Supercharged Sections: Put More Power in Your Practice - PHH 164

I'm thinking about performances I have done in the past where I haven't been paying quite enough attention as I've been playing and realized that I played my copycat section, let's say section six, and instead of going on to section seven, I let it go back to section two, just like the first section would have. Well, it's a recoverable mistake. Having that clear in your mind is one of the things that will help help prevent at least an epic fail.

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.

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 and 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. I love riddles. And here's an oldie but goodie for you. What's the best way to eat an elephant? Well, let's all say it together, one bite at a time. So what's the best way to learn a piece one bite at a time? Obviously, it's just that what constitutes a bite isn't very obvious. How big is a bite? Is it a measure? A phrase? A page? Is it hands separately or hands together? And how come the bytes that worked for that piece don't work for this piece? Well, dividing your pieces into sections is the way you create your bites. But there are lots of ways to section a piece and no two pieces will have exactly the same sections. Sometimes finding the sections is easy. We can look at the piece and see an introduction, a first verse, a second verse, and an ending. Those are the kinds of sections that help us understand the piece. Then there are the sections that help us practice the piece. These are typically fewer measures in length and a little more bite sized, if you will. And lastly there are the spot practice sections. Those measures in the piece that are sticking points for us and take extra work.

Of course, this isn't just about labeling the sections. I understanding how to section your pieces at those three levels, why each of those is important, and how to practice each kind of section will make the difference. Correct section practice will save you practice time, help you structure your practice, and help you prepare for performance. In fact, many of the most common mistakes we worry about in performance, things like losing your place in the music, recovering from a missed fingering or pedal, and going on autopilot, are easily resolved when you've prepared your piece in sections properly. That's why I know that sections can supercharge your practice. And that's what we're talking about today. So grab paper and pencil unless you're driving and get ready to take some notes. Even if you're an experienced section practicer, you're going to get a slightly different perspective and on your sections today. Before we get started with our discussion on sections today, I just wanted to give a shout out to everybody in the Harp Mastery Hub community. And maybe you're one of those. I certainly hope you are. If you're not, this is an invitation to join. The Harp Mastery Hub is our social media free social channel. It's just for Harp Mastery members. It's totally free to join you just sign up with your email. And there's always a discussion happening there. There's a way to communicate with lots of different members. We have hundreds of people in the Hub, including me. That's the place. Even more than on regular social media, that's the place where I'm likely to respond to a question and get involved in a discussion that's happening there. Of course, we also have the the easy access to our live Monday warmups that happen nearly every Monday. A little bit more sporadic in the summer, but just about every Monday they happen live on YouTube as well. But you can join them easily from the Hub. Our summer long challenge is also going on. We have just a little practice prompt there each week for you as a little spur to just make your practice more interesting in the summer. And of course, for those who complete the entire challenge, you'll be entered into a drawing for a basket of harp goodies as we come to the end of the summer. But one of the nicest things about being a member of the Hub is that you are essentially right on our first to know list. Everything that we release, we release first in the Hub. So you're the first to know about things like courses and special events and retreats and all that kind of stuff. So being a member of the Hub is an extra little benefit there. We like to to make things special for our Heart Mastery Hub members and I'd love for you to be one. So you can find the link in the show notes to join there or you can go to heartmastery.com and you'll see the link right on the homepage to join up and sign up for the Hub. As I said, it's easy, it's free, and we'd love to have you in there to join in the discussion. As we start our discussion on sections here, I'd like to acknowledge that you probably already divide your piece into sections. That's one of the first things that we learn when we start practicing bigger pieces that we need to divide in order to conquer. And so we divide our piece into sections and that's how we get started practicing. But I want to make sure that we pretty thoroughly discuss all three levels of sections and why each one can be important and together how they can help you not just speed up your practice, but help you play better even in a pressured situation. So right up front, I want to remind you about some of the things that practicing in sections and learning your piece in sections and learning the sections of those pieces, and that's a little bit different, how those can work for you. First of all, sectioning your piece, it's an essential part of learning about that piece. Before you start learning the piece itself, it's incredibly helpful to get that big picture view. Sectioning your pieces obviously saves you practice time. And one of the reasons for that, because you're substituting the knowledge that you're gaining about the piece for the effort that you need to put into it. So it's a big practice assist. It can help you prepare for performance because you're going to know the piece from many points, not just from the beginning. It can help you structure your practice. I can start from here today, rather than always starting from the beginning. And it can help you even sort of gamify your practice because you're going to prepare it to be crash resistant in sort of ways. Like you could play all the odd sections, you could play all the even sections, all different kinds of ways that help make your piece crash resistant. So let's start with what I call the big sections. These are the sections that are part of the form and the structure of your piece. You know that I love to start with a big picture view of a piece because it lets you know what the piece is all about and helps inform all those smaller decisions that you're going to make as you practice. If you start with a detail view and start too small in your piece, you. You might be making decisions that aren't going to serve you in the long run. So it's much better to start with that big picture perspective, and these big sections are part of that. You might want to take the, the music and look at it and see if you can see those big sections. And sometimes, as I mentioned before, those sections are easy. Oh, here's the introduction, here's the ending, here's a first verse, here's a middle section. And sometimes the composer even indicates those for you. Not often enough to be really helpful, but every once in a while you'll see that, and that is helpful because it shows you the framework for the piece. But sometimes you have to find them, and it's a good practice to find them by looking at the music. This is something that actually will translate into a sight reading skill later on. So it's a good idea to sort of get that view and that perspective at this point. So do you take that piece and you look at it and you can say, all right, look, here's these measures, this page, these two pages, these all seem to go together, and these all seem to go together, and these seem to repeat what I've seen before. And this looks like an ending, and this looks like an interlude. Anything like that, look at it. And then go ahead and label those big sections. I label my big sections with letters. So that I start from the beginning with letter A, unless I decide I want to call that one an introduction. And then I use letter A for the next section. But I usually use letter A right at the beginning. And then my next section will be letter B. And I letter those sections. I almost said number them, but they're letters. I letter those sections sequentially. Even if I see a section that's repeated, I use a different letter. Because this is helping me track my progress through the piece. I may know that section A and section L are the same, but I don't want to name that A again. Because I want to know where I am in the piece. Because almost certainly section L will end differently than section A. There's going to be some little difference. And so I really want to be able to tell those apart. So I use those letters and I section my piece sequentially. And I do this when I'm looking at the music. Then, and only then will I go and listen to a recording of the piece and see if what I hear matches with what I saw. I may want to make some adjustments from the listening that I've done. And you know, what I hear, but maybe not. But it's a good idea to sort of test what you've seen with what you've heard. Now, you can also do this the other way around. Sort of think about the piece and listen to it as you're looking at the music and kind of, you know, gauge it that way. But I find the other way around to be a little bit more of a learning experience. And one that helps me trust my own judgment a little bit more. So that's why I do it that way. Now, these are big sections. And so each section may be an entire page, might be half a page, might be more than one page, depending on the length of the piece that you have. So don't feel like you need to get into too much detail here. We're going to get into the practice sections in a moment. But this is the one where you're going to see that big picture. We are understanding the structure of the piece. And it may help if, in addition to giving everything a letter, you give everything a name, like, as I said. So, you know, letter A might be the introduction. Letter B might be the first verse. Letter C might be an interlude. Letter D might be the second verse. Letter E might be something else, and then letter F is the end. So most pieces will probably only have, you know, sections A through H. And they're not going to have more than that. Some pieces will have fewer sections. They may only have three or four big sections. We're not looking for little things here, we're looking for big things. It's going to help save you practice time. You're going to see the structure, you're going to see what verses repeat. You're going to see similarities and differences, and it's going to help you preserve the flow of the piece once you get around to actually playing it instead of practicing it. So the big sections are there for understanding, and that's where we start. Once you have those big sections, those structural sections in place, it's time to find the practice sections. And what I like to do is I'll play through the entire piece. And I realize this is, even for me, often stumbling through the entire piece. It depends on the piece, right? You don't have to do a great job with it, but just start playing through the piece. And this will give you a way to check your structural sections, those big sections, and it will make some of those practice sections really obvious. And so playing through is more important at this stage than just looking. Now, obviously, your practice sections won't be a page long. They're more likely to be in that eight bar sort of category. You know, four measures, eight measures, they shouldn't be too short because you want to get some sort of flow happening. But you don't want them to be so long that they're unwieldy to practice either. And eight measures is often sort of the right length.

Lots of times you can use the phrases in the music to help guide your small sections. And those phrases, sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're not. If you can hear the phrases as you play, which is why we're playing this through at this point. If you can hear those phrases, you can hear that natural, you know, stopping point, not an ending point, but where there might be a breath, as if someone were reading a story and they came to a comma in the music. Now, that would be perhaps the end of a phrase. And that might be a great division for a practice section. But the practice sections are really up to you. You want to be sure that they're a manageable length, not too long, not too short. Different pieces will have different length of sections. Sometimes eight measures in one piece might only have a few notes. Maybe there are only a few notes per measure. And so eight measures is a really easy section. In another piece, those eight measures might have a million notes crammed into each measure, and that would make it too long a section. So you can't just say, all right, every eight bars, here's a section. Make it reasonable for yourself. And they don't have to be of equal length. You can make this section 8 measures and make this 1 4, and make this 1 3, and make, however it seems to divide up for you. What, Once again, these aren't the little mini sections that you're going to use for spot practice. We'll get to those later. So these have to have a little bit of flow to them, but not too much. Now, having given you all those guidelines, the next thing I want to tell you is that it's really up to you. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It has to be what works for you. So please don't spend time wondering if you've gotten these sections right. These are practical, and they have to be practical for you and for nobody else. You're doing the practicing, so don't worry if it's right or if it's wrong. If it feels right to you, you just do it. Now, these practice sections I identify by number. So my structural sections are all lettered A, B, C, D, E. My practice sections are all numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. And I will have many more practice sections than I will structural sections, obviously. And of course, in a very long piece, I might have tons of them. So I number these, and that way I can differentiate them from the structural sections. And it also gives me a really easy way to know where I am in the piece. So those I number.

One very important thing, as you're playing through the piece, starting to identify these practice sections.

Look and listen while you play for copycat sections. Phrases that are identical or nearly identical, and we all see them right, they may start the same, but end a little bit differently. Or maybe they're exact replicas of each other. Or maybe one has the same melody but a different accompaniment. Or it's exactly the same, but it happens in a different key. All those copycat sections are important, and I don't want you to number them with the same number. I certainly don't, because once again, I want the sequence of the piece. I want to be able to keep the piece flowing, so I use a different number. But this is an opportunity for you to be sure that you're numbering those sections the same way, sort of the same length Right. The section that you heard, that's identical. If you is going to start in the same place so that those sections would line up, and if you were to, and I don't advocate this, at least not at this point, if you were to take that piece of music and cut it apart, you could line up those sections and they'd start at the same place. So, you know, number those sections in the same kind of way. Hope that makes sense to you and that it's clear. So having lettered your structural sections, now you've numbered your practice sections.

So what do you do with those practice sections? Well, that's the next question to answer. Obviously, these practice sections give you a manageable bite at a time way to work yourself through a piece. We can learn this section and then we can learn this one, and then we can learn the next one. So that works very well. But I want to share some additional practice techniques with you. I'm sure that many of these are familiar to you, but just in case they aren't, I want to go through a bunch for you. So first of all, one of the things you can do is when you're starting a piece, go ahead and start. You can start at the beginning, no problem there. Start at section one and you can learn it hands separately and hands together, however you like that. But then as you're going on to section two, you get to review section one and work on section two, the hands separately, hands together and put those together afterward. It also means that on the next day, or next two days or next week or whatever it is, you can start with section three and then go backward to section two and section one. So you're not just learning your piece in order from the beginning, but you can start at different places in the piece. As you get more familiar with the piece and you've learned it a little bit more and you've worked through more of the sections, you'll realize that this is going to build in a lot of knowledge about the piece. And knowledge is security. Our practice knowledge, our knowledge of the piece makes our playing more secure. So this will give you start anywhere capability so that you don't have to go back to the beginning to start the piece over. But you can start from section six, or you can start from section 12, or you can start from section three, or you can start from section 15 and you know where you are in the piece. Now consider how important this might be. First of all, if you end up making a mistake or while you play, you always know where the next section is if you get lost in the music, you can jump to a number, any number, and start there. You don't have to go back and start over. You can make your recovery process a little bit more seamless. And you can feel like you've got. Like you're sort of working with a net. You've got a safety device there for you in case you make a mistake. There are ways that I'll talk about in just a moment to help make that even more secure. But that's the idea. You've always got those sections as reference points where you can start. Obviously, this would help if you memorize as well, so that you're not just memorizing beginning to end, but that you're able to start from the middle should you get distracted. What if you go on autopilot while you're playing and then all of a sudden you're jerked back to reality and you're not quite sure where you are? Having a section having a reference point that points to a section, right, that. Oh, okay, let me just jump to 11. Boom. You can go. That's one of the additional powerful points about these practice sections. They not only help you practice your piece better, but they give you that added security when you're playing as well. They help create musical understanding, and they can help you shorten your practice time.

If you did what I suggested and were able to do that you've played through the piece and you've numbered those sections and you've found those copycat sections, those phrases that are similar if not completely identical, and you say, okay, well, 1 and 6 and 13 and 18, they're all essentially the same. You can practice those sections altogether. So that you are learning all those sections that are pretty much the same gives you a chance to compare and contrast, boosts your practice further ahead in the piece. You don't have to wait to section 18 to practice it. If you know that it's the same as section one, go ahead and play that. Now it might mean that you're actually able to learn the beginning of the piece and the end of the piece and at the same time. So it's going to help you get through the piece faster. Because once you've learned one of those copycat sections, you don't have to practice it the next time if it's identical and you don't have to practice it nearly as much if it's pretty close to the same. And if it's the same but a little bit more different than that, it's still going to cut down on your practice time. So use your knowledge of those sections to help you learn the piece faster and make your practice more efficient. It will also make your memorization, if that's what you decide to do, a little bit more stable because you'll be able to say, okay, section one does this, and this is how it gets to section 2. The copycat section, section 6 does this, and that's how it's able to get to section seven. So here's what's the same, here's what's different, and you're less likely to get that confused or mixed up in performance. I'm thinking about performances I have done in the past where I have been paying quite enough attention as I've been playing, and realized that I played my copycat section, let's say section six, and instead of going on to section seven, I let it go back to section two, just like the first section would have. Well, it's a recoverable mistake, because at least I know that. And I've gone back to section two and I can keep on playing. I've added a repeat that the composer certainly didn't intend, but the piece will continue. But being able to practice those sections and know that, yes, this is how the first time it happens goes to the next section, right? Section one will go to section two. The second time it happens, section six. This is how it gets to section seven. Having that clear in your mind is one of the things that will help prevent at least an epic fail, if not prevent the mistake in the first point. So that's one of the reasons that identifying those copycat sections and keeping them distinct from each other, as opposed to saying, oh, this is section one again, right? That's one of the reasons that I number my sections consistently and make sure that I pay attention to them and practice them that way. Now, having said that, I always number my sections. I want to encourage you, especially if you're going to memorize your piece. Go ahead and name them if you like. I know some people, it's sort of like, okay, I want. You know, this section relates to this in my mind, and this section relates to this in my mind. You know, this is the beginning of the story. This is the middle of. This is this character. This is the guy with the mustache. This is the heroine, whatever it is, go ahead and name them. They don't have to be numbered. And you can do the same with the big structural sections if you want. Oh, this is where they get lost in the forest, whatever your story is, if that helps you Go right ahead and do that. Don't feel like you have to stick to letters and numbers if a different system would make more sense for you, but just realize that the identification of these sections is what's key. My numbered sections are the ones I use for memorization. And of course, you might have named yours, and that's fine. But it's these numbered practice sections that I use for memorization. And I always do this. I put all my numbers on index cards and mix them up, and I put those index cards on my stand. And, you know, if it says number three, I play section three. If it says number eight, I play section eight. Whatever number comes up, that's the section I play. Because when I know my piece by section without looking at the music, I know I really have it memorized. Think how secure that is. That's what I mean by the power of a reference point to be able to say, okay, yep, this is where I am, and this is where I'm going. And. And I can go to section 10, I can go to section 12, I can go to section 15. I know where I am in the piece, and that's what it's like. So that's security. But just suppose you're playing with the music and you get lost. You don't know where you are. Well, you know what? You can look at the page and go to the first number you see. If you're looking at a page and you really have no clue where you are, that first number that jumps out at you, maybe it's 12. Then just start at section 12. And because you've practiced starting at section 12, you know exactly what it's like. There may be this weird little lurch, but when you can just say, okay, section 12, boop, go. You don't have to go back to the beginning. You don't have to fumble around until you figure out what's going on. You. You can just jump to where you want to go and go. This may not be. Probably isn't the ideal way, the way you have envisioned your performance going. On the other hand, it's going to save you from having to start over. It's a safety net. It's not, you know, the perfect performance in the making, but it is saving your performance from ruin, right? And saving yourself a lot of heartache. You don't have to worry about getting lost to the point where you don't know what to do anymore. You just go to that next number. And I will tell you that in my experience and my experience working with my Students, you're probably, as you look back on the page, even when you're lost, you're probably not too far in your eyes from where you need to be. And so that number that you see will probably be very close to where you are, won't be that far away. Also, because you've practiced starting at those different sections, you're much less likely to get lost in the first place because you're going to know what the music looks like at every one of those places. It's not going to look so foreign to you. I mean, think about the difference, right? If you've only ever tried tracked the music, start to finish, and you know, maybe you have a couple places in the middle that you've started. You know, the middle maybe, maybe the beginning of one of those structural sections. But if you haven't practiced starting at nearly every measure, you don't have that flexibility and performance. So practicing in the sections builds that in.

One interesting way. I'm holding back from calling it fun because it may not seem like fun for you, but it could be fun. If you want to sort of test what this system would be like in a performance. You know, you're playing along, you lose your place in the music, and you jump into a section. If you want to give that a test, have somebody in the room with you while you're playing through, and you play for a while, and then they suddenly call out next, and you jump to the next numbered section from wherever you are.

It's sort of like musical chairs a little bit, right? You just have to jump when they say jump, and you go to the very next section in the music. It's going to give you an interesting experience because it's going to help you learn to just skipping over those couple measures, go to the next place. It's a good skill to have, not one you want to have to use in performance, but one that's good to know you've practiced and can use. And that's how you can do that. But you can and should practice that same skill on your own in your practice regularly anyway. And the way to do that is when you're playing through the piece, you're getting the piece ready for performance, and you can pretty much play it through. You play through and you get to one of those places where you make a fingering mistake or you play the push the wrong pedal, or there's something that happens and your inclination might be to stop and fix it. What you want to do instead is to practice jumping to the next section. I Mean, play through it if you can, but if you need to, just make your eyes move to the next section and go right on. And practicing that as sort of an emergency skill, kind of like a little fire drill for your practice you is good. It's going to give you the confidence that if you need to do that, you can because you've practiced it. So once again, this is a way to build in that flexibility. What's kind of interesting too is that it's really going to improve your reading skills. It's going to push those to the next level because you have to stay in touch with the music. You have to know what's going on. You can't just go on autopilot when you play. So that's a very important performance skill as well. Now, just to touch quickly on that third kind of practice section. And those are the spot practice sections. Those sections for the. The really tricky things. They're usually one or two measures long where, you know, you just need some extra work. I don't generally mark those with numbers or letters. Sometimes it'll have a little asterisk, sometimes it'll just have a big mark and I'll know where it is. You can mark that, you can highlight it, you can put a little, a little post it note dot there. Those can work really well for remembering what those practice sections are, those little spot practice ones. And of course, those are the things you work on as needed. Um, I've done a whole podcast episode on spot practice and that's podcast episode 107 and I will put a link to that in the show notes. It's called a cure for the spots. How to solve those problem measures. So I don't think we need to talk about spot practice work today. I just want to make sure that you understand that that's that third level of sectioning and that's the real detail level. And that's just where you're going to woodshed, where you're going to put in that extra work. One final note. I touched on this earlier, but I want to be sure to mention it again. There's no right or wrong way to label these sections. They need to make sense to you. They're there to help you play the piece better. So make sense of the sections for yourself. Don't spend time worrying or if you're doing it wrong or trying to look up how to do it right. And the sections that work for somebody else may not work for you. So you don't even have to copy somebody else's. You can put those sections in. When they make sense to you, they're going to be more useful to you. So please, with everything that I've said, consider how these sections are useful to you and how you can use them in the various ways we talked about today to help you learn and play your pieces better. I know that's a lot of food for thought for one podcast episode, but I hope it helps you understand what the point or what the many different points of sectioning your pieces might be, how that can help you as you learn, as you practice, as you play all of those things. Those sections can be really, really helpful. Not just as a practice tool, but as a tool for understanding your music. Now, next week on the podcast we have something just a little bit, little bit more defined. We're gonna be talking about techniques that your left hand plays, five specific techniques that your left hand needs to know. So that's next week on the podcast. Don't forget to join us in the Harp Mastery Hub and be the first to know about everything that's going on there. As always, you'll find the links to everything that I've talked about today in the show notes for this episode, which you can find in your podcast app or at the at the podcast page on harpmastery.com and I look forward to speaking with you next week about those left hand techniques. But in between now and 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.

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.