For harpers, one of the most challenging things to learn is fingering. I don’t mean “learn” as in getting it into your head. Rather I mean internalizing the concept and grounding everything you do in that.
After all, we know that fingering can make or break your tune. We know that while we’re ingesting a tune, we need to pay attention to getting the fingering into our head so we can do it again.
But making that knowledge part of our intrinsic fabric of self is challenging. Precisely because you learn it along with the tune. And that’s what makes it slippery.
Because when you learn the fingering as part of the tune, rather than embedding the need for fingering in your core, you just let it sort of wash over you. In effect, you don’t really pay attention to the fingering as an element of the tune, it’s just a means to an end.
You learn it but you don’t commit.
And at the beginning of acquiring a tune, that’s a good thing. After all, before you know the tune, how you can you know what the best fingering can be? How can you understand where the phrases are going to take you? Where will you place your stamp? So, at the beginning, you do need a fingering that will get you through the tune. But do you need to commit to it? Or is it too soon?
To successfully play the tune, make it yours, and frankly, to enjoy it, you might need to mix up that fingering, so it might be too soon to commit. You might change the fingering as you develop your overall approach to the tune and to the harmonies. You might find that the whole thing will go better if you take this note in the other hand. Or that a big fat lush rolled chord just there is exactly what you want so you now will play the melody note with the thumb. Well, those things, those changes, those modifications, those betterments will change your fingering. If you have already committed to an earlier fingering, it will have been too soon.
If you’ve committed to a fingering too soon, it will chafe. And of course, once you’re committed, every change becomes harder to implement (because you have to unlearn what you were doing and relearn the new thing).
Once you’ve settled on what you’d like to have, then you could commit to the fingering. When you have assigned your imprimatur, then you can commit the fingering to memory, based on the development and analysis you bring to the tune. And then use it!
When you’re learning a tune, yes, work on the fingering (especially if you’re a newer and shinier harper – if you’re still learning how to play, all of this will apply after more development… learning elementary tunes as taught is helping you build the foundation you need to then later do what I’m advocating here). As you cultivate the tune, give yourself the freedom to explore other fingerings and approaches to rendering the tune. Then you’ll be ready to commit, and it won’t be too soon!
How do you help yourself make the commitment at the right time? When do you feel ready to commit? Let me know in the comments!
Ah, fingering — it’s the main ingredient, and one we (or I) am so often tempted to neglect thinking my hands will just “do the right thing” without my putting thoughtful effort into it. I always refer back to the pedagogy of a great harpsichordist I was fortunate to have briefly as a teacher, Ralph Kirkpatrick. In the first volume of his edition of 60 Scarlatti Sonatas, he lays it all out for us. Among his simple wisdoms: “Good fingering involves an economy of motion and a consistency that ensures security, and that most simply and directly exposes the musical content. Bad fingering introduces unnecessary motions and changes of hand position that hinder rather than assist the expression of musical content. There is a musical solution to every problem of fingering.” I could go on but you get the gist!
Economy of motion? Security? Exposes the musical content? I might be in love!
I’ve been working on Sylvia Wood’s “Into The West”. I started in January. Try here’s plenty of repetitive patterns and phrases in the tune (by Howard Shore), , some with slight changes. Because I was learning the Intermediate version, I worked hard on doing it her way until I got the overall arc of what she was doing. And I also decided to learn it backwards starting with the outro, and working backwards, roughly a song-line at a time. I’m so glad I did! There were similar-but-varied phrases where Sylvia used a simple fingering for the early Simple version of the phrase v & a more complex fingering for the more complex version of the phrase—and I KNEW I would mess that up. So I learned the more complex version— and stuck with it through all the phrases. I’m so glad I learned the song backwards. If I had learned it forwards the complex fingering would have pounced on me as I got towards the end!
That is a great strategy!
I loved the graphic with this one! Laughed out loud!
😀
you’re Right! i had thought there was A Special Way that fingering needed to be… nope. like all other “harp tricks”, this is changeable.
for me, longer experience and more confidence has allowed me to alter what’s happening- or (hopefully)recover from whatever i did.
So right- you have to know the rules to change them.