Kaleidoscope Practice: Focusing On What Matters - PHH 038

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.

Welcome to the show. Close your eyes for just a moment and imagine that you found yourself stranded alone on a deserted island. No one else was there, just you, surrounded by strange and beautiful exotic plants, hearing unfamiliar sounds. It's a beautiful place, or it would be if you knew a little bit more about it. Right now, it's just a little scary. Are there dangerous animals or poisonous plants? How will you survive? You'll need food and clothing and shelter, but right now, you have no idea how to provide them for yourself. Out of necessity, you begin carefully and slowly, learning just as slowly. And sometimes the trial and error process is kind of painful.

Sometimes harp practice can feel like that deserted island. You tune the harp, you sit down, you're ready to work, but you don't have a clear direction. You don't know if you're doing the right things the right way, and there's no one by your side to give you advice. You're on that deserted island, right? You have plenty of notes from your last lesson. Maybe. But essentially, your teacher told you what to work on or what to accomplish. Not so much, actually. How to get it done on a daily basis.

Even the best teachers sometimes don't recognize where students need help focusing their practice until the results aren't showing up in the lessons. And by that time, a lot of practice hours have been wasted. Music is one of the only endeavors I know where you're expected to make progress on your own. And you're only checked at intervals. I mean, think about athletes. They're coached in practice with their teammates daily or schoolwork, right? Students have daily homework assignments that get checked by their teachers so that they get prompt feedback on their work and they can make corrections quickly. But Music lessons may be once a week or even less frequent. Now, this wasn't always the case. In days gone by, students might have two or three lessons a week, and often they would have daily class classes or coachings in addition. Now, there's nothing wrong with less frequent lessons. They're fine. And each student needs a lesson schedule that works for him. But infrequent lessons only work if you know how to practice, because your practice is where your music is going to happen, and your practice needs to be as directed as it would be if your teacher were beside you the whole time.

And I'm sure you've experienced the feeling that comes from a lesson where your teacher helped you get to the next stage with a piece, right? You walk away from the lesson practically on a cloud, knowing that you've done meaningful and productive work.

What if every practice session felt that way? All right, I'm pretty sure that feeling good about every practice session is not realistic, but you should be able to feel certain that the practice that you're working so hard on is actually getting you where you want to go. That may not be the case for you right now. It certainly wasn't the case for me in my early college years. And so today I'm going to share with you my own story about pointless practice and the discoveries that I made trying to turn that around. These are the discoveries that led to my Kaleidoscope practice system, and I'm going to share that with you, too. It's all about what to practice and why, and even more importantly, how to do it right using the five focus areas that I identified as critical to practice success and the key results and strategies for each. Plus, if you stick around to the end of the podcast, I have a special bonus just for my podcast listeners. So hang in there. This one's just for you. You won't find it in the show notes, so just keep on listening and I promise I'll share that with you when we get to the end. But first, I wanted to give a quick shout out to one of our podcast listeners, Nell. Nell heard the podcast that I did recently about performance fear and about my no Sweat performance strategy. And on that podcast, I related a story about an epic fail I had in a performance. And Nell was so kind to send.

To say that she was in the audience for that performance and witnessed my epic fail. And she was, you know, she had lovely compliments to say, and I'm so grateful, but I'm especially grateful to know that that there was somebody there to witness my epic fail who can still talk about it because I don't want you to think that I've made it up. So, so thank you, Nell, for sharing that with me and, and sending that, that quick little email. It was encouraging, it was gratifying and I'm so, so grateful for, for hearing from you. So thank you. And remember everybody else, you can always send in your questions to the podcast right@podcastartmastery.com if you've got questions, comments, that's the place to send them and we'll be sure to to hear them. And hopefully if you send in your questions in the next few weeks, we are going to be doing a listener Q and A episode coming up here in just a few weeks. So if you have questions you would like me to address on a podcast, this is a great time to send them in. So I'm anxious to get to some of these questions and address them here on the podcast. So I've got some sitting in the mailbag right now that I've just been itching to answer and so send in those questions. Podcastartmastery.com all right, now here's the deal about kaleidoscope practice.

You remember that desert island I mentioned just a moment ago? Right. Well, that's the way I felt when after my in the spring of my first year at Curtis Institute of Music, when I was studying there as a college student, my teacher told me that, you know, I just wasn't playing up to standard. I was not progressing the way she had hoped or expected. And if I didn't turn things around, I was going to find myself looking for a different place to go to school and a different teacher, which was not at all what I wanted to hear. But.

At the same time, my teacher was telling me she didn't know what to do for me. She had tried, I'm sure, to, you know, to, to give me all the information and all the help that she could. But whatever it was, it wasn't making my music go the way she wanted it to go. It. I wasn't getting the results that I needed now. I knew that I was going to be required to practice at Curtis on a level that I hadn't in for most of my playing years up until that point. And so I was really trying. I was really, you know, getting down there and knuckling, you know, knuckling down and practicing and putting in the time. And I didn't understand either what was wrong. I wasn't quite sure what my teacher was looking for and why it wasn't Showing up when I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do.

So I took the next summer and really thought about what it was I was trying to do and how I was going to figure it out. Because it was important. It was essential. It was the only thing that I needed to do. I wanted to be at school. I wanted to be at Curtis. I knew I was supposed to be there, and I had to figure out how to get it done.

And essentially, I discovered over that summer that I had been kind of practicing with the wrong focus, the wrong results in mind. And here I was trying to make things correct because I knew that I'd been guilty in my early years of just letting a lot of stuff slide. And if you're going to be a professional musician, you have to not do that. So I knew that I had to change the outcome. But I still hadn't found the right balance, the right results. And really, practicing has a correct result, not necessarily only one way to do it, certainly not only one way to do it, but it has only one result. And that right result is not the right notes, the right rhythm, the right fingering, even the right dynamics. All of those things are important. And that's what I was working on at that point. But those important things are not what practicing is about. There is only one point in practicing a piece of music, and that is to be able to play it the way you want. And I'm sure that for you, as for me, playing music the way you want isn't just about notes or rhythms or fingering. It's about playing it beautifully in a way that satisfies you, Right? So what was happening with me in my practice was that I was just trying to get stuff right.

And that wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough. And it was when I finally adjusted the focus, the main focus of my practice, to get to those pieces that the music in those pieces, that I finally got those results that my teacher was looking for, too. You see, the thing is that most musicians approach a piece of music, a new piece of music, let's say, this particular way, they learn the notes, they add the expression, and then they practice it for a long time until it gets good enough to play for other people, right? Nothing sounds wrong with that.

But consider this idea.

What if you learned the notes with the expression and the meaning and the context right up front? Granted, those things will deepen and change as you grow to know the piece at a deeper level. But what if we learn all those things right up front and practice putting them all together right from the beginning.

Then we're creating the results we want. And so we're not just practicing over and over and over and waiting for something to get better. We're deciding what that end result is going to look like or sound like from the beginning and start there. Now, that may sound impossible to do, but I'm going to show you the five specific areas that I call the focus areas that are part of any piece of music that you learn and are essential to being able to play it the way you want. And it's much less focused on the nitty gritty and focused on that end result, the piece of music that you want to play.

The path to those results, the path to beautiful music, requires repetition, as we all know. But if repetition is all you're doing, then you're not serving yourself or the music. So kaleidoscope practice is about making every repetition of a passage or a piece or a little tricky spot. Making every repetition mean something more than just doing it over. You see, I am, by temperament, not the sort of person who can just get in there and do something over and over and over again. I need to know why. Some people find a lot of comfort in just repetition, and you may be one of them, and there's nothing wrong with that, but doing something over and over again the same way isn't going to get you to the place you want to be with your music unless you're playing it the way you want to play it every single time. So, in other words, slow, careful practice by itself does not lead to the kind of music you want to make. And doing something 10 times or 20 times or 100 times doesn't necessarily lead to a wonderful performance or a beautiful and expressive piece of music, unless you're working those 10 or 20 or 100 times on these specific qualities that a piece of music needs to have. And those are the qualities I identified as focus areas. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about right now. You see, when I sat down that terrible summer to try to figure out what was the gap between where my music was and where my teacher wanted it to be, I sort of had to identify what was different, what was different between those two things. And the more I thought, the more I figured out that, oh, okay, this is what I want my music to do, but it's not what I'm practicing to have my music do. So that summer, I rethought what I was doing in my practice and looked at the results that I wanted Differently and then found, once I found the right result, I was able to practice for the result. And I think that's what slows so many of us down. We think we understand what practice is, and we think we understand what our music wants to be and what we want it to be. But we don't allow our practice to bridge the gap. We don't allow our practice to get us there. We see them as two separate things and hope that magically the practice turns into the peace when nothing could be further from the truth. So the short version of this is that having figured out how to bridge that gap for myself.

And I did, successfully, I came back in the fall and my teacher heard me and thought, you know, I realized that the crisis was over and I was back doing the kind of playing that she had hoped I would do. So all that was fine.

But over the years after that, I spent quite a bit of time and energy figuring out how to get that to be consistent for myself and then how to convey it to my students as I taught. And eventually, I sort of lumped the five focus areas that I had identified under the term kaleidoscope practice. I was kind of trying to find a term that reflected this different way and these different ways plural, of looking at practice. Now, the kaleidoscope is, you know, that beautiful 19th century invention. And the. The name itself, you know, if you picture a kaleidoscope, right, it's like, you know, I first knew a kaleidoscope as the little cardboard tube, you know, and you'd turn it, and the little beads or. Or colored plastic pieces inside would form those beautiful patterns, right? And the name itself comes from three different Greek words, kalos meaning beautiful, iodos meaning shape, and skopeo, meaning to observe. Isn't that interesting? Observing beautiful shapes? Isn't that a fascinating way to look at your practice? Not as, you know, nose to the grindstone, putting in the time, but as observing beautiful shapes. Now, there's nothing about kaleidoscope practice that is going to.

Obviate your hard work. I mean, you're going to have to get in there and you're going to have to do the hard work of practice that's there. But I want you to keep in mind these beautiful musical shapes that we're trying to observe, because that's where the beauty of this system is.

So I identified five focus areas, five particular looks at a piece of music that you need to be thinking about in order to play it well now, not in order to practice it well. Right. All of this is geared toward playing, not just practicing. So the five focus areas are detail, expression, continuity, control, and connection. And we're going to go through each one briefly, and I'll give you a specific practice technique that might surprise you a little bit, that will help you work on all these different focus areas and bring that to your practice. But please remember, you don't need to work on all of these at once. Practice is about focus, and you can only really work on one thing at a time. Now, some techniques have a couple of things that a couple of different skills or focus areas that combine.

But don't try to do everything every day. Just one thing is good enough. So let's talk first about detail. Detail is the easy one, because detail is what we most often practice. Detail is about notes and rhythms and fingering and expression. It's about getting everything right, looking at all those details. But practicing for detail goes beyond all those things because it really talks about faithfully interpreting the composer's work, looking at everything that the composer has written on that page, which is the only way that a composer has to communicate with us, right? Well, okay, maybe these days they have YouTube videos and all those things to help us understand what they mean. But if you're looking at a piece of music by Handel, say, or a piece of music by Hasselman, Hasselman is not going to tell us. He has no other way to tell us other than through the legacy of his students, perhaps.

What he meant. It's all written on the page. And so everything that a composer has written there needs to be considered as a suggestion, as. As an intention, as a. Well, this is what I meant. And I wrote it this way for a reason, to show you something, because it was the best way that I could figure out how to write it when that's the way I want to play it, and I want to tell you how to play it. So you don't have to be a detective, you don't have to be a psychic. But paying attention to what's on the page is really what we're talking about here. Detail also means understanding how those small musical elements, like a dynamic or a staccato marking or a phrase marking, are going to contribute to the big picture of the finished piece. So in detail practice, we're really trying to make every expressive and technical detail serve the overall musical vision. That's what detail is about. Now, does that give you a different idea of what you could practice when you're working on notes and fingering? Now, one of my favorite detail Practice techniques is the one I call dotting the I's. And this allows you to really see detail at three different levels. So take a section of your piece, and the first time you play it through, play it through in super slow motion as slowly as you can, and let your focus be on your technique. Make sure that your mechanics are beautiful, that your fingers are working exactly the way they want, that your posture is good, that you are relaxed, that you're playing your best. Because after all, when you play your best, you'll be able to do what you need to do most easily, right? So first time you play that section super slow, mo focusing on technique. Now play it again at a medium tempo and listen for the clarity and the even fingers. See if you can eliminate buzzing. See if you can make sure that your pedal or lever motions are correct and that they're not creating noise. Make sure that your fingers are even. This is about listening to what's going on. And then play it a third time. And this time, bring out the dynamic detail. What do you want that section of the piece to sound like? Is there a crescendo you have to make sure you're doing or a retard or a specific color change? So that little dotting the I technique, great for looking at detail in a way that goes beyond playing the right notes.

Now, the second focus area is expression. Expression in music is certainly, you know, dynamics are a part of that, right? But it goes way beyond that because we're also talking about tone and touch and articulation and phrasing. Expression requires us to use every single expressive tool that we have to make the music come alive for somebody who's listening to it.

So one technique to practice your tone, we're going to add to your tone repertoire here, right? Think about the four words that could describe your sound. Your sound quality, perhaps. It could be light, it could be distinct, it could be full, it could be mellow. Others could be rich or lush or brittle or crisp. And at one time or another, in one piece or another, we want to have all those in our fingers, all those different sounds. So play one section of your piece and take four or five of those words and try to create each of those sounds in that section. Play it again and see if you can create a sound that combines a couple of those words, like maybe distinct but mellow or crisp and light. So, you know, think about that. This is a way to do one or more of those repetitions of a section that you have to do to familiarize yourself with it. But to make it musical at the same time. So when you're looking for all those expressive things in your piece, concentrate on those in some of the repetitive work you have to do so that you're creating the musical vision at the same time that you're just practicing the notes. You get it? Okay, so it's detail and expression. Let's go on to the third one, to continuity. Continuity is. Is a little bit harder to understand on the surface. It's really about the flow of the music. And you can think about being able to play your piece without stopping or without hesitations. So at that top level, it's all about that seamless flow. But there's another level too, and that is the idea that your piece as a whole needs to present a complete vision, beginning to end, so that the piece itself seems like a seamless and logical progression. Now, the joy in practicing for continuity is that you get to experience putting together those small musical elements to create a total musical vision. It's very creative work. In addition to being sort of difficult, detailish kind of work. Working for continuity means smoothing out all those transitions. And it also means developing the mental picture of the entire piece and being able to convey it beginning to end. So in this sense, it seems pretty complicated and could be hard to work on. But really, it. There are just a couple of levels that you want to think about with continuity. One is to really get in there and think about what you want this piece to convey. You want it to be what to give what picture to a listener. And that's going to guide you in your expressive choices. And it's going to help you create that sense of inevitability that happens in the best and most moving performances. Right? You get the sense that the piece is unfolding as it happens, because one section builds on the one before and leads to the one after. So one of the ways, and it's a simple way that you can practice for continuity, is to think about those sections that you're using to practice your piece. And practice what overlapping section groups so that instead of just practicing section A and then section B and section C, be sure that you're practicing not just one section, but two sections at a time. Like, you're going to practice section A and B and then overlap the sections so that when you're practicing A and B together as one section, also then follow that up with practicing B and C so that you're overlapping them that way. And then you can practice B and C together together, but also practice then going from C to D and practicing C and D. This will help you find the bigger picture in your piece and eliminate those holes that are happening. So that's one very simple practice technique that will help you achieve more continuity. Of course, the very basic practice technique that we all know to use, right, is just don't stop while you're playing. That's an important part of flow. But working at the seamless transition between sections, thinking about how your sections of the piece relate to each other can be extremely helpful in giving you that big musical picture. So that's continuity. Next on our list, Focus Area 4, is Control.

It'd be nice to have control, wouldn't it? So many things happen when we play that are outside our control. We make mistakes, we slip up, and that's only to be expected. But what I'm talking about is not that kind of control. That kind of control can actually lead to tension in your playing, and can. I've known people to hold their breath while they're playing because they're trying to keep all those little parts of the piece in their control. We're going to look at control from a bigger, larger, more removed sort of standpoint. When we are in control as we play, it's not about being tense or tight or having everything right, you know, right in our control. Rather, being in control means that we've removed the obstacles between ourselves and the music.

So that we are in charge of what's happening and we've taken care of the things that might daunt us. Right? Mistakes are still going to happen. You can't prevent those. Your practice will minimize them, certainly. But we are human. We will make mistakes. Think about practicing for control as when it's done right, you're going to be expending less effortless and playing more easily, because the things that are in your way will not be in your way. When you are in control of the piece, the three main areas of control would be tempo, obviously, right? You want to be in charge of the tempo technique. So there's a lot about how your fingers move and how dependable they are for you. And then your energy, how you spend your energy in the piece. There's a lot of control that is related directly to your physical and mental stamina. Being able to get from beginning to end of the piece and still be able to be in charge of it, to not be fighting it at certain points or certainly even more toward the end of the piece. Right? We want the entire piece to. To be in your sphere of comfort, in your comfort zone. Now, when you're talking about controlling tempo. This is where I always like to remind people, you know, to not be practicing at the top of your, you know, at your goal tempo, right? You're going to need to practice a little above your goal tempo to build in some headroom so that you feel comfortable playing at your gold tempo. And of course, your choice of tempo is important here, because there's no point in trying to play a tempo just because it's printed in the music if it's something that's a little bit beyond you, which is where technique comes into play, right? You need the piece to be manageable for you, for your fingers, for your technique. So be sure that you are choosing wisely so that you are removing those obstacles, like a tempo that's too fast or a finger passage that makes your fingers stumble. Can we edit that? What can we do to give you that sense of not being blocked in the music, but being able to actually play it? And then, of course, there's stamina, right? Your energy. How are you going to maintain your energy from the beginning of the piece to the end? It's generally all about pacing yourself and about giving yourself plenty of practice getting through the entire piece so that you know know what your energy is going to be like. One simple way to practice for this kind of control would be to think about an element of change in your piece, like a crescendo or a decrescendo, a retardando, an accelerando. Choose one of those and then starting from the last note, that place where you want your crescendo, for instance, to end up. Work backward note by note, keeping that end in mind. Find the dynamic level where you want to end up, and figure out where you're going to start, and plan how to arrive there so that your crescendo is a controlled crescendo. Not because you're reigning it in, but because you've planned it and practiced it. So I would do that with a crescendo. I would do that with a retard at the end of the piece. We all have been surprised by retards, right? You get to the end of the piece and it's like, oops, I should have slowed down there. So you slow down the last two notes instead of making it very gradual. Well, in practicing for control, you're going to practice that in, so there are no surprises.

The last focus area is connection. This is about you and that piece of music, because having a deep personal connection to the music helps us practice it and play it. Better when we can make connections between the music we're playing and areas outside music or internal to ourselves, we can find the context for the music. And when we consciously create those deeper, more personal, more knowledgeable connections, we can find deeper meaning and more enjoyment. Look for.

Paintings or pictures or think of words or stories. Something that helps you connect to that music just a little bit more. One other good way is to find some reference recordings. Find two or three recordings of your piece. They could be, you know, CDs or YouTubes, whatever. They could be by famous harpists, they could be by students. But choose a few different recordings. And in fact, if your piece isn't originally written for harp, go and find some recordings of the piece it is or the instrument really that it is written for. Listen to those recordings. Note some characteristics that might be the same or different between those recordings. Are they all performed around the same tempo? Do the performers make the same dynamic choices? Do they pace things the same way? Do they use the same kind of tone? Do they have the same kind of musical idea? Think about that. This will inform your choices and will help you decide what things you like and what things you don't. And this will help you create a connection to the music.

So those are the five focus areas, and I've covered them just so briefly. There's so much more to dive into with these. Once again, they are detail, expression, continuity, control, and connection. When you are practicing these five ideas, when you're using these guiding principles as ways to direct your practice toward that end result of playing the music, you'll find it happens faster. You're not wasting time just focusing on notes. When you could be using that repetition part of your practice to think about the expression, to create connection, to work on the control or the continuity of the piece, things that are going to matter when you play it, things that are just of prime importance and like a kaleidoscope, you know, all of these are essential. They're all beautiful, they're all different, and they're all important facets of how your piece of music.

Should be for you, how you want it to sound, how you want to play it. Now, as I said, there's a lot more about this topic, and I feel so very strongly about it. And it's that, you know, I've written my. I've written a little ebook about it. I have actually a workbook that I call the Harpist's Playbook, and right now I don't have any physical copies of it left. And it's for sale on our website as a PDF. What I like about it is that it takes the five focus areas, gives you different techniques for each of the areas, and then gives you four weeks worth of a practice plan using these. So that when you start a piece, these are the detail techniques, for instance, that are really helpful at first sight when you're just beginning a piece or when you're in the messy middle. These are the expression techniques or the continuity techniques that you might want to use. All in all, there are more than. Oh, there are spot practice techniques in there. I think there are more than 75 practice techniques in the Harpist Playbook. And it's set up so that you can create a practice plan from it, or you can just pull from this repertoire of techniques and incorporate them into your practice to help give your practice a little bit more dimension and help you get the results you're looking for. Now, because you have stuck with me here till the end of the podcast and because I am so passionate about this particular topic and about your harp success, I want to reward you just a little bit. I told you that I had a special bonus if you made it to the end of the podcast. And here it is. If you would like a copy of the Harpist Playbook PDF, you will be able to find it either linked in the Show Notes or on the harpmastery.com website. And I would love for you to have it. Not just because I'd love to sell you a copy, but I want to give you that copy for $5 off. So there is a special coupon code and I'm going to mention it here. It's not advertised anywhere else, it's not printed anywhere, and it's only available for one week after this podcast airs. So you have until Valentine's day. So that's February 14th of 2022. Depending on when you're listening to this, you have one week to use this special coupon code and it is this. The letters P, H, H, K, P, all in capitals. That's P as in Paul HHKP and then the number 22. So that's PHH, like practicing harp happiness and KP, like kaleidoscope practice, all capital letters. And then the number 22, phhkp 22. And if you use that coupon code at checkout, you will get $5 off the price of the playbook P. If you are interested in learning more about these techniques and in fact learning more of these techniques, there's a lot of information there, information about the entire Kaleidoscope practice system, information about organizing your practice and the three learning stages, first, sight, messy, middle, and finish. There's a lot in this, in this playbook, and I would love for you to take advantage of it. So follow up with that coupon code and get your copy for $5 off, which is great. Remember to submit some questions to the podcast because in a few weeks we'll be doing a listener Q and A episode right here. So if you would like to send Those in, that's podcastarpmastery.com next week on the show we'll be talking about chords, about three ways to improve the your playing of chords. Doesn't that sound great? It sounds very dry and very dull. I know. But you know what chords can be. Chords can be lush and rich and wonderful, but you have to know how to play them. And that's what we'll be talking about on next week's show. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this has been helpful and has inspired you to think about those focus areas in your practice, and I look forward to finding out how that has gone for you and to talking to you again right here on the podcast next week. 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.