My 5-4-4-3 Plan for Learning Christmas Music Now - PHH 270

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. There are lots of ways to get our music ready for the holidays. Yes, I know it's only July and we have months to prepare, but that's actually the point. You could wait until the week before your first Christmas gig in December to practice your music, Ooh, and I have to say there were times in the past that that was my strategy, but as you might imagine, it isn't a course of action I'd recommend, nor is it one I follow anymore. Or you could try the standard Christmas-in-July method: you learn your holiday music in the summer and then try to hang on to it until the holidays eventually come around. Granted, it's a much better plan than waiting until December, but as a preparation strategy,— it still leaves a lot to be desired. If you've learned your music by the time summer ends, what do you do with it for the next 3 months? Naturally, there are a lot of different approaches you could take, and some of those are going to feel more natural to you than others just based on your personal practice preferences. There are external influences that might play a role as well. For instance, perhaps this is the year that you have been asked to play Britain's Ceremony of Carols for the first time. Well, the difficulty and scope of this piece will require a much more focused approach than standard church or party holiday music. And while I used to be fairly undisciplined in my approach to my own holiday repertoire preparation—and believe me, I paid the price for it more than once—I am unwilling to let my students suffer the same way. So I have a few "always" ground rules and a couple of "never" caveats that I try to share with them. These have their roots in my own learning the hard way. However, I also have a system that seems to work pretty well for most of my students, and the odd thing is that I haven't really told any of them about it. We've used the system, but I've never given it a name before. So here it is, making its official debut: my 5-4-4-3 plan for holiday music preparation. My students will recognize it, or at least most of it, and I hope this will organize more clearly what we've talked about already. If you haven't studied with me, well, I'm happy to share this with you for the first time ever. Of course, also, if you're one of the challengers taking our Compose for Christmas challenge, this is going to fit right in. You're working on your own arrangement, creating your own arrangement, and you'll be doing that Ooh, next week from the time this podcast goes live, our challenge starts on July 20th. So you'll be working on that. And the, as you work on that, it will fit right into this plan because of course your arrangement isn't going to be the only piece you have to play this holiday season. So it will fit easily into this whole little system. If you haven't signed up to join us for that challenge, it's gonna be a lot of fun and I would really encourage you to do that. Working on your own arrangement is very different from just playing one just, you know, off the shelf, as it were. You get to have so much more control, and you invest yourself in the arrangement in a very different way. And you'll find that practicing it and learning it is a very different experience as well. So you still have time to sign up for that. We had our pre-challenge call last week where we got everybody started with MuseScore and got everybody their, their sample carol files that they can start playing around with. And a week from today, July 20th, we start with our 3 classes on creating your own arrangement. It's going to be a lot of fun. Everybody really loved the first call, and what a great group of people to work with. So if this intrigues you at all, I would urge you to sign up and do this. It's going to be a great addition to your holiday repertoire this year, and you're going to learn so much by doing this. Also, of course, we still have registration open for the Chrysalis Music Workshop, which is coming up the end of September. And I'll— I've told you plenty about that before, and I'll tell you more about that in the coming weeks. But right now, I want to start talking about Christmas. I want you to consider the holiday itself. Like other holidays throughout the year, Christmas comes once, right? We have one New Year's Day, one Valentine's Day, one St. Patrick's Day, and we could go on and on. So we have all this Christmas music and we learn it and we practice it, and then we put it away. And I think there's a, there's a special challenge with Christmas music because we play the same music every year. I mean, I don't know that a Christmas goes by that I don't play Silent Night, and I might do different arrangements of it, but it's always going to come up. And we have the same music, and it's well-loved music. I mean, we enjoy playing it, but we're as harpists facing a dilemma. Do we play the same old arrangements every year? And granted, we might love them and look forward to them every year, that's fine. Or do we sort of satisfy our more creative soul and look for another arrangement, which means, yeah, we know how Silent Night goes, but now we're still learning another set of coordinations and a different set of notes. So where is the balance? How do we add new music? How do we refresh the old music? How can we meld it all together? And I think that's the challenge with Christmas even more than with other holidays because we can mix things up more, or there aren't quite so many expectations around music for other holidays. Christmas is just big. It's got a lot of stuff, a lot of emotional weight, and a lot of musical the pressure that comes with it. Lots and lots of Christmas performances, and people want to hear what they want to hear. We want to play what we want to play. We hope there's an intersection in there somewhere, and we really want to enjoy what we're playing. We don't want to feel like it's just rehashed or stale, and we don't want it to feel uncomfortable and new and raw either, because we know that everyone we're playing for knows how these pieces go. They're going to know when we make a mistake. We can't really cover it up quite so easily as we can with the concert repertoire, perhaps. So this is the juggling act that we're faced with every year. And so that's why I came up with this little system, because we know we want to work on Christmas music now, or at least well in advance of September, so that we have time to learn it and we don't feel pressured about it. We know we want to work on it ahead, but we also don't want to get it all done and then put it all away and then have to relearn it. At the same time, we don't want to have to spend an hour every day from now until Christmas keeping our Christmas music fresh. Now, there are a lot of systems that you could use to say, all right, I'm going to do these pieces this day, these pieces this day. But that can get a little complex. I have students, and have had students in the past, who are really great at keeping spreadsheets of everything that they're working on, and that works for them. As much as I use spreadsheets to keep track of, oh, just about everything, I don't do that to keep track of my music preparation. That's just not me, and maybe it's not you either. Or maybe you are the spreadsheet person, and that's great. You can keep track of everything and put your check marks. I've done this one, I haven't done this one, I've done this one, and that will help keep you organized. But I like to think that the beauty of my 5-4-4-3 system is that it gives you permission to work a little bit differently and with a little bit less structure. Enough structure that you feel like you're on track and moving, but not so much that you feel like if you didn't check the box you were supposed to check today, you're automatically behind. That's where I come from for a lot of my playing and my teaching. I wanna know that I'm making progress. I wanna be sure my students are making progress, but I don't want you to feel like you're locked into a particular system. And I personally never want to feel like if I wanna take a day off, that's not gonna put me behind. That's just part of the life that I want to have. That includes my harp playing. I mean, trust me, I know when my playing is important enough that I absolutely need to be doing it every day. But I also have learned over the decades I've been playing to trust the time and the process. And that's what this system does. It gives you the preparation that you need and the flexibility that gives you room to breathe and just to take it easy and room for whatever unexpected thing might come up because sometimes things do, right? Life has a way of destroying our best laid plans. So the result we want is that you'll have your holiday music comfortably ready. It'll be ready in plenty of time so you don't have to rush through anything. And the music that you want to play is going to be comfortable for you to play. That's what we're looking to do. And in order to have that happen, my own feeling is that it's nice to think that by our Thanksgiving time— so that's the fourth Thursday of November— so by that last week or so in November, everything is ready. Your first Christmas gig is likely to come up very early in December. It might come up in November too, in which case you might wanna adjust the timeline just a little bit. But thinking about having that last week of November, you are ready to go. Think about how wonderful you'll feel going into the holiday season, right? So this is the feeling that we're going for. It's the level of preparation we're looking for. And that's why we all say, "Okay, yes, start your Christmas music in the summer." But what I'm going to tell you now is how to start it and when to start it and how to get from summer to the end of November and feel like you're in control and feel like you still have time to work on other music. I don't want you just to do your Christmas music, and I don't want you to think, okay, I'm putting my Christmas music away for a moment because I need to learn this other piece. I have other pieces I want to play in the fall. Well, yeah, and you should be able to to do that. So that's where I'm coming from, and that's where the 5-4-4-3 plan starts. And it starts now, in the middle of July or so. You know, you can give yourself a few weeks earlier to start if you want. You can start this as late as you feel comfortable with, but mid-July is kind of nice. And so what does the number 5 stand for? We're going to take 5 weeks or so. Think sort of middle July to the end of August. And in those 5 weeks, you're going to learn any new pieces that you think you want to learn. You're going to review the repertoire you already have. And that's your first 5 weeks. You're probably already doing that. If you're the type that likes to start your Christmas music in July, that's probably what you're doing. You're deciding what new pieces you want for your repertoire, and you're looking at your old ones and saying, okay, yeah, I've played that one long enough. I'm going to give that a rest this year, or I liked that piece but I want to do a different arrangement this year. So you're pulling out new things, and think about what 5 weeks gives you time to do. It gives you time to read through everything you played last year. It gives you time to investigate some new pieces and start working on them. It gives you time to figure out what that set is going to look like. After all, Your holiday playing might take different forms, right? It might be, "I play these things at church every year," or it might be, "I play these programs for nursing homes," or "I have to be prepared for holiday luncheons," or "I need 2 hours of background music." You know what your holiday playing is going to look like, and so your repertoire needs to be around that. And you probably have done this before, right? You know what you need. And so if you had 2 hours of background music last year, you're going to start by pulling out that 2 hours of background music this year, and then you'll do some judicious weeding. Uh, didn't want to do that one again, don't want this one again, don't want this one again. And I've also heard these new things, or I want to go on the hunt for some new things to add to that just because they'll be fun to play. Whatever your repertoire needs are— background music, church music, nursing home music, whatever it happens to be— that's what you already have most likely, and you're just going to do your editing of that music. Keep what you like, ditch what you feel like ditching, and find some new things to add. And this is the time to do that. So far so good. We've got your music picked. It's the end of August. You're ready to approach a new autumn with new things, and you've got your Christmas music in hand. And here's the question I hear from a lot of people: "Well, so what do I do with it now?" Well, we've finished with the number 5. We're going to go on to the number 4, and I suggest that you take the next 4 weeks, which would essentially be all of September— take the next 4 weeks and put it all away. No touching it. Absolutely no touching it. Now, this is a system that strikes terror in the hearts of harpists who haven't done this before, but you've done your work. You spent 5 weeks playing through things, deciding things. You've made your decisions. You know what pieces you're going to play. You've played through them. You've practiced them. Now, if there's a big one— I talked about the Britten Ceremony of Carols before— that probably doesn't fit in this category. Although if you have taken your 5 weeks and you've totally learned the Ceremony of Carols, you can absolutely put it away for 4 weeks now too. But if there's something that you feel, okay, I, I need the next 3 months to continue working on this because it's not even close to where it wants to be, that's different. And perhaps you have an arrangement you've added this year that you know is going to take some extra time. Well, I would still say put it away for 4 weeks. You're gonna have time to bring it back. And there's so much that happens when we let our music go. Okay, I heard that laugh. I know you laughed because you're thinking, yeah, the last time I put music away, I brought it back and it was as if I had never seen it before. Yeah, I know, I understand that, but we're not putting it away for very long. And most of it is probably music you've already played in previous years. It's not as if it's brand new to you. There might be a couple brand new things, but that's all right. Take these 4 weeks right here in September at the beginning of everything else coming back and getting busy to put that away and get everything else on board. Bring on those pieces that you're going to have to learn for your harp ensemble or for your lessons or whatever it else, whatever else you happen to be doing, go ahead and pull that up and start working on that. There's time for Christmas, I promise. There's time. So you're going to take those 4 weeks and you're just going to put it away. Now you get extra bonus points if you actually get to the end of September and you haven't touched your Christmas music during that month, the Christmas music you already prepared. You get brownie points from me. So, you know, consider that gold star yours. But now the work starts again. We've put it away and, you know, your brain has had time to sort of take a vacation from it and let it sort of sink in. All that's good. And now we're going to take the next 4 weeks. Remember, that's the next number in my system. We're going to take the next 4 weeks, essentially all of October, to rework and refresh the new additions that you brought in in the summer. And how do I know you brought in new additions? Well, I can guarantee it because we all love new music. So I'm 100% sure that you didn't just say, "Okay, I'm gonna play everything I've played before and I'm not gonna do anything new." That would be unnatural. Very unmusical, really, if you look at it, 'cause music is always an adventure to us, isn't it? We're always looking at new arrangements and saying, "Hey, that would be cool. I really like that. I found out about this. I discovered this." I want to do this, this year. So we're going to take those next 4 weeks in October to just work on the pieces you added. Now I give you permission if there's a piece that you brought back that you haven't played for years that needs a little bit of extra time, you can put that in here too. But all the repertoire you've played last year and the year before, we don't need to go over that right now. It probably didn't need a whole lot of work in July and August either, so we don't need to bring that back yet. Now this is where I think you can really experience the crucial difference between this kind of plan and just about any other kind of plan. We're trusting and relying on the work you've already done over years on this other repertoire. To have that, that repertoire will be ready. We're not going to do that yet. We're also trusting the work you did on those new pieces in July and August to have some impact and some effect when we come here at the very beginning of October to refresh it. Even if it feels like you're relearning it, you'll find that you move much faster than you did the first time. You know, it might have a a day or two of, gosh, I don't remember this at all, but then it will move forward quickly because you worked on it not that long ago. So we've taken 5 weeks to work on your entire repertoire. We've taken 4 weeks vacation from Christmas. Ah, now we're taking the next 4 weeks, which times out to essentially the month of October, to pull out the new things and maybe the more difficult things. If there are things that are really challenging that you're doing, you can put those in here too. But realize you're not doing an hour's worth of Christmas music here, so you still have time to bring this back and still work on the other pieces you're working on for the autumn. You don't have to abandon all that other repertoire just to do this. And if you do, if you're bringing back so much or adding so much new music that you really— it's taking all your practice time, then you've probably overreached, and you may need to rethink that a little bit because you shouldn't have to spend all your time on just Christmas music to the exclusion of other music that you want to or need to play. So there's a question of balance to consider right there. So October, you're working on your regular harp stuff and you're bringing back the new additions and any really super challenging thing that you worked on in the summer. This takes us to the end of October, and by the end of October we can start to feel the holidays coming, right? By this time all the stores are, you know, well past their initial holiday offerings. We know that Christmas is coming and we still have 3 to 4 weeks probably before your first holiday performance. So you have enough time, and this is why— this is where the number 3 is. You've got 3 weeks, those first 3 weeks in November, to bring back everything. So in those last 3 weeks, the first 3 weeks of November, you're going to add in all the familiar repertoire that you've already reviewed, that you've already chosen. So that repertoire you worked on in July and August, you had some new things. We've been working on those in October, but now we're going to bring back— in addition, we're going to bring back everything so you can start playing it. Now this will take more time because you're going through everything that you actually need to go through. So this will take a little bit more practice time, but you've been putting in practice time on your other regular non-holiday music. So you probably can divide your practice time a little bit more generously to the, the holiday music because you've spent plenty of time on the regular autumn music. Do you see how that balances? It's a different way of looking at preparation. We front-load the preparation in the summertime when the schedules are a little bit easier and perhaps you have less other music you need to prepare. And we get everything set there, and then we give it a rest in September. Then in October, we're bringing back the new things and the really challenging things, make sure that they're ready. And then those last 3 weeks, the first 3 weeks of November, we're adding back in everything else and reviewing it as we think is necessary. There may be some pieces you're playing, and I certainly hope there are, that are just so simple for you and you've done them so many times that you really don't need to review them more than playing them once or twice, and that might be all that you need. So don't practice anything you don't have to, right? If it's something that doesn't need to be practiced because you've played it so many times, then don't practice it. There's nothing that says you have to practice it just because it's there. Use your practice time on the things that require it. That makes sense, right? Now let's look at the whole system in review again. We're going to look at the whole thing, and I'll suggest a couple of tweaks you may want to make to it. The 5-4-4-3 plan as I outlined it is essentially you can set your entire holiday repertoire in the summer and practice it. The old stuff, the new stuff, whatever it is you want to add. That's what summer's for. Then September, you take the month of September off. Put it all away, let it just marinate, and do your other regular harp stuff. Get that going. Then in October, you bring back the new things and the hard things just to give them some time while you're still working on your regular music. Then the— once November hits, bring back everything, and that's that final 3 weeks to just get all the rust off of everything that may have gathered just a little bit of rust since the summer. There shouldn't be much. And again, my special rule: don't practice anything you don't have to. If it doesn't need practicing because you can play it well enough without, then don't practice it. There's nothing wrong with just using the skill that you have. You don't have to keep practicing it if it doesn't need it. But there are some times you might want to adjust this, or some things that might make you feel a little bit more secure. If you are not at all sure about taking that month of September off, then I would suggest that you take the work that I was suggesting you do in October and move that back to September. So in September, put the easy things away and focus on those harder pieces, or the harder passesges that you need to, to work on so that you've got the new things and the more challenging things that you're keeping in rotation in September. And then you can bring back the other things earlier in October if you want, or you can wait till November. But if you feel like there's more than you can comfortably let go for the month of September, then just limit what you're doing. You could also decide that, all right, I'm going to mostly let it go, but on one day a week I'm going to play through my Christmas stuff just to play through it. If that makes you feel better and helps your music be better prepared, then by all means do that. You will, over the course of trying this kind of a thing, you will learn where you can trust yourself and where you need to put in extra time. Like, okay, no, this is going to be fine. I don't need I don't need to keep practicing it right now. Or, ooh, this is not going to be fine. I do need to keep practicing this. As you get better at this whole kind of a system, you'll learn what you can let go and what you can't. And you will probably surprise yourself with how much you can let go, particularly of Christmas music, because it is so familiar. But if you want to spend extra time Preparing— there's nothing wrong with that. I want to make sure that you aren't just practicing Christmas stuff when there are other pieces that you want to learn and play. That's where the balance point comes in for me. I think that we don't want to just have this fabulous Christmas repertoire and nothing else to play, so I want you to keep moving with the rest of your repertoire and not let Christmas just overwhelm that. And that's my point with this kind of a system. I think you can do it, and I think you can do it well. The other thing to watch for, and I alluded to this before, don't overreach, right? Don't throw out a dozen of your favorite old arrangements and bring in a dozen new ones and then overwhelm yourself with the amount of new notes that you have to learn. A couple of key substitutions, probably all you want to make each year. But you know you. You might not have any problem. You might be a great sight reader and an advanced player, and you might not have any problem bringing in a dozen new pieces. But just because somebody else can bring in a dozen new pieces doesn't mean that that's going to be the right course for you if you're not as comfortable reading, if you're not as fast a learner, or you haven't been playing as long. So be very aware of what works for you because that's the point of all of this. Your Christmas music should not be a stressor for you. It should work for you. You should be able to enjoy playing it, and that goes for practicing it too. So that's what I want to leave you with today: the idea that whatever system you use needs to be geared toward you being comfortable with your holiday playing and not having that be added pressure. Remember that the simple carol arrangements are ones that people love to hear. Don't think that you can't play it for people just because it's easy for you. It's only going to mean that you play it better and they enjoy it more. So don't overload yourself. We want our Christmas music to be special and sound special, but Christmas music is special by definition because it's holiday music, because it only comes up once a year. It's already special. We don't have to work so hard. That's great news, right? Okay, so consider my 5-4-4-3 plan. Tweak it however you think is best for you, but remember that it's giving you permission to practice and to not practice, to prepare your Christmas music and to take some time off from it so that you can play other things which are only going to enrich your playing. So that's my idea for Christmas playing. It's what I like to do. I will play it and then put it away, and I'll bring it back when I have to. That's what I like. It's what I like to recommend for my students, and it's what I'm suggesting to you today. So I hope you give it a try. I do want to encourage you once again to join our Compose for Christmas challenge if you have not already. That's going to be a terrific way to have one piece ready for Christmas. And the beauty of it is that it's your arrangement, so it's playable for you. It's playable by you. You don't have to write anything you can't play. What a deal is that, right? You're in charge of it, so if you can't play it, you won't write it. There you go. It makes life easier too. All right, so I will put the link to Compose for Christmas, our 3-day arranging challenge, in the show notes for you. You can find it at harpmastery.com under the Learn tab. And we start a week from today, June 20th— or July— listen to me, June. We start a week from today, July 20th, and we'll be all ready to go, and I hope you will be joining us. On next week's show, I'm going to be sharing a friendship with you, a new friend for me. I had the privilege of doing an interview with harpist Alexandra Chang. Alexandra has just— is just releasing, I think it comes out later this week, is just releasing a new solo album called Abandon, and she has the most interesting harp story to tell, and I'm really excited about sharing it with you. And she is a person that just truly embodies harp happiness, and I know you'll get that sense from the interview. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you, and that'll be next week on the podcast. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.