Layer by Layer: Build Your Own Arrangement - PHH 267

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions, the same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. As I look back on my childhood and my very first music studies, I realized that I was incredibly fortunate— blessed, actually. Not because I was gifted or because my parents were not only willing but were able to support my harp lessons, Not because I was in one of the music capitals of the world and had access to world-class teachers. Not because I had so many opportunities and people that encouraged me along my journey. Well, yes, I was blessed because of all those things, certainly. But I want to talk today about a different gift that was given to me, one I didn't realize the value of until much later. The gift was this: I was always encouraged to play music outside the box. Let me explain. I started piano lessons when I was 4 years old, and my piano teacher was not only a fabulous musician but a creative and generous teacher. My lessons included all the usual piano exercises, which I hated, and the sonatinas, which I loved. And she also made sure that she gave me performance-worthy arrangements of popular music. I played arrangements of "Blue Moon" and people from "Funny Girl" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" that were written by well-known pianists like Roger Williams. These were fancy arrangements that took quite a bit of technique and a lot of practice to play well, and I really enjoyed them. But my teacher never stuck exactly to the printed page. She always had some alterations to add a little more pizzazz to the arrangement. We were always taking bass notes down an octave, or playing another part up in the high register like a music box, or changing the dynamics and the tempo. What she taught me was that music was self-expression. It was about so much more than just playing the written notes. It was about making the notes say what you thought they should say. Now please understand, we didn't take liberties with the classics. She made sure I played absolutely every note that Bach wrote on the page. But I learned very early on how to be creative in my music making, and that has been a tremendous gift. I've never shied away from arranging, and in fact, it's one of my favorite things to do. I'd love every harpist to learn the freedom of making their music their own, and that's what this show is about. Now, I actually went back about 2 years into the podcast archives because I know that I did a show on this particular topic, and of course I found it. And so that's the show you're going to hear now. And if you've ever wondered about what it takes to make an arrangement or how to go about it, this is the episode for you. And then afterwards, I want to give you just a little bit more information about this, and I want to tell you about an opportunity, a new challenge in fact, where you be able to work with me on your own arrangement. So here's the show going back a couple years. Here is the show that talked about creativity and making your own arrangement. Think about it as taking your music outside the box. And then when this is over, I'll be back to talk to you again. Back in the 1970s, I read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by artist Betty Edwards. Now, at its most basic, and I'm doing her book a big injustice here, but Dr. Edwards' premise, which is based on research, uh, carried out in the 1950s at California State University, her premise is that we can learn to utilize the more creative right side of our brain even if we are very strongly biased toward perceiving things with the more logical left side of our brain. Now, this book is a result of her search for a way to teach drawing, which came so naturally and easily to her, and she wanted to be able to teach drawing to her students who found it difficult. The question she had kept asking herself was, "Well, why should it be so hard for them? 'Cause it's so easy for me." And her own investigations and observations led her to explore how it's possible to tap into the more intuitive mode which the right side of the brain uses by learning to shift your cognitive perception. And the book itself is filled with exercises based all around drawing, of course, but exercises that really show you this, this way to shift your perception from the way the very logical left side of your brain looks at things to the way your more creative, intuitive right side of your brain looks at them. It's a fascinating book, and if you've never looked at it, I think it's now in its, I don't know, 12th edition or something, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." Now, in a very skim-the-surface way, that's kind of what we're doing today. We're exploring how the discipline of a process can free you to explore, how a, a checklist can unleash your creativity, if you will. So I'm going to remind you of what I said just a moment ago and expand on it just a little. The art of music, whether you're doing your daily practice or playing for fun, playing for an audience, composing, arranging, any of that learning, playing, or writing stuff, the art of music lies at the intersection of intuition and intention. It's the creativity and it's the discipline. Both of those things play into it, and without either one of them, your music is going to sort of fall flat. What we want, of course, is to be able to have both of those inspire our music all the time, right? The creativity part of it and of course that discipline part, that part where we have to practice and we have to improve, we have to make things better. But if all you're doing is, is working at that improvement, you might think of it as the technical side, you're missing out on all the fun. And if all you're doing is the fun stuff, you probably could do it a little bit more skillfully with more mastery if you added some of the technical stuff, right? So it's not just about technique and it's not just about expression. It goes way deeper than that. But today we're going to talk about it in terms of making an arrangement of a piece because I think it's a great way to look at process. It's a great way to look at process when it comes to something that is really a very creative kind of a thing. And the most important part of this is that it's really going to help you understand the music that you play even if you never really thought about creating an arrangement, just going through this process is going to help you really get a much more inside, back behind the curtain kind of view of what is in a piece of music, which is going to help you learn it faster and play it better. So this is a win across the board. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I used to do a lot of embroidery. I did crewel, I did cross stitch, and I would use patterns and, you know, out my different color yarns, and the patterns told you what colors to use and where. I know many of you are more familiar with this than I am, but it's been a long time. But the thing is that sometimes you just had a couple strands of one color of yarn that you were going to use, and those few strands created just a, a hint of a shadow. In one little place in the design. Just those few stitches created, in essence, a whole, you know, three-dimensional look to an object, right? I was fascinated by this because it hadn't really occurred to me. I'm not a visual person in that way, and it hadn't occurred to me until I was paying attention in the embroidery that, oh, that's how that shadow is created. If I were somebody with a, a painter's eye, for instance, I would be looking at that and seeing that change of color that create— that was part of that shadow. But I didn't see that without the stitches there. Once somebody, you know, said, okay, well, you want 3 stitches of that other color here because that's going to lead you into the shadow, it was just sort of like, oh, this is an aha moment. I learned a little bit about how a painting, a work of art is created just by how that color was used in the embroidery. Creating an arrangement, looking at an arrangement the way we're going to look at it today is going to help in the very same way. It's going to help you look at a piece differently. You'll see things that you didn't see before. It's that, as I said, that glimpse behind the curtain. So that's where we're going, and we're going to start by talking about the most basic part of any arrangement. We're talking about the foundation. The foundation is the actual piece itself. It's the, uh, the most basic ingredients that go into any piece of music. It's the melody, it's the harmony, it's the rhythm— probably in that order, but that's okay. It's what makes the piece that piece. Melody, harmony, rhythm. Now you can tweak these in your own arrangement, of course, either maybe because you need to for a lever or pedal kind of consideration, or because you want to. You can decide how far afield you want to go, but in essence, if you don't bring— if you don't retain enough of the original melody and a little bit of the original harmony and the rhythm, it's not going to sound like that piece anymore. This is kind of like Baking a cake where you start with the cake. You can make a very fancy cake. It can have lots of layers, it can have icing, it can have Jimmies on the top and all kinds of stuff, but it's got to have the cake. And we can start with a very plain cake, just the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm. That's where you can start, but you've got to start there because if you don't have that you don't have the piece, right? You just don't have that. So one easy way to do this is to find a very easy, uh, maybe a very simple piano arrangement of it. If you don't have a simple harp arrangement of it that you want to embellish, that's okay too. But start with something very simple that you can see those basic ingredients, that basic probably right-hand melody, probably left-hand accompaniment where you can see the chords that are there and you can see the basic rhythm. If you can discern that for yourself and you don't need another, you know, a written version of the piece, that's great. But finding a very simple one where all those other things are taken aside, that gives you sort of a clean slate to work with, and that gives you that foundation. So that's where you're going to start. Now We're going to make some decisions about our cake. In the original recipe, if you want to look at it that way, the cake has one particular flavor. I'm thinking about my Aunt Floss's pound cake. She liked her pound cake very, very plain. Other people like pound cake with more of a vanilla flavor or more of a lemon flavor or more of an almond flavor. So it's still the cake, but it has a particular flavoring that gives it its essence. Now, in a piece of music, those ingredients— the melody, the harmony, the rhythm— are usually arranged into a structure. And that's sort of where we are now. We're looking at the structure of the piece. This would be the sections. You might look at it in terms of verses or choruses, maybe an introduction, maybe a coda at the end. Maybe there are sections that repeat. It depends on how the piece is arranged, but it generally comes in those particular sections, things you can identify. Oh look, this part comes back. You can find those, look for those sections, those structures. That's the essential nature of the piece. And now you can change this. This can be part of the choice that you make in an arrangement. You can say, all right, well, you know what, I don't know that I want to have a verse and then another verse and then the chorus. I might just want to do one verse and then the chorus. I mean, you've probably heard a version of a, of a song or a hymn or another piece that starts with a different kind of introduction, or maybe it even starts with the chorus and then goes to the verse, right? This is an arranger's choice. So it's like, oh yeah, it could be lemon, it could be almond, could be vanilla, but it's still the cake. So we're going to take those parts of this structure, we're going to take the verses, take the sections that repeat, the A sections, the B sections, whatever it is, and either leave them in the original order— nothing wrong with that— or if we feel like it, change it around a little bit. You can do that too. Now I admit, so far this is more like system than creativity. We started with some bare bones And then, okay, we looked at whether or not we wanted to keep those bare bones in exactly the same order or maybe mix it up a little bit. We haven't gotten extremely creative yet. And if you're an expert arranger, those are steps you probably don't even think about very much anymore. You cut right to the chase here. But the fact is that without considering the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, and the structure, you don't really have the bones, the foundation for your own arrangement. So everybody starts here, whether or not that's a really quick and almost unconscious part of your process or not. But now we do get to the good stuff. We're going to color in the lines here. We've got the outline for our arrangement, and we're going to start just making it a little bit more special. So we're going to start putting in the fun stuff. We're going to not Not get too carried away at first, but right now we want it to be more than, okay, a melody line and a harmony line. All right, great. We want it to be filled in a little bit, so we're going to be filling in the left hand and the right hand using chords, patterns, extra notes to add richness where you want it. Now there are a couple of considerations here. First of all, realize that what you're really doing is just creating the texture of the piece. Now you're not getting all fancy yet. We're just sort of adding in the notes that make it sound more like a piece of music than just the, the, you know, the big note, very easy version of a piece of music, right? We want it to sound like something you would play. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to look at pieces that you like to play, pieces that you play often. Go back to those pieces that you play and see what's there. See what the left hand does. Take a look at options and say, "Oh, okay, look, this is a left hand pattern that I've played in this piece and I really like it, and I bet it would sound right in this kind of a piece." Or, "Oh, look, here are how to add some extra right hand notes, and I remember that in this piece I used a whole bunch of these 3-note chords." Or I used the right-hand melody in 6ths there, and I played a whole lot of 6ths. Or I did this. Or, you know, look at the pieces you already play. And this is for a couple of reasons. One is it's going to give you some choices to choose from, right? If you're not used to just pulling music and notes out of thin air, as it were, The easiest thing to do is to look at pieces that you've already played and get your ideas from there. That's not stealing. You can call it benchmarking, if you will. But the fact is that for a more experienced arranger who's pulling those ideas out of thin air, they're not out of thin air either. They're from their own experience. This is using your own experience to inform your, your set of options for this particular arrangement. So go back and look at what you've played, find what you like to play, and bring that over to your new arrangement. This has a couple big advantages. Not only do you have those choices written down, but you know that since this is in a piece that you can play, you know how to play that already. It's going to be within your ability. An interesting fact is that many of us who arrange pieces, and I include myself in this group, arrange them to be too hard. We hear possibilities and we think they'd be great and we write them down, and then we discover later that, gosh, I know I wrote this down, but I have to practice it. It's really hard. And at that point we may decide that it's worth simplifying things just a little bit and, you know, going back to the drawing board and erasing some of the complexity that we put in. And that's great, but when you're choosing from pieces that you know you can play, you're probably choosing things that you can play. So not bad. So this gives you those kinds of choices that you can add, ways you can add extra notes. But remember, you also get to make artistic choices. That's part of of what this is. We're not just taking notes and sticking them in. You can decide in terms of what you want the music to sound like. Consider the mood of the piece, what you want from this piece. Do you want it to sound dreamy and reflective? Do you want it to sound energetic? Think about how the notes that you choose and the patterns that you choose are going to help with your interpretation of that piece. If the piece is dreamy and reflective, maybe you want more arpeggiated things. Maybe you want something more legato. Maybe you don't want as many notes because you want it to sound very simple and peaceful. On the other hand, if your piece is fast and energetic, you probably don't want to put too many notes in there because you're going to make the— make it harder to play, for one thing, but you may very well obscure the melody or the harmony, and you want some extra clarity there. So think about what you want the piece to sound like. Those are your artistic choices. And then bring over some of the things that you know you can play, some of those ideas from pieces you have played before, and bring those to help you color in those lines. So does that make sense? We've got the foundation, we've got the structure, and now we've colored it all in. And by this point You should have a piece that sounds pretty good. It sounds like a piece you could play. Sounds like the original piece, but maybe with a couple little tweaks. You know, maybe you've arranged some of the— rearranged some of those sections, and you've certainly harpified it. You've gotten it to a point that, you know, where it's a piece that you want to play, that fits in your fingers. And now we get to the last stage. We get to add what I call the harp bling. Simply, the harp bling is the fun stuff. It's the special effects. It's the glissandos or the harmonics. It's all those different sounds that we harpists can do. Things that make harp music sound special. Things that are different from something a piano could do, for instance. We can do glissandos, harmonics. We can play near the soundboard. We can play with our fingernails. We can tap on the soundboard. There are so many different sounds that we could make. Salzedo's book Modern Study of the Harp has a glossary of sounds that he used. Andrés, Bernard Andrés, his notation is filled with even more sounds like the son pincé, the pinched sounds, right? The harp has such a rich variety of sounds, effects that we can make. Use them. To add atmosphere to your arrangement. Make your glissandos ethereal if that's what you want. Make them dramatic if that's what your piece needs. Use these. You don't have to use a lot of them, right? They're like accessories. We don't want to over-accessorize. You can use them sparingly, but use them to make your piece special. Special to the harp, special to you. After all, what good is your arrangement if it doesn't sound like you? Right? These are the choices that you get to make with your arrangement. Now, following these steps will give you a framework to stretch your creativity, right? It's a little like that needlework pattern I was talking about. By following the pattern, you learn more about what is possible, and so you feel freer to experiment and make your own choices. But it's not only a creativity framework, it's also a learning framework because it's going to help increase your awareness of musical structure and patterns, which of course will help you learn your music faster and see these in any other piece that you start to learn. So it's truly a very powerful framework whether you're being intuitive or intentional or both. Now one last thing. You might have realized that I have ignored a really important element here. If you're going to be making your own arrangement, you have to figure out how to write it down. There are plenty of music writing programs around, and you can just quickly Google them and see which one works for you. There are a few that are, are pretty complicated, but some of the easier and less expensive ones are Notion, like an idea, Notion, MuseScore, and NoteFlight. They are pretty easy and pretty inexpensive. Dorico, D-O-R-I-C-O, Dorico is more fully featured and only a little bit more expensive. Something like Sibelius, it's very full-featured and it is pretty expensive, and it comes with a really steep learning curve if you've never done this before. Do one of the easier ones. MuseScore is pretty easy to use, so is Notion. So try those. But I would urge you to try handwriting your music because this is really the best way to learn how music looks and why it looks right or why it looks wrong. Think about how when we learn language, we learn to read it and write it. Those two skills go together. Music language works the same. So get yourself some manuscript paper. You can download free manuscript paper. Just look anywhere online and try writing your own music. It's an education in itself and one that is very helpful, even if it does have a slightly steep learning curve of its own. So that was the podcast episode that I recorded nearly 2 years ago. It's Episode 171, so quite a while back because this is Episode 267, so it was a while ago. The point of that episode was to sort of give you a look at what the arranging process was like. But I do realize that thinking about arranging is very different from doing it, and just getting over that first hump and beginning to arrange might seem like something that is still a mountain for you and something maybe you, you would like to try, but you're you don't think you're quite ready for it. And so I was thinking that as we're coming up to July and as we like to start our Christmas music in July, we almost always have some kind of Christmas in July event here at Heart Mastery. I thought this year our Christmas in July would be about arranging, about making your own arrangement of A Christmas Carol. And which Christmas carol is yet to be decided because we're going to have a poll and you'll have a few different Christmas carols to choose between and we'll vote for the top 3 and it'll be, it'll be a lot of fun. But what we're going to do is in the middle of July we're going to have a 3-day challenge and we're going to work with the Christmas carol of your choice from the set that we pick and you're going to arrange it. We'll start with the framework, we'll put in the, the structure, we'll go all the way to the fancy stuff, and we'll do it in the course of one week, just 3 calls. We'll get it, and by the time we finish the challenge, you'll have enough that you can polish it on your own, and you've got plenty of time to get it ready for December. And just imagine what it will be like for perhaps the very first time for Christmas, you'll have an arrangement that is yours exactly the way you want it to be. You'll be able to play it because you will have written it, so it's going to be really, really special. And I want to help you with this. I want to make sure you know how to do it. We're going to be using the music notation app MuseScore. We're going to have a pre-challenge call where I make sure you've got MuseScore and you know how to use it and you're all ready and set so that by the time the challenge starts, you'll be up and running and we can get all this done. So I'm really excited about this. I think it's going to be a ton of fun, and I'm going to put the link in the show notes for this episode so that you can register. We're calling it Compose for Christmas, but it's all about your music. It's about taking that Christmas carol and making it yours. I can't think of a more fun thing to have when it comes to this Christmas season. It's going to be the best one ever. So check that link in the show notes. Registration is opening today, so you can get in there and register, and we'll get everything moving. You can take the poll to vote on the Christmas carols that we're going to be working on. And by the way, I will be working on a Christmas carol right alongside you. I'll I'll pick one of the— I'll pick a different one, not one of those three, and you'll get that arrangement as a special little bonus for completing the challenge too. So that will be your special gift from me, another arrangement to add to your repertoire if you like, but you'll have yours, and that's the one that counts. I'm so excited about this. I think it's going to be a ton of fun, and I'd love for you to work along with me. So check that link. Go ahead and register for Compose for Christmas. Now, next week on the show, we're going to be talking about music in the silence, something totally different, but we're going to be talking about what makes music so impactful when it's quiet, when nothing is happening. It's a scary moment for us harpists when we're just letting go and the strings are ringing and we're— we have nothing to control. It's something that I think we need to spend a little bit of time on. So that's next week's show, Finding the Music in the Silence. Now 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. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.