Taking a Lesson from Chopin: Legato and Rubato - PHH 184
Practicing Harp Happiness
There are three ways we learn how to play the harp. The first and most obvious one is by doing. Playing and practicing is our “go to” method for learning. You can’t actually learn to play the harp without playing it. When my son was about 12 or 13, he fell madly in love with football. There weren’t any teams he could play on at his school or in our community, so he had to be content with playing football video games. Not the same thing, of course. Even so, when he got to high school and finally had the opportunity to play on a real team, he was actually surprised to find...
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How to Focus on Doing Less to Get More Done - PHH 183
Practicing Harp Happiness
Are you feeling a little bit scattered or unsettled at the moment? It’s no wonder. Chaos is all around us in this crazy world, and there’s precious little we can do to fix it. But the chaos in our own personal harp world is something completely different. If you’re feeling any chaos or overwhelm about your harp playing, I have good news for you; this kind of chaos is something you can fix. Absolutely. Even in a year when we aren’t bombarded on every side by messages of gloom and doom, these last few weeks of the year are hectic. In the midst of the holiday festive preparations and the...
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More Than Dynamics: Uncovering the Real Secret to Musical Expression - PHH 182
Practicing Harp Happiness
“What can I do to make my music more expressive?” If I’ve been asked that question once, I’ve been asked it a thousand times. This isn’t a beginner question, either. It usually is a question of an intermediate level player. Once harpists achieve a fair level of technical competency, they have enough bandwidth to consider how to make their playing more musical. Until that point, it’s all about getting the right fingers on the right strings. Naturally enough, most of us look to the dynamics to make our music more expressive. It’s a good plan. Following the dynamic markings that the...
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The Fourth Thing You Need to Know About Rolling Chords - PHH 181
Practicing Harp Happiness
When you think of harp music, is there a characteristic harp sound that comes to mind, a musical gesture that belongs to the harp more than to any other instrument? A glissando, maybe? That’s certainly one of them, and a favorite of mine. Another one that I find very powerful and very harp-y is a rolled chord. Harps were meant to play chords, especially rolled chords. They sound liquid and rich, even plummy. You can listen to an orchestral recording and when the harpist plays a rolled chord, you know it. It’s almost as if everything melts for a moment. If you want to check out some...
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How to be Better than Perfect - PHH 180
Practicing Harp Happiness
The sinking of the unsinkable Titanic still fascinates us all over a hundred years after the disaster. It’s the subject of all sorts of speculation and theories, and there’s one of those that is actually relevant to our topic today. The question is this: if the Titanic crew had performed all the safety drills they were supposed to, if there had been enough lifeboats and if the passengers had been drilled in lifeboat procedures, would so many have perished when the ship went down? Some people have noted that a routine safety drill on the fateful Sunday morning was not held. This has been...
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Why Harpist Beginners Need Bach Too - PHH 179
Practicing Harp Happiness
A little while back, I did a podcast episode about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and why I believe studying and playing that music is so important for harpists. If you want to go back and listen to that episode, it is Episode 154, and I will put a link to that episode in the show notes. Understandably, after that podcast aired, I was asked why I was emphasizing the music of Bach who didn’t write anything that we know of for harp, when there are brilliant harp composers whose music we could study. I agree that studying music written for the harp is important for every harpist. But the...
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Gentle Strengthening for a Weak Finger - PHH 178
Practicing Harp Happiness
There are plenty of things we can muscle through: fatigue, a headache, the last email, the last pot to wash, paying the bills. But we can’t muscle through harp playing, especially when it comes to our fingers. For all that we talk about strong fingers and considering how hard we work them, they and the bones, tendons and muscles that support them are relatively fragile. So when we talk about strengthening our fingers, we don’t want to do any more heavy lifting. Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to train your weakest fingers to be stronger by training them the right...
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No Sense of Rhythm? The 3 Step Cure - PHH 177
Practicing Harp Happiness
Do you have no sense of rhythm? Has someone told you that you have no sense of rhythm? Or do you sometimes wonder if you do? Right off the bat, let me tell you that if someone said that to you, I know they are dead wrong. In the first place, I don’t believe that people can be so connected and drawn to music that they commit themselves to studying and learning an instrument for years without an innate sense of rhythm. Rhythm, like any other musical skill, is a subject that is studied intentionally in music schools. It’s not a topic that is merely left to chance with an “either you got it...
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Powerful Practice with the Five Focus Areas - PHH 176
Practicing Harp Happiness
Ten years ago, I wrote a small book. It was my response to the frustration I observed some harpists experiencing. These harpists were diligent in their practice and dedicated to doing everything right. But they still weren’t able to play their music the way they wanted. Some told me that they just couldn’t get the notes, the fingering and the placing correct. Others said they couldn’t get their music anywhere near an appropriate tempo. Some couldn’t look at their hands and the music at the same time. Others couldn’t make their music flow. And none of them seemed to be able to...
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Make Your Warm-up the Prelude to Your Practice - PHH 175
Practicing Harp Happiness
If I had to give the shortest possible explanation of what a daily harp warm-up is, it would be this: your warm-up is the prelude to your practice. Why a prelude? A prelude is most often defined as a short piece of music intended to be an introduction to a longer one. It sometimes uses musical themes or ideas which appear in the larger work, but the prelude’s most important function is to set the scene, the mood or the tone for what follows. That’s how I like to think about a warm-up. It sets the scene for your practice. It allows for a transition from your possible hectic...
info_outlineThere are plenty of things we can muscle through: fatigue, a headache, the last email, the last pot to wash, paying the bills. But we can’t muscle through harp playing, especially when it comes to our fingers. For all that we talk about strong fingers and considering how hard we work them, they and the bones, tendons and muscles that support them are relatively fragile. So when we talk about strengthening our fingers, we don’t want to do any more heavy lifting.
Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to train your weakest fingers to be stronger by training them the right way, gently.
What do we mean by saying a finger is weak? How do you know if a finger, or even more than one finger, is weak? Weak fingers can manifest themselves in one of four ways.
First, you may have knuckles that collapse or lock up. When this happens, your finger may feel like it gets stuck on the string or frozen; it won’t move when you want. Or it may play unevenly or unintentionally play more than one string at a time.
Second, it may not have the same tone or volume as the other fingers. It might be louder or softer. It can feel like the volume knob is broken.
Third, it may feel awkward or uncoordinated, compared to your other fingers. It may not place accurately. It may not play well in combination with other fingers.
Lastly, it may not be independent. Actually, lack of independence is at the heart of some of these other issues, too. When your fingers can function independently, they have good dynamic control and can play evenly and equally with the other fingers in whatever combination is called for. Clearly, this doesn’t mean that every time you stumble over a fingering, it’s because of weak fingers. More likely, you just have a new finger pattern to learn. But a finger that causes you to constantly accommodate it, is a weak finger. And today, you’re going to learn exactly what to do about it.
Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:
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Get the Harp Mastery® app for iPhone and iPad.
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Related resource Strengthen Your Fourth Finger blog post
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-178