Category Archives: Performance

‘Tis the Season

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Wedding season that is.  The good news is that people are still getting married!  If we’re fortunate to be booked we know that we will add immeasurably to the event.  I heard a great characterization for waffling brides (or checkbook holders), “People won’t remember what you served for dinner but everyone will remember that you had a gorgeous harp!” (if I could remember who said this brilliant pearl I would definitely credit that person here!).

 
 
 


Some of the best parts of playing a wedding include:

  • Knowing that you are making an event extraordinary
  • Playing through your repertoire (out in public!)
  • Seeing some of the best architecture in your area
  • Seeing some of the nicest gardens where you live
  • Having a solid half hour to play before the main event (typically uninterrupted)

And if you’re not playing weddings – why not?  “I don’t want to” is a perfectly good answer.  “I am afraid to” isn’t as legitimate – and may point out things you should work on (we’re talking about music, not temperament!). 

What do you like best about playing for weddings? What do you play? Do you have any standards or chestnuts? If you had to play a wedding tomorrow, do you have enough music at your fingertips?  I hope you’ll what you like and what works with me!

Whisper down the shout

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Sandy Grason said, “Your inner wisdom whispers, your inner critic SHOUTS” (my emphasis).  It has been my experience that she is correct.

Especially when it comes to our music.  We know a large number of people who play better than we do.  And if we are adults who came to the harp in adulthood, many of them are still children!

Unfortunately, we let that shouting inner critic get in our way.  We can’t even discern the whispering wisdom – we are too caught up in swooning to the poison of the critic.  We focus on every “mistake”, every “failure”, every variance.  We note how the “real” harpers never make mistakes, have stunning repertoires, and can play any tune.
It is too bad that we are so focused on ourselves.  We typically are so caught up in our fear that someone else will be better than us that we don’t really listen to those that we idolize.  We don’t recognize that the “real” harpers:
  1. make mistakes when playing

  2. are learning tunes

  3. are sometimes chagrined when they are not having a good day (my experience has been that this is especially highlighted when teaching!)

  4. may also be feeling this same way – and with much more at stake!
So, if you find that you are listening to the stupid shouting rather than the wise whispering you can take action to change.  There are only a few things you must do:
  • Pretend the critic is talking about your friend, mother, spouse – wouldn’t you tell that critic to stop and start listing all the reasons they are wrong?  Of course you would!  The critic only has the power you grant – therefore if you defend yourself vigorously, the critic will recede.

  • Do not compare yourself to others – only to yourself.  I suggest that my students make a recording annually (usually at the New Year).  The idea is to record what they are doing at that point in time – playing whatever they happen to be working on.  They periodically go back and listen to the recording in its entirety so they can hear for themselves how much they have improved.  They can compare themselves to their previous performance – the only comparison that matters!

  • Listen to others – I guarantee you that only the meanest of people would seek you out to deliver a cutting critique.  When people hear you play and tell you how much they enjoyed your playing, when a respected teacher tells you what a good job you’ve done, when someone asks you to play – they are being honest!!! Believe them and enjoy knowing you’ve done well.
Listen carefully – and the whisper will grow louder!

Stand up for Harping

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You might have seen in the news lately that the new rage is to work standing up.  Stand up desks are popping up in all sorts of places – even on treadmills. Working standing up has many benefits including:


  1. Expending more calories than sitting
  2. Better alignment of the spine

  3. Improved flexibility of the large muscles of the lower body

  4. Better posture

  5. Reduced perception of fatigue.

You might think it is impossible to bring this trend to the harp, but you would be wrong.  There are a number of good reasons to play standing up –


  1. Better visibility of the harp and of the harper for the audience

  2. Better visibility of the audience to the harper

  3. Expending more calories

  4. Better alignment of the spine

  5. Postural improvements with concomitant breathing improvements

  6. It looks cool!

You might want to try playing standing up.  It is very effective for stage presence.  It is not so appropriate for background gigs (weddings, cocktails, parties, etc.) where the point it to become “sonic wallpaper”*

But when you are meant to stand out, standing is a good way to start. It is essential that you find a platform that is the right height (standing is not license to slouch).  The platform must be stable and you must be able to keep the harp on the platform safely while playing (and preferably while not playing).  The harp should not be wobbly, nor should you have to grip the harp while playing to keep it stable and upright.  Finally – you must practice with the harp in the standing configuration.  Many of your muscle memory cues will be slightly different.  Your sight picture will also be different so rehearsing standing will help you recalibrate.

So, give standing a try, see if it works for you – take a stand!

*thanks Kris Snyder for sticking this phrase in my head!

Holidays are coming

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It’s that time again – the holidays are coming and whether you’re working or entertaining or playing in church, it is likely that you will be called upon to provide some music.  So, what are you going to do?

You could pretend like it won’t happen and wait until someone asks you to play – then you can panic and feel unprepared. OR you could start preparing now so that when the holidays come around you’re ready, unstressed, and confident.  I don’t know about you, btu the second one sounds like the better idea.

Most people panic because everyone knows the holiday tunes and will know if you make a mistake.  There are a couple of ways around this –

1.       Use a fake book (or play by ear) so you are not glued to the page and can relax while you’re playing.

2.       Play Christmas tunes people are not as familiar with – start with the one you’ve never heard and move (which are likely to form a small group) and then move on to the ones you only hear very infrequently if at all on the radio.  This is also a good plan to assure that your listeners aren’t tired of the tune before you even start to play

3.       Keep up the rest of your repertoire.  Rather than interspersing “regular” music into your holiday tunes, think of sprinkling your holidays music into your regular repertoire.  Even the happiest elf (and those strong employees at the shops!) can take only so much Christmas music.  This really reduces the burden on your learning.

4.       Enjoy yourself – it’s the holidays (well it will be as soon as your work these tunes up!) so have some fun while you’re out there!

Never miss the opportunity…

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Performing can be such a terrifying word.  We’re never ready, the time’s not right, the venue is too small to bother, the venue is too large to be comfortable, we always have excuses.


I know.  I hear the excuses too.  And for those of us who have other things competing for our time, like the work of our day jobs, it is all too easy – seductive even – to believe our excuses.  We think the lack of singular focus gives us an out. 

But when you do step up, when you give yourself permission to take the chance, when you take the opportunity, inevitably you get reminded of one of the most attractive things about performing with your instrument – people do listen – and you do touch them!

Michael Tilson Thomas said, “The most important thing about music is what happens when it stops, what remains with the listener, what they take away. A melody, rhythm, some understanding of another person or another culture. The way those experiences add up, in the soul of a person over the years….You want to shake people even when they’re not listening to the music.”   And he’s right!

So, when you have the opportunity to share, and especially if you are offered the opportunity to play with someone else – do it!  Don’t let your fear get in your way. 

And by the way, it’s not about you.  Don’t focus on how you’re not good enough, or you haven’t practiced enough, or you’re not ready.  It’s about them – focus on the person that you will touch, that person that you don’t even know.  the person who, after hearing you will be brave enough to come up to you later and tell you how much they enjoyed it…and the person who loved it but didn’t work up the courage to come tell you so.

 

Revel in knowing that that little piece of the music has gotten to in to the soul of the person – and that you’ve shaken that person even when they are not listen to your music.  And be glad that you haven’t missed a fantastic opportunity.

The Holidays are Coming! The Holidays are Coming!

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While it is not as threatening as to need signal lamps for one if by land and two if by sea, the holiday season can be very stressful. With the buying, wrapping, giving of gifts, the baking, the visiting, the housekeeping, the hosting, the social events – they all pile up. And if other people know you play the harp, add the stress of preparing for holiday gigs and the need to have a completely different seasonal repertoire.

It is a dangerous time – so be careful out there. Whether you’re booking gigs every day with multiples at the weekend or being strong-armed into playing for relatives after the Christmas (Chanukah, Inti Raymi, Yule, Lenaea, Pancha Ganapati, Yalda, Brumalia, Festivus, Holiday No 11 or another winter celebration not listed here) feast – make sure you’re ready.

And if you’re not ready to play – or just don’t want to – say no. If you think you’re not capable of this, remember that everything, even saying no, gets easier with practice.

But most of us do want to play – whether its work (and if you’re fortunate enough to book a gig every day until Jan 2nd – good for you!) or being the embodiment of a Victorian Christmas card and entertaining family and friends after dinner. Regardless of the number of times you perform this season and irrespective of your level of development as a musician – you must get ready!

Over the next few weeks we’ll discuss how to be ready successfully – while minimizing your stress and your injury potential and maximizing your enjoyment and performance.

And don’t forget, coming to Scotland with us for Music in the Highlands and Islands Tour makes a fantastic gift and fits everyone!

Fear Factor

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We all want to grow (I don’t mean taller or around the middle). We are typically not satisfied to simply maintain what we have achieved – we want to become better. We don’t like to stand still.

It is said that the only way to grow and develop is to be challenged. Another way to say challenged is to say “scared”. We can use our fear to help us grow and develop. We have to cultivate our Fear Factor.

One way to experience the fear of challenge to achieve that growth is to make ourselves uncomfortable. Try something new. Do something different. How different, new, or uncomfortable? We’ll that’s up to you. What is new, different or uncomfortable? It could be a new piece of music. It could be a new style of music. It could be a new instrument. It could be practicing at a different time of day. It could be learning to foxtrot. It could be deciding to run a marathon. It’s your fear and your desire to grow – you decide the size and shape of the challenge.

Any challenge that is within your ability to take on will make you feel alive (whether its scaling Mt. Humongous or speaking to someone you do not know). And of course, the more often you challenge yourself (in large and small ways), the easier it becomes to surmount the fear and take on the challenge. (See, even taking on your fear takes practice!).

It’s up to you – you have to know yourself and then decide the best way for you to add a challenge to your life. Are you going to let fear keep you from achieving your best performance? To keep you from playing that arrangement? To keep you from composing that tune? Why would you? Leverage that fear and take on the challenge – and watch yourself grow! And let me know – I’d love to hear from you.

Should Auld Acquaintance be forgot…or, "There’s goal in them thar hills!"

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It’s that time of year – the beginning. 

It is that time in which we have every intention of making and keeping resolutions to improve ourselves. But we often fail. We fail because while we have intentions, we also expect to succeed on improvisation. We hold a vague idea but we have absolutely no concrete idea how we will get to that resolution.

And so we sit at our harps with every intention to spend more time practicing, play more, enjoy more, perform more, arrange more, learn more, master more…but how? We think we will improvise our time – that we’ll figure it out as we go. And we state our approach as simply I’ll find more time.

But this is one instance in which improvisation will not work. To accomplish anything we have resolved, we have to have a plan. We have to perform some Goal Setting.

I do this every year, personally and with my students. And to help make it real, we write it down. And we check on it periodically throughout the year. We monitor our progress toward our goal – mostly to see how we’re doing. And later on in the year, this monitoring is even more to see what we thought was important. What, at the beginning of the year, did we think was important that we have subsequently forgotten. This let’s us focus or resolve our resolutions – to modify our goals. Or to review them to see if they were reasonable.

Goals don’t have to be set in stone.  They are just a way for you to remind yourself, periodically, what you resolved to do and how you set about getting there.  There is nothing special about writing them down, although this does give you a reference later on when you’re wondering why you’re bothering!  Its just an aid to remember where you’re trying to go and how you thought you might go about getting there.

Setting goals is just like looking at a map – it helps remind you where you were trying to go, but what looks like it will work on the map is just a representation of the path – it isn’t the path itself. ..remember, it’s the journey. See you there!

Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

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It’s that time of year again.  You know the time – when all you play is music everyone knows.  Unfortunately, we only play for about a month so it doesn’t get as much practice as we might like!  Very nerve wracking!  If you make a mistake everyone will know it because they are so familiar with the tunes.  That puts a lot of pressure on you.

But that everyone knows the music is exactly what makes this repertoire so much fun!  You can insert “jazz improvisations” (in my studio we don’t make mistakes in performance, only jazz improvisations)  into the music (planned or unplanned). But even better, this is a great opportunity for you to start to make the easy leap to generating your own arrangements. 

If you are skittish about doing your own arrangements, you might start by staying very close to an existing arrangement (many people would consider this still their arrangement – but the important thing here is to start to flex your arranging muscles in a safe way). You could use lead sheets to let yourself go.  Or, as I noticed I was really doing this year, you can just work on those little jazz improvisations building them into your own arrangements. 

Because, let’s face it, much of the music of the season has a tendency to be trite. If everyone plays all the same tunes in the same way in the same arrangements, how will you every stand out (and not go barking mad)? Easy – amp up your own arrangements!

And don’t forget to note how you amp those arrangements up – you could use them again next year! 

Did you take the gig?

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Some of us make a living, or part of our living by playing the harp for money, as often as possible. 

But many of us are perfectly happy playing in our living room, very quietly, when everyone else is at school or at work or asleep.  Now, I’m not saying that you must be out performing, but…

What is holding you back? 

Do you spend a great deal of your practice time (or other time for that matter) telling yourself you’re not good enough to perform for others?  Do you tell yourself that you’re not any good at playing “that thing”?  That you’ll never get good enough?  That you shouldn’t even bother trying to get better or even practicing?

We all provide a running critique of our performance of all our activities, but for some reason, many people let that critique hold them back from the things they love.  Are you one of them? 

Do you believe all the movie reviews you read?  I didn’t think so,  So why do you listen to your inner critic?  Why not listen to your familiy members, your teacher, your friends, who all tell you that you play well and they enjoy listening to you?
You practice, you learn, you spend time with your harp…why wouldn’t you be good? (Now, if you’re one of those people who really doesn’t practice, spend the time and then go on with the rest of this post!) 
Before the resolution season gets kicked off, vow to yourself to bend your comfort level just a bit – share your gift, your talent, your hard work.  Remember that audiences are very receptive – they appreciate that they couldn’t get up there and do that – but YOU CAN!
Start by playing somewhere new – play for your family on Christmas day.  Take your harp out somewhere like a park and share with passers by – just share your harp with others – play your favorite tunes or  improvise.  Its not Carnegie Hall, but we don’t all want to play there.  Try it – you’ll be glad you did…and so will the people you share with!