Moving Up: The Intermediate Level Skills You Need - PHH 256

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. I think one of the biggest challenges in music study is that it is very difficult to really measure our progress. It's so easy to lose track of what we've accomplished when we're faced with new challenges that often seem to be more of the same ones we've been struggling with all along. The notes are still hard. Our fingers still aren't moving fast enough. We still can't make our music flow. The reality of music study is that we will continue to face the same challenges at every stage of our harp journey. At the same time that we find new levels of facility or expression, we find new levels that we want to attain. It can feel as if we aren't getting anywhere even when we're truly making significant progress. I like to think of it as a spiral staircase where we're dealing with the same skills but at increasingly higher levels. Naturally, there are ways we can remind ourselves of the strides we have made. Reviewing pieces we played long ago or reading old practice journals can be powerful evidence that what was hard for us then isn't hard for us now. Participating in exam systems can give us this stamp of approval from an objective source that in effect certifies our progress. Think, you know, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. But it can be frustrating to feel like you're not progressing even if you actually are, and it can be more frustrating to wonder if you will always be stuck playing beginner-level music even as advanced beginner-level music. Of course, we know that these levels aren't standardized in any way, and we have to recognize that our own skills have strengths and weaknesses that make some pieces easier than others for us. Even so, wouldn't it be nice to know what skills really mark the step up from beginner to intermediate? And that's what I want to help you clarify today. Now, I've talked before about skills that I consider level-up skills, but today I want to look at a wider range of skills and show you how they translate to that important, if very ill-defined, jump from advanced beginner to intermediate music. And if you're a solid intermediate level player already and you'd like to push yourself to a more advanced playing level, this will show you how to move up that skill ladder too. It's that spiral staircase thing. We keep coming back to the same things. Now actually, this is the same principle that I used when I designed my Scale of Success curriculum. This is a curriculum that is available to our My Harp Mastery members. You have to be part of the membership in order to access it. And I'm going to remind those My Heart Mastery members who might be listening that this is the point of that curriculum. It's going to work you through those skills that you need in a very general way so that whatever playing level you are, you can use this curriculum as a way to make sure you're covering all the bases that you need, and you can work your way from Courageous all the way up to Celestial. And this is what that curriculum is about. Of course, if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, I'd certainly encourage you to take advantage of membership because that Scale of Success curriculum is in there, and it's just one of the many advantages of membership. So I've put a link to the Scale of Success in the show notes, so if you're a My Heart Mastery member, you can just click right through and it'll get you started with the Scale of Success. If you're not a My Heart Mastery member, please go to the website, take a look at everything My Heart Mastery Membership has to offer, and you can join us and start your own scale of success. It's a totally do-it-at-your-own-pace, on-your-own kind of curriculum, and I think that you will find it helpful. I know that our celestial graduates who have worked through all the levels have wonderful things to say about it, and talk about how it's helped them learn what they need to keep learning in order to keep moving forward in their heart plan. So that's the Scale of Success. That's the curriculum, lives in the My Heart Mastery membership, and it's based on these same principles that I'm going to talk about with you right now. And it's about that spiral staircase of stuff and what you need to know to become a player at that next level. And specifically, we're talking about the skills to get you from beginner to intermediate. Of course, before we can start talking about those skills, we have to realize that we're talking about something that is so unclear. There is no clear line of demarcation that objectively divides the beginner level from the intermediate level. There isn't that other levels, of course, too. It's just that we know that there are some things that seem like they're beginner, some things that seem like beginners couldn't do them, so we call them intermediate. Of course, when you're looking at a piece of music, maybe you're looking at one online and it says advanced beginner, and you look at and you think, wow, that looks kind of hard. And then you look at another piece that says early intermediate and you think, wow, That looks pretty easy. You can see that there's no real standard here, and it's not that we harpists are, are on purpose trying to be vague. That's not the idea. It's just that the skills are so individual. A person who is very good at this one particular thing may not be good at another thing. You may have terrific harp reading skills, but if your music reading is great, that's terrific, but maybe your fingers aren't really working fast enough. Or maybe your fingers are doing just fine, but you're really not sure about reading bass clef yet, so that's slowing you down. So everybody has different skills and they're at different levels, and so trying to say one piece is advanced beginner and another one is early intermediate is really difficult. And that's why you'll see that kind of discrepancy. As I said, we're not trying to be vague. We're not trying to be unclear or confusing. It's just that that's what happens. So what I'd like you to consider, aside from those pieces of music, what I'd like you to consider is what really separates players beginning-intermediate or intermediate to advanced or advanced to professional. And there are really 3 things I think that separate the players no matter what level you're playing at, separating one level from the next. These 3 things may not be what you're expecting, although the first one probably is. The first one is technical facility. Just how well your fingers find the strings, play the strings, move around the strings. It's all about your technique, right? The, the more comfortable you are with harp technique, the more playing you've been doing, the more your fingers can do. So your technical facility is a big thing here. And if you think again about maybe a beginner piece it doesn't have a lot of connection maybe. I mean, think about a really easy beginner piece, very beginner, right? You're working with learning to connect your fingers and learning to play more than one finger at a time. And that's really a challenge at the very beginning stage. And as you get better, then you play more fingers and the things are more connected and you can play more fingers at one time. And so that's a technical facility thing. And then of course, if you think further along the line, right? You're playing faster and you're playing more notes and you can do big arpeggios, that kind of thing. So that's definitely a level up kind of an indicator, right? So your technical facility has to be up to the challenge of getting to the next level, whatever that level is. Now we'll get specific about beginner to intermediate here in a moment. But technical facility is one of those big level-up factors. The second one is speed of learning, and this has to do with how quickly you can get into the music and really start learning it. Not how long it takes you to polish a piece, because that can take quite a bit, but you know how How difficult is it for you to start and get through the notes of the piece? Are you able to read fluently? Are you able to get to playing? How well do you sight read? Can you play very quickly at those beginning stages? The speed of learning is really essential here, and you can see that a beginner is going to be trying to figure out the notes and what strings they go with on the harp. And a more advanced player— I mean, think way further down the line to somebody who's been playing a very long time— they can start a piece and they're way ahead even though the piece has more notes and is more complex. They've been doing it for so long, they're so comfortable at the harp, so comfortable with what it takes to play music on the harp, that they can make progress, big progress, right at the beginning of the piece. Pretty quickly. So speed of learning is the second factor. The third factor here is the power to communicate. Now I know that we spend a lot of time talking about flow. I want my pieces to flow. My playing doesn't sound fluid or smooth. And the power to communicate goes beyond that. Sure, flow and smoothness and fluidity and agility, that's all part of this, but it goes beyond that. The power to communicate. Do you understand the piece, and can you communicate that understanding through your own creative expression in the harp? Can you control the dynamics? Can you control the pace of the music? Everything from the tempo to the retards or rubato or anything like that. So that's all part of the power to communicate. And you know what I mean. Even you might have heard this, I'm sure you have, even if my explanation of it seems awkward and unfamiliar to you. It is a little awkward. It's a little hard to talk about, but think about listening to a very young child play something on the piano. And you know, there they are at the piano recital and they're pounding out the notes and everything is correct and it sounds 'Exactly right,' except it doesn't really sound like music. That's the difference. The player who has a little bit more experience, a little bit more musical maturity, is going to make those notes sound like something so that people don't just say, 'Oh, that was nicely played, dear.' They're going to say, 'Wow, that was really beautiful. That made me feel something.' That's the power to communicate. Granted, with this skill, as with the other two— the technical facility and the speed of learning— there's a very wide range of accomplishment between a raw beginner and somebody who's a professional who's been playing for years and years and decades and decades, right? There's a lot of, a lot of playing time has gone into that difference, and that shows in the way the music comes across. So There's a long range of accomplishment here. And so what we talk about in terms of levels, beginner, intermediate, advanced, those are segments of that path, right? Where you are leveling up to this point and then leveling up to the next point and to the next point and so on. So it's not a journey you have to make all at once. You don't have to be excellent at any of these things right now. But those are the things that tell us whether a player is, you know, a master or whether they're not there yet. So these are the things we're listening for, whether we're considering it in terms of judgment or not. When we listen to a player, we unconsciously register how comfortable they are at the instrument and how well they understand the music. This is something that we as listeners can sense, and these are the areas that we seek to improve in our own playing. Now, what I've done for our discussion today is pick out some skills that I think are very specific to moving up from beginner level to intermediate level. These are the skills that you will need to develop if you're going to play intermediate-level repertoire. Obviously, there are some intermediate-level pieces that won't require the same level of development of these skills as others, and there probably are some pieces that are labeled advanced beginner that will require these skills too. But these are the ones that really will make that difference for you so that you can move into the intermediate repertoire and feel like you've done so successfully. They all are relevant to those 3 factors that I just talked about. And if you're already at that point where you're trying to move up to intermediate level, you'll notice that these are the things you need to work on. Naturally, all of these skills relate to the 3 factors that we talked about before. They're going to help you move into that. So if you're at the point in your playing where you're really kind of struggling a little bit trying to get to that intermediate level, the skills that I'm going to talk about now will show you what you need to work on to make that transition successfully. Now, if you're past this point, you're a, you know, a solid intermediate or, or better player, but you still want to move to that next level, you can use these ideas that I'm going to talk about now, these skills, to show you what your stepping stones are going to be to the next stage of your development. So I've divided these skills into 3 technical skills and 3 musicianship skills. The things you need to know, the things that will make your journey into the world of intermediate music a lot easier. So let's start with the technical skills because they're so clear. At least I think they're clear, and I'm gonna hopefully make them clear to you as well. First, we're going to talk finger fluency. This is about how well your fingers move over the strings. Do they feel comfortable on the strings and you can find them easily and you're not struggling to make your fingers do the right things? You know, think about when you were a raw beginner at the harp and how the harp position felt so uncomfortable and you had to think about, you know, your hand being in the right position and trying to close your fingers and crossing under for a a scale was a big deal. That's the beginner stage. By now, if you're moving to the intermediate level, your fingers should be much more comfortable. They should be able to play a lot of patterns on the harp, things like arpeggios and chords and scales, and they should be playing a little bit faster than they were and feeling a lot more comfortable doing what they need to do. Connecting shouldn't be such a big deal for you. So when we're talking about finger fluency, that's what we mean. We're talking about the ability to play the strings easily, to not be trying to struggle to figure out how to get your finger on the string and then play it. That very basic beginner skill, that's what we want to move past. So we're talking about connecting and closing and playing scales and arpeggios and playing a little bit faster. You don't have to play lightning speed at an intermediate level, although some pieces are going to require it, but you can work at that as you go. It's finger fluency, and this should apply to your right and your left hand as well. Your left hand needs fluency. Think about what the, the pieces that intermediate level players play calls for a lot of left-hand dexterity, sometimes left-hand melody, lots of ripling arpeggios perhaps in the left hand or big chords. So this applies to both hands. And of course, the standard way to work on these things— exercises, right? You're playing lots of music and you're reviewing your music, and all of that is good, but your exercises, scales and arpeggios, are key here. Get used to them, play them all over the harp. We really want to be able to be comfortable playing anywhere on the harp. So think about that. Scales, arpeggios, exercises— you're building finger fluency, and that's what you need for intermediate level. Technical skill number 2 is chords. I know it is a hard thing. Think about when you first started playing intervals on the harp, and getting your second finger and thumb to play at the same time was a big deal. And now I'm sure that you're playing 3-finger chords and, you know, 3-2-1 or 4-2-1, also not a big deal. But think about what is or was a challenge about that step up from 2 fingers at a time to 3 fingers at a time. If you can't remember that far back, I'll give you an idea. Getting 3 fingers on the strings at the same time is not an easy skill. Maybe you're taking that for granted now, and that's terrific. That's a good sign. So you can place those 3 fingers on the strings and they can play at the same time. Maybe you can even roll the chord. Terrific, that's great. To get to intermediate level music, you need to be thinking about 4-note chords, being able to get all 4 fingers in one hand on the strings at the same time and to have them place at the same time, to have them play at the same time, teaching them to roll chords. Those 4-note chords come up in intermediate level music. Now, your skill at those chords will get better the more intermediate level music you play, but I want you to be able to start working on those 4-note chords before you get there. Otherwise, it's going to make your first journey into intermediate music a little bit trickier because those 4-note chords come up all the time. We won't even talk about the fact that you might need 4 notes in both hands at the same time, but that is something to work on as well. And of course, you can do exercises that will help prepare you for that, Going from 3-note chords to 4-note chords doesn't seem like a big deal, but it is. It's much harder to think about those 4-note chords. And of course, it's not just the playing, is it? It's recognizing them on the page. It's deciphering the notes. And so you want to do drills and exercises where you're not only playing the notes, but you're reading them as well. When you're comfortable or at least fairly comfortable playing 4-note chords, intermediate level music is going to be so much easier for you. So maybe you're thinking someday you're going to get to intermediate level music. We'll start working on those 4-note chords now because that's what you're going to want to do. If you're already struggling with a piece with 4-note chords in it, we'll do some extra work. Let's shore up that skill. Let me take a moment here and just remind you that everybody has different skills at different levels at different times. So maybe your chords aren't giving you problems, but your fingers aren't very agile on the strings. Or maybe it's the other way around— your fingers do just fine on their own, but chords are still a struggle. If the skill is easy for you, then you're ready to move on. But if it's a skill that needs some work, if that's one that's kind of behind for you, then go ahead and work on it. Do play to your strengths. I mean, if you've got a lot of finger facility, then go for it. See if you can push your tempo faster. That will help you too. But if your chords are lagging at that same time, well, let's get some more chord work so that we can bring that up to the level you want to play the music that you want. All right, we've talked finger fluency, we've talked chords. The third technical skill has to do with hands together playing. I know that in even in beginner music you're playing hands together, but our challenges for each hand are going to be significantly bigger when we're talking about intermediate music. So What we're trying to do is to get you to play hands together sooner. I'm sure that when you were a beginner player, you started by learning one hand, then learning the other, and putting them hands together. But that's not the way we want to continue learning. An intermediate level player is able to start learning a piece hands together and then pulling it apart to work on the hands separately. That is such a key skill, and I find so many players who are stuck and don't realize that they need to level up their learning strategies to get to that next playing level. So that learning hands separately and then hands together is great. It's very secure, but it's a beginner strategy. And once you get to intermediate level, you don't need to do that anymore. You can trust your hands together playing a lot more than you could when you were a beginner at the harp. So we need to start moving up your comfort level with that. My guess is that the hands together playing isn't really such a problem for you. At least, you know, some things are harder to put hands together than others. I get that. But it's really about the confidence that you have in your own development of your skills that you can start by starting and trying anyway to do it hands together and then pull it apart and do it hands separately as you need. But starting hands together, that acknowledged comfort level with hands together practice and playing is a huge step forward. Definitely an intermediate level skill. So you can begin to do that now wherever you are. Make sure that you're starting hands together first. It's a big deal and it's a big difference maker. Now this brings us to our 3 musicianship skills. One is about reading. It's a reading skill. We want you to be able to start making more automatic connections between the dots on the page and the strings that you have to play. Think about this as the idea that your fingers are going to read the dots. We don't want you to look at the note and say, "Okay, second finger A," then look at the harp and put your second finger on the A string. At an intermediate level, we want that to happen without out your conscious direction. This is one of those things where we want the music to go straight through your eyes and into your fingers. That's where we're going eventually. We don't have to do that to play intermediate level music, but we need to start doing it. And one of the interesting ways to start training yourself to do that is to not look at the harp strings as much. Keep your face focused toward the music and use your peripheral vision as much as possible. We want to avoid tennis match head where your head's going looking left, then right, then left, then right. We want your head to be able to stay pretty still so that you can stay focused on the music and let your fingers find the strings on their own. Working toward that level of independence where your fingers are pretty independent of your actual managerial skills, right? Where you're looking at the strings and saying, okay, you know, this is where you need to be. We want your fingers to be independent from that, but this is something we can work toward. So as you move into intermediate level, this is a skill you need to start developing. You don't have to have it perfected to be an intermediate level player, but you need to be working there. So connecting the dots to the strings, that kind of a reading skill is absolutely a level up. And of course, going along with this is the actual reading of the notes, right? Your reading fluency, being able to easily and automatically know what the, the lines and spaces of this, of the staff are for both clefs and get hand to the right strings. That reading skill is also essential. But by the time you get to an advanced beginner level, you should be pretty well set with that. If you have any reading stumbles that, that seem to come up all the time for you, then take a look at practicing some of your reading skills. No harm in that. It will only help you, that's for sure. Okay, musicianship skill number 2. Is rhythmic confidence. Once again, this doesn't mean you have to be able to instantly decipher every rhythm as you get to the intermediate level. Think spiral staircase. You'll keep getting better as the demands keep getting more difficult, but you should be really comfortable with the common time signatures and rhythms, right? The, you know, the 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/8— those kinds of things should hold You know, they shouldn't be confusing for you, right? And the rhythms that we see all the time, you shouldn't have to stop to try to figure out. That doesn't mean that you won't have to stop and count them and figure them out from time to time, but you should be familiar with the things we play all the time because you're going to see more of them as you move into intermediate music. Counting is a skill you will definitely need here. Counting is not a skill for beginners. It's not just a skill that you learn at beginner stage and then abandon. You will continue to count throughout your musical life. It's an important skill, so be sure that you can count. And you should be getting comfortable with the metronome at this stage of your development as well. The metronome is a valuable tool. Yes, it can help you speed up, but it's most important for keeping you steady even at a slow pace. That's what it's training you to do. It's giving you time to get everything correct. It can help you develop your own inner sense of rhythm and pulse, and it will prevent lots of mistakes, prevent you from having to go back and relearn something. So counting, working with the metronome, being comfortable with common time signatures and rhythms, all part of the rhythmic confidence you need to step into intermediate level music. And the third musicianship skill that's a level up for you is creating flow. Now obviously this goes along with that power of communication that I talked about as that big separator, but what I mean here at this level where you're going from advanced beginner perhaps to early intermediate, creating flow— we're talking about being able to maintain a steady tempo, being able to play past mistakes, Being able to begin to have a sense of dynamic movement, thinking about phrasing, starting to think about all that, all the elements of musical expression. That's where creating flow comes in. Again, you don't have to be an expert at this in order to become an intermediate level harpist, but this is the skill that's going to be required for intermediate level music. Think about some of the pieces you want to play and think about how they need to go. They need to flow. They need to have a sense of melody. Whether it's something that has a lot of arpeggios in it, perhaps they need to flow with a certain degree of fluency and movement. Or just something that has a beautiful melody that needs to be phrased. That's the kind of flow that you're going to want to be developing. As you work your way through intermediate level. And you want to have that skill started before you start your foray into some of these more difficult pieces because that's what you're going to need to do. So creating flow is that last of the musicianship skills. So I gave you 6 to think about, right? Altogether talked about 3 technical skills: finger fluency and 4-note chords and hands-together playing where you're more confident with hands together, and you start that first. And then musicianship skills, where you're no longer having to watch every finger on the string, but that your fingers can read the strings and play without your full attention. Rhythmic confidence, and then creating flow. These are the skills that you will want to be developing as you move into intermediate level music. And what you can do at your advanced beginner stage is to think about preparing for those now because that's what you're going to need to move on. And then go ahead and choose one of those intermediate level pieces that you know you want to play that incorporates at least one of those things so that you have something fun to work on. It's like, okay, I, I know I don't want to work on my 4-note chords perhaps, but I do want to play this piece, and maybe that will make you feel just a little bit more motivated to get in there and get those 4-note chords in shape. And if you're beyond that stage in your own harp journey, maybe you're trying to get to more advanced music, the same kinds of skills will apply, but you're going to level those up to meet the musical demands of advanced literature instead of just intermediate literature. And I'll tell you one of the Others that you're going to need at that higher level is stamina. Mental stamina and physical stamina because those pieces get a lot longer, don't they? All right, so just a little hint of some things that we're talking about. Also, practice skills play into this too. So you may want to consider how much time you practice, how often you practice, how you use your practice time. That's a topic for another day, but it's something that you might want to consider as you're moving into more difficult music as well. My Heart Mastery members, I want to remind you again that our Scale of Success curriculum, which is right in our website, that will help you work through the skills that you need in a pretty logical way. It's all self-directed. It's pretty simple, but you're going to be able to learn the things you need to learn as you go along. So if you haven't started your Scale of Success journey, Go ahead, dive in there and take a look at it. I can guarantee that the people who have gone all the way through it have found it incredibly helpful, and I'm sure you will too. Now, next week on the podcast, we're going to be going back to one of the topics that is always fun. We're going to be talking about practice styles and practice breeds. Uh, one of the things that I have done in the past is compare practice styles to different breeds of dogs. I mean, I'm a dog lover. If you're not a dog lover, that's okay. I still think you'll find this helpful, interesting, and maybe even entertaining. But we're going to talk specifically not just about those original practice styles, but what you need to do if you need to switch up your practice style for one reason or another. Hmm. And I'm also going to be adding a fourth breed of dog. So I have— I started with two, we added a third one, but I'm going to add a fourth one because I've noticed that we could use it. So, so I hope that piques your curiosity. It's going to be a fun podcast next week, and I certainly hope you join me for that. In the meantime, 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.