Monthly Archives: February 2022

Play for peace

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It’s not a good time just now.  (Another) War has broken out.  (Un)Fortunately, we have 24/7 media coverage, so you can be forgiven for being unable to escape the reporting.  Its relentless drumbeat is likely to wear on you.  And while you might think it’s stupid/pointless/misguided – now is the time to play for peace.

For your own peace. 

play for peaceThere are plenty of stressors available in our worlds and if the lingering crisis of the last two years wasn’t wearing on us enough, this latest one is a doozy. 

Regardless of your politics, your “side”, or your more general thinking, these events aren’t usually good for most of the people involved.  But for those on the outside, looking in, incapable of drawing away from the window, it will also take a toll.

Because we are all “involved” – some just have the luxury of pretending that they’re not going to be touched.  At this point though, there is not much we can do about it.  It is far away.  The diplomats are doing whatever it is they do over coffee in fancy meeting rooms.  And it’s been a long time since a “mighty war harp” was needed on a battlefield.

But just like there’s a tiger inside your kitten and a wolf in your puppy, inside your harp might be your best defense while we wait and watch and wonder what will come next. 

You have music.  It can help shield you from the ugly.   You can play the music of sorrow and the music of respite and make ready to play the music of joy…eventually.  You can play for yourself – as a balm for your soul.  And you can play for others who find themselves also locked in the thrall of the media, needing the succor you can provide.

You might think that you aren’t doing anything – but you’d be wrong. 

Every act of beauty will counter an act of ugliness.  Each beautiful note you play near an ear will send out sound waves that will bang into and deform the shock waves of a bomb detonating too near the ear of another. 

You might consider playing those simple but beautiful tunes.  Let them act as a salve for your mind.  If you aren’t sure what tune that might be, I’m sending subscribers one of my favorites.  It is the simply beautiful Crodh-laoigh nam Bodach (The Old Man’s Young Cows).  Play it to pour out all your emotions and once they are in front of you, play to move around in your feelings.  No good, no bad, just you, your harp and the defense of the music. 

In the end, which tune is not important – play anything you like that allows you to expel your emotions.  And once again we have a lovely opportunity to share with others who might not have the facility to play the music but will be comforted if you decide to share.

Times are troubled – again, more. Play your harp to help you get through the time and possibly to help others as well.

What do you think of the tune?  What other tunes you would play to feel the same things?  Are you letting your harp get you through (another) trying time?  Let me know in the comments.

Do you love your harp?

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It has to be more than a crush – It must be love.  This feeling has lasted through good and bad.  Through great lessons and broken strings.  You love your harp!  What else could explain it?!

Maybe more importantly, how do you stay in love with your harp?  Well, like any relationship, you have to nurture and care for it!  After all, you want to feel that exhilaration of being in love, but you also just want to have that connection that stems from a love that lasts.

Do you love your harp?How?  Well, the same ways you’d be sure to stay connected to any other love in your life!  Here are five things that might help:

  1. Focus on it – a lot!  Make sure you spend a little time with your harp every day.  Some days you will have more time than you know what to do with – and woohoo, those are great days full of practicing and playing!  Other days, you might only have time to gaze longingly and possibly run your hand over the column.  Value both of those types of time (just try to keep the very short days infrequent!).  We all know that while absence may make the heart grow fonder, long-distance relationships are hard.
  2. Make (and keep) regular “dates” …and show up!  Ok, that might seem corny, but you know that you need to spend time together. One way to fit that time into the rest of your busy life is to make a date (or a meeting if you’re not romantical (not a typo, I meant romantical)).  And when you’re on your date – be present.  If you have time to spend with your harp – be there!  And pay attention to it while you’re playing.
  3. Actually listen.  It can be easy to listen without hearing. Like being present when you’re spending time with your harp, be sure to hear what your harp is telling you – whether it’s that you need to practice more or that your strings are getting old or that tuning might be in order – or whatever it wants to say to you.
  4. Go away together.  It’s amazing what a weekend getaway can do for your relationship!  There are loads of events all over the world, opportunities to take part in workshops and other events.  These are really helpful, so be sure to take them!  You’ll learn something and the time away can sweeten your relationship with your harp!
  5. 5. Be explicit about your needs – good relationships are built on caring for each other and meeting needs. Your harp has needs – to be maintained (and maybe occasionally dusted?) and you do too. So be clear what your needs are – whether it’s more practice time, more emphasis on a particular technique, changing up your approach to your music, better lighting, taking regular lessons, setting a goal for yourself, whatever else you need – make sure you know what you need – so your harp can help you get there.

If you’ve been feeling like your harp love is slipping away, try some of these to rekindle that romance.  Remember that all loves take some effort and work – but it’s worth it.  Do you have other ways to keep the love alive?  Share them in the comments!

 

(I probably should have written this last week for Valentine’s Day – but honestly, it didn’t occur to me in time!)

 

Cards against remembering

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I recently had the extreme good fortune to get to hang out with friends with the sole intention of playing tunes – lots and lots of tunes.   It was great!

It was horrible.

Like every social music interaction we know, we shared by taking turns starting a tune and then we all join in and have a blast!  And then it happens.  I know my turn is coming.  It’s exciting. I’ll get to suggest a tune that I know and love and can’t wait to play with my friends.And just like that, in our wonderful, marvelous, delectable tune sharing, I’m wracking my brain fussing over what tune I should suggest when it’s my turn.  And it’s a tussle…because I can’t remember any tunes that I know!!!

ARGH!

When you have a vast, amorphous collection of tunes in your head (or even if it isn’t that vast), it’s easy to forget what you do know.   It’s the same when you’re practicing and you get to that part of your practice time when you’ve finished the work and now get to play for fun. It strikes again, that remember-y thing and you can’t think of anything you know.  You know you have a library – just not what’s in it. 

How are you ever going to remember what tunes you know?  How will you know the contents of your library?  And frankly, how do you know if you have the Library of Congress in your head or if it’s more like a neighborhood Little Library?

You need a card catalog!

Each time you learn a new tune, start an index card and write all the useful and relevant information – the title of the tune (you could also include what you call it if you don’t think of it by it’s actual title – like if the title is in Gaelic or Irish), the key you play it in, the type of tune it is, maybe what you like to pair it with.  You might even get fancy and include the first couple of measures (trust me, it can help!).  Make a card for every tune you have learned.  Watch your catalog fill up!  And don’t forget that you can “pre-make” cards for the tunes you want to learn but haven’t gotten to yet.

Like any card catalog, you’ll be better able to use if it it’s organized.  The organization approach is up to you – organize it how you think about tunes.  You can do it alphabetical by title.  Or by tune type or by country of origin.  Or by where you learned it? Whatever, as long as you can find it when you need to.

You might be a Thoroughly Modern Millie and have already turned up your nose at my index cards.  No matter.  Make a spreadsheet.  Keep a paper list.  Generate your own code from Legos. I don’t care how, so long as you can use it!  The point is to keep what you know close to hand so you can use it – all of it. 

When you know what you know, you can be more clear on what you haven’t learned yet.  And you can be more deliberate about what you practice.  All of which might make it easier to remember anything you can play the next time you get to play for fun with friends!

How do you keep track of what you already can play?  Do you have a system to keep track? Let me know in the comments!

Have you got the Temperament?

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So, we’ve talked about the tools you might use to tune and a few approaches to assuring you tune all your strings to particular pitches.  But last week, Sara brought up a good point that I had been dancing around. 

Why?  Because it’s easy, but not simple.  What?!

So, let’s start with a caveat.  I’m not an expert in tuning or the mathematics and music theory behind tuning.  I’ll share what I know but please understand that this will be a skimming of the topic*.  Here goes.

The Social Component.  You might not have known there’s a social component to tuning, but there is.  We use A= 440Hz as we mentioned before.  But why?  Because this is the current convention.  Translation,

“We do it that way because that’s the way we do it.” 

In times past A = 432Hz, and who knows what it was before that (ok, someone probably knows, but I don’t).  This consensus on what “in tune” means is the social component of tuning – we’ve agreed,  we’ve come to consensus that we will use this standard (A = 440Hz) to tune our instruments. 

After all, why do we tune at all?  Because making music is social – and we want to enjoy playing together. 

Having said that, there are other elements of this social consensus.  More plainly, there is more than one “tuning system.”   These tuning systems “define” the scales you tune to.  There are loads of systems, and variants on them, and like every other human endeavor they have grown, developed, and changed (morphed?) over time.  Here are the two Temperaments you are most likely to bump into playing the harp.  I’m presenting them here as fait accompli but realize that they are all defined through and across music, philosophy, culture, and history.

Equal Temperament.  I’ve started here because this is the system you have likely always used (and unless you have changed a setting on your tuner, it’s what most electronic tuners use).  This system has the twelve tones that match the keys on the piano (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B) and the pitches are distributed equally.  This is the tuning that makes it possible for the piano to be played in each major key**.  The upside is that everyone can play together.  The downside is that when you smush the pitches like that, they are no longer mathematically “correct” and when this was first used, it “sounded funny” (or more likely slightly off because when they did that, the notes all moved a little, sort of like kindergartners shifting around in line for cookies).  If you’re not sure, look at your tuner (or at the paperwork) –  it likely says it’s equal temperament.

Pythagorean Temperament.  You’ve heard of the Pythagorean Theorem?  Pythagoras thought that all beauty could be captured in mathematical ratios – the right triangle, the movements of the planets, and the arrangement of pitches.  This tuning is based on tuning “pure 5ths”.  This is the tuning you might use if you worked with a tuning fork.  This is the temperament that is easiest to tune by ear – you listen for the glorious pure 5th (remember – an in-tune 5th will “ring” and be audibly in tune.  You can’t miss it – and if you’re not hearing the ringing, you’re not in tune yet).  Each pitch will be near its cousin from equal temperament but only the octaves and 5ths will be exactly the same.    

There are other Temperament Systems including Meantone, all the variations of Equal Temperament (the 12 tone we’ve talked about above and including a lot of others counting up to 72 tone, Well Temperament (which Bach used to make a set of tunes for all 24 major and minor scales available on the keyboard at the time), Just Intonation (which I’ve never run into but is a thing), and many more.  Remember too that the temperament selected might have more to do with the music being played (renaissance had a different sense than modern) or the instrument being played (remember, it’s hard to retain theory that doesn’t apply to you!). 

Here’s a suggestion – play around with your tuning and see what you think.  If you’re typically using Equal Temperament, try Pythagorean and see what you think.  You might make lemon face because, it will be slightly different.  It probably will sound out of tune, but if you’re interested, give it a try.

Which type of tuning do you use and why?  “Because that’s what I was taught” is a perfectly good answer!  Did you try another approach?  What did you think?  Let me know in the comments.

 

*If you’re interested, there are many books on tuning, but one of my favorites is Lies My Music Teacher Told Me by Gerald Eskelin.  It’s a really fun book, and a short read, weighing in under 175 pages, but it is dense going – and having an interest in math will help.   Alternately, you can choose the path many do and stick with the theory you have learned by rote from teachers who have learned by rote.  Another way to say that is,

It has always been thus….

You will do fine if you want to keep it there, but read the book if you’ve always wondered.

 

** if the wording starts to be a little stilted, please note that is me attempting to be correct in an area that I don’t fully understand (nor do purport to), and is language that many musicians have bandied about but is actually quite technical – kind of like you call it a bruise but your physician calls it a hematoma – they’re both right, but one is more technically accurate than the other!