The 3 Things All Harpists Need to Do Well - PHH 229

If it's something that's a little challenging, something you're still struggling a little bit with, it's going to come right over time. Don't hold yourself back because of one measure, because of one line. Don't keep yourself on one exercise or one etude for weeks on end. Get the idea of it, get your fingers kind of around it, and then move on to the next one.

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.

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Welcome to the show. If I were to ask you what you think the most important skills are for any harvest, what would you say? Well, there are lots of obvious choices. You might include technical skills like scales or arpeggios, or putting hands together. You could mention skills like note reading or sight reading or rhythm skills, or knowing basic music theory. What about working with a metronome or playing expressively? All of these are important and none of them is particularly easy.

While all of these are crucial, though, I consider them all just part of playing the harp. Every harpist develops these skills continually, every day, over a lifetime of playing. Some of them come more naturally than others, but we become more skillful in all of them over time. It's also a fact that neglecting one of these essential elements, and my list was by no means a complete one, will limit our playing at some time, in some way. Today, though, I want us to think about a different category of skills. Skills that are less about actually playing the harp and more about the mindset we bring to our playing. Our ideas and attitudes play a big part in the pace of our progress, the ease of ease with which we practice and play, and the satisfaction and.

Fulfillment we experience along the way.

I've seen too many harpists struggle in their harp playing simply because no one ever told them how musical growth really happens or shared with them the specific instructions that will enable them to make the progress they want to play the music they want. These aren't musical instructions. They are mindset instructions. They relate to our playing, but they also guide the way we work, how we spend our time at the harp. So while they aren't do this, don't do that kind of directions, they are put this on a sticky note on your music stand reminders. And I've picked three big ones to talk about with you today. So get at your sticky notes and and let's get going. But before we jump into those mindset skills, let's talk very concrete harp skills for one moment because you may have noticed that I am offering a course coming up all about skills. It's about arpeggio skills and it's called Arpeggios with Ease. That's an acronym, E A S E and it stands for evenness, accuracy, speed and expression. So this is a five day course? Well, it happens over five days. It's four days of instruction. We have a day off there in the middle. But it's a four day course guaranteed to help you look at your arpeggios In a new way. We're going to be working on arpeggio skills. On the skills that you need to play them. Yes. To understand them. Yes. But most importantly, to apply those skills, your pieces. I mean, when you approach a piece of music that has a lot of arpeggios, maybe is essentially built on them, like maybe the little fountain, for instance. That's one of the biggies, right? So it's got a lot of arpeggios. How do you practice them? How do you practice them so that you can play them up to tempo, so that you can get from measure to measure smoothly? What are the specific techniques that are applicable to a piece like that or to that specific piece? See, the thing is that when you look at arpeggio practice from this particular framework, this evenness, accuracy, speed and expression framework, you're looking at the arpeggios from the music that you want to get out of them, from the results that you want. And so when you're working that way, then the music begins to show up. You're not still going, no, no, no, no, no. Trying to make the arpeggios work. So I want to be sure that you have the practice to make those work. I know we're coming up to a season where you're going to be playing lots of arpeggios, whether it's accompanying Silent Night or maybe you're playing the Waltz of the Flowers cadenza. We'll be looking at a little version or two of that in this course as well. But I want you to know what's important about arpeggios and how to do it. Because what's important is how we shape them, right? How we make them musical. And. And you can learn to do that from the very beginning. When you're starting to practice those arpeggios, you don't have to wait till you've practiced them for three or four weeks to try to make them sound the way you want. So we want to be working on the speed and the evenness, all those things, right from the beginning. So I want to show you the basic skills you need. You may already know those, but. But I'll bet I have some tricks or two that you haven't learned yet. So we'll be looking at those basic skills. We'll be looking at a little bit of the chord theory. Yeah, you probably know that too, but it never hurts to review it. And we'll be looking at specific pieces that use arpeggios in different ways so you can find out how to practice them in Those pieces. When I taught the Waltz of the Flowers Cadenza Intensive a few years ago, we spent a lot of time working on arpeg theory, and we applied it to just that cadenza. I want to take some of those skills, add a bunch of skills to them, and add a bunch of pieces to this so that you can have a really solid way to look at any arpeggio that you're going to play now or in the future. So that's the Arpeggios with Ease course in a nutshell. If you haven't signed up yet, do please check out the link in the show notes. Sign up and register. Today we start the course October 20th, but we actually start with a pre call, that is a webinar on October 15th. That's Wednesday night, October 15th. And we'll be talking about the course of what we're covering, and I'll be giving you some important information. You need to know about.

What the point is of looking at these skills in a different way. So we'll be talking about all of that on the 15th. But before we get started on the 20th, do register for the course. The course costs $47. It's kind of a bargain. I think there's lots of materials. And of course, if you can't make the calls live. Yes. These calls are recorded and you'll have access to the replays. We'll be leaving those replays up for quite a while. So it's not as if you only, you know, have a week to watch them. You'll be able to watch them at your convenience. You'll have all the materials, and I think you're going to get a lot out of this course. I'm really excited to be teaching this. It's a new framework for me to teach, and I think you're going to find it really helpful. So that's the Arpeggios with Ease course. Check it out and register. And I look forward to seeing you there. But that's just arpeggio skills, and we want to get back to talking about those mindset skills. So if you have your sticky notes ready, we're going to get started.

To set up our discussion. I want to remind you that we're not talking about the doing of things. I'm not going to tell you how to practice or how to drill notes. That's not what this discussion is about. We're talking about things in a different way. And perhaps the best way I can explain it to you is imagine sort of a factory where you have all the factory Workers, and they're all doing their jobs, and they're doing the thing that they need to do to make the product happen. But there are people above them, supervisors and managers. And those managers are making sure that everybody is working together toward the same end. They're making it possible for their workers to work well. Perhaps they're making sure that everybody works the right amount of hours, that nobody is working too hard, that everybody gets breaks at the right time, that the factory line is working smoothly, that nobody's holding any one part of the process up, that everything can move well to produce this end product. It's that management level that I'm talking about today. Your fingers are going to do the doing. You're going to get in there, you're going to practice. All those things are going to happen. But they'll be able to happen more easily, more consistently. If the managers are good, we're going to make that part of it easier by managing the whole experience in three specific ways. That's what I'm talking about today. Those are these essential skills. There are more, but I think these are really key. And the ones I'm talking about have important value. They're very impactful. When you have these skills in place, things do work more smoothly on your music factory floor. And these also, I think, are ones that many harpists struggle with, which is why I wanted to talk about them today, because I don't want to see any harpist struggle. So let's start with the first one. This manager is about managing time.

Think about all the ways that time is important to us as harpists, as harpists, as musicians. Time is in everything we do. There are meters which tell us how many beats in a measure there are. Rhythms, maybe we have syncopated rhythms. We have a tempo marking that may indicate another level of time. We've got the flow of a piece. It's all about managing time. Now, that's the kind of time that I was just talking about that we do in our practice. That's one of the doing kinds of time, right? We want to be sure that we're managing the beat, that we're using the meter properly and our accented and unaccented beats. We want to keep the tempo steady. We want to have a good flow through the piece. That's the kind of time that we're used to practicing. We use the metronome, we count, and we manage time that way. Now, if you haven't thought about time as that critical a factor in your playing before this, this might be a New concept, and I'm happy to spend just a moment talking about it. This is where players can sometimes get stuck thinking that as they play, they need to take extra time to do this, or they add extra time without thinking, or they don't keep the time steady. But the time is one of the ways in which we as listeners relate to music. We tap our feet, we clap our hands. We appreciate something that has a steady flow and that's keeping the beat steady. So if this is something that you've been maybe putting on the back burner and not focusing on in your practice, use your metronome, use your counting. This might be why your teacher is urging you to do both of those things. So time, in a very practical sense is a large part of what we do. But there are other key ways in which we need to manage time that have much less to do with our actual playing. And one of those is our practice time. Assuming that you're good about finding time to practice, and I know how hard that is in a busy schedule, believe me, I sometimes find it challenging. You can put those blocks of time in your calendar and stick to them. Now, I realize also that is much easier said than done. But creating practice time is important because without practice time, there is no progress. Practice is the only path to progress when it comes to music. So creating practice time, particularly a practice time that you can rely on perhaps at the same time every day, or perhaps at different times on different days, but part of a predictable schedule, creating that practice time is key. But once you've done that, then using your practice time, once you're sitting at the heart bench, is also extremely important. Obviously, if you've blocked out an hour to practice, what are you going to do in that hour? This is why planning your practice ahead of time, even if it's something as simple as making a list on Monday after Monday's practice, of what you're going to do in Tuesday's practice, it's a real difference maker to know what you're going to do when you sit down at that harp bench. Okay, today I'm focusing on this because it's part of my plan and I intend to spend this much time on it. If you have difficulty managing your practice time, use a timer. We all do this from time to time, and I got used to using a timer from my very early practice days. Usually when I was young, the timer was, you must spend this much time, and I knew that I had to practice until the timer went off. But for us, when you're practicing and you lose yourself, you do lose track of time. So thinking that, okay, I'm going to spend 10 minutes on this, and I can only spend 10 minutes because I only have an hour to practice, and I want to do these other things, having that timer set for 10 minutes is so important. Of course, when I was, you know, in the dark ages growing up, timers all were like egg timers, and they ticked right. You have a timer right on your cell phone, and it's not going to make any noise until it goes off. And that's a wonderful feature because you're not at the mercy of the ticking thing. It may feel uncomfortable at first to know that you're on the clock, so to speak, and that you only have 10 minutes to do this, but you'll get used to it fairly quickly, and you'll find that it's very freeing to say, all right, I've spent my 10 minutes, and now I can move on to the next thing. You won't find yourself in the trap of getting stuck, getting to the end of your practice time and not having done the things that you wanted to do. This doesn't mean you're going to actually get to everything every day. You might run into a situation where you say, I need the time I was going to spend on this piece. I need to spend on this piece, so you can make those adjustments and go along. You're making the rules for your practice, so feel free to remake them if you need to. But after a while, if you stick to those little time blocks, you'll find that it is so freeing that it just makes your practice so much easier because you get to the things you want, and you're not coming back to your practice the next day saying, oh, gosh, okay, so what didn't I get to yesterday? And how much time do I need to spend on it today? Your progress will go faster because your practice is also more consistent. You'll be getting to everything every day, or most things, most days. Which is really good because it's that kind of consistency that leads to growth.

What I like about the timer idea for my students is that for those students who tend to get stuck in the weeds, they want to repeat this section over and over until they get it right. It helps them move along. It helps them remember that progress doesn't happen because I got it right today. Getting it right today doesn't mean it's going to be right tomorrow. It happens over a longer time period than that. So that if you don't spend an hour trying to get that measure right on Monday, but spend five minutes getting that measure right on Monday and five minutes Tuesday and five minutes Wednesday. You'll be making more progress by spending less time and being less frustrated. I should expect as well. The way we manage time also comes into play when we're talking about our goals, our plans. Do we set out a plan to say, all right, in three months, I want to do these things, I'm going to spend the next month working on this, and then I'm going to do this? Do you have goals? And they don't have to be lofty, big, important kind of goals. They only have to be important to you. And they can be incremental, just representing growth stages or pieces you wanted to play or books you wanted to work through. But having that goal helps you keep a forward trajectory because you're going to keep working toward the thing you want to work toward instead of sort of wandering aimlessly. So there are some ways you might not have considered that you need to manage time, but see how important that is. When you're managing your practice time, you're making progress faster by spreading out your practice time over the things that matter and getting more daily touches at those things. You're getting a better feeling about things because you're getting to everything that you wanted to get to. And with a goal and a plan, you know what you need to do. You can see the next step. It's kind of funny, if you don't have a destination, it's hard to know where your next step is. So those are some of the ways in which I think managing time is so important for us.

The next level of managing I want to talk about is managing your mistakes. The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi was known to have said, if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. Now that does sound sort of like a hardline sports coach motivation kind of thing. But the fact is that when we're trying to do anything new, we're going to make mistakes. When we learned to walk as babies, we fell down. The first time we tried to tie our shoes, the knot didn't work. When we're learning, we are going to make mistakes. So I ask you, could we turn around the way we think about making mistakes and let mistakes not be something that we have to banish and avoid and perhaps even fear, but that we can manage our mistakes? Our mistakes can be something that propel us to another level in our playing or in our learning of a particular piece. I believe that mistakes cause more Tension and frustration, not by the fact that they're wrong notes or missed pedals or levers or forgotten measures or anything else. Not because of the mistake, but because of the way we feel about them. So to manage our mistakes, we really need to turn our ideas around. And if we want to survive and thrive as harpists, if we want to pursue harp playing for a long time, happily, we need to accept the fact that we're going to make mistakes, that they're part of our learning process, and we need to manage our attitude about them. We need to learn how to let our fear or our blame go and just release it. When you can release mistakes, you will release your tension. You will release the idea of having a failure. It's not a failure, it's just another step along the path. And some of those steps are beautifully on the stepping stones, and some of them, we step on the gravel on the side a little bit. But you need to not own the mistakes as a failure. You need to own them as part of the growth process, part of the learning process. And a symbol, a medal even, that we could pin on your chest, just like the lion in the wizard of Oz that says you're trying hard enough because you're making mistakes. Now before you laugh and shrug that off and ignore what I just said, because I know you want to think about where this different attitude about mistakes could change so much for you, could release you from some of that self judgment that is so harmful to our playing. It could help you deal with comparisons that you might end up trying to make between you and other harp players, or maybe shield you from comments that other people might make to you about your playing that feel hurtful, like, oh, I heard those mistakes there. Well, frankly, if that's what they were listening for, they weren't enjoying the music because no one listens for mistakes when they're listening to music, they listen to music. So we need to learn to manage our mistakes in two key ways, Right? We need to learn to manage them from the fact of acceptance that they're part of a growth process. And we need to learn to manage them from our own internal idea about them and recognize that they're not the negative, demerit, bad mark kind of thing we often layer onto them. They're something that happens because sometimes they just happen. And sometimes it's because we're trying something new, trying something hard, something challenging, and we make a mistake. Oops. All right, release it and do it again, but release it first. You don't need to carry that mistake. With you, it's not going to serve you that way. Release the mistake and move on. Manage it. Don't regret it.

All right. Our third thing to manage when you're being this manager and assuming your new manager mindset for your playing, and that's, you need to manage your expectations. Now, I'm not here to throw cold water on your dreams and tell you, oh, you're never going to be able to do what you want to do. That's not the kind of expectation I'm talking about. But I know that there are lots of harpists who don't really understand how musical progress happens, how musical growth happens, and they've got what I would call skewed expectations for their practice and when their practice will yield results. Now, you've probably heard me talk before about the image that when you plant a seed, you put it in the sun and you water it, you say nice things to it, and then one day, some weeks later, all of a sudden, it sprouts above the ground. Well, you've been watering it and you've been making sure it gets plenty of light and just the right temperature, but nothing is visible, nothing's happening. That's because underneath the ground, the seed is opening and it's beginning with little bits of roots and little bits of growth. And then finally one day, it pushes above the soil. This is closer to the way musical progress works. We practice and we practice, but it's not till a little while later that we finally see results from our practice. Remember just a little bit ago, I was talking about managing time and how in our practice sessions, a little bit of time every day on a piece is better than trying to put a whole bunch of time in on one piece on one day and then expecting it to stay fixed. Because that's not what happens. That's the kind of expectation that I would like to fix. That's not the way music happens, unfortunately. We can't fix it once and have it stay fixed. We can't learn it once and have it stay learned. It never ends. The process goes on and on. It's just that the fixing, if you will, that we need to do gets incrementally smaller over time, and the piece gets incrementally and consistently more in our control.

So just because you fixed something today doesn't mean it's going to be fixed tomorrow. Think about your progress more like a spiral staircase where you're going to have to keep revisiting the same thing, but at a higher level. That measure that you fixed when you Were going really slowly may turn out to be a problem. Again, when you speed up the tempo, that's okay. Once you understand that part of the process, then you can free yourself from what I feel like are practice chains. It doesn't have to be right. Whatever it is, whether it's a measure, a fingering, a note, it doesn't have to be right before you move on. If it's something that's a little challenging, something you're still struggling a little bit with, it's going to come right over time. Don't hold yourself back because of one measure, because of one line. Don't keep yourself on one exercise or one etude for weeks on end. Get the idea of it, get your fingers kind of around it, and then move on to the next one.

With exercises and etudes, it's about increasing finger vocabulary. With pieces, it's about keeping learning. You're going to have more of the piece to learn, and fixing that one measure isn't a permanent fix, so it doesn't have to be right. This is a way to manage that sort of perfectionist idea that, oh, I want to get it exactly right before I go on. You won't. You shouldn't. What I want you to do is not worry about getting it right today. I want you to know that everything that you're doing today is going to help it be right. Maybe not tomorrow, but next week and next month and next year, and for as long as you want to play this piece, but give it the time it needs, work on it, manage your time the way I mentioned before. Manage your time, give it the time it needs today.

But not more time than it needs, and move on. Your perspective in that piece is far more valuable. That bigger perspective, that bigger picture, far more important to your playing than fixing that one measure. I know, too, that fixing that one measure feels like real progress. It feels like an accomplishment. And it is to say, ah, I nailed it. Yes, I nailed it. But if you're too invested in that feeling today, when it doesn't go right tomorrow or the next day, you're in for a real letdown, aren't you? Managing your expectation, managing your understanding, and realizing that, great. I'm going to celebrate my win today, but I know I'm going to have to be still working at it. It's going to take some time before it becomes consistent. That's great.

So let me quickly recap and review why I think these things are so important. We talked about managing time. We talked about managing mistakes. We talked about managing expectations.

These are support things for our practice? Yes, especially when we're talking about managing time. But they're also critical attitudes to how we approach everything we do at the instrument. It allows us to be free. It allows us to release the tension and the blame. If we're managing our time well, we don't have to feel guilty about not practicing or not getting to everything today in our practice. If we're managing our mistakes and realizing that mistakes are part of of the path to progress, then we're not living with those mistakes. We're able to release them and practice with more freedom and more enjoyment because the mistakes are just there. They'll come right give them time, which is where managing expectations comes in. It will take time, but you will make progress, you will grow, you will improve, you will be able to play the things that you want. The timeframe may be a little bit different than you expect, but that's the whole thing. When you can change your expectations to be closer to the reality of learning music, you will be on the path to harp happiness, which is where I want you to be now. Next week on the podcast, we're going to talk about something I've never addressed here on the podcast before, and it's a really interesting and slightly sticky issue. Imagine that you're doing something and your teacher corrects you and say, oh, that's not the way to do it. And you discover that it doesn't work the way she wants you to do, only works your way. So next week, what we're talking about on the podcast is what to do when your technique seems to be getting in your way, or when when the right thing to do doesn't work for you but the wrong thing does. How do you make those two things merge what's right and what's wrong? That's on the podcast next week. And one more quick reminder that the Arpeggios With Ease course is coming up. Registration is open. You'll find the link in the show notes or on the webpage@heartmastery.com you'll find the sign up also in the app. It's a terrific course and, and I'm so excited to teach it. As I said, I've never taught this material this way before and I'm really looking forward to it. We've got a lot of people already in the course and I hope you will join us too. So that's coming up. We start on October 20, but you can register and get in there today. So I certainly hope you do that. I'd love to see you in that course and share this material with you. Thank you so much for being here. And remember 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.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.