How do you know if you should quit?

[Ee Reen Chew]

Dear Gillian,

Don’t quit … the harp is a very magical instrument … reading comments posted in their replies, you can roughly tell that the main thing is to break away from the old pattern that you have grown accustomed to and try a new way of approaching your harping hobby 🙂

[Ee Reen Chew]

Hi there again Gillian,

I also wanted to add that – whenever you have trouble in pursuing / learning the harp, try reading the forums and the responses in this wonderful site .. we are all really lucky to have this page for us to ask for help 🙂

[unknown-user]

“Progress” is such a nebulous word, isn’t it?

It sounds as if you feel that you’re not where you’d expected to be when you started, and that you’re placing a great deal of importance on the end result, rather than the process. It’s difficult not to have expectations when you’ve invested a good deal of time and money in lessons and such, but is there a pressing need to be at a certain level at this time? What criteria are you using to determine where you “should” be at this point? Unfortunately, as with baking a cake, some things work on their own timetable, and can’t be rushed.

Think about what attracted you to the harp in the first place, and why you took it up. If it’s purely for your own enjoyment, it might not hurt to step back and just enjoy, say, the feel of playing the harp, rather than focusing on the need to improve, especially if it’s on someone else’s timetable.

[jeanne-koehler]

Jonathan Pingas, HAHAHAAAAAAAAAA! that is FUNNY!

[Harper Cait]

I loved the Jonathan comment, btw. LOL.

[o. t.]

Don’t sell your harp. Just take a few months off and see if you really wanna go back to it.

Try switching teacher, too. To have a perfect lesson, you have to have talent, like what you’re doing and have a teacher that can teach YOU. Each student has different learning style and you need to match your learning style with the way your teacher teaches. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just that you might not have found YOUR perfect teacher yet. It’s like finding your perfect harp. You try as many of them as possible. Then you choose.

[unknown-user]

It seems that the Suzuki method teaches by learning the music first, and then learning to read what you already know, based on the idea that this is how we learn language.
Is there a Suzuki harp teacher in your area? Do you think this would help?

As for theory… well it became much clearer to me when I was learning piano as a grownup with the Alfred Group piano book!

I think all humans have musical aptitude. Music permeates every culture and time. The earliest instrument artifacts we have are little flutes!

Oh… breathe! And maybe take a look at “The Inner Game of Music”.

[Author]

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