Welcome to Notes from the Harp!

Greetings! By now, I hope your powerful New Year's intentions have been bearing lots of musical fruit. In this issue, we're going look at how certain core beliefs can limit or broaden your musical horizons. Changing your beliefs may just revitalize your harp playing and bring you even deeper satisfaction.

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In This Issue:

Article
Belief: The Open Door to Musical Growth

Technique Tip
Hand-Position Metaphors

Improvisation Starter
The Power of Two Chord Vamps

Resources
New Finds

What you believe about yourself - and about your own musical abilities - has a direct relationship to how well you progress learning to play the harp. As with any other area of your life, what you believe creates the only limits to what you can achieve.

Believing that you “aren’t musical” or talented enough to play the harp well is like living in a locked room with an open door. If you simply operate from the belief that you live in a locked room, you will never notice the door swinging open right behind you. What would happen if you learned to believe in your unlimited power to learn?

First things first: what would those beliefs look like? Here are three essential and powerful beliefs to cultivate about playing the harp.

1. I deserve to spend time exploring my musical passion.

Frequently, most of us complain that we just don’t have time to practice, or to practice those things that are new and challenging, and so we stay in our musical rutts. The truth is, we all have the same amount of time, and we get to what we most want to do by setting priorities. But setting a priority on a personal goal like musical development requires belief that we deserve to take time for our passions. If you don't believe - for whatever reason - that you actually deserve to spend time developing your harp playing, you will continuously find something else "more important" to do instead.

2. Learning to make music is a crucial part of my life, and every new skill gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

Whenever we’re struggling with something technically demanding on the harp, practicing can seem like a chore, or even an overwhelming problem that we don’t know how to solve. Such an atmosphere is counterproductive from the start, making it unlikely that we’ll discover the solution or practice effectively. In this situation, believing and reminding yourself that musical growth is one of the juiciest parts of your life, something that makes you happy in a way nothing else can, can give you the confidence to see the current plateau as a temporary, solvable obstacle.

3. I really do (and will) grow as a musician, and the more I play, the more skill I acquire.

Sometimes we expect that every time we sit at the harp we will experience that wonderful state of musical flow. While there are certainly techniques—like grounding and centering — that can help bring that flow more often, there are times when we’re just not in the best space to make amazing music. When this happens, we can easily feel disappointed, or even feel like a musical failure. If it happens for awhile, we might even feel like giving up playing the harp altogether, giving in to the old toxic beliefs about “talent” — that thing we’re obviously lacking. But practice sessions are just that — sessions. As with anything, some days we’re more successful than others. When you hold the underlying belief that you will develop as a harpist with each challenge, each piece you learn, each new technique, you will find the motivation to keep showing up, expectantly, ready for whatever musical experience arrives.

So what do you think will happen on your harp-playing journey when you cultivate these powerful beliefs? I think you’ll find that it’s easier to make time for your musical passion, that you more easily find your way around obstacles (perhaps asking for help when you’re stuck), and that you look back, astounded, as your progress in a few months.

Try this: record yourself, today, and make notes about how you feel about your harp playing. File the recording and notes away to look at in three to six months. In the meantime, work on cultivating these essential beliefs and keep practicing. I’m pretty sure you will find out for yourself what stepping out through that open door is like!

Harp teachers everywhere emphasize the critical key elements of hand position. You know the drill: thumbs up, fingers down, all closing into the palm every time, and so on.

As a teacher, I enjoy the creative challenge of coming up with colorful ways to help my students remember the feeling of good hand position on a physical level, since of course I'm not there to watch them practice and keep adjusting their hands. A few tricks that help tremendously are playing in front of a mirror, checking your hands against pictures, video-taping your playing so you can watch it, and using things like sticky tape on certain parts of the hand to alert you to when you're doing something unproductive like bending out your wrist or not closing your fingers all the way.

But what I'd really like to talk about today is the power of metaphor. Take "thumbs up" for instance. In order to remember what that should look and feel like, it helps to have an image to conjure up. Christina Tourin talks about a little dove keeping its head up, instead of sleeping. I've heard Suzuki teachers call that open space between thumb and index finger the "strawberry space," reminding the student that a big, fat strawberry could nestle there. My current favorite image is rope climbing; you can't imagine doing that without your thumbs up, can you? If you pantomime climbing the rope, you will open and close your hands just as you would ideally do playing the harp.

Closing your fingers? Imagine closing around a butterfly: you don't want to hurt it by clamping but you need to keep it from flying away. (And double-sided tape on your palm can let you know that you're making contact every time).

Fingers pointing down? Imagine that if your fingers were longer, they could brush the soundboard like it was the fur of an animal.

Elbows raised, but not too far? Imagine a shelf at lower rib height and "rest" your right elbow there (left can be more at waist level). Of course, for this one check with your own teacher because these guidelines are hotly contested by different schools of harp technique.

Think up your own helpful metaphors, and have fun as your technique improves!

What do you do if all those chord progressions confuse you and you want to start with improvising? One of the simplest, most satisfying ways to start is by using a simple, two-chord vamp. You can choose any two chords that sound good one after the other, and you can play each one twice before changing. Here are some options to try on a harp tuned in C:

Dm and C (dfa, ceg)
Am and G (ace, gbd)
C and Am (ceg, ace)
G and F (gbd, fac)

For now, you don't need to worry about the theory behind these choices. All you need to do is find the chords. In fact, if you're a real beginner, all you need to do in your left hand is find the first and final note of the chord and play them together (d with a, and c with g, in the first example). Choose a count, like 4, and play this chord on beat one as you count 1, 2, 3, 4.

As soon as that's really easy, start noodling around with your right hand. To begin with, if you stick to the notes that are in the chord, plus the two open strings between them, you can't go wrong. Play with single notes, repeated notes, and simple but varied rhythm--nothing so complicated that you lose the left hand pulse on beat one. Remember that simple notes on the harp are heavenly, and have fun!

Have you discovered harpist Sunita Staneslow yet? Sunita's music offers a beautifully eclectic approach to the harp, reflecting her background as an American expatriot living in Israel. Her website offers recordings, sheet music of her wonderful arrangments (including a free selection to download), and lots of harp news. Find her website here: Sunita Staneslow

Tanah Haney has been offering a wealth of resources to harpers for years through her websites. She also publishes a wonderful blog full of technique tips, with lots of helpful ideas for beginners. Check it out here: Celtic Harp Blog

And finally, there is a fabulous organization for Celtic harp enthusiasts called the International Society of Folk Harpers and Craftsmen (ISFHC). Among other things, the ISFHC publishes the Folk Harp Journal, a quality quarterly magazine full of free music, articles, ads from harp makers and classified ads (invaluable if you are harp shopping). Here is the ISFHC website: ISFHC

All content by Susan Zevenbergen, Copyright 2008.

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