Practicing Harp Happiness

In my family, my grandmother’s sister was pretty much our favorite aunt. Aunt Dolie was sweet and generous, although she never had very much of her own and worked very hard all her life for what she did have. She was a gentle soul and totally without worldly savvy. She lacked a lot of practical knowledge, what we would call “know-how,” But that didn’t mean she was without courage. Hence, this family legend I am about to relate to you.

When Aunt Dolie was in her fifties, she decided she wanted to learn how to drive. As a city person, she had always used public transportation or relied on my grandparents for rides to the store or to the doctors. My grandfather helped her find a driving instructor. He knew that teaching her himself would likely push his patience past the breaking point. 

The driving instructor showed up for Aunt Dolie’s first driving lesson. They successfully navigated the difficulties of starting the car and pulling away from the curb. The instructor made sure she s...

I rarely have guests on the podcast, but today I’m so happy to be sharing the show with my dear friend and my former student turned colleague, harpist Candace Lark, If you’re a My Harp Mastery member or in our coaching program, you will already know and love Candace, because she is one of our Certified Coaches and helped me to found our Harp Quest program for young student harpists. But if you haven’t had the chance to meet her yet, you are in for a treat.

Candace isn’t only an extremely busy professional harpist, playing with all kinds of ensembles and in all kinds of venues (spoiler alert: she’ll tell us later about playing at Will Smith’s house), but she has another aspect to her musical life as well. Utilizing her years of performing and teaching experience, she created an online business called The Happy Musician Coaching. Her coaching helps musicians, not just harpists, create and meet specific goals while cultivating a mindset for musical success. That’s what we will be talk...

They say that only two things in life are certain, death and taxes. But if you’re a harpist you know there is a third certainty; at some point, often at the wrong point, you’re going to break a string.

I remember one performance with my flutist friend Joan when one of my high strings broke as I played it at the end of a glissando near the end of the piece we were playing. When we had finished the piece, I began to change the string while she joked with the audience that the string had broken on time and in tune. We had been playing concerts together for years at that point so she also gave the harp talk to the audience while I finished changing and tuning the string. 

Not all string breakage is so convenient, of course. A few years ago, I was playing a big flashy solo piece as part of a program with various performers.  The piece was Salzedo’s “Variations on a Theme in the Old Style,” The piece is in G Major and it’s about 12 minutes long. I was less than a minute into the piece w...

Maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t, but these podcasts are organized into three different categories. One category is “Practice and Performing” and another is “Music and Meaning.”  The third category is “Technique and Musicianship.” Technique is one of those self-explanatory items, but musicianship probably needs a little more description. 

A common dictionary definition of musicianship is “the skill or artistry involved in performing music.” Other definitions include the word “knowledge” along with skill and artistry. Musicianship as a category is so broad that it actually encompasses everything about playing music except for technique, although technique obviously has a role to play in musicianship as well.

I like to define musicianship as the craft of music. It is the part of playing music that is common to musicians whatever instrument they play, or whether they sing or compose. For us harpists, it’s everything about music that is not specifically related to the harp. I...

At one of our Harp Mastery® retreats several years ago. I presented a workshop called “Learn Anything Fast.” That sounds like a pretty ambitious topic, and I imagine that some of the retreaters were a little skeptical. After all, learning a piece of music takes time. But my point in that workshop was this: does it have to take as much time as it’s taking you now?

There’s no golden rule about how long it should take you to learn a piece. That’s something students would often love to know, and it would be wonderful if each piece came with a guarantee, like all those infomercials have: Learn this piece in 30 days or your money back!

There is no “30 day guarantee” for a piece, because each harpist approaches each piece with a different set of individual skills and strengths. Each piece requires specific skills, either technical skills or musicianship skills or both. How long it takes you to learn a piece is a combination of the demands of the piece, your own skill development relative...

In a world of sticky notes, Gorilla Glue and tape that can hold a leaky boat together, why can’t we make a piece of music stick in our fingers?

Does this sound familiar? We sit down at the harp on Monday with fresh spirit and energy and we dig into the music we want to learn. Tuesday we repeat the process, feeling very virtuous. On Wednesday, we are a little disappointed that we don’t see any progress from our practice. Thursday, we decide that it just needs a little more effort. On Friday, it seems like our fingers have forgotten everything we’ve been trying to teach them, so we take the rest of the weekend off and hope that next week will be better. 

And if we’re trying to memorize a piece, it can feel even more frustrating. It takes so long to see any progress. Our music just doesn’t seem to stick. 

We can put the blame in lots of places: the music is hard, we don’t have enough practice time, we’re too distracted to focus, we’re too old. Any of those things could be contributi...

I was going through some old music the other day and came across a notation that made me smile. It was written in my best elementary school cursive script and read, “Thumbelina’s having trouble with her thumb.” I don’t even remember what piece of music it was on, but it could have been on just about any one. I always had trouble with my thumbs. In fact, most of my music has the words “Thumbs up” in my teacher’s handwriting somewhere on the page.

I am double jointed, not to any circus freak level but in the more or less usual way. My thumbs bend backwards at the first knuckle. It’s not a big deal, not unless you’re a harpist, that is. It took me until I was sixteen to finally learn how to control my thumbs and have them play properly.

What I learned in the process was exactly how crucial our thumbs are for our harp playing. Our thumbs actually have the ability to free our fingers to be relaxed and supple; used another way, our thumbs can just about immobilize our hands. They can pl...

Are you a free spirit, a rebel? Or maybe you just hate being told what to do?

I have to admit that sometimes one or more of those labels fits me. Most of the time I toe the line but there are moments when I just don’t want to do the thing I know I should do. Now I’m not talking about anything illegal, immoral or dangerous. It’s more like sometimes I just don’t feel like practicing. Or maybe I’d rather play the new piece of music I just bought instead of slogging through those four measures that are giving me so much grief. Going over and over those four measures doesn’t feel like making beautiful music. It doesn’t feel creative, and even though it may make me feel a little virtuous when I’m finished, it doesn’t always bring me joy in the moment.

Because playing the harp is not only as important to me as breathing but it’s my job, I know I need to buckle down and do the important work, and so I do. But that doesn’t mean that I have to shut my more creative side in a box somewhere. ...

Have you ever had one of those moments when you wonder if you’ve been doing it all wrong? It might be something you have taken for granted, a habit maybe, or a process, something you thought was the perfect system. You always have done it that way, but suddenly you have a moment of doubt. Maybe it felt like a blinding flash of clarity; the clouds part and suddenly you see the thing in a new light. But just as quickly that clarity fades, and you are left with a nagging feeling that you’re missing something important. 

Maybe it’s just me. But I don’t think so. I think we all encounter things that we thought were working, until we see that maybe they aren’t.

I think that many of us actually feel that way about our harp technique. We go along just fine for a while and then we hit a wall. There’s a piece or a performance that shakes things up and all of a sudden our technique doesn’t seem so trustworthy any more. We need to strengthen it, to sharpen our skills, maybe even rethink our t...

Johann Sebastian Bach is a name every musician knows. He is revered as a composer whose music defined musical practices in the Baroque era and whose compositions still influence music and musicians today. Learning about his music and learning to play his music is required study for any music major.

But we harpists do feel a little neglected. We play one of the instruments that Bach did not write any music for. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from borrowing extensively from his keyboard music, his violin and cello sonatas and partitas and his lute music. Much of Bach’s music is well-suited to the harp with rippling scale passages or rich chords. 

My first in-depth encounters with Bach’s music were in my piano lessons when I was about 12 years old. My teacher was insistent about how the preludes and inventions I was studying should be played: how long each note should be, how the music was made up of melodies played together, or how the harmonies moved in progression. It was my firs...