Monthly Archives: September 2022

It’s coming soon!

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I hate to break it to you, but next week is October!  While there’s been pumpkin spice muffins, pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin spice tires, and more available for over a month, you would not be seen as unreasonable for not realizing that the most terrifying time of the year (for harpers) is racing up fast – the Holidays (cue Halloween music – after all, that is the next holiday, despite what you might see in the stores).  If you think I’m being dramatic, I have already seen tv ads for Christmas trees!

Now, you might be wondering why I say this is the most terrifying time of the year.  It is, after all, the season of twinkly lights, candy everywhere, pretty ribbons and bows – what’s not to like?  It’s also the busy season (which is nice and helpful to affording gifts to put inside the ribbons and bows).   Well, here are three reasons it can be terrifying:

1. While all the professionals are booking events (yea income), non-harp-playing people also have no problem, upon learning that you play the harp, attempting to press you into performing.  This is all well and good…if you want to be performing.  But if you’re not interested in performing, are extremely nervous about performing, or have only been playing for a month – you might not want to be pressed into service!  And people (who don’t play an instrument but are adept at organizing) are relentless.  I’ve also found that their relentlessness is inversely proportional to the amount of money they are willing to pay you!

2. Everyone knows all the music!  Yup, when the entire audience knows all the tunes, that’s a little intimidating because you are certain they will hear every artistic deviation (not mistake!) from perfection that you introduce.

3.  The holidays can be fraught – fraught I say – with stress.  Even if, like me, you lead a stress-free existence*, it’s difficult to avoid the feeling of stress rolling off all those around you. 

So, it’s time to start preparing!  Here are four things you could practice being ready:

1. Saying “No”.  I know it’s hard but, if you don’t want to be playing for whatever reason (you’ve only been playing for a week, you are embarrassed by sweating navigable puddles when performing, because you just don’t want to) – practice saying “no”.  Sound too abrupt? Then say, “No, thank you”.  You don’t owe anyone an explanation (well…maybe if it’s your mom, but no one else!)

2. Christmas music you’ve played before.  Since you’ve learned it before, it will come back easier than the last time.  Yes, I know it might not feel like it, but it will.

3. New Christmas/Winter.  Well, new to you.  You don’t want to be playing the same stuff year after year.  You need to keep learning.  New things will help you stay fresh and keep you interested.  Adding in winter music will also help you bridge gaps for audiences and give you things to play past Christmas (after all – winter goes for about 80+ more days after Christmas day).

4. Other music.  Since the Christmas music will probably start sooner than later, by the time the holidays actually arrive, everyone is a little fatigued of hearing them.  Keeping your wider repertoire ready to go will help you add to your set lists and avoid burn out…and will keep you ready for the rest of the year!

So, dust off your Christmas books and binders, start reworking your old tunes and deciding on what you’ll add this year.  Be proactive when deciding what you will let slide in your regular repertoire (for now).  And spend a little time with your calendar so you’ll know when you are (and aren’t) interested in playing.  Keep in mind that most of your friends and family would be delighted if you shared your gift of music with them (even if you’ve only been playing for a week – they love you!). 

What are you going to be playing this holiday season?  Which are new to you?  Let me know in the comments!

 

*LoL – I wish!

How to

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Ever looked at your bookshelf and realized that you have about 100 versions of (in effect) the same book?  I have – and it’s not entirely pretty.  It’s the How To book collection…

I have a lot of “how to” books – how to cook, how to garden, how to measure things, how to calculate what those measurements mean, how to knit, how to relax, how to be creative, how to teach, how to repair your house, how to fly an airplane, how to decorate, how to get rid of everything in your house, how to play the harp … the list goes on and on.

They are filled with details.  After all, I don’t need to smooth the plaster over a statistical analysis (ok, that’s debatable if we are being conceptual, less so if we’re being concrete).

When push comes to shove though, they all pretty much say the same thing – be organized, be familiar with the steps, do a test, then do the thing.  That might be some of the least useful information in each of those books.

What are the most important things then? you might ask. They’re buried in the book somewhere.  Often, it’s only a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, unhighlighted, unremarkable, and unrelated to each other. They are some version of:

The more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll feel.

and

Once you know the rules, feel free to do your own thing.

Because when you know the rules, you know which ones are real rules that cannot be broken with impunity, which can be broken but at your peril, and which are merely strong suggestions – guide rails for the uninitiated, which can be freely broken by the mavens.

We can break those down to be more useful.  The first one is pretty clear – practice practice practice.  The more you do something (correctly and preferably with feedback), the easier it will be to complete and the better you will do it.  No surprise there.

The second one has a more mysterious translation.  And it is by far the scariest.  What it really says is, “to thine own self be true” – Thanks Polonius for help/not help.  So, let’s pull it apart a tiny bit more (because after all, I’m no Shakespeare scholar!) – the modern way to say it is to “have your own voice”.  How do you know what that sounds like? Well…..

First you have to know the rules to break them.  And by “know” we mean inside and out.  A shaky knowledge of the boundaries doesn’t result in cutting edge – just sloppiness.

Next you need to know how much rules can bend and still be unbroken.  Some rules “change color” as you gain experience – because your experience allows you to see relationships you were unprepared to predicted before.

Finally, you must understand which are really guidelines.  Following these leads to pablum – playing that is ok and offends no one – but also doesn’t excite anyone.

Which brings us back to be yourself.  As you grow as a musician you can learn the rules and follow them.  Or you can internalize those rules and use them to find you voice.  What rule are you interacting with just now?  I want to hear it – and how you’re finding your own voice – let me know in the comments!

 

Don’t slag off

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If you’ve been reading my blog for more than about 15 minutes then you know that injury prevention is important to me.  If it hasn’t been 15 minutes yet or you don’t remember seeing these posts check out this post, this one, and this too. 

Injuries aren’t fun.  After all, they hurt!  But more importantly they can take you away from playing.  It’s difficult to sit on a hard bench when your back aches or is “thrown out”.  Having a crick in your neck can turn into a headache while sight reading.  Overuse “ouchies” in your hands can curtail your practice so that you don’t spend as much time at the harp as you planned/would like to/need to.  And an injury that is untended or uncared for can lead to enforced time away while you recover.

Hopefully, you’ll take good care of yourself, and this post will be irrelevant for you forever.  However, it is estimated that 70 – 80% of musicians have developed an overuse injury – which suggests that the odds are ever in your favor … to get hurt.

While that’s sobering (and a little disheartening) let’s move to the next question – if you’re injured and need to rest and recover – away from the harp – do you just slag off and wait?

No, of course not! 

There are loads of things you can do to keep your recovery time useful and moving forward!  Here are ten:

1. Read a book.  Whether it’s Sanger and Kinnaird’s Tree of Strings, Rensch’s Harps and Harpists, or McCaffery’s The HarpMaster of Pern, you can stay connected to your instrument by reading a good book.

2. Read a score.  We’ve talked before about sight reading practice – this is a perfect time.  You could sightread by reading a note and then fixing your gaze on the appropriate string to be played, or you could point to the string as you read.  You can also work on your sight singing (or hearing the music in your head).

3. Learn your intervals – do a little ear training.  Find and identify particular intervals in music you already know.  Go online to find ear training exercises.  It does get easier – I promise.

4. Compose.  You can do this in your head and sing what you come up with into your recorder.  When you’re healed you can move your tune onto the harp.

5. Study your theory. Find a good theory book and work through it.  Don’t skim – do the exercises!

6.  Listen to music.  Find new things to work on later, when you’re healed.  It’ll give you something to look forward to. 

7.  Read all the posts in this blog! (No, really)

8.  Go for a walk (or knit, or some other thing that’s sort of meditative and quiet) and sing your rep in your head to keep it in there.

9. Restring your harp (if it needs it).  You might need practice changing strings and this will do it.  At a minimum, it will build your confidence for quick string changes!

10. Have coffee with a harp friend to enjoy their growth, commiserate on your injury, and stay connected to your harp world.

If you’re not injured, celebrate – but take care too.  Hopefully this assures you that, should you become injured you will be able to keep working.  And it might give you some ideas if you find yourself there.  Not every injury will require weeks to recover (for instance, I am quite good at cutting my index finger just before gigs).  I’m sure there are loads of other things you could do while you heal.  If you’re already hurt, which of these have you done/are you likely to try or do you have other ideas?  Please share them in the comments! 

How’s your Transposition?

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I started learning a language just before the pandemic began.  If you hadn’t already sussed it, I’m a bit of a word nerd.  I like knowing words and where they come from – and how that same thought can be represented in another way.  When you make those translations while speaking, they need to be rapid and seamless.  Then you can hear the sameness of the thought and the slight differences in the translation.  In effect, switching the language transposes the thought.

When we’re playing, sometimes we need to do the same thing and transpose to a new key.  Why?  Well, we can transpose to play with someone else (e.g., all the Bb instruments), or to support a singer, or to fit a tune on your harp (so you can use all of it without “running out of strings” or because you just like the sound of it better in a different key.

Are you thinking “ugh”?

Transposing is a very useful skill that will serve you well.  It’s a good workout for your brain.  It’s good for building flexibility in your playing too. It’s also intimidating to many – after all, if you’ve not learned how or just haven’t practiced, it can leaving you feeling be uncomfortable and embarrassed.

Before I go on, let’s start with – what is transposing?  It’s a big, scary word for moving from one key to another.  For us as harpers, it’s actually not too scary and certainly less work than for some other instruments.  We just have to move to the new lever/pedal setting and everything else stays the same – the fingering, the spacing.  In fact, the only things that change after resetting the lever/pedal are the look of your finger on the string and the pitches.

I won’t lie to you – when you start trying to transpose, it’s challenging (that’s my fancy way of saying it’s harder than lots of other things).  Your poor brain is going to try to “translate” every note, one at a time. Often, at the beginning, you might just be guessing.  But like everything else we do, taking a moment to think will help us become better and get faster sooner.  All of this will also help you become more facile with theory (or it will come to you sooner if you already know your theory and how to apply it).

The hard way – that so many people go through – is to identify the relationship of the key you know the tune in and the key you’re transposing to.  But don’t fall for thinking that a small move is easier than a bigger one.  It’s easy to think that moving from C to D (for instance) will be uncomplicated – after all you just have to move up a string.  But that’s why it’s hard – you have to second guess every note, keeping track of which is the “old note” and which is the “new note”.  If the new key is farther away, then you have to “translate” every note.  If you move from C to A, each note is now a 6th above (or 2 below the old right note) so you have two opportunities to second guess – did you do the math right (in one direction) and the close problem (in the other direction) – ugh.

Do it the hard way often enough and you’ll be glad stop and think first!  Because you already know what you need – the intervals are what matters.  If you know what the intervals sound like (yup, ear training!), you’ll be even closer to making the transposition easily.  The fingering and patterns will help solidify the move when you transpose.

While you can think about all this when you’re transposing, imagine how far ahead you’d be if, when you learned the tune, you’d been thinking about the intervals and relationships, rather than just the note names and sequences!  Same thing with the harmonies.  Rather than memorizing the chord names, think about their place in the scale and the chord progression.  If you know I, VI, V – you’re on the way.  Learning the chord progression as a set of relationships will make it so much easier to remember.

If all that makes sense to you – now practice doing it.  Take some well-loved, well learned, often played tune, and put it in another key.  Keep at it – the more you practice doing it, the easier it will become. 

If all the above is so many words that don’t make sense to you, don’t worry.  They will.  They just might need to percolate.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also try it.  The practice is what will help get it into your head.

Before you say, “yeah, yeah, whatever” – think about your next harp circle or session.  There will be some tune you love that you want to play along with everyone, but they’re all playing it in the key of Qb mijor, so you’re left either sitting there wishing you were playing OR you’ll employ your new skill and tuck in!  What tune do you love that everyone else plays in some other key?  How are you going to transpose it?  Let me know in the comments!