Practicing Harp Happiness

Fact number one: Your focus is in your control.
Fact number two: Your focus is a critical factor in your success and harp happiness.
Conclusion: What you focus on matters… a lot.

In the last episode of the podcast, we were talking about focus in terms of placing your chords. I cited one of my favorite Zig Ziglar quotes, “You hit what you aim at.”

I’m going to put a different spin on that today. We aren’t going to talk about focusing on a goal exactly. We’re going to discuss how to shift your focus to get you beyond a sticking point or a challenge. Here’s my idea in a nutshell: when we focus on the hard thing, we lose perspective on why we are doing the hard thing to begin with. That can cost us a lot in terms of time, energy and enjoyment.

Consider some of the things we focus on that can leave us with a feeling of letdown or even loss. We spend weeks preparing for Christmas, only to realize on December 26th that we didn’t really remember to enjoy the day. Or we put days of effort i...

They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Unfortunately, familiarity also breeds secure and confident music. We want to play our music well, and so we need to know it inside and out. That takes time.

Learning music also takes time. And the longer we take to learn our music, the harder it can be to stay interested in it. No matter how much we love a piece of music, it is possible to get bored with it. 

Also, there are times when we are required to learn a piece that we don’t really like, perhaps for a performance or an exam. Practicing a piece we don’t like can feel like torture.

I believe there is no upside to playing or practicing a piece you are bored with. If you’re trying to learn it, your practice won’t be focused; your heart won’t be in it. If you’re performing it, your lack of interest in the piece will communicate itself to the listener. It might be a flawless performance but it won’t have you - your personality, your energy - in it, and those are the things that bring a...

Today’s episode focuses on the music of harpist, singer and composer Sophia Dussek. It is partly music history, partly harp history and partly harp technique. But it’s really about connection. I want to help you feel a connection to our roots, to some of the musical and harp traditions that aren’t merely history, but are part of the fabric of our daily harp playing. 

There’s an African proverb that says,”Walk like you have 3000 ancestors walking behind you.” We harpists so often feel that we’re all alone on our journey. The truth is that we are only the newest leaves on a tree with many other branches full of other leaves, a tree whose roots were formed long ago. Every time we play, we are continuing the traditions of those harpists, so it makes sense to learn a little bit about them. The things we learn about our roots can help us connect to the music we are learning today in a deeper way.

That’s why I chose “connection” as the fifth of the five growth areas I identified in my bo...

A special holiday music mix just for podcast listeners!

• Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, arranged by Anne Sullivan 
• I Wonder as I Wander,  arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Ave Maria, by Franz Schubert, arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Sinfonia, from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Slumber Sweet, a medley of Christmas lullabies arranged by Scott Lavender
• In Dulci Jubilo, arranged by Anne Sullivan

All harp solo selections are from my Break Forth CD.
Flute and harp selections are from the SPARX Christmas Echoes CD.
All CDs are available for digital download in our online shop.

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

• Listen to our Harpy Christmas playlist on Spotify featuring music by Anne Sullivan and other harpist performers.
• Find some great holiday sheet music or a CD in our shop.
• Harpmastery.com

Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at podcast@harpm...

As you probably know, one of the reasons I started Harp Mastery® back in 2012 was because of the number of adult harp students I was meeting who were frustrated by their lack of progress. Although these harpists were at different stages and interested in varying kinds of music, what they had in common was an incredibly strong desire to play the harp, a desire that kept them practicing despite the challenges they were encountering. Although I hadn’t come up with the term “harp happiness” yet, I knew that I had to help these harpists find a path that would give them the joy and satisfaction they were looking for in their harp playing.

But years before that, I had already discovered something that shocked me about adult harp students. I had started a class for beginning harpists of any age - the classes usually had teenagers and adults - and I became intrigued by the reasons these students wanted to play the harp. Many of the adults had wanted to play the harp since they were young an...

There are three ways we learn how to play the harp. The first and most obvious one is by doing.  Playing and practicing is our “go to” method for learning. You can’t actually learn to play the harp without playing it. 

When my son was about 12 or 13, he fell madly in love with football. There weren’t any teams he could play on at his school or in our community, so he had to be content with playing football video games. Not the same thing, of course. Even so, when he got to high school and finally had the opportunity to play on a real team, he was actually surprised to find out how different the game was when he was on a real field instead of a virtual one.

The second way we learn is by instruction, by having someone show us how to advance our skills or teach us new ones. In today’s world there are countless ways to get instruction: lessons, coachings, videos, online courses. But instruction can teach us more than how to get our fingers to obey our commands. For example, a music th...

“What can I do to make my music more expressive?”

If I’ve been asked that question once, I’ve been asked it a thousand times. This isn’t a beginner question, either. It usually is a question of an intermediate level player. Once harpists achieve a fair level of technical competency, they have enough bandwidth to consider how to make their playing more musical. Until that point, it’s all about getting the right fingers on the right strings.

Naturally enough, most of us look to the dynamics to make our music more expressive. It’s a good plan. Following the dynamic markings that the composer has included allows us a glimpse of what the composer intended the music to be. Dynamics create differentiation in the music that helps a listener hear the intent of the music as well. And dynamics add variety so our music is more interesting. Dynamics are a great place to start if you’re ready to make your playing more expressive. 

Usually, however, the harpists who ask me about making their mu...

The sinking of the unsinkable Titanic still fascinates us all over a hundred years after the disaster. It’s the subject of all sorts of speculation and theories, and there’s one of those that is actually relevant to our topic today. The question is this: if the Titanic crew had performed all the safety drills they were supposed to, if there had been enough lifeboats and if the passengers had been drilled in lifeboat procedures, would so many have perished when the ship went down?

Some people have noted that a routine safety drill on the fateful Sunday morning was not held. This has been attributed to several factors including high winds and the morning church service on the ship. Even with that, however, there was only lifeboat accommodation for about half of the passengers and crew onboard. Was the ship thought to be so well-designed that safety preparedness could be relaxed?

Probably not. But the safety regulations for passenger ships that we have today came in part out of the h...

We are the product of our influencers. The current wisdom says that if you want to know what a person is really like, look at their circle of friends. The thinking goes further to posit that if you want to elevate yourself, whether in your income, your fitness, your intellect or your spirituality, you need to associate with those who have the attributes you would like to develop. It’s not just that you adopt the habits and thoughts of the people you associate with; your brain patterns actually change.

In the 1950’s a Swarthmore College psychologist named Solomon Asch observed an interesting phenomenon. A group of volunteer subjects was asked to estimate the length of a straight black line drawn on a white card. Asch discovered that each person’s estimate was dependent on the estimation of everyone else in the group. People actually saw the line differently based on the opinion of the people with them.

Physiologically, the brain craves reward, which it receives when we have our own...

Today I’m doing something different on the podcast.

I don’t usually talk about what’s happening in my life because this podcast is not all about me; it’s really all about you, me and our harp playing. That means I talk about what I think is important for you to be able to enjoy your harp playing at every step of your harp journey. But a few weeks ago, I participated in an event that reminded me about some essential truths, concepts that have made the difference for me in my journey, and which I think may make a difference in yours as well.

That event was the first, and likely the only, reunion of harpists who attended the Salzedo Summer Harp Colony in Camden, Maine. In terms of numbers, the alumni who attended the event represented a small fraction of the harpists who studied there between its founding in 1931 and the early 2000’s when the program ended. But for those of us who were there, the reunion was an event like no other.

So today, I want to tell you a little about the Col...