Harp and Strings

I’ve recently passed my three-year anniversary of beginning to learn the harp, and it’s time for some review! My fledgling YouTube channel has temporarily fallen silent while I concentrate on reclaiming and continuing to work on some old pieces (and even the ones I posted online; it’s amazing how quickly they fall out of practice without attention), and one new tune. My work on the harp has typically been characterized by shiny-object syndrome that leads me to the next tune and the next without much motivation to keep the ones I’ve learned in practice. I’m basically the student my teacher has always warned me about—you know, the one who has been playing for months or years but has no repertoire to show for it. In fact, the YouTube channel was created in part to provide motivation to finish pieces to a polished state. Up until recently I’d been in the habit of moving on before finishing a piece. I’d like to break this habit.

There’s a repertoire list at the back of my harp lesson notebook with 20 items, but the only pieces that are anywhere near complete are the three I posted on YouTube. The others have been put on pause, and I’ve forgotten some of them completely. This week, in addition to integrating those three YouTube pieces into my practice rotation, I selected another piece to return to—Star of the County Down.

Star of the County Down was one of the first pieces that I chose to learn after moving on from Sylvia Woods’s Teach Yourself to Play the Folk Harp book. I found Joanna Mell’s arrangement of the tune on YouTube and ordered the sheet music from her in summer 2016. At that point, I had been taking harp lessons for three months. I had no idea what was viable for me as a learner, and I quickly found that Star of the County Down was a significant leap in difficulty. For one, the arrangement is eight pages long and I had been working on pieces that were at most a page and a half, printed in large font. The target tempo was far faster than anything I had done, the arrangement covered much more ground on the harp than I was used to (e.g., in some places the right hand is in the third octave while the left hand is down in the sixth octave), and some of the note intervals required of the left hand were nearly impossible for me to reach because my hand didn’t have the necessary flexibility yet. I made a valiant effort to memorize the piece and get it up to speed, but ultimately ended up walking away from it.

Here’s a video from September 2016 of me practicing part of the tune:

The funny thing about working on this piece after such a long break is that I’m having to fight my own muscle memory. Rather than playing with the improved technique that I’ve built over three years, my return to the piece has also brought back the technique I had as a brand new harpist, like replacing fingers too early and playing hesitantly and choppily! Oh joy! Most of the effort for this piece will need to be applied to developing new muscle memory for smoother playing. I had no idea that muscle memory was so contextual. I assumed that as my technique progressed, I would seamlessly be able to apply it to any piece, whether it was new or something I had learned previously. Instead, there is an unlearning and relearning process for older repertoire. In addition, I made the unhelpful assumption that I had retained the details of the rhythm in memory, and so did not look at the sheet music very closely in this regard when I first started reviewing the piece. Take it from me: look at the sheet music!   

The good thing is that it isn’t taking too much effort to re-memorize the tune. When I first memorized it, I was not yet able to recognize note patterns effectively and viewed everything as a series of individual notes, which made memorization far more laborious. Much to my bemusement this time around, I immediately noticed that the left hand simply copies the right hand for much of the first page…

Star of the County Down will make an appearance on the Harp and Strings YouTube channel once I finish re-memorizing and polishing it.