Recycling

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The headline says, “Get Crafty Using Recycled Items”.  Wow!  What a great idea!  You know that I am 1) intrinsically lazy and 2) always looking to increase my repertoire without actually working too hard (see number 1.).  I will do anything (climb fences, practice for hours, eat nettles) to avoid working too hard (as you see, my definition of work too hard might need some work).

But recycling speaks to my inner Goddess – Parsimony.  There is a real treasure trove in even the smallest repertoire.  Music that can be expanded and refashioned in such a way that the overall volume of music available is not additive but really, it’s multiplied! So much gain for so little gain.

Building on our earlier discussion, here are three ways to recycle your music to have even more to play:

       1. Slow it down or speed it up – there are some hauntingly beautiful melodies cleverly disguised as dance tunes.  You don’t even have to change the chord pattern just blow the block chords up into schmaltzy rolled chords or lush broken chords.  Take the tempo way down.  Add ornaments and if you’re of a mind include variations.  And don’t forget to breathe – use your breath to highlight the phrasing.  Or take an air and move it into a dance form – speed it up, block up the phrasing, block the chords to help add some heft and bulk and you’ll have a new tune! 
2.       Move into another key – it always amazes me how dissimilar different keys can feel on a tune.  Play around and move a tune from one key to another (which might be a lever change away!) and see if you like it as well or better in another key.  Another take on this is to really change it up – move the tune to a very different key and see what you get – move to the relative minor (or major) and get a whole new feel.  Or set your levers to some other key but continue to play the original shapes and strings (note – sometimes this is brilliant!  And sometimes it can’t end quickly enough – but you have to try to see what works and what you like).
3.       Modify the chords and change the feel – you know that there’s the chord patter you’ve learned, read, or generated.  But you also know that each note appears in at least three 1-3-5 chords so there are plenty of opportunities to mix it up.  If you always come down on a D for instance, consider coming down on a G (or a B maybe…).   Noodle around and see what works – and see how it changes what you played.
Of course, each of these takes some time, just you and your harp.  But the outcome is really rewarding (especially if you have to fill more time than you planned). Let me know how you come along!

Spring Cleaning

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Spring cleaning is that annual ritual in which we shake off the old detritus of the last year, clean our space, let in the light and the fresh air.  Of course, we mostly put it off so we can practice.  But maybe we should consider spring cleaning our playing.

Technique is essential for good performance and will help you get new music down.  I know you have good technique.  You have worked hard to achieve it.  And it has served you well for all this time.

But just like our homes, our technique could use some spring cleaning.  There are 3 things you can do to give your playing a tune up:

1.       Work on your exercises – I know, no one likes exercises – but they are good for you.  The real reason to include exercises though is that they allow you an opportunity to evaluate your technique.  Use the time to work slowly and carefully through those basic elements of playing that are the building blocks (or technique).  If you are inclined you can enlist the aid of a friend or use a video camera to learn more – what are your hands actually doing while you’re playing?  These are always useful – I try to monitor my technique like a hawk especially when doing scales, arpeggios and building patterns which give you a good idea of areas you need to work. 

2.       Tune up old tunes – I had the opportunity to take a lesson recently and in the course of it, learned that I had developed a very bad habit.  I never noticed it because I never do it when I’m watching myself work through exercises.   This bad habit had developed over the course of building comfort with the tune and its arrangement.  If you develop a problem, go back to old tunes that you know really well.   In effect, they become like the exercises in that you know them so well you don’t have to focus on the tune and can instead look at your technique.  Because you’re playing a real tune you can explore even greater aspects of your playing than with the exercises.

3.       Do a real cool down – Most people don’t think they really need a cool down after practicing or playing.  After all, it’s not like you ran or anything – you certainly didn’t break a sweat!  However, each time you practice you are doing a lot of work.  And just like an athlete, you need to cool down and stretch to help build strength and allow the muscles to recover.

Of course, this spring cleaning is something you should do throughout the year.  It will help you strengthen your technique which will improve your playing in the spring and throughout the year.

SoMD Celtic Festival Harp Competition is soon!

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28 April 2012 marks the 34th year of the Southern Maryland Celtic Society Festival Saturday, in beautiful Calvert County Maryland. This is the oldest Celtic celebration in Maryland!

In just two month’s we will have a Scottish Harp Society Sanctioned Competition (rules are available at http://www.shsa.org). Our judge will be the wonderful Sue Richards (http://www.suerichards.net/). And we are fortunate to again have the Virginia Harp Center as our Prizes Sponsor this year.

I hope you’ll come to the competition, whether you compete or not. If you want to compete you’ll find the online registration (there will be no onsite registration) on cssm.org/harp. And if competition performance is not for you, come out anyway – we always need volunteers (who get complimentary admission to the games – just leave me a comment if you are interested).

The festival is scheduled on the last Saturday of April every year from 10 AM to 6 PM Rain or Shine.  Look for more information on www.cssm.org.  While the park will allow pets, it would be less stressful for them if you left your furry friends at home.

Our Festival was chosen in 2000 by Congressman Steny Hoyer to represent Southern Maryland in the national “Local Legacy” project of the Library of Congress’ Bicentennial celebration.  The Southern Maryland Celtic Festival and Highland Gathering highlights the heritage of the Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scots, and Welsh.

The Festival is centrally located to the mid-Atlantic.  Our Harp competition has had competitors from as far as North Carolina to the south, Michigan to the west, and upstate New York to the north – and I hope this year will be no exception. The Festival is held at Jefferson Patterson state park with the field overlooking the Patuxent River which is stunning and delightful – a lovely location for a games.

When final details, like the time, have been updated  for 2012, I’ll post them here.

Three sure ways to double your repertoire today

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We all want to have a prodigious repertoire that will allow us to play for hours with little to know effort.  But how do you get there?  You know that it will take some time to develop a deep repertoire but there are three steps to getting there quicker.

1.       Play the classics.  While you know “Twinkle” because you learned them at your first lesson, that doesn’t mean that your audience won’t love it when you play it!  Bring out and play all those eight-bar tunes!  The tunes you know are the ones to play – they’re not trite, they’re fun…and…you know them!

2.       Rearrange your tunes.  Whether you learn by ear or a strict page reader, you can make more of your repertoire by “letting go”.  You can use the same chord progression (which means you only have to remember the one progression) but present it in different ways – 5ths, octaves, blocked chords, broken chords, rolled chords, various collections of these).  This will allow you to play a tune through as many repeats as you need.  If you’re playing off the paper, you might want to write in the chord names – make it your own lead sheet.  And, if you can, add in some alternate chords for variety.


3.       Timing is everything.  Music is a means of communication.  What you choose to communicate is up to you.  The tunes you know can often do double duty – especially when you have no time to prepare.  Most of the “fast tunes” you know can be slowed way down – way down!  This will instantaneously increase your store of airs.  But remember too that your store of airs can be sped up – thus increasing your cache of fast tunes (this does take some practice!).  And it’s relatively easy to do – the biggest challenge is to actually play slowly!  The chord progressions stay the say, but break the chord up which will help you stay slow.

All these will, at a minimum, double your repertoire – as quickly as today.  Don’t forget to write out a list of your tunes – don’t want to forget any of them!

I’m listening

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Long ago on this blog, I took a moment to thank you for reading it.  I really do appreciate that you read what I have to say. And I am always delighted to get comments from you!  This week, I’d like to again thank those of you who are following my blog. I do hope you find it useful. 

If you are visiting for the first time (or you just remembered and came to check out what I was going on about this time!) and like what you’ve seen, please join us and become a Follower. Followers get an email when content has been added or updated so you get all the information, fresh as it gets posted.  And it reminds you to take a moment for yourself and your harping.  It also gives me a continued warm fuzzy that I’m not talking to myself!

I’ll tell you about important stuff: travel to Scotland, growing as a harp player, and other essential stuff, like playing the harp while we’re in Scotland!  I’ll also highlight harp events or other excitement in our harp world that I think would be interesting to you.

And, of course, I would love to hear from you.  You can always let me know if there’s a particular topic in which you’re interested. 

I hope you’ll join us on a regular basis.  And if I don’t know you personally I’ll look forward to meeting you when we’re at one of the many events available.

If you see me somewhere – please introduce yourself…you have me at an advantage – you know what I look like!  It would be delightful if I met you in Edinburgh as we set off on the tour – but OSAS, Harp Camp, or any of the other wonderful learning opportunities would be great too!

See you soon!

The Bridge

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Once we get over the terror of playing in front of other people we need to move on to developing and sharing a musical experience for our listeners. Music acts as communication – a bridge between people.  This can be very difficult for a number of reasons. We need to have thoroughly learned the music. We have to have really thought about what the music says – what the story we’re telling is. We have to decide how we want to tell that story. We need to suss out how we want the audience to feel about the story – and how we’re going to help them get there. And we have to be proficient enough at our instrument that we can actually achieve these aims.

Musicality is the quality with which we imbue the music to assure the listener arrives where we meant them to with respect to the story we’re telling. Musicality has many facets but we’ll focus on the melodiousness of our presentation. But how do we get there?

You might think that musicality is in-born. Either you have it or you don’t. But actually, like most of what we talk about, you already know the answers. The same answers for so many things -Practice!



Musicality, like everything else comes with practice and work. You need to focus on improving your musicality, deciding on the story you’re going to tell, how you’re going to tell that story, the emotions that are essential to evoke to tell the story fully.

Then you can practice developing that story and evoking it from your harp.  You can craft the music, the presentation, the arrangement to assure that the story you meant to tell is the one that comes off your harp.  And practice it until that is the story you tell each time you perform the piece.  And then you can move on to telling a different story each time you play the tune (why not?  It’s your story!).



And with that level of practice, you will be so focused on your story and so well practiced in its telling that you won’t have to be worried about playing for people.

2012 Harp in the Highlands and Islands Tour is coming up!

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The 2012 Music in the Highlands and Islands Tour is rapidly approaching.  We will be going 16 – 23 July.

This year, we are welcoming not only harp players, want-to-be harp players, and harp loving companions but also other instrument players.  If you, a friend, companion, or music partner play a small instrument and would like to join us – welcome and come along! While we will continue to bring the harp experience to our guests, we understand that not everyone is ready to play the harp, but that is no reason that these instruments can’t also come with us on our musical adventure. So this year we are also inviting other musicians to join us. So if you already play fiddle, flute, concertina, or whistle, please bring your instrument and join us!

You’ll get the same great instruction and tunes. You’ll still have the opportunity to try your hand at the Harp – THE traditional instrument of Scotland, but you now have the opportunity to learn some or all of the tunes on your “native” instrument.

For more information, email me or leave a comment. Remember that seats are limited. I hope you’ll be joining us!

Afterglow resolutions – goal setting not new years resolutions

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So, by this time you have generated your New Year’s Resolutions and maybe started using an inspiration board to develop goals for your personal growth for this year (or you are humoring me by not saying you haven’t). We’re in the afterglow of the Resolutions. All done, right?

Not by half – now the real work begins. Here in the afterglow we are close enough to forming our goals to forget that within a few weeks we will be in the hustle and bustle of daily living and will have all but forgotten them. We will have forgotten all our resolutions, not just the ones we developed for our harp life. By this time of January, most of us have already stopped going to the gym, begun buying our lunch instead of packing again, and not getting enough sleep, still.

So there are some strategies to help keep ourselves on track. Here are a few to try if they work for you:

Set an appointment with yourself. Once a week (or once a month depending on how dedicated and motivated you are), set an appointment with yourself to check your progress against your goals and see how you’re coming. This shouldn’t be a punitive time. If your goals are too aggressive – modify them. If you’re way ahead and your goals weren’t aggressive enough, modify those too!

Record yourself. Most of us set goals that are related to our performance – either learning, memorizing, improvising, performing, arranging, composing or some other facet of our playing. Record your work so you can hear it better. No matter how well you play or how well you have learned something (including what you’ve written) you will be better able to review it if you listen to a recording than if you listen while you’re playing.

Don’t be afraid to change things – including your goals. This is not the same as abandoning your goals as soon as things get tough. However, if you realize that you have set an inappropriate goal (a piece you have selected has only been arranged for pedal harp which you don’t have and has a zillion accidentals) – change it.  You should consider modifying a goal that just is not working. If you achieve a goal with relatively no effort (although you have passed your grade eight exam, you decided to work on learning Twinkle Twinkle) that goal may not have been as challenging as you had hoped and you could add a new one.

None of these is focused on punishing you into meeting your goals. The point of the exercise is to keep an eye on your goals and an eye on your progress to assure that you continue to be moving forward. Be positive and friendly with yourself – and you’ll make it!

You just have to start.

Coming off the season – inspiration boards

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I spend a lot of time on this blog exhorting you to set goals, make plans, and do other things to help you become a better musician. But sometimes, it can be challenging to get motivated to do these things. Especially because they are hard work! Or you might just be stuck. Maybe it seems like a big undoable task. Maybe you don’t know where or how to begin. Or maybe your goals are lofty and you’re not sure how you’re going to get there. Maybe a tool would help you to focus on what you’re trying to do and to find a path to get there.

One way to get going is to start by building an Inspiration Board. This is a tool to help creative people be more creative. And it is just as good to help busy people be creative, or to help people who don’t think they are creative to be creative. It is a way to collect the things that inspire you in one place so you can be reminded what your goals are and possibly see linkages between ideas you have. I stole this idea from the home decorating shows on television (yes, all that good information and all I learned was inspiration boards can be very helpful!)

If you check on line there are plenty of ways to make this complicated.  But I would suggest something simple. First, use a means that works for you. Many people make a collage from photos that represent things they want to achieve. I have a three ring binder that I filled with sheet protectors (the kind you use to put music into binders) and with both lined paper and manuscript paper.  I collect articles, photos, bits of TAB or musical notation, quotes, and other stuff I have found.  I just stick them in the binder. You can actually set up a bulletin board or make an on-line collage, or put things into a box. The form is irrelevant – it’s the function that is important. Collect things that give you ideas and put them somewhere that you actually look at them – so you can gain inspiration – and generate more ideas!

Your inspiration board is for you. You can share it (as many online sights push) if you like, but you don’t have to – you can keep it where only you can see it. It’s your board, and your inspiration – you can do as you wish with it. Its also important to remember that the board is a tool – just like a tuning key. It can be helpful but it is just there to help, not to become a new vocation. So put as much (or as little) into it as you need to identify what inspires you – and build your goals for the coming year from that inspiration. Use the collection, not only to identify your goals, but also to document them so you can refer to them in later months (when the January clarity has dimmed). And enjoy looking at your goals and inspirations in a new way!

Self-Care

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Winter is a time of colder temperatures with brisk, dry winds, and rain, ice, snow and combinations of all of them. I’m sure you don’t need a weather report from me. We all have to get through the winter season where we live. The winter does bring some challenges for us as harp players. We have to take self-care seriously to assure we don’t get hurt. Here are two areas that will help you get through the winter successfully.

Start with the skin. Your skin is the largest organ in your body. It protects you from a lot  including your harp – and other, bad stuff. It is your first line of defense. It protects you from disease. It is sturdy but delicate. You need to give it appropriate care. Being sure to wash your hands frequently is good for your health. But putting moisturizer on frequently is really good for your skin. Just like we get thirsty in winter because cold air and heating systems dry the air, our skin is also thirsty. Moisturizer will help keep your skin supple.  A shea butter, cocoa butter, aloe vera or other moisturizer you know works for you is good to have on hand all the time.

Moving on to your hands – keep them warm – physically. Wear your gloves or wristies* There are lots of free patterns online if you want to knit your own or you can buy inexpensive versions in knits or fleece. They are very helpful, even in warm weather, for keeping warm before performances.

While I always tell you the importance of warming up, in the winter it is essential to warm up before you play. Just like the rest of you feels the cold, your hands and forearms and their muscles will feel the cold. And if you are a more experienced human (read: older) you may feel the cold even more keenly. So that warm up to start your practice is even more important than at other, warmer parts of the year. In addition, consider adding a warm up to your office work in winter. Typing, writing, and other small motor activities (think texting) can also take a toll on your hands so think about warming up for those as well.

I’m also partial to holding a good cup of hot tea!

*”Wristies” is a patented and trademarked item, developed, according to the website, by a smart and enterprising 10 year old Girl Scout! Not an endorsement – I’ve never worn Wristies ™ but I like the idea and the story. Here I am suggesting any sort of fingerless warmer that helps you preserve your muscle warmth).