Harp Strings and Heart Strings: A Lesson in Romantic Music - PHH 091

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 and happy early Valentine's Day as this podcast is released. It's the day before Valentine's Day, and whether you celebrate the day in a special way or not, it's hard to escape the advertisements urging us to buy and send cards, candy, and flowers. I think, though, that we harpists have a special role to play, not just on Valentine's Day, but every day. Music, love, and romance are inseparable. For most of us, we have our special songs that bind us to those we love. There are certain pieces of music that tug at our hearts and move us to barely expressible joy or tears. In the words of virtuoso cellist Pablo Casals, music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart. And what instrument is more appropriate than the harp to be the voice of those beautiful, poetic things? In the Bible, we read how David soothed Saul with his harp music. Folk traditions the world over associate the harp with love. In early Norse and various Celtic traditions, the harp was a symbol of love, and its strings represented sort of a mystic bridge between heaven and earth by which you could ascend to higher levels of love. The men and women who play the harps in legends from every corner of the world are brave and courageous heroes whose music wins the freedom and the hearts of those they love. But history aside, I imagine you feel, as I do, that the harp is the quintessential instrument of romance. Harp music encompasses a wide variety of styles, certainly, but the beauty of its rippling arpeggios, lush chords, and warm, liquid tone are undeniably magical. So today our conversation is about romantic music. I'll give you some insights about what music historians mean by the term romantic music. Which may not be what you think of as romantic music. We'll also talk about romantic harp music, the composers who wrote it historically, and the romantic feeling music we love play no matter when it was written. I'll even share some of my music with you. Plus I'll share some of the techniques you'll want to use to make your music more flowing, more magical and well, more romantic. And before we get started, I want to thank everyone who participated in the five Days to Freedom Intensive. We had so much fun and I think we all learned so much. We really spent quite a bit of time working on our fingers, working on our practice, our playing, all different kinds of techniques. And I want to give a special shout out to the harpist who participated in our test track group coaching call. I think it was pretty spectacular. We had a great time with that. So if you were one of our intensive participants, thank you so much for sharing your week with me. I really enjoyed working with you and I hope that you take those, those techniques and tricks and tactics and methods and systems that we talked about forward with you and put them into amazing use in your own harp playing.

One of the things that we did on the intensive was we used a brand new platform that we have introduced in the Heart Mastery community. And we had a special part of that community that was set aside for our intensive students. But the community as a whole is open to any harpist who would like to join. It's free and it's just a community for talking all things harp. It's sort of, you know, social media without the pictures of your food. Right. It's not about anything other than harp playing and all of us who do it. So it's, we already have quite a, a nice group of people participating. The community is called the Harp Mastery Hub and we have an amazing group of harpists already there. And these are, you know, people like you. They understand that harp happiness isn't just about skill development, it's, it's about growth, certainly, but it's also about community. So I'd love for you to join us there for discussion and challenges and tips. And we'll be doing live Q and A sessions and more. It's a brand new platform, a brand new way for all of us at Harp Mastery to get together and communicate and, you know, sort of talk all things harp. So, you know, no ads, no data tracking, none of that stuff. It's a site we control so you're not, you know, signing all your, all your personal data away. It's just Harp Mastery that is it? And we would love you to join us. It's totally free. We will have the at the link for you to join in the show notes for this blog post podcast episode. Oh, who. Who thought this was a blog post? Not me. So we'll have the link to the show notes for this podcast episode and you can also find the link right on the homepage at heartmastery. Com. But we would love for you to join us in the Hub. As I said, it's brand new for us. It's, you know, it's up and running, but it's we're still working out the kinks, so be a little patient and we'll try to, you know, all learn how to use this terrific resource together. So join us at the Harp Mastery Hub and I will look forward to seeing you there. In academic terms, Romantic music has a particular era you might be familiar with. Baroque era composers, composers mostly in the first half of the 18th century. Composers like Bach and Handel particularly. And then the Baroque era was followed by classical music. And these are composers like Mozart and Haydn. Now, as we think about these eras, remember, there's no sort of hard and fast cutoff date, right? These are people with lives and everything overlaps. But in general, Romantic music is what comes after classical music. And the the rough dates that historians give for Romantic era music is sort of about 1830 to about 1900. So the early part of Romanticism overlaps with classical era, like Mozart, and it overlaps with the Impressionist era music like Debussy. So there are those little end points that are a little bit vague, a little bit blurry. But in general, Romantic era music and Romantic era literature and Romantic era painting were all sort of about the same thing and close to the same time. The central ideas of this kind of Romanticism involved a looking back at the past and to use our term of the day, Romanticizing legends from the past, particularly knights and medieval times, and chivalric stories, stories of heroism and folk traditions. All of these things were definitely part of the Romantic era. Some of the painters from the Romantic era that you might recognize would be Eugene Delacroix or John Constable in England, Francisco Goya in Spain. These are all very prominent Romantic era painters. Romantic era literature. In English literature, we have Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. Think about those heroic romances like Ivanhoe, right? Poets like John Keats and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the Brontes. These are all Romanticists in English literature.

In music, the Romantic era begins more or less with Beethoven. Now, your impression of Beethoven Might not be that he was, you know, it might not be of romantic music, but you can think about that first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and how beautiful and haunting and just emotion filled that music is. In fact, the very idea that that sonata has a sort of a subtitle of the moonlight is really indicative of the Romantic era in music. Because before that, compositions didn't really have names like that. They were dance forms like Gavotte or Rondo or Minuet or there were sonatas and sonatinas and concertos and suites and that sort of thing. But the idea of music that had a theme, music that had a subject, music that told a story, is particular to the Romantic era. This is also the time that symphony orchestras started getting bigger. The orchestras in Haydn's time and Mozart's time were relatively small, but these orchestras got bigger and bigger. And of course the technology was changing too. This was.

Well into the Industrial Revolution when all of this Romantic era stuff was starting. Technology was improving, instruments were improving, things were becoming more available and orchestras got larger. Composers wrote for larger orchestras. Think about people like Berlin and his Symphonie Fantastique, or Tchaikovsky or Liszt or Wagner. Huge orchestras that served their romantic ideals of what they wanted to express. Unfortunately, this was not a time of great growth for the harp, at least not early on. Beethoven, as one of the, the early lights and the early developers of this Romantic era, was interested in the piano. Makes sense, right? And this was when the pianoforte really became an instrument. Its technology had changed and improved and grown, and largely to Beethoven's influence, the piano became a real standard instrument in the home, whereas the harp and the harpsichord had been the ones primarily before that. So composers put a lot of their effort into composing for this brand new and newly developing instrument, the piano. And the harp was sort of seen as kind of a weak cousin at this point. So a lot of the Romantic era music that is most familiar to us is music that was written for piano or for orchestra, of course, but less so for the harp. I mean, we have Romantic era composers for sure. Spohr, Louis Spohr or Ludwig Spohr, depending, whichever one you like. He went by both names. He wrote quite a bit for harp, but then his wife Dorette was a harpist. And Spohr's music is, is relatively contemporary to Beethoven's. And it, there's, you can tell there's a certain similarity. Let me play you a little clip from a recording of mine. I did a recording quite a while ago and the title of the recording is romantische, which means romantic in German. You know, it's an adjective a little odd for the title of a, of a cd, but there you go. And it's, it's not all Romantic era music. But the fantasy for harp that Spohr wrote for his wife Dorette is on that cd. And I'm going to play you just a little clip and you'll hear how baby Beethoven esque it sounds. But it's very romantic, it's expressive.

It'S got a picture to it, it's telling a story. More so than just a plain movement of a sonata or a gavotte or a minuet might. So here's just a little snippet, a couple minutes worth of the fantasy by Spohr for harp.

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So Spohr was definitely a Romantic era composer. And we have some harpists and composers who wrote for harp who were from that same era, like Bohse Paris Alvars. But these are not necessarily the only composers that we think of. When we think of romantic harp music, we tend to think of those more familiar French composers. And historically they came a little bit later. They came toward the end of that Romantic era and maybe even into the 20th century. These are people like Hasselman and Rainier Tournier, certainly even Gabriel Forey. These are composers that wrote music that we would describe as romantic music, whether it's specifically about romance or not. But it has that same quality and it's a little bit later. But when you think about that, this sort of brings up the question of what really makes music romantic. Is it the subject matter? Does it have to be about love or romance? Is it the date of composition? Does it have to be in the Romantic era? Or does it have to do with the mood, with the affect, with what the music is communicating, whether it's actually telling a story of romance or not? Obviously a piece can be romantic with any or all of those attributes. I want to draw your attention now to a composer, a harpist and composer whose works you may or may not know. His name was Alberta Sbel, and he was a German composer and a German harp virtuoso who taught in St. Petersburg at the conservatory there. And what's interesting about Sabel is that his birth and death dates, the span of his life, almost exactly fits into those Romantic era music dates. He was born in 1834 and died in 1910. So it's very close to those Romantic era dates. And he certainly did write quite, quite a bit of solo literature for the harp. And he Also wrote a concerto, even for harp and orchestra. One of his more famous works, as far as a work of his that's played today, is a composition called La Source, or in German, Am Springbrunnen. And it would be the fountain, right, the brook. It's translated any number of ways. You might be more familiar with the composition with the same name by Alphonse Hasselman, the French harpist and composer. But this is a different piece entirely, but with that same idea of those rippling arpeggios that just, you know, the harp does so well. So this is a piece written by a romantic era composer, certainly a Romantic era piece, and sounds extremely romantic, nice and goopy and gushy and lush and all those wonderful things that you want harp music to be. Not necessarily a romantic subject, depending on how you feel about a book, but it's a very, very cool piece. So. Well, let's. I'm going to share a snippet with you once again. This is from my Romantische recording, so. So it's nice and clean and clear for you. At least I hope it will be. So this is just a portion of the piece called La Source by the German harpist and composer Albert Zabel.

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I don't think anybody would think that music isn't romantic, right? But this brings up that really more important question and the one I really want to get to today. What makes a piece of music romantic in terms of the way you play it? When you have a piece of music that you think tells that kind of story or needs to have that feeling of romance and emotion to it, how do you convey that in your music? What are the essential musical qualities that are important to convey and how do you do that? So that's what we're going to spend just a few minutes talking about. Now, I think it's important to remember that a romance, the word romance is really bound up with the word story. And any piece of music that we want to play in a romantic way needs to tell a story. It needs to communicate. And I think that's the most important thing. Now, we have tools, we have expressive tools, all kinds of things that can help us do that. So let's talk about how to communicate. Remember also that your personal interpretation of a piece of music might be vastly different from somebody else's. You've heard two performers, whether they're harpists or not, right? Playing the same piece of music at very different speeds and with very different ideas. It doesn't mean that one is right and one is wrong. What it does mean is that you have a different viewpoint and a different story to tell than somebody else. So please remember, this is not necessarily about rightness and wrongness. This is about telling that story. We often use words when we're talking about this. Things like style or emotion or affect. The mood of a piece, the atmosphere. And it's important as you approach any piece of music that you want to have that depth of feeling, that you understand first what you want to do, what you want that emotion or mood or atmosphere to be like. Because this is going to give you the palette for your personal expression. And here's what I mean by that. If you want a piece to be gentle and light and warm, you might think of your tone and your touch in one way. You might choose a tempo that is going to suit that. Perhaps a little bit slower. You might have a very gentle, sort of almost minimal dynamic range. Depending. It might be very lilting. Maybe even hesitant would be a word you would use to describe what you're doing. But if you want the piece to have a little bit more passion into it, your dynamic choices would be completely different. Your tone choice, it might be richer or fuller. Your dynamic range might be larger. You might make more dramatic shifts in tempo. So this is what I mean by your palette, right? Choose your mood, choose what you want the music to express, and then think about what you can do in terms of tempo, tone, touch, dynamics and pacing to support that. Those are your tools. Let me go through them again. Right? Their tempo, the speed that you're playing. Tone. Do you want a rich tone? A light tone? Airy, feathery, deep, full, Right. Touch. Do you want a very articulated, separate sort of a sound? Do you want a very legato sound? Dynamics. Choosing your louds and your softs, your crescendos, your decrescendos. Do you want them to be gradual? Do you want them to be sudden or surprising? And, of course, your pacing. Where are your retardandos? Where are your accelerandos? If they're in there? And this is where the term rubato is going to come in, right? It's going to be that ebb and flow, that sort of pushing and pulling that happens, that's not strictly metronomic, but helps the piece convey the feeling that you want.

So these are the qualities you're looking for. You might want a gentler, warmer tone for a piece that's more romantic, but maybe you've got some heavy, strong, passionate moments in the piece, too. Your tempos overall might be slower, but that doesn't Mean that there aren't really important moments in the piece where the piece moves forward.

In general, you're probably looking in romantic music for those singing melodies that are. That sort of spin out indefinitely, you know, and have that beautiful arch and flow to them.

And then I mentioned, just a moment ago, I mentioned rubato, that wonderful term where we sort of steal time from one place and then put it back in another. Right? That's that ebbing and flowing of the time where we kind of slow down and then speed up a little bit. And it doesn't have to be cyclical. That's not the way rubata works, but it just allows you time to express the line the way you need. Espressivo is one of the terms we see in romantic music all the time. And it means expressive, of course, espressivo. And when you see that, even if you just see that little ESPR abbreviation, do pay attention to that. That's the composer telling you that you need to really let that melody sing or let that portion of the piece be very emotive. All right? You might see terms in romantic music like dolce or dolcissimo. Dolce is often used to mean soft, but it also means gentle or sweet. And dolcissimo, very sweet, very gentle. You might see terms like morendo M O R e n d o moreendo, which means dying away, or perdendo si, which means pretty much the same thing. Literally, it means losing oneself. P E R D E N D O S I I love these Italian words, but it's, it's a. Once again, it's, it's a fading away sort of a dying away idea.

So as you think about those terms, as you think about.

Modifying or modulating your tempo, your tone, your touch, your dynamics and your pacing to tell the story of your music, that's what's going to make the music romantic. I mean, it might come from the composer's pen or the composer's computer anymore these days. Right. It might come from the composer's pen already with those things just the. Just embedded on the page, waiting for you to bring them to life. But you have the expressive tools to do that. And as interpreters of the written music, that's our job as harpists. That's the fun stuff. That's what we get to do and really do so well. So to sum up quickly, romantic music belongs to a certain period in history. And there are certain composers that we associate with romantic music, particularly composers like Beethoven and Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, all these people. But for us, as Harpists, Romantic music can mean so much more. We have our own wonderful composers of romantic music, and we can make just about any piece of music sound even more romantic by the tools that we employ.

Our tone, our touch, our tempo, our dynamics, our pacing. All those things and more go into making our music sound just as romantic as we want it to. So just a couple of quick reminders before I close with another recording that I want to share with you. So very quickly, don't miss out on everything that's going on at Heart Mastery Hub. It's free. And just look for that link and sign up and join the conversation over in the Hub. Next week here on the show, we're getting all practical. We're doing a quick fix episode on how to fix your cords. We're going to roll cords. It's all about rolling your cords next week. So that's next week's episode. As always, I'm going to remind you now before we close with this recording, remember, every day is a day. You can add more harp, happiness and romance to the universe, to your world and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Okay, now with that reminder, I'm going to share just part of a live recording. This is from a recent concert that I did. And this is one of the world's most romantic pieces of music, I think. In fact, I was working with a colleague recently who said, you know, if you don't like this piece of music, you just don't like music. So they're not originally written for harp. It's an orchestral composition. This is the very famous Intermezzo from Mascagni's opera Cavalleria Rusticana. I performed this live, so it's got some audience noise for you and all those little glitches and stuff that happen in live performance and. But I just wanted to share this piece of music with you, or at least part of it.

So that just because it's one of my favorite pieces of music, and I hope it's one of yours, I'll let that close the show for us. So this is the Intermezzo from Cavallaria Rusticana. Thank you again for listening. I look forward to talking with you again next week.

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