Glorious Glissandi - PHH 024

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. I love a good glissando. A harp glissando is something that cannot be duplicated by any other instrument. It just doesn't sound the same. A harp glissando is magical, and it can make any moment in any piece of music make magical. In fact, there's at least one harp glissando that I incorporate into every one of these podcasts just because I love it so much.

It's likely the very first thing that you ever played when you touched a harp, right? We all want to just slide our fingers over the strings. And in fact, that's what the word glissando means. It means sliding. Okay, Pretty good, right? And from that first time you played that glissando on the harp, maybe that was the moment that you decided that you needed to learn to play the harp. Maybe it was part of the first harp piece you ever learned. It was certainly part of my first harp piece. But somehow after that, once we start studying the harp, glissandos can be scary. They can intimidate some harpists. And part of that is because we, we don't usually teach them, right? We deal with them on a case by case basis. And the fact is that there are key techniques and very important musical considerations that come up with an eglissando. And so it's important to sort of think about those ahead of time so you feel prepared, so you don't feel quite so intimidated when you see them in the music and you know what to do.

One of the things that can be really intimidating is just the terminology. Glissando is what we usually call them, or we call one of them a glissando. We call more Than one glissandi. That would be the correct Italian plural, right? Glissandi with an I at the end. But you may see other terms. Sometimes you'll see it called a flux, F, L, U, X. And sometimes you'll see the Italian word.

And I'm not going to spell that for you, but you can check it out in the show notes because it's there. Zdruccio Lando. It's a wonderful Italian word. What does it mean? Sliding. Because that's how we play them, right? We slide our finger over the strings. But it's about so much more than that. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And I'm excited to get onto that topic. But before we do, one quick reminder. I just have to tell you about this one more time. Our Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza Challenge is kicking off today, Monday, November 1st. And it's not too late to join us. If you still want to get in.

We'Ll leave the course open for another couple of days just so you can get in there and get in there on the ground floor, as it were. We're going to be playing the Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza and, and learning it together. And it is possible for you no matter what your skill level is on the harp and in fact just about any kind of harp you have. We have full versions for petal harp, but we have a version that works on a 26 string lever harp. So, you know, it's, it's going to be possible for a lot of harpists who may not have thought that the walls of the flowers cadenza was in their realm of possibility, but that is still going on. I will put the link to the show notes we're starting today and you can still get in, so be sure to take advantage of that. And after the next day or two, we will close the registration so that you don't get in too late to really participate in the challenge. So that is coming up and I wanted to be sure to let you know about that now. Now here comes one of those wonderful harp glissandos. And then we'll start on our topic for today. Wasn't that a nice glissando? Okay, so for the purpose of our talk today, I've divided the topic into three different segments. We're going to be talking about sweep, the sweep of a glissando, the swoop of a glissando, and the specifics of playing a glissando. Now, I'm not starting with the specifics but because I think that we can get too caught up in being correct with glissandos. And a glissando is not about being correct. It's truly about the music. It's about the magic. It's about expression, it's about intention. And if we are too correct with it, it loses some of that. So we're going to start by talking about the sweep. Now, the sweep is sort of a technical thing, but it's what will make your glissando flow and be even, right? We want a glissando to have a continuous, even sound without holes or bumps from beginning to end. And in order for that to happen, we need to have the correct technique. It's not hard. In fact, it's very simple. And it boils down to one fact. If we want the notes in a glissando to sound essentially the same, I mean, we'll add dynamics and all that stuff in a minute here. But if we want them to sound even, and if we want them to sound equal, and if we want to have technical control, it all comes down to maintaining the. The angle of your hand, just as it does with any other playing. Now, it's not complicated, right? If your hand is in one position, we know that your finger will strike the string at that position. And if we can maintain that position, no matter where we are on the harp, your tone will be relatively consistent. And that's the way our regular playing works, right? That's why we use our arm to balance our hand. It's why we're concerned with the angle of our wrist and keeping our hand centered, all that good stuff. In the context of a glissando, what it means is that you're going to use your arm to pace the glissando and to actually control the motion of your hand. You're not going to use your wrist. So think about it this way. If you had your finger in front of you and you were going to pull it by twisting your wrist, you can see that the angle of your finger is going to change, right? But instead, put your hand sort of in playing position, and then use the hinge of your elbow to just move up and down your imaginary strings. This would be right. You're moving up and down these imaginary strings, and your hand is staying at the same angle to the strings. It's just that the hinge of your elbow and perhaps your shoulder is moving your hand without changing the angle of your hand. You get it? So we're using your arm to control the glissando this will mean that your finger is playing each string essentially the same way. And it's going to be, you know, pretty much your second finger going up and your thumb going down, right? So there's your glissando, and it's measured, it's paced, it's controlled by your arm, not your hand. This is a big thing. It seems like a little thing when we talk about it. It's just like, okay, use your arm, not your hand. But it's so easy to think that that you'll just add a couple of tweaks of the wrist and get a couple extra notes on your glissando. And it doesn't work that way. You really want to use your arm for it, even if it feels like a short glissando. A glissando is not a flick of the wrist, trust me. Try it and see. So the sweep of the glissando is going to depend on the motion of your arm. So to try this out, all you have to do is pull your harp back, put your second finger on the strings, make sure your hand is in a good playing position, put your second finger on that string, and then pull your arm back and let your arm guide it and see how even that is. Your arm has a wonderful sense of control, and it will make that glissando even for you. What you want to be sure of is that you're keeping a relatively even pressure on the strings, right? But once again, your arm is going to be a great guide here. And then try the same thing with your thumb going down. When your thumb goes down and your arm guides your thumb, you'll have the sense not so much of pushing your thumb down, but of pulling your thumb down, which will make the glissando, the downward glissando, much smoother and much more even. So we pull the glissando, we don't push it. Whether we're going up with our second finger or down with our thumb, you'll find that it makes that glissando sweep. And that's the first thing you know about glissandos. So when you're working on a glissando, start with the sweep. Now, after we get that, we're going to start talking about how to make that sweep more musical, how to put expression and dynamics and all the interesting stuff that makes a glissando so magical. We're going to put that in next, and then we'll get to the specifics, the stops, the starts, the turnarounds. But let's make the magic first. So the magic is what I call the swoop of the glissando. Now, a glissando can simply be just sliding this way.

And it's perfectly lovely. But much of the time, our glissando has a purpose. It has an intention. And we create the musical intention by working with the energy and the direction of the glissando. And that's what gives it swoop. So think for just a moment about what the intention of. Of a glissando like that might be. Now, there are different kinds of glissandos, right? We have glissandos that are just atmospheric, maybe sort of like this.

And we have glissandos that are the big Hollywood finish, like this.

Well, those aren't the glissandos that I'm talking about right now. They're important, and they have their own considerations. But. But think about just a plain old, simple, single glissando, the kind we see most often.

When you see a glissando like that in a piece of music, the question you need to ask yourself is, what is it doing? What is its purpose? What is it trying to help convey musically? Usually a glissando and has a pretty discernible purpose. And often it has to do with a sense of growth, an intensification, a move. Maybe it's part of a modulation to a new key. Maybe it's just a sense of arrival at an important note in the melody. Maybe it's.

Giving energy to the beginning of a piece, or it's helping the end of a piece taper away. All of those things are just a few of the things that a glissando might be doing. But you'll be able to play a glissando more easily when you understand why it's there. And of course, there isn't necessarily a right answer. As with so many musical things there, there's a choice. And you might get to decide what that glissando is doing. But as with every other musical element, when you're playing a piece, your decision that you make is important. You need to make that decision. You need to make that choice. Because if you don't understand the glissando, if you don't have a reason for it, the listener won't either. And I think this is where a lot of harpists get stuck. They see it as something they have to do rather than as a moment that they get to create. And glissandos, more than any other effect, are like that. You get to create a Moment. And here's what I mean. So a glissando can be a single direction.

With a single dynamic and a single speed. That can be lovely. But think about what happens if we add a little bit of a change in the energy and the direction, if we create some momentum. How do we do that? Well, we do that two different ways. We do that by working with the speed and by working with the dynamics. So we're really talking maybe not speed as much as pacing. And so if we change the pacing and we change the dynamic, our glissando means something else. And I'm not just talking about playing it louder or softer or faster or slower, but actually changing it as we go. Think in terms of a crescendo and a decrescendo, and in terms of an accelerando or a ritardando. Right? A speeding up or a slowing down. Those happen during the glissando. And these are fun to experiment with. So one glissando, right, with no alteration to it. What if we take that glissando and we add a crescendo to it?

Now it's doing something. It's got a purpose. And the. The way you create a crescendo and a glissando is by just adding more pressure onto the string. Don't change the angle of your hand. Don't you know, we want your arm to still control it. But by changing your pressure on the string, you will make it louder or softer. Same thing with a downward glissando. We can make it start softly and crescendo on the way down. It's a little bit bumpy. I'm facing the microphone instead of my harp. But we could also make it start softly and get louder. Right? Both of those things. Or start loudly and get softer. There you go. And it's not by changing our arm motion, but it's by just changing the pressure on the string. So that's how we change the dynamic. Now, when we combine that dynamic change with a change in the pacing, like an accelerando or ritardando, then we get some excitement and we really have that sense of direction. So we. What if we start slower and softer and get louder and faster? How does that change the glissando?

Ooh, there's motion in that glissando, right? There's energy, there's flow. It could be this wonderful sense of arrival.

Ah, okay. Wonderful. That accelerando combined with the crescendo pushes us toward the top, and we get that sense of.

Arrival. At this wonderful moment, we can turn it around and let's have the glissando start faster and louder and get slower and softer.

There you go. That's a less common one to find in an upward glissando. You'll find that more often in a downward glissando, but still, it could absolutely be that. And you get that sense of fading away, that idea that we're going into the distance. Right. So that's where the musical idea can be so profoundly expressed. And it just is very easy to do. You're controlling the pacing. You're either going to get faster or slower, and you're controlling the dynamic by getting louder or softer. And you have ways you can mix them either, because there will be an upward glissando or a downward glissando. Now, yeah, if you have a more complicated glissando and it's going different directions, you may have additional choices. But in that straight line glissando, that's where to start. And that's how to start crafting your repertoire of glissando techniques. So it comes down to keeping your arm in. In motion, but adding pressure on the string or relieving pressure on the string to create the crescendo or the decrescendo, and then speeding up or slowing down your arm motion to get it faster or slower. Now, a couple things to watch for. You want that pressure to be applied evenly, right? So that it sounds like a crescendo and not like you're fading in and out.

That's actually a little bit hard. Hard to do. But do pay attention. Listen carefully to be sure what it is that you're doing as you add your pressure.

To make it an even crescendo or decrescendo. And same with the pacing. You don't want your glissando to speed up and slow down, or even worse, to have holes. So you need to keep that pacing consistent to the end. Even if you're speeding up as you do it or slowing down, don't change your mind in the middle. Um, a glissando requires a certain amount of courage. Once you've committed to it, you just have to do it. Changing your mind in the middle is not going to make a beautiful glissando. Trust me, I've tried it. So just commit. Remember, it's a glissando. You. You. No one will mind if you do it a little bit differently every time. It's just. It's too wonderful an effect. So don't be afraid to experiment. This is a very easy thing to play, and I'd like you to try and experiment with all the fun stuff before we get on to talking about the specifics. So now that you've gotten the sweep down, work on that swoop, changing the energy and the pacing and the dynamics so that your glissando has an intention, has momentum, and takes us somewhere musically. And then we'll be ready to talk specifics. Now, as I've mentioned once or twice already today, the specifics are where harpists are likely to get tripped up. We want to be careful. We want to do things the right way. And so we spend a lot of time and energy working at how they. How these glissandos start and how they stop and. And do we have to have all the notes in them and what's the right fingering? And we worry about those details. And while they're often important, and actually they're not always important with glissandos, or not maybe as important as we would like to think, but while they are important, they're not the focus of a glissando. And if you get too caught up in them, you end up robbing your glissando of its musical magic. And in addition, you take away a lot of the fun of playing glissandos. So with this, with the magic of a glissando in mind, there are still some considerations, and we need to talk about them. But remember that experimenting with the glissando and just playing it for the sweep and the swoop is really where you want to start.

You will find that some pieces give you specific instructions about where a glissando is supposed to start, which string, which note, and where it's supposed to stop. And ideally, we should be paying attention to that and obeying the instruction. And that's what we're going to talk about now, exactly how to do that. But remember that those are important, but they're not the only thing that's important. And if the glissando loses its swoop and its energy, then, you know, we may not. We may as well not have played it. So, you know, that's. Keep that in mind as you practice. All right, so starting a glissando is very simple because you're going to start it either on the note that's indicated or. Or wherever seems comfortable for you. We'll talk about that in a moment when we talk about rhythmic considerations. But, you know, if the glissando says to start on a particular note, start on that particular note. And remember that when you place it, place your finger in regular playing position so that you're free to move your arm. Right? So starting L. Starting woo. Starting. Starting. The glissando is relatively simple. It's ending the glissando that's tricky. So if there is a specific ending note that your music gives you for the glissando, then that's the last note you should play. And it needs to happen exactly on the beat where it is indicated in the music. So you need to be rhythmically precise. Often a good way to practice is getting your glissando to fit in rhythm is to play just the first note and the last note as you practice so that you might be playing, say it's a right hand glissando, you'll play your left hand as it's written and just play the beginning and ending notes of that glissando where they're supposed to be. It's a great way to save your finger some wear and tear as well. Practicing glissandos too often or too much in one sitting particularly can, you know, make your fingers sore. So be. Be kind and remember that practicing the beginning and the end of a glissando at the correct rhythmic moment is a great way to fit your glissando in without wearing your finger out. Playing that last note of the glissando without having played the glissando is one thing, but landing on it accurately when you've played the glissando is something else. And there are generally three techniques for landing on the right note at the end of the glissando. And any specific glissando will lend itself more to one than the other, probably. But it's worth talking about all three, because you never know which one will work best for you. So the first way. Let's think about a glissando that's going up. All right. Your second finger needs to hit that last note at a specific time. One of the easiest and simplest ways to do it is just to, you know, your. Your arm is going up, your fingers going up, the strings. Just play the last note. When you get to that last note, pluck it instead of continuing your glissando. Easy. It's simple, not always easy to land on the right note at the right time. So. But you know, that's what practice is for. There is another way that gives you a slightly softer sounding last note, and that's to slide your finger as you slide up, slide it and slide it past the last note and just bring it to a dead stop on the next string so that the top note of the glissando single sounds more like part of the glissando than a separate note. And your finger just stops at the next string, as if the string beyond the one you want to play was a wall. And you hit the wall and your arm just stops there. It's a different sound. Let me demonstrate for you. So here's a glissando where I pluck the last note.

Now, it was a soft pluck, but it was.

Definite and distinct on that last note. Now here's a glissando where I overrun the last note. So instead of plucking the E flat at the top of the glissando, I'm going to let my finger slide past the E flat and come to a dead stop on the F. And it sounds like this.

So it's just a little bit less emphasized.

Than with a pluck.

Now, a third option, which is sometimes feasible depending on the piece of music, is to play the last note of the glissando with your other hand. So this is a right hand glissando, and I'm going to use my left hand side second finger.

Or my left hand thumb.

To play the top note.

It can be a little bit louder if I want, or can fit into the glissando more, can blend a little bit better. Right. So those are the three options that apply particularly to upward glissandos. You can pluck the last note with the same finger you're glissandoing with. You can slip slide one note past it, or you can pluck it with your other hand.

And depending on the situation, one might be better than another, right? Because you're going to make a big crescendo and you might want that very definite note. But maybe you're not going to make such a big crescendo and you want it to be a little more subtle. And so you'll just glissando right past it. So there are your three options there. Now, with a downward glissando, it's a little bit different. You can just bring your thumb all the way down to the last note.

But that's not the usual way to do it.

And I suppose you could slide past, but you could miss it that way too, Right? It's more usual on a downward glissando to reach out with your second finger as you come down with your thumb. And when your second finger can put itself on that final string, you're going to do it.

So that your second finger.

Can play the bottom note by itself. That would be the more usual way to do it with a downward glissando. So you're going to sort of play with your thumb, reach out with your second finger, get it on that last string, and then play. You can play it with your other hand again too, so that your glissando goes down and your other hand plays the last note. That's so easy to be accurate that way. It's just that we don't always have the freedom in the music to have our other hand ready to do that.

The other thing I want you to be very aware of is that as you do that downward glissando, you can get all the notes in between. You know, you can have every single note in the glissando sound.

But sometimes it's really hard to get your thumb all the way to your second finger.

And if you're missing a note or two in the glissando, don't obsess about that. We probably won't hear that little gap depending on the context. So don't worry too much about getting every single note. That's part of that getting down in the weeds thing, and we want to stay out of that. It's more important to make the glissando sound right than to get every single note in there. So don't focus on that. Now, one trick you can use to get every single note is, is after you've gotten your second finger on that bottom string, you can just sort of close your thumb over to your knuckle the way you would normally to close your thumb when you play it. But brush by those strings on the way, which would be something you normally wouldn't do, right? You would want to close your thumb and not hit those strings. Well, now we want to hit those strings. So you essentially stop your arm motion and then just close your thumb over to get those intervening strings.

Now, I put a little hole in there, which you heard. The little gap between those bottom two notes. I did that to demonstrate to you, but it's something you do not want to do. And it's what I want to talk about right now.

That hole, that's what we don't want. Whether you're going up or going down that gap in time. Something that's really detrimental to a good sounding glissando because we feel like, oops, you got there too early.

So the glissando needs to fill the space allotted. And most importantly, it needs to lead into that next beat. So if you get there too early, it's not going to sound right. Better you should have to speed up your glissando at the end to get there in time than to get there too early and have to wait. So this is where the rhythmic implication is. You must be really, really careful about this. It has to take the right amount of time, but most importantly, it has to get to the next beat without hesitation. So if that means that you need to start your glissando a little bit later than it's indicated so that you have enough strings to do it, then that's what you need to do. The arrival time is more important generally than the start time. Now, if you can see in your music that they're both critical, here's something to consider.

Glissandos only have so many notes in them, so they are very tempo dependent. And a glissando that works very well at the intended tempo of a piece, say the intended tempo of the piece is 80. A glissando that fits very nicely with sweep and swoop at 80 may not work at all at 50 and may sound like.

Like you'd be better off playing a scale. So in that case, if you're practicing something under tempo or playing it under the intended tempo, start the glissando a little bit later if you can, so that you can get some of the sweep and swoop without that stutter effect.

Glissandos need this swoop, right? They need to have all those notes in a rush of some. To some extent, and they don't work so well slowly. So that's an alteration you're going to have to make when you practice slowly and be aware of that. One last thing to cover, and that's the turnaround. If you have a glissando that goes up and then down or down and then up.

We often talk about a figure 8 that happens, and it's sort of more like an infinity symbol, a sideways figure 8 and a very skinny one. But your second finger goes up and before it reaches the top, your thumb will start down. Before it reaches the bottom, your second finger will start up. You will not cover every note in the glissando this way, but your sound will be continuous, which is important. And the figure 8 comes in or the infinity symbol comes into play this way, when you come up, your hand will come up on the strings just a little bit so that your thumb will go down, starts a little bit underneath. This changes the angle of your hand just a little bit. I know I told you not to do that, but that's why I want your infinity symbol to be skinny. I don't want you to make it a big, fat swoop because that will mess with the quality of the sound a little bit more. But that little bit of figure eight swoop will make it easier for your thumb to get on the strings starting down, and for your second finger to reach out and start that swoop going up. An easy way to. See what I mean when you're only listening to the audio here, put your. Just hold your thumb up in front of you as if you were going to, you know, put it on a harp string and then stretch your finger out straight in front of it. Now think about raising your second finger to point it toward the ceiling and then swooping it underneath, almost as if you were. As if you were scooping something delicious off. Off a plate in front of you, was facing you. You're gonna scoop it up and then get it on your finger. Okay? So you're gonna stick your finger up in the air, scoop it down, and bring it toward you. Now, that's a very exaggerated version of the motion you're going to make here. You're going to make it much smaller, but it's that same shape. So it's that little bit of scoop that happens. Little bit of scoop. We'll talk about the turnaround. I have a feeling in more depth another time. But what I want you to take away from today's show is that your glissando needs sweep. It's got arm motion in it, and it needs swoop. It needs musical intention that you create by changing the pacing and the dynamics so that it moves from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top, whichever it has to be. And then we talked about the different ways to stop to get to that last note, remembering that with many Gl, the timing of that last note is very important as well. Wow, that's a lot to cover with glissandos. But I'm hoping that that has given you a little bit more perspective and has encouraged you to spend a little bit more time experimenting and playing with glissandos because they are so much fun. On next week's show, I will be talking about the Ave Maria. This is a piece that we harpists are asked to play often. And in fact, there are two of them that we are most commonly called on to play. And I'll be talking about both versions of the Ave Maria. The practice considerations, the background of the pieces a little bit more about what that music is supposed to be and of course, how we need to do it. So we'll be talking about the Ave Maria pieces, the one by Schubert and the one by Bach and Gounod on the podcast next week and I certainly hope you join me for that. But in the meantime, one last reminder. This is your last opportunity to sign up for that Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza challenge. So if you're on the fence, it's time to get off and get registered for the challenge. The link is in the show notes here and I certainly hope you join me. We have a lot of people joining us for the challenge, so it's going to be just a ton of fun. And remember that the challenge is not just a once and done thing. It's actually a course that you will have continuing ongoing access to long after the challenge is done. This course is going to be, you know, on the Heart Mastery site, as long as we have a Heart Mastery site. So if, you know, if you're worried about I, you know, I'm going to run into run out of time to do the challenge. Rest assured, everything will be in the course for you whenever you get there. But doing it as a challenge with us, I think is going to be a lot of fun. So I hope to see you on the challenge with us. But even if I don't, I hope to be talking with you right here on the podcast next week. Thank you for joining me today and have a wonderful week. 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.