Taking a Lesson from Chopin: Legato and Rubato - PHH 184

I like to say let go to let flow, and there's no more important time to do it than when you're working on these techniques. You can't take your music higher in expression if you're still trying to control your fingers all the time.

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.

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Welcome to the show. There are three ways we learn how to play the Harp. The first and most obvious one is by doing, playing and practicing are our go to methods for learning. You can't actually learn to play the harp without playing it. For instance, when my son was about 12 or 13, he fell madly in love with football. There weren't any teams he could play on at his school or in our community, so he had to be content with playing football, video games. Not the same thing, of course. So when he got to high school and finally had the opportunity to play on a real team, he was actually surprised to find out how different the game was when he was on a real field instead of a virtual one. It figures, right? The second way we learn is by instruction, by having someone show us how to advance our skills or teach us new ones. In today's world, there are countless ways to get instructionlessons, coaching videos, online courses. But instruction can teach us more than how to get our fingers to obey our commands. For example, a music theory class can help us learn the elements of music like keys, harmony, melody, structure and form. That's an important part of our harp playing too. Today though, we're going to talk about the third way to learn to play the harp, and that's through music itself. This is the part of learning that goes beyond the doing, beyond the fingers, notes and rhythm, to discovering how music communicates and learning how we can communicate it through our harp playing. This may be an advanced concept, but the methods we're learning today, going back to learning method 2 instruction are ones every harpist at every skill level can and should use. We're going to talk about how music can show you how to be more musical. If that sounds a little circular, don't worry, I'll sort it all out for you. Our particular focus areas today will be two techniques that are extra challenging for harpists, more so than for other instrumentalists. We're talking about legato and rubato, and we're going to be looking at both of those through the music of two pianist composers, John Field and Frederic Chopin. Now, whether you've played their music or not, there's a lot for us all to learn from them. So get ready for some beautiful music and some ideas you can use to make your your own playing more expressive and beautiful. This topic is very timely for us right now because we are about to get into our 12 Days of Harp Happiness 2025. For the past number of years we've been doing this special event the first 12 days of December and usually or oftentimes I have launched 12 new arrangements that we publish one every day during those first 12 days. But this, as we did a couple of years ago, our entire 12 days is going to be focused on one new arrangement that I have done. And so you'll be able to opt into that. And it's a $12 course for my Heart Mastery members. It is totally free. It's part of your My Heart Mastery experience. But it's a $12 course. And for the $12, you not only get all the PDFs for the the new arrangement, and it comes in three different versions, sort of a, an advanced version, an intermediate version, and a somewhat reduced version that is easier to play for sure. So you get all the PDFs, plus I'll be doing a video for every day from December 1st through December 12th, with the exception of the two Mondays in there, December 2nd and December 9th, when we're having live calls. And these are the calls that the My Heart Mastery members will be on. And so these will be live instruction where you'll get to ask some questions and, and learn a little bit more about the piece. But so those first 12 days in December are all about this piece. Plus this year, the way the calendar works out, I'm offering a bonus Q and A call, a live call on Friday, December 13th. I know, Friday the 13th, right? But it's gonna be a lucky day for us because we're gonna have a live Q and A call to just wrap up our studies on this piece. Piece. So what is the piece? It's called Nocturne for a Midnight Clear. Now, I'm guessing you might be able to guess what the, the focus is. The, the Christmas Carol focus for this piece, but it also has sort of a Nocturne spin on it, and that's part of what we're talking about in today's podcast. So if you are interested in joining us for the 12 days of harp happiness, Nocturne for a Midnight Clear. This podcast is going to give you a big leg up on how to approach the piece, and it's going to teach you a lot about it. So we're going to start with that today and talk about all the beautiful music that some of those pianist composers like Frederic Chopin made and how we can use those pieces to help inform our own playing. Now, if you want to join us for the Nocturne for a Midnight clearance course, the 12 days of harp Happiness, you can look on the app or look on the website and you'll be able to opt in from there. And as I said, my Harp Mastery members, you're already in So I look forward to working with all of you on those live calls and getting those videos for you so you can learn this piece along with us. But right now, let's step back and look at some bigger musical concepts. You've probably heard of the composer Frederic Chopin. Chopin was a Polish pianist and composer. Lived his life in Paris, died very young. He was born in 1810 and died in 1849, just 39 years old. But he was a pioneer. He'd been considered a child prodigy when he grew up and he was known as a virtuoso pianist. Of course, he composed all kinds of things and most of what he composed was for solo piano. There are etudes, there are waltzes, there are mazurkas, and there are nocturnes. And the nocturnes are the things that we're talking about today. Now, a nocturne was originally just music to be played at night, right? Think of the word nocturnal comes from the same root. And nocturnes had been around for a long time. Chopin didn't invent them. Mozart wrote a nocturne. But at that time, a nocturne was often a piece of music, several pieces of music sort of strung together. And it was intended to be performed at night. So that was its whole idea. But by the time Chopin was writing them and he didn't invent the nocturne. We'll come back to that in just a moment. By the time he was writing them, they were pretty much solo piano, particularly very romantic sort of works. So I'm going to play just a few measures of a Chopin nocturne, just so you can get the idea of what we're talking about.

These pieces were written when music was entering its romantic era. And this doesn't just mean like romantic love, romantic. But it was all about mood and all about atmosphere and about expression. And that's what is so characteristic about a nocturne. It's got this beautiful arching melody that just goes over everything. And often the accompaniment is arpeggiated, which makes it really suitable for the harp. Although I have to say that most of Chopin's nocturnes were much too chromatic and very pianistic and not really suited to the harp without a little bit of adaptation. But. But the style is something that feels very natural for a harpist. Now they think that the person who first came up with this piano style nocturne was a composer named John Field. John Field was Irish. He was an Irish pianist and composer and teacher. And he was certainly living when Chopin was. He was Actually born quite a bit earlier. He was born in 1782 and died in 1837. But he is credited with being the first composer to take the term nocturne and apply it to a solo piano work like this. They call it a character piece because it is a piece that has its own. Its own identity, its own character. And once again, this is about that melody over that beautiful flowing accompaniment. Now, here's a little sample of one of John Field's nocturnes.

It sounds very similar to the Chopin example, doesn't it? You can see how these are related. Now, not every nocturne sounds just like this. Not everyone has that. That same kind of flowing bass line, at least not through the whole thing. But it is very typical for a nocturne. And once again, I'm mentioning this particular kind of piece in these composers because there are some things that we can learn from it. Aside from the fact that you could learn to play a really nice arpeggiated left hand and the flowing feel that goes along with that. The two particular things that are so characteristic of a nocturne are a legato melody. Another word would be contabile, which means singing. But, you know, legato. Legato is smooth. And legato is something that we have trouble with, we harpist. So we're going to talk about the legato. And then the other characteristic of a nocturne that's going to be helpful to us to study a little bit is rubato. Rubato is that flexibility in the tempo that just give and take that can make a piece like this so effective. We're going to talk about both of these things, but let's take them one at a time. And let's start with legato. Legato means connected. Tied is a literal translation of it. And we often think about trying to make a legato on the harp by connecting our fingers. And sometimes that's the way to do it, sometimes it isn't. But what legato really refers to in music is the idea that the notes sound connected one to the other. That the line, and most often it's a melody line, sounds very smooth. Think of it as a line that goes ta, ta, ta, ta instead of ta, ta, ta, ta. Now, when you think of it that way, when the notes blend one into another, like note, note, note, note, note, and it's very smooth instead of note, note, note. When you think of that connected way, you can see why this is such a challenge for us. All our notes are separate. We play one note, and we have no power to sustain it until we get to the next note. A singer, a flutist, a violinist, they can control the length of their note, actively control it. They can hold it longer, and then they can stop it shorter. For us, once we've played it, however long the note lasts in the room is how long it lasts, we have no power to make it last longer. And if we want it to be shorter, we actually have to stop it from sounding. So we have a very different problem to deal with if we're going to create notes that at least need to sound connected, because we can't do it. Well, of course we can. And of course, we're not the only instrumentalists that have this problem. Pianists do too. They can't make a note last any longer. They can lift their finger off the key and stop it, but they can't actively sustain a note. It's just however long it sounds. If we are to create the idea of legato, we have to be very clear on what legato sounds like and what its purpose is. I think when you consider both those factors, you can arrive at a solution, or at least a workaround for legato. So legato needs to sound connected. It needs to sound endless, at least until we choose to end it so that it sounds like one breath. A singer singing something in one breath. That's what we want.

And as far as a musical purpose goes, I think the nocturnes illustrate really well that those melodies need to be spun out. They need to be lifted and just carried along on the air and then supported, of course, by that beautiful accompaniment. But that melody, think of it as a soaring sort of melody, right? It's going to be carried along.

This, for us, is something that's not so natural for us to think about. First of all, our notes aren't connected. Already said that. But the other thing that we worry about when we're playing, when the physicality of our playing makes us think in these vertical dimensions all the time, where we're thinking about lining up our right hand and our left hand and doing both of those things together. Obviously this is really important, but it draws our attention away from that connected melody that we want to create. The phrase that we want to create. That's another concept that goes with this. A phrase is a group of notes that connect to form an idea, a musical thought. Think of it just like a phrase in language. It might not be a complete thought, but it's enough of a thought that it has a beginning and sort of that arch that it goes somewhere and it comes to at least a temporary stop.

So when we start thinking in that horizontal dimension, we start thinking about melody. And then we can look at how we want to create a legato. So we want to create something that sounds connected, that sounds like it has a direction, sounds almost like it's in one breath.

And yet we have to do that with individual fingers and strings over which we have no control after we play them.

So we're looking for something that sounds like legato, even though it isn't exactly. One way to create the idea of legato is to create it with dynamics, so that when you start a melody that you want to have sound connected, you start it at one dynamic and then crescendo through it, and then decrescendo through the other side. If you think of that melody like an arch, where it has the beginning of the thought, the middle of the thought, the end of the thought, then you're going to start at one dynamic and crescendo through to the top of the arch and then decrescendo through to the bottom of the arch. Again.

It doesn't have to be a huge crescendo, decrescendo, but it does need to be enough that we sense motion. We can create a sense of connectedness by creating a sense of direction, by creating the idea that all the notes are moving forward. And we can do that simply by making sure that no two notes right in a row have exactly the same dynamic. Now, you could get absolutely scientific about this and count it out for every note, but. But if you just think about the entire phrase and move that phrase forward and then let it relax, you'll be creating a sense of legato. Obviously, there are some technical things here too. You want to keep your fingers fairly soft feeling, right. You don't want to pluck the string extra hard with an accent, because that's going to work against that sense of connectedness. So you want to be sure that your fingers are relaxed and that you're playing with a full sound in terms of its richness, but without a very strong attack.

Another technical consideration here, ironically, considering that it means connected, legato is often better created by letting go instead of connecting. If the notes are very slow moving, obviously, if the notes are quick, you need to connect them, because that's how we can make them sound smooth. But. But if you have a half note followed by a quarter note, followed maybe by another half note, if the note values are long and slow, feel free to use a disconnected fingering to maybe play some of those notes with your second finger and lift it. The lifting will help create some air around that melody, and it will help give some life to the sound. So rather than if you've got a whole slew of slow notes, rather than trying to connect them all to keep your hand on the string, try lifting them and see if you can't help sustain that sound just a little bit by lifting your hand and creating some motion in the sound that way. Rubato is the other concept I want to talk about. Rubato comes from a word that means stolen, robbed. And that's what we do when we play. With rubato, we're actually stealing time. So for all of you who are tired of matching the metronome and playing very precisely rhythmically, rubato may just be the thing you're looking for. Unfortunately, we can't use it all the time. It's a technique you want to use with some judiciousness and a certain amount of moderation, because a little bit goes a long way. But rubato is how we give breath and life to our music. So that in a piece like a nocturne, but in lots of pieces, by the way, this is the sort of thing where just a little bit of easing of the time can make the phrase have more life. Now, in terms of a nocturne, lots of times the melody will be very decorated and ornamented, and you'll need some extra time just to fit all these extra notes in these extra little runs or turns or that sort of thing. And so you stretch the time just a little bit to accommodate it. This is not metronomic playing, for sure, but it's also not done just because you need some time, because the notes are hard. It's done to add some suspense to a phrase so that instead of rushing through a bunch of fast notes, we use them to open up the expression of the piece and to just make us hold our breath a little bit, as if it were a dancer just holding a pose a little bit longer, or an opera singer holding that high note just a little bit longer. And we just get to savor the moment a little bit. So it's one of those things that nobody can exactly tell you when to do it and when not to. But you can use your musical instinct. And of course, your musical instinct is one of those things that's informed by your listening. So this is why I would encourage you to go listen to some recordings by some master virtuosos playing nocturnes by people like Chopin and John Field. Listen to them and listen to how they weave that expression through rubato into their music. If it's done skillfully, you won't even notice it as a distortion of time. You'll just notice it as this beautiful moment. But if you go back and listen again and try to count carefully, you'll see that it. It doesn't fit the beat.

And this is what rubato is all about. It's about finding those moments where you can just make a little bit more beauty and a little bit more expression. And this kind of music is just filled with those moments. So you want to listen for them, Listen to the flow of the music and how it stays steady and then how it doesn't. How you can hear that accompaniment. Maybe just a 1 and 2 and a 3 and 1 and 2. Just those moments of stretching that allow us to savor those beautiful moments. One last thing that is very important. As you think about these concepts and start to try to put them into play in your own music, remember that these concepts are going to require you to move beyond practicing for correctness. I mean, you can't get to the music by only practicing slowly and carefully. And when you're trying to make your music live and breathe, you're going to stumble. You're going to make some mistakes that you don't want to make. As you go through this process and you're starting to practice this way, you're going to be finding that you trip over yourself a little bit. But that's okay. The music might trip over itself a little bit as you learn to make it speak. Don't fear those mistakes. Don't even try to fix those mistakes as you're starting to work on these things. When you're creating rubato, when you're creating legato, things are going to shift. Your fingers are going to be doing different things. Your mind is going to be focusing in a different way. And that's all right. This is a process. You can just let go of things a little bit and trust that you'll be able to incorporate the techniques for legato and the techniques for rubato as you go. I like to say let go, to let flow. And there's no more important time to do it than when you're working on these techniques. You can't take your music higher in expression if you're still trying to control your fingers all the time. That kind of practice is important, but it can only take you so far. So once you're fairly well acquainted with those notes and your fingers are doing most of the right things most of the time, then it's time to push them a little bit and to expand your musical horizons with certainly dynamics and tempo and all those things. And with legato and rubato too. Enjoy the process. It's fun to create something that communicates so expressively and you'll find some beautiful music to do it with. I know. Next week on the podcast we're talking about something a little bit more light hearted. We're talking about how to make some instant variations on your favorite holiday carol. So if you're the type, you've got that book and and it's got all your favorite Christmas carols in, but they're looking a little bit dull and a little bit plain and you think, gosh, I'd like to spiff them up a little bit. We'll be talking about that on the podcast next week. Once again, I invite you to join our 12 Days of Harp Happiness. You can join now. The course itself starts on Sunday, December 1st, and it's just a video course with a couple of live calls thrown in, but it includes the PDF of the three different versions of of my brand new arrangement for the holiday season called Nocturne on a Midnight Clear. So I hope you take a moment and check that out and that you join us for that because it's gonna be a lot of fun. You'll find the link in the show notes for this episode as well as on the homepage@heartmastery.com and in the app. So feel free to join us there. We'd love to have you until I talk to you next week. 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 into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.