Jenius Creations

Category: Musicianship

  • Theory Moment

    Theory is one of those things that people love to hate.  After all, it is the grammar of music.  The rules.  Written down.  To be learned, memorized, and used.  Theory is the liver and onions of being a musician!

    Some people love liver and onions.  And it’s good for you*.

    But for most of us, theory is hard and unapproachable.  It’s challenging to read.  It’s confusing to read.  It’s boring to read…and if you have to sit through lectures – ugh.  It’s torture to do those listening exercises.  And if you’re not formally trained (by which I mean forced to learn it), it may keep growing into a behemoth of stuff you are going to put off as long as possible.  Maybe you think you’ll hold your musical breath until it’s over.  If you find yourself in a workshop where the presenter starts spouting off theory, you just try to ride the wave, bide your time – does it really matter what key the tune is in? Don’t you just need to know which levers to set?  Why do you need to know that stuff?To be honest, there are loads of reasons to learn theory.  After all, it is the rules of our game.  Like golf, football, or figure skating, the rules are complex and complicated.  But just as a thorough understanding and knowledge of the rules is one of the things that distinguishes a great sports player, that knowing the rules of music will help you be a better harp player. 

    Have you ever sat in a workshop and felt like you didn’t understand what was being said?  Do you have that weird feeling like, although there are harps and people you recognize…it also feels like you’re watching a foreign language film – with missing subtitles?  Knowing your theory makes you part of the club.  The people in the club don’t mean to exclude you (ok actually, unfortunately, sometimes they do, but it has been my experience that often those are the people who only think they know stuff).  It’s ok – you can learn that stuff (no really, you can!).  Knowing the rules is your passport to getting into the “club”. 

    These rules of theory serve to create a language of music.  And that language allows people who know the rules to talk to – and to understand one another. They can easily share their musical ideas with loads of people…and be accurately understood.  They can have an impact!  And that’s kind of important.  Especially if you want to get as much from your musical life as you can – each workshop, each lesson, each harp circle, and each performance.

    And if you want to share your ideas, it is helpful to speak the language.  It’s certainly easier than waving your arms making vague finger shapes in an effort to tell others what you’re thinking!

    There are a number of books on theory if you want to study it yourself.  One of my favorites is Music Theory Made Easy by David Harp (and not just because of his name).  No, it’s not spectacular reading, but it is a handy reference.  I also like the Music Theory For Dummies (go figure) and I found the Alfred books while, if not approachable, at least they’re useful**. 

    It’s true that knowledge is power.  I fought learning and studying this stuff for a long time. But once I had studied a little, things began to fall into place.  And once some things fell into place in my head, playing actually became easier…well, a little easier!  Whether it’s being more familiar with well used chord progressions, making better phrasing, or building sets that make sense, every little scrap of theory you pick up, encode, and use will move you a little farther along your journey

    I hope you can see that actually studying theory may help you play better because you will have a better understanding and will start from a more knowledgeable place.  Do you have a reference you prefer?  Let me know what it is in the comments.

    *  please don’t start a word war about nutrition – you might have noticed that I’m not a nutritionist.  It’s an analogy.

    ** these are suggestions and the links are provided so you can find the books if you want.  I’m not an affiliate, I won’t get any money if you buy the book, I just want you to know what I’m talking about.

  • Expand your musical reach – another stretch (or 7!)

    We have talked about stretching through making art and stretching our bodies.  There’s another place we need to stretch and that is in our music.  And it’s the perfect time to think about it – it will be the winter holidays and all the lovely opportunities to play will be coming.  I mention the holidays because they are the perfect foil for stretching our music.

    The holidays are great from a repertoire perspective.  There is a relatively small set of tunes to work from and each year, those that have been on our set lists for a while seem to become easier to prepare and to play.  It’s also easier to knuckle under and practice – we know it’s coming; we know we’ll be playing; and we know the bulk of what we’ll bring to each performance.

    That doesn’t exactly sound like stretching.

    And that’s why it’s so great!  There are loads of holiday tunes – so you probably don’t know them all.  But you know some and so each year you can add another one or two to fill in your set list.  But we have to fight the urge to be lazy and just play all the same stuff. 

    I don’t know about you, but I really like hearing new (to me) stuff at the holidays.  From countries whose music I don’t know well, from new sources, and from the set of those songs that hardly anyone records but are just so good. 

    So, the holidays are an opportunity to stretch ourselves – musically.

    What does stretching musically mean? Trying new things!  It can be adding techniques we don’t usually use, playing music we don’t usually play, finding stuff we didn’t know existed and fitting it into our lives, arranging music we like (from other instruments) and playing it on the harp, or more.

    How is stretching musically good for us?  Here are seven unsurprising ways (some of these might sound familiar since they are as with making art)

    1. Stretching is (still) the opposite of static!  Static is not moving or changing.  Static introduces b-o-r-i-n-g into your playing.  It also means that you’re not growing as a musician.  So, learn how to do some effect you think is cool…and actually use it in your playing!  Do the work of technique practice.  And after learning some new technique, actually add it to your playing!
    2. Stretching makes you more flexible.  By adding new music, new sources, new techniques, new practice approaches, just new stuff to your playing, you will begin to explore yourself more and bring that into your playing and performance.  And you will be free to do more than you thought you could when you were less flexible.
    3. Stretching helps defeat stress.  The more you stretch your music, the more comfortable you become with playing it – because you’ll become more accustomed to being stretched.  In your practice, in performance, in ensemble, in sessions – no matter where you’re playing you will be more relaxed, able to enjoy the process and product of making music.  That comfort is an indication of your reduced stress.
    4. Stretching helps overcome pain and discomfort.  You might decide to stretch your music when you feel the discomfort be becoming bored.  Of course, once you decide to stretch your music, you might feel self-conscious, uneducated, or ignorant.  The music activities that stretch you might make you feel uncomfortable in and of themselves.  But keeping at it – a little bit each day – will help you be more comfortable and soon, you’ll be interested in the flexibility of trying new music.  I’d suggest adding time for creativity in your practice each day so you will be able to stretch musically with less (perceived) “stiffness”.
    5. Stretching helps you focus.  You can be mindful when you are stretching your music.  Mindful of what it is about the music that attracts (or repels) you, what technique elements you need to work on, what your harp really shines with.  In addition, a broader repertoire may help you to feel more accomplished and allow you to comfortably book gigs previously out of reach.  Be sure to pay attention as you’re stretching your music to identify what to keep on doing.
    6. Stretching improves your range.  As you add music to your toolbox, and include the listening, reading, technique and effects the new music might require of you, you will become more able to do more things with greater musicality – and add new things more quickly.
    7. Stretching stretches you.  There’s nothing like playing something you never thought you’d be able to (or possibly even that you never thought about adding) to boost your confidence and encourage you to try even more new things!

    Stretching – the gentle kind that broadens your abilities, and leaves you relaxed and enjoying making music, is just what you need.  With these seven stretches you might become a better musician!  What kind of music might you add to stretch yourself?  What else might you do to stretch yourself musically?  Tell me in the comments – I can’t wait to hear!

  • Make your music shine!

    When I walked into my local grocery on the morning of Halloween – yes, on the 31st of October – the candy shelves were bare. Not picked clean by overeager spoilers of goblins, ghosts, and ghouls. Swept bare – professionally cleared out. In preparation for stocking the Christmas treats. In October!

    That helped slam home how little time remained before the holidays. How little practice time actually occurs before the onslaught of holiday playing opportunities.

    In the weeks since then, while cramming Christmas carols and jamming holiday songs, it’s easy to lose sight of one teeny-tiny element. Yes, you know you need to know the music – but how will you make it shine?

    You might be shaking your head thinking, “what is she on about now?”.  What do I mean by “shine”?

    Well, think about it. There will be music everywhere. Children’s choirs, high school bands, muzak, and….you.

    You with your beautiful, enchanting harp.

    You, with your lovely arrangements.

    You – just another performer in a season that is full of performers and goes on and on and on.

    So, how will you stand out? Of course, you will have the novelty of the harp. And that will be satisfying to your listeners for a few minutes. But it is what you do with it that will keep them captivated. And this is true whether it’s your first Christmas harping, or if you were there playing at the nativity!

    You will play your best for them pa rum pum pum pum.  You need more – but what?  I’m so glad you asked – here are five ideas.

    1. Remember – the melody is the thing.  You may be working on an arrangement that looks like the most rhythmically complex arranger made a bet with the most lux chords arranger to generate an arrangement that uses all your fingers, toes, your nose and your friend’s fingers – but if it comes apart (from nerves, poor lighting, not enough preparation, or any of the other things that knock your playing) it doesn’t serve your audience.  Be sure to deliver the melody – on time, every time, even if you have to drop the harmony.  An amazing arrangement is great, but it’s the melody that’s the show – the melody is the thing – deliver the goods.
    2. Learn some cool stuff, but include the traditional old favorites. I recently saw a statistic which indicated that over 90% of Americans celebrate Christmas, even though somewhere like only 40% identify as church going Christians. As humans, we crave traditional things, and we follow trends!  So, know your audience (as much as possible) and play for them. For every I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas have a Silent Night. And I’ll give a prize to the person who can explain to me why this hippopotamus song is so popular!
    3. Don’t forget the rest of your repertoire. Even though it’s holiday time, you can fill out your performance package with some non-holiday tunes. These give the advantage of being slightly more practiced, so if you hit a rough patch, playing these tunes will help you to refocus and settle back in before returning to Christmas. Distribute these tunes throughout the set list and keep the non-holiday portion of the list to about 25% or so of the total. The change up will revive your audience of the monotony of all holiday music, which happens – especially as we get closer to Christmas day.
    4. Add “pro” touches to the tunes. If you typically play trad, there aren’t a lot of intros, codas or bridges. But now, it’s holiday time and not everything is trad (or not the trad you usually play!). So, step up your game. Generate some intros. You don’t need to spring the tunes on the audience.  Intros are cues to your audience of what’s to come so they can be part of the music. Don’t let them all be church organ wonders (playing the last phrase before launching the tune). You can use a “catchy” phrase, a countermelody, a chord progression, or anything else that helps the audience be “in” on the tune as it starts.  Add a bridge to move between tunes that make good sets or pair up tunes that help lead from one to the other (my current favorite is to lead into Silent Night from a riff on Brahms’ Lullaby).  and don’t forget the coda to make sure everyone knows your about to wrap the tune.  Remember – you’re communicating with the audience so don’t bury the lead – let them be part of the conversation.
    5. End Big! Keep a standard that is a strong part of your repertoire for your close. I like We Wish You a Merry Christmas – it’s upbeat, comes in varying tempos and, like Auld Lang Syne, helps signal that we’re at the end of the event. This works well for a background gig and it also makes a great encore/stage return for a concert gig. Either way, if you can, practice it with volunteers “joining in” so you can get a feel for how it sounds/what it feels like when people start to sing along. Trust me, it will happen and the first time, you might as well be ready for it.

    All of these elements will help make your set shine – like the lights on the tree. I’m sure you have great ideas too – what do you include to make your holiday music shine? Do you close with other tunes? Let me know in the comments!

  • Reading is reading!

    You cannot practice your reading enough! There, I said it. It’s also true that only by practicing your reading will you ever get any better at it. Just like you practice making the right timbre and holding the notes the right length of time, and getting all the notes in the right order, you can also practice your reading. Doing so will help you immeasurably to read more music, more easily.

    But saying you need to practice and actually doing it may seem like a big leap. After all, how do you practice reading? Well, here are some ways you might go about it.

    1. Set aside time in your practice to do reading. I love my kitchen timer – set the timer for 5 – 10 minutes (depending on your overall practice time). Then spend that time focused on reading. If you’re a beginning reader, you might identify the names of each note. When that becomes easier, you might name the note while finding it on the harp. Or you might name each note value (find all the eighth notes, then find all the quarter notes, etc.).  You might start with naming all the rests. You’ll know best what you should work on by what gives you the most difficulty when you’re trying to read.
    2. Choose wisely. If you are a beginning reader, you might want to start reading a beginning book (it is helpful to think about how you learned to read as a child – remember those books – loads of pictures and very large type? Find the music equivalent!).  As you become more experienced at reading, you can more on to more complex music, or looking at ensemble  scores! You might be willing to read music for other instruments (although I would suggest you stick with the treble and bass clefs!).
    3. L-O-O-K at the music! Analyze it. Look for the patterns that repeat, find the motif that is moved around (a pattern that starts on different notes in different places). Pay attention to all the ink – it’s all there to tell you something – spend the time to figure out what it is! Look at the beginning. Check out the end to get an idea of what’s going to happen (this is analogous to reading the last chapter of a book!). I really like finding the patterns and using those to convince myself that it won’t be as much work as I think it will be (especially true with the dot density is high and there is a lot of ink on the page!). Work on building the habit of doing this analysis each time you open a piece of music (and avoid the trap of opening the music and just trying to play it).
    4. Think of the whole. When you’re beginning to read, you may need to look at each note individually and each line or space of the staff (do you remember when you were young and you had to sound out each letter – like that). It is overwhelming! However, I promise, with practice you will become better, faster, stronger at seeing the whole (the staffs, the notes, the inflections, etc.) and processing the meaning more quickly! This will make reading easier and more fun, and definitely less work!
    5. Pay attention. Once your reading becomes more effortless, you will be tempted to read more quickly and bang through the music as fast as possible. But remember a couple of important things – faster is not necessarily better and you are reading to take something in – but what are you going to do with it after you take it in? Keep that end in mind and pay attention the whole way through!
    6. Find the “sight words”. In word reading there are “sight words” – words you have practiced so many times you can read them without reading them! Words like – word, so, many, times, you, can, read – well you get the idea! In the same way, the more you read music, the more these musical “sight words” (patterns) will become clearer. With practice, you’ll see an octave and won’t even thinking about it, you’ll know it’s an octave. A triad (1-3-5 chord)? Bang on. Know an F from an A?  Piece of cake.

    I know, if you’re just starting out, this seems like magic or malarkey, but it’s not – it’s just practice!  Reading music can be challenging. I used to hate sitting next to a “paper trained” person at a workshop – they’d rattle through the music at a clip and I’d still be placing the first chord. It can be disheartening. This may be more so if you’re coming from another instrument – either a one liner (like fiddle or flute) or a flatliner (like piano).

    Be patient and actually practice and you’ll see improvement very quickly. Or you can go back to wishing – it is a strategy, but it doesn’t work very well!

  • Being a Beginner

    Today, I’m sitting below a poster with a quote from Marcel Proust,

    ”The voyage of discovery is not in seeking

    new landscapes but in having new eyes.” 

    It dovetails nicely with some of your comments to last week’s post – thanks so much for those!

    DB brought up the concept of the “beginner’s mind”.  This is the concept that a beginner may acknowledge that they don’t know much.  Beginners are open to learning and new experiences and don’t cloud their vision with preconceptions.  They don’t think they’re experts.  You might remember this phase from your early harp life?

    DB went on to say, “it seems that what separates the “masters” from the dilettantes is a maintenance and mastery of the basics, through a strong curiosity of what “new” thing they might or might not discover in that practice.”

    KB suggested that, “Paying close attention to what causes something to go wrong is essential to avoiding the same problems repeatedly. Issues with hand position, fingering, placement, focus, etc. lead to mistakes. Find the underlying issue, then fix it through targeted practice. It works for both my playing and my knitting!”

    This too is something we often do that appears to move us forward but actually holds us back – we are often satisfied with a “fix” but don’t do the additional work to find the underlying cause.  Without doing the technique work, you might never find that little nuance you need to get the fingering down or to drop your shoulder or read just a little ahead of where your playing or any of the other little things that are holding you back.

    DB pointed out that, “in many ways the lesson seems to be rooted in always finding time, and maintaining a strong curiosity in practicing the basics, no matter how far away from the basics, we think we’ve progressed.”  How can you do that in your everyday practice?  Here are six ideas to move you forward:

    1. You can acknowledge that you will learn things at different rates, that some things will be harder than others to you, that you can only calmly evaluate and learn.  You can only take it one step at a time.
    2. You can stop with the comparisons! You should not be playing like everyone around you. And remember that, like high school, facebook, and reality tv, nothing is what it seems when you look around you – just because the person next to you is sailing through something with which you are struggling doesn’t mean that they didn’t aslo struggle (just earlier) – it only means that you didn’t see it!
    3. Actually LISTEN to the feedback you get – the best teachers use the praise and guide approach – they will provide actual praise (from which you can learn what you are doing well in terms of performance and practice) and guidance (from which you can learn what you need to do more of, learn how to do, or learn what to stop doing).
    4. Remain a beginner – ask questions.  Do not assume that you know something just because you have been doing it. There is always something to learn that may (or may not) be good for you to incorporate.
    5. Ignore what doesn’t fit. Some of the best advice I received early in my harp life was from my teacher at the time who told me that I should play what I liked and leave the rest on the floor.  Her point was sound – if you don’t like classical music, don’t play it!  (NB this is not the same as, “it’s hard and I don’t want to do the work!”.  But you are more likely to work hard if you’re mostly playing music you like. Don’t cut yourself off from a genre just because it’s challenging – learn what it can teach you and port that to what you do love).
    6. Don’t worry! We (especially adults) worry that we’re not getting better, that we’ll never be good enough, that everyone else is making more progress. Let-It-Go!  Focus on you, what you need to learn, what you want to learn.  There is no need to train to go to Conservatory if your goal is to have a nice set of music to play for your friends and family. And if your goal is to go to Conservatory, then focus on the necessary development – but either way, channel your energy into learning, asking questions, and enjoying. Don’t waste it worrying.

    Keep working on being a beginner – question, wonder, enjoy! Discover the landscape with new, beginners eyes.

  • It’s a mistake to worry about mistakes!

    John Cleese, legendary funny person and noted actor is quoted as saying, “Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

    And truly, that is not funny.

    We are often our own worst enemies, telling ourselves repeatedly that our mistakes are not creative, just errors, cowering in our harp space not playing so we don’t miss, harboring the fear that we are not good enough to be creative, that other people are creative and we just appreciate their gifts because while they make charming mistakes. our own mistakes come out more like farts.

    Hogwash!

    not-creative-hogwashSo how will you get around this?

    • Acknowledge that mistakes are not failures. Not getting where you meant to only means that you have an opportunity to learn from where you ended up.
    • The cool stuff only arises from “mistakes”. Pay attention to where you landed and how you got there – some of the best tunes only get captured by turning on the recorder and collecting everything that comes out of your harp, good, bad and indifferent.
    • There really are no mistakes – there are sometimes elements that are not as pleasurable as others but they are stepping stones to the next note.  And if music is too perfect, it gets boring.
    • Acknowledge that, like fine wine, sometimes an idea needs to age or mature before it is really what you wanted.  Give yourself time for creativity to happen.  You have no idea how many times the creator tried before you get that perfect “Pinterest” photo!
    • Failure – what’s the worst that could happen? While you’re alone in your harp space something you didn’t intend comes out? Get over it and move on! Unlike the movies, creativity is not going to smite you with virtue…you’re going to have to work at it…and take the good with the bad.

    Some of the best stuff ever has arisen from having the wrong levers set, not quite remembering how the tune starts, landing on the wrong chord, or some other mistake. So, make a beautiful noise and work with it – nothing that comes out of your harp is a failure!