Why Harpist Beginners Need Bach Too - PHH 179

There's melody, there's harmony, there's flow. Every aspect of beautiful music is to be found in the music of Bach. Remember that. It's not all about technique. It's not all about too many notes. Bach never intended his music to be just about the notes, and your study of it shouldn't be either.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every har 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 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. A little While back, I did a podcast episode about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and why I believe studying and playing his music is so important for harpists. If you want to go back and listen to that episode, it is episode 154. 154 and I will put a link to that episode in the show notes.

Well, understandably, after that podcast aired, I was asked why I was emphasizing the music of Bach, who didn't write anything that we know of for harp when there are brilliant harp composers whose music we could study. I agree that studying music written for the harp is important for every harpist, but the music of Bach has been considered foundational for generations of music students, and it's no less important for us harpists. In fact, it is precisely because Bach didn't write for harp that we need to be extra intentional about including his music in our studies. There is a drawback, however. The difficulty factor of much of his music makes it inaccessible to beginning harp students. And beginning students, particularly adult beginners, could benefit so much from studying his music. So today I have three goals. First, I'll show you what you can learn, even as a beginner harpist, from Bach's music, and I'll demonstrate how you can learn it. Second, I'll share a practice page, a study sheet that you can use as a warm up or for more practice on this kind of material. And most importantly, in the course of our time together today, I want to help you connect with the beauty in Bach's music. Even though he never wrote anything for harp, he surely did write music that is beautiful, even transcendent, when it's played on the harp. Now, whether you're a beginner or not, there are so many things that we can do to increase our harp skill set. Whether it's building technique or building musicianship skills like sight reading or memorizing, there are so many things that we need to do and it's really hard to stay on top of all of them. And that's why at Harp Mastery, we try to offer you lots of different ways to keep building that skill set, and many of them are ones you can access for free right in the app. Now you might have heard, I hope you have that. We now have a Harp Mastery app that's available for iPhone and iPad and you can download that app right from your app store and have access to all these things. One of the resources that you'll see as soon as you download the app is you'll see our live Monday warmups every Monday morning, or almost every Monday morning I go live in our community, our free community, the Heart Mastery Hub, which you can access right from the app as well. But you can join us for these live Monday warmups. They're free. We go for about 45 minutes and I walk you through an aspect of technique mostly, but could be musicianship some days as well. And it's a great way to keep your experience points growing, to make sure that you're not just doing the same kind of thing, but you're really stretching yourself and learning more about the harp. And it's easy to join right from the Harp Mastery Hub and you can be right in the app and do that. Also in the app we have, usually twice a week we have practice labs. We these are also free and they're sort of like study halls. There's no learning that happens here, but it's a way for you to practice alongside other people who were doing their own practice. So it's actually a silent call, just the way study hall is silent. And we meet together and we do our practice together. So you don't hear anything, you don't learn anything new, but you get that approach. Appointment to do your practice. So many people have told me that they love having the practice labs because they know that that's a dedicated time that they're going to be able to practice and they know that there's that little edge of accountability. Right. Other people are on that call and, you know, you just sort of practice a little bit differently when you know that everybody that is there doing it with you and everybody is there to focus on their heart playing. So those are just two of the free resources. You'll also be able to access our new seminar series. Each month we have a new course focus. And these are the same courses that I teach in the my Harp Mastery membership. I teach them along with my certified coaches. And these are our weekly live calls that happen on Monday evenings. Now, if you can't join us live on Monday evening, that's no problem. There are always the replays and we make those available to you. But the seminar series is a way to get the experience of those courses that are so in depth and so helpful on different aspects of harp playing without the. The whole monthly membership. So the monthly membership has much more. Of course, it's got the library of courses and the library of featured pieces. It's got the scale of success, it sounding board. So it has many other benefits of membership and we'd love to have you there. But the seminar series is a nice kind of way to at least test the waters and see what that's all about. And so it comes with the calls and the PDFs that go along with that and you get to learn right alongside our My Heart Mastery members on those Monday night calls. So check out the app, take a look and see what you can find there that will be just right to help you keep growing and building your own harp happiness. I've put a link to the Harp Mastery app in the App Store right in the Show Notes for this episode. So there's a single click if you would like to use that link. And also of course, in the Show Notes for today, you're going to find a link to the last podcast that I did on Bach. It was called three Bach Pieces Every Harpist Should Know and why. And I've linked to that in the Show Notes and and you'll also find the link to download your free Bach Study Sheet PDF, which I will talk about just a little bit later. But you'll be able to use that link in the Show Notes to download that as well. So maybe we need to start talking about why Bach would be so good for beginners. Let's face it, if you pick up any piece of music written by Bach and you check it out, maybe everything except that famous minuet in G. Oh, by the way, that minuet in G wasn't really written by Bach, but that's a different story for a different time. So if you pick up that music piece of music by Bach and you look at it, it can look very daunting. It doesn't look like beginner music and it isn't right. There are lots of notes, lots of complicated, fast notes sometimes, or fast looking notes anyway. And then it's got lots of accidentals. The accidentals can be really very frightening, but that's not what we have to do. And I think there's so much, much to learn if we can get past those notes on the page and look at what's really there and look at some pieces of his that aren't quite so complicated. We can really learn so much and I think it's so helpful for beginners. Now, I'm not talking about raw beginners where you're really just starting to figure out how your fingers work on the strings. But just a little bit beyond that, there are things you can learn from this music that will not only speed your learning process for learning the harp and speed along your music reading skills and your rhythm skills, but it's also going to help teach you how to approach music that Looks more complex, because although much of Bach's music is very complex, the things that we're going to look at really aren't that complicated. And once you learn how to break them down into manageable pieces and how to work with the things that are there, they start becoming a lot less frightening. And so to help you think about this in a less threatening, less frightening, friendlier, perhaps kind of manner, I've created a little acronym. You know, an acronym is where those letters spell stuff out, right? So if we take the letters of Bach's name, Bach, I want you to think about those four letters as these four skills that you can really develop when you look at his music. B would be for the basics. We're going to be looking at how to develop your reading skills. The A is for agility. Well, that makes sense, right? This is a great way to help your fingers find these new patterns and work their way around the strings in ways that go beyond straight up and down scales. It's great for coordination, developing your hands together skills, that's not a surprise either, Right? But I'll show you how to work on that. And then the H is great for developing your hearing. Now, this is one of these areas that I think we overlook so much. And it's not just harpists, I think it's musicians in general and music students. We get so involved in the doing and having to get something right, having to get the fingers in the right place at the right time, that we forget that music is really all about what we hear. It's not just about what we do or what we see, but it's about what we hear. And Bach's music.

Has become sort of this common musical vocabulary where this development of Western art music, which is another name for classical music, that this Western art music has developed from that vocabulary that is so clear in Bach's music. Now, he didn't invent it, but he just used the same materials that other composers of his time were using. You know, composers like Telemann or Vivaldi, all great composers. But there's something about the way Bach used those chords and used the melodic materials that just became a standard. And. And it did serve as sort of the jumping off point for composers that came after him. So I want you to think about what you can hear in this music. You can learn sort of the musical idiom so that you can start to anticipate what might come next, what chord might come next, what accidental might come next, and you can anticipate key changes, all kinds of things. This allows you, of course, to be a better sight reader. Right. You're going to learn faster, you're going to understand things a little bit more. And of course, it's a key to secure memorizing as well. But you don't have to get into all the intricacies of music theory to do this. Just making sense of what is on the page, looking at what's there and listening to how it sounds is very educational. So those are the four things that I think beginners certainly, but all of us can learn from Bach's music. We can think about working on our basics, like our reading skills and our technique. We can work at our finger agility. There's the A, C is for coordination, particularly with hands together skills, and H is for hearing. So that's what we want to work on. Let's talk about how to work on it with this music, especially when all this music looks so difficult. Well, when the notes to something look difficult, that is your clue that this is a great exercise for you to work on your note reading. And for Bach's music, I suggest that you look up, you can just google it if you like, or look through a hymnal. Look for hymns by Bach. Now, I have to say that most of the hymns or chorales that we think of as Bach's music weren't written by him. Most of the hymns that we associate with him were ones that he provided the setting for. Let me just be sure you're clear on those terms. The melody to the hymn, some of these are very, very old. Some of them we don't know who wrote them. Some of them we have melodies from other composers, like Johann Kruger is one of the famous ones, or Hans Leo Hassler. Hassler wrote or is credited with writing the melody for the hymn that we know as O Sacred Head Now Wounded. So that's this melody that's there. But what Bach did was take those melodies and then put his own chords to them, put his own voice parts to them to make it sound a little bit different. In essence, he arranged the hymn tune and that's called a setting. So he arranged these hymn tunes. And what scholars talk about when they talk about Bach's chorale settings or hymn settings is they talk about how interesting all the voice parts are. Remember, these would have been written in four voice. Soprano as the highest, then alto, then tenor and bass. And mostly these were sung by choir boys and then male voices for the tenor and bass. So this was church music for church choir. And these four voice parts were the way the hymn was sung. So soprano had the melody, and that mostly didn't change. You know, Bach might have tweaked a note here or there, but mostly he was sticking with a melody that his congregation already knew. But then we find the real genius of Bach because the other voice parts, the alto, the tenor and the bass, are usually much more interesting. And that would be much more challenging for the choir to sing than some of the other earlier arrangements. They have more complex chords, they have more moving lines. If you've ever sung in a choir, you know that often those middle voice parts, like the, the tenor and particularly the alto, they kind of tend to stick around one note a lot. Ba, ba ba ba ba ba ba. You know, it's a celebration when the altos get to sing another note. Not so in Bach settings, these voice parts are much more interesting. They're, you know, I don't think you could call the alto line exactly athletic. It moves around more. And so all these voice parts create more interesting harmonies to, to go with the melody. So how do you develop your note reading skills from this? Well, open a hymn book, get a hymn from online and take a look at it. Now, the notation is the first thing we need to decipher. Remember that in the treble clef, you're going to have the soprano and alto parts. The soprano are the higher notes, alto are the lower. And almost always you'll see the soprano notes indicated with the stems going up, the alto notes indicated with the stems going down. Bass clef, you'll see the tenor and bass parts. Once again, the tenor is the higher part. So the tenor notes will be having their stems going up, the bass notes have their stems going down. And it's very helpful to learn to read these voice parts. It comes into play if you decide you're going to play along with the organ and accompany the congregation singing a hymn. If you can read the tenor part, you've got a really nice little descanth that you can play. So this is a useful skill. So get that, that hymnal or that copy of a chorale in front of you and take a look first of all at the soprano line. Read those notes through. I mean, say the names of the notes, okay? A, B, C, say them through. Make sure you can identify them. And it's good sight reading practice or note reading practice to be sure that you're keeping a nice steady beat. So you can just set a steady beat for yourself and sort of tap that beat. Or you can put a metronome on and say those names of just the soprano Line in rhythm, say the names of those notes in rhythm, and then when you're ready, go ahead and play them. If there's a spot that has too many accidentals and you're not comfortable playing them, then just don't play those measures. That's okay. Play as much of it as you can. Then I would go back and I'd look at the bass line for that same section. So you're going to go down to the bass clef and you're going to look at the lowest notes and practice saying those notes. And then when you can say them, play them through, play them and say them at the same time once again, keeping that steady pulse. Then you can do the same with the alto line, the same with the tenor line, and you're practicing reading those notes once again. If the accidentals get too much for you, then just skip that and stick to a small chunk. Even two or four measures is terrific for practice like this. Then level up your note reading skills by choosing one of those lines to play and another one to say. So, for instance, maybe you'll play the soprano line while you're saying the names of the notes of the alto. This is wonderful reading practice. And what you can do with the chorale is you can use every voice part in combination with every other. So even from just a couple of measures of the chorale, you'll have lots of practice that will help you with your note reading. Now, I have included a chorale on that study sheet that you can download. It's not a Bach arrangement of a chorale, it's a chorale he did arrange. But the chorale itself is by Johann Kruger. It's now, thank we all, our God. And I've done my own arrangement of it for you rather than use the Bach arrangement. I know we're talking about Bach, but I didn't want you to be so intimidated by the notes that you didn't try this system. So I have really simplified the chorale for you. There are no accidentals whatever, so you have no excuse not to try this. So when you download that study sheet, you can use these techniques. And I've written them all right on the page for you, and you can try them out with this really simple chorale. And then you can look at some of the really ultra beautiful Bach settings that are just so beautiful and granted, a little bit more challenging, but you'll have the skills that you need to work on that. So that's where I would start for developing my note reading skills with those hymns or chorales. Once you've decided, you can Play one line and say another. Why not play two lines at once? Play one of the treble clef lines with your right hand, one of the bass clef lines with your left hand, and switch that up as well. Do bass and soprano, do bass and alto, do tenor and soprano and tenor and alto, and then maybe play tenor and bass or soprano and alto. But this is also developing some hands together skills, hands together sight reading skills, which are so important obviously to develop. And so you can get a lot of mileage from just one of these pieces. And then as you do that, go ahead and listen to how those voice parts work together even better. Take those same two measures once you've done all this work and play through them. See how much you can actually play of all four notes and play the entire little section that you've been working on. Listen to those chords and the way they progress. Listen to those harmonies. Identify the chords if you can. There's so much value here. So hopefully you're beginning to get the idea why I think Bach can be ideal for beginners or indeed for harpists to learn at any stage. But we're not done yet. Those fast notes that you see in other pieces by Bach that just look so scary, those are pieces that we can use to help develop our finger agility and the independence of our hands as well. Of course, these are skills that pianists and harpsichordists and organists also need to develop. So Bach wrote pieces that were designed to, to do that. And the pieces that I'm talking about right now are the inventions. There are two part inventions, there are three part inventions. But let's stick with the two part inventions. If you look at the chorales, you see these voice parts that are pretty much all moving along at the same time. There's not a lot of rhythmic variation between the parts. But these inventions look like somebody took one melody and then they took another melody that was pretty much the same and they just kind of put them together almost like it was a cannon or a round, but there's a little bit of difference. But it doesn't look like chords, it looks like running passages. Things with figuration, exactly the kinds of things that we need to train our fingers to play. Now, some of Bach's two part inventions and little preludes have been transcribed for the harp and are made so that they're not quite as difficult. And of course, when they're transcribed for harp, then you have all the harp fingerings, which are so helpful because of course, the keyboard fingerings are no good for us at All. But if you don't have one of those, you can download from online, download some of these two part inventions or some of the short preludes, and you'll be able to find those easily and then white out all the piano fingering. And then do the same thing you would do with a Bach chorale. Take a very small section of it, two measures, four measures. Something where you don't have a lot of accidentals. You're going to have to deal with a lot of 16th notes. I mean, there are small note values here, but you don't have to play them fast. That's not our primary objective. I have two objectives. Our primary objective for this is to help you learn to get your fingers around these patterns and perhaps to do it without even writing and fingering. Now, my other objective for you with this is that I just want you not to be afraid of all those little black dots on the page. Just because there are a lot of notes on the page doesn't mean that they're going to be impossible for you to play. And this is how we'll figure it out. So you're going to take a couple measures of one of those two part inventions. Number one is nice. Number eight is nice. Number four, I think you might like. I mean, there are lots of them, right? And just look at the right hand for the first couple measures. Once again, pay no attention to the piano fingering. If that's what you're looking at, just see how you might play it. The fingering itself isn't terribly important, except that you want a fingering that feels comfortable in your hand and feels fairly connected. This is not something that you want to play, just all with your second finger. You want to sort of figure out a fingering that works. Don't worry about the ultimate fingering, just something that you can play. And if you want to write that fingering in, go ahead and do it. I will tell you that the more you do this kind of practice, the less fingering you'll have to write in, the smarter your fingers will get, and they'll do it on their own. But go ahead and look at that right hand part. Say the notes. We're going to go back to note reading again. Say the notes, say, and play the notes and. And then go ahead and play it and see what you can do. Then do the same with the left hand for those same few measures. Usually one hand starts before the other. Often the right hand will start before the left hand in one of these inventions. So that's okay. Pick a few Left hand measures that would go with those right hand measures and learn those do exactly the same thing. So now you're getting some bass clef reading in as well. I know some people fall behind on their bass clef reading, so this is a great way to do that and get your left hand moving on that part. And then it's time to think about putting these hands together. You can do it just one measure at a time. You can work backwards through a measure to do that. But once again, you can use some of those techniques that we used with the chorale where you play one hand like play the right hand and say the names of the left hand. It's not easy, but it's really a very good way to ease into hands together. It can also be very instructive to take the right hand line and play it with the right hand and the left hand play the same part with your hands an octave apart. And have your left hand learn the right hand part as well. And then have your right hand learn the left hand part and play that hands together. That can be very helpful. So on that study sheet that you can download, I've taken just a few measures from one of the two part inventions. I have fingered them for harp. There are no pedal or lever changes. I've taken care of those. And so just in, you know, seven or eight measures, you get what feels sort of like an entire piece. It's not, it's about, I don't know, a quarter of it or so, but it's still, it's still listenable and it's playable and it will sound nice when you get the hands together. And I've included some directions for practicing so you can try this. But remember, this is going to work at your note reading, your rhythm skills for sure. And it's all about agility for each of your hands individually and the coordination of your hands together. And to go back to what I said before, if working in some of this music in these manageable chunks of just even just a couple measures, if that helps you become more accustomed to reading things with lots of notes on the page and not being so afraid of them, then I've done a really good thing for you today. Remember, the number of notes is not the problem. What makes music like this difficult is you're not knowing how to make sense of them or how to practice them. And that's why I've given you these ideas today and written out some more complete directions on the study sheet that you can download. But that's the idea. Don't let those notes worry you. And then there's one more thing that I'd like you to do. When you're playing this music, remember that it's not meant to be just a technical exercise. Remember to listen for the beauty that's beyond the complexity. Bach's music just isn't about the math or the formulas. There's melody, there's harmony, there's flow. Every aspect of beautiful music is to be found in the music of Bach. Remember that it's not all about technique. It's not all about too many notes. Bach never intended his music to be just about the notes, and your study of it shouldn't be either. I hope today's talk has inspired you to look at some music of Johann Sebastian Bach and to include it in your harp studies. No matter what level of study you are at right now, I encourage you to download the study sheet that I have linked to in the Show Notes here. And of course, if you don't find the show notes in your podcast app, just head over to Harp Mastery and go to the podcast. This is episode 179, and you'll see it right there on the podcast page and you'll find the link right there in the Show Notes for the episode on the page. So that's easy to find. I just want you to try this and to experience it, because if you don't, I think you're missing out on something. So I hope this has helped you with that. Next week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about practicing for perfection versus practicing for recoverability. I know that's not a real word. I just made that one up, recoverability. But maybe it's worth something in Scrabble, I don't know. But at any rate, that's what I want you to think about as we go into next week's episode. We're going to be talking about where you prepare for mistakes, how you prepare for mistakes, and whether you can really eliminate them or not. And if you can or can't, is it really the smartest thing to do? So, perfection versus recoverability on next week's podcast. Now, as we go out of today's podcast, I'm going to mix things up just a little bit and share with you a recording I did of one of Bach's beautiful songs called Bist du Baimir, if you are with me. And that is just a beautiful, beautiful melody and a simple recording that I did just the other day, and I want to share that with you. But as you listen to it, please 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 hope you enjoy this little bit of Bist Dubai mirror there.

Sam.

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Sam.