I’m a big fan of learning by ear – it is easy, portable, social, and exciting. Because of this, I often encounter people who expect me to tell them that they do not need to learn to read music or that there is no need to develop proficiency in reading.

Nothing could be farther from the truth! Reading is  Fun – Duh – Mental!

Reading is Fun: First, never forget that reading music is just like reading a book – there’s a story in there, intricately coded in a way that only those who know the cypher can understand, just waiting to give you a bucket of new emotions! There’s Romance, Mystery, Biography, History, from anywhere on in the world – something for everyone! What could be more fun than uncovering the story within?

Reading? Duh! Reading is a necessary tool for every musician. Music captures and retains those patterns that make the music.  And although people are typically very good at remembering patterns, you will be able to remember more, better if you have multiple ways to access them. So, if you have learned the tune by ear, you have all those audio patterns (including pitch, rhythm and tempo). But when you add printed music, you also have the visual patterns (including direction, shape, an structure) that really help solidify what you already know (or help you retrieve what you already have stored but ….just……can’t ……………reach……………….in your memory).

Reading is Mental: Just as paper music can help you remember music as an additional pathway, the act of reading music is also a great mental exercise. Again, just like reading the letters to generate the words of a story, reading the notes to generate the phrases of the music in the visual domain provides another means of working along with the other modes including motor and auditory. All this mental work is, well, work. However, this work will really help you develop as a musician.

So, go read a good book (of music). And if it helps you to read better, try reading loud – that is read along with a recording before you ever sit to your harp…because Reading is Fun- Duh! Mental!

As musicians, we strive to develop our skills, to improve our technique, our repertoire, our span of knowledge. We want to get better – typically we are working on our ability to perform. Whether we are renowned for our performance on the world stage, or simply playing to amuse our cat, we work to be worth listening to.

Do we take the time to really hear ourselves? Do we actually really listen to others when they play? I don’t mean the listening where you relax and let the sound wash over you (even though that is one of the benefits of playing our beautiful instrument, but that’s not what we mean here).

Involved listening is another skill that we must develop. This is an essential skill. Whether you are solely ear trained, solely paper trained, or somewhere in between. It is from this type of all attentive listening that you learn important elements like phrasing, ornamentation, style, and expression. And like every other skill, you can build your involved listening. Here are four things you can do to get better at involved listening.

• Focus. You can spend all day listening, but if you don’t pay attention, you won’t actually hear anything. Take the time to focus on what you’re listening to.
• Think. What are you listening to? Are you hearing the melody? The harmony? A particular phrase? Think about captures your attention and decide if that’s what you want to focus on.
• Pause. Remember that music is a communication so the pauses are almost as important as the sounds. Listen for those pauses. What do they mean? What do you want them to mean?
• Reflect. Now that you’ve listened to the tune that you’re interested in. You have to think about how you’re going to make it yours. Reflect on what you’ve listened to and how your to bring it out and you.

Being involved with your music by truly listening will allow you to become a better musician as well as appreciating other people’s music all the more.

I came to the harp in the folk and aural tradition.  It was very difficult for me to leave the page – the safe haven of knowing precisely what was expected, how the music had been played since it was written.  Although initially I fought (hard) against learning this way, eventually I realized the freedom in learning music the old way. 

The bad thing about the sheet music dots is that they are a haven.  They can encourage you to pursue a false perfection, to abandon your own good judgment.  If not careful, dots form a jail not a frame.   And if the jail is reinforced with doubt you may never break out.

I was originally classically trained.  I lived for the printed music.  It was a game to me – how could I express (fill in some adolescent angst here) given the constraints of the page?  How could I play the music “correctly” while giving it an indelible stamp of my existence?  How would my presentation of those dots be different from all the other presentations while remaining true to the thoughts of the composer?

I worked relentlessly to master reading, phrasing, and technique to coax out of my instrument precisely my interpretation of the music.  Sometimes, in a fit of pique my interpretation would be to elect to interpret the music exactly as written – no inflection, no variance.  In those times, I strove for Swiss watch precision.

That is the beauty of written music, it preserves the presentation. It allows you to play the same music that has been played for years, decades, centuries.  It provides you a link to your musical past, a genealogy worth preserving.  Further, the music page creates a frame within which you can work.  Nothing about putting music on the page prevents you from bringing that music to life in your own way.  Be creative – as long as you honor the composer and play the music as written – with your own twists.

I know the holidays are coming.  I know.  It’s easy to get excited about the holidays.  But it’s also easy to get totally uninspired – the same tunes, year after year, to the same people (usually), for the same events, all in a time when you’re totally crushed with other obligations.  It’s too easy to lose all inspiration.  And that leads to boredom and cynicism – which start to show in your music.

1.      Listening to music- yup, seems counterintuitive, but listening to music can help.  For some people it will be listening to other presentations of holiday music for ideas and inspiration.  For others, it will be listening to whatever is, for them, the antithesis of holiday music to break the mold – and maybe to get some fresh ideas to apply to the holiday tunes.

2.      Reading – quotes, books, poems, letters – we end up playing the holiday standards, which all pretty much say the same thing.  Read something with another message.  Let that message wash over you and see how that might change how you tell the holiday stories with your music.

3.     Smells/tastes – I know, me and food!  But really, smelling “holiday” smells – cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pine, fires, cold – all can put you in a better frame of mind to re-approach your music – and leave a good taste in your mouth as well!

4.     Beautiful scenery/ Fresh air – take a walk, enjoy the changing weather – all these will help you bring a new perspective to your music, your musicality, phrasing, arrangement, and presentation.

5.     Breathe!  Simply taking a few deep breaths will allow you to think, reassess your arrangements and playing – and its in the pauses that I find a lot of new ideas. Breathing is, after all, the basic definition of inspiration!

There are few things less inspiring than an air that has no – well – air!  You hear them all the time – lifeless, soulless presentations of tunes that should make you feel something.  But when it’s through, all you fell is relief that it’s over.

Which story are you telling – the rich full one or the one that needs some air?

Don’t let your airs be like that!            

1. Make it breathe – phrasing is not something only to be marked on classical scores and then forgotten.  Phrasing is the breath in the music – make sure yours has some air! If you’re not sure where to put the phrasing, sing it (in the shower if you’re squeamish) – everywhere you need a breath – put one in the music!

2. Make it feel – airs are essentially a story.  And while many are songs and therefore come prepackaged with a story, you can always tell your own story.  Give it your take.  And make sure your audience can tell what the story is!

3. Make it lifelike – in addition to breathing, the story needs to shine through and the audience has to know what you’re telling them – assure that your arrangement helps tell your story – make it minor when bad/sad/not great things are happening, make it major when happy/good things are going on and make it funky if it starts to get boring!

4. Make it live – when you’re arranging the tune, make it have a life, don’t just repeat it relentlessly.  Put the arrangement together so that the story is supported – and be sure to bring your audience along for the whole tale.

Just these minor tweaks will make your airs breathtaking – and there’s nothing wrong with that!

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.