this is the hardest one. Total trust. You need to give your fingers the controls.

This is what stops most people from playing fast.

They speed up the tempo, but they still try to control their fingers instead of letting their fingers do their jobs.

It's a scary sort of a thing.

But we've talked about speeding up pieces before. And so hopefully, you know what I mean. When you're working on something at a slower tempo.

We have time perhaps to watch all our fingers, to supervise every single finger independently. But in real life, when we want to think about the music and the expression, no matter what tempo we're playing.

We need to let our fingers do what we've trained them to do. Because our thought process needs to be somewhere else, needs to be on the expression and the musicality that we want. So we need to learn to trust our fingers that they will do their job. We don't need to watch them every moment, and they cannot be allowed to absorb all our attention.

Now here's an interesting experiment to start thinking about total trust and to sort of think about that. Every finger response or any finger, anytime, any job kind of a thing. Take a clean copy of a piece of music.

Make a clean copy if you have to, and white out all the fingering, whether you wrote it in or whether it was printed in. Take out every little bit of fingering, then play it, letting your fingers figure it out as you go.

That's what we want. You've done those exercises. Your fingers have done this work. Your fingers should know what to do. All you have to do is get out of the way and let them do it. And if it's not the most efficient fingering that they come up with the first time around, that's okay. Think about it from a sight reading perspective. You get a new piece of music, it has no fingering in it, and you want to sight read through it for whatever reason. Whether it's because you need to sight read it for a particular moment and you need to do it right then, or whether you just want to read through a piece and see what it's like. We don't want you to be reading the fingering because that's going to slow you down. You need to read the notes because that's where the music is. So we need your fingers just to be able to get to the next strings. Doesn't matter in that particular instance whether the fingering is the most elegant, the most beautiful, the most efficient. It just needs to happen.

And that's what we're talking about here. Take that copy of a piece that, you know, white out all the fingering and then read through it. You might find that your fingers know more than you Thought they did. You also might surprise yourself to see how often you're actually looking for the fingering to guide you.

Because that's not what we want. We want to be looking at the notes, not the fingering. So it, you know, consider it an experiment. Consider it informational, but just try it and see what happens. Okay, so those are the four ingredients in finger facility. You. Your fingers need to play with a relaxed, full motion. They need to be able to play independently with equal tone dynamic and control. They need to have that every finger response, right? Any finger, anytime, any job. And you need to give them your total trust so that you believe that they will do what you have trained them to do in your practice. Extremely helpful. Think how freeing that would be for you. Right? Okay. Well, let's talk about some drills, some exercises you can use that are specifically designed to help you develop that every finger response. Now, thinking about the equality of your fingers, right? We talked earlier about.

Taking a melody and trying it with each finger in turn and seeing if you could make that melody sound the same no matter which finger you're using, or make any of those fingers sound the same as if you were playing a connected fingering for that same melody. Here's another way to sort of start that whole process. Take a single note, like, let's just say a D, and play that D string with each finger in turn. Like 4th, 3rd, 2nd, thumb, 4, 3, 2, 1. With just a little wrist bounce, maybe in between. Can you make that one string sound the same with all your fingers? An interesting exercise. And don't just do this in your right hand, you know, be sure you do it in your left hand, too, and try it at different dynamics. Try doing that same single note exercise at a piano dynamic and at a mezzo forte dynamic, maybe something in between. It's hard to do this at a forte dynamic. I wouldn't worry too much about that. But see if you can keep the dynamic even. And then see if you can create a crescendo and a decrescendo that are beautifully even and smooth while you're switching fingers. You know, maybe something like this. 4, 3, 2, 1. 4, 3, 2, one. Right? So that as you're switching fingers, you're doing that crescendo, and you're doing that decrescendo as well. An interesting exercise in control. You have to be relaxed to do this, right? That's one of those things that that single drill does for you. It makes sure that you relax in between. So give that a try.

Another easy one. You might Try doing your regular daily exercises, whatever they happen to be, at three speeds instead of one. Use your regular speed. Choose that as sort of your bass tempo, and then choose a tempo that's faster and a tempo that's slower. This will help just give your fingers a little bit more of a workout, a little bit more exercise in doing different things rather than doing the same thing all the time. Remember that the faster you go, the softer you should play so that you can stay relaxed while you do this. Don't be afraid also to push that faster tempo quite a bit faster, almost to the point of.

Of discomfort, you know, so that you're not quite sure that you're going to get to the next note in time. And make that slower tempo quite a bit slower. Give your fingers a range of tempos across which to practice. That will help make them more flexible and facile as well. Now, there are a couple other simple, simple things. Scales. Try a scale fingering, but without your thumb. It is the most interesting thing to play. Four, three, two, four, three, two, four, three, two. You're crossing under your second finger with your fourth finger, and then on the way down, you're crossing over your fourth finger with your second finger. It's a very interesting exercise to not let your fingers use that ballast that your thumb often provides. The. But to really make themselves stand on their own and function, you know, like independent fingers. And the free scale refresher PDF that I talked about earlier in this episode, that's. That's one of the scales I believe, on that PDF. And there are a bunch of other fingerings like that that are just slightly different scale fingerings from the ones we normally use that will just help, you know, shake things up a little bit for your fingers and give them some new experiences and some ways to develop that, every finger response kind of thing. So mixing that up is always a good thing. You can do the same thing with arpeggios. You can do the same thing with intervals. So that where we might usually play the interval of a third, say from C to E, might usually play that with 1 and 2. Try playing it with 2 and 3, so no thumb again. Or with 3 and 4 and see if you can make your fingers sound exactly the same. And when I'm talking about making your fingers sound that way, free them up, right? They have to stay relaxed. They are in control. You're just going to relax and let them play the way they. They can play right now. And you're going to direct them a little bit. It's like okay, well, let's see if I can keep that knuckle curved. Let's see if I can close them a little bit more. Can I make that third finger sound a little more even if that's the issue? Right. So listen carefully while you do these. It's not just about how the fingers are working physically, but it's about the results that you get in terms of sound, dynamic, tone, all that kind of stuff. So be sure you're listening while you do these. Another fun exercise, if you like, is the infamous 4, 3, 2, 1 trill. So a trill, say, going back and forth between two adjacent notes like C and D, you can just go back and forth with those repeated notes doing 2 and 1. Or you could do 3 and 1, or you could do 4 and 1. Or you can alternate those 2, 1, 3, 1, 4, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1,. 4, 1. Or you could do the same kind of trill, C and D, but try this messed up fingering. 4, 2, 3, 2. And then cross over even with your thumb. 1, 2. That's really a messed up fingering. But 4, 2, 3, 2 is an interesting way to practice a Trill. And then of course, my favorite, the 4, 3, 2, 1, where you would have your fourth finger on C, third finger on D. Then after you've played your fourth finger on C, your second finger crosses over because it's going to play C and then your thumb will play D. So if you're. If we're doing a C, D, C, D Trill, the first group of C and D is played with your fourth and third finger. The second group is played with your second and your thumb. And then you're going to keep going 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1. And they should all be connected. So we'll. We can talk more about that four, three, two, one trill another time. But those trill exercises, anything with two adjacent notes like that, and alternating fingers for those, going to be a terrific drill for this.

I think, though, that there's one more thing that I should mention, and it has to do with the way we think about fingering. If we want truly facile, flexible fingers that can play fast because we're not worried about which one has to be there, but we know that they'll just respond to the notes because the notes are there to be played. If that's what we're looking for. What we have to stop focusing on are the fingering numbers. We have to stop asking what is the right fingering for something.

And just start trying a bunch of different fingerings, realizing that there is always more than one option.

So that doesn't mean that there isn't one optimal fingering for a particular passage for you. Right? A fingering that works for one harpist extremely comfortably and easily may not work for another harpist. Right? Everybody's hands are different, everybody's skills are strong in different areas. So fingering is individual.

And there certainly could be an optimal fingering for a particular passage, but there's never only one right fingering. So let yourself explore options. If you get to a piece that you're trying to learn and the fingering's not printed in, try letting your fingers just play it and deciding on the fingering from what your fingers like to do.

I know it seems kind of radical, but it's absolutely a great way to work to let your fingers do what you've been training them all along to do.

And that's the basis for every finger response and that's the key to finger facility. Makes sense, right? And it's so easy and it's so much fun. Okay, well, let me quickly remind you about the free resources I talked about, our scale Fingering refresher PDF and the other podcast episode that is related to this. Please hop over and join us and join the conversation. Join the challenges, all that good stuff in the Heart Mastery Hub. I would love to see you there. All those resources are free and if you can't find them in the show notes, just look on heartmastery.com, go to podcast and you'll see this podcast episode right there. You can click on it and all the show notes will be there for you with all the right clickable links. Next week here on the podcast we will be continuing our month long look at skills and we're gonna be talking about overcoming left hand lag. Now you may have experienced it and not know what I mean by that. It's sort of my own term, but left hand lag is what happens when you are playing something hands together and your left hand just doesn't get where it needs to go on time. Now this can also happen with your right hand for sure, but what we're going to be looking at are the skills you need and how to develop them to read ahead with both hands. So it's all about hands together reading and hands together playing next week as we tackle the ever problematic left hand lag. Now until then, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit and all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for 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.