Music For The Ears - PHH 021

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 today's show. Here's a question that's been on my mind a lot lately. As harpists and musicians, are we becoming too visual? Are we not using our ears, our listening skills enough? I'll tell you, this first came to my mind when I was talking with a student about electronic tuners and remembering that when I grew up as a young harpist, we didn't have electronic tuners. I learned to tune by ear, using just a tuning fork for one note as a reference note and then going on from there. It's a whole different world of tuning now. And don't get me wrong, I would not give up my quartz tuner. But this is where I started. I thought, think about the ways in which we see our music when we really should be listening to our music. After all, we talk about an artist maybe having an eye for color. Well, a musician has an ear for music. And so if we have an ear for music, and we do, why aren't we using it more? We talk about ourselves as being paper trained, stuck to the paper. We play the notes that are on the page, and we rarely venture outside that. And even for the harpists who are more adventurous and play by ear or improvise, they can still fall into this gap between playing the harp and actually listening to what's going on.

I was reminded of one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes quotes. I love the Sherlock Holmes stories. And this one comes from A Scandal in Bohemia. And as usual, Holmes is lecturing poor Dr. Watson, and he tells him that. He says to Watson, you see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.

And I think as harpists, that's what we often do. We hear, we listen. But maybe we don't really hear. We don't really pay attention to what it is we're doing. There's a level of observation that we skip right over, and it's so critical to what we do. I think that for me, I was drawn to the harp by the sound of the harp. Music is an important part of my life, and I'm sure it is for you, too. So why aren't we paying more attention to the sounds that we make rather than to just what we see and what we do? This is what I'd like to explore today, and I'd like to give you a quote from Dr. Stephen Covey to start you thinking about this before we dive into this topic. The quote is this. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. Now, Dr. Covey was talking about communication in conversation, right where we are supposedly listening to what the other person is saying, but we're already formulating our reply in our head. Think about how this might play into your practice. It's very easy for me to think that, okay, yes, I'm listening to what I'm doing, but sometimes what I'm listening to is just what I have to fix, and I'm getting in there to act on the mistake instead of to understand what the error was. That's just one of a number of instances that I'm going to share with you. I think that this is truly not just a theoretical, lofty, academic kind of discussion. I think this is completely practical. I think that when we learn to listen with observation, which is one of the three steps that I'm going to be telling you about, when we learn to listen with observation, we can speed up everything we do. We can deepen our understanding. We can fix problems faster, we can see them faster, we can understand music better. Now, those are big goals, but it's a process. It's something that we come to a little bit at a time. And incorporating a little bit of active listening in our daily music making can make an incredible difference and bring a lot more joy along the way. So I have lots of practical tips to share with you today that will help you in fixing mistakes that you make in your practice, help you work with your tuner better, work with your metronome better, and a couple other interesting little tidbits as well, plus some practical exercises to help you learn to be a more observant listener. But before we dive all into that, let me make a mention of our challenge that is starting in November, right at the beginning of November, we will be starting our Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza challenge. This is a brand new challenge and I've based it on a course that I did years ago. It was how I taught my students to learn the Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza. Now, most of those students years ago were young harpists who are going to be playing with an orchestra. But the thing is that the Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza is just a stunning harp piece to play. Whether you're playing it on your own or with an orchestra, that's fine too. But it's not accessible as it's written for every harpist. It's difficult and it's a little lengthy and it's got a lot of black dots on the page. So in our Cadenza challenge, I will teach you my three step system. We'll work day by day, step by step to go through and learn the cadenza. But I have created three different versions of the cadenza. There's a more advanced version certainly, which is typical for and useful for pedal harpists, but there's also an easy, yes, easy and intermediate version of the cadenza, which is playable not just on pedal harp, but also on lever harp. And so that whatever kind of harpist you are, we have a cadenza for you. And we'll be walking through it with videos and practice plans and all this good stuff. And at the end of three weeks, plus a couple of days to polish, we will have the Walls of the Flowers Cadenza. You will have the Walls of the Flowers Cadenza learned and ready to play just in time for this holiday season. So I certainly hope you join us for that challenge. You can find all the details using the link in the show notes or you can go to heartmastery.com and click on Upcoming events and you will see the information there as well. Also in the show notes, there is a link to a blog post I wrote some time back that will be just some nice supplementary information for today's topic. It's called how to Listen Like a Superhero. And you will find the link to that blog post from our archives in the show notes as well. So if you're ready, you can listen up and I'll start sharing the information I have for you about how to be a better listener. This is the cautionary tale that I wanted to tell you about electronic tuners. It's not a warning about being careful using your tuner as much as it is just an example of the lack of listening that we tend to do without noticing that that's what we're doing. There was a harp ensemble concert that I was directing. And this was the dress rehearsal just right before the performance that day. And one of the performers had gotten to the dress rehearsal a little bit late. She'd had car trouble. And so she came in. Everybody else was pretty much tuned, and, you know, we were just pretty much waiting for her. So she came in and she was a little flustered, took the covers off her harp, got in place and started tuning. The other performers were running through sections they wanted some last minute practice on while she was doing her tuning. So of course it was appropriate that she use her electronic tuner to help tune out the extra noise. So she tuned her harp and we got started and it was obvious immediately that something was terribly wrong. Not just mildly out of tune, and not just one string. Something was terribly wrong. It took us just a little while to realize exactly what had happened, but we found out that she had inadvertently pushed a button on her her tuner that resulted in her tuning her harp a half a step flat. So instead of tuning what she thought was a C, she was actually tuning it to match a B. She wondered at the time why her whole harp was sharp. But she didn't worry too much about it because she was so flustered. So we had to wait, of course, and it was kind of comical. And she retuned her harp and, you know, there was no problem, and the concert went on from there. But think about the number of oral cues, listening cues, things she could have heard to help her realize that her tuner was set incorrectly. Now, granted, I know some people don't even know that their tuners can be adjusted this way, and I don't think she did either. So that was a revelation in itself. You mean my tuner could be telling me something other than what I think it's telling me? And of course, the answer to that was yes. And so everyone in the ensemble learned a little bit about what their tuners could do that they maybe didn't know about beforehand. But in order for her to miss tune her entire harp, she had to be not listening to her own instrument, which was telling her quite clearly, you know, hey, look, we're totally out of tune here. Could all of our strings be wrong? Hmm, interesting cue to ignore. She was a responsible player. She knew her harp was pretty much in tune. She kept it in tune, so why should it all be sharp?

That would have been a first clue. And had she not been so flustered, she might have stop to think a little bit there. Second clue, second cue that she ignored Everyone else is playing around her. And it's likely that over the course of several strings, she would have found that her strings just weren't matching up with anybody else. You know, when you're playing something and it's vaguely in the same key as other people, you can sort of hear that it's kind of matching. And she might have been able to notice that. Okay, that's a level of listening that not all of us do. And certainly it's a level of listening that we might not trust ourselves to do. Well. You might listen and think, wow, it sounds like I'm really out of tune. But, okay, my tuner says I'm in tune, so I'm not going to question it. And that's my point. Should we be relying just on our eyes to match the tuner when we tune our harp? Wouldn't it be nice if we actually knew whether we were tuning the string, whether we heard it and we had to adjust it so that it wasn't so sharp or it wasn't so flat? Wouldn't that be a good idea? Sounds like a good idea. So the upshot of the tuner story is really that we need to be a little bit less busy doing the tuning and maybe spend a little bit more time listening to what we're tuning. Now. I have some more thoughts about that, and we'll talk about the practical ways to do that in just a moment. But here are a couple other ways where we could be listening but often aren't.

One of them that.

May make you laugh, may make you cry. One of them is in our work with the metronome, we often hear the click. But do we pay enough attention to actually match it for every beat? When you're working with a metronome, you're not just listening to it click, you're predicting where the next click comes, and you're making decisions based on that. So your listening really has to be at a slightly deeper level than just hearing the click. What about if you could hear the patterns in your music as you were practicing it? Not just see them on the page. Hopefully you see them on the page. But there are patterns. Perhaps they're chord patterns or perhaps there are sections in the music that repeat. Do you see them first or do you hear them first? Do you see them and not hear them? Oh, well, that's something we can certainly work on. But the place where I think we could do a lot more active listening is in our own practice. When we make a mistake, do we rush in to fix the mistake before We've actually figured out what it is. I know that when I teach, often if a student makes a mistake before I let them play it again and try to correct it, I will ask them what the mistake was. I particularly do this if I can sense that a student is a little bit flustered or is just not really paying attention to the music that they're making, but just kind of trying to get through things. If they play a chord and they can hear that one of the notes is wrong, the next thing we should do before we replay the chord is to figure out which note was wrong, which finger played the wrong note. You could try this for yourself sometime. It's amazing how often we just rush in to fix something without really figuring out what it is we're fixing. And think about how powerful that knowledge would be if you knew that that was the note that you needed to fix and that that was the finger that needed to place on perhaps the B instead of the A or something to make the chord correct. It would be so much easier to play it correctly the next time because you have the information you need to do that. So I think this particular instinct to just jump in there and fix it instead of listening to what we exactly want to fix before we do that, I think that's the place that it's most obvious that we need to follow a process to really make our listening powerful.

I believe that powerful listening starts with observation. You can go back to the Sherlock Holmes quote if you want, or you can think about it from the Stephen Covey perspective that our first job in listening is actually to listen, not to be thinking about what we're going to do about it right away. We need to observe. To observe, we need to have a degree of stillness. I don't know anything that's more difficult to achieve in this slightly frenetic society in which we live than stillness, but it's important. So starting from a point of observation is the absolute most essential skill to develop. How can you develop it? I'm so glad you asked. Let me give you a couple of ideas. The first thing I would suggest is that you find a recording of a piece that you know well. Now, I realize that finding recording might mean that you're finding a video. And if that that's the case, then I suggest that you put in some earbuds or whatever it is, and turn away from the screen so you're not watching the video, but that you're really listening. If you choose, you know, a CD or just an audio recording, that's Even better. But you can use YouTube. Just don't look. We're training your ears, remember? Right. So a recording of a piece that you know well, listen to it, and as you listen, see what you can hear. Could you, for instance, could you hear anything about the form of the piece? Can you hear where the sections change? You know the piece, you know what's supposed to be happening? Can you identify it in sound? Can you listen to the dynamic choices that the performer is making? Are they different from the ones you make? Are they the same? What about dynamics? What about Rallentando's or Ritardando? Are the tempos similar to what you do? Are they different? Do they start in different places? Listen and observe. Whatever you can hear, whatever you notice is good. You don't have to hear specific things. You don't have to come up with a long compendium of things that you heard. Just starting to listen is the best first step in this process. To go a step further, try listening to a recording of a group, an orchestra, a band, an ensemble. See if you can, as you listen, pick out the sound of one of the instruments or one of the voices and follow that through. Can you hear that one voice? What does it do? Can you hear the different roles that it plays? Who has the melody? Where does the melody go? Does it switch from instrument to instrument? Can you follow it? Can you hear a difference in the balance between parts? Which ones are louder, which ones are softer? At any given time, these are the kinds of things that you can listen for. There are plenty more. Anything that you can hear is a bonus, and it's part of your listening skill. But the more you can hear, the more you will hear the next time you listen to anything. So starting to practice that skill of observation is an important first step in developing or refreshing your listening skills. After observation comes understanding, or at least seeking to understand. In the recording exercises that we just talked about, as you were listening, you were looking for things that you could identify by putting that identification to them, giving them a name, like, oh, this instrument has the melody here. That's a level of understanding that goes beyond just hearing something, right? So that's the next step. There are some things that you may not understand fully, but being able to put a name to them is important, because once you have done that, then you get to step three. Step three is the one we usually jump to before we've gone through our observation and our attempt at understanding. Step three is to choose your response. Once again, to use Stephen Covey's conversational Example, if you are listening to someone and at the very same time formulating your response to whatever it is they're saying, you've skipped the actual clarity that you would get from listening to them without having your brain working on the response at the same time. And you have the opportunity to understand what they're saying before you choose your response in a practical harp related way. If you hear that you have made a mistake by observing not, you know, okay, the mistake's easy enough to observe, right? We know it's there. But then by trying to understand it, which note was wrong? Was it the fingering that I screwed up that made me play something wrong? What can you understand about it? Then you can choose your response. If you know that that note in the chord was wrong, then you can fix that note. Rather than just playing the chord over again, which would indeed be a response, but not a very thoughtful or considered one, playing it over again just to make it correct doesn't give you the benefit of the understanding and the knowledge that comes from fixing a specific mistake. Which note was wrong? Which finger was wrong? So let's talk about how the observe, understand, then respond system can work with some of the other things you do in your harp playing. Let's start with tuning. I'm not advocating that you discard your tuner or stop using it. In fact, your tuner can be a really valuable way to train your ear. But you have to be listening in order to do that. So as you tune your harp, the next time you go and tune your harp, and I hope it's today, what I'd like you to do, have that tuner there and using the tuner, tune one note. It doesn't matter. Tune whichever note you usually tune first on your harp. For instance, if you usually tune middle C first, then go ahead and tune middle C and using the tuner and get it exactly in tune. Then turn away from your tuner and play the middle C and play the C an octave above it. Play those two strings together. Do they sound in tune? Do you need to make an adjustment? If you do need to make an adjustment, it's going to be to the note you haven't already tuned, right? You've already tuned middle C, so you don't want to change that one. You want to change the upper C that you haven't tuned yet. So compare the two notes again and decide. Observe. Is the upper note too high or too low? Is it sharp or is it flat? You observe, you make the decision. Then if you like, go ahead and check with the tuner and make an adjustment. See if you can make your adjustment without the tuner so that you can get it exactly in tune just by comparing it with the C that you know is in tune and check it with the tuner. This is how you start to train your ear, by listening to the note, making a decision, understanding is it sharp or is it flat or is it in tune? And then choosing your response. So many times I'll hear harpus playing the string a bazillion times and checking the tuner and trying to get it just to line up to, you know, have the light flash green or the needle stay straight or whatever your tuner does. But why not play it, decide whether it's sharp or flat, and then make the adjustment. Once you become more confident, you will need your tuner less, and you'll be more comfortable using your ear to make those decisions. It doesn't mean that you're going to give up your tuner. No panic there. But just think, if your tuner battery is low, guess what? You'll still be able to tune. Aha. There's a definite benefit right there. How could you be a more observant and intentional listener when you're using the metronome? Well, here is one example. Suppose you're playing along, and you're playing along with the metronome and your play, play, play, play, play, and all of a sudden you realize you are no longer with the metronome. Well, our first response, without necessarily a lot of thought, would be to go back and just try it again. Great, have to do it over. But let's make a little adjustment. Let's listen and observe first. So, yes, we're going to go back and you do the same passage with the metronome again, but this time, listen. Can you tell earlier when you get off track with the metronome? When do you first notice it? You're going to be a little bit more observant in your listening this time. You're not going to wait until you can hear that you're far off. You're going to be listening a lot more closely. Chances are that you will actually stay with the metronome better because you are listening more closely. So there may not even be an additional response from there, but you might find that, oh, this is the spot where I get off. It's right here. This is where I'm a little too slow or I'm a little too fast, and so perhaps I need to work this particular moment in the music a little bit more carefully. With the metronome, and you want to work it more slowly, perhaps, or whatever it's going to take to iron out that particular portion of the music. Then you can go back and fit it in once again. Listening observantly to make sure that you're staying with the metronome. It's a different way of listening, but it's actually what will help you use the metronome a little bit better. Most importantly, of course, there's listening to fix errors, not fixing errors, but listening to fix the errors. Right? Once you've observed that you've made a mistake, you need to name the mistake, identify the mistake, understand the mistake. You don't have to spend a long time doing it, but just take a moment to figure out what went wrong before you go back and try to fix it. Otherwise, your fix might not actually be a fix. You might just be doing this over again and having the same thing happen. I'm not saying that knowing what went wrong is the cure all for eliminating a mistake, but it is the first step in knowing how to eliminate the mistake. And that's what we really want to know, how to eliminate those mistakes. Right? So this is the power of the three step listening system, right? Observe it, understand it, and then choose your response. One final thought. For me, it's important being a harpist and a musician that I don't just play, but that I listen. That I listen to the music that is around me. To listen to the music that is within me, to listen to the music that I make all of those things. Listening the sound. It's part of why I became a harpist. And it's part of why I continue to play and love the harp. So that listening and listening with my fullest self, the best way that I can is the way that I can be the best musician that I can be. Music is not just about the playing and the doing, but it's also about the music itself. And that is in the sound. And we listen, we share our music, and we experience the beautiful sounds around us every day. I sometimes struggle to keep that as part of my daily musical practice. To remember to listen, to observe, to understand before I do. But I am always rewarded when I take the time to listen and to observe. And I know that you will find that too. So I hope this gives another dimension to your music this week. For some more ideas about being a listener, be sure to check out the link to my blog post from the Heart Mastery Archives. You'll find that link. The blog post is called Listen Like a superhero. And the link is in the show notes for this episode. And if you're ready for some doing in addition to your listening, I invite you to join us for the Walls of the Flowers Cadenza Challenge. And I've done my very best in this challenge to make the cadenza accessible to harpists of every level. And of course, whether you're playing a lever harp or a pedal harp, we have a version of the cadenza that will work for you. The challenge is going to be a lot of fun. Lots of people are going to participate, and we'll have the live calls, of course, where you can learn in person or at least virtually in person. And I'm looking forward to working with all of our challengers on this wonderful piece of music. Wouldn't it be great to have all of us be able to play it together at the end? That won't happen, but it's fun to think about anyway. It would be something to listen to for sure. All right, I hope you have enjoyed this week's show. Do check out all those links in the show notes to join the challenge and read the extra blog post. And do join me on the podcast next week when we will be talking about how to review your pieces so that you have your holiday repertoire, whatever that is, ready to go. So we'll be talking about reduce, reuse and recycle as a way to prepare your repertoire. So I'm looking forward to sharing all that with you next week on the show. In the meantime, have a great week and listen up. 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.