Harp Column Blogs: Carl SwansonArchive

I do a limited amount of teaching, and only take students who have been playing the harp for awhile. I've run into a problem with several of these students that has been vexing and for which I tried without success to find a good solution.  Please understand, I am not in any way saying nor suggesting the previous teacher of each of these students is to blame.  They are not.  The problem is part of the learning curve of getting students into harder repertoire.

The problem is this.  Students start developing practice habits as soon as they begin playing the harp, and as the student moves into harder repertoire, those original practice habits are inadequate for perfecting the more difficult pieces.  The result is that the student gets the piece to a certain point, and then there it sits, with inumerable stops and starts and trips and missed notes.  It took a while for me to realize several years ago that the student I was teaching at the time who had this problem had, in effect, learned these stops and starts.  After all, she did them everytime she practiced the piece, but she never stopped to work out the problem spot.  She'd just stop, regroup, and continue on.

I now have a very talented student who in many ways is a dream to  teach.  But as I've pushed him into harder repertoire this year, the same problem was cropping up.  I tried practice sessions during the lesson.  I tried giving him a second lesson each week.  The result had limited success, and I was getting more and more frustrated that he wasn't finishing anything(i.e. getting each piece to performance level.  He's been working for several weeks now on the Hasselmans La Source, and this problem of stops and starts, dropped notes, etc. was driving me nuts.

So right after his last lesson I had an idea.  I emailed him and told him to play the first 4 or 5 pages through, and everytime he tripped, missed a note or stopped, to put a check mark above that spot in the music.  Then go back and practice only the checked places, one at a time, until he could play through it without a problem.  When he got to the point  where he could play through that spot 3 or 4 days  in a row with no stop the first time through, he could remove the check mark.

He came for a lesson today, and the result was dazzling.  He played the first half of the piece(which had been bolted to this stop-and-start stage for weeks) at performance level.  It was ready to record.  And he was able to focus his attention on the nuances and musical expression because he knew the notes cold.

I thought some of the teachers here might like to hear about this, and I hope it helps you and your students.