The Other Side of Harp Playing: How to Develop Your Musicianship - PHH 160

Refining your own musical instincts through observation, understanding or knowledge and experience. All of that works together to help you play your music better. It's a beautiful thing.

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 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 My Harp 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 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.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now.

Welcome to the show. Now, maybe you've noticed or maybe you haven't, but these podcasts are organized into three different categories. One category is practice and performing, and another is music and meaning. The third category is technique and musicianship. Technique is one of those self explanatory items, but musicianship probably needs a little more description. Now, a common dictionary definition of musicianship is the skill or artistry involved in performing music. Other definitions include the word knowledge along with skill and artistry. But musicianship is a category so broad that it actually encompasses everything about playing music except for technique, although obviously technique has a role to play in musicianship as well. I like to define musicianship as the craft of music. It's the part of playing music that is common to musicians, whatever instrument they play or whether they sing or compose. For us harpists, it's everything about music that is not specifically related to the harp. It's note reading and music theory, rhythm and expression, music history and interpretation. There is so much to musicianship that it can feel overwhelming. I mean, where do you begin to start developing your personal musicianship skills?

For our discussion today, I want to start with two important ideas. First, you already have a level of musicianship skills. You're not starting from scratch. Developing your musicianship is a process, just like developing your repertoire or your technique, and we'll talk about how to do that. And secondly, I want to offer a new way to consider musicianship. It's a slightly different perspective, one we will work with today that will help you identify specific things you can do and are already doing to become the musician and the harpist you want to be. As an addition to our discussion today, you might want to check out the blog post from our archives that I have linked to in today's Show Notes. The Post is called One Book 10 Ways to Become a Better Musician. And it's it gives you a way to look at a particular piece of music. It's all described in the blog post and find 10 different ways that you can work on your musicianship as a as an easy sort of little exercise. And I think that will interest you. So you can check out the link in the show notes or you can just go to the Harp Mastery blog and you can look for one book to 10 Ways to Become a Better Musician. So that's easy to find. Also in the show notes you'll find a link to join the Harp Mastery Hub. The Hub is our free and social media free online community and most Mondays I take some of the summer Mondays off. But most Mondays I have a live warmup that I will lead you through and they're these warmups are very easy to access through the Hub. They're totally free. We spend about 45 minutes working on techniques and some musicianship things as well. So they're lots of fun and they happen most Mondays. And if you're a member of the Hub, it's very easy to go to the meetups and you can click right through and join us there. If you don't want to join us through the Hub, you can join us through our YouTube channel. The Harp Mastery YouTube channel also carries the stream of the live Monday warmups. And you can join us there. Just hop over to YouTube and you'll see the video right there under live. So another way to improve not only your technique, but your musicianship too. To begin our discussion about musicianship, I want to remind you that musicianship is something you already have. You already have a level of musicianship wherever your harp playing level is right now. So remember, this isn't something that you have to strive to attain. You have it and you're just going to develop it and practice it in a similar kind of way to the way you practice your other harp playing. There are going to be levels of growth. It's going to be part of everything you learn about your harp playing. Now, if you are already an accomplished musician on another instrument, and the harp is just a newer instrument to you, then a lot of the musicianship that you already have, you'll be bringing to your harp playing and working through what's just a little bit different about using those tools. On the harp. For instance, if you are an accomplished pianist, you know all about your key signatures and scales from playing the piano, and you know all your different fingerings for all those different keys. Well, on the harp, our problems with scales are just a little bit different. The nice thing is that all our scales are fingered the same, but we have to get around the lever or pedal settings that allow us to play in the different keys. So the musicianship concepts can be the same, but the application may be just a little bit different. Also, musicianship isn't about being a musician. It isn't about playing musically, although certainly that expression is a part of it. And developing your musicianship will help you play more expressively, but it's about acquiring the information and the experience that will inform your playing. And so that's why I want to offer you my new perspective, my sort of slightly different definition about musicianship. I want you to consider this. The study of musicianship is really the process of refining your musical instincts by observation, understanding, or knowledge and experience. Okay, I'm going to say that again. The study of musicianship is a process of refining your own musical instincts the ones you already have by observation, understanding, or knowledge and experience.

Does this give you a different idea? Maybe your mind is blown right now, or maybe you're just saying you're gonna have to explain that one to me. I just don't get it. Well, that's why I'm here. I'm going to explain it to you. But the first thing you have to accept here is that you have musical instincts. I know sometimes we downplay our strengths, but if you're studying the harp, you have a connection to. To music. We get. We're going to take that as for granted. We're going to take that as a given. You have musical instincts or you wouldn't want to play the harp. You wouldn't want to express yourself through music. And you know you have musical instincts because you can tell when you listen. You can tell the difference between a perform a poor performance, one you don't like, and a really masterful performance, one that just is awesome and inspiring. You have pieces of music that you like and pieces of music that you don't. You have musical instincts, and those instincts are going to serve you well if you pay attention to them.

We can refine them. And that's where the things that we're going to talk about today will come into it. We can make them more. More acute. We can make your senses sharper, we can make your instinct based in more knowledge and information. But you have the instincts to start with. And I want you to be sure that you acknowledge that and that you own it, that you have the raw material to work with. We're just going to add to it. And that's where musicianship study comes in. Maybe that's a phrase I need to stay away from, musicianship study. I don't want this to be something that you feel you have to take a course on or that you have to learn from a book. Musicianship is practical. Musicianship is part of what we do every day as much as your technique is a part of what you do every day. So let's talk about your daily practice of musicianship. Just the same way you make your harp playing a daily practice, in that harp playing, your musicianship is going to be part of a daily practice. It's going to be a habit. That's what we want to do. We want to use this habit, the practice that you're already doing, and bring some additional qualities to it that will help enhance your musicianship, will help you learn, learn to learn faster, understand more of what it is you're doing, play with More polish, more mastery, more expression. That's where we're going. And it all starts with your instincts that we're going to refine. And the first place we're going to look to, to hone those instincts is observation. It's so easy when we're practicing to get wrapped up in the notes, the notes, the fingers, the technique, all of the stuff that we're doing. But I want you to widen your sphere of observation. I want you to look beyond the notes, beyond your fingers, and just think about what's really there, what's really on the page. Musicianship, which is about everything from the notes to the theory, to the history, to the expression, to every part of music. All of that is in that piece that you're playing. So I want you to look for patterns, I want you to look for chords. I want you to consider musical form. Oh, look, this is the section that repeats similarities between this piece and maybe other pieces you've played like it. Anything that you can observe that makes sense of the notes beyond just, okay, this is a B and this is a C. And these notes have to be played at the same time, and these notes have to be played in this rhythm or whatever it is. We're really looking beyond those dots to see what the composer wanted those notes to mean. To signify, we're considering the composer's choices a little bit. Why is this note here? And we don't have to get really deep into this. You don't have to try to read the composer's mind and consider the intention there, but just to say, oh, look, this is the same as the music that we saw at the beginning. So the composer's bringing this to a recap, a recapitulation. We're reviewing the material we've already heard, and maybe that's part of the process of winding up the piece, right? Bringing it full circle, as it were. It's amazing to me how much time we can put into practicing a piece and still not notice these things about it. And the truth is, if those were the things we were looking for in our practice, it would make things so much easier. I mean, wouldn't it be easier if you were looking at that piece of music that you were learning and say, okay, great. Whew, I'm coming up to the last page here, and I've got all these notes to learn. If instead of just saying, I've got all these notes to learn, you could say, hey, look, half of that page is exactly, or almost exactly like what I did in the beginning. Oh, I've already learned that you've just cut your practice time. Now, you might discover that while you start practicing.

But often what happens is we get so busy practicing that we don't take time to really consider what it is we're doing. Oh, we're playing the beginning material again. Oh, we're playing the same thing as the beginning, but look, it's in a different key.

All kinds of things that could make our learning easier and bring us to more understanding of the music. That's the musicianship part. Now, listening is also a part of this. It's not just what you see, but it could be what you hear. Does this sound like something you've played before? Maybe it even reminds you of a passage from another piece. And if that's the case, taking a moment to put those pieces side by side and see if you can figure out why they sound familiar. What are those similarities that make you think they sound related? That's part of this too. So don't forget to use your ears. After all, music is something we hear. But these observational skills, the observation of looking at the music, the observation of listening to the music, that's why when you study this kind of thing at a conservatory, you're going to be studying sight reading and note reading and going to be studying oral skills. They hone your powers of observation. Do I want you to go ahead and take those courses? Not necessarily. I think you can do just fine without them. But please remember, that's why those skills are so critical. That's why we think it's great to practice sight reading. That's why we love you to listen to music, because you can observe and you can learn. So musicianship really starts with observation. But then we need to start making sense of what it is that we're observing. That's where the understanding or knowledge component comes in. We want to be able to put names to concepts. Key signatures and chords are really simple examples, right? It's one thing to look at the key signatures, set your pedals or levers and then just put play. But it's another level of understanding to say, oh, there's one sharp there. This is G major, or, oh, there's one sharp there, but it's not G major, it's E minor. That's the difference that I'm talking about. This is putting that name to the concept. There's the key signature, but this is what it represents. Same thing with chords. We can see the shape of a chord, and that's terrific. But being able to give it Its name tells us something more. If we know that it's a C major seventh chord in second inversion, that's more information that we have. So those things can and will over time be helpful to us. Understanding cadences that at the end of a phrase, we might come through a V chord to a I chord, or maybe we have a semi cadence, we end on a V chord. Now, those might be terms that aren't familiar to you yet, but you'll come across them. And when you're practicing a piece and you say, well, how come it's not finishing on the tonic at this one part? It's not. We're in C major, but it's not coming back to C major. And now all of a sudden, I've got F sharps in my music. Well, we've gone to the dominant. So it's one of those things where you learn as you go. Now, when you're studying music theory and music history in a music conservatory, the curriculum they run you through is very thorough. It's very dense, it's very concentrated and focused because they're trying to get as much information into you as they can in just those couple of years in conservatory. But for most of us, learning a little bit at a time is more helpful. You can go and you can take a course, and if that is what floats your boat, if you are like, oh, I love learning, I love taking courses and I want to learn more, then absolutely go and do that and do that with the understanding that this is what's going to benefit you. You're going to be taking this knowledge and applying it in the music that you're learning.

But if not, then you're going to be learning this as you go. And here's how that works. We're looking at the music that we're playing. We're looking at something that happens in the music. And then we give it a name. If we don't know a name for it, you know, then you can ask your teacher, that's terrific. And your teacher will generally be on top of this and offer that to you, perhaps before you even ask for it. But, but you can Google, you can send me a note, email me at, you know, podcasteartmastery.com we'll see what we can do. But that's the thing. You want to take what you see and give it a name. Then you can explore that concept just a little bit more that way. The concept, that idea of that C major seventh chord in second inversion isn't abstract, not something that just lives in a textbook or something you create to fill in a workbook page. But it's immediately practical. It's got not just an idea, but it's got notes, it's got a sound, it's got a fingering. It's got its place in that piece of music that you're playing. Remember that the knowledge that you're learning isn't supposed to be separate from your playing, it's supposed to be part of it. Here's another example. You might go to a music theory book or a music history book, depending, and look up a minuet. What is a minuet? Well, it's in. It's most likely going to be in three, four time. It's a dance form, it's going to have an A section and a B section and they're going to repeat and it's going to go back to the A section and then maybe it's going to have a trio section and then it's played this way. I mean, you can learn all those details about a minuet.

But here's where the knowledge at whatever level you have about a minuet is going to come into play. When you open that new minuet that you're going to learn, what do you know? What did you observe about the last minuet you played? Was it in 3 4? Is this one in 3 4? Did it have those kinds of sections that repeated? Does this new one have those sections that repeated? It's not essential that you have names for everything right away. What is helpful is that you're pulling information from what you've learned and observed and applying it to help you learn something new. That's where this understanding and knowledge happens. It happens gradually, it happens over time, and it happens as a result of your looking and listening to the pieces that you're playing in that more focused, deeper sort of way to observe it. I was trying to stay away from the word observe. I've used that plenty, but you know what I mean. So when you have that in depth experience with a piece and then you can explain it because you've learned some of the terminology, maybe, or you've just been able to put a name to what it is that you're playing and seeing you've got a new level that you've achieved, and here's what happens next, we're going to use that experience to build on, to grow your musicianship even further. That shouldn't be a surprise, right? Everything in our music grows level by level. We play a piece and our fingers learn a new technique and so the next piece that we play, when we see that same technique, we can learn it more easily. It goes more quickly. We've already seen it, our fingers have already practiced it. Think about something. Maybe it's big chords, and you haven't played a piece with big chords yet. So the first time you encounter them, it's going to take you some time to really work through them. But the next piece that has big chords, you know a lot more about how to play them and how to practice them, and so you can learn them more quickly. Musicianship is the same thing. Once you've observed, once you've looked at those patterns, looked at the concepts or the form of the piece, and you've been able to understand some of what that is, then you can very quickly identify them in new pieces that you encounter. And. And it's a shortcut for you because you don't have to look at all those notes and say, oh, gosh, I don't know what my left hand is doing with this pattern. You can go, oh, yeah, that's an Alberti base. I know how that goes. Wow. Think how much more quickly you could learn a piece if you had those things at your disposal. And that works for sight reading too, because once you've learned what those big chords look like or how that Alberti bass goes, your eye looks at it in a new piece and it just makes some assumptions, and boom, you're playing it right there. So all of that observation, all of that understanding gives you the experience to help you learn the next piece you want to learn. Right? Musicianship isn't a single thing that you learn and then apply. It's a process where you are continually acquiring more understanding and bringing that to your playing. And that's what musicianship is. Does that make sense to you? Remember, musicianship, as I'm talking about it today, is the process of refining your own musical instincts through observation, understanding or knowledge. Experience. All of that works together to help you play your music better. It's a beautiful thing. Here's an analogy for you that may be helpful. Imagine that you're just a beginner cook. You, you know, have never really cooked before, and you're just getting into cooking. So as your first steps in beginning to cook, you learn from a recipe, and you follow the recipe carefully, and you put in all the ingredients and boom, the. The whatever it is you're cooking turns out, at least we hope it turns out right. You might make some mistakes along the way, but you're learning from a recipe. The more recipes you Follow the more experience you have, and you begin to understand a little bit more about how the ingredients interact and what substitutions, additions you could make. Right? Ooh, well, I'm out of this. Could I use this instead? The beginner cook might not have a clue, but a more experienced cook would say, oh, I'm out of breadcrumbs, but I could use some flour or whatever it is. So you know a little bit more about what substitutions or additions you could make. You know, what kind of seasonings you might want to add to make it a little bit more flavorful in just the way you like. And eventually you become experienced enough that you know, just by reading a recipe, how that dish is likely to taste when you've made it. You can say, don't think I want that one, or, oh, yeah, that looks delicious. I'm going to try that. So that's the difference between just a starter cook starting from a recipe, following the directions, and a more experienced cook who's able to make more creative choices. And because she understands how the ingredients interact, how the flavorings work, and she kind of knows in advance how it's going to come out because she's done it before. Musicianship is the same way when you don't just learn from the recipe, but make those observations about, oh, this is how things interact. This is how those patterns of notes work together. This is how the piece is constructed. Each you understand more about what choices you can make, and of course, the whole process goes faster.

So I hope that has helped you understand a little bit more about musicianship, and I hope that it inspires you to just look a little bit more deeply at the music you're playing while you're learning it, and dig into what's really there on the page. Maybe explore a little bit about what those patterns of notes are or what they mean. And then remember to bring that information to every new piece you learn so that those aha moments. Oh, I've seen this before. I know what's happening here can help you learn your music faster and play it even more beautifully. Next week here on the podcast, we'll be talking about summertime and your strings. How to care for them, which ones you need, how to keep them, all things strings. Next week on the podcast, don't forget to sign up for the Hub. If you're not already a member there. Join us for those live Monday warmups. I'd love to have you on those calls, so I look forward to talking with you again next week. And in the meantime, 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 you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.