On Teaching

August interlude

I have decided to take a partial break from my sequence of columns about helping students to develop fingerings and instead write about a few miscellaneous matters that have been on my mind. These are all small but interesting things that are hard to fit into columns that are about something well defined. So this month’s column is a grab bag or smorgasbord. I am influenced to construct this sort of column right now by the following confluence: it happens that I am writing this during a real heat wave (early summer mid-90s temperatures, with lots of sun and little wind), and this column will be distributed in August, when, around where I live, this sort of weather would be more typical. So it feels like time for a bit of summer relaxation and catching up.

A couple of things that I am writing about this month tie in with the business of teaching fingering. That may not be too surprising, since, as I wrote a few months ago, there is no such thing as keyboard playing without fingering. I will note these connections, but not go into them at great length, and then pick up those threads as well in the coming months.

As I looked over my notes about some of these points and thought about a few more things that have passed through my mind recently, I noticed that some of what I want to discuss is even more personal than usual: my playing, my own reactions to things, some of what I think has gone well in my work, and some of what has gone not so well. I believe most of us find it challenging to say openly: “Yes, I did this well. This was a success.” or “That didn’t work out. I am not (yet?) good at that.” Grappling with framing certain things in one of those ways is a reminder that everything that we do performing and teaching is a result and a reflection of our makeup and experiences. It is extraordinarily important that we remember that this is true of our students as well.

Forced into sight-reading . . .

I recently played a harpsichord recital for which I forgot to bring some of my music. (Is this going to be a trend? Do I have to do something about it? Not sure yet.) In particular, I simply didn’t have any way of obtaining a copy of a Froberger toccata that I had programmed. This is a piece that I have played in recital a dozen times or more over the last couple of years, more on harpsichord than on organ. It is also a piece that I know extremely well. I could probably write out at least chunks of it, and write in what I know to be my fingerings for those bits.

But that doesn’t mean I could play the piece from memory. (This is my first experience of bumping up against this particular practical disadvantage to my preferred approach of not performing from memory.) I noticed that in a Froberger volume that I had with me, from which I was going to play a suite, there was another toccata in the same key as my missing one. That meant that I could play it instead of the programmed one without making the printed program inaccurate or misleading. 

The only problem was that I had never learned this piece. I have probably read through it at some point in the past, since I have specialized in Froberger for decades and have read through all or close to all of his music. But if so, I didn’t remember that, and it would have been years ago. But I read through the piece once during my tuning and warming-up session and decided I could go ahead and play it in the concert. I did so, and it went fine: basically accurate, a wrong note or two, but not necessarily more than I or another performer might make in any piece; rhythms certainly accurate; tempos in the faster bits perhaps slower than I would want them following a normal amount of preparation, but not by much. It was a successful performance, though I hope that it was not as effective as it would have been if I had worked on it. If it was, then that casts some doubt upon my whole normal learning and preparation strategy!

So, what did I get out of this? I am certainly not recounting this to suggest that I am a particularly great sight-reader. Really I am not. I figure that by the standards of professional keyboard performers, I am probably about a “B-plus” sight-reader, and if not exactly that, then more likely “B” than “A-minus.” And I suspect that the several other toccatas in the volume would have been a stretch for me to sight-read in performance. They looked more intricate. It was a lucky coincidence for me that the one in the correct key was the simplest-looking one. But it is also important not to remain trapped in a sense of what we cannot do or what we are not good at. When I was in college, it would have been utterly out of the question for me to perform this piece without having practiced it for weeks. Could I have performed it after one read-through fifteen years ago? Five? I am not sure. But I was correct to intuit that I could do so now. 

We should also never remain trapped in a sense of what our students cannot do. What they (and we) can and cannot do should be changing all the time. While I was actually performing this piece, the feeling of playing it was more comfortable and serene than what I often experience while performing a piece that I know well, that I have prepared obsessively, that I feel ready to perform or record, that I consider part of my identity as a player. Why? How is this even possible? There has to be something to learn there about concentration, expectation, and anxiety. I do not yet know exactly what that is. It must start from the awareness that I had to pay close attention all of the time, every fraction of a second, like driving on a slippery road. But what about that would be good to import into the act of playing a well-prepared piece? Would there be a down side to doing so? Less spontaneity? My thinking about this is new and evolving, especially since this was the most recent concert that I have played as I sit here writing.

This also reminds me that there is such a thing as sight-reading fingering, or even a sight-reading approach to fingering. Fingering will be a different sort of phenomenon depending on whether you do or don’t know what is coming up next. To some extent this has to tie in with patterns and templates for how to play what sort of passage. How does this, or doesn’t this, have the potential to inform work on carefully planned fingerings?

 . . . and improvisation.

I am not much of an improviser. Long ago I was intimidated by improvisation and never even considered studying it systematically. That may or may not be a loss or a problem for me—after all, nobody does everything. However, I can play rather meandering chord progressions that often sound perfectly pleasing and that serve to enable me to explore the sounds of instruments without needing to put music in front of me. This very limited improvisation, or noodling around, is really derived from my continuo-playing experience. I am in effect generating bass lines, more or less at random, and then realizing them as continuo parts. I recently noticed that when I do this with a pedal line as the bass line, I find it almost impossible to involve my left hand. The influence of the feel of ordinary continuo playing is so strong that I can’t get any intuition going as to how to add chords and notes other than in the right hand. I find this interesting, just as a kind of archeological dig into my modest history of improvisation. But it also makes me think that I should try to make myself sit on my right hand when playing this sort of thing and force my left hand to get involved. Furthermore, I should urge any student doing this sort of thing to emphasize the left hand, or at least to be sure to give it equal weight.

Learning a magnum opus

I have played Bach’s French Overture, BWV 831, in three recitals over the last several months. This is a piece that I have loved for many years. I initially tried playing it when I first had regular access to a harpsichord on which to practice, about 40 years ago. It was beyond challenging for me at that point, so it pleases me that I can work on it, learn it, and perform it now. In order to do so, I have had to get past a little bit of the trap mentioned above: getting stuck in a sense of what I cannot do. But what has been most interesting to me about actually playing this piece in concert is that it is long, about 40 minutes, and quite intricate, dense, and varied. Since I have played many concerts that are a lot longer than that, even those that have halves longer than that sometimes, it never occurred to me that stamina might be an issue. However, in each of the three performances, my playing of the last movement, a sprightly and excited piece with the non-traditional title of “Echo,” has been influenced (really I should say undermined) by stamina issues. I believe that what happens is that as I get through the end of the previous movement, the Gigue, I feel my energy and/or concentration lessen, and, in trying to boost it back up, I start the Echo too fast. It is then hectic, helter-skelter, and more prone to note inaccuracy than I would like. Although I identified this concern after the first time I played the piece in recital, I was not able to prevent it from happening each of the next two times as well, though it has been progressively less severe. 

I have learned from this that the little opportunities to regroup in a concert that are afforded by breaks between pieces are significant and useful. Also, regardless of how well learned the various sections and movements of a program are, and no matter how tempting (and genuinely important) it is to focus on practicing hard passages, it is a good idea not to neglect playing through the whole thing. (Not that I have neglected that completely in preparing for these concerts, but I think that I underestimated how much of it I should do.) This reminds me to review my approach to any similar issues with my students.

The familiar and the unfamiliar

A few months ago I played a short lunchtime recital at the Princeton University Chapel. This is an extraordinary venue, for music or for anything else, and home to a justly famous and wonderful organ. But for me it is something more: a place where I spent thousands of hours playing the organ during the years when I was an undergraduate at the university. In the years since then, I have mostly pursued performance on mechanical-action organs and on harpsichord and clavichord, and the large Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner/Mander organ is not the most familiar sort of beast to me nowadays. On the other hand, this particular organ, rebuilt though it has been, and most especially this setting, evoke as much feeling of familiarity and as much deep nostalgia as any place or any instrument could. I was playing, in part, music of Moondog that day. Moondog is my second specialty along with music of the Baroque. I first encountered all of his pieces that I played this recent day during or shortly before my time as a student at Princeton, and I played them all frequently in the chapel back then. This was a powerful reminder to me that individual experience is what most informs our feelings about music, as about everything else, and that no two people—teachers, students, listeners, players—ever bring the same set of experiences to the way that they take in music.

I was also reminded that everything about technique, as well as about interpretation, is in part about the instrument. (That is, the instrument as a separate entity alongside the music, the interpretive stance of the player, the player’s habits and preferences, and so on.) Of course I know this, and have written about it. But this was a vivid real-life experience of it, with interesting twists because of the unusual blend of familiar and unfamiliar.

Hearing wrong notes 

I recently heard about a (not particularly recent) study that showed quite systematically that most listeners don’t consciously hear or notice most wrong notes. The study involved asking several talented graduate student pianists to record several piano pieces. These were pieces that they had not studied before, and that they were given a fairly short time to learn. This was to try to secure enough wrong notes to make the study meaningful. The listeners were undergraduate pianists, some of whom were and some of whom weren’t familiar with the pieces. The gist of the result was that the listeners reported only a very small fraction of the wrong notes. (Here is the link to the article about this study to which someone directed my attention: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audience….) 

This study tended to confirm my feeling that we as players exaggerate the importance of wrong notes. Of course there are questions. Does what this study found about piano apply equally well to organ, to harpsichord, or to instruments outside of our specific concern here, or to singing? Should we actually embrace for ourselves or for our students, caring less about accuracy than we might feel required to do? Is that a slippery slope? Preparation and practicing, and planning fingering, are in part about striving for accuracy. In fact it is easy to fall into thinking that that is all that they are about. Is there a way to juggle successfully both motivating ourselves and our students to try with all our might to prepare for extraordinary accuracy and wearing the need for that accuracy very lightly? Does a clear-cut study like this add to our intuitive sense? All of that planning, to the extent that it is not just about reliable accuracy, is about gaining enough control to do what we want to do expressively. Can we separate out those two goals and emphasize one more than the other? Are there differences in fingering choices that might arise out of this distinction? Or different ways of approaching the whole matter of fingering choices? How can we best help students sort this out?

The next generation

A short while ago I was visited in my harpsichord studio by a few students of a fine local piano teacher. These students were second- and third-graders. After they had played around a bit on several instruments, one of them commented to me that she liked the antique Italian harpsichord the best. That made sense to me, as a lot of people have that reaction. She then said, in explanation, “it has an intelligent sound.” I was really taken with that way of putting it or that way of hearing the sound. I had never encountered that particular image before. It resonated with one of my ways of experiencing instrument sound, especially that of organs and harpsichords.

I want to have the subjective experience, if I listen closely and without distraction, that the sonority seems to me to come directly from, or in a sense to be, a sentient being. Although this young girl had no prior experience with harpsichords, it reminded me of the description by the very experienced Keith Hill of clavichord sound, which I quoted in last April’s column. It includes the statement that “clavichords should have the sound of thought.”

Next month I will buckle down, so to speak, and get back to work on our extended look at fingering.

Performance

Something that has been on my mind for a while now is the relationship between being a player and being a performer. This has been on my mind in one way or another for most of my adult life, but it has recently come to the fore and presented itself as an interesting subject for this column.

There are a few reasons for this. I have been playing more concerts over the last five years or so than at any other period of my life. As a result, I have been focusing directly and intensely on my own experience of being a performer and my feelings about that experience. I have had a larger than usual influx of new students over the last several months, and whenever that happens I have to focus as consciously as possible on my own thinking about the goals and needs of those students. Over the last five or six years, I have also been a more frequent audience member both at concerts and at other sorts of artistic endeavors­—theater, dance, and so on—than I had been over the preceding couple of decades. In this I have looked for (not totally) offbeat, non-traditional, semi-improvisatory, some-
times mixed-media, or otherwise somewhat avant-garde sorts of performance. This has been partly for practical reasons (a lot of such things take place near where I live, tickets are usually easy to get, and much of this sort of work is not costly to attend) and partly because this is an area—or a set of overlapping areas—that I had previously neglected. This has given me an interesting look at new aspects on performance as a phenomenon. 

By and large this column has dealt with two sorts of things over the years: the really practical, such as a protocol for learning pedal playing, suggestions for solving hand distribution difficulties, general practice strategies, or exercises for trills; and the tangential but relevant, such as tuning and temperament, an introduction to the clavichord, or my thoughts on the ways in which trying to learn golf has informed my playing and teaching of music. What I have not dealt with very much is the whole set of questions that bridge the gap between playing and performance. Some of these perhaps boil down to what might be called the fundamental question of musical performance: how do I know that what I am doing is valuable to those who are hearing it? 

But this in turn expands to a host of specific questions and things to think about. This includes everything that we call interpretation. Interpretation as a part of actual performance includes not just interpretive choices that we know we are making (tempo, registration, articulation, approaches to rhythm, etc.), but also all sorts of intangibles that make the worked-out and describable interpretation seem compelling and convincing. This “compelling and convincing” phenomenon is probably one reason that a given listener can like so many different interpretations of the same piece. The describable interpretive choices are by no means all of what makes a performance effective: you can make a case that they are often only a small part, or that they essentially just set the stage for effectiveness rather than create it. 

The relevant questions might well include things about presentation. Is the way I look while playing important? Is it important that a written program be presented a certain way? Shall I talk to the audience? Looking at it from another point of view, is it better to pay as little attention as possible to those trappings and think only about how the music sounds? 

The strongest reason that I have not dealt very much with the question of “Is what I am doing valuable to the audience?” in these columns is that I feel I don’t want to dictate anything to my students about interpretive choices. I do not want to say, “This is right, and that is wrong,” or even “These could be right, but all of those are wrong.” Nor do I want to say, “This is how I do it. Why don’t you try that out?”

Helping a student to become a competent, eventually exceptionally accomplished, player or to become a well-educated, well-rounded musician, artist, and person, can all be addressed without prejudice as to interpretive stance. Can that also be said of helping students to deal directly with the question, “Will what I do be valuable to the listeners?” I think that it can. But I also feel that this is one of the most elusive aspects of teaching and among the most difficult to describe. I think that I have deliberately (or let’s say subconsciously deliberately) shied away from trying to address it over the years. Indeed I am not going to answer it in this or any future column. However, in raising and considering all sorts of questions about what performance is and what it is to be a performer, I will perhaps approach some ways of answering it over time. 

The other big matter about performing is nervousness. There are all sorts of ways to help students deal with that. To start with, helping a student to be highly competent at all of the practical dimensions of playing, and to know and to trust that, is a major part of that picture. Perhaps other aspects of understanding performance as such can also be helpful.

Thoughts about performance and being a performer

So here are various questions and thoughts about performance and being a performer. I will address more of them in future columns. And we will see how many of them wind their way to answers.

Should students be expected or required to perform? When I was very young and taking piano lessons, I used all of my wiles to avoid playing in any of my teachers’ studio classes or recitals. I am pretty sure that from the moment of my first piano lesson in the fall of 1965 when I was eight years old, no member of any public ever heard me perform so much as a note at a keyboard instrument until mid February 1974. I was then 16.

My debut that month involved my playing one organ piece at a Valentine’s Day-themed service at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. Do I think that my avoiding performing for all those years was good? Did it do any harm to my development as a musician? How do I square that history with the fact that I am now a more-than-average comfortable performer? (That is, regardless of whether a given listener likes my approach or doesn’t, I greet concert performance with very little nervousness these days, 40 years and more after the events described above.) 

Why did I not want to play for people in those days? It wasn’t for lack of interest in music or for lack of identifying myself as a musician. Both of those things were present in abundance. I spent a lot of time at the piano, not necessarily practicing what I was “supposed” to practice, but playing. I listened a lot to LP’s and to concerts. I even composed a bit. I think that I was influenced by a feeling that if I played for someone, it had to be perfect. The only thing I would have meant by that at the time was note perfect. This is an attitude that is very easy to pick up from our society and culture. 

There is a billboard that I often pass on the highway near where I live that says, “You don’t get medals for trying, you only get medals for results.” This may be literally true as to “medals,” but it strikes me as a harmful attitude to try to instill in people in general and certainly in aspiring musicians. To put it more neutrally, it is at least an attitude that has consequences. One way to frame how I felt when I was young and trying to play piano is that, in effect, if I would only get a medal for (perfect) results, then I might as well not try. That’s only about performing, not about engaging with music, which I did with great energy in private. 

I don’t believe that my early piano teachers (or other teachers or any adults in my circle) directly conveyed this fear of making mistakes in public to me. I imagine that many of them felt about the whole subject more or less the way I do now. But this is a reminder that being afraid of doing something wrong is a powerful force and one that we have to think about how to counter. One tremendous benefit to me from my memories of my own early refusal to perform is that I can tell the story to my students. Those who are more or less beginners and who are nervous about performing—and about whether they can ever learn to be comfortable performing—take a good deal of comfort from my history.

When I was a student at Westminster Choir College, the organ department was very systematic in introducing us to performance. With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals, shorter or longer, with or without memorization, depending on the student and his or her program. I credit this systematic and humane approach with a significant proportion of my evolution into a comfortable performer.

I have had students who start out thinking that they don’t want to perform.  Their interests in music or in playing organ or harpsichord are inner ones, and expecting to play for other people would only add a layer of tension to an experience that they want to be serene. I have a lot of respect for that sort of feeling. However, I can report that almost everyone who starts out saying something of this sort and whose inner-directed interest is strong enough to cause them to stick with their studies for a while ends up actually wanting to play for others, if only in an informal studio class, and getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing so. 

I am fairly certain that there is a different or competing reason that some people feel reluctant to perform or to be identified or to self-identify as performers rather than just as people who play music. In a way it’s the opposite of the fear of making mistakes or playing badly, but it also stems from a set of societal biases about performing. It is a fear of seeming arrogant, vain, or self-indulgent by putting oneself forward as a performer. This stems at least in part from the awareness that we tend to elevate performers to the rank of “celebrities.” It gives rise to such inhibiting questions as “Who am I to play this great piece?” or “Who would want to listen to me when they could be listening to X or Y?” Such thoughts probably exist and function mostly at a subconscious level. But I believe that for a lot of people they are present. The great, famous touring and recording virtuosi are doing things that many of our students are not going to do, and indeed that you and I might not do either.

The truth is that most of those things that are inevitably different are about circumstances. My experience is that almost any student can play at least as many pieces as effectively, with as much benefit to the listener, as any experienced or famous performer might play them. The chief difference is that the famous performer probably has a larger repertoire and performs more. There may be individual pieces that are too difficult for us to learn comfortably, at least given realistic limits on our practice time. But this knocks out only some of the repertoire and has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the performance of any other piece. The most beautiful and moving performance I have ever heard of Variation 25 from the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach was given recently by a student of mine at a studio class. That reaction of mine as a listener did not come about because the performance reflected my specific interpretive ideas. It aligned with them in part, but not in full. And I mention this example only because it is the most recent. It is one of many from over the years, on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. 

At any given moment in history, there are many listeners for whom the performances of certain pieces by well-known touring and recording artists are indeed the finest performances out there. Those performers are not excluded from the community of those who might give great or even transcendent readings of great music. But no one who gains some level of competence at an instrument is excluded from that community either. It can be liberating to students to be reminded of this. The answer to the question “Why is that performer so famous and successful?” is not always or exclusively because he or she does things on a piece by piece basis that the rest of us can only dream of—not at all. 

Performance as improvisation

I feel that a version of this dynamic has been at play in my own life in the area of improvisation. If it comes up in conversation, I always say that I am not someone who can improvise. This is true of me as I stand now. But why is it? Some time very early in my engagement with music I decided that I couldn’t become someone who could improvise. This was in spite of my being a developing organist, and the organ’s being one of the corners of the “classical” music world where improvisation is most likely to be found. Looking back, I am pretty sure that I never chose to study improvisation and thereby find out what I could and couldn’t do in that field (which would have been the logical approach) because of two inhibiting assumptions: I couldn’t learn to improvise music of the quality of the greatest pieces in the repertoire, and I couldn’t learn to improvise as well as the great and famous improvisers. Were these assumptions correct? I have no idea. But I know that they cut me off from trying.

I close with a stray idea about performance, though as you will see, a logical segue from the above, which came into my head at some point over the last year or so. It stems in part from my experience watching certain theater and dance performances that included an element of improvisation. It is in a way an effort to counter the notion that as performers we must always be humble and self-effacing with respect to the composer. Such an idea is not without merit: it makes a lot of sense, especially, for me, as a kind of specific practical point. The composer probably knew a lot about the essence of the piece, and it might very well turn out that that knowledge can be of use to us in figuring out how we want to play it. (How we tap into that knowledge is a complex subject.) But I also think that too much reverence for the composer, especially when it is specifically expressed as humility, can be inhibiting.

This is not utterly unlike the ways in which too much reverence for other, more famous performers can be. So here’s my thought: one of the ways to conceptualize a partial goal of live performance of repertoire is that the pieces should seem improvised. They should have a kind of spontaneity and ability to surprise performer as well as listener—that we would ideally associate with something that was being brand new. This notion, though paradoxical when applied to a piece that we have leaned through hours of practicing, can be a strong antidote to staleness. But if I play a piece that was actually written by Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Messiaen and I feel like I am improvising it, then I am embracing at that moment the idea that I am someone who could be improvising that extraordinary musical content.

I am in fact not such a person. Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece. In a way, I am playing the role of that person, in a way that is perhaps not the same as but also not completely alien to the way that an actor plays a role. This is just a concept. But it feels to me like one that can bridge the gap between respect for the composer and the fortitude necessary to perform.

More to come . . .

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is gavinblack-baroque.com, and he can be reached by email at [email protected].

Helping Students Choose Fingerings IV

This is my tenth anniversary column, as the first one was published in The Diapason of September 2007. It has been a great pleasure all this time, and I look forward to more. I also take this occasion to mention, as I did at the beginning and as I have from time to time, how much I like getting feedback from readers, and how helpful it is. Please keep it coming!

In this column I am returning to the thread about fingering, musing about ways of introducing students to the art of choosing fingerings for themselves. My plan is to outline some thoughts and suggestions about how to make a success out of my own preferred model: one in which we come as close as possible to letting students work things out for themselves from the beginning. In previous columns on this topic I have sketched out what I see as some advantages and some pitfalls of this basic approach, and the same for a contrasting, more “hands on” or interventionist, approach. Here I try to be as concrete and specific as I can about how to maximize the advantages and, especially, avoid the pitfalls of suggesting to students that they operate with as much autonomy as possible from as early as possible.

General ideas or principles

The overall scheme that I use with most students can be described this way. I want the student to have a set of general ideas or principles to work with prior to working out fingerings for pieces in general or for any particular piece, though these can be somewhat flexible. I ask the student to think about, explain, justify, defend, or rethink specific fingering choices that they bring to me. And I want to be on the lookout not so much for fingerings that I would do differently or that I disagree with, as for fingerings that I think have the potential to be physically harmful. (If the principles that I suggest in advance are well enough thought out and if the student remembers them, then this last point should be moot.) 

The first and over-riding advance principle is simply this: that fingering matters. It should not be taken for granted that everyone knows this. I have two brief anecdotes. First, I recently spoke to someone I know, an accomplished and committed amateur pianist. She was musing about why certain aspects of her playing were going better recently than they had in the past. As we explored that, she mentioned that she had been paying more attention to fingering over the last couple of years than she had previously. I assumed at first that this meant some refinement about an exact approach to fingering, one that she had found subtly more fruitful than what she had been doing. But it turned out that she meant something more basic. She had not, until quite recently, made a practice of planning out fingering at all, or of writing fingerings into music, or of necessarily always playing a passage with the same fingerings. Furthermore, she remembered that when she was taking lessons in her high school years, a few decades ago, none of her teachers ever particularly mentioned fingering as something to think about or really as something that existed as a subject. 

Second, a day or two ago I encountered, poking around at random the way one does, an internet discussion about all sorts of aspects of organ playing: finding repertoire for church, choosing editions, aspects of pedaling, and so on. A couple of posts featured a fervent and well-crafted attempt by one (anonymous) writer to convince everyone else that it was worth paying attention to fingering, planning it, being systematic about it. No one, as far as I could see, was arguing against this, but it also wasn’t obvious to everyone or necessarily part of their way of thinking. We might not all realize or remember that this basic point sometimes has to be made, or that it is something about which some students might need to be reminded.

I see that in the cryptic notes that I made for this column over the last couple of weeks I included the line “everyone needs reminders about everything.” I think that that is a good working assumption. I know that I do!

Convincing arguments for systematic fingering

The starting point for convincing (or reminding) students that they should take systematic fingering seriously is simply this: that if you drill or practice or repeat a passage with the same fingering every time, you are learning a physical gesture, making it progressively more solid. But if you repeat the same notes over and over again with different fingerings, you are drilling, if anything, contradictory gestures. Some of that practicing actually cancels itself out. This is concrete, basic, and true, and tends to be convincing. In fact, it is usually so quickly and uncontroversially convincing that it feels more like “reminding,” even if the student hasn’t thought about it in that specific way before.

It might be worth talking to a student about the distinctions among three connected but different things: 1) working out fingerings in advance; 2) always practicing with the same fingering; and 3) writing fingerings in the score. Clearly no one of these leads inevitably to the others, and they relate in different ways to the project of learning a solid approach to fingering. Writing fingerings in is neither an absolute necessity nor a guarantee that the fingering process will proceed fruitfully. Remembering what fingerings you want to use is necessary. Some people achieve that by writing in everything and reading those markings carefully at first, more subliminally later on, in a way that tracks the note-reading process itself. Some people achieve it by writing in only key or transitional fingerings, or even a random subset of all of the fingerings, just as guideposts. Some people achieve it by just having a really good memory for fingering. All of these approaches are fine if they work. The last one is rare, but I use it myself. I remember fingerings extremely well, but I find written fingerings distracting, so I write in very few indeed, none for most pieces. I should emphasize that this does not mean that I do not use the same fingerings consistently. This approach does not work best for most students or players, but works well for some. It can conceal inconsistent use of fingerings, so that should be monitored. But writing fingerings in is no guarantee that those fingerings will always (or ever) be followed. One pitfall of writing in all fingerings is that that act itself can seem like learning the fingerings, so that it becomes subconsciously tempting to ignore the question of whether you are really following what you have written. 

A student who is fairly new to working out fingerings will probably do well to start by writing in more rather than less, bearing in mind the concerns mentioned above. This makes it easier for the teacher to see what the student has done and to offer feedback, and to observe along the way whether the student is in fact using the intended fingering. 

It seems logical that if you write in many or most fingerings, you must have worked them out. And this is true at the extreme: no one is going to lean over the page and write in numbers at random. But it is more than possible to write in fingerings that have been worked out partially, quickly, or with inadequate thought, analysis, or attention. Then the writing can become its own pitfall: once the fingerings are written in they take on a bit of authority, and inertia favors keeping them. It is important for every player to remember that writing fingerings is just a tool. If while you work fingerings out you write them in, even if only to make sure that you don’t forget them while working, then you must be willing to erase them just as readily as you wrote them. In fact, just to be safe, you should try to be eager and enthusiastic about erasing! (It is annoying that most pencils can still write long after their erasers have worn away. Make sure that you have a good eraser at all times. No fingering should ever be written in ink.)  

What students should bear in mind when starting to write fingering

Our main concern right now is the working out itself—neither the writing, which has no real meaning in itself beyond its service as a tool towards other goals, nor the practicing, although it is the essence of the learning process. So what are some of the thoughts specific to the act of working out fingerings that I want students to bear in mind before starting to work?

1) Hand position. This is always my starting place with fingering. If the hand is comfortable, the chance that a combination of fingers will be able to execute a note pattern comfortably is greatly enhanced. If hand position is good, no fingering can be actually bad, though some can be more appropriate to the situation than others. Good hand position is self-defining: if the hand isn’t tense, then the position is fine. However, there is a lot more to say about it than that. The main thing that I point out to students, early and (if necessary) often, is that for the wrists to be turned out is productive of strain and tension. If a fingering choice causes one of the wrists to be turned out more than just a little bit, it is important to rethink that choice.

The second most potent source of tension in the hand is too much stretching between fingers, not so much between fingers 1 and 5 as between other pairs, especially 2 and 5. (Almost all keyboard players are aware of what interval they can reach with 1 and 5. But many of us don’t pay attention to what we can reach with 2 and 5 or other shorter segments of the hand. An awareness of the feel of wide intervals with non-thumb fingerings can help us understand the connections between fingering choices and the comfortable use of the hand as a whole.) Hand position is a good place to start in helping students to approach fingering with independence and autonomy, since only the player can actually know and experience whether a position is comfortable or not. The rest of us can only guess or predict. 

2) Do not play black notes with the thumb. When the thumb plays a black note, it is quite likely that the hand will twist into an uncomfortable position. However, the point of this as a guideline is the comfortable hand position itself, not something primary or critical about not letting the thumbs touch the raised keys. It is also a good way to promote awareness and autonomy. Yes, the student should assume that the thumb will avoid black notes, but should also be on the lookout for those situations in which for one reason or another it would actually be more comfortable to contravene this “rule.” This happens typically with octaves, but can happen for miscellaneous reasons having to do with the notes around a given black note. It is the exception, by a wide margin, but not vanishingly rare.

3) Repeated notes. I have written at great length in the past about why I believe that changing fingers on repeated notes is a good standard practice. This is mostly about the effect of this approach on the shaping of the repeated notes themselves, especially the release of the note(s) to be repeated. But it is also true that the freedom to move, on repeating a note, to any finger other than that which is already holding that note can open up possibilities for the shape of the overall fingering of a passage. Sometimes it really unlocks the whole thing. Students should always be on the lookout for this. In some passages, looking first at moments when a note is repeated, and reasoning the fingering out from that moment, forward and backward, can be fruitful and efficient.

4) Analyze fingering both forward and backward. We often start at the beginning of a passage, with a fingering for that beginning that might be rigorously determined or might be somewhat arbitrary, and construct fingering by going forward from there. However, whenever it is possible to choose a finger for a note based not on what just happened, but on what needs to happen next, that can lead to ease and simplicity. You do have to get to that finger, but the question of how you get there should not be granted automatic priority. That automatic priority is often hard-wired into our thinking. I will occasionally ask a student, “What finger would you play that note with if it were the first note of the piece?” And still they start their answer by saying, “Well, it has to be x,” because they have decided that you can only get to it with x. So then I will intensify the question: “Never mind how to get there. We’ll figure that out later. What if it were the first note you ever had to play?” That gets the focus on what comes next, on going on. And the interesting thing is that indeed the “how we get there” is usually easy to solve.

5) Don’t avoid fingers because of a perceived intrinsic problem with that finger. Of course this applies mainly to 5, second most to 4. It is common to see a student finger a fairly busy or spread-out passage with all or mostly 1-2-3, just because the outside of the hand seems (or is) weaker or less agile. That can lead to intrinsically awkward fingerings, and actually using the outer fingers is part of the way to get them to work their best. (There are also exercises and other dedicated techniques for that.)

Next month I will continue from here. Meanwhile I want to report, as a sort of tangent or coda, on a couple of random interesting things about fingering that I have bumped into in my preparation for these columns. The first is about Marcel Dupré. He is, for better or worse, greatly associated in organ culture with the notion of fingering, since his Bach edition was so thoroughly fingered. I encounter, surprisingly often, debates among colleagues about whether his Bach fingerings are good or bad, or perhaps whether they are good, in a sense, but inauthentic, or various other nuances about how to think about or approach them. (This includes whether or not to use his edition at all.) None of this, I hope, overshadows his legacy as a composer. I find it interesting to note that in his own published organ compositions he provided really thorough fingerings only for some of his simpler, or “teaching” works, not for the virtuoso performance pieces. Did this mean that he assumed that players of the more difficult works were intrinsically able to think about fingering on their own, or that they would have already absorbed his fingering ideas from teaching pieces, or something else?

Second, I have been looking at the version of the Bach Fantasia, BWV 922 (no pedal, probably for harpsichord), which was fingered very thoroughly by Johann Gottlieb Preller (1727–1786). Very little is known about Preller, but he is not known to have had any direct connection to Bach. He is also not known to have studied with any of Bach’s own students. However, he was born and raised in the same general part of Germany as Bach, and clearly knew of his music, since he copied some of it out. He was 40 years younger than Bach, and grew up in a musical milieu in which Bach was already somewhat old-fashioned. So how do we regard those fingerings?

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

To look or not to look

During my months off from writing this column, I heard from several readers, partly with various stories or questions or comments about organ study, but also with some suggestions for topics for future columns. These suggestions included aspects of service playing, advice about how to get pieces up to a fast tempo, and on fingering, including how to plan fingering with ultimate tempo in mind, dealing with acoustics, and details about pedal playing (always at the forefront of concern about organ playing!). I will in due course cover these topics. This month, however, I begin with something I consider to be more important the more I observe students—and indeed the more I observe my own process of learning and performing music. This is the question of whether, when, and how to look at one’s hands and feet while playing.

In an early column, I noted that some day I would devote a whole column to this, and while I have mentioned aspects of it from time to time, I have not yet written that column. Furthermore, I have developed some new ideas about it over the last few years—ideas that supplement rather than contradict or change my thoughts from several years ago. So it seems like a good idea to take it on, in this column and the next, pulling together some of my long-standing ideas and supplementing them with some new thoughts.

I have always been—and still am—very skeptical of the practice of looking at the hands or (perhaps especially) the feet. However, I have become more open to the idea that looking can sometimes be all right—certainly neutral, if it is done correctly, perhaps even helpful in some cases. This has led to the other new turn in my thinking: how to be sure that when you occasionally look down at the keyboard(s), you don’t create any problems by doing so. I have also developed some exercises and practice techniques that address looking or not looking at the hands and feet, or deal with looking away from the music. 

Beyond the practical aspects of looking or not looking, one can learn about focus and concentration, and about the whole learning process, by thinking about the different approaches to the looking/not looking question. I will include a few thoughts about that here.

The fundamental, most important fact about looking at the hands and feet while playing is that a reliance on looking is extremely damaging to the learning process for someone who is still learning to play. This is probably one of the things that I have observed the most clearly in my years of teaching and that I am most sure about. It is also one of the few things that I am willing, if necessary, to ask students to believe on trust even if they don’t see it for themselves right away. Not every student will do that, especially since I always urge students not to take things on trust, but it is why I have tried to make the advantages of not looking seem clear and obvious.

There is a distinction between someone who is still learning and someone who is an accomplished player. The pitfalls of too much looking are the most hazardous for anyone who is still engaged in the early to middle stages of becoming comfortable with the instrument. This is why thinking about this issue is specifically an important part of the work of a teacher. For more experienced, comfortable, “advanced” players (whatever imprecise term seems best), looking or not looking becomes more of a personal choice, a matter of comfort—at least much of the time.

Most of us find it natural to look—that is, literally, with our eyes—for things that we want to find. Picking up our glasses off the table, reaching for the light switch, getting a stick of butter out of the fridge, anything normal and everyday, is usually achieved partly through looking. The keys of keyboard instruments—more than the technical components of string or wind instruments, I believe—seem to be things that are there and that we want to find. So it is natural to think something like: “OK, I need to play that ‘A-flat,’ so I should look for it” or even “so I’d better look for it.” This is a way of seeming to map normal experience onto the act of playing a keyboard instrument: it seems intuitive, at least as a starting point.

However, there are equally fundamental reasons not to accept that intuitive feeling, not to look at the hands and feet while playing—especially while first learning to play. First of all, it is impossible to find every note of every piece by looking in time to play that note on time. If all music were extremely slow, this whole discussion might well be different. Looking at the hands and feet might be a valid option as a way of feeling comfortable at the instrument. But with real-life repertoire and performance conditions this just won’t work: there just isn’t time. Only a strong and reliable kinesthetic sense of the keyboard can enable the fingers and feet to go where they need to go, when they need to go there. So learning to play has to be, in part, a matter of developing that kinesthetic sense. And (this is the most important point here) every time that a student finds a note by looking, he or she misses an opportunity to strengthen this all-important sense. 

It is a very clear distinction: if you move your hands and fingers, or your feet, directly from whatever position they have just been in to the position they need to be in to play the next notes or chords, then you establish in your mind a connection between those two positions. If you intervene between those two points with a glance at the new position, and then find that new position through that visual clue, you do not establish that connection, or you establish it weakly. Only by reinforcing these connections over and over and over again can we achieve the ability to execute them reliably in the infinitely varied circumstances created by an infinitely varied repertoire. Using our eyes to find notes makes this process of learning physical connections inefficient. Using the eyes a lot makes it extraordinarily inefficient, and possibly totally ineffective.  

Other reasons to be concerned about looking at the hands and feet are more practical, and apply beyond the learning stage. It is always a possibility that upon looking away from the music, the player will get lost and be unable to come back to the right place in the music. I will discuss ways of dealing with this later on. This is tied up with questions about memorization and about solid learning in general. Also, there is a strong tendency for looking away from the music to cause delay: very tiny delay that doesn’t add an amount of time to the playing that can really be counted, but that tends to undermine the sense of rhythmic momentum and continuity. This is something that an accomplished player can find ways to deal with, if it is addressed purposefully. I will also come back to this later.

The good news, especially for beginning students, is that a very basic level of awareness of the kinesthetics of the keyboard gets established surprisingly promptly. I tell students that anyone who has been playing any keyboard instrument for a few weeks essentially knows where the keys are, though he or she might not realize it. Of course, this sense of where the keys are needs to grow stronger, so that it can function reliably with ever more complicated (and faster) music. Also, crucially, the player needs to learn to believe in it. However, a basic version of this awareness is established much sooner than most people—most students—realize. How early may depend somewhat on the exact nature of the very beginning lessons and/or practicing that this student encountered. But it will be there as something to build on, even from random doodling around. The layout of keyboards seems to be intuitive and humane enough to make this happen.

Let me mention the analogy to the typing keyboard. I don’t know from personal experience how intuitive that layout is, since I have never learned “touch typing.” I type with, perhaps, two or three fingers, always looking at the computer keyboard. Sometimes I must spend appreciable time searching for a given letter or symbol: my sense of where they all are is that poorly developed. It has slowly improved over many years of typing that way; I now often find my fingers heading towards the correct letter before I have consciously thought about where it might be. But I never can pin a letter down exactly without looking. This means that I am an extremely slow typist, and that I effectively cannot type a copy of something that I would have to read while typing. I can only type while composing. It is interesting to me that the most common form of “real” typing involves always pressing (I originally wrote “playing”) any given key with the same finger. 

This is completely different from playing a keyboard instrument, where there is no linkage between specific fingers and specific keys. It is more analogous to fingering on a wind instrument. My own slow typing suits me: it matches the speed at which I think out what I want to type. This is analogous to the slow musical tempos that would be required if players were all to try to find all of their notes by looking, but in this case it is suitable—or at least it works for me. I am, however, very aware that my need to look imposes limitations. This informs my sense of how important it is not to be limited by looking while playing music. My awareness that (almost) everyone but me does indeed type without looking reinforces my belief that everyone can do the same with a musical keyboard.

The fundamental difference between the keys of a keyboard instrument (and the typing keyboard) and the other objects that I mentioned above—the stick of butter, and so on—is that the keys don’t move. We don’t come to the moment when we need to find them without knowing where they are to be found. This is a necessary condition for us to be able to find them without looking. Other things in everyday experience also have this quality, such as the gas pedal and brake arrangement in a car. Of course, no one has ever thought that they had to look to get a foot from one of those to the other. It would be courting death to do so, so we are motivated to learn and believe that we don’t have to! Various household situations work this way: reaching for the bedside alarm clock, or a light switch on the wall of a room that you always enter the same way. Anything that is always in the same place relative to your person is something that you might well be able to reach for and find without looking. In normal life we don’t always do so, since there is often (gas and brakes aside) very little reason not to supplement the spatial awareness with visual confirmation. But such things can help to persuade students that the keys of their instrument can also be routinely found without looking.

Another way of looking at it is this: when we talk about reliably finding notes, we are also talking about avoiding wrong notes. These are complementary ways of looking at the same thing. When a student feels a strong urge to look at the hands or feet, that student is trying not to play wrong notes. However, by far most actual wrong notes made by students—and by most of us—come specifically because we don’t really know what the correct note was supposed to be. I first learned this by observing myself. When I was still a beginning (or at most “intermediate”) player, it one day occurred to me that whenever I made a wrong note or a cluster of wrong notes, if someone had stopped me and asked me what the right notes were supposed to be, I would never have been able to answer that question. I have since observed this with students, fairly consistently. The proportion of wrong notes that happen when the student clearly knows what note or notes or chord is indicated—and could promptly tell you if you asked—but makes a wrong judgment about where to find the note(s) on the keyboard is very small. The proportion that happens when the student doesn’t quite really know what was supposed to be played is very high. It is exactly the information that is on the page that is most urgently needed at the moment when a passage might be about to go wrong, not the information found on the keyboard itself. 

When a student has played a number of wrong notes—especially if it happens to be a high number—and has been looking down at the hands or feet quite frequently, I ask the student to try playing the same thing without looking at all. If the student is reluctant to do that, I remind him or her that the worst that can happen is that the passage will fall apart dramatically—so badly that it will be funny. And if that happens, so what? We will have learned something. Of course, the most common result is that the accuracy improves immediately and dramatically, even if the student didn’t expect anything good, and even before he or she had any sort of chance to get comfortable doing this, or to believe that it was a good idea. This experience, repeated as often as necessary, will help to persuade the student that not looking is fruitful.

I will continue this discussion next month and include further ideas about how to convince or cajole students into taking advantage of not looking at the hands and feet. I will also talk about when and how it is OK to look, and I will give the exercises and practice techniques that I mentioned above.

More on performance

As I listened to the recording of the concert that inspired last month’s column, the experience gave me a few further things to say about performance. This month I will discuss those matters, as they will constitute the first part of this article. Following that, I wish to present a few ideas about performance for specific occasions, partly derived from some recent personal experiences. As has been the case with the last few articles, I will leave you with more questions than answers, as this is a large, important, and difficult subject.

Emotion during the act of performance

Listening to the recording from my March 25 recital leads me to continue the thread from last month about one’s own experience of the emotion, message, or meaning of music during the act of performance. I cannot match what I hear on the recording to any detailed memory of when I was or was not feeling what, or how involved or detached I was.

I do remember something about a particular moment. The ending of Samuel Scheidt’s Warum betrübst du dich is a spot that I like to stretch out quite a bit. I remember executing that gesture in a much more extreme way than I had planned, because it felt right to do so in the moment. It is a strangely textured passage, and the feeling of some of the chords was one that I did not want to let go of for longer than I would have expected. Others I wanted to push through. The whole variation was also a bit slower and freer overall than what I intended. Was all of that effective? I don’t know: I like it, but of course I am biased. You may listen for yourself at the following link, where I have posted the very end of the penultimate variation, just to set the scene, and then the variation in question: www.gavinblack-baroque.com/Scheidt.wav.

I have also written that I am working on trying to derive rhythm, some of the time, from the shape of the sonority rather than (or in addition to) from a pre-established beat. At the beginnings of certain pieces, my listening confirms that this was not always effective. In several cases the openings of pieces or movements sounded too slow or lacked momentum. I am not sure whether the solution is to go back, in some cases, to simply establishing a beat in my head before I start or to do something like what I was trying, but to do it better. Doing it better could mean doing it in a more moderate way or different way, but it could also mean doing it in a more committed or “extreme” way.

Sometimes ineffectiveness comes not from exaggeration but from inadequate expression of an idea. I do believe that the problem may have a greater proportion of being about the approach itself or the execution of the approach, rather than just being an artifact of the concert situation, as I thought that it might be when I wrote about it a month ago.

Finally on this subject, I have experienced what feels like a major revelation about my stance as a performer, which I think was developing even during the preparation for the recent organ recital, and which I experienced during the recital itself, but which has crystallized over the last few weeks. At one level, it is quite specific to my own circumstances and indeed in a sense quite personal. I believe that it could be of interest to others, and I am thinking about how to apply it to some of my work with students.

There is a feeling that most of us have of something looking over us and judging what we are doing. This is perhaps a kind of externalized, collective superego or conscience. It may feel like something that is connected to specific people—former or current teachers, parents, colleagues, critics, friends, neighbors, people in authority, people in general—or it may well be related to ideas or feelings about the supernatural, eternal, or spiritual. It may not be about any of those specific things. This feeling is not necessarily one that is always good or always bad, always inhibiting or always motivating. For better or worse, it is often with us.

I have a strong feeling of such a watching presence when I am performing on harpsichord, but absolutely none of it when I am performing on organ. This could sound equivalent to “I am self-conscious and unsure about my harpsichord playing but not about my organ playing.” However, I believe that is a less accurate way of putting it. I am conscious of the feeling of others scrutinizing or paying attention, but I do not necessarily think that what these non-specific and fictional others will experience when they listen to my harpsichord playing will not please them. I just feel them as being there. But again, not at all when I play organ. This could all be correlated with my thinking that my harpsichord playing is not as good as my organ playing, whatever range of meanings “good” can take. But I honestly do not believe that I do feel that way. I have a very similar awareness in both realms of what I am trying to do and why, of what proportion of the time I think that it is relatively successful, of how it stacks up with respect to various schools of thought or approaches, of how much feedback and of what sort I get from listeners, and so on. I might be unhappy with my playing on one instrument or the other on a given day, but I do not believe that I am a better organist than a harpsichordist, or the other way around.

I suspect that this dichotomy is about things that are irrational, symbolic, and subconscious. Some of it may have to do with the “Wizard of Oz” sort of credentials. My degree is in organ. I write for an organ magazine. Many of my former organ students are working full-time in the profession as organists. Indeed many of my former harpsichord students are working as organists; fewer are working full-time as harpsichordists, if there even is such a thing. I had two great organ teachers, whereas I am more or less self-taught as a harpsichordist. When I was an undergraduate I had a key to the Princeton University Chapel and often went in there alone and played the organ through the night. Of course these things are not accurate assessments of my skill level. They are superficial, and none of them may in fact be the source of the feelings that I am describing. 

If my observation about my feelings while playing went the other way, I could perhaps come up with an equal list of superficial symbolic things that also went the other way: that I am lucky enough to be the proprietor of a seventeenth-century harpsichord, that my recordings are mostly on harpsichord, that my actual job or position is with an “early keyboard center,” and so on. I would not know in that case whether some of these symbols were or were not the reason behind the psychology that I observe.

What I do know is that whereas this overarching collective superego may have a valuable role in society as a whole, it feels like a definite impediment to my finding the truest version of myself as a performer. That is, both the version that I will find the most satisfying and the version that has the best chance of sometimes creating great performances. Since I feel that this impediment isn’t there when I am functioning as an organist, the urgent task for me at this moment in my life as a musician is to learn how I can also remove it from my harpsichord performing. Whereas I had been planning to enter a period of perhaps a couple of years during which I planned only organ recitals, I have realized that I have to avoid a hiatus in harpsichord performance. Perhaps I need to mix them up as much as possible, giving organ recitals and harpsichord recitals on successive days, for example, trying to pretend that one of them is the other.

As I say, this is very personal. This is so specific to me that I would not expect anyone reading to discover exactly the same state of affairs for herself or himself. Perhaps it will resonate in some way. I am just starting to digest the question of what this says to me about work with students. Is it an insight that can lead to fruitful evolution in what I offer as a teacher? I suspect that it is, but I have to avoid imposing anything on students via any sort of projection.

Performance for other occasions

I have a couple of thoughts about performance for occasions. I recently played harpsichord at two events that were not concerts and that were driven primarily by imperatives other than those of the music that I was playing, or indeed of any music. They were both events acknowledging a particular person, and in one case it was around a retirement. I knew each of the people, but not well enough to know anything about their musical taste or what they might or might not like in performance. They had each asked that I be there to play—neither occasion was a case of my just being hired as a professional. Likewise neither of them knew enough about the harpsichord repertoire to request any particular pieces. That was up to me.

I observed in these performances what I wrote a few months ago about my goal for performance: that it create the possibility that the experience will have been important to some of the people who are present. The shift was that I identified the particular honorees as a sort of primus inter pares. If anyone was going to find my playing important, I most wanted it to be the honorees. What did I then do with that? I am not sure. I suspect that I tried to play more fervently than I normally would—or to put it more accurately, I tried to give myself permission to play as fervently as I always want to; that I played with as much lucidity as I could manage; that the self-consciousness that I described above abated to a considerable extent. 

It occurred to me as a consequence of these two experiences that almost certainly anything that guides me as a player to make the music more expressive and communicative for a particular purpose also helps to make the music more effective in general. If I did succeed in enhancing the chance that either of the honorees felt that what they got out of my pieces was important to them, then I certainly enhanced that chance for everyone else present. 

I believe that this concept might, for me and perhaps for others, help to bridge the gulf between “I am playing this because something about the day’s schedule says that I should play it” and “I am playing this because I care about expressing what it can express. “

I also noticed that the self-consciousness largely went away. I believe that the reason may have been something like this: “I know what my goal is in playing this right now. I am here to offer something to these particular people, and I believe that I know how to do so. This performance doesn’t have to bear the burden of showing that I am this or that kind of harpsichordist, or that I understand x or can do y.”  

This is very personal. It may or may not resonate with what anyone else has experienced or thought. Once again, I am still mulling over what it might mean to share the fruits of these thoughts with students.

§

I recently viewed the movie Seymour: an Introduction, which is about the pianist and renowned piano teacher Seymour Bernstein. It is a fascinating film, and he is a captivating, multifaceted, and appealing individual. At one point, he is discussing music lessons for children. He notes that just as children are required to go to school and do their homework—on pain of not being allowed to play with friends, perhaps, or to watch television—so, too, they should be required to practice for their music lessons. He mentions an hour a day of practicing before being allowed to go on to other, more enticing activities. I am only summarizing, and this was a brief moment in the film. I want to make it clear that I have no idea to what extent it represents his fully developed ideas. I mention it because, as anyone who has read this column for very long will not be surprised to read, these sentiments evoked immediate, strong disagreement from me. 

I have a great aversion to coercing anyone into doing anything. If no one finds a way to induce children to take music lessons, then many or most children will not; many of those who do not would have found it extremely rewarding to do so; if no one twists anyone’s arm to practice, then a lot of people will not practice; if you do not practice, taking lessons and trying to play will be more frustrating than it should be. There are problems with my stance about such things. In our society, organ and harpsichord teachers do not have to confront these questions as often as piano, violin, and voice teachers do.

The same dynamic applies to performance. I strongly believe that performing in front of listeners is an amazingly good learning experience for anyone at any level or with any relationship to music. I believe that abstract performing—concert playing in which there is nothing to hang your hat on other than making the music really work—is a great learning experience. I wish that more of my students had more opportunities to play concerts or to play in concerts. I observe that often once a student has played a piece in a concert situation, he or she plays that piece better and plays better overall. 

However, most students, especially those who still consider themselves beginners, are scared to perform, or at least approach performance with anxiety. Many, many students are convinced that they will never give concerts or even play for others informally. That is sometimes part of the bargain. If you throw in that I as a teacher do not want to coerce, that I believe that anxiety is counterproductive, and that my role is to help create relaxation and ease, then we have a certain kind of impasse. 

My attempt to solve this has always revolved around persuasion and coaxing. I have a strong sense that this works very well most of the time. I also have ideas about how to carry it out. Yet I am also aware that it may leave some people out, and that there is a set of questions about whether this approach is letting some people down. 

I have mentioned previously that I was deeply scared of performance as a child—terrified, really, and rather beyond childhood, as well. I also claimed in an earlier column that I successfully avoided ever playing in any of my teachers’ studio recitals through many years of piano lessons. I recently found the document that illustrates this column, the program from such a studio recital involving the students of Lois Lounsbery, the second of my three piano teachers. I am manifestly included in the program. I do have a memory that I was indeed physically present that day, but that I managed not actually to play—perhaps, honestly, by pretending to be injured or sick. That I may have done that is a measure of how much I did not want to perform. It is in part the memory and awareness of how I got from there to here that informs my ways of working with students on performance, and which I will come back to in future columns.

Excerpts from his March 25, 2018, organ recital can be found on Gavin’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/gavinblack1957.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at gavinblack@mail.com.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

This month I will continue questioning, musing, speculating—almost free-associating—about aspects of our ways of working with our students, and about how that process connects with the students’ lives and their many paths to learning music and to getting something important out of that learning and that music.

Remembering Peter Williams

However, a sad coincidence makes me start with a comment or two, and an anecdote, about Peter Williams. Just before I sat down to write this, the news came across the computer screen that Peter Williams had died. [See Nunc Dimittis, page 10 in this issue.] That made me remember my first introduction long ago to the first few of his many books: my teacher Eugene Roan mentioned that he valued Peter Williams’s writings especially because he asked more questions than he gave answers. I was jolted by this realization: that in starting last month’s column noting that I would be asking more questions in this series of columns than giving answers, I was subconsciously paying tribute to that aspect of Williams’s work. And indeed, Gene Roan was not the only person to notice that about Peter Williams. Several comments I have read online say exactly that about him. My own feeling (not based on anything he said to me, since, to my regret, I never spoke to him or communicated directly with him) is that his approach was simultaneously based on the perpetual asking of questions—the refusal to view anything as settled or determined in the way that can seem like ossification—and on valuing real and copious information as a spur to understanding and to art. This seems to me to be a very fruitful and also rather life-affirming combination. 

I once attended a combination lecture/demo and masterclass that Peter Williams conducted at the Schuke organ in Voorhees Chapel at Rutgers University. It was thirty-something years ago, and I don’t remember the specific topic. I do remember being (as someone very young and very much a beginner) astonished that someone so august, with actual books to his name (and impressive ones at that) could be so relaxed, friendly, and informal. I think I was still then in the grip of a youthful reluctance to believe that anything with the authority of the printed page could have flexibility to it. I had heard what Gene Roan had said, and knew that I liked that approach. But I still couldn’t quite believe that an “authority” really thought that way. His tone at this class helped me begin to internalize that as a possibility.

Furthermore—and this impressed me a lot—he conducted this class wearing sandals and other very informal summer gear. When he sat down to play the organ, he played in those sandals. I don’t remember what I thought then about organ playing and footwear. I am not sure whether this confirmed for me or actually started me thinking that simple comfort while playing might be an underrated value. Since I base much of my thinking about technique and teaching on the importance of comfort, naturalness, and relaxation, I consider that moment in Voorhees Chapel to have been quite significant for me. 

Now to get on with some questions . . .

Fingering

I wrote last month that “I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking ‘what do you most deeply want out of life?’” And, as I said last month, this is sort of a joke—but not entirely. Questions about fingering are often phrased like this: “What is the fingering here?” or “What is the fingering for this passage?” Of course this way of putting it is predicated (probably subconsciously) on the assumption that there is a “correct” fingering, or at any rate that other people have already deemed what the fingering should be. I understand that most students who ask such a question are not strongly asserting that they believe that there can be only one correct fingering and that someone else has already worked it out. It’s just an underlying flavor to the thinking. But in any case, my first response is to examine the question. Whose job is it to know what the fingering should be then and there for that student? Shouldn’t it be the student—of course with help from me, since I am there and can interact, not the kind of help that just gives one answer. However, if a student wants to work within a particular tradition, or has habits that stem from a particular tradition, then perhaps that student’s comfort will be enhanced by hearing about ways in which others with more experience in that approach have worked things out. I am inclined to be uncomfortable with this, and to believe that what a student should actually be learning is specifically how to work things out from scratch for him- or herself. However, that is of course one of my biases that I need to acknowledge and re-examine. 

Once or twice I have had a student who specifically wanted to use, by default, Marcel Dupré’s fingerings for Bach. This could have been because of something that a previous teacher suggested, because of something that they read, or just because those fingerings have the authority of something printed in a real book. My initial impulse is to be against this way of working out fingerings. Even if it is done with flexibility—with a willingness to view those fingerings as just a jumping-off point—it still strikes me as an inefficient path for arriving at what is right for a given student. However, if I myself have the flexibility to let that student start with something by which he or she is intrigued, then I discover a few things. One is a more complete picture of what is gained or lost by a particular approach to fingering. I also discover something about my student’s thinking, and about where past work and study have brought that student. And, most importantly, the student and I together learn something about the philosophy of fingering and of learning fingering. Will any of this outweigh the loss of efficiency when working on fingering is filtered through the ideas of a very different player—one who can’t participate actively in the discussion? I don’t know. But if it is in keeping with the student’s interests—and thus keeps the student interested and involved—it might work out well. 

Suppose that the Dupré fingerings are not for Bach but for a piece by Dupré himself? Then it might seem obvious that the fingerings are very fittingly authoritative—literally so. This leads, however, to questions about what fingering is for. Is fingering mainly about the piece and its interpretation, or is it mainly about logistics and comfort for the player (including how fingering habits might create predictability and repeatability)? Or is it about the instrument, and techniques for making the instrument speak? (All of the above?) Furthermore, suppose that the Dupré piece in question (such as Opus 28) was written for the express purpose of teaching a student how to begin working on Bach, and that the student does not want to adopt Dupré’s approach to playing Bach? 

Authenticity

This all leads to the question of authenticity, and why we should care about it. These can probably be summarized in two camps: authenticity for its own sake—seeking out and appreciating an awareness that what we are doing is what the composer would have done or wanted; and authenticity because we assume that what the composer really wanted is likely to be the most artistically effective, convincing, beautiful, communicative, and so on. (The former of these constitutes giving the composer authority, the second, trusting the composer.) Neither of these is demonstrably right or wrong, or excludes the other. Some players wish to start with the artifact as such—the music on the printed page—and reserve little or no role for authenticity or a reconstructed sense of what the composer would have done as a performer. 

The point here is not to sort all of that out. It is just that a student’s approach to fingering will inevitably reflect his or her approach to all of this—that is, to the student’s philosophy of life and of art. And as that approach evolves (perhaps with the help of the teacher), the approach to fingering should evolve as well (likewise with the help of the teacher).

Relaxation

What about relaxation? I have staked out (and mentioned repeatedly over the years) a position that relaxation is crucial to playing and to the learning process. I want students to be relaxed and happy and do things that they want to do not just because that seems like a nice state of affairs in itself, but also because I think that it leads to better learning. But I have no clear answer to how you induce relaxation. There is a paradox in that sentence—one that was embodied in a self-help book that was around when I was growing up called “Relax Now!”—the title sort of slashed across the cover in garish red letters. It looked like an attempt to intimidate people into relaxing. That, I imagine, can’t be done. 

The similar paradox in music learning is that we want students to relax, but also to believe that what they are doing is very hard, that almost no one ever succeeds, that they must be extraordinarily disciplined, practice a lot and always very well, that they must have succeeded by a very young age or they might as well give up, and so on. I or any other teacher may be quite good at not conveying that long list of dangers—it helps if, like me, you don’t actually believe in it. But it is still all there in our culture and its approach to music, especially music as a profession. 

And of course the basic part about work is not false: really learning music requires plenty of work. Part of my reason for wanting to make this work as efficient as possible—effective practice strategies—is to keep the process from being overwhelming in its sheer amount. However, I have to ask myself whether an emphasis on really good practicing can’t lead to pressure of its own. If I am not practicing perfectly, then maybe I’m losing out in some way. If not, why not? How can practicing be a relaxed or relaxing experience?

One thing that can help with relaxation is out-and-out silliness. What part can that play in learning an instrument or even in practicing? Quite a bit, I think. For example (minor silliness), it is quite a good thing for anyone who practices occasionally to play a piece focusing on nothing but physical relaxation. That is, let the hands, feet, and the whole self be almost completely lacking in muscle tone—almost slumped over. Certainly try to play the notes of the passage or piece, but give absolute top priority to being as over-relaxed as I have described. This will almost certainly lead to plenty of wrong notes. But it is a delightfully pure way to feel relaxed while playing. 

Other practice techniques

This is also good practice in keeping things going when you make a wrong note—possibly the single most important performance skill. Another paradox of working on music is this: if you really practice perfectly all the time you will in fact never make a wrong note. Technically, practicing well means keeping everything slow enough and broken down into small enough units that you never do anything wrong. But how can you ever practice the very thing that I just said was the most important performance skill? Surely that is the last thing that you want never to have practiced. So, is it possible to make wrong notes on purpose and recover from them? Is that a good idea as part of a practice regimen? I think that it probably is. (I continually demonstrate to students how much better it sounds when there are obvious wrong notes but no break in rhythm as compared to minor, fleeting wrong notes that the player allows to disrupt the flow of things.) Of course it isn’t pure: practicing making wrong notes on purpose and then continuing isn’t exactly the same as keeping going when a wrong note takes you by surprise. But it is useful, and, again, silly enough to be relaxing.

Practicing while it is really noisy is also a good idea—that is, a “bad” idea that can be fun and also serve as good training for some aspects of our work. A student can try practicing while there’s other music on—at home this can be the stereo, at the organ console it might be a device with headphones. I recently spent some time practicing clavichord while a recording of piano music played. It was interesting: I could tell that the (very quiet) clavichord was making sound, but I couldn’t tell that that sound had pitch. It was a great concentration exercise. (This reminds me of what Saint-Saëns reported, namely that in his days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire the piano practice facility contained twenty-four pianos in one big room. Everyone could hear everyone, and you really learned to concentrate and to listen.)

How about playing too fast? That is, playing a passage faster than you can play it and faster than you would want it to be. This of course can be fun. One of the big obstacles to students’ practicing slowly enough is that it is often just plain more fun to play fast. So perhaps playing too fast should be separated out: when you are really practicing a passage, do all of the things that I have described in past columns: slow enough, fingerings that are well-planned, and so on. But once in a while just let something rip. This ties in with the previous few paragraphs: if and only if you keep things physically relaxed are you able to go really fast, and if you try to tear through a passage much too quickly, you will make wrong notes, so you can practice keeping things going. (If you don’t make wrong notes, it may be fast but it is not too fast. So go faster!)

I have noticed (this month I seem to be writing more than ever about the production schedule of these columns) that during the part of next month when I usually write the column, I have a recording session. It is for a Frescobaldi harpsichord recording that has been in the works for quite a while. This juxtaposition has given
me the following idea: I am going to keep notes, a sort of diary of the latter stages of my preparation for those sessions, and then of the sessions themselves. The June column will be an edited selection of those notes—an account of some of my thoughts and experiences from the recording process. It will end up being a natural extension of some of the musings
of these last two columns. Its relationship to teaching as such will be, I assume, tangential but real: examples of thinking and working and trying
to make things come out well in a certain kind of musical situation. In any case, I hope that it will be interesting.