How to Study a Piece: Look, Listen and Apply - PHH 147

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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 me 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. My husband's family is German, and even before we were married, I discovered that one of the things I had long heard about German housewives was true. At least in my mother in law's house. Germans take a clean house seriously. Now, by American standards, my own house isn't filthy. I keep it fairly neat and decently clean. But my mother in law saw clean in a completely different way. There was no dust in her house, not even in the corners under the beds. She used paste wax to keep all the wood surfaces gleaming. And the only exceptions she made to the keep your feet off the furniture rule were her grandsons. Cleaning didn't just mean mopping the floor, it meant scrubbing it on your hands and knees. So why am I talking about this on the podcast? Because just like there are different levels of clean, there are different levels of knowing a piece. And sometimes we find this out the hard way. Like when we think we know a piece and then try to play it for someone else and discover that we lose our place or. Or can't make it musical or even forget how it starts. One of the ways we learn our music at a deeper level is by studying it away from the harp. You know the basic idea. You listen to recordings. You study the printed music and look beyond the playing of the notes to what the notes might actually mean. Just like deep cleaning, this approach helps you reach the places that regular practice doesn't reach, like seeing patterns or chord progressions or repeated sections. But studying your music can do much more for you than that, as long as you know what to look and listen for it can actually help you develop important skills that will apply beyond one particular piece to all your harp playing. Plus, it's not nearly as taxing as scrubbing a floor. So on today's show, I will show you what to look for, what to listen for, and how you can speak. Speed up your learning with some specific study methods. You don't need specialized knowledge of music theory to do this, and you don't need to take a lot of time, but I can pretty much guarantee that you will find this both interesting to do and rewarding. And it's fun, too. As you probably know, we have a lot going on at Harp Mastery this week. Today is the day we start our Finish It Intensive. We had the launch party last week, but today the workshops are starting. And actually, you can still get into the intensive today, Monday, March 11, if you register right now, you can get that done. We will close registration at the end of the day today. So if you aren't on the intensive and you want to be, this is the moment to do it. The intensive is all about finishing your piece, getting your pieces out of limbo and into your fingers so that you can actually play them. We're covering how to get. How to bridge that mysterious gap between you're still practicing a piece and you're trying to play it. As I just mentioned a moment ago, sometimes you play a piece and you think you have it prepared and it doesn't work for somebody. Well, what we're talking about today on the podcast, studying a piece is part of that, but there's a bigger piece to that as well, and that's part of what we're talking about in the Finish It Intensive. So please, if you haven't registered, I can't explain how excited I am to be teaching this stuff because I really am really excited about this intensive. We've got a lot of people joining us, and I certainly hope that you are one of them. If you're not, use the link in the show notes to Hop on today or go to heartmastery.com and you can hop on there. But aside from the Intensive, we also have our challenge in the Hub going our March Challenge. Last week, I announced the winner of the February Challenge, and that was Alison Moore, who won a $25 gift certificate to our Harp Mastery Shop. But this month, we're doing something a little different. The challenge itself is called Jigging it, and it's all about jigs, sort of in honor of St. Patrick's Day. But you don't have to pick an Irish jig. Any piece that has six, eight, kind of a meter will work just fine. For this challenge, all the instructions are in the hub, and it's totally free to join. Just use the link and join us in the hub. The prize is a little bit different this time. The winner of this month's challenge will be invited to work with me to choose the next piece that I arrange for harp. Could be for petal harp, lever harp, whatever you like. And I will arrange it, I'll publish it, and we'll put it in our. In our shop for sale. I'll dedicate it to the winner. And of course, the winner gets their own personalized free copy. But that's the prize for this challenge. So if you've ever thought that, you know, gosh, why doesn't she arrange at this piece? Well, this might be the perfect time to do it. And all you have to do is participate in the challenge. And then from all the people who participate and complete all four weeks of the challenge, we will draw a winner randomly from that group. So there's your chance. There's your. Your prize. I think it's kind of a cool one. So I certainly hope you participate in the challenge. So that's a snapshot of what's going on at harp Mastery. But let's start talking about how to study that piece. Really, I guess the first question to address is, why study a piece at all? Why isn't practicing enough? After all, practicing is what we do. We play, right? So why is study so important? Well, when you're working on a piece and studying it away from the harp, you. It gives you a chance to observe rather than to simply do. Oftentimes, it's easier just to get in there and practice the notes, because we know how to do that. You know, it's very clear what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to play these strings with these fingers at this particular time in this particular way, and there's a rightness or a wrongness to it that makes it very simple to do. Studying, observing, a little bit less clear cut. But there are some things that you can discover from looking at a piece or listening to a piece that you might not learn from your practice because you'll be too busy. So being able to study the piece helps you discover things that can actually be useful for you, things that might help you learn the piece faster, remember the piece more, and it can help you find things that will help you understand music, bring more expression to it. So there's a lot that you can learn when you stop doing and just start looking and listening. So as we're talking about studying the music, I want you to have this kind of an understanding. We're not talking about getting very academic here. You don't have to have a theory background, you don't have to have gone to school to understand this. You don't have to put all those chord symbols under every chord in the piece. We're not taking an academic approach to this, but we're taking an intentional approach to your learning so that you can get more from your music. Not just study it more, but learn more that's going to help you play it. So not an academic approach, but an intentional approach. We're not looking for something that's knowledge based. Well, I understand all theories, so I'm going to put all those chords in. We're really just being observers. It's all about being observational, getting in there and just looking at it and really sort of seeing what you see. And this is not, of course, for achievement for its own sake, but it's really for developing familiarity with the music. Because the more familiar with it you are, and the many different ways that you get to be familiar with it are important too. So the more familiar you are with a piece, the easier it is to play, the less likely you are to get lost, to lose the thread of what you're trying to do. It's all about making those notes on the page mean something to you. And both parts of that little sentence are important. Making the notes on the page mean something, yes, but put, you know, put some names to the patterns. Put some, you know, understanding behind the notes so that they don't just become little dots on the page, but they have some significance. But also those notes must be significant to you. The things that you learn from the piece may not be the same things that I would learn from the piece. We might see the same pattern and call it different things. And that's okay. That's what I mean by this doesn't have to be theory based or knowledge based. It's not about putting the right name to it. It's about putting a name to it that means something to you. So there's not a real right or wrong approach to this. I will help you with the. The things that you could look for, the things that you can listen for, and the things that you can do to make use of that knowledge.

But remember, this is all about helping you, not just being correct. So I hope I've made that point really clear. So just relax, take it easy. You don't have to have to take a course to do this. We're just going to take a look at the music that's in front of you. In fact, I suggest you do that right now, if you can. If you're not driving or on the treadmill and you can get a piece of music in front of you that you're working on right now, it would be a great idea to just have that in front of you as we talk for the next moment or two. Looking at the music can give you a lot of information that can actually be useful. Now, most of these things, I imagine you probably already do, but I want to be sure that we've talked about them in case there's something where you have one of those aha moments. It's like, oh, yeah, I never thought of that. So I want to go through them, even though I'm sure, as I said, you probably already do these. So if you take that piece of music and take a look at it now, you may want to go through these kinds of steps that we're about to talk about before you ever play a piece for the first time, or if you're a little bit less patient and you just love digging into the music the way I do, you might want to play it through a couple of times and then approach it this way. But this is really an important part of learning any piece. So I start by looking at the title of the piece. I know that sounds kind of silly, but sometimes the title has some significance. Sometimes it has some. Something that's worthwhile in terms of information for you. I mean, sometimes it just says prelude. Okay. That, you know, that could give you an idea. It could relate to other preludes that you've played. But perhaps it has more of a little of an atmosphere in mind. Maybe it's called romance. Well, that gives you an idea perhaps about tempo, perhaps about mood. Right. It certainly tells you what the composer was thinking when they wrote that piece. And perhaps it doesn't have any significance at all. Or perhaps it's a word you need to look up or something to think about. A title like Contemplation or Reverie might be very evocative and pull a certain picture to mind. So don't ignore the title. Similarly, don't ignore the composer and the arranger if there is one of the piece. Knowing who composed it is an important fact because it may help you once again get a really quick idea of what the piece is going to sound like. Think how helpful, by the Way these two tips could be for anything you have to sight read, right? They give you information. So, for instance, if you see that the composer is Bach and you've played a lot of Bach music before, you have an idea of what you might encounter this time. If it's a piece that you know, perhaps something like the swan, and it's been arranged by a particular harp arranger, well, you know perhaps what that arrangement is going to be like, right? So there's information to be gathered there. And even if those names don't mean anything to you right now, storing them away in that memory bank and just having noticed them might give you information later when you run into that composer's name or arranger's name again. Of course, there's a little bit more you can learn about a composer. It's worth doing a quick online search to see. Is there something interesting about that composer? Does this fit in a particular period of their work? Is this a new piece? Is this a very old piece? When do you suppose it was written, was going on in the composer's life, or where were they in the world when they wrote it? Any of that information may not help you play the notes, but it's going to inform the expression that you bring to the piece. You're going to have a different level of connection to it. So in that sense, it's important.

But let's get to some of the more practical things. Always you want to take a few moments to look at all the musical terminology and all the specific markings that are on the piece. Make sure you know what they all mean. I mean, if there's, you know, one of those wonderful Italian words like that, you don't know what it means. The Internet is a wonderful source. Just go and look it up, give yourself the definition. Because you don't want to be practicing this part that says perdendo, si. And you do this beautiful crescendo and accelerando. When you discover later, after you've already worked it in, that means dying away, losing oneself. And so it's a diminuendo and a rallentando, and you go, oops, been doing that wrong. So that's sort of an extreme example. But knowing what those terms mean is going to directly affect the way you practice and play this piece. So take the time to look up those meanings and write them in your music. Harp markings. Harp markings are so tricky because they're not universal. And you know, the. The way this person marks a muffle or a pedal change or a lever change isn't the way somebody else marks it. So be sure that you understand what these markings are going to be. One particular thing that can always stump you is harmonics. Most of the time, harmonics are written on the string where you're supposed to play them. But there are a few composers who followed Salzato's example and wrote the harmonics where they sound. And you're supposed to play them on the string an octave lower. This is a very small subset of harp composers who follow that practice, and they almost always tell you that that's what they're doing. Even Salzato in his harp music isn't consistent. Some of his music is written where the harmonics are played on the string an octave lower. Some of them are written where you're supposed to play them. So, you know, pay attention to that. Just one example. There's.

Fingerings. Do you see fingerings that are unusual or things you might want to change? I don't spend a lot of time worrying about fingerings until I have a degree of familiarity with the piece, because then I know if they're going to work for me or not. But just taking a look at them doesn't hurt. But beyond that level of practicality, then we get to sort of musical observations. Take a look at the bone structure of the piece, the framework of the piece. Can you identify sections? I mean, how does the piece flow? Maybe it has an introduction, then maybe it has a first part and then a second part, and then the first part comes back, and then the second part comes back, and then maybe we hear the first part again, and then maybe there's a coda, a tail end section that's just a little bit different. So you want to look for that bone structure, that framework. Identify any sections you see that are repeated, or maybe they're not repeated identically. Maybe they start the same but finish differently. Or maybe they're very similar, but they're in different keys in different places. So, you know, see what you can look at once again. There's no rightness or wrongness about this. Whatever jumps out at you, whatever you can see, pattern wise, is fair game because you see it and it's going to mean something to you, even if it's not something that someone else would see. Now, your teacher may help you and say, oh, but did you notice this? And you say, wow, yeah, I didn't see that. Okay, now you have something else you can look for another time. But don't worry about things that you might be missing. We're going to find them and we'll find them in a different way in just a moment. So just let yourself notice what you notice. Give it a little bit of a look, but don't obsess about it. That's not what this is for. So once you've looked for sections along the way, you might have noticed that there are also smaller patterns that occur throughout the piece. Maybe it's a left hand pattern that you see a lot of, or a particular rhythm that shows up all the time. Or maybe it's a chord series that you've seen. Or perhaps maybe it's just a little bit, you know, right hand kind of a pattern that seems to show up. Probably there's something like that that kind of jumps out at you that's worth noticing, because you're going to come across it as you start practicing that piece and as you're playing it, and you'll be able to see, okay, look, yes, it's the same left hand that I've been doing here, and I'm going to do it with the same fingering. Or maybe in this particular case, I'm not for some reason or another. But it's going to help you make those very practical decisions about how you play. It's going to speed up your learning because you're going to be able to see right from the early stages of learning a piece. Oh, yeah, that's all right. I remember I did this back on the first page. Okay, good. I don't have to practice it or decipher it again. I've already deciphered it once. I just need to play it this time and realize it's the same thing. So that's just one way. And that studying a piece just by looking at it is going to save you time and help your learning. But remember, this is all about developing a deeper level of familiarity with your piece, which is going to help you in a lot of ways. Talk about that. I promise, before we finish up today, we'll talk about some of the applications. But the next step in this process is to take that score and to head on over to YouTube or to whatever recording you have of that piece and, and to study the score, look at the music while you're listening to the recording. Now, I realize that listening to the recording is possibly something you even did before you chose this piece to work on, but now that you've looked at the printed music and you've maybe played through it and you've seen a lot of what's there and you've sort of given it a much deeper look than you might have before. We're going to take that information that you have, the notes that you've made on your printed music, and we're going to look at those while you listen to the recording. What we're trying to do here is help that connection between what you see and what you hear start to develop. Now, this has a lot of implications. I know I was talking about this a moment ago, and I said I'd get to it eventually. And here's the first thing I When you start to make connections between what you see on the page and what you hear, you're training your ears. This is an important concept that's part of what we call aural skills. A U R A L. Right. Oral training is to be able to look at something and hear what it sounds like, even if it's not being played at the moment. We want to make those connections between this is the way something looks and this is the way something sounds. So looking at the printed music and following along while you listen to the recording is not only going to help you with this piece, but it's helping develop those oral skills, too. Okay, just a little benefit, but let's talk about what you're going to do while you're listening. First of all, all those markings and terminology and all that stuff that you wrote down and identified and that you made sure you knew the meaning of when you were looking at the page. Well, as you're listening, pay attention to how the performer is realizing those markings. Are they following them? Are they going off on it on their own and doing something different? Because they can. You can, too. That's artistic license. You get to do that. But if you know what the term means, then you can decide whether they're following it or whether you hear them following it. So listen to how those markings and all of those musical terms are literally played out in the recording. Do you hear them? Would you like to hear more? Would you like to hear less? Ooh, ideas. Listen also for the sections that you identified now you identified them by sight in the piece. Do you hear them? Can you hear the sections that sound the same? Can you hear the sections that are almost the same but not quite the same? Can you hear that bone structure in the piece when it's being played? As a regular old audience member, you might not hear that bone structure, but you're going to sense it in the way the performer relates it. Because a performer who understands the framework of a piece can communicate it. And it makes the same kind of narrative sense as a story does. So this is your chance to go a step beyond audience type of listening and go to a musician's informed kind of listening where you're paying attention to the way those sections sound. Can you hear them in the performers playing? And maybe those smaller patterns, that left hand that plays the same kind of arpeggio pattern over and over again, or other sorts of patterns that you identified. Can you pick up on those while you're looking at the score and listening to it? And do you see why following along with the music is important here? When you are looking at what's on the page, it's going to help you know what it is you're listening to. So that's why just listening to the piece, while it's helpful is not really enough for a study purpose. You want to listen to it and read the music at the same time. Because you're going to be able to make the connection between what you're seeing and what you're hearing.

Also, something to listen for is you're listening to a particular performer play that piece, listen to their interpretive ideas, and see how they match up not only with the markings on the page, but with your idea of the piece. It can be really interesting, especially as you start to get closer to the finish on your particular piece. It can be very interesting to listen to different performers play that piece. By the time you know the piece fairly well. And you're up to the point where you're making significant and really fun kind of musical choices with it. Because you're comfortable enough with the notes, you can do that. You get to listen to these different interpretations and say, oh, I really like that, or no, I don't like that at all. And that's an important part of your own musical education. It's developing not just your taste and your musical instincts, which are part of what make your playing so individual. But you're listening to those things with the peace and the idea of the piece in mind. Your listening will become more acute because it's become more informed. You'll be a more discerning listener, able to pick things up better. So this is part of your musical education as well, not just useful for this one particular piece. So you will probably need to listen to that one recording of the piece. So several times to listen for all these different aspects, to listen for the. For the terminology and the markings, to listen for the sections or the patterns, to listen to the interpretive ideas. But that's what study is all about. You don't just have to do it once so, you know, take 15 minutes or whatever it's going to take. Grab that cup of tea, grab your printed music and shut the door so it's quiet. And then pay attention while you're listening. Right? Look and listen and write down any notes that you might want to remember from what you hear, because all this is going to help speed up your practice, speed up the way you learn the piece. It's going to help you get to that finish, which I've been talking a lot about lately. It's going to help you get to that finish just a little bit faster. There's one more thing that I want you to do while you're listening to the recording. So. So this will probably take another time through the recording, and you probably want to do it with that door shut. You want to feel kind of private about this. So you're going to listen to the recording, you're going to read the music, and you're going to airplay at the same time. What do I mean by airplay? You're going to play the air harp. So don't have the harp there. I don't want you touching any strings, but look at the music and move your fingers kind of as if you were playing the harp. I mean, do your best job at sort of, you know, okay, this is kind of where I am. This is kind of, you know, you won't be able to make it exact by any means, but you can do a better harpist impersonation than any Hollywood actor could do. Right? Because they all look very funny when they're playing the harp. You're going to look a little silly, but you're going to do sort of the right thing. Now, why is this valuable? Well, because now you're reading the music, you're hearing the music, and. And you're sort of experiencing where your hands kind of need to be in space. So you're going to get a really good sense of, whoa, those are big jumps that I'm going to have to do quickly or, oh, look, this is going to feel slower than I thought. So it's going to give you the idea of what playing the piece is going to feel like at the right tempo, which may take you a while in real life to achieve. Right. But it's going to give you the idea of where you want to go, what your fingers are really going to need to be able to do without having to actually worry about technique or wrong notes or correct fingering. Because you're just airplaying. You're sort of getting the sense of where you need to be. I know it may sound a little bit silly, but I promise you this is very valuable. You're going to find out things that you had no idea you were going to find out when you do this. So give it a try. So we've done three things now. We've done the initial read through of the score where you're looking at the printed music and you're doing all those markings and identifying, and then you're confirming those by looking at the music that you've marked while you're listening to the recording. And you're getting the oral part of this, the listening part lined up with the visual learning part, you're making those connections. And then we're making that third connection with the airplay, right? Getting your fingers involved, but not stressing them out at this point by not being able to get around the actual harp strings. Those air harp strings are much easier to play and gosh darn, you never play a wrong note. So we've done sort of a three component learning process, a study process with your piece that involved your eyes, your ears and your fingers. I imagine by this point you've gotten several ideas about how this could be very helpful to you in your actual at the harp kind of practice. Right. We talked already about making the connection between what you see on the page and what you hear. This is very helpful at a very simple level for helping you keep your place in the music, for helping you start from anywhere in the music. If you have to stop in the middle while you're practicing or playing, to be able to know what that measure sounds like is going to be very, very helpful to you. And just the study work that we talked about today is going to help you start making those connections and start making those connections firmer for yourself with each piece of music that you play. But this also has ways to help your reading. For instance, just the looking at the music while you're hearing the recording helps train your eyes to keep reading ahead. And if you put the airplay component with it, it's really helping you learn to read ahead. This will help make your playing more fluid, more fluent. It will also help you recognize those groupings and those patterns just a little bit faster because you've identified them in your study. This will help you place them faster, will help you practice them more easily because you can see them as groups of notes rather than individual notes. And once again, you'll be able to hear them.

So the next level, of course, is that this is going to have good benefits for your sight reading as well. So that this is going to help you with sight reading. Just think you'll be able to make the connection. You're going to look at those notes. You're going to be able to hear in your head what they sound like now. All right, this isn't an instant process, but it's going to help you start hearing more of what's on the page. And this is also going to help you with anything you want to memorize because you're going to have those connections a little bit more, a little bit firmer in mind. So this is a very helpful process for. Okay, this is the section that does this, and then it comes back and it does this section again. It's going to help you memorize more quickly and remember things a little bit better. So there are some really obvious practical applications for this particular sort of study technique. But I hope you realize that all of these benefits only happen because you're being intentional and you're being an observer and you're looking and you're listening rather than just playing. That's where the power of this kind of study system is. Now, you can do this just once for a piece, or you could do it every once in a while. Because as you practice a piece and you get that next level of technical familiarity with it, you might discern different things from the recording and from the printed page. So it's worth every few weeks or whenever seems appropriate to you to take that music and sit down and listen to the recording once again. Airplay if you like. But do at least one listen where you're just listening and watching and not airplane. Because just taking your hands out of the equation allows all sorts of information to become apparent to you. So that's something that you could revisit from time to time. It's also wonderful to do at the finish of a piece where you can pay more attention to the interpretive ideas as they are realized by the different performers you're listening to. So much to listen to, to watch for, and to experience without any playing. That's how you study a piece. A lot of what we talked about today has implications for taking a piece all the way to the finish, to making sure that your piece is polished and ready to play. But remember, we're going to be working on some really core aspects of finishing your pie pieces. On the Finish it intensive. We won't be talking about the studying a piece aspect. I think we covered that here today. But there are some more things that are really key to making sure that you're practicing the right way so that you actually finish the pieces instead of just putting them away. So the finish intensive closes today. I mean, we just started today. We had our launch party last Friday, but you can still get in before midnight Eastern time today. We will close the doors then. So after that it will be too late. Remember, we don't rerun these intensives, so this is your chance to get in and to get this information. I think it's going to be really, really valuable. The people on the intensive had a great launch party on Friday and we've already been busy in the forum. So there's a lot going on and I'd love for you to be a part of it. So if you haven't signed up for that, do that today. But we have going on all of March, our challenge in the Hub, our Jigging it challenge, and so that is totally free to join and we'd love to have you in there too. Next week on the podcast, I'll be talking about practice bursts. Those short 15 minute segments of practice that sometimes, you know, sometimes that feels like all you have energy for may be all you have time for. But we're going to be talking about 10 benefits of those practices, practice bursts. So that's next week on the podcast and that's going to be a fun thing to talk about because sometimes I think we get the idea that you have to practice for a long time to really get benefit from your practice. And that's just not true. And I'm going to show you how you can use those practice bursts to keep yourself moving forward next week on the podcast. Until 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.

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.