Rubato: Secret Sauce for Your Musical Expression - PHH 142

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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. Every restaurant chain, every chef has their secret sauce. It's that unique ingredient that makes their food taste special every time it's part of their culinary signature. There is a secret, or maybe not so secret, sauce in musical expression, too. It's rubato. Rubato is the element of musical pacing that breathes life into music, that keeps it from sounding dull and robotic, that helps a melody sing and helps rich harmonies unfold with spaciousness. Today's podcast is an exploration of what rubato is and how you can use it to add depth and expression to your playing. I'll explain how to figure out where and when to use it, and equally important, when not to use it. I'll play some examples for you too, so you can hear exactly what rubato is for a harpist. I imagine that you're going to have one of those aha moments as you're finally able to put a name to that thing that's been missing from your playing. Now, I'm not saying your playing is unmusical, but rubato is something that most musicians don't understand, and it's something that is hard for even experienced teachers to explain. Singers and instrumentalists who play a melody line instrument like the flute or the violin know a lot more about rubato than we harpists do. That's partly due to the fact that unlike a flutist or a violinist, we can't control the sound of a note after we've played it. We can't actively sustain it or crescendo as we hold it. As a result, we tend to focus on the coordination of our two hands on the chords, on the vertical dimension of our playing, rather than on the horizontal melodic line, which is where rubato has the biggest effect.

But music lives in both these dimensions, horizontal and vertical, as well as the dimension of time. Using rubato is a way to use time to allow us to express the other two dimensions of music. It's how we create freedom and flow, and it's so much fun. I hope I've intrigued you, because I really want you to listen to the information I'm going to share today. It will likely change the way you approach playing a piece. It may possibly change the way you practice a piece or what you consider a hallmark of good performance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that you will want to try it out with one of your pieces. As soon as this episode is finished.

I'm really anxious to dive into this topic. I love talking about rubato, so I'm going to get some of these other things out of the way really quickly. First of all, a big congratulations to our 2024 HARP Happiness Hub Challenge winner, Connie Ennis. If you weren't following along with that, we were doing a little challenge in our hub. It's a free challenge and easy, but we had a drawing this past week for all the people who entered and participated in all four weeks of the challenge. And the prize was a $25 gift certificate to our harp Mastery shop. And our winner in a random drawing from all those completed entries was Connie Ennis. So congratulations, Connie. Now, if you missed that hub challenge or if you liked it, I had a lot of people tell me that they really liked the. The extra little accountability nudge that came with having to participate and just talk about what they did with their harp playing every week. Then I have a new challenge for you, and we're going to be doing one of these every month in the hub. This month's challenge is called Express Yourself and it starts today. And all you simply have to do is follow the little prompt that we give you. I think this first week is something about dynamics, but you go in and you take a look at it, and then you come back at the end of the week and you post a little something about what you did. Like, oh, this is what I did with my piece this week. That's all it is. It's pretty simple, pretty easy, but it's a lot of fun. We had quite a number of people participate in this last challenge, and I'm hoping this one gets even bigger. Remember, it's free, it's in the hub. All you have to do is click into the hub. You'll have to give us your email address in order to join, but that's it. And then you're welcome to participate, and I certainly hope you do. As always, there is a link directly to the challenge in the Show Notes for today. Usually in the Show Notes, I also mention a related resource, like a blog post from our archives that helps support and supplement what I'm talking about in the podcast. Today's related resource is a link to the sheet music for the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana. This is a piece I'm going to be talking about in the podcast today. It's a beautiful piece. If you don't know it by its title, the music is probably familiar to this is a piece from the opera Cavallaria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni, and it's a beautiful and pretty short little piece, but we're going to be using it today in our discussion because it illustrates so many points of rubato so beautifully. And we do have the sheet music for this for sale in our shop. And so I've put the link there in the Show Notes in case you are inspired and want to hop over and purchase that for yourself. If you could see me now, you'd see me doing my little happy dance, because now I get to talk about rubato. Rubato is not something that I knew about as a younger music student. It's not really part of a beginning curriculum for any music student, but it is something that I learned quite a bit about when I was studying at the Curtis Institute of Music. In fact, we had to attend an entire lecture by a gentleman, Henry Pleasance, who had written an entire book about rubato and singers, and one of the examples that he used was Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra was a master of rubato. Now, maybe you hadn't expected some Sinatra talk in today's podcast, but if you can imagine, if you can call back to your mind one of your favorite Frank Sinatra performances, I'm thinking, you know, Strangers in the Night is sort of iconic, and you can think about how he would spin these lines out and his melodies would just sort of his singing would go on, and it wasn't exactly matched up with what the orchestra was playing, but somehow it all came together really, really well. That's rubato. If you think about the way an opera diva might sing, and she sings this amazing aria and she's holding these notes and it's just kind of you're wondering how she ever has enough breath to sustain this note. That's a kind of rubato too. If you look up the definition of the word rubato, you're going to see a lot of different results. So that those first few Google results you pull up, they might use words like a distortion of tempo or freedom or flexibility or stretching or shrinking. Because rubato is a lot of different things. The word rubato comes from the Italian verb rubare, meaning to steal or to rob. And that's kind of what we're doing. We're robbing time, we're taking it from one place, we're sort distributing it, almost like a little Robin Hood, if you will. But don't think of it mathematically. We don't have to come out even. Exactly. Now, in the case of Sinatra spinning his melodies out, we know he did eventually match back up with the orchestra. The orchestra kept on playing in their nice steady beat. And whatever he did, he somehow, through the genius of Sinatra, managed to come out in the right place at the right time. And, you know, they ended the phrase together. Sometimes it almost seems like a miracle. But rubato is that flexibility. It's a flexibility around the beat. It allows us to communicate the music better. It allows us to make the melodies breathe and make the music flow. Imagine when you're listening to somebody read a text in a monotone picture a grade schooler who was just reading something from the book. And it doesn't have a lot of inflection, it doesn't have a lot of observation of the pauses that punctuation would call for. And imagine that sort of a thing compared to a professional reader who's reading an audiobook. And the inflection and the pauses that they bring to it, that's the difference between a strict by the beat performance and. And a musical performance that incorporates rubato. Perhaps you're beginning to get the idea and you can see that you've already been using rubato or listening to it, and maybe you just didn't have the right word for it. And now you do. Congratulations. That's the first step. Rubato for harpist, though, isn't necessarily exactly the same as the rubato I was describing that pitted Frank Sinatra against his orchestra, right. And caused that beautiful rhythmic and metric tension, that little contrast between where he was and where the orchestra was. That's not exactly what we do. In other words, your right hand doesn't have to do this beautiful rubato thing, and your left hand keeps strictly to tempo. That's not really what our rubato is like at Least for the majority of the time. Our rubato usually doesn't lie in a hand separately kind of idea, but it's hands together. Our rubato is really between the music that we're actually playing and the underlying pulse, right. Whether or not we're sticking to that exact beat, that exact beat is there. It's that fundamental pulse that is happening from the very beginning of a piece when we play it. It's that fundamental connection we have to music, that kind of beat, right. The first instrument in history being the drum. This is how we connect to music. And then there's melody and harmony and all that good stuff. You know, even people who claim to be tone deaf will be able to tap their feet to music, because that beat, that's where that's what gets them.

So our rubato is often pretty subtle because it is relying on a listener's sort of conception of where that beat's going to be. And we lay our more free music on top of it. And often it's very subtle, not, you know, the Sinatra kind of drama. Sometimes it's like that, but often it's almost unnoticeable. And I'd like to play some examples for you so you can hear the difference. I'm going to play a little bit of the opening of Debussy's first Arabesque, and I'm going to play it for you three times. The first time, I'm going to play it the way I would usually play it, and hopefully that will sound musical and expressive to you. Then the second time, I'm going to play it through with the metronome and stick exactly to the metronome, and you'll notice it will sound quite different. Then, just for absolute understanding, I'm going to go back and play it more the way I did the first time with the usual sort of rubato, that flexibility again. But I'm going to leave the metronome on, too, and you'll be able to hear where I deviate from the metronome. Do I come out exactly even with the metronome at the end? No, but that's not what our rubato, that's not really how it works most of the time, but you'll be able to hear the give and take, the flexibility where I move ahead or I pull back and how that helps the music flow, even though it's not strictly with the metronome in tempo.

Sam.

And now playing keeping to the metronome.

Wow, that's hard, actually playing that way. Now let me leave the metronome on. But play it again over more with the rubato I usually use.

That difference is really interesting, isn't it? So you can see what rubato is. And while you might not have heard it as so far away from the pulse when you heard it the first time, you can see when I put that metronome with it, how different it really is. But that's the key. I'm not giving you carte blanche to ignore the pulse. We want that steady pulse there. That's where rubato starts from. You can't, you know, have freedom and flexibility if you don't know what you're having freedom and flexibility from. So I encourage you to practice with that steady pulse. And of course, you know, I love the metronome. And find out what your bass line is, because then you can create the rubato that you want from there and know that you still have some musical substance, some justification, if you will. You have a strong sense of what that music is before you mess around with it. I hope that makes sense to you. But I've been telling you that there are different ways to use rubato. And so that's what we're going to explore right now. And we'll use that intermezzo that I mentioned before from Cavallario Rusticano. We'll use this intermezzo because in this very short little piece, it has three kind of big ways to use rubato that I want to demonstrate for you. First is sort of very subtle, and this is probably a kind of rubato you've been using and not even thinking about. This is rubato that helps you end a phrase, sort of like creating the end of a sentence. It gives a little bit of closure, creates a little bit of breath. Before you start the next thought, think again about what I referenced before. Sort of a monotone reader and an expressive reader. So this is the kind of rubato that helps us understand and hear the phrase groupings a little bit better, and that's how it helps convey the music. So this is just a few measures from that intermezzo.

Now, another way to layer rubato into a piece of music is perhaps in the middle of a phrase to just help that melody sing just a little bit more, to give it a little bit more importance, a little bit more drama, but still a pretty subtle effect. So just the next phrase right here in the intermezzo is the one that I'm going to play for you, and you'll hear it just stretch just a little bit.

That's pretty subtle, right? It's Beautiful. And it's expressive, and it's that small kind of tweak that you can make to help those phrases sing. So this might not have been something that you would have considered, especially if you're doing the very good practice thing. You're practicing with the metronome, and you're keeping right to the metronome, and everything's nice and steady. Well, this is that next level skill. We have the steady beat in place, and now we get to make just some artistic choices that are that next level of expression up where we can create that freedom and flexibility. Yes, it's distorting the time, but just subtly enough to help us really, in this particular case, just sink into that amazing melody and that very lovely harmony that's supporting it. And it just is all gooey and romantic and gushy. But there's another way to use rubato that's not nearly as subtle. This is your diva moment. This is that high drama that happens even in pieces sometimes where you might not expect it. Now, in this intermezzo, it is Italian opera, and so we do expect drama. And even though this is an instrumental piece where the orchestra is playing and there's no sing or singing, we still have a big dramatic moment. And this is how I like to play that big dramatic moment. But it has nothing to do with staying in time at all. So here's a quick example.

And while those diva moments can be fun, remember that it still has to have a valid musical purpose. So rubato is something that we use to enhance the musicality that the composer already wrote in. It's not usually a liberty that we take just because we feel like it. Usually our choices need to support the expression and the flow of the piece. There are some clues that show up sometimes that composers use to help indicate where they think we might want to put some rubato in. Sometimes you'll see little rollen tondo's written. Sometimes the French composers will use a word, sede, C, E, D, E, Z, which is another sort of a little mini rollen tondo. And it's a very good rubato indicator. Just like. Okay, we're going to taper the end of this phrase off just a little bit. Sometimes you'll see more forceful kind of markings, like a fermata. Okay, we're going to hold this one. So we're stretching time. So sometimes composers will help you that way. But often the choice is up to you. You hear the music and you know where it breathes. You make those decisions for yourself. You might consider if you were singing that melody. Where might you take a breath? That's sort of that punctuation point again. And that might be a place that you want to use that most subtle rubato to communicate that. Don't use rubato, of course, where a steady beat is really important. I mean, if you're playing an Irish jig, it's not going to use a lot of rubato. Picture somebody trying to dance to it. And if you're speeding up and slowing down, they're not going to know when to put their feet where. Right. So those dance sorts of forms, not really appropriate for very much rubato. But don't think that just because a piece isn't a romantic kind of a piece, it's not going to use rubato. I want to demonstrate that idea with just a little bit of the very famous Prelude in C by Bach. It's got a lot of running 16th notes, not a lot of inflection points in terms of longer note values. You don't see a phrase ending. He hasn't given us any markings that say, slow down here. There's not even a really clear melody in sort of the right hand, left hand sort of sense. I mean, there's a melody there for sure, but we don't hear it exactly the same way. We don't see it the same way. But a little bit of rubato in this Bach prelude helps us find some of the music that is in there, and that's what's so wonderful about it. So once again, I'm going to play a little bit of that Bach prelude for you, and I'll play it strictly with the metronome. And then I'm going to turn the metronome off and play it with just a little bit of rubato and see if you can hear it, see if you notice it and see what you think about it. You may not agree with my choices, and you know what? That's fine, because that's what music is all about. It's about you. It's about your personality and your ideas. So it's okay if you don't like what I did, but you'll see what I did or you'll hear what I did as an example of where rubato has a place even in music that might not seem on the surface like it has room for it.

Isn't it interesting to hear the difference, to hear the difference between what strictly in tempo does and what just slightly freer, slightly more flexible, slightly out of exact tempo does? You can see that this gives you a lot of choice about how to communicate the music, how to make that melody even in a piece that doesn't have a really clear melody, like this Bach prelude. But there's room in there. So if you've been wondering what the difference is between the way a piece sounds like when you play it, or when you hear a young student play it, maybe, and when you hear a master of the instrument play it, this may be the difference. That ability to find the flow of a piece and to communicate it with that little rhythmic shifting, that little motion, that change of pacing that helps the feeling of the music come across. Now, I should warn you, though, that there are a couple things that you need to know. I'll give you a little warning and then I'll give you a quick tip. So here's the warning. Be very careful with rubato, that when you're practicing a part that you're going to play with someone else, like play in an ensemble or play to accompany a singer or an instrumentalist, you need not to practice rubato in your part. You might need to follow their rubato, particularly if you're playing with a singer. Think about maybe accompanying a singer singing the Ave Maria at a wedding. They might take quite a bit of rubato, and you need to be prepared to support that however it works. But in an ensemble situation, your job is going to be to follow and to match. So you have to be prepared to play exactly in tempo, and then whatever fluctuations happen in the group, you'll go along with. But remember to prepare exactly in tempo. This is also something that, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, I recommend for, for practicing a piece anyway, even a piece you know you're going to incorporate a lot of rubato into later. Give yourself that baseline of knowing exactly what that correct rhythm is supposed to be, so that then you can add onto it and you can build from there and you can layer the pacing over a correct and solid foundation. So that is my little warning. And here's a really important tip. Rubato can also be used in a way that will help you place a passage that's a little bit difficult. So I'm not really talking about what I sometimes refer to as strategic rubato, like, oh, this is just a little bit too hard, so let me slow down here. Strategic rubato can be one of those emergency things that we do when, oops, we can't really play this part in tempo. You know, you've got those couple of measures, or maybe even just one measure, that's really too hard. And if you could slow down through it, it would work. And the thing is that sometimes slowing down through it is something that just doesn't suit the music at all. So in that case, the strategic rubato may allow you to play it, but it may not be musically what we want. However, there are other cases where you might find that the music is really difficult to play or challenging to play for some reason. And then with a little bit of investigation, you realize that perhaps that difficulty is related to the fact that the composer really understood the piece to have some rubato. At that point, there might be more notes toward the end of the phrase because. And the composer thought that you'd be sort of slowing down there and taking a little bit of time, in which case you're going to have time to play all those notes. So that may be something to investigate. So this is one of those cases where you really want to pay attention to what the music is telling you, even at those early stages of practice. And it will help you avoid some of the frustrations that may come from trying to play too many notes or tricky notes in a smaller space of time than the music is really calling for. Once again, remember that this is a decision that's driven by the musicality and not driven by, I can't fit all those notes in. I can't play them that fast, whatever it happens to be. So you're looking for something that's, you know, maybe it's a breath point in the music or a dramatic moment, or maybe it's a moment where a phrase would come to a conclusion, an articulation point like that. So you can use rubato in a way that supports the music and supports your playing.

Be very careful not to create a hole in the music when you do this. Right. This is a stretching thing, not a stopping thing. We don't want you to slow down. Blup, blub, blub, blub, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't want you to play and then have a hole and then continue. This is probably about stretching.

And just stretching the time a little bit to allow the music to speak and yourself to play the music and then move back into tempo. It's very delicate, but I think you've had some examples, as we've talked today, about the kind of thing I mean, so sort of an advanced use of rubato, but something definitely to think about. So I hope you've enjoyed thinking about this secret sauce that you can add to your music to make it even more expressive. It's been a fun topic to talk about, and I'm looking Forward to next week's podcast too. When we're talking about how to improve anything. I know that sounds like kind of a huge topic, but of course what we'll be talking about is how to take the steps that you might take to improve anything and and use them to improve anything in your harp playing. So we'll be talking about that and I want to take a moment to invite you to a very special brand new webinar that is happening one week and one day from today. It's happening on Tuesday, February 13th. Brand new webinar. And this is what it's about. It's about making progress. It's about taking the right small steps. It's about figuring out how to actually make your goals happen. And it is happening in just one week. Of course, it's free. All you need to do is register so that we can send you the link to join and you'll find a link on our homepage@heartmastery.com we'll be sending you emails if you're on our email list. So you can go to heartmastery.com look on the homepage, look under the Events tab. We'll put it everywhere we can so you are able to join us for that, because that's going to be fun. I have a brand new way to be teaching some of this material and we'll be looking at some really specific ways that you can identify steps to improve anything. We'll touch on it in the podcast on Monday and then we'll dive a little bit deeper on that webinar on Tuesday. So I hope you will be able to join me then. Don't forget we've got a new hub challenge starting today, an expression challenge. And that should be fun too. Free to join. Just hop over to the hub. So many things happening here and all that's important, of course, is that you play the harp. So 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 in to 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.