Rhythmic Confidence: It’s Not About the Math - PHH 202

What I want to help you do today is to start building a bridge between what you see and what you do. You see something on the page and it doesn't immediately translate into music in your head. That's what I'm talking about. Because the more experienced we get with music, the more we understand it, the more we listen to it. The more we play, the stronger our automatic connections should be between what we look at and what we play.

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.

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.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. If I had the opportunity to teach music to an absolute music newbie, someone without any previous musical instruction or experience, I know exactly how I would begin. I would start without printed music. Now, that's hardly revolutionary. The German composer Carl Orff is known today not only for his most famous work, Carmina Burana, but for the innovative methods he brought to musical education. Emile Jacques Dalcroz created Eurythmics. Now, this is not the 1980s pop band with any Lennox, but a system for teaching music through movement. And music schools throughout the world have been teaching young children with the method developed by Shinichi Suzuki, which begins by emphasizing learning by ear rather than by printed music. Now, all of these educators believed, as I do, that that music is within us and that by learning without the printed page, we can create connections that allow us to develop our natural instinct for how music is organized in notes and rhythms and chords and more. Our musical notation system is really just a code that we use to transmit and share musical ideas between composer and performer. The actual music doesn't live there. Now, please understand, I'm not suggesting that we should all learn exclusively by ear. My meaning is that when we become so accustomed to using the page as our only path into the music, when we sublimate our instinctive musical understanding to deciphering the dots on the staff, we make playing harder. In short, we ignore the very innate connection that brought us to music and to the harp in the first place. So today we're going to explore some very fundamental rhythm concepts through this lens, focusing on the experience first, then the notation, rather than the other way around. I promise I won't ask you to try playing by ear, or to memorize everything or to light candles and repeat affirmations.

What I want to not that there's anything wrong with that. What I want to do is to give you some very simple ways to change how you think about rhythm. We'll do a couple of small experiments that I designed to help relieve any confusion or uncertainty you have about basic rhythmic concepts. Even if you feel totally confident about your skill in deciphering and playing complex rhythms, you. These little drills will help you reconnect to what is truly important about the rhythmic element of our playing. Now, if you like what you hear today, and if you want to keep developing more confidence with your rhythmic skills, I would encourage you to join our April seminar, which is coming up very soon. It's called Rhythm Makeover and We're going to be exploring these kinds of concepts, but in a lot more depth. Not perhaps as much off the page, but we're going to work with really practical drills and ways to help you understand what the music is telling you and ways to practice it so that when you encounter a new rhythm in a new piece and it's something you haven't seen before, you have the confidence to decipher it, and you're working at building the ability to automatically play it without having to spend so much time figuring it out. After all, rhythm really isn't all about the math, and that that's what we're going to be exploring today, and it's what we're going to be working with in our April seminar. Remember, My Heart Mastery members, the seminar is part of your membership, so that's included for you. But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member and I'm tapping you on the shoulder right now and saying, well, why not? But if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, you can join us just for the seminar. And join us on those Mondays in April. If you can't make the calls live, of course, they're all recorded and you'll have all the PDFs and all the instruction that our My Heart Mastery members are getting from our wonderful certified coaches about how to work with rhythm. And yes, we'll eventually get to some pretty complicated things, too. So if you have questions about rhythm or you're just not sure about it, this is going to be a terrific resource for you. You'll find the link to join the seminar just about everywhere. It's on the homepage of Harp Mastery. It is in the app, and of course, I've linked to it here in the Show Notes as well. What I want to help you do today is to start building a bridge between what you see and what you do. I think lots of times what we see on the page doesn't automatically translate into what we do. If your note reading is slow, that's part of that gap that we need to bridge. But we're not talking about note reading today. We're talking about this in terms of rhythm. But just think you see something on the page and it doesn't immediately translate into music in your head. That's what I'm talking about. Because the more experienced we get with music, the more we understand it, the more we listen to it, the more we play, the stronger our automatic connections should be between what we look at and what we play. Similarly, if you are listening to music the more experienced you are with music, the more you ought to be able to hear something and know a little bit about what it would look like on a printed page, know how you would play that on your own as well. So it's all about this connection, and I think we often ignore the easiest way to make those connections, to build that bridge. That bridge is built through our own musical instinct. You have musical instinct, or music wouldn't attract you. You would have no desire to play music if you didn't have instinct. I'm not talking about, you know, an amazing talent. I'm just talking about that affinity that you have with music, the way that music touches you, the way that you want to express yourself through music. You've got that tool, that bridge is right there. Dorothy, you've got those slippers, right? So we want to be able to use to help you play music better, to be more confident in your ability to play it and to play it more confidently after you've learned it. That's what we're talking about. Now. There are lots of ways to build that bridge. I mentioned note reading a moment ago, but today we're building that bridge through rhythm. We're just looking at how to build the bridge between rhythms that you see, rhythms that you hear, and rhythms that you play. So if you look at those notes and you don't know how they sound or how they go, or if you struggle to decipher what's on the page and figure out how to play it, that's the thing that we're going to fix today, or at least start fixing. Right. Those dots have sort of no experiential context for you. It's like you look at the dots and they don't mean anything. If you can remember back to the days when music reading might have been new to you, and maybe that's a long way back for you. It was for me. But if you think about, you know, you're looking at the dots, it's like looking at, you know, a foreign language that you have no understanding of. It just doesn't make any sense. And the more we learn about music, the more those things that we see on the page make sense. But we want that sense to be part of what we absorb, not just that one instance in that one piece. So we're looking for sort of more global learning. I first became aware of my own lack of conscious connection here when I started my studies at Curtis as a student. One of the courses that we're required to take at Curtis is ear training, or Oral skills. And this is, you know, a three year program of courses that you, that you have to take. And so it's, you know, twice a week for three years, you're learning how to build those connections between what you see and what you hear, what all things sound like. And, you know, this is musical dictation. We're writing notes, we're listening to things, we're singing things, we're sight reading, all different kinds of things. And I realized then that although I had been playing music at a very high level, after all, I was accepted to Curtis, right? I was no musical slouchier. I was, you know, a promising young student. So. So, you know, I was quite accomplished already, but I wasn't aware of the depth of connection that was going to be useful to me in my music learning. Now, after I got out of Curtis and I'd been out of school a year or so, and then I came back and started teaching. And I was teaching that very same subject and some others as well, but I was teaching oral skills. And I knew from being a student that, you know, sitting in class twice a week and doing these things and trying to practice these assignments was not any student's favorite thing. We wanted to be practicing, we wanted to play our instruments. We didn't want to be doing this kind of schoolwork. So I was sympathetic when they showed up without their assignments done. Didn't mean I didn't give them the grade they deserved. But the point was that they didn't want to be there, didn't feel like they needed to do these assignments. And yet I knew.

From having gone through that and being now out on the other side that this was the most practical course they were going to take while they were there. And I told them that repeatedly. Some of them got it, some of them didn't. But I often would have students come back a year or two after they graduated to say, you know, you were so right. Can I come back and sit in on those classes? Because that's really the most important thing now that I'm playing in an orchestra or whatever it was. And I said, you know, you have all the skills you need. You're welcome to come back and sit in, but you don't need to. You have everything. You just need to do what we talked about for three years in class and make those connections. So the fact that you haven't made those connections yet is not unusual and it's not damaging. You haven't been a bad student. So please don't beat yourself up because this Happens to all of us. But. But those connections will help you. And so if you're ready to start making them, we're going to start with a real simple little experiment. Just to show you where the connections can come from and how they have nothing to do with the printed page. So here's what I'd like you to do. And if you're driving or if you're walking on the treadmill, if you're not at a place to do this, you can come back and do it later. But, but I want you to sit still for just a moment, relax. I promise it's not going to be hard. And I just want you to breathe in and out. See, I told you it wouldn't be hard. Right? And we're going to do it a little bit consciously with a little bit of focus. So make your breaths can be nice and slow and they can be at your own pace. But as you breathe, I want you to feel your inhalation, your in breath as a strong beat and your exhalation as a weak beat. So it'll be like strong.

Weak, going out and breathe in and it's strong and breathe out and it's weak. Right? So the strong beat and the weak beat, that 1, 2, in, out, in, out. You're not going that fast, right? I don't want you to hyperventilate. But the difference between that, that strong beat which we're representing on our inhale and the weak beat which would be our exhale, that's the essence of meter. What's a meter? Well, a meter is a time signature, right? And it's definition wise. A meter is a repeating pattern of accented and unaccented beats. Gosh, who knew I could talk like a dictionary? But a meter is a repeating pattern, meaning that the pattern we're repeating we usually represent in music as a measure. And so that meter is a measure that has a particular pattern of strong beats and weak beats. Now, the meter is different from the rhythm. The meter is the 44 or the 2 4. Our pattern right now of a strong beat and a weak beat for our breath, that would be like a 2, 4, wouldn't it? You know, strong, weak, strong weak, and 1, 2, 1, 2. But probably your breaths were slower than that. I would expect they would be. So here's what I'd like you to do now. We're going to think about the inhale still. It can be strong and the exhale can be weak. We're not changing that. But what I want you to do is to count during your breaths. So just count any number that seems natural to you. And as you know, you'll have to count in your head, right? You can't count out loud and breathe in, I don't think at the same time. I suppose you could, but I'm not that talented. So you want to count in your head while you breathe in, and then count while you go out. And don't make your breathing really, you know, strange for you. I don't want you to hyperventilate or faint or fall down, but the idea is to count your breaths and make each breath the same length, the same number, right? So that if your intake breath, if your inhale is 1, 2, 3, 4, then your exhale needs to be 1, 2, 3, 4. And find your rhythm. Maybe you're counting three, maybe you're counting five. Maybe you're counting. I don't know, maybe you're counting eight. If you're counting really fast. But, you know, four might be a real natural number for you. But do whatever is natural. So, like, inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 1, 2, 3,. And inhale, 1, 2,3, 4. And exhale, 1, 2, 3', 4. Okay? Stop your patterned breathing before you fall over. So, but isn't that interesting? You had a beat that was your inhale or your exhale. Each one of those was a beat. And you counted during that beat. You know what you did, you just subdivided. So let me take a moment here. We'll relax from our breathing, although we're going to come back to that. But first I want to say this, that counting feels very mathematical. And we talk about numbers and we talk about subdivisions, and we talk about note values. At least if you're using the American system, we talk about, you know, halves, wholes, halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, 32, 64ths, 128th notes. The English counting system is so much more gentle, right? With crotchets and quavers and semiquavers and all of those things. So it's kind of. Kind of very quaint. Our numbering system is very logical because a whole note is divided into two halves. Two halves make a whole, okay? And then each one of those can be divided. So we have four quarters, right? So our note, the. The. Our notation system and the way we call those notes, right, with quarters and eighths and sixteenths, they're very. It's very logical. But if you have some kind of phobia about numbers or about math, you might think that counting is about math. And it really doesn't have to be. It's about a span of time. Think about that. Inhale and exhale again. It's about that span of time and how we use it. So that span of time that is a beat could have any number of numbers in it. Now, I counted four, but you could count three or you could count six, or you could count 11 or 17 or whatever you wanted to count. It doesn't make any difference how you use that span of time. Those are the things we call subdivisions. And our most normal subdivisions of beats are in sections of 2 or 3 or 4. Now picture what this would look like. I want you to picture in your head for a second what those notes would look like. If we have a quarter note beat and we're dividing that into two, then we've got two eighth notes. If we've got a quarter note beat and we're dividing it into three, we have a triplet. If we've got a quarter note beat and we're dividing it into four, we have four 16th notes. So that's how a beat gets subdivided. And although we use those numeric terms like eighths and sixteenths to talk about the subdivisions, it's really a concept that doesn't require numbers. If it required numbers, the English system with crotchets and quavers and minims and all those good things wouldn't be effective, and it clearly is. So it's not about the numbers. It's about a span of time that is going to be subdivided or divided, if you like, into equal spans of time that are smaller. Right. Like a quarter note is divided into two equal eighth notes. So we're going to go back to that breathing for a second and think about your breath. Now, if your breath is, you know, faster or slower, you might have a different experience, and that's okay. But think about kind of a breath that's sort of like in 2, 3, 4, out 2, 3, 4. What if that breath, each breath was a whole note? Oh, well, then if the breath is a whole note, then what are our subdivisions? What are the numbers that we're counting? Well, if our breath is a whole note and we're counting four subdivisions, then we have four. Four quarter notes.

So do the breathing again and think about your breath as a whole note that you're subdividing in your mind into four quarters. So inhale. So 1, 2, 3, 4 quarter notes. Exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4 Quarter Notes. That's where that comes from. Now suppose, though, that that breath isn't a whole note. Suppose it's a half note. Then our four Subdivisions aren't quarter notes anymore, are they? If our breath is a half note, those subdivisions are eighth notes. So now, instead of our breath being 1, 2, 3, 4, and those being four quarter notes, all four subdivisions are actually going to be eighth notes. What's interesting is that even though in music we would count it differently, one and two, and perhaps it doesn't change our counting, it doesn't actually change the numbers for our breath. Our breath in is still just as long. 1, 2, 3, 4, out. 1, 2, 3, four. It's a pretty slow half note, but it's a half Note. And our 1, 2, 3, 4 are the 4 8th notes that are part of that half note. And we might usually count that 1 and 2 and. But that's okay. It's the same thing. Now I'm wondering if this was an aha moment for you, and maybe you haven't made that little connection yet. In which case I'm going to tell you what I think I've got, what I know I want you to get from this particular exercise, and that's this. That note values themselves, whether they're eighth notes or 16th notes or quarter notes or whatever, have nothing to do with a particular speed. I know sometimes we're tempted to think that, oh, 16th notes are fast notes, but that's not necessarily true. And there is music, I'm thinking of music from the 18th century particularly, that has lots and lots of really fast note values that actually go at a very slow pace. Now, maybe you haven't run into that in your own music yet, but I want you to remember that just because something has a lot of those flags, you know, because it's a 16th note with those two extra little flags on it, right? Or an eighth note with one flag. Just because it's a fast looking note value doesn't mean that it's fast. It's only length. Its only true value is in how it relates to the other notes around it. So that we know that a 16th note has no particular speed, but we know that it is four times faster than a quarter note at that same speed, whatever the speed is, right? If your quarter note is 60, we know your 16th note is going to be four times faster because there are four of them in a quarter note. But if the quarter note is 30, your 16th note isn't still as fast, it's actually half as fast as it was. Since your quarter note is half as fast as it was. Don't let the numbers confuse you. I'm just saying that however slow or fast one Note value is those faster note values are only that same proportion faster or slower. They're not related to a particular tempo. So that when you see a 16th note, it doesn't mean it's fast. It only means that it's perhaps faster than the notes around it, assuming the notes around it are slower, like eighth notes or quarter notes. Right. Okay. So remember that note values have nothing to do with fast or slow, except as they relate to the notes around them. Now, let's play around with those subdivisions for a little bit. So remember that we were counting. We were counting 1, 2, 3, 4 on the inhale, 1, 2, 3, 4 ON THE EXHALE. What I'd like you to do is to leave out one number. Don't change the pacing of the numbers, but leave out one number. For instance, maybe I'm doing 1, 3, 4, 1, 3, 4, so that I'm actually keeping 1, 3, and 4 in the same place. I'm just leaving out 2, 1, 3, 4, 1st, 3, 4. It's the same on the inhale, same on the exhale. What would that look like if those were note values? Well, you could decide whether you wanted that long first one to be combination of the two note values so that it was a long note, or whether you wanted to make the first one a short regular note and then a rest. Let's imagine that it's a long note for a second. 1, 3, 4, 1, 3, 4. It takes the same amount of time as the 1 and the 2. Well, let's think of it this way. If our breath is a whole note, 1, 3, 4, 4, then our 1, 3, and 4, they're going to be our 1, 2, 3, and 4. All four subdivisions. They're going to be quarter notes. Right? Because we've got four of them. So four quarters to a whole. So 1, 2, 3, 4. But now 1 and 2, we have to combine into one note. What would they combine into? They'd combine into a half. So our rhythm, 1, 3, 4, 1, 3, 4 would be a half note followed by two quarters. If we had chosen to make it a rest, it could have been a quarter note on one quarter, rest on two, and then quarter notes on three and four. Okay, that was pretty easy. Same idea with number two in our four missing. What if our big beat was a half note so that we had only a half note with four subdivisions in it? What we mentioned before, those four subdivisions would be eighth notes. Right? Four eighth notes and a half note. So, you know, our 1, 2, 3, and 4, we might more usually count 1 and 2. And so now if we hold through the second one, we're going to have 1, 2, and. Right. 1, 2, and. And what would that look like in note values? Well, our two and those would be eighth notes because we have four eighth notes that we're trying to account for. Right? So three and four would be eighth notes. One is now not an eighth note, but it's two eighth notes combined. So that would be a quarter note. So that rhythm 1, 3, 4 is now a quarter and 2, 8. Oh, well, what if our big beat was a quarter note? What would that be? Well, okay, if our big beat is a quarter note, then our numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, they're going to be 16th notes. Because four 16th notes equal a quarter, right? Okay, so the last two notes, if we have 1, 3, 4, 3 and 4 are going to be 16th notes, but one is going to be two 16th notes combined. And what do two 16th notes combine together to be? They combine together to be an eighth note. So now our rhythm 1, 3, 4 is now an eighth, and 2, 16. And yes, we might count that differently, like 1E and is a way we often count 16th notes, but it comes from the same thing. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1E and A. Or in this case, 1 and.

1, 3, 4. Get it? It's not about the math per se. It's really about understanding that whatever note is in the beat, we have this equal number of other smaller beats that fit in there and that we can combine them as we like or as the composer liked and come out with it. So that's how you start to decipher rhythms, how you start to think about them, and how you can step away from just some of the confusion and realize that all you really have to do is breathe. It really is that simple. Now, there are lots of other ways of talking about rhythm and explaining it and teaching it, and they can all be valuable, too. And we'll be using other methods as we work through our seminar course in April. But this can be a very simple way to remind yourself that that is where the pulse comes from. It comes from our breath, which is the breath of the music. That's what we're doing, and that's all it needs to be. It's simple, it's instinctive. It doesn't have to be complicated. And when you can use that to help ground you and to give you the confidence, you need to start looking at some of the more complex rhythms and think, okay, how simple can I make this? That's what we're talking about, and that's what I wanted to share with you today. A very simple way to start approaching rhythms in a way that is a little bit more grounded in what we're really trying to do, and that's make music. If you're interested in doing a little bit more work off the page and just working with music, playing the harp without relying on printed notes, I wanted to remind you that this is what we do just about every Monday morning on our live Monday warmup. We work without music. We work together. Sometimes we work in rhythms. It's basically a morning 45 minutes or so that we spend working on technique, but we work without music, just learning together. And it might be something that you find very helpful in freeing yourself from the tyranny of the of the dots. So that I encourage you to come and work out work your technique with us on Mondays. You can access the live Monday warmups either on YouTube or from our Harp Mastery Hub, which is our free community. And of course, there, these warmups are very easily accessible through our Harp Mastery app. So if you haven't got the app yet, go ahead and download it. The app is free and it's an easy way to log into all your courses to see weekly videos. I' post there with tips and things. And we have the Hub, which is our discussion forum, which is also free. The warmups are free. We have our practice labs, which just help give you a little bit of accountability for your practice. You heard me talk about those on the podcast last week. But there's so much going on, and the Monday warmups might really help you with just getting off the page just a little bit. Um, once again, the April seminar series is open for you to register. We start with our first call just about a week from today. And it's gonna be a lot of fun working with all kinds of fun rhythm things. And the coaches have lots of great information to share and some fun tips as well. So that's coming your way. And I hope you join us for that next week on the podcast. We're talking about the good and bad of slow practice. What slow practice can do for you. And believe me, it can do a lot. And what it means, it can't do for you. And that's really important to know, too. So we'll be talking about slow practice on the podcast next week until I talk to you then. 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.