Working From Both Sides: Arpeggio Skills in Context - PHH 195

It's not just about working at technique, it's also about understanding what your technique needs to bring to the music so that the music sounds right. So as we're working on technique, we're working on it in a very specific way to serve that piece of music. What needs to happen? That's the emphasis we're looking for.

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 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.com join-now that's harpmastery.com join now welcome to the show. When I was a kid, even before I had started harp lessons, I used to go to summer camp in the mountains. I grew up in the Philadelphia area, of course, and the closest mountains to us are the Pocono Mountains. These aren't mountains by Rocky Mountain standards for sure. Not nearly as high peaked or impressive, but they are beautifully wooded and green, with lots of rivers and lakes. In order to get to summer camp, we had to drive through the Lehigh Tunnel, which fascinated me. Driving through an actual mountain was a little scary. Of course, the scariness was part of why it was my favorite part of the trip. Tunnels are truly an engineering miracle, in my opinion, especially considering that tunnels can be drilled from both sides to meet, assuming the calculations are correct, in the middle. The earliest known example of a tunnel that was dug from both sides is the tunnel of Eupolinos in the Greek Isles, and it was constructed in the 6th century BCE with pickaxes, chisels, hammers, shovels. Two teams dug through Mount Castro from both sides and managed to meet in the middle. Now, the tunnel has some zigs and zags, but the fact that they actually met and broke through is. Is a testament to their engineering prowess. So why is this relevant for us today? Because we're going to approach the technical requirements of our music from the other side of the mountain. I know you've heard me talk about the importance of doing your technique work daily. And naturally, our pieces require our technique to be used in very specific ways. So these are the two sides of our mountain. Ongoing technical development on one side and piece, specific technical demands on the other side. And we want them to meet in the middle, which is where the music is. So today we're going to focus on arpeggios and three different ways arpeggios are used in our music. These aren't the only ways arpeggios are used, of course, but these are common enough that they're worth our time and attention. So we'll look at these particular technique and how to meet them from both sides, with exercises that will help you build the necessary skill and with the understanding of the underlying principles that will help you develop your technique for that particular musical instance. So it's all about skills in context today. Since we're talking about arpeggios today, it seems an appropriate moment to mention our February seminar series, which is called Just Scales and Arpeggios Too. And it's a look at fundamental drills. Scales and arpeggios can be used to develop your technique in four important ways. It's going to develop your technique for evenness. Nice, even fingers for rhythmic precision. Yeah, we want those fingers to play at exactly the right time. For speed. Well, who doesn't want to be able to play faster, right? And for flexibility, as in agility and all that goes with that. So that's our seminar series this month, and I invite you to join us. You can register for the Semin series either in the app or@harpmastery.com or you can use the link that's here in the Show Notes. The seminar series is all about learning, and it is actually the monthly course that our My Harp Mastery members are taking. Of course, there's a lot more to My Heart Mastery than just this seminar series, but this is a way for you to access this particular learning without the investment of membership. Of course. I would urge you to check out everything else that My Heart Mastery has. You can find out more about My Heart Mastery by looking at the My Heart Mastery page on heartmastery.com and you can see everything that's there. Like our unique curriculum, the scale of success that helps you walk through the various stages of heart playing and develop your skills in a systematic way. And of course, there are lots of other resources, an entire library of courses to support you. I think we have over 20, 70 courses. There are. There's an incredible amount of material in the My Heart Mastery site, so I would of course urge you to check out full membership. But if you can't do that right now, the February seminar is a great way to get your fingers moving. And as I said, it'll go right along with the things that we're talking about today. So check out the links. I will put those in the show notes for you, and I hope to see you on those Monday night calls. Of course, if you can't be on the calls live, no problem. There are replays that are posted the following day, so it's easy to keep up with the material that we're teaching in a time frame that's convenient for you. So no excuses there. The arpeggio pieces that we're talking about today are ones I just pulled out from my library. And of course, they're not the only example of what we're talking about. There's no point in talking about something where there's only one example we want to talk about that's going to serve you. So it needs to have a lot of application. But I divided the the whole topic of arpeggios into three different ideas that I think involve techniques that come up over and over again. And so we're going to look at those and I'll give you all the names of the pieces and I will also give you the exercises that I identified that go with them. So I will list those for you in, in the show notes so that if you can see the show notes on your podcast app, that's great, you'll have them there. If not, just hop over to harpmastery.com, go to the podcast page, look for this episode, which is episode 195, and you'll see the entire list on that episode. I'll put it all there for you so you can see the, the names of the pieces and the exercise books that I'm talking about. So the first arpeggio category that I want to talk about is simply left hand accompaniments. Now, there would be a ton of things to talk about and a ton of different patterns in the left hand accompaniment, but I just picked two that just happen to be my favorite. And the first one I want to talk about is just the very simple pattern of connected up and down arpeggios. The piece that I pulled out to, to demonstrate this for you is a little air from an Aaron Rondo by the French harpist and composer Robert Nicolas Charles Boxa. And so this is that little accompaniment. I'll play a little snippet of the piece for you and you can hear how it goes.

And you heard what the left hand does there, right? It plays these arpeggios just going up and down, like.

Just up and down. Very simple. 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4. Not much to it except that it's not easy to play cleanly. And you might have discovered this in something similar that you played. So the principles we need to work on in order to have this sound the way we want, there are a few we certainly need to work at. Connecting that left hand needs to be as connected as possible. Sometimes the jumps are difficult, you know, the reaches are a little bit too big, and so you might need to add a jump. But it, it needs to sound smooth, it needs to sound legato, and of course, it needs to sound clean without finger buzzing. So that's what we're working at. It also needs a little bit of what I'm going to call an accordion dynamic. We don't want it to sound like.

With this big accent on the fourth finger. Our fourth fingers are so strong, it's hard to rein them in sometimes. But we want the fourth finger to just sort of lead in and their little swell up to the top of that arpeggio, and a little decrescendo down to the bottom, like yamba da dee da da yamba da di. So we get the sense of a swell rather than a metric.

Right? Obviously. So that's what we want to work on, and that's what you need to work on in your exercises. Now, one of the exercises that I think is very good for this is a pozzoli etude. This is the. From the Pozzoli et are at the back of the Grossi Method for the harp book. And so this is exercise 24, or etude 24 on page 129. And it's got exercises for the right hand and the left hand in the course of this etude, just playing those arpeggios up and down. And it'll give you a lot of practice at working this. And of course, with the etude, work at it hands separately and hands together, so that you get the benefit of both. There are plenty of arpeggio exercises that do this. Actually, the conditioning exercise number one is one of my favorites. But you might enjoy this Pozzoli etude just a little bit more. So once again, I'll link to this in the show notes and it's the etude number 24 on page 129. As you work on this, remember, you're looking to connect, to have it be legato and smooth, not over accented. And with that pretty little swell dynamic, so that we're not always hammering out the bottom note. Those same principles of connection and legato and dynamic apply to my next example. This is a different left hand pattern. And of course, it's one of my favorites. One of those patterns that you see in a lot of different places. It's the one we call the Alberti bass. And the Alberti bass is an arpeggio, but it's usually done with sort of a fingering in the left hand. Like 3, 1, 2, 1. It sounds something like this.

That's the idea. And the piece that I've chosen that uses that is another boxa piece, actually. It's his little arrangement of a march from the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart. Here's just a little snippet.

And that's the Alberti bass in action, a pretty fast action in that piece. But you've got that same idea that this left hand.

Needs to be connected, both in terms of physical connection, your connecting from finger to finger, and in terms of the legato that you produce. We don't want it to sound very.

Sometimes you might want that kind of a sound, but most of the time you want something that sounds just a little bit more secure. In this pattern, though, what the big difference is is that it requires a little bit more work at finger independence than the other. The other one. All those fingers are going in the same direction. 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4. Here they're going in all directions. 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1. A couple places where it went 2, 1, 2, 1. On different notes. And of course, it requires a level of interval security. So that's what you need to work at with a piece like this. You want your fingers to be nice and independent and know where they're going. Obviously. Now there are lots of great exercises that work on those same skills, particularly on the finger independence. When it comes to arpeggios, just about any exercise book that you pick up is going to have a bazillion exercises for this. And you'll find arpeggios in all different kinds of orders and all different kinds of patterns. But I selected a book that you may very well have. This is the Deborah Freeu Exercises for Agility and Speed. And if you start with her left hand exercises on page 44, you'll get lots of practice in this same kind of pattern. It's got Alberti like patterns. It's got things that are just a little bit different, just a little bit twistier, but it'll give you some good experience with playing these kinds of patterns. So that's the Deborah Friu Exercises for Agility and speed. And page 44 is what I recommend for this kind of a piece. So if you're working on something that has a very patterned left hand that relates to arpeggios, this is where you can go to get some extra work on it. So those are two examples of left hand uses of arpeggios as accompaniment. But what about when the arpeggios happen in the right hand? They often happen as part of something we call figuration. They can also happen as an accompaniment figure. But let's talk about figuration first. In figuration, what it sort of is, is a really ornamented or decorated melody. And I've chosen a little Beethoven to show you what I mean. So this is the right hand melody for this country dance.

It's a pretty fancy melody. And the melody itself doesn't do a whole lot. I think if you were just to pick out the main melody notes, you'd have kind of a pretty basic little melody here. And in fact, Beethoven gives us little accent marks to note that that's where he wants some emphasis. That's part of the country dance style as well. But you can hear the arpeggiation in this melody, right? It's all over the place.

Pretty darn F.

So that's a melody with figuration. And when we have a melody like that, we need our fingers to absolutely be on top of it. So our fingers need to be even and they need to be secure on the notes. Obviously, slow practice is going to help you here. And a very careful attention to the, the evenness of your fingers and to the cleanliness. Right. We don't want buzzing and all that kind of stuff. But what you really need to do is think about how those accented notes come out and which ones are not quite as important as the others. We want the melody notes, whatever they happen to be in whatever melody you're playing here, to have that gentle emphasis. They don't have to be slammed out with a heavy accent, but a gentle emphasis. And then we need to be sure that the notes that don't need that emphasis are a little bit less. So it requires a certain degree of technical control. And the exercise I'm going to recommend for this today is also from the Deborah Frio book. It's a little etude on page 23. What I like about this, it's a two hand arpeggio exercise or etude, and it's very pretty, very nice to play, but it works with accents in an interesting way. The exercise looks like it ought to be in 6, 8.

But she's written it in 3, 4. And she's very careful to note the accents that she wants. One and two and three. And when you practice this etude with the accents, you're giving your fingers some real experience in whether or not they can play louder or softer whenever you want them to, whether they can be accented or unaccented. So I suggest playing that etude exactly the way she's written it, with the accents and then going back and doing it as if it were in 6, 8. And the accents will shift and you'll get some experience playing that that way as well. Of course, rhythms like long, short, they're always good too. But I think you'll enjoy playing the little etude. So a melody with figuration. It's all about the accents. Now that comes into play with our second piece that has to do with right hand arpeggios as well. And I've chosen a piece by Henriette Regnier called Au Borde Rousseau. At the edge of the Stream. This piece all by itself is a great study in arpeggios. There are arpeggios in the right hand, arpeggios in the left hand, arpeggios involving both hands. And it's a really great piece and it's beautiful. Rainier chose to get the watery effect. You know this is by a stream, right? She chose to get the watery effect by putting a repeated arpeggio pattern in the right hand like this.

And the left hand has a melody underneath that.

But it's the right hand that is the babbling brook. And the right hand also echoes the melody notes that are in the left hand. And so the effect together is something like this.

So the challenge here is twofold. Not only does your right hand have a little bit of low level burbling to do, like the brook, but it's got some melody notes that need to be lightly brought out in it. And then it also needs to be underneath the left hand melody so that the left hand melody is more prominent. And I know what kind of a challenge it can be to have your right hand be subservient, at least musically, to your left hand. Right, left hand just wants to be the accompaniment all the time. Right hand wants to shine. And this is an example of totally the opposite. So it needs some control practice for that as well. So learn to make your right hand soft and light, because here it is truly accompaniment and we want it to sound like that. Of course, if you're learning this piece, you have lots of notes to learn, and it's a piece for pedal harp, and it's got some petals in it. So there are lots of additional complications to this piece that mean that just working on that one technical skill, you might need to pull it outside the piece and work on it. And so I've chosen a Pozzoli Etude, once again, from the Grossi book, Pozzoli Etude, that does sort of the same thing, but in a slightly less complex texture, which is just what we want in an etude. So it's got left hand melody and it's got right hand arpeggios, but not nearly the complexity that Renier puts into her piece. And of course no petals or lever changes, so you don't have that to worry about either. So this is exercise, or rather etude number 14, and it's on page 120 of the Grossi book, and it gives you some practice at simple right hand up and down arpeggios like this.

With a left hand melody. But the nice thing is that the Left hand melody notes occur under arrest in the right hand, so it makes it a little bit easier to bal. So that's a really nice etude to have to sort of break you into this particular skill the easy way so that you can be ready to play the Rainier. All right, so that's our right hand and left hand arpeggio scenarios. But what if the entire texture of the piece is an arpeggio texture and both hands are doing the arpeggios the whole time? Don't think you know any pieces like this. Sure you do. This is the little fountain kind of a piece, Right. It's just made up of arpeggios. There are lots of pieces like this La Source just Ribbons by Stephanie Curcho. Lots of beautiful arpeggio pieces. That's one of the things the harp does and does so beautifully. Right. They sound liquid and rich. So we want to be able to play those arpeggios. But in a two hand arpeggio texture. We have some other things to consider. Not only do we need the fingers to be even, but we need the connections between the hands to be even. And if there's a melody, it often belongs to the right thumb. Not always, but particularly if the arpeggios are descending. If they're going down, the right thumb is the melody note. Now, the standard advice that we teachers give to our students is to bring out that melody. But the fact is that you really don't have to work very hard to do that. For most of us, our right thumb is quite strong all by itself. So once we know that those notes are the melody, once we can hear the melody in our head and sing it to ourselves, the right thumb is going to do a pretty good job of just saying, Yep, okay, I got this. I can make the melody sing. I would advise against trying to accent it unless you, you know, listen to yourself or your teacher says you're not bringing it out, don't try to accent it. Unless also that's what the texture calls for. It calls. If it calls for something really forceful, well, then by all means put on those accents. But if it's a more gentle sort of a melody, you can bring it out by pressing your thumb a little bit more instead of actually accenting it. And as I said, lots of times, just hearing the melody in your head is enough to tell your right thumb what it needs to do. Now, I picked actually letter B from Linda Wood's Processional, just because this is a lovely little arpeggio moment on its own. So this is the kind of texture I'm talking about both hands playing arpeggios. And in this case, the arpeggios go down.

You could hear the right thumb doing the melody right. And I wasn't working very hard to try to bring that thumb out. It's the highest note anyway, it's going to stick out. But aside from keeping the melody note prominent enough that a listener can recognize it, we want to have all those fingers even and work at the connection between the hands. Once again, practicing in rhythms can be helpful here. And of course, if you have problems placing the arpeggios, well, practice them as chords. And this works for any of the pieces we've been talking about today. One good strategy for practicing arpeggios is always to learn to place them as if they were chords. And if you've got a piece with chords, guess what? You practice those as if they were arpeggios. They play back and forth and it's a great way to cross train your skills, if you will. But in a piece like this, you're really listening to the connection between the hands and trying to make each one of those arpeggios, all six notes, three in the right and three in the left, sound like a single unit. If you want lots of practice at two hand arpeggios going up and going down, especially in four fingers, I suggest the Deborah Fria book. Again, she's got Pages like pages 33 to 37 that are all about drills with two hand arpeggios, and you can really work at making your arpeggio smooth. Once again, the etudes and the exercises take this out of the context of the piece. So you're not quite so worried about the musicality, angle of it, and you can really focus on what's happening technically. So that's why the exercises in ETUs are so valuable here. Now, if all we were worried about was evenness and evenness of tone, evenness of dynamic, evenness of rhythm, all those, that would be one thing. But that's not the only kind of arpeggio texture we have. And sometimes we have something that's just a little bit different and a little bit more complex. And I've chosen for this the very famous Bach Prelude in C. You know this one.

Much of what we had to practice for the downward arpeggios like in processional, is the same here. We still need to practice for the evenness across the hands, but the pattern turns back on itself, doesn't it? It's not just a straight arpeggio, it's got that, you know, up and downness to it that we have to watch. And because it starts with the left hand, the bass note, that lowest note, the first one of each group that we play has a special. Not only is it rhythmically important, but it's also setting up the harmony for the entire chord. Everything that comes after that. In that arpeggio we understand harmonically because of that first note. So the first note needs to be clear. We don't want to overplay it. We don't want it to be.

But we don't want to underplay it either, because it is so important.

And in fact, here you can almost think of each two beats of arpeggio. So a single arpeggio taken up two beats like this.

That would be two beats worth. You could think of the entire arpeggio almost as if it had a little decrescendo where the beginning of the arpeggio was the loudest part of it. And then the right hand.

Diminuendo just a tiny bit.

Again.

You can hear it just fade away, just a little bit, without slowing down. We don't want it to slow down. We just don't want that right hand thumb to get in the way. Not the way it was in processional, where it was the melody. What we don't want is.

That that's not what we're looking for. So controlling your right thumb and bringing it down volume wise, intensity wise is important in a pattern like this. So it's about evenness. Yes, but it's about evenness, the other direction, isn't it? Where the right thumb is the least important of the notes, not the most important. I found a Pozzoli etude that that gives us the same objective of keeping the accent on the bottom note and off of the right thumb, at least some of the time. It trades back and forth a little bit, but it has some arpeggios that alternate left and right hand, but like this.

So it'll give you some practice at phrasing an arpeggio that goes upward where you don't want the accent on the thumb. So this is ET2 on page 108 of the Grossi book. Once again, I will list all of these for you in the show notes, so you'll have all the references that you need. And not so many books to choose from either. So that's really great. Also, I want you to consider what we've talked about today and think about how this can apply to your pieces, not just in terms of arpeggios, but when you have a piece that has a particular technique involved in it, are you sure that you understand what it is that you're trying to work on? What skill really is in play here? Because often it's beyond the notes. This is what I meant when I was talking about that tunnel thing before. When we're coming at it from both ends, it's not just about working at technique. It's also about understanding what your technique needs to bring to the music so that the music sounds right. So as we're working on technique, we're working on it in a very specific way to serve that piece of music. What needs to happen. That's the emphasis we're looking for. And that was the point of my tunnel metaphor. And I also invite you again to join us for our February seminar series on just scales and arpeggios, too. That may help solve some of those other dilemmas. It'll certainly give you plenty of drills that you can use to help your fingers with their even, with their precision, with their speed and with their agility. And of course, you'll find those links everywhere at Heart Mastery as well. To join the February seminar series next week on the podcast, we're talking about something that was a topic that came up on my very recent Finish it clinic, and that is what happens when you get bored working on a piece. So we'll talk about how not to get bored working on a piece and what to do if you are bored with a piece. Maybe you've been working on a little too long and we need to finish it up, but we'll talk about how not to get bored in the first place and what to do if you do. So that's next week on the podcast. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, to your spirit, and all you have to do is play. You. 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.