Practicing Harp Happiness

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...

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...

Right now, I’m in a tug-of-war with myself. 

Usually, I’m all about helping my students and pushing myself to set goals, to find the next level, to discover more harp happiness through progress and growth. But it’s summertime, and I’m facing a tough choice between leveling up or lazing in the sun. I will admit that sometimes the sun wins.

This struggle isn’t just a summertime struggle, though. In our harp playing, we are continually caught between two opposing ideas: to achieve and accomplish or to simply enjoy. It’s not just about lazing in the sun. It’s really the conflict between the two ways we approach the harp each day. Do we practice? Or do we play?

Ideally, of course, we do both. Playing the harp means exactly that - playing music. Practicing the harp includes all the woodshedding, the repetition, the struggle to clean up notes and fingers and rhythms and make our playing (note that word again!) the best it can be. In a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Happy New Year! It’s the first morning of a new year and I am feeling, as I do every new year, that sense of excitement and possibility that inhabits those empty calendar pages.  I can hardly wait to see what 2024 will bring. 

Since this podcast is going live on New Year’s Day, I thought it was particularly appropriate to talk today about goals. We talk about harp goals a lot at Harp Mastery® but today I actually want to elevate our viewpoint and look at harp playing goals with a broader perspective.

SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based - have been the gold standard of productivity experts for a while. Those five criteria combine in a way that makes success look almost like a mathematical certainty. They feel powerful because they are so concrete.

But music isn’t like that. Music is about creativity. It’s not about following rules, it’s about choosing which ones you want to follow. It’s not about...

A special holiday music mix just for podcast listeners!

The program:

• Two from Messiah
  Pastoral Symphony/He shall feed his flock
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan

• Greensleeves, from Anne’s Break Forth CD,
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Coventry Carol
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Pat-a-pan
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan
• In Dulci Jubilo, from Anne’s Break Forth CD,
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan
• Largo from Winter, from Anne’s Break Forth CD,
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan
• 12 Days of Harpiness
  Arranged by Anne Sullivan

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 Sullivn 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 [email protected]

The year-end wrap has become a hot trend. The worthy practice of reflecting on the year that is nearly over and the new one about to start is no longer simply a quiet moment with a cup of tea and a journal. It’s an opportunity for businesses to go public with their successes. We at Harp Mastery® have jumped on the bandwagon, too. It’s fun to look back and see what we’ve accomplished. It’s important, perhaps even more so, to see where we missed the mark. Somehow, though, those aren’t the numbers that show up on social media. We like to count the wins.

But this episode isn’t about what Harp Mastery® has done. After all, this isn’t a business podcast. This podcast is about you, me and our harp playing. And that’s what this episode is about too.

I want to share with you my own system for looking back, for remembering what my year was like. I start in the same way you may, by looking back at my calendar week by week and month by...