Harpsichord Notes

Random

Last month, as I was finishing up the column recounting my youthful discovery of the playing of Alfred Brendel and discussing some of the effects of that discovery on my life and work, it occurred to me that my affinity for Brendel was something that came about utterly at random. I alluded to this briefly at the end of the column, but I have continued to muse about it.

Randomness is a flexible concept as well as one that is subject to various interpretations or restraints. I would not expect to be able to sort all of that out here. Instead, I will posit some of the ways this randomness affected my own story—some aspects of music making that seem to engage the idea of randomness in a fruitful way, and how this might benefit teaching.

I invested a lot of time in 1970 listening to BBC 3 and thus hearing its broadcasts of Brendel Beethoven records was itself random. It was also a matter of chance that I was then at a particularly receptive moment to encounter that music and those performances. In other words, that receptivity did not arise out of, or have any connection to, my having injured my back, my wanting to skip school as much as I could get away with, my family being in London at the time, or the BBC’s choice to program that music. I wrote last month, “As a ‘classical music person’ in the latter third of the twentieth century and thereafter, I would certainly have been familiar with Alfred Brendel.” But at a later time, I may have gotten little or even nothing out of my encounter with that playing. Or I might have gotten more. In any case it would have been something different. By that point, perhaps I would have more-or-less given up on piano listening and not paid any attention; or at another time, maybe I would have been so inspired that I would have decided to rededicate myself to actually learning piano, and would thus not have ended up as an organist or harpsichordist.

Another development in my education as a musician came about at random and yet was of tremendous importance. I took bassoon lessons during the 1968–1969 school year. Late in that year my teacher, JoAnn Wich, downsized her record collection and gave me a pile of LPs. Among those was the recording of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, conducted by Paul Paray with Marcel Dupré at the organ. At some point I listened to this at random: I had essentially never heard of Saint-Saëns and thought of myself as someone who did not like post-Classical-era music. I could easily have never listened to this record. In fact, I fell head-over-heels in love with it: the music, the performance, the sonorities, even the discussion on the record jacket of the recording technology that was used. I became an instant Saint-Saëns fanatic—I still am—and Paray became one of my favorite conductors, which he still is. In discovering Saint-Saëns I allowed the first crack to form in this resistance that I had to music from after the Classical era.

It would be impossible to overstate how strong that resistance had been up to that time. I can still remember the feeling that music after Beethoven engendered in me (come to think of it, maybe music after early Beethoven). It was a kind of fear of chaos or anarchy—probably, really, death. I thought that it would be wrong as well as dangerous to engage with that sort of music.

I do not know where those feelings came from. I suspect that I got from Baroque and early Classical music more of a sense of order and reassurance than I would want to get out of that music now, and that later music challenged or upset that sense in a way that I was not ready for. It took a while for that crumbling of my resistance to bear fruit. As I wrote last month it was in 1974 that I first became receptive to Schumann, and later to Liszt, for example, or for that matter Brahms.

Most germane to my work at the organ was that I discovered Dupré, and this is where it gets particularly interesting, since the story is not that I became a great devotee of him or his playing, as much as I do indeed admire both. The first thing my exposure to his playing of the magnificent Saint-Saëns organ part did was to help push me away from the bassoon and back toward keyboard playing. I was forcefully reminded that I was excited about the organ, even though the return to keyboard playing meant, for the time being, going back to piano lessons.

Second, it got me interested in Dupré and the kinds of organs that he was generally associated with. As I grew up and became generally a bit more diligent, that led to a significant amount of time reading about and listening to Romantic organs, especially in France, but also Germany and England. I already knew that in my own playing I wanted to focus on Baroque music and the instruments that pertained most directly to that repertoire. This is something that has never wavered. But the chance encounter with that Saint-Saëns recording is the specific source of my awareness of organs and organ music beyond my own performing specialties. If I never had that encounter but had returned to and stuck with study of the organ I would someday have had to learn about all manner of details about the organ and its music. Perhaps my interest in doing so would have been sparked by another chance encounter; after all, I grew up less than a mile from the Woolsey Hall organ at Yale University. But maybe I would have simply had to grapple with that music as a part of my education, understood to be necessary. It occurs to me now that discovering something by chance or at random can give an extra jolt of excitement and can help it to feel more personal.

Randomness in music

So what about randomness in music itself, be it performance, improvisation, perhaps composition, and maybe even instrument design? I will not write about composition or improvisation here, since randomness in those settings is complicated, and I do not have direct experience with these concepts myself. Besides, other scholars have canvassed these topics at great length. But I have some thoughts about instruments and performance.

One of these concerns harpsichord voicing. In the case of harpsichords, voicing means causing the plectra to be the way that you want them to be. It is about size, shape, and relative rigidity or flexibility. It affects volume of sound, character of sound, and touch. The plectra are relatively ephemeral, and voicing has to be reworked or touched up on harpsichords rather regularly. Many harpsichordists do most or all of their own voicing, and I have done so for several decades. In thinking about voicing, the voicer probably has a template in mind for all the notes of a stop on a harpsichord. That could be that all the notes should be the same strength as one another; or that the middle two octaves should be even and the volume and touch should gradually ascend in the high and low outer octaves; or that the middle should be even, the top notes gradually louder, and the bass notes slightly quieter; and so on. I feel convinced from my own experience that whatever the template may be, the result is more effective musically if there is a small amount of random variation from that template. When I do a total voicing of a harpsichord stop, I do the initial, rough voicing as carefully as I can, according to whatever plan I have in mind. Then I wait until the following day to do the final refining of that voicing, which rarely needs to be done.

I believe that these very slight deviations from the theoretical ideal help to enliven the sound and compensate for any aesthetic stiffness that might come from the lack of player control over dynamics. But there is something about the way that this works that I had not sorted out until now. It is actually critical that it be genuinely random, not a planned-out slight deviation from the plan. That would just be a second, more detailed version of the template. The randomness is what makes it feel alive. Random variation will relate in various ways to different pieces in different keys, without any danger that the voicer will favor one over another. 

I suspect that there are similar things to say about organ voicing. This logically should relate differently to a wide variety of harpsichords or organs. It is a subjective reaction, but still an example of the way that randomness can come into play in music.

This puts me in mind of an aspect of the sound old natural horns make. Some notes have a sonority that is completely different from the adjoining notes—vastly different, on the scale of placing a few Vox Humana pipes throughout a stop that is otherwise a Gedeckt, for example. These notes are distributed at random with respect to any given piece and add a surprisingly vivid color dimension to the effect of a performance.

I have observed similar concepts about interpretation and performance. As players we often have templates for how we want pieces to go: tempo and registration, but also details like articulation, phrasing, rubato, dynamics or dynamic inflections, voicing of chords on piano (a different use of that word, of course), arpeggiation, and so on. We map these things out; doing so is an important part of the process of creating our interpretation. Drilling the results of this planning into our fingers and feet is an important part of making an interpretation into a performance. However, my own experience tells me that a bit of random deviation from what we have planned and drilled so diligently is usually a good thing. It is as a listener rather than as a player that I have noticed this. In particular, I realized that performances in which a fugue-subject phrasing or the shaping of a recurring motif is exactly repeated without change tends to sound sterile, boring, and, eventually, annoying. There can be planned deviation from one instance of a theme to another. However, I feel that a little bit of random variation, including from the planned variation, brings the results closer to feeling alive and human.

Random choice of repertoire

Another aspect where randomness seems to be a fruitful lens through which to ponder is that of finding repertoire for students. There are various ways of approaching that task. At one extreme is the concept of having a list of pieces that you expect all students to work on, perhaps in a set order. (This is, I believe, rare as a practice, but is a concept that can inform the process.) At the other is simply letting students bring in and work on any pieces that they happen to like. (I am temperamentally inclined to this, though I do recognize the glaring problem with it, namely, that it fails to introduce students to pieces that they do not already know about or happen to hear or otherwise discover.) Most approaches are a hybrid, and many approaches can work. But it is fun to ponder how to randomize this process: line up all of the pieces ever written on the desk, swirl around until dizzy, then lunge over and pick one! Or put them all on a dartboard and throw! These are joking ways of describing the idea. But I wonder whether choosing the occasional piece utterly at random might be a way to enliven study and might not teach both the student and the teacher something about the learning process.

If the actual experience of working on the randomly chosen piece was boring or fruitless it might be humane to let the student drop it after a while. But in order for this to be a good experience or experiment, the student would have to want to give any such piece an honest try.

I plan on choosing my own next piece this way. I need to concoct an actual method for doing the random choosing. But I am very curious to see how it feels to work on a piece for none of the sorts of reasons that I usually have. That should mean starting the work itself with fewer preconceptions or expectations. That is part of what is intriguing about it, and I will report back at some point.

Next month I will write about some of the feedback that I have received about my pedal method column from several months ago. I have not done that yet because other things have come up and because that feedback is still coming in. Interestingly, most of it by far, though not all, has been about shoes.

So, I shall kick off the discussion in May by talking about shoes.

Celebrating Herbert Howells

Born on October 17, 1892, Herbert Howells lived until February 23, 1983. While he was seeking information needed to write his book on Domenico Scarlatti, Ralph Kirkpatrick found several Scarlattis listed in a Spanish telephone directory, phoned them, and discovered that they were, indeed, descendants of the great master. Imitating that search for knowledge, I found Howells’s address and phone number in the phone directory for greater London and made my telephone call to his Barnes home during a visit to the UK in 1974. I have often thought that Mrs. Howells, by this time hard of hearing, may have thought that I was Herbert’s biographer, Christopher Palmer, when she directed me to contact her husband in his studio at the Royal College of Music. I made an appointment for the next day, and, with the utmost delight, spent one of the most stimulating and memorable visits of a lifetime, one that initiated a foundation for several subsequent meetings, and ultimately resulted in my commissioning the Dallas Canticles for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Dallas, Texas, the only set Howells composed for an American parish church. As our friendship blossomed he also transferred to me the copyright for his glorious Dallas “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis,” and we had quite a prolific correspondence about the various legal matters involved.

One of my reasons for wanting to speak with Herbert was that he had never responded to my written questions about the persons named in each of the twelve pieces that comprise Lambert’s Clavichord, the first contemporary music for the instrument to be published in the twentieth century. I wrote about his generous answers in The Diapason issue of December 1974 (pages 7 and 8), but there have been some interesting addenda in various publications since that time, and what better way to celebrate the 127th occurrence of HH’s natal day than to share this information?

The first mention of Howells’s neo-Elizabethan keyboard works came during my very first year of harpsichord study with Isolde Ahlgrimm in Salzburg (1958–1959). In 1961 I acquired my first copy of Lambert’s Clavichord (Oxford University Press). It is a reprint in larger format of the original printing, which was a deluxe limited edition of 175 hard-bound copies autographed by Lambert (with a faint pencil signature below the photograph of Howells and the clavichord built by Lambert, who was a famous photographer, and autographed also by the composer, who numbered each volume and signed his name in bold black ink). I acquired my prized copy of this deluxe edition (number 8) at a London antiquarian bookshop in 1981. The hardbound volume is the perfect size for a clavichord’s music desk: 10 inches wide by 61⁄4 inches high, exactly one half the height of the later trade print edition.

Very briefly, the reason that Howells composed all twelve of the keyboard pieces was that, in gratitude for his being the next-to-youngest composer photographed and included in Lambert’s 1923 publication, Modern British Composers (from Elgar, born 1857, to Howells and Goossens, born 1893), he wrote the first piece (“Lambert’s Fireside”) while at the photographer’s home and decided to invite his fellow composers to create a similar gift for Lambert and his clavichords. All of them responded in the affirmative, but a year or more later, no other musical offering had been received, so Herbert decided to write the remaining eleven pieces himself. Each is dated, and each has a designated musical figure in the title (not necessarily one of the photographed composers).

All of the identities spoken to me by Dr. Howells are confirmed by the “other Palmer,” Christopher (1946–1995), who died at age 48, but left an amazingly large list of compositions and studies of musical figures. In his 1978 Novello small book, Herbert Howells: A Study, CP’s listings of the Lambert’s Clavichord titles agree with my 1974 verbatim ones from the composer himself, except for one: the dedicatee of “Sargent’s Fantastic Sprite.” Howells told me that it was meant for Sir Malcolm Sargent, the conductor; however, in Christopher’s copy of the score (as quoted in the Novello volume) Howells wrote: “There never was another Sargent save the painter.” So one might choose a favorite, or mention dual remembrance, since both the composer and author have passed on. I rather think the music could suggest the painter, but . . . who knows?

Music by Howells is never far from my various music desks, and much of the inspiration for this column was through a chance finding of a score that I had forgotten: Six Pieces from Lambert’s Clavichord, arranged for oboe and piano. The half of the collection chosen—“Lambert’s Fireside,” “Fellowes’s Delight,” “Hughes’s Ballet,” “My Lord Sandwich’s Dreame,” “De la Mare’s Pavane,” and “Sir Hugh’s Galliard”—are my favorites, too, and I hope to program them, using harpsichord, later during the 2020 season. (The pieces are published in one volume by Oxford University Press; the arrangements are by Patrick Shannon.) That these pieces were favorites of the composer is evident, both from his own mouth, and from yet another source, thanks to Christopher Palmer. In his very comprehensive book, Herbert Howells: A Centenary Celebration (London: Thames Publishing), I noticed on page 458 a listing of three arrangements for cello and piano from the RCM Library Howells manuscripts: “My Lord Sandwich’s Dream,” “Sir Hugh’s Galliard,” and “De la Mare’s Pavane”—it might lead one to make some transcriptions of one’s own, should any of the other movements be special favorites.

And finally, two suggestions for those of us who play the organ: a gentle, lovely two-page “Cradle Song,” Howells’s contribution to the Organists Charitable Trust Little Organ Book: eleven pieces for solo organ from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, selected and edited by Martin Neary, published by Novello (2010). And, reminiscent of his close friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Howells’s Master Tallis’s Testament, another ravishingly lovely creation, and another indication of how comfortable he felt dealing with the harmonies of Elizabethan music.

The Art of the Fugue, Part 1

Before delving into the principal topic of this column, I must first briefly revisit the subject of the last two columns, which dealt with aspects of the practice of listening to music. Shortly after I finished the May column, I was in New York City for the day, and I happened to notice, walking along one of the avenues, some bins of used LPs outside an antique store. I had a few minutes to spare, so I started leafing through the boxes. Midway through I saw a record of Brahms’s First Symphony. This is a favorite piece of mine, and part of my program for that day was to hear a concert performance of it at Lincoln Center. I pulled it out to take a look, as I wanted to know who recorded it. But there was nothing: no orchestra name, no conductor, no date, no recording venue, no clues.

I had just written of my experience noticing that students and other listeners have a habit of seeking out recordings online and listening to them without noticing anything about who the performers are. I presented this as being a characteristic of the structure of modern listening technology and a strong and well-accepted modern ethos. But it is interesting to be reminded that it also is not a new concept. This Brahms LP, monaural as far as I could tell, is an artifact reflecting the view that it is perfectly acceptable to listen to a performance not only without noticing who is playing, but also without having any way to find out.

Some of the implications of this would be fascinating to explore at greater length, and I will write more about it at some point. When we listen to a performance, especially when we listen to the same one repeatedly, what do we feel about letting that particular way of performing the piece shape our way of defining it? Do we think about this consciously and give the performance permission consciously and deliberately to affect us in certain ways? The history of this has been more complicated than I was remembering when I touched on it before. That in turn ties in with questions of authenticity, which we tend to think of as being about composers, and authority, which can come from any number of places—writings, performances, teachers—and which can influence us with or without our being aware of it.

Questions concerning Bach’s The Art of the Fugue

For this month’s discussion, I turn to Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080. There are a myriad of issues surrounding this monumental opus that open windows into our thinking about authenticity and authority in particular, as well as many different aspects and dimensions of what we do as performers, listeners, students, and teachers. With its length, complexity, and importance in the arc of the work and career of Bach, crucial questions about the work are unanswered and perhaps unanswerable.

So, what is The Art of the Fugue?

It is a work written by Bach over the last decade or so of his life, consisting of many movements—about twenty, but that is one of the areas that can be looked at a number of different ways—each constructed contrapuntally, some as fugues and some as canons. The movements are all based to some extent and in some way on a particular theme. The piece was published shortly after Bach’s death in an engraved edition, and while Bach certainly composed the bulk of the music, the work was completed by others. There are also surviving earlier manuscripts of some but not all of the work.

The theme mentioned above is found in Example 1. The theme in this form opens the first movement, which is a four-voice fugue on this subject. The first movement is the only one to open with a simple statement of the theme in exactly this form and the only one that is based primarily on this form of the theme. The variants of the theme that form the basis of the other movements include inversions, diminutions and augmentations, rhythmic variations, and versions with added passing tones.

One question that intrigues me, and that I will broach here and come back to in the course of these articles about The Art of the Fugue, is, why this theme? One answer could be, why not? After all, Bach wrote fugues on a large number of different subjects and must have improvised fugues on many, many more. However, I think that it is worth interrogating the ways in which this theme in particular might have lent itself to the extended and varied treatment that constitutes this long work. The Art of the Fugue theme was not, as far as we know, or as far as I have ever heard, taken from somewhere else. (As, for example, the theme of A Musical Offering was, or as the themes of all chorale-based pieces are.) Bach wrote a number of other fugues on themes that are largely based on a minor triad, like this one. That is true of the subject of the fugue from the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, and, in an even more thoroughgoing way, of the stand-alone Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578. The Canzona in D Minor, BWV 588, is based on a subject that could in fact qualify as a variant of The Art of the Fugue theme (Example 2).

(If that piece were dropped into the middle of The Art of the Fugue it would be quite possible to justify it, at least as far as themes and motifs are concerned, as part of the work. It would seem an interesting variant that the semitone by which the subject departs from the confines of the perfect fifth is the one going up, whereas in the original subject it is the one going down, and that the two of those outline the notes that give the minor mode its harmonic flexibility or instability.)

I have heard or read suggestions that this theme or subject is so simple, basic, plain, that it is astonishing that Bach could construct a massive edifice upon it: that his ability to do so is a particular proof of the power of his genius. I do not disagree with that conclusion, in that it took a genius to create this work. However, I am not inclined to agree with the premise. It seems to me that constructing this theme was indeed part of the genius: that it is specifically and purposely designed to carry the weight of all that was developed out of it, and potentially more. I will come back to this later on.

That brings us to one of the most famous and important things about The Art of the Fugue: that it is incomplete. The movement we regard as the final one, while already the longest in the piece, breaks off in the middle of a measure. It is not a neat ending; it is not the end of a section—just an abrupt crashing from music into silence.

The reason that fugue is incomplete is that Bach died before he could finish it. Perhaps, he had it composed in his head. It seems likely that Bach or any composer would have had to have a fairly strong idea as to where a big contrapuntal structure such as this movement was going before venturing on starting it. It is a complicated fugue with multiple themes. But that does not mean that he had worked out the ending in detail.

In any case, we do not have the last measures of this movement, and therefore we do not have all of The Art of the Fugue. This creates a set of dilemmas for performers. Should one simply break off, playing all and only those notes that we have, allowing the “ending” to be jarring? Or should the performer or performers play one of the many endings that composers, scholars, and performers have composed over the last hundred years or so? Or should one look for a nice closing cadence as close as possible to where the piece currently ends and stop there? The fundamental fact is that none of these portrays Bach’s true intentions.

I have always favored the practice of ending abruptly. This preserves a certain “purity” of playing only Bach. It also forces us to confront in the most direct way the fact that things do not always go the way we want. That breaking off is beyond jarring: it can be deeply distressing and filled with anguish. It is an ending determined, as endings often are, not by any person but by death itself.

There is no way to maintain that this troubling breaking off is what Bach intended. I have had colleagues point out to me that by playing only and all of what we have on the page, we guarantee that we are doing something that Bach could not possibly have wanted. And every completion that has been attempted has been predicated on some analysis of what Bach might have been planning. Therefore any one of them has a chance at least of being similar in concept to what Bach would have envisioned. If nothing else, the length of the piece gets closer with each added measure to wherever it would have ended up if Bach had been able to finish it. And the abrupt breaking off is replaced by a normal ending. In between, the further working-out of the counterpoint might well be something like what Bach would have done. That is presumably the goal for those who have written such continuations, and each person has brought knowledge, care, and analysis to that project. But it is not Bach’s ending, and the piece is no longer just a Bach piece.

The first published edition, supervised by some of Bach’s surviving family and colleagues, chose a version of the third plan. The printed edition ends with the last solid chord, so to speak, before the spot where the manuscript source breaks off. This is an A-major chord in a piece in D-minor and indeed sounds like a dominant. It is a chord, and the rhythmic structure of what has preceded it gives it some solidity. But it does not sound stable, which raises an interesting question about authority. This is the approach apparently sanctioned by those closest to Bach. What authority do we give to that? What do we know or believe about how likely it was that they got that idea from J. S. Bach himself?

We tend to believe that this movement, an ostensible triple fugue that was very likely intended to end up as a quadruple fugue, was clearly meant to be the last section of the overall work. It certainly looks the part. However, we do not know for certain that if he had had several more years, Bach would not have added much more. Perhaps this triple (quadruple?) fugue would have ended up as a centerpiece rather than a culmination. Or perhaps it was really intended to be a centerpiece even without more movements. We do not have absolute certainly about the intended order of the movements, only very well-informed guesses.

Speaking of performance: we also do not know for certain what Bach’s intentions were for the performing forces that are brought to bear on this work. The surviving manuscript sources and the first edition say nothing about what the music is “for.” It is all in open score—four staves for a four-voice piece, three for a three-voice piece, and so on. There are no instrument names or any words on the pages of music talking about instrumentation or performance. There is a significant amount of evidence that this was probably intended to be a work for keyboard instruments, though that is not absolutely certain. And accepting that, it is less clear whether it was for harpsichord or for organ. There is a tantalizingly similar amount of suggestive evidence for each. Another real possibility is that the piece was intended equally for each of those two instruments. There was a long tradition of writing music that fits that profile, mostly from the generations before J. S. Bach. And there is a great deal about this piece that suggests that the composer wanted it to resonate in part as a throwback to those older generations.

The question of what instrument or instruments to use in playing a piece is crucially relevant to performance, to put it mildly. And since this series of columns is really about my own efforts to grapple with The Art of the Fugue as a performer, I will return to this in considerable detail.

Christmas gifts:
a few suggestions

Writing this column in mid-October means that I have not given much thought to Christmas shopping. Instead I have spent most working hours planning programs (and then practicing) for the second in our annual schedule of three house concerts, enjoyed the opening nights of Dallas Opera’s fall season by attending Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Bizet’s Carmen, and preparing for the first-ever wedding to take place in our spacious music room. (After all, with a pipe organ and seating for forty guests, why not?)

However, now as you read these December Harpsichord Notes, I hope they may contain some suggestions that could be of help for all who have yet to make gift selections. So, tally-ho and read on!

• Eagle-eyed subscribers to The Diapason will have seen the notice of J. William Greene’s new compact disc Christmas Ayres and Dances in the Here & There section (page 12) of our October magazine. The disc (Pro Organo CD 7281) comprises Greene’s performances of his genial compositions played on a Gerrit Klop continuo organ and a single-manual harpsichord by Peter Fisk. The clever Baroque-style arrangements of familiar carols and secular songs of the season are sure to delight the ears of music-loving friends. Among my personal favorites is Greene’s Bell Fugue (based on Jingle Bells), sure to be a hit. For colleagues who are fellow keyboardists, why not purchase not only the compact disc, but also the printed scores for these captivating arrangements? All three volumes are available from Concordia Publishing House. Bell Fugue is the final piece in Volume II.

• An earlier publication by Edwin McLean (born 1951) bears the title A Baroque Christmas—Carols and Counterpoint for Keyboard (New Interpretations of traditional seasonal pieces for piano, organ, or harpsichord), issued in 2003 by Frank J. Hackinson (FJH Publishing Company), Fort Lauderdale, Florida. With works somewhat easier than Greene’s compositions, McLean offers a single forty-page volume of charming and useful pieces equally suited for all the instruments mentioned in his introduction, including digital keyboards. Eleven tunes are set: Noël Nouvelet, God Rest You Merry, Greensleeves, Coventry Carol, Kings of Orient, Pat-A-Pan, In dulci jubilo, Veni Emmanuel, Tempus Adest Floridum, Stille Nacht, and Adeste Fideles. I have used most of these for church and concerts and continue to enjoy them very much.

• Now for something completely different: author Mark Schweizer has made a slight deviation from the fourteen murder mysteries that began with The Alto Wore Tweed and progressed through the various vocal ranges (The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Diva Wore Diamonds, The Organist Wore Pumps, etc.), a series of novels that has captivated so many of us.  A fifteenth story, also set in St. Germaine (Schweizer’s fictitious small town in North Carolina), is replete with the familiar cast of characters headed by Hayden Konig, police chief and organist/choirmaster extraordinaire of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. But in the shorter novella titled simply The Christmas Cantata the author deviates slightly from the others in his series. It is available in the original paperback format (95 pages) or as a more recent hardback edition, both of which present exactly the same text, but the second edition is in a slightly smaller book format that requires 128 pages—more elegant and better, perhaps, for stocking stuffing. ’Tis a gentle tale, still filled with hilarious episodes, musical references, and sly liturgical guffaws: available from St. James Music Press (SJMP Books). You may wish to include a special handkerchief in that stocking, for the denouement is beautifully touching and may bring tears to the eyes. Also, a warning: this author’s mysteries are habit forming; I sincerely doubt that anyone can read just one! In a surprise email, received as I write this essay, Schweizer announced the fifteenth, and final, St. Germaine mystery: The Choirmaster Wore Out. Definitely a brand-new entry for acquiring and giving away!

• Thanks to my mother I began listening to operas at a tender age. Each Saturday afternoon in fall and winter, beginning when I was nine years old, my ears would be focused on our radio speaker as Mom and I listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in our small town of Corsica, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for this background as well as for my grade- and high-school experiences as a wind player, especially the ones after I began to play oboe. That, plus the choral directing experiences that were part and parcel of my graduate work and early professional engagements taught me a great deal about phrasing and making the music “breathe” in natural ways. I firmly believe that every keyboardist needs this type of training to become a better musician. Later these experiences engendered many a humorous moment in organ or harpsichord lessons when I would stop a student to suggest some necessary phrasing here or there, and often end with the comment, “I still can’t believe that you pay all this tuition for me to remind you to breathe and count!”

As an aid to the development of vocally informed musicality I would suggest as a Christmas gift, both to “self” and “others”—and a most unusual one, at that: ARC, which is the title of the Decca Records debut CD performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. This artist (who has been selected as “Vocalist of the Year” by Musical America) has put together a program that demonstrates his self-admitted 50% love of Baroque music and 50% devotion to contemporary works. On this magnificent disc Costanzo performs works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel. This modern mastersinger of both styles convinced me of the beauty to be found in each, and I have listened repeatedly, enraptured by his musicality. Costanzo made his Dallas Opera debut on October 30, 2015, in the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera Great Scott. Since that magical evening I have been following Costanzo’s brilliant career. His artistry, both as singer and actor, earns him my highest recommendation and admiration.

• Another Handelian who could bring tears to the eyes with her exquisite vocalism was the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who began a musical career as violist, but soon was discovered to have one of the great female voices of the twentieth century. Sample her exquisite singing on the Avie CD 30, released in 2002—only four years before her untimely death at age 52. Lieberson is ably abetted by the Baroque specialist, conductor, and harpsichordist Harry Bicket, playing an Italianate single-manual harpsichord by Douglas Maple (after Zenti). This recording is another musical experience that just might be life changing.

• August 16, 2019, will be the sixtieth anniversary of Wanda Landowska’s death. The “mother of us all,” this pioneering harpsichordist still resonates through her recordings and through the memoirs contributed by her devoted friends (and occasional detractors). I was incredibly fortunate to have known Mrs. Putnam Aldrich, known universally as “Momo,” Landowska’s first private secretary during the years they spent together at Wanda’s “Temple of Music” in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, France. I became acquainted with Momo through our mutual friend Richard Kurth, a fellow Ohioan who has spent most of his career teaching French and Spanish at the Kamehameha School in Honolulu. Richard, who drove Momo to the local Alliance Française meetings, actually accomplished our mutual introductions, and thus resulted my invitation for Momo to tell her account of those years for The Diapason. For many subsequent winters I spent my Christmas holidays visiting Richard and Momo in Hawaii (a tough choice, but someone needed to do it), interviewing Mrs. Aldrich year after year and taking notes that eventually found their way into Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival.

It was during one of these remarkable meetings that I, quite brazenly, asked Momo who might inherit a caricature of Wanda that was prominently displayed in each of Momo’s dwellings (she changed addresses several times during these years). That query remained unanswered until the last day of that year’s Honolulu sojourn when Momo handed me a wrapped package, approximately eight and a half inches by six and a half inches. I knew without looking what was enclosed in that brown paper, and I said, “You must keep this! I know what it means to you.” But Momo insisted, and, I confess, I did not argue with her for very long. The caricature, an unsigned watercolor, is widely considered to be the finest of all such drawings, especially in its perfect details.

When I arrived home in Dallas I immediately had some photographs made, and sent them to Momo so she would not be without that beautiful image. Eventually I loaned a professional high-decibel print of “my” Wanda portrait to Martin Elste for his 2009 Berlin Landowska Symposium and Exhibition, and it served as the signature work of that event. It also is published in Dr. Elste’s magnificent book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo [The Lady with the Harpsichord] (Schott Music, 2010, Order Number ED 20853; ISBN 978-3-7957-0710-1). The full-color print of the caricature may be found on page 98. The book’s text is entirely in German except for the four pages from the memoirs of American harpsichordist Irma Rogell: “Walks with Wanda,” on pages 146–150. Even if one is not fluent in German the comprehensive range of Elste’s illustrations (many of which are photographs that he travelled far and wide to make) places this deluxe 240-page volume at the top of the list as the most comprehensive pictorial history of our beloved “Mamusia.”

• I was tremendously moved by Martin Pearlman’s generosity with his Armand-Louis Couperin Edition, made available for all of us to download and print, free of any copyright restrictions. In a recent email Martin included a shorter URL for accessing his gift: http://tinyurl.com/ALCouperin. I pass it on to our readers as per Martin’s suggestion, and wish you, once again, a happy downloading experience.

It is with a small, Pearlman-inspired gesture that I offer my Christmas gift to our readers: free use of my Landowska caricature. Like Martin, I urge you to use it wherever and whenever you wish, copyright free. And, I would ask only that you use the credit “Larry Palmer collection, gift of Momo Aldrich.”

• As my final Christmas suggestion: if you have a friend or acquaintance who does not subscribe to The Diapason, why not present that lucky person with a year’s subscription to this journal? It would benefit your friends and help to ensure that the magazine continues in its beautiful, full-color format for many years to come. What could be nicer? And twelve times a year you make your friend(s) happy­—and perhaps more involved in your musical world.

The Art of the Fugue, part 4

Over the next two months, I will continue my analysis of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080, with a focus on my own experience of learning the piece. Following that, I will expound on the piece itself: namely analysis, form, history, and more. The later stages of the discussion will refer back to the long program notes I originally wrote in 1985 that formed the content of the July and August columns. This will include looking at some of what I wrote there in greater detail and from various points of view.

The ideas constituting this month’s column are set down in no particular order—not quite as a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but with some of that miscellaneous quality, somewhat reflective of how I learn a piece as monumental as The Art of Fugue. Of course, there is a big part of that process that is highly structured, especially the act of practicing.

The Art of the Fugue is monumentally important to me. I care about it more than any other piece of music, which is not a statement I make lightly. I have experienced the work, both as a listener and as a performer, While performing, it has a level of emotional power that is both deeply satisfying and difficult to live with. It is a known phenomenon that once in a while a person simply cannot listen to some particular piece because the emotional effect is too strong, too disturbing. I have a similar experience with The Art of the Fugue.

I can remember once hearing from a musician that he could not listen to the Bach Saint Matthew Passion because it was overwhelmingly emotional—but that he could and did participate in performing it. Being involved that way did not weaken his emotional force. Rather, it gave it somewhere to go that made it manageable. That is different from my experience with The Art of the Fugue. I find the piece more intense and powerful—and that intensity and power more difficult to assimilate—when playing it than when listening to it.

I do not think it is that I “like” my own performance better than the ones I might listen to. That is, in itself, a complicated concept. I make the interpretive/rhetorical choices that I want to make, whereas other performers make the choices that they want to make. So my own playing is at least striving to be that which I would find most powerful. It does not always succeed. Consequently, ideas that are not the ones that I have thought of myself can end up striking me as powerful.

I suspect this is not about liking interpretive choices or a particular performance. It may be connected with another aspect of my relationship to The Art of the Fugue. I wrote in the column from June 2018 that I experience a kind of impersonalized, societal superego looking over my shoulder while I perform with harpsichord performance than I do with organ performance. This is not that I necessarily think that my organ playing is more successful than, or better than, my harpsichord playing. But for some complex set of psychological reasons I have a more settled sense of ownership in my organ playing. In a similar way I seem to be discovering that I have an extremely solid, even unshakeable feeling of ownership in this piece. That sense feels exactly the same, in nature and in strength, whether I am playing it on harpsichord or organ. I intend to use that sameness to overcome some of the weakness in the feeling of ownership that I sometimes have at the harpsichord. In other words, some of the strengths of the way that I feel about The Art of the Fugue will, after I experience performing it on the harpsichord, be transferable to other harpsichord performance situations.

My early history with The Art of the Fugue

The first time I performed The Art of the Fugue was May 8, 1985, on the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey. This was the first of my two graduate recitals for the Master of Music degree in organ performance. I presented two recitals; the school’s policy stated that one could play either one recital from memory or two with music. It was easy for me to choose the latter. On the day of my first lesson in January 1985, I put The Art of the Fugue score up on the music desk before my teacher Eugene Roan came into the room, and then with some fanfare announced to him that I wanted to play it as a recital. He agreed immediately, even though it was clearly a stretch for me to learn it within the projected time! (I was 27 years old then, a late-bloomer as a player.)

This was an important step in the evolution of my belief that everyone should be allowed and encouraged to work on that which they find the most deeply important, engaging, and exciting. An interesting difference exists, however, between the project that we began that January and the normal approach that I take with my students as to their repertoire choices. Normally, if a student wants to work on something that is a “stretch,” I make it clear that I am very happy to oblige. But I also note that one key to making that process work is that there be as little time pressure as possible to allow the process to unfold naturally.

In the case of my first pass at The Art of the Fugue, we knew very well that we did not have any time flexibility, and the piece is long and difficult. There are passages that are still, at a minimum, tied for being the most challenging music that I have ever tried to learn for performance. So it was a bit of a gamble and a high-wire act. One consequence of this was that I spent that late winter and early spring doing something that I had never done before and have not done since: actual ten-hour practice days. I was taught up until then that it was counterproductive to practice for more than four hours a day. For those three months I averaged something like eight hours, five or six days a week, with some of those ten-hour days thrown in.

This was grueling and tiring, physically and mentally. I have never wanted to do anything like that again. But simultaneously, it was fun, exhilarating, and clearly something that could become addictive, even though it seems not to have done so for me. It also was effective. I learned the piece: not perfectly, but well enough to give a performance that made the people glad they were present. (That concert was not recorded. I am almost certain that many of the tempos were slower than what I would now want, and that was in part out of necessity. I also remember there being plenty of wrong notes.)

I believe that the full-immersion approach to the initial learning of the piece left me in a position to revisit it later with a kind of serenity and comfort that feels like quite a luxury when dealing with something so imposing. That practicing experience was, among other things, kind of mind-bending. I felt sort of spaced out, vertiginous, in another world much of the time. I now wonder whether my sense of bonding with the piece comes in part from my having encountered the nitty-gritty of learning it for the first time. Though a lot of effort was involved, it was also sort of as if I had learned it in a dream; therefore, it felt in a way like something that had been magically bestowed on me rather than something I had done.

Instrumentation in The Art of the Fugue

The Art of the Fugue was not designated by its composer as written for any particular instrument or combination of instruments. For my purposes in planning out a performance, this is liberating. We are all very aware of transcription as a kind of thing in itself. If I take the notes of a Beethoven string quartet and try to execute them on the organ, that is a transcription. Transcription has been an important aspect of organ literature for ages. In some way—which is not rigorously defined—transcription is seen as different from other performance. (As a personal confession: part of my own frustration with the common practice of performing harpsichord music on the piano is not that it is done, but that it is never categorized as “transcription.”) I have a lot of faith in composers’ abilities to know what they are doing with sonority, and I have a preoccupation with shaping music and performance to sonority, so I have never been that interested in playing transcriptions myself.

But what is or is not transcription with The Art of the Fugue? Neither a harpsichord performance nor an organ performance can fall into that category. How about a clavichord performance? Bach never specified clavichord in so many words for any piece of his, whereas he did for organ and harpsichord. How about a performance by an ensemble of any instruments that the composer could have known? There is a fair amount of reason to assume that he had keyboard performance in mind, but it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. What about instruments that the composer could not have known?

Even though we care about what is or is not a transcription, it is not really important to know how to answer these questions. I enjoy knowing that the various ways that intrigue me to perform the piece all have similar claims to being “valid,” while each one has its own light to shed on the work. The ways of distributing the piece on instruments that interest me the most are the following:

1) on organ, played “like organ music.” That is a deliberately silly way of putting it, but what I mean is with ample pedal, by and large putting bass lines in the pedal, typical of Bach’s other organ music. One feature of this approach is that it allows the three-voice mirror fugues to be played in trio-sonata texture. In some other movements, the distribution of the four voices over two hands and feet enables the independent motion of the voices to be especially clear.

2) on organ, mostly or entirely manuals. This approach opens up the interesting idea of playing on a chamber organ or trying out lighter textures.

3) on harpsichord. Part of the interest for me right now of this very normal, obvious, and mainstream approach is that I have never done it.

4) on two harpsichords. For several years about ten years ago, my occasional student and current colleague George Hazelrigg and I performed and recorded The Art of the Fugue in a thoroughgoing arrangement for two harpsichords. That is, every movement was played by two instruments, usually with each of the four voices on a different manual. This provided an extraordinary variety of colors, but all within the landscape of colors that the composer knew. It made the note playing simpler for each performer, but introduced the challenge of chamber-music-like coordination.

It is fascinating to me that in the entire Art of the Fugue there is exactly one note that is unplayable on the organ (because of compass) and one spot that is unplayable by one performer on the harpsichord (because of hand span). Since there are plenty of arguments in favor of playing the work on either of those instruments, it almost seems like he is teasing us!

Since I have played this work on the organ frequently in the past, learning it and playing it on the harpsichord is the first priority for the current project. That is true both in that, in a pinch, it is more important as a project for me and in the sense that I plan to do it chronologically first. However the real point is to see how it feels to have both performances in my fingers and feet simultaneously and to try to get comfortable playing it one way one day and the other way the next day or soon thereafter. There are two main components to this: getting comfortable with the differences in sonority and touch between the two instruments and the interpretive/rhetorical differences that these make necessary, and getting used to playing some notes now in the pedal and later in the hands.

In one of my first columns in The Diapason, addressing the question of why playing manuals-only is often considered easier, I wrote “ideally, the more resources one can bring to bear on playing a piece—like ten fingers and two feet rather that ten fingers alone—the easier it should be.” Working on The Art of the Fugue simultaneously with pedals and without is a good test of this. Often the fingerings required to play all four voices of a four-voice movement are extremely complex. The gain in out-and-out easiness created by only having to finger the three upper voices is considerable. It is also usually meaningfully easier to make the voices seem clear with this lighter load. On the other hand, the bass lines themselves, while most are amply playable by the feet, are also often extremely challenging. Both sides of the equation are heightened in intensity, and there is the matter of keeping both approaches fresh and reliable at the same time. Will there be moments at the organ when the outer part of my left hand inadvertently starts to play the pedal line? Will there be moments at the harpsichord when the same outer part of my left hand drops out, relying on a pedal keyboard that is simply not there?

I close this month with a couple of stray thoughts. I notice reading through the piece these last months that I feel significantly less connected with Contrapunctus II than with any of the others. That certainly does not mean that I do not like it. I like it a lot, as I do the whole piece. Maybe just a tiny bit less. And, as a practical matter, I have a much less well-developed sense of what I want to do with it than I do with any other movement. It is the one that begins with the version of the theme seen in Example 1.

And I have also noticed that when a fragment of The Art of the Fugue starts going through my head, more often than not it is the opening of the long and imposing final movement. I do not know why this is the case, but I just want to notice and muse about all such things.

To be continued.

Lessons and questions from figure skating

This month I want to go out on a limb and write about something of which I know very little. This is intentional: I want to think about an art form from the perspective of an interested and absorbed—but by no means expert—appreciator of that art. This also carries risks, essentially the risk that some of what I say will be wrong or at least not quite correctly described. There is also the complementary risk that in writing this column I will pull back from saying some of what I want to say for fear that it will be wrong or dilettantish. But being willing to sound dilettantish occasionally is probably a valuable exercise—good for the soul. 

I know very little about the technical nature of figure skating. My way of interacting with it is that I do not know much about art, but I know what I like. And this is, perhaps, somewhat akin to the posture that we as musicians want or expect our listeners to be, though not ourselves or our students.

I have observed figure skating off and on over the years, not steadily, as I have baseball or golf. Most of what I want to write about here comes from my latest interest, which has been ongoing for several years. In the last few months ideas have been buzzing around in the back of my head, engendered by watching, but my thoughts have not been very well organized. These have concerned figure skating as an art, its relationship to other arts (dance and musical performance), and ways in which watching figure skaters do what they do can inform my work as a musician. I am trying to pin some of these ideas now to the point where they can appear in writing. But while what I will present here is not quite stream of consciousness or free association, it is a set of thoughts related to one another rather loosely. Some of these stray thoughts are directly about teaching, as any or all of them may relate indirectly.

In December 2014 I last wrote a column that was about sports—my own golf game. I play golf avidly and seriously, though not at the level of a professional. On the other hand, I am not a skater; in fact, it has been decades since I so much as put on a pair of skates. Those most recent attempts were in connection with school activities of my children; I barely went on the ice. I knew from bitter cold experience that attempting to skate hurts my ankles, badly enough that I simply could not do it. The earliest phase in my life when I had anything to do with the whole world of skating was in my childhood. Occasionally, I was expected to give it a try, usually at a birthday party. I always hurt, feared it, and felt trapped. While the social pressure encouraged me to stick it out, the pain in my ankles said otherwise. This is one set of memories that informs my reluctance to force students to do things with which they are uncomfortable. I wonder whether I am too reluctant in this regard. No one should play in a way that hurts physically, but do I let my desire not to make students feel trapped into doing things that are uncongenial shade over into failing to push them to take risks or try new things? 

As best I remember, the first time that I paid any attention to figure skating was around the 1968 Olympics, which was when Peggy Fleming was active. I had a sort of “better them than me” fascination with it. It seemed to me like it was natural and easy to them—at least in that they were not hobbling off the ice grimacing. At the same time, it seemed unfathomably difficult. But I still doubt that I had any conception of how hard they had to work to make what they did even remotely possible. I remember being more entranced by spins than by jumps. I also have realized, looking into this all now, that Peggy Fleming is literally the only skating name from those days that I even recognize. This may be in part due to her celebrity status and my own sense of nationalism.

It was not until about twenty years later that I really paid attention to figure skating again. My family became interested, and I became interested initially because of the school skating outings mentioned above. For someone who loved music and was deeply involved in it, I was remarkably detached from any interest in dance. I had never gotten anything out of watching any form of dance. I had formed a hypothesis that the need for dance steps to be discrete was somehow at odds with an overall sense that dance should be fluid. I am pretty sure that this is nonsense and that I was trying to sound analytical and knowledgeable when in fact I just had not happened to encounter any dance that I liked. 

But in the early 1990s I happened upon some of the ice dancing of Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean. I found out they were regarded as the greatest ice dancing pair of all time. They were extraordinary groundbreakers and innovators, mostly in areas of choreography and technique that I could not then and cannot now really understand. For me the point was that I loved watching their skating and dancing, and I felt convinced that it was the smooth gliding of the skates that made it possible for me to accept what I was seeing as an integrated and convincing art. Again, I think that this was a mistake on my part; the disparaging of land-based dancing was unfair. It is probably true that the gliding of the steps on skates creates some possibilities that are not there on a wooden floor, but the same is very likely true in reverse. Every art form has its own character. But the result for me was that my getting immersed in watching ice dancing at an extraordinary artistic level opened up for me the world of dancing in general. It took a while for that to grow to where it has been for some years now, that I seek out dance performances almost in preference to anything else when I look to go out as a spectator. But I began to be intrigued and to pay more friendly attention to dance after getting to know Torvill and Dean.

During that same era, I watched the 1992 Olympic performance of the American skater Paul Wylie. His longer program, called the “free skate,” was one of those artistic moments that really hit me; I was deeply entranced and moved by it, and I was not alone. It became a well-known phenomenon, and for some people, it was the best skating event that they have ever seen. Encountering that performance helped consolidate and strengthen my growing interest in dance. But there were several other things of note going on. First of all, one of the pieces of music that Wylie used in the program was a segment of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, a longtime favorite of mine.

This raises questions about how our reactions are shaped. Did I respond to that skating program more intensely because of happenstance, since it included a short excerpt from a favorite piece? Or is it possible that the same aesthetic predispositions that cause me to like that piece also caused me to respond well to the skating program? That would make sense if we assume that Paul Wylie and his choreographer were creating a meaningful artistic parallel to that music. In a way this is just saying that they were good at their job, that they knew what they were doing. Nonetheless, it seems likely that someone with an existing love for that piece will respond differently to the artistic whole of the skating program. From the point of view of someone creating that program, this is random. 

Paul Wylie came into that 1992 Olympic event as a very good skater—he would not have been there otherwise. But his career had not led the skating world to view him as an all-time great or as a favorite to do extremely well in the Olympics. He was not expected to win his event, since he had never won a major national or international competition. It was a bit of a surprise that he was one of the three skaters who represented the United States at the Olympics. That whole story is widely believed to have had an influence on the judges. Though he won a silver medal, many believed that he should have won a gold medal. No one is suggesting any sort of malfeasance on the part of the judges, just that what people see and how they react to it can be influenced by expectation.  

Over the last few years, I have watched figure skating regularly. I have seen substantial parts of most of the international skating events that have taken place in the last few years: International Skating Union Grand Prix events, various national championships, and the winter Olympics from earlier this year. All of these competitions follow a similar pattern: each skater performs a short program of around two minutes, and a longer program of about four minutes. These are not on the same day, as that would be much too grueling. 

These skating performances are executed to music, and the timings of the programs are defined quite precisely, so when a skater is performing to an existing piece they almost always end up cutting and rearranging that piece. (Once in a while a skater commissions a piece for the purpose.) In watching competitive skating, one has to get used to hearing a pastiche of pieces of music, often familiar ones. Sometimes this comes across as a quotation of the piece, and I believe that is how I reacted to the Saint-Saëns in Paul Wylie’s program. Sometimes it feels more like a disfigurement of the piece. I have reacted that way to excerpts from the Moonlight Sonata in which the (originally) beautifully paced segues are betrayed. This is probably just a fact of life for this kind of work. It would be impossibly restrictive for a skater only to use complete pieces, or even coherent sections of pieces, that happened to be the right length. I would guess that most of the gaps and juxtapositions that have bothered me would not bother someone who did not know the piece, and I am in that posture with much of what I have heard.

The most fascinating skating issue that I have tried to analyze is this old conundrum: is figure skating a performance art or an athletic pursuit? There is a straightforward answer to that question when it is posed as a simple question: both. But the tensions and interactions between the two aspects are fascinating. Each competitive skating routine has narrowly defined elements that it can or should contain. The most striking and difficult of these are jumps, but they also notably include spins as well as various other sorts of choreography.

The ins and outs of how these requirements are defined and shaped have changed over the years. In short, each performer or competitor has to execute several jumps and is judged in part on those jumps. The judging is based on how difficult the jumps are and how well they are done. There is enough leeway in the exact choice of what to do that it is possible for two skaters in the same competition to choose layouts that are meaningfully different in level of difficulty. It is then entirely possible for a somewhat less difficult jump, done more successfully, to win a skater more points than a more difficult jump done less successfully. This is something that goes into each skater’s planning. These are specific, difficult, athletic moves. At the same time, the overall scoring of each program also depends on the judges’ reaction to the artistry of what the skaters are doing. There are attempts made to contain these aesthetic/artistic reactions within objective bounds. These are widely acknowledged to be only somewhat successful. There is more than just a possibility that some skaters win or lose the athletic competition based on whether certain judges liked or did not like what they were doing as a matter of artistic performance. 

Is this okay for an athletic event? In golf, no one is judging the grace and artistic beauty of the competitors’ swings, at least not in a way that influences competitive results. And that is a good point, since reacting aesthetically to a golf swing is intrinsically possible. Most people who like to watch golf do so all the time, but that cannot affect the results of the game. That certainly does not mean that the way this plays out in figure skating is wrong. 

What about looking at it the other way round? If a dance performance is an artistic expression—or if someone reacts to it primarily that way, as I do—what effect does the presence of the athletic/competitive side have on the artistry? It constrains it. It is impossible that every skater would spontaneously include the same number of jumps and other elements in each performance if they were concerned only with effective performance. So, the artistic possibilities are by definition reduced, but maybe only from a larger infinity to a smaller one.

There is also the matter of emphasis. The great American skater Nathan Chen has done a lot of winning at the highest level. He is renowned for executing difficult elements well. He and his coach have said that they zero in on doing what it takes to win the competition. This leads to an emphasis on difficult and thus points-heavy elements. My own reaction to his competitive programs over the last few years has been that they are impressive from an athletic point of view and fun to watch, but clearly not the most expressive or artistically important programs that I have seen. Those belong for the most part to Yuzuru Hanyu and Jason Brown. Jason Brown is someone who cannot do the most difficult jumps—that is not where his skill lies. And this has meant that he has not won often in big events. He is often second, third, or worse, but his performances are riveting, compelling, and beautiful.

Yuzuru Hanyu is widely regarded as the greatest figure skater of all time, largely based on the expressive power of his performance. He has a number of wins similar to that of Nathan Chen. Although his technical prowess is extraordinary, it is not quite as prodigious as Chen’s, and he has rarely if ever beaten Chen head-to-head in a major event. 

Late last spring I attended a figure skating exhibition, a live show in which the skating was all for performance without judges. Among the performers was Nathan Chen. I was delighted to see that the two pieces that he offered were both wonderful artistically, significantly more expressive and compelling than anything that I had seen from him in competition. He accomplished some difficult jumps, and they were thrilling. But they did not drive and determine the whole content and feeling of the event.

I will leave this for now. All of this has something to tell us about the various relationships between technique, virtuosity, and expression in music. I do not feel like trying to pin down in words exactly what that might be; it is more fluid than that. I want to continue to let it swirl around in the back of my mind. I may return to the subject in some way in the future.