3 Terrific Reasons to Review Your Music

Every harpist should have music they can play when someone asks. That’s essentially what a repertoire is: music you know and can play, and ideally, music you like too.

Playing for people is part of what gives us joy as harpists, to be able to share music we love. To do this, we have to have pieces ready to play. Your teacher can help you create a plan for reviewing your music, but let’s make sure you understand why review is so necessary.

Reason for Review 1: Developing Your Repertoire

Obviously, review is a must for developing and maintaining your repertoire. If you want to play for weddings, church services or other types of gigs, you must have a fairly sizable list of music you can bring out and play without much notice. 

Reason for Review 2: Room for Mastery

This is the most overlooked benefit of review. Simply learning a piece to a completion point, perhaps performing it and then putting it in the drawer doesn’t lead to mastery. When you play a piece often over a long period of time, it becomes familiar and terror (and error!) free. You can play it with ease and expression.

Reason for Review 3: Reconnect With Your Love of Music

Reviewing your music lets you reconnect with music and the harp. Practicing is hard work and sometimes the payoff feels like it’s in the distant future. It’s surprisingly easy to forget that the reason we play music on the harp is because we love it.

Imagine how much fun it would be to spend part of a leisurely afternoon playing through a stack of your favorite music without having to worry about mistakes or technique, just playing for the fun of it.

Ask your teacher to help you identify some good pieces to review, ones that will be cornerstones of your repertoire for now. And then, start enjoying playing them!