How to Make Panic-free Page Turns - PHH 249

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. Are you ready to talk about page turns? I realize that page turns may not seem like a captivating topic. However, if you've ever had a page turn go wrong in a moment when you don't want to have anything go wrong, you know how important page turns are. Even in the age of Bluetooth pedals, poorly prepared page turns can mar an otherwise lovely performance. So I'm warning you right now that page turning is a subject that I am liable to go off on a rant about. Just ask my students at our harp camp, Harp Quest Summer Live. For example, the evening before our closing concert is spent making sure that all the students who have forgotten, forgotten to prepare their pages, take care of them. The mantra they hear from me is this, no loose pages. And then I tell them this story. I was 14 years old and accompanying our high school choir in a performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. Now, this is a difficult work for chorus, and we were doing the version that is accompanied only by harp, organ and percussion. Now, in the orchestral version, there are two harp parts and they're combined into just one part for this version. So you can imagine that the part is fairly challenging. This performance was a big deal for me because I was still in junior high, and for this concert, actually two performances, I was accompanying the big kids right in high school. So it felt really important. And the first of the two performances went really well. The. The second one was not at the high school, it was at a church. And they provided a music stand for me. And, you know, it was one of those folding metal stands that are commonly referred to as wire stands. We all know they're a little bit rickety, but that was what was there so here's where the page turns come into play. We were at the beginning of the third movement, and I went to turn my page and the music stand collapsed. That alone would have been a moment to remember, no matter how much I would want to forget it. But it was worse than that because the choir director had given me a photocopy of the original part to practice from, and that's what I was using for the concert. So here's the rub. I had never taped the pages together. So when my music stand collapsed, the pages went everywhere. There was a good Samaritan in the audience who jumped up and gathered my pages. And then, of course, I had to find the right ones and jump back into play. So while I wasn't scarred for life from this, I did learn a really powerful lesson about how to prepare and prevent page disasters in a performance. Of course, there's a secondary lesson here, which is never trust somebody else's wire stand. But. But that's not our topic for today. So it's the page turns. And over the years, I have learned a lot about not just taping my pages together, but about the art of turning pages. And I want to be sure that you know what I have learned as well. So, trust me, you actually need to know how to manage your page turns, how to prepare them, and how to practice them, whether you're using paper or a petal. And yes, you do need to practice them. A couple quick things to note before we get started. I wanted to give you a last call. Heads up for our harpists Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive, which starts today, the day this episode is airing. And if you're listening to this promptly, it's not too late to get into the intensive. I'm going to be helping you plan your entire year. And if you haven't jumped in, this is your last chance. So I urge you to use the link in the show notes. Use the link@harpmastery.com under upcoming events and join this important intensive. Now, if you have ever sat down at your harp and wondered, A, if your practice is really getting you where you want to go, or B, just what should I be doing today? I don't know. If you've ever wondered one of those things, this is the solution to and the answer to each one of those questions. So this is what you wanna do. And today's the day. We start this morning and everything is recorded and there are all the replays. So if you can't make the calls live, not a big problem. But you do need to get in and register before we close the doors, since we are starting today. So last call for that. Also planning ahead a little bit more. If you have a young harpist in your life, either because you are the parent or grandparent, or teach a young harpist, consider Harp Quest Summer Live for them. We have registration open and this year is going to be a real special year. We are celebrating our 20th year of our summer harp camp and it will be a really fun time to get in. I'm really proud of this program because there's no other camp that's quite like it where we focus on working together, learning together, playing, preparing, composing music actually. So it's really a lot of fun and it's always a small group and that means that everybody gets attention, everybody gets to have a good time, and we always do. So that's happening in July and now is the perfect time to register. So two things you that harpist breakthrough blueprint starts today. Be there. And of course, for young harpist, Harp Quest Summer Live coming up in July. And you can register now for that too. Those links are in the show notes. And I want to start talking about page turns. When we're playing for someone, whether it's just one person or whether it's a big audience, there are so many things that we think about to prepare, right? We think about maybe if you're a pedal harpist, we think about our harp shoes even. But we're thinking about making our music beautiful and flowing and as mistake free as we can make it. We want everything to be polished so that we can present a very controlled and correct and musical and expressive performance, one that really brings a listener into that musical world with us. That's our ideal. And everything that we do in our practice is designed toward that. We practice to get the notes right, to make the technique smooth sounding, to get the expression, there we go, work so hard at all those details and yet we manage to forget that page turns are a part of that. Now, obviously, if you're playing from memory, page turns aren't going to be an issue. But even then, practicing across the page might be something you need to do. But let's talk about the actual page turn. Imagine this. You're at a concert and the harpist is playing and the harpist has music. Let's pretend the harpist has paper music and they're playing along and all of a sudden they clearly get to the bottom of a page, they need to turn the page and what you hear is rustle, rustle and this desperate phong as the Page goes across and they keep playing. Everything was smooth in the playing, but the page turn itself was this moment of distraction that happened. Right. There was a big, you know, kind of noise, and the music went. And you really noticed that the person was turning the page. It worked, but yet it detracted from the performance somewhat. Yeah. Or let's pretend this. The harpist is there. They've got their Bluetooth pedal, and clearly there's, you know, there's a smoothness that goes with the blue tooth petal. Except when you accidentally turn two pages, or you push the wrong petal and you turn backward instead of forward, or you push that pedal and nothing happens. And then we have that moment of flurry as well, trying to catch up and correct. So page turns can go wrong. They can be a distraction even when they're correct. We want a page turn to be controlled, to be calm, to be quiet. And that's just from an audience perspective. From our perspective, we don't want it to be something that we're holding our breath to see if we can manage properly, or holding our breath to see if the technology works the way we expect it to. We don't want it to be another factor that we're worrying about. We don't want to have to stop and turn the page. We know that. We want it to be part of that continuous flow of the music, but that doesn't mean that all of us remember to practice it and to prepare it and to learn how to fix it on the fly when something goes wrong. So what I want you to consider, first of all, is that we want our page turns to be effortless. Not just to look effortless, or even better, to seem invisible from an audience perspective where they don't notice at all that we're turning a page. We also want it to be effortless and secure. From our perspective, we want it to be as practiced in, if you will, as all the rest of the details that go into making that music. We want it to be just another little thing that we do as part of our playing. But if we're not practicing and preparing it correctly, if we're not thinking about it the right way, that's not likely to happen. Or we've left something important about our playing to chance, which we know is something we don't want to do. So I want to start by talking about how to prepare your page turns. This is even separate from your practice. I was going to say it's before your practice, but not necessarily, because I often find that as I'm practicing a piece. That's when I start to learn what I'm going to need to do for my page turns. So we'll talk about the practice aspect of it in a moment, but I want you to think about how you're going to have to prepare those page turns. Now, this is true whether you're using paper or a petal. Either one is fine. I go back and forth between them and probably you've had the same experience if you do this just like me. It's kind of funny. If I'm practicing with paper page turns and then I go to use my petal, that's usually not a problem because, you know, I'm on top of that. But then I'll go back to paper and find myself tapping the paper page, trying to get it to turn. Very silly. But that's. That's all right, right? You can get past that. You practice that. But when it comes to using paper or using the Bluetooth pedal or even your tablet, where you're just tapping by hand, either one of those is fine. They have different sort of advantages and disadvantages. Paper is always there. It's not going to suddenly have its battery die. It's not going to lose its Bluetooth connection. You know, the paper is there and dependable. Which is why when I'm playing a program or any kind of performance where I have my music on my tablet and I'm planning to use that, I always have paper backup with me because it would be very silly to have my tablet just die on me and then have to just not play anymore because I don't have a paper copy. I had something interesting happen not too terribly long ago. I was playing in an orchestra concert and they had sent me the orchestra part as a PDF rather than give me a hard copy of it. And so I was playing from that. And I wasn't particularly concerned about it, but I should have been. So I didn't have printed out a paper copy. Well, the part was so long, and I really just didn't feel like wasting the paper or the time to do that. So I left it on my tablet and it was all working just fine. But then in the dress rehearsal, something happened and my. My tablet just zonked out for a moment and I was able to quickly recover and come back, but it made me just a little bit uneasy. And I asked the conductor at the break, I said, you know, is there a real paper copy of the part? This was a contemporary composition, and so it wasn't something that I could just, you Know, pull up and from my archives or something and print out. So I, you know, I asked and assumed that there would be a paper copy, and he said, well, let me talk to the librarian. So he asked the orchestra librarian and the librarian said, well, I didn't print out a copy and there was not time to do it. So I was left with the option of having a tablet that may or may not work for me. It always had in the past, and it seemed like it was going to work, but it was just taking a risk. And the conductor agreed with me that it was something of a risk. So he actually had the librarian, who was a student and was supposed to have printed out the part, by the way, he had the librarian sit next to me in the orchestra with his own iPad and the part on his iPad, just in case my part failed. So he was there to just switch tablets if I had a problem, and I didn't. But that was the backup system for that, and you don't really need that. Having the paper backup system would have been just fine. But I do suggest that you have a backup system if you're going to use your technology, because you just don't know. Of course, paper has the advantage of not, or the disadvantage rather of not seeming as smooth. And you could turn two pages and, you know, we can talk about how to prepare for that too. So neither one is ideal. And it's nice to be able to turn hands free, isn't it, with that Bluetooth pedal. Oh, gosh, that's nice. So, you know, there are times when I will use one and times when I will use the other. By the way, I'm often asked for a recommendation for a Bluetooth pedal. I have always used an airturn pedal. There are other petals and other harpists like other pedals, and that's fine. It's a, you know, a personal thing. What you like. I have always used the airturn pedal. I really like it. And one of the things I like about it is that I have found it so reliable. Very rarely do I turn two pages by accident. It's a really easy push and it, it's exactly what I need. So I really like that. And the Bluetooth connection is seamless, so I've never had an issue with that as well. And it's very reliable. But as I said, you know, that's just what I use. And you may find a pedal that works better for you, and that's fine, too. One more quick thought about having paper backup. If you are playing from your tablet and you have paper backup, that's great. But there's one more level of preparation you should consider. If the worst happens and your tablet fritzes out on you, what are you going to do? Well, if you have paper backup, at least you have something you can play from. And the worst that would happen is that you have to stop and you have to start over with your paper copies. But remember, there are a couple important things that you need to prepare for if that's what you're going to do, if that's the plan that you have. One is you have to have access to. If you haven't brought it with you, you have to have access to a music stand that will hold your paper. Right. Many of us travel just with those tablet stands and they hold tablets really, really well. But if you had to play from paper, it's not going to work so well. So you need now a backup music stand and, and you probably should practice with that paper to make sure that you can manage those page turns as well as your electronic page turns. So that's an additional level of preparation. And depending on what you're playing, where you're playing it, how you feel about it, that may seem like being over prepared. Like, well, if my tablet fritzes out, I just get to stop and go home. And maybe that's fine, but. But if it's the kind of thing where you need to continue, then having that backup system is really critical. It's not over building or over preparing. I know it seems like more trouble than it's worth. Well, now I've got to take another stand. I've got to take another bag for my music, whatever it is. But if something happened and you didn't feel like you could just say, okay, sorry folks, got no music to play, I'm going to go home, then you really do need to have that preparation done. And those tools, music stand and paper music in hand, at your disposal, so that all you have to do is just stop and apologize and restart. Makes a huge difference to have that with you and not just be sitting there, you know, figuratively biting your fingernails, which are probably too short to bite anyway, right? So, and thinking, oh, well, gosh, I hope my tablet works this time. I hope my pedal stays connected to my tablet this time. So just a quick preparation thought, but if you have all that in, you know, under your control, you say, okay, I've got my tech, I've got my paper backup, or I'm just using paper and I've got all that planned out. That's great. Now we have to think about when you're going to turn the page. I know that seems like it should be a no brainer, but sometimes it requires some really strategic decisions. You know, the bottom of the page might not be the best place to turn, and this applies whether you're doing paper or digital. Do you need to turn it just a little bit before? Because the stuff at the top of the next page is more challenging and you need to just get a little bit of extra lead time to have your eyes prepare for it, or do you need to not turn the page at the bottom of the page because what's going on there is so complicated and you just want another measure or two to prepare before you have to turn so that you can. Okay, I'm going to get through this and then I can turn the page. Hmm. Decisions, Right? This requires some reading ahead, some practicing, and we'll talk about specific techniques for that in just a second. But let's talk about the other aspect of preparation, and that's are you using your hand or you're using your foot? If you're using paper, there's no question that you're using your hand. So there are some things you have to consider. Right. Is my left hand. Since our music stands on the left, is my left hand free to make a page turn at that moment? In other words, is my left hand playing line going to allow my hand to go over to the page and turn it without frenzy and panic? If there's only one beat or a half a beat to flip that page, you don't want to have all the energy and desperation that comes with making a quick page turn and having to do it to accidentally mean that you fling your music a little further than you went to, or that you miss your page turn and then you're caught trying to get your page turned to actually work and still trying to play at the same time? You know, does your left hand have time to make that turn? This is when we look at old school techniques for page turns. Back in the day before there were digital options, you would have to do some specific things to work out page turns where your left hand just couldn't do it. Yes. Okay. Memorizing your music, always an option. But if memorization isn't the way you want to go for whatever reason, then you need to figure out how to turn a page when there's no time for your left hand to turn it. Option one, you could leave out notes. It's been done. And if your left hand just needs to not play every note in that measure so that you can turn the page. Then maybe it plays the first note in the measure and you skip everything else and then you turn the page. That's an option. Maybe it's not the best. Maybe you really want to play all those notes. And in that case we have to look at some other techniques. Easiest one is that perhaps there's a way you could copy the next page, the one that you don't have time to turn, so that perhaps on the next page there's a place where your left hand is going to have time to turn the page. Or maybe your piece is only three pages long and you don't. If you had that third page out, you could see pages one, two, and three all at once, and you wouldn't have to turn a page. In which case, either of these cases, you can photocopy that page that you need and place it out. Just tape it onto your regular music, either onto the left if it's the first page, or onto the far right if it's the last page. Tape it on there, and that way you can have that page and you can turn it if you need to, when you have a chance to turn it, or not turn it at all if you don't need to. Now, this is not a copyright violation. It is not a copyright violation to copy one page in order to facilitate page turns. So you can do that without fear. We're not copying the whole piece. We're not, you know, not violating copyright. This is. Okay. So that's certainly a solution. Another solution I have used when it's necessary is to actually cut the page in half. There are times when I will have plenty of time with my left hand to turn the page after the second line on the page, but not after the fourth line on the page. And I can actually cut the page in half so I can turn the top when I have time, and then I can turn the bott when I have time after I've seen the top of the next page. That can work very well. And of course, there's a digital version of this too, because you can have an extra page or even crop the pages so that you can put those in your digital music. You'll just have to edit the file a little bit and say, okay, well, I want two of page three, and I'm going to read the top half of page three, and then my, my foot will turn and I'll read the bottom of page three. Now you might think, oh, I'm not going to need this because my left hand doesn't have to turn the page. I'm using my pedal. Well, yes, but sometimes, especially if you're a pedal harpist, this is an issue because your left foot can be busy. We can't turn a page with our left foot if our left foot is busy pushing the B, the C, or the D pedal at the same time. So this is another strategic choice you need to make. When am I going to turn that page? Am I going to turn it before I push the pedal, after I push the petal? Or am I just going to have another solution entirely and push it? Let's see, with. I'll turn it with my hand. Maybe your foot's busy, but your hand isn't. There are lots of choices there, and you can use whatever works as long as you understand what your choices are. One more thought on this. If your piece has a repeat in it that goes back and forth over the page turn, it can be much handier to have that page either be separate as one of those pages that you copy and put next to your music. Tape it. Don't leave it loose. Right. So that if you're working from paper, you don't have to flip back, but you can go on. Or you can do the same thing digitally and once again insert an extra page so that you're turning your pages forward and you don't have to worry about turning a page backward. Sometimes turning the page backward is easier. You could do it with your hand or with your foot, but sometimes it feels more secure just to keep turning forward in the same direction. And you can edit the file that way. So making your page turns as convenient for yourself as possible is an important part of this. So let's talk about practicing. How do you practice your page turns? Of course, what we tend to do when we practice is practice to the bottom of the page, and we use that as a natural marker. We'll practice to the bottom of the page and stop. And we'll do that practice. Then we'll turn the page and we'll start practicing from there. The result of this, obviously, is that our page turn doesn't get practiced at all. And we have this break that we have actually practiced in where it's okay, I know it to hear, and then, oh, it starts anew on the other side of the page. And we don't actually practice that. I'll call it a transition. But we don't practice the music going over the page turn, which means we haven't really practiced a very important part of our music, because the music Continues over the page turn. So here's the way to do that. The basic way to do this is to say, all right, I'm going to look at my page, that I can't see the page that comes next. And I'm going to play a couple of measures and really learn those, like semi memorize them. And then I'm going to play that the first page, the one I can see. And without turning the page, I'm going to play the next couple of measures so that you're practicing the transition without actually having to turn the page. So don't turn the page, just play that bottom of the page and the next couple of measures. What you're doing here is building in security. We want to really know what's on the other side of the page. Then flip the page over and do the same thing, but where you're playing the last couple of measures on the page before you would make the turn, and then looking at the stuff that comes on the new page. So you're going to look at the new page, let's call that page three, and you're going to play the last couple of measures on page two or three. But already having page three in front of you, this is that other level of security. So now what you've done is given yourself perhaps a four bar buffer for being able to turn the page. Why is this so important? Well, if you're doing a paper page turn, this gives you just a little bit of time in case you fumble with the corner of the page, in case the page doesn't turn quite as seamlessly as you'd like. You've got a little bit of a buffer and you're playing. Yeah, you may miss some left hand notes, but you know what's coming and you don't have to panic. Avoiding panic is always a good thing. I think if you're doing digital page turns the same thing. What if your foot stutters and you accidentally turn two pages? This gives you a little bit of time to push that other pedal and get the page back. So it gives you the information that you need. You're not going to be stuck at the bottom of the page. You're going to the music able to continue while you do whatever it is you need to do. That's the most important part. So practicing what comes on the page that you can't see before you turn it, you know you're playing page two, what already is at the top of page three before you turn it. And then having turned to page three, do you know what's at the bottom of page two so that you could turn a little early if you want. Think about how this is going to save you from having to make that last second page turn. If you've got perhaps petal harpists. If you've got a bee petal that you have to push at the same time you want to make that page turn, you can turn the page a measure early and have plenty of time to turn with your foot and then push the B pedal. It's easy. It makes everything just a little easier. And this is how you find out how you really need to turn that page when you really need to turn that page by practicing. It gives you options. It gives you backup plans. That's the key to practicing them. You will also find out if your page turn really works or not. I would advise you not to put off this kind of practice until the week before your performance. Have this be part of your practice as you're going along and learning your piece. It's only going to help you. It's going to give you a lot more security. That's really the only practice technique that you need and it's so important. One more quick tip. As I'm doing my page turn practice, I always mark when I need to turn the page in my music. I use a capital T with a circle in it and I put that where I plan to turn the page. This is part of not leaving those kinds of decisions to chance. I want to be sure that I'm making deliberate choices when I turn the page and that I know when I need to do it. It's also really helpful for a piece that I haven't played in a while, right? I've played it. I put the piece away. Months or a year or something later I get the piece back out and there's a marking so that I know where I turned my page and I can trust the fact that I made that decision for a really good reason and I don't have to figure it out again. A simple marking saves so much time. This may be more than you've ever wanted to know about page turns, but hopefully my hard won experience will save you from some difficulties that nobody needs to encounter. Now, next week on the podcast, we're talking about how to make an exercise out of a piece. We're going to. We think about this, right? We've got the piece and we want to. We want to learn the technique that's in the piece. And I really, truly believe that we want to have that technique in place before we learn the piece, but sometimes we get there and we don't. And so how can you really strategically take that section and make an exercise out of it and get your technique ready to play the piece? We'll talk about that on the podcast next week. Don't forget our Harpus Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive starts today, and I certainly hope that you jump in and register for that and get all that goodness if you haven't yet. I'm so looking forward to working on the intensive with everyone who has registered, so I will look forward to talking with you again next week. And 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.