What do fingers, flow and faith have to do with each other? Absolutely everything. The three things are totally interdependent. You can think of them as three corners of a triangle, each corner being connected to each of the other corners. And, just like the legs of a three-legged stool, all three support your playing.
I’m guessing you haven’t thought of these three elements together before, or how together they form the core of your playing, so I’ll give you a quick sketch of what we’re going to talk about today. Also, I should be clear that we’re not talking about religious faith on the podcast; we’re talking about trusting yourself.
The idea is this: your technique, your fingers, produce flow and give you faith or confidence in your playing. You have to have faith in your fingers doing what you have trained them to do, because they really don’t need you to micromanage them. And you have to have faith that the flow of the piece is...
One of the things I love about watching virtuoso artists perform is how easy they make it look. For instance, just this past summer I attended a reunion of many of us who attended the Salzedo Summer Harp Colony in Camden, Maine. One of the highlights of that weekend was a concert of music written by Carlos Salzedo, and the star performer on that concert was Judy Loman. She is in her eighties, and she walked onto the stage with as much comfort and ease as if she were in her own harp studio at home.
One of the pieces she played was Salzedo’s Variations on a Theme in the Old Style. This is a monster piece, very long and very difficult. She told the audience how she first heard and fell in love with the piece when she was taking lessons with Salzedo in Maine in the summer as a young child - I think she was ten. As she was walking to her lessons, she heard this piece wafting from the windows of houses where other older harpists were practicing it. She asked Mr. Salzedo if...
When you think of harp music, is there a characteristic harp sound that comes to mind, a musical gesture that belongs to the harp more than to any other instrument? A glissando, maybe? That’s certainly one of them, and a favorite of mine. Another one that I find very powerful and very harp-y is a rolled chord.
Harps were meant to play chords, especially rolled chords. They sound liquid and rich, even plummy. You can listen to an orchestral recording and when the harpist plays a rolled chord, you know it. It’s almost as if everything melts for a moment. If you want to check out some of those moments, just stick with me because we’ll be talking about a couple. But I also want to talk to you about how to make your rolled chords sound just that magical.
In my opinion, we often forget that our rolled chords play a significant role in our musical expression. I hear so many harpists playing their chords blocked or flat when the music clearly calls for a chord...
A little while back, I did a podcast episode about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and why I believe studying and playing that music is so important for harpists. If you want to go back and listen to that episode, it is Episode 154, and I will put a link to that episode in the show notes.
Understandably, after that podcast aired, I was asked why I was emphasizing the music of Bach who didn’t write anything that we know of for harp, when there are brilliant harp composers whose music we could study. I agree that studying music written for the harp is important for every harpist. But the music of Bach has been considered foundational for generations of music students, and it’s no less important for us harpists. In fact, it is precisely because Bach didn’t write for harp that we need to be extra-intentional about including his music in our studies.
There is a drawback, however. The difficulty factor of much of his music makes it inaccessible to beginning...
There are plenty of things we can muscle through: fatigue, a headache, the last email, the last pot to wash, paying the bills. But we can’t muscle through harp playing, especially when it comes to our fingers. For all that we talk about strong fingers and considering how hard we work them, they and the bones, tendons and muscles that support them are relatively fragile. So when we talk about strengthening our fingers, we don’t want to do any more heavy lifting.
Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to train your weakest fingers to be stronger by training them the right way, gently.
What do we mean by saying a finger is weak? How do you know if a finger, or even more than one finger, is weak? Weak fingers can manifest themselves in one of four ways.
First, you may have knuckles that collapse or lock up. When this happens, your finger may feel like it gets stuck on the string or frozen; it won’t move when you want. Or it may play unevenly...
Do you have no sense of rhythm? Has someone told you that you have no sense of rhythm? Or do you sometimes wonder if you do?
Right off the bat, let me tell you that if someone said that to you, I know they are dead wrong. In the first place, I don’t believe that people can be so connected and drawn to music that they commit themselves to studying and learning an instrument for years without an innate sense of rhythm. Rhythm, like any other musical skill, is a subject that is studied intentionally in music schools. It’s not a topic that is merely left to chance with an “either you got it or you don’t” philosophy. The great Elvis Presley said, “Rhythm is something you either have or you don’t, but when you have it, you have it all over.” However, his meaning and our investigations into a sense of rhythm are somewhat different.
My point is that if you think you need to develop your sense of rhythm, you probably do; so do we all. A sense...
If I had to give the shortest possible explanation of what a daily harp warm-up is, it would be this: your warm-up is the prelude to your practice.
Why a prelude? A prelude is most often defined as a short piece of music intended to be an introduction to a longer one. It sometimes uses musical themes or ideas which appear in the larger work, but the prelude’s most important function is to set the scene, the mood or the tone for what follows.
That’s how I like to think about a warm-up. It sets the scene for your practice. It allows for a transition from your possible hectic daily non-harp life to a more calm and focused musical space. My warm-up, which I will tell you about later in the podcast, is a moment I truly treasure in my practice. It is also a temptation moment, which I will explain later too.
I’ve talked about warm-ups on the podcast before. Episode 98 was a mini masterclass on warm-ups. Episode 120 was about three important skills that your...
Do you think of yourself as creative?
From time to time, a harpist will tell me that she doesn’t feel she is very creative, at least not in a musical way. I instinctively challenge this, because I believe that anyone who persists in studying the harp for more than a few months is nurturing a gift and a desire that is, at its essence, creative. I also believe, though, that much of our practice and pedagogy shifts us away from the creative spirit. This is unfortunate, to say the least. We risk drowning our enthusiasm for the joy of creating music in the hard work that is part of studying it and learning to do it well.
There are endless ways to add more creativity into your harp playing. Certainly, musical expression is creative, but that’s just scratching the surface. I’ve linked in the show notes to a blog post in the Harp Mastery® archives that outlines just a couple ways to add creativity to your practice. But there are so many ways that the harp can not...
Juggling. Patting your head and rubbing your tummy. Walking and chewing gum.
Coordination challenges come in all levels of difficulty. Playing hands together is another one, but it’s one that we harpists eventually get comfortable with. Your right hand does one thing and your left hand does another. For the most part, everything works out, until we encounter polyrhythm, that is.
What’s polyrhythm? The technical definition of polyrhythm is one of those dictionary definitions that cause more confusion than it clears up. According to the New Harvard Dictionary of Music, polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another, or as simple manifestations of the same meter. I warned you.
In terms that are probably more meaningful to you, 2 against 3 is an example of polyrhythm. In a general sense, it is two rhythms that don’t normally go together and that, as a consequence, present a rhythmic...
Many harpists can remember the first time they saw someone play the harp. The harp itself looked magnificent: tall, majestic, maybe gold. The harpist might have looked magnificent too, maybe a lovely lady in a flowing gown. The harp and the harpist together made an impressive picture. No wonder people want to play the harp. More than any other instrument, the harp is decorative. It makes a visual statement just sitting in a corner. And when it speaks, it’s magic.
We can all agree on that much. But there’s more to a harpist’s appearance than just sitting behind the harp in beautiful clothes. There’s a more important visual aspect to playing the harp, one that draws a lot more debate, and that is what we look like when we play. I’m not talking about any funny faces we might make. I’m talking about how we gesture with our arms.
To an audience, harp gestures look graceful. We harpists know, though, that there is musical purpose behind them....
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