Everyday Opportunities to Grow and Discover - PHH 194
Release Date: 02/03/2025
Celebrating of Summer - 20+ Pieces Just For Fun - PHH 216
Practicing Harp Happiness
This week I started my yearly ritual of going through my drawers of music and pulling out new pieces to play. Actually they aren’t all new; some are old friends that I haven’t played in years. Others are pieces that have been sitting around waiting for me to get to them. Others are favorites that I seem to pull out every summer and play for a while. It’s a summer thing for me. Perhaps because my playing schedule is a little lighter, I don’t feel as pressured or as driven. Also, though, I just want to play music, music that fits my vacation mindset. So this week as I was...
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The Superpower of Shortcuts and Why You Need Them Now - PHH 215
Practicing Harp Happiness
There’s a third kind of shortcut, though, that I want us to think about today. It’s the kind of shortcut that comes with experience. I remember when I was learning to sew and following all the directions very carefully so that I wouldn’t mess up. I even learned which pattern companies had the clearest directions, and which seemed to presume that I knew more than I did, so there were steps missing. Those missing steps weren’t shortcuts, per se; they were just knowledge that a more experienced sewer would have. One day, I watched a professional seamstress start to cut out a dress....
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Recovering from Burnout - the 5R Framework to Recover and Reset - PHH 214
Practicing Harp Happiness
It’s summer time here and time for a little R and R, rest and relaxation, maybe even time away. You might be feeling like you need some time away from whatever stress you’ve been experiencing. I hope it isn’t your harp playing that’s been causing the stress, but even playing and practicing the harp can cause frustration and burnout. If you’re feeling like you need a break from your harp playing, I’m here to help and to make sure you take that break in a way that will bring you more confidence and more joy in your harp playing again. Actually, at the time you are listening to this,...
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Freedom to Choose - How to Make Any Piece Sound Right - PHH 213
Practicing Harp Happiness
Have you ever made something and it turned out ok, but somehow it just didn’t look right? Maybe you thought those two paint colors would go together, but now you’re not sure. Or maybe the furniture arrangement in the living room looked great on paper but it sort of doesn’t work now that you see everything in place. I think we’ve all had those moments. I had one not long ago with a photo I was doing. It wasn’t quite right, but since I had to get it done, all I could do was to shrug and sign off on it, whether it was right or not. But if a piece of music we’re working on doesn’t...
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3 Exercise Books You Should Know and How to Use Them - PHH 212
Practicing Harp Happiness
Since you’re here with me today, I know you are the kind of harpist who knows that technique matters. You take your warm-up seriously. You have exercises and etudes that you play regularly, maybe even religiously. You subscribe to the motto, “If your fingers can’t play it, you can’t play it.” But there may be times when you, even as dedicated to your technique work as you are, need a new direction, some more motivation, inspiration and know-how to move your technique to the next level. Here’s the thing we don’t want to think about. We have our favorite exercises and...
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Could Your Practice Today Actually Be More Fun? - PHH 211
Practicing Harp Happiness
Every time I talk about putting more fun into your practice, I hear feedback like, “I enjoy my practice,” or “I really like doing the challenging work,” or “My favorite part of practice is my exercises and etudes.” All of those harpists are enjoying their practice, and that’s terrific. But that’s not what I mean. Much of what we do in our practice can accidentally disconnect us from the music we want to make. We identify and correct mistakes. We drill our technique. We repeat passages over and over again. That’s all part of practice, and it is part of what enables us to play...
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Do You Hear What I Hear? Listening with Your Ears Open - PHH 210
Practicing Harp Happiness
Four friends went to an orchestra concert. Afterward, they went out for dessert and compared notes on the concert, talking about what they heard. Here is what they said: One person heard the person in the row behind crackling a cough drop wrapper.One person, a flutist, heard that the clarinet wasn’t in tune with the flute.One person, a harpist, heard that the orchestra drowned out the harp solo.One person heard that the piano soloist was humming to himself while he played. Oddly enough, when the review of the concert appeared in the newspaper the next day, it seemed the critic had gone to a...
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Is Your Practice Not Working? Maybe Hard Work Isn’t the Answer - PHH 209
Practicing Harp Happiness
Today I want to talk with you about hard work. I don’t mean how to buckle down and do the hard work. We all know that playing the harp is hard, and we spend a lot of time working out practice techniques, strategies and routines to help us play the music we want in spite of the difficulties. No, what I want to talk about today is how to get out of the “just buckle down and do it” mindset. The truth is that when it comes to playing the harp or even music in general, sometimes trying harder is counter-productive. For instance, the harder we try to get that harmonic to ring, the more it just...
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Is Music Theory Really Useful? Turning Theory Into Practice - PHH 208
Practicing Harp Happiness
Is studying music theory really useful? Yep. You heard right. I really said that, and I’m a total theory nerd. I’m not going to leave you in suspense. Of course, knowing music theory is useful and helpful and part of being a good musician. But only - and this is a big “only” - if you know how it’s useful. Did you ever take a class in school and the whole time you were sitting in class you were thinking, “I’m never going to use this stuff”? Of course, you did. I remember sitting in my calculus class in high school - which, incidentally, I really enjoyed - knowing...
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How to Choose Your Next Piece - PHH 207
Practicing Harp Happiness
Shel Silverstein wrote a beautiful and supremely short poem that perfectly fits today’s topic. The poem is called “Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda,” and in just seven short lines, Silverstein sums up the ultimate way to prevent regret. He tells us that all those woulda-coulda-shouldas vanish with one little “did.” Doing beats wishing every day. So if we were sitting in the same room together, sharing a cup of tea, and you asked me what I thought your next piece should be, I’d have to ask you a question right back, “What do you think you want to do?” Life is filled with...
info_outlineWhen 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:
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