Confidence….!

[Alison]

what do you do when it’s tricky and your confidence is questionable ? Do you… sing that song from the Sound of Music, whilst running along; Practise more; Cancel the gig; Book a Dep ? Pray; Practise till it hurts; Give yourself a deadline? Go on regardless? It’s a serious work… I think the last time I was scared was leading up to VW’s Dives and Lazarus which went well, but what happens if the pedals go wrong with a very different piece I’m currently working on for next time, will I die ? Have just read an article on shoes and pedalling here making reference to the so called Harpist’s graveyard !!

[gena-mcclure]

Hi Alison,
I think the key is to relax! Most people have NO idea that you’ve messed up anyway, as long as you know how to cover mistakes and keep going. I’m nervous in the beginning, but then it’s a mental game. I realize that no one else “out there” knows anything about what I’m playing. If I am REALLY nervous, I start to play glissandos for awhile (to warm up) and everyone goes wild! They THINK I”m GREAT! Then my confidence is fed and I can go on with no problem. Again…all MENTAL

[Sylvia]

Alison, please put the link to the Harpist’s Graveyard!

[Alison]

Darn, I lost the link but theoretically if you factor in enharmonics on adjacent strings, there’s a 2 in 9 chance you’ll get the right string and pedal combination to hit a note and therefore a 7/9 chance of missing it and after that it’s a train crash, one wrong pedal move leaves two out of joint. This happened to me once as a teenager, when there was no chance of recovery in a little piece by Pescetti, occasionally when in orchestra (they can play on) and sometimes to others, when unfortunate competitors crashed out of the 2nd movement of coincidentally Pescetti’s Sonata, which was the set piece….! Oh well, I guess I have to work out a recovery strategy, insist on rehearsals and try to eliminate hesitations and recaps.

[jeffrey-mcfadden]

Back when I used to play my guitar and sing (mostly in churches) with my first wife, I had a standard position on mistakes: 99% of the people won’t catch you. Of those who do, 99% will be too polite to mention it. The one percent of one percent who remain simply do not count. Play like nobody’s listening!

[Tacye]

I agree -work on recovery plans. Know what the important bare bones are for example an even pulse of notes or a few key chords even if you only play the tonic as octaves. Have your pedals marked in at places where you can spare the brain to get back on track.

Advice when I turned up at my teacher with the Magic Fire Music – sit up straight, look confident and anyone who notices mistakes will assume one of the other harpists made them!

[seika-dong]

 

[Alison]

Thanks Seika, know it’s a steady and cumulative process and I have written your points down in my study book as a checklist. I’m an experienced player and know to do most of these but there are some I hadn’t thought of. I’ll check I have sufficient pedal bookmarks (hadn’t thought of that for active listening) and master the jumps, yes, the piece needs higher heels than usual. As I keep working I’ll see if my confidence is growing !! We all have to stretch ourselves…

[Alison]

The focus of the discussion is about preparation & coping with the specific difficulties of the harp (those peculiar to the harp) when it’s tricky and pedalling mistakes become unrecoverable (everything relies on an extremely precise and coordinated sequence in hands and feet).
I can cover and recover when acting, speaking or playing a different instrument, but the harp is unforgiving and some pieces have nasty pitfalls so the whole piece breaks down. The harshest judge is one’s own ear, having worked so hard to know what each note sounds like, it’s often impossible to ignore or correct pedalling mistakes on the fly.

[Sylvia]

As I told my teacher once…the pedals are the stuff and guts of harp playing.
You absolutely have to know what your feet are doing…if the hands get off, well…but if the feet are off, it’s certain death unless you can think with your feet.

Also, it IS important to fake it because the audience will get uncomfortable if you show you’re upset. In my early days, I played mobile home parks, (I had terrible stage fright, so I played in those and in nursing homes to weather) and if I apologized for my mishaps, I’d get puzzled looks, or disturbed looks of some kind. It was unnerving. That’s where I developed a celebrity smile…I hit them with that when I’m done…I never act like anything went wrong. If you smile, they smile.

Recording tells it like it is…no sugarcoating, like when a person tells you…not just recording practice, but tape recording performance can be an eye-opener. I used to do that (still do, sometimes), and sometimes what I thought were bad places lasting forever would actually be only a few seconds, so it can be comforting as well as the opposite.

[Alison]

Now I have reached a point of better security and remarkably greater confidence, I can experiment to find out what the wrong pedalling sounds like, so that I instinctly know, in the places where it happens, how to correct the problem. It won’t eliminate train crashes ( and had one suddenly today practising) but it could get me out of trouble. However the feet do learn what to do, they are the last secure link in the learning process. Ears to feet wiring…!

[Elizabeth Volpé Bligh]

If you know the reason for a pedal change, it is much easier to remember it or fix it if you missed it. For example, say to yourself, “I have to change this G# because it is the leading tone in A minor”. If you know that an F minor chord is made up of F, Ab and C, and you hear yourself playing an F major chord, then obviously you must change the A pedal to flat. If you don’t know music theory yet, take some lessons on this subject. It will be the best money you ever spent. There are even online courses and quizzes.

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