Preparing to Compete – Body

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When you decide to compete you will need to prepare! While you might think, “Oh, I’ll just throw on a kilt and sit down to play”, you’ll feel so much more poised if you spend some time getting ready ahead of time.

Of the three areas in which to focus to maximize your time – Music, Body and Mind, this week – it’s your body*

While competing isn’t running a marathon, being physically prepared certainly helps!

Work on your bench stamina – if you can’t sit on your bench comfortably for longer than it will take to play your competition set, you may need to improve your stamina. You won’t be sitting on the stage for very long (although it might feel like it) but the time you have spent on the bench practicing will help you get settled and comfortable more quickly which may help you be more comfortable as you start to play.

Practice all the movements – we spend a lot of time practicing our technique like closing our fingers appropriately and sitting up strait by also practice breathing while playing, relaxing between notes, gesturing (but not wildly – please, you’re not Liberace!), sitting without slouching, walking on stage without schlumping, and smiling! All of these things will come more easily if you practice them – just like the music itself!

Variety – try to practice in different locales to become used to changes in lighting, temperature, furniture layout, and sound qualities. This will help you be more focused and comfortable when you make ready to play your comp set. Practicing in your stage clothing will also allow you to get used to it (or change it before it makes you crazy!).  Definitely practice sitting down in a kilt!

General stamina – no matter how you cut it, competition day is long! It is also a total disruption of your regular routine. Add that disruption to the excitement of competing and you will be better able to enjoy the day if you are in better physical condition. You don’t need an arduous workout – just get some exercise each day. If not for your heart, then for your art!

Practice enough to feel confident in your skin and you’ll have moved yourself more of the way there! Next time – preparing your Mind to compete.

* I’m not a physician or a fitness expert, these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, malady, disorder, problem, difficulty, trouble, woe or ill. Quit whining and go back to practicing!

Preparing to Compete – Music

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When you decide to compete you will need to prepare! While you might think, “Oh, I’ll just throw out a few tunes”, you’ll feel so much more confident (and play so much better) if you spend some time getting ready ahead of time. How much time? Well, that depends on you!

There are three areas in which to focus to maximize your time – Music, Body and Mind. This week it’s the Music

Before you even begin to consider tunes – read the rules! Nothing is more frustrating that talking to competitors on the day of a competition only to discover they have prepared tunes that don’t meet the rules – wrong tune types, not enough tunes for the category, too many of the same type of tune, etc. It’s disheartening! But I can guarantee you that every competition has rules – and that they all state that in the end, the competitor is responsible for reading and complying with them!

Learn your music – unless you have an iron ego, most of us would prefer to play our best and that requires actually knowing the music we intend to play. Be sure you actually know the tunes – otherwise when you sit you will activate that switch in the bench – you know the one that empties your brain as soon as you start to play? Yup, that switch.

Consider a backup plan – having prepared at least two sets of music that conform to the rules can be very freeing. This backup plan means that if for some reason you have a crisis of confidence with a particular tune on the day of the competition, you can shift to your other set. Just knowing that makes you feel more confident and gives you flexibility to play whatever feels right that day (or to switch when everyone before you plays the same tune – don’t laugh, I’ve seen it happen!).

Practice enough to feel confident with the music itself and you’ll be most of the way there! Next time – preparing your Body to compete.

Competition – Seven reasons it may be bad for you

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In an effort to be fair and balanced, this week let’s talk about how competition can be bad for your harp playing. One reason is that people who don’t like to compete are very vocal about it! I’d like to thank Kate for sharing her thoughts on this – and her permission to incorporate those thoughts.

There are reasons to not compete and here are seven of them. I’m sure there are more – feel free to share your reasons.

  1. Not everyone finds it fun. And really, why play at all if it isn’t fun?
  2. It can be limiting (do you only learn things or practice in preparation for a comp?) There is so much music, why limit yourself to what adheres to the rules?
  3. It may highlight things you might not want to know about yourself – like the possible need to work on fear of failure or performance anxiety. Or a lack of preparation that might arise from not practicing enough.
  4. It might drive you away from needed hard work – if you think you can only be ready in time if you skip warm-ups, exercises, and etudes so you can focus on comp tunes, does that really serve you?
  5. It may make you focus on everyone else rather than on your performance (against a standard or against your own growth) – and that won’t serve you well.
  6. There are plenty of ways to share music without force fitting your music six minutes on stage! If you do need to work on performing you can play for your cat, at a local elementary school, at a library, for your church or civic group, for a bunch of friends – the list is long and the audiences are appreciative!
  7. It may divert your focus away from spending more time being creative, exploring your music and yourself.  Enjoy the time at your harp, and breathe.

So, don’t let anyone bully you into competing unless you want to! Work toward your own goals, your own growth areas, your own challenges. Popular online just now is the quote from Zenkei Shibayama, “The flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it, it just blooms.” So don’t compete, just bloom!

Competition – Seven Reasons it’s Good for You

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If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you know that I’m a big advocate for competition – and especially for Scottish Harp Society of America (SHSA) competitions. Some of you have told me that you don’t agree and I can respect that – but many of you don’t know why I think competitions are good. I don’t just think they are good, I think they are good for you! Here are seven ways that competition is good for you:

  1. It helps you monitor your progress against goals. Why learn a strathspey? So you can play it in competition! Why have two sets of tunes – so you can select the one you feel best about on the day you have to play them.
  2. It gives you an outlet – you do all that hard work practicing, it’s nice to have a safe place to play the tunes you worked so hard to get.
  3. It provides you with social engagement with like-minded harpers. It’s always interesting to meet and talk with other harpers and the shared preparation means you have built in conversation starters!
  4. SHSA competitions are structured so you know what you’re going against. The rules and the standard are posted so everyone can see them and you compete against the standard, not against everyone else.  The competition is about you.
  5. It gives you just a little bit of pressure to work under which often helps improve our performance.
  6. Competition helps you develop performance skills in front of and behind the harp. You will not only have to play your pieces, you’ll have to introduce the music and yourself…and of course, you have to walk onto the stage!
  7. You will learn a lot! Not only will you meet new people and seek out new tunes, you’ll also get to hear how tunes have been interpreted, learn something about the tunes, and hear some great music. And, of course, you’ll learn more about yourself!

So, as the competition seasons gears up, consider entering – it’s good for you!

Taking it all in – Learning new stuff

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We are always learning – in school, at work, in social situations, and all the times in between are opportunities to learn. So, when we sit at our harp it would be helpful if we knew exactly how to go about learning new music. There are many ways to learn and it helps to use as many as possible.  It does help to actively think about how you will learn and here are eight ways to help you learn your music and how to play:

  1. Take care of you: if you’re thirsty or hungry you will have a harder time focusing, so before you start be sure to hydrate and have a snack.
  2. Know before you go: as they say, “plan your work and work your plan” – you’ll have an easier time learning if you know what you are trying to learn before you start!
  3. Think first: it will be easier to take in the music if you analyze it before you try to play it. Look at the music or listen to the tune so you have some idea of the patterns that are coming and you’re not totally surprised by each note!
  4. Don’t start from zero: practice the fundamentals so that when you get to the more advanced stuff you are not also working on the basics, just the new music.
  5. Get up: it is important to learn the rhythm and to help get that down you might have to get up and move to find it.
  6. Write it down: keep your journal up to date to capture your plans, your progress, your successes and insights you get along the way.
  7. Take it in small sections and build it up: music is serial – that is, all the notes don’t hit you at once! Rather, they stream by over time (except for the chords!). If you have already done the analysis (see 3 above) you can learn the patterns as time flows.
  8. Use all you’ve got (hear, see, feel) – Learning is hard work – use everything you have to make it go better, faster, and learn more music!

Break it up and move along

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February is a great month – not so long that you get bored with it, not so short that you can’t learn something new – so this month we’ll focus on learning.

Reading music is a challenge for many people.  It is, after all, a whole new language. Written music conveys a lot of information in relatively little ink.  Ok, it does look like a lot of ink!  Music scores are built from a set of symbols that come together to express musical ideas.  Just like letters build to make words, sentences, paragraphs, or entire stories!

So how do you get to the meaning of all that ink?  Well, you have to read it.  It’s important to remember that just like in a word book, those little strokes and splotches convey a lot of information.  The score conveys pitch, movement, rhythm, volume, and more.  That’s a lot to take in and it can be intimidating.

Musicians with strong formal training quite literally read a score.  Just like you read a book, their eyes move along the lines as they recreate in their heads what’s being conveyed. They have a lot of practice – they’ve already sat at the equivalent of the blue bird table just like you did when you were learning to read words.

Sounding out words?  Reading aloud?  Pronouncing (and mispronouncing) strings of symbols while you learned what they meant and how to voice them.  Remember that?  No, you probably don’t (or the details may be fuzzy) – you practiced very hard to learn the symbols, then to put a couple together (remember sh-, ch-, th- and ae, ai, ea, oa?), and then put more together, until you were speeding through sentences and then whole books!

You need to do the same thing with your score! Practice reading, learning the symbols.  Then practice reading them in pairs.  Then move on to longer strings, until eventually you are zorching through entire tunes.  Keep at it and soon you’ll be reading Sonatas and Symphonies!!

But it all starts by looking at the sheet and not panicking but by slowly breaking it up, getting the idea and moving on to the next couple…just practice, take it slow, acknowledge the work you are doing.  Break it up and move along!

Harpa 2017 is Full!

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The holidays are past us and the new year is firmly established – and the Harpa 2017 trip is all booked up! We are excited to be finalizing planning and the itinerary as we all begin the work of preparing to share music.

Sue Richards is acting as Concert Mistress and has identified some fantastic tunes for us to share.  Harpa founder Beth Kolle and the the irrepressible Therese Honey with us too!  And we have a diverse group of people that are looking forward to traveling together building friendships and seeing Scotland — it’s a full and fun group!

We’re even starting to look forward to the challenges of taking a harp on travel. Ok, “looking forward to” might not be entirely accurate, but it will all be worth it to be where so much of our favorite music comes from! We will be playing lots of music and are looking forward to giving back with concerts for good local causes.

We’re not all harp players but we are all fun. We will be visiting St Andrews, Glencoe, Skye, Ayr, Dumfries and Galloway and more. And we’ll be posting pictures – I’m sure of that! Keep an eye on our Facebook page too: www.facebook.com/Harpaniks

I’m so looking forward this trip – I know we’ll have a great time!

You set goals – so what? Five ways to capture your progress

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All of January we have been talking about identifying, setting, keeping and meeting goals to improve playing, learning, and performance. The final question – how do you know if you are making progress? How can you be sure you are moving toward the outcome you wanted?

Well, like everything else, you need to record what you have done and see if you are on track to get there (or maybe that you are already there!). How do you go about recording your progress? Well, here are five ways:

  1. Write it down! And be sure to reread your notes. This can be in your lesson notebook or your journal. You can make notes on little scraps of paper – doesn’t matter, just so long as you can make sense of it when you go to review it.
  2. Record yourself. You can buy an inexpensive digital voice recorder at your favorite local office supply depot that are staples of most areas. This will give you good enough sound quality for this purpose. Then you can listen to your playing after you play as well as when you are playing – you’ll be amazed what you hear later!
  3. Check yourself against your plan – and review to see how well you are keeping up. Did you actually learn three nocturnes last week? No? You can always modify the plan but you won’t know if you aren’t watching!
  4. Ask someone to listen to you and provide you feedback (and then provide feedback on the implementation of their previous feedback). This can be your teacher or a helpful friend or family member. The point is to get some information on your progress (don’t lose sight of that).
  5. Videotape yourself. This is, of course, a variation of recording yourself but with the added benefit of having visuals as well – you might learn something you weren’t even expecting!

I’m sure there are more ways to be sure you are making progress – what do you do?

Just like you learn – you succeed!

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So, you have written down your goal(s) for the year.  And that is an important step – you’re most of the way there if you have actually written them down.   But now you need to move from doodling in your harp journal to actually moving forward. Just like you learn music – a little at a time, and beginning with the end in mind! Here are seven ways to get going:

  1. Be honest – don’t make a harp goal just because I’m leaning on you! Make goals because you want to achieve something in particular, not just because it’s January.
  2. Make a plan – a real plan.  Make sure you know what you need to do, how long it will take, when you will expect to have things done. Use a schedule so you will know you are making progress.  If it helps you, make a road map.  Or a vision board, or Goals storyboard…it doesn’t matter, so long as you have something you can work with. This will help you keep your eye on the ball!
  3. Make small steps – in that plan, make sure the steps are small and achievable.  If they’re too big (play Carolan’s Concerto?) break it down into bite size chunks so you can actually get there.  You know the joke – how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.
  4. Make “tests” so you will actually do the work – we all know that we work to a deadline.  No one says you can’t set your own test schedule!
  5. Schedule a lesson – which will make you practice – just so you don’t embarrass yourself! Think of it as a pop quiz. And the bonus is you’ll learn a lot while you have the lesson!
  6. Continue to document to keep track of what has happened and what is coming next.  Use your phone/laptop/ipad to help you! No, not to watch youtube videos of other people playing the harp! Rather, use the calendar, the recorder, the notepad – all ways to help you keep track and keep moving toward your goal. Or, keep it all in one place and include it in your lesson book/harp journal.
  7. Get support. No one gets anywhere alone.  Enlist the aid of your family, friends and other harpers to help you – to make sure you have time, that you learn what you need to so that you get to the next level, to cheer you on when you have challenges.

By keeping track, you are much more likely to have success in getting to where you want to be – and you can be proud of you progress.