Practicing Harp Happiness

How can you correct a problem – any problem from a water leak to paper jam in the printer – if you don’t know where the problem really is?

Harp playing is no different. Our practice is supposed to help us fix mistakes and even prevent them from recurring, at least to a degree. But if we don’t know where the underlying issue is, it’s nearly impossible to find a fix for it.

The obvious solution to this dilemma is to ask your teacher. Unfortunately, though, even if you have access to a teacher or other harp expert, the things we want to fix usually reveal themselves in a practice session when we are working by ourselves. So we rely on our own experience to find the fix for whatever challenge we are facing, whether or not we have the experience we need to do it.

Of course, teachers don’t always have an instant solution either. Often we arrive at the solution through a process of trial and error: the student tries our suggestion and we discover we...

Let’s talk warm-ups.

You likely have a favorite way to warm up at the beginning of a practice session. It might be short and sweet, like an arpeggio and a scale. It might be a fairly thorough routine that allows you to check everything from your posture to your focus. Or possibly it’s just a passage from a piece that you’re learning.

Whatever you do, however you like to warm up, that’s great. I don’t want to change that today. 

What I want to do is show you three different and important ways your warm-up can help you, that’s the “triple” referred to in this episode’s title. These aren’t earth-shattering or revolutionary new techniques. They are simple, clear approaches to your warm-up that will allow you to develop critical skills beyond what is usual in a warm-up. I have a warm-up that I will use to demonstrate as I teach you these approaches and it’s available for you as a free download. You’ll find the...

Wouldn’t it feel great to relax? 

Of course, since this is the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast, I’m not just talking about a cool drink, a good book and a bubble bath. I’m talking about being relaxed when you play the harp. 

You know why it’s important to be relaxed when you play. When your hands, arms, shoulders and the rest of your body feel relaxed, you can practice and play without strain and with freedom, flexibility and flow. When your mind is relaxed, you can concentrate and focus without fear or distraction. When your mind and body are relaxed, your music can also relax so that it can communicate its mood or story in a clear, relatable way.

Does that sound too good to be true, like an impossible dream to you? Let me tell you that it isn’t impossible to achieve. More importantly, this kind of relaxation shouldn’t be just a happy accident for you. 

We teachers are experts at telling our students to relax, but not so expert...

While there are many notable quotes from Johann Sebastian Bach, one of my favorites is this one: “There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”  Okay, the man was a musical genius, but obviously he also had a remarkable talent for understatement. 

On the other hand, that really is the major part of learning and playing a piece of music, at least it’s where we start. Certainly the expression of the music is our ultimate aim, but communicating the music starts with the right notes at the right time. That’s the focus of the podcast today: not so much how to find the right notes, but how to play them at the right time. 

We all know it’s not as simple as Bach made it sound. In fact, the difficulties of finding that “right time” are evident everyday in our practice, even if we are expert players. See if any of these common rhythmic challenges sound...

There are markers along the road in every harpist’s development, signposts that indicate you’re making progress. These are like those highway signs that tell you how many miles you are from the next town or city, like “New York City - 90 miles.” No matter how long it’s taken you to get to that point and regardless of the traffic jam ahead of you on the New Jersey Turnpike, New York City is now only 90 miles away. 

Graduating from three-note chords to four-note chords is one of those markers I talk about often. Another one is fluent hands together playing.

Fluent may not be the best word to describe my meaning. It’s more a comfort level, the point at which hands together playing is not any more difficult for you than playing hands separately. Many harpists develop fluency playing hands separately and then are frustrated when that fluency doesn’t translate to their hands together playing. What they don’t realize is that the...

Okay, here’s my question for you today. What would be the scariest words you could hear in your lesson? I can think of lots of possibilities but I’m guessing that one of those phrases that comes to your mind might be, “I think we need to get out the metronome.”

If that’s a phrase that makes you start to squirm on your harp bench, you’re not alone. Learning to use the metronome is one of those things that we teachers often fail to teach our students. Sure, we pull out the metronome in lessons and tell our students to practice with it at home, but we don’t often really show them how to work with it or when to use it and why. We almost turn it into a punishment. I sometimes worry I sound like the Wicked Witch of the West; “Well, my pretty, you counted that badly. It’s time for the metronome for you and the little dog too!”

But the metronome is for more than just identifying and solving counting errors or uneven beats. And...

Legendary harpist and composer Carlos Salzedo had this to say about buzzing: “It is important that there be no buzzing when replacing. Buzzing comes from lack of precision in replacing, and will be eliminated if the player replaces very accurately.” 

That quote comes from the Method for the Harp book that he wrote with Lucile Lawrence, his former student and at the time that method book was written, his wife.

What is interesting about that quote is that even though Salzedo had so much to say about so many aspects of harp playing, that is all he says about buzzing, nothing more.

On the one hand, it’s enough. Every harpist should be replacing accurately in order to avoid buzzing. But we knew that much. What Salzedo leaves us wondering is exactly how we should practice accurate replacing so we don’t buzz. Unfortunately, Salzedo either thought it was too obvious to elaborate on or he wanted to keep his secrets for his students.

I imagine he thought it was...

What would you do if you were playing the harp in a concert and the lights went out?

I’m sure many of you have stories about playing the harp when there was a sudden power outage, and I have several myself. I remember one wedding when a neighborhood-wide blackout occurred just as the newly married couple kissed. The priest didn’t miss a beat, directing the acolytes to lead the bride and groom in a candlelight recessional to the back of the church. My fellow musicians and I were missing lots of beats however, as we struggled to keep playing the recessional music in the dark. 

Fortunately it was a familiar tune, but even so, the other musicians finally gave up, leaving me to carry on by myself. Because I knew the piece, the notes weren’t the problem; obviously the real difficulty was not being able to see the strings.

Today’s Quick Fix podcast episode isn’t about memorizing your music or carrying a spare music stand light with you. It’s about...

Music is not a numbers game. You can’t quantify a moving performance or a composition with statistics like a batting average. You can’t predict how many minutes, hours, weeks or months it will take to be able to play a certain piece fluently. A player's skill isn’t solely a result of how old they are or how many years they’ve been playing. Those kinds of numbers aren’t relevant in the music world.

There are numbers that have great significance to us as musicians and harpists. Some are meaningful dates in music history, like the birth and death dates of important composers. Some numbers are important for what they represent. I’m thinking of the Roman numerals we use to describe chords and chord progressions, like a I-IV-V-I progression. Other numbers are even more practical, such as numbers for fingering. And then there are those numbers that are at the heart of our discussion today, the numbers in the time signature.

You know the numbers I mean;...

Playing hands together is a topic of constant concern and endless discussion for harpists. When should you start playing hands together? Should you learn a piece hands separately first? How do you begin putting the hands together? And the most frequently asked question: why isn’t hands together working for me? As much as we debate the other questions, this last one is the hardest of all to answer.

One of the more common problems in playing hands together is one I call the “left hand lag.” The left hand lag happens when your hands are playing together sort of, but your left hand seems to be taking too much time to find the strings it needs to play. It’s not a left hand issue; your left hand plays perfectly when it plays by itself. But when you play the hands together, your left hand seems to be behind the beat. It causes hesitations that interrupt the flow of the rhythm and slow everything down. 

Your teacher’s first response is likely that you...