#255: Simplify and Renew: How to Spring Clean Your Harp Playing

Spring is finally settling in where I live. You might be weeks ahead of me or behind me or in a totally different hemisphere, but in the spirit of sharing what’s on my mind and what’s happening in my world, I want to talk about spring cleaning today. Naturally, though, I’m not talking about cleaning windows and carpets and closets. I want to talk about spring cleaning your harp life. 

When I first decided to focus on spring cleaning for this podcast, I didn’t want to take the easy way out. It would be easy to talk about harp care - changing strings, cleaning your harp, the right products to use, etc. But I wanted to go deeper and look at what matters to your harp playing even more than new strings or polish. I want to talk about your playing, your practice, your music. 

We all get into a practice routine, and in general, having a routine is a good thing. It helps us stay on track more easily by creating a habit that can be nearly effortless to follow. But those same habits that support our playing can become ineffective when they go from being effortless to being mindless, and sometimes we aren’t even aware of  it happening.

Here’s a simple example. Maybe you like to warmup with a particular scale or arpeggio pattern or perhaps a favorite short piece. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, unless you find yourself playing it so automatically that you aren’t paying attention to those things we want to watch in a warm-up: our posture, our relaxation, our finger action, and so on. Sure, we’re still warming up our fingers, but our focus is really elsewhere. 

This is where we can decide to do a little spring cleaning. We can try a different warm-up, or rotate between several warm-ups. We could play our warm-up in different keys. There are a million things we could do, but the refresh is the point. 

So in our spring cleaning planning today, I want to focus on two big objectives. One is refreshing or renewing some of what we are doing, whether it’s part of our practice routine or maybe the music we’re playing. We want to spruce things up a bit.

The other objective is to simplify, to investigate what’s working for us and what isn’t, to eliminate extra work so that we can do more of the playing we love. Think of it as decluttering your harp playing. We will start by simplifying and then we’ll get on to the renew and refresh part. And it’s going to be fun.

Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode: 

• Check out this blog post from the archives: Spring Clean Your Technique: 5 Days to Fresher Fingers
• A five day guide to understanding music at a deeper level: Playing More Musically: 5 Days of Discovery
• Harpmastery.com

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