Organ Method XX

This continues without a break from last month’s column. (In fact, it begins with a repetition of the last paragraph of that column, for continuity).

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]; his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com.

After you have completed this process with the passage that you have chosen, move on to the next increment of the piece and do the same thing. While you are working in an intense way on this next passage you should continue playing through the passage that you have already learned. In this way you can build up an entire piece. Note that it is normal for different sections of a piece to be at different tempos during the learning process. If the naturally comfortable tempo for one section is faster at a particular moment in time than the naturally comfortable tempo for another section, then, if you wish to play those sections continuously with one another, you have to choose the slower tempo. (This only applies if the two passages are adjacent in the piece). It is all right for a passage to be unnecessarily slow; it is not all right for a passage to be inappropriately fast.

There is a preliminary exercise—or set of exercises—that you can do to become accustomed to using the hands and feet together, before you start to work in the manner described above on your first piece or passage for hands and feet together:

1) Choose a short piece or passage for manuals only that you already know and with which you feel very comfortable. Play through this piece or passage a couple of times so that it is fresh in your mind.

2) Start this piece again, but as you do so, play one pedal key with one foot, but silently—no pedal stops on at all. Release this pedal key at the end of the piece. Then do the same thing, but playing a silent pedal note with the other foot.

3) Start the piece again, and play a silent pedal note at the beginning. At some point approximately halfway through the piece, switch to a silent pedal note in the other foot. Then do this again with the feet in the other order. The timing of the switch from one foot to the other should be planned in advance. It doesn’t matter when you do it, but you should not be worrying about when you should do it while you are playing.

4) Next, play the piece changing from a note in one foot to a note in the other foot several times during the piece (all still silent). Again, these changes should be planned in advance, perhaps according to a regular rhythm or pattern: in any case, in such a way that you don’t have to think very much about them as they happen.

The purpose of this is to give yourself practice with the physical feeling of playing keys with your feet while playing on the manuals, without the difficulty of actually negotiating a pedal line and without the distraction of the pedal sound. It can be surprising that it can be more challenging to play a piece that you know well with one foot holding down a pedal key than it is to play that piece with both feet resting under the bench. 

You can also try this same exercise with a very quiet pedal stop on: ideally something so quiet that it is almost not there, but in any case the quietest stop that you have. (This is often a soft 16′ stop all by itself.) This adds the distraction of sound, without requiring you (yet) to pay any particular attention to what you are actually doing with your feet. 

The approach to actually practicing hands and feet together outlined above (from last month’s column) will work well with any piece, any sort of music. It is of course crucial that you know absolutely for certain what the distribution of notes between the two hands is, before you attempt to practice each hand with pedal. (It is also crucial to know this when you work on learning a manuals-only piece. When a pedal part is involved the overall complexity goes up, and the importance of being certain about all of the component parts is heightened.) The simplest or most straightforward sort of piece with which to begin practicing hands and feet together is a trio: that is, a piece in which each hand plays one line (not chords and not more than one voice within the hand) and in which the pedal line is also one voice. This short piece by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (Example 1) is a good example among many.

It can be practiced with the hands on one keyboard or on two. If you play it on two manuals, make sure that you use a registration in which the two hands balance well—that is, that neither drowns the other out, and that they are different enough that the overall effect is interesting. The pedal line can have its own sound altogether, or can, as is often useful especially on smaller organs, have a sound which is created in part by coupling. (Notice that, in this piece, if the pedal part is using stops that are also part of the left hand sound, then on the second beat of the third measure, the pedal is taking over a note that the left hand has been playing. It is important not to let the sound of this confuse you when you put those parts together). 

A number of fingerings and pedaling are possible. Two pedalings are shown in Examples 2 and 3. (And you can of course create one of your own.) This short piece is from Lemmens’s École d’Orgue (1862), which includes many other such useful pieces. 

Bach’s setting of the chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir from the Orgelbüchlein is a longer and more intricate piece; it is also very suitable for working on combining voices in a trio texture. Example 4 shows the opening of the piece.

The texture remains the same throughout: the eighth-note line in the pedal, evocative perhaps of a continuo line played by a stringed instrument, the largely chord-derived sixteenth-note middle voice, and the slower ornamented chorale melody in the soprano voice. The piece presents interesting musical and technical questions overall, about how to render the groupings suggested by the slurs, what sort of articulation to apply to the pedal line (bowed strings as an inspiration, or pizzicato? or perhaps not a stringed instrument after all), how to create a pedaling for the repeated notes that make up so much of the pedal line, and so on. You will come up with solutions to these questions as you practice each separate line. You must be very secure with the notes of each line before you work on putting any two lines together. However, you also have to be comfortable enough with your approach to some of these basic interpretive matters—articulations, phrasings, and so on, that you need not worry about them as you are putting complex lines together carefully. However, it is a true and inevitable part of learning music that you will have to be open to changing at least the subtleties of some of these choices as you get to know the piece better and specifically as you hear how the separate parts interact with one another. You don’t have to force these changes, but they are likely to come.

As always, there is no reason to require that the whole piece be ready to put together before you start putting any of it together, nor is there any reason to start the process of putting the piece together with the beginning and go to the end. In fact, it is important to remember that you can start putting together any passages from this (or any other) piece as soon as they are ready, based on your progress in learning the separate parts. The longer the piece, the more of an issue this will become. In this instance, measure 3—in which the motion of the pedal line is the most straightforward of any in the piece—might be the first measure in which you want to try to combine the pedal with one and then the other of the manual parts. Measures 10–12 in which the pedal line is consistently moving by step might be next. This should be shaped by your own experience as you work on the separate lines. This is a piece that must be worked on patiently, as there is a lot going on. (There are as many pedal notes in two measures of Ich ruf’ zu dir as there are in the whole Lemmens piece above). It is probably appropriate to work on combining parts in this piece in units of at the very most two measures. It is absolutely fine, and might well be best for parts of the piece, to work in units as small as the half measure.

In pieces in which the manuals have a texture of more than two voices—either more complex counterpoint or chord-based or other non-contrapuntal textures—the process of putting hands and feet together is exactly the same as what we have been discussing. The difference (not really a difference) is that you must be especially honest with yourself about whether each of the more complex manual parts is comfortably learned before you start putting it together with other parts. Pieces of this sort make up most of the organ repertoire. There are a host of different particular textures possible, some of which are:

1) a single voice in one hand and chords in the other hand;

2) a single voice in one hand and two or more voice counterpoint in the other hand;

3) three contrapuntal voices in the hands, the middle of which migrates between the two hands;

4) miscellaneous changing non-contrapuntal texture.

Brief excerpts illustrate different textures. Example 5, from the Fugue à 5 of de Grigny’s Livre d’Orgue, is a passage with two voices in each hand and one in the pedal. This is meant to be played on two manuals and pedal, as the manual parts overlap considerably.

Example 6 is a passage from Résignation from the Pièces de fantaisie by Louis Vierne. Here the manuals have three voices, meant to be played together on one manual. The middle voice would most comfortably be shared between the hands. Since there is no one correct way to do this—it will naturally work out differently from one player to another—it is especially important to work out your own hand choices and fingering and practice each hand thoroughly before beginning to combine hands and feet.

Example 7 is from Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf by Bach—from the Orgelbüchlein. In this case the left hand has one (quite virtuosic) line, and the right hand has a texture which, like a typical hymn, is simultaneously contrapuntal and chordal.

This is again a piece that must be played on two separate manuals (and pedal) since the swooping tenor voice in the left hand often occupies the same space as the right hand voices/chords.

Hymns that are presented in the traditional manner—four-voice arrangements with the hymn tune in the soprano voice and each of the other voices following that voice rhythmically and supporting it harmonically—provide good material for practicing the art of playing hands and feet together. The process is the same as that described above. For convenience and simplicity in using hymns for this purpose, it is perfectly all right to assume that the tenor voice, printed as the upper line in the lower staff, constitutes the left hand part, and that the soprano and alto voices, printed together in the upper staff constitute the right hand part. The bass line is the pedal part. Playing the three pairs of component parts of many hymns—after going though the individual parts enough to learn them, and without even necessarily putting all the parts together—is good drill for combining hands and feet in general.

(In some hymns there are notes in the alto part that could more conveniently be played in the left hand, but it is not important to work that out in order to use hymns as practice material at this stage. If the fingering of a hymn that you are looking at appears particularly awkward, you can move on to a different one. Of course, for this purpose we are ignoring the notion of “soloing out” the hymn tune, or rearranging the notes of the hymn in any other way).

The left hand and pedal parts of the version of the Old Hundredth that we have looked at before, written out as separate lines, are shown in Example 8. 

You might or might not find it useful to write out the lower two voices of a few hymns this way. It is entirely possible to read the same information off the “normal” way of printing out the hymn, however if at first you find that at all confusing or if it seems less obvious to follow the two separate voices that way, you might find it useful to write those voices out explicitly for the first few hymns that you look at.

If you use hymns as practice material for the overall project of learning to play with hands and feet together, you will also become increasingly comfortable with the process of playing hymns. There is nothing wrong with using hymns or any other music just as practice material. For example, if you wish to go through a hymnal or a selection of any repertoire simply working on the left hand and pedal aspect of the pieces, without progressing to learning the entire pieces, this can be fine practice. You can return to the pieces as a whole another time if you wish. 

This month’s column continues the discussion of learning to play more than one note or voice in each hand, specifically expanding it to music in which the multiple-note texture is that of counterpoint. Playing multiple independent voices in one hand is a practice that many players, most particularly beginning students or aspiring players, find intimidating. As always, part of my own aim in teaching this aspect of playing, or in presenting it in written form, is to demystify it and make it seem less scary, though of course without in any way “dumbing it down” or leading students to believe that it can be achieved trivially or without plenty of study. This is an area in which I would most appreciate feedback from Diapason readers. I begin with a discussion of the concept and move on to exercises and practice suggestions.

The distinction between multiple-note textures that are chords and multiple-note textures that are voices is one that is meaningful and important, but not always cut-and-dried. In the setting of the Old Hundredth discussed last month (see October issue, pp. 18–19), there are four voices: each voice might well be sung as a separate melody by members of a choir or of a congregation. For purposes of practicing at the organ, and in particular becoming accustomed to playing more than one note in each hand, it is possible to think of the piece as being written mostly in chords without misrepresenting it, because the voices are mostly in the same rhythm as one another. Voices (in keyboard pieces) that sound together and that are in the same rhythm as one another are, in effect, simultaneously voices and chords. Voices that differ from one another in rhythm are clearly voices as such. If the number of notes in the texture varies a lot, then it is probably a sort of hybrid. At this stage you should feel free just to keep these notions in the back of your mind. You do not have to define the texture of any passage that you are working on: just notice its characteristics. You will perhaps explore these definitions and distinction further, from a theoretical point of view, later on. The distinctions are also somewhat circular, in a way that is artistically meaningful: that is, you as a player can influence, by how you play, the listener’s sense of what is counterpoint and what is chordal texture, when, because of the nature of the writing, both are possibilities.

In fact, the last line of the Old Hundredth can be used to illustrate the process of practicing separate voices—that is, in a texture in which there clearly are independent voices—that fall in one hand. (The last line is best for this because in that line the rhythm does vary a little bit from one voice to another.) This process is, as mentioned above, mostly one of training the ears: that is, training the ears to follow the separate voices as melodies while playing them together (Example 1). (Note that in this example the voices are differentiated from one another by the direction of the note stems. Most publishers use this technique when it is appropriate to the music.)

Start with the notes—the two voices—in the upper (treble) staff. Work out a fingering for just the upper voice, in the right hand. Since the notes of this voice, taken by itself, span a fifth, the fingering could be as simple as the five fingers over the five notes. This would give (in order) 5-3-1-2-4-3-2-1. Now work out a left-hand fingering for the lower of these two voices. (Yes: you will, when putting the voices together, play them both in the right hand. This left-hand fingering is temporary.) This line covers a span of only three notes, and there are many possible fingerings. One would be 1-2-3-2-1-2-1-2-3. Practice each of these lines separately a little bit: until each one seems solid. (Each of these lines is, in itself, fairly simple, but should still be practiced enough to become really well learned.) 

Now put the two voices together—one in each hand, as you have practiced—on two manuals. This makes the notion of the independence of these voices as concrete a physical reality as it can be, and therefore makes it easy and intuitive for your ears to follow it. At first, choose sounds that are similar in volume but different in character. Then, after you have done this a few times, try sounds that are very different in volume: one of them almost, but not quite, drowning out the other. Then play the two voices together on one manual—still in two hands.

Next, go back to playing the entire two-voice texture together in the right hand, using the fingering that you worked out when you worked on this hymn earlier (October, p. 19). After the experience of separating the two voices between the hands, you should be able to hear the voices independently as you play them together—or at least to be able to begin to do so.

Now follow this same procedure with the two lower voices—those that will end up being played together in the left hand. A right-hand fingering for the upper of these two voices (the tenor voice) might be as follows: 4-3-4-3-2-4-3-4. A left-hand fingering for the lower (bass) voice might be 2-1-3-1-5-3-2-1-5. Of course, other fingerings are possible; work out fingerings that seem comfortable to you. After you have learned each line, and tried out various keyboard and sound combinations for playing the two voices together in separate hands, put them back together in the left hand, again using the fingering that you worked out earlier.

At this stage of putting two voices back together in one hand after practicing them (temporarily) in separate hands, you can try to focus your listening on one of the voices at a time, while playing both. In doing this, you may notice that it is easier to listen consciously to one of the voices than to the other, or that focusing on one of the voices tends to make the playing easier while focusing on the other makes it harder. You can then “zoom out” so to speak, and listen to both voices while playing them both. You should also go back and forth: after you have put the two voices back together in one hand, separate them again and play through them in two hands a few times. 

It is, psychologically or as a matter of perception, easier to hear two voices simultaneously and to follow them as separate melodies if you can feel yourself playing them with different physical entities. This sort of practice is a way of enlisting your ears in helping you to follow separate voices when, because they are together in the same hand, the are naturally pulled towards feeling like part of the same entity. 

It can also be useful to ask your teacher or another player to help you with a drill similar to this one. This involves your playing one voice while the other player plays the other voice of the two that will later be combined in one hand. This should of course be done in all of the different possible combinations. You should play one voice by itself two or three times in a row, then you should play it again while your assistant adds the other voice on a different keyboard. (Note: choose keyboards in such a way that the two of you don’t bump into each other.) Next, switch voices. Then, right away, while that experience is fresh in your ears, you should play the two voices together in one hand with the proper fingering.

Here are some further exercises and excerpts from pieces to help you get accustomed to this sort of practicing, with comments about how to approach each one (Examples 2 and 3). In these two exercises, each separate voice stays within a compass of five notes, so the fingering for the hands separated into voices is straightforward. When you re-combine the voices into one hand, feel free to keep the articulation detached if that helps the fingering to remain simple. Here is one suggested fingering for each hand, though as always others are possible (Examples 4 and 5). 

In the following examples, the two voices are more different from one another rhythmically (Examples 6 and 7). Again, neither of the separate voices spans a particularly wide compass, so the fingering and practicing of the separate voices is straightforward. In practicing the separate voices on different sounds, it is particularly interesting in this case to try registrations in which the two voices are quite different in volume, and in doing so, try to listen carefully to the one that is quieter. See what effect this has on your ability to hear the two voices independently when you put them back together in one hand on one sound.

The following is an excerpt from the Fugue in C Minor from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier by J. S. Bach (Example 8). The two voices, which are the upper two voices of a three-voice texture, pass a motive back and forth. In performance, the left hand is fully engaged with much lower notes and cannot participate in playing either of these two very active melodies. A possible fingering for the passage might begin like this (Example 9). The fingering of the individual lines, one in each hand, is straightforward, especially since the rests allow for easy repositioning of the hand. 

Since this is a lively and dance-like passage, it is interesting to try the separate voices on colorful sounds: perhaps reeds, flute combinations including mutations, and so on. Again try some combinations that make the two voices similar in volume, and others that almost drown out each voice in turn. Focus on listening to the voice that is harder to hear. When you put both voices back together in the right hand, notice that in some of the spots where the two voices are both present and moving, they are moving at the same rhythm as one another. Can you hear those spots are individual voices rather than as chords? How does that compare to the last half-measure of the excerpt? 

(There are many passages in Bach’s works both for harpsichord and for organ that provide excellent material for this sort of practice. You can browse through The Well-Tempered Clavier, both preludes and fugues, or, especially, the fugues from the various Preludes and Fugues for organ looking for appropriate passages. It is a good idea to do this sort of practicing in fairly short increments: about the length of the Bach example above.)

Here is an example for the left hand, from the Chorale-Prelude Morgenglanz der Ewigkeit from Opus 79b by Max Reger (Example 10). Each of the two voices ranges fairly far. However, each is still fairly simple to finger for one hand. (The upper voice goes high enough that it lies extremely comfortably under the fingers of the right hand). When the two voices are put together in the left hand, the fingering is challenging, especially since the composer has marked the entire piece sempre ben legato. This does not necessarily mean that all notes must always be legato. However, any convincing rendering of the legato style calls for the use of substitution, an important technique which is discussed later in this method. For purposes of using this and other similar short excerpts as part of the project of learning to hear multiple voices clearly while playing them together in one hand, it is acceptable to play the lines less fully legato than you would want to play them if you were learning the piece. (For example, using 5 on certain successive notes in the lower voice can clarify and simplify the fingering quite a lot, in a way that will be useful for a player who is not already familiar with this repertoire. The articulation that that gives might differ from what you would end up preferring if you were to learn the piece. You should experiment with different possibilities for fingering the two voices together, while working on getting to know the voices separated between the hands.) The fingering can be modified later, if necessary. In fact, just out of interest, I will use this same passage as part of the material for discussing substitution later on. ν

This discussion will continue next month, and will then segue into certain special techniques in manual playing, including substitution and playing repeated notes. After that, in the following several columns, I will deal with combining hands and feet. That will conclude the “nitty-gritty” practical aspect of the Method. It will be followed later on by discussion of registration, repertoire, and the history of the instrument.

Hand Distribution I

In the last few months, several of my students have simultaneously wanted to zero in intensely on the question of how to decide which hand should play which notes of a passage, when there is any choice. I have been known to rely on a general comment, “if it’s unclear, try out different things, and go with what is most comfortable.” It is possible that I have over-relied on this level of generality; however, there is nothing wrong with this casual approach. It is the essence of what one should do in the end. Furthermore, just leaving it at that with a student could encourage that student to develop autonomy, to think for him- or herself. 

But there are also many more specific and analytical things to say about how notes might best fall between the two hands. (In the series of columns from a few years ago that I headed “Working”—in which I examined the process of learning two particular pieces—I touched on this a little bit. Those brief discussions were tied to the specifics of certain passages, and not as theoretical or general as what I want to do here.) One of the purposes of this kind of analysis should be to widen the range of possibilities that students can see, to move the student farther from making limiting assumptions about what the choices are likely to be.

In this column and the next, I will analyze in detail my thinking about this. This analysis may seem too detailed: sort of fussy, or making too much out of something that could in fact be done efficiently through trial and error. Some students will happily take to going over these issues with this sort of fine-toothed comb—finding it interesting in the manner of a puzzle or detective story. Others will not, but will probably still learn something from doing some of it. Probably no one will go on analyzing these situations exactly like this permanently: it is a stage in learning to think about it and to develop intuition for it.

It is inadvisable to create a fingering for a passage without first deciding or knowing which hand will play which notes. However, perhaps because we talk so much about “fingering” as a crucial step—the crucial step?—in preparing a piece, students naturally want to plunge in to the actual fingering process as soon as possible. This may be one reason that students (and many players who are not students) often give more weight than is appropriate to the assumption that the upper staff is “the right-hand part” and the lower staff is “the left-hand part.” It seems to give a ready-made answer to the question of hand distribution. It would be willfully silly not to notice that there is a correlation: higher notes are more likely to be within the reach of the right hand, lower notes within the reach of the left hand. However, I think that it serves the player well to try to separate that simple logistic fact from the typography. The first principle of hand distribution, for me, should be:

Try not to think of the two manual staves as representing the two hands. Instead think of the combined staff—ten lines, eight normal spaces, one larger space in the middle, ledger lines, and so on—as representing music for your ten fingers to play in the best way possible.

Of course this—and all of what I am going to be discussing here—does not apply to music that is expressly written for two manuals.

This is just a change of attitude, but it makes a difference. Part of the difference it makes, if you really internalize it, is that there is no longer a “burden of proof” assigned to the notion of playing notes with the “other” hand. The sort of question that goes something like this—“Is it OK to play that note with the other hand?” or “Would it be all right to take that note over with the right hand?”—simply goes away. This saves time, for one thing. I have known performers to debate with themselves and take a long time to believe that it is (morally, ethically, or practically) acceptable to “switch” some note or notes to the “other” hand, when that is clearly the natural way to do it, and when the composer’s original way of writing out the music very likely didn’t have the notes divided the same way between the staves anyway! 

Analysis for hand distribution

In order to determine how to distribute the notes between the hands, there is a sort of protocol that you can follow—a series of observations to make about the passage that will help you discover  the most comfortable hand distribution for you. The way I am going to present it here is too cut-and-dried, really: in practice, all of these interact with one another and sometimes with other considerations. But these questions are a good starting place:

1) Is the manual part in (only) two voices? If so, then there should be a strong assumption that each hand will play one of those voices. This is the simplest case. It is almost not worth talking about, except that it brings us to the second great principle of hand distribution: when it is possible, ask your hands to share the work pretty much evenly. Students should be reminded not to play two voices in one hand while the other hand does nothing—at least not to do that reflexively, just because both voices are in one staff (as they might often be) or are both high or both low. Once in a while, two voices should be combined in one hand for the most practical of reasons: to free a hand up to turn a page or to manipulate stop knobs or something like that. This should only be done if the loss of ease in playing is very small. 

2) If the passage is in three voices, then realistically the issue becomes “which hand will play the middle voice?” Again, this is a better way to ask the question than “where can one hand take over the middle-voice notes that seem to belong to the other hand?” This is probably the kind of texture in which these issues actually come up the most. The questions to ask in figuring out how to distribute the notes of a middle voice between the hands are:

i) To which outer voice are these notes closer?

ii) Is one outer voice more active, busier, or just plain harder than the other? If so, then can the inner voice be grouped with the less difficult outer voice?

iii) Is the middle voice more intricate than either of the outer voices? If so, then    what can be done to make it as simple as it can be: can it be split between the    hands, for example, or grouped with the simpler of the two outer voices?

iv) Are there ornaments—especially trills—in any voice, and does it make sense to isolate ornaments into their own hand, if possible?

v) Sometimes the need to prepare a good fingering for a repeated note suggests a way to proceed.

vi) Is there anything about hand position, independent of all of the above, that suggests that the middle voice notes can be played more comfortably with one hand than the other? This often comes about because of something to do with sharps or flats. Perhaps one hand would be forced to play a raised key with an awkward finger if also called upon to play the inner voice, while the other would not run into any such trouble.

Example 1 shows the Alla Breve section of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532, beginning on the last beat of m. 16 of the piece. It provides all sorts of material for thinking about hand distribution in three-voice manual textures. The rest of this column will be taken up with a detailed analysis of parts of this section. (For simplicity, from here on I will provide examples with only the manual staves, since we are only looking at the manual writing, though there is pedal almost throughout.) In this entire 80-measure section, there is no spot at which the right hand actually cannot play both the upper voice and the middle voice—though in many spots doing it that way would create awkward fingerings and articulations that would probably not make either the player or the listeners happy; the left hand can reach both the lower and the middle voices for all but an occasional measure or half measure. Therefore this is a good passage to think about what is best, not what is necessary or inevitable.

The middle-voice f#′ on the last beat of measure 16 can be taken very easily with either hand. It is almost equidistant from the upper and lower notes, and there is nothing in particular going on: on that beat, no voice is, or is about to become, busy or intricate. So, is there a way to make the choice, other than at random? (“At random” is fine when there is no reason to prefer one over the other: this is often the case. The point is to recognize when it is not the case.) The thing that I notice about this beginning is that there are several repeated notes coming up. I would prefer to finger them with different fingers for each repetition. Of course, different hands implies different fingers, so right away it seems as though there might be some good to be derived from moving the middle voice back and forth between the hands a bit. So, if we take that f#′ with the right hand, then the left hand is free to finger the repeated d′ in the lowest voice in whatever way seems best, and then the left hand can play the repetition of the f#′. Example 2 shows one specific version fingering modeled on that idea.

And there could be others. A player who does not want to change fingers on the repeated notes, might use fingerings shown in Examples 3 and 4, or something else.

At each point over the next few measures, we see one voice being more active than the others, as shown in Example 5.

In the first half of measure 18, it is clear that the middle voice should be taken in the left hand, both because that way the more active voice is left alone in one hand (point ii above), and because the notes of the middle voice are closer to those of the lower voice (point i above). In the second half of measure 18, the situation is more complicated, since the voice that is more active than the others is the middle voice itself. The three last eighth-notes in the middle voice, c#′′–b′–a′, can be reached by either hand. Does it matter which hand plays them? The c#′′ is closer to the upper voice, and the other two notes are closer to the lower. That might suggest splitting that line that way. However, the upper voice is in itself simpler than the lower voice through that part of the measure, which would suggest just playing the eighth-notes of the middle voice in the right hand. Here personal habit or something about the shape of the player’s own hand might determine the choice: therefore it is a place to try it a number of ways and see what works.

However, that might be influenced by what is coming up. The first few notes in the middle voice of measure 19 can also be reached by either hand. However, here the choices might make more of a difference to the musical effect than in the previous measure. The second eighth-note of the measure must first  sound like it slips in and takes over the position of the e′ that is being held: that is, in such a way that it doesn’t sound like that note is being repeated in the same voice, even though as a key on the keyboard it is in fact being repeated. (This notion comes up again very soon.) Then it has to be held over into the a′ half-note, just long enough to suggest that the lower voice is still there. Furthermore, the a′ half-note itself begins a new pattern (that is, through the lens that we are using here). It begins a long passage in which the upper voice is clearly more active than the lower two voices, and should therefore be left alone in the right hand if at all possible. It is possible: beginning on that second beat of measure 19, the two lower voices fit comfortably in the left hand for the rest of this excerpt. 

So if that a′ should be in the left hand, then so should the e′ that precedes it in the middle voice. (Otherwise there would be an unnecessary and awkward hand crossing.) If the three e′s in a row will be played in the left hand, then that hand needs all the flexibility it can get, in order to come up with a fingering that creates the right flow: in particular, this is a case where changing fingers on that note is a tremendous aid in creating the non-repeated note repetition that I described above. The left hand is the most free to finger those e′s if the right hand plays the g#′. That should then also be taken into account in planning the approach from the previous measure to the g# on the first beat of this measure. 

To be continued . . . ν

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com. 

Hand Distribution II

I have suggested that beginning in the middle of measure 19 and going on for a while, it is best to take the upper voice—a somewhat wide-ranging eighth-note pattern—by itself in the right hand, and to group the other two voices—both of them slower, and occupying places in the keyboard compass very close to each other—in the left hand. This is logical and satisfies the various points that I listed last month. It also predisposes the important “hidden” repeated note at the beginning of measure 22 to work out to best advantage, with the left hand playing and discreetly releasing the on-the-beat quarter-note d′, and the right hand coming in to play the following eighth note. 

If, by any chance, it is important to the student/player to make all of the half notes and quarter notes of the lower two voices fully legato, then keeping those two voices together in the left hand throughout will require a substantial amount of substitution, which by definition makes the fingering more complex. This could to some extent undermine the gain in simplicity that comes from letting the right hand track the active upper voice unencumbered. It would be simplest to keep the lowest and middle voices in the left hand. (Also, a player whose performing style suggests keeping this passage strictly legato is probably a player who is quite adept at substitution—someone for whom it does not add much difficulty, if any.)

Example 2: Finding the middle voice

The next section is quite different. Example 2 shows that the three manual voices are for the most part doing similar things to one another.

The measure-long passage beginning at the second quarter note of measure 25 is an exception to this and has the same texture as the passage discussed above. It would be physically possible in this measure to take the middle-voice notes with either hand, but it seems clear that taking those notes in the left hand will make the playing of that measure much easier.

Throughout this passage—with no exception—both hands can reach the notes of the middle voice. The middle voice is somewhat more active than the other two—just for the record, thirty-two notes in the excerpt as it appears in the example, compared to twenty-seven for the upper voice and twenty-five for the lower. This is not enough to make a difference on its own. Active or not, it is the middle voice that can be, and perhaps should be, shared between the hands. It can’t be isolated. 

One way to approach a passage like this is to try it both ways: play the top two voices all in the right hand—probably two or three times, just to get used to the feeling; and then play the lower two voices together in the left hand, also a few times. The point of this is not to choose between those two absolutes, but to look for moments of tension. Where, in playing two voices in one hand, do you feel that it becomes awkward or difficult? If you are lucky, those spots will be complementary: places that are awkward in the right hand will seem natural in the left hand and vice versa. If this is the case, then you are very close to having found a pattern of hand distribution that will work and that will maximize comfort in playing. You can sketch out that pattern, create the specifics of the fingering, and begin to practice. You might want to change something as you go along—I will come back to that important concern below. 

In carrying out this procedure, I make a few discoveries for myself. I find it slightly awkward to reach the f#′ and the e′ in measure 24 with the right hand. I find it somewhat awkward to track the middle-voice notes beginning with the last quarter note of measure 27 and going on for about two measures with the left hand. However, I find it easier to get the c#′ at the end of measure 29 with the left hand than with the right. There are various other details. Again, this is all empirical, and it is just about me: no one else will necessarily experience the passage that way. (For one thing, my feeling for hands and fingers here inevitably bears the traces of my having played the piece for more than forty years, and of my initial encounters with the piece when I was very much a beginner, and tried to read through it and learn it without the guidance of a teacher!) However, anyone can discover a fair amount about what will work best by trying it out this way.

Here are a few more analytical or specific things to say about the passage:

1) If you take the a′ on the second quarter note of measure 23 in the right hand, expecting also to take the b′ immediately following it in the right hand, then that gesture—going from a′ to b′—involves contracting the hand. This is, all else being equal, relaxing and natural.

2) Measure 24 is perhaps an especially good place to alternate hands in the middle voice. If you play the d′ with 4 in the left hand, then the left hand can easily play the f#′ with 2, then the c#′ with 5 and the e′ with 3.

3) If you alternate in this way, then you can play from the beginning of measure 23 through the downbeat of measure 25 without changing the right hand’s position.

4) The g#′ in measure 26 will be easier for most players to take in the left hand. This is because it is far enough from the f#′′ in the right hand that the right hand must execute an uncomfortable stretch or assume an uncomfortable hand position in order to reach it.

Answers to questions about what hand distribution is the most comfortable— particularly in a case like this, where any number of things are possible—may depend in part on interpretive choices. Certainly in this passage, as I mentioned above concerning the earlier part of this section of the piece, if the player wants to make the lines truly legato, that choice will have implications for hand distribution that are different from what might apply if the notes are by and large detached. Full-fledged legato will tend to require more substitution and might in general lead to a need for more even sharing of the voices. It will be easier to finger the outer voices legato if neither hand has to track the middle voice for very long at once. (More substitution and a more even sharing of the middle voice might be alternatives to each other.) If the player wishes to keep the lines detached, a wider variety of hand distribution choices will work fluently and well. In effect, more fingers are available, since fingers that are already holding notes are nonetheless available to play the immediately following notes. Since interpretive choices can—and should—change as someone gets to know a piece better, and also just over the course of a player’s career, fingering choices and hand distribution choices have to be revisited from time to time. Even in the first stages of learning a piece, hand distribution choices might have to be revisited as the specifics of the fingering develop. This is sort of a paradox: you literally can’t create fingerings until you know which hand is going to play which notes, but you might want to make changes in your template as to which hand will play which notes based on the way the fingering works out in practice. (This is only a concern with passages like the one we are looking at now where the hand distribution choices are rather open.) There is no way around this: it is part of the process.

Example 3: Dividing the work

The next brief section of the piece is similar in principle to the opening several measures: there is an active outer voice, so if possible it is likely to be most suitable to group the other two voices in the other (in this case right) hand, as shown in Example 3.

This is true even though the two upper voices are quite spread out from one another for much of the time.  The b′ in the middle voice at the beginning of measure 34, for example, is much closer to the lower voice (left hand) notes than it is to the upper voice notes. However, it is very likely that most players would find it hard—or at least unnecessarily harder—to grab that note in the left hand, since doing so would tend to disrupt the flow of the playing of the eighth-note line. Also, of course, there are more of those “hidden” repeated notes, the playing of which can be especially effective if they are split between the hands.

Example 4: Room for questions

The next short section, shown in Example 4, is interesting. The middle voice is the active one, and here it is doing the most active thing that is represented in this Alla Breve section: outlining the chords in eighth notes, like those seen in the upper voice around measure 20 and elsewhere and in the lower voice around measure 32 and elsewhere. As in the passage found in Example 2, the middle voice is the most active, but here it is a lot more active than the outer voices. This raises several questions: which notes of that middle voice are closer to each of the outer voices? For which hand is it easier to play any given note? Is there a musical advantage to letting one hand track (so to speak) an intricate moving line, or this line in particular? Or is there a musical gain from the ease that might be created by splitting that line up? If so, how is it best to practice a fast or intricate line that moves from one hand to another? Is this an issue of its own, or is it essentially just a subset of practicing the notes as such?

Example 5: Xs and Ys

In this particular case, as shown in Example 5, clearly only the notes marked below with “x” can be reached easily by the left hand, though those marked with “y” can probably also be reached by the left hand, though less easily, for most players.

I would probably find it easiest to take the “x” notes in the left hand (possibly not the first one, f# ′) and all of the other middle-voice notes in the right hand. At each of the “x” spots, I would play the two left-hand notes with 3/1. This is predicated in part on my wanting to play the lowest line somewhat detached, and, for me at least, it clarifies and simplifies the right hand fingering quite a lot. I would also expect to play the upper voice detached, but less so. I want the freedom to close those gaps down quite a bit in response to the harmonic tension of the line. A player who wanted to make that line quite detached could more readily play all of the middle-voice eighth notes in the right hand, if that seemed desirable.

Example 6: A simple choice

The next section, shown in Example 6, is a classic case of the most active material being in an outer voice—the upper voice—and the other two voices having slower, simpler material, the notes of which are close to one another on the keyboard. There is little or no reason not to join the lower voices in the left hand throughout this example (after the first note printed here, which the left hand can’t reach).

Example 7: Upper vs. lower voice

The next several measures, as seen in Example 7, present a number of interesting questions, which can be answered a number of different ways. 

As in Example 5, the middle voice is the active and intricate one. The right hand can certainly reach all of the middle voice notes, and the left hand can reach most but not all of the measure. The difference, for purposes of thinking about hand distribution, is that the upper voice is all repeated notes. If the player wants (as I myself would) to change fingers on those notes in order to gain more control over the timing and articulation of the repetitions, then that might suggest taking some substantial number of the middle-voice notes in the left hand—though it might not make it necessary, depending on the player’s hand size and relative finger lengths. If the player does not care about changing fingers on the repeated notes or would positively prefer not to do so, then with (most likely) 5 playing all of those c′′ sharps, the remainder of the right hand is available to play the eighth-note line. This might in turn mean that on balance it makes the passage easier to free the left hand of the need to catch any of those notes and to allow it to track the quarter-note lowest voice, with its couple of fairly substantial jumps. That might in turn depend on articulation choices for the lower voice.

Next month I will continue this discussion and turn to discussing hand distribution choices in other textures. I will also discuss practice techniques for hand distribution choices that are technically sound, but musically counterintuitive. 

Hand Distribution III

Continuing our trek through the Alla Breve section of Bach’s D Major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 532—looking closely at issues involving hand distribution—we come to a brief section that is influenced by something other than the music itself:

Example 1 shows that if there were nothing else to think about, clearly there is reason not to distribute the two voices between the two hands. That is the first principle of hand distribution, after all. However, in most editions of this piece, there is a page turn right about here. Therefore, the player can gain a bit of ease with that page turn by taking all of these notes in one hand (most likely the right hand). It is entirely possible that the various editors have chosen to position these measures at a page turn in order to help out in this way. Of course, for a player who memorizes the piece this won’t matter in the long run, but it might still help during the learning process. 

This is a special case—sort of a diversion. In fact, analyzing it like this is a useful way to help a student to relax: talking about something practical and not artistically intense, but relevant. However, it is not an unreal concern, and there are other reasons for taking clusters of notes in one hand in order to deal with something else while playing. The main one is probably the act of changing stops. Even something as simple as grabbing all of the notes of the final chord of each verse of a hymn in one hand to change stops with the other is a branch of decision-making about hand distribution.

The rest of this Alla Breve section mainly presents the same issues that we have already seen, with perhaps a few twists. I will go through it all, but concisely, since it is more or less “review”. 

The next short passage (Example 2, measures 48–49) has an outer voice that is more active than the other voices. Therefore it will make sense to keep that voice by itself in one hand, for the most part. Some players may want to break up the middle voice by taking the d′ at the end of measure 48 in the right hand. There may be other modifications that could make sense, but tracking the entire middle voice in the right hand would significantly increase the difficulty of the passage.

Example 3 (measures 50–51) shows the next measure, which has an intricate middle voice. All of the notes of that voice can be reached by the right hand; however, it might make sense to take some or all of those notes that can also be reached by the left hand, to break up the physical act of combining that line with another. The candidate notes are probably the opening c#′, and the b and the a in measure 50.

The next, which is fairly lengthy, has the fast-moving figures in the upper voice. However, the two slower voices are not close enough to one another to be taken in the left hand, clearing the right hand just to track the intricate line (see Example 4, measures 52–59).

For most players, the easiest and most natural way to finger the passage will involve taking in the left hand all of the middle-voice notes that the left hand can actually reach, and taking the notes that the left hand cannot reach in the right hand. On the second quarter note of each of the odd-numbered measures, where the two higher voices come together, there is a special issue to think about. Which hand can best project to the listener the illusion that this is two notes, one of which moves away as part of the upper eighth-note line and one of which is part of the middle-voice quarter-note line? It is actually a trap in a spot like this to try to play the note with two fingers at once, one from each hand. (No one would suggest this on purpose, but students will indeed fall into doing it, probably through indecision.) The choice of hand (and finger) should be made clearly, even though it can be made either way.

For most of the next nine measures, there are no real questions to think about, either because the (manual) writing is in only two voices or because the balance of more intricate and simpler writing makes it clear. 

At measure 65 (Example 5) there is an interesting subtlety to examine. The middle voice takes over the note being held—presumably in the left hand—by the lower voice. Which hand should play the note? The left hand is right there, but with the “wrong” finger—since whatever finger is holding the note, the hidden repeated note will sound better if it is played with a different finger. This is not hard to manage. The articulation and timing of the move from the c#′ to the a in the middle voice might seem to be under more natural control if both those notes are played in the same hand. However, it is entirely possible to practice towards making that gesture effective across the two hands, as I will discuss below. It might seem better to take that eighth- note a with the left hand to give the right hand more time to get up to the c#′′ on the second quarter note of the measure. However, to me that “leap”—the tenth from the a to the c#′′ over the time-span of an eighth note—is the main reason to take the a in the right hand. The physical gesture of moving the right hand up the distance of that tenth will—like a bowing gesture in string writing—give the player the best chance of shaping the articulation and timing of the musical gesture in an effective and natural way.

At measure 69 (in Example 6) there is a brief passage in which any and all of the notes of the middle voice could be taken by either hand.

This is a good spot at which to remember once again that it doesn’t matter on which staff the notes are printed. The decision about which middle-voice notes to take in which hand should be based on comfort and logistics. This is not a bad time to mention that this will vary with the particular hand shapes of different players. For example, it is quite likely that a player with relatively short thumbs will gain more comfort from taking the d′ in measure 70 with the left hand than a player with relatively long thumbs will. 

Measures 71 through 78 display a texture in which the upper voice is mostly holding long notes, while the other two voices are fairly active. A sample of that passage is shown in Example 7.

It makes sense to take the eighth-note middle voice in the right hand, just accepting that one finger (the fifth finger) of that hand is unavailable since it has to hold long sustained notes. 

At measure 79 there is another opportunity to use hand distribution to make the playing of repeated notes sound natural, and to avoid letting those repeated notes disrupt the flow of the voices. My suggestions are indicated by letters, and are shown in Example 8.

The next complicated or involved spot begins at measure 89 (Example 9). This is a longer example of the sort of writing found at measure 36 and discussed in last month’s column. In this case, however, the eighth notes in the middle voice can all be reached by either hand. The player has a free choice as to which hand should play any of these notes and therefore what pattern to follow through the passage. The teacher’s role is mostly to point this out to the student, and to help the student notice the implications of different choices for hand position and articulation (and of course the implications of articulation preferences for hand distribution choices: the more interested a student is in playing the upper half-note line legato, for example, the more middle-voice notes the student will want to take in the left hand). I myself would probably take the third eighth note of each beat in the left hand—those that are a third higher than the lower voice left-hand notes, closest to them—and the others in the right hand. There are other ways to do it.

The next few measures (Example 10 measures 94–96) end the section of the piece that we are analyzing. Again, either hand can reach the middle-voice notes. Choices can be made based on the usual factors: closeness of notes to one another, hand position, and so on. However, this passage also has a special feature. A player might find that the shaping of the timing and articulation of the syncopations/suspensions in the upper voice feels more natural either 1) with those notes isolated on their own in the right hand, or 2) played with the middle-voice notes in the right hand, using a kind of rocking motion to reinforce the feeling of the pacing and articulation of those notes. This is an individual thing: I can easily imagine doing it either way.

When a student (or any player) has made all of the decisions about which hand should take which notes of a (middle) contrapuntal voice, and worked out the actual fingering, then the next step is to practice the passage in such a way that that voice sounds the way that the player wants it to sound. If the hand distribution and fingering are right (comfortable) then this should not be categorically different from practicing any other sort of passage. 

However, there is one concern. It is undeniably a little bit more difficult—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “less intuitive”—to shape the timing and articulation of the transitions from one note to the next in a contrapuntal voice when those notes are in different hands than when they are in the same hand. It is very important not to let this fact lead a player into making awkward hand distribution choices. (Sometimes it can and should influence those choices when other factors are fairly evenly split). But it should be kept in mind and addressed in practicing. 

The main way to address it is to practice that voice by itself, but split between the hands with the correct, worked-out fingering. This is partly physical practice, but even more it is listening practice. It is easiest to attune the ears to the flow of the line when the line is not covered by other notes, and this will make it easier to hear and follow the line in the context of the full texture. It is always straightforward to extract the line once the fingering process has been accomplished. It can be a good exercise for a student to write out—or type out—the line by itself, add the chosen fingerings, and practice it from that. However this is probably not necessary. 

For the bulk of this practicing it is important not to change the chosen fingering—and it is crucial not to do so accidentally or at random. (It is always OK to rethink fingering consciously, if there is a reason to do so.) It is also important to listen carefully during this practice to the transition moments, where the voice crosses from one hand to the other. It is possible, especially with a line that is physically not hard to play, to play short sections of the line in one hand at this stage to listen for the continuity, and then put it back into the correct (two-hand) fingering, trying to match the one-handed effect. It is probably a good idea not to do very much of this: just once or twice through a given short section of the line being practiced. If a student finds this to be disruptive (that is, if it is hard to go back to the fingering that is really being practiced after visiting the one-hand fingering) then he or she should not do it. 

When a student has practiced a line this way and is ready to put the whole texture back together, he or she should try at first to listen only to the line that passes between the hands and to pay no attention to the voices around it. (Unfortunately, it is impossible by definition to solo out this line, since in all of the passages of the kind that we have been studying both hands and all the voices are—and have to be—on one keyboard.) This is an exercise in focusing, and of course it can’t be achieved literally. You will always hear the other notes, but you should try to focus on the line that passes between the hands, to be conscious of that line and the sonority of all of its notes.

It can be a good exercise to take any line of music—say the top line of a hymn, or one voice of a two-part Invention, or a cantabile melody from the slow movement of a Mendelssohn sonata—assign it an arbitrary fingering that shifts back and forth between the hands, and practice that fingering. (The fingering can be worked out arbitrarily, but should be written in and not changed at random.) This is not to end up playing that line that way regularly, but as training in listening to and executing the transitions from one hand to the other.

Often the issue is not that of passing a line between the hands. In non-contrapuntal music, the question of how to divide the notes between the hands (assuming, as always in this context, that the whole texture is meant to be played on one keyboard) should usually be determined as simply as possible by trying out the physical comfort, simplicity, and convenience of any of the various possibilities. In fact, very often, just remembering that it is perfectly all right to distribute the notes between the hands however they fall most easily is the most important as well as the first step. The rest follows from that. 

It is interesting that the impulse to play upper staff notes in the right hand and lower staff notes in the left hand can be pervasive. I recently took part in a conversation about the wide left-hand chord on the fourth beat of measure 8 of the Widor Toccata (Example 11). For many players, it is impossible (or nearly so) to play all four notes of this chord in the left hand, and for even more players it is at least awkward. The player who initiated the discussion absolutely could not reach those four notes. Nonetheless, the conversation revolved around such issues as which note or notes it was best to leave out, or whether there was a solution based on arpeggiation, or whether Widor’s left hand was really big enough for him to be able to play this chord easily and nonchalantly. 

It took a while for someone to notice the obvious solution, namely that the highest note of the so-called “left hand” chord is within easy reach of the notes of the upper voice, and can perfectly well be played in the right hand. Doing it this way opens up some performance issues similar to some of those discussed above. The timing and articulation of that note must be just right, as a match to the other notes of the chord. That is intuitive if all of the notes of the chord are in the same hand—and less intuitive, more challenging, if the notes are split between the hands. This is analogous to the issues involved in passing a voice back and forth between the hands. It is also important to keep the articulation of the top line going the way you want it while adding an extra note for the right-hand thumb. A player who absolutely cannot reach the entire chord can take on the task of practicing to get these things right. A player for whom the chord is possible but awkward can decide where the balance lies as to what is easiest and what will give the best results. 

Organ Method XIII

This follows directly from last month’s column. For those with little or no prior keyboard experience, I have made this method’s exercises simple, direct, and systematic. At the same time, assuming that the student can remember and build on what has come before, the student should be able to take the right approach to practicing the exercises and be able to concoct his or her own exercises to some extent. A student who is already experienced on another keyboard instrument should be able to get something important out of this section, since the feel and sound of playing in chords and multiple voices is critically different on organ from what it is on other instruments. 

Before we look at exercises designed to get each hand used to playing patterns of more than one note at a time, there are a few general points to consider.

1) The clearest physical difference between playing one note at a time in one hand and playing more than one note in a hand, is that the latter places more limits on fingering choices. If you are called upon to play five notes at once in one hand—which is rare but not unheard of—then there is little or (usually) no actual choice about fingering. In the more common situation of two or three notes at once in one hand, there are often different fingering possibilities, but not as many choices as when playing only one line in a hand.

2) Hand position, already discussed earlier in this column, can be even more important when playing multiple notes at once than when the hand is playing one line, and can also be more difficult to manage well. In particular, the role of fingering choices for raised keys—sharps and flats—in determining comfortable hand position is crucial. In some passages, the position of the notes necessitates some compromise in hand position. Part of gaining experience and comfort with playing the most complex repertoire is learning how to manage these situations well. If a hand position is not ideally comfortable, then it is important to relax the hand away from that position promptly and smoothly.

3) In a piece of music, or a passage, in which each hand is playing only one note at a time, each hand’s part is a musical line or voice or melody. When either hand has more than one note at a time, that texture can be multiple voices or it can be chords, or it can be some combination of the two. 

4) Playing two or more separate melodies or voices with one hand in a way that sounds to an attentive listener like simultaneous melodies rather than chords is mostly a matter of attentive listening by the player. Exercises designed to address that aspect of playing are essentially listening exercises.

5) In most contrapuntal pieces with more than two voices in the hands, at least one voice migrates from one hand to the other. When this is the case, it almost always means that the piece, or that part of the piece, should be played on one manual: otherwise the sonority of that voice changes at essentially arbitrary times. It is also important that choices about which notes will be played by which hand be made carefully and sensibly. (In particular, it is important not to assume that every note printed in the upper staff should be played by the right hand, and that every note printed in the lower manual staff should be played by the left hand. These will be the tendencies, but the whole texture should be divided between the ten fingers in whatever way is most comfortable and gives the best musical results.)

6) Chordal passages often present articulation issues. If a series of chords in one hand is meant to be played legato, that presents fingering challenges, often involving finger substitution—a technique that will be dealt with later. If chords in one hand are meant to be played detached, then more fingering choices are available. Any detached fingering should be practiced first with enough space between the notes that the physical motion from one chord to the next feels easy. Once the gestures have been established, the spaces between the notes can be made smaller without abrupt gestures or tension.

7) Just as it makes sense to practice hands or feet separately, it makes sense to practice individual components of the note picture within one hand separately. Sometimes it also can make sense to focus on listening to one component of the texture of the part being played by one hand over the other parts.

Examples 1 and 2 are simple exercises with which to begin playing more than one note in each hand.

I have placed these exercises in regions of the keyboard that, for most players, will permit the note patterns to feel most comfortable, with the forearm and hand aligned well. However, as with earlier exercises in this chapter, you should move them around: up or down by octaves, or by other intervals, mixing versions with few or no sharps or flats with versions that have more. 

There is an obvious fingering for these exercises. For the right hand: 3/1–4/2–3/1–4/2–5/3–4/2, repeat; and for the left hand: 3/5–2/4–3/5–2/4–1/3–2/4, repeat). However, you should also try different fingerings, for example, playing all of the two-note chords with the same pair of fingers, and simply moving the hand smoothly and gently from one chord to the next, or a mixed fingering such as (for the first exercise) 3/1–4/2–3/1–4/2–4/2–3/1 (repeat). In any case, whenever you pick up the same pair of fingers to play the next chord, make that gesture as light, relaxed, and smooth as possible. In particular, do not try to make the space between the chords particularly short: use as much space as you need to allow the gesture to be completely without tension or any feeling that you are “snapping” from one chord to the next.

Keep the tempo slow for now, and do not worry if you hear the two notes of each chord not quite sounding at exactly the same time as each other. This is important: of course in the long run you need to be able to make multiple notes in one hand sound exactly together, and also indeed to make them sound not quite together in ways that you have decided on for musical effect. However, any attempt to ensure that each finger depresses its note at exactly the same time as each other finger does —before you have developed a fair level of comfort playing note patterns of this sort—will lead to a touch that is too crisp and too focused on driving each key to the bottom. This can sometimes lead to real physical tension and, in the long run, pain. The good news is this: any tendency of multiple fingers to play notes somewhat out of kilter with one another will go away naturally and of its own accord as you continue to practice. 

If you have studied other keyboard instruments, you might be impatient with the simplicity of these first exercises. However, the touch and sound of the organ are different enough from piano, harpsichord, and clavichord that both the physical act and the listening aspect of playing more complex textures is very different indeed.

After taking a first look at these exercises and moving them around on the keyboard a bit, you should practice them in a couple of different ways that involve breaking them up. For example, play each line (upper note and lower note of each chord) separately, as shown in Example 3. (And similarly for the other parts of the exercise.)

Or stagger the upper and lower notes, as in Example 4. (And similarly for the other parts of the exercise. Don’t make this too fast: for this purpose, the rhythm doesn’t much matter.)

Note that these deconstructed versions of this two-voice chord exercise are themselves simpler than the exercises and pieces that you have already been playing. 

Try playing three-note chord patterns,  such as those in Example 5. In this case, the fingering can well be 1–3–5 (or 5–3–1), and the same for each chord. It is important to move from one chord to the next smoothly, allowing the breaks between chords to be as long as necessary to keep the motion comfortable. Are there other fingerings that are possible or, perhaps, better? Play around with it. Move these patterns around to other notes and other regions of the keyboard as you have done with other exercises.

This set of exercises can also be broken into component parts—the lower two notes, the outer notes, the upper two notes—or played staggered. You can devise ways of moving from one of these components to the full three-voice texture yourself, as in Examples 6 and 7. Make sure that you use the same fingers for the components that you want to use for those notes when they are put back into the full texture.

An exercise such as that shown in Example 8 combines some of the above:

A traditional four-part chorale harmonization, such as that of Old Hundredth (shown in Example 9), provides material for continuing to practice moving each hand from one two-voice chord to another.

For the current exercise, you should break this hymn into short sections, and into separate hands. Then work out a comfortable, sensible fingering for each section, assuming that it is acceptable to allow a breath or break between each two successive chords: that is, to play detached. Do not worry at this point about how detached the chords are, but, no matter how much space you leave between chords, keep your hands light and flexible at all times. Release notes/chords smoothly and gently, and move to the next note or chord calmly. Do not necessarily expect to put the whole hymn together or to put the hands together: that is not the point at this stage, though you may very well return to it later and learn it as a piece, probably with pedal. You can find ample material for this sort of practice in any collection of chorales or hymns. ν

Next month’s column will continue this discussion, moving on to techniques for practicing the art of playing truly independent voices together in one hand.