Summer Reading for Harpists (and other musicians) - PHH 272

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. As you may know, I love to read, and maybe you're like me with several books in progress at once. I seem to have a book in every room that I can pick up when the fancy strikes. Plus, I always have at least one book on my Kindle and an audiobook going for when I'm in the car. I like to think I spend more time reading each day than doing anything else, but that's probably not accurate, just aspirational. Summer reading is always my favorite, though. It feels indulgent to sit outside on the deck or at the beach or under a shady tree and just read. Maybe it is actually indulgent, but it's never wasted time. And today I'm going to share some of my summer reading with you—books that have of particular interest to harpists and other musicians, or at least books I have found interesting. When I read about music and musicians, I find I'm not just learning facts. I'm releasing myself from the doing, from being absorbed in practice and playing and all the practicalities that go with my day-to-day harp life. Instead, I'm able to gain a fresh perspective, to see the musician's life or ideas about music from the outside, I discover possibilities which have gotten buried by my daily practice routine. I learn about the struggles that shaped the lives of other musicians, as well as the breakthroughs that finally led them to their music. I finish a book like that feeling inspired and thoughtful and very grateful. So find a comfortable chair. We're going to talk about books about music and musicians that I've enjoyed reading. It's a little bit of a hodgepodge—some biographies, some memoirs, even a novel and an audiobook. I expect that some of these will appeal to you more than others. I found them all worth reading, but I urge you to choose the one or two that seem most intriguing to you and then dive in. I've put links in the show notes to the easiest places to find each of the books so that you don't have to waste a moment on the internet when you could be reading out on the deck with glass of iced tea beside you. Before I start talking books, I would like to give a huge shout out to the challengers who took my Compose for Christmas challenge. This was the challenge where we took 3 classes, a Monday, a Wednesday, and a Friday, and I worked through all the, the nitty-gritty of creating their own arrangement from A Christmas Carol. And we worked together on all about how to do that. And I was so excited to see that there were nearly 50 people, 49 exactly, who signed up for the challenge, took the challenge, and we have one more finish-up call. I just added a bonus call 'cause I was so excited. So I added a bonus call where I'm gonna work with them one more time and answer all their last-minute questions, But these are 49 people who are going to have their own arrangement of A Christmas Carol that they will be able to play this Christmas, and I'm so excited. So this was a breakthrough for a lot of the people on the challenge. There were some who were pretty experienced arrangers, some who had never done it and weren't sure they could attempt it, but everybody's come out with something. And I've heard, and some of the bits and pieces, some of the works in progress that the students have put together. And I have to tell you, they're so creative and so interesting, and I hope that we will get the chance to share some of them with you. But I don't know that that's going to happen. I just want to tell you that when we do one of these next time, watch out because it's going to be a good one and you don't want to miss that for sure. So congratulations, challengers, you've done a great job. I'm very proud of you, and you should be very proud of you too. But right now, I want you to picture yourself sitting outside, sitting at the beach, sitting under a tree, sitting there with a glass of lemonade or iced tea, whatever you want to picture in your glass, and reading a good book. Plenty of time, beautiful weather, plenty of relaxation. Today we're going to talk books that help you, that put you in the company of other musicians, people who have lived the musical life in extraordinary ways or written about it in ways that have something to say and something that you can bring into your own musical experience. So I have 6 books for you. Some are memoirs, one is a novel, and I'll tell you up front that it's kind of the, the wild card on the list, uh, but it may be one that you really enjoy reading. It has been one of those kinds of books for me. One of them you'll listen to, it's an audiobook rather than read, and two of them, but only two, are about harpists specifically. So if you've ever wanted to spend time with some of the people whose names are on the music on your stand, today is the day. So let's start. I'm going to try to give you a real sense of each book, not just what's it about, what it is about, but why I think it matters for us, what you might be able to get from it and take from it for your own life. And I'm going to start with the happiest book on the list, and it won't surprise you, and I'm sure that many of you have already read it, but if you haven't, you must. And that's the book called Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx. There's really nothing more fun than reading about the man who created a whole comic image around some pretty spectacular harp playing. I can promise you that this is one of the most wonderful books, certainly one of the most amusing, about a musician's life that you'll ever read because he was, you might say, an accidental harpist, right? The harp for him wasn't just a prop, although I think it might have started that way. The story is that, you know, their Their mother wanted to bring some class to this vaudeville act, and so she sent them a harp, and just, you know, there it was. One of them had to learn to play it, and it turned out to be Arthur, and he later on became Harpo Marx. He had to learn, he taught himself, and the stories are that, you know, he saw a harpist figurine in a five-and-dime store window and, you know, saw the angel with the harp, and so he put it on that shoulder. Little did he know that the harp was actually on the wrong shoulder, which is why you see him being able to switch shoulders back and forth. And he tuned his harp in a way that was convenient for him, which was definitely an oddball thing to do, but he didn't know what the right way was to do. He was totally self-taught. He did later in his life take some lessons from the very famous harpist Mildred Dilling, But he never did learn to read music. And just hearing his stories, because they're not just about music. I mean, his music was incredible. And if you've ever watched him play and listened to him on the movies, you know that he was an incredible player. But there's so much more in this book besides the harp playing. He lived an extraordinary life. He was in that early 20th century New York, not just the vaudeville circuits, not just the, the hard way that musicians and comedians and other performers had to come up through the ranks, but he ended up in the center of the, the wits, the real aristocracy of New York at the Algonquin Round Table, that legendary gathering of writers like Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, Robert Benchley, a brilliant circle. He ended up going to Hollywood, of course, befriending royal royalty, revolutionaries. He was just truly a life, you know, his was a life lived to the full for sure. But the book itself, it's warm, it's funny, it's, you know, self-deprecating and very observant. And when you think that this is the observation and the memoirs of a life that professionally was made without speaking at all since he never spoke on screen, You— it's really quite remarkable to think how he expressed himself through his music and his physical comedy in public, and then listen to these thoughtful and genuinely beautiful words that he uses to talk about his own life. Something truly amazing, and sort of the idea that, you know, your authentic voice doesn't have to be the most visible one, right? So One thing for Harpas specifically in this book, there are places where he describes what it felt like to discover what the harp could do, the way audiences respond to it, the way it stopped people in their tracks. And if you've ever played the harp anywhere in public, this will resonate with you because you know you've experienced the same thing. So it's this lovely reminder that our instrument is just, you know, one of a kind. So extraordinary, right? So if you're looking for some entertainment and some thought-provoking writing at the same time, I definitely recommend Harpo Speaks. You'll love it beginning to end. Now, this is another harpist book for you that I want to mention now, and it's certainly one that every harpist should read. I'm not telling you you need to do that as a sort of prescription, but as a real conviction, because it's a book about Henriette Regnier and she's one of the central figures in the history of our instrument. And so this small book really brings you a different look at her. I have, of course, read and enjoyed The Legend of Henriette Renié, written by Odette Montesquieu and Jamie Haffner, but this one's a little bit different. It didn't begin as a biography in the usual sense. It began as a series of radio programs broadcast in France, conversations between Regnier and her goddaughter Françoise de Varennes, and it was recorded near the end of Regnier's life, and her goddaughter later adapted those conversations into this book, and it was translated and published in English under the direction of Suzanne MacDonald. So you get that extra layer of authority. So what this means is that you actually get Renier's voice. You're not hearing it, of course, but you hear what she was like. You can hear her sort of thinking, and that brings a whole different layer to this book and makes it very much unlike a regular sort of biography. You get her words, her feeling of the story about being, you know, 5 and a half and hearing Haussermann perform at a concert where her father was singing. And on the way home, she tells her father, "This man will be my harp teacher." I mean, she was 5, but she was right. She started the harp when she was 8. She became a regular student at the Paris Conservatory studying with Haussermann when she was 10, and she went on to essentially found French harp technique. She taught legends in the harp world like Marcelle Grandjeany and Suzanne MacDonald and many, many others. Her influence on the 20th century harp world is incredible. She performed all kinds of premieres of works that classical harpists consider standard repertoire. It's— her legacy is just actually staggering. Remember that Renier achieved all of this in an era when public fame was not quite so acceptable for women, so her story isn't just a harp It's a story about someone who decided very quietly but extremely firmly with an incredible amount of determination that she was going to do this. She was extremely ambitious and this is what she did and it's a remarkable story. It's a very short book so it's great for summer reading, right? But it really is one that I highly recommend. I realize I didn't tell you the name of the book. It's called Henriette Regnier: Living Harp, and it's by Françoise de Varennes. So once again, it's Henriette Regnier: Living Harp, and of course, as I mentioned before, the English translation is by Suzanne MacDonald. That's what happens when I get excited, I forget the important details. Well, I won't forget the important detail here. So this book, our next book, is Pentacle: The Story of Carlos Salcedo and the Harp, and this book is by Marietta Bitter, who was a student of Salzedo's back in the day— really back in the day. She began studying with him in 1922, which is a little scary when you think about it. That's over 100 years ago, right? What's interesting, and I think what makes this an interesting pairing with the Regnier book, is that you've got two of the 20th century greats in harp pedagogy who actually studied with the same teacher, with Haussmann. At more or less the same time and went completely different ways. I don't think they could have been more different from each other, but they both had profound impact on the harp world. So I think when you read the Salzedo book Pentacle, you're going to find that you really get a— not just a student's view, of Salcedo, but you get sort of a colleague's view too. So she knew him after her student years. They stayed in touch for the rest of his life, and so this is really very much more sort of conversational. I mean, she's telling you about this man that she knew for decades, and Salcedo's story is every bit as unique as Regnier's, but it's very different, and you'll find that Salcedo had a different understanding of the harp, a different thing. He wanted to bring the harp into the 20th century, and he finds himself at the center of post-World War I contemporary music scene in New York, really pushing to make the harp an instrument of the 20th century, of drama, instead of just continuing the tradition. Now, Renier took Haussmann's music and what she learned about harp playing in her own very unique and extremely impactful direction. Salzedo did the same thing, but in almost 180 degrees of difference from what she did. In the book, you'll read about Salzedo's interactions and friendships with dancers like Nijinsky and Martha Graham, with just about about everybody that was in that 20th century artistic world. And without going into the, the details, because you'll read them in the book, you'll be able to see how these associations became important inspiration for Salzedo with his own harp technique, with the way he incorporated gesture and what he wanted the harp gestures to mean. So it's very interesting and revealing look at that particular aspect of Sazedo's harp method and his playing and his musical understanding. What's so interesting is that you see the intersection of his music and his life and the harp in all these other aspects of the 20th century artistic world, not just the musical. World. So it's a really— it's another short book, it's another short read, but once again, the perspective for us harpists is so interesting and impactful. So there are 3 harp books. We've got Harpo— how can you go wrong with Harpo, right?— Harpo Speaks, and Henriette Regnier, that book, and then Pentacle, the Salcedo book. Excellent reading. 3 very different harpists, and they're all really, really great books to read. But I've got 3 other books for you, not harp-specific but music-specific, and in very different ways. This next book is sort of the wild card of the set. It's by one of my favorite authors, Willa Cather, and it's called The Song of the Lark. Now, you may know other Willa Cather books. This one's just a little bit different. The Song of the Lark is a novel. It was published in 1915, and it's not about a harpist, it's about a singer, a young woman named Thea Kronborg who grows up in a small Colorado town. She discovers she's got a musical gift, and she fights and struggles as hard as she can to develop that talent against every sort of obstacle you can imagine. She's in the wrong place, she's in the wrong community, and you would never think that a girl from this little Colorado town is going to become a famous opera singer, but that's what she has in mind and that's what she does. So I'm including this book on my list because I really think it's such an interesting and pretty real-to-life account of what it feels like to live for music. You know, not the glamor, not the performance, but the idea that music is necessary to you. Now I said this is different from Willa Cather's other books, and you might know her from, you know, the books about the pioneer west, and this is actually one of the three books known as her Great Plains Trilogy. The other two are O Pioneers and My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark is just the different one. It's a different Willa Cather book. It was one of her least commercially successful, at least when it first came out, and that's because the subject matter, I think, was so different and not what her readership expected. The others are about, you know, lives of the pioneers, the struggle with the elements, and this is about the inner life of an artist, the inner life of a musician, but you get to experience Willa Cather's own deep love of music in this book, and you get the sense she really did understand the artistic temperament, and she manages to bring that across through the book. So while it's not one of her, you know, pioneer books, it truly is worth reading for every musician. I think the, the book was partly inspired by the opera singer Olive Fremstad. I mean, this was a real opera singer, so there's a little biographical root in there, even if this is fiction. But this just isn't one person's story. It's really about every musician who's had to choose their music over something easier, who's had to resist, you know, the, the family who can't quite understand why this matters so much. I think it's an interesting book from that perspective, but it's just a really good read. It's not a short book. The title itself, Song of the Lark, comes from a Jules Breton painting that Cather saw and loved. It's a picture of a young peasant girl standing in a field at dawn with her face turned toward the light, and that's the image that inspired the title. Of the book. There's one incident I'd like to just describe for you. It's about halfway through the book. Thea goes to the Southwest, the American Southwest, to the ancient cliff dwellings of the Anasazi people. And while she's alone in that desert sort of landscape, she's in the silence, and she suddenly hears herself differently as a musician. There's something that unlocks, and the, the technical work that she's done for years suddenly connects to something much deeper, something she hadn't been able to, to find and describe and get her hands on before. It's a great description of an artistic breakthrough, perhaps one of the best in American fiction, and I think every musician who reads this will be able to recognize something in that experience that it's describing, even if their own was very different. I just, I think it's a really interesting book. So if you're the sort that likes your beach read to be pretty absorbing, this would be a great meaty sort of a book to, uh, to take to the beach. As we're talking about artistic breakthroughs and artistic struggles, that brings me to book 5 on my Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk. This is perhaps the, the most immediately useful or practical sort of book for you on this list. It's most likely to send you back to your practice room. Jeremy Denk is an American pianist. He won the MacArthur Genius Grant, and he writes about music in The New Yorker and in his own books. And he's a very good writer. This book, Every Good Boy Does Fine, was published in 2022, and it's a really interesting and revealing book about learning music, not just as a, you know, as a child, although we certainly start there, but the increasing levels and layers of learning that happen throughout his life. The title, of course, Every Good Boy Does Fine, comes from the lines on the treble clef, E, G, B, D, F, and that's one of the mnemonic devices that many of us have been taught through the years to remember the names of those lines. E, G, B, D, F, every good boy does fine. And so it's a completely relatable title. But this is a memoir, but it's not just about, you know, I did this and I did this and I did this. This is really about his struggle to become the pianist that he thought he could be. You know, the little neighborhood teacher, the family that made a big move, the amazing teacher he had at Indiana University that absolutely changed the way Denk thought about his music. And I think you'll find that what's really interesting here is that this is a book about his teachers. The book is really structured around those teachers one by one. I was with this teacher and this, you know, this was my playing at this point, and then this teacher who changed my playing in this way. And, you know, the student-teacher relationship is such a powerful one, and I think you'll understand that when you read it. But to understand how his thinking changed on the way to becoming this concert pianist, you'll see so much in here and understand how profound those changes can be. His one teacher that he had at Indiana, you know, had so many aphorisms, sayings, right, that just stuck with you, you know, talking about— which you will find familiar— talking about, you know, the music isn't in the notes, We talk about that here all the time, right? But you'll be able to get this different perspective, I think. As a harpist, you're going to hear the same kinds of things and think, wow, I never thought of my harp playing that way. Our literature, the music written for harp, is so different than the music written for piano. Completely different set of composers. We don't have the wealth of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms that pianists do. We have of music by Renier and Salzedo and Grangeni and all those other greats. Hausselmann, of course. But it's very different music. And to be able to hear the way they're talking about Beethoven or talking about Brahms and the way Denk's teachers teach him and inspire him to find things in the music and to bring that over to our music and your own harp playing Very interesting and really powerful. In his writing, Denk captures the struggle of being a musician for sure. The years of, you know, kind of just not getting what's supposed to happen and how you finally have those sort of V8 moments and things that all of a sudden work. You know, it's the ups and the downs and the struggles, and it's kind of nice to hear somebody else doing this. It's an interesting book. I have to say that my own experiences as a student and as a professional musician were not the same as Denk's. My frustrations were different, my teachers were certainly different, and I don't always agree with the conclusions he draws, the way he frames things, the decisions that he would make. There were moments, if I'm going to be particularly honest, where I didn't I didn't even particularly like him as a person as I was reading. Understand that I do not know him personally. This is my experience from the book, but I kept reading because underneath some of the specifics of his story, there was so much that was also part of my own experience. I recognized so much of this really deeply, and even in some of the smaller incidents, they just absolutely hit home, like, yep, that happened to me too. And so I found it really compelling, and it was— it— I enjoyed the book. And so in that way, I am recommending it to you. I think you'll get a lot of insight from this book, and there's going to be something that you are able to take away from it and bring to your own playing. I guarantee. This brings me to the last book on my list. This is an audiobook. It only exists as an audiobook, and it was put out as an Audible original, so you'll need to get it on the Audible platform. I don't think there's anywhere else you can get it. It's called A Beginner's Mind by Yo-Yo Ma. Beginner's Mind. And Yo-Yo Ma, of course, the famous cellist I love this book. I discovered it when I was on an airplane and I was, you know, looking through the entertainment system trying to find something, and I went to audiobooks and there was this Audible original, Beginner's Mind, and I thought, "Up yo yo ma, I think I need to listen to it." And it's wonderful because you hear him talking to you, and of course there's nothing more special than hearing the author read their own writing. And this is special because you not only get Yo-Yo Ma speaking to you, but you get live performances, his live performances, woven into the narration. So it's not just, you know, reading a book aloud, it's a real experience, music and words together, and I just fell in love with it. The title Beginner's Mind, that central idea, comes from the Zen Buddhist concept of shoshin, The beginner's mind. It's exactly what it sounds like— approaching even the most familiar thing as if you were encountering it for the first time, with openness, without the assumptions, without the, the prejudices that come from having done something a million times before. Yo-Yo Ma's point— and of course he's been playing the cello for well over 60 years— is that he still tries to sit down to his instrument as if it were the first time, that he actively works against the habit of familiarity, that the music that he's played hundreds of times still has something to show him if he brings the right quality of attention to it. I found that awe-inspiring to think about approaching your practice Knowing that you were sitting down to something new, even when you were reviewing a piece that you've played 100 times before, to be able to get something new from it, to struggle, to strive, to try to find something in it that was new, that was different, to discover something new about it. Right? It's not about, you know, your fingers just playing the notes. It's about not letting your mind wander, but keeping your encounter with the music present and purposeful. It's a fabulous concept, of course, and it's a wonderful, wonderful listen. It's not a read, it's a listen. And the memoir itself, if you want to call it a memoir, is organized around 4 stories of beginnings, moments in his life when he had to start over, to let go of what he thought he knew, or to see something that he'd looked at 100 times with genuinely new eyes. And I— it's just something that left me so uplifted and so inspired, um, I wish there were another word besides inspired. I know that there are probably 100 words if I could only pull out the thesaurus, but it truly just left me with a new energy to go and look at my practice differently. And it— I hope it will do that for you too. It's, you know, a 90-minute listen, so it's definitely the shortest item today. You can, you know, listen to it on, on a walk in the afternoon, or, you know, as you're sitting by the pool, whatever. You want to do, but it's incredibly worth it to hear one of the most important musicians of our time talking on such a wonderful subject that is essentially a subject where he is humbling himself to the music. It's, it's remarkable. I can't, I can't say anything else. It's just remarkable. Do give this a listen. So there they are, my 6 books for your summer: Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx, Henriette Renier, Living Harp by Françoise Divarin, Pentacle by Marietta Bitter, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk, and Beginner's Mind by Yo-Yo Ma. I love those books. I I think that they all have something interesting to offer, and I hope this has added to your summer reading list in a good way. Those are my recommendations for you, and I hope that you enjoy them. I have put links to each of those books in the show notes. Most of the links are Amazon links. They're not affiliate links. I don't get any money from them. They're just the easiest place to find the books, but you do find them and choose whatever vendor works best for you. I just wanted to save you a little bit of browsing time, but those links are there for you. Now, what's coming up on the podcast? Well, I have decided to do something a little bit different for the month of August. I've pulled out 5 podcast episodes from the archives that haven't seen the light of day in a while that I think are particularly necessary to share with you again. I think that there was so much information in those episodes, and I want to be sure that if you missed them the first time, you don't miss them now. They're going to be great if you haven't heard them before. If you have heard them before, they're going to be really good reminders of, oh yeah, that's right, I should be doing that. And I've pulled them out on 5 different topics because we have 5 Mondays in August, so while we are enjoying the summer heat. If you're spending your summer in the Northern Hemisphere, you probably are enjoying some, some summer heat, but you're going to hear some things that are going to be good reminders for just about every aspect of your playing. So those will be coming your way in August. I've pulled out the meat of each episode and then added some new thoughts to each one. So we'll be starting that next week, and you'll hear— these aren't exactly best-ofs, they're just 'I really want you to hear this one again' episodes. So we'll have the first one of those available for you next week, and I'll surprise you with the topic. So that's coming up next week and all through August on the podcast. And now I just need to remind you 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. 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.