Music Theory Starts Here - PHH 254

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. If you came to me for a lesson and said you wanted to work on music theory, my first reaction would be to do my happy dance. I admit it, I am a theory geek. I love talking about the building blocks of music and exploring the way composers use them to create the kaleidoscopic variety of that we love to play. But after my happy dance, I would ask you this question: Why do you want to learn music theory? It's not a test question. There's no wrong answer. But I have often found that harpists make assumptions about what theory knowledge will do for them, and those assumptions, if they aren't completely wrong, aren't always on the mark. I mean, knowing more about the inner workings of music, the nuts and bolts of it, is is undoubtedly important for any musician, for every musician. It's also certainly true that some elements of music theory are immediately applicable to our playing. Most harpists, for example, realize that if they understood more about how chords work, they'd be able to learn their music more quickly, sight-read more easily, and memorize faster. Now that sounds like a superfood for your playing, and lots of harpists are ready, willing, and eager to add that to to their practice diet. But here's the thing: before chords will make sense to you, before they'll be really useful, before you can become fluent with them, you need to know your major and minor keys. You need to know them cold, not have to figure them out, just know them as well as you know your alphabet. This is a step that too many harpists fail to take. They try to jump right into learning about chords without the foundation that makes their construction and sequences inevitable and logical. You see, it's all about keys. So that's where we're starting today. I want to be sure that whatever your goals are with music theory, you have the knowledge that everything else in our system of music springs from, and that's scales and keys. One caveat: don't think this is going to be basic baby stuff. I promise that unless you're a complete theory geek like me, you'll learn something today that you didn't know before. I've also linked in the show notes to a couple of other instances where I've spoken or written about keys, and you may find these resources helpful as well. So I've put a link to a blog post called "Musical Understanding Starts with Key Signatures" and a link to a podcast episode. It was actually episode 6, so that was a a long time ago in the podcast world. So podcast episode 6, which is Minor Keys: A Scale of a Different Color. So there's a little bit of extra understanding there if you want to follow through with those. Also a heads up for My Heart Mastery members, we are going to be spending all next month's calls, that would be the month of April in 2026, depending on when you're listening to this, we are spending all of April's calls talking about music theory, about how it's useful, and we'll be making it really practical for you. So we'll be taking the understanding out of the theoretical realm and putting it right on the harp strings where you need it. So that's what we're going to be focusing on in My Harp Mastery, uh, this coming month. And so I thought I'd give you a little heads up here on the podcast. Also If you're not a My Heart Mastery member, please feel free to join us. We would be happy to have you join our community. And I will put a link to that in the show notes as well. Or you can always go to heartmastery.com and you can look under programs and you can look and see what My Heart Mastery is all about. And I'll tell you the weekly calls that we have, most people find those so helpful. There aren't very many places that you can get live learning on all these different kinds of HARP topics every week. You get to learn from a real person. So, and sometimes it's me, sometimes it's one of our certified coaches, but that's what makes it so valuable. So I would encourage you to check that out as well. So with those resources in place, the blog post, the podcast episode, and my Heart Mastery coming up in April, you will be extra ready to think about what we're gonna talk about today. We're going to start with keys, and here's a little metaphor, a little example that I want to give you just to start off our discussion. Imagine that you're at somebody's house and you were there for dinner, and they've served you this dish that was just absolutely incredibly delicious, and you would love to make it. You compliment your host or hostess and you say, "This is so delicious. I'd love to make this at home. Would you give me the recipe?" They say, "Oh, Of course. But then the recipe that they give you has all the instructions for what you're supposed to do, but it has none of the ingredients listed. You know, or you probably know what a recipe is like, right? It starts out with that list of ingredients so that you know you have to gather a cup of this and a half a cup of that and half a pound of this, whatever it is, right? But this recipe just has the directions and it says, "Take the flour and combine it with the baking powder," or whatever the dish is that sounds kind of like a cake or something, right? If you don't have the knowledge of the ingredients, the directions aren't going to make a lot of sense because you're not going to know how much of what to put in. When you, when you only know the directions then you're, you're missing something that's really key. There's a reason they put the ingredients list first, because you want to know what you're using. You want to be sure you've got your shopping done so that you have all those things in-house. And you want— generally, this, I remember this from home ec class, right? We got all the ingredients out, got them all measured, and maybe we had to get flour sifted, and you put them all out, and then you could follow the directions easily. Well, music theory is like that. That if you don't have the ingredients in place, mixing them together gets a lot harder. When you know what the ingredients are, then you can combine them in different ways. It's simple, it makes sense, it's logical. You can get creative with it. You can say, oh, well, you know, instead of using that half a cup of sugar, I could use this particular amount of maple syrup. Whatever it is. Uh, don't hold me to any of those. I really can cook, but you'd never know it from this little explanation. So you can make those kinds of substitutions and you can get creative, but that assumes that you know the ingredients, the building blocks for that recipe. And music theory is the same. Chords make a lot of sense, but they really make sense only when you can understand the perspective of the scale and the key and how that relates to the chord you're trying to build. Of course, it's going to help you with identifying chords or putting chords in logical sequences or progressions too. So this is why you need to start from the ingredients, and those ingredients are scales and keys. Now let me tell you a little story from my past. I had just graduated from high school and was accepted to the Curtis and Institute of Music, which is a world-class music conservatory. It takes very few students. The, the entire enrollment of the school is just around 100 at any given point, so it's quite small. And Curtis prides itself on taking the best of the best and training them to be the best musicians in the world when they graduate. So you can imagine it's highly competitive, and you're getting young musicians who are already extremely skilled at their craft. But that doesn't mean that those who are coming in know everything they need to know about the musicianship aspects of their craft. They may be terrific at playing their instrument, but there's still stuff they need to learn, as I found out years later when I was teaching there as opposed to just being a student. But coming in as a student, I had had years of musical training. I had excellent instruction, But I was still placed in the Fundamentals of Theory class. Now this is like the Theory 0 class. This is the— you really need to learn everything from the beginning. Now there was a lot that I knew. There was a lot that I could play, but the wisdom of the teachers in that program, the entire music, uh, musical studies program at Curtis, the wisdom was that if you didn't have those basic building blocks firmly in place, then everything else was going to be harder. And of course they were right. And of course they started with scales and keys. And I came as a teacher to realize the wisdom of this. I also noticed it as a student because although I felt like I was learning baby stuff that I probably should have known before, And granted, it wasn't my teacher's fault that I didn't learn it. It just— I was busy playing. I didn't want to spend time learning my keys. So, uh, it seems kind of natural, right? So the— while it was— while I felt the importance of it as a student, I really learned the importance of it as a teacher when I saw the students who had mastered this early material. They could just zip through the rest of it because it all made sense. And the students who had to struggle struggle with some of this material, we're certainly going to struggle with the later concepts. So this is why we're starting here today, because when you understand scales and keys, everything else becomes easier. Keys help us recognize home notes, right? Tonic notes. They help us know where we're going. They help us understand accidentals in the piece. They help us recognize interval and chords and harmonic progressions. They make transposition, improvisation, reading from a lead sheet all possible. But if you don't understand keys, it makes it all more challenging. And I think we as harpists have a little handicap when it comes to this. I like to think of it most of the time as an advantage because all of our scales are fingered the same. Whatever we choose to play, whatever scale we choose to play, whatever fingering we choose to play, it's all the same. All we have to do is set our levers or pedals to the right accidentals and we're good. But this means we have fewer opportunities to experience the tactile differences, the feeling differences between playing in one key and playing in another key. And it often means that we neglect the study of plain old scales just because they all are the same as far as our fingers go. But knowing the levers and the pedals is so essential. It's essential for glissandos. It's essential for being able to read a lead sheet, as I mentioned a minute ago. We need to know these things, and we need to know them, not be able to figure them out. Well, let me see, the minor— We don't want to figure them out. We want to know them. It's a basic building block. It's absolutely, quite literally, the ABCs of music, and we need to know them. And I hope I have impressed on you how important this is. If you're still skeptical, I understand it, but I would appreciate it if you just keep following along because we're going to talk about where all this stuff comes from and how it all relates. So bear with me. Now remember that we're talking exclusively here about Western music, art music, which we would often call classical music or folk music, but it's the music that is based on our particular scale. There are other kinds of music, particularly Eastern music, that uses a whole different scale. They've got a whole different notes, so that's not applicable here. So this is just to Western music, art music as I said, or folk music. Now what we have are 7 different notes and our scale is formed of those 7 different notes, those letter names, right? A, B, C, D, E, F, G. That's a diatonic scale. Don't worry too much about the terminology, but just remember that we've got 7 different letter names and then every scale that we form is a pattern of those 7 different letter names starting in one place and ending back up in that place right in order. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, or we could start on C. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, right? Just a circle, a little pattern, a line, however you want to visualize it. It's those 7 letter names arranged in order, and together those notes form a pattern of half steps and whole steps. The half step being the smallest interval we have, right? Two notes that are right next to each other. Or the whole step, which is combined of two half steps. So we can start on any note and go in order, and that's where we get this pattern of half steps and whole steps. And that's the key to scales. It's the pattern. Because we have those notes arranged in a particular way, wherever we start in that series of notes, we end up with half steps and whole steps in different places between different notes in the scale. So that's the pattern that forms our scale. Now, if we want to make every scale a major scale, then we have to realize that we're going to have to make some adjustments. A major scale, as I hope you know, would be maybe from C to C, right? That would have no flats or sharps. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. In order to make a major scale starting on any other note of the scale, we're going to have to add some flats or sharps to make it work. Those flats or sharps are added specifically to keep the half steps and whole steps in the same place so that every major scale sounds the same. So if you look at the scale as a particular pattern— a major scale as one pattern, a minor scale as another pattern— And the modes, of course, are other patterns as well. If you look at a scale as a pattern, then you realize that all the notes are in a particular relationship to each other. The scale is about relationships between notes so that we always hear our notes in a particular scale, like a major scale. We always hear those notes in the same relationship to each other. We just have to add those flats and sharps as we need to make those relationships sound the same. That's where key signatures come from. One way to think about this is that that key signature, that is the key. It's like the code, right? It's the shorthand for the accidentals that we need to create the scale. So that it, it's almost like putting a pedigram or putting a lever chart at the beginning of a piece. It tells you which sharps and flats you're going to need. Boom, boom, boom. So that you know exactly what you need to do to start out. Now, as you know, because we all do this, you can look at that key signature at the beginning of a piece and just automatically set those flats and sharps. Isn't it wonderful to play the harp sometimes? You can just set them and then forget them, because until you need to do something else in the middle of the piece, those levers or pedals can be set and you don't have to think about it. We can just play it. And as I mentioned before, other instruments don't get to do that. They have to think about every flat and sharp that they play. We should be, but we sometimes don't have to. So we set those things and then we forget them. And what we're forgetting is that we need to be making those chromatic adjustments, those flats and sharps, all the time to stay in that key, to stay with that scale, to keep that pattern the same. So if the key signature is just sort of the code, the shorthand that lets us know what sharps and flats we need, then we really need to start associating that with the scale that it goes with. It's not enough to look at a piece and say, "Oh, 2 sharps, great, and I can set my 2 sharps and go." Well, maybe it is enough because we can do that, but if you want any level of understanding, then you have to know what those 2 sharps mean? That's where the musicianship part of this comes in— knowing what those key signatures mean. Two levels to meaning here. One is to know what it means in terms of the name of the key that it applies to. The other one, of course, is understanding more about what the relationships are that it's trying to tell you— that sort of underlying meaning. I'm not so interested in talking about that today. I'd love to talk about that with you, and if my Heart Mastery members, we're going to be talking a bunch more about that as we go through our course in April. But what I want to talk to you about is this whole idea of learning your keys so that when you look at that key signature that says 2 sharps, you know instantly what major key it could represent or what minor key it could represent and how to tell the difference. Yeah, that gives you information. If you know that that 2 sharps means D major or B minor and you can look at the piece of music you have and say, "Oh, okay, yes, this is clearly going to be D major," then there are some interesting things that you know right away. You know that you're going to have a lot of D major chords, whether they're in a chord structure or as part of the melody. D is going to be your home note. So you can look at that, at the piece of music, without even listening to it and sort of see where the phrasing is going to be. Where are you going to come to a resting point? Where is it going to feel like you've arrived? Because that's going to be a D major moment. You're also going to be able to see the A major moments because A is the dominant in D, and this is going to give you some more information. Once again, a little bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about today, but this key signature gives you information. If it's a minor key, if you look at those two sharps and you look at your piece and you see, gosh, it doesn't look like it starts on a D or it ends on a D, And what do you know? It's got a lot of A-sharps. A-sharps are pretty weird. D major wouldn't have a lot of A-sharps in it. That would be very strange. Then you can make that instant decision that, ah, perhaps this is B minor. And then you see that the piece begins and ends on a B in the left hand. Perhaps you see a lot of B minor chords, and you see those A-sharps, which are part of the minor scale—harmonic minor or melodic minor—that would be associated with B. So just having that quick knowledge, it's going to be D major or B minor, can give you some information about the piece. You know something about how it sounds before you even look at the first note. Okay, so I hope you're saying, all right, I get it, I need to know my key signatures. Well, how am I supposed to do that? What do I do? And what is this circle of fifths deal? All right. I want to come back to the idea that scales are about relationships between notes and that key signatures come about through the accidentals that we need, the sharps or flats that we need to add to that scale to maintain the relationship between the notes. So when you understand that the scales are just patterns, you can realize that there are a lot of other patterns that might come about just through the fact that we've got one pattern to start with. And the fact is that we've got a lot of patterns in our musical system. Patterns by notes, patterns by fifths, patterns by thirds, all kinds of ways to look at things. So the circle of fifths is one very cool visual way to look at the pattern that keys form. What I like about the circle of fifths is that it just looks cool. But then I have, you know, I like the visual aspect of it. I like the sort of diagram aspect of it. But truthfully, I don't want you to get all bound up in the circle of fifths. I could look back at my piano lesson books from when I was a kid, and in back of the lesson book. Every single lesson book, my teacher drew this circle of fifths. And I have to tell you, it really didn't mean much to me. I didn't exactly understand what this was trying to tell me. And I think it's because the circle of fifths is a pattern that makes sense when you understand keys. I don't think it's a great way to learn them, and I I don't want any of my students to get caught up in learning the circle of fifths when really all they need to do is memorize their keys. So what I would like to tell you is that those patterns that scales and keys form happen by fifths, which is why the circle of fifths is kind of cool. But don't bother about learning the patterns if you can just learn the keys. What I think is best is what I actually had to do as a college student. I'm a, you know, a little embarrassed to admit, and that is to just learn the silly keys. You know, we've got 26 letters of the alphabet, we only have 15 major keys, and we only use half of them most of the time. If you learned the major keys that we use most often and the minor keys that we used most often and then just memorize them life would be so simple. You don't have to worry about the circle of fifths or worry about anything else. So we're talking about the major keys. Start with C major, no flats or sharps, and then maybe go up to 3 or 4 sharps and 3 or 4 flats. So you have C major with no sharps or flats, you have G major with 1 sharp, D major with 2 sharps, A major with 3 sharps, E major with 4 sharps. Okay, and then you've got flats. You've got F major with 1 flat, B-flat major with 2 flats, E-flat major with 3 flats, and maybe you can't play with more than 3 flats if that's where your lever harp is tuned, but you do have A-flat major with 4 flats. Kind of nice to know. So that's 9 keys. You can memorize 9 keys. It's really, really simple. And then there are the minor keys that would go with those key signatures as well. I know people like to try to figure out the minor keys. Well, you just go down a third, or you go up a sixth, or you whatever it is. And there's a pattern that goes with those too. But why not just learn them? It's so much simpler. No sharps or flats, A minor. 1 sharp, E minor. 2 sharps, B minor. 3 sharps, F sharp minor. 4 sharps, C-sharp minor. And then flats: 1 flat, D minor. 2 flats, G minor. 3 flats, C minor. 4 flats, F minor. Now you may not play in all those keys. You may not be able to play in all those keys depending on how your harp is tuned. But to be able to recognize those keys, realizing they're the ones we see most often, is going to be so helpful. You're just going to have that basic knowledge that's going to get you around almost everything you have to play, and it's going to give you a little bit more understanding about what you're doing so that you're not just reading the sharps or flats in the key signature and starting to play, but that you have some information that could be useful as you go along. It makes a huge difference. And here's what I suggest in terms of beginning to learn those keys: do just memorize them I mean, I think that that's the place to start. But I don't want the key signatures just to be head knowledge for you. I want them to be practical knowledge. I want them to be not just something that you see on a page, but something that you listen to, that you hear, and that you experience. So to go along with learning your key signatures, do pay attention to whatever key each piece that you play is in. Take a look at it, not just in terms of where you have to put your levers or your pedals, but what major key does this represent? Is your piece in major or minor? Which key is this? And then go ahead and play that scale. You know, set your pedals or levers and play the tonic scale, the, the key scale of your piece. If your piece is in D major, well, play a D major scale and maybe a D major chord just to get that in your head and hear what it is. But if those two sharps at the beginning of your piece represent B minor, well then play a B minor scale and get that sonority into your head before you start the piece. Just to give you the idea of the connection between what that key signature is doing, is telling you, and what it's really representing in terms of the sound. Remember, we don't just see our music, right? We hear our music, and I want you to make those kinds of connections. So simply playing the scale and the key chord of every piece before you practice it, that's a real bonus and it takes almost no time. It's going to bring your attention to the key signatures and help really reinforce the memorization or the learning of those key signatures that you've done. It's a great place to start. But then I suggest that in your scale practice you make it a point to play a different key every day. If you want to take, say, all right, I've got 7 major keys that I'm going to work in, and I'm going to learn those major scales that go with those keys, and then I'm going to learn the minor scales that go with those keys. And you pick one every day. Okay, today is C major day. It's C major and A minor day. And play those scales today. Then tomorrow, let's go to one sharp and say, okay, it's going to be G minor and G major rather, and E minor today, and I'm gonna play those scales. And you do that. So once again, you're using practice you would do anyway, your scales, to help reinforce those key signatures. It's a really easy, easy way to get so much benefit. Remember that learning your keys It's just basic musicianship. It's stuff you ought to know, and it's going to make you feel so much better when you know that you know it because you're not going to be floundering around for a key signature. Okay, let me see what— it's in E-flat major. How many flats do I need? Well, you probably know that one. At least I hope you do. But maybe there are other keys you're not so familiar with, and I'd like you to be familiar with them. And remember why. It's going to help you with learning your chords. It's going to help you with understanding the accidentals in a piece, learning to predict where they are, learning to hear the chords that are coming next. It's going to help you with transposition if you want to move something to another key, with improvisation if you want to do that. It's going to help you with playing from a lead sheet if you want to play from you know, just a melody with chord symbols, it's going to be essential. All of these things are fun things to do, part of what's fun about being a harpist, and they all start with knowing your keys. Okay, so as you can tell, this is something I can get pretty excited about, but I hope that you've taken away something valuable from this episode today at a practical level. Well, there's memorizing your keys. More importantly, there's playing those scales and keys so that they're in your ear and in your fingers and not just locked away as sort of irrelevant head knowledge. Because they're not irrelevant. They're about the relationships between the notes in the pieces we play every day. And it's those relationships that are so crucial. And that's what I'd love you to not only understand but to experience, that the keys aren't something that are just separate from what we do. They're a natural result of the way our music is organized, and they're a part of everything that we do. Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now. Let me tell you a little bit about what's coming up next week. Next week is my spring cleaning episode. We'll talk about all different kinds of ways that you can spring clean your harp playing from just cleaning to just about everything else. So it's the annual spring cleaning episode coming up next week, and I look forward to talking with you about all that fun stuff. 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. Thanks so much for listening today, 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.