Healing Harp Concert

Host a Healing Harp Concert. It's a wonderful way to connect with friends and enjoy an evening of relaxation and healing. I provide lovely healing harp music while you relax and meditate. Refreshments and drinks are an option for your comfort. Your place or mine!

In the "aural" tradition, muscle memory

The way to learn a folk tune or Celtic tune "by ear", in the "aural" tradition, is to disect the tune, phrase by phrase, or, half-phrase. Listen to it, over and over until you can hum it. I keep stopping the Cd after a phrase, and repeat just that part until I can hum it, then move on to the next phrase. Then work out how to play, phrase by phrase, playing over and over several times. Gradually put the phrases together, 1st 2 phrases, then next 2, moving on till you can string together all phases from beginning to end. Your muscle memory, your brain and fingers, will memorize how it "feels" to play each phrase. Muscle memory will keep you playing with ease.

Muscle Memory

Muscle memory in memorizing music: A musician "feels" the music through his fingers. She feels the music, physically and emotionally. Our personal feeling comes through. Each musician has her own unique personal "touch", so, because of this, we can recognize the player when we hear someone playing a tune even before we see them or hear the name. We can identify their personality, their touch, their own musical fingerprint in the music they play. When I listened to the radio, sometimes I could identify who was playing a new tune by the "touch" of the musician. That can happen with any instrument: piano, fiddle, whistle, bagpipes, flute. Like my violin teacher said, what we "feel" also besides our emotions coming thru in the music we play, is how it "feels" to our hands and fingers. When it's right it feels right. Muscle memory makes our fingers remember the shapes and space measurements between fingers. Our brain and finger muscles have been trained. When I play a concert at the Artsgarden, sometimes, I get "in the zone" and my hands seem to move independently from me. I look down at my hands playing keyboard and it looks like anyway I'd place them would be right, like, it doesn't matter where I place them. It was surreal! I was like floating above the keyboard looking down at what was going on!