It’s the height of the summer and it’s hot. Do you know what that means?

It means it’s time to start thinking about what we’d like to play for the holidays! By then, it will be a stressful time, so we want to be ready. Of course, we have to balance out our need to prepare with ensuring we don’t let our enthusiasm for the repertoire get stale.

What can we do? How should we prepare so far ahead? How will we stay focused and motivated?

Let’s set ourselves a: READING CHALLENGE!

We know that we should be reading more because being proficient in reading takes practice. We also know that reading can be more challenging on the harp than on other instruments because the music isn’t propped up directly in front of us so we have to turn our heads to read the music and to see the instrument – on top of all the other effort of reading.

Many of us feel as though we don’t read well enough or fast enough or accurately enough. It’s easy to forget how hard we had to work to learn to read at all in the beginning. For most of us it was so long ago that we don’t remember how hard it was to get to fluid reading!

There is a way to make reading easier – PRACTICE!!

But practice is also easier if we have a goal. The holidays make a great goal – focused, limited, and they include a deadline – what’s not to like?

To make our holiday reading a more focused goal, let’s do (drum roll please) a 

Summer Christmas Reading Challenge!

The goal is to practice our reading so it becomes second nature (or at least is closer to second nature than it is now!) and to be ahead of the game when it’s time to hit the holiday opportunities to play.

But let’s not be too over the top. Let’s set this Challenge for just this week and keep focused on holiday music. The plan is to read through as much music as possible in that time. You can select music that you are interested in. You can read melody lines or both hands – whichever will get you further along in reading the music you want to read more easily. The point is simply to practice your reading so it will get easier while also preparing for the cold time.

My goal is to read at least one new tune every day! I’ll post my list at the end, you send me your lists and we’ll see how we do.

Hope you’ll join me! Start keeping a list in your practice journal and you can send them to me by next Monday (just a week) and I’ll post what we’ve got. This should be both motivating and motivational. Motivating because we’d like to have made a good start and motivational to see what everyone is planning on for the holidays.

Start reading – you have until 21 July! (PS – if you’re running late, send it anyway, we’ll get caught up!). Just use the button below to send me your comments and your list!