Next Level Repertoire: Turning Baby Steps into Giant Strides - PHH 246

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. Have you ever started learning a piece that seemed like it should be relatively easy to learn and then discovered it was actually much harder than you thought? Of course you have. It happens to all of us. And in this situation, we have a choice. We could persist digging our heels in and fighting our way through the piece anyway, or we could put the piece aside for the time when we're ready for it. By the way, that time only comes when we are super focused on leveling up our skills. Now, neither choice feels good, mainly because we feel like we aren't growing. We feel like our playing is staying at the same level. In fact, one of the reactions I see from harpists in this situation is that they choose to put aside the challenging piece and play another piece by a composer or arranger whose works they know they can play easily. Unfortunately, this can mean that the music they're playing and the finger patterns they're learning don't stretch them at all, but actually keep them stuck in the same place. So obviously, there's a gap we need to bridge. It's the gap between our actual skill level and our perception of our skill level. Now, don't get me wrong, it isn't that we think we're better than we are. It's not a case of inflated ego. It's just that we can't see the holes we need to fill before we are actually ready to learn that piece. Now, sometimes the holes are missing technical skills like independence of the hands that makes playing hands together fluid and easy. Sometimes it's a musicianship skill, maybe fluency with a rhythmic pattern or quick chord recognition. But my point is, you shouldn't have to take baby steps with your music. It's important that you play the music you truly want to play, not feel trapped playing music that isn't what you really aspire to. But you don't have to take such a giant step that you're struggling to learn a piece in a reasonable amount of time. Now, if you've ever ridden the underground in London, you may remember the signs and the announcements that are alerting you to mind the gap as you step from the platform onto the train. That's my idea for today. I'm going to show you how to mind the gap between the music you can play and the music you want to play. So your journey will be faster and easier. Naturally, a faster and easier journey as you work on a particular piece or on anything in your heart. Playing is part of what we've been talking about for the last few weeks. It's about finding that next level. It's learning how to level up the various skills you have. So today our focus is on leveling up your music, leveling up your repertoire and how to do that. That's why this gap is important to pay attention to between the music that you know you can play and the music that you can't play. What's stopping you from moving forward? That's the point for our discussion today. And remember, we're going to be working with each of those components in a much more detailed and personal way on the Harpist Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive that is coming up in just a few weeks, starting on February 16th. You can register now for that. And I urge you to register if you've ever been been at your harp and thought, gosh, I don't know what I really need to do in order to get to that next level. In order to improve my playing in ways that are important to me. I don't know what to do. This is going to give you those ideas. I know that everybody's different, everybody has different goals. So I'll be working through the big concepts with you. And then in each day of the intensive we have a hands on workshop where we're going to be talking about the questions and the specifics and, and actually putting those things on a calendar that you can use to guide your practice all the way through 2026. So that by the time you get to New Year's Eve this year, you'll be in a different place with your heart playing than you were last New Year's Eve. That's the point. It's a breakthrough. It's a blueprint for a breakthrough. That's what we're working on. So please I urge you to go ahead and join me. It's going to be fun and I think it's going to be a a real revelation to a lot of people and I think it might be one for you too. So you'll find the link to register in the show notes for today's episode or you can go to heartmastery.com and look under Upcoming Events. By the way, when you're on that Upcoming Events tab, you'll still see that we have registration for the getaway retreat open. It will be open through this week and then we'll be closing the registration. We have a couple of spots left and I don't want anybody to miss out who feels like they might really benefit from that one on one attention that they're going to get at the retreat. If you have questions about the retreat, please feel free to email me. You can always do that and you can email directly through the podcast. Email if you like podcastarpmastery.com or email me annearpmastery.com we'll get those questions answered for but the retreat is such a special thing. So this is our getaway retreat for this year. So we still have a couple spots. It's your time to get in before we close registration. Now, the Getaway retreat and the Breakthrough Blueprint are both excellent ways to make sure that you can hone in on the growth that you want this year. But we can talk about a little piece of that right now and that's this minding the gap once again. We're talking about how to turn those big baby steps into giant strides. And that's making sure that we can get you from the place where you are now, the music you can play now, and the music that you really want to play. There's a process for this and let's talk about some of the pieces to that process. Think about the pieces that you can play now and let's consider what is in them. The the way the left hand works, the way the right hand works, how long they are, how many notes you see in each measure, whether they're fast or slow, whether they have any or lots of pedal or lever changes. What are the components of pieces that you can play now? Make a short list. Say, okay, well you know, they're like this and there are these kinds of left hands and there are these kinds of chords. See what you can come up with. If you can come up with sort of 10 characteristics of pieces that are in those pieces that you know that could be Kind of an interesting list. Then take a look at that piece that you want to play that you think you're maybe ready for, but you're not sure. Take a look at those same things. Are the hands arranged the same way? Are the chords bigger? Are there more? Are there more notes in a measure? Is it faster? Is it longer? What are those characteristics like in that piece? What seems like it's going to be harder? And make a list there. There's benefit to actually writing down these things, because learning music as we know is not something that you can quantify very easily. And every time we try to put a grade level on a piece, oh, this is advanced beginner. This is early intermediate. That's a designation that's right for some people and wrong for others. You know, I'll have harpists say to me, well, gosh, I've been playing for a long, and I can play intermediate repertoire, but this piece that says it's an advanced beginner piece, I'm having a lot of trouble with it, and it's hard for me. Well, that's because the skill set is different. When we put a level on a piece, when we say, okay, this is an intermediate piece, that is such a broad characterization. That's why I'm suggesting, look at the elements of the pieces that you can play and the elements of the pieces that you want to play and see what the difference is. That's where the gap is. And the baby step pieces are essentially playing more of the same, so that if you have those characteristics of the pieces, you can play well and you can find another piece that has those same characteristics. You can probably learn that pretty quickly because it's music that you can understand at a glance. It has very few surprises, very few challenges, and there's a lot of repertoire at just about whatever level you are these days that allows you to learn that piece and play it pretty quickly because it's so completely aligned with your skill set. Now, there's a reverse component to this, too, that if you can play a piece like that well, then you have developed the skills that allow you to play that piece. So other pieces with that same skill set are going to be within your reach pretty easily. The nice thing about this is that when you know what you can play and what you're good at, you can find more of those pieces. And that allows you to build a repertoire pretty easily. The downside of that is that those pieces may sort of all sound the same, and they certainly, even if they sound different, they don't allow you to level up so that those pieces that you want to play might end up staying out of reach. Does that make sense? If you are playing at a particular level and you choose to play more pieces that are pretty similar to that, that's where you're going to stay. If you want to move to another level, we have to have pieces that have more challenge. That's where we're going to go. Now, learning music, of course, is this combination of things, isn't it? It's all about putting those skills that we're developing, the technique skills and the musicianship skills, and putting them to the test. When it comes to technique, we're taking away that very orderly, almost laboratory environment that we use in exercises, and we're going to add different tempo, different rhythms, different dynamics, and all kinds of different things. So the differences make those same patterns that we've been playing in our exercises more challenging. Now, you can level up your skills all you want, but if you aren't leveling up your repertoire intentionally, too, you're going to stay where you are. So that if you're doing all the techniques work, that's great, but you have to level up your repertoire to challenge the technique that you're developing. If you want to stay at the same level, it's pretty simple. You just keep doing what you're doing. But very few of us actually want to do that. We hear pieces that we want to play, and we want to play them someday, and we'd like someday to be sooner rather than later. So we have to figure out how to get there. Now, in the last couple of podcast episodes, I talked about ways to level up your technique and ways to level up your musicianship. But let's talk right now about how to find those next level pieces and what to do with them when you get there. Let's start with that list that I asked you to make just a little bit ago. Take that piece that you can play. You have it, you like to play it, you know it, and you can play it pretty well. That's a good baseline. And let's take a look at those attributes. I know I talked about it a second ago, but let's be just a little bit more systematic at it. I think one of the first things to look at is length. How long is the piece? And I know this is crucial because it's a big thing. When I give a student a piece that's three or four pages and they've only played something that's two pages before, it takes longer to get through a piece that is more pages, that's actually longer. And it takes a little bit bigger perspective to put all those sections of the piece in order in your mind and make them all relate to each other so it's working at a higher level. So the length of the piece is important, and so is the tempo of the piece. If you're comfortable playing at one particular sort of tempo, well, in order to move forward, in order to make progress, we need to think about ratcheting that up. So think about the tempo that you like to play at. Because this piece might be a particular sort of speed. I don't mean in terms of numbers, you know, like metronome numbers. I don't think that's the criteria, because metronome numbers change with pieces. So don't look at the number. Just think about how fast or slow the notes in the piece move. And that gets me to another attribute, and I call this busyness. How busy are the parts? So are the hands both playing a lot of notes? Does one hand play a lot of notes and the other hand doesn't play very much? What's that interplay of the hands like so that we can think about what the hands together coordination is. I mean, you know how important that is, and you know how tricky it can be. So take a look at what you're playing because. And consider it from that angle. How busy is it? You might also consider things like the size of the chords. If this is a piece with a number of chords, are they three finger chords? Are they four finger chords? Are they hands together chords, or just one hand at a time? Are they rolled or are they flat? All of these are skills that you need to have developed. So look at where you are now, because this tells us where we can go. Are there a lot of accidentals? Are you comfortable with lever or pedal changes? Do the notes pretty much stay in one place on the harp, or do they go all around the harp? You see, the qualities of the pieces that you're playing now are what you know. And so we need to look for pieces that have many of those same characteristics, but also level up in a couple key areas that you could grow in. So we don't want a piece that's different in everything. If you're used to playing slow pieces, we don't want that one that's fast. And if you're used to playing things where the left hand doesn't do very much, we don't want one where all of a sudden the left hand is jumping all over the place. If you've never done lever changes before. That's one big hurdle. And we may not want to add on a whole bunch of other things with that. When I help my students choose their next piece or two that they're going to learn, those are the kinds of decisions that I make. Sometimes they're very deliberate and conscious and planned out. Sometimes they're much more intuitive. But those are the things I'm looking at. How much more complicated is this than the kind of music that we've been working on? Because I want my students to grow, to make progress, to level up their skills, but I don't want them to be overwhelmed by trying to do that in too many areas at once. So that when I'm looking for that next piece, it might be a tempo increase and a couple of pedal changes. You know, we'll put on a couple of things, but we're not also going to add big chords and huge arpeggios all around the harp if that's not they're used to doing. So these are things you can look for. And I know that it's. You know, you go into the music store, you're looking online, and you think, oh, that doesn't look too hard just because the notes are big and spread out. So hopefully I've given you some ideas of what actually to look for, not just how blank the page looks. Right. If the page looks nice and clear, it could just be because the print is big. So think about. All right, let's see. There are a lot of notes in those measures. Well, how fast does the piece go? How long is the piece? Are these things I'm used to playing or things I'm not used to playing? Those are decisions that you can make. And then you can say, all right, I'm ready to level up one or maybe two of these things. And you can look for a piece that levels up one or two of them, but not six of them all at once. I hope that makes sense to you, because it really is a very easy way to step up your music gradually and not get overwhelmed, not take too big a jump forward all at once. There's a very important point that I want to take a moment to emphasize right now, and that's that what we're talking about is looking at your repertoire and as the result of the skill set that you have, which makes sense, right? If your fingers can't play it, you can't play it. Your repertoire, the music that you can play, you are able to play because your skill set, your fingers, your technique, your musicianship, skills. They're up to that task, they're able to do it. That's what they can do. Your repertoire uses your skill set. And when you're working on a piece that is at that skill set or maybe just a tad further along, you're working from your strengths, so it's going to be easier to learn that piece. I don't want you to stay at the same level, so I don't want you to choose pieces that are 100% falling in your skill set because you're not going to move forward. They can be fun because they're fast and easy to learn and you know you're going to play them well. But if you want to move up that level ladder, what you can do is be careful about the skills that you add on and be intentional. When you look at the piece the way we just outlined, you're going to be able to see what skills you need to develop. You can go and work on those skills separately and then come back and put them into that repertoire. I'm a firm believer of working on the skills first and then applying them to the music. I don't want you to think that, okay, I'm going to play this piece and it's really hard, but it's going to make my technique really terrific. It's going to be such a struggle because you're trying to do too many things at once. I don't believe in addressing your technical development through your repertoire. Build your technique however you need to do that. If it's chords or arpeggios or tempo or patterns or whatever it is, Build your technique through your technique. Work dedicated exercises that allow you to focus on what your fingers need to do. Then when you come to that repertoire that requires that skill set, your fingers know what to do and they just need to put them with the right notes. You're not trying to do both things at once. This allows you to work from your strengths and not always be behind. It allows you to learn music faster and this is how you get steady growth instead of starting a new piece and oh, finding it's just a struggle. That's what we don't want. Yes. Okay, here's an example of what I mean. Let's take the piece, one of my favorite example pieces, the Little Fountain. This is a beautiful piece. We love playing it. There are all kinds of pieces that are like this and they're pieces that use these continuous downward arpeggios, 4 note arpeggios in each hand, going down and repeating. And we want it to be beautiful and fluid and smooth. We need our arpeggios to be even, and we need them to be pretty fast. We need to be able to switch between chords. There's a lot going on here. And even though it's not a tremendously difficult piece in the grand scheme of things, it's not an easy piece to play. And just because it's in a book with pieces that are much easier and some that aren't, you can't make the mistake of thinking that it's a beginner piece, because it isn't. It's not an easy skill that you need to have developed in order to play this piece well. And it's not just for a couple measures of the piece, it's the entire piece. So it's tricky. Unless you're great at arpeggios, you're not just going to pick up this piece and play it. So it's a great piece to demonstrate your fluid arpeggios, but because it's so filled with them, it's really not a good piece to learn them with. You want to have those arpeggios learned and fluid before you get to the little fountain. So what you want to do is start with some exercises. If the little fountain is a piece that you aspire to and your arpeggios aren't smooth, then let's go back to some arpeggio exercises. There are great arpeggio exercises in just about every exercise book you can pick up. There's a really nice chapter in the Deborah FRU Exercises for Agility and Speed that talks, that works your downward arpeggios in two hand. Start there and get your arpeggios moving. Then when those arpeggios work for you, then you can step into the little fountain. That's what I mean. Get the technical skill going first. And that way, when you get to the little fountain, it's just a matter of learning those notes. Your fingers are going to understand how to play the pattern. You'll have that skill developed. And it's just going to be learning the piece of. So that's how you can step up that way. So I think that we've talked about the first two steps in this process of turning your baby step pieces into your giant step pieces. The first one was understanding how to choose your next piece, right? That's the list of characteristics of the piece and just adding on gradually. And the second step was, once you've chosen the piece, you know what skills you need to develop for that piece. Go back to the exercises and all the technical work and develop them there. Then bring that new skill over into the piece so that you can use your new skill and just learn the notes to the piece instead of trying to do both at once. But there's a third step, and it's a simple one to explain because it's what do you do when you get to the new piece? You've developed the skill. What do you do? In a word, I want you to approach that piece from a position of strength and confidence, not timidity. You're building with this piece. You're building gradually. You're not taking a huge step. There's nothing to be afraid of here. You are moving forward, and I want you to feel confident in your ability to do that. You've strategized carefully with the skills that you're leveling up. Granted, we sometimes make mistakes with that, but it's all right. You're going to go forward and you're going to learn what you need to learn before you start the piece, and then you'll learn the rest of it as you go. So as you approach the piece, the first thing you need to do is play through the entire piece. I don't care if it's four pages long. I don't care if it's 14 pages long. This is the thing I do when I start a new piece and some of my pieces are long and playing all the way through it. It's a struggle, believe me. I don't sit there and just zip it off and play it right away. Now, if it were a piece that were at my level, my sight reading level, then that's what I could do. But most of the new pieces that I'm learning aren't at my sight reading level. They're going to be challenging to work on, and so they're hard to read through. So I'm stumbling my way through it. I'm making mistakes, I'm stopp. I'm starting, I'm sputtering. It can take me an hour to get through a piece, to read through it for the first time. But here's the huge benefit. Once I've read it all the way through, I know what's there. I don't have to worry about what's on the next page when I turn it. And I don't have to feel like I'm starting with just a couple of measures right at the beginning. I've got the big bird's eye view of this piece. I know what it's going to be like And I know that sooner or later, and hopefully sooner, I'm going to be able to do it. I've got the idea of how it all goes, and now I just have to sit down and start learning all that I need to learn in order to play the piece. So start that way. Play it all the way through, and then really look at what's on the page. Don't just number the sections or identify the sections, although I certainly hope you do that. But really look at the notes. Observe. Are there patterns that repeat through the piece? What can you use that's there to help you? Do you see patterns that you know from exercises that you've played? That. Oh, take a look. That's conditioning exercise five. I can do that. Or are there other things? Look at the scale patterns, the arpeggio patterns, maybe chords or intervals. Look for patterns that you know so that you're not reading every note, but you're relating all the notes to each other. That's one to remember, right? You're not just reading, you're relating. I'd love for you to think about your first adventures with a new piece of music in that light that you're not just reading that. You're relating these notes to each other and to notes that you know from other pieces or from your exercises. Look at those. Start there. Then you know you can play through what's not familiar. You can start working through it. And you can look first, perhaps at the spots that are going to use that new skill you've been working on, because they may take a little bit of extra work, Right? So go ahead and do that. Practice the piece however you like to practice it. Beyond that. But I think once you've gotten the big picture, once you've started relating the notes to each other. And what. Once you know you're coming to that piece with the skill that you need to play it already in progress, if not, you know, fully developed, that's okay, but it's in progress. You've been working on it. You are coming to that piece from a position of strength and confidence. And that's not misplaced confidence, right? I mean, we can feel confident going into a piece, but if we don't have the skills to back it up, that confidence doesn't mean much. But you're coming with the skills. You're going to be able to play this piece and sooner rather than later. That's the idea. And that's how you can level up your repertoire. By choosing carefully, by doing the work on the drills and then bringing that to the new piece. It's a simple system, but how many times do we overlook one or more of those crucial steps? I don't want you to get stuck in the quicksand. That happens when you don't have the skill set. You need to play a piece and you're trying to play it anyway. It just takes forever. I don't want you to be there. I want you to be able to play your pieces, but I want you to be able to level up, too, and this is how you do it. I hope that makes sense to you, and I hope it has shown you a little bit of how you can see where the gap is between where you are and where you want to go and how you can bridge that gap. It's not very hard to do. You just need to take a look at it, analyze it, make your lists, and then choose one or two things to move forward on, and you'll have the new repertoire growing and your skill set leveling up. And it's just the recipe for growth right there. And of course, that's just one piece of it. And we'll be talking about the whole picture on our Harpist Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. So if you're ready to put those pieces together, the intensive is going to be the place where we get to do it. And I'm so excited about that. So that's coming up. Don't miss it. I think it's going to be great. Next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about control, how to exercise control over your fingers and over your music and over your playing and how to let go of control at the same time. Because so much of what we do requires us to let go. Let go to let flow is one of those statements I have been heard to say. My students get tired of hearing me say that sometimes, but that's what we're talking about. It's sort of the duality, both sides of control. Next week on the podcast, that's what we're talking about. In the meantime, 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 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.