How to Play Any Piece More Musically - PHH 124

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about, showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. A long time ago, I attended a concert by a famous pianist and I overheard two audience members talking about how impressed they were, how the performer's virtuosity and expressiveness showed true mastery of the instrument. And then I heard the comment that stuck with me. He could make Hot Cross Buns sound like a musical masterpiece. If you took piano lessons as a child, chances are that you played the nursery song Hot Cross Buns in your first few weeks of study. The melody only has five notes. It couldn't be more simple. But this idea made me consider what I believe is a common misconception among harpists who want to develop a repertoire of music. Whether their repertoire would be geared toward concerts or weddings or church music or local senior centers, harpists usually overcomplicate things. Naturally, we want to present music that our audiences will like, and we want to play it well. But often we make it much harder for ourselves the than we need to. Here's an example. Let's imagine a harpist whom we will name Zelda. Zelda wants to put together a program of music to play at the nursing home where her mother lives. She's excited about playing, and she knows her mother is proudly spreading the word to all her friends in the home. Zelda is a little anxious, though, because she's never put together a solo program of music before. So she searches through all her music, assembles her favorite pieces, and begins her practice. She's pleased with the music she's chosen, knowing that she's included a couple of her mother's favorite pieces and a couple of others that she knows will make the program extra special. So far, so good. However, as the date of the performance gets closer, she becomes a little anxious, thinking that maybe she's been a little too ambitious. There's a lot of music, and some of it is more challenging than she remembered. She's not sure everything will be ready and polished by the performance. Now she's getting nervous.

This is probably a common trap for us harpists, thinking we need to play our hardest, showiest or most ambitious music on a program. There are some obvious reasons to choose simpler music. We can play it with more confidence. It doesn't take as much practice time, but sometimes we feel like it's cheating to play the easy stuff. We think that people won't think we're really good if we aren't playing the hard pieces. In fact, most audiences, even musically educated ones, don't know which pieces are difficult and which are easy. What they do know is if we're struggling to get through a piece of Our show, today is going to be about how you can find the musical value in those easy pieces, how you can play them so they sound polished and expressive, not like a baby piece. We'll talk about musical considerations, ones you probably haven't given much thought to, that will change the way you play any piece, not just the easy ones. And you'll play more confidently too, because you know the technical aspects of the piece are well within your grasp. Who knows, if you've been reluctant to get out and share your music in your community, this might even change your mind.

Sometimes. All we need to encourage us to get out and share our music in our world is a little help from our friends. And that's what we have in the Harp Mastery Hub. If you are not already in the Harp Mastery Hub, maybe you don't even know what it is. So let me tell you a little bit about it. The Harp Mastery Hub is our free online community. It's not only free to join and to participate in, but it is Facebook and other social media free as well. This is our own platform. You won't see any ads, you won't see any spam. We're not collecting any data about you. It's just a place where you can communicate with other harpists. We have little challenges that go on. And of course I also host my live Monday warmup sessions from the Harp Mastery Hub. So it's a place where you can. Where you can chat, where you can just be part of a harp community. And of course with lots of things that are happening in the Harp Mastery community, my Hub people find out about it first, so that's a great place to be. So if you are ready to ditch the social media, but you don't want to lose the social part, then the Harp Mastery Hub would be a great place for you to be. So it's easy to join the hub. I've put the link in the show notes, or you can go right to our homepage harpmastery.com and find it right there on the homepage and you can sign up to join us. So in these days of making everything more complicated and just a little bit scarier, we hope the Heart Mastery Hub makes things simpler for you. So hop in, join us there. There's always something happening. Now, I was talking before about simple pieces and about playing simpler pieces and making those part of your repertoire, and clearly there are good reasons to do that. But this episode really isn't about playing simple pieces as much as it is about the musicality that we need to play any piece well. So I invite you for a moment to shed your doing perspective and think about music from a listener's perspective. I mean, we've all been music listeners, so think about what you listen for when you hear a piece of music.

We don't really listen for the number of notes. I mean, it's fun to hear a flashy piece. It's fun to hear a virtuoso just dash through something. But that isn't why we listen to music.

We listen to music because it communicates to us. And so in our preparation of a piece to play for someone else, we need to have that same listener's mindset, the idea of their perspective, so that we're practicing in a way that's going to communicate what we play. Now, I'm not saying that everything we need to play needs to be something familiar to an audience or something that is slow and meditative. That's not at all what I mean. We want those fast, flashy pieces because they're fun. But whatever kind of piece we play, we need to be able to communicate it well. And so what I'm really going to try to help you with today are a few things that are musical considerations that go beyond what we usually do in our practice that will help us play the music better. Now, in terms of a repertoire, they may help you choose music because you know you're going to be able to sort of fulfill your musical contract with the listener just a little bit more comfortably and confidently. So that may influence the way you choose music for a program. But really this is about playing any piece more musically. So I think that we need to start with a couple of obvious ones, and then we're going to go to a couple that I am willing to imagine you haven't really thought of before. So we're going to start with perhaps the most important one, and this is to maintain the rhythmic flow of the piece.

This is not a new concept, right. So we need to be sure that the piece progresses. We want to eliminate those hesitations, eliminate those moments of stumble. But I want you to think about it again from a listener's perspective. Remember that when you're listening to a piece of music, the very first thing that you relate to is the beat, the pulse, that constant repetitive pattern of strong beats and weak beats that are part of almost every piece. And that's how we relate to music. It's our most primal instinct. Right. Even older than the harp is the drum. So we've got a beat within us, our heartbeat. So the beat is really important. And when you can make your first mission in playing a piece to maintain that rhythmic flow, you're giving the audience the first piece of the puzzle, the thing they really need to hold onto. This is why when we talk about sight reading, we talk about, oh, the notes are less important than just keeping the steady beat. When we talk about ensemble playing, we say the notes are less important than keeping a steady beat. This is not to say that the notes are not important. That's not what I mean. But keeping that beat steady allows us to just sort of gloss over the wrong notes as we listen, whether we hear them or not. There have been studies done that showed that we don't pay attention to the wrong notes. But I can guarantee you that when the rhythm stumbles, when we lose that pulse.

We'Re drawn back into the idea that, oh, this is someone playing something for us. Think about for a second, sort of.

The illusion that happens in the theater. You're seeing a play and the play is there. The theater is darkened and there's this rectangle that is the lit up stage where the actors are acting out the drama for us. We're able to ignore everything else because the drama is happening right there. And we accept it and lose ourselves in it, involve ourselves in it.

But the second that an actor turns to address the audience, to break that wall, that invisible curtain that separates the audience from the stage.

We remember that we are real people and that they are only actors. And it breaks that magical spell for us. That curtain, that invisible wall, is the steady, rhythmic Flow. Now, this doesn't mean that there isn't room for bravado, that there isn't room for, you know, cellondo ritardando, all those good things. That's part of it. But when we're supposed to have that steady pulse and it stumbles, a listener is jerked back to reality, if you will, and the magic of the music stops. So that's what's so critical. This is why teachers are always saying, oh, you must play past your mistakes. And this is why. This is why you will often hear a performance that sounds really, really perfect. And yet the performer will say, oh, I totally forgot those two measures and had to make them up. As long as the rhythm is maintained, so is the magical spell. So maintaining the rhythmic flow is, I think, the number one aspect of musicality. I realize it may sound very technical and sort of dry, but it's anything but dry. It's the foundation for the music itself, and it's the way that we connect with music on a most basic fundamental level. So that's what you're looking for. So in terms of a piece that you're choosing, whether you're looking for a difficult piece or an easy piece, we still need to maintain the rhythmic flow.

And you can guess, you can sort of extrapolate from there how much easier it's going to be to maintain the rhythmic flow in a piece where you feel technically secure. So those technically risky pieces, like, oh, I'd love to play this, but it's still kind of, oh, I don't know, still a little chancey, or, you know, yes, I can play this piece and know that I'm going to be able to keep that flow steady all the way through. That's a choice that you might make when you're assembling a repertoire or a program for something. Makes sense, right? Okay, this next item on my list is also pretty basic, and it's about the dynamics of the piece. Dynamics are generally what we think of when we're talking about musicality and expression. We're thinking about dynamics, about the softs and the louds and the changes, the crescendos, the things that are gradual, the things that are sudden, and how those dynamics help us communicate the message of the piece. How do they help the melody flow? How do they help us hear the repeated sections? How do they help us journey through that musical composition? Is it a new idea to you to think about a musical piece as a journey? Even the simplest piece has a journey. It's got a form, most likely, you know, with maybe it's got an initial statement, like an A statement, and then a repetition of the A statement, and then a B statement, and then back to the A statement. That's a journey. And how could your dynamics help you.

Convey that, help you make that clear? Well, perhaps use the same dynamics for the. For the first two A sections, or maybe contrast them. Maybe make the first one loud, the second one softer. The B section can have an entirely different dynamic. And then the final A section could either be a strong repetition of the theme or maybe an echo of the theme. But even those simplest pieces have a plan, and dynamics can help you convey that. So this, again, is creating clarity for someone who is listening to the music. Your dynamics help emphasize the form, and that helps a listener connect with what's going on. It's the difference between sentences that are clear and have periods and sentences that just kind of run on. It's the difference between reading aloud with expression or reading in a monotone. The expression, whether you're reading or playing, is what helps the listener understand what's going on. So what I'd like to suggest is that you try what I call plus one dynamics. In your practice, it can be very helpful to think about all the dynamic levels that you want and all the dynamic changes that you want to make and turn the dial up one notch, so that if you're going to make a moderate crescendo, try making a bigger crescendo. Some people call this exaggerating the dynamics.

Either way you talk about it, it's like, to go back to my theater analogy, it's a little bit like stage makeup. It's just a little bit overdone, because by the time it gets to a listener, it's already dissipated a little bit in the air. The sound has. By the time the lights are on the actor, the stage makeup is lessened. Right? It looks less intense under the bright lights. You need extra makeup. This is sort of the same thing, except that by the time the sound gets to the listener, some of the dynamic effect is lost. And this is why sometimes you will think you're playing terrific dynamics, and then you listen to a recording of yourself, and it's like, well, I thought I did this big dynamic change here, and I don't even hear it. It sounds kind of puny. Well, this is why it's distance and the fact that our sound goes out into the air and just dissipates. So the effect of our dynamics is lost. So when you practice, if you raise your intention around the dynamics, either thinking of it as exaggerating them or just by dialing it up. One a plus one on the dynamic so that it's either one notch softer or one notch louder. One notch more crescendo, one notch more diminuendo. Whichever way you think of it, that can be extremely helpful in getting those dynamics across. But always while you're practicing, remember that the dynamics aren't things you layer on at the end. You don't sort of slather them on like the icing on the cake. We need to bake them into the cake. So be sure you're practicing those dynamics from the very first. It makes it so much easier. The dynamics become part of your understanding and your knowledge and your habit around this piece.

So I would encourage you to pay attention to those dynamics and work on them every time you're practicing, whether you're just starting on this piece or it's one that you've been playing for a long time. Remember to do those dynamics, as a friend of mine used to say, or.

You can just layer them on at the end and hope that they work. But I think that that's a much less.

A much less rewarding part of the musical journey.

What it does is take the music away from our practice.

Right. If you take all the dynamics out of the music and take the musicality away from it and just drill notes, how interesting is that? Not very, according to me. But so there's a thought for you. Put those dynamics in all the time and then practice exaggerating them, turning up that dial just a notch.

Okay, now, those were the two that you probably have thought of before and you probably know to work on. So these are wonderful things. The rhythmic flow and the dynamic. They're important elements in musicality. They're clear. They help a listener understand what the music is about. They help keep the listener engaged in the music. And they present a very polished, confident performance.

An expressive performance, one that you can feel proud of, whether it's a simple piece or a more difficult piece, either way.

But these next two might be things that are just a little bit new, or maybe you've struggled with them and they're just a little bit different. And I can help you understand them a little bit better today.

You're probably familiar with this quote. It was a quote attributed to the composer Claude Debussy. And the quote is, the music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them. It's interesting to think about. Right. We think about the music as the notes, and we have to, because that's what we do. But the silence between the notes, how do we use that?

It's an interesting idea. In fact, there's a Zen saying that builds on that a little bit, goes something like this. It's the silence between the notes that makes the music. It's the space between the bars that cages the tiger.

Hmm. It's very thought provoking. And you could go any number of places with this. But when it comes to the musical discussion we're having today, I want to encourage you to think about the spaces between the notes and to learn to find the spaces. You. And enjoy the spaces. Hmm. Let me tell you what I mean. So when we're playing a piece of music and we're playing the rhythm correctly and we're playing at a steady tempo, think, you know, you could put a metronome with the music. It's very correct.

And people who enjoy practicing with the metronome, and I'm one of them, know that the metronome will help you line things up, will help create that bed of certainty with that particular piece. Piece to make sure that the rhythmic flow is staying constant. And you're not making adjustments that you don't want, that you're not inadvertently slowing down or speeding up. It will help you build that level of rhythmic security into the piece.

However, one of the things that the metronome doesn't do, and you've probably encountered this, is that it doesn't allow for the retards, the rubatos, the accelerandos, those kinds of rhythmic flow things. It also doesn't necessarily allow you to help the phrases breathe. And that's what I want to talk about. I want you to learn to let your musical phrases breathe.

As harpists, we think vertically. We're always working in those that left hand, right hand, you know, vertical dimension. We're lining up chords, we're placing things for arpeggios. And we tend to see music as this vertical line that is helping us progress through the measures. We are not always conscious or as conscious of the flow of the melody. The horizontal dimension of music. If music has a melody, has a song, we're just as responsible for making that melody sing as would be a violinist or a flutist or a singer. Those are musicians that deal pretty much exclusively with a melodic line. They have the control to sustain that line actively. And of course, we don't like a pianist, when we play that note, it's done. We have no more control over it. We do have control over the next note. And because we have control over note A and note B. Right. The first note and the second note. We also have control over the space. Now, let me go back to Debussy's quote, right? The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them. Debussy was a piano. Granted, he wrote for all kinds of instruments and wrote beautifully for them all. However, he was a pianist and he understood the distinction that you had to make between the ability of an instrument to carry a melody line when it can sustain its own legato, and an instrument like the piano or the harp that doesn't have that built in ability. So we have to create those spaces by graduating the progression from note to note to note to note. Now, this isn't just a timing issue. This is at heart, I'm interested in talking about the phrasing issue here. The idea that the melody line needs to sing, so all those notes need to sound a little bit different one from the other.

Just as a spoken aloud sentence starts in one place and then gathers energy, gathers momentum, has a dynamic change, and then comes to a conclusion, so does your melodic phrase need to do the same thing? Needs to start somewhere, go somewhere, and then go, come back, likely come back to where it started in terms of dynamics or energy. Just think about that flow of creating essentially a sentence.

That's what the musical phrase does, and it's more difficult for us to think about. But if you just take that melody, likely it's in your right hand and you play it so that it sounds like the song, it sounds like someone would sing it and not just like, note, note, note, note, note, note, note.

This will be different. This is where your little bit of rubato will come from. And when you start identifying those phrases, you'll see where one begins and one ends. You'll likely hear where one begins and one ends. And you might have that little tiny breath at the end. That's hardly a rhythmic distortion, but is just enough of a phrase differentiation so that we can hear that grammar, if you will, in the music. We can hear that sentence, we can hear where the breath is in the song. Sometimes it's very helpful to think about it the way a singer would and say, okay, if I were singing this, where, where would I want to take a breath? You may need some extra breaths. I don't have terrific breath control for something like that, so you may need extra ones. But where would the singer breathe? Where does that musical sentence end and the next one begin? Look for those moments and use that extra tiny, tiny bit of silence, that little break to help articulate that phrase.

So I think on a most.

Overarching level, what I would say here is to enjoy those spaces. Listen for them, listen for the phrases. Don't be in a rush to get from one note to another.

Let the listener hear the phrase.

Think about the phrase yourself. We don't want to be so involved in sticking to the click of a metronome. Boop.

That we ignore the phrasing because that's where the song is.

This is a little bit more tricky and it requires you to think about music differently. It requires you to get out of some of the doing phase of practice and sort of get into the more creative, more, dare I say, musical side of practice. Looking for the melody, listening for the melody. Where is it? Where does this go? It's not.

It might be.

Right. There are ways to play that and you need to listen. So that's my suggestion. Number three, enjoy the spaces, Let the music breathe.

Okay, now if you're ready to take a risk, we'll go on to number four, the last one I want to talk about today. I would like to suggest that you start experimenting with sustaining the music visually.

Oh, new idea? Yes. Maybe, maybe not. But think about this for a moment. When you go to a performance, do you sit there the entire time with your eyes closed? Probably not. You may close your eyes at some point. Hopefully it's not to fall asleep. Hopefully it's just to listen to the music. But either way, at some point you're likely to be watching the performer.

And we've all seen performances where the performers on stage gestures or. Or just their physicality on stage was so distracting that it made it more difficult to pay attention to the music. Sometimes you'll see very well known performers who have very odd facial gestures or strange body movements, or very, very wild, crazy sort of movements that don't seem to relate to anything they're doing. Or maybe they're just quite impassive when they play and they don't do much motion at all. I remember watching a performer when I was at Harp camp in Maine. We went to a chamber music series concert and one of the pianists who performed regularly there was very difficult to watch because at some points he would bend so far backwards it almost looked like he was going to fall all the way backward off the bench while he played.

Sometimes I've seen pianists, and I'm sure you have too, play practically with their nose in the keyboard.

Now, looked at from a musical standpoint, there's nothing necessarily wrong if this doesn't impact their playing, then, you know, and if you. If you would not know the difference if your eyes were closed, then, okay, that, that might be all right. But most of the time, we want our physical presentation to match our musical presentation. This was something that Carlos Salzedo was very aware of and something that he was quite careful to teach his students and to include in some of the stage directions, if you will, for the music that he wrote.

But this isn't specific to Salzado's music. But I do think that, you know, we've all had a little bit of this. When your teacher has said, oh, don't make a face. When you make a mistake, watch your facial reactions. You don't want to smile. Maybe you don't want to grimace. You don't want to, you know, don't want to do anything like that that distracts visually from the performance.

I'd like to suggest that you carry that through to your arm movements as well.

That you think a little bit about what you're doing with your body when you're playing.

Do your hands always seem to like, okay, I'm going to rush to get to the next note, or do they seem as calm and collected as the piece of music that you're playing?

It's not difficult to think about matching your gestures to the music that you're playing, particularly if it's a slower, more meditative piece. You don't want your hand gestures to look abrupt or to look frantic or hurried. You don't want to just sort of let your hands drop when you get to a long note. I mean, imagine if there's a big chord that maybe lasts for an entire measure in the middle of your piece. You don't just want to play it and then quickly move your hands to the next one when we've got four long beats to do. So you're going to make your gesture more slow. You're going to make it more gentle, more lasting. You can use that entire measure and move to where you're going more slowly. This kind of musical.

Visual combination is very effective and can make your music have that extra bit of meaning for a listener, because most listeners are also listening with their eyes.

So with any particular piece that you're working on, think about how you can use the harp gestures, particularly the ones that you usually make. I'm not talking about doing something wild and crazy here. We don't need huge dramatic gestures, unless that's what you want to use at the end of a huge dramatic kind of a piece. But think about what you're doing how your hand motions are helping to sustain the music or maybe just not fitting with the music. Do a quick video of yourself playing the piece and look at it from that perspective.

Without listening to it necessarily. Think about, you know, what that looks like. Are your hands taking the time that they have? Are they using the time that the music has to just create exactly the same mood that you want? Think about it. And once again, you don't have to do anything that doesn't feel comfortable for you. And I'm not talking about making some, you know, odd sort of gesture with your hand. You know, we're not trying to make big circles. You don't need to raise in the traditional salzido method. Raise if that's not part of your playing. But think about what you already do and see if you can make your usual motions somehow help convey the idea of each particular piece you play. It's a little bit different, something kind of fun to think about and fun to work on, especially since you can work on it on your own in your practice room and not feel embarrassed by it. Right? But think how much more professional and polished your performances will look in addition to how they sound. And both of those things are important.

So here's a quick homework assignment for you that will help you apply all these things. I want you to look for a very simple piece. I'm not saying you have to program this. I'm not saying you have to play it for anybody else, but look for a piece that you know well, that you play easily, and certainly not more than one page, no matter how advanced you are. That's okay. It's not about finding a difficult piece. It's about finding a very simple piece right now so that you can practice these techniques. So find your simple one page piece, and I want you to play it through several times and think about the four things we talked about today. Are you or can you maintain the rhythmic flow despite whatever note issues you might have? That rhythmic flow needs to stay steady. And if you've picked the right kind of a piece, it will probably not be difficult for you. Play it again and try adding those plus one dynamics. Take everything up a notch, as Emeril likes to say. Kick it all up a notch and really put in dynamics that you know will go past the column of your harp and make it all the way to a listener's ear. Then let's go on to those harder ones. Look for those phrases in your piece. See where they are. See where you have room to breathe. Think about the spaces between the notes and how you're creating those phrases, right? The music is not in the notes but in the silence between them. So we're going to find that silence, enjoy the phrases, let them breathe, and then take the plunge. Do a quick video and see what you can do to sustain that music visually. Take a look at what you're doing. You know, video your performance, right? Take a look at it. Don't worry if it's going to make you cringe. This is what we're working on and nobody has to see it but you. So take that video, look at it and say, what could I have done that would have helped just convey that mood a little bit more. Was it just taking a moment to sit calmly with my hands on the strings before I started? Was it maybe just making a simple unified gesture at the end of the piece by, you know, having both hands end nicely raised in the air and then bringing them simultaneously back to the sounding board? Sometimes the beginnings and the endings are really the most impactful from a visual perspective. So check those out. So see what you can do with a simple piece and see how much more professional polish you can add to it. I think you'll enjoy it. Remember, we have the link for you to join us in the Heart Mastery Hub. If you have not joined us there, the link is in the show notes for today's episode. You should be able to see them in your podcast player or on the podcast page at Heart Mastery. We also have a link to join the hub right on the homepage of Heart Mastery, so you don't have to look hard for it next week Here on the podcast, we're talking about eight tips for perfect lever or pedal pushing. And that may be a hard title for me to say, but that's what we're talking about. So if lever or pedals are causing you problems, we'll work with those next week on the podcast. In the meantime, please 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.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time. Sat.