Good learning states

Current ideas:

Figure the task out by yourself for yourself! It's your information, order it in a way that makes sense to you.

Take time, have patience and be calm. Learn in a way you enjoy.

Play games, explore, go on a whim.

Let the movement connect itself up naturally for you.

Little practice and often eases frustration.

Set up a good environment - easy access (instrument out) - not too much at once - timer (maximum detailed concentration is about 20 mins)

The hardcore part of music is often building the physical side, it's like a tree. Plant a seed then water in lots of little stages, return to see how it's growing frequently!

Life cycle of learning a tune...

1, Figure out notes and rhythm
2, Explore physical side - hand shapes , bowing patterns...
3, Make physical bits easy (play games with it - see below)
4, Re imagine music - add something new (left hand?)

Section 3 is the bit we really think of as "practice". All the normal rules apply - learn what you repeatedly do so you want to sort out small bits and get them right first time. However if you're really exploring the movement then little games are helpful to prevent the boredom:

Treacle practice - like you're moving through treacle - how slow can you play?
Taking a specific movement or pattern and playing with it - rhythm, accent, different expressions...
Re: harps you have block practice, practice finding where your fingers need to go in clumps

The main thing is play with it, improvise, explore through games. When you can mess about with and return to a data set you can understand it in a much more intuitive way, whether a movement or a pattern of notes. It's a great state to learn in and fun too.

Anatomy of harp technique...

The best technique is the set of movements that allow you to play what you want to play remaining comfortable, relaxed and free of injury.

I'm still adding to and researching this... basically harp technique is a very natural movement, it's all about getting the right posture. Playing the harp can feel great, a goo dhand shape feels really relaxed.


My ergonomic thoughts thus far...

• Your general body posture - upright, relaxed, balanced, the harp leans to you.
  
• Openess across shoulders supported by back muscles pulling shoulder girdles back into place
• Arms are held up by upper arm muscles and pectroal muscles - must be balanced by back muscles!
  
• Hands held somewhere around or just below heart level - it's better to play around with your harp height to find the sweet spot
  
• Positioning hands - you can change the angle of your arms and two planes and then the amount of rotation on your forearm
• Your fingers should work in parallel with forearms (no bend from side to side)
• Wrist should be held so there is as much space available for everything going through the carpal tunnel. This also affects the balance of strength in your hands (difference in ulna and radial muscle strength). Sweet spot is when closed thumb is in line with forearm
• Fingers work much more efficiently and relaxed when pulling under the hand into a flat (baby) fist, not clawing back. A hand shape where fingers are straighter but more bent at the knuckle enourages this more. Also bringing fingers that aren't being used in to the hand in flat fist position encourages the other fingers to follow.
• The wrist angle allows a backwards bounce in hand after each movement to release tension in wrist.
• Thumb needs to start open with space at all joints and close fully to curl over your index finger - gives it a hug!

Photos to follow!

In many ways it doesn't matter what movements or shapes you use, but the quality of movement is very important. You are looking for shapes that allow you to get a great contact on the string, fully articulate to follow through your movement, and then release any tension. It's all about all about the contact with the string and sharp ping away from the string - relying on finger weight, no effort needed.

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.