Simplicity and Stillness: How to Create Calm in Your Harp Playing - PHH 186

And I'm not talking about the way it looks. I'm not talking about the way it helps you when you're playing. Except for this. When you have stillness of your hands and your body, you can control your breath a little bit and you can be relaxed. Think about the difference this can make. If you're actually relaxed while you play, your mind has the ability to focus. There's so much more clarity, so much more sense of presence, of being in the moment, because you're not flustered.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Anne 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 place. 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 every 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. One of the things I love about watching virtuoso artists perform is how easy they make it look. For instance, just this past summer I attended a reunion of many of us who attended the Salzado Summer Harp Colony in Camden, Maine. One of the highlights of that weekend was a concert of music written by Carlos Salzato. And the star performer on that concert was Judy Loman. She's now in her 80s and she walked onto that stage with as much comfort and ease as if she were in her own harp studio at home. One of the pieces she played was Salzato's Variations on a Theme in the Old Style. If you don't know it, this is a monster piece, very long and very difficult. She told the audience how she first heard and fell in love with the piece when she was taking lessons with Salzedo in Maine in the summer as a young, I think she was 10 or something. As she was walking to her lessons, she heard this piece wafting from the windows of houses where other older harpists were practicing it. She said she asked Mr. Salzato if she could learn it and he told her she could learn it when she was 14 years old. Now I believe he actually let her learn it when she was 12 or something. But she said she still loves it and has been playing it ever since. So here she was on stage over 70 years later playing the variations. For us, this wasn't just brilliant playing for an 80 something year old. Hers was incredible playing, simply incredible playing. And here's my point. She made it look so easy. Most of us harpists break a sweat when we play this piece. When we finish, we're mopping our brows and we feel like we've run a marathon. But not Judy. It looked and sounded as easy for her as playing a simple little ditty. Every motion was just what it needed to be and nothing more. I'm not just talking about arm motions or raising her arms. And her hands were calm when she played. Hers is an efficient technique, one that allows her to play with security and strength and without extra energy. That kind of efficiency, that kind of stillness is what we should all strive for in our technique. And it's never more important to think about that than now, when the holiday frenzy is in full swing. So today we'll talk about how you can add stillness to your harp playing right now in your technique in your playing and in yourself. I have some simple tips that will help you feel more relaxed not just in the holidays, but after the holidays too. Now, while we're talking holidays, this is just about your last chance to join our 12 Days of Harp Happiness and still get on some of our live calls. We are right now as this podcast goes live where at December 9th. And so that's nine of our 12 days of harp Happiness. And we have a live call this evening. And of course, as part of this 12 days course, we've been working through my new arrangement, Nocturne for a Midnight Clear. And I've been giving you daily videos that to help you learn this piece. And of course the sheet music for the course for the piece is included in the course and it's been a lot of fun. So, so we have our second live call tonight and that's going to be hosted by one of our certified coaches. And we're going to be talking about how to add flow into the piece, finding the flow, how to make the hands work together, how to really make the melody sing, and how to make that arrangement come together and sound beautiful. So that's tonight on the live call. Then we've got some more videos coming up in the next few days. And this coming Friday, December 13th, we'll wrap everything up with a special Friday 13th day to our 12 Days of Harp Happiness. And we'll do a good luck Friday the 13th live call. That'll be a Q and A and some finer points of working on the piece and we'll, you know, see how all of that goes. So if you want to join our 12 days of harp happiness and still participate live, that is, this is the time to get in. I've put the link for that in the show notes. You can also join the course, register for the course and join directly from our Harp Mastery app. Our app is of course available for Apple devices and for Android devices, and you can find that in your respective play stores or you can join it from our website, harpmastery.com just look under events and you can join from there. So that's our 12 days of harp Happiness. And of course, there's nothing that creates more Harp Happiness than one of our retreats, especially the Getaway retreat, which we do in February of every year. And this February we're coming up on it and it's coming up quickly. So this might be a great time. While you're trying to plan for everybody else's wonderful holiday, give yourself an early holiday in February and really get your 2025. Off to a terrific start, harp wise and you can register for our getaway retreat in in Kissimmee, Florida. So the link you'll find again in the show notes or on our webpage or in the app and you can read all about it. I certainly hope you join us. These are really not just fun events, not just a lot of community, but it's a great time to really think about your heart playing and get some expert advice on how to go where you want to go, how to get what you want to get done, how to remove the obstacles from in front of you and really get moving. Our theme for this retreat is small steps, big changes. And so we're really working on big progress that come from small steps in the right direction. And whether or not we're talking small steps or whether or not you need a big change or just a little one, this is going to be a really great retreat and I certainly hope you can join us. So go ahead and register for that now. We'll have to close registration sometime, sometime next month, sometime early in January. So this is the time to get in. So don't delay, don't put off your harp happiness when you can get it jump started for you at one of these retreats. So those are a couple things that I wanted you to think about when you need to get on right away. That's the 12 days of harp happiness and one you need to get thinking about pretty quickly too. And that's the retreat. So a couple things to think about there. But now I want you to take a deep breath. Breathe in.

Let it out.

Do that a couple more times while I talk to you. Get nice and relaxed because we're talking about creating stillness today. And I know you're going to really appreciate some of these techniques. If you don't know what I mean by stillness when you play, you might find it very educational to just randomly, you know, scroll through some YouTube videos of harpists and just see how they look when they play. Watch the ones who look very energetic when they play, who have a lot of motion. Look for those who sit fairly still, but that when you close your eyes, you can still hear the expression and the beauty in their playing. Remember that what you see in terms of drama at the instrument doesn't necessarily translate into musical expression. Now, that's not to say that your gesture and your affect, your attitude at the instrument can't enhance or add to the musicality that you want to convey. For instance, if you're playing a piece that has a Lot of. A lot of tension and drama in it. You might use gestures that support that. But in general.

Your attitude at the harp can be minimalist. So as you look at these videos, do you see that there are some harpists who move back and forth a lot, where the harp is actually rocking back and forth with them, or that they lift their arms? That just seem, in a way, to be sort of overdone.

Or maybe not. Maybe you're finding that there are videos of people who are very still when they play. Just look at some of those and then consider if what you see in their playing is something that you can hear in their playing or something that you, as a listener and watcher, experience as part of the energy of that music. Is it energy in a good way, or does it detract? I remember going to a concert once and watching a pianist who was seated at the piano. And he would alternately bend so far toward the keyboard that his forehead was nearly touching the keys. And I wondered how he could actually figure out where his hands were on the keyboard because he was bowed so far into the instrument. And then at other times, he'd lay back until he was almost actually a horizontal on the piano bench, just up enough that his hands could reach the keys. But he was, you know, leaning back, looking at the ceiling. And his, you know, his back and forthness, if you will, was so much that that's when I started paying attention to instead of his playing. If I closed my eyes, his playing was magnificent. But when I watched, it was a distraction. Now, I'm not really saying that you need to change your whole attitude at the instrument right now. This is possibly not the right time to go thinking about making big changes. But I do want you to understand these things. Excess motion is really the cause of much of our inconsistencies in our playing. It can cause us inconsistency in our tone or in the accuracy of our fingers. It can make our fingers uneven. It can hamper our ability to get around the strings quickly, to have our fingers respond with agility over motion of our wrist. Too much twisting of our wrist can make it very hard to get the right fingers on the right strings at the right time and have them play with the kind of sound that we want. Learning to look for stillness in your technique is actually not difficult. And you'll find that it fits very naturally in the context of your warmup. So if you think about coming to the harp and just sitting at the harp, if you've ever done one of my live Monday warmups, Maybe you've gone through some of this routine with me. One of the things I like to do is just sit at my harp and sit straight. Feel myself sitting on my sit bones, sitting at my harp and just take a few nice breaths. Thinking about how lucky I am, how blessed I am to be able to take some time to play the harp. Wow. What a great thing. There's nothing better. And to just take a moment to feel that and to release some breaths, breathe out some tension and just get ready to play the harp. Wow. Then to pull the harp back. Feel yourself still sitting straight, maybe wiggle your fingers a little bit, maybe put your hands lightly on the strings. Thinking about maintaining your posture and without any other motion, without moving the harp, without moving your body, without holding anything stiffly, just staying straight and relaxed. Put your fingers on the strings, maybe just, you know, C, D, E and F in each hand. Four fingers, four strings, right in a row. And gently close your fingers one at a time. Just the one, you know, maybe your fourth finger first and then your third finger and then your second finger and then your thumb. Keeping your fingers loose and relaxed with close them all the way into your palm. Don't worry about playing loudly. Just think about your fingers just closing and nothing else moving. Your wrist should be still, your arms should be steady, your posture should be steady. Once again, don't hold them, don't try to hold them stiff and steady. Just realize that you don't have to move them. Remember that in your playing, the more moving parts you have, the less your chance will be at getting your fingers on the right strings consistently right. That's just more opportunity for error. So you want to be able to stay still and relaxed. So much of the time we think about our technique in terms of strength and speed. What I want you to do well in every warmup, but particularly right now, is to think in terms not of strength and speed, but in terms of movement, suppleness, movement, meaning no extra movement, but full movement of your fingers so that your fingers close completely into your hand, completely and gently. Simple movement and suppleness. They stay relaxed. Your body is in good posture, but it's relaxed so that everything can be supple. This is where your agility comes from. Your tone comes from your full motion of your fingers. And your agility comes from no extraneous motion of anything else. And that nice relaxed, supple feeling of your fingers and your warm up is the perfect time to practice this. So this is a great way to create some stillness in your technique, right at the beginning of your practice. Absolutely. But obviously your warmup is only the beginning of your practice. And it's very easy. As I'm sure you know, once you get into that mindset of practice and you're working at preparing, maybe you're preparing a piece to play on Christmas Eve or something, and you're, you know, you've got a little bit of extra nervous energy getting ready for this performance. So it's very easy to get wrapped up in that energy and start getting tense and start just losing that beautiful stillness that you started with in your warmup. But I think that you can remind yourself as you go to reconnect with that stillness. I want you to pay a special attention to those moments that you feel yourself getting tight, getting tense. Be alert as you're practicing for when and where you're gathering tension. Is there a particular spot in your piece where you know that you're getting tense and tight? Or do you just accumulate tension as you are practicing? Because these are things that will impact your performance. And the more you can learn to let go of that tension in your practice, the more you'll be able to do that in performance. And doesn't that sound like a good thing? And trust me, it is a good thing to learn how to release the tension as you go. After you've practiced for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, just check in. Are you still loose and relaxed? And if not, do that quick stillness check that we just did in your warmup. But we'll do, we'll abbreviate it a little bit. Take a couple breaths in and let go of the tension. Feel your fingers be very relaxed on the strings. Maybe whatever you were just practicing, play through it at a warm up tempo with no tension, no attempt at speed, no forceful dynamics. Just take everything back. You know, it's chill playing, right? You're going to really relax here and just play through that measure. If it's a tough spot, if it's a tricky spot, it's actually going to respond very well to this. So just let go of the tempo, bring it way back. Let go of the dynamic, let it be mezzo piano, mezzo forte. At the most, make sure that you're starting out very relaxed. And just play one note at a time through that passage, staying very relaxed. Make sure you're breathing, make sure that you're staying nice and slow. You can be expressive with it. You know, close your fingers, lift your hands. All those things that are part of your best technique, and everybody's best technique is a little different. Right. There are different thinkings about technique. That's why we have different methods. And that's okay. Whichever one you use, then use that. But you do whatever technique you're using. You need to close those fingers. You want to breathe, because we all need to do that. And you want to, of course, make your music more beautiful. This will give you a chance to think. Think about how it sounds. And trust me, the more relaxed you are, not just your fingers, but your whole body, the better it's going to sound. The more freedom you will have, the better your phrasing will be. Think about how you really want your playing to sound. Do you want it to sound sort of, you know, on the edge and a little scary and tense, or do you want it to sound relaxed and secure and rich and beautiful? Probably more on that end of things than on the edgy, tense kind of side. So think about how you want it to sound, and that's going to come from your stillness and relaxation. So take a moment and do that while you play. You don't have to try harder always to get that effect right. Sometimes it's trying less, if you know what I mean. Just bringing back that expectation, bringing back the striving and the driving and just say, let me let the music happen. Let me just let my fingers do what they know how to do. Remember that all those masters of the harp, people like Renier and Salzeiro, all of those, they taught that an important part of performance preparation was playing a piece at half tempo, or certainly well under tempo, even after you can play it at speed, because this takes the pressure off. It allows you to relax. It allows you to play through the piece and stay relaxed and loose and still with your mind, not frenzied and worried and concerned, but just knowing that you'll put the next note in the right place. So don't be afraid to do slow playing. It's not going to impede your ability to play at tempo. I mean, if you've worked very hard to get your piece to a particular speed, yes, practice it at that speed, but practice it slower, significantly slower as well, to just take all that tension back out of it. It's a great way to check your fingers and check the notes. Trust me, it works. And it's not going to sabotage your fast playing, I promise. I've talked about some really practical reasons that you might want to think about incorporating stillness and getting rid of extra motion and extra tension in and around your playing. But what I haven't talked about were some of the other important benefits here. And I'm not talking about the way it looks, I'm not talking about the way it helps you when you're playing, except for this. First of all, when you have stillness of your hands and your body, you can control your breath a little bit and you can be relaxed. Think about the difference this can make. If you're actually relaxed while you play, your mind has the ability to focus. There's so much more clarity, so much more sense of presence, of being in the moment, because you're not flustered. Your hands are calm, your arms are calm, your body's straight and strong.

And you're only doing what you need to do to play the harp. Your fingers are relaxed, they're closing. We're not talking about strength and speed as much as we're talking about movement and suppleness. Doesn't that sound like a wonderful way to play? And there's an important benefit even beyond that, when you can create the habit stillness at the harp. You can have that nice, still, relaxed feeling every time you come to the harp. It can help you fight nerves. It can help you just love your harp playing more. I mean, imagine if every time you came to the harp, you were nervous and overexcited and you knew you were approaching it with a sense of tension and dread. And I know you love playing your harp and it doesn't really feel that way to you, but you know what it's like when you get nervous before you perform or before you even play in a lesson or something. You get nervous and it doesn't feel good. Well, what if you could make it feel good? And what if you had a habit of creating that sense of stillness and relaxation so that you could do that when you needed to and so that it just became a part of your playing? That sounds really good, doesn't it? So let's think about that. I gave you one way to think about that in terms of your warm up. But here's something you can do. And if you're sitting at your harp, you can do it right now and you can try it, you know, as we're going, you can try it. And as I describe it to you, if you're not at your heart, but particularly if you're driving, well, you'll just have to come back and listen to this episode later and, and try it again. But this is what I want you to try. Sit at the harp and you can do that. Breathing, make sure you're sitting nice and straight. Pull the harp back to you. And as you Pull your harp back, give it a nice little friendly pat, right? Because it's your partner in this music thing. So just remember that it's your buddy, all right? Then play a chord or an arpeggio, something that feels pretty and sounds pretty. Something that's just, you know, just one quarter arpeggio, nothing more than that. And after you've played it, put both hands on the sounding board and just feel those vibrations for a moment. Now, perhaps you've read or heard about how the vibrations of the harp can actually be physically therapeutic. And I. I think mentally phys. Therapeutic as well. But, you know, these are very powerful vibrations and we get so caught up in making those vibrations, we don't remember to experience them, right? So after you've played your chord or arpeggio or whatever it is, you know, a luscious rolled chord could be a wonderful thing to do. Put your hands on the soundboard, feel the vibrations and listen to the sound of the strings as it slowly dies away. And as the vibrations ease away, you can feel them. You can feel them in your hands. Can you feel them in your body? Can you feel them in your feet on the floor? Then play that chord or arpeggio in a different octave and listen to the difference. Listen to how it sounds different. Put your hands back on the soundboard. Feel the difference in the vibrations. Try it lower, try it higher. You can close your eyes if that helps you feel it, and hear it better.

Taking a moment and just enjoying that is pretty powerful. If you haven't done it, you really should then do it again. But think about this time. As you play, think about that movement and suppleness. Your fingers are going to close all the way. They're going to be totally relaxed.

Feel those vibrations again. Listen to the sound. Was it any different? Did the sound change?

Possibly. In fact, I would say probably. And then try it once more with even more relaxation and see what happens. Listen to what happens. Feel what happens. It's a very simple exercise, but you can do this anytime. Anytime that you're feeling on edge before you play.

You can do that. Not a bad thing to do. In fact, it can be very helpful. And if you do it every day.

Maybe at the beginning of your practice, maybe even in between pieces.

You'Re learning how to create that feeling of stillness. Will it dissolve your nerves? No, it won't. But will it give you a way that you can feel confident, will help you release some of that nervous tension? Yes, it will.

Just by being still. So let's recap what I tucked into about today to just remind you of the opportunities for stillness in all kinds of aspects of your playing. First of all, we talked about stillness in terms of physical efficiency, getting rid of extraneous motion that doesn't serve your playing, or the music that will help you play more accurately and more consistently. We talked about stillness that creates musical relaxation, whether you're listening to it or whether you're just playing it. And you want that music to have more breadth and more expression to it. And we talked about how stillness can create mental clarity and calm before you play and while you're playing. We talked about creating that stillness as part of your warm up when you first sit at the instrument with your breathing and your posture and just closing your fingers without doing anything else. We talked about doing the same kind of thing in your practice so that you could be aware of when tension was creeping in and you could release the tension.

As you're practicing, right? You can release it, say, okay, stop, I'm going to slow down. I'm going to play this passage at half tempo. I'm going to just breathe and I'm going to play it very slowly. I'm going to play it at a reduced dynamic and I'm going to play it without tension. I'm going to play it with stillness. We talked about using those moments of stillness to feel the vibrations of the harp and let the vibration and the sound be part of your experience with the instrument too. And we talked about developing a habit of stillness that will help you create more calm around all kinds of aspects of your playing, whether it's just in your practice or playing for yourself or playing for others. There are so many reasons that stillness and calm can be beneficial to you, not just in your life in general, but in your heart playing in particular. And it's not a hard habit to develop. It's one that's, oh, perhaps hard to think about because our plang is so busy. And it can be one that is hard to maintain because we strive. We're striving to be better. We're striving to improve a passage. We're trying to play harder, faster, whatever it is. But we don't need to work harder to do that. Sometimes what we need to do is work a little less hard and to be still, to let ourselves focus, to let ourselves listen, to let ourselves feel.

And that's just a matter of letting go something different that we talked about today. Next week we're talking about something still different. We're talking about those bucket list things, those things that you've had on your heart bucket list and why maybe you need to think about those things because they're not going away. Those things that you really want to do, you're still gonna want to do them and they're not gonna go away. Whether it's next year, next month, next week, or 10 years from now, they're not gonna go away. So let's figure out how to how to get those things off your bucket list so that you can accomplish them and feel like you're doing them. So that's next week on the podcast. Remember, this is also a great time to sign up for the 12 days of harp Happiness. We're working on a piece that Incor Lot of Stillness, by the way. So that's a good thing. It ties in with what we're doing today. But our last live calls for that course are tonight, Monday, December 9th, and also on Friday, December 13th, our Lucky 13 call. So if you want to get in on those live calls, you need to get into that course this week and, and get in today to get on tonight's call. So that's a lot of fun. And then of course, the getaway retreat, that's coming up too. Yeah, great time to have some stillness in your harp playing life right there on the retreat. We could do that too. So we'll talk, we'll be talking about those bucket list items next week. In the meantime, remember, every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness and maybe stillness 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.