Next Level Musicianship: The Sensory Triangle - PHH 245

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 tackled the real challenges harpists struggle with. The sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and 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've listened to me for a while or taken any of my classes or workshops, you know that I love finding the solutions to problems we harpists face and creating the step by step plans to take action to solve them. I've discovered over my years of teaching, though, that it's not hard to define the problem, at least the surface problem. For instance, if your left hand can't play the notes in two specific measures of your piece, then that's the problem and the solution is drill the notes. Sometimes, though, the real issue lies a few layers down. Maybe the reason the left hand can't play those measures isn't the notes. Perhaps there's a technical issue, or maybe reading bass clef is the sticking point. It could be a counting issue, or even not quite understanding what the meaning of the music is at that moment. So when I'm working with my Gold Circle students, we often spend some time digging a little deeper to see where the real issue is, because then we can define the proper steps to address it. Now, I'm mentioning this not because we're going to talk about solving problems today, at least not exactly. What I want to point out is that music study isn't as linear as we would like it to be. I mean, it would be terrific if we could practice a piece, put extra time on the hard spots, polish it up and play it. But we all know that it doesn't always work that way. That's because when we play music, we are using a very complex set of skills that involves much more than just playing with our best technique or learning the notes. This is the skill set that comes under the heading musicianship. In today's podcast episode, I Want to talk about the specific musicianship skills we use every day in our playing and how to keep them growing and developing. These skills are truly key to your growth as a harpist. I'll help you understand how they connect to each other and to your playing. And we'll talk about how to integrate more intentional musicianship skill development into your daily practice. And we're gonna talk about them using a concept that I developed called the sensory Triangle. Now, today's podcast episode is part of the series that I'm doing all this month. We started out talking about how to architect your progress in 2026. And last week our podcast episode was Next Level Technique. Specifically what you can do, the myths you could bust, we talked about those too. But what you can do to start leveling up your technique this year and how to do that, start to do it in a systematic way. Today we're talking about leveling up your musicianship. And I hope that our discussion about the sensory Triangle will help you do that. But remember that along with all of this, we're talking high level concepts here. And what I really love to do, as I mentioned before, is to get down in the weeds with you and really work on those things. And that's what I'm doing on the intensive that is coming up in just a few weeks. It's the harpist's breakthrough blueprint, and we're taking all of these concepts and exploring them considerably deeper. And. And over the course of five days of our intensive, we're going to work together to create a plan that's going to carry you through the year and help you know exactly what you need to do to make progress in all of these areas this year, so that by the time you get to the end of 2026, you will know that you are at that next level, or way further ahead, maybe the next level after that than you were when you got to the end of 2025. So that's what the harpist's breakthrough Blueprint is about. And I've included the link to a page that gives you all the details so that you can register and be sure you save your spot in this intensive. It's gonna be a really powerful course because I've never laid out this much for you as a plan before, and I really want to be able to share that. So, as I said, we're talking high level concepts today, but we are gonna dig deeper and I don't want you to miss that opportunity. Now, when we're talking about musicianship, we are talking about A complex and vast set of skills. It's a big area. I like to think of it as the craft of music. It's everything about music that isn't specific to our playing the harp. It's the skill set, the knowledge that we share with every other musician, no matter what instrument they play. So that's a big topic. Right. But some of those skills are so vital every single day. Now, I'm not the person who's going to tell you you need to become a music theory expert just because that's part of the craft of music. I believe that for all of us, we need to know what we need to know. We don't need to know everything about everything. That would be a lot. So we're not going to talk about the esoteric areas of musicianship. I'm going to talk about the things that we use, the things that we need, the things that are important to us. Now. I first started thinking about musicianship and the set of skills when I was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music, because all of a sudden I was called on to study these things. We had classes in music theory, we had classes in oral skills. So we had to learn how to train our ears. We had to learn how to read music in a completely different and better way. We had all sorts of things that we had to do. And so that got me really thinking about the role that these skills played in my own playing. And I could see that they were valuable. But then I discovered truly how valuable they were when I started teaching at Curtis. You may not know this, but I taught music theory and ear training there for a lot of years, for 19 years. And it's a special school, it's a very small school, very prestigious, a very, you know, world renowned music conservatory. It's. And the students who go there are at the top of their studies already. I mean, they're so gifted and just brilliant students. And so teaching them was interesting because, well, I had been one of them, so I knew what the attitudes were. But nobody wants to sit in class and learn these things. They want to go into their practice room and play music, right? So they didn't want to have to learn these things. But I was, as a teacher, totally passionate about the fact that they were going to use these skills every day. And how did I know that? Well, because I was using them. So I just was so passionate about helping my students try to understand how this would benefit them. And I had so many students come back to visit me at school after they had graduated. They'd come back and say, oh, I had no idea. I used this stuff all day, all the time. And so what I want to share with you about this is that if these skills could help these musicians who were so gifted and so skilled, if they can help them, imagine how they'll help you, right? That's the kind of thing we're talking about today. And it's not difficult. It's not, you know, highfalutin. It's not, you know, some esoteric academic flight. These are practical skills, the things you're going to use every moment you play. But as I started teaching these concepts to the harpist that I taught, I realized that I needed a little bit different way to talk about them. When I was standing in front of a classroom, it made sense to deal with these topics sort of academically and in a very classroom structured sort of way. But in a harp lesson, that's not really how we work. And I wanted to connect these concepts a little bit more to what we actually do. And that's when I came up with the sensory triangle. So picture a triangle. We've got those three sides, we've got those three corners. And at each of those corners we're going to put what I thought of as a sense. That's why I called it the sensory triangle. So one corner is going to be your fingers. It's our technique, right? It's, it's, you know, we play so we use our fingers and granted they, they touch, they feel okay. So that's at one corner, then at another corner of the triangle are our eyes. What we see. What we see is so critical. Think of all the things we can see. We could look at our fingers and see if they're behaving. We could look at the music to read the notes. We could look at the patterns in the music and understand what they mean. We could look at a lot of things in the music, all the little stage directions, all those foreign words. We could look at all those details as well. So our eyes and what we see plays a lot into our playing. So that's the second corner of the triangle. The third corner of the triangle is our ears, what we hear. I think that for many of us, we so under use our ears. I would love us to be much more intentional about our listening. What do we hear? Because when we're playing, for those of us who read pretty well, it can be tempting to just sort of sit there and you let the notes go in through your eyes and come out through your fingers and never really pay attention. To what they sound like. And we should be listening not just for wrong notes, but we should be listening to predict what's coming next. Where is the music going? Do we understand what it's going to sound like? What that progression of melody and harmony is going to be? We should be listening to our sound, to our tone. We should be listening to the dynamics. There are so many things that we should be paying attention to. I also think that we should be using our ears more when we tune. But that might be a topic for another day. So I don't think tuning should be about our eyes on the tuner. Our tuning should be about our ears. As I said, I'll get off that soapbox for today and we'll deal with that another time. But our ears are important. Now, if you're a person who's used to playing by ear, maybe your eyes are the things that you don't trust quite so much, and maybe your reading is more difficult. But think about this triangle. It's an equilateral triangle, if you remember your geometry. So all three sides are equal. So our fingers need to do their job, our eyes need to do their job, our ears need to do their job. And we play best when they all work together all the time. And then right in the middle of that triangle, of course, is our very capable brain. That's everything that we know. We know a little bit about music theory. Maybe what you know are your key signatures and some chords. Great. Well, maybe you can maybe you know a little bit about music history. Maybe all you know are some things about the piece you're playing right now, and that's fine. Oh, it was written by this composer. And this composer lived here and lived at that time and wrote pieces like this. And this is what the title means. And I like the piece especially because of this chord. You know, all those things that connect us to the music and give us understanding about the music. That's what lives in the middle of the triangle. Because really, what lives in the middle of the triangle is the music. And all the things on the outside of that triangle. Our fingers, our ears, and our eyes are all creating that music and that musical moment. So that's the concept of the sensory triangle. But what does it mean for us practically? How do we use that in our practice to help us move these musicianship skills forward? That's our question. Right. And we talked about technique last week, so I don't think we need to talk about the technique aspect of this. I want to focus right now on the eyes and the ears. And we'll talk a little bit about the connection in the middle as well. So let's start with the eyes, with what you see. All right. When we think about what we see, the first things that come to mind are, okay, note reading. I need to be able to read my notes quickly and fluently and know what they are. I need to be able to read ahead, and I want to be able to sight read. I know that when I think about all the things I need to read and to see, it can be very daunting. And it's not easy to practice. I mean, it's much easier to sit there and drill a couple of really tricky measures than it is to figure out how to help yourself read better. So here is the best advice that I can give you. It's the advice that I give any student of mine who asks, and that is to read intentionally, to be aware of what you're reading and how you're reading it. And there are a couple really basic techniques that you can use to help you practice your note reading. Take a piece that you're playing can be a very simple one. Don't worry about doing something complex. Find an easy piece. If all the pieces you're playing are quite hard, go back and find an easy one. And then take the right hand line and say the names of the notes. I know it seems like a baby thing, but what I want you to do is to put on the metronome so that you're staying nice and steady, and then say the names of the notes in rhythm. You don't have to say all the flats and sharps. That's okay. Just say those letter names, say them in rhythm, and then say them and play them at the same time. Oh, see, now we're making an important connection. Because now you're not just connecting the dot on the page with the letter name of the note and the string that you're going to play that note on, but you're also connecting it with a pitch, that kind of connection. That's the thing that makes the sensory triangle powerful. When you can take just a couple minutes and say, well, I'm going to read these notes so that I can be sure that I understand what. What the note is, what its letter name is, what string I play it on. And I'll help myself learn the music by practicing it in a steady tempo in the exact rhythm, and then I'll sing along with it, and I'll play along with it so that you're getting the pitch as well. This Is such important training because it's going to allow you to think about what those note relationships that you're singing or playing, what those note relationships are like. So that when you encounter a new piece of music that you're going to sight read, you can look at the dots on the page and have a guess, an educated guess as to how they're going to sound. That's why this training is important. Imagine how much easier it would be to learn a piece if just looking at the music gave you a hint of what it was going to sound like. If you could predict the way the next note was going to sound because you knew what it should be relative to the note before it, that's pretty powerful. And the saying and playing that I talked about, you know, say the names of the notes while you play it. That's such an easy thing to do. And of course, once you've done it with the right hand, be sure to do it with the left hand. Be sure you're practicing both treble and bass clefs. You don't want to get stuck in just learning one. We want to be fluent in both. You may not be able to sing all the notes. They may be too high or too low, or maybe you just don't like singing. But. But do play them and listen while you're playing, say those notes, Play those notes, Listen to those notes. That's so important, so interesting to think that something so basic could give you a really powerful tool and of course a way to level up your reading. Of course you can practice good old sight reading, right? Get sight reading books or use books that you played from a long, long time ago. Get out those books and read through them. Practice your sight reading. That's also a time proven way to get better at this. Sight reading has a lot of other components though, and that's why I recommend say and play. To start with sight reading, you've got hands together things probably you've got more comple music perhaps than just that one line that you're looking at. So sight reading is a little more challenging. However, I want to make it just perhaps a little bit easier for you. If you are practicing sight reading, remember that your goal of sight reading is to get to the right note at the right time. It says nothing about fingering, nothing about technique. When you are sight reading, all those rules don't apply. Your only job is to get to the right note at the right time. You could play it with your nose if that was what was going to work. So it doesn't matter what finger you use, doesn't matter if your technique isn't exactly what you want it to be. The idea is to get the notes out at the right time. And you can't do that if you're trying to second guess yourself with fingering and all that stuff at the same time time. So remember, when you sight read, stick to that one thing. Practice your sight reading. You can always go back and fix fingering later. That's not what that's for. So when it comes to reading, you need to read intentionally. That's the sensory triangle key for your visual part of this. You need to read intentionally. Know what those notes are, Practice what those notes are. Make those connections strong between the dot on the page, the string on the harp, the letter, name of the note, and the pitch that the string makes. It's all about connection. So if that's leveling up your reading, what is leveling up your hearing? All right, I'm going to start with something pretty similar. We're going to start listening with focus. Now, there are lots of ways, of course, to level up your hearing. You could take a lot of oral skills things. One of the time honored practices for learning to listen with focus is to take musical dictation, where somebody plays a fragment of music and you have to write down what you hear. You know, maybe they give you a starting note. Oh, maybe they don't. But maybe they give you the starting note and you have to write down the right notes in the right rhythm without seeing the music. That's one of the conservatory ways of teaching oral skills, of teaching you how to listen with focus. But we can do this a little bit more easily. I want you to start this way. When you make a mistake, you hear you play a wrong note, you can stop. Now, granted, some of the time we want to learn to play past mistakes. But if you're going to stop and fix your mistake, I want you to stop because you've heard something wrong. And don't just fix it. Ask yourself, what's wrong? What did you hear? Was it a wrong note in the middle of a chord? Okay, which note was wrong? Which finger played the wrong string? Was it on the top? Was it in the bottom? Was it someplace in the middle? Teaching yourself to discern at that level is going to help you learn faster. Of course, fix mistakes faster, but it's going to help you be a much more attentive musician. So when you play that wrong note, next time, just ask yourself what was wrong. Maybe it was the rhythm, Maybe you just heard Something and you stopped because you knew it wasn't right. Well, ask yourself what wasn't right and then you can tell yourself what it should have been and you can fix it. But listen to the difference. Right? This was wrong, this was right. I think that's such an easy way to start paying attention and start listening to what's going on. Of course, you can also learn to listen with focus in your warm ups and in your technique exercises where you can really pay attention to your tone. That's a wonderful way to learn to listen with focus as well. And as I mentioned a moment ago, kind of a pet peeve of mine. Yes, listen. When you tune your harp, don't just believe your tuner, use your tuner, use your tuning time to train your ear. When you play a note, to tune it. When you play a string, to tune it, check it with the octave either below it or above it that you've already tuned, is it sharp to the note that's in tune? Is it flat? Make your own decision before you look at the tuner and check. There's absolutely no reason that you can't do that. Yeah, it will take a little bit longer, at least at first, but you might get so good at it that you don't even use your tuner A lot of the time. Just listening to what in tune sounds like, listening with intention, listening with focus. That's how you train your ear. And then the last way to, I think, teach yourself to listen with focus is that element of prediction. When you're listening to a piece of music played, can you get a sense of what chord is going to come next? What melody note is going to come next? Can you predict it when you are playing a piece? This is a very useful skill, believe it or not, for memorization as well as for sight reading. In sight reading, it's helpful because you're making guesses all the time as you play. Thinking about, okay, well, let's see, it's going to go here, it's going to go here, it's going to go here. And sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong, but you're making those predictions based on what you hear. It's easier than you might think. And you'll know if somebody ever played a piece and they stopped right before the very last chord, you'd know what the last chord should sound like. You'd know what the last melody note should sound like. We have an instinct for these things, we've trained our instincts, but we just forget to use them so often and it's quite helpful. So this is a helpful skill for sight reading. It's a helpful skill for memorizing, because as you memorize, you don't want to just think about what those notes might look like on the page. You can't see anymore. And you don't want to rely on your fingers, just hoping that they know where to go. Your ear can guide them. Imagine if, while you were hearing the piece in your head, your fingers played what you heard. That's part of listening with focus as well. It's the knowledge that you get that comes from having listened with focus, and your fingers can use that to play the music from memory. So if we look at the entire sensory triangle and we look at those three corners or three sides, the technique aspect, which of course, we talked about in depth last week, and the visual part of it, the seeing, using your eyes and then using your ears, that third corner, of course, the middle of that triangle being connecting those dots and putting them all together, those three corners of the sensory triangle all need to be developed. And it's generally so much easier to work on the technique corner, the technique piece of it, because the tasks are clearer. With the visual and the aural part of musicianship training, it's a little bit more nebulous, a little bit less comfortable to work in, but this is part of what you need to get to the next level, or whatever level it is you want to get to. It's part of what's important. I want you to really think about the easy things that we talked about today that you can use to make your playing more knowledgeable from a musicianship standpoint. It's not just about the knowledge, though, either. It's about being able to do what you do more easily because you can make more sense of what you see and get more information from what you hear. So as we finish this discussion today, I want you to really think about this. It's not about what you're practicing particularly, but it's about what you want to do and the harpist that you want to be when you play. Do you want to be somebody who's just playing the notes, or do you want to understand more about what you're doing? I mean, musicianship isn't something you add on after the notes are learned. It's the core of what we do. It's that thread that connects everything, connects the music that we play to all the ways that we play it. It's what turns into your own individual musical voice. So if you've ever felt that you're playing sounds kind of okay, but not really the way that you want. That's not a sign necessarily that you're just not doing the work, but it is a sign that there are some areas that you really need to work in that we haven't been as intentional about and that they could use just a little bit of planning. And that's where I'm going to remind you that this offer for the harpist breakthrough blueprint is there waiting for you, because we will plan this out with intention in that intensive. We will make sure that there is a focus and a plan for you to work on this. But in the meantime, because that's still a few weeks off, do the plan say, or I usually say say and play. That came out backwards this time, but say the names of the notes while you play them. It's so helpful. And I'm going to give you one quick tip. If you are having problems putting a passage hands together, say and play the right hand, or say the right hand while you play the left hand, and then say the left hand while you play the right hand. It's exactly the practice that you need at dividing your focus between the hands and lining them up. So say and play is a valuable practice tool in that respect, too. But being intentional about what you read and listening with focus, all of that is going to help you with your music. And that's what I want you to think about as you're looking for that next level of playing. Your musicianship skills are things you can level up to help you get there. So I hope this was helpful today. I have a feeling that it might have been just a little bit overwhelming for you, but if you have questions, send me a note through the podcast. You can send them right to podcastartmastery.com and we'll talk a little bit more about it next week. We're going to get onto something a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more familiar. We're going to talk about next level repertoire, and I'm talking about it in terms of moving from where you are to that next level of repertoire. How do you find that, what does that look like and how do you get there? So that's next week on the podcast, and that's gonna be a fun one. I love talking about repertoire and talking about what might come next and how to figure that out for yourself. So that's next week. Before we go, I just want to apologize. I don't know if you were listening to this today and thinking that maybe I was doing this in a train station. It is so noisy here. We have a huge windstorm that's going on and so everything is going the windows are rattling, the wind chimes outside are going a mile a minute and the the wind is pounding at the windows. So in case you thought I was doing this from the train station, I'm not. But we do have a lot of wind, so my apologies for that. Hopefully when we talk next week, the weather will be a little bit calmer. So 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.