Tess Nurman transcribed some of her favorite excerpts from this webinar below (thank you Tess!!). If you don’t have time to watch the whole webinar, these excerpts will give you a sense of what’s in it.

NOTE: The timings in Tess’s excerpts may not be exact because we sometimes edit the video.

0:54 to 02:36  “In any ways that I interact with other people, I love to work with impassioned people. I love to learn from impassioned people, I love to talk to impassioned people, I love to play with impassioned people – like you. And as a coach and as a mentor, I love to help you find the way to express yourself with your instrument. If you’ve been in any of my classes, you’ve heard me say this over and over and over again, because that’s what’s so important to me. I’m not thinking about your technique – sometimes a little bit to help you because technique is only there to help you express yourself. But I don’t care how big your harp is or how big your hands are or how long you’ve played or all of that.

I just care about your passion and your self-expression. And that’s great! I mean, that’s what’s important to me.  But do we all know, do we all have that connection to that self? Do we know what that self is? Do we know how to make that connection? Someone wrote to me just recently about that and said, ‘You know, I love all this stuff  but I don’t know where that self is. I don’t know who that self is. I don’t know how to find that.’ And I was so moved by that because that is what Strings of Passion is about. It is about finding that connection to that you, even if you think there’s nothing there. And so often we’re not aware of who we are and what we have to express.”

04:49 to 06:36  “So, what you just heard a second ago was me giving into an impulse. And impulse is the first of the seven strings of passion. Impulse. Before we ever desire to be desired,  before we ever long to be heard, we are desiring. We are hearing. We have the impulse to touch, to be, to do, to speak. And this impulse is at the heart of our personal expression. And as we go through life, it is very easy to lose connection to this impulse, either because we forget – now, I just had an impulse there and I didn’t follow it. And the impulse was to sing. [singing:] Sometimes we lose the impulse because we forget. Sometimes we lose the impulse because there are obstacles in our way. But it’s always there. It’s always there.”

06:36 to 07:13  “And the strings of passion, these seven steps – they’re not steps, they’re strings like the strings of our instrument. And there are seven, just like there are seven strings of each octave of our instrument. And the point of these seven strings and these seven ideas is to connect us back and forward and in and out and around and through to that impulse.”

10:24 to 12:21  [After telling the sugar water story] “And you must always look for those strings in life because they are all around. The strings in the sugar water that will bring ideas to them, that will bring people to them, that will be the foundation for the crystalization of things that are already there. And so to me, the string in the sugar water is the idea of structure.” [improvisation with looper] “That was the beginning of  a lifelong search for me for structure. In fact, almost all the classes, if you’ve taken  any classes from me in workshops at Sommerset or in Hip Harp Academy, almost all the courses that I give online have been up to now about different structures – different musical structures, the basic arrangement structure, the structure of the blues, the structure of little tiny vamps for improvisation, the structure of pieces that I write – because that structure once you get it, once you can distill it down, is the thing that gives you freedom.”

13:10 to 16:21  “The third string is the string of character. Now, if you think about your music, if you read music, think about a page of music, there are notes there all over the page. And then there are a lot of other things – things like mezzopiano or phrasing lines or accidentals. We have names for them. All of these tell you about the character of the music. So first, let me tell you about how I first played music as a kid, because I didn’t start with lessons. My grandmother had a piano and I would just use it for fun, as a toy.

Actually, all my families had a piano. But I was left alone at my grandmother’s house, so I could just do whatever I wanted with the piano. And so I would always tell stories. And they would always have certain characteristics. Like they would always have weather-related things in them.” [Then demonstration of the sound of rain, thunder and example of cool story from 14:10 to 15:32!]

“I was playing simply with the character. I didn’t know the notes I was doing. I was playing with the character of the music that sounded like rain to me, the character of music that sounded like thunder. I was playing with volume, dynamics. I was playing with soft, loud, gentle – all those things. Those are the character. And you can see that even with, at this moment with these three strings – impulse: I had the impulse to tell a story, the impulse to play with this instrument; structure: I had the structure of a story that I was telling in the moment to myself based on how I liked the story was going to go; and I had character. Just with those three things, at that point, I was already playing with music.”

16:22 to 16:57  “So, we have impulse, we have structure, we have character. You can play with impulse by – well, we’ll talk more about that in a little while. You can play with structure by giving yourself a structure in advance, like any of the ones I give you in Hip Harp Academy. And I can give you even some simpler ones. And in the longer form of Strings of Passion we’ll get a lot of structures and impulses and all of that. But I just want to go through this quick today. Character, you can play with that by taking away the things that you think are music and literally playing with your instrument.”

16:57 to 18:57  “But here’s another way to do it. It’s really kind of fun. So let’s take the idea of pianissimo and fortissimo. So imagine, just say those words – pianissimo, fortissimo. Just say them again. Pianissimo, fortissimo. Pianissimo, fortissimo. So pianissimo means very, very soft. Fortissimo means very, very loud. So now let’s do it by saying the words as if they had the character of those words.

So, pianissimo. Fortissimo. Pianissimo. Fortissimo! Now even just this little bit, I notice that in my body – my body is acting different to these words. I’m curious if yours is. Let’s just keep going. Let’s make it even more pianissimo. So, pianiiiisimo… FORTISSIMO!!! Make it even more pianiisssisissimo…FORRRRR-R-R-TIIIIIISSIMO!!!!! This is the character of the words. And the thing that is so interesting about it to me is that, as a composer, I only have these two words. But there are so many different kinds of pianissimo and fortissimo.

So think about why you would be having something fortissimo. Why would you be fortissimo in your life? Would you be fortissimo because you were telling a secret? You’re just telling a secret. Or because you were being very intimate? Would you be fortissimo because you just had to be quiet? Be quiet. Be quiet! You know, why? The character is about the why. The technique is about the how. But te character is about the why. And as you start to play with all of these – it could be thousands of different kinds of pianissimo – that starts to enhance your understanding of music.”

18:58 to 19:51  “I want to stop for one minute here in telling you this fact, that each of the strings on the outside – just think about the idea. If there were a mirror image of those strings on the inside, so that as you are playing with any of these concepts, it is both resonating outside in your instrument what you’re feeling inside and is also resonating back into you. This is one of the things that I’ve learned about the Strings of Passion as I’ve gotten more and more deeply into it. There is this mirror happening. So just think already with those three strings – impulse, structure, and character – you can be playing music and experiencing already. And they all interplay.”

19:52 to 22:14  “The fourth string….[another cool improvisation with looper]….The fourth string of structure is the string of roles. Now there are many different ways to think about roles. [Singing:] When I first started playing jazz, my teacher was my boyfriend and he played the bass. And the first thing, just about the first thing he told me was, ‘Listen to me – the bass player is always right!’ [singing:] So now, why did he say this to me? Was he just a control freak? No. Well, maybe, but not in this instance. He said that to me, because what he meant was: ‘you need to have someone to follow if something goes amiss. So let me tell you this. You’ve gotta follow me. You’ve gotta follow me, don’t you see? You’ve gotta follow me.”

22:14 to 24:13  “So the first kind of following of the three kinds of following that I think of – or the three kind of roles – is the idea of followship, or leadership and followship. I mean, we hear a lot about leadership. We may not hear as much about followship. But they go together. And I first learned about them – I mean, I learned about them from him – but before that, I learned about them in gym class!

Because in gym class, I was taught something that I now know is called contact improv….[description of the exercise]…You must move slowly enough so that the person can follow you. Because leadership is about making it clear what you’re doing so that people can follow you….[continuation of exercise]….Ok now, follow each other. And we were able to do that.

So one of the things that I learned was that in leadership, you have to make it clear what you are leading people for. They can’t follow you if they don’t know what’s clear, that following is a beautiful, thing to do. It’s very exciting to do, and that you can switch back and forth. And I got this idea of switching back and forth when I started playing jazz and I started realizing there were these roles, which I’m going to show you a little more in a second. I began to realize – and that they switch in jazz, you can switch them at certain points. I found this so beautiful, to get to have the role of leader and then the follower and switch back and forth.”

24:13 to 26:29  “So the first idea of roles is this idea of leadership and followship. And this gives you freedom. For example, if I know that the bass player’s always right, if I get lost, it gives me the freedom to know how to get back on. The other thing is in jazz, when you know what the role is – well, let me show you this next one first, because these two fit together, leadership and also these three roles.

There are three roles in the music that we normally play. And it’s wonderful because our harp shows them to us beautifully. Many instruments primarily play a specific role. We are unusual in that we can play all the roles. But by that token, we can sometimes get confused about the fact that there are roles. If you look at your harp and you think about the fact – and this would be true of a piano as well – it’s very, very clear on the harp.

You can see that the bottom third is basically the bass role, the middle part is the accompaniment role, and the top part is the melodic role. This became clearer and clearer to me as I began writing for orchestra and I began noticing ok, there’s four musical families – there’s the woodwind family, there’s the brass family, there’s the percussion family and there’s the string family. Within each family – and this is very clear if you look at an orchestral score – it’s always laid out so that the higher instruments are at the top of that part of the score and then it goes down, the ones that kind of play the middle part are in the middle, and then the lower instruments are down at the bottom. It’s not true of the French horns but ignore that! There’s always got to be some exception. Alright, enough of that.

So, what I started to realize is these three roles. There are three roles: bass, accompaniment, and melody. And that was very clear to me from jazz because there was a bass player, I had to be taught to play accompaniment to stay within a certain area. And I began to realize, oh wow, then there’s the sax player who doesn’t play bass and just kind of comes in and is a soloist. Ok, that’s very clear. Those roles are very clear. And what I loved about jazz – let me show you these roles for a second, because they go along with character.” [exploration of roles and switching of roles from 26:29 to 29:12]

29:12 to  29:58  “So we would switch roles all the time. And that’s when I began to understand that by having the roles, we were given freedom. The roles gave us freedom. Because we knew what the parameters were. So that point, I had the impulse – I wanted to play jazz. Structure – each jazz tune is its own structure. Character – I began to understand, the character and the roles really fit together. And I began to understand what my roles were. Now this is in all music. You’ll see this all over, these concepts all over. And you will begin to see it in yourself as well. You will begin to understand that when you’re doing things with people, if you understand what your role is, you can have a lot more freedom.”

29:58 to 30:19  “Now, sometimes we chafe at those roles. We will chafe at the role if we feel that we’re stuck in them. We will chafe at structure if we feel that it is being imposed. But when there is an internal structure, and when there are roles that are flexible that we can switch around they give us freedom.”

30:40 to 33:30  “There’s one really important thing about roles I want to tell you about before I go on. There’s a third one. And the third one is that a role can inform you. Here’s an example. I usually tell an example about a teaching situation but I’m going to tell you a different example today….[powerful example of World Authors committee asking questions instead of saying what to do, how one of the characters became an emissary when asking about a particular situation]…What I realized as I did this more and more was that I used her role. I had given her the role of emissary to this other world, and in that role, she had helped me access a part of myself and answers that I needed. And so a role can also be like a kind of archetype that gives you an insight, into your own world, into your own self, into your own questions. And so that’s the third way in which roles can give you insight and freedom and why they are such an important part of the Strings of Passion.”

33:30 to 35:50  “…And the fifth role is practice…..[story about going to Scotland and a harpist group who sang]….Practice. You have to be bad to be good. If you are not willing to be how you are, which maybe other people – your brother or whoever else is going to tell you is bad – if you are not willing to express yourself in that way, you will not ever become what you would call good, which is comfortable, able to express yourself, able to have the sound that you want to reach other people. You have to be bad to be good. You have to embrace that. That’s been one of the most important principles of my life, to embrace that. I recently realized that it is only one side of practice.”

35:50 to 37:11  “And the other side of practice is something that I am doing so much more now, which is practicing once I can already do something. Not to get better but to develop a practice that helps me get deeper. I noticed as a classical musician when I was first starting, that I would learn something until I had it and then I would learn something else. It would be going on to the next achievement. And when I would be playing jazz, we were playing the same tunes over and over and over again. And then when I started performing, I began to discover that the more I performed something, the deeper it got. And so this idea of developing practice of doing what you already can do at a deeper and deeper level. That is one of the things that is very much at the heart of Strings of Passion. And that is one of the things that I am so excited about in the 10-week program, is about building that in. Because that then leads to something at the Strings of Passion, which is fluency, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.”

38:59 to 39:06  “The string of deconstruction or distillation….What are your takeaways? Because that is your distillation, that is your deconstruction. One of the most powerful things you can do is to get beyond and beneath all the details down to a deconstruction of the simplest aspects of anything you are trying to do….[asking for takeaways]…You don’t have to worry about if it’s brilliant or if it’s silly or if it’s simple. [singing:] A deconstruction often comes about as if it’s a metaphor.” [+Susan’s takeaway of being bad to be good]

40:10  to  41:42  [singing:] “Roles are like archetypes [after Claudia’s takeaway of roles are like archetypes + showing example of lighting candles and playing the role of Athena with the harp]…And you reach for your strings and you play a single note and you let it ring into the world. And you let that single note ring the world into being. That is the experience of playing like an archetype. Just simply taking on that role – I can say the idea of taking on the role of Athena, and my whole body changes, my approach to the instrument changes. I could go and say, ‘Stand up straight, approach the harp with your hand out like this, play a single note.’ I could say that. Or I could say, ‘Walk into the room like Athena. The instrument brings the world into being. Now, play it.’ And the instrument, that role, has informed that whole experience.”

41:42 to 47:09  [singing Jody’s takeaway:] “I have to embrace myself and allow myself to be bad in order to be good. And allow myself to go with all my impulses. I love that, Jody. I love that. You’re making me think again of one of the things that  I really loved to do when I came to the harp as an adult beginner, when I was 22….[story of working hard]….and I gave myself a treat.

At the end of every day, every practice session, I would play the piece in its entirety, forgetting about playing the correct notes….[more details about example]….I was actually embracing, allowing myself to be bad, to be the way I was so that I could actually play the entire gesture of the piece. So there is an art, there’s actually an art to be able to embrace being bad. And there is also a type of protection that you need to give yourself.

And that’s one of the things that I talk about in a lot of my classes but especially in Strings of Passion – how to create a safe place for yourself. Sorry, I’m just having this epiphany because when I was at the doctor yesterday, I walked into this room and I think they had a diet thing there. And it said something like, ‘Use your moments of willpower to prepare or pave the way for your moments when you don’t have the willpower.’ I just saw it on the board. And I’m just realizing that one of things that you can do as an adult is to create safe places for you to be bad.

In other words, you use one part of yourself to protect another part of yourself. So you make sure that nobody’s home when you dress up like Athena so that nobody can come in, in their well-meaning way, say the thing that is going to destroy that impulse. And this has happened to me. One of the most powerful pieces that I have ever written is called Catcher in the Rye…[example of not being able to play it for 15 years after a friend’s reaction but then afterwards became one of the most powerful pieces + other takeaways such as being comfortable in a role + example of playing a harp concert for the first time and not knowing how to go onstage and taking on the character as Diva mother who was an opera singer]…

47:09 to 49:02  “So this is the sixth string in the string of passions, this deconstruction, distillation, takeaways – the moment you make something your own. For me, many times, distilling it down to of an idea of a role that I can take on gives me the opportunity to express it in very many ways. Very so many ways. That simple idea of taking on a role allows me to be – even if it’s just Athena – Athena in her good moments, Athena in her bad moments, Athena as a child. Athena whatever. And then when I’m done with that, well, wait a minute  – what if I was Mercury? You know, this is a distillation, one small idea. And for those of you who have been in any of my online classes that talk about structures, you’ll know that for example I talk about the five-part arrangement structure. Or the twelve-bar blues. It’s a simple structure. Yet with that simple structure that’s been distilled, the twelve-bar blues is a distillation, a deconstruction, of millions of pieces down to one idea that you can use as a seed to grow an infinite number of blues, in infinite number of keys, in infinite number of rhytmns. And that’s why I chose it. Because it’s so, so, so powerful.”

49:02 to 51:28  “So, this leads us to the seventh string. And the seven string is the string of lift-off, or sometimes I call it the string of fluency….[story about touring in Germany]…And since stories are so much an important part – I’m just realizing now why. That they’ve always been such an important part of my experience with music. I translated all my stories and so I would say them in German…[story about not remembering and acting it out instead]….Suddenly I felt a connection to the audience. Suddenly, I knew they were with me. Suddenly, I experienced the experience of fluency. I was not speaking German any better. I actually gave up speaking German in that moment. And I was speaking me. And what I’ve learned since then, is that that moment of lift-off is not the moment when you’ve got it all but that moment of lift-off is when you let go of everything that you don’t have. And you actually embrace and speak with what you do have right now in this moment.” [then awesome improvisation with looper from 51:28 to 56:10]

56:10 to 57:27  “When we are searching for that connection to ourselves, we almost never go from glory to glory. Ok, we never go from glory to glory. We go from one type of being lost and found to another type of being lost and found. But what happens as we take that journey is that the strings of our instrument – we’re lucky because we play the harp. And those instruments help us to hone and touch and make the resonance of the instrument inside of us. That parallel. And what Strings of Passion is about is learning to do that more, to make that a lifelong practice of taking the outer instrument and helping it resonate the inner instrument. And taking the inner instrument and helping it resonate to the outside world.”

58:34 to 59:04  “Susan says my best performance ever was a trouser role and most fun. So a trouser role for those of you who don’t know theater is a role of being a man, if you’re a woman. And it is wonderful because you get out of yourself. And when you get out of yourself, you get to let go of so much of your stuff that’s been holding you back, obstacles. I don’t know, I keep thinking of being Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels. All those little slender threads that holds you down.”

59:04 to 1:01:32  [In response to Susan’s other takeaway about not feeling alone regarding criticism from well-meaning folks:] “I will say that that is very succinctly and very well put. The pain that well-meaning – it’s not that mean people – somehow that can be easier got over; it is the well-meaning, the people who love you and want to protect you from yourselves. And that’s one of the reasons why it is so important to get into a community.

It’s one of the reasons I have my Harness Your Muse mastermind. That’s a very small community, so that people can feel free. Because only when you are free to express these parts of yourself can you go beyond that stage. I mean, I always think about this -I always think about everything that comes out, of anything, comes out slimy. I mean, babies don’t come out smelling nice and covered with baby powder. Butterflies do not come out of the cocoon – they come out with slime.

This is how things are born. And when people don’t realize that, they have not been part of the experience or they haven’t been willing to do that. They get scared for you. They think that you’re ruining something, when in fact you are letting something be born. And this is why it is so important to be connected with a community that you feel safe in. And why the smaller – like Harness Your Muse has only a very small group in it. Because people are expressing much deeper parts of themselves in ways that need to be supported.

And this is why when I give feedback, in any of my classes or anything, I am not – unless you ask me specifically – I will not, I can’t even answer the question ‘What is wrong?’, maybe unless you ask me, ‘How am I getting in my way here?’ or something like that. Because I am looking at ‘What are you trying to do and how can I help you do that?’ Because that’s been the most helpful feedback that I’ve gotten. It’s not whether someone tells me it’s good or bad. What are you trying to do? Ok, I see that. So let me help you try to get there. And that’s the kind of feedback you want when you’re developing.”

1:01:32 to 1:01:43  “Gail is saying even a negative reaction from the listener is better than no reaction. Right! Right, because when there’s no reaction, you put your own definition on and you make it like way worse.”

1:01:44 to 1:02:22  [Reading another takeaway:] “Wanting to share the present of music does leave us vulnerable. It does. We are opening ourselves. I am still struggling to share parts of my music that I literally call secret music….[more details]…I protect myself. Will I always want to? No, I don’t. I don’t always want to.”

1:05:35 to 1:06:05  “And if there’s nothing else that you do in 2017, what I want you to be able to do is to connect to your strings of passion – the ones inside you – and to be able to bring them out and express them to the world and to yourself. And have that greater and always greater resonance between yourself on the inside and yourself on the outside.”

1:06:34 to 1:07:32 [end of webinar]  “Then there’s what you do. If you feel like you’re not getting stuff, don’t worry about it. Focus on what you do get, even if you just get one little nugget. And take that. That’s your takeaway. That’s the thing for you. Take that away and think about that. I was just thinking this morning about the fact that so much of the stuff that I have innovated in life is because I didn’t ‘get’, I didn’t understand something, or I missed something. And so I ended up trying to do it a different way. And so that experience where you’re just like, ‘I don’t know. I’m going to try this anyway’ – that will often lead you to a lot of creative places . So, it is great when we can use the vagaries and imperfections of our connection through technology to really allow us to practice letting go of everything having to be perfect.”