Harp and Strings

First off, apologies for the slow pace of posting on the blog and on YouTube. My only excuse is that I took my first major vacation since high school in order to participate in archaeology field school on the island of Menorca. I have now been back for a little over two weeks and am settling into my routine. My harp broke four strings while I was away, which is record string-breakage and must be some form of revenge for neglect.

Before I left on vacation, I was trying to polish Star of the County Down while feeling secretly suspicious that it was a futile effort. To keep myself going, I allowed myself to begin memorizing another piece, to disastrous effect. This new piece is highly syncopated and took so much mental energy to memorize that my progress on Star of the County Down began regressing, even though I continued to work on it while memorizing the new piece. I started forgetting passages of the arrangement and my muscle memory became unreliable. I have encountered this issue before to a lesser extent when memorizing new pieces; sometimes the new material causes older material to suffer, even with continued practice. There’s no fix for this as far as I’m aware, but I do know to expect it now. Older repertoire must go through a reinforcement process in light of the new intervals, patterns, etc. that a new piece introduces. Anyway, Star of the County Down was in shambles when I left for vacation.

When I returned from vacation and attempted to resume my harp practice, I found that my arms and hands behaved as if they were made of lead. The unaccustomed work of field school had taken a toll, and Star of the County Down sounded worse than when I first began work on it in 2016. Super encouraging. But with stretching and calculated avoidance of the new syncopated piece, I got back on track. (I believe that my memory has conveniently deleted all progress that I made on the syncopated piece.)

And now, voila! A far from perfect but shareable rendition of Star of the County Down, arranged by Joanna Mell.

I’m not sure exactly what shifted, but I was able to make rapid progress on the piece this week. The pressure to get something else up on YouTube helped provide a little extra motivation, which is one of the purposes of the Harp & Strings channel. It feels great to have a video of this piece, finally, after first picking it up about three years ago. Better late than never!