Review Done Right: It’s More Than Repertoire - PHH 204

And there's the key. How we want to look at it again is really going to be determined by what we want to do with the review.

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 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.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists and anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists on the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.com join now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Do you review your pieces? If you don't review your pieces regularly, then keep listening because today we are going to explore the different reasons you might want to start and a few different methods for review. You might want to try. But here's the thing. If I asked a dozen harpists who say they do review their pieces. If I asked them how they do their review, I'll get a dozen different answers. Some people schedule it. Others set a rotation. Some people do both. Some harpists are trying to develop a repertoire list of music they can play at a moment's notice. Others are trying to keep the last piece they learned in their fingers. By the way, we'll talk today about what that phrase in your fingers means now. I last talked about review on this podcast in episode 99. That episode is called the Shortcut Way to Build and Maintain a Repertoire. In that episode, I outlined some step by step frameworks to grow your repertoire with simple review tactics. So I've linked directly to that episode in the show Notes or you can find it by searching for episode 99 in your podcast app. However, I think review is more than keeping your music fresh and ready to play. I believe there is an important learning component as well, because review develops a unique skill set if you set about it the right way. Review isn't the same as practice, but it isn't exactly the same as playing either. It fills in the middle ground, that place where the imperfections get polished out and where we develop a deep familiarity with the piece, one that can surmount the challenges of performance. So today we're going to explore what Revu is and is not. I'll give you some simple ways to work on that unique skill set, and I'll show you how the simple act of reviewing your music can help you grow as a harpist. It's so much more than just keeping music in your fingers. I'm really excited about this topic and I hope you are too.

I'd also like to share a couple of other things I'm excited about. We now have opened our coaching program. We've opened registration for people who have not been in the program previously. We have a lot of alums who are in the program who have their favorite coaches that they've been working with for quite a while and they're enjoying that. But we do still have some spaces in our coaches rosters. Not all the coaches are available, but we do have openings in several rosters and we'd love to get them filled. I love to hear about the harpists who enjoy working with our certified coaches and some of them have been in the program working with their coaches for quite a while. They're really enjoying the progress that they're making. They're seeing big strides. They're making strides. They're doing what they wanted to do with the harp, and their coach is guiding them through this process. So this is a different way to work. Granted, these are sort of lessons just like your regular lessons, but I think you'll find that working with these coaches is sort of supercharged. They are very good at working with people just like you to get them to that next level, to help them do what they want to do. Not just working them through a regular curriculum unless that's what they want, but making sure that the work that they do is going to be useful for the way they want to play. I think that's so important because we're all about harp happiness, right? And harp happiness is simply playing the music you want, the way you want. And in our coaching program, that's what we aim to do. So if you're interested in working with one of our certified coaches, this is the time to get in while they still have room. And the easiest way to do that is just to go to the coaching page. You can find it heartmastery.com, look under programs, and you'll see the coaching listed there. Or even easier, just use the link in the show notes and go directly to that page. And once you're there, you'll find all the directions on how to get started. For new students, we always suggest a planning call, so you'll take a quick questionnaire. Sign up for a planning call with our dean of harpist success, Caitlin Mertens, and she'll guide you to the the right coach for you and talk about what your program will look like. So all that is there for you. And as I said, I'm really excited about the opportunity to offer this to to people who haven't been in the program before. Also, of course, we have our April seminar still in play. So if you haven't joined us yet for our rhythm makeover, it's not too late to get in the door. Of course, my harp mastery members, this is the course that you are studying for this. And I know that you're excited about that, but if you want to join in and learn what they are learning about rhythm, this is perhaps your last opportunity to get in the door before we close it. So this is rhythm makeover. And in this, we're not just teaching you how to count, although we will be working with counting for sure. But the goal of this course is to help you be more confident with the way that you understand rhythms, feel like you have the skills and the knowledge you need to decipher any rhythm you come across and to be able to learn to play it confidently, accurately, precisely. And all that is what we're working on in Rhythm Makeover this month. So you can find the link to join the April seminar on the Heart Mastery homepage. You'll find it in the Heart Mastery App as well. And if you haven't joined us yet, I urge you to go ahead and do that. So those are just a couple of the things that are going on at Heart Mastery. If you want to be the first to know about what's going on and make sure you don't miss any of these offerings, I urge you to download the free Heart Mastery app. That is the easiest way to stay in touch and it's available for Apple devices and for Android devices. It's a free app and you'll know everything you will need to know. You'll have an immediate link to the podcast. I always put up a Tuesday tip, so there's a tip that comes out each week that helps you just learn a little smidgen of something. And of course it's a really easy way to access all your Heart Mastery courses or to just communicate with other harpists in the Hub. The Hub is also free. You need to sign up for it once you're there, but it's absolutely free and it's a great way to join us for the live Monday warmups for the practice labs. There are challenges there and of course there's always discussion going on in the Hub as well. So don't miss out and just download that Heart Mastery App. You'll find it in your device's Play Store. So there you go. Well, let's get back to talking about review. Just the word review needs a little bit of consideration here. There are so many ways in which we use the word review. One of the ways that came to my mind first was reviewing notes for a test. Remember you were in school and you had to review your notes? Well, this took on different levels of review, right? If you were maybe a day or so out, you'd be really looking for every detail that was in your notes. Maybe going through the textbook too. Maybe you were looking up facts or dates or scientific formulas or something, but you were really looking for that detailed look. But yet on that day of the test, maybe you only have time for a quick review. When you're sort of scanning those big topics, they're very different ways to look at the subject and the material, but they're both review. And then of course, there's something like reviewing a book Or a movie, right? Where all you're really doing is you're being called to give an outline of the book, maybe some background and maybe your opinion about it. A very different, very over the top kind of look, not so detailed perhaps, but the word review, we can look at it really, really basically and say, okay, it's review. We're going to look at something again. We're going to give something another look. And there's the key. How we want to look at it again is really going to be determined by what we want to do with the review. This is what I mean by there are going to be different methods for sort of different outcomes. Because review doesn't necessarily refer just to repertoire building. I mean, it could, right? You could be reviewing pieces with an eye toward getting a number of pieces in that state of readiness where you could play them anytime. So review would be part of building a repertoire or keeping a repertoire fresh. And review isn't just playing through a piece. It could be in the same way that reviewing your notes could be just kind of giving all your notes a sort of a cursory glance. So it might just be playing through, but it doesn't have to be. And review doesn't have to be just keeping something in your fingers. You know, you've learned that piece and you don't want to let it go because it took you so long, long to get there. You really don't want to just put it away right away. You want to keep it around for a while so you know you can play it. And that's that funny phrase, keeping it in your fingers. That's the phrase that we use, but it's not completely descriptive. And I just wanted to bring your attention to that before we get back to talking about review specifically. We may talk about keeping a piece in our fingers because we want our fingers to remember the patterns. Maybe we want our feet to remember the patterns too. It depends, right? But it's not just about the physical part of this, because music doesn't just live in our fingers. Our fingers need to remember how to do it. But really the music lives in our head. It lives in our inner ears, right, where we can hear the music and create it from there so that we know how the music goes. We know the music, and our fingers can work themselves around what we hear. That's really what we're talking about. Granted, our fingers need to stick around the, you know, they need to remember all the coordination they, they discovered and practiced so hard when they were learning the piece. But it's not just about our fingers. So even though we use that phrase all the time, I just wanted to mention that because, remember, the music doesn't live in our fingers. That's not where it is. Our fingers have to do it. Yes, but that's not where the music lives. So having made that point, let's go back to Revue. Okay, so Revue isn't just repertoire. It's not just playing stuff. It's not just keeping the rust from gathering on a piece of music. What we do in review isn't really practice. And what we do in Revue isn't really exactly playing either. Most of the time. It's more the way I would describe the finish stage of a piece, right, where we're doing a lot of playing through, but we're doing a little bit of fixing as it's required. What we're really doing is developing that deep familiarity with a piece that allows us to play it and not to feel like we're starting from scratch every time. But exactly what you do in review really depends on what your goal is. So we'll talk for just a moment about how the review tactics might change. For instance, if you're building a repertoire, what is it you really need to do with Revu? Well, clearly what you need to do is you need to have a number of pieces, and of course, how many or how long a time span they take, that's up to you. But you need to have those numbers of pieces that you can play through. So you're going to set probably a rotation, and you're probably going to set a schedule and say, okay, I'm going to learn this many. Then I'm going to add these more, then I'm going to do this, and then maybe I'll rotate things in and out. So playing through those pieces and having them current and fresh for yourself, that's a way to build a repertoire. Or maybe you just want to review pieces because you feel like playing something that you like to play. Well, that's perfect. And so maybe one day a week, maybe you just get out pieces that you like or books you haven't played from before, perhaps, in which case it's not really review, I guess. But, you know, you get out some old music and you put it on your stand and you start playing through them.

They're different, aren't they? You can just think about those two things and think that, okay, we call them review, but they're very different review. Because in the first one, in that repertoire building, we're getting ready to have music ready to present to somebody. So we want it to be pretty polished. We want it to be, you know, relatively flawless. You know, it needs to flow and sound like music. But when we're just playing it through for ourselves, if we have a couple of stumbles and bumbles, not a big deal. If we need to drop the left hand out for a measure or two, not a big deal at all. We just kind of keep going because we're there to enjoy the music. Now, both of those things are review, and both of those things are good. But you can see that they're going to take different strategies, right? Or in our other scenario, if there's a piece that you just finished and you don't want to let it go, well, maybe you just play it through once a day or play it through a couple times every other day. And you play it through gradually increasing the time span in between repetitions. For instance, maybe you play it every day for a couple of weeks, and then for the next couple of weeks, maybe you play it every other day or every third day until you know that you can go a certain number of days without playing it and still pick it up. By the way, that's a wonderful way to have pieces really embedded.

In your psyche, right? Embedded in your mind and your ears and your fingers is to have them played so many times over such a time period that you can go weeks in between times you've played them, and they still come back just like that. So that's a really great strategy. Now, a lot of those strategies I go into detail in that other podcast episode, and that's where I wanted to direct you. But today I want to talk, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I want to talk about the skills that we can polish, the skills that we can develop, the skills that we can grow just through review. If we look at our review in specific ways, you see, we talked about all those different reasons for reviewing, but when it comes right down to it, review is totally about playing the music. It's about playing music, right? Whether you're playing it for somebody else, just playing it for yourself, keeping the rust off, keeping it in your fingers, whatever it is, review is about playing the music, which means that it's about everything that goes with playing the music. And this is where review is really different from practice. I've had this discussion with students of mine where they say they're going to bring something out to review it, and then they spend hours practicing it. And it's like, well, practice and review are not the same. Thing. Now, granted, if you're reviewing a piece for performance or for your repertoire, you may want to do quite a bit of practice on it. And that I understand. But if we're just talking about reviewing pieces, we're talking about playing them. And that's why I equate this so closely to the finish stage of practice. Right? If you've got that, you know, beginning stage and you've got the messy middle and you've got finish, the finish is about familiarity. It's about time, it's about polishing. But very little of that stage is about practicing. It's about playing. And so think about this for a moment. All those things that might frustrate you in your playing are things you can work on through review. Okay, is the light bulb starting to go off yet? Well, let me give you some some more information, and maybe I can make that light bulb burn even more brightly. So the big thing. I'll start with a really big thing here. The big thing that review can help you with is flow. If you troubled by having to stop and fix mistakes, Revu can help you learn to play past them. If you are the person who gets stuck, you've practiced a piece in sections and it never seems to really come together, review can help you with that because it's about playing. So that when you are reviewing a piece, what I want you to do to help you practice your flow, get that piece out and play it through. Don't think about it with a practice mindset. Think about it with a playing mindset. I'm just going to play it beginning to end. Now, there may be things you want to stop and fix. If you're preparing a piece to be part of your repertoire, or if it's something you're keeping in your fingers, you may want to go back and fix something after you've played it through. Note that phrase right after you've played it through. If you're just playing it through for yourself, you may not feel the need to fix anything, but maybe you will. But start with the idea that you're going to play it through beginning to end. Then once you've done that, you can go back and work through a couple things that maybe didn't go the way you wanted, or check on a couple of things that you weren't sure about when you played it through. But the idea is that you're not really going to do a lot of practice. Review is about playing, and it's going to teach you to play. Now let's just take this a step Further, if you want to develop more flow in your playing, if you want to be more confident playing for others, one of the things that can help you with that is pulling out review pieces and playing them through regularly. This is where that, you know, maybe you have a piece a day that you do, and you do that at the beginning or the end of your practice session, or maybe you have one day a week, or maybe you have one day every two weeks, or maybe you have a review week. You can schedule it however you like, whatever feels like it works for you. There's no rule about that. But if you challenge yourself to play through pieces regularly, to play through, to play them through for musicality, for expression, without stopping and without correcting, and I might say also without self blaming, right? We're not counting the mistakes here, we're just playing through the music. If you do that regularly, you will get better at that. Flow is a skill that a lot of people find hard to practice, and review is an excellent way to practice it.

Okay, the light bulb's burning brighter, right? You're like, oh, okay, look what review can do for me. Oh, okay. Well, let me tell you something else review can do for you. Let's say, all right, you're sitting down and maybe it's a Saturday and you think, I'm going to just review stuff today. I don't feel like practicing anything. I'm just going to review something. So you pull out a book that you played from a long time ago and you start going through it, Open the book, turn to page one, there's the piece, I'm going to play it. And so you play it through and okay, maybe, maybe it, it doesn't go so well the first time through. I'll play it through again and it probably goes a little bit better. You know what you just practiced besides flow, of course. But you know what you just practiced? You just practiced reading, as in sight reading. I know this is a piece you've seen before and I know you know how it goes, but that's okay. You still have practiced putting a piece of music on the stand and just playing through it. Something you hadn't been practicing regularly. That's practicing your reading skills. Remember what's important about note reading, and I know we've talked a little bit about this. It might be time for a more in depth podcast about it. I'm not sure. But what's important in note reading, what happens is you're working with this whole, what I call the coordination of processes. You're looking at the notes on the page. Hopefully you're sort of hearing them in your head. And if you are, maybe you're making guesses too, educated guesses about what comes next. That's part of musical hearing as well. But you're looking at those notes and you're lining up both hands. You're reading ahead to see how to place your hands, to know how to place your fingers, to know what's going. You're reading sort of exactly where you are as well. So you're doing that back and forth reading thing that happens when we read particularly, you might notice it if you read aloud, right? If you're reading words aloud, you're reading forward and back to where you are at the same time. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make the sentence that you're reading aloud sound expressive. So you're doing that. And when you're coordinating all those things, your hands, your fingers, your eyes, your ears, your brain, all of that, that's what note reading is. So no wonder it's difficult, right? So when you pull out a piece to review and you play it through, you're practicing your reading skills, of course, something I forgot to mention. What's important with those reading skills is that you're doing them in time. You're doing. You're coordinating those processes in a specific amount of time. In other words, you're keeping a steady beat, right? That's what's important. And so when you're reviewing a piece, we're hoping you do that too. Keep that steady beat. So you're working on your reading skills, and what a lovely way to do it. It's not a drill, it's not an exercise. You're playing music that you like and you're working on your reading skills. I call that a real win win. I mean, that's a bonus right there. So review is about playing the music. So it's about flow. It's about the reading skills that go along with that and all the coordination that it takes. Obviously, review would be about expression as well, because we hope that when you review a piece, you are putting all that musical energy into it as well. You're not just reading it for the notes, you're making it that piece of music. It's a lot like the finished stage of practice, isn't it? You're really making sure that the piece communicates. There's one more thing I want to suggest about Revu that is a real benefit. It's not something we often think of, but yet. But it's something that my students ask for all the time. And something I've heard from a lot of you, it's that question, you know, well, am I making any progress? Am I getting any better? And one of the things that Revu can offer you is perspective. If you pull out that piece that you played five years ago and you put it on the music stand, okay, might not be great the first run through, but if you look at it a couple times, you'll be like, oh, yeah, this is a piece of cake. Why did I think this was so hard? You're going to get a really lovely sort of, you know, pat on the back here. Remember when this was hard for you and it's not anymore? Remember how you struggled with that particular skill or that measure? And they're not hard for you? Not now you've come that far. That perspective is so valuable. We always think in terms of what we need to stretch and what we need to improve and what we need to work on next and what still kind of stinks. And, you know, there's all kinds of work that we know we need to do. But to be able to take a moment and focus on what we've already done and how far we've come.

That'S a real treasure. And that's one of the things that you can find in review if you're looking for it. If you want to say, okay, I'm going to pick out this piece, and I played it a long time ago, and I remember I struggled with this and this and this, and you play through it, and now this and this and this are just piece of cake. It's a breeze. And now the piece sounds the way it was supposed to sound. It possibly sounds the way it sounded when your teacher played it for you, and you're like, wow, look what I've done. I've done a cool thing. I have grown as a harpist. What a great confidence booster. One word of warning here before I let you go. It's an important thing, too, I think when I pull a piece out that I haven't played in a long time, and perhaps it's not a particularly easy one, and I've pulled it out, and I want to start reviewing it because. Because I'm going to actually practice it and get it ready for a concert. Perhaps this is what happens to me. And I'm telling you this because it's likely to happen to you, too. I know it has happened for some of my students, and so that's why I'm warning you. I pull the piece out and it's you know, not a real easy piece, but I play through it, it's like, oh, wow, that's not so bad. That came back pretty quickly. I haven't played it in years. And look, there it is. Well, okay, what happens the second day? Or possibly not till the third day? That first day goes so well, but on the second day or the third day, it's as if I've never seen it before and I have to go back to square one with it. And that has been so consistent for me. And I have found it so often to be part of the experience of other harpists that I'm mentioning it to you now so you don't get discouraged with it. You'll pull it out that first day and it'll be just amazing. And you'll think, wow, I'm terrific. I'm the best harpist ever. Look at me. And then that next day when it completely falls apart, it's sort of like you had a little bit left, a little bit of gas left in the tank. You know, like you knew your car was almost empty, but you had that little bit of gas left and you turned it on. You said, oh, look at that. I had enough gas after all. I don't, you know, I don't have to get the gas out of the gas can. I can go right to the gas station. And then you pull out to the driveway and your gas and your car just dies. And you think, I did need the gas can filled. All right, I've never had that happen. But that was the best analogy I could think of. So this is the same thing. That's that little bit of gas that's left in the tank, and it's going to pull you through the first time or two through the piece, and then you're going to have to go back and spend some time practicing it. Now, this is not true if it's a piece that's considerably below your level. But if it's a piece that was pretty challenging the first time and was a pretty substantial piece, this is very likely to happen. I'm not saying that it will, but I'm saying if it does, please understand that this is normal. And so you've had a great couple of days and now you have to get back down and you have to do some slow practice to really re cement the notes in your mind and your fingers, right? So you really need to get those notes just reassimilated. And it'll take some slow practice to do that, and then it'll speed right up again. You won't have to go through all the learning process you did the first time. But I'm just warning you because this happens. Despite that little word of warning there, I hope that I have inspired you today to get those pieces out, to review them and to look at your review in a new way. It's not practice, it's much more like playing. It can prepare you to be a better player because it it will help you work on flow, it will help develop your reading skills. And of course it'll give you some perspective on where you've been so that you can better appreciate where you're going. Above all, it's going to make you happy. Reviewing Music Just being able to play through music is the best. And I know I don't have to tell you that. I know you already know, so that's the best reason I can think of to review. I just love playing music. And I know you do too. One reminder that there are some more specifics about step by step ways to use Revu to build and maintain your repertoire in podcast episode 99. So you can go back and review that. If you'd like to find out some more specific tips, please do. Remember that we still have openings in our coaching program and we're extending that to people, people who are not alums of our coaching program and would like to study with one of our coaches. So you can go to our coaching page@heartmastery.com we use the link in the show notes and get started with a little six question questionnaire and a planning call and be on your way with that. And of course we're still working through our rhythm makeover in our April seminar and you are welcome to sign up for that and join us on those calls as well. So all those things going on next week on the podcast we're getting very practical. I'm going to share with you my best tips for placing chords. Whether they're three note chords or four note chords, whether it's one hand or two hand. We had such an interesting live warm up the other week and we did a lot of drills on placing chords and talked a lot about it. And those insights were valuable enough that I think I need to share that here with you in case you missed that warm up. And of course I have some other things to add to that too. So we'll be talking about how to place those chords accurately so you get to the right strings the first time. So we'll be talking about placing chords on the podcast next week and I hope you join me for that. 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. It.