Simplify and Renew: How to Spring Clean Your Harp Playing - PHH 255

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions, the same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Well, spring is finally setting in where I live. You might be weeks ahead of me or behind me or in a totally different hemisphere, but in the spirit of sharing what's on my mind and what's happening in my world, I want to talk about spring today, particularly about spring cleaning. Naturally though, I'm not talking about cleaning windows and carpets and closets. I want to talk about spring cleaning your harp life. When I first decided to focus on spring cleaning for this podcast, I didn't want to take the easy way out. I mean, it would be so easy to talk about harp care, about changing strings and cleaning your harp, the right products products to use, etc. But I wanted to go deeper and look at what matters to your harp playing even more than new strings or harp polish. I want to talk about your playing, your practice, your music. I mean, we all get into a practice routine, and in general, having a routine is a good thing. It helps us stay on track more easily by creating a habit that can be nearly effortless to follow. But those same habits that support our playing can become ineffective when they go from being effortless to being mindless, and sometimes we aren't even aware of it happening. And here's a simple example: maybe you like to warm up with a particular scale or arpeggio pattern, or perhaps a favorite short piece. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Unless you find yourself playing it so automatically that you aren't paying attention to those things we want to watch in a warm-up: our posture, our relaxation, our finger action, and so on. Sure, we're still warming up our fingers, but our focus is really elsewhere. And this is where we can decide to do a little spring cleaning. We can try a different warm-up or rotate between several warm-ups. We could play play our warm-up in different keys. Well, there are a million things we could do, but the refresh is the point. So in our spring cleaning planning today, I want to focus on two big objectives. One is refreshing or renewing some of what we're doing, whether it's part of our practice routine or maybe the music we're playing. We just want to spruce things up a bit. The other objective is to simplify, to investigate what's working for us and what isn't, to eliminate extra work so that we can do more of the playing we love. Think of it as decluttering your harp playing. So we're going to start by simplifying, and then we'll get on to the renew and refresh part, and it's going to be fun. I've put a couple links in the show notes, links that might help you follow up in case anything in this spring cleaning episode jogs your, your mind and you want to do a little bit more work, I've put a link to a blog post from the archives that is called "Spring Clean Your Technique: 5 Days to Fresher Fingers." That one's obviously all about spring cleaning your technique. Now we're going to talk about a lot more than that today, but if that's a, a thing you want to follow up on, the blog post might give you a couple good ideas. And then there's a 5-day guide to understanding music at a deeper level. I call it "Playing More Musically: 5 Days of Discovery. And that's a blog post as well, and you'll find that link along with the link to the other post in the show notes. As a reminder, if the show notes don't show up for you in your podcast app wherever you're listening, you can always go to Harp Mastery, click on the podcast. This is episode 255, and you can just look for that latest episode. It should be right at the top of the list, and you can find the show notes with all the links there. I remember a while back I used to love to watch the house cleaning shows on television. I don't know why, they seem kind of silly to me now, but I was really into watching these people who had a lot of stuff they needed to get rid of bring in professional help so that they could totally declutter their house and their life. So, you know, you would see this big messy thing at the beginning of the show, and by the end of the show, there would be, you know, it would be model showroom kind of ready, right? Right, for a model house. It would be just beautiful and perfect, and you think, how wonderful. Of course, it didn't always reflect the way people were going to live in the house because we don't live in model houses, at least not most of us. You know, we've got stuff and we have to deal with it. So I realized that these things weren't real, and I also realized they didn't happen in a 1-hour program. They happened over weeks. But there still were some core ideas there that were really helpful. And I always loved the part where they were helping somebody clean a room and they put out 3 bins, and it was, okay, this is what we're going to keep, this is what we're going to give away, and this is what we're going to throw away. So we're going to start our spring cleaning, at least this simplified portion of our spring cleaning, with 3 categories that are just a little bit similar. They're not quite keep, give away, or throw away, but they're not unrelated. And these are the 3 categories that I want you to think of. We're going to be doing less, we're going to be doing more, And there are things we're going to ditch. So there are some things we want to do less of. These are the things that keep us stuck, keep us from moving ahead. There are things we want to do more of, the things that actually move the needle for us. And there are some things we just actually want to ditch altogether. Now the ditching category, that might be sort of a fun one for you to think of. It's like, ah, if I could just get rid of all those measures with the pedal changes in them. I could ditch those, but that's not what we're talking about, and I knew you really knew that. But, but we will find some things that we really do need to ditch. But let's start by looking at the things that we could do less of. As I said, these are the things that keep us stuck, and these often fall in the category of good habits, things that were really working for us that just aren't working for us anymore. So we need to do a little bit less of them. It doesn't mean we're going to give them up entirely, but it means we need to rethink what we're doing. And I mentioned the first one just a moment ago when we started the podcast, and that's sticking to a routine. Too long. As I said before, there are some times when routine is what actually helps us. It sort of greases the skids and we can get right into practice and know we're doing the right stuff, and that's really helpful. But there are some times when the routine just becomes rote, when it's just not invested with the energy that we really want to be bringing to our heart playing. We don't want to be little robots or automatons doing our harp practice. We want to really be creative artists. Ooh, had you thought about that? Had you thought about the fact that when you're playing the harp, you are a creative artist? I hope you think about that because you are. So we don't want to be stuck in a routine that stifles that. So think about what it is that you do. Do you always do the same warmup? Okay, that's great. But do you find yourself zoning out during the warmup? Or maybe you're always doing the same exercises. We've been talking, we've talked on, uh, we talked on the Breakthrough Blueprint Intensive. We've been talking in My Heart Mastery. I've been talking with my Gold Circle students about ways to change up their technique practice so that they aren't always doing the same kinds of technical exercises the same way, but that they're working through a variety of exercises, training their fingers in different ways, and that mixing it up just a little bit is going to give them way more benefit as well as being more interesting. That's an example of something that you could do a little bit less of It also comes into that renew and refresh category, right? There's quite a bit of overlap here, but you can see what I mean. If you're sticking to that routine and you're finding yourself stuck in something or just doing it just because, let's decide that we're going to do a little bit less of that and we're going to shake things up a little bit. And we can talk more about that as we talk about the renewing aspect of this. So that's something we want to do a little bit less of. Here's something else, and this may be a challenge for you. I want you to think about doing less repetition in your practice. Now I know that we have to do repetition, but you've heard me talk before, and maybe I'm repeating myself, but you've heard me talk before that repetition without focus isn't really as valuable as we need it to be and we want it to be. And here's where I want you to really focus on it today. So think about when you were at the beginning of your harp journey. Maybe you still feel like you're there, maybe it was years ago. There were some things that you had to do. You had to do a lot of repetition, maybe a lot of hands separately playing before you could put it hands together. You had to do that because that was where you were in terms of your development. But maybe you don't have to be doing it the same way right now. You've come a long way. Your fingers know more. You can read more. You can move faster. So I don't want you to stick with the, the habit of, "I have to play this this many times hands separately before I can put it hands together." if you don't really need to do that. That's slowing you down. That's keeping your skills in one place when you could be moving them forward. They're ready for you to move them forward, but you haven't taken that plunge yet. So there are two different ways to look at ways to, to do less repetition. One is if you find you're doing repetition that's just rote, you know, you're just moving those practice beads over, right? I did it once, I did it twice, I did it 3 times without thinking about what you're doing in that repetition. I'm trying to create this phrase, I'm working on dynamics, I want to make sure my fingers are clean, whatever that focus happens to be. If you're not putting the focus on the repetition, then we didn't need that repetition. We can certainly do less of that. Fewer focused repetitions are going to give you more benefit for sure than a lot of, oh, half-paying-attention repetitions. And then part 2 of the repetition thing: maybe you don't need to do so many because you're actually better than you think. You're not giving yourself enough credit for the work you've already done. You might not need to do so much. And I would urge you to experiment and see if you can do less. And here's the third thing that I would suggest you might want to do less of. I realize that this doesn't apply to everyone, but if it applies to you, you're going to know it. What I'd like to suggest is that you spend less time making it right when you could be making it music. You might be spending a lot of time trying to get every single thing correct, figuring that once it's correct, you can make it musical. But that's really not the way music works. It doesn't have to be right first. You need to work at the music and all the nitty-gritty of actually making the music at the same time. So you don't want to be doing just practice just to make it correct. Let's do a little bit less of that so we can add in a little bit more of making it music. I realize that that is— can be tricky. It can be tricky for some people because you're really invested in making it right, and there's nothing that, you know, that says we don't want it to be right. We do. We know that. But the music doesn't have to wait for that. Lots of times you'll find that there are things that you need to correct that will become correct when you start playing it musically, or things that you thought you had worked out don't quite work when you try to make the music flow the way you want it to. So Remember, spend less time making it right if you're not also making it musical. Does that make sense? Okay, we've talked about doing less of a routine that's not serving you, less of repetition that's not serving you either because you're not paying enough attention or because you're actually better than you think, or doing less of trying to make it correct without making it music. Okay, 3 things you could do less of. How about some things you could do more of? Now before you panic, I'm not going to suggest that you do more practice, although if you're not doing enough practice and you know that— for instance, if you're not practicing regularly enough to actually make progress, if it feels like you're always starting from zero when you get back to the harp, then you probably should do more practice. You know, it depends. People ask me all the time how much practice time I should be doing, and it depends on how much you want to do in your practice. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? How much progress do you want to make? How quickly? There's no one good answer for that, But I think that you have to remember that practice is by definition a habit, and a habit requires a certain level of consistency. Now what that certain level is has to fit in with your life and your goals and what you want to do with the harp. So I'm not going to tell you how much to practice, and as I said, I'm not going to tell you to practice more You can tell yourself that, but there are some things that you could do more of that you're probably already doing. And I want you to look at what is really working for you, what you do well, your strengths, and let's do more of those. For instance, in your practice, you might have something that's really working well for you. Maybe it's your practice schedule. Well, good. Keep sticking to it. I like that. Maybe it's your practice plan. Maybe it's working with your practice journal. Maybe it's the inclusion of technical work in your practice every day. Maybe it's a review habit. Any of those things that you are doing that is really working for you, Let's not discount that. Let's use that. Let's do more of that because that's working. I don't want you to say, well, you know, I've, I've, I've been doing a lot of review and that's really good, but I think I should be doing more of this other thing. So I'm not going to do as much review. I would suggest instead, let's keep the review where it is, but let's find another way to add in this other thing that you want to add into it. If something is working well for you, don't discard it just to bring something else in. So before, when I was talking about doing less, let's not do less of the things that are working for you. Does that make sense? We can do more of those. All right, enough said. If it's working for you, do more. Second thing I want you to consider doing more of is doing more of what you need. Aha, now I'm speaking to you. I know most of us are all, yes, I, I need to do more of this. We're very driven. We, we really want to get in there and we want to get this thing figured out. So doing more of what you need might feel really good for you, and that's okay. I like that. So what is it that you need? Do you need to strengthen a skill? Do you need to build a new habit? Maybe you're doing a little bit of review, for instance, but you're not really reviewing enough pieces. Well, let's do more of that then. More of what you need is a good thing. Maybe you're doing some technical work, but it's not enough. Maybe you're doing some sight reading, but you think you could do more of it. You need more of it. Well, let's do it then. Get in and do more of what you need. It's going to be like adding vitamins to your practice. It's going to be great. So doing more of what you need is always a good thing. The trick with that, naturally, is trying to figure out how you're going to fit it in. And this is where you need to be a little bit strategic. But let's look at the list of things you can do less of. Well, Maybe if you just change up your practice routine a little bit, it could be more interesting and include more of what you need. Maybe your warm-up could include sight reading, for instance. Or maybe part of your warm-up could be review pieces if you need to do more review pieces. There are lots of possibilities. If, for instance, you do fewer repetitions of something, maybe that's going to free up just a few practice minutes so that you could do some improvisation if that's what you'd like. Right? So you could use that, that do less category to help bolster your do more category. It's all a balancing act and we know that. But this is the greatest time to think about doing less so that you can do more. Aha, you like that? I do. All right, there's one more thing to consider doing more of, and that's doing more of what you love. Playing the harp is something that you love. You wouldn't do it if you didn't. And it's not supposed to all be hard work. We're supposed to do the stuff that we enjoy. We're supposed to do the stuff that feeds our soul and feeds our creative, uh, desires and impulses. We need to do more of what we love. It's going to keep us connected to the harp. It's going to keep us moving forward. So maybe that's just remembering to play instead of just practice. You know, playing the harp, your daily practice of playing the harp, shouldn't all be about fixing things and, and drilling down and finding mistakes and self-correction. It should be about playing music that you love, exploring new music, getting some of that music out of the pile. You know, we all have those piles, music that you bought that you think you wanted to play someday and you just haven't gotten to it yet. Well, give yourself some time. Maybe not every day, but maybe every week, or maybe even more often, maybe not quite so often, but just to sit down and play for the fun of it without worrying about, oops, missed a note, oh, my technique's not right, any of those things. Just time to sit down and love playing the harp. That's what it's there for. That's why you started. That's why we all started, because we knew that we wanted to do it. And so those are the 3 categories of doing more. These are the things that will really fuel your playing for you, and that's doing more of what's already working. That stuff you're doing well, let's do more of it. Doing more of what you need. Whatever it is that you think you need to help move your playing forward, you could do more of that, and that will move the needle for sure, right? And then do more of what you love. That energy, that, that spark that is within us needs that kind of fueling. We need to fan the flames all the time so that we stay just as motivated, just as inspired, just as desirous of playing the harp as we were when we started. So doing less, doing more. Now we get to the fun category. Let's talk about some things we can ditch. Now maybe this one won't be so much fun for you. This is fun for me. I love throwing things out. I'm the kind of person that, you know, give me a cluttered room and I'm all about just getting rid of stuff. My husband is the total opposite. He's all about keeping stuff. So between the two of us, we generally manage to keep what we need, and that works out fine. But I'm— I love getting rid of stuff. I just want to clear the decks and make everything just simple and just flowing. But maybe you're not that sort. So But what we're talking about, or what I want to talk about in terms of ditching, are the, the, the attitudes perhaps that really detract from the happiness that we can have in our playing, the things that really get in our way. And they're not so easy to ditch. One of them is this: I think we need to ditch the idea that we can do it all. Remember, you can't do everything you want to do in your practice every day. You can't fit in technique and sight reading and improvisation and memorization and these pieces and review pieces and the new thing. And we can't do everything every day. We're going to have to think a little bit longer term. We want to do all those things, but we don't have to get them all done now. Maybe we choose this first month or these first 3 months to think about, all right, this spring— let's try that— this spring I'm going to work on sight reading, but when it comes to summer, I'm going to learn new pieces from my repertoire. And we'll work on all the usual things, you know, we'll keep working on technique, we'll keep working on the pieces that we're trying to learn, all that sort of stuff as we go. But the big focus things that we want to accomplish, we can work on seasonally, or we can work on month by month or week by week, but we don't have to do everything every day. Don't try to do it all because it won't work. Okay, next thing to ditch. It's really time to ditch our perfectionism. That does not serve us. It's time to just put that aside and realize that music isn't about being perfect. Music is something that happens in the moment, and because it happens in the moment, it's going to have the unexpected. Maybe we stop calling them mistakes. They're just unexpected things, little surprises, things that haven't ever happened before perhaps, but they don't count against us. They're not, uh, something to be embarrassed by or ashamed of. And we need to stop making things perfect. Let's make things beautiful instead. Remember the, the, the old Persian carpet thing where those craftsmen from centuries and centuries ago would make their carpets and those beautiful oriental designs so intricate and so elaborate, and they look symmetrical, but the artists making those carpets always added in one little flaw because they felt that perfection would be an insult to their God. So perfection was not allowable, not even not attainable, it was not allowable. How's that? So that might be something that makes you rethink your idea of perfectionism, but I'd love to see you not be hampered by that. Anymore. Same thing with the shoulds. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. That kind of goes both with perfectionism and trying to do it all, right? I should be. I should. I should. No, your heart playing isn't about shoulds. It's about wants. I would. I want to do this. I would like to do this. I enjoy doing this. It's not about the shoulds. We don't have those. And if you can get rid of all those things, trying to do it all and trying to be perfect and trying to do what you should do, then maybe we can put your fears to rest as well. Ditching the fears. I know that nerves are there. I know that we want to do things well when we play for other people. But our fear doesn't serve us. There are so many other ways to think about what it is we're doing when we're playing our music for someone else, or when we're thinking about doing something that feels risky with the harp. We can think of it as anticipation or excitement or any number of things. Just the joy of sharing could have that same sort of almost butterfly sort of feeling for you. But we don't have to be afraid. I would love you not to be afraid of anything with your heart playing. You can just get in there and do it. So those are some big things to ditch: trying to do it all, trying to be perfect, trying to do what you should do, and having fear around your heart playing. Definitely some things to ditch. Now, with all of that, you have probably found some things that would feel like renewal, that would feel refreshing, that would put that polish on your spring cleaning. Remembering what we're renewing here is stuff that is good for you, stuff that feels good, the things that are just good for your soul. We talked about that when we talked about doing more of what you love, because remember, these categories overlap for sure. But here are some other things that you could do to add some fresh things to your heart playing. You could try some new things, try some new music, try building some new skills, try a different kind of music. How about playing in an ensemble or sharing your music in a new place or a new way? Trying something new, this is a great time to do it. Figure out what might be kind of fun, what you might be interested in, and then if it's something that feels a little bit scary, have a buddy do it with you. You can make some plans. Say, "All right, well, I'm going to try some music by this composer," or, "I'm going to try playing in this harp circle," would you come with me? Would you do this with me? We could even have a little online challenge with a friend where it's, okay, this week I'm going to play a piece for you, next week you're going to play a piece for me, or something like that. That could be a lot of fun, trying something new. Definitely a good time to do this. You could also look out for some new learning opportunities. Try some lessons or coaching, attend some conferences. We're coming up to the summer season where there's so much going on harp-wise. You can certainly find something. We have the big One Harp World Conference in Toronto, so that's coming up this summer. Lots of things that you could do. So think about participating in something like that. Think about classes. Think about things that are in person. What could you do with your music? What could you experience that was something in person? Or what would be a new learning opportunity that was maybe something you could provide? Could you help someone learn more about the harp? Doesn't mean you have to teach them, but maybe you could take your harp to, uh, to a school or take it to a preschool and let the, the kids experiment a little bit with it. I know you want to be careful with your harp, and I know you will be, But there are lots of things you could do there to help share your love of the harp without perhaps the, the fear of performing for somebody. And you would be helping to teach a little bit about the harp. How cool would that be? So there are plenty of ways you could renew your harp life, right? With whether it's playing something new, playing in a new place, experiencing something new with the harp. But this is the time to do it. I should say any day is the day to do it, but since we're talking spring cleaning, this is the perfect time. I do want you to be careful here. I've given you so many ideas— things to do less of, things to do more of, things to ditch, ways to renew your playing— a lot of things. I don't want you to get trapped in trying to do all of them or even paralyzed by thinking, "Oh, which one shall I do?" I am 99% sure that there was one thing that I talked about today that just really had that extra ring of possibility for you, that extra thing where you thought, "Oh yeah, I could do that." If you don't remember what it was, go back and re-listen to this podcast until you can find that one thing that's like, oh yep, I could do that. And then do that one thing. Unlike real spring cleaning where we have to clean all the windows or all the baseboards, unlike lots of things where you have to do all of these, unlike decluttering a room where you just, you can't stop with one little pile, right? All you need to do today is one thing. If you can find one thing that I talked about today, or if anything I talked about today gave you another idea, then do that one thing and watch the difference that it makes for you. It's going to give you that gosh, aren't I great kind of feeling. It's going to give you that breath of fresh air that we need. So Find the one thing and do that. Don't do everything because that's a little bit too much, but find that one thing and then either do less of it, more of it, or ditch it. Whatever it is you need to do, but use it to spring clean your playing today. I think that sounds like fun, and I hope you think so too. Next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about how to go from being at beginner beginner level to being at intermediate level. Now, there are, there are a few markers and a few skills, a few things you need to be able to do that are going to take you from that beginner stage to the intermediate stage. I often say that there's not a clear-cut progression or very clear division between where perhaps advanced beginner and early intermediate are, but there are some specific skills that are going to enable you to play intermediate-level repertoire. And so we're going to talk about what you need to get from the beginner level to the intermediate level. I'm looking forward to digging into that topic with you. And until 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. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.