Winning the War of the Rhythms: How to Master 2 Against 3 - PHH 169

When it comes to two against three, I think the big idea is this. What if you could just feel it? What if you could just see it and play it without overthinking or cringing or holding your breath to see how you come out on the other side? That's really our goal. It's not about playing the rhythm in one particular piece. It's about being able to play that rhythm or others easily and instinctively.

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 place. 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 Miharp 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 and 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.comjoinnow. that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show. Juggling, patting your head and rubbing your tummy. Walking and chewing gum. Coordination challenges come in all levels of difficulty. Playing hands together is another one, but it's one that we harpists eventually get comfortable with. Your right hand does one thing and your left hand does another. For the most part, everything works out until we encounter polyrhythm that is. So what's polyrhythm? Well, the technical definition of polyrhythm is one of those dictionary definitions that causes more confusion than it clears up. According to the New Harvard Dictionary of Music, polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another or. Or as simple manifestations of the same meter. Yeah, I warned you. So in terms that are probably more meaningful to you, two against three is an example of polyrhythm. In a general sense, polyrhythm is two rhythms that don't normally go together and that as a consequence present a rhythmic coordination problem when you try to play them. Interesting sounding, yes. Easy to play, not necessarily so. A group of two notes, as in 2/8 notes that you'd be playing with your right hand playing those at the same time as your left hand plays an eighth note triplet. That's a very common example of what I'm talking about. And these rhythmic challenges crop up everywhere from the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms to Chopin and Debussy to to folk music. So today I'm going to help lower the difficulty factor of these rhythms for you. We'll start with a perspective which may be a different one from the one you're used to. Here's a hint. It's not all about the math. So I'll show you the best ways to practice these rhythms and how I think you shouldn't practice them if these rhythms always stop you in your tracks. We will try to clear the tracks and get you moving today. I want to take a moment right now to celebrate and congratulate some very special people. We have brand new harp Mastery accredited teachers. Harp Mastery accredited teachers are teachers who have taken a course with me to learn my systems for setting my students on the path to harp happiness. They've learned how to work with a student to identify and focus on their students harp playing goals so that their student students make progress faster and enjoy the journey more. I'm very proud of these exceptional harp teachers. We had a day long seminar and worked together to identify what makes their own personal way of teaching the harp unique and impactful for their students. Most of these teachers have been teaching the harp for a long time. I don't have to teach them how to teach the harp. I. I wanted to share our goal setting and progress impacting techniques and that's what they have learned now. They made this investment of time and money in this seminar because it matters to them. Their teaching matters to them. The harp matters to them. Their personal harp happiness matters to them. Their students success matters to them. And that's something to celebrate. So very soon you will find a brand new page on the Harp Mastery website showcasing our accredited teachers. These teachers don't teach in our Harp Mastery programs, but they are ready to teach you. If you are looking for a harp teacher, I urge you to consider our accredited teachers. You'll find their photos, their teaching statements, their contact info on our webpage. And please know that we don't take a referral fee or any kind of compensation for this. Simply, we at Harp Mastery are proud of these teachers and we want them to be able to reach more students. This is one of the ways I'm spreading harp happiness. Also, while you're checking out the Harp Mastery website for that accredited teachers page, take a moment and look at our retreats page under Upcoming Events. We have announced the dates for our February retreat. Now we still have spots open for our October retreat as well and you'll see both of those on on that page. So you can take a look at the October dates, take a look at the February dates and you can hop in. So I will tell you that I expect those February dates to go pretty quickly because they usually do. So hop over there and see what you can do. I would love to have you at either or at both of those retreats with us. The retreats are always very special and it's my chance to get to work in person with so many of the people that I see only online during the year. Maybe in our My Heart Mastery calls or on a live Monday warmup, whatever it is. I see you and I see you through the computer, but I'd love to see you and work with you in person. And so that's what the retreats are for. So please do check out those dates and see if you can join us for as I said, either or who knows, maybe both of those retreats.

When it comes to two against three, I think the big idea is this. What if you could just feel it? What if you could just see it and play it without overthinking? Or cringing or holding your breath to see how you come out on the other side. That's really our goal. It's not about playing the rhythm in one particular piece. It's about being able to play that rhythm or others easily and instinctively. That's why I said this is a different perspective and it's not about the math. Well, it is, but only partly. It's about combining three different approaches so that you learn not just that particular rhythm, that particular polyrhythm, but so that you learn to trust your fingers and your innate musicianship to just play it. See what I mean about a different perspective? Okay, here we go. The three approaches are these. First is the mathematical understanding. Okay, we have to have to deal with the math here. So the mathematical is understanding how those two rhythms actually combine. When you're thinking about the very smallest subdivision and where they meet, it's all about. Okay, you ready for your math term? It's all about the least common multiple. Don't know if you remember that from your elementary school math, but the idea is that if you have a group of two and you have a group of three, they don't match very nicely together. That's the whole point of a polyrhythm. But if you think of a bigger group of six, then you could divide it into two, where you have a group that goes 1, 2, 3, and then a second group that goes 4, 5, 6. You can take those same six things and divide them into groups of two. So there'd be three groups of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So we'll talk about this more in a moment, but that's the idea. Where the three and the two meet is in the number six. So that you could take those six counts and figure out exactly where the one and the two should be or where the one, two and three should be. It's a very intellectual approach.

Second is a physical approach. This is really about how to feel it, and it's about the physical things that your hands have to do in order to create these polyrhythms, the. The two different rhythms that match. So what we want to do in this, it's a sort of a eurythmic style approach. If you've ever heard about eurythmics, it was a system, not the. Not the pop group, but Eurythmics was a system developed by Jacques Dalcroz in the early part, very early part of the 20th century. And it was about teaching rhythm and, in fact, all of musicality through movement. And this was whole body movement. Which we can use to help us understand polyrhythms. So I'm not talking about eurythmic specifically, but I am talking about using your body and your physicality to help you put more complicated rhythm patterns together. So there's the physical and then there's the musical approach, where it's not about the numbers and it's not just about the motion, but it's about the beat. It's about how the beat flows in the music. When we listen to music, we understand it because it has a beat. Sometimes with music that actually doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't have a meter, that's part of our experience of the music, too. But most of the time, music is about the beat. If it weren't, we wouldn't be able to call rap music music. Right? Because that's primarily what it has, the beat. So the beat is how we relate, and it is part of us. We have a heartbeat, right? So the beat is there. And when we understand the beat, the pulse of the music, then we can approach a polyrhythm from how those different combinations of notes, whether it's a group of two or three or four or five or 17, how that fits into the beat. And we can use that as a framework. So we have the mathematical, the physical and the musical. You might want to think of them as the head, the hands and the heart. The mathematical being, the very intellectual head approach, the physical being, the hands and how things move and how we physically manage this. And then the musical being about the heart, about the heartbeat, about the idea that the music has its flow and we're just fitting into it. Three approaches to one rhythmic problem. Now, polyrhythm comes in all different kinds of numerical forms. We're talking mostly about two against three here, here, because the two and three counter rhythm is what we encounter most often. But you might see three against four, you might see five against three. You might see any number of, you know, different rhythmic conflicts like that. And these approaches work for all of them. That's the whole point of what I want to help you with today. This is an approach or a combination of approaches that's going to work across the board, doesn't just work for two against three. So you can think about our head, hands and heart approach as we talk about two against three, remembering that it's going to apply to everything. So we're going to start with a musical example, and I've chosen one that is pretty common as far as musical literature goes. It's Debussy's First Arabesque, a piano piece that's often played on harp. You might know it if you are of a certain age. This is the piece of music that was used as the theme song to the old PBS series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So if it sounds familiar and you're not sure why that perhaps is it, it's a very familiar piece, and it presents us with lots of opportunity to talk about two against three. So here's just an excerpt of First Arabesque.

The interesting thing about this piece, or any piece like it with that kind of a polyrhythm in it, is that as tricky as it can be to practice and as hard as it can be to learn to play well, when you finally get it right and you can play, doesn't even sound that complicated. And that's part of what I'm talking about, the overall sense of going together that happens when you do these polyrhythms, right. You don't notice them. They just become a more intricate part of the musical fabric. So that's kind of where I think the mathematical approach goes wrong. Don't get me wrong. The mathematical approach is a great place to start because you want to know what's actually there. But in the mathematical approach, what we're going to say is, all right, in this particular piece, the right hand is playing the group of three, the left hand is playing the group of two. So if we use our least common multiple approach, we're going to say, well, three is, you know, three times two is six. Simple math. Okay, let's do it the easy way. So three times two is six. So if we had six, let's imagine six 16th notes in a group. Then if we want to play three notes distributed evenly among those 6, 16, we're going to play on the first of those six notes, on the third of those six notes, and on the fifth of those six notes. So our group of three is going to be played on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Makes sense, right? We now have three equal groups that have two 16th notes in them each. 1, 2, 3, 4th, 5, 6. And we can take the same 6, 16, and we can say, all right, if we're going to use a group of two, as our left hand is in this example, we're going to have that play on the first of those 6, 16, and the fourth of those six sixteenths. Because now we have two groups, two equal groups that have three sixteenth notes in them, each. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So that leaves us with the right hand playing 1, 2, 3, 4th, 5, 6, and the left hand playing 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6. And you can make little hash marks, little numbers, little charts, and you can say, all right, this is what's happening. So my right hand is going to play 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. My left hand's playing 1, 2, 3, 4,. 5, 6. It's completely correct and very precise. It also is miles away from the music. If you're taking that approach and start there, I mean, it's a good thing. I'm not saying not to do this, but this is what you end up with. And this may have been your sticking point with this kind of polyrhythm. So you are taking 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4,. 5, 6. And you're trying to put it with these notes in the left hand. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, four, five, six. One. 1, 2, 3, Four, five, six. 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6. One. It doesn't much sound like first arabesque. And of course, when you add in any struggles you have with fingering or notes, it makes it even a little more complicated. But once you get the notes lined up exactly right like this, then in theory, the idea would be that you could just speed it up. The. The problem is that it gets harder and harder to speed up the counting that lines the notes up that way. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. It's really difficult to finally get to the music. At some point you have to let go of the numbers. Sounds right, but what else do you do? Aha. This is where sometimes a macro level physical understanding of a polyrhythm like this is helpful. One traditional way to do this is to do it with a combination of walking and clapping, where perhaps you walk on the two subdivisions of the beat. So you're going to walk on 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Using those steps, right? Right, 3, 4, 5, six. Right, 2, 3. Left, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, four, five, six. And combine that with your clapping. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, Four, five, six. Just get the feel for how that happens. I also suggest that with this kind of an approach, you put on a metronome on the big beat so that you start feeling how each one of those physical things lines up with the big beat. So you put your metronome on. Click, click, click, click. And then you have to walk in 2, 1 and 2 and 1 and 2, and. And get that going. Your metronome's going. And you're walking. And then try to add the triplet on top of it. The clapping, that's going to be this way, a one, two.

And fit that in. Yes, it's going to be awkward, but it's going to start showing you how these motions, the walking and the clapping, will become automatic and can both fit with the beat. It also is great because it takes away the idea of notes and fingering. Now, if you don't feel like walking around and clapping, another way to do this is to take your left hand on your left leg and your right hand on your right leg, put that metronome on and have your left hand do its rhythm. Maybe in this case, those eighth notes. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 and 3. And get your right hand doing the other rhythm. I suggest that you start with the. With the metronome and just do one hand and line that one up. Do the other hand and line that up.

And then you can use your mathematical approach again and put them together. 1, 2 and 3. 1, 2 and 3. Which is a nice way, by the way, to count the two against three. Polyrhythm. Because if you have three subdivisions of the beat on one and three and five, your other. Your other rhythm is playing on one and four. So the three, four, five can be like a two and a. So you can count one and. Or 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And then your other one's going to fit on the. And right between the two and the three. So 1, 2 and 3. 1, 2 and 3, where both hands are going to tap or clap on 1, 2 and 3, both together. Right, together, 2 and 3. 1, 2 and 3. It's hard to demonstrate this without the visual, so I'm just going to skim over it. We'll do a more in depth lesson another time. But that's how these line up. But to stop thinking of the 1, 2 and 3 and start thinking of the macro beat and is where that physical approach starts to say that this is the big beat, right? One, one. This is how this fits into that. This is how this fits into that. And now I'm just going to do them together, realizing that they line up on the big beat. When the metronome is clicking, they're going to line up, and other than that, they don't. And just fit them in sort of holistically, if you like. It's a different way to look at it. Once again, this takes it away from the harp. So you're not worrying about your fingering, your technique, the strings, the pedals, the levers, whatever. So it's a nice way to look at that, but at some point we have to bring it back to the harp. And hopefully these combination of approaches has given you a little bit of a foundation. But now we want to make it sound a little bit more like music. So I suggest that you think about the beat. Make sure that each hand fits with the metronome on its own. And you're going to say, yeah, I already did that. Yeah, this is a good time to check it, because you want both hands to easily play at that speed. And don't make the speed too slow. Remember that whatever tempo you're using.

Is. It's best if you get the coordination as close to that goal tempo as possible. At a very slow tempo, you won't be able to feel the beat. It's harder, slower, it's easier, faster. So work at that hand separately, as close to your goal tempo as you reasonably can. Something that begins to sound like a flow, you. You can't do this part very slowly. Not like you can count the math slowly. That has to be slow. This needs to be more musical, so it needs to be closer to what the piece is actually like. From this point, I use a practice technique that I know most of my students haven't used before. When I start working with them and it's like, okay, this is how we're going to get from where we are are to where we want to be. You understand how the rhythms go together. We've got the math down. You've got a basic understanding of how two and three, in this case anyway, work together, and you've got your hands playing their own rhythms properly. Now we have to put it together, and here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start with one hand. Often I start with the left hand because it's going to be our rhythmic foundation depends on the piece. But in first arabesque, this works. We're going to start with the left hand and take just a measure or two and have the left hand work nicely with the metronome. You have to use the metronome for this because it's going to make sure that you're keeping the beat exactly steady. So get the left hand going and just sort of put it on. On an imaginary loop, right, where you're going over and over that measure. It doesn't have to absolutely connect, but it's a great idea. So then we're going to get the right hand and we're going to add that In. So for first arabesque, it might go something like this.

I'm going to get my left hand pattern going. I'm not going to put the metronome on for this just to demonstrate, but you're going to practice with the metronome. So.

You'Re going to get your left hand going. I'm going to do that same measure again.

Now my right hand has to play the triplets on top of this. So we're going to bring in the right hand and see how it works. And.

Maybe it doesn't work at all. It's okay.

Let's see if we can get one beat in there. So one.

And then maybe it falls apart after that. That's okay. See if you can get any of it working together. Don't overstress. Just a little bit of this. Practice goes a long way. Now I suggested one measure as a place to use this technique. In first arabesque, it would actually be a good idea to use a two measure grouping so that you're playing measures six and seven and working on those in this particular way. That would be a good idea for this piece. But. But for your piece you might want a different, different size chunk. But here's what we're going to do next. A little further on in the piece, there are a few measures, a couple of measures that have the rhythms mostly lined up, but there's a right hand triplet at the end of the measure. And this is a very common sort of pattern. This might be more like what you're seeing in the piece of music you're working on. And so here's what I do for this one. And I'd be doing this in first arabesque. I do this when I teach it. So you can play everything in these two measures except for the triplet. So we're going to play the entire left hand which is playing these eighth notes.

And we're going to play most of the right hand. The right hand has a quarter note, a half note and then a triplet.

And we're just not going to play the triplet. We'll play the first note of the triplet and we'll ignore the rest so that we can get those measures mostly lined up. Once again, we're aiming for the music, not just the rhythm, just a single right hand note here.

And we'll make sure that that lines up properly. Now what we're going to do, we've played the whole measure and we've ignored or those whole two measures and ignored the triplet. Now what we're going to do is play all of the right hand, but when we get to the beat with the triplet, we're going to leave out the left hand this way.

What this does is allow you to play the triplet nice and evenly without worrying about it lining up with the left hand. So this will give you a sense of the melodic flow. You'll be able to keep the melody together, but ignore the problem with the left hand. Now, if you can get both of these approaches here going and working well, the one where you're dropping out the right hand triplet, but keeping the left hand steady, and the one where you're dropping out the left hand, but keeping that right hand triplet in there and nice and smooth, and then you can start playing both hands together. Don't go back to that 1, 2 and 3 mathematical approach. Let your hands do what you've trained them to do and see if you can just line it up. It's an experiment, and you can always go back to working it with that 1, 2 and 3, 1, 2 and 3 approach. But this will help you line it up and in a musical way, at the right tempo, or at least as close to the right tempo as you can get. The truly significant difference between the mathematical approach and the musical approach is in two factors, what you choose to control and what you choose to trust. In the mathematical model, you're controlling the hands, telling them exactly where to play at any given moment, or 1, 2 and 3, left, left, right, left, both left, right, left. Whatever it happens to be, that's what you're controlling. And you're trusting your fingers to play when you tell them to play. In my opinion, this is kind of micromanagement. Compare that to the musical model. In the musical model, you're choosing to control the flow of the music through focusing on the pulse, the beat, and you're trusting your fingers to fill in that beat with whatever rhythm they have to play. After all, you've practiced that rhythm. Your fingers should know what they're doing. And when you let go of the micromanagement, when you stop worrying about how the hands line up, when you let go of that need to control every finger, you free up your hands to do what you've trained them to do, and you can focus on the music, on the flow of the music. After all, this is why you practice your scales and arpeggios in different rhythmic patterns and with the metronome, so that your fingers can play without your constant attention. And this is when that training proves its value of Course, don't ignore the physical approach either. A drill, like I described earlier, a walking while clapping drill. You're walking one rhythm and clapping the other can be very fun and very instructive. And that can really help you sort of understand at a different, at a different level, with different senses what these polyrhythms are all about. So I highly recommend that as well. But when you encounter one of these two against three rhythms or some other polyrhythm, I suggest you break it down, look at that mathematical component, right? What is that least common multiple, so that you can understand where things are going to fall. And it gives you a way to slowly practice and see what is really there. But then as soon as you can start working in those big beats, in the way I described with first arabesque, where you're doing all of one hand and dropping out the other when the polyrhythm comes in and then switching so that you get used to the flow of the music, working in those big beats will give you more facility and a more musical perspective. One final thought. Remember, the reason we hear these polyrhythm figures as interesting is because we hear the crunchiness, we hear the contrast and the conflict between those two rhythms. And they blend in a way that's specific to that particular piece, whether it's just an organization, ornate, bubbly, sort of froth, or perhaps it's a little bit more urgent and passionate in a different piece. But that's part of the musical fabric. And really, you can only get that sense of that musical fabric when you're feeling the big beats. Now, I'd love to spend a lot more time talking about this and talking about it really in depth, something that goes beyond the scope of this podcast. But I hope what we talked about today gives you some different insights. Some insights and perhaps a different approach to how you practice these, how you think about them, and hopefully they'll stop being quite so scary when you encounter them. Next week on the show, we're going to be talking about performing and nerves. I'm going to be sharing some of the things I shared about performing on one of the recent live Monday warmups. And I'm going to expand on those thoughts a little bit. And so we'll be talking about the performance shakes and what they're really all about and what performing is really all about, and how to get around those and play. Anyway, so that's next week on the podcast. Don't forget to check out the retreats page and plan to join us at one of our retreats either in October or February. In the meantime, remember, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, you 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 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.