Organ and choral collaborations in the worship setting: Issues and solutions

Towards a pedal method

I recently decided that over the next few months, I will work on writing a stand-alone pedal-playing method, and much of it will draw on what I have written in The Diapason. My columns from November 2007 through February 2008 constituted a discussion of teaching pedal playing intended to be read by teachers. The June 2009 column presented thoughts about use of heels. The columns from January through May 2013 revisited pedal playing, this time in a way that was directed at students. These latter columns come close to adding up to the pedal method that I am now contemplating. This version, however, will differ from the sum of those columns in several ways: it will be longer and will include more exercises and excerpts from pieces.

In this month’s column I again discuss pedal playing and pedal teaching. I will not canvass all of my specific thoughts about teaching in any detail, as I have done that previously. I will go through a summary of some of those thoughts, with particular references to ways I have somewhat reshaped my approach over the last several years. That reshaping is probably more “meta” than “nitty-gritty.”

My set of techniques for helping students to become comfortable negotiating the pedal keyboard has not changed much. When I was developing these techniques years ago I felt after a certain period of thought and discovery that it worked well; I still feel that. But there are details that I have rethought, and there are aspects of somewhat more advanced pedal playing to which I want to give more attention and more space in the forthcoming method than I did in those columns. I also think that I know more now than I did when I first began to formulate my approach (thirty years ago or so) or when I wrote my columns on the subject (seven to thirteen years ago) about how to present some of the ideas in ways that will engage and help the greatest number and variety of students.

My earliest memories of my own attempts to learn to play with my feet as well as my early attempts to teach pedal technique revolve around the notion that pedal playing is difficult. It is difficult. But I also suspected early on, and still believe, that it often presents itself to people as even more difficult than it is, perhaps in the wrong ways. It seems awkward or unnatural rather than just something that properly requires a lot of practice and dedication. I have mentioned here more than once before that I was a late bloomer as a playing and performing musician. Thinking back now, I realize that for many years my pedal playing lagged behind the rest of what I was trying to do as an organist and harpsichordist. At least all through high school, I found pedal playing awkward and uncomfortable. And beginning at least that early, long before I was any sort of teacher, I encountered people who told me that they had given up trying to play organ because they found pedal playing too awkward: they could not believe they would ever get to a place where they could be comfortable with it. In my zeal for playing the organ I reacted to this as a tragedy. For some of the people involved it probably was a tragedy, in that they were led into passing up something that could have become a valuable part of their lives. This stayed with me and was part of my impetus for becoming an organ teacher.

Over the last few years I have noticed that my pedal playing has been the most robust part of my playing. In juggling harpsichord and organ performance I sometimes go for as much as several months without practicing organ very much or playing pedals at all. The first time that I then sit down at an organ after an extended time away there is never any rust in my pedal technique, in fact it feels well-rested rather than creaky. This certainly does not prove that my technical approach to playing is better than any other approach, but it does suggest that it is not worse. 

This reminds me of the situation that prevailed for so many centuries, when getting to the organ to practice was a difficult enough proposition that most organists did most of their practicing on manuals-only instruments at home. They then needed to have a pedal technique that could be called upon as needed on short notice. Some organists had access to pedal clavichords, pedal harpsichords, and pedal pianos, but that was very far from universal. Here is a speculative thought: is there a correlation between the development of winding systems that allowed organists to practice without having to enlist an assistant and a boost in the type and level of virtuosity that could be expected of pedal playing?

My approach to teaching pedal playing arose more or less in sync with my efforts to improve my own pedal facility during and shortly before and after my graduate school years. The foundation of the approach is that everything about playing should be physically comfortable. This highlights the crucial difference between two ways of approaching something difficult. Pedal playing is, along with most music making, difficult in that it requires a lot of well-targeted work. No one should expect to become adept at playing pedals without putting in many practice hours; one should expect to find the process sometimes arduous or daunting. However, there is no reason to expect it to feel unnatural or awkward or to accept it if it does. 

None of the people I have met who have told me they gave up organ playing because they could not get comfortable with pedals ever say that they simply did not want to put in any work. They say that they cannot get their bodies to do the things that are required to grapple with the pedals or some of the things they had been told were required. Some of this may have to do with being asked to keep one’s knees and heels together much of the time. I sympathize with this concern, since I cannot sit on an organ bench with my knees together for even a few seconds without experiencing back pain and overall physical tension. However, I sympathize with what I take to be the impetus for directing students to sit in a particular position. It is part of a system for learning to find notes reliably and to be able to play with confidence. The question is whether this is the best system or is necessary for all or any students. An approach that starts with a specific physical requirement like this tends to act as a gatekeeper, weeding out people for whom it does not work. I believe that is the strongest reason for only embracing it if it is absolutely necessary. It is not the worst tragedy that we encounter when someone who might have entered the world of organ playing is turned aside from doing so, but it is a tragedy.

What about the practical side of learning to negotiate a pedal keyboard? There are three ways to find the next note in a pedal passage: 1) by discerning where that note is in relation to the note that you most recently played in the same foot regardless of whether there have been intervening notes in the other foot; 2) by discerning where the note is in relation to the note you most recently played in the other foot; and 3) by discerning where the note is in relation to where you are sitting on the bench. The impetus for asking students to keep themselves in a specific set posture while playing is an emphasis on the second of these. It seems to me that, although sometimes useful, the awareness of where each foot in itself has been and is going is the most efficient and reliable of these techniques. I developed a set of exercises and practice techniques for training this.

I will not go through all details here, but I do mention some questions that I have and some ways in which I want to rethink things a little bit, or to supplement the ways in which I have thought about this in the past. Have I placed too little emphasis on #2 while believing that some others have placed too much emphasis on it? In my own playing I rely on #1, but am I right to do so? I think so: it seems to work for me. But does my personal emphasis on that technique bias me towards emphasizing it too much in teaching? What about #3? This is sort of an analogue to “perfect pitch”—just hit the note from scratch. I have always been a bit distrustful of this, and I have tended to de-emphasize it. I wonder if I should think a bit more than I have in the past about ways of training this sense, at least so that it can be an always-available backup. (Playing a note with the heel when you have just played a different note with the toe or vice versa is a special and important case of #2.)

How much does all of this vary from student to student? How much does it vary from one sort of repertoire to another or from one instrument to another? 

Notice that I am not even mentioning: 4) looking at the feet and 5) feeling around for easy-to-find keys and then using them as guideposts for the notes that one wants to play. I am generally skeptical about looking. It can sometimes work in the moment, but it is dangerous to use it as a technique for making finding notes seem easy during anything remotely like the beginning learning stage. Every time a student finds a note by looking, they pass up a chance to become a more skillful and secure pedal player. Looking can become a habit. And when it is a strong habit it can get disconnected from the business of finding the next note. It is not uncommon to see someone look down at their feet quickly and still play the wrong note. Looking at the feet also creates a perpetual risk of getting lost in the score. It is not impossible that a given player can incorporate some looking as a successful part of pedal playing. I need to consider how to characterize this situation. 

Concerning #5, I feel strongly that this is a bad idea, except perhaps as an occasional emergency measure. Any use of this technique during the beginning learning stage can actually make it close to impossible to get away from needing it. And since it requires extra gestures and time it can force slower tempos than would otherwise be necessary. It can also tamper with a player’s sense of rhythm and timing. However, I once had a student who came to me after decades of playing who found every note this way, who therefore made exactly twice as many gestures with her feet as she would have had to, but who was so adept at it that it did not create any trouble at all. That is, it did not create hesitation, insecurity, or inaccuracy. It did place an upper limit on her tempos. I need to continue to consider how to address this when writing for students.  

Concerning proper organ shoes, they should be comfortable; they should be light enough that keeping them up in the air is not a burden; and they should not be inclined to slip off or around in such a way that the player has to clutch at them with the toes to keep them on. When I was first trying to learn to play pedals I tended to use old-fashioned men’s dress shoes. These were uncomfortable and much too heavy. Each of my organ teachers gave me an indescribably vast amount of help, input, and encouragement, as I have written about over the years. But none of them ever said anything about shoes. Eventually I noticed that my ankles and leg muscles were perpetually tired and sore. I tried a number of lighter, more supple shoes. I have wide feet, and, in those days, it was difficult to find anything just right. But the heaviness was worse than any other sort of compromise would have been. 

For many years now I have played organ in New Balance walking shoes. For me, they are amazingly comfortable, light, wide enough, etc. Thinking of those shoes puts me in mind of another big issue. What about built-up heels? They can assist in heel playing, but they can impede certain sorts of foot crossing. I think that the extent to which built-up heels are necessary is influenced by certain things about foot position and foot flexibility that vary from person to person and also vary depending on technical choices. In preparing to write this method, should I revisit various different sorts of shoes, maybe purpose-designed organ shoes? These are now available to fit my wide feet, which was certainly not the case in the early 1970s! If I do this, I will be coming at those shoes through a filter of unfamiliarity that would not be there for a student who started out with them.

Marcel Dupré wrote in his memoirs that he answered the question, “Avec quels souliers jouez-vous de la pédale?” (“With what shoes do you play pedals?”), with “with my own.” Various eyewitnesses have testified that he indeed played in his everyday shoes, not normally changing shoes between walking in and playing. What about this latter practice? I certainly know people who consider it to be unacceptable to track outside dust and dirt onto a pedal keyboard. But here is a venerable precedent for doing so! Is it enough to sort of dust off the shoes? Is this something that I should write about in the method?

As much as I always enjoy getting feedback from readers, in this case such feedback could be especially useful and interesting. What do you think should be included in a pedal method? Did you happen to read my earlier pedal columns? Did you find them helpful? Do you have anything from your own experience either learning or teaching pedal playing that you think might inform such a book? I would love to hear from you.

Further thoughts on
counterpoint II: a miscellany

I mentioned at the end of last month’s column that I have been rethinking some of my ideas and practices about teaching rhythm and counting. This is the result of recent experiences teaching students contrapuntal voices. I have noticed—more than I previously observed—that moving from an understanding of the rhythm of individual voices to an understanding of the way the rhythms of those voices fits together is not always easy or natural for everyone. It is helpful to address it directly, and I developed some new ideas about how to do so.

As outlined in my April 2012 column, my approach to teaching rhythm and counting involves ignoring time signatures, bar lines, and the “one-and-two-and” structure that we often employ. Rhythm is about ratios, and my experience has suggested that grappling with ratios directly—understanding that a dotted quarter note lasts as long as three eighth notes, that a half note lasts twice as long as a quarter note, and so on—is the best way for a student to become comfortable with rhythm. This is true for a beginner learning to understand rhythmic notation for the first time and also for a more experienced student who is having trouble with a particular rhythm or needs a refresher course. This has the advantage of being simple and completely accurate. I have seen much more trouble arise when students worry about whether a particular note is “on the ‘and’ of two” than I have seen clarity arising out of this way of describing rhythm.

This is an over-simplified summary of an approach that differs from other approaches in emphasis, since the learning of note ratios is always fundamental. This is not the place for a complete restatement of what I wrote six years ago, or to explain why I believe that it is a good approach. You can find it in the above-mentioned issue of The Diapason, which I have posted at http://gavinblack-baroque.com/Diapason column April 2012.pdf.

When a student needs to work out the rhythm of a passage, I suggest counting individual notes in relation to a suitable short note value. For example, if that short unit is the eighth note, then each eighth note is counted as “one,” each quarter note is counted “one-two,” each half note “one-two-three-four,” and so on. This does not involve denying that those beats also relate to positions in a measure, but it just deemphasizes that at first. In learning the rhythm of a single line or passage, the texture of which involves all of the notes, voices, chords, etc., being in the same rhythm as one another (say in the manner of many hymns), this approach is very successful.

Therefore, it is also successful when learning individual voices of what will be a contrapuntal texture, regardless of its eventual level of complexity. So the following two “voices” (the pitches are not important) could each be counted as indicated in Examples 1 and 2. As with any rhythmic counting, the numbers have to come at an even pace.

Each of these examples contains nineteen eighth notes, and the two of them fit together. But the sort of counting that I have suggested would be extraordinarily hard, if not impossible, to follow in Example 3.

The first-order solution is that the rhythm of each voice should be internalized before the voices are put together. This is a goal worth striving for in the practicing process. However it seems sensible to readmit traditional measure-based counting at this point.

I have purposely created an example that is not divided into measures. But it could be, like Example 4, which then allows for the regular (“one-and-two-and”) approach to counting.

I believe that it is a good idea for this sort of counting to be secondary. To the extent that working out the rhythm of each voice separately is something that must be approached consciously and deliberately, I think that my per-note way of counting is useful. In addition to being sensible and effective in itself, it can promote an awareness of the importance of the middle and ends of notes, whereas “one-and-two-and” counting, especially with counterpoint, can focus attention disproportionately on the beginnings of notes. As soon as the measure-based number for a note has been spoken or thought, the next step is to see what notes in other voices correspond to the next counting numbers. This can shift a player’s overall focus toward a more homophonic feeling.

Thinking about applying the normal measure-based templates to counting multi-voiced pieces has made me more open to other ways of keeping track of the rhythm of pieces that are not derived from a strict awareness of the voice structure. For example, there is net or overall rhythm. Sometimes, while the rhythm of each voice in a contrapuntal passage is different from all the others, the surface rhythm is quite simple. That rhythm might be thought of as a new note every eighth note.

Here are a few examples of writing in which this concept might make things easier. Example 5 is from Bach, Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 8. Example 6 is from Mendelssohn, Prelude and Fugue, op. 37, no. 1 (fugue). Example 7 is taken from Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, Fugue #2.

In the last of these, the net rhythm is more complicated, but still simpler than each individual rhythm. It is interesting that the first three measures of each piece have the same overall surface rhythm, which in turn is the rhythm of the fugue subject. In the opening measure, the fugue subject is alone, in the second it is combined with a countersubject that does not change the surface rhythm, and in the third measure only the surface rhythm alludes to or quotes that subject.

If the printing is neatly aligned, it is possible to derive all of the rhythm from the surface rhythm by how things line up. Sometimes it is useful to picture a cursor line going steadily from left to right and to identify whatever it touches as what is to be played at that moment. But this should all be secondary, understood to be forms of assistance, not a primary way of understanding rhythm.

Some observations

Here are a few more observations about counterpoint, some of which may be a bit abstract:

It is natural to think of counterpoint as being something that is easily differentiable from harmony. After all, there is counterpoint that exists outside the norms and expectations of tonality or functional harmony. But for most of the music that we play on the organ and other keyboard instruments, pieces that are rigorously contrapuntal are also completely embedded in harmony. This is something essential about the meaning of the counterpoint itself: that is, the way that the flow of contrapuntal voices/melodies comes across to us, and therefore the way that the directionality of the different voices interact with one another function, is determined crucially by where the voices are moving harmonically.

For this discussion, I have invented an exercise. Try playing a piece of contrapuntal music with all but one of the voices transposed, and not each transposed by the same amount. The simplest case would be something like Example 8, from the opening of the first Bach Two-Part Invention.

This is going to sound discordant, to put it mildly. But that reaction or judgment is not necessary. The point is that it sounds radically different from the “real” version, although, analytically, a good deal of the counterpoint itself remains unchanged. A little bit of this exercise, possibly even just the amount that I have written out here can be eye-opening for a student. (It is not bad as an odd sort of sight-reading exercise either, and it is much harder with more than two voices.)

A bit of exposure to this oddity can also make the ears more sensitive to the ebb and flow of harmony-based motion or pressure in contrapuntal works. Even though the interaction of voices is always shaped in some way by the separate voices’ harmonic direction, the evident force of that phenomenon is stronger in some places, yet weaker in others. It is also more divergent in some places and more in sync in others. The places where the force of the harmonic direction of different voices is most in sync are cadences and moments that feel cadential.

Many years ago, probably when I was still in high school, an older friend of mine recounted something that a friend of hers had said. This friend once removed was an extremely erudite and thoughtful music listener, thinker about music, and keyboard player. The comment that was relayed to me was: “Helmut Walcha’s problem is that he is too focused on the counterpoint.” I immediately felt that I was learning something—not so much about music or playing or performance, but about attitudes toward musical work. The first thought that occurred to me was that Helmut Walcha was not the one with the “problem!” The phrase “Helmut Walcha’s problem is . . .” really meant, “The reason that I do not like Walcha’s playing is . . . .” That comment and my reaction to it at the time taught me that many people take their own reactions for objective truth, and that it made me uncomfortable. That in turn has shaped a great deal of my own approach to my development as a player and teacher.

What does that comment tell us about counterpoint? I have never thought that it was an apt description of anything I heard in Walcha’s playing. That may be in part because I grew up listening to him, and, at that time, his approach was my own default. But it has made me sensitive to the question of what it would mean to pay too much attention to counterpoint and too little to other things.

My guess is that this commentator was probably referring to Walcha’s relatively steady approach to rhythm, and also, just as importantly, to his focus on consistently phrasing subjects. (For what it is worth, he was also reacting to hearing recordings, not to any conversations with Walcha or to any direct knowledge of the roots of his approach.)

This leads to a host of questions:

Is it correct that relatively steady metronomic playing is associated with bringing out counterpoint clearly, whereas playing that is rhythmically free is associated with harmonically derived music, or with an approach to playing music that is more focused on harmony?

What about the business of “subject phrasing?” If a phrase, theme, or motif happens more than once in a piece, is it important to articulate and phrase it consistently? Does doing that enhance the extent to which the counterpoint seems like counterpoint?

Is it important, or is it good or bad, for the notes of different voices that are written ostensibly at the same time to happen at exactly the same time? Could there be something good or necessary about notes being somewhat staggered at times? The reason that I associate this question with the Walcha-related anecdote is that in his playing, notes do line up rhythmically to a great extent. Furthermore, the above-mentioned commenter believed that Walcha was too focused on counterpoint. But there are many players and theorists who believe that counterpoint is enhanced by staggering: it is difficult for the ears to follow separate lines if the notes of those lines coincide with one another exactly. Which of these is true? Does it depend in part on habits of listening? Is it really about clarity of counterpoint, or is it about some other aspect of style?

How does this relate to thoughts about basic counting in counterpoint expressed above? I suppose that I feel most interested in the notion that any melody including a contrapuntal voice has some logic by which it might be stretched out or otherwise inflected rhythmically. Also, two voices that occur at the same time might have different logic. They might not line up all the time, but not because the phenomenon of their not lining up should be sought out, rather, because the internal logic of each has them manifesting slightly different timing. This may be why I am more interested in counting individual voices that are somewhat removed from each other and from the template of measures. But then all voices have to be together enough in the end so that the piece is coherent.

I present all of this as questions or ideas that are interesting to think about or, more to the point, to engage with in conjunction with students. None of it is hard and fast; none of it represents answers or conclusions.

One last topic: notes that we play have overtones. On the organ some of those are the inherent overtones of the pipes, while some are the higher stops added for a particular purpose. Especially in the former category, there are often overtones that, while they blend in enough to make the sound coherent, can also be heard as faint separate notes. And the rather cool thing is this: different overtones are relatively audible on different notes. So in playing a theme you might hear the twelfth over the first note, the fifteenth over the second note, the twelfth again, then the seventeenth, and so on. In Example 9, in this melody, you might happen to hear the higher (gray) notes as very faint, audible accompaniment to the “official” theme.

This is a kind of shadow overtone counterpoint that is always present, at a greater or lesser degree of audibility, and is present separately in multiple contrapuntal voices when they combine.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by email at [email protected].

What is rhythm? That question has recurred to me as I have thought about and written about rhythm over the last few months. This is a prime example of putting the cart before the horse. After all, how have I been thinking about rhythm without first sorting out what it is? But there is no one answer to this very fundamental question, and we all work with rhythm without having established a clear definition.

I searched the internet with phrases such as “What is rhythm?” and “rhythm in music.” I was not looking for any answers as such, but to get an idea of some of the “headline” ways in which any sort of definition of rhythm is encapsulated. The results were very interesting. There were two basic kinds of results: 1) simple descriptions of some of the mechanics of the way that rhythm is depicted in some sorts of music, such as “Rhythm in music is the regular motion of half-notes, quarter-notes, etc.” or “Music has a regular beat sometimes indicated by a metronome marking;” and 2) complex but certainly intriguing philosophical discussions of concepts of rhythm.

One set of answers to the question of rhythm is contained in the fact that we work with rhythm when we make music. Music moves through time. Rhythm is predicated on the phenomenon of time passing as we listen to music or create it.

Music moves through time in a way essential to its nature. The same can be said for dance, though I have less experience talking to people who have had a deep involvement with it. Drama—live theater, television, movies—also moves through time, but in a way that seems meaningfully different as much of what is going on is dialogue. The semantic content influences the way one experiences the flow. (This is in part also true of vocal music.) Painting, drawing, sculpture, and other visual and graphic arts do not move through time the same way. Time passes as one experiences that sort of artwork, but visual focus is up to the viewer, as is shifting of that focus as a viewer encounters the work of art. There is no set time that the rhythm of viewing a painting, for example, will occupy overall, and no set ratio between times allotted to different parts of the whole. There is also no set order in which those parts will make themselves felt to the viewer, including any aspects of repetition.

I have always thought it fascinating that if you hit the pause button while a CD or any music file is playing, there is silence, whereas if you do the same on a video recording, a still image is displayed. Music has no existence without the passage of time, without motion and change.

Would a piece of music that existed in time but never changed seem to have rhythm in any sense we would recognize? This is an abstraction, since we do not encounter music that never changes. Maybe the closest we could come would be to play a note on an organ and hold it forever. But even that would change. There is always a miscellaneous fluctuation in the sound or in the way that the sound reaches the ears. Maybe a computer-based instrument could create a sound that really would never change even at the level of what the most sensitive instruments could measure or any ears could hear. If someone were to listen to (part of) such a piece would there be anything that they would experience as rhythm? Maybe not, but what occurs to me is that they would experience the inner rhythm of their own shifting reaction to the unchanging sound.

I see from framing the last thought the way I did that I want something to happen in order to accept that the quality of “rhythm” is present. So possibly rhythm is not just music moving through time, but things happening—things that we can hear—as music moves through time. I understand that this is sort of obvious and phrased in a deliberately simple or even naïve way. Maybe it is even really a tautology: if we are listening and something happens, we notice it. Since it happens across time, there is rhythm to it, if we define rhythm broadly or just decide to apply that word to that phenomenon.

But as the first set of answers that I found in my internet search reminds us, there is something specific about how we use rhythm, ​​not necessarily what rhythm is in most of the music that organists, pianists, harpsichordists, or other classical musicians grapple with. That has to do with regular beat, which presumably means that the “something happening” happens at regular time intervals, and some sort of way of grouping that regularity. This is expressed with a naïve pretense that we do not know it perfectly well already. It points to a vast set of questions as to why this should be standard. How did it evolve? What does it do that is different from what we might be able to do with musical sounds not organized that way? Are there necessary relationships between this regularity and other aspects of music in this range of styles: melody, harmony, texture, and so on? To answer these questions is not the point here, since the truth is that no one knows, although there has been a lot of interesting research and speculation.

So where does any of this leave us as to the teaching or grappling with rhythm in our own playing? Grappling with rhythm means deciding when to play notes. The thought that has formed in my mind over the last few years is that there are two fundamental ways to do this, and they are opposite. They are both important, but very different in how straightforward they are to describe.

The first of these is the normal one for most music that we play. It is the one that we engage with all the time, the regular beat and meter phenomenon. I like to describe it this way: there is a regular beat that exists outside of the piece and before the beginning of the piece; the notes of the piece will fit in with that beat once the piece begins. That beat defines one note value, and the other note values are all clearly defined in relation to that one. There could be many other ways of describing this same thing. And to avoid its being a caricature, we should add that although the regular beat exists before the piece begins, it is in a sense a separate entity from the piece itself, and to a large extent governs the motion of the piece.

This is consistent with this concept that the actual notes sometimes deviate from the place where that regular beat says they should have been. That then becomes a matter of taste, of judgment, of awareness of a composer’s intentions and so on. Although this deviation is normal and frequent, it is defined as an aberration, and therefore it is often felt to require specific justification.

The second, opposite pole is a lot harder to describe. At any instant in a piece of music, there is some prevailing sound—a note, more than one note, the dying away of released notes, the ambient room sound, any combination of these things and others—and something about that sound will suggest when it feels right for the next sound to happen. That suggested moment is the appropriate time to play or sing the next note or notes. This perceived sense may sometimes be caused by the phenomenon of notes having come at a certain regular pace up until that moment. But it may also be caused by other factors that have nothing to do with regular pulse. These could include something about the inner behavior of the sound in the time since anything was last expressly played, shaped by the nature of the performing medium or by the room acoustics; anything about harmonic development and the ebb and flow of harmonic tension; something arising out of the desire for a certain kind of forward momentum; a need either to sustain a mood or to change the mood; and so on.

Each of these two poles can be found to a greater or lesser extent in any piece or passage that we play, and they interact in an infinite number of ways. The second idea is often most obviously at work in recitative. This only starts with “official” sung recitative. It also includes instrumental passages that imitate recitative and are marked as such—for example, the section in the first movement of Widor’s Sixth Symphony that immediately follows the opening about which I wrote in my September 2021 column (pages 10–11), or sections of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903, or Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565.

More interestingly, perhaps, it includes passages that strike us as being in recitative style without being marked as such. This applies to many other sections of those same Bach pieces, for example. The opening of BWV 565 is full of fermatas, unmeasured and written-out arpeggios, and tempo changes, all of which add up to making it an absolute necessity to find some source other than a grid of beats and accents to figure out when each successive note is best played.

The opening of Bach’s Fantasia in G Minor, BWV 542, is not aesthetically like the opening of BWV 565. It has no fermatas, tempo changes, or other direct suggestions that the rhythm suggested by the mapping of the notes onto the regular meter is not perfectly viable. When I played this piece decades ago, that was how I derived my sense of when the notes came. I recall being very focused on counting it correctly. Now, when I sit and read through it, I am more focused on listening to each sonority and trying to feel or intuit when what comes next should occur. This is not in the absence of an awareness of how the different note values stack up against one another or where the strong beats are. In this case it supplements that. The feeling of pressure or momentum to move to the next note or cluster of notes comes in part from an awareness of the imperatives of the beat structure. For example, everything about the opening chord and the act of moving away from the opening chord comes from sonority, ideally including whatever I can hear of room acoustics.

So how does this concept differ from a simple acknowledgement that it is possible to play ordinary measured music either rather strictly or more freely? This is a common though not uncontroversial subject to debate, be it in a friendly or heated way. One point I like about this approach is that it seems to be true. That is, whether it is something a composer intends or a performer tries to bring out, it is palpably the case that each moment in a piece of music has some sort of inherent momentum. It can vary in strength and be perceived differently by one person and another. After all, this momentum is something that arises in part from what a given performer or listener wants to do with a piece, their prior aesthetic predilections and tastes, and a host of other factors. This is never something that can be defined by one person for another: it must be heard and felt.

One way to demonstrate that this intrinsic momentum is real is to stop a piece at a random place. A jarring quality that experience creates comes from unfulfilled expectation or broken momentum. That momentum cannot be just that of a regular beat pattern—they stop all the time, and it does not bother us.

Another matter that I like about this concept is that it ties in with the notion of playing a piece as if you were improvising it. Even if your sense of the directionality and momentum of the sonorities does not lead you to do anything very different from a fairly strict rhythm, as soon as you start listening for that momentum you are behaving like someone who is creating the piece.

Also, just as a matter of my own discipline, trying to listen like this prods me not to let my attention and hearing faculties wander too much, to pay attention and to care about each note. This is one of the key points in working with students around this idea.

Next time I will write in some detail about that: how to introduce this idea to students, what some if its advantages are, and what some of its pitfalls are, how to help students reconcile this approach with whatever amount of respect to the notated rhythm is due, if that ever rises to the level of conflict. I will end this series about rhythm with notes on a few stray ideas and observations about rhythm that are either germane to the above ideas or interesting on their own account.

Music as community . . .

When I was offered the opportunity of joining the Organ Clearing House during the summer of 2000, I faced a critical choice. In addition to working independently as an organbuilder and technician, renovating and maintaining a gaggle of organs in the Boston area, I was also director of music at a large suburban Congregational church. I knew that the Organ Clearing House would sweep me into a busy travel schedule, and that I would have to make a choice.

That was a difficult decision on many levels. I had developed many friendships over my nearly twenty-year tenure at the church. For the first sixteen years, it was a privilege to work with the senior pastor, a kind and wise man and fellow sailor who preached beautifully and supported the music program vigorously. The privilege diminished after his retirement with a string of short-term successors who ranged from silly to terrible, but I valued my relationship with the choir enormously. We were fortunate to have a superb professional quartet joining the twenty or so volunteers, and we had a blast preparing and presenting all sorts of music from simple unaccompanied hymns to great oratorios with orchestra.

Each Thursday night, we opened our home after rehearsal, and at least half, sometimes all of the choir would show up. BYOB was the order of the day (though we made sure to have extra on hand, just in case), and we would order pizza or some appropriate substitute and spend a couple hours discussing the music we had worked on that evening, projects that various members were involved in outside the church, and simply nourishing our friendships. I have no doubt that the camaraderie of those many evenings enhanced our music-making by building special levels of trust and respect among that cheerful group of musicians.

Almost twenty years have passed since I faced and made the decision to leave all that and join the Organ Clearing House. I do not regret the choice, but I miss the fun and richness of working with that choir. Of all the aspects of playing the organ for worship, I miss most the pageantry of processional and recessional hymns—the movement of the sound of the choir through the building, the relationship between the choir and congregation, the ebb and flow of the poetry, and the wonderful feeling of producing all that acoustic sound to surround, lead, encourage, and inspire the congregation. As the choir mounted the chancel steps and split into the rows of center-facing choir stalls, I loved having eye contact with them as I played and they sang. Sometimes an exchanged wink would remind us of a joke, sometimes we simply reveled in the joy of it.

The living organ

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) was an innovative and inquisitive organbuilder and founder of the venerable firm C. B. Fisk, Inc. Charlie was revered by his coworkers for his Socratic teaching, inspiring creative thought by posing questions. He famously said, “The organ is a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to appear to be alive.” I have often written that it is the challenge, even the responsibility of the organbuilder to remove the mechanics from the equation. Practically, it is impossible. Every organ has some elusive click, buzz, or hiss. But careful attention to fabricating techniques and quality control, especially being sure that moving parts are identical in form and function can tame the wild beast within.

Some organs, especially undistinguished organs with electro-pneumatic action, can seem like industrial products with lifeless tone, but when I am working inside an instrument, there is a big difference in the sensations I feel whether the blower is running or not. When the blower is not running, the organ is static and lifeless. When the blower is turned on, I hear and feel the air surging through the windlines, filling the reservoirs and pressurizing windchests. There may be a few creaks and groans as wind vessels fill. The organ gains breath and comes alive.

Organs that are conceived, intended, and built to seem alive are those that can become part of a community of music making in a church. They join the choir in air-driven acoustic musical leadership, that unique type of tone that carries and blends so well.

At one with the machine

In his book, Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, the now retired first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, wrote sensually about his relationship with his violin: “When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.” (page 5)

I have shared this quote in these pages several times over the years. When I first read it, I was touched by his eloquence about the intimacy of his relationship with his instrument, and I wondered further, what about the clarinetist or bassoonist who puts the business end of his instrument in his mouth. It does not get much more personal than that.

Compare that to the organist sitting on the bench at one end of a large room. She draws a simple stop, perhaps the most beautiful Diapason voice on the instrument, and plays a single note. If the organ has tracker action, the motion of her finger has moved a few levers to open a valve, releasing stored pressurized air to move into the pipe and produce tone.

If it is an electro-pneumatic organ, her finger has closed an electric contact (switch) sending current through a wire to an electro-magnet. The energized magnet moves a metal armature (valve), which opens one end of a pressurized channel to the atmosphere. The other end of that channel is closed by a leather pouch with a valve glued to it. When the pressure is released from the channel, the pouch collapses, pulling open the valve. It takes a lot more words to describe simply the motions of an electro-pneumatic action, and if it is a large instrument, there can be many more steps between key and valve including intermediate relays and switching. But in a well-built and well-regulated action, it all happens instantaneously.

That one motion of the organist’s finger sends a single tone across the vast space. It is similar to flipping a switch to turn on a light. But the lively thrill of playing the organ comes in the clever and seamless operation of the machine. Touch a button with your thumb and that single note releases a roar. Hold the note and flex your ankle, and the note gets softer. And to think you have done all this with a single note. Multiply those gestures exponentially, and you create a musical whole with an expressive range greater than that of a symphony orchestra, deftly skipping from one family of instruments to another, combining them, giving them solos, filling the room with complex tones.

Mr. Steinhardt is one of our greatest violinists. He can produce magic from that pound of spruce, producing a kaleidoscope of colors. He can shift from stentorian majesty to nimble coloratura. But Steinhardt’s kaleidoscope is miniscule when compared to the organist shifting from a mighty chorus of Tubas to a distant Aeoline. And the organist’s ability to superimpose a variety of tone colors simultaneously is unique in the world of music. The contrast between a Diapason and a Trumpet is the perfect example. The two voices may have the same volume level, but they are significantly different in harmonic structure. They can be compared one after the other, they can be contrasted, each being given an independent line of music, or they can be combined and played together. And that is just two stops. Multiply that by dozens or even hundreds, and the organist has a seemingly limitless variety of tone available at the touch of a finger. Or thousands of touches of fingers.

And that is where the seamless machine comes in. Recently, a colleague mentioned that he was using a sequence of forty-five pistons for a single decrescendo. What does that statement mean to a knowledgeable organist? First, it must be a huge organ to have that many pistons and enough stops to make that many meaningful changes in a single passage. Second, the organist is seeking a very grand, sweeping effect. Third, the organist is putting in a lot of work to prepare. Does it take an hour, two hours, or more of practice time to create such a sequence? Did he need to have a friend present to share in the listening as he made decisions? And we can assume (or hope) that this monumental organ is in a huge acoustic space. And that is one of the singular aspects of playing the organ—creating vast tonal structures in vast acoustic spaces. (I was right on all counts. It was David Briggs working on registrations for his new transcription of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City on February 26.)

§

A violin typically weighs less than a pound­—400 grams is usual. The luthier labors for months with a half dozen pieces of wood, each of which weighs a few ounces. We weigh pipe organs by the ton, and the process of building an organ involves thousands of hours of managing hundreds of components, some of which weigh as much as a ton. You see that big tower crown with moldings and carvings, sitting on top of a forty-foot organ case? And how did it get there? That’s right. People put it there. Notice how it is just a foot or two from the ceiling arch? And what does that mean? Right. There could be no hoisting point above it. People put it there without mechanical assistance.

How do we build a ten-ton machine whose mechanical presence can vanish under the fingers of an artist? Here are a few of the myriad issues to be considered by the organbuilder.

Architectural design

The excellent monumental organ should claim a commanding architectural presence in its surroundings. The organ relies on the building for the projection and blending of its tone, and the symbiotic relationship should include visual harmony. In that sense, the organ is the mouthpiece of the building.

Tonal structure

If an organ is intended for liturgical use in a large space, it must include:

• a wide dynamic range with individual voices carefully planned so as to allow subtle gradation between different levels of volume;

• enough variety of tone to satisfy the requirements of congregational leadership, expressive accompaniment of solo voices and choruses, festival outbursts, and the realm of solo organ literature;

• multiple keyboard divisions, each with a specific purpose and individual character, and each blending seamlessly with all the others.

Limitless lungs

A mentor and colleague once shared his mantra with me, “Air is the fuel we burn to produce organ tone.” If we are setting out to produce monumental tone in a monumental space, we are going to need a lot of fuel. It takes a hurricane of air to make one big bass pipe go. Once in a while, when servicing an organ, I have occasion to lift one of those big babies from its hole, and let me tell you, until you have experienced ten or fifteen inches of wind blasting through that six-inch hole, you cannot have full appreciation of the amount of energy involved in the speech of that pipe.

Add to that one toehole the hundreds involved in the last fortissimo chord of French toccata, and you might get a sense of what’s going on. A six-note chord with a hundred stops playing equals how many toeholes? A large organ blower might be able to move ten thousand cubic feet of air per minute at whatever pressure the organ is running on. How big is ten thousand cubic feet? It’s fifty by twenty by ten feet. A professional bowling lane is sixty feet long.

The machines and reservoirs that create and store the pressure are accurately regulated to provide pressure at a steady and constant rate. If the pressure varies, so does the pitch and intensity of the tone.

Sensitive mechanics

I have stressed several times the importance of silence of the organ’s mechanical systems. Once again, it is impossible, practically, to make such a complex and monstrous machine disappear. The listener may hear a “thump” from the console during a big registration change, a squeak from an expression shutter, a click from a distant primary valve. The organist and the organbuilder or maintenance technician cooperate to correct and repair those conditions as they arise. I know I have spent hundreds of hours crawling around in organs looking for extraneous mechanical noises. On more than one occasion, it has turned out not to be the organ at all, but a light fixture above the nave ceiling that rattles when low FFF# is played. The last time the bulb was changed, the custodian did not tighten all the screws.

The keyboards are regulated so that all feel alike, and the “strike point” of each is at precisely the same level. All the keys travel the same distance and have the same spring tension and weight.

Windchest actions are silent and consistent. Precision is essential in fabricating the mechanical parts of a pipe organ. Each must have exactly the dimensions, density, and weight in order to ensure that each note performs the same as the rest. The standard for the best pipe organ actions is the repetition rate. In both tracker and electro-pneumatic organs, the action must be free and capable of repeating faster than any human fingers can move. While many musicians assume that speed of attack is essential to rate of repetition, the offending issue is more often the (lack of) speed of release.

With all these factors faithfully executed and carefully balanced, the pipe organ becomes the perfect extension of the musician. It is an acoustic pantograph, expanding the scale of musical thought according to physical settings.

Community spirit

That organ, so beautifully balanced and scaled to its environment, is not only an extension of the thoughts and inspirations of the organist, but for the entire community of listeners and singers. While plant life takes in oxygen and produces carbon dioxide, a transformation that is essential to the balance of life, a pipe organ takes in air and exhausts air. The same air that runs through the works and the pipes of the organ is inhaled by the singers, soloists, choristers, and congregants alike, who in turn produce musical tone in harmony with the instrument. The inspiration and exchange of air enables the inspiration and exchange of musical ideas, emotional responses, worshipful experiences, and the range of human interaction. Those sensations are measured in goose bumps.

The organ in the church where I played last was not extraordinary, but it was a good, solid, pretty complete three-manual electro-pneumatic organ. It was in good condition and everything worked, and the independent voices blended nicely into choruses, with solo singers, the choir, and with the congregation. It was a familiar part of the family, and together we rode its broad back through countless adventures. It was a magic carpet ride with plenty of seats and cup holders. I loved it.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Princeton, New Jersey.

Further thoughts about rhythm, part 4

After writing my last column and in the course of searching for further ideas about rhythm, I came across this quote, which was new to me and I quite like. It is from a review of Rhythm and Tempo by Curt Sachs published in 1953 in Journal of Research in Music Education, written by Theodore F. Newmann:

The essence of all musical expression is that of creating a feeling of organic movement. And that factor, above all else, which contributes to a work’s organic unity, its total feeling, is rhythm. Rhythm is not a matter of divisions of time and accent but rather a relation of tensions—the preparation of new expectations by the resolution of former ones. It is rooted deeply in the framework of all living organisms. It permeates the very body of music—its tempo, melody, harmony, and form. Rhythm is, in fact, the most vital element in music.

I might quibble about the absolute terms in which some of this is expressed. Rather than “the essence” I might say “an essence” or “one essential part.” Despite my focus on rhythm right now, I would not say that it is “the most vital” element in music—certainly one of the most vital, and one that, defined broadly enough, must be present.

What I really like is the part about expectations. This is a powerful way of framing the theoretical background for my second mode (as per last month) of determining rhythm in music. The ebb and flow of tension, the creation of expectations—and then the fulfilling or the subverting of those expectations—is the source of the rhythm of my second sort. And this operates at every level, from a whole piece to the motion from one short note to the next. Newmann’s quote is a beautiful expression of the notion that rhythm can be derived from and described as something other than counting beats. For me, this description also establishes that the expectation-based sense of unfolding rhythm is primary. It is not just a system of departing from the rhythm created by the beat structure. If anything it is the deeper, more essential source of rhythm.

How is it possible to reconcile the simultaneous existence of these two radically different ways of defining, projecting, and perceiving rhythm in one piece of music? I do not know if I have a thorough or systematic answer to that. Both forces being discussed here are real, and therefore they do coexist pretty much regardless of whether we know why. Not having an answer to how or why that works may reflect something about how flexible it is in actual practice. It may also relate to the phenomenon of people responding differently as listeners to the choices made by performers. After all, expectation is a listener’s experience. And if a piece or passage of music creates and then fulfills or subverts expectations, then the actual flow of that experience is very likely determined in large part by the listener’s experience, training, philosophical stance, temperament, and so on. Different listeners will hear what is being performed in a way that is literally different.

If a piece of music is ostensibly measured and structured in a regular meter, then any overt conflict between the two approaches to rhythm would take this form. The intuitive, listening-based approach might well lead to something other than playing the rhythm as written, and playing the rhythm as written might lead to ignoring the ebb and flow of tension and expectation. One axis along which a solution to this conflict might exist is that the sense of pulse is remarkably strong and resilient.

My experiment with Helmut Walcha’s recording of Sweelinck, as described in my December 2021 column, page 11, is a manifestation of this resilience. As I wrote then, my reason for testing out the literal metronome steadiness of the recording in the first place was that the performance came across to me as remarkably and inexorably steady. So it was interesting and telling that the metronome reading varied so much across the piece. I have conducted similar tests on other recorded performances. For example, about eighteen different recordings of the beginning of the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony yielded similar results. Some of my odd driving-based experiments about time have this same import.

A Chopin anecdote

There is an anecdote about Chopin that I have come across in writing twice over the years, though I cannot remember where exactly. One version framed the story around his mazurkas, the other around his waltzes. It works equally well for either, as they are in ¾ time. The point is that a friend of Chopin’s said to the composer that when he played one of his own waltzes there were four quarter notes in each measure, not the notated three. Chopin denied this. The friend made him sit down and play and kept strict track of the timing, and Chopin was indeed taking four quarter notes worth of time between bar lines. This story implies three things: that Chopin was playing very freely, holding some supposed quarter notes for as much as twice as long as they “should be” held; that there was nonetheless something that could be identified as “the quarter note;” and that Chopin himself intuitively accepted what he was doing as being a manifestation of three quarter notes per measure.

It seems also possible that if the intuitive, expectation-based approach to rhythm is applied thoughtfully in a way that is really derived from careful, involved listening, then it might enhance the sense of regular pulse while being less regular than a purely beat-based rhythm would be. If the sense of momentum that is associated with the concept of regular accent-based meter is as robust and as difficult to destroy as I suspect, and if an expectation-based shaping of rhythm can make the ebb and flow of intensity the most compelling that it can be, then it could make sense that the latter approach would make the accentuation patterns that define regular meter more rather than less convincing.

The actual results of the two approaches do not always have to be very different from one another. For some performers and listeners experiencing repertoire, the listening-based intuitive approach might well yield results that are quite regular in their actual rhythms.

In musing a bit about how to introduce this idea to students, I start by quoting something that I wrote in my column from April 2015, page 17:

I often suggest to students the following practice tool. Once they have identified a spot where they want to make a rhythmic gesture (usually of the sort that might be described as “rubato”) they practice that gesture, in the privacy of the studio, in as exaggerated a manner as possible: take the risk of executing a gesture that is utterly tasteless, mannered, “schmaltzy.” This is to counter the fact that we usually only visit the gestures that we think we want to make “from below” (so to speak), that is, only compared to and judged in comparison to not making such a gesture, or to a modest version of the gesture. This stems from and then reinforces a philosophy that teaches a kind of reluctance about such gestures. If you hear a rhythmic inflection from both sides, you get a different sense of exactly how it might be effective.

When I wrote the above, I invoked the word “rubato.” Now I would be inclined to avoid that, since it is a term that relates the flow of rhythm to the underlying regular meter. The relationship is real, but I would want to encourage the student to move away from considering that relationship to be primary or of overriding importance. In applying this practice suggestion with many students over many years I have observed that almost everyone finds it easy to identify spots where they intuitively want to create rhythmic gestures that are not identical to what a strict reading of the metric notation would suggest. While these gestures fluctuate in number from piece to piece, it is more common for the student to believe that their interpretation of some of them are wrong.

Experimenting with notable works

As an experiment, try giving a rhythmic inflection different degrees of magnitude—including the highly exaggerated, but not limited to that—and try to experience and analyze what is happening with each different shape. For example, consider the very beginning of J. S. Bach’s Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565. Play the opening mordent and then listen for when you think that the following scale passage “wants” to come in. Try taking longer next time. What has changed? Have you lost the moment when the impact would have been greatest, or does the added suspense increase the impact? Does it sound like you caught a sort of wave of expectation when you initiated the scale passage, or did you miss it? If you missed it, could there be another one coming up, different yet also fulfilling?

Questions like these are easy to highlight with a moment in an intrinsically free passage like this, but they are potentially present all the time. Returning to the pieces that I invoked at the beginning of this series of columns, I would say that the first barline in the opening of the first movement of Widor’s Sixth Symphony is also a place where the dynamic of this sort of rhythm is clear. A student can play it metronomically and then try various timings, listening as closely and open-mindedly as possible. What is gained or lost by various different timing possibilities? What does the timing at that barline imply or suggest or even necessitate about playing the second measure itself? Would the answers be different if this were not the opening of the piece? Is the answer to that question different if we stipulate either that it was a recapitulation or, on the other hand, that it was a new idea introduced in mid-piece? Does the use of this motif later in the movement as written affect choices here at the beginning?

It is interesting to listen for intuition-based timing of quick notes within a texture. In Example 1, in this Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331, how can we determine exactly where to play the sixteenth notes?

My own approach to figuring this out would be to leave those notes out at first, making the rhythm of the first half of each of the first two measures the same as the rhythm of the second half. I would play this a few times, just like that, as if it were the piece. Then I would play it a few times hearing the sixteenth notes in my head, but not playing them and then add those notes back. I often do not know and cannot seem to determine as a matter of counting and calculation where I want to place short notes after dotted notes. To use a piece I have played a lot, I have no idea exactly what ratio I give to the pervasive dotted rhythms in Bach’s Prelude in E-flat Major, BWV 552i. I can only hear whether they do or do not seem to do the right sort of job in creating momentum from one long note to the next.

When one asks a student to listen carefully to every moment in a passage and to discern as much as they can about rhythm through that listening, interesting things happen. Some of these are advantages while others are pitfalls. One great advantage is that this tends to keep the student from rushing. Not everyone has a tendency to rush, but most of us do at least some of the time. One reason for rushing is that we pay the most attention to the things that we must do physically—and for organ and harpsichord that means initiating the notes and releasing them. As soon as one note is safely played, there is some pull toward either the moment of release or the moment of initiating the next note. The sort of listening that I am describing here focuses the attention as much on the middle of a note as on the beginning and end.

Listening this way tends to lead to slower playing. That has been true for me, to a fault some of the time, though it is a perfectly natural outcome of this approach. The way to counter this tendency is through awareness and honesty. This listening approach is both a practice technique and something to bear in mind while actually performing. As with any other sort of practice, it is important and good to utilize it at a slow tempo, but as with any slow practice, it should be ramped up to the desired tempo in a systematic way.

It is natural to prepare for the moment when you believe the next note should occur and then play that note. This makes that moment in the music late by definition and leads to slow playing. It is probably acceptable for this to happen early in practicing a passage, as long as you are aware of it and work on evening it out as you get to know the music better. I have also been guilty of this in performance, not recognizing it clearly enough in practicing, and therefore not working to smooth out the process.

This is analogous to something that can happen when using a metronome, when one listens for the metronome beat and then plays the note. Something like this can also happen with releases. If you hear the instant at which you want to release a note and then release it, the release is late. A release that is executed by pushing off—down, then up—will also be late if the downstroke is timed to the desired moment of release. There is a sort of leap of faith when executing something, whether the timing of the beginning of a note, as we are discussing here, or of the end, without waiting to confirm that the looked-for time has arrived.

A few miscellaneous points

What is the meaning of any given note value? We know the answer: a quarter note is equal to two eighth notes or to half a half note; a whole note is four quarter notes, etc. But here’s another definition: a quarter note (or whatever note value) is whatever a listener will hear or accept as a quarter note. This relates directly to the Chopin story above.

Watching a TV game show recently, I heard the host say to a contestant, “Time is ticking away!” Why? Why is time defined as made up of discrete entities, ticks of a clock? Is it just because old clock technologies produced audible ticking? Or is there really something more fundamental about time that requires us to think that way? This vignette from a fraught moment in a game reminds us that thinking of time as ticking tends to create a sense of impatience or even panic.

The beating of the heart is sometimes evoked as a possible source for the notion of beats in music. This makes sense because the heart does beat fairly regularly in the absence of a medical issue. That beating is audible to the one whose heart it is, though not usually in a way that rises to the level of conscious awareness. If you quiet the outside world, you will easily hear your heart beating. But no heart beats as absolutely steadily as the beat we hear from a metronome. If the heart is a model for musical beats, maybe it should confer some flexibility onto those beats. If the heart is the model for a beat-derived sense of musical rhythm, breathing should be the model for a sense of rhythm based on expectation and fulfillment.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Katelyn Emerson is a member of The Diapason’s inaugural 20 Under 30 (2015) class, an honor bestowed prior to receiving her undergraduate degrees from Oberlin. She had already earned top prizes in numerous competitions in the United States, France, and Russia. She teaches in her private studio and performs nationally and internationally. Katelyn Emerson is represented in North America by Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc.

Katelyn, what were some of the first instruments you played? What led you to prefer the organ?

Growing up, I was drawn to voice, piano, flute, and organ. Singing was integral to my childhood as my whole family sang in a church choir and my older brother, Andrew, and I both sang in the Sandpipers Seacoast Children’s Chorus, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

When Andrew turned ten, he began piano lessons. Naturally, as a six-year-old enamored with everything he was doing, I began to sightread through his piano music, and my parents sought a piano teacher to spare them from the cacophony coming from the keyboard—and so that I wouldn’t learn bad habits. 

Four years later, all I wanted for my birthday was flute lessons as I had watched my mother play and loved the sound of the instrument. Flute and voice ultimately allowed me to join both local and all-state youth symphonies and choruses. 

Dianne Dean, director of the Sandpipers Chorus, first introduced me to the possibility of playing the organ. I had plunked out a hymn or two at my parents’ church but thought this imposing instrument out of reach for a small girl. However, Dianne had been instrumental in founding the Young Organists’ Collaborative, an organization that introduces young people to the pipe organ and funds their early studies. She encouraged me to audition for a scholarship, and upon receiving it, I studied piano, flute, and organ through high school.

The “lightning bolt” moment was during the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, opus 78, of Camille Saint-Saëns. I was principal flutist of the Portland (Maine) Youth Symphony Orchestra, playing at the heart of the ensemble while my then organ teacher, Ray Cornils, played the Kotzschmar organ in Merrill Auditorium. There had been no time to rehearse with the organ prior to the concert, so those brilliant C-major chords of the final movement came as a complete shock. I realized the organ could be all the musical instruments I loved—and that it could even keep pace with a full symphony orchestra! This could be my instrument.

Tell us about your experience with the Young Organists’ Collaborative.

The Young Organists’ Collaborative (YOC) was founded in 2001 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a new Létourneau organ was installed in Saint John’s Episcopal Church. When Bishop Douglas E. Theuner came to bless the instrument, he donated $1,000 seed money with the charge to find a way to bring young people to play the pipe organ. Chosen students received a year’s worth of lessons and a small stipend for shoes or scores. Today, students come from around the seacoast—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.—and are paired with an approved local teacher who can help find practice spaces. They are required to play at the end-of-year recital and are invited to take part in a masterclass with a professional organist partway through the year. The YOC can fund up to three years of study and offers additional scholarship competitions.

I received one of these scholarships in 2005 and began studies with Abbey Hallberg Siegfried, who worked at Saint John’s. When she went on maternity leave a year later, Abbey connected me with Ray Cornils, municipal organist of Portland, Maine, whose teaching included practice techniques, patience, and good humor that form the foundation of my playing and teaching. 

When and where did you give your first recital? What did you play?

It’s difficult to recall my first recital! I do remember my first organ masterclass vividly, when I had only been studying for about six months. This class, sponsored by the YOC, was with Ray Cornils, whom I was meeting for the first time. I played the “Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major” from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues attributed to Bach. After I played through the work in its entirety, Ray quietly asked if I realized which pedal note I had missed in the prelude. While I can’t remember now which note it was, I do remember him guiding me through the process of identifying the reason for the mistake. That detective work set the standard for how I problem-solve in my own practice and how I work with my students to do the same.

You earned your degrees at Oberlin and subsequently studied in France and Germany. How did each of these experiences form you?

During my first semester at Oberlin, my assigned teacher, James David Christie, went on sabbatical. While usually a cause for chagrin, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck: he swapped positions with Olivier Latry. 

I have always learned repertoire quickly, but Professor Latry’s demands put me into high gear. At least one new piece each week was expected, which meant that I had expended the music I had prepared over the summer halfway through the semester. After panic-learning Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain in five days, I finally mastered “the back burner”; with two dozen or so pieces in progress at once, each at a different stage of learning, a new one would hit the “lesson-ready” point just at the right moment. Professor Latry also expanded my arsenal of practice techniques, and I would credit nearly all of my inherited practice methods to him and Ray Cornils.

Professor Christie’s preferred pedagogical approach was almost perfectly opposite: rather than covering new music every week, he preferred a lengthier study of style, working through a half-dozen pieces over the course of a semester to develop deeper understanding that could be applied to other music of that genre. I have grown to appreciate this more than I did as a teenager and to balance learning notes quickly with understanding and translating the music. 

My love affair with all things French had begun only two years before university, and fortunately additional academic scholarship was available if I pursued the double degree program at Oberlin (a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music after five years), so French language and literature was the natural choice. I remember asking Professor Latry about studies at the Conservatoire de Paris within our first few lessons together, likely to his amusement!

My first solo trip abroad was in 2011, between my freshman and sophomore years, for the last iteration of the Summer Institute for French Organ Studies, led by Jesse Eschbach and Gene Bedient. Aided by a scholarship, I traveled to Poitiers and then Épernay, wondering if I could handle being alone abroad. Wandering the cobblestones of Poitiers, reveling in that 1787 Clicquot, and then the 1869 Cavaillé-Coll of Église Notre-Dame in Épernay, and getting to know the other students from Indiana, Utah, and Canada, I discovered that I thrived on travel. 

During my sophomore year at Oberlin, Marie-Louise Langlais came to teach. In contrast to Professor Christie’s detail-oriented teaching, Madame Langlais emphasized beautiful broad lines, Wagnerian long phrases, and propelling the music forwards no matter what.

At Oberlin, one of my most impactful teachers was not an organ professor. David Breitman remains head of the historical performance department and teaches fortepiano. After I carelessly ran through a Mozart sonata in one of my first fortepiano lessons, I remember him asking, “Now, this is an opera. Tell me about the first character. What else was Mozart working on while composing this?” Ray Cornils had planted the first seeds of exploring musical character in my mind (“If you met this piece walking down the street, what would it look like? How would she feel? Where would he be going?”), but I hadn’t applied this inquisitive curiosity more broadly. Professor Breitman’s similarly Socratic method of teaching was a continuation of Ray’s. Neither teacher ever dictated interpretation. Instead, they posed questions that led a student to make informed decisions and arrive at possible conclusions themselves through a contextualization and personification of music that has become a cornerstone of my playing and pedagogy. 

The formative experiences and broad education I received from Oberlin continued to feed my curiosity. I took classes in psychology, astronomy, anthropology, rhetoric, French literature, and more. 

Upon graduating, I won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Toulouse. I documented a fraction of that year in France on my blog (katelynemerson.wordpress.com), but spent most of it on road trips to see untouched instruments in the countryside, locked into Saint-Sernin at night, scrambling for practice time, being clapped at because nobody had mentioned a noon Mass, stopping by the marché for bread and a bottle of wine for a picnic, and showing up at the Conservatoire to discover there was another strike and it was closed. Life had a different pace. Concerts were a train ride away, I performed on instruments sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightful, and I met brilliant colleagues and lifelong friends. 

My teachers in Toulouse, Michel Bouvard and Jan Willem Jansen, once again revealed how contrasting teaching styles can enrich study. With Michel Bouvard, I delved into the French Romantic, allowing the instruments to inform how the repertoire can really be played. His relaxed technique and unpretentious approach to this music gave it space to sing. Jan Willem Jansen had extraordinary attention to detail. After hearing me play the “Allein Gott” trio from the Clavierübung, he rightfully informed me that the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes of measure 27 had rushed. I doubt my ears will ever be so attuned to proportion, but I still strive for it nonetheless!

As my year in France concluded and I prepared to pursue further graduate studies, I was offered the associate organist and choirmaster position at the Church of the Advent in Boston, which I simply couldn’t turn down. I had worked with music director Mark Dwyer for several months while at Oberlin and was in awe of the program, liturgy, and choirs. Mark remains a dear friend, colleague, and teacher, and his attention to detail emphasized the importance of every part of music—from note to silence. 

The itch to live abroad is difficult to scratch, so I’m particularly grateful to make a living based on travel! Having heard that Ludger Lohmann would retire in 2020, I applied for a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD) to pursue the Master Orgel at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. It broke my heart to leave Boston but I looked forward to two years in Germany.

Navigating life in France had been fairly easy given my comfort with the language. I had enough German to be dangerous—enough so that people assumed I understood. Thankfully, I avoided extreme disaster, realized the meaning of halb zwei in time not to miss my lessons, and discovered the delicacies of southern German cuisine. Lessons with Ludger perfectly balanced churning through new repertoire, exploring historical context, and receiving a list of sources (often primary) to consult. When the pandemic disrupted studies, we met at his beautiful home on the border of Switzerland to indulge in cake and then play and discuss Reger on the three-manual tracker in his living room.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have mentors, human and instrumental, that have each shared perspectives and ideas for ways to approach both music and life. This is but a small sample of those who have shaped my understanding, and I hope those not mentioned will still feel my appreciation and forgive the oversight, due solely to lack of space.

How has your knowledge of foreign languages and your living abroad given you insights into the music of those countries’ composers?

Music is inevitably tied to the social, historical, and cultural context in which it was conceived, even while its nature as organized sound allows it to have meaning outside a single context. My understanding of different languages and sensitivity to ways of comportment have helped me to get to know people all over the world, and I continually strive to connect with and understand them better. As an interpreter, I try to delve into the composer’s influences as well as my own, linking both to the present listeners as we undertake the aural tour of emotive depth and structure that is music performance. To do this, I strive to learn as much as I can of the time, place, and people that surrounded the music’s conception to make interpretative decisions that both link and are drawn from the past and present. The more I learn and study, the richer and more complex these relationships become, which results in further exploration and endless excitement!

Tell us about your recordings—those already made, and those planned for the future.

I have released two recordings on the Pro Organo label, working with Fred Hohman. The first of these, part of the prize package from the American Guild of Organists’ 2016 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, was recorded on the glorious 1935–1936 Aeolian-Skinner at the Church of the Advent in Boston where I was working. These winners’ CDs are typically variety programs, so I sought to showcase how this liturgical instrument can play a variety of repertoire brilliantly, with music by Bruhns, J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, François Couperin, Alain, Vierne, Tournemire, Thierry Escaich, and Howells. The album title, Evocations, comes from Escaich’s Évocation III (this was its first CD recording). Two years later, Andover Organ Company approached me about a new recording on their magnum opus, Opus 114, at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in honor of their company’s seventieth anniversary. For this CD, Inspirations, I played Rachel Laurin’s Finale, opus 78 (this was the first recording), Horatio Parker, Rheinberger, Buxtehude, Bairstow, de Grigny, Langlais, and Duruflé.

Over the last two years, recording has become more essential than ever. I now have my own video and audio recording equipment and, while none of it equals commercial-level recording equipment, I can use it to pre-record recitals for venues that want to “premiere” the recital on YouTube or Vimeo, particularly if they don’t have their own equipment, and I can also make recordings for my channels. I have a huge “dream list” of instruments on which I would like to record CDs and frequently tweak ideas for programs on them. One idea would juxtapose commissions of living composers with previously composed repertoire related by inspirational source or another contextual consideration—an idea that will hopefully come into being in the next few years!

Who are some of your favorite composers?

My favorite composers are those who wrote the music I’m currently playing! Similarly, the best organ in the world is the one on which I will perform next or am currently playing, and the best piece in the world is the one that’s on the music desk right now. While this might seem to be a cop-out, it’s a simple truth: we play music better when we like it—so we must like what we are working on in order to play it well.

When push comes to shove, I am happiest playing a variety of music. My music bag currently contains music by Parry, Bach, Taylor-Coleridge, Dupré, Demessieux, Reger, Sowerby, Alcock, Laurin, Duruflé, Price, Widor, Whitlock, Franck, and Scheidemann, as well as a few others.

Tell us about your teaching.

After beginning at Oberlin, I was asked to help guide incoming students as an academic ambassador, explaining the sometimes-overwhelming collegiate administration and helping them to choose courses that would feed their curiosity. I tutored French, music theory, and organ at Oberlin, and taught music theory at the local community music school.

Since graduating, I have continued teaching, both privately and in masterclass and lecture settings, holding general question-and-answer sessions that follow tangents of interest as well as structuring courses that focus on specific topics. I enjoy connecting sometimes disparate ideas and exploring possibilities, discussing why decisions can be made this way or that, and, above all, searching for the many nuanced ideas that make an individual “tick.” 

My teaching studio is loosely divided into three groups: those working on interpretation, those seeking to improve practice strategies, and those learning about injury prevention or working to recover from injury. Of course, most are tackling all three! 

Interpretation, at its core, requires working with ideas, examining options, and then seeking physical means to translate them convincingly into sound. Since we organists cannot modulate volume with touch as pianists can, nor can we swell or diminish sound via the breath of wind or the bows of string players, much of our playing is about manipulating smoke and mirrors to turn our intention into aural reality. Since we can now so easily record ourselves, I hold even greater admiration for how players listen in the moment to what is going on, and particularly for how each of my students has a different way of perceiving the sounds swirling around them. Couple this with learning about the context of the composer, their influences, the instruments they may have known, and the time and place in which the piece was composed, and we have rich, unique “readings” of the repertoire that can link to the interests of any student, all while we explore techniques to help bring that perspective to reality. 

Time is short for everybody, and practice must be as efficient as possible. Having studied with excellent teachers of practice methods and having experienced fairly limited practice time during study and travel, I continue to explore ways to break down repertoire for efficient practice. I often make a game of turning difficult sections into manageable chunks, isolating them from the context that can distract from them. Sometimes, I encourage a student to leave it in that “practice mode” for days or even weeks, which allows the subconscious mind to digest novel movement. The best part of this technique is the excitement with which a student brings me new ideas for this “game,” ideas that I can then share with others when similar sections come up!

Surveys indicate that somewhere between 60% and 90% of professional musicians in the United States have experienced some kind of performance-related musculoskeletal disorder, most often due to overuse. The enthusiasm with which the work of pedagogues such as Roberta Gary and Barbara Lister-Sink has been received, the many stories shared by colleagues and students, and both the unnatural perch on the organ bench and the similarity in how organists use their hands and upper body to that of pianists all make me suspect that this prevalence is much the same in organists.

At age fourteen, I developed bilateral tendonitis in my wrists and forearms. Giving music up was not an option, so I undertook technical retraining with Arlene Kies, late professor of piano at the University of New Hampshire. Arlene helped me to completely rebuild my technique, as I had had almost no technical training in my six years of study. Through her work and that of my mother, a certified hand therapist and occupational ergonomist, I regained my ability to make music and developed a deep respect for my body. By paying attention to its abilities and limitations, I overcame many flare-ups throughout the next decade (including several during competitions). 

This firsthand experience with how playing and practice techniques can couple with contributing factors for tragic consequences inspired me to deepen my understanding of these complex issues so I can work with musicians, particularly organists, to prevent injury and, when injury happens, collaborate with the individual and their medical specialists to work towards recovery. We discuss healthier practice techniques that utilize mental involvement to balance out physical repetition that can lead to overuse, review postural considerations, and discuss ways to give whatever part of the body that is most at risk a little relief, whether avoiding using force when opening jars or cans or making small changes to computer and office workstations. If a student is experiencing pain or discomfort or is recovering from an injury, I always strongly recommend that they work with a medical professional for treatment in addition to exploring adjustments at their instrument.

Being a teacher and being a student go hand in hand. We teach ourselves while in the practice room, but the added variable of joining another person on their journey of learning means that we are continually exposed to different vantage points and ideas. 

How have things been for you during the time of covid?

In spring of 2020, I was based in Germany, but, when rumors that international borders might close began to proliferate, I was on tour in the United States. Fortunately, I made it back to Baden-Württemberg just a few days before flights were grounded. Despite the restrictions, I was able to complete my final semester of my master’s study, performing a program of Froberger, Messiaen, and Reger to an audience of fourteen (including the jury) in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule’s concert hall. That summer was spent waiting and then moving quickly as restrictions changed, but my husband, David Brown, who then worked for Glatter-Götz Orgelbau while I completed my studies, and I managed to return to the United States in September 2020 so he could resume work at Buzard Pipe Organ Builders.

Many people I have spoken with have described challenging months, yet they have almost always also shared silver linings like cherishing time with family and friends or pursuing new projects. My 2020 and 2021 were the same: over seventy concerts were postponed (incredibly, very few canceled entirely), which broke my heart, but my time was filled with writing articles, teaching in person and over Zoom (which I had been doing while traveling, even before 2020!), and learning new repertoire. I also took a course in occupational ergonomics to support my teaching of injury prevention. The world felt like it was on hold for so long, but hope was always on the horizon with wonderful events scheduled for the future—many of which are taking place now! 

What are some of your hopes and plans for the future?

We live in such an exciting time. No previous generation has had so much information at their fingertips, just a click away. The work of thousands of previous performers and researchers—and the life experiences of millions of human beings—is there for our perusal and for us to build on. 

It is incredibly easy to pour through stacks of music and literature, both physically and online, and I’m constantly noting repertoire that I want to learn and share with people. Including some of this less-familiar music in programs requires that I show why this music matters and why audiences should care about it. Without knowing the context or inspiration of a particular piece, how could a listener attending a concert after a busy workday be expected to respond to it? They often have nothing to hold onto, particularly with a longer or more esoteric work, so why should they come back to hear more? Highly aware of this, I seek to share my passion for each piece, proposing some ways through which to relate to it. Connecting a particular piece of music with the heart of the listener has become one of my highest performance priorities.

I would also like to help to evolve the definitions of success for us musicians and organists. I have spoken with so many who did not experience their “big break” before age thirty and who desperately strive to feel successful. We are so often told what success should look like that we can no longer hear our internal voice showing us how our unique skills could create something quite different. This leads to discouragement, depression, and sometimes a heartbreaking lack of self-compassion. I tackle this with my students and work with musicians in all stages of life to help curate their unique careers and pursue whatever they hope to achieve. My own path has been rather unusual, with several gap years that opened Europe and Asia for performance and study, and with my primary income from performing and teaching. The latter is integral to who I am as a person and a musician, as is writing articles that continue conversations about a diverse range of ideas.

While I don’t yet have the answer to this challenge, I try to work with my students and colleagues to explore ways to find our place in a world large and varied enough for all of us. We all may play the pipe organ, but our unique backgrounds—culture, language, family, and everything else—cause us to approach life and this instrument so vastly differently that each of us have the potential to fill a gap that the field didn’t even know was there.

It just takes listening.

Thank you, Katelyn!

Katelyn Emerson’s website: katelynemerson.com