How Not to be a Control Freak Harpist - PHH 247

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way? I'm Ann Sullivan and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackled the real challenges harpists struggle with. The sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear, step by step solutions. The same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Today we're talking about control. Control is a word that comes up a lot in our heart playing. Whether it's about controlling our fingers or our dynamics, a tempo, tone, focus, and a hundred other relevant things, it feels like we're always trying to gain control something in our playing or over ourselves. But the path to mastery isn't about asserting control. It's actually about letting go of control. If you search and you do your Google thing, you can easily find dozens of books that explore the idea of control in music. And nearly all of them start out with the idea. Sometimes it's even written in the title that we gain control by letting go. It's a simple enough concept, but it comes with a big paradox. Letting go of control essentially requires us not to do what we've been training ourselves to do. For example, we train ourselves to play the right notes, which usually requires a lot of focus, a lot of concentration, repetition, correction, and sometimes sheer willpower. In other words, it takes control. But if we don't let go of that control, our music doesn't flow. Another example is our technique. We work really hard to teach our fingers to play the right way. And we want to make sure that they behave themselves so we keep paying attention to them, we keep them in our control. Of course, this means that we don't have the attention to spend on making the music expressive. And we don't let our fingers play naturally simply because we want to make sure they play correctly. Perhaps the best example is when we try to play faster. We want to stay in control. And the challenge of playing a passage or a piece faster creates chaos. We resist the chaos. It's natural, right? But it has the result that we never achieve that faster tempo. So the crux of the dilemma is really we need to control many different elements in our playing. But if we don't let go of control, we can't achieve the expressive, fluid musical playing we want. And practicing not controlling these things feel. Feels uncomfortable and even wrong. But today I'm going to try to show you how to let go of control without the fear and without feeling like you're on the brink of disaster in your playing. I'll teach you a three step system for keeping your controlling instincts in check so that they can serve your music instead of hold it back. But before we get all wrapped up in that topic, I want to answer a couple of questions that I've been getting about the harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. That's really hard to say. That's why I say it so slowly. The Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. The point of this intensive is to understand what is important for you to do not just in your daily practice, but over a span of months, to really make progress. If you've ever gotten several months down the road and thought, gosh, I should have been here, I should have achieved this by now, or maybe you've, you know, gotten to the end of a year, that December 31st moment, and thought, gosh, I didn't really get anything done this year. I wanted to develop my repertoire, I wanted to play someplace, I wanted to be playing better. And I feel like I'm still stuck in the same place. Well, that's happening really because you don't have a plan and a curriculum. This is not about, you know, planning your practice time, although you're going to have more efficient practice time when you have this big overall plan. But the idea that we need to include these building blocks in your study over time and this is how to move them forward so that you don't end up at, you know, December 31, 2026, where you were at January 1, 2026. We want progress. So that's what the Intensive is all about. And because there are so many oh, facets to what we're going to be talking about, I've created a webinar to sort of introduce those topics. So whether you've signed up for the intensive or not, I would invite you to this free webinar because it's going to tell you a lot more about what I think is going to be the real breakthrough kind of progress, the breakthrough system for all of us this year. And I have to tell you, I'm following this same thing in my own practice this year, because this is what I want. I want to be sure that I know where I get where I'm going to get by the end of the year. And I want you to know that for yourself, too. So on the free webinar, which is called your breakthrough year, that webinar is happening Tuesday, February 10th. So you can sign up. We've got the link here in the show notes, and you'll find the link also@heartmastery.com let's get you understanding what is really involved in a breakthrough and how you need to make that happen. Then whether or not you sign up for these intensive, you will have the basic concepts of what we're going to be working with on the intensive. The intensive itself is much more about workshopping your own personal plan, but the webinar will give you the concepts that you need to think about how your year might look. So, as I said, I've put the links to both of those events, the webinar and the intensive in the show notes. You'll find them on heartmastery.com as well. So please, I urge you to sign up for this even if you don't think you need a breakthrough. You're going to come out of this with some real aha moments. I'm really sure about that. I usually teach a lot of the components of this, but I've never put it together quite this way before. Where you can look at, okay, this is what I'm doing this month and next month and the month after. And you won't have to create hardbound goals that make you feel like you're not making your goals, but rather you're just going to know the steps to follow. So if you go on vacation, that's okay. The plan is going to wait till you come back. There aren't hard and fast deadlines. It's only a path to progress. And that's why I'm so excited about it. And that's why I wanted to take this minute to share it with you now so that you don't miss this opportunity. So that's coming up. I urge you to sign up for that. Of course, I don't have control over that, do I? You're going to sign up or not as you see fit. So let's talk about some things that we can and that we can't control. I'm ready to dive in if you are. All right. So our basic premise is that our attempts to control things don't always get us the results we want and that it's going to be easier and more effective for us if we learn to let go. Now, that's not a new concept for sure. And I know it's not a new concept to you. You've heard this before, maybe you've found ways to incorporate it in your heart, playing or other areas of your life. But I included a quote in my Kaleidoscope Practice book. If you haven't looked at my Kaleidoscope Practice ebook, it's a short little book. You can find it in our shop. And I'll put a link to the book in the show Notes as well. But it's my little manifesto about what we really are trying to do in our practice. And in that section, there's a section on control, a chapter on control, and I have included a quote by an Elizabethan courtier, John Astley. And so when we're thinking about control and letting go, it's not New Age psychology. This is an Elizabethan era quote, and I really kind of loved it. And so that's why I included it in the book. And I'm going to read it to you now. He said this, but if a rider teach his horse to go with the bridle loose, he would thus lead him to do everything in pleasure and pride. Now, I know, okay, it's Elizabethan English. I'm going to read it one more time. You have to sort of wrap your head around it, don't you? But if a rider teach his horse to go with the bridle loose, he would thus lead him to do everything in. In pleasure and pride. There you go. The rider isn't controlling the horse by keeping a tight grip on the reins. He's letting the reins, the bridle, go loose so that the horse can be taught to do everything in pleasure and pride. Now, I don't think the analogy goes so far as to say, well, if we just let our fingers be loose, they'll do everything we want. We have to train them. And that's the subtext here in Astley's quote. We're teaching the horse, in his quote, to do these things with the bridle loose. And that's what we need to teach ourselves to do in our playing. We're going to teach ourselves to let go of control so that we can do the things we want to do, so that we can play the way we want to, perhaps even with pleasure and pride. I think it's important, though, to understand what we usually mean when we say we want control. I think the basic thing we want Is that we want to be in charge of the outcome. We want to know that our fingers aren't going to fail us, that the music is going to sound in performance or in our lesson, just the way it did when we played it at home. We want guarantees. That's what we want most, often from control. If it's just technical control, we're thinking that, okay, I want my scale to be even. Well, of course we want our scale to be even because it sounds good, right? So that's the outcome part of this. We want to control what happens. But the problem with this is that that kind of certainty isn't really a part of music. I was reading an article recently in Harp column with a harpist whose CD was being reviewed and she was expressing the the idea that it was so nice to have these pieces that she loves recorded so that she's got them and they're always there because in music you're always creating everything fresh. That's the good part and the bad part, right? It's what makes live music exciting, not only to listen to, but to play. And not just because of the tightrope factor. It's not that we're waiting for someone to fail, it's just that it's live, vital communication. Something happens in a live performance that can never be replicated in a recording. And it's the actual vibration between performer and listener. That kind of true interaction can't come from just a recording, as wonderful as recordings are and as transcendent as the performance that perhaps is captured on the recording might be. So we're not going to get CD level certainty probably ever. I mean, I just don't think it's reasonable to think that we can achieve perfection in our practice and then replicate it whenever we want. That's a recording that's not real life. At least it isn't for me. And I imagine it isn't for you either. So we need a different way to frame the idea of controlling the outcome that we want. I don't think we're looking for that perfection, but I think we can ask ourselves to aim for a reasonable consistency. Realizing that there's always going to be something that happens that never happened before. This is the day our foot falls off the pedal, or this is the day the string breaks, or this is the day that somebody slams a door and it's jars your concentration. But I think a reasonable consistency is something that we can actually aim for. And that's what we can think about controlling. We can't control to the highest degree we can try, but it's going to drive us nuts. So let's be sure that when we're talking about wanting that outcome to be the best it can be, we're looking at a reasonable consistency as our goal. Now, if you can agree with me on that, then we can move forward to the things that we need to control. I've put those things into three big categories, three buckets, if you will. I think the first one, and one that might come to your mind immediately, has to do with tempo. There's a lot of control that we need to maintain over tempo in our playing. First of all, we need our tempo to stay steady where it's supposed to, right? We need to be able to have that rhythmic procession of beats that is part of most music. That's what gives the listener an easy way into the music. We hear the rhythm, right? We tap our feet. So I think being able to have tempo control, to think that we're keeping a steady beat, and then perhaps even more than that, that our retardandos, our accelerandos, all these things are paced well, that we're thinking about the phrasing, that all of that is happening in time. Controlling the tempo, not speeding up and slowing down when we don't mean to. That's a big one, right? I think keeping tempo in control is important for us. I think we work at that for sure, but I think it's an important thing overall. The second thing I think we want to control is the flow of our music. And this I would think of as technical flow. I mean, your fingers need to be able to play without stumbling over the notes. And of course, the musical flow, the phrasing, the conveying the idea, the music, how the music progresses from the beginning to the end. Because music tells a story. It may not be, you know, a Goldilocks and the Three Bears kind of story, but it is a story. It takes us on a journey. From that first moment that we play that first note all the way through the closing measure, that is a journey. And controlling that flow is how we make our music sing. It's what engages the listener. And I know it sounds. As I'm thinking and listening to myself talk, I realize that it sounds like I'm doing this from a listener's perspective, but really, that's because. That's why we play music for people, even if it's just us to listen to it, it's the expression of our music and the way it tells that story, that's what. What we relate to when we listen to it, and that's the way we want our music to sound when we play it. So I'm using the listener's perspective here, but really, it's what we want. It's the outcome that we're looking for, too. All right, so tempo and flow, we need to control. The third thing we need to control is energy. And this ties into some of the others that we just talked about, too. I think we need to control our physical energy so that we don't get so carried away that our music speeds up. Our physical energy is also our. Our nervous system. Right? We get so tense and tight and fearful occasionally, hopefully not more than occasionally, when we perform that we're not managing our energy well. Not controlling our energy could be our mental energy. Staying focused when we need to, Staying focused on the things we need to. That's part of our energy control. And then I think our musical energy as well. And I'm really thinking in terms of specific pieces here. For instance, think about a lovely slow kind of piece like the Moonlight Sonata. We need to control the energy, the musical energy of that piece. If we start playing it like da da da da da da da da da da. You know, it doesn't sound like the Moonlight Sonata anymore. It sounds like a little jig or something. So controlling that musical energy is part of what we do as well. I do believe that these three things, tempo, flow, and energy, are really the things that we need to control. I think they intersect, they play off each other a little bit. But I think in those three words, tempo, flow, and energy, we find what we're really looking for, for control in our music. We want our music to sound expressive, to sound beautiful, to sound the way we want it to, the way it's supposed to. And when we have those three things in control, then it will. Now, notice, I didn't say we need to be in control of every note. I didn't say we need to be in control of every correct thing so that we're not making any mistakes. That's. I don't think, in my own opinion, that's not a reasonable thing to ask of ourselves. Wrong notes are going to happen. But if we have the flow of the piece in control, those wrong notes are just like a little tiny blip on the radar. They don't affect the value of what we're playing. So I think you can survive a lot of wrong notes. And I've said that to you before, and I'm sure I'll say it again. The music will survive wrong notes. But it has to have that overall vision and overall flow. So tempo, flow and energy, those are the things we want to focus our control on, not our technique or our mistakes. Got it? So let's get down to the nitty gritty. What does practicing so that you can play with relaxed control for that reasonable consistency, what does that look like? How do you learn to let go of control? Well, I want you to think about what it might look like if you let go just a little bit. I think practicing control means that you're going to remove the obstacles between you and the music. Okay. This is nitty gritty practicing because you're going to have to practice the things that need it. You're going to have to practice those tricky spots. You're going to have to be sure that your playing is polished sounding or smooth sounding. That you don't have lurches or hiccups or slowdowns when you're not supposed to do them. This kind of thing, that's certainly practicing for control. And that's the kind of practice that we know how to do. We know how to try to make things right. Okay, check that box. You've got that one right. Practicing for control, I think also means putting everything about your music in proportion so that you're looking. This is where flow comes into play, by the way. This is what that is. We're looking at the entire piece. We're looking at the tempo changes that may happen in the piece, the on purpose ones. We're looking for the dynamics. We're looking for the phrasing for the story. We're looking for the right notes and the fact that your fingers aren't stumbling and that you've got all your pedal and lever changes worked out. So everything needs to be in its proper place. That's certainly practicing for control as well. Here's the one that's a little bit trickier. Practicing for control is also about eliminating excess effort in your playing. It's about taking the stress and the tension out of your playing. The beautiful thing is that when you remove that stress and tension, your fingers are freer, your mind is freer. You're not trying to hold on tightly to everything. Think about our John Astley quote and loosening the bridle, right? We're letting go of the reins just a little bit, giving that, that piece of music a little bit of room, letting our fingers kind of do their thing instead of keeping such a tight watch on them. We want to be relaxed when we play. This is part of that energy, control and that's something that is wonderful. When you are in control or you feel like you're in control, that stress level generally goes away. But I think you want to practice it in. I think you want to practice in the relaxation and not wait for some magic or perhaps even mythical moment when you're going to feel relaxed and confident. Let's practice that in. All right, so here's the little three point system that I want to share to help you just frame control and practicing for control and letting go in a different way from what you probably think of now. I have found this to be helpful because it's not just somebody screaming at me to relax, relax, relax. And it's not me screaming at my fingers saying, play this, play this, play better, play better, play better. Neither of those things is particularly helpful. Right. So I think this has helped me think about how I need to establish control and let it go. Here's the first step. The first step is train. You want to train yourself to do it correctly, right? That's what we were just talking about. Removing the obstacles between you and the music. We want it to go properly. So this means you're going to need to do your technique work, you're going to need to do your spot practice, you're going to need to work at different tempos so that you've got all the tempo control that you want. All the usual nitty gritty practice is going to be in this training. Okay, this is what you already do, but I'd like you to think about it with one addition. You are training your fingers, your feet, your whatever it is you're doing. All that practice, you're training this so that it will all happen without the same degree of intense focus that we're using in our practice. Think about that for a minute. What would it feel like if you could let go of some of these worries when you were playing and you wouldn't have to worry? Okay, I've got to put my fourth finger here. I've got to get my feet there. I mean, there's some of that. That always happens as we play, but it shouldn't cause us to clench our stomach. It shouldn't tighten everything up so that it's just really uncomfortable when we're playing. These things just happen. We know where we need to put our fourth finger. We know where we need to get our feet for the next petals. That happens because we're training those things to happen. That's what's different about this. We're not trying to do something correctly. So we can do it correctly every time we're doing it correctly, so that it will happen without quite so much attention on our part when we need it to. So the word train, that's our first step. Like training the horse in our quote, Right. Step two is direct. And this is all about the result, the outcome that you want. What do you want to have happen? And it's not enough to say, well, I want to play the music beginning to end, flawlessly with all the dynamics. That's not enough. Think about the kind of practice that we do. Maybe you did this in your practice today. You pulled out a couple of lines from one piece, and you did them over and over again. Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted them to be when they grow up? Not just, well, I want them to be right at this tempo, but something more specific. Like, this is part of this story. This is. This needs to sound flowing. This needs to sound this way. Look for that musical outcome that you want and then just ask your fingers to do it. You've trained them. That's the whole point. You've been doing this passage over and over again, repeating it. They know what to do. You need to tell them now, okay, I'm not going to watch. You know, make sure that that third finger closes and that my thumb does this. I'm not watching. This is what I want. We're going to play this, and I want it to sound this way. Ask your fingers to deliver, listen to the result and do it again. Understand that when you do this, your fingers aren't going to get it right every time. They might not get it right for a while. Because when you've been practicing and do in that training phase, you've been working with them very intently and purposefully. Purposefully. And you've been giving them all kinds of attention. And now you're telling them you're going to take the attention away, so they have to do it by themselves. Now, I realize I'm personifying your fingers again in kind of a funny way, but this is sort of what happens. Think about how involved we get when we're practicing. We're looking at all kinds of things. And then when we try to speed things up, that's when we find out that we've been practicing wrong. Because when we try to play faster, we can't pay attention to everything that we were paying attention to when we were playing more slowly. And we don't know what to do. Our fingers don't know what to do. They're used to all that focus Right on every single note, I go, here I go, here I do this, I do this. And then as you get up to tempo, you can't think that way anymore. You can't think that that fast. You have to consider the result you want and ask your fingers to deliver and then get out of the way. Keep training them and keep directing them. Train them, direct them, train them, direct them. Eventually, that's going to come together, but you can't stick in the train phase because that won't get you the music that you want. But I told you there was a third point coming, and here it is. We've done train. We've done direct. The third one is release. You need to release a lot of things. You need to release the tension in your hands. And I think you'll find that once you stop trying to control the outcome quite so much, your fingers will be more willing and able to relax. I think we need to release our fears. We need to release our desire for perfection. We need to let the learning happen and let the music happen. Remember, too, that when you are playing for someone else, you have the least control of all, because there's a lot that will happen outside you that can affect you. So you need to remember that performance is the ultimate in releasing control just because you don't have it anyway. There's an analogy that I have found helpful just for myself at various times. Think about those Olympic ice skaters. You know, you watch them and they're skating and they're doing their routines and they're perfect or they're not. They're, you know, landing the jumps or maybe they're just falling down and all those things happen. And. But back there at the side of the rink, there's their coach. Their coach has worked with them every single step of the way. That coach has been there, pushing them, correcting them, helping them, encouraging them. And here their skater is on the biggest world stage and the coach can't do anything. They can't do anything. In that moment, it just comes down to the training that they have provided for their skater. They can't do anything. That's a little bit like us in performance, isn't it? We've done the training, we know what we want. We're ready to direct our fingers and say, okay, here we go in a nice big crescendo, and we're going to make this beautiful. But beyond that, we can't do anything. What comes out is going to come out. And releasing that, releasing your expectations is very freeing. So if you train properly, which I know you already do. Then the big release step comes in, learning to direct your fingers and not keep micromanaging them as you want to get closer and closer to actually playing the music instead of just learning notes. And then the ultimate release is when you let go in performance, even if your only performance is in your living room, that's fine too. But that release needs to happen as well, and that's how you work with control and how you let it go. Next week on the podcast, I'm going to be talking about some answers I had to come up with for some questions I was asked recently, and they all sort of circle around the topic of, well, how do you know if you're stuck? So we're going to be talking about those questions and my answers, and hopefully I'll give you some helpful tips about how to know when you're stuck and what to do about it. Please don't forget. I will remind you again to sign up for the webinar coming up on Tuesday, February 10th. That's going to be a lot of fun that we're talking about your breakthrough year and we'll talk about what a breakthrough is, what it could look like for you, how to get there. And of course that will lead nicely, if you enjoy that topic, into the Harpist's Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive, which is coming up the following week, February 16th to 20th. So both of those, you can find out more about those on harpmastery.com you can use the links in the show notes to get you right there. And I certainly hope to see you at both of those events. They're going to be, going to be good. Gonna be good. So in the meantime, 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. Enjoyed today's episode, then share it with a harpist friend. Subscribe for your weekly Harp Happiness Boost and check out harpmastery.com or the harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.