Music in Motion: The Art of the Graceful Gesture - PHH 166

I have to tell you that while I'm here talking to you about all these gestures, I'm sitting here in front of the microphone, making them all so that I'm watching my hands and watching what I'm doing as I'm talking to you. If anybody could see me now, they'd think I was a little bit nuts.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the My Harp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join Us just go to harpmastery.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now.

Welcome to The Show Many harpists can remember the first time they saw someone play the harp. The harp itself looked magnificent. Tall, majestic, maybe gold. The harpist might have looked magnificent, too, maybe a lovely lady in a flowing gown. The harp and the harpist together made an impressive picture. No wonder people want to play the harp. More than any other instrument, the harp is decorative. It makes a visual statement just sitting in a corner, and when it speaks, it's magic. We can all agree on that much. But there's more to a harpist's appearance than just sitting behind the harp in beautiful clothes. There's a more important visual aspect to playing the harp, one that draws a lot more debate, and that is what we look like when we play. I'm not talking about any funny faces we might make. I'm talking about how we gesture with our arms to an audience. Harp gestures look graceful. We harpists know, though, that there is musical purpose behind them. While different harp playing methods have varying ideas about the look of harp gestures, most agree about their importance to our playing. And while they look lovely, those gestures aren't easy. They're awkward to practice, and they feel unnatural at first. Today I'll talk about how to make your harp gestures graceful and musical. We'll review how to practice them and why. You should trust me, you absolutely should. It doesn't matter what harp method may be in your background, the basic principles are the same. And if you've always felt just a little awkward or self conscious trying to be graceful at the harp, this discussion should make you feel a lot more comfortable. But before we get started, I'd like to just talk to all you harp teachers out there for just a moment. First, I want to thank you for everything that you do for your students. I know that the reason I play the harp now is because of the wonderful teachers that I had when I was growing up. And I know that you probably feel the same, and I know that you're striving to make that kind of difference for your own students. I also know that teaching is a lot harder than it looks. We spend so much time thinking about what's the right next step for our students, where to go, how to help them along their path, how to help them grow, how to give them the tools and the skills that they need to be able to play the music they want the way they want. It's not easy. It takes a lot of thought and planning. And of course, in this new world of online teaching, everything is just a little bit different. When I started doing coaching online, I realized that I was going to need a slightly different system to help make up for the loss of personal contact and help keep communication really clear and move things forward. And so I had to create systems that helped me do do that. And I want to share those systems with you. They've made my life so much easier and they've helped my students move forward in ways that I really couldn't have expected when I started this. These are the systems I use when I teach my Gold Circle students. These are the systems that we use in our certified coaching program and I want to share them with you. And I'm doing that for the first time ever in a one day seminar on Saturday, August 10th. It's just a one day online seminar. I will walk you through the processes that I use, the why's, the hows and the what's. I'm going to share my document vault, all the templates that I use to help my students get this sort of success. And as a little extra, thank you for being this kind of teacher. Who's this dedicated to your students. We will also be creating Harp Mastery Accredited teacher page right on our website. And if you take this course, we'll give you a listing. And we have all kinds of goodies like that for you in this course, including these three pretty powerful workshops on how to think about these systems, how to teach your students in this way and how to use all these things. It's a terrific course. I'm really excited about teaching it and I invite you to join me. You will find the link on our homepage@harpastery.com and as always in the show notes today. So harp teachers, there's your personal invitation to join me for our brand new teacher accreditation course on August 10th. Now think back for a second to any class reunions you might have attended. Sure, you're there to connect with your old schoolmates, but you also have that whole wealth of common memories where you can talk about what this teacher said, what this teacher did, and you have that sort of connection just through your experience with your teachers. Well, I had a similar experience just a little bit ago. I was in Camden, Maine for a reunion of students who had gone to the Salzado Harp School in Camden. And it was just a wonderful event and we did the same kind of things. Remember when the teacher said this or this or this or this and there were a couple phrases that were are common phrases in the world of Salzado method harp playing like elbows up. And we were talking about those and talking about how the the Teachers there reminded us to do these kinds of things. Oh, did you have the pencil thing? Did she put the penny on your hand? But as students of the Salzado method, one of the things we know, we were always told was to raise that lifting of the hands that is part of that method. Now, when I speak about a harp method, I'm talking about a cohesive idea of technique and musicality that blend to the same purpose. Various harp teachers throughout the centuries and all over the globe have created their methods. There's not one right method, obviously. So you have to understand that different methods have different ways of looking at these things. How you use your fingers, how you use your arms. It's a complete idea. The Salzido method that I was taught has one idea about harp gestures, and that's the raising that I just mentioned. Other methods have different ideas, and we're going to talk about those too. But I really want to talk about harp gestures today from a more sort of global, if you will, standpoint, talking about some really very practical things that these gestures do. Sure, they look nice, and that's why audiences love them. And we like them too, because we like to look graceful. But they have other purposes that are more related to how we're playing and what we're playing. And that's what I'd really like to discuss today. So if you have studied, studied a harp method that doesn't do a lot of gesturing with your arms or has a different kind of gesture than one I might be talking about at any given moment, don't let that turn you away from listening to what I have to say. I really want to make this more universal. Likewise, if you have never been exposed to this, if you haven't studied a particular method or haven't spent a lot of time learning about harp gesture, I think you're going to learn some things today that may help you have a clearer idea of why you might want to incorporate this into your technique and how you might want to incorporate it so that it really works for you and doesn't just look beautiful, but also works for your technique and your sound as well. First, let's consider the obvious. On the harp, to get from one place to another on the harp, we often have to lift our hand, right? If your hand's in the middle of the harp and you need to go to the top, you're going to have to lift it up. And if it's in the middle of the harp and you need to go to the bottom, you have to lift your hand up So a lot of our harp technique involves what I like to think of as geography. We've got to get from one place to. To another. We have to do it efficiently. We have to just get there. So in one sense, it's all about speed and efficiency, getting your hand from here to here. And we can move it just very quickly and pretty much horizontally, just right up the strings or down the strings, or we could make it more graceful. Now, if you don't have a lot of time, if it has to be done quickly, then that more horizontal motion can work. But what if you have a piece that has a lot of chords and they're all over the harp, but they're slow, and you have a whole note, perhaps a big, lush chord. If you just play the chord and then get your fingers to the next strings, you're not really using that time effectively. You're not really using that time to. To create that musical moment. So we need to get somewhere. Yes, but do we just get there efficiently, or do we get there beautifully, too? The harp is made up of playing in a disconnected kind of way. We work very hard to create the impression of legato. We do a lot of placing and a lot of connecting where we can. But, you know, you have to get from one place to another, and you can get there just efficiently, or you can get there efficiently and beautifully. So we're trying to combine the practicality of needing to move around the harp or needing to at least let go of the strings from time to time, and the musicality of trying to create this environment that is also musical in a visual way. But leaving the visual aside, think about the essential difficulty that we have on the harp. We cannot on purpose prolong a sound the way a singer or a violinist or a flutist can prolong a sound just by continuing it. Once we've plucked the string, we have no control. The sound will die out of its own accord. We can't do anything to increase or sustain it. What a raise or a gesture can do is to help prolong that sound. And I love what Rainier says. In her method book, she talks about raising the wrist or the arm as necessary to prolong the sound. And she said it can either sort of prolong the sound or give the impression of it. And I think that's where the importance of the gesture becomes really apparent. Because when you have a note that you want to prolong, that gesture, whether it's a small one with your wrist, whether it's a larger one with your arm, is going to visually Give the impression of a longer note. If you have that longer note and you play it and you move quickly to the next one.

Then we don't have that visual of the longer note. If you give that note a chance to just be raised and visually prolonged, we get the impression of it. And I love the fact that she talks about the impression of prolonging the note. Now, I think that there is an audio component to this, something that you can actually hear. I believe that when you raise, you do help move the air. We make our sound by moving the air. Air is how sound travels. So when you create a little bit more air motion, you are going to help move the sound. And so I think that there is a component of this that we hear as well as a component that we see. And for me, in my own experience, I know that I can tell by listening to a student whether or not they're raising, because the sound has a little bit more life to it when they are. You can do that experiment very easily on your own. Just take a chord and play it. Close your eyes so that you can hear, perhaps with a little bit more focus. Play that chord. Don't move your hand at all. Then play the chord and move your hand right after, right? You want to close your fingers first. Raising is never about pulling away from the strings. It's about the after motion. You're going to play and close your fingers and then move your wrists or your arms. So you're going to close and then release that sound by moving the air, by raising.

That's the idea. I know. I'm talking again about raising. That's my own background. Some methods use harp gestures that go downward. And that's the same idea. We're moving the sound. So try that experiment and see what you think. But remember that by moving your arms, by raising or gesturing, you are not only prolonging the sound physically, but you're prolonging the sound to a listener who is watching. Right? So this is something that can be heard and something that can be seen. To go back to Renier's writings for just a moment, she talks about how the alternative to this kind of wrist or arm gesture, in terms of being able to prolong the sound, the alternative is an accent. And that often an accent isn't what we want musically, that to try to give the impression of a sound that sustains itself over other sounds, we have to give it more weight in a way that may not be musically appropriate. And that's when this gesture can come into play. Think about if you have a melody in your right hand, and maybe your thumb is doing the melody while your fingers are doing other figuration. And we know that, you know, our other fingers are busy. We don't want them to sound as strong as their thumb melody note. We want the melody to come out. And so often we need to give that thumb extra weight, extra emphasis, extra force, if you will, to get that melody note to sound. Now, I think there are other ways of doing that as well, but that's one. And when all our fingers are busy and connected, that's the only one we have recourse to. But in other situations where we don't have all the figures going at once, we have more options. And releasing that sound is something that we can do instead of forcing the sound out. So I want to give you some. Some words to help you think about what these harp gestures can do for the sound instead of just playing it harder and louder to make it sound longer. Oh, I've got, you know, I've got a half note, I've got a whole note. I want it to sound longer instead of just playing it louder. Think about releasing the sound from the strings.

I think as soon as you think about the word release, a little bit of a gesture comes into your mind. Just to think about closing your fingers and even just moving your wrist back a little bit, curving your wrist ever so slightly, or raising your arm to go with it. Whatever kind of gesture you like. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, too. But thinking about releasing the sound is a whole different idea. You can also think of it as pulling the sound out of the strings. I like that one personally. Not quite as much because it makes me think that I'm pulling away from the strings and I'm not. I'm closing my fingers and then releasing the sound. So I don't like that image quite as much, but I know it works for some people. You can also think about sending the sound that once you have closed your fingers, you can release your wrist and your arm to send the sound outward. Any kind of imagery like that that works for you is going to be helpful as you think about your gesture. But remember that this is part of your sound production. Another important fact here is that when you do that little bit of motion, whether it is just a little bit of mot with your wrist or a bigger motion that involves your arm, you're creating the opportunity to relax. You're moving your arms or your wrist, so you're creating a way for that. Any lactic acid that Might have built up in forearm muscles or something. You're releasing that. You're giving your fingers a chance to just release any tension that has built up there. This is a wonderful moment for you as a player to give your technique just a breather.

And it doesn't take much time, just that half a second in between notes. Sometimes, if you have trained yourself to use that as a moment to relax, you'll find that it works wonders for this as you play. And of course, when you're relaxed, you make a prettier sound. So this is a full circle kind of moment right there. We're creating opportunities to relax. We're creating opportunities to release the sound from the strings just with a little bit of motion, and that's the next thing. It doesn't take much. Lots of harpists who want to start incorporating this kind of gesture in their playing, they want to do it. It looks very pretty. They. It looks graceful, they get it, it's going to help their sound, all that sort of stuff. But it feels so awkward. I remember as a young harp student trying to learn this, and I remember, oh, my teacher saying, oh, you look like you're in the Three Stooges. It just can look and feel really awkward when you're practicing it. So here are a couple of. First, start small. It doesn't have to be a big arm gesture. In fact, those master teachers of the past that were talking about these gestures were not talking about big arm gestures. So don't feel like it has to be giant. In fact, I want you to start small.

Imagine you're tying a shoelace. You know that little tightening gesture that you make at the end. You do the knot and then you take both hands and you just pull them slightly apart just to tighten that knot. It's just a little backward motion of the wrist that tightens the knot. That's where I want you to start. So if you need to, to figure out how that gesture works, tie your shoe and look how both wrists just go back a little bit. And as you tie your shoe. Now, if you tie your shoe really differently than that, then this visual isn't going to work for you, but I think it works for most people. And then just take that little wrist gesture and away from the harp. Just imagine your hands are in front of you, sort of like they would be if you were playing the harp. And then make that same small wrist gesture. And then, in fact, if you want to try it still away from the harp, open your hands as if they were on imaginary strings. Close your Fingers and then make the wrist gesture. That's how to start with raising. Close and lift. Close and lift. And we're just doing wrists here. Our little knot tying gesture. Right? So it's just wrists. And now do it so that after you close, it looks smooth and graceful. Doesn't have that jerk that we make when we tighten the knot. Right. We tighten it. So we don't want that. We want it to just look a little bit more smoothed out, a little bit more graceful. Just do that. I find that most people when they're starting with just a wrist gesture, they find that this works pretty well. And then you can take that over to the strings once again. Close and wrist. Close and wrist. Close and wrist. It's a pretty good way to start it. Then let's incorporate more of your arm, if you like. Realize that you're not going to be using your entire arm. We don't want your arms flailing around. And I personally teach that nothing from your shoulder to your elbow is really a part of this gesture. We don't want your elbows swinging like chicken wings. We want that upper part of your arm to stay pretty steady. The gesture is. Is going to be pretty much from your wrist down to your elbow and not more than that. Most of these master teachers talk about that controlled range. I know Granjeni used to talk about a circle of gesture that went from the middle of the strings down to the body of the harp. His gestures went more downward than upward. I'm not an expert on that technique, but I know that much from talking and listening to some of his students. So that's. You can see that that controlled area, that small sphere of raising is part of this. Now, certainly there are times when you might want something more dramatic. Get to that in a second. But for the most part, this is from your wrist to your elbow. So having accomplished that little wrist motion, when you can get that working away from the harp and trying it on the harp, you can incorporate a little bit more of that hinge motion and just raising your forearm as well. Certainly if you have just a little bit of time to raise. If the notes are faster, your wrist raise is going to be more effective. If you have more time, you can use that hole forearm and use that to make your gesture. I have to tell you that while I'm here talking to you about all these gestures, I'm sitting here in front of the microphone making them all so that I'm watching my hands and watching what I'm doing as I'm talking to you. If Anybody could see me now, they'd think I was a little bit nuts, sitting here doing my little wrist raises and my elbow raises, just working on all of these while I'm talking to you. But that's what helps me make sure that I'm clear about what I'm telling you, or at least as clear as I can be. So how do you practice these raises? Once you've got these gestures a little bit. A little bit more comfortable away from the harp, take them over to the harp and think in terms of whole notes, something you can count over four beats. Start with single notes. Just start with your second finger, if you like, and over the four beats, I want you to think about that.

Visualization, that visual representation of the whole note that you're going to play. Just the way Renier talked about it. We're going to talk about having that note prolonged visually. So as you play that whole note, think about moving your wrist or your forearm for two beats going up and then two beats going down. As you replace the next whole note to play, just stick with one note. Stick with middle C for right now. And just two beats up, one, two, and then down. One, two. It's going to be a nice slow gesture, and yes, it will probably feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit awkward, but you'll get used to it. Just close and then up, and then come back down and replace. And then when you're comfortable on one note, switch and do the octave above. So suppose you do middle C, and then the next whole note is going to be the C above that. You'll incorporate that idea of geography that I was talking about earlier, playing the C and wrist, raising up for two beats, moving your arm to replace on the higher C. And you can do this and just make the gesture efficient and graceful. Right? We're doing the visual representation of the note. Be sure to close before you raise and at first make that gesture, just your wrist, and see what happens. And then, as you're more comfortable, do a larger gesture, either up, raising up from your elbow, the way I was taught.

Or raising downward, if that's. That seems like a contradiction in terms, releasing the sound downward, if that's the way you were taught. So that's okay. You can experiment. If nobody taught you one of those things, try and see what works for you. You're thinking about releasing the note, releasing that sound, and you're going to close and move your gesture in the air for two beats going up and then in the air for those next two beats going down to the Next note. And you can up an entire scale in octaves that way. Then you can work with three or four note chords doing the same thing. Closing and raising. Start with a single chord, see how that works. And then go up an octave and back down so that you're using that gesture. With geography, two GS. Easy to remember, right? Also do these drills, hands together. This is terrific for training hands together coordination. Working on this simultaneous placing. You can do single notes, you can do intervals, you can do chords, but count those raises so that it's two up and two down, so that you close and go up and then use that entire whole note to get to the next note, wherever that is. You can also do some contrary motion drills with this, so that you can train your hands together that way, so that you've got one hand jumping up, one hand jumping down, and work at that. It's terrific training for all kinds of things, but it's really good for raising practice. As I said, start small and then try larger gestures. Just to try it. Because you can change your gesture to suit the music that's coming up in a moment. First, I want to remind you that this is also about relaxation, so that when you close, let all that tension go out of your hand so that your hand is totally relaxed as you move from string to string. Once again, I'm doing this in the air while I'm talking to you, so that I can feel it. It's very relaxing to do. But use this, and use this in your warm ups so that you're reminding yourself about relaxation. Because that's the time to do it. When your hand is in the air, it doesn't have to be much in the air. Even if it's just your wrist. That's okay. That's part of your chance to relax. Now, up to this point, we've talked about making the gesture, prolong the note, give that visual representation of the longer note, create relaxation and just sort of look nice. But there are musical considerations here too. And Carlos Salzato in his writings talked about this raising, which he called the aesthetic gesture, as being important to the music and the atmosphere of the music that you were trying to evoke, that the gesture could visually help support your musical interpretation. He said that the aesthetics of the harp are based on discipline. So making the gestures, and indeed all of your playing as technically precise and clean and correct as you could. But also, he says, also on auto suggestion. And this goes back to what Renier was talking about as far as giving that visual impression of the length of the note. But Salzaida went a little bit further. He said that it's not just about creating that, you know, that longer note impression or being graceful, but that the type of gesture that you use should be regulated in the same way as the character of the music that you're playing. So if the music calls for something abrupt, then your gesture is going to be shorter and more defined and, yes, more abrupt looking. If the music is graceful and slow, then your gestures will be graceful and slow as well. So that this is not just a visual impression of the length of the note, but also of the music itself. And I think that this makes so much sense. When we're playing for someone, we want the musical experience to be complete for them. We've all seen people whose gestures, whether they're facial gestures or anything else, don't suit the music, and they're quite distracting. So that the arm gestures that we use can suit the music as well. If we have lots of time to be graceful and that's what the music calls for, we're going to use one sort of gesture. If the music is jazzy or spirited or fast or angular in some way, then our gestures are going to look a little bit more like that, too, so that the visuals that we create for an audience can reflect the music that we are presenting, can be an additional element of our interpretation. Kind of a nice way to think about it. So harp gestures incorporate elements of geography and sound production. The length of the sound, that visual impression of the sound, they're a way to relax. And they help us create a musical aesthetic. Right? They help us create that musical interpretation in a visual way. They do all those things for us. And I hope I've given you some hints that you're going to be able to use to help you practice those very important gestures. Next week on the podcast, we're talking about something very different. We're talking about the idea of harp goals versus the idea of harp contentment and finding that intersection point where goals and contentment meet. Until I talk to you next week, 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. Thank you so much for listening 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.