What Makes Any Piece a “Harp Piece”? - PHH 218

It is not the number of notes, it's not the number of accidentals. It's not any of that stuff. It's that the harp has a unique voice. Every instrument does.

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 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.com join now. That's harpmastery.com joinharp hyphen now. Welcome to the show. Here's our question for today. What makes a piece of music a harp piece? Does it have to have been originally written for harp or composed by a harpist? Or could any piece of music, no matter what instrument or instruments it was written for, be a harp piece if you just play it on the harp? Well, I happen to think that the third answer is the correct one. Mostly so let me explain.

If you play a piece on the harp, it has absolutely become a harp piece, whether it started out that way or not. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it should have become a harp piece. Some pieces just don't work on the harp. Take the 1812 Overture for an extreme example. This piece was written by Tchaikovsky to commemorate Russia's victory over Napoleon. It's 15 minutes long. It requires a full symphony orchestra minus a harp. Actually, an additional brass band, a bell carillon, and a battery of cannons. Yes, cannons. How could a single harp play a meaningful rendition of this monster sized work? You could play some of the themes from the piece. You. You could shout boom. When the cannons are supposed to fire. No matter how hard we try, though, it will never really sound like the original. Okay, that's an extreme example. However, we harpists are known for borrowing music liberally from the piano repertoire. While that's a good idea in general, after all, the harp and piano have a lot in common. Some piano pieces never make good harp pieces. Even when the piece translates easily from piano to harp, sometimes something just gets lost in the translation. So what makes a piece of music a harp piece? What are the essential qualities and the specific characteristics that identify a piece as being written for the harp or that? On the flip side, mark it as definitely not a harp piece? Canons might be one of them, but okay, today we'll talk about those characteristics and how you can use them to spot spot pieces that might or might not be good ones to transpose or arrange for harp. This information will also be very useful when you're playing someone else's arrangement of a piece, and I'll tell you why in just a minute. But of course, before we get started, I have some things I want to let you know about. If you haven't visited the Harp Mastery app in a while, you know the app that's on your phone. If you haven't visited that app in a while, this is the time to do it. We have posted new courses. We have a whole courses page that has courses for growth and courses to help you solve problems. And we've got some recent calls. Not everything has gone up on the page that we want to post, but it has started and there's a lot of stuff that's there for you Some of the courses are free, some of them you have to pay for, but there's a lot of learning you can do right in the app. So you'll always have the your harp resources from Harp Mastery right at your fingertips and I wanted to be sure to let you know about that. Of course. We're also halfway through our Super Summertime Challenge and I hope you're participating in that. We're following along with our Christmas in July theme as well. And this week, as part of our Christmas in July promotion, we are focusing on the app and I have posted a little video. You can watch it from the hub. You can watch it in our Facebook Harp Happiness HQ group. You'll be able to take a look at that on YouTube as well and see what's going on there because there are some other things in the app that you might be interested in particularly. We're going to be talking about the new courses and I'll let you know a little bit about the answer bot this is our in house AI version of me. It's a little clone of me and it's been around for a while, but we have some updates and I wanted to be sure to share those with you because it's a resource that could just be exactly what you need, giving you the right answers at the right time. So we'll be talking about the app a lot this week and I hope that you get in there and check out all those goodies there for you.

When it comes to thinking about pieces that are good heart pieces or pieces that aren't, we often approach it from the negative. We know when we're playing something and it doesn't feel like a good heart piece. And the way we make that decision is generally because our fingers don't feel right or there's something about it that just doesn't sound right. But sometimes it's tempting to use that, oh, it's not a harp piece almost as an excuse for not working at something that's just a little bit challenging but really could work well on the harp. So there's that thing we need to be aware of, right? Are we calling something not a harp piece because it really doesn't suit the instrument or because it just doesn't suit us and it's a little too challenging. But perhaps you've been in this situation. This is just a little bit different. The piece is written for harp, but maybe it's written for harp by a composer who has never written for harp before and who doesn't really have a lot of experience with how the instrument works, that can be the biggest challenge of all. Because the piece, even though it's nominally written for harp, actually doesn't suit the instrument in any way, shape or form. Maybe it's got too many fingers, maybe it's got too many notes, maybe it's got too many accidentals. Whatever it is, it probably has way too much of it, and it just doesn't work well at all. I remember very recently working with a student who was doing an orchestral part that was written by a composer who just didn't have a grasp of how the harp worked. And there was really almost nothing in that orchestral part that the harp was able to play. It was really sort of a disaster. And it took a lot of work to try to come up with a playable part out of it. It took almost essentially recomposing the part. You might have run across something very much like that. What's interesting to me about a scenario like that is that it's not about the difference between a piece written for harp and a piece not written for harp. But it really shows us how a piece that is supposedly written for harp still doesn't work for the instrument. And what's interesting is that it leads us to think about what is characteristic of a harp piece, what makes a harp piece playable for us, what makes it suitable for the instrument, what makes it feel right, sound right. And that's what we want to dig into a little bit right now. First, I want to look at some very concrete ways in which harp music and piano music are different. And it's not just the music. It has to do with the essential qualities of the instruments. And after we've dealt with sort of the harp and piano contrast, I want to take a step back and look at a bigger picture of what the harp is, is as an instrument and what its essential qualities are, because that's the biggest factor in this discussion. But let's start with some detail, some concrete kind of things. And we're going to look at three ways in which harp music and piano music are very different, and why. So the first one is about chromaticism, right? It's about accidentals. And I call this the bumblebee factor. Why do I call it the bumblebee factor? Well, think about the piece Flight of the Bumblebee. You've probably heard it. It's played on lots of different instruments. And, you know, it's all filled with chromatic scales. You know, scales that have all those things we can't do that. We can't flip levers. Or push pedals fast enough to do Flight of the Bumblebee. So that's why I call it the bumblebee factor. The piano has it all over us in this particular area. They can do all kinds of things. All those key are just all the notes set out right there. It's easier than practically any other instrument as far as getting all those chromatics. All you have to do is get your fingers over the right keys. Now, I realize that's not easy, but it's way easier than us trying to manipulate strings and levers or pedals at the same time. We can't do that. So the piano can play music that is much more chromatic in terms of how many accidentals it uses or right in a row. That's a limitation for us. It's not that we can't play chromatic music. It's just that it has to be very carefully structured so that we can make those adjustments with either our levers or our pedals as we go. So music that is very chromatic, some of it's not possible, but some of it is possible if we make careful edits. And that's why when you're looking at a piano arrangement and it has lots of accidentals, you might find a harp arrangement of the same piece that has a lot of those accidentals left out. Because the arranger has been very clever. Clearly, it's a harpist arranger who's been very clever about figuring out ways to still make it sound right, but avoid some of that complication. Some of the stuff that just makes it too hard to play. But when it comes to chromaticism, the harp has an advantage as well. Yeah, we lose out on the bumblebee factor, but we win on what I call the flux factor. Now, I like the word flux. It's kind of cool. It's a word, you know, you might be thinking flux, capacitor, like Back to the Future, if you're that old. But flux is a word that Salzato wanted to substitute for the word glissando. Didn't stick, but I like the word anyway. But you could call this the glissando factor. Think about those wonderful glissandos that we can play. When you set your levers or your pedals the right way and you get one of those wonderful chordal glissandos or maybe a whole tone glissando, that's something that the piano just can't replicate. So it's an element of chromaticism. We're using enharmonics, right when you're setting up.

One of those chromatic glissandos. You might be setting up like an N F glissando. It'll sound like an F chord or an F9 chord, if you like, but it's got all naturals, but with a B sharp and an E sharp. And that's wonderful. But see, we've got the ability to eliminate a B flat and an E from our scale. By changing the B to a B sharp, we now have made it the enharmonic equivalent of a C. And the E sharp, of course, is the enharmonic equivalent of an F. So now we just have notes that fit in the chord, and that's what makes glissandos like that sound so wonderful. So that's something that piano can't do. So we might as well claim our advantage there. So that's the first item. That's chromaticism, right? We can't do the flight of the bumblebee. The bumblebee factor is a win for the piano, but the glissando factor, or the flux factor, if you like, is definitely a win for the harp. Okay, let's look at item two. This one is about clarity. Now, it's not, again, that the harp can't be clear, but the piano has some advantages when it comes to clarity. On the piano, when we depress the key, the note sounds. And as long as we hold the key down, the strings reverberate. But when we pick our finger up from the key, the damper absolutely comes down on the string inside the piano and the sound is cut off. So anytime we're not using the sustain pedal on the piano, which holds the dampers up, anytime we're just playing the keys, we have to keep a key depressed in order for the sound to continue. So I call this the Bach factor, because that kind of clarity is something that obviously is an advantage in. In the complex kind of music that Bach wrote. And in fact, of course, he wasn't writing for piano, was he? His keyboard music was written for harpsichord, which had, you know, had a clarity factor all of its own, a little bit different. But when you listen to music from that baroque time period in the 18th century, and some before and some after, when you listen to that kind of keyboard music, the noting can be so complex. And that automatic dampening that the piano gives the notes gives a lot of clarity to the performance of the piece. The harp doesn't do that, Right. When we play the string, it reverberates. And if we want to stop it, we have to stop it again. The harp is the only instrument I can think of. Well, aside from percussion instruments, which I guess are like this, where it takes just as much energy to stop the sound as it does to start it. Right. We have to pluck the string to start the sound and we have to muffle it to stop the sound. Two distinct motions. It's not just pressing the key and then picking it up, or it's not just starting the air stream for a wind instrument and then stopping it. No, we have to play it twice, once to start it, one to stop it. So we don't have the same kind of clarity factor. When we're playing a piece by Bach, for instance, we have a lot of resonance that's happening underneath because we can't muffle every single note right after we play it. Not like the piano does. In fact, I had a colleague when I was teaching at Curtis Institute of Music, and he was a wonderful theoretician and a wonderful performer on piano of Bach's keyboard works. He came to me one day after coaching one of our harp students on a Bach piece she was playing, and he said, does there have to be that much over ring, that much resonance in the Bach? Because it's just not very clear. And I said, you know, that's the harp. I said, we can muffle some things, but we can't muffle everything. So there's the Bach factor. So when you're looking at a piece of music that has a ton of fast notes like a piece like that, you have to understand that all those notes are going to have some over ring. We don't mind that. We're harpists, we're used to it, but it may affect the way the piece sounds. On the other hand, we harpists have what I very capriciously called the French factor. Now, this is not about a particular French composer. It's not about French anything particularly. I just thought of the French music that is so, so wonderful on the harp by some of our legendary harpist composers like Hasselman and Regnier. These are harpists who understood the resonance of the harp and allowed for that, particularly in their compositions. The beautiful ringing tones that just carry the harmony and the melody from one measure to the next. That's the way the harp works. Imagine being in a big auditorium or maybe a big church and playing a few chords on the harp and listening to resound through the entire room. That kind of resonance is wonderful. That kind of resonance is the harp. And so that's what I'm calling the French factor. And it's something that the piano can do, but we have way more resonance. There are times when you might not want it. That's where the Bach factor comes into play. But most of the time, that resonance is what gives our harp its warmth and its magic. So while the piano wins out on the clarity scale, we win out on the resonance scale for sure. And the third factor is about color. Now, I call the piano advantage here. I call this the bombast factor, because one of the things the piano can do, it's a huge instrument and it's got a huge sound. Think about music of Brahms or Rachmaninoff or those big booming chords. Now, we can have big kind of booming chords, but it's not the same thing. And particularly our lower register, where some of those big booming chords are so effective on the piano, our lower register isn't as clear. Going back to clarity again. And so the crashing factor of the chords, it sounds a little bit muddier. Doesn't sound quite as clearly tonal as it does on the piano. The piano has a big advantage there. So they can do that bombast thing. They've got that clarity in the lower register that allows those chords to really be dramatic instead of just muddy. On the other hand, we have what I like to call the Baskin Robbins factor. Yeah, I know, I like ice cream. And if you've know Baskin Robbins, you know that they started out with 31 flavors. That was their big pushing point, Right, Their big selling point. They could have 31 flavors. I think according to the company website, they're up to something like 1400 flavors, which is just mind boggling. But that's exactly what I'm talking about. We have the Baskin Robbins factor. Think about all the colors we can get on the harp. This is not to say that the piano doesn't have different colors, but because we play the strings with our fingers, we have so many choices. We can play near the soundboard. We can play partway down toward the soundboard. We can do harmonics, we can do glissandos. We can play with our fingernails. We can play with the pads of our fingers. We can do effects like tympanic sounds where we're hitting the soundboard, or xylophonic sounds, or so passe where we pinch the strings. We have almost an endless variety of colors that we can get. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of actually just altering the tone that we make with our fingers playing regularly. We've got Baskin Robbins beat. I Think we have so many choices that we have for color, and that is a tremendous advantage. And this brings me to what I want you to take away from this show today. The particular point that I think is really important about thinking about what makes a harp piece. It is not the number of notes, it's not the number of accidentals. It's not any of that stuff. It's that the harp has a unique voice. Every instrument does. But the things that make up that unique voice of the harp, that's what makes it a harp piece. So no matter what instrument it was originally written for, when that piece of music matches well with what the harp does well, matches well with the voice of the harp, that's when we have a harp piece. It's a little bit like a singer who needs to sing a particular piece in their key. It works for them, maybe in another key, but when it's in their key, it sits exactly within their vocal range and it feels right and it sounds right. The same is true for any piece of music, whether it was written for the harp or written for something else. When it fits the unique voice of the harp, and in thinking about the terms we've been talking about today, when it takes advantage of the resonance of the harp, when it takes advantage of the colors of the harp, when it takes advantage of all of the stuff that makes harp wonderful.

That'S when it's a harp piece. And it could be a very simple arrangement of Ode to Joy, for instance, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, that's part of his ninth Symphony. It's got masses of choirs and big orchestra. Yeah, no harp. I know, but it's got vocal soloists. It's got the whole shebang. But I think we can bring our own voice to that piece and make it something that works very well on the harp. Even though we don't have those huge orchestra and choral forces behind us, we can use our harp to bring life to a piece of music, but we need it to match our voice. And I think this information is important for a few things. Yes. If you're going to make an arrangement from a piano piece or any other kind of instrumental piece, it'll give you some touch points, some things to remember as you go forward. That, okay, yeah, the harp does this well. The harp doesn't do this well. And it's so much more important to remember those things than just to remember, oh, yeah, we don't use all five fingers on one hand. You know, there are things obviously we can't do that you can do on the piano, but thinking about the soul of the instrument, the voice of the instrument is even more important. So, yes, it's useful if you're making an arrangement. I think it's also helpful if you're playing an arrangement and there's something about it that just doesn't sound quite right to you, feel free to go in and make that adjustment. It might be because your personal harp voice just doesn't match with that. Now, I'm not saying you should mess with notes that were written by a harpist. I mean, maybe you need to. But I personally have difficulty for myself going in and editing notes in a piece by Renier or Hasselman or Granjeni or Salzato, because these are the masters of the instrument and they knew what they were doing. I don't generally go around changing their music, but if somebody had written an arrangement of some piece and I had a question about it and thought, hmm, you know, that's not the way I hear the original piece as being translated through the harp, then, yeah, I'd make a choice and I'd make an edit, so you can feel free to do that. But the most important thing is that understanding and giving some consideration to what makes the harp unique, what are the components of the unique voice of the harp helps inform our playing. It's part of our understanding and that comes across in how we play. Our understanding of what makes the harp unique and how it sounds is something that informs our playing at every level. It allows us to make choices about when we muffle and when we don't, about the way we manipulate, manipulate the accidentals in a piece where we push pedals or levers even to make the sound exactly right. How we use the special effects that we have at our disposal. Whether or not we roll chords and how quickly or slowly we roll them, all of our expressive choices can be guided by two what is happening in the music and how the harp interprets that music, translates that music, communicates that music best. So that's where the harp's unique voice will make any piece of music sound exactly right for the harp. That's what makes it a harp piece. Next week, we're going to talk about how to prepare yourself now so that you are mentally fit, so that you have the right mindset to return to your playing after summer. Now, I've talked before about how to get your music ready to prepare, how to prepare your fingers after you've had all this time off, how to get back into the harp. I've talked about that before, but I haven't talked about how really to structure the way you think about coming back, because it can be like just getting into a whole bath of cold water all of a sudden, right? It's just like, argh. Everything's wrong. The strings are broken, the harp's out of tune, obviously your fingers are a mess. So let's talk about how to get yourself in the right place to survive all the difficulties and to get back to your harp playing with positivity and pleasure. So that's next week. And in the meantime, until I talk to you, then remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world and to your spir. 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.