At the beginning of this week I received the harp part for a work I’m performing next month, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It’s a renowned choral orchestral piece and I’ve never learnt it. It’s completely unfamiliar. I’ve never even heard it performed. It got me thinking that this would be the ideal opportunity to share some insights from my learning process.

After leaving the music to ripen further in the envelope for 2 days as I didn’t have time to start looking at it, out came those notes enshrined in mystery yesterday morning. I’ve worked on quite a few of Britten’s harp parts and they are at times fiendishly difficult. His harp writing was strongly influenced by his friendship with male Welsh harpist Osian Ellis who was I suppose Britten’s harp muse. Ellis was a technical whizz in his heyday and this is obvious when you study Britten’s often complex writing.

I scanned through the music yesterday morning and was relieved to find that nothing made me wish I’d received the part sooner. Time will tell. This evening I started looking in more detail and seeing patterns in his writing. I recognised the meticulously precise indications and articulations specific to his style.

My next step will be to go through the part very slowly exploring each element and making sense of them. Much of my work will be done away from the harp with little playing. If I do play sections, they won’t sound great, much like a first draft or a sketch. I rarely like to listen to a new piece before I investigate it myself, mainly out of curiosity to see how near or far from the mark I get to the general interpretation. I will then research the piece and work out the roles of the harp within the orchestral texture. After I become quite familiar with it I’ll start listening to it, both with and without the printed music. With 3 busy weeks to learn it, time is of the essence and I’m trying to cut myself a little slack. It probably won’t be perfect this time. Marking up is a long and vital part of the process, and I’m often adjusting and making corrections a few days before a performance and, best of all, afterwards if there’s a repeat performance. Then I can go to a deeper level. There is only one performance this time, so hopefully I will have the opportunity to do it again. It’s a lot of work, which I enjoy immensely.

There’s an arid coldness to some of Britten’s writing and I often find his music can seem quite angular, stark and impenetrable at first, and by the same token there is so much beauty, such warmth and spine tingling emotion. His violin concerto is a scorcher, his operas masterpieces. One of my all time favourite Britten works is the Lute Song from Gloriana, so simply stunning I’ve added this sound clip.

The fact he almost always writes for the harp in his works means Britten is a force to be reckoned with and the challenge of learning one of his pieces is an opportunity for enrichment.

I digress. Great pedalling is an art form and it’s very important to find a system that works. If you’re a non musician or lever harpist, the harp has 7 pedals, one for each note, with 3 positions - flats are at the top, naturals in the middle, and pressing the pedal right down sharpens the note. Accidentals (flats, naturals and sharps) basically make the note sound higher or lower. Looking at my feet, the pedals are in this order: D, C, B / E, F, G, A. I’m a left foot over right foot kind of girl. This means I write my pedals with D, C, B on top. There’s no right or wrong here but consistency is key.

Choosing a good fingering can only really be done at the harp so that you can hear the results. To some extent, you can do this away from the instrument but you have to hear and feel the result and like pedalling, the fingering I choose might not work for another harpist. I think it’s down to morphology and how my brain functions as well as technical ability. I know some harpists would laugh at my imaginative fingerings but if they work for me and the music, it doesn’t matter. I try to choose my fingering according to the articulation and the musical intention and Britten is very precise in his demands. The small arrows in the passage above mean staccatissimo, very very short, and ppp means pianississimo - very very quiet, so this can be quite tricky especially if it’s fast. Articulation is like talking. Imagine someone talking in a monotone way, you soon stop listening. It’s the same with music.

Analysis is essential in understanding the piece, so this means working on key signatures, time signatures, harmonic progressions, basic structure and so on. It’s like baking a cake - knowing and understanding the ingredients you’re putting in. It’s way less boring than it sounds - it can be a vividly colourful discovery.

Visual memory is so important. I feel reassured if I can see the pages in my mind away from the harp and the more detail the better. Learning a new piece is like putting information into a computer. Input it any old how and any old how is what you get out. This doesn’t stop me from making it a fun, indulgent, imaginative and creative learning experience. This may seem silly but listening is important! Sometimes I’m so busy with one particular aspect of the music that I feel daft when I realise I’ve stopped listening. I pay attention to the various voicings in each hand. Germaine, my teacher in France taught me this, to define each line within a chordal left hand part for example, to connect the notes and hear and SING the individual lines. I can still play many of the pieces I learnt with her mostly from memory. This brings me to muscle memory, a vital element in practice and performance. What I mean is feeling the gaps between the fingers (inversions), the jumps, left and right hand coordination, how to remember the music by encouraging the body to FEEL it. It is physical and emotional work. And it’s as much fun as I make it.

The metronome soon becomes my close ally again and sets me on the right track. Slowly but surely I will get there and my aim is to feel as though the music belongs to me, that I know it intimately. I often get discouraged during the learning process - this is normal and I know I just have to keep going, or take a break and let the music in. When I feel like this, I remind myself to focus on how I want to feel in the rehearsal and concert, to focus on the music and the performance. Visualisation and meditation are really useful here. I’ve suffered from performance anxiety in the past, and sometimes I still do. It passes as soon as I get into the music. I’ve learnt to manage it and it isn’t destructive anymore. It helps if I have practiced well and offered myself plenty of anchors in my preparation to keep me from going adrift.

Time for some practice. Not on the piano.