Efficient practice

I'm collating any ideas about how to practice - guidelines for how long, what kind of stuff, techniques to tackle difficult corners, mental practise. Any more ideas please pass back...

How long....
little and often
regular - tied into routine
leave your instrument out - just dip in for 10 mins - timer
20min "learning spots" may be most efficient

General ability....
focus on individual hand patterns
interacting patterns (.e.g. scales in left, moving chords in right)
improvisation, playing games with shapes - pushing general coordination

Techniques for difficult corners....
block playing odd shapes (harp specific)
rhythm and accent practise

General rules....
slowly sorts it out!
play it right first time - then play it right 3 times
hands separately to start
small sections - target, achieve, move on
need method / diary to see what you are achieving

Mental practise....
imagining how you want the music to sound, in small detailed sections, in overall sweeps
imaging the movement in fine detail - see hand from 3 different angles

What is traditional harp music?

I'm going to do a couple of gigs towards the end of June. I'm thinking about all the different places the harp goes and I go with the harps - I feel like it's a complete meeting place / melting pot for music and musical traditions. Also I feel myself as a musician is also a huge melting pot... classical, early harp, Irish, Scots, English, Breton... composed, improvised, ensemble, solo...

The remit of trad harp within Britain and Ireland:

The harp has its own historical repertoire dating from 1000 - 1600 roughly, location specific:

• Ireland
  
• Scotland
  
• Wales
  
• Britanny (claims an early traditional though I know of no historical sources as yet)

New compositions for solo harp (ones here listed are all Scottish) e.g.

• Savourna Stevenson
• Corrina Hewat
• Phamie Gow

The harp as song accompaniment for traditional or "Nu folk" songs:

• accompanying trad song and folk song in general
• specifically associated with the Scots gaelic waulking songs (partially responsible for the revival of the clarsach in Scotland)

The harp as part of the dance tradition (a fairly recent invention)

• accompanying (rather like a continuo player but sometimes more involved / composed)
  
• as a leading melody instrument - first person to do this in Ireland was Maire Ni Chathasaigh in late 1970s / early 80s

The harp also accompanies spoken word - poetry and storytelling. The earliest documentation of the music for this is the Ap Huw Manuscript.


Historically the harp has always been more aligned with songs, storytelling, ceol mor - literally "big music" meaning music to be still and listen too. Despite it being a listening instrument, the aural nature of transmission means it's still traditional instrument, related very closely to the rhythms of the body and a pesronal touch.

Performance practises associated:

• Fixed compositions and arrangements whether solo or ensemble (like classical music learnt aurally with whatever sense of rhythm)
• Improvised accompaniments
• Ornamental improvisation on melodies (specifically Irish trad)
• Bigger improvisations on melodies (more of an English thing)
• Theme and variation (early harpers used this particularly)
  

It's valid to have a classical sense of rhythm (fits with "pop-y Nu folk") or a trad sense of rhythm. To me I only want to use a trad sense of rhythm - all ties back to this sense of traditional music "feeling right". That's what trad means to me - very human dance music. Even my songs have to feel like they are dancing.

Being able to play - what a relief

Gradually as time goes on I can play more as I want to - it's like the overwhelming drive is to be able to express myself within music through music, to be able to hear something in my mind and produce it through my hands. It's bizarre - I am not me if I cannot make music happen. What a bizarre need - why should shaping sound matter so much? Anyway it does. After just over two years of relearning to play harp from scratch to accomodate my right hand music is really becoming fun again.

I can improvise and think with the harp again. It's magic, like mercury flowing, all connected up. I can sense my links when I watch other players - now I can perform those movements at a similar speed I can feel them when I watch others players. That's very beautiful.

My sense of rhythm while playing has also improved massively. That really is a relief. This time last year I could not play a dance tune to speed to my satisfaction. Now there are some that I can and it doesn't take forever to get new ones to that point. Recently I even got my first freebie - when you suddenly can play a tune that you've never consciously practised, your fingers just know what to do. Magic.

Steph's crazy hand history and how it relates to her learning the harp

I started to play harp in Oct 2000. For about a year I tried playing from both sides and then decided that right hand top made much more sense (I'd played piano before and they have the same melody / accompaniment function). I really fixed that in my mind and got on with it from summer 2002. I started investigating harp teachers and got a very negative, cautious view point - faced with my right hand I had a harp teacher tell me to only play with two fingers (very limited!).

In March 2003 I first went to the Edinburgh Harp Festival. I met and heard loads of fantastic harpers, finally got some lessons from people who didn't write me off and who could see how much I wanted to play. I loved every minute of it and it completely set me up to carry on playing.

About two months later I really started chasing a hospital referral that had been hanging over me for two years - by the end of my first year at uni (summer 2001) it was clear that I had movement problems with my right hand, that the corrective procedures hadn't worked as the doctors had predicted. When I finally got the appointment that I'd been waiting so long for I was told fairly bluntly that corrective surgery on growth deformities (macro dactyly) didn't work, fingers were too complicated.

I was deeply unimpressed by the surgeon I'd been referred to, so started looking for other ways to get treated. I got referred to Royal Orthopaedic in Birmingham via my uni physio therapist - an appointment booked by my then boyfriend's mum for which I am very grateful. I was finally seen by my consultant in March 2004, in June 2004 I had an amputation of my extra large finger. The aim was to improve my overall hand function and specifically remove the mechanical problems I faced with harping.

In 2005 I went back up to Edinburgh, found a harp teacher to go to back south and got on with the job of building up speed and technique. I also started going out gigging where I could. By harp fest 06 I'd realised I'd maxed out my speed in my right hand for tunes and it wasn't enough. I dabbled in swapping hands but didn't fully until harp fest 07 - three x 1.5 hours a day for 5 days was enough to get past the initial pain barrier. I came home and realised that all the gigs that were lined up I was going to have to play left hand top - it was too confusing, seriously hurt my head to swap constantly.

So I stuck it and continued with the hard grind of technical work. Around this point I started sessioning massively and it paid off. However I also started getting soreness in my hands in general - a stiffness in the stump that was left from my middle finger made me almost use my hand in two.

Harp fest 08 saw me pretty depressed. In the months preceeding I'd been starting to build my right hand technique and getting pain and weird feelings. It was during this fest that I realised I needed yet another op - that I just couldn't sustain a wide enough range without being able to bend the middle stump, the hand has to work as a whole in order for the forearm to be relaxed.

So MayDay 08 saw me back at the consultants, after a month of absolute fear that there would be nothing they could do. I finally had a hand op Oct 08. During the summer I'd massively over played, and so banned myself from touching my harp for October. That's pretty much when I started this blog, out of sheer desperation to keep moving forward.

It was really really hard not playing, but going out to sessions kept me going and I started to perceive music in a different way - I'm a much stronger player now because of that enforced break.

It was a very difficult time because very close friends with whom I played a lot were suddenly cut off from me. A lot of our sense of closeness actually came from our playing - it's very intimate - and suddenly I'd completely backed off from it.

Oct - Dec was full of physio. During this time I also started sorting out my technique problems. I knew I had been setting myself up for a fall but the previous summer had been so mad - just head down, blinkers on. Now I started assessing and changing habits - sessioning less for a start. That's a bit of a sadness but not too bad - there is a balance in everything and if you aren't having fun doing something there's no point doing it to excess.

Dec 08 saw me meet a harper called Dominique Dodge. She's great - quick, accurate, loads of Scots repertoire and tunes, beautiful voice and sense for the Gaelic song. She pointed out one technical thing - where your carpal tunnel is most open - and just liked what I did. She gave me my confidence back. She also passed on the contacts for a chiropractor specialising in soft tissue overuse injuries. That has also been a major turning point.

So, for the past six months, I've been playing less, playing more slowly, but my overall speed ability has been going up. Wicked. It's finally finally coming together. I still have hand problems, I suspect I always will, but they feel managed and I'm calmer, not panicking. It's such a relief to be able to play how I want and there is still more to come. So the motto: be patient, be kind to yourself, be confident and keep looking for solutions: you'll get there in the end.

More music / movement links to follow...

Matthew Roger at Belfast University:
http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~mrodger/Academic/
"I am interested in exploring the role(s) of ancillary body movement in music performance and how this develops over the course of skill acquisition.

Ancillary body movements made by musicians during performance (such as swaying, nodding, hand gestures, foot-tapping, etc.) do not seem necessary to create sounds, yet can communicate expressive or emotional intentions, relate to musical structure or facilitate co-ordination with other musicians. My research is into the origin and development of these movements during musical skill acquisition. This research project consists of three aims:

> Exploration of the development of ancillary body movement in musical skill acquisition
> Development of a theoretical framework of embodied music cognition
> Development of an appropriate human-computer interface to exploit characteristics of musicians' ancillary movements as augmented feedback in skill acquisition"

Frustration / inspiration

I've been writing this post and it basically comes down to me wanting to go back to study full-time somewhere, also that I think frustration and inspiration are different sides of the same coin. There you go - you can skip the rest now. If you're daft or bored enough... read on.

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I've hit a huge unhappy block of frustration. Not sure why exactly - I can feel this wall, can't see how high it is or how wide, or how I'm going to get over it - yet. Mostly it's to do with desperately wanting to get on with making some expressive/varied/intense/interesting music and taking it out somewhere and feeling like I don't have the people / finger skills / inspiration - whatever.

Does everyone involved in a creative process have points where they go mad from their own internal pressures? Where what they want to achieve seems so far away from their current point that they can't even begin to think where to go next? I expect so. Somehow though I've noted that it's often in extremis that I come up with something new - that difficulties push me into a corner and so I visit unexplored areas because I can't explore the normal ones.

Whenever I hit a wodge like this it's often because of something to do with my hand, though I'm realising that probably isn't accurate anymore other than needing to take time to build up my playing to a level I am happy with. Bizarrely I think this really will happen - not that my playing is in anyway perfect (or ever will be) but I'll get a set of songs and tunes together and be able to feel like they're hitting neough of the mark that I should take them out here. I think my benchmark is that I have to really enjoy them. Actually my plan is find the right kind of people who can judge that for me and push me off in the right direction!

Even though it has taken me several years just to get this far I feel so strongly that this is my instrument - I can't quite imagine gelling with another instrument so completely - even down to the fact that it's fantastically inspiring and wonderfully tactile but also ridiculously awkward to play on almost every level. And to play it properly is incredibly geeky.

I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to go down this path of trying to make a living from playing a few years ago - I wish I'd had the common sense to pick something else that I could do part-time and carry on studying along side it (hang on... I did... but oh yes it was another financially insecure but interesting job. Whoops). I'm feeling like I'd really like time off from this financial pressure, time just to play and learn and play and learn. Also that I'd really like musical input for me, inspiration for me. Time to listen and watch.

I feel like life is a series of crises and that you don't get prompted to sort things out in a way that will take you to the next stage until you hit that wall of frustration. I guess it's a good thing, even if right now I feel like breaking things. I just have to focus on the next goal more or less within target. Keep on finding the next solution and look for people who can help you along the way.

Movements / mirroring / social glue

I've been developing my ideas about how our bodies relate to music, how it is passed on. Central to this is the fact that when we see a movement performed, the part of our brain that controls movement copies it - as far as our brain is concerned we might as well be doing the movement. This is one way that we absorb new physical movements, also how we read emotions. We see someone else's expression, copy it, and then that posture tells us how they feel.

Also, our brains synchronise with any rhythm that they hear. I wonder if this is a separate device or an extension of our ability to mirror movement. As I've mentioned before this doing things in unison within a group promotes a sense of loyalty to that group. Music is social glue.