Rounding Up! 3 Non-Technical Skills For Success - PHH 115

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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 me 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. Today's show is a special one. It's a peek inside our My Harp Mastery membership. You'll be hearing part of a recording of one of our Monday calls. Now, on this call, our topic was three skills that are vital for your harp playing success. In particular, memorizing, practicing for flow and continuity, and sharing music with friends. These skills may not sound very exciting, but I really want to share this call with you because I talk about ways to look at your harp playing that may be very different from the way you usually think about your practice and playing. This call was an eye opener for some of our My Heart Mastery members and I hope it will inspire you as well. Now, because this is a recording of a call, you'll hear me reference some materials that our members have access to, but which I can't share with you here on the podcast. Also, I'm talking about these three skills in relation to one of our My Heart Mastery resources, the Scale of Success. This is a curriculum that we offer inside the My Heart Mastery community to help harpists of all levels round out their skill set so they can be more confident harpists. So before we get to the call, I do want to take just a moment to remind you that we have finished camp, the last of our summer Sizzler camps coming up this week on August 2nd. It's not too late to register. Go ahead and join us at finish camp. I would love to have you. We're talking specifically on that at that camp about how to get your music from the messy Middle east to the finish point. You know if you've been playing for any length of time, it's so easy to get stuck in that messy middle and not actually take your piece to a, a place where you feel like you can comfortably play it well. There are techniques you need to know to bridge that gap and that's what we're talking about in finish camp. I would love for you to join me. The link is in the show notes or you can find it under upcoming events@harpmastery.com I want you to be able to finish those pieces. And once again, if you are a last minute vacation planner and you'd like some time away with your harp, consider joining me at our August harp retreat in Sevierville, Tennessee. I'd love for you to join me there. It's a chance to work with me in person and with one of my certified coaches, Candice Lark, who will be there as well. It's a small group. It's a very wonderful way to reconnect with your harp, to have some focused time, just you and your harp, to make some big strides, to find some fabulous harp friends and to get some terrific instruction. We've got workshops, we've got games, we've got everything. It's a fun, fun event and filled with discovery. Just ask anybody who's been at one of our retreats. So I would love to have you join us there, but I don't want to take another moment. I want to get on with our call recording. So here I am talking about three skills to help round up your harp playing success.

So that's a little bit about logistics and I'm ready to start talking about our theme. So if there's not any comments from the, if there aren't any comments from the floor, go right along. You should have been able to print out the Quick Start outline for this particular theme. The Quick Start outline is the only PDF you need. And here's the deal.

When we work on our technique, we do really good things for our playing. I don't have to tell you that. And if you went through the Build Extend Advanced challenge, as I think all of you did in at least in part so far, it'll stay there. You have access to it, you know, forever. So no, no worries there.

So if you went through that, you could see how small changes and working on the right things.

In the right way can make a real difference in how you play, a real difference in how your fingers work. And that's great. But of course, there's more to playing the harp than that, right. Which is why? On the scale of success, we identify five areas that you need to keep developing. Technique is just one of them. And if you've been through any of the levels on the scale of success, you can say the others with me. There's technique, there's musicianship, which of course is everything except for technique. Everything that has to do with the craft of music and the music you make, except for literally how you play it. Right? That would be sort of technique. Musicianship is everything else. Then there's repertoire, the music you play. There are practice skills, as you probably have discovered, there are more efficient ways to practice and less efficient ways to practice. And so learning some of those practice skills is always a good idea. And so we tried it up your practice skills as we work through these things here. And the fifth development area we call sharing. Other people might call it performing, but I know that a lot of you don't feel compelled to perform. You don't want to give a recital. You don't necessarily even want to play in public. A lot of harpists I meet say, well, I really just want to play for myself. And you know what? That's fine. That's totally fine. But sharing your music is important.

I think that, you know, it's sort of it. It could go along with hiding your light under a bushel.

But at the same time, you know, how many of us would.

Be not at all hesitant to share a recipe that we loved or a book that we enjoyed reading or, you know, a plant from our garden? Right. You'd feel good about sharing those. So why do we feel so hesitant, shy, or embarrassed about sharing the music we make? Well, I have some ideas about that, and you probably do, too. And we're not necessarily going to worry about those right now, but I am. And you probably read them on your. On your Quick Start Guide. We are going to talk about some easy ways to start sharing your music with someone. Because.

As in, as with so many other things, when we reach out, when we give of ourselves, we get oh so much more back. And it's just the same with music as with anything. So you will find that sharing your music in the way that makes sense for you is extremely rewarding. So we'll talk about that.

All of those are the key areas on, in every level, in the scale of success. I chose those for the scale of success because I think they're the areas we all need to work in all the time. I don't think we can ignore them. So with that being said, let's just get right into the three that I chose, I chose figuring we'd had enough technique. I skipped over that one. And because we were dealing with.

Enough, I mean, well, because we're dealing with skills, I also skipped over repertoire, figuring that the things we were talking about were going to serve your repertoire. So those were the two that I did not include in this theme. But we're going to round out your education with the other three, which would be Musicianship, practice, and sharing. So I went back to the Scale of Success workbooks, and I looked for a musicianship skill that I knew some people had gotten stuck on. I have had from time to time emails from members who say.

But I don't want to memorize. And so this starts at Excited Level. Now, in case you don't know the scale of success, we start at C and work up to the next C. So our levels are Courageous. Courageous. That would be the word. Courageous. Daring, Excited, On Fire, Growing, Adventurous, Bold and Celestial. We have one Celestial graduate, and I know we have another one who's just about there. So that's kind of cool. Celestial has its own.

It has a different sort of set of criteria, the same focus areas, but it's a little bit. A little bit different. Courageous and Daring. Fairly easy to get through. Most people will get through those pretty quickly, and then they get to Excited Level, and there's. What do you mean I need to start developing my memory muscle? I've quoted from the Excited Level workbook there on your PDF, but I wanted to talk about the. The skill that I chose, memorization as a musicianship skill. I wanted to talk about that and sort of reframe, if I can, your ideas about memorization. Now, we've talked about it before here, so this is probably not new to a lot of you. I've talked about it on various challenges. I've talked about it in the Facebook group. But I will say it again. Memorization is much less about remembering something as it is than it is about knowing something and just knowing it better and better and better.

It's not a brain game.

Although starting to memorize something can feel like a brain game, but it's. It's a depth of knowledge and familiarity that deepens over time.

It is not required. Now, having said that, actually, you know, it sort of is required to pass Excited Level and a couple of the other levels as well. But you're talking to the person who wrote the curriculum.

And if memorization, if you've tried it and it's the only thing standing between you and getting through Excited Level, let Me know, because, you know, I'm able to make exceptions. We don't have to have anything stand in the way of your progress here. But I do want you to try memorization on these terms, which is probably pretty different from how you memorized as a kid or. Or how you memorized when you were under pressure to do it. Now, for some people, memorization comes really easily. In fact, it's their preferred learning method.

I don't believe that's the best way to learn something. To learn a piece of music, I think it's cumbersome. If that's the way you learn, that is, instead of reading the notes, note reading is a very valuable skill. So is memorization. Note reading, being able to read the music is the quickest way to learn music. Memorization is the way to retain it. Even if you don't memorize something completely, what you have memorized of it is, is. Is in there, and it will stay part of you.

So, having said what, memorization isn't. It's not remembering, it's not required, and it's not the best way to lear.

It is all about knowing. It is weakened by distraction, is what I say on the PDF, meaning that if you've ever been in a performance situation, even just playing for your teacher, and you think you have a piece memorized, if you are distracted, if your brain is elsewhere.

If your focus isn't on the flow of the music, your memorization may not work as well. So that's definitely a fact of memorization, but it is a product of your time, your attention, and your intention. So you, yes, you have to put time into memorizing if you're going to do it.

But what I really mean by that is that memorization strengthens over time.

You know, that first time you learn the nines, times table or something, it's a little bit shaky. After a certain number of decades, well, maybe it's shaky again, but after the right number of decades, it's not so shaky anymore. Right? So it takes time. It won't take that long, but it does take time, and it takes attention. The wrong way to memorize is to just play it, play it, play it, play it, and hope it sinks into your fingers. If memorization is about knowing rather than just rote motor skill, then you have to pay attention. So the more you know about the piece, the more your memorization will serve you. For instance, if you're playing from memory and you make a mistake, when you go back to look at that mistake, you want to fix it by not Just playing it through again and saying, well, I don't know why that went wrong. It's never gone wrong before. Find something to know about it. Find a piece of information to help you with that. And then it's intentional. The slowest way to memorize is just to play it over and over and over again and hope it settles in. The quicker way to memorize.

Is to do it on purpose. So you're going to start, and this is that four step system that I put for you there. You're going to start small. Pick a small chunk of your piece. Now, if this is a piece you've been playing for a while, you likely can rattle off parts of it, particularly the beginning, without even thinking about it. But there's. There may very well come a point in your playing when it's like, don't know what comes next. All right, so let's take 4 bars or 8 bars or 2 bars if 4 bars is too long. But start with a small section and then we want you to learn it with attention. So I want you to play it through several times with the music paying attention. What's going on? Where do. Where does your hand start? Where does it end? Is there something that. Is there a jump you need to know? Is there a chord spacing you need to know? Do you need to, you know what's going on? Find features that you can latch onto so that when your right hand has to make that jump, you know you're jumping for a G.

Or whatever it is that you're doing. Okay, so that's where you want to go there. Then. Then the next thing on my four step system is to give yourself landmarks.

This will happen naturally if you're memorizing in sections, but be intentional about those landmarks. So this is why I number sections in pieces that I'm memorizing. Every four bars there will be a number. Everything I have memorized, I've got memorized in four bar sections. And by the time I start working on the memorization, I know what Section 4 is like when I start it. I know how to start at section 8. I know how to start, you know, not just at the second page, but at that third measure on the second page or wherever it is. So those landmarks are important because they give you something to hang on to. Yes, I made it as you're playing. Or something to aim for if you think you're not going to make it. Like, okay, some wrong notes, Boom. Now I know where I am and I can keep going. Those landmarks are important a lot of people call them repair points.

Which is sort of a.

Strange translation of the French point de repair, which means a reference point. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for landmarks for reference points so that you know places in the piece.

Here's an example of what happens if you don't have landmarks.

You're playing, playing, playing, playing, playing. Ah, don't remember what comes next. You've all heard me tell stories about this, so I won't tell my story again. But don't remember what comes next. Yeah. So you have to go back to the beginning and start over. If you have landmarks, reference points learned properly, you can jump forward rather than going back. Hugely important. And as you practice that, you can get even so good that you can jump forward and people will almost not notice. It'll be like, oh, you know, did I blink? So that's the kind of reference point we're looking for. Then the last step in that four step system is just test it, retest it, play it, video it. And that's how memorization works. So if you're not going to play anything for anybody else from memory ever, I'm fine with that. And that's okay. You don't have to play from memory if you don't want to. But it's a great exercise.

Not just for your brain, but for your musical education.

When you start looking at a piece of music with that much attention and that much focus, there are things that you learn not just about that piece, which will help you play it better, whether you're playing with the music or not, but also about music in general. You will find elements of form, you will find chord structures, you will find melodies and finger patterns and all kinds of things just from looking that closely. So it's a wonderful exercise for a number of reasons. So give some memorization a try. All right, so there's our musicianship skill.

Just one last thing. I chose memorization.

As I mentioned, because I had some, I've had some people worry about memorization and get all.

Worried about it. And I don't want you to worry. That's not what we're about here. But also because I think that it has so much importance for so many reasons, and why should you be afraid of it, right? So you might as well just go ahead and have fun with it and try it, knowing that there is, there's, you know, the stakes here are low. You're just gonna try it. All right, musicianship. Now on to a practice skill. This one starts practically right at the Beginning, we find this first in daring level, Right? Courageous daring. You don't have to be going through the scale of success to do these, but this is a skill that I think most of us need reminding about, and that's playing past your mistakes, playing through a piece of music. So the daring level workbook, right? Over the course of a week, your practice should include learning a piece of music, building technical skills, and playing music for fun. And then I have this extremely rough outline of 20 minutes worth of practice. And I know that many of you do much more than that. But if you spend a part of your practice session on technical drill, by the way, if your practice session is four hours, 25% would be an hour, right? So, wow. Imagine what your technique would be like if you spent an hour a day on it, right? Imagine what your playing would be like if you spent four hours a day. Of course, maybe you couldn't move, but Kate says memorizations become more difficult with birthdays. Of course. But that's why we're doing it this way, because memorization is not about remembering, it's about knowing. And everybody can know more about their pieces no matter how many birthdays you've had.

So do pay attention to that, because it's not. It's not about remembering. We talk about it that way, but it's really, truly about knowing. All right, so going on, then.

The 25% of your practice session on technique. Well, wouldn't that be wonderful? 50% on practicing a piece or more.

Because we want to play music. Okay, so you're going to practice your music. The last 25% just playing music. Just playing. Playing through a piece of music that you've been working on, that counts. Playing through review pieces, that counts.

What's so important about this? Totally, aside from the fact that playing music is fun and that it's really why we started the harp, right? Nobody started the harp to do technical exercises. Nobody started the harp to have to struggle with fingering. We started playing the harp because we wanted to play it. So that's got to be part of what you do.

But totally aside from that, when you play through a piece without stopping, this gives you a chance to create the piece of music, to settle on a musical idea and convey that idea, right? Stopping and starting and practicing, doing sections out of order, as valuable as that kind of practice is, and as necessary as it is, you can't develop continuity or flow if you don't actually play through. And if you're stopping to fix something along the way.

That'S not Developing that musical cohesion either it detracts from the musical idea rather than serves it. So you have to practice playing through, playing past whatever it is that happens.

It has the added advantage.

Of making the music real for you at a musical level, so that the music becomes more than the notes. It becomes more than the fingering and the levers or the petals. It becomes more than the challenges involved in playing.

Becomes what it was meant to be all along. It becomes the music. And that's when you can start to make music out of it. If you're stopping and starting and fixing it doesn't work that way. You can't make the music sing if you're stopping to fix things. So playing through is critical. It's important.

And of course, if you're playing for a listener, that's when they get to hear the music too. That's when the music becomes a real for them. If you were to stop and fix something, or stop and start whatever.

You'Ve shattered the world that is created by a piece of music. We've all been drawn into that, right? You hear this piece of music and it just, all of a sudden you're inside a different place.

But the second that a performer stops and stumbles and restarts, then that illusion is shattered. So a wrong note, a performance can survive a wrong note, not a big deal. But a performance can't survive a stopping and starting. And if you're not practicing for that.

Then you're going to be struggling to create it when you need to. So making playing a part of your practice all the time.

Will help you prepare to play through a piece without stopping. It'll help you practice not stopping as you play through. It will help you practice the expression, practice the stamina, practice the control you need to play a piece beginning to end.

And you'll like it, you'll enjoy it. It's playing music and that's what we do. How much fun is that? Right?

So that's an easy task for you to try this week. Just playing through, no big deal. Then the last one here is a sharing skill. This is from on Fire level, and it's playing with friends. Not necessarily with in an ensemble setting, but it could be. But playing sharing music with friends. Now these can be harp friends for those of you who have, who are new here. One of the things that, that we started last year and that we will be resuming in the, in the fall, we have sounding boards, small groups of members who get together and just play a piece for each other.

And that's the kind of thing I'm talking about where you can just play something for somebody else. And if you're not.

Comfortable performing, if you're not. If you don't think that, you know, you really want to play for anybody else, that's a really safe way to just give it a try, because it's an absolutely no pressure environment.

That's what this particular section of our theme this month is supposed to be. So you could trade videos with a friend of a piece you could play along with a video.

So that. Suppose there were a harp duo piece, right? You could record harp one, your friend records harp two, you send the videos, and then you get to play with your friend wherever they are. You're playing one part while you're hearing them play the other one.

Now, of course, if you can get together live, that's even better. But sometimes that doesn't work so well. Right? You could play for each other in person. Get together for tea or coffee or anything else and just play. You know, you play the piece you're working on, I'll play a piece I'm working on. It's a little bit of accountability. That's what. What you think you could use. But it's really, really nice to have a chance to play for somebody and have some really great feedback. Now, Beverly just typed in the chat. The sounding boards are great. Everyone is so encouraging, and the pieces are so different. Yeah, we have. Thanks for putting that in there, Beverly. The.

Sounding boards, you know, we have. We have members who do all different kinds of harping. All different kinds. And so everybody has a different interest, a different skill level, a different kind of harp, a different thing they want to play. And to just play for somebody and to play for another harpist is pretty cool because they get it right. I mean, you could play for another musician, but they might not know the struggles that you're going through to try to change those levers on time or the fact that your harp won't stay in tune. All those things that we struggle with all the time. Right. Playing for another harpist is. Is a. It's a gift. And the kinds of groups that we have are totally meant to be encouraging. They're not teaching groups, they're just encouraging groups. So that's what that's for. And says, totally agree. Love my sounding board. Yep. We have a couple groups that have been ongoing, which is terrific. But we'll. We'll start up some more again in the autumn, I promise.

And of course, you could always plan a mini concert with a friend if that's the kind of thing that you enjoy doing, you know, it's so much more fun to plan a concert together than have to do one on your own. I know when I. The first time I did that, I guess, I don't know, I was always the sort of let's put on a show type. But I think the first time I did that was when I was in high school, and I had a wonderful, very good friend who was a fine pianist, and we decided to do a joint recital sort of as a, you know, a senior project. They didn't have those back then, but that's kind of what we were doing. So we put together a recital and we chose music, and we arranged it so that we had things we could play together and things that we played separately, and we found a place to have it and we did all. And so it was just a ton of fun. And, you know, you can do that. You can make it as formal or informal as you like. You can, you know, do all kinds of things. But whatever it is you do, whatever it is you choose to do to share your music, once again, make it something you enjoy and make it fun. So my.

All right, your assignment, if you want to look at it that way, is to think about the three things that I have offered you here as ideas. You don't have to do all three of these. Pick one of them. Tweak it a little bit for yourself. You know, like, you might say, well, I don't know that I want to try.

Playing with my friends, but maybe I'll try playing, you know, playing a little concert just in my living room, see what I could do. Or you might.

Decide that to help yourself play through a little bit, you record yourself because it's, you know, nobody wants to stop the recording, right? So you might find that's helpful. Or maybe you don't want to actually memorize a piece. Start by memorizing a short etude or an exercise just to start, you know, thinking about what it would take to memorize. You don't have to do anything hard. There's nothing strenuous about this. And of course, you don't have to do any of these at all. But I think that these are skills that we don't emphasize enough. They're skills that are very helpful. I mean, imagine.

What you could do if you enjoyed playing with and for other people, assuming that's something you don't enjoy now. Or what if you sharpened up your memorization skills. Now, if you say, oh, my memorization skills are Fabulous. I'm a great memorizer. What I need is some work on sight reading. Okay, then let's round out your skills by getting you some work on sight reading so we can do that, too. But the idea here is to start rounding out your musical skills so that we're not just about learning pieces and we're not just about technique, but we're learning those other things that support the music that we play. So, wow, enough talking for right now. Do you have questions about this? This isn't anything you have to do, but.

I hope you enjoyed that call recording. There are so many little nuggets in there that I think could make a big difference for you in your harp playing. I. I'd love to know if there's something in there that was particularly important for you or that just absolutely rocked your socks. Go ahead and let me know. Send me an email at our podcast email address podcastarpmastery.com and let me know what you found interesting on that call. And of course, don't forget to register and sign up for our finish camp happening just in two days from now, Wednesday, August 2nd. I'd love to have you join us there. And by the way, if you have missed our other two camps, you'll still be able to sign up for those, too. You won't be able to attend them live, but the materials, the workbooks, the recordings of all those calls, they're still available for you, so you won't have to have missed out on anything. So next week on the podcast, we'll be talking about the mastery trait. What you need to do, how you need to think, almost what you need to be to be a confident performer. Now, I'm not talking about being a master musician and playing in Carnegie hall and doing solo recitals everywhere. Maybe that's what you want to do, and in that case, you'll probably find this information helpful, too. But I really want to tell you how every harpist can play more confidently, can play better under pressure, and can enjoy it more. I know it's a radical thought, right? Enjoying a performance, but it's true. And I want to talk about the specific ways to think that will help you do that. So we're talking about the mastery trait next week on the podcast, and I certainly hope you join me on for that. In the meantime, please remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

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.