Welcome back to Notes from the Harp!
I've been awfully quiet this summer because I was preparing a house for the market and getting ready to move across the country. In October, I'll be in San Diego, connecting to a new harp community!

In this month's feature article, "Owning Your Audience," I'm excited to share with you a story that demonstrates how you can count on your audience to help carry you through any performance, and I also give you advice about how to work with instead of against them. I hope you enjoy it.

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In This Issue:

Article
Owning Your Audience

Technique Tip of the Month
Building Performance-Ready Repertoire

Improvisation Starter of the Month
Lush Seventh Chords

Resources
Improvisation Tips & Tools

What do I mean by the phrase "owning your audience"? Sometimes we think the key to performing is to act as if the audience isn't even there. By "owning your audience," I mean acknowledging that these friendly people are in front of you, eager to receive the gift of music through you, your hands, and your harp. Because they love and honor their role, they will support your playing to the fullest extent that they possibly can. It's an unspoken agreement, a sacred contract, between musicians and their audiences.

I’ve written before about performance anxiety. In fact, there is a whole page on My Harp’s Delight about minimizing your performance jitters. You can read that page here. One of the things I say about performing is this, “Love your music, and love each person in the audience that you want to share it with. Think about ‘sharing” rather than ‘performing.’” The word sharing implies unselfish giving, something you cannot do without a receiver. We all need our audience members--no matter how few or how related to us they are--to receive the gift.

Today, I especially want to talk about owning your audience, because I had an experience recently that reminded my about the sacred honor of being a part of an audience. I think that once you read this story, your image of the people in your audience will change.

In May I attended the end of the year concerts at a prestigious arts academy, a boarding school for talented high school students in all disciplines, but with a majority of music students. I was thrilled for the opportunity to attend the harp recital, at which about eight young women performed demanding classical pieces on pedal harp. The one-room building was hot and buggy, and packed with people, and it was hard to see because this was not a concert hall but simply a large room with folding chairs. Nonetheless, I scored an aisle seat where I could lean forward and see each young, amazing musician at work.

One young lady performed a dazzling Baroque piece on the harp, and then returned to her seat while others took their turns. It was obvious that she was one of the stars of the harp studio, and she was pleased with her first performance. After a few other students played, this young lady was up again with a gorgeous and demanding Debussy piece. Midway through the piece, she started to play dissonant notes and began struggling to regain her spot in the music. Feet moving furiously, she tried to right the wrongs she must have created with incorrect pedal changes.

From the front row, the harp instructor suggested a new starting point in the piece, but the student’s composure continued to unravel. Finally, the young woman exclaimed that she just couldn’t do this and rushed from the building. The next student played her piece beautifully, and then left as well, obviously bent on consoling her friend.

After all the other girls had played, some of them a bit rattled but with aplomb, the second young woman returned to have a chat with the teacher. In another moment, the audience was thrilled to see the original student return to the front of the room. She said that she was ready to try again and, after bringing out her music and stand, proceeded to play the Debussy from start to finish. Though she was still too upset to play it with the ease she might have wanted, she managed the entire piece. When she was finished the audience sprang from their seats and gave her a standing ovation.

Now, I don’t have to tell any of you what it felt like to be in that audience, because you’ve all been there, at one time or another. You can easily imagine the energy of being in a room full of strangers, all pulling for the performer, all wishing her nothing but success, and all feeling connected to her struggle and her ultimate achievement. Why is it, then, that when we ourselves are performing, even for our friends and family, we forget that feeling?

When we make a huge mistake, our first impulse is to push against the energy of the audience--we try to shut down our emotions and somehow barrel through. Of course, that rarely works, not just because of how lost we are, but because it cuts off our heart connection to the people in our audience, the very people investing themselves in the music with us. What would happen if, instead, we owned our audience: we embraced the gift of energy the audience offers and used it to find our way out of the woods?

Impossible? I know you’ve seen it happen, and perhaps even done it yourself. Maybe you’ve used humor, or a comment to the audience, like “Oops, I’ve become tangled up. I’d really like to try that again. Everyone game?”

Why does this help?

Remember the truth that you love your music, your audience, and sharing the music with each person? Connecting with that audience verbally reestablishes that fact in your consciousness, and takes away the pressure to be perfect. It stops that voice in our heads that tells us we can’t possibly survive a big mistake. If you acknowledge that you’re not perfect, it’s like telling your inner critic, “Yep, you’re right. I always need more practice. But I love this piece, and I’m here to share that love.”

I’ve done it both ways; I’ve been that girl who got lost in the woods and then cried about my performance. Other times, I’ve used little comments to reestablish my composure, own my audience and its support, and change my path, right in the middle of a piece that’s seriously derailing. I can tell you that this strategy is not only more successful but also much more fun! Try it, next time you get the chance, and please let me know how it goes.

If you are performing with your harp, even informally, or starting to think about doing so, you will want to use your lessons and practice sessions in a way that helps you build your repertoire. To facilitate your planning, try keeping the following lists.

First, take a piece of paper and divide it into three columns. Label the first column, “Working Pieces”, the second, “Needs Polishing”, and the third, “Ready to Share.” If there are pieces you have worked on that you just don’t like, please leave them off the list (they won’t be a gift to anyone if you don’t like them).

Even if you’ve only been playing the harp for a year or so, you probably have lots of pieces that you can play well enough to put in your “Needs Polishing” category. Every time you practice, choose a different piece from both this and the “Ready to Share” categories and review them. Look through each piece before you play it, and then play it with a focus on expression and bringing out what you love about that particular piece. Doing this allows you to continue progressing on your favorite pieces and to keep them as performance-ready as possible.

The "Working Pieces" category contains your newest pieces, anything you've started but that needs serious practice time before you can play it smoothly and up to tempo. This is where you spend most of your practice time. If a piece stays for a long time in the “Working Pieces” category, you might decide to set it aside for awhile, knowing that in a few months it might be much easier to learn.

On another piece of paper, list the pieces you’d love to learn. You can categorize these by genre or difficulty and start deciding which ones to tackle next. Look to harp books and listen to as many CDs as you can. Better yet, attend concerts and recitals. Write down the pieces you love so that you can find and read (or learn by ear) those gems that really call to you. Strive for a balance among the genres you play, and a balance in the mood of your pieces, and you're already on your way to a successful playlist.

Make sure that you go to your lessons prepared to talk about your specific performance goals, and also prepared to hear your teacher’s input about how to achieve them and what you might need to work on first. By “owning your lessons” in this way, you will make much better progress towards learning the repertoire you would most love to play. This is equally true whether your main focus in on reading, playing by ear, improvisation or arranging/composing your own music.

Finally, set a date for your first, or next, performance, several months or more away, and book some kind of venue (even if it's just a friend's house). Put your date on the calendar, let a few people know, and you'll suddenly be a lot more motivated to work on the smaller goals you need to meet to get to that committment.

For a lush and funky sound, we're going to play with seventh chords. Here are the chords to use (familiar from Heart and Soul, but turned into sevenths); Cmaj7, Am7, Fmaj7, G7. Right now, you don’t even have to understand how those chords are constructed, because I’ll give you the notes. If you want to delve into that later, there are resources in this newsletter for the music theory.

Using just your left hand, play b, c, e and g (the C major triad with a b added to the bottom of it). The b is the seventh, added to the bottom instead of the top of the chord (and thus they are "inversions", one possible way to turn the chords upside-down). Don't worry about your right hand right now, although you can of course play these chords with either hand. You build the other chords in the progression the same way. Here are the chords spelled out for you:

Once you understand the hand form, you may want to play seventh chords up and down the scale, all over your harp. Then, try to play through the sequence above, rolling the chords in your left hand, until you get very secure about which chord comes next.

To begin improvising, try playing any notes from the chord in your right hand as you play each chord with your left. Find pleasing notes that connect the chord tones, and you're on your way to creating your own melody. Remember, there is no test . . . this is about having fun with sound!

Here are some wonderful online tutorials to help with improvisation. This first one is a great article about approaching improvisation with an open attitude and stretching your limits:
8 Tips for Improvisation

This site offers tips for improvising, plus a music theory review to help you understand chord progressions and how to use them:
Make Your Own Music

This wonderful online chord generator will allow you to specify any chord, and it not only spells out the degrees and notes in the chord, but also highlights the notes on a keyboard:
Chordhouse Tutorial

All content by Susan Zevenbergen, Copyright 2007.

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