Performance Preparation: The Yin, the Yang and You - PHH 129

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. What's the hardest thing you've ever done? Climbing Mount Everest? Swimming the English Channel? Raising a teenager. Okay, I haven't done the first two, but I did survive raising a teenager and I think it ranks right up there near the top. Top of the list of hardest things. I actually found a website the other day that listed someone else's ideas of the hardest things to do in life. None of the ones I mentioned were on their list, but there were some that hit home, particularly as I was thinking about this podcast topic. One of them was giving up comfort. Getting out of your comfort zone.

Sharing your music, playing in front of other people is definitely out of the comfort zone for most of us. When we play for others, we are making ourselves vulnerable. It isn't just about playing well, although that always helps. It's also about feeling, however wrongly, that we are being judged and that we may be found unworthy. It's about revealing our artistic side, something we often feel is private and personal. No matter how confident we are in other areas of our lives, sharing our music can be extremely hard. I've been playing the harp in public myself for over 50 years, and although I can tell you it gets easier over time, I still face some of the doubts and fears I had when I started. I've had plenty of good performances, but I've had plenty that were more the crash and burn type too. So today's episode is devoted to making playing for others easier for you. One of the benefits of my own performing experiences, particularly the crash and burn ones, is that I have had to look at the right way to prepare so that I can be reasonably confident that my performance will meet my expectations. And I have discovered that the best preparation has two parts. Preparing your music properly, which is isn't the type of practice you're doing right now, I can almost guarantee. And preparing yourself. This is a big topic, much bigger than we can cover in a single podcast episode. But because we're coming into a season with lots of extra musical performances, I thought it was important to share the broad outline with you so that if you decide to share your music this holiday season, you have the information you need to prepare. Well, now, just a quick note for everyone who is in the My Heart Mastery membership, if that is you, please note that we will be spending the entire month of November on this topic, and the coaches and I will all be teaching on different aspects of sharing your music. So this is an extra resource for you as you begin this month's theme. Prepare to share. But if you're not in the membership, never fear, you're going to get a lot of great and really necessary information out of today's podcast episode. Before we get started, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who participated in our Theory Essentials Intensive. It was a great course taught by one of our certified coaches, Naomi Hoffmeier, and it was really well received. And I'm just so excited by some of the results that we're seeing from the students and the comments. And I know it's hard to, you know, take a week from your life and add a few little workshops into it. It doesn't seem like a lot to add just a few, but I know it's not easy. And I know that this was something that was important for you if you did that intensive. And I hope that you really enjoyed it as much as most people seem to have. And because of that, I want to invite not only you from the intensive, but all of you listening to join me in the Hub. I'm going to follow up on that intensive with one more call. And this call is going to be free, free for everyone, whether you participated in the Theory Intensive or not. And the call is called three More Ways to Use Music Theory Every Day. It's a quick call, some quick tips, and it's totally free. But. But you have to access the call in our Harp Mastery Hub. So that's also a free resource. We have hundreds of harpists in the Hub. If you're not there, that is our social media free harp community. Um, so if you are the type that would really like to communicate with other harpists and be part of a group. But you don't like social media. Well, this is the place to go. We don't have ads. We don't, you know, try to sell you stuff. We let you know about our programs, but that's it. And we have, you know, lots of stuff going on there. It's a social place so that you can chat with other harpists if that's what you want. And it's a learning space we have every week, or nearly every week. We didn't do it during the intensive week. We have a live Monday warmup where I walk you through a warmup that's not. It's a little bit more than a warmup. It's geared toward helping you understand some of the important aspects of harp playing. And we have a great time just playing the harp and warming up together. And that's every Monday. Um, and if you can't join us live, all those replays are in the Hub as well. Uh, we have an occasional monthly ish Q&As where I just hop on a call and we talk together. We have challenges that go every month. So it's a great way to just sort of keep yourself in touch and keep moving a little bit and making sure that you are not just kind of going around in circles in your heart playing. So the Hub is free to join and it's where this call is going to be. The call is again called three More Ways to Use Music Theory every Day. And it's happening on Thursday, November 16th. All you have to do is join the Hub and you'll be there. If you took the theory intensive, it's going to be in your portion of the Hub as well. So you're, you can join us from there. So thank you again. If you participated in our Theory Essentials Intensive, I really appreciate it and I hope that you learned a lot and got what you wanted from that intensive. So if you need to join the Hub so that you can join us on this call, it's very easy. You can just click the link in the show notes and join us there. You will find a link to join us in the Hub or on our homepage as well. So, as I said, it's free and we're looking forward to having you join us in the Hub. Now, I titled this episode Performance Preparation the Yin, the Yang and Yu. And please don't think I'm going to get deeply into Chinese philosophy here with the Yin and Yang thing. I'm not qualified to do that. But what I really wanted to reflect in that title was the idea that we've got these two sort of yin and yang kind of forces, or at least ways to look at our playing, that are essentially opposite. They're both necessary, they're both part of the process, but we have to use both of them. And this is what I mean. Yin, if you want to look at it this way, just to assign. Assign the names for it. Yin could be the kind of practice that we usually do, and the kind of practice we do most often seems like hard work, right? And it's preparing those notes. We're looking for accuracy, we're looking for consistency. And it involves checking everything. The notes, the fingering, our technique, the rhythms, all of that good stuff, all of those details. And that's difficult practice because it's very painstaking. And so we do a lot of it, necessarily. So we have to. But that kind of practice isn't enough on its own. And this is where we get to the Yang part of this, which is the kind of practice you need to do when you're preparing to play. That's very different because that's no longer about the details, that's about the big picture. Now, you've heard me talk about this before, but think about it in this kind of, you know, yin and yang idea, with the feeling that they're both necessary, but we need to be able to access them both because they're so different. They're part of the whole. We need the detailed practice, we need the big picture practice. They both need to be there, but at the same time, we have to know when to do one and when to do the other. Now, I will say that as painstaking and just difficult as the yin practice, the detail practice usually is, it's actually the easier sort of practice, which is why we stay there. And when I mean it's easier, I don't mean the work is easy, because we all know it's not. But it's quantifiable in a way that the more artistic sort of practice is not. We know when we hit a wrong note note, we have techniques and strategies for fixing that wrong note. And it's easy to say, okay, I'm going to do this 10 times and I'm going to get this right and I'm going to place this finger and I'm going to do it this way. And it's actually easier from that sort of standpoint. We know when we've done it right, we know when we've done it wrong, and we Know, we just need to do it over.

The kind of practice I'm talking about is much less quantifiable, much less objective, much more subjective, much more creative. And while it should be the fun sort of practice for us, the kind that is interesting, we often don't do it because we're not sure how to do it. But this kind of, what I'm calling Yang practice, the, the big picture practice is about flow. It's about the music, it's about the artistry, it's about the pacing of the entire piece. It's about what the piece communicates rather than the notes it uses to communicate that idea. It's totally beyond the notes. Now, if you're listening and you're thinking to yourself, well, yeah, that sounds really great, but you know, I've got to get the notes right first. And I, and, and I know how to do that. I'm with you there. I get. Is important to get the notes right, but if we stay at the notes right, getting the notes right stage too long, we never get to the music. So what we're going to talk about in just a moment are the ways to get yourself beyond that note practice and get yourself to the kind of practice that's going to prepare you to play your music and think about what the detail practice is like. We're taking the piece apart, we're taking it into sections, we're pulling it apart. We're looking at those little teeny details, but the music itself doesn't exist in those little details. Those little details are part of the big picture. And what's hard to remember when you're busy fixing all those details is that the details themselves don't add up to the big picture. And if you don't believe me, just think about the kind of performance you've heard where it seems like everything's there. It seems note perfect, it seems like everything's right, but it's still an uninteresting performance. Somehow it doesn't speak. Somehow it isn't exactly what we call musical. It just doesn't speak to us. And it's difficult to pinpoint why. Right. Because the notes are right. Everything seems good, but it just doesn't make it somehow. I used to work with an audio engineer, and when we'd be putting together CDs, we'd be thinking about the way a particular take of a piece went, whether it was really what I was looking for, if it was a keeper or if it was not what I wanted, or if it was just kind of close and he had a phrase for it. It's like it's going right around the rim, but it's just not quite dropping in. And when he would tell me that, I would know that I'd need to go back and just put a little bit more soul into it, you know? So that's the sort of thing that, I mean, the performance can be really great and still not quite make it. Now, I'm not saying you have to be a great artist. You don't have to have that musical standard at the ultimate. You just need to have it right for you. But we all want our music to say something. We all want our music to touch someone, and that's where that other kind of practice comes in. And whether you think that this might be too intense for you or not, I'm going to tell you that it isn't. It's totally accessible. It's totally doable. And that's what we're going to talk about. We're talking about that Yang kind of practice, the kind that's going to help you prepare your music to play and not just prepare it to make it right. If the idea of practicing music and practicing artistry and practicing creativity sounds like it might be a little beyond your skill set right now, I have an easier way to think about it. You can think about this kind of practice as an effort in developing stamina. You want to develop stamina sort of in your fingers, in your ability to play the notes and play all of them, and in your focus. So both of these things, your fingers and your focus, this is all about your getting all the way to the end of the piece, right? Think about the kind of detail work that we do. We usually do it in tiny chunks, maybe one measure, maybe just a couple of beats, maybe two or three or four measures at a time. We do it in little chunks, but in order to play the piece, we can't be thinking in those little chunks. We need to be able to get from the beginning to the end. We have to know that we have the physical stamina to do it, and. And that we have the mental stamina to do it. So that's what this kind of practice is really all about. Now, when you think about it from a musical perspective, this is going to make sense of those dynamics. The dynamics that you practice in those small sections are great, and they're part of the story, but they really come alive when you have the entire story of the entire piece. So let's take this sort of idea by idea and think about how you can Start developing that kind of stamina in your playing, right? So as you're practicing here, the first thing that you have to start doing is playing past your mistakes. Now, some people are very good at this, and they're really great at just sort of, you know, ignoring what they know they did wrong and letting that just kind of go right past them so that they can keep on playing. But for a lot of people, we train ourselves to react to a mistake and to want to get in there and fix it. And that is perhaps the single biggest difference between practicing and playing. Because in playing, you can't stop for that mistake. You have to keep going. And so the result of this is the single biggest problem with performing. If you haven't practiced playing past your mistakes, you're not going to know how to do that when you get to the performance. So it absolutely must be part of your practice. There's nothing that you can do in the moment of a performance to. To play past a mistake if you haven't practiced doing it. So this is the number one skill you have to develop. So set aside part of your practice for your piece where you can say, okay, now, this time, I'm going to play through whatever section it is, whatever it is you're trying to do. And even if it's incorrect, my goal is going to be to keep going. So there might be the little glitch in the middle where there's a mistake, right? A wrong pedal, or, you know, you leap and you get to the wrong thing, or you play the wrong notes in a chord. Whatever it is, you have to keep going. And that's a skill you need to practice. So that would be the number one difference between what I'm calling yin practice and yang practice. You absolutely must keep going. Now, if this bothers you, that's okay. Play past your mistake and do that for a few times, and then go back and correct it and practice it with that yin kind of practice again. But, you know, get out of that detail work in most of your practice, because that's what playing is going to be. It's going to be getting out of the details and looking at the big picture. And that means playing past your mistakes. Now, going along with that, most of your detailed practice is going to have been focused on those little sections, right? So as you're working toward playing your piece, you need to start playing it and practicing it in bigger sections. So if you were working in four bar sections, let's get to eight bar sections. Oh, forget that. Let's get to half A page. Let's get to a page page. Because you need to be able to get through all of those, you know, the whole piece beginning to end, right? But certainly all of these bigger sections you need to be able to get through without having to stop and take, you know, a mental break. So this needs to become part of your habit. That might be a comfortable word for you. If the idea of playing your piece beginning to end is a little scary, think about the habit that you're developing. You've developed a habit of working in those small sections because it lets you really dig into the nitty gritty of the piece. But now you need to develop the habit of playing in bigger sections so that you're able to do that when you need to. It's just a different habit.

One of the nice things about this is that if you say, oh, gosh, yeah, well, I've got, you know, 37 two bar sections in my piece, this is going to take forever. Phew. Okay, well, the nice thing is that the bigger the sections you work in.

The more the piece will shrink for you. So the first of all, it's not just a question of being able to play that for that stretch of time, you know, at once, but it's the perception that we have of the piece. And the more you play those big sections of the piece, or even the entire piece beginning to end, the smaller that piece will seem to you. It's no longer, okay, great, I made this little step. I made this little step. I made this little step. But you see the entire journey and it all seems shorter. I mean, think about a big car journey that you've taken, right? When you don't know where you're going, you see all those little things and you, you know, it, it, it seems to take a long time. I don't know, I mean, how many traffic lights do I count here? But if you're taking a trip that you've taken a lot of time, a lot of times, you see what you know, you see bigger landmarks and you see further ahead. And the trip doesn't necessarily seem so long because you have the whole trip in mind. Same thing with a piece here. You need to have the whole piece in mind and it won't seem so huge. Big tip number three, and I love this one. Take those big sections that we're going to practice the piece in, whether it's a page or two pages or whatever, and start from the last one. Start from the end and do that one first, because you really need to know the end very Very well. Figure this, and you might be able to think and recall some performances that you've already done. You know, you start the piece and you've got a lot of energy, but. But you're using a lot of energy, and by the time you get to the end, you may hardly have the stamina to play the last note. I can tell you that there are plenty of performances I played earlier in my life where I didn't have enough stamina to play the last note, and the last note was wrong. So you just need to be able to keep that focus, keep that energy all the way to the end. And if you know the end really well, it's going to make it easier. You can also develop stamina by just playing the piece several times in a row, play all the way through once, all the way through twice, all the way through a third time. One of my favorite stories about that was told to me by Ms. Jeanne Chalafou, who was a student of Salzato's at the Curtis Institute of Music. And.

And she and I were talking once, and she told me about a recital that she had given when she was a student at Curtis, and Mr. Salzado was coaching her, and she was playing one of his etudes, Flight, which is a very difficult etude, and it's very, very fast, and it's all scales, and it's incredibly challenging. And she played it in the dress rehearsal that she was doing for him in the. In the hall where she was going to give the recital. And he said, that was very nice. And he said, now do it again. And she sort of looked at him like, again, I just, you know, I just survived this, right? And so she had to play it again, and she finished it the second time. And he said, very good, again. And she had to play it three times for him. He said, now you're ready. And this is the same idea. We mere mortals can do the same sort of thing where, you know, okay, I can play the piece once. That's great. But if I know I can play it three times, then I know I'm going to have the energy to do it once. Sort of the same way athletes prepare, right? You know, if you're going to prepare for a short race, you train for, you know, multiple short races so that, you know, you have the stamina to do it. Now, I'm hoping that these ideas give you very concrete, very practical ways to look at the kind of practice that you need to do to actually prepare your music to play it. But I'm going to Give you one more tip which is going to help you with your own focus, and it's going to help with the musical big picture here, and that is to create some sort of narrative for your piece. It can be a story. You know, you could make it an entire storyline that you sort of tell yourself in your head while you're playing the music. It could be just talking yourself through the dynamics mentally. But this is going to do two very important things. It's going to give the music a forward energy so that you're not just thinking section A, section B, section C while you're playing, but that you are mentally and therefore musically connecting all those sections into an entire musical communication, one that's going to take the listener from the starting point to the ending point on that little musical journey.

And it has the benefit of giving you something to focus on besides just, oh, no, I played a wrong note. Oh, no, I might play the next wrong note. We want to give your mind something very positive to focus on and to keep it busy. Which of course, brings us to the next part, the other important part of performance preparation, and that's preparing you. When I talk to harpists about their fears around playing for others, what they're worried about might happen in a performance, they're usually around three big things. One is them losing their focus, forgetting what comes next, just not being able to remember what it is they're supposed to do. The music doesn't look familiar. So it's about your focus. It's about being distracted. Right. You're in an environment that probably isn't as comfortable as your own little practice space. So there are distractions of environments of other people. Things happen, and we're very aware of them. So the distraction would be a second one. And the third one would be they just are worried about being nervous that their hands are going to shake, their palms are going to sweat, they're not going to be able to play. So let's just talk about those. When it comes to focus. We talked a moment ago about how you're going to prepare your music and you really to focus a little bit more with that storyline, that narrative that will help you keep moving forward. Remember that your focus has to be on the next note. We can't go backward and focus on a mistake that we just had. That's part of that playing past mistakes thing, because then we're thinking backward and we've interrupted the entire musical flow. So we are practicing as we're doing the. That Yang kind of practice, we're practicing moving Forward and keeping our focus moving forward as well. But beyond that, you know, our brains are very active. They like to go lots of different places and think about lots of different things. So it can be very helpful to find a focus word that when you find your mind wandering, you just bring it back.

And it allows you to sort of regroup and stay on track. Don't make it something you have to do. I think that a focus word like relax sounds like a command that we can't obey. But it could be something like let go or something simple like joy or expand or speak or calm or peace or flow. Something could be something that you want the music to be in that particular moment. Dramatic, you know, gentle, reflective. You know, it could be. I love to have those words that are related to the music because it could be something exactly like that, or it could be a word that you just want to have as your own mood for when you're playing. And if you practice using that focus word when you feel like even in your practice, when your mind is starting to wander, bring it back with that word once again. You have to practice this. You can't just pull it out in performance because it won't work. But you'll find that the more you do that, the more you are able to do that. Focus is a muscle like anything else. Once you've practiced it, you get better at it. It works better. So try that and see how that works for you. Don't worry about not being focused. Just give yourself a way to come back. Distraction. Distraction is going to happen. So what you need to do is you need to prepare for that. It's like having, you know, a fire escape route, right? It's like having an emergency response plan. You have to assume that there's going to be a distraction, that you're going to get distracted, and what will you do?

So if it's a little distraction, you lose your place in the music. Where will you jump to be like, okay, do I just flounder around until I find myself on the page, or do I jump to the next lettered section or numbered section on my page? Do I just go to a measure and start there? You know, if that's what you want to do, you have to practice that.

So think about it this way. The biggest preparation mistake that we make is not preparing for a mistake, right? So that when we accept that there's going to be a mistake, there's going to be a distraction, we're going to lose our place. Then we can say, okay, when that happens, might not happen. But when that happens, what can I do? And again, this is something that you can practice because I guarantee that you get distracted in your practice. And in our practice, what we usually do is stop, regroup, and start over. But that's not necessarily what we want to do in a performance. It may be. It may be the kind of thing where it's just like, oh, okay, I'm lost enough now that I am going to stop and start, and I'm going to start from here and play. And if that's your emergency plan or one of your emergency plans, that's fine, and just do it. There's, you know, there's no harm in that. We see expert players doing that because, you know, we all get distracted. So you can do that. But, you know, if. If you miss a pedal, for instance, it's easier to miss a pedal than a lever generally, which is why I'm talking about pedals. If you miss a pedal, what are you going to do? Are you going to play? Are you going to stop? How are you going to fix that? So in your practice, when those things happen, you have to not only learn to play past them, but to make them part of your plan. It's emergency preparedness. And that will help you not fear being distracted. What was that quote? The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Exactly. So when we can know that we've got a plan, when this happens, this is what I'm doing. There's power in the plan, my friend. Okay? And lastly, I know you're going to be nervous. We all get nervous. And if you've ever seen anybody else play and, you know, you say, oh, you looked so calm, nine times out of 10, they will tell you, oh, yeah, well, I was really nervous. Didn't you see my hands shaking? No, I didn't see that at all. So remember that the nerves are your experience. They're primarily your experience. They are the result of a physical reaction. Adrenaline is kicking in your body, your lizard brain, the amygdala, your lizard brain is telling you that you are in a life or death situation. Actually, you're just playing the harp. No one is going to die. So. So your adrenaline, your body's overreacting, but you can't fight those nerves. You just have to accept the adrenaline, accept that your hands are going to shake. And it's, you know, it might not be the kind of comfortable, fluid performance that you would like, but it's going to happen. And nerves are a funny thing. Adrenaline is a very funny thing. When you Accept it. You can begin to work through it, work around it, work in spite of it. And then the next time it comes up, you're not so afraid of it. Doctor's going to check your blood pressure. So you go to the doctor and your blood pressure is. You're worried that it's going to be a little bit high. And so you worry about it, and you worry about it. And guess what? It's high. When you're at home, your blood pressure is fine, right? It's the same kind of thing. The more you worry about the nerves, the worse those nerves are going to be. You can't fight them. Fighting them will increase them. You just have to know that you can play through them. Give yourself some experience playing through them. Which brings me to the last, most important thing that you can do to prepare play practice performances, Preview performances, if you will. If you have to play them for a row of stuffed animals, for your house pets, for everyone in your house, for your family over the phone, for, you know, for anybody you can drag in off the street. But give yourself some practice performances because the more you do it, the less afraid of it you will be. It's one of those things. Experience is the best teacher. And the lessons don't all have to be painful. So that's how to prepare you. You're going to prepare your focus. You're going to find that focus word. You're going to make your emergency response plans, and you're going to know that it's okay to be nervous. And you can play through your nerves. Just don't try to fight them. One final thought on sharing your music, and that's to consider why sharing your music is important. Remember that music doesn't exist on the paper. Music only comes to life when you play it. And it only communicates its meaning when there's someone there to listen.

Sharing your music is also generous, right? You share things that you love, like books and movies. So why wouldn't you share your music with someone else? It's a gift to. To someone that you care about. And you might not have thought of this one. Sharing your music can be an inspiration to others. They see you being brave. They see you being creative. They see the beautiful harp, they hear the beautiful music. And that's an inspiration to others. So let your music be a gift. Don't let it be a trial to you. We know it's not easy, but it's a gift. And the giver can enjoy it as much as the receiver. Okay, just something to think about.

Now. Having given you all that to think about. I want to remember to invite you again to the call that is happening on Thursday, November 16, the free call in the Heart Mastery Hub on three more ways that you can use your music theory knowledge every day. And we'll be talking about that. Just you just need to be a member of the hub. Totally free. You can use the link in the Show Notes to join. You'll find the link@heartmastery.com as well. We'd love to have you there next week. Here on the podcast we're talking about overwhelm. We're coming up to that season, so we'll be talking about how to prevent overwhelm. So that is certainly a timely topic and I look forward to talking with you about that next week. 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.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.