Left Hand Literacy: Skills Your Left Hand Is Missing - PHH 047

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. Now, we're talking about left hand today and I have a serious question to ask you. Does your left hand struggle to keep up? Well, you know what I mean, right? Your right hand seems to have its act together, but your left hand always takes longer to feel comfortable with the notes, no matter what piece you're learning right now. Maybe you're thinking that I have a hidden camera somewhere in your practice room, right? But not at all. It's simply that I have had my own left hand issues too. Now, I used to think that if I were left handed, I wouldn't have these problems. But I hear many of my left handed students, even the more advanced players, complaining about the same left hand awkwardness. So much for trying to become ambidextrous. I as a solution. Even more frustrating is that the solutions I used to recommend to my students, the same ones I was using myself, really aren't solutions at all. Sure, they helped my left hand become more fluent and flexible, which I would call a big win. But I still saw my students struggle with left hand passages that should have been easily within their grasp, or more precisely, within their left hand's grasp. That's when it finally dawned on me. I had been training my left hand the same way I was training my right hand. Now, while there's no harm in that, and there's really no doubt it's tremendously beneficial, it clearly didn't fix the problem. And there's a simple reason for this. While our two hands do many of them of the same things and need to be able to do them equally well, things like scales, arpeggios and chords, for instance, each hand is also a specialist. Our right hand plays more melody, our left hand plays more accompaniment. Our right hand thumb, for instance, is key to a well phrased melody, but our left hand needs to have a dependable fourth finger for those resonant low bass notes. Our right hand spins out the tune, but our left hand provides the harmonic support and the rhythmic stability that make that tune intelligible, that make it flow. In short, our left hand has a very specialized vocabulary, certain techniques, certain patterns that are different from those that our right hand usually plays. Now, most exercise books don't address this, and most teachers, and I've been guilty of this too, don't emphasize this either. But on today's show, we'll review the things your left hand must know in order to be literate, to be comfortable with the unique tasks that we ask of it every day. And of course, talking about them isn't enough for us here on this podcast. So I'm going to give you some practice strategies and I'll share a free resource that will help you follow through on our discussion and develop your left hand literacy.

Now, of course, our podcast theme today fits right in with our theme for the entire month of April, which is all about technique. So at Harp Mastery, we are working on all things technical. Doesn't mean that the podcast will be about technique every week in April, but today it certainly is. But I also want to recommend one of our Harp Mastery courses that can really help you if technique is something that you think you need to brush up on. And this is our four weeks to finger freedom course. Now, this is a four week, it's a four week, you know, self study kind of course. It's six video lessons with accompanying PDFs, everything's downloadable, of course, and there are four weekly practice plans that you can use to guide you all the way through the course. But the idea of the course is this. If you want to play more quickly, if you want your fingers to move more quickly, to be able to play fast music, to be able to play it fluidly and evenly, the secret to that playing is scales. You need to work on your scales. Now, I know that sounds boring, it sounds dull, it sounds unmusical. But. But the thing is, there's a reason that harpists have been for centuries practicing their scales, and that's because they work. But you need to have to prac. You need to practice them the right way. Scales don't have to be boring when you practice them, but they do have to be focused. They have to be intentional. And this particular course is going to help you develop your fingers and your scales the right way so that you can have that dependable and even 10 technique that you want. So if this is something that sounds like it might be useful to you, and at one point or another it's useful for all of us, that's for sure. I highly Recommend this course, 4 weeks to finger Freedom. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's a simple and easy to follow course, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some really powerful content. The, the, the skills that you'll learn, the concepts that you'll learn will really help propel your technique forward.

You know, hopefully give you some new, some new technique habits along the way. And of course, like all of our courses, once you purchase the course, you have lifetime access to it. It doesn't go away. So, you know, if so, don't feel like you have to, you know, learn it all in four weeks. It's going to be there for you when you want it. So I will put the link to four Weeks to Finger Freedom in our show notes and you can start brushing up on your scale technique using that course. But right now, we're going to start talking about your left hand literacy. If you look through some older 19th century Etude books, you'll notice something very peculiar. Most of those etude books treat the right hand and the left hand very differently. They give a lot of work to the right hand and not so much of the same kind of work to the left hand. Now, more contemporary books have tried to even this out, which is great because we need to really work our left hands the same way we work our right hands. But as I mentioned at the top of the podcast, the difference here is that your left hand does have very specialized work to do and it is different from what the right hand does. So when we see all those older etude books that have not a lot to do for the left hand, we have what they are giving the left hand to do is what the left hand needs to do, the things that it particularly needs extra work on. As I said, that's no reason to ignore those agility exercises for your left hand, but it is a good reason to pay some attention to what your left hand really needs to do. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And I'm going to talk about three or four different things that your left hand really needs to be good at. And we'll talk about how it needs to practice them or how you need to help it get better at these Techniques. And the first and perhaps most obvious one is simply playing octaves. Think about it. I mean, your right hand plays octaves, of course it does. But the left hand octaves have a particular purpose and they're very pervasive, aren't they? They're everywhere. And the left hand octaves are there to add depth. They add richness to a chord, they add emphasis to a beat, they add that wonderful resonance.

To the harmony of a piece. So those left hand octaves are really important. And we have a couple different ways that we play them. One of those ways is sort of a normal position for your hand. And the other one I would call an open hand or a flat hand octave. So let me explain the difference. When your left hand plays an octave in the same. The usual hand position, the same one that your right hand would use if it plays an octave. I mean, in fact, you can visualize that. Think about your right hand playing an octave on its strings. And your left hand is going to play it the same way. So it's going to play the bottom note with your fourth finger, the top note with your thumb, and the second and third finger are sort of dropped down in between, right? So that if you closed your hand and then just opened 1 and 4, that would be your octave. And that's sort of your normal hand position octave. And it works very well. And it's a technique that your left hand needs to be able to do. And just practicing scales in octaves will be helpful because it's going to help you learn the spacing between one and four. And it will help your octaves be just a little bit more automatic. But as I mentioned, there's another octave technique that you need to be aware of, and that's the open hand or the flat hand octave. This is a completely different technique and one that your right hand never does. It's exclusive to your left hand. Isn't that nice to think of your left hand as special? So this is done with your entire hand open and you can even place it flat on the strings just to sort of get an idea of what it would be. You're going to put it flat on the strings and then use 1 and 4. Or sometimes third finger can even help with this. And you can have 3 and 4 on the same string, but usually it's just 1 and 4 playing the octave. And 2 and 3 are sort of sticking up in the air. You play the octave, release it and close all four fingers when you do that. But what happens, the virtue of the flat hand, the Reason we're doing it this way is because when you replace the octave, you're going to flatten your hand against the strings and create this instantaneous muffle. And replacing that just clears the sound. So that when you have a series of octaves to play, you can get.

A lot of clean sound. You can eliminate some of the extra resonance so that you can hear the series of octaves. Now, hang on for a second. I'm going to move over to the harp and I'll play this for you so you can hear the difference. Okay, I'm going to play a scale of octaves for you and I'm going to play them in my normal hand position. All right? So I've got 1 and 4 here on the strings, and 2 and 3 are dropped down into my hand and I'm going to play a scale just like this.

Lots of resonance, lots of over ring. Perfectly nice. And a great way to play octaves. But what if we wanted to separate the sound just a little bit and to create that clarity so there wasn't quite so much over ring between one note and the next? We could use a flat hand and that would sound like this.

You can hear that instant when my hand replaces on the strings and muffles them as it places the next octave. Now I can use. I can time that muffle so that it could be the way I did just now. And that keeps the notes nice and long. Or I can make the notes shorter, more staccato by replacing more quickly with my flat hand like this.

So that flat hand technique, you can imagine, it's got a lot of. A lot of uses, right? We can use it to just take out some extra notes we don't want ringing and just use one octave like this.

And take out the middle notes that we didn't want to keep to have vibrating. Or we can use it to create a very staccato bass or just a very clear one. So that is an expressive technique that is specific to the left hand. Right hand doesn't do this. So that's octaves. Now, going along with that is another left hand technique that right hand doesn't do at all. And that would be thumb muffles. Now, you may have seen these marked in your music. Usually a note that is intended to be a thumb muffle note might be marked. Instead of having a one where you would place your thumb, it might be marked with a little plus sign. Or sometimes there are other ways to muffle it. You might see the French term sans et to fait Muffled sounds. And it's got a little muffle and some dots and stuff. But.

That'S the bane of our existence, right? Heart markings are not standardized and they never will be. But a thumb muffle does much the same thing. It creates clarity. It can be a staccato thing. It can just create a little bit more punch to a bass line. And you do it much the same way you would do a flat hand octave. Your hand is going to replace entirely flat and open on the strings. But you only play your thumb. So you end up playing your thumb in what looks like a pretty weird position. Your hand is not on the strings when you play your thumb. But before you play the next thumb, your hand replaces flat on the strings to create that separation. And it sounds like this.

You can hear how short those notes are. Now, once again, we can vary the length, right? They can be longer.

Or they can be very short.

And that all comes from replacing your hand more sort of the. The base of your thumb almost on the string and then lifting it off in order to play your thumb and then replacing it before you play the next thumb. So the replacing becomes the muffle. It's a very efficient way to. Way to muffle something like that. And it's a standard left hand technique you will find in various books. You'll find some exercises that work on thumb muffles and you likely have encountered them in pieces that you've played. But it's a great technique to just brush up on once in a while so that you know that you can do it. So there are a couple specific things right there. Octaves and thumb muffles. But of course, your left hand has plenty of October other responsibilities as the accompaniment hand. So let's talk about a couple of those left hand accompaniment figures are almost always based on chords or arpeggios, right? Which are pretty much the same as chords, except the notes are one after the other instead of all at the same time. So any understanding of chord theory or harmony that you have is always useful in helping you learn a left hand faster, helping you see the patterns and understand what's going on. So starting from that understanding of chords is terrific. But I want to talk more about what it actually plays, the figures that it plays. So simple, plain old chords, always good. And you know, there's a lot that goes into playing chords. But I want to talk about a couple more specific left hand patterns. One pattern that's very basic but shows up an awful lot is where you have a single low note on the first beat. And then the other beats in the measure have a little chord higher up. Maybe something like this.

You've got that low note on the bottom, and then you have to jump to the chord. There's one very basic trick that I just want to share with you because I've seen lots of students struggle with this and they'll start working on a piece with it and then they bring it to a lesson. It's like, oh, no, I forgot to tell you something really basic. And I want to be sure that you know that before we go any further. When you have a pattern like that, play that low note with your fourth finger. Don't try to play it with your second finger, even though your second finger might feel stronger. Your fourth finger is the finger to use. Why? Because it's closer. Your fourth finger is going to reach further and you're going to be able to.

Decrease the effective distance between the low note and the chord. Think about it for a second. If you can reach your fourth finger all the way out, you have a very short distance to move to play that chord that comes next. You go to the harp and you try it. When you get a chance, use your second finger on the bottom note and then jump up to the chord. Or use your fourth finger and jump up to the chord. You'll find your fourth finger is much more efficient. So I just wanted to mention that really quickly because it's going to be a big difference maker for you if you haven't done that before. So that's one of those little tricks. Not exactly a specific technique, but definitely a fingering that you want to know if. But your left hand has more complicated patterns too. Right? One pattern that we see a lot is the pattern we call the Alberti bass, named after that wonderful composer Alberti, whose music is largely forgotten, but whose name persists because of this particular accompaniment pattern that he supposedly used in his music. And it's a pattern that goes like this.

Where you have the low note, the high note, the middle note, the high note. In this case, I'm playing G, D, B, D, right? And so the fingering would be 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1. Unless you have a larger reach. And you might have three one, two, one, four, one, two, one, three, one, two, one, four million one, two, one. And that's a pattern that your left hand needs to be able to play. My guess is you've come up against that more than once in your harp playing journey so far. And so you know that you really need to be able to do this with different chords, different spacings, and you know the different finger positions that come with that. But as you practice it, what you want to do is to remember to close your fingers fully and to stay relaxed. Keep your hand open. Don't let your hand scrunch up and your fingers get tight. When you play this, keep your hand relaxed with a good amount of space between your fingers and your thumbs so they have room to move and room to close. And that will give you that nice, relaxed, full sound. So start from there. There's a more sophisticated technique that goes along with this and is sometimes useful in extended passage, and that's the technique of oscillating.

Oscillating is when you essentially use your wrist to help you play your thumb. It helps your thumb not get so fatigued in a long pattern like this. We use it in trills, we use it in other sorts of things. But it can be useful in an Alberti bass too. What happens is you play your thumb. Say we're doing a three, one, two, one pattern.

You play your third finger normally, but when you play your thumb, you turn your wrist forward toward the column of the harp, almost like you were turning a doorknob. And you actually don't have to work so hard to close your thumb because your wrist is helping your thumb play. And then you bring your wrist back far enough that your thumb can replace on the string. You don't want to turn it further back because that turns your hand upside down and that doesn't help you play the harp. So you play your third finger normally. Then use your wrist to help twist your thumb forward, bring it back, play your second finger and once again use your wrist to help throw your thumb forward so that wrist oscillation can make an extended passage of Alberti bass, for instance, a lot easier to play. So that's what happens with your thumb in a pattern like this. So the Alberti bass is one that you should know. You can practice this. Find any little passage of three note chords, even if it's not written like an Alberti bass. Just find a few three note chords together or just make up one on your own and practice them in that pattern. 3, 1, 2, 1. Maybe this. 3. 1, 2, 1. New chord. 3, 1, 2. Next one. How about 4, 1, 2, 1? 4, 1, 2, 1. 3, 1, 2, one. Any series of chords that you like will work for this. So go ahead and make up a couple chords and try out your Alberti bass. But this is something your left hand should know how to do.

Left hand arpeggios also really common and they often happen where you have a really big spacing here in your left hand.

Right. I'm playing a G and then a D G with my fourth finger, a D with my third finger, a G with my second finger and a B with my thumb. This is a really interesting spacing and it's a spacing that happens in our harp. Left hand chords all the time chords and arpeggios. Both pianists don't use this spacing as much. It happens to sound really, really good on the harp. It's rich and it's open and the resonance of the strings really shines through with this, with this particular spacing.

It's really beautiful. And so you see it a lot. And it's something you need to be prepared to play as an arpeggio or as a chord. In fact, in its chord form, I call it the left hand master chord because it shows up so, so often. But let's talk about it as an arpeggio first and then we'll talk about it as a chord. So in its arpeggio form, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's often too big a stretch for people to play. You know, that stretch between four and three is big. And to try to put all four notes on the strings can be really difficult for a lot of people. So I wanted to give you a couple of ways to do this. If you can't place all four fingers on that big stretch at once, there are a couple things you can do. One is you can place just four and three, Then play your fourth finger and rock your hand up, using your third finger as a pivot to place the top two notes. So you're going to place four and three and have your other fingers open, but not on the strings so they're not overstretched. Then as you play four, rock your hand up, pivot it on your third finger, place two and one and you can play the other notes. And with a little bit of practice, you're able to do this in a smooth rhythm.

And it will be as smooth and fluid as if you had placed them all at the same time. Another possibility, of course, is to jump. Right. You may not be able to place four and three. That may not be comfortable for you. So don't be afraid to jump. Play your fourth finger and then jump to the 3, 2, 1.

You'll be able to do this smoothly also with a little bit of practice. But it is something that you should practice and be comfortable playing because I guarantee you're going to see it in one of your pieces, and probably many more than one, if you haven't seen it already. So do practice this kind of arpeggiation, either with placing or with rolling up or jumping if you need to.

You will. You will use it, I guarantee. What I want you to avoid is over stretching and causing pain in your hand. Never stretch something so far that it hurts and certainly don't repeat it once you've done it once. So do not hurt yourself with this. You can really injure your. Those. Those delicate little tendons. So don't, don't overstretch. Better to jump or to pivot up or to make accommodation, however you need to, rather than hurting yourself. So there are the two best ways to avoid that. But of course, sometimes that chord doesn't show up as an arpeggio, it shows up as a chord, and that's a little bit more difficult. When we want to play all those notes at once, it's usually not an unbroken chord. Usually we can roll it, but it's still a big grab all at once, isn't it? It's really hard to do. So I would suggest that if that's a difficult stretch for you, don't be afraid to make an accommodation to leave out one of those inner notes. And usually the note to leave out would be the note that the second finger would play. So if we're playing the G, the D, the G and the B, lots of times people will talk about this as a 1, 5, 8 and 10 or 3 chord, right? Because you're playing the first note, the fifth above it, then the octave above that bottom note, and then another 10th above that bottom note. So G, D, G, B is what I've got here, and it's a big stretch. So the note I would advocate leaving out, if you need to leave one out, leave out that higher G and just play the low G, the D and the B, what people will often call a 1, 5, 3.

Scenario, because it's the first note, the fifth note, and then the third note way up there, right? The. The root of the chord, the fifth of the chord, and the third of the chord way up there. And playing just G, D, B, 4, 2, 1 is not nearly as big a stretch. It still might not be comfortable. And in fact, you may have to work up to even playing a tenth from G to B. In this case, a tenth between your. From your fourth finger to your thumb. That may be a bit of a stretch. So you can practice that and practice it gently and calmly like this. Start by playing a short series of octaves and make sure that your 1 in 4 spacing for octaves is comfortable, like an octave G, an octave A, an octave B. And just make sure that that's nice and comfortable with a nice normal hand position. 2 and 3 dropped down towards your palm, not touching your palm, but just drop down toward it. And 1 and 4 nicely open and then closing into your hand as you play. So start with the octaves, then see if, rather than just playing an octave G, see if you can play a G on the bottom and an A on the top. That's a ninth. And see what that stretch feels like. Go back and forth from the octave to the 9th.

I know the 9th doesn't sound as pretty, but that's how you know you're working at it. And then you can do a few ninths in a row. G and A, then A and B and B and C. Definitely not pretty, but you know you're doing the right thing and see how that feels and then see if you can get to a tenth. Once again, it's so important that you don't hurt yourself. In fact, I have an entire PDF that I would like to give you that talks about developing up to the this master chord and working on it step by step. It's just a one page PDF but it'll show you the various sort of combinations of notes and fingering that you can try as you work up to this. Don't overwork. It's. It's so important to keep your hand healthy and safe, but it is something that will show up in your music. You'll see it and it's so lovely to play. So let's, you know, see if we can get you, get you started getting there. Even if it's just getting that tenth stretch between your fourth and your thumb in your left hand, that would be great. But once again, that's a left hand thing. Right hand doesn't do this nearly as much. Left hand encounters it all the time.

Who knew that there were so many things that the left hand needed to learn and do totally aside from all the regular aspects of playing. It's amazing, isn't it? Your left hand is a busy fellow and we need to need to treat him kindly. But we do need to remember to spend a little bit of time developing the techniques that left hand wheel need to do. So that's what I call left hand literacy. So do be sure to use the link in the show notes I mentioned that PDF about the, the exercises for the left hand master chord. It's Totally free, but. And I've put the link in the show notes for you. So head on over to the Show Notes. You'll find them on the website or here, wherever you're listening to the podcast, and head on over to that spot. Enter your email and we will send you that PDF for the left hand master cord. And if you're ready to take your technique a little bit further, go ahead and try that four Weeks to Finger Freedom course once again. I know it says four weeks and it is a four week course. That doesn't mean you have to do it in four weeks. You get to do this at your own pace. And as always with all of our heart mastery courses, you have lifetime access to it, so don't feel like you have to rush. But it's going to show you new ways to think about your scales, new things to do with them, and certainly a new path to more flexible, fast and fluid fingers. Try to say that four times quickly. I don't think I could. So anyway, we've given you a lot of technical things to think about today, but I hope that you have developed a new appreciation for what your left hand does and gotten some better understanding about what you need to do to help to train it to do those things. It's been a lot of fun sharing these things with you and next week I have something totally different to talk to you about. I'm going to be talking to you about three questions your teacher wishes you would ask. Now, maybe you think that sounds a little self serving, being that I'm a teacher and perhaps it is, but I hope the topic intrigued you. I think you'll find it very interesting and you also may find that it gives you permission to ask some things that you have been afraid to ask your teacher. At any rate, I certainly hope so. So this is some. That's what we'll be talking about next week on the podcast. In the meantime, thank you so much for being here with me today. And remember that every day is a day. You can add just a little bit more harp happiness to the universe and to your own world and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Okay, see you next time. Bye. 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.