Practicing Harp Happiness

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...

Today’s podcast is all about tempo, and I have to start by saying that tempo is a funny thing. We define it with numbers or with the familiar Italian words, or less familiar French or German ones, and it still seems elusive.

Much of the time we try to pin a piece of music down to a number, a mathematically precise ratio of beats per minute. Perhaps the composer put it there as a guide for the performer. Perhaps it was added by an editor, an arranger, or a teacher. But it still doesn’t necessarily satisfy us. In fact, everything about this feels wrong. How is it possible to limit a piece of music, a creation that lives in a single moment, to one number? 

I remember reading the liner notes to a CD recording by legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein. This recording was made toward the end of his life. He was already in his 90’s, but the producers of this recording wanted to preserve Rubinstein’s interpretations of piano masterworks for generations to come who would not have heard him. T...

When I was preparing for this week’s show, I couldn’t help being reminded of a couple of tired old jokes.

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this. 
Doctor: Then don’t do that.

And,

Patient: Doctor, it hurts and I don’t know what’s wrong.
Doctor: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

When we’re thinking about our harp lessons, we may sometimes think of it like a doctor-patient relationship. Something is wrong with our playing and we want to get it fixed. Give me the prescription and let me go home.

Or we may think of our lessons in a less transactional, more relationship based-way. Our teacher isn’t just our expert harp guide but our friend as well. We look forward to our lessons as a time to reconnect with our harp and with our teacher too.

While both of those scenarios may be accurate to some extent, neither one truly describes what a music lesson is or should be. If our lessons are transactional - just give me the scrip, doc - we’re missing out on the deeper experience...

It’s high time I got up on my soapbox. It’s not often I do a rant on the podcast, but there’s an issue that has me so fired up that I had to talk about it with you.

I believe it’s the result of how we are learning now. There are so many opportunities to learn online, everything from individual live lessons to Youtube videos to video courses to coaching to online masterclasses. And before you mention it, yes, I am obviously a contributor to those online learning opportunities, which makes me part of the problem. I’d rather be part of the solution. Hence, the reason for today’s rant.

You may have heard me talk about the leveling up involved in playing four-finger chords if you’ve been playing mostly three-finger chords. I’m not changing my opinion on that. 

But recently I’ve seen that the main stumbling block for many students isn’t just the addition of one more note to the chord. It’s actually more about the way their technique has developed. Their entire technical approach, parti...

This podcast episode goes live on April Fool’s Day, and I probably couldn’t have picked a more appropriate day to release it. I didn’t do it on purpose, but today’s topic lines up very nicely with April Fool's. It’s about the fool’s game of self-criticism.

I think the most dangerous pitfall for harpists, or for any musician, doesn’t have to do with performance nerves or losing your place or not having a strong technique or being able to sight read. I think it is being overly or inappropriately critical of our efforts. 

Now before you say that you are skilled at keeping your perspective and you don’t let your drive to achieve lead to frustration, I want you to stop and really think. I run across harpists every day, every time I teach a webinar or an intensive, who describe themselves as perfectionists. Most of these harpists know that their perfectionism is slowing them down, possibly even preventing them from enjoying their playing or sharing it with others. Maybe that sounds fami...

We harpists take our finger placement seriously. Getting the right fingers on the right strings at the right time is paramount. One misplaced finger and a whole passage can go wobbly.

One of the quotes of Johann Sebastian Bach that comes to my mind at this moment is this one: “It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.”

Bach was known for his sense of humor and so, without knowing the context for the quote,  I like to think that this was not intended to downplay the difficulty of playing an instrument but was more tongue in cheek. But it’s still a little depressing.

Our physical connection to the harp strings is key, not just for playing the right notes, but for our speed, our tone, our range of expression, our relaxation, even our confidence. When our fingers are too loosely placed on the strings, they can slide up or down or even off the string. This makes for uneven rhythms, a weak ...

Call me crazy if you want. I know your ideal day might be a day at the spa, or sitting on the beach with a good book, or going for a hike in the mountains. Although those all sound good to me, my ideal day - or at least one of my ideal days - would be a day when I could practice all day. A day when I only had to practice would be a true luxury for me. That's really not that crazy. I think a lot of harpists would feel that way. Maybe you would too.

Of course, the reality is that most of us are too busy most of the time for that ideal practice day. Usually we are sandwiching practice in between the other parts of our lives and often our harp playing ends up taking a back seat to tasks that are more urgent or the care we give to others. And when we do have time to practice, we don’t feel that we have time to get to everything on our practice list. 

It’s not uncommon to feel a little frustrated that we can’t spend the time we would like to with the harp. We sense that our progress is ...