When Right Is Wrong: The Ultimate Musical Dilemma - PHH 259

What if playing the harp felt easier the way you thought it would be? Not because you practiced more, but because you finally understood what was getting in your way. I'm Anne Sullivan, and welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness. Here we tackle the real challenges harpists struggle with: the sticky passages, the tricky fingerings, prepping for performance, and all the ingredients that go into making music sound the way you want it to. I've studied with world-class harpists, taught at a top conservatory for 20 years, and I love playing the harp. But what I love just as much is breaking down the real challenges harpists face and turning them into clear step-by-step solutions, the same ones I teach my students and use myself. So if you're ready to play the music you love with more confidence, clarity, and joy, you're in the right place. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Here's something I know you know: playing music is hard. Now, trying to evaluate how well you are playing it, though, is even harder. Much harder. If this were a sport, a game like baseball, our own efforts in relation to those of the opposing team would be reflected in the score. Simple to evaluate. In an individual sport like golf, your score is a marker of your performance against the challenge of the course, the weather, and any number of other factors. In an artistic endeavor such as art or music or dance, there isn't an objective numerical scale to score the outcome. I think that's why I'm always ambivalent about Olympic figure skating judging. I understand that they've tried hard to find objective measurements for all the aspects of a skating performance, but there's still room for debate. There isn't always a clear right or wrong. When we practice, we aim for right. We want to get the notes right, our technique right, the fingering right, the pedals right, the dynamics right. And as my friend MJ says, we get all wrapped up in right. And when we get wrapped up in right, we lose our perspective on the music. Simply put, it's not seeing the forest for the trees. I'm sure you get that. Yet somehow we still focus on being correct. In fact, I believe we actually overvalue being correct. That's why on today's show I'd like to explore the actual damage that over-focusing on right can do, how it can sabotage the music you're trying to create. Never fear, I promise I won't tell you to play wrong notes, and of course I won't leave you without some ideas for refocusing. But we'll get you back on the right side of right. I'm not actually talking about perfectionism here. I mean, perfectionism is a funny thing, and I think lots of times we use the word perfectionist, uh, to just talk about some of the things that we do and how we are really invested in doing things correctly. So I'm not really talking about perfection today, but I will offer you another perspective if you want to check out a blog post I did a while back, something from our archives. It's called "Perfection or Performance? It's Your Choice." And that's a different perspective, something different from what I'm talking about today, and that might, uh, resonate with you a little bit too. So I've put a link to that blog post in the show notes, and if you want to check that out, you can go ahead and do that. Naturally, this is a topic that we've talked a lot about in My Heart Mastery in terms of talking about how to do things without worrying about getting them correct. We've talked about making adjustments, making alterations, learning how to play for the flow and get beyond errors that you're making. So My Heart Mastery members, you have lots of courses and calls on this topic, so remember to use that search function and look through those courses that you have available to see what topics are really relevant to you and to what you want to know about this particular subject or any other. So My Heart Mastery members, check out that library of courses in our website. There are so many there, and we've talked a lot about different aspects of this kind of topic. Of course, if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, I invite you to join us. It's a simple membership and it gets you live calls with me or with one of our coaches every month. We always have interesting topics that we're teaching on and we get to do that live. So of course that means you get to ask questions. You're not just learning from a video, you're making the learning real to you, and that's where the power and the impact is. So if you're not a My Heart Mastery member, I have put that link in the show notes for you too, and you can come in and join us. It's a simple thing to do, and you get the live calls, you get the archive of courses. We have, oh, uh, over 75 courses in there for you to choose from on all different kinds of harp topics, and there's something there to answer a question for you. I know there is. And of course, our Scale of Success curriculum too. So there's so much inside of My Harp Mastery membership. Use the link, look at what's involved, and come over and join us. We have a lot of fun, and there's so much in the way of resources for you to help you find more harp happiness in your playing. So all of those resources are in the show notes for you in this episode. If you can't find them in your podcast app, just go ahead over to Harp Mastery, click on the podcast link on the home page. This is episode number 259, and you'll find all of those there. Let's put aside our own ideas of right for just a moment, and I want you to imagine that you're going to hear a performance, a performance by Anne Sullivan, you admire and respect, and you're going to go hear that wonderful harpist play this wonderful music. What is your attitude as an audience member? Do you sit there and keep score? "Oh, missed that note. Oh, missed that note." Now maybe you don't know the piece so you don't know about the wrong notes, but how do you judge it? Are you going to look for those mistakes and see if you can detect them and score them? I don't think so. Now I actually used to do that when I was very young because that was all I knew. It was okay, it was right or it was wrong, and that the mistakes were the easy way to evaluate somebody's performance. But as adults, that's not what we're looking for, is it? We're thinking about how— maybe how the performer looks when they play. Are they assured? Are they graceful? Do they look nervous? Do they seem in control of what they're doing? Do they seem confident? We can judge their performance in all kinds of different ways. And most importantly, I think we often consider someone else's performance by how it makes us feel. How does that music communicate from the performer to us? Does it touch us? There are so many things that we as a listener think about when we are experiencing a performance. The music takes us to another place. We hear a lot of wonderful sounds and notes, and we hear them in this context that makes them sound beautiful and smooth and flowing. It evokes some kind of emotion, sounds confident, sounds delicate, all the things that make music music. And I think if you were to think about those aspects of performance— how a performer sounds or looks, or how you feel when you hear the music, and what you're thinking about in terms of their performance— I think you'll notice that the things that you value most highly are not about being right. Those things that you value most highly are about the music. Okay, that sounds really good. So why do we not take that same feeling and apply it to our playing when we're the ones doing the playing? All of a sudden, then it becomes about right. Then it becomes about being critical or critiquing ourselves or expecting others to judge us when that's not an audience's perspective. Now, I mention this because I think it's really important to understand that just playing correctly isn't what we want to hear as an audience person. I'm sure you've heard— probably not from harpists because we're all wonderful— but I'm sure you've heard performances that were truly correct but didn't move you. It didn't seem to have that soul or the personality, or it didn't speak. It didn't seem to have mistakes. It didn't seem to be wrong. It just wasn't music. Do you see what I mean? Music is so much more than right. So why is that the standard that we choose for ourselves? I think there's a very simple reason: because right is easy. It's black or it's white. It's right or it's wrong. We know that, "Oh, should have put that finger there." But somebody listening to the music isn't going to know whether we've played that string with our 3rd finger or our 4th finger or our big toe. Well, they might know if it's your big toe because that would look a little funny. But if the music still sounds right, that fingering doesn't matter. So now I'm not telling you to ignore fingering. We know why fingering is there, but the rightness or wrongness of your fingering doesn't matter to the piece. And you've heard me say more than once that a piece can survive wrong notes if you can sustain the musical flow. But what I want to deal with now is how we can remind ourselves as we're working through the things we want to get correct, not to get so invested in correct that we lose sight of what it is we're actually trying to do, which is to play the music. And I think that is what's so difficult When we're trying to make something correct, which is part of the point of our practice, how do we keep that in balance so that we're not so focused on just getting it right that we lose sight of what we're doing? Now, in case you're not yet convinced that focusing on right is something that can hold you back, I want to give you a few very concrete things that are affected by your trying to stay and keep things correct. One of them is speed. If you want to play faster, it's going to involve some messiness. It's a process that, that churns up a lot of the stuff that you've worked really hard to correct. In your, in your practice. Playing something at one speed can go very well, but when you move that tempo faster, all kinds of processes get interrupted and it's going to be messy all over again. And you have to be prepared for that, and you have to let that wrongness happen. So speed is something that is absolutely dependent upon your letting go of right, at least for a little while. So is flow. If you want more musical flow, one of the things that can stop your piece from flowing is if you're looking for every mistake as you play and you are checking yourself as you go. You can't keep the music flowing forward if you're always looking backward to what just happened. Flow doesn't work unless you can let go of that inner censor and inner corrector that is saying, "Oh, that was wrong. Wait, I must stop." That's definitely something that you can let go of. Now, so dynamics. Another thing that can suffer from being focused on right at the expense of the music. You're so involved in actually doing the thing that the dynamics happen without your thinking, and they might be what you intend, or they might not even be there at all. So you're not focusing on what has to happen in the music, you're just focusing on making things correct. I always say to put those dynamics in at the beginning so that you're practicing those in, and then actually they become part of the rightness of the piece. Which is fitting and proper. Also, I mentioned before when I was talking about flow how kind of keeping track in your head of all the mistakes you're making can actually impede the flow of the piece. Well, it can also cause you to lose your place because once again you're not focusing on the note that comes next or the note that should come next. You're focusing on something that already happened. And that just throws a wrench into the whole progression of the music, the flow, and you can actually lose your place in the music. So those are some things that are definitely impacted by just focusing on being correct and how you might need to let go of the focusing on correctness in order to have those things happen. So perhaps you're recognizing one or more of those as things, places where you maybe could use a little bit of redirection. And so I have a little acronym for you that I want you to consider, and the acronym is not a real positive sounding one, but the word is RUIN. And my idea here is that over-focusing on right can ruin the musicality that you're trying so hard to develop. So here's what RUIN stands for. It's this: right undermines intuition and nuance. I know I'm going to have to explain this, so that's fine. We'll do it one letter at a time. But here's the whole acronym again: RUIN stands for Right, Undermines, Intuition, and Nuance. All right, let's dig in here. And I've already talked a lot about right, and all I need to say, I think, that to add to that is that remember, I'm not talking about right as opposed to wrong. I'm talking about your focus and your degree of focus on right. This is about the difference between working toward right, working toward correct, or prioritizing right over some of the things that are really going to make it music. So it's just a matter of balance, as I said a moment ago. So we'll leave right aside and let's talk about undermining intuition. Realize, give yourself some credit, you've got a lot of musical intuition. That's what brought you to the harp and to music in the first place. So give yourself some credit. Remember that that is there, and then consider that every time you're— when you're practicing, you pull yourself back to make something correct, you're actually working against your intuition. To a certain degree, this is part of what we want to do because we don't want to be the free spirit that doesn't worry at all about wrong notes and doesn't play any right ones. That's not where we want to go. But the fact is that the practice strategies that are effective in so many ways actually undermine our musicality, and they're designed to do that. Think about how we practice slowly, how maybe we practice with an extra full sound or full finger motion. That has nothing to do with the way we want the piece to actually sound. Those are things that allow us to find the right notes at the right time. And perhaps to play them with a really solid technique. It's about learning to get our fingers around those particular strings in that particular timing with that particular rhythm, but it doesn't necessarily make it music. And those very strategies that help us make something correct take us further from the music. As I said, that's what they're supposed to do. We're looking at the nitty-gritty, not the beautiful big picture. That's how we get something right. But when you continually and only work against your musical instincts, it can be damaging in a long-term kind of way, because you have to know how to put that aside and get back to the music. Remember that when we're working and practicing, all of those things are taking something apart, and when we put it back together, it needs to be more than just the right stuff. The right fingers at the right time on the right strings. It needs to be more than that. So that's what we'll talk about in just a second— how to get rid of the, the sense of just making something correct and start using our musical intuition and instinct again. This is your intuition in, uh, in conflict with your trying to inoculate yourself against errors, right? We're trying to make something so secure and perfect, and that's not guaranteeing that it will be musical. All right, so I said right undermines intuition and nuance. Musical nuance, that's the subtlety. That's what makes Music speak. And I'd like to suggest that if you don't feel that your playing is very nuanced, one thing you can do is to stop worrying for a little while. Don't fear, I'm not going to take away your, you know, your safety, your security blanket here. But to put aside for a little while that need to make something absolutely correct and substitute for it the desire to play it with the musical nuance that you want to hear. Remember that nuance doesn't require right. Musical nuance can be something that's planned, and, and, you know, you can plan the end of your phrase, your retard, whatever, so it's beautiful. It can be a happy accident. It can be a magical moment, and none of those things have anything to do with right. I will say that if all the notes are wrong, all the nuance in the world is not going to make it sound good. But consider this idea: in jazz, often people talk about jazz as having no wrong notes. They're all just notes that came out at the moment, and they have their place. If we're not playing jazz, we may feel a little bit differently about that. But remember that if we don't start from the idea of musicality and nuance, then we're so invested in the right notes that those notes may not speak. Learning the notes takes detail work, but what if we thought about the nuance first? What if we thought about the way we want the music to sound before we started digging into the details and checked ourselves continuously as we were going to make sure we weren't losing sight of the way we want the music to sound? One simple way to start turning your mind toward the music as opposed to over-focusing on correctness is from the very first moment you start a piece. Look at that piece before you mark your sections, before you put in fingering or pedals, or even before you've tried to play it, before you analyze chords, before anything. Think about that piece. Maybe you've listened to it, maybe you haven't, but you have an idea of what that piece is. What do you want that piece to say? What are some words that describe how the piece feels, or how it makes you feel, or how you want it to make somebody else feel? What are some words that you could just use to describe the piece without saying, well, it's in A major and it's in 4/4? All that stuff is fine, but that's not what needs to concern us at the end of our time with the piece. We know it's in A major, we know it's in 4/4, but we want it to sound a particular way. We want it to create a particular vision. And maybe it's not something very grand or, or, you know, image-based. I mean, maybe, okay, it's a minuet perhaps, and so it's going to be just graceful and elegant. Okay. That's good enough. And so once you've found some of those words, fill in the blank at the end of this sentence: I want this piece to sound like— blank. There's your blank. How do you want the piece to sound? And write that sentence at the top of your music so that it's always in front of you reminding you what this piece is going to sound like when it grows up? When you're all done working through the notes and the challenges of playing the piece, how is it that you want it to sound besides correct? Because that's not the fun part. All right, so that's a very simple thing to sort of try, but I would like you to consider this too. Think about being right as sort of being in a state of stasis. Right is right. It's like, okay, it's done, the picture is complete, I'm putting it on the wall, there's nothing more that happens with it. But of course music isn't like that. Music is an art of the moment. It's something that communicates in a particular moment in a way that is different from the communication it will make in another moment. We don't want our music to be static. We want it to grow. We want it to breathe. We want it to speak. And in order to do that, in order to make that happen in your music, you need to be prepared to stretch and grow with it, which is going to require you to let go of right, at least for a little while. So when you let go of right, what do you get to hang on to? If you're going to let go of focusing on the mistakes and not making mistakes and getting all those details right, where can you put your focus? And I think that's the hard part for a lot of us because we need to know what else to think about. Well, go for flow. And when I mean go for flow, let's practice playing your piece at a tempo where we can feel the melody move, we can feel the harmony move. It sounds kind of like it's supposed to, even if it's not up to tempo. We're playing past our mistakes, we're creating the arc of the music. Going for flow will require you to let go of always being right. Because we're choosing a different priority. We're choosing to make the music more important than all the little details. Yes, we want all those little details to be part of the music eventually, but if we don't start working at the music, then we only have those details. So this is another thing, another way to practice, another practice objective that will release you from some of those details, meaning you have to let go of needing to be correct all the time so that you can start moving toward the musical flow you want. You could go for phrasing, following the breath of the music, and think about how the music is structured in terms of breathing. You know, what notes go together? If I were singing this, where would it breathe? And playing with that in mind, practicing with that in mind, is going to require you to ignore some of the mistakes, some of the things that don't work right, so that you can find that musical element. Of course, you could always go for speed too, couldn't you? As I mentioned before, trying to get something to go faster is going to mean that you make some mistakes. You can't expect something that goes very well at 60 to the quarter to instantly go very well at 80 to the quarter. You can't kind of ease it on up. That takes very, a very long time. Move that metronome up and be prepared for the mess. Understand you'll get back to right at the, this new tempo, but go for speed. It's a great way to sort of practice letting yourself make mistakes. We hold ourselves back when we hold ourselves in. We hold ourselves back when we're holding ourselves to this standard of needing to have everything correct. We ignore that absolute musical imperative, that idea that we must play the music and find the correct notes as well. But making the music, and in all of its aspects, the priority, is going to release you from getting stuck in right. Remember, right is where the music is. It's more than the notes, it's more than our technique, more than our fingering, more than our investment in following the rules. Right is where the music speaks. It's when the music speaks. It's a whole different way of looking at right. And I hope that you found this discussion helpful. I find this a really hard topic to talk about because it just sounds like I'm lecturing all the time and telling you to be wrong, and that's not at all what I'm telling you to do. But I do know that in trying to get every single detail right before you move on to the music, or before you move on to the next étude, or before you move on to the next part of your piece, isn't serving you well. I want you to be able to play the music that you love and to play it the way that you like. And I know that you would like it to be correct. I want my own music to be correct too. But I know you want it to be more than that. And that's what I hope I've helped you find a new perspective on today. Remember that over-focusing on right is taking you away from the music. We talked about Bruin, right? Right undermines intuition and nuance. Over-focusing on right takes you away from the music. And we want to remember to keep you in the music because that's the part we love. It's a tricky balancing issue, and as I said, it's what makes it hard to talk about. But I hope this was helpful, and I'd love to hear from you if this topic resonated with you or made you think about your own music a little differently. I'd love to hear from you, so shoot me a quick email. You can always reach me at podcast at heartmastery.com. And I, I said I would love to hear your thoughts on this. It's a difficult topic. It's hard to think about. It's very challenging to try to let go of some of the things that you've worked so hard to make correct in order to move forward, but it's so essential. So now next week on the podcast, we're talking about desert island pieces. If you were stranded on a desert island and you had a harp and 3 pieces of music, what would those 3 pieces of music be? I hope you have a tuning key and some spare strings too, but that's beside the point. What would those pieces be? I'll tell you what mine are, I'll tell you why, and I'll help you think about yours and show you how to leverage them. It's sort of an interesting idea. So desert island pieces next week on the podcast. Until then, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time. Enjoyed today's episode? Then share it with a harpist friend, subscribe for your weekly harp happiness boost, and check out harpmastery.com or the Harp Mastery app in your app store for more resources and ways to connect. I'll see you next time.