On Teaching

This is the next part of the Introduction, addressed to someone who has never sat down at an organ before.

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

Organ Method III

This is the next part of the Introduction, following directly from last month. Next month’s column will include the final section of the Introduction—which will finish up the preliminary discussion of registration, and touch on one or two smaller points—and the beginning of the first chapter, which will be about pedal playing. This Introduction includes, as I mentioned last month, quite a bit that is very basic, that is really addressed to someone who has never sat down at an organ before. I want to include this for several reasons: first of all, that some such people may want to use the book; that some of them may not have access to an experienced teacher (though of course working with a teacher is a very good idea whenever possible); and that a beginner’s perspective can be interesting as a refresher even for non-beginners. I would especially appreciate feedback about this aspect of what I have written here. I would also like to begin to solicit the following from readers: terms that should be included in a Glossary. If you have a term that you think is important but not obvious—I don’t need to
be reminded to include “Great” or “Swell” or “Crescendo Pedal,” etc.—then please send it along, with—if you wish—your definition.  

What do you the student need to know as you sit down at the keyboards of an organ for the first time?

First, you should know in general terms what to expect to find in front of you once you are seated at the organ bench. There will be keyboards: probably at least two manual keyboards (routinely abbreviated as “manuals”) and one pedal keyboard (“pedals”). There are a very few organs out there with only one manual, and of course some without pedals. A manual keyboard usually has the same general setup and configuration as a piano or an electronic keyboard: the same arrangement of seven “white” keys and five “black” (really “raised”) keys to the octave, the same letter names for the notes:

Remember, though, very little about the organ is “always”: you may someday encounter an organ on the keyboards of which some of the notes are actually in a different order from this. (This is rare: more about it later in this volume.) You will probably indeed encounter organs on which the “white” keys are of some dark or natural wood color, and the “black” keys are of a different wood color or perhaps are white. These colors and materials make no difference to the functioning of the instrument. (But if as a beginner, you find yourself at an organ that seems to have the notes of its keyboard(s) in a non-standard order, then consult the last chapter of this book, or the proprietor of that organ!)

The manual keyboards of most organs have a compass of four-and-a-half or five octaves. It is almost always the case that the lowest note of the manuals is a C, and that it is specifically C two octaves below middle C—the note two ledger lines below the bass clef: this is also, for example, the lowest note of the cello. The highest note is usually one of three notes: the C five octaves above that lowest note, or either the G or the F below where that five-octave C would have been. Middle C is, therefore, a bit to the left of the actual middle of the keyboard. It is normal—not universal, though close to it—for the multiple manual keyboards of any given organ to have the same compass as one another. 

The most common numbers of manual keyboards on organs around the world are two and three: any survey would probably show that 90% of the organs out there are either 2-manual or 3-manual. However, 4-manual organs are far from unheard of, and even more than that can be found. The purpose of multiple manuals is to provide different sounds, and more flexible ways of using different sounds than could be achieved with just one keyboard: much more about this below.

The pedal keyboard is—appropriately enough—down at your feet, or essentially on the floor. Like the manuals, the pedalboard uses the regular keyboard configuration: it is important to be aware that this is so, even though it looks so very different. The keys of a pedal keyboard are of course bigger than the keys of a manual keyboard, or of a piano, say, or a harpsichord. Each key will be played, when it is played, by a foot. Manual keys are played not by the hand as such, of course, but by individual fingers. (Manual keys meant to be played by the whole hand are found in carillons, where they are about as big as organ pedal keys, and look similar.) The pattern of “white” and “black” keys is the normal one, though fairly often the keys are all of a natural wood color. (Raised keys may be black; no pedal keys are normally white.) The lowest note of a pedal keyboard is again usually a C: the same C as the lowest note of a manual keyboard—two octaves below middle C. The highest note is usually either the F or the G above middle C. This give a compass of about two and a half octaves, corresponding to the lower two and a half octaves of the manual compass. 

Thus if you saw these notes 

you would play, on a manual keyboard:

1) the lowest key

2) the next C up, which is the eighth white key and the thirteenth key overall

3) the next C up after that, the fifteenth white key, the 25th key overall: roughly the middle of the keyboard

4) the F above that (18th, 30th), still near the middle of the keyboard

5) the C above that (22nd, 37th)

and on a pedal keyboard:

1) also the lowest key

2) also the next C up (8th, 13th), but near the middle of the keyboard

3) also the next C up (15th, 25th), but rather near the top of the keyboard

4) also the F above that (18th, 30th), but very near the top of the keyboard—perhaps the top note (on a few pedal keyboards this note is not there: it is above the compass of the pedals)

5) this note is well above the compass of any pedal keyboard.

Note that “middle C” is more or less in the middle of a manual keyboard, but near the top of a pedal keyboard. The C that is found in the middle of a pedal keyboard is “C below middle C,” often called tenor C. Also note that E or F above middle C on the manuals is probably directly above E or F below middle C on the pedals.

All of this quickly becomes intuitive or second nature, but it is important to be clear about it from the beginning.

Beyond the keyboards, what else will you see when you first approach
the organ?

Surrounding the keyboards are various switches, knobs, tabs, buttons, lights, perhaps LCD-type displays, toe studs, pedals other than the pedal keys, and more. Organs vary from one another quite a lot in the configuration of all of these accessories. Some organs have many more of them than others. Most of the pedals, knobs, and so on have to do, one way or another, with changing sounds, and, therefore, they can be of critical importance in allowing the organ to reach its full expressive potential. For the beginner at the organ, some of them are more important to understand and to use right off the bat than others.

Somewhere on or near the keyboards is a switch to turn the organ on. Almost every organ needs electricity, either to pump wind, in the case of pipe organs, or to generate the sound directly, in the case of the various types of electronic organ. Prior to the late nineteenth century, all organs needed wind, and all pumping of wind was done by people: to play the organ—even just to practice, however briefly—required the help of someone plying the bellows. The switch that enables us now to play the organ alone can take any one of several forms—a button, something that looks like a light switch, a toggle switch of a different shape, a timer knob, a key in a lock. It can be located anywhere: right by the keyboards, on a nearby wall, in another room. The first time that you arrive at a new organ, the proprietor of that organ will probably show you the switch. If not, look around: if you’re lucky it will be labeled. If not, there might be some trial and error involved.

Other than the on/off switch, the most important set of “extras”—accessories—that you need to understand before embarking on the journey of learning to play the organ is the stop controls—that is, the knobs, switches, or whatever it might be that turn the stops of the organ on and off, and that allow you to choose from among the many different sounds of the instrument. 

Thus we come to the subject of organ registration or the art of choosing sounds for organ pieces—or for any playing that you do at the instrument: repertoire, hymns, accompaniment, improvisation, and so on. I discuss registration at some length from historical and aesthetic perspectives in the later chapter on registration. Here I will go over the beginnings of what is a very big subject: enough to allow the beginner to start feeling comfortable using organ sound, and therefore to be able to start practicing and learning.

An organ has stops. A stop is a sound. Traditionally—that is, in pipe organs—a stop is a set of pipes, usually one per key of a given keyboard, that make a certain kind of sound. (Electronic organs make the sounds in different ways, and the sounds can be rather different, but the concept is the same.) The pipes of a given stop differ from one another in pitch, as they go up the compass of their keyboard, and resemble one another in sonority. Different stops cover the same notes as one another but differ, a little bit or a lot, in sonority. No note will sound on an organ keyboard—no key will produce a sound—unless there is at least one stop turned on when the key is pressed. 

Stops are normally assigned to particular keyboards. So, if there are two manuals and one pedal keyboard on a given organ, each of those three keyboards will have its own set of stops, from as few as one to as many as, rarely, dozens. For a keyboard to have between about eight and sixteen stops is common. (A keyboard and its associated stops are normally referred to as a “division.”) There are often, but not always, limited ways of sharing stops between keyboards. Most of the accessories mentioned above, found around the actual keyboards of an organ, are the switches that turn stops on and off. These can be knobs, which are pulled out to turn stops on, giving rise to the expression “pulling out all the stops.” They can also be tabs, rectangles or rounded rectangles, which are flipped up or down, or tablets meant to be rocked back and forth. The stop controls for each keyboard are usually grouped together. If the organ at which you find yourself is well labeled, then it will probably be clear which group of stop knobs or tabs controls the stops for which keyboard. If it is not clear, then it can be found out very readily by trial and error. 

Organ stops can be used singly or in combination. In general, just as each stop has its own distinct sound, so any possible combination of two or more stops has its own sound. If a given keyboard has just two stops, then that keyboard has three possible sounds: stop A, stop B, and those two stops together. If a keyboard has eight stops—still a fairly small division—then it has a total of 255 different possible sounds. A large division with, say, eighteen stops has over a quarter of a million possible combinations of stops, and thus that many different sounds. Of course many of these sounds are similar to one another. Also, these numbers—which get even bigger when we talk about combinations of sound across the whole organ—are for technically possible combinations. Only a fraction of those possibilities are normally judged to be musically attractive and useful. This, of course, is subjective, and open to disagreement and change.

Each organ stop is defined by two attributes: its pitch level and its sonority. The pitch level is easy to define or describe: a stop is either at unison pitch or at some other clearly defined non-unison pitch, say, an octave above unison, or two octaves above unison, or an octave below unison, or an octave and a fifth above unison. The purpose of stops that are not at unison pitch is not to transpose music, nor to alter the apparent pitch level of the music that is being heard. All of the non-unison stops are used in combination with unison stops. They blend in and change not the pitch level, but rather the sonority. It can be a bit of a leap of faith at first to believe that this works or makes sense, but it does. Stop knobs (or tabs, etc.) are labeled with numbers that tell us clearly what the pitch level of each stop is. These numbers are expressed as feet; however, it is important to know that they are not about length: they are simply a convention for describing pitch level. The meanings of the numbers are as follows:

8′ - at unison pitch (that is, each note has the same pitch that you would expect a piano to have, except for minor tuning differences)

4′ - one octave higher than unison

2′ - two octaves higher than unison

1′ - three octaves higher than unison

16′ - one octave lower than unison

32′ - two octaves lower than unison

51⁄3′ - a fifth higher than unison (a C key, for example, plays the G above it)

22⁄3′ - an octave and a fifth higher than unison (a C key plays the G a twelfth above it)

13⁄5′ - two octaves and a third above unison (a C key plays E a seventeenth above it).

It is very important for the student to know these numbers (there are a few others that are used rarely, but can be figured out). If a stop knob has a Roman numeral—say V or III or IV—then that stop is a conglomeration of many very high-pitched pipes. 

Stop controls also have words on them—the likes of “diapason” or “gedeckt” or “salicional” or “trumpet”. These are terms that attempt to describe the sonority of the stop. There is a lot to say about what these terms mean and where they come from (again, see the chapter on registration), but the best way to look at it at the very beginning is this: the term attempts to describe the sound, but if I pull out the stop and play some notes I can hear the sound itself.

An introduction to understanding organ sounds, and to pedal playing

Organ Method IV

This follows directly—without a break—from the last sentence of last month’s column. The first part of this month’s excerpt is again aimed at the student who is new to the instrument, and I am trying to explain enough to enable that student to start to practice and learn, without making anything too complicated for the earliest days at the console. Everything here is presented in a simplified way that I hope is neither over-simplified nor inaccurate. The second part of this column is the beginning of the chapter on pedal playing.

The best way for any keyboard player new to the organ to begin to understand organ sounds—organ stops—and therefore to begin to feel comfortable with organ registration is indeed to pull stops out essentially at random and to listen. In order to do this efficiently and to get the most out of it you should start by following a few guidelines:

1) Make sure that you know which group of stop controls applies to which keyboard. (See below about
keyboard names.)

2) Start by drawing one 8′ stop—on any keyboard—and playing a few notes. (For this purpose, it doesn’t make the slightest difference what you play: if you are an absolute beginner, just play separate individual notes; if not, play something short and simple that you are comfortable with—a bit of a scale, chords, a passage from a piece, etc. Elaborate or fast passages are not better for this purpose, by any means.)

3) Draw a different 8′ stop on the same keyboard. Play a few notes. Listen for the sound: how does it compare to the first stop that you tried? Is it very different, somewhat different, or surprisingly similar? 

4) Draw these two 8′ stops together. The combined sound will be louder than either of the two stops by itself, though not necessarily very much louder. It will create a different sonority. Does this combined sonority sound more different from one of the separate stops than from the other?

(Of course you can do this same exercise with further 8′ stops from this same keyboard, if there are any, and then with 8′ stops from other keyboards.)

5) Draw a 4′ stop from any keyboard. Play a few notes. Notice that this stop is an octave higher than the 8′ stop. Play a few notes in the octave below middle C, then play a few notes on an 8′ stop in the octave above middle C. Try some other 4′ stops—alone and in pairs or larger groupings if there are enough 4′ stops to make this possible. Pay attention to all of the different sonorities, noticing that, as long as you are only using 4′ stops, the pitch level of everything that you play is one octave above unison.

6) Draw out an 8′ stop and a 4′ stop together on the same keyboard. Listen to this sound, then try other combinations of 8′ + 4′, both on that keyboard and on others. 

7) Draw out an 8′ stop along with anything higher-pitched, in any amount and combination: 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, etc. Play some notes, chords, or passages, changing the higher-pitched component of the sound from time to time. As you do this, the sonority will change, but the sense of pitch level should not. Then, remove the 8′ stop. When you do this, the pitch level of what you are playing will jump up to the level of the lowest-pitched stop that remains in the stop combination that you have drawn. 

Beyond these specific suggestions, however, you can simply play around with stops in any way that occurs to you or that you discover at random. It is only important, at this stage, that you be aware of the pitch designations: know whether you are playing an 8′ stop alone, something higher (or lower: 16′), or some combination. As I have said, very little about the organ is “always.” However, the pitch numbers are: what they mean is very specific and concrete, and it is always the same. In the later chapter on registration, I will discuss the more elastic situation regarding the stop names and the relationship of those names to sonorities and to musical applications. 

Once you feel comfortable pulling out stop knobs, knowing that you can find sounds that are coherent and at the right pitch, you are close to being ready to start practicing organ. That is, you are almost ready to turn to Chapter 1 and beyond. However, there are just a few more things that you need to know about first.

First of all, manual keyboards on most organs have names. The most common names in English are probably Great, Swell, Choir, and Positive (or Positif). Some organs in predominately English-speaking countries have keyboard names in other languages, with words such as Hauptwerk, Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, Brustwerk, Récit, Grand Orgue, and various others. On some organs—usually smaller ones—the keyboards have numbers rather than names. There is a lot to say about the history and meaning of these names and naming practices. Some of this can be found in later chapters of this book, along with suggestions for further research. However, for now you just need to note the names of the keyboards on any organ that you are using, and correlate that name with that keyboard’s group of stop controls.

Along with the stop knobs—or tabs, or buttons, or whatever it is—there are controls, similar in look to the stop controls, that do things that are a little bit different. Some knobs or tabs are labeled with something like this: “Swell to Great” or “II/I” or “CH to GT,” that is, with names, numbers or abbreviations that refer to whole keyboards. These are couplers, and they are one of the ways in which stops proper to one keyboard can be shared by a different keyboard. What they mean, specifically, is usually dictated by common sense. If a knob says “Swell to Great,” then drawing that knob causes any stops that are drawn on the Swell keyboard to be playable also from the Great keyboard. There are couplers bringing the stops of manual keyboards to the pedal keyboard—“Swell to Pedal” or “I/Ped,” for example. Couplers bringing the pedal stops to a manual keyboard—“Pedal to Great,” say—are extremely rare, though not impossible or unheard of. Most organs have several couplers, but do not have all of the couplers that might be possible in theory.

Couplers are sometimes controlled by toe studs or pedals of some sort. There is also sometimes duplication: a coupler will be controlled both by a button or knob of some sort and by a toe stud. This is just for convenience. Don’t be worried by it: if two controls appear to do the same thing as each other, they are probably meant to do so.

Many organs have rows of buttons—usually between the keyboards—and/or toe studs—above the pedal keyboard—that are numbered with Arabic numerals. These are combination pistons. They operate to turn on pre-selected groups of stops, turning off all of the other stops. When you first sit down at an organ, try pushing the combination pistons one at a time. Observe the stop controls going on and off as you do so, and try out the resulting sounds. It is likely that any organists who use this instrument regularly have set up the pistons to bring on combinations of stops that they have found particularly useful, though as it is usually quite easy to change the combinations, the ones that you find have not necessarily been there very long, and are not necessarily intended to be used very much or for very long. The proprietor of the organ that you are using can show you how to set combinations of your own if and when that becomes relevant.

A stop control that is labeled “Tremulant” or some variation of that word does not bring on an organ sound of its own. Instead, it gives a vibrato-like quality to the stops that are drawn. (There are several different mechanisms for making this happen.) A tremulant may apply to the whole instrument or to one division.

Many organs have pedals that are not keys on a keyboard, that are set above the pedal keyboard itself, and that more or less resemble gas pedals in cars. These have two main functions, both intended to alter the sound that the instrument is making. The more common type of pedal is called the swell pedal—or sometime the “expression pedal.” It makes sounds louder or softer. On a pipe organ, this can only be accomplished by enclosing pipes in a box, and creating a setup for opening and closing that box. Many organs have this arrangement for some or, less commonly, all of the divisions. On an electronic organ, the loud/soft technology is analogous to the ordinary volume control on a stereo. When the swell pedal is all the way up—the top of it as far from the player as it goes—the sound is at its loudest, the same volume that it would have if there were no swell pedal. When it is all the way down—the top as close to the player as possible—the sound is at its softest. Some organ music explicitly calls for the use of the swell pedal; much of the repertoire does not.

The other sort of pedal that affects the sound of the instrument is the crescendo pedal. This is a device that brings on combinations of stops in a pre-determined order, quiet to loud. If the crescendo pedal is all the way down, it has no influence on the sound. As it is moved towards the up position, it brings on more and more stops. When it is all the way at the top, it has engaged a loud registration. The order in which stops are brought on is set either by the organ builder or by someone else, prior to the player’s sitting down to play. There is some organ music that expressly calls for the use of crescendo and diminuendo made by adding or subtracting stops in the manner of a crescendo pedal: most organ music does not. Many organs do not have a crescendo pedal.

To a large extent, the point of learning a little bit about these features and devices as you first sit down at the organ is to make sure that they do not confuse you as you begin to practice and to become adept at the basics of actually playing organ. For example, if you are certain that you have only one quiet stop drawn, but you are hearing a very loud, brash sound, you should know to check whether the crescendo pedal is really all the way off. If you think the sound you are playing should be loud, but it is in fact rather soft, check the swell pedal. If you move your legs around a bit, and suddenly the position of all of the stop knobs change, you might suspect that you have accidently hit a toe stud combination piston. 

For the earliest stages of practicing and learning the organ, you need to work directly with the stop controls and the keyboards. That is not to say, by any means, that you can’t experiment with the swell pedal, couplers, and all the rest. However, it is as you get to know the instrument better and better, and start to work on organ repertoire, that you will explore all of this and more in greater and greater detail and complexity.

One more thing: the bench itself. 

An organ bench should be adjustable in two directions: up and down, and back and forth. I have never seen an organ bench that couldn’t be slid back and forth at least a bit. Some benches can be moved up and down with a crank or other device that is built in. Others are, so to speak, solid. These should be provided with blocks. There are clever organ bench block designs that build different heights into the same blocks oriented differently. Some organ benches have multiple blocks that can be used separately or together. It is extremely important that blocks, and the bench as a whole, be stable: not rickety or inclined to wobble. If they are, this should be fixed. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that an organ bench would actually fall over. However, a wobbly bench makes playing more difficult, and can lead to physical tension for the player who has to struggle to remain in the right orientation to the keyboards.

If the bench seems all right, sit down and look towards your feet!

Chapter 1: Pedal Playing

Organ playing that includes pedals involves the whole body. It is one of the most athletic of musical performance activities, and therefore it is especially important that it be carried out comfortably, without tension. It is important, in other words, that it be done correctly. However, it is important to understand that it has to be done in a way that is correct for each player, and that this will not necessarily be the same for everyone. Different bench heights, postures, positions of the legs and feet, and, to some extent, technical practices will be right for different students. This is true even before we think about differences in musical goals, since it arises at least in part out of the differences in physical type of different people who want to play organ. Those differences in musical goals also play a part in determining aspects of the type of pedal technique that a player needs to develop. However, a student new to the instrument cannot yet (or at least probably should not yet) know exactly what those goals are going to be or where his or her involvement with the instrument may lead. 

On any given organ the distance between the pedal keys and the manual keys is fixed by the builder long before anyone sits down at the instrument. This distance is important, since it determines the way in which your height above the pedal keys affects your orientation to the manual keyboards. The height of the bench—that is, of the player sitting on the bench—above the pedal keys is important. It is difficult to play the pedal keyboard comfortably if that height is wrong. If it is too low, then you have to hold your feet and legs up artificially in order to avoid playing notes by accident. This is a great source of tension, and it is very important not to let it happen. If you are sitting too high, then it can be hard to reach notes easily with simple, comfortable gestures of the feet, especially with the heels. This can also destabilize your manual playing, since it can lead to a slight but annoying sense that you might be about to fall forward. 

However, on the whole, sitting too high is usually less of a problem than sitting too low. You will discover, as you play more and more, what bench height is best for you. Initially, you should adjust the bench in such a way that if you relax your legs entirely—especially the big muscles above the knees—the bottoms of your toes just barely touch the tops of the natural keys, and your heels don’t. This is just a starting point. You will see, as the process of learning pedal playing proceeds, how to determine what changes to make in this, if any.

You should start out centered on the bench—along the left-to-right (or bass-to-treble) axis—and positioned on the front-to-back axis in such a way that you feel stable. (This may also be essentially centered, but it need not be. This will depend on the depth of the bench, as well as the way that the size of the bench relates to your own size.) You should sit comfortably. This is extraordinarily important. It is neither practical for playing nor healthy for the player to slump far forward or to lean to one side or the other while trying to play. However, it is also neither necessary nor healthy to sit in a way that is stiff or artificially tall, or with the shoulders, back, and arms under any tension, or with your legs or knees so close together that you need to work to maintain the position.

As soon as you have sat upon the organ bench in what you think of as a good position, with the bench at a good starting height, take a few deep but relaxed breaths. Then look down at the pedal keyboard. Notice what note appears to be directly below your nose. Notice what note appears to be directly below each of your feet. For the purpose of learning to play pedals, this should be the last time that you look down at the pedal keyboard or at your feet while playing the organ.

I will end here, for reasons of space. Next month I will continue with the discussion of pedal playing, and introduce beginning pedal exercises.

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.

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

Organ Method I

Note: This is the first excerpt from my Organ Method, as discussed in last month’s column. It is the Preface to that book, and, as such, is written with the audience of prospective readers and users of the book in mind. I strongly welcome any and all feedback from readers of this column.

Preface

This book is written and presented with one concrete purpose at its core. It is intended to offer to anyone who is interested a clear and reliable path towards becoming a highly competent player of the organ. I would like to examine a few of the specific implications of that concept.

1) First of all—and, in a way, most important of all—is the notion of “anyone who is interested.” One of the greatest joys of my years as a teacher of organ and harpsichord has been the discovery that no two people who develop an interest in something do so for the same reasons, with the same background, or with the same expectations. Any approach to teaching that suggests, even unwittingly, that some of those reasons, backgrounds, and expectations are more suitable than others will have the effect of excluding or discouraging a portion of those who are—or were, initially—interested. In the world of organ playing, some of the notions that can end up excluding or discouraging potential students are those derived from the world of music and music teaching in general: that after a rather young age it is essentially too late to become a truly competent and skillful musician, or that anyone who cannot develop perfect pitch, or become a good singer, or learn to take dictation cannot be or should not be a musician, or in general that only those “touched by the gods” can master the mysteries of understanding and playing great music. 

I am well aware that, fortunately, very few music teachers or working musicians hold this last attitude. Unfortunately, however, I also know very well that many prospective students do—people are scared off by it. No one should be. Some other of these notions are specific to the world of the organ, and many of them are indeed inadvertent or unwitting. (Certainly very few, if any, music teachers want to exclude or discourage anyone.) The assumption that anyone who wants to become an organist should specifically first become a pianist is one such notion. (It is one to which I am personally sensitive, as it almost derailed me from pursuing organ in my teenage years.) Certain approaches to the learning of pedal playing are so prohibitively uncomfortable to some people that they convince those people—wrongly—that they are just not cut out to be organists. I am also sensitive to this one. 

At an early point in my teaching career, I happened to encounter a couple of people who told me that they had really wanted to play the organ, but found it too uncomfortable to sit in some particular posture while learning to play the pedals. They had come to believe, perhaps because of something that they had read or that they had been told, that this posture was necessary, and they actually gave up. This felt to me at the time like a tragedy (both for their sakes and because I wanted there to be more organ students out there as I began my teaching career!) and it led to my developing my particular approach to pedal learning, the latest refinement of which is found in this book. Others are discouraged by being told that it is absolutely necessary that they work on some particular part of the repertoire that really—for the time being at least—doesn’t interest them. I don’t believe that there is any good reason for this—even for something as basic as requiring a student to play some Bach, for example—as I discuss later on in this book.

2) In order for it to be true that any interested party can work successfully on organ playing, it must also be true that this does not involve any “dumbing down.” If I am claiming that a particular approach to working on organ can be successful not just for selected students but for anyone who is interested, then I must mean that anyone can reach a high level of competence and understanding—not just dabble a little bit. I firmly believe this to be true. And I am reminded of the saying attributed to J. S. Bach, concerning organ playing that “All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.” I have always believed that he meant something quite specific by this: that it was not, as it perhaps sounds at first, a joke or some sort of dismissive remark. I believe that he meant that the organist does not have to create tone and intonation in the various ways that singers and many string and wind players do. The basic act of making a note happen on the organ, with its pitch and tone color intact, is simple. That is why it is appropriate for the world to provide us with such amazingly complicated music. It is also why learning to play organ very well—at least what we might call an “intermediate” level—is available to anyone who chooses to work at it.

3) The process of learning to play the organ is, I believe, natural, simple, very human, and available to all. I hope that this volume helps to make that convincing. It is not, however, easy. That is an important distinction, and its main implication for the student is that learning to play (well) requires both the time and the personal commitment to do a substantial amount of work—of practicing. To a large extent, an organ method should be a statement, fleshed out in considerable detail, that amounts to: this is how to practice. That statement should be clear—enough so that a student can follow it without already knowing everything that the writer of the method knows. If this is not the case, then the book has in fact failed to convey its message. It should be reliable: that is, the approach to practicing must really lead to results if it is followed. This latter point is indeed my main claim for this method. I certainly don’t make, and wouldn’t want to make, the ignorant and arrogant claim that other approaches and other methods don’t work—or even that they don’t work at least as well as this one. I will, however, make this claim, also arrogant unless it is true: that anyone who actually does all of the things described and suggested in this volume will—inevitably, everyone, every time—become a competent, skilled organist. This is another lesson that I have learned through thirty years or so of teaching, and it is one that gives me great joy. I hope, always, that anyone contemplating or starting the study of organ approaches it with optimism and joy. It has always been my goal as a teacher, and is my goal as the writer of an organ method, to help students feel that way about the process. But it is a process: it takes work, it takes time, and it takes patience.

Is there an ideal or core student to whom this book is addressed? The answer to that is yes and no. The “yes” side of the answer looks like this: a student who is old enough to think about matters of learning on his or her own, who can already read music, who has already done at least a bit of keyboard playing, on any instrument—that is, who starts with a basic sense of what it is to use fingers at a keyboard—and, of course, who is really interested in learning organ. I have tried to write in such a way that this student can use the book either with or without the guidance of a teacher, and that this student can, so to speak, plunge right in to work on organ. The section on pedal playing is completely “from scratch,” that is, designed in such a way that it can be used by someone who has never played a note on a pedalboard before.

Any student who does not fit that particular description can use this method just as fruitfully by bearing in mind a few things.

A student who does not read music must learn to do so, both to use this method and in general to function as an organist. That is not something that is dealt with directly in this volume. There are, as I write this, many online music-reading resources: there probably always will be, though of course they change all the time. Most or all community music schools—or colleges that offer music instruction to the public—have classes that include an introduction to reading music. These classes usually include other aspects of basic musicianship or elementary music theory that can be interesting and that are useful for beginners. Although I do not attempt to teach music reading here, I do, in side-notes, make suggestions for the benefit of those whose music reading is still new and not fully internalized. Such students should be able to feel all right about working on the early stages of learning to play while getting more and more comfortable reading.

In my opinion, a student who has never played any sort of keyboard instrument at all and who is interested in organ need not start with any instrument other than organ. There is certainly nothing actually wrong with starting on piano or harpsichord—except that for a student who is not particularly interested in those instruments or their repertoire it can be frustrating. But there is also no reason to do so. Everything practical that you need to know about organ playing can be learned by playing the organ. (There are certainly things to be learned artistically from an involvement with piano and its repertoire or harpsichord and its repertoire: also by any involvement with any other sort of music. I discuss this from time to time in the course of the later chapters of the book.) The relationship of this student to the pedal-playing work in this method will be exactly the same as that of the “core” student. However, the sections here about manual playing do not start absolutely from scratch—there are no basic exercises for just a few fingers, or similar things. A student who has never played before might very well want either to work with a teacher who can begin at the very beginning, or to consult a beginning keyboard method on his or her own—in print or online. I have tried to write in such a way that there is very little of this sort of preliminary work needed, the less so the more a student is able and willing to follow my suggestions about slow and systematic practice.

Students who have in fact already played organ—either a little bit or more than a little bit—can, I hope, also get something out of this method and this approach. This is true especially for anyone who finds pedal playing awkward. (As I have suggested above, my approach to pedal playing involves a kind of physical simplicity that some players find helpful.) It might also be especially true for a player who feels less than fully comfortable with the difficulties of grappling with complex counterpoint. Of course, an experienced or accomplished organist who is comfortable with all the main aspects of his or her playing is not likely in any case to need to consult an organ method. However, I have tried to include enough here in the way of generally interesting ideas, observations, and thoughts about the organ and the never-ending task of learning, that such a player might find it worth browsing through, as I myself have found it interesting to browse through a wide variety of organ methods, from at least Sir John Stainer on.

The method is organized as follows: 

1) A very brief introduction to the organ in general, geared mainly to what a student needs to know in order to start working. 

2) The section on pedal playing. This is the most categorical thing that a student who is already a pianist or harpsichordist needs to grapple with in order to begin the alchemical transformation into an organist. This section outlines, quite systematically, a comprehensive approach to playing pedals. It can certainly be used on a stand-alone basis by anyone whose main concern is either to learn pedal playing or to review and revise his or her approach to the pedals. This section includes—logically enough, though somewhat out of order—a set of protocols for practicing hands and feet together.

3) The section on manual playing. This section is largely about practicing, the most important aspect of work on organ playing. It includes, however, discussion of ways to approach work on counterpoint and other specific organ textures, thoughts about articulation and other interpretive matters, and discussion of registration. (My goal in addressing interpretive matters is always to help students create possibilities for themselves, never to tell them where they should end up.) For a student specifically hoping to make the transformation from non-organ keyboard player to organist, the second element of that transformation, less categorical than learning to play pedals, but just as important, is learning to manipulate the touch and sound of the organ in a way that is idiomatic and that opens up as wide a range of possibilities for expressive and communicative playing as possible. This is open-ended and subjective, but I try to provide a framework for thinking about it.

4) A longer discussion about the organ and its history and repertoire—not seen through the lens of “what a new student needs to know to sit at the console and get started” but rather as a slice of what an evolving organist might want to absorb about the instrument and its music. This includes a substantial number of suggestions for further research. It is characteristic of our times that information—say the detailed history of the evolution of a major historic organ—is easy to find, and that what is available changes (expands) rapidly. An organ method nowadays does not need to include, as a basic resource, a representative set of historic stoplists. It needs, instead, to inform the student about how best to find such information and how to understand it, and how to use it to create and expand possibilities.

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. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. He writes a blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method IX

This excerpt begins the section on manual playing, in which I offer guidance to the student who has already played piano or harpsichord, on how to adapt that playing to the organ. This is, as I wrote in the Preface to the method—which appeared as the October 2012 column—mostly about how to practice. One model for an approach to learning organ (manual) playing for a student who is already a keyboard player is this: sit down at the organ, play around, and see what you notice. Of course, this is potentially inefficient. There is no reason that a student should lack the advantage of some guidance from someone more experienced, in person or through writing. However, this hands-off, unguided approach is in fact the essence of what a musician/student should do. The way to learn what sounds and touch on the organ are like is to play the organ, notice everything that you hear and feel, and respond to what you notice. Although I think that at least on grounds of efficiency it is a good idea for a student to accept guidance from teachers (or for that matter from method-writers), I also think that such guidance should remove as little autonomy and initiative from the student as possible. The opening of the section on manual playing—the part included this month—is a general guide to starting the process. 

I should mention that, whereas in the column from last October I wrote that the work on playing manuals and pedals together would form part of the section on pedal-playing (the section that was printed in several columns ending last month), I have since decided to shift it to after the section on manual playing. This seems to me to make more sense, although of course in the end students can uses chapters of this book in any order that they want.

Position

Take a seat on the organ bench. If you have already begun to work on pedal playing, then remember to position yourself on the bench—and to position the bench itself—in the way that you have found best for pedal work. It is not a good idea to get accustomed to a different bench position for manuals-only music, pedals-only music, and the large segment of the organ repertoire that uses hands and feet together. (Though once in a while, later on, it might be a good idea to change position for a particular piece that presents some sort of unusual challenge.) If you are coming to this section of the book without yet having begun to work on pedal playing, then position the bench at a height that allows you to relax your legs completely either without depressing any pedal keys, or only depressing them lightly with your toes. Of course, while practicing manuals without pedal, you should rest your feet in whatever way that the organ you are playing provides. Usually there is a bar low down on the bench that is meant to accommodate the feet when they are not being used to play. 

Since the vast majority of organs have at least two—often three—manuals, there is no way to sit that gives you one position in relation to the manual keys. The higher manuals are both higher and farther away. In trying to work out the right distance from the manuals at which to sit, it is important to make sure that you do not feel cramped. If you are too close to a keyboard, it is extremely difficult to play without tension. You should never feel that your shoulders need to be drawn upwards or back in order to give your hands and arms room to address the keyboards. Your shoulders should also, however, not be hunched forward. Your posture on the bench should be as relaxed and comfortable as possible. As you get accustomed to playing, you may make changes in the exact distance from the keyboards that you choose to sit. There is no “correct” posture for your arms while playing the organ. That is, your elbows, for example, do not have to be in one particular place or one particular alignment with your torso; your wrists need not be consistently above, below, or even with your forearms or hands. These things will vary with your own physique and habits.   

Once you are seated on the bench, notice where on each keyboard each of your hands most naturally falls—the place on the keyboard at which your forearms, the middle three fingers of each hand, and the keys themselves line up straight, while your shoulders and elbows are in a comfortable place. This will probably be roughly an octave below middle C for the left hand and an octave above middle C for the right hand: a bit farther out from the center for players who are particularly broad-shouldered or who prefer to keep their elbows out from their sides. This is the place on the keyboard where it is easiest to play without tension. Therefore, it is the best place to use as a sort of laboratory for learning or trying out various aspects of organ touch and various fingering skills. 

Begin to play

Now draw a stop or two (you can revisit the Introduction for a reminder about drawing and combining stops) and play some individual notes in the region of the keyboard described above. What do you notice? What is the touch like? How does it compare to the instruments with which you are most familiar—piano, harpsichord, or others? Is it heavy or light or in-between? Try playing a few notes with your fingers as far out on the keys as possible—almost slipping off to the front—and then with your fingers in the middle of the keys. Do these different positions feel different? Try playing notes in this same region of each of the different keyboards of the organ at which you are seated. Do the keyboards feel different from one another? Try engaging a coupler. Does this change the feel of either of the keyboards involved? If you depress a key very slowly, with as little force as possible, does that seem to sound or feel different from what you experience if you strike a key with more force? The answers to these questions will vary—sometimes a lot—from one organ to another. Whatever you notice or learn at the first organ keyboard at which you sit and play is, of course, only a beginning. 

Next play some simple note patterns, one hand at a time, along the lines of these, the first for the right hand, the second for the left (Examples 1 and 2). I have located these short exercises in the region of the keyboard that I have identified as the most natural for your arms and hands to reach. However, if for you that region is a little bit higher or lower, then start out playing the same four-note pattern using whatever specific notes seem most comfortable. (Stick to natural notes for the moment.) Try the following different fingerings—right hand: 2-3-4-5-4-3-2 or 1-2-3-4-3-2-1; left hand: 5-4-3-2-3-4-5 or 4-3-2-1-2-3-4.

What do you notice about the different fingerings? Do they seem to result in differences in hand position or in where on the key you play each note? Does one feel more comfortable or more natural than the other? 

Next, try the same exercise about a fifth closer to the center of the keyboard. If you started on the notes that I pictured, move to this (Examples 3 and 4). Try the same different fingerings, and look out for the same things. Then play the same pattern near the middle of the keyboard, perhaps with each hand crossing or including the note middle C. Try this on all of the keyboards of the organ that you are playing. 

In playing this short exercise bear the following in mind:

1) Keep everything relaxed: hands, arms, shoulders, and your entire body.

2) As long as you are physically relaxed, do not worry for now about the shape or position of the hand: the relationship between the fingers and the rest of the hand; the height of the wrist; the height of the wrist or hand in relation to the arm. All of these things are individual and flexible. There might turn out to be right and wrong ways for you to approach these things, but they will be right or wrong for you specifically: they will emerge in the course of your learning—they can’t be dictated in advance. There are aspects of sideways hand position—that is, how the hand is turned or cocked side-to-side—that are important, and that tend to work out the same way for most players. You will begin to work on this a bit later on.

3) The fingers need not always be parallel to the keys. It is fine for the finger playing a note to be at any angle to that key, as long as the part of the finger actually playing the note touches the key solidly. 

4) Keep the tempo slow, and listen to the sound of each note: savor each note. There is nothing to be gained by speed.

5) Try different articulations. Some of the time, make the exercise legato: release each note as you play the next note. Other times, try an exaggerated legato: let notes overlap to such an extent that you hear adjacent notes sounding together, perhaps for nearly the full length of the latter note, even though this will sound odd. Then try it detached: release each note long enough before playing the next note that you hear a gap. Then also try it very detached: release each note as soon as possible after you play it, only making sure that you do really hear the sound of each note. (Even these very short notes should be played without extra force or tension.) 

6) In trying out all of these articulations, do not worry about precision or making everything come out the same. Just keep relaxed and listen. This will lead to the most control—and precision when it is desired—later on.

Next, add some raised keys—sharps and flats—to the exercise. Start with one of the following, and take it through all of the steps described above (Examples 5 and 6). 

Two hands together

These simple exercises are meant to be played one hand at a time. The next step is to put the two hands together, keeping the note picture simple. As always, you the student can construct such exercises yourself. Here are a few possibilities derived from the exercises above (Examples 7, 8, 9, and 10).

Concerning the fingering for these exercises, bear the following in mind:

1) Use the same sorts of fingerings for each hand of these exercises that you used for the separate-hand exercises above; that is, sometimes 1-2-3-4, etc., sometimes 2-3-4-5, etc. 

2) Mix and match these fingerings between the two hands. Sometimes use the thumb-based fingering in both hands, sometimes use the second-finger-based fingering in both hands, and sometimes use one of those in each hand. 

3) Note that when the notes are parallel, the fingerings are mirrored, or nearly mirrored; when the notes are mirrored, the fingerings are parallel or nearly parallel.

4) Before you play through an exercise, be absolutely sure that you know what fingering you are about to use. If it would help, write the fingering in—but lightly, in pencil. When you want to try a different fingering, erase what you have written and write in the new fingering. 

Keep these exercises slow: it is not useful to practice this sort of material if, in doing so, you feel that you have to scramble to find the next note, or if you actually make wrong notes, or if you have to hesitate in order to get it right. There is no disadvantage to keeping the notes very slow indeed. Listen to the sounds, and to the intervals. Savor the sounds of the registrations that you use. 

Continue to try different articulations, as described above. If you feel comfortable doing so, you may try different articulations in each hand. In doing this, again don’t expect for the results to be measured or precise: just keep the feel of the hands relaxed and natural, and listen carefully.