It’s All in the Wrist: The Crucial Link - PHH 049

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Do you suffer from uneven scales, particularly when you cross under or over? Do your fingers sometimes fumble to find the strings? Is your tone warm and lovely some of the time and other times thin or weak? Have the drills you've tried made no real difference? Well, here's the miracle solution to all these problems and more.

Welcome to the show. If this sounds more like a late night infomercial than usual, I apologize. But I want to call your attention to the often overlooked, frequently misunderstood, and almost always underappreciated member of your technique team. Your wrist. We harpists consider so many points of our technique. Our fingers, our arms, our shoulders, our fingering, our placing. We worry about whether to raise or to connect, and in what situations one might be better than the other. Do we hold our elbows up or down? Should we sit on the edge of the bench or more in the middle? And how high or low should we sit? So many questions and nearly as many different answers to each one, right? But when was the last time you thought about your wrist, that crucial link between your hand and your arm? Have you ever really stopped to consider the role that your wrist plays in your technique? Well, if you're like most of us, probably not. But today we are going to change that. This show is all about your wrist. We will talk about the correct position or positions of your wrist, how your wrist can help your fingers place more accurately on the strings. We'll talk about how a supple wrist is the source of graceful, fluid motion and a full and lovely sound. Most importantly, we'll talk about how to prevent injury to this so delicate connection between our hand and arm, how to protect it, and how to practice in a way that ensures it stays healthy. Now I know you're probably wondering if this is going to be a show you want to stay tuned in for, but I can assure you that this is going to be eye opening or maybe wrist opening, I don't know, in some respect for you, because this is a topic we don't often talk about. And when you understand your wrist and how it works and the role that it can play in your playing, I think you'll find that there are all kinds of things that you discover you can do that you hadn't maybe been able to do before. So I'm really excited to talk about this with you today. But before we get started, I wanted to close out our Technique Month focus, which, you know, we've been doing all month here at Heart Mastery. And I wanted to remind you about one of our oldest and one of our best courses, and that's our Etude A Day course. If you are a My Heart Mastery member, you already have access to Etude today. That's part of your membership. And I know that there over the years we've had so many people purchase this course, we're about ready to update it. And sometime in the next number of months we'll be working on that. But it's one of the most valuable courses that we have in that it is an absolute guided study of an etude book. It's like having a teacher, me, particularly since I'm the one on the videos. But it's like having your teacher sit with you and tell you exactly how to work on each one of these etudes. The book is that we're studying from is a collection of 25 etudes by the harpist Alfred Costner. Now, if you're not familiar with Costner, he was an Austrian harpist and composer and teacher born in Vienna. And then he became First Harp with the Warsaw Orchestra Opera Orchestra in Poland and then went to Budapest. From there he came to the United States just after the turn of the 20th century. He played first harp with the Philadelphia Orchestra for a couple of years while he was also doing some soloist performances and touring all over. Moved to London and played in the Queen's Hall Orchestra and taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Then he joined the New York Philharmon Philharmonic and then went out to the Los Angeles Philharmonic where he played from 1919 to 1936. So he had a rather globetrotting kind of a career and wrote some lovely harp pieces and some really nice study things, including these etudes. Now, what I did was take these etudes, which are, by the way, all lever Friendly. And they're all written in the key of E flat major. I also transp them so that we have them not only in E flat major, but also in C major, if that suits the tuning of your harp a little bit better. Or if you just want some variety in the keys. There are a couple that are in other keys, but they're all very, very accessible. So for each one of these etudes, I have videoed for you an introduction to the Etude. And then there are two play along versions of the etudes, one at a slower tempo and one at a faster tempo. You can watch me play. You can play along with me so that the entire course is totally guided. There are, you know, all of the lessons for each of the videos, plus some supplemental review etudes that I wrote that are part of that course as well.

I've had a number of people ask me over the years. So why is this called Etude a Day? Well, when I first came up with the course, we did it as a challenge, and we did one etude every day. Not that you were necessarily required to or even expected to finish it in a day, but I wanted to give my students the sensation, the experience of working through etudes more quickly, of understanding that it wasn't as important to finish as every etude to the nth degree as it was to get the experience of the different kinds of techniques that each one of those etudes brought to you. You can always go back and polish something up. It doesn't have to be completely polished right away. So I didn't want my students to get stuck. So we did it as a daily challenge when we started. And then after that challenge was over, I did a little bit of reworking it, and we published it as this course. So you do not need to an etude every day unless that suits you. You can spend as little time or as much time as you like on each of the etudes. And, you know, you can polish them or just plow through them, whatever seems to work best for you. But that's why it's called Etude today. Just so you know, there's no time frame. Once you purchase the course, you have access to it forever, right? But the best thing about it, I think, is that absolutely every etude is demonstrated and explained to you. So you know what you're doing, you know why you're working on it, and you know exactly how to work on it. And if you listened to last week's podcast, you know how important it is to have the answers to those questions. So if you have not investigated our ETUD course. Please do that. You'll find the course@heartmastery.com or there's a link to it in the show notes, and you can check that out. Remember, my Heart Mastery members, you do not need to check it out separately. It's already in your library. You already have access to it. So that's the conclusion of our technique month focus here at Heart Mastery. We'll be working on something else coming up, but for right now, let's start talking about your wrist. It's probably worthwhile to just remind you how complex your wrist is, right? The structure, the physical structure of the wrist is perhaps one of the most complex in the body and for a very good reason. It needs to be able to support an extremely wide range of movement. Right. Our wrist is how we twist things, how we pry things. It goes back and forth, it goes around, and it's. It's actually the pivotal point for our hand, right? As it connects our arm to our hand. It's made up of so many joints and bones and ligaments and tendons, all these things that have to work together for it to be able to move in all those different directions. But I'd like you to think of your wrist as sort of a transfer point, as perhaps even a fulcrum between your arm and your hand. It's going to help to transfer the force that your arm, with those big muscles, is capable of producing down to your hands, where we want the strength for our fingers to be able to pull the strings. Without your wrist, your hands would never be flexible or strong. They're going to take that force from your arm, from those big muscles, and allow your hand to work properly. If you want to just see and experiment real quickly with exactly how your wrist functions in this capacity, hold out one arm in sort of a harp playing position and take your other hand and clamp it around that wrist. So, for instance, if you're holding your right arm out as if you were going to play the harp, take your left, left hand and clamp it right around your wrist so that your wrist is. Is in one position. It can't bend forward or anything. Then just move your fingers as if you were going to play the harp and feel how much stiffer, not necessarily your fingers are, but everything about your arm and your hand is stiffer. It's less graceful, it's less mobile. And the word we're going to be using in today's podcast is one that Henriette Rainier in her method book, uses a lot, and that's the Word supple. We're going to apply it in a bunch of different ways. But when your wrist can't move, all that suppleness is gone. So that's how important your wrist is for your playing. Even though we don't think about moving our wrist except in some specific situations, when we think about it really hard, the wrist is really critical for us. So Yolanda Kondanasis, in her book on playing the harp, she likens the role of the wrist to, you know, when you're, when you're trying to lift a heavy object that's on the floor and you know you're supposed to not bend over and use your back, right? But you're supposed to lower yourself and use your knees to help you lift that force. Well, that's the analogy she uses to how your wrist works to transfer that force from your arm to your fingers and as long as your wrist and has that natural kind of an angle to it where it's not stiff, it's not bent at a 90 degree angle one way or the other, and it's not stiff or straight. When your wrist has that sort of natural bend, then that strength gets transferred. But if your wrist is stiff and your arm is kind of hanging down, you'll find that your fingers feel a lot less free and a lot less strong. That's a quick away from the harp experiment that you can do too, right? Just hold your arms out in front of you with your hands kind of in playing position, drop your elbows and straighten your wrist. Now, many harpists play with their elbows dropped, but not with their wrists totally straight. So that's the difference I'm making here. So with your elbows dropped and your wrists very straight, just wiggle your fingers. Then lift your elbows enough that you can get a natural bend in your wrist. They don't have to be really high, they don't have to be in, you know, salsato parallel to the floor position, but just lift them some so that your wrists acquire that natural bend and see how much freer your fingers feel. That's the power of that transfer point. That's what your wrist should do for you. Now, I want you to know that our discussion today is not method specific. You can be a salzado player, you can be a French method player, grand player, the folk player. It doesn't make any difference. We're not trying to, I'm not trying to advocate one method or another. And so these tips for your wrist won't depend on whether your elbows are up or down or however you happen to play. They're really wrist specific. I will be referring a lot to what Henriette Rainier says in her method book. It's one of the the most complete, comprehensive sources for a harpist's idea about wrists. As she states right in the beginning of her discussion about the wrist, she said most people don't talk about it. And of course, in her opinion, the people who do sort of mention the wrist go about it all wrong. But there's so much in her information.

So much to think about in the observations that she's made and the instruction that she gives that. That there so much that is excellent for every harpist, regardless of what method you play. So we're going to be talking a lot about what she has to say. And as I mentioned before, we're going to be using the word supple. A supple wrist is a loose wrist. It's not stiff, it's not too angled, it's not too straight. There's nothing extreme about it. It's loose.

It might be resting lightly on the sounding board. And I'll get back to that in a moment because I know that's a point of contention between methods. So we're going to come back to that. But it must not be clenching the harp or resting too much on the harp. You're not gripping the harp with your wrist. That's not going to be good for you. So it's a supple wrist, a loose wrist, it's a relaxed wrist. It's not stiff, it's not straight, it can move. It's that movement, that freedom that is going to allow your fingers freedom to move, allow them to be able to be strong and yet not harsh. And relaxation is going to be key here, where your fingers are not the only things that are relaxed. Your fingers are relaxed, your wrist is relaxed, your arm is relaxed. Because when you're relaxed, you have the freedom to play, you have agility, you have fluidity, you have suppleness. Okay, so a supple wrist is a loose wrist and it's a relaxed wrist. Now, let me take just a moment and come back to that all important on the soundboard, off the soundboard discussion.

If you're a Salzato method player or you know anything about his method, you know, he was very insistent that the wrist, most particularly the right wrist, should not rest on the sounding board. And in fact, pressure on your wrist can impinge on nerves and on tendons, and this can cause damage.

We're going to talk about wrist injury. A Little bit later. But that was his thinking, and it's not wrong at all. However, generations of harpists have learned to play with their right wrist resting loosely and lightly on the soundboard. And Renier, in her method book, advocates the resting of your right wrist on the sounding board, but very lightly and not all the time. She has you raise your wrist from time to time as well. And she makes the point also that you should not be pushing on the soundboard because that can hurt your wrist. So please be careful with that and make the distinction between resting lightly on the soundboard or pushing on the soundboard. And if you choose not to rest your wrist on the soundboard at all, that works too. Obviously, resting your left wrist on the soundboard would be more difficult. So this is why we're talking mostly about your right wrist here.

Because we want to keep the freedom, we want to keep the flexibility. So that's what's critical. Remember, too, that every person's body is different, and things that work well for one person might not work quite as well for another, just because we're all constructed differently. So be sure to take your own physique into consideration when you're thinking about this, and don't just automatically assume that you want to do one thing or the other, or even that you want to do it all the time. Right. There might be occasions when resting your wrist on the soundboard works for you and others when it doesn't. Just beware. We're not pushing on the soundboard or resting heavily or resting your arms, your wrist, on the soundboard in such a way that your arm weighs it down. That is not going to be good for you, your heart playing, or your sound. So let's not do that. All right. Enough for talking about the soundboard. So a supple wrist is going to allow for freedom and flexibility in your playing. And that's what we're looking for. Right? So what we want to do is what Rainier advocates, which is to look to the suppleness of your wrist first to help create the fluid motion, which the movements are very small of your wrist, or at least most of them are. So we're not looking to add movement to your wrist to make it supple. We want it to be supple first. The problem with this is that it's kind of like when someone shouts at you, relax. And the first thing you do naturally is tense up. So let's talk about how to relax. And I'm going to start by asking you to try this. Put your Hand on the strings. Start with your right hand. You'll do this with your left hand as well. Any four strings will do, but just get your fingers on the strings, sit properly, and then create as much tension in your fingers, your hand, your arm, your wrist as you can. In other words, while your hand is on the strings, just hold. Tighten everything up. I know it may seem counterintuitive to start relaxing by tightening everything up, but I find that it's the easiest way to know what relaxed feels like. And if you've ever thought to yourself, well, I think I'm relaxed, but I'm not quite sure. This is how you get there, right? So just for a moment, with your hands on the strings, tighten everything up. And then release it. Think about releasing it in this order. Make your fingers relax without taking them off the strings. You're not moving anything. Just relax your fingers. Then feel relaxation in your hand. Feel your palm, that curve in your palm. Feel that relax. Feel your wrist relax. Feel your arm relax. And then finally your shoulder. Then put your arm down. Shake it out and do it just one more time. Briefly tense up, and then relax. Feel the difference? That's what we're looking for. Okay, so that's pretty clear, right? We now know what relaxed feels like, and we know what tense feels like, and we don't want to go there. Okay, now what we're going to do is we'll add just the next step to this exercise so you don't have to tense up anymore. But this time, put your fingers on the strings and take turns playing each finger and then wiggling just a little to check that you're relaxed. So I call this play and wiggle. But what you're really going to do is you're going to play each finger, and then as you play, you're going to play close that finger fully into your palm and then kind of let it bounce back a little bit so that your finger is relaxed. Then check your hand, check your wrist, check your arm, check your shoulder and make sure that they're relaxed. You know what relaxed feels like because you just did that. And wiggle them a little bit. Even if your fingers are still on the strings while you're doing that, just wiggle them a little bit to reassure yourself that they're relaxed. Then you're going to do the same thing, same idea. Put your fingers on the strings and you're going to play. But this time, relax without the wiggle. It's the invisible relax. And I want you to check all of those points. Check that after you play your finger, your fingers are, no, not clenched in your palm, but loose. They've sort of bounced away from your palm just a little bit. They're relaxed. Your hand is relaxed, your wrist is relaxed, your arm is relaxed, and your shoulder is relaxed. So you're going to check it. And the notes themselves makes no difference what notes you play, but just say you're doing. I've got my four fingers on C, D, E and F. And I'm going to play my fourth finger, let it bounce back. Wiggle my fourth finger. Wiggle my hand a little bit. I'm still holding on with 3, 2, and 1. Wiggle my wrist a little bit just to see. Wiggle my arm. Relax my shoulder. Yeah. Okay. I'm relaxed. Do the same thing with your third finger. Yes. Takes a minute to do, but you don't have to do this every day. You just want to do this. When you want to check and see what relaxation feels like, remind yourself what relaxation feels like.

And then for the next step, you're going to do the same thing. Same fingers, the same strings. But after you play, you're not going to wiggle everything. You're just going to do a mental check, relax everything, release that tension. You can do that and you can do this kind of invisible release.

In every exercise you do. Do slow scales and think about releasing that tension from your fingers and your hand and your wr wrist and your arm and your shoulder after each note. Do a little bit, a moment, an octave of that in each hand each day, and you'll be reminding your body what relaxation feels like. You'll be training yourself to relax on command, which is so helpful when you're playing, to be able to relax as you go and not lose the music as you do it. So that's a very simple, very basic relaxation exercise. And I'd love you to start with that and just see how that works for you. Then here are a couple other little things that you can check.

The motions that we're most concerned with, as far as our wrist goes in our heart playing, are the motions where we twist our wrist and the motions where our wrist moves back and forth. So, and I mean back and forth, kind of like bending it up and bending it down, bending it up, bending it down. Those two motions are the ones that we really use in our heart playing. The. The back and forth one. The. Think about the twist like you would twist a doorknob. This is something that we use without in. In a smaller form, not as big as you would actually twist a Doorknob. We use that for the technique of oscill. We use that to help our hand stay relaxed when it's got a repetitive pattern or a trill. So this is a motion that we use. We use it a little bit also in crossing under, particularly in arpeggios, also in scales, but we use it a little bit there. So what you can do is do a really simple oscillation drill. So we're going to have, we're going to have your wrist do that doorknob thing. I have my thumb on G, my second finger on E, and I'm going to alternate them. And as I play my thumb, I turn my wrist forward toward the column of the harp. And then I turn it back far enough when I play my second finger to replace my thumb.

As you play it, think about releasing the tension just the way you did before. But feel how loose your wrist is, needs to be to do this. Feel how loose your wrist can be. It's very enlightening. And you'll know that your wrist is relaxed. And then the third little drill here is, you might think of it as hot potato. This is going to be, you know, bending your wrist back so you have your wrist at a normal playing angle. Let's put our same two fingers on the strings again, thumb and second finger on E and G. And but this time, after you close your fingers, you're going to move your wrist back so that it, it's, it's bent closer to that 90 degree angle as if, as if the strings were hot and you and your wrist jerked back from them. Only you're going to close your fingers first like a real harpist, right? So you close your fingers and then flick your wrist back lightly, not too far, not exaggeratedly. But this is useful in playing in that it gives you a moment to relax, it helps prolong the sound, and it gives life to that sound at the same time. So you're going to close and flick just like a little hot potato. You can do a little scale of them if you like. Right. And that backward, backward motion is what is very useful for us. And this will let you know if you're holding tension in your wrist, because you can't possibly do this if your wrist is tense. And you can do these with each hand, and you should, but just gently. Remember, everything about working your wrist needs to be gentle.

So let's talk about why that is. Well, obviously you can injure your wrist. And the two common injuries that show up for people in their wrists, especially for harpists, are Tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. And I know some of you probably have a lot of experience with these, a lot of painful experience with one or the other, hopefully not both. But let's just quickly talk about what they are and how to avoid them. Tendinitis, of course, is.

Wrist. Tendinitis is, you know, inflammation in those tough tissues of your wrist, right, the ones that connect the muscles of your forearm to the bones in your hand. These are the ones that we use. And these tendons are. Are important for us. It's what makes our fingers move. These are usually caused by overuse or for tension or by tension, rather, for all those sorts of things. You know, some people get it from lifting heavy items. You can get this from carrying your harp. So be very careful what you do.

And the general first and best therapy for tendonitis is, or is to just rest it and let the inflammation go down. And obviously this would mean some time away from playing or with very minimal playing at best. And so, you know, tendinitis is something to be avoided. And then if, perchance, you end up with tendonitis, we need to treat that carefully. And a wonderful, you know, physical therapist will. Will help you through all that stuff.

Carpal tunnels a little bit different, but. But the symptoms of carpal tunnel are enough to make you never want it, right? It'd be numbness or in your fingers or in your hand or your forearm, tingling pain, all the kind of stuff that makes it very hard to play. And what's happening in carpal tunnel is that the nerve, the major nerve that runs to the hand is being squeezed or compressed as it travels through the wrist. This is something that can absolutely be caused by putting too much pressure on your wrist with the soundboard. So if you're pressing on the soundboard too hard with your wrist and you happen to be pressing in a vulnerable spot, you can cause this kind of sensation and you can end up with. With carpal tunnel syndrome, you don't want this. So that's why we're talking about. If you're resting your hand on the soundboard, be sure it's light and just be alert to. To something. Everybody's body's constructed a little bit differently, so you may not have any trouble resting your wrist gently on the soundboard, but if that seems to be causing you trouble, be alert. And let's just. Let's nip this in the bud. It will get worse over time, so be very careful with it. And of course, there are various treatments and therapies for this, which would include wrist splints or, you know, we certainly don't want to, to get to surgery or steroids, all those kinds of things. The best thing is to, to rest your wrist. Um, a doctor would tell you to avoid those activities that aggravate the symptoms. Well, that's going to be heart playing. So you're going to have to rest it and then you're going to have to figure out how to come back from it. Once again, medical advice and, and good physical therapy is what you're going to look for here. Um, and every case is different, so be sure that if this is you, you're taking your case to somebody who's actually.

Educated enough to treat you well, not, you know, not just me here. So be sure that you do that. But you can prevent this from happening. In large part, you can prevent this by working at that relaxed wrist. Some gentle wrist circles people will do some, you know, just little back and forth, little around in a circles, gentle, easy motions to keep your wrist flexible and then remembering to keep it flexible, supple, to use that word again as you play, which will make all your playing easier, more fluid, more fluent, and with just a gentle, warm sound, what you're really looking for. So that's a little bit about the wrist. I know we can't get so specific here on the podcast. It's not quite, you know, what might answer your specific questions, but if you do have a specific question on this, be sure to email me. You can email us@podcastartmastery.com and we'll see, see what we can do to address that question in, in a future show. So, or sooner if that's, if that's necessary. Now, next week on the podcast, we are talking about metronomes and how to use your metronome. I'm calling this Metronome Methods for the Unconvinced. If you're a person who doesn't like to use the metronome, who realizes that, you know, maybe it's helpful, but it's not helping me. I don't know how to use it. It just flusters me. I can't keep with the little click. Then you're really going to get a lot out of next week's podcast, so do not miss that show. In the meantime, be sure to just, you know, keep your wrist light and mobile. Think supple, right? All those good things. Uh, remember that we have, have a link in the show notes to the Etuday course. I highly recommend that if you're looking for something to really move your technique forward. This will give you lots of ways to do that. Just be gentle and stay relaxed as you practice it. All right? I was so excited to talk to you this week. I look forward to talking to you next week about those metronome methods. 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. Okay, 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.