Each year at the University of Delaware, I hear auditions of prospective university harp students, young harpists with big hopes and dreams for their futures, varying cases of nervousness and in very different stages of preparation.  Allowing for the fact that everyone gets nervous and bad days happen to us all from time to time, there are a few things any student preparing for college auditions c...

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, (b. 1926) Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist

“Take a deep breath,” has always been good advice, but now there is evidence that deep breathing can alleviate performance anxiety. Although I didn’t need the study to tell me what I found out years ago.

Over 25 years ago, flutist Joan Sparks and I founded our flute and harp duo Sparx. We hav...

Can classical music survive in a world where orchestras fail and concert attendance dwindles?

Two dismaying things happened to me this weekend. The first came in a casual conversation, in which two people attempted to persuade me that classical music and attending concerts is a high-brow, elite and upper class thing. Every fiber of my being resists this idea, but the nagging fact persists that cl...

Marcel Tabuteau, 1951

This post follows up on a previous post about phrasing. Here I describe what is arguably the best system for teaching phrasing I ever came across, and how you can practice to make your phrasing more meaningful and expressive.

When I was a student at Curtis, I learned from my wind player friends about the amazing technique for phrasing and legato they were learning in thei...

Today’s fast pace and shorter attention spans make it easier than ever to feel stuck in a rut. Within a week after we return from a vacation, we can find ourselves feeling uninspired, unmotivated and dull. Building on an idea from a previous post on this blog (Move That Mountain – Do One Thing),  I would like to offer this suggestion: change one thing.

When I was little, back in the pre-digital...

Sometimes we have a task before us that seems to much to tackle. All we see is a big mountain of work and we don’t know where to start. The secret to creating momentum and getting the job done is simple and only one step – you just need to do one thing.

The inspiration for this came from a blog post by author and thought leader Seth Godin. Seth is the author of best-...

You’ve heard the expression “I don’t do…whatever.” Well, harpists have their own special do’s and don’ts, things we can or can’t do because we play the harp. We have peculiar ways of looking at the world and music. Here are a couple of examples:

We DO ramps. We DON’T do spiral staircases.

We DO Tchaikovsky. We DON’T do Beethoven. (If he was really a genius, wouldn’t he have written more for harp...

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Some people might tell you that a "successful working musician" is a mythical being. But those of us who are successful working musicians know that it is possible with hard work and determination. Those jobs, whether they are wedding gigs or an orchestra chair, don't just fall into your lap. You have to pursue them with a focused strategy.It takes some business sav...

At a house concert in Tennessee

While you may not have thought of it this way, we all start out playing house concerts. It's that first holiday after you have started taking lessons when your mother asks you to play for your relatives. If you continue your music studies, you may play for women’s club luncheons, made infamous by the musician/comedienne Anna Russell. You may play for local music ...

_{© Andrey Ushakov}

In a recent post, I discussed how to practice when you couldn’t concentrate. I offered some techniques for overcoming the mental block that may be keeping you from focusing on your work. Today I wanted to share with you an experience I had that demonstrated how powerful a mental block could be, and showed me the best tool we have for overcoming it.

I used to study martial arts...