Practicing Harp Happiness

• Here’s Your Sign: How to Tell if You’re Making Progress - PHH 197

  The day this podcast episode is released, we will be living Day 55 of this year 2025. According to the calendar, we’ve already had 55 days this year to get things done, to grow, to accomplish. We’ve had 55 days to play the harp. If you set goals at the beginning of the year, this is a good time to check in on them. Are you where you thought you’d be? Are you ahead of the game, checking things off your list and moving on to your next steps? If you are, here’s a huge high five from me. That’s the way to create harp happiness. Today we are going to revisit your goals. We’ll look at how far you’ve come, confirm your direction and realign your course if necessary. We will focus on the progress you’ve been making and where your next steps may be. But if you haven’t seen the progress you had hoped for or expected, no worries. Progress is tricky to measure and sometimes hard to spot, even when it’s happening. When you’re walking the path, you can’t always tell how far you’ve come or how far you still have to go, and that can be unsettling or even frustrating.  We’re talking today about how to create progress and, more importantly, how to measure it. I’ll share the three things I think are absolutely necessary for you to make progress, and I’ll give you some ideas for progress markers you can use to make sure you’re moving in the right direction.  I want you to keep this in mind too: sometimes all you need is a fresh look at where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. It is often that simple. And I think that’s what our time together today will help you do, find those simple next right steps to move you and your harp playing forward. Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:  Work with a Harp Mastery® Certified Coach in our new Lessons program. Learn my new “Variations on Bendemeer’s Stream” in our March Seminar course. Harpmastery.com Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected] LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-197  

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• What to Do When Your Music is Boring You - PHH 196

  They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Unfortunately, familiarity also breeds secure and confident music. We want to play our music well, and so we need to know it inside and out. That takes time. Learning music also takes time. And the longer we take to learn our music, the harder it can be to stay interested in it. No matter how much we love a piece of music, it is possible to get bored with it.  Also, there are times when we are required to learn a piece that we don’t really like, perhaps for a performance or an exam. Practicing a piece we don’t like can feel like torture. I believe there is no upside to playing or practicing a piece you are bored with. If you’re trying to learn it, your practice won’t be focused; your heart won’t be in it. If you’re performing it, your lack of interest in the piece will communicate itself to the listener. It might be a flawless performance but it won’t have you - your personality, your energy - in it, and those are the things that bring a performance to life. This is true not only for concert performances; this is true for every performance, whether it’s a video for Facebook or playing in church or playing for friends. If you are bored with the piece you’re playing, you are, in effect, cheating your listeners. So I want to start by saying right now that you can choose to stop playing any piece that bores you. You have the power to choose; you could even say you have the obligation to choose. You owe it to yourself not to spend your time on something that doesn’t interest you, and you owe it to a potential listener not to present something that you don’t care about. But maybe you don’t want to just put the piece aside, or maybe you can’t. That’s a situation worth investigating. When is it worth persisting with a piece that you don’t like or has become boring to you? When should you just put it away? And if you decide to persist, what can you do to make the piece interesting to you or to at least to help you endure practicing it? I have some valuable ideas to share with you today. Even if you haven’t run across a piece that bores you - and maybe we should say “haven’t yet” - you can use these ideas to keep that musical love light burning. Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:  February Seminar Series Become a My Harp Mastery member Harpmastery.com Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected]  LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-196  

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• Working From Both Sides: Arpeggio Skills in Context - PHH 195

  When I was a kid, even before I had started harp lessons, I used to go to summer camp in the mountains. I grew up in the Philadelphia area, and the closest mountains to us were the Pocono Mountains. These aren’t mountains by Rocky Mountain standards, not nearly as high, peaked or impressive, but they are beautifully wooded and green, with rivers and lakes.  In order to get to summer camp, we had to drive through the Lehigh Tunnel which fascinated me. Driving through an actual mountain was a little scary. Of course, the scariness was part of why it was my favorite part of the trip. Tunnels are truly an engineering miracle, in my opinion, especially considering that tunnels can be drilled from both sides to meet - if the calculations are correct - in the middle. The earliest known example of a tunnel that was dug from both sides is the Tunnel of Eupalinos, in the Greek isles, constructed in the 6th century BCE.  WIth pickaxes, chisels, hammers and shovels, two teams dug through Mount Kastro from both sides and managed to meet in the middle. The tunnel has some zigs and zags, but the fact that they actually met and broke through is a testament to their engineering prowess. Why is this relevant for us today? Because we’re going to approach the technical requirements of our music from the other side of the mountain. I know you’ve heard me talk about the importance of doing your technique work daily. And naturally, our pieces require our technique to be used in very specific ways. These are the two sides of our mountain: ongoing technical development and piece-specific technical demands. We want them to meet in the middle, where the music is.  Today we are going to focus on arpeggios and three different ways arpeggios are used in our music. These aren’t the only ways arpeggios are used, of course, but these are common enough that they are worth our time and attention. We’ll look at these technique challenges and how to meet them from both sides, with exercises that will help you build the necessary skill and with the understanding of the underlying principles that will help you develop your technique for that particular musical instance. It’s all about skills in context today.  Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:  February Seminar Become a My Harp Mastery member Books mentioned in today’s show: Grossi, Method for the Harp: p. 129, no. 24; p.120, no. 14; p. 108, no. 2. Friou, Exercises for Agility and Speed: p. 44; p. 23; pp. 33-37. Harpmastery.com Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected] LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-195    

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• Everyday Opportunities to Grow and Discover - PHH 194

  When my husband and I moved into our new house four years ago, we were moving from a very small house that was part of our business in the mountains to a nice, roomy house in a neighborhood. When we moved to the mountains, we had too much furniture to fit in the little house; for instance, we had dining room furniture but the house had no dining room. We had to put the furniture that wouldn’t fit in storage.  When we moved to the bigger house, though, we were able to bring it all out again. It was a little like Christmas or at least meeting up with old friends. But there were some spaces in the new house that needed furniture that we didn’t have, and one of the things we decided we would like to get was a desk, specifically, a desk with pigeon holes for sorting papers and a lid that closed, so we didn’t have to look at those papers all the time. Pigeonholes are great for organizing papers or mail or stamps or paperclips. They keep everything in their proper place. They keep the right things in, and the wrong things out, which is precisely why they are so damaging to our harp life. I can hear the screeching of your mental brakes from here. “What? How did we get from a desk to harp playing?” I’ll tell you how. It’s the pigeonholes. Most of us harpists aren’t aware of the pigeonholing we do with our playing. Our warm-ups, exercises and etudes stay neatly in their respective pigeonholes, as do each of the pieces we’re practicing. We may see the intersections but we don’t exploit them. We also try to put our learning in those little boxes, labeling our pieces and even ourselves as harpists by a skill level. Who can tell you that you are an intermediate player or an advanced beginner or a beginner advanced player? There isn’t even any clear definition of what any of those terms mean, and no harpist fits completely into any one of them. We all have individual strengths and weaknesses that make our “level” unique to us and no one else. The worst result of pigeonholing, I think, is that it shuts the door on opportunity. When we choose a label for ourselves as a harpist, we overlook possibilities for growth and for pleasure in our playing. So today, I’d like to reveal to you some opportunities you may be missing. I’d like to show you some different ways to think about your playing and about yourself as a harpist, ones I hope will help you find more joy in your harp journey. By the way, my husband and I did get our pigeonhole desk, and while the pigeonholes are organized, the smartest thing we did was to get a desk with a lid that we can close. There’s a lot going on in that desk! Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:  February Seminar Become a My Harp Mastery member Harpmastery.com Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected] LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-194

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• Making Connections: Harpist Composer Sophia Dussek - PHH 193

  Today’s episode focuses on the music of harpist, singer and composer Sophia Dussek. It is partly music history, partly harp history and partly harp technique. But it’s really about connection. I want to help you feel a connection to our roots, to some of the musical and harp traditions that aren’t merely history, but are part of the fabric of our daily harp playing.  There’s an African proverb that says,”Walk like you have 3000 ancestors walking behind you.” We harpists so often feel that we’re all alone on our journey. The truth is that we are only the newest leaves on a tree with many other branches full of other leaves, a tree whose roots were formed long ago. Every time we play, we are continuing the traditions of those harpists, so it makes sense to learn a little bit about them. The things we learn about our roots can help us connect to the music we are learning today in a deeper way. That’s why I chose “connection” as the fifth of the five growth areas I identified in my book, Kaleidoscope Practice: Focus, Finish and Play the Way You’ve Always Wanted. When you take time, even occasionally, to enrich and enlarge your musical experience that is apart from your playing, you bring more understanding and dimension to everything you play. And in today’s podcast, I will help you make those connections between the music of 200 years ago and the music that you’re playing now. So today our musical “way back machine” will take us to the turn of the nineteenth century when harp playing had yet to be eclipsed in the drawing room by the piano. Picture any screen adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” you’ve ever seen, and you will have the right atmosphere. In fact, our heroine for today, Sophia Corri Dussek, was born in the same year as the author Jane Austen. So put on your best muslin frock and we’ll get going. Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:  Join the Finish It Clinic Our February Seminar Series is available. Find out more about my Kaleidoscope Practice book Online resource for music by Sophia Dussek Harpmastery.com Get involved in the show! Send your questions and suggestions for future podcast episodes to me at [email protected] LINKS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? FInd all the show resources here: https://www.harpmastery.com/blog/Episode-193  

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