Muses, Models and Mentors: Where Does Inspiration Come From? - PHH 088

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. We call them light bulb moments, those unpredictable flashes of brilliance that spark our creativity. Or perhaps our inspiration comes from others we admire. Common thought says inspiration is necessary for anyone in an artistic endeavor, yet we believe it is elusive and selective, showing up randomly and bestowing its gifts unequally.

What does inspiration mean to you? Is it outside you, meaning that something or someone inspires you in a certain way? Or is it inside you, meaning that our inner light bulb has a secret switch that suddenly flips and makes that light bulb moment? Is it both? Is it neither?

Music history is filled with stories of inspiration, particularly stories about musical mentors who have helped shape the lives and careers of some of the most famous classical musicians. From the greats like Mozart and Beethoven to modern composers like John Williams and Leonard Bernstein, these mentors have passed down their knowledge and expertise to generations of aspiring musicians. If you look at harp history in particular, you can find countless instances of composers who wrote for the harp because their wife or mother or other loved one played the harp. One of my favorite composer performer pairs is the French harpist Micheline Kahn and her son, composer Jean Michel Damas. Damas told of his early musical education coming from sitting outside his mother's teaching studio. He learned the language of music through the repertoire of the harp, and he clearly learned it well, as evidenced in the numerous and mostly very difficult pieces that he wrote for the harp. Of course, Micheline Kahn inspired other composers too, and she premiered many of the works that we now consider pillars of the concert harp repertoire, pieces like the Impromptu by Gabrielle Foret, as well as his Une Chatelaine en Satour, Ravel's Introduction and Allegro and Capelet's Deux Divertissement and contes fantastique. In today's episode, I'm going to share my ideas and musings about inspiration. Oh, yes, we'll talk a little about those fickle Greek muses, too. And I'll discuss some powerful sources of inspiration that you have available to you and how you can harness that creative energy to add growth, interest and fun to your harp journey. Why should we care about inspiration? Does inspiration really, really matter if we're just, you know, normal, everyday kind of people and not aspiring to be musical geniuses? Yes, it matters a great deal. Inspiration is what fires our imagination, propels us to achieve and accomplish. Inspiration is what keeps us going when the work is hard. Without inspiration, music would be dull and meaningless, and who wants that? So let's be sure we know where to find it and how to use it. Now, if you're interested in learning more about Micheline Kahn, you'll be able to look down in the show notes for this episode and you'll find a link to a blog post I wrote a while back about her amazing life of premieres of these famous works. Just a short blog post, but if you're inspired to learn more. Speaking of inspiration, there's some information for you there. And of course I do want to invite you also. If you haven't signed up yet, please join me on my Creating Harp Freedom webinar that's coming up this Wednesday. That's two days from the day this episode will be released. And it's going to be a really fun webinar talking about how to create more harp freedom in your life and the three keys to breaking down the barriers between you and your music. So that's going to be a really fun webinar and you'll find the link to join that webinar in the show notes for this episode or you can go to upcoming events@harpmastery.com so that's what's coming up here. But right now it's time for a little inspiration. Artist types, and that includes musicians, are fond of thinking about inspiration as coming from their muse or one of the muses, or any sort of universal inspiration, right? It's the Greek muses that are most often invoked in this in this framework. And in case you are not totally up on your Greek mythology, there were In Greek mythology 9 Muses, and they were the daughters of Zeus, and they lived either with Zeus on Mount Olympus or sometimes they lived in other traditions on Mount Helicon or on Mount Parnassus with Apollo. But each of the muses represented one of the arts. And they were sort of, you know, the goddesses, the muses of these particular arts. And we had Calliope, who was for epic poetry, and Erato, who was for history. Cleo was also a muse of history. She is often though depicted as the muse of lyre playing. So that would be of particular interest to harpists. Euterpe was.

The muse who was most closely associated with music and especially flute playing for Euterpe. So, you know, they were very specific. And apparently the arts were all given to muses because they thought that there were no gods pure enough to reign over the arts. So if this was the kind of inspiration that you were waiting for as an artist or a musician who was waiting for their museum, they could be pretty capricious. And, you know, that inspiration just might not show up. Right. So muses are not where we want to look for inspiration, but yet somehow it seems like there are times when they just show up. And that's, I think, what we talk about with these light bulb moments, you know. And maybe it's not a Greek muse that's showing you the path. You can ascribe that inspiration to, you know, to any kind of higher power or inner spirit or whatever, but sometimes it just shows up. I tend to think that those moments of inspiration come about mostly because of our observations that as we go through our day, our week, our life, we assemble all these different little bits of information and then all of a sudden, without our conscious thought, our brain puts them together and we have that moment of inspiration that we attribute to nothing in particular. So that's a wonderful kind of inspiration, but it's not something that we can actually manufacture. So it's not particularly reliable.

There are various quotes that you can, you can look up. There's one attributed to William Faulkner that says, you know, of course I wait for my muse, but fortunately she always seems to show up at 9:15 every morning.

So there's, you know, one thought Stephen King had another idea and was quoted this way saying, don't wait for the museum. As I've said, this is the Stephen King quote again. He's a hard headed guy, that muse, who's not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit world we're talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from 9 till noon or 7 till 3. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later He. He'll start showing up. So the. The muse is somebody who shows up when we're working, when we're working for it. So the. Once again, we have to put in the work, and that's when the muse is going to show up. But that's not really the kind of inspiration I want to talk about today. I want to talk about things and people who absolutely actually inspire us and how we can create more of that for ourselves. So let's put muses to one side and consider them as the, you know, that. That slightly fickle, unpredictable thing that's going to show up, and we just don't know when. And let's look at something that's much more concrete, much easier to understand, and much more helpful. So if it's not a muse, what about a model? An example? We often talk about role models, people being role models in our culture, but what if we had musical models instead? And you have them for sure, right? There are people that you hear in concert or on recordings or that you see playing at various places. And these are people that you in some way would like to model yourself after. So every time you go to a performance and you hear that wonderful performer playing that wonderful piece, and you say, yeah, that's it. That's what I want to do, or that's a piece I want to learn, or I want to play just like that person, that's not just inspiration, but it's a very powerful influence. And these models, these role models are so powerful for us because they show us possibilities. Wow. That piece could go that way, or I could try to do that, or wouldn't that be an interesting thing to try?

I could play there. I could go there. I could do this. So they demonstrate to us possibilities and possible outcomes or possible goals for ourselves. Those role models are real and concrete examples of what we could choose to be or do. So even deeper, perhaps, than inspiration, and certainly.

More easily understood, is the influence of role models. Okay, we'll come back to that. But I think that there's yet a third level, and I think that beyond muses and models, we have mentors. When you think about a mentor, it just feels inspiring to start with, doesn't it? I mean, what is a mentor? Well, I think in its sort of purest definition, it's a person who shows you a path and then helps you along it. Right now you can have mentors that you know well and work with often like a teacher or a coach. Right. And they're helping you craft your direction. They're showing you, that path, they're guiding you along it. They're. They're your. Your compass, your touchstone and your encourager, your cheerleader, all that kind of stuff. That's a mentor. But perhaps there are mentors that you haven't met who are still strong mentors for you. This could be.

A person whose career you follow. For instance, if you are a fan of someone and you follow everything they do, you listen to their recordings, you watch their videos, whatever it is, and you follow that person.

They can be a mentor to you without you ever actually being in contact with them. And that's very strong. And I'll tell you, I mean, I've had plenty of mentors who were and are very powerful influences for me, and so incredibly helpful. And. And they're people I've never met, people whose books I've read, people whose courses I've taken, maybe, you know, online courses where I didn't even meet the person, just watched videos of them. And yet these people became strong influences in my life, showing me how to get something done, how to, you know, how to be a better this or that or, you know, anything. So if we're talking about muses and models and mentors, I think we're talking about three different levels of creativity. Inspiration from the muses and influence from the role models.

And a word that I don't often use, but I really like, is inspiriting from the mentors. Obviously, it's got the same root as inspiration in spirit, but it's so much more active, at least in my own understanding of the word. You know, inspiration feels like that aha moment. But inspiriting, it's encouraging, it's guiding, it's everything that you need. Those mentors, right? Your companions along the journey, that's where all that action starts.

So let's dive into this just a little bit deeper as we start talking about how you can get more inspiration or influence or inspiriting and how that can be useful to you in your harp journey. I think the first thing that we need to do is to be open to the idea of inspiration in our musical lives. Not that we have to aspire to do anything particularly great with it, but the inspiration that sparks us, that helps us play, that helps us get to the harp, even when the day's been a tough one, right? That inspiration needs to be there. So the first thing you need to do is you need to feed it. And this goes back to what I said a moment ago. I believe that inspiration starts with observation and experience.

I think that it's very difficult to feel inspired if you're practicing in your little practice room or your little studio in the corner of your room, whatever. If you're practicing all by yourself and not out in the world, even if it's the virtual world connecting with other harpists and other musicians, music can be very lonely. I mean, practice is something we do by ourselves, and it can be very lonely. And of course, I think as harpists, we have kind of the double whammy here because there are so many, few of us compared to flutists or compared to guitar players or. Right. They seem to be everywhere. And there are, you know, plenty of clubs and plenty of other flute players that can gather together. And we just don't have that many harpists around us. Depending on where you live, of course, but it can be hard. Sometimes even a teacher is hours away. So finding ways to connect is really important. And I think that the observation and experience part of inspiration starts there. I think it starts with our harp lives as part of a harp community. So I think that's really, really important. You never know when something someone else says or does or plays is going to give you that little spark for that moment. So connecting with other people is key. It's connecting and it's collecting, collecting information, collecting all sorts of attitudes and ideas that you never would have come up with on your own. And just. You never know where that might take you. But along the way, don't be afraid to look for people to serve as role models. Perhaps not for everything, but, you know, if you love this person's YouTube videos, go ahead, watch them. All right. Sometimes those role models are easy to find. Those with the videos, articles, events, all that sort of stuff. Other times you might need to look for parallel models. For instance, if you're looking for a harpist who does a particular thing, plays a particular style of music, and you can't find them, well, maybe you can find another musician on another instrument who's doing something similar and you can work from them, use them as a role model.

Why not right now? Mentors, of course, pretty easy to find. They can be teachers, they can be coaches, but they can just be friends, right? Even if you don't know them, Sometimes those people are just right in front of you. Sometimes they're a phone call or an email away. Sometimes they speak to you through their music or their words or their art or their actions, but they show you the path and support you in some way. You to keep walking it. So what do you do with Inspiration. When it shows up, when you have that aha moment, what do you do? Well, there's a. There's a famous story about the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. Vivaldi was known as the Red Priest, and that's because he had flaming red hair and he was an ordained Catholic priest. And the story is told that one day Vivaldi was presiding at mass, and right in the middle of the mass, he got a brilliant idea for a fugue subject, the opening bars, the initial melody for a fugue.

Well, you know, the inspiration had come, and it had come at sort of an inopportune moment. He was in the middle of mass, but. But, you know, the muse had to be obeyed. At least that's what Vivaldi thought. So Vivaldi left the altar in the middle of mass and went back to the. To the sacristy and quickly jotted down the fugue subject, the little melody, and then he came back and finished Mass. Well, this did not go over very well with the church higher ups, and Vivaldi was removed from. From active duty, as it were. And that's when he was.

Reassigned to teach at the orphanage, the girls school in Venice, which is where he composed so many of his amazing compositions. Most of us don't have to leave mass in order to write down a fugue subject, but we do need to be alive to inspiration when it shows up. And so what do we do with it? Well, assuming that you're, you know, not driving or on the treadmill, just head on over to your harp and begin to play. You hear that wonderful piece on the. Of music on the radio as you're driving in the car. Well, when you get home, get out of the car and go to the harp. That's one of the things that I remember as a child. I'd hear something and it would be so exciting to me, and I would have to go right over to the harp or the piano and start playing. Even if it wasn't that piece. I know that some of those rash, impulsive things that we did as children, we outgrow. But that's one I want you to hang on to, that joy of, wow, I heard that. I'm going to play that, or I really want to try that. Go ahead, get the music, sit down, play with it. And you know what? Don't get the music and just let it sit there. Play, respond. Right when that inspiration shows up, when the muse has, you know, knocked on the door.

Answer it.

So I think that if we let ourselves respond to the inspiration, and let ourselves be open to where it might show up for us. We could have so much more fun. So the homework assignment that I'm going to give you right now is a pretty simple one, but it's probably one that you haven't done. It's a pretty easy one, too. I want you to start by listing, writing down somewhere, three pieces of music that inspire you. They can inspire you because they're beautiful, because they're energetic, because you just love them. Doesn't matter why they inspire you. But write down three pieces of music that inspire you. Oh, and they don't have to be heart pieces either. That's okay. Three pieces of music that inspire you. Three people that inspire you. And if you'd like to keep this music or harp themed, you could make them three musicians that inspire you or three harpists that inspire you.

And you don't even have to write why, although it might be interesting.

And then write one follow through action for yourself so that you've got music that inspires you, you've got people that inspire you. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to try a new piece? Are you going to send an email to one of those people that inspires you and just thank them? That's always a great way to make a connection.

Are you going to do some extra practice today or you're going to play through some new pieces? Any of those things would be good. But there's your assignment. Three pieces of music that inspire you, three people that inspire you. And one thing that you're going to do to take action on one of those inspiring things or toward one of those inspiring people.

Then you get extra credit on this assignment. If you share the three pieces of music and the three people who inspire you with a friend. If you say, I just wanted to share with you these three pieces of music that I love and these three people who inspire me because they might inspire you, too. I hope this little discussion has inspired you to look for the inspiration that's all around you and inside you. Inspiration is our fuel. It's our food. It's our nourishment. It's what helps us do everything we need to do in music and in life. But look for the inspiration. Don't wait for it to happen. Seek it out, and then use it wisely. Next week on the podcast, we're getting back to practical matters. It'll be a masterclass episode. I'll be showing you how to use my tempo pyramid. I keep getting lots of requests for. For talking about the Tempo Pyramid, how to speed up a piece, and the various techniques to use to do that. So it'll be a little masterclass on the Tempo Pyramid next week. If you haven't signed up this week for my Creating Harp Freedom webinar, I would love for you to join me. It is this Wednesday night, January 25th, and we'll be talking about the ways to break down the barriers between you and the music. It's free and it it'll be fun, I guarantee it. You'll find the link to join the webinar in the Show Notes for this episode or@heartmastery.com under upcoming events. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, you to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening. You inspire me and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.