Harp Playing Hiccups - PHH 008

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 today's show. We harpists have so many things to worry about when we perform. We've got the notes, the strings, the fingering, the pedals, the levers, maybe a string breaking. So many things to worry about. And it may sound silly, but one of the things I used to worry about was getting the hiccups while I was performing. Now, adrenaline is a wonderful thing, and when adrenaline kicks in, the hiccups generally don't happen. So I never really experienced that. But I have experienced a different kind of hiccup in my performing, and I know that other harpists have experienced it, too. And maybe you have. These are musical hiccups, the kinds of things that prevent your music from sounding smooth and continuous and even. It can be sort of something like an uneven fingering or tempo. It could be actually a disruption in the musical flow where all of a sudden it doesn't sound like the music it's supposed to be, or it could just sound sort of insecure and unconfident. Now, all these things are a little bit amorphous, and they can be very hard to practice and to prepare for if you don't know how to do it. But they're all symptoms of a harpist who hasn't been practicing, at least properly, for flow, for continuity. And that's what we're talking about today, exactly how to prepare your music so that it can flow confidently, smoothly, and musically, all of those things that you want your music to be. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about the three elements of musical flow and why they are so crucial to your performance. We'll talk about practice tweaks, easy things you can do that you're probably not doing, but that will help create that flow that you want. We'll talk about how to close the gap between where your music is right now, which might be in a state of hiccupness, and get it to that state of continuity where we want it to be. And I'll give you my system, a start to finish, step by step way to prepare your piece. That will prepare it to flow, to be beautiful, and yes, to still be correct. Because we want that too, right? And in addition, I will show you how to put that system into play, and I'll give you access to a resource that you can use to help you on that path. So let's talk about flow. Now, we've all heard people who stutter and stammer in their speech. It's very difficult to listen to, but, you know, it's even harder for them. And there are many people who have had this affliction and struggled valiantly, often with great success, to overcome it. Our president, Joe Biden, is one of them. You may not have known this, but he had a terrible stuttering problem as a child. In fact, when he was 12, he made a decision that he was going to have to do something about it. He wrote himself a letter, and the letter said this. Dear Joe, you're only 12. Your stutter is debilitating. It embarrasses you, and the bullies are vicious.

So he started to work on his stutter. And he credits his reading aloud of poetry to his success. He used to read Emerson and Yeats aloud. He says that there were a couple of nuns in his school that helped him learn how to speak with a cadence, and that that rhythm, practiced through reading the poetry aloud, was what enabled him eventually to. To get over his stuttering problem.

So while the hiccups that we may have in our heart playing are not nearly as critical an issue, most of the time, they can seem pretty debilitating to us. And they can ruin music that we have practiced so, so hard to learn. So what causes those musical hiccups? What causes us to break the cadence, the flow, the continuity, the sense of inevitability from beginning to end of a piece that makes it sound so wonderful.

Think about that for just a moment. That that's what continuity is. That it projects a sense of inevitability of the music in a natural progression as you move through it. It's a sense of mastery and confidence that is projected. And it also is the illusion of music that allows the listener to be drawn in to this magical world that you create. Even if it's only for a moment or two, right? You don't have to be a great harpist or playing a really impressive piece for this to happen. Any piece of music needs continuity. It needs flow. And the more you prepare for that, the more you will be able to engage your listener and to communicate with them whether you feel like you have anything profound to say or not.

So if that's continuity, and if we can agree that this is important and that it is essentially the elimination of musical hiccups, let's talk for a moment about the three elements that go into that. They are absolutely the three biggest things that contribute to the flow of your piece. The first is the underlying continual pulse, right? Music happens over time. And most pieces of music, there are some exceptions, but most pieces of music have a beat, right? Maybe it's not a clap your hands to it kind of a beat, but that's a pretty good visualization, right? Imagine yourself listening to some. To a band play a piece of music, and you're clapping along with it. And the rhythm is enlivening and it's bringing energy. And then all of a sudden, there's a sudden break, like they miss a beat.

Well, that is a hiccup, isn't it? And it sort of throws everybody for a loop. And the clapping goes kind of wonky. And the fact is that the performer, the band, whatever, has broken that underlying pulse. Now, sometimes composers use that as an effect, and it can be extremely.

Arresting, which I think is an appropriate word.

But it's useful as an effect. If that's not what's intended in the music, then we don't want to do that. We want that pulse to stay steady.

Even through retards, achelorandos, all that sort of stuff. That underlying pulse needs to be there. So we'll talk a little bit about, a little bit later, about how you can work to create that underlying pulse. If that's a problem for you, and believe me, it goes beyond working with the metronome.

The second element of flow, of continuity, is the sense of musical progression. That it's not just time that moves our music forward, the music itself moves forward. Melody has a direction. It takes us from one place, moves us through any number of changes and notes, and takes us to a conclusion. Harmony obviously does that. In fact, we call a series of chords a progression. Right? But music moves on its own. And the sense of flow that you want for your music is dependent on your understanding and your ability to convey that sense of progression. We do that through dynamics we do that through phrasing, we do that through pacing. But all of that happens at the big picture of music. It does not happen note by note. It happens when we step back and look at the whole thing. There's a context for it and we'll be coming back to that word, believe me. And the third element of continuity is a seamless performance.

Okay, I just heard in my imagination, I heard everybody go, oh, well then never mind. I want you to pay attention to the word I used. I used the word seamless. I did not on purpose, did not use the word perfect. There's a huge difference. And I'm going to give you an analogy to hopefully illustrate that a little bit better.

There was.

A man I was listening to give a lecture and he was talking about being asked to advise a writer who wanted to become a best selling author.

And he was speaking to her and listening to her personality problems and her questions. And he said, well, so what's stopping you from being a best selling author? And she said, well, it just takes me so long to write a book and then I get there and then I want to change it and I want to d d and I have to rewrite and. And so I just can't get my book done. And he said, well, you have a choice to make. Do you want to be a bestselling author or a best selling writing author?

There's a difference, isn't there? And let's think about that when it comes to our music too. We're not necessarily talking. Well, we're not talking at all about something that's poor quality.

But what we're talking about is a seamless performance rather than a perfect one. If you can give up the idea of playing perfectly and needing to play perfectly to have your music flow, you will be able to create a seamless performance that has the illusion, at least of perfection. We've all heard a master performer give a wonderful performance, only to find out later that they weren't pleased with it because there was this that they didn't do the way they wanted to, and this mistake and this and this. Although we didn't hear the mistakes at all, all that's because they were able to keep the seamlessness of their performance in spite of the imperfections. And if you're practicing for absolute correctness alone.

Then you're fixing mistakes that may not need to be fixed, but you may need to to learn how to get over those mistakes. I know this is sounding familiar, but hopefully I can give you a new way to look at the idea of playing past your mistakes. So let's go back for a moment. Start talking about that underlying pulse and what you can do to practice for it in a slightly different way, aimed at preventing the disruption of flow. Let's start with the idea of the underlying pulse now. Yes, practicing with the metronome is an excellent idea. I am a true believer in the power of the metronome to help you not only keep a steady beat, but to help you learn to listen to more than just yourself, which is a very useful skill and a subject for a different episode. For sure, the metronome is a great start. But let's talk about some of the places in your music that might trip you up where you might be sabotaging the.

Continual steady nature of the pulse.

One of the biggest issues that I have found with harp students.

That they stop at the bar lines.

The bar lines are like this visual wall, or they can be. Now, they're there for a very important purpose. They're there to help mark the beginning of each repetition of the meter. Right? If you're in four, four, those bar lines show up every four beats so that you know where the first bar beats are. They're a visual aid to help you identify where the metric pulse is. But they can also serve as a wall where you forget to look beyond those, forget to hear beyond those, forget to think about what comes next. So if bar lines are one of those places that where you seem to stop, stop and correct, or stop and redo, or stop by accident when you don't even really know why, then do remember to practice across those bar lines on purpose. Don't practice two measures. Practice two and a half measures. Practice starting a half a beat before a measure starts and ending your section that you're practicing on half a measure after your section ends so that you get used to playing across those bar lines.

A similar problem is playing across the transition from one line of music to the next one. Right. It can take a moment for your eye to go down and over, so be sure that you're reading ahead. Practice those transitions as well. A bar or two or three at the end of one line going seamlessly to the first bar or two of the next line, so you're practicing across those transitions. Transitions need to be invisible. That's part of flow, part of maintaining the pulse. Of course, if you're speeding up or slowing down without knowing it, the metronome isn't excellent way to help you correct that. If you're not sure, my recommendation is to record yourself and listen to see if it sounds steady to you. We'll talk more about how to sort of diagnose those issues in a little bit. But the key, I think, to making sure you're maintaining the pulse beyond keeping a steady beat, where it's called for, is to making sure that all your transitions are smooth.

All right. What about the progression of the music?

I think that the musical progression of the piece is something that is partly written into the music and partly something you decide. So in the very first days of looking at a new piece of music, think carefully about what you think the piece is going to sound like, what mood it will have, what the eventual tempo needs to be. Not in terms of a metronome marking, but in terms of a pace. Right. I mean, a minuet, for instance, could be a very stately, powdered wig and candlelight kind of minuet. It could be a much more lively sort of. Sort of dance idea. So there's always a range, but what's the characteristic that you want to have in your music? And then if your piece is supposed to. If you feel your piece should be pensive and thoughtful, maybe a little melancholy, then you have a lot of choices that are going to support that or not. Your choice of tempo, your choice of tone, your fingering options. All these things will help to support the phrasing and musicality that you want.

I would start from that big picture. Because if all your choices are directed toward that big picture, you have a much better sense of making your music what it wants to be in terms of the whole piece. Now, the progression of music comes down to a lot of other things. You might recognize a form like, oh, look, the end is the same as the beginning. The middle section does something different. So use those as clues to help you choose dynamics or to remind you of dynamics that the composer may have written in for you. So pay attention to. To what clues the composer has given you. And then extrapolate from those. Or, you know, add your own. Interpret the music. I think that we often are afraid to interpret because we think we don't know enough.

But, you know, you don't have to be a master musician and theoretician and everything else to interpret music. Every time you play music, you are interpreting it. So don't be afraid to let it mean what you think it means. Or to imbue your own sense of meaning into it. That will give the music progression and will give the music flow all by itself. So this has a lot to do with your idea of the music as well. As the dynamics and the phrasing and the pacing that you use to bring into that. So start with your idea, then do pay attention to the dynamics. Do some experimentation if you like, but remember that the dynamics, the pacing, the phrasing, they're not things you add on later. They're things that are baked into the music and that you should be including in your practice from the very start.

Then the third element of flow, that seamless performance, this is the hard one.

I think that most musicians practice to eliminate mistakes. When we do that, we become focused on those mistakes. When we focus on them in our practice.

Well, all right, we need to focus on them. Let's change that a little bit. When we focus too much on them in our practice, we draw our attention to them habitually.

And if our attention is drawn to them in our practice, our attention will be drawn to them in our performance. And frankly, that is going against what we need in a performance. We don't want our attention to be on our mistakes. We want our attention to be on what comes next. And we don't want our audience's attention to be drawn to that mistake either. But if that's what we're thinking about, I guarantee you that's what the audience will notice as well.

So practicing in a way that allows you to play past that mistake, to ignore it, is really critical.

Remember that every time you stop to fix a mistake in your practice, you're playing along, you make a mistake, stop, stop, fix it, and then continue playing. You've practiced in a mistake, you haven't fixed what was wrong. You've practiced stopping and then replaying it, which is not going to lead you to a good performance. It's going to create entirely the wrong habit. So how do you balance fixing mistakes and playing past them?

One of the best ways to do this is to be sure that you have separate parts of your practice, that for part of your practice time, you are playing through your piece, beginning to end, playing past the mistakes, not stopping for them, then going back and fixing them separately. If you're really worried that you're going to not get everything right, then record yourself and then take notes and go back and fix it that way. It's not a bad thing to do, especially on sort of a weekly or every other week kind of basis, just to give yourself a really good reality check, sort of be your own teacher. You can do that.

But you do have to spend some of your practice time playing past those mistakes. If you don't do it in your practice, you won't do it in your performance. And seamless performance is what we really need more than anything else. To preserve that flow, to project continuity, to project that sense of inevitability and that sense of confidence and mastery.

Let's talk about a system that you can use for that. I have a step by step approach that I like to encourage my students to use when they start a new piece. For many people who do this for the first time, they find it uncomfortable, they find it difficult, and it makes them worry that they're not going to get to play their piece well. But I want you to consider this.

That if you want to have a piece that flows, then you need to be practicing for the flow, not hoping that it's going to happen by magic afterward. So here are the four steps to learning a piece this way.

With a new piece that you approach. I like to start by playing it front to back, playing the whole thing and playing it hands together. Now, this usually means that it's going to be quite slow. It may take me on that first reading especially a really long time to get through it because you're going to have to stop and start. You're going to have to make some adjustments, going to have to figure things out. But if you get all the way through the piece the first time you look at it.

You will not need to ever fear what's coming next. Right. You're not learning the first line and then learning the next line and wondering what's going to happen when you get to the last line. You will know the whole thing. You'll have that bird's eye view. Granted, it may not be a great read through, but there won't be anything that you haven't seen. You'll know what's coming up next.

Now, if this is a shorter piece and it's well within your capability, you might have a pretty good sight reading first thing through. If this is a very long piece and it's very difficult for you, it's going to take a longer time to read it through and it's going to be more challenging.

But it's going to be of tremendous benefit to you. And. And please do just as much as you can hands together. Because there are things you find out hands together that you don't find out hands separately. So let's figure this out now. All right? So read through the whole thing, get that big picture. Make some musical first decisions about it. You can change your mind later. But what do you think the piece is going to be.

Then? See what parts of it are Easy to play some of it will be. See what parts of it are harder. Make a plan of.

Of attack. You know, a learning plan. Where do you want to start? What's going to be most important? You might have parts of the piece that you can just about play right now. So don't put too much practice time in on those. You can play through those parts. Let's try start some practice at some of the harder sections. But whatever, however you choose to do it, the. Your first mission with the piece is to just go over it. Don't worry too much about fixing it. Don't worry at all about fixing anything. Let's figure out what's on the page.

Read the whole thing down. Hands together. Make. Start from the music. Start from that big picture. I know that's not where you want to start. You're ready to dig in, hands separately and stuff, right? Resist the urge. We'll get there. So that's step one, the big picture. Step two. This is where the flow comes in. We're going to sort of bring in a little bit of the technical work, but in a way where it helps support your musical vision. So start working on your piece in larger sections, like, you know, the. The first page and the last page and the middle page, kind of big sections. And in smaller sections as well, sections of four bars or eight bars, but don't take it apart. Measure by measure. Don't get into the details. Start playing through those sections. Play them under tempo. Play them as close to tempo as you can get. The idea here is to not completely let go of the musical idea.

But to see what we can get up to that musical idea as quickly as possible.

You'll do mostly hands together work some hands separately when you need it. But the idea here is to keep working at the bigger picture.

Step three is where we get to dig into the details. And this is where you'll find the stuff that still doesn't work. You may be surprised in that stuff that you've done. The work you've done through those first two steps.

Actually bears some fruit. And you think, wow, okay, there's stuff in here I really don't have to practice and take apart and drill very hard because it actually isn't so difficult having spent a little bit of time working on it. So the details that you have to dig into are much fewer. And so that third stage is where we really dig in and get all that stuff worked out. Make sure that all the notes and the fingering are right. Get done with the little stuff that we haven't been able to clean up just from the broader brush work.

But I don't want you to get stuck there, because part of the work you should still be doing is making sure that the detail work that you're doing is still serving the musical vision.

We never want to lose sight of that. And step four is all about rebuilding into that musical vision. I call this insurance. We're going to work. Play the whole thing, play these big sections, play the small sections. Make sure that all those details are in place and that we're putting the piece together, back together the way we envisioned it in the first step.

How long does this process take? It doesn't need to take very long. A piece that you're. That is sort of at your level, that you're pretty comfortable with, you could get through this in just a couple of weeks. A very long, very difficult piece is going to take you longer. And you may spend much more time in that detail stage right, cleaning stuff up. But it doesn't matter how difficult the piece is. I urge you to start with step one. So step one, you're going to play through the whole thing. Step two, you're going to break it into those big sections, but still not get into the details. Just do your work playing through each section. Step three, get into the details when you really need them to, when you really need to fix them. And step four, put it all back together in that musical context.

I know it's radical, right? But it's totally doable. It will preserve the musical context. It will save you time.

So let's talk for just a moment, recap, and see how you might start this process for yourself. Now, you'll remember we talked about the three elements of flow. Preserving the underlying pulse, preserving the musical progression, interpreting the musical progression, and creating a seamless performance. Not a perfect performance, but a seamless performance. That's what makes your music flow. And we talked about how this has to do with the context, with the big picture, not with the nitty gritty, not with the details. This is all about the big picture. I'd like you to consider this. If you don't remember that that musical big picture is where you want to go, then you won't practice for that. And if you don't practice for that, it won't happen.

So that's why I urge you to work through, if you can, a piece with those four steps that I talked about. Start with the big picture. Play it through. Play everything you can. Practice as little as you need to. Practice only what you need to and play everything that you can. So there's step one. Step two. Think about the bigger sections of the piece. Work in big sections and smaller sections, but stay out of those details. Stay out of the weeds as long as you can. Once again, we're playing as much as you can, practicing only what you must. Step three. This is the what you must. We're going to practice those details. Fix everything that hasn't fixed itself. Step four, get back to the big picture. Get back to that 30,000 foot view. Make sure that the pulse and the musical progression and the seamless quality are all things that you are practicing and.

Presenting in your performance.

If you need to record yourself and listen, listen as if you were a third party, right? As if you were listening to somebody else. Do you hear the pulse constant.

Unaltered, nice and even and steady all the way through? Can you sense the music beginning to end? And does the performance sound seamless?

It's difficult to be an objective listener. The one question that you that you have to be or the one thing to be careful of. It's not really a question. Don't start noting the mistakes. Just evaluate your recording in terms of those three elements of flow. Remember, the wrong notes don't count here if the flow is continuous. Okay.

If you would like a more organized way to work through those four steps, I do have a course that walks you through those. It's called 30 days to done. You will find it in the links below in our in our show notes for this episode. You'll find it on the heart mastery website. 30 days to done gives you a four week framework based on the four steps that I talked about with two actual practice techniques for each day of those four weeks so that you know exactly how to practice, exactly what to do so that you can work through those four steps. It can be very helpful if you've never worked this way to have somebody tell you exactly what to do. There are videos of course, that go along with it and as I said, all the PDFs with all those action steps. So if you're interested in getting a little bit more support walking through the steps that I talked about today, I urge you to check out 30 days to done.

Before I leave you, I want to tell you what's coming up. Next week we're going to be talking about placing. You know how placing is so critical for harpists and there's a right way to do it. There are a few, a few wrong ways to do it as well. And we want to make sure that you are using placing to your best advantage. Because when you know how to place your fingers well and can practice it properly, you will not only be more secure in your playing, but you'll be able to play faster. Like at a faster tempo. You'll be able to read more easily, too. I know sounds just about impossible, but placing is a huge deal for harpists, and that's. That's what we'll be talking about in next week's episode. I thank you so much. Be sure to check out the links in the show notes for all kinds of resources that we talked about today, and I look forward to talking with you again next 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.