Hebrew 101

Of course, you can't go to Israel without at least trying to learn Hebrew!

So I went to my local library, which just happens to specialize in language resources, and checked out a basic audio course. It's a good excuse to get out and go to the park. I sit on a bench and practice writing out sentences like “Hello, how are you?” “What is that?” and “That is an apricot.”

Learning Hebrew, for a Westerner like me, is just like learning a modern piece on the harp: at first it makes absolutely no sense, so you just have to memorize by rote for a while until you build up a framework for understanding how things are put together. I feel like I'm a little kid again – making up codes to send secret messages, writing everything backwards for good measure! Except it's more than just learning the alefbet. Everything that we English and Romance-language speakers thought we knew about language is different for Hebrew. Here's some of the curious things I've discovered about Hebrew so far:

• Vowels are dots, like morse code, sprinkled around the consonants. But since it's tedious to write all of those dots all of the time (and really frustrating if you're using a pencil or a ball-point pen, because you can't just tap the paper, you really have to grind away at each one to get it to show up), most of the time the vowels are just left off!

• There is no indefinite article (a/an). It just doesn't exist.

• There is also no “to be” in present tense. Literally: “What that?” “That apricot.”

• Verbs are conjugated not just in function of person (I, you, he/she) and number (singular or plural) but also depending on whether you are a man or a woman!! Aaaaa!!

• To indicate possession, you add an ending to the word that is being possessed. The ending changes with the gender of the possessor. Thus, in order to ask how someone is, since the idiomatic way of doing that is literally “What your health?” you have to add the appropriate ending to [shalom], which means health or state-of-being, as well as hello and peace.

Sitting and Practicing

Preparation for a competition (or concert or exam) involves a whole mix of interesting things, such as: choosing and arranging the pieces on your program; organizing the logistics of harp transportation; shopping for fancy dresses and shoes; setting up rehearsals and practice performances, etc. Due of the extent and variety of the Israel program, I have had the opportunity to come up with creative ideas for how to prepare that go far beyond this list. But before I get into any of that, let's just be clear on one thing. None of it happens without hours and hours of just sitting and practicing.

Sitting and practicing is the staple in the schedule of any performing musician. To the outside observer, this looks quite boring, and the excuse “sorry, I can't go out, I have to practice” becomes old fast. This routine makes it hard to have “friends” in the normal sense of the term as “people to hang out with in your free time”, but that's a story for another day. What other musicians know is that if you're doing it right then practicing is not boring at all, nor is it ever the same.

First of all, if you are really going to practice, then you better get the sitting part down just right, or else you won't be able to play to the best of your ability and you may actually hurt yourself. Harpists have to sit, hold their arms out in front of themselves, and support a 35-kilo instrument leaning back against them, while also changing pedals. There's a glorious amount of physics and anatomy involved in mapping out all the force vectors that go into holding this position. My exploration of posture began toward the end of my years at the University of Illinois, as I started comparing thoughts with friends and thinking consciously about spinal bones balancing over my hips and such. At the Ecole Normale de Musique our harp studio had actual physiotherapy masterclasses in which we would be critiqued on our position at the harp. I've been fortunate enough never to injure myself by playing, but I remember having to deal with a small amount of right-shoulder pain when I was preparing a different competition in Hungary, two years ago. This time I am proud to announce victory, as I have absolutely no pain anywhere after playing 5+ hours each day. (I just get tired.)

As for the actual practicing itself – learning pieces, drilling passages, memorizing music – I barely know where to start talking about this. I feel like I could write a whole book on the art of practicing! I am convinced that everything depends on what you do with your practice time, how efficiently you work, how you concentrate. I had an idea once that if we really wanted to be helpful to young, upcoming musicians we should have competitions not just for performing but also competitions for practicing. Competitors would come and practice in front of a jury, and they would judge you based on how efficiently and intelligently you managed your time. Even just imagining participating in such a competition is a productive thought experiment that can shed light on your practice regime.

For me, practicing my harp is the art of knowing myself and understanding how my mind learns and remembers things. Through experience, I have become closely familiar with what I have to do to teach my fingers a piece, though I am constantly amazed that it works and that I do actually learn and improve. Often I feel that after beating away at a hard passage I haven't made very much progress on it, but as long as I just spend the time and concentration on it, then when I come back later, it will have improved.

On the one hand, this is because learning just takes time. Here's a visual analogy by way of illustration. Somebody once pointed out to me that you don't actually see all of what you look at. (I think this was in relation to the reliability of eye-witness accounts, in a psychology class.) When you're out, trying looking in some random direction and then close your eyes and try to recreate in your mind all the details of the scene before you. Unless you really were to spend time studying that scene, there will be lots of fuzzy parts to your mind's-eye version of it. Painters know all about this, I imagine, but the phenomenon in music is the same. In order to create that whole mental file I have on the piece, I have to look at it again and again to make sure I've really “seen all the details of the scene”. I have to test myself by painting it all by memory and then checking my work with the original, to make sure I'm not missing anything without realizing it.

On the other hand, the human ability to learn is impressive. More specifically, I have come to worship the power of learning by doing. Actually reaching out with your own hands and doing something is so much more real than reading or hearing somebody lecture. It is truly amazing the way the things that you do soak down into the deepest fibers of your being and stay. The effect is all the more amplified if you repeat the same thing over and over. This is the magic that enables performers to achieve the feats that they do. This almost supernatural power, however, can work against you if you don't use it intelligently. You have to constantly make sure that the correct way of playing the piece is what sinks in, and not the sloppy, unconcentrated way. Making mistakes while you practice is horribly detrimental to learning the piece correctly; the mistakes stay with you too.

Practicing can become a very personal thing for musicians. It is truly a form of meditation, alone-time specially set aside, a comforting routine. In these last few weeks before I get on that plane for Tel Aviv, I am ramping up my practice efficiency as high as I can get it, and my time at the harp every day is what keeps me calm in the face of an approaching deadline. Getting frustrated is bad for efficiency, so I don't get frustrated. Self-doubt is also anti-productive, so I ignore it. Besides, if I let these things sink into those magical inner fibers where I store all the neurological files I have on my pieces, then they'll just come out and slap me around while I'm trying to give a good performance in Israel. Out of logical necessity, I've been forced into a glowing state of hyper-optimism and confidence! It's fun. It wouldn't be possible any other way.

Introduction: Aiming for Israel

Enough reasons have built up to finally result in the launch of my blog. It seems that everybody is asking me to let them know how things go at the competition I'm doing in Israel this October, and I've decided this is the best way. There's so much to tell! This competition is not just about what happens in October, but everything that goes into preparing it. The reason I chose to entitle this blog "Beyond the Moment" (other than the fact that there's a big title area up there demanding me to enter one) was to emphasize that for every fleeting, seemingly effortless moment of performance, countless hours of all various kinds of preparation have been done to ensure that that moment comes across with just the right effect. This is my story of not just the moment of performance, but the real adventure beyond that moment.

In the interest of starting from the beginning, I'll introduce myself. Hello, I'm Elizabeth. :) I am a harpist – a decision undertaken as I was starting college and realized that I had been irreversibly enchanted by the harp and therefore had no choice but to major in it. According to my mother, my whole musical career began by tying shoes at the age of two, which gave her the idea that my fledging finger dexterity could be developed to do things even more interesting than tying my shoes. I don't remember this shoe-tying incident, just as I don't remember life without music lessons. I was lucky to have a really supportive family who raised me to appreciate the importance of music, even if they aren't professional musicians themselves. Over 20 years later I now have made it through the rigor of classical concert-artist training and have degrees from the University of Illinois' Music Department and the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. I live in Paris, by the way! “Yes, I'm American,” I say to all the French people who can't quiet figure out where my accent is from. “Yes, I love living in Paris, and the musical environment here is great,” I say to all the Americans who ask. Really, my enjoyment of Paris depends on my mood. Some days it all just makes me want to scream. Most of the time it's wildly stimulating and exciting.

Having just concluded my formal education, I am now entering the International Harp Competition in Israel, which will take place in October. Learning to be a concert artist is done by facing a series of challenges – class recitals, then recitals of your own, local competitions, then bigger competitions... – each time learning from your experience, and then being capable of more the next time around. The competition in Israel is going to be the last big challenge of this sort that I give myself. I really want to be done with competitions for good after this, so I made sure to choose one that was completely off-the-charts ridiculously hard, just so I would really feel like I'd gone all the way, made the best effort possible, and would be justified in moving on afterward.

By way of introduction, the International Harp Competition in Israel (hereafter abbreviated as just “Israel”) is one of the most prestigious harp competitions in the world. Because it is the oldest of the most prestigious harp competitions, it could be thought of as the most prestigious. This is, however, the last time you'll hear me talk about it like that. I don't like the way that calling Israel prestigious implies that I'm prestigious for doing it. Prestige is absolutely not the reason I chose to enter this competition.

For those who don't know, I'll give a bit of an explanation of how the competition works. On October 6^th, about 30 talented, hard-working, and completely insane young harpists from all corners of the world will show up in Tel Aviv. We have known about the required repertoire for the competition and have been working on learning and perfecting those pieces for two years. The pieces range from solo works to small chamber ensemble to full, orchestral concerto, and they are all extremely, technically challenging.

There are four elimination rounds. The first round is a program of four solo pieces:

• a set of two Scarlatti sonatas

• a sonata by Jean-Baptiste Krumpholtz

• a choice between two pieces by Carlos Salzedo

• and a new piece commissioned for the competition by Israeli composer Yitzhak Yedid

Everybody will play in this round – everybody who actually makes it as far as getting themselves to Tel Aviv with the repertoire prepared – and it will take four days for the jury to hear everybody. Then follows the brutal slashing of about half the competitors off the list. Only those who pass the first round will play in the second round; the rest are finished.

With fewer people playing now, the second round takes only two days. It is also a solo round:

• a sublime baroque suite in c minor, by J.S. Bach

• a rich sonata and absolute staple of the harp repertoire, by Paul Hindemith

• a free-choice contemporary work, preferably something from the competitor's own country

• and the gushingly passionate Pièce symphonique by Henriette Renié

The jury subsequently dismisses another handful of bright, aspiring young stars and we're down to the cutthroat, chamber music rounds. In the third round the harp stands in for the violin in an arrangement, originally for violin, viola and flute, of a serenade by Beethoven and then creates a chillingly eery atmosphere for a musical rendition of Poe's Mask of the Red Death, by André Caplet. I'm convinced that this is the hardest round. The music is extremely demanding, very long, and you are put to the test not only for your skills as a harpist but your sensitivity to the other musicians you will have to collaborate with. This round is one of the reasons I chose this competition over all the other competitions I could have concentrated on instead: to make it past to the final stage (at least in my idealized vision of how this works) you can't just be a self-obsessed diva, you have to be able to listen and collaborate... in just three days of rehearsal.

The final round is the other reason I chose this competition: the Ginastera concerto!! This has been a dream-piece of mind for years, and I figured it would serve as good motivation to try to make it through the first three rounds. Only three people will make it to the final round. Once you're there, you're pretty much already on top of the world, and you get to celebrate by rocking out with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. To me, at that point, it wouldn't matter what the final results are. Just the chance to actually play that concerto with an orchestra decent enough to pull it off would be such an exhilarating experience that it would be worth all the sacrifice of the past two years.

In the end, the first-place winner receives a gold harp, which I also don't like talking about because it's also not my motivation for doing this competition. Much cooler is that the winner also gets a whole handful of debut recitals in fun places like London and New York AND a CD recording (probably of all the pieces that you just played in the competition, right?). Second and third prizes are monetary, and then there are a few special prizes for best performances of certain pieces in the course of the competition.

It's going to be an adventure. It already is an adventure. I'll try to share as much of it as I can with you here. Please stay tuned for upcoming posts on my thoughts and experiences during the final days of preparation and then, in October, news on how the competition progresses.