How to Learn a Piece You Can't Listen To First - PHH 262

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 Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, 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. When I was a young harpist, there was no internet. I know that would shock a young harpist today who has grown up with the wealth of resources that are available with a single click. Now, I was curious actually about when the first internet-savvy generation grew up. So with a quick search, because everything is clickable, I found the Gen Zers are the first internet generation, born between 1995 and 2010. That means those Gen Z adults are now between the ages of 16 and 30, or thereabouts. So while the internet may feel like a birthright of Gen Z, the rest of us have come to rely on the internet too, and it's a tremendous resource for us harpists. I mean, if my teacher wanted me to learn a new piece, I had to go to the record store— I'm hoping there are some of you who remember those— to look for a recording. Most often I was out of luck, but I got into the habit of buying any harp record I found in the store just in case I might want it someday. Now today everything is turned around. There are more harp recordings available to a harpist than anyone could possibly listen to. This makes it simple to hear someone else play the piece you want to learn. You might even be able to hear many players with vastly different interpretations, which is an education in itself. But even now there are those times when there is no recording of the piece you want to learn. When that happens, how do you begin? Where do you start? Are there things you can do before you play the first note to help you learn it more quickly and with more confidence in your approach? I want to give you a framework for that today, one that will not only help guide you through approaching a piece when you have no idea how it sounds, but one that will develop a set of skills for you which will shorten the time it takes you to learn any piece. We're going to explore what you can know about a piece just by looking at it and what you can guess. You may be surprised at how much useful information you have been ignoring until now. A while back, I did a podcast episode on a similar topic, or another look at the same topic if you like, and it was called "How to Study a Piece." Look, Listen, and Apply. And that was actually about learning the piece away from the harp, and that has some valuable information you might want as well. So if you want to follow up on anything we're talking about today or look at different ways to apply that information, you might want to check out that podcast episode, and that's Episode 147. And for you My Heart Mastery members, we have a a video on this as well called Making Music Without Your Harp. And that is also another sort of broad brush look at when you don't have your harp, what can you do and how can you learn that piece, or at least keep working on it and studying it away from the harp. Both of those are extremely valuable. So My Harp Mastery members, be sure to check out Making Music Without Your Harp. Remember, all you have to do is You can put that search right in the search bar on our site and that will come up for you. That is a course that was taught by our certified coach Candice Lark. So you'll enjoy that course. And of course the podcast episode on how to study a piece is Episode 147. And I've put links to both of those in the show notes, but you can always go to our podcast page at our website and just look for Episode 147. And you will see it there. I'd like to start out by confirming something with you. I think it's okay to want to hear a piece of music before you learn it. It's quite natural. It's how we connect with music. We are supposed to hear it, just as what we are doing through our practice and our playing is helping other people hear it. Right? Music is about hearing. It's about listening. So I think that's natural. I'm not saying that listening to a piece is something you shouldn't do. That's not at all what I'm saying. You know, after all, our musical notation system isn't the point of music. It's just a convenient way to make any musical creation, any piece repeatable. Our notation system came from having music that we played and created and we wanted to pass along. It didn't come first, right? The music came first. So it's okay and good to want to listen to a piece, and that's where we all start, at least in our musical development. We hear it and then we want to play it. But it's also good to approach a piece with a blank slate, at least as far as hearing it is concerned. When you listen to someone play a piece, that becomes your idea of the piece, at least in part. The way they played it, the speed they played it, the idea that they projected That's their communication, and that's what you're hearing through those notes. You're not just hearing blank notes, you know, or notes with no interpretation. You're hearing someone's communication, which is what makes music wonderful and personal. But that informs, or at least infects— not in a bad way, but it colors that That's a better word. It colors your own idea of the piece. And when you haven't heard the piece before you start to learn it, you're able to form your own ideas about it. And that, in fact, is how I prefer to approach a piece. When I have a brand new piece that I've never heard before, I generally work on it quite a bit until the point where I think I have it you know, 80% of the way, and I think I have a pretty good handle on it. And then I will see at that point if there are recordings that I can listen to and compare and think about what those performers are doing with the piece compared to my own ideas. That's generally how I approach it. But you can see there's a lot of distance between hearing a piece and needing to hear it before you start to learn it the way you might have as a beginner, or working a piece to pretty close to completion before you listen to anybody else's interpretation of it. There's a lot of room in there. There's a big gap, and that gap is what we're going to talk about today. I think it's important to learn how to make your own musical decisions, how to look at that printed page and decide what you think that might mean, not just in terms of interpretation like dynamics, but everything from, you know, what can you learn, what, what tempo do you think this is going to go, all those kinds of decisions you get to make. And the more you think about them from the printed page and not just as replicating something that you've heard, the more you learn about how music is created and about how you can create the music. There is so much to learn just from that page and from making decisions about what you will eventually want to project in the music just from what's written down. The composers try to help you. They give you printed instructions in forms of tempo indications and dynamics and all those lovely expressive terms, but then the rest is on you. And yes, you You can use a recording as a reference, but I'm encouraging you, or at least I want to encourage you today, to think about that reference coming a little bit later on in your learning process. If you put off that listening to the recording, how much could you figure out first? In thinking about this topic, I was struck by the phrase we often use when we're talking about a piece of music. We ask, "How does this go? How does this piece go?" And I think it's such an interesting phrase because it encompasses so many things, doesn't it? It encompasses everything from the speed that we're going to play to the overall mood of a piece. It encompasses how we want the piece to flow, what it's going to say, what it should be like. And none of these words— well, okay, tempo perhaps— but very little about this is concrete. These are decisions that we make. They're artistic decisions. But so many of them change in a moment. One day we play a piece faster, a little bit, or a little bit slower. One day we make more crescendo, another day we make less. So that when we're talking about how a piece goes, we're really talking about something beyond those single elements. We're talking about what it means, what it's trying to say, what the whole experience of the piece is like. And I think that's where it gets difficult, and that's what we don't seem to be able to get from the printed page, at least not at first. I do think that it's something that we can look at the printed page and make some important decisions about. I think there is information there that we don't use, that we forget to analyze or look at or just take as clues. So when I have a student ask me, "Well, you know, so how should this piece go? How fast should it be? What should it be like?" Obviously, there's no one answer because there's no single musical interpretation. So what we're looking at when we answer the question about how a piece goes is we're looking at really what we want the piece to be. And it's not just the, the being part of this that's important. It's what we want it to be. What do we think it's going to say? And that may change as we learn a piece. It may change day to day within a certain range. That's the fun of playing music. These are the decisions we get to make. So what we're going to talk about is how you get that information from the printed page and what you can do with it. And so I have 4 questions that you're going to start with in order to help you find that information. And the first question is: What do you actually know? There are things you actually know about a piece, and that's because there are things written on the page that are there to tell you things about the piece. It could be as simple as the title. What does the title mean? It could be a tempo indication, even if it's something very undefined like allegro or andantino. You know, don't use those little metronome markings on your metronome to tell you what allegro means because it's different for different meters and different pieces. Allegro is not a number. It's not even a range of numbers. It is an idea. Actually, in Italian, allegro means happy. It has nothing to do with speed. So you could look up in a dictionary, if you still have one, a musical dictionary, or just look online and find out what allegro means in terms of idea, right? Largo, adagio, any of those. What do they mean in terms of ideas, not in terms of numbers? You can look at the key, decide is it major or minor. That might tell you something about the piece. Look at anything the composer has written down to tell you something about what the piece is what happens in it. Look, look for sections, those big sections, not the little practice ones, the big ones that say, "Oh, look, this is the introduction, this is the ending of the piece, this is the main theme, this happens here." All of that gives you some information. Of course, it's what we do with that information that's so important, but this gives you the best head start you can get because it gives you the look at everything the composer was able to tell you, aside from the notes perhaps, but everything that that composer was able to tell you about how the piece goes. And actually, the composer, him or herself, might have a clue for you in there too, right? If this is a piece by Bach, you can make some assumptions about it. If this is a piece by Debussy, you will make a completely different set of assumptions about what the piece might sound like, how it might go. So use those ideas, use those facts first of all to make some educated assumptions about what the piece is. So step 1 is to actually look at what you know. And then I just hinted at question 2. After what do you know, you need to know what that means to you. I think our first instinct as practicing and playing musicians and harpists is to take that idea, all that information. We know what key it's in, we know how fast it's supposed to go, we see the sections, we see the notes. And that's what we do. We dig into it right away and we say, all right, well, I'm gonna, gonna practice it so that I can learn it and make it sound that way. But what if we tried something different? What if instead of asking that second question being, what can we do with this information, ask the question I just posed a second ago: what does that mean to you? If you have a piece that's in major and it's allegro and it has a particular title written by a particular composer and you see these kinds of sections, does it remind you of anything you've already played? It may, it may not, but I think it's a really good practice to look at the piece before you start to play with the information you've been able to gather from the page and say, what other pieces do you know that maybe have those same or similar characteristics? What other pieces do you know that might be similar? Without having made decisions about your new piece here, you know, take a— just take those qualities and say, well, This could be like this. Oh, if this is a gavotte, I've learned another gavotte. It might be like this one, you know. It obviously has a title that is similar, right? Or when I look at it, when I look at these characteristics that I identified, what does it remind me of? Or I've played other pieces by this composer How is this similar? If you can look at a piece and find 3, 4, 5 other pieces that you think might be related or might be similar, you have a very big step up in figuring out how your piece goes. You're making assumptions, which in this case is a good thing. You're making comparisons, and you're using the knowledge that you have to relate this new piece to things you already know. This is a great practice. It helps you learn to understand your music. It helps you understand what the essential qualities of music are. We ignore these so often, right? Because we're so busy doing things that we forget to really strip away the doing and think about what the music is. But when we can regularly make it a habit to think about what the music is beyond the doing of it, what lies underneath, what is its real core and real heart then we can start to make some intelligent decisions about how we practice and move forward. So that if you have a piece that you've never played before, never heard, and you're— you've seen what's on the page, you've found the facts that you can find, and now you can relate it to something you already know, think how much farther ahead you are in your learning of that piece because you have something to hang it on. You have a frame of reference. You have something that might be in some respect similar. You don't have to go farther than that. It doesn't have to be identical, but just, oh, I played another gavotte. Okay, that's, you know, and it kind of went like this and it was happy and I counted it like this and okay, I know another gavotte. I know another piece by Bach. I know another piece by Renier. I've played Hasselmann's music before. Anything like that gives you some understanding. After all, if those are pieces you've already played, you put a lot of time into them. You know them in depth, and all of that experience you can now bring to this new piece. You are way farther ahead than just looking at that blank page because you're using the work you've already done to help you know something about this piece or make some educated guesses about it before you even start. Aha, right? I, I can hear those light bulbs going off like Oh, why haven't I done this before? I know. That's alright. It's a great time to start. Okay, so our first two questions were: What do you know? And what does this mean to you? And the third question, which I've already hinted at, is: What can you guess? This is where you take that musical experience, you take the pieces that you were comparing this piece to, you take those and you sort of finish this thought. Well, since I know this about this piece, this piece might do this. Since I know this fact about a minuet, like it's in 3/4 or 3-something, then this piece might do the same thing. Knowing this piece by Bach This other piece by Bach that I don't know might sound like this. These don't have to be very concrete answers. Just let it sort of roll around in your head a little bit and say, well, gosh, okay, this was at a very broad level. This piece was like this, so this piece might be like this. You know, they're actually not guesses that you're doing. They're actually predictions that are informed by all your musical experience, all those years of listening to and playing music. You know a lot about music, and when you think about it that way, it's kind of silly not to use that experience to help you with this new piece. After all, when you have a piece that you've never played before You're not a beginner approaching that piece. You know a lot. You're bringing a lot to that piece. Even if you feel like you're at the beginning of your harp journey and, you know, a lot of this is new to you, you've still heard a lot of music. You might not be able to make the, the number of guesses to, to understand the number of things on the page that a more experienced musician would be able to find. But if you get in the habit of finding out what— of looking for what you do know and finding out more about what you don't, then you'll be able to make more educated guesses. You'll have more information on which to base this kind of a guess so that when you start to learn a piece, you already know or have a pretty good idea of what it's gonna be like, of how it goes, right? So what do you know? What does this mean to you? How can you compare it to something you already know? And what can you guess or deduce or suspect? You know, find a bunch of— find a word that works for you. But these are educated guesses. These are predictions based on your musical experience, as I said before. And that's what makes them so powerful. Now, when I get to this point, I feel like I have enough information to start practicing the piece. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of where I'm headed with it. That doesn't mean my idea might not change along the way as I get to know the piece better. In fact, I expect that as I get more in-depth information, about this particular piece, once I really know how the notes go, how everything is going to fit together, my idea about it is going to evolve. And that's a good thing. But the information that I have is enough to start. But there's one more question I ask myself before I do that, and it's this: it's what is the most important thing. I would like to think about what the most important aspect of this piece is in how I want it to sound. Is it going to sound very moody? Is it going to sound peaceful or restful? Is it going to sound reflective? Is it going to sound energetic? Is it going to sound dramatic? What's the most important aspect of how I want it to sound? I'm certainly not going to be able to pull that off while I'm learning the notes, but it's going to be the basis for every decision that I make about fingering, about phrasing, about timing, about how the hands have to fit together, because this is how I want it to sound. As I said, it may evolve, it may change, it's likely to, but that's okay. Because I'm making these decisions that are going to serve me further along in the piece. They're not just, I've got to play this finger at this time. They're, I've got to play this finger at this time because I want it to sound this way. So that this question, what is the most important thing, is going to help me be able to do what I need to do in the playing of the piece to make that happen. It's going to be a, a foundation for making these important decisions, the, the technical decisions, if you will, that are going to create the music that I want. Do you see how this changes your entire practice plan? If you already know what you want the piece to sound like, how it goes, then all your decisions are going to point to that end, and you won't have to redo them when you're finally ready to think about what the piece should sound like. And we've been able to do this without even listening to the piece first. We've decided what we think the most important thing is going to be from looking at the information that is printed on the page, from comparing that to music that we already know that might be similar for some— in some way, or hopefully in multiple ways. And then we've used our musical experience to decide what it might be like and what we might need to do, how we might want it to go, just from pieces we already know that are like that. And then by making that fourth important decision— what is the most important thing We're already many steps ahead in our practice. We are significantly closer to knowing how the piece goes and being able to make it go that way. I need to make another important point. This isn't a system just for learning a piece that you've never heard before. This is a system for learning how to sight read. Good sight readers do this. They probably do it without thinking unless you really ask them what they're doing, and even then they might not be able to tell you because they probably do it so automatically they don't know. But when you start to sight read something, you You have to figure out what is printed on the page that gives you information and to make some instant decisions about what those things mean. What pieces this might be like and what you're gonna have to do, what you want it to sound. Those people who can sit down and play anything, they're going through this system almost instantaneously. And using their musical experience to help them make guesses about what's coming next so that they can have a piece of music sound almost finished and polished, sound like it's sort of supposed to at the very first. Now granted, you know, it depends on the difficulty level of the piece and all that sort of thing, but this is what sight reading is. It is using what you know to help you learn something or play something that you don't know. And these are the skills that we need to be strengthening and bringing to every single piece that we play. Beginning to get this information from each and every piece that you're playing is so important because it's going to help you not just know how a piece goes, but to make any piece sound the way you want it to, to go the way you want it to, right from the very beginning. It doesn't mean that the notes are all going to be smooth, but it means you're going to have an idea of what you want them to be once you can get your fingers around them. And that's the point, isn't it? Okay, I know that's a lot to think about. I heard light bulbs going off before. I might be hearing some heads exploding now. But I hope this has given you a different perspective on what it means to learn a piece of music and how much learning you can do by using the learning you've already done. And of course, how that can help you learn a piece that you can't listen to first. Okay, wow, I know so much. And of course, I gave you a couple of things, a couple of ways that you can follow through on this, um, different looks at this in the, um, the podcast episode, episode 147, that talks about learning a piece of music away from the harp. And for My Harp Mastery members, the, the course with our certified coach Candice Lark, where she talks about making music without your harp as well. All of those are linked in the show notes for you, and they're very useful references. So please do go ahead and check those out. Next week on the show, we'll be talking about music notation programs. In My Heart Mastery, we had one of our members give a fabulous presentation about MuseScore, and I can't possibly go into that kind of detail here on the podcast, but I want to talk a little bit about music notation software, even if you've never thought about writing down any music before, and I will compare a few of the, the free options that are out there in case you want to get started with that. As I said, you might not have thought about writing music down, but I'd like to talk a little bit about how that might be helpful for you. So we'll talk about those notation programs on the show next week. And until I talk to you then, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. 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.