On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. See his blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method XI

I ended last month’s column with the suggestion that experienced keyboard players who are using this book to begin their exploration of organ playing could now feel ready to bring to the organ any reasonably simple two-voice piece that they have already learned on another keyboard instrument. My experience suggests that this is a good idea. It can be tricky to transfer a piece from one instrument to another (very different) instrument, and there are pitfalls to watch out for, having to do with touch, sound, and idiomatic performance. Any student should also begin quite promptly to learn new pieces from scratch. However, already knowing the notes of at least a piece or two can provide added ease. When I am working with such a student, I always suggest a mix: initially a few pieces that are already under the student’s fingers, very soon a new piece or two, and a transition to mostly new pieces. 

In any case, this next excerpt is intended to ground a student with little or no keyboard experience in the practicing of what will of necessity be new pieces at the organ. It provides some general guidelines, and takes the student through the process of beginning to work on a short two-voice piece: one that is not trivially easy (and therefore that adds significantly to what the short exercises from the last few columns have provided) but that is also fairly straightforward: no tricks, nothing too unusual. It is also a piece in which the left-hand part is the more complex of the two voices.

If you have come to the organ without having played a keyboard instrument previously, and have gone over all of the above enough to feel comfortable with it, then you can now also start on simple pieces in two voices—one line of music per hand. These will not, of course, be pieces that you have played before. The repertoire is full of such pieces (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions are probably the best known) and they are appropriate to work on, if you are willing to be careful and systematic about it, and to keep practice tempos slow. A short piece by Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) from his collection Tabulatura Nova Part III of 1624 will serve as an example of how to work on such a piece at this stage in your learning process (Example 1).

Some important guidelines

1) At the beginning, work on each hand separately. In fact, at this stage—and indeed in many circumstances throughout your life as an organist—practice each hand separately until it is fully learned and comfortable before putting the hands together. (You will learn over time when this is, and isn’t, necessary or a good idea for you.)

2) Work in small chunks: maybe a measure or two at a time. It is always a good idea to practice in small enough increments so that when you return to the beginning of what you are practicing, you remember it well: that is, the repetition has a chance to impress itself on your subconscious memory. 

3) Work out fingering carefully. Your approach to fingering will evolve with experience. At this point you are using the piece and the fingering to help you become comfortable with the act of putting the two hands together. Later you will use what you have learned about fingering and practicing to give pieces the musical shape that you want.

4) Always practice slowly enough. This means that what you are playing should both be accurate and feel comfortable. If you hear yourself playing the right notes but feel yourself having to scramble to do so, you are playing too fast. There is no such thing, for purposes of effective practicing, as playing too slowly.

5) Keep your eyes on the music, not on your hands. Even when, in the course of practicing short simple lines, you find that you remember those lines well enough that you don’t need to look at the music, do not fall into the habit of watching your hands. It is OK to take an occasional glance, but that is all. Over-dependence on looking at the hands slows down the progress of becoming comfortable as a keyboard player.

6) And, of course, look the piece over in general before taking it apart and working. Notice rhythms, patterns, exceptions to patterns, wide intervals, repeated notes, compass, and so on.

(I am addressing these suggestions to those who are essentially new to keyboard playing, but any player new to the organ should read and consider them, especially when approaching new pieces.)

Practicing and fingering

In this piece, the left hand part is more active than the right hand. The right hand plays 28 notes, the left hand nearly five times that many. Thus you should probably expect to practice the left hand significantly more than the right hand. This piece also contains many repeated notes—mostly in half notes in the right hand, as in measure 3, for example, and mostly in eighth notes in the left hand, as in measures 3 and 4, and elsewhere. The compass of the right-hand part is one note under an octave; that of the left-hand part is an octave and a fourth. There is a spot in measure five where the two hands coincide on the same note, and a spot in measure nine where the left hand succeeds to the note that the right hand has just been holding. (These spots will feel different depending on whether you are playing the piece on one manual or on two.) 

The right-hand fingering can be worked out using the repeated notes as an anchor—bearing in mind what I have already mentioned about changing fingers on repeated notes. For example, if you play the first of the seven consecutive A’s starting in measure two with the second finger, and then alternate that with the third finger, the rest of the passage falls into place nicely. (This results in the first fourteen notes of the right-hand part fingered as: 2-4-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-4-3-2.) You should try a few different fingering possibilities, guided for the time being mainly by comfort and logistics.

The left hand is more complicated. You will have to spend more time working out fingerings, and you may want to change some of what you first work out as you practice it. This is, of course, normal and fine. If you have been practicing a passage with one fingering but want to change that fingering, it is necessary to back up and practice more slowly, focusing specifically on the notes where you have changed the fingering, and just a few notes before and after. Do not let fingering “change itself” at random as you practice. (To be honest, you will certainly do this later on when you have become more adept at playing and when the process of choosing fingering has become more ingrained and intuitive. But it is best not to let it happen for now.)

Take a look at the first four notes of the left hand. What fingers most naturally would play those notes? 4-3-2-4? 5-4-3-5? 3-2-1-3? Do these feel equally easy and comfortable? Does one fingering seem to create a more comfortable hand position than the others? Does one make it seem easier to go on to the next note than the others do? Or does one make it harder, while the other two seem about the same? What finger can most easily reach the middle D on the third beat of this measure? Is there more than one choice that might make sense? What about coming down from that D? 

Examples 2 and 3 are two fingering possibilities for the first part of this left-hand line. Can you devise another possibility that does not start on 4? Or that does not use 1 to play the fifth note of the line? Or that uses 1 for the first note of the second measure? Spend some time playing around with this. Try a number of fingerings a few times each. Don’t try to practice and learn each one—that comes when you have chosen one.

Later on in this left-hand part is a passage in which repeated notes occur not as groups of notes (as they do in mm. 3 and 4) but as part of moving lines. This creates interesting fingering choices, since every time that you change fingers from the first to the second note of a repeated-note pair you have a chance to reposition the hand. One possible fingering is shown in Example 4—you should try to find others.

Once you have thought about and explored the fingering of these passages and of the rest of the left-hand part, zero in on a small chunk of that line, say the first measure and a half, choose the fingering that you will learn, and begin to practice it. Practicing means repetition of the same thing done the same way, slowly and carefully, and many times in a row. As you break up a line such as this into sections for practicing and learning, bear in mind two important things: first, the increments must be small enough for the repetition to be meaningful; second, the increments should overlap or dovetail into one another, at least a little bit. The second of these is necessary to prevent the first of them from creating fragmentation or moments of insecurity in the passage. 

So, for example, if you start by practicing this left-hand part from the beginning through the middle beat of the second measure (middle D, quarter-note), then it is a good idea to begin your second increment for practicing with that same middle beat, or perhaps either two or four notes before that. The principle is that practice sections should overlap: the details should be worked out in each case in such a way that it feels natural. The exact extent of the overlap doesn’t matter. (This applies, by the way, equally to page turns. When you are working on a piece that requires a page turn, you must make sure that you do not always interrupt your practicing at the same spot. Either through brief bits of memorization or through the use of photocopying or something similar, you must practice across the page turn in a way that dovetails, so as not to create a moment of discontinuity.)

Start your practicing of any left-hand passage very slowly, so that it feels easy. Do not increase the tempo until 1) you have played the passage at least three times at the existing tempo and 2) the passage feels easy and natural at that tempo. Increase tempo a little bit at a time.

Once you have chosen fingering and practiced the same measure (or measure and a half) of each hand—remembering in this case that the left hand will require more attention and more repetition, and to practice each hand enough that it is really learned—then you are ready to put the two hands together. You will probably have to back the tempo up a bit from each hand’s separate tempo in the course of the individual practicing. (It is all right for the two hands to have reached different tempos in separate practicing, as long as you now slow things down to accommodate the extra complexity of putting both hands together.) The purpose of this exercise is to help you to become increasingly comfortable putting the two hands together. There is nothing to be gained by speed; there is a lot to be gained by good focus. 

In starting to put the hands together in a passage, make sure that you have reminded yourself in advance of the note on which each hand will start—especially if the two hands do not come in together. In the beginning of this piece, the right hand comes in well after the left hand, so you should be thinking ahead a little bit to avoid hesitation at that spot. 

(This discussion will be continued in next month’s column.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) miscellaneous changing non-contrapuntal texture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at .

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 2:
Fingering, pedaling, and
practicing, part 1
In this month’s column, we will look at the opening section of the Buxtehude E major Praeludium in great detail as to fingering and pedaling, and outline ways of practicing that section. When we return to this piece, after beginning our look at the Boëllmann Suite Gothique, we will analyze the section that begins in m. 13 with regard to practicing and learning that section. These two sections offer several different textures and types of writing; each suggests a different approach to the very practical act of learning the notes. These textures include the one-voice opening, the multi-voiced but not strictly contrapuntal measures that immediately follow, and the rigorously contrapuntal—fugal—section that begins in the soprano voice in m. 13. Each of these textures recurs in this piece, and of course throughout the repertoire as well.
This and the next few Buxtehude columns will focus on the steps necessary to learn the right notes securely and efficiently. I will try my best to do this in a way that leaves open as many different interpretive possibilities as possible. In particular, I do not mean to take sides in any debate about how much to incorporate “authentic” fingerings and pedalings, or about what those are or might be in any particular case. That does not mean that I will not mention them or include them among the possibilities. As I hinted but did not quite state last month, I will not discuss any work on memorization. (I have, like many performers and teachers, somewhat mixed and complicated feelings about memorization, but I do not consider it to be a necessary or integral part of learning a piece well and performing it in a way that is both solid and artistically worthwhile. I will discuss memorization as an issue unto itself in a later column.)

Fingering
Since the opening of our Praeludium (see Example 1) is a monophonic statement of three rather long measures—49 notes—the first question that arises is which hand or hands should play it. (This foreshadows the most important practical question about any passage of keyboard music; namely, which notes should go in which hand. This question must precede detailed questions about fingering, and it is often overlooked or shortchanged by students. More about this later.) Since the passage is basically high—in the right hand region of the keyboard—and is probably not going to be played in a way that is prohibitively fast for one hand, it makes sense to start out by assuming that it is a right-hand passage.
However, it also makes sense to look for places where taking some of the notes in the left hand would make things easier. Each student can look the passage over and make this judgment for him- or herself. It might, for example, make sense to take the four sixteenth notes of the third beat of m. 3 in the left hand. These notes are lower than the rest and using the left hand to play them would put that hand in a good position to participate in playing the chord on the first beat of m. 4.
It is also possible to share the notes more or less equally between the hands, though I myself have not been in the habit of doing so in this passage. An advantage of sharing the notes between the two hands is that it is just easier to execute. This becomes more important the faster a player wants the passage to go. A disadvantage to dividing the passage up between the hands is that it gives more to think about in the learning process and to remember in playing, and probably takes longer to learn.
On a more positive note, an advantage to keeping the passage in one hand is that it is probably easier or more natural to project the overall rhetorical shape of the line when the shape and spacing of the notes is felt in the most direct physical way by the player. None of these considerations is absolute, and a teacher and student can think about them and work them out.
Just for the record, the fingering that I myself would use to play this passage is shown in Example 2. This is largely a common-sense and hand-position-based fingering. For example, the choice of 1-3 to begin the passage is entirely based on the way that my own fingers happen to fall over those notes, given my posture and my arm angle. (The arm angle stems from my preference for letting my elbows float out from my sides, which in turn is—for me—part of a relaxed posture.) The first four notes could just as well be played 1-2-3-4 or 2-3-4-5. The choice of 3 rather than 4 for the D-natural 32nd note late in m. 1 is designed to make it easier to reach the coming G# with 4 (rather than 5). The point of playing that G# with 4, in turn, is twofold: first, to place the (long) third finger on the F# and the (shorter) second finger on the E; second, to make it easier then to reach the high B on the final half-beat of the measure with finger 5. (It would also be fine to play those notes—G#-F#-E—with 3-2-1.) For me, keeping the thumb off of raised keys is a guiding principle.
A reason for not playing the third beat of m. 1 with 2-1-2-5, etc. (but rather with 4-3-2-5, etc.) is that the gesture of turning the second finger over the thumb to play the G# moves the hand away from the upcoming (high) E, and therefore makes the playing of that note awkward—at least, that is how it works with my hand. In m. 3, the non-adjacent fingerings of each of the beat groupings are all designed to move the hand in the correct direction for whatever is coming up next.
This fingering is not intended to be a recommendation or even a suggestion: it is just how I would probably do it. There are many other ways. (Some of these might be more historically minded—with more disjunct or pair-wise fingerings—or less so—with substitution or more use of the thumb, even occasionally on a black note.) The important thing is that teacher and student work out a fingering that is appropriate for that student. Sometimes that process involves a lot of specific input from the teacher, sometimes little or none. A teacher should always look for ways to let the student assume increasingly more responsibility for working out fingerings. I tend to give very few specific fingering suggestions, but keep an eye out for spots where a student may not have succeeded in finding something that works well. In those cases, I will invite the student to analyze the spot again, perhaps with more input from me.
So in this case, once a fingering has been worked out, the most effective approach to practicing the passage is clear. That is, since it is only one line and one hand—at least, certainly one hand at a time—there is no concern about how to combine parts, and in what order. The plan is just to practice it. First, choose a very slow tempo: slow enough that playing the right notes with the planned fingering is actually easy. This might, for one player, be sixteenth note equals 60, for another 80, for another 45. For an advanced player or a good reader it might be faster, and it might be all right to think about a pulse for the eighth note even from the beginning. Anything is all right, as long as the student does not start with too fast a tempo. Then, having played the passage several times at this starting tempo, the student should play it several times a little bit faster, then a little bit faster still. At some point, the beat in the student’s head will naturally shift from the sixteenth note to the eighth note, then to the quarter note. The crucial thing is not to get ahead of a tempo that honestly feels easy. This, if practiced rigorously, will lead to unshakeable security.
Meanwhile, the rest of the opening section is multi-voiced, a mix of not very strict counterpoint and homophonic writing. In this passage, the main practical question is which hand should play some of the inner-voice notes. As I mentioned above, this is extraordinarily important. I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make an easy passage almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in an awkward way. This is usually caused by assuming too readily that the notes printed in the upper staff should be played by the right hand and those printed in the lower staff should be played by the left hand. In fact, there should never be such an assumption unless the two hands are meant to be on different keyboards, providing different sounds for different parts of the texture. In general, the two manual staves between them present a note picture, and we have ten fingers with which to play that note picture in the most reliable way possible.
In each of the measures in Example 3, there are notes in what is more or less the alto voice that are printed in the upper staff; some of these might be best played in the left hand. The notes that I have highlighted are those that I would choose to play in the left hand. Again, this is not by any means the only way to do it. The first criterion that I use in working this out is that “extra” notes should be placed in the hand that otherwise has less to do. That is at work very strikingly in mm. 7-8, and the beginning of m. 9, but also elsewhere. Sometimes hand choices are made based on the need to prepare what comes next. That applies here in m. 11, where I am not taking several notes in the left hand that could, or in a sense should, be in the left hand, so as to make it possible for the left hand to play the (tenor) E in the chord in m. 12. (There would be other ways to deal with this, involving substitution.)
Sometimes the notes of a passage in a middle voice can be divided between the hands just to make that passage easier—less inclined to get tangled. This is the case here in m. 5 and to some extent in m. 10. An overriding consideration is hand position: how can notes be divided between the hands in a way that best allows each hand to remain in a natural, comfortable position?
After the hand assignments have been worked out, the next step is to work out fingering. (In the process, some hand choices may be changed.) As always, fingering will depend in part on factors that differ from one player to another, including the size and shape of the hands, existing habits or “comfort zones,” and artistic goals concerning articulation, tempo, and other matters. Example 4 shows a possible sample fingering for one of the more convoluted of these measures. As always, there is a lot here that could be done differently. For example, it could make sense to play the E that is the first note in the top voice of the first full measure with 5, or the D#/B right-hand chord later in that measure with 2/1. It would also be possible to take the A#-B in the first full measure with the left hand, probably with 2-1. The above is just one way of doing it.

Practicing
Once the fingering has been worked out, the next step is practicing. The principles of practicing are always the same, and they are both so important and so difficult psychologically (for most of us, certainly including me) that they can’t be repeated too often: break the music down into manageable units—short passages, separate hands and feet; practice slowly enough; speed up gradually and only when the unit being practiced is really ready for it. In the case of the passage under discussion, one sensible way to divide things up might be as follows:
1) the right hand from the last few notes of m. 3 through the downbeat of m. 9
2) the left hand from the downbeat of m. 4 through the second beat of m. 9
3) the right hand from the first high B in m. 8 through m. 12
4) the left hand from the half note D# in m. 8 through m. 12, and
5) the pedal part, which I will discuss in its own right just below.
(Notice that the sections are designed to dovetail, not to bump into one another. This guarantees that practicing in sections will not cause fissures or awkward transitions to develop. This is quite important. It also applies to practicing across page turns.)
Each of these units should be played many times at, initially, a very slow tempo: as always, slow enough that it feels easy. For most students it would probably make sense, given the somewhat complex texture of this passage, to start with a beat—in the student’s head or from a metronome—that will represent the 32nd note, so that each of the sixteenth notes will receive two of those beats. This 32nd-note beat might initially be at 100, or 80, or 120: whatever feels comfortable. Then each unit should be sped up gradually.
(Some musicians express concern that starting the practicing procedure with beats that represent very short notes—many levels down from the “beat” suggested by the time signature—will result in playing that lacks a sense of underlying pulse, that is too divided into small fragments. However, it is insecurity as to the notes, fingerings, and pedalings that is by far the greatest cause of rhythmically unconvincing playing. At the early to middle stages of learning a passage, the best thing that we can do to predispose that passage towards convincing rhythm is whatever will get the notes learned the most securely. The use of very small note values early in practicing is so removed from later performance, in time and in feel, that I have never known it to come back and haunt or influence the quality of a that performance.)
Some variation is possible in the mode of reconnecting the separate hands. In general, the slower you are willing to keep things, the more promptly you can let yourself put components of the whole texture together. There is some speed at which any given student could indeed skip the step of separating hands. For most of us, in moderately or very difficult passages, this tempo is very slow indeed, and in general it is not a good idea to aim to do this. (Not a good idea partly because it taxes our boredom threshold and partly because separate-hand practicing also allows us to hear things clearly.) In general, if each hand feels really solid at a certain tempo—ready in theory to be performed by itself at that tempo—then it is possible to put those hands together at a somewhat slower tempo. How much slower varies from one situation to another. The overriding principle is a familiar one: when you put the hands together, the tempo should be such that the results are accurate and the experience feels easy—no scrambling, no emergencies, no near misses.

Pedaling
The pedal part in mm. 4–12 of this piece is simple though non-trivial. I would play the fifteen pedal notes with the following feet, all toes:
l-r-r-r-l-r-l-r-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
Other possibilities involve, for example, playing the first note of m. 5 with left toe (crossing over) or playing the second note of that measure with right heel; or playing some of the two-note groupings that span bar lines (between mm. 6–7, 7–8, 8–9) with one foot, either all toes or toe and heel. Once a student has decided on a pedaling, he or she should play through the pedal part slowly, not looking at the feet, until it is second nature. Since the note values are all long, getting the pedal part up to tempo will not take as long or go through as many stages as it would with some other passages. However, it is extremely important not to shortchange the practicing of even this fairly simple pedal line. This is all the more true because in general lower notes and slower notes play the greatest part in shaping the underlying pulse and rhythm in organ music. This pedal line is both.
When the pedal part seems very solid, then it is time to begin practicing it with the left hand. It is often true—for most players—that “left hand and pedal” is the combination of parts that requires the most work. Therefore it should be started as soon as each of those parts is ready. It is also often true that once left hand and pedal is very secure, and the right hand part is well learned, and the two hands together are secure, then the whole texture will fit together without too much trouble. However, it certainly never hurts to practice right hand and pedal as well. In the case of this section, there are a couple of places where the strongest rhetorical and rhythmic interaction is between the something that is being played by the right hand and the bass line in the pedal. This is the case, for example, with the transition from m. 3 to m. 4, and also the middle of m. 10. Practicing the right hand and pedal together will draw the attention of the ears to these spots.
Next month we will start looking at the Boëllmann, concentrating on understanding the overall shape of the piece and looking for connections and contrasts.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 3: Practicing the first fugal section
This month we return to the Buxtehude Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, looking at the second section of the piece, which begins at m. 13 and goes through about m. 50. This—except for its last three measures or so, which are a transitional passage, cadential in nature, and which we will in the main discuss next month—is a contrapuntal, essentially fugal, section, a fact which has implications for studying, practicing, and learning the music. Much of what I will suggest here will involve revisiting the ideas that I discussed in the series of columns about counterpoint that began in September 2008, applying those ideas to this specific passage.
The fugal section that begins in m. 13 is in four voices. The musical text could by and large be written out on four staves, accounting for all of the notes, with each staff presenting a coherently “melodic” melody. (It departs from this briefly in mm. 32–33 with the addition of a few “extra” notes, and again in the transitional passage.) The voices behave like the voices of a contrapuntal piece: each of the four voices has a different compass, each of the voices is present most of the time but not all of the time, and, melodically, the voices do the same things at different times and different things at the same time. The section is “fugal” in that the voices enter one at a time, each with a version of the same theme, and that theme recurs a lot during the section.

Theme
This theme is as follows, in its first iteration:

It enters first in the top voice, and then in the other voices in descending order. It is present in 24 of the measures of the section, and a motive identical to the second half of this fugue subject is present in another 3½ or 4 measures. The longest stretch without any of this theme present—prior to the transitional/cadential section at the end—is about one measure.
(There is an interesting side note about this theme, one that in a sense is irrelevant to the piece on its own terms because of the chronology, but which should be intriguing to organists nonetheless. The first half of the theme is the same as the fugue subject of Bach’s Fugue in E-flat Major, BWV 552, and the second half of the Buxtehude theme is essentially the same as a recurrent pedal motive in the Prelude, BWV 552. This Buxtehude work seems like a more likely source of Bach’s inspiration for the so-called “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue than is William Croft’s hymn tune, which Bach most likely never heard.)

Bass voice in pedal?
The first practical question about working on this section is whether or not the bass voice belongs in the pedal. This is often a question with Buxtehude, since the sources for his music do not often indicate pedal explicitly, and in any case are rather far removed in origin from the composer. In this section, there are several reasons to believe that the bass voice was indeed intended as a pedal part. First, it works on the pedal keyboard, and, in order to make it work, the composer has shaped it a little bit differently from any of the three other voices. That is, there is no scale-wise writing in the bass voice that is any faster than the eighth-note, whereas there is such writing in each of the other voices. Second, there are many places in this passage where it is awkward to play all four of the voices in the hands and where the fingering is much more natural without the lowest voice. (This is true, for example, in m. 33 or mm. 42–43.)
There is, as far as I can see, only one spot prior to the transitional/cadential section where it is actually impossible to play all four voices in the hands, namely the second eighth note of m. 44. Someone else might be able to find a clever way to make it work, and it is certainly possible to do so by fudging the duration of some of the longer notes. (Someone with larger hands than mine would have no trouble with it, but the stretch of a tenth is beyond what is normally found in music of this time.) Furthermore, the transitional section ending in m. 50 certainly requires pedal—really physically requires it—and there is no particularly good place to shift the bass line to the pedal if that line has been played in the hands from m. 20 on. So on balance this seems to me to be a section to be played with pedal.
(The closing fugue of the Praeludium in E Minor, BuxWV 142, presents an interestingly different picture. There the fingering is made dramatically easier, more natural, and more idiomatic to the organ playing of the time by not including the bass voice in what the hands are expected to play. However, at the same time the bass line itself is, if not unplayable in the pedal, still extraordinarily difficult and well outside what would have been the norm at the time.)

Learning protocol
The protocol for learning this fugal section starts with the approach that I outlined in the columns on counterpoint mentioned above; that is, playing through each voice separately and then playing pairs of voices. Here are some specific points about applying that approach to this passage:
1) The section that we are looking at is about 34 measures long—long enough that it should be broken up into smaller sections for this kind of practicing. It doesn’t really matter how it is broken up. It is fine to practice separate voices and pairs of voices in chunks of just a few measures, or in significantly larger chunks. One average way to do it would be to have breaks at around m. 23 and at around m. 36. Each voice will naturally break at a slightly different place. So, for example, it would make sense to play the soprano voice from m. 13 to m. 20, the alto from m. 15 to the middle of m. 23, the tenor from m. 17 through the first beat of m. 25, and the bass from m. 20 through m. 24. Then these sections of these voices can be combined in pairs.
2) When playing individual voices, it is fine to finger those voices in ways that will not be used when later putting the voices together. This is especially necessary and important with inner voices—typically the alto voice in a piece or passage that has three voices in the hands. Such an inner voice will almost certainly end up migrating from one hand to the other. However, at this stage it is important to play each voice in a way that is comfortable and natural, and that makes it as easy as possible to hear that voice as a coherent melody. It is also necessary to be flexible about playing inner voices in either hand. So, of course, when putting soprano and alto together it will be necessary to play the alto in the left hand, but when putting alto together with tenor it will be necessary to play the alto in the right hand.
3) At this stage, it is also not necessary to play the pedal part in the pedals. Practicing the pedal line as a pedal line (see below) can come later or can start in parallel with this process of getting to know the voices. However, for carrying out this approach to learning the voices, just as it doesn’t matter what fingering is used, it also doesn’t matter whether the feet play the bass voice or the left hand does. The important thing is that the student be able to listen carefully and hear the voices well while playing them.
4) In putting voices together in pairs it is a good idea some of the time to play the two voices on two manuals, in order to hear them with extra clarity. This is especially useful when voices cross or, as for example with the soprano and alto voices at mm. 38–39, come very close. The two sounds should be similar in volume and different in character.

Pedaling
While studying individual voices and pairs of voices, it is emphatically not a good idea also to finger and practice the manual part of the texture. That will come a little bit later. It is perfectly fine to practice the pedal part, however. It is interesting that in this piece the pedaling choices are more straightforward, and in fact the pedal part is probably easier overall, in the more active fugue subject and subject fragments, than in the measures in which the pedal is playing long-held notes.
The fugue subject can easily be played with alternate toes, starting with the right foot; the subject fragment that occurs in m. 33 and elsewhere can also be played with alternate toes, starting with the left foot. These pedalings are natural enough that I would expect essentially every student or player to use them. (There are other possibilities: for example, using the same foot to play some of the successive quarter notes, or occasionally using heel to play some of the sixteenth notes that are on white keys when the immediately prior note was on an adjacent black key. On the whole, I doubt that many players would find these variants easier or better, but perhaps some would. They could certainly be OK.) This consistent alternate toe pedaling implies nothing in particular about articulation, phrasing, timing, or other interpretive/performance matters.
However, when the pedal part moves more slowly, particularly from m. 43 on, pedaling choices both affect and depend on choices about articulation. To the extent that the player prefers or can accept spaces between these long notes, he or she can apply the principal of playing each note with whatever foot happens to lie most comfortably above that note. As an example that would lead me to the following succession of toes for the eleven pedal notes beginning with the first note of m. 44 and going to the end of m. 50:
l-r-r-l-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
For someone else it might be a little bit different. Creating more legato in this passage would involve different pedaling choices—for example, crossing the left foot under to play the E in m. 44, and then playing the C# in m. 45 with the right foot.
Of course, practicing the pedal line once pedaling choices have been made involves the usual things: keep it slow and accurate; look at the feet as little as possible—ideally not at all; repeat small-enough passages that the memory of the feeling of the passage does not fade before you get back to it. When the pedal part has become secure, join it first to the tenor voice, then to the left hand part as such—once that has also been practiced as outlined below—then to the hands together. (Of course, it is fine also to practice pedal with right hand alone. However, as always, left hand and pedal is most important. Usually if left hand and pedal has been practiced enough, then adding the right hand is something that feels natural and almost easy.)
And do not forget what might be the cardinal rule of practicing: if you hear yourself make a wrong note while practicing, do not stop or hesitate or go back and correct it. By the time that your ears have heard the wrong note, your mind should already have moved on to playing the next note. Next time through the passage you can make sure to adjust what needs to be adjusted to correct what was wrong.

Fingering choices
Once you have played through all of the voices and all of the pairs of voices, it is time to work out a fingering for the three voices that will be in the hands. And, as I discussed in the column from last July, the first task is to decide which notes belong in which hand. This must come before making specific fingering choices, and it must be done in such a way as to make those fingering choices as easy and natural as possible. As I wrote before: I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make a passage that could be fairly easy almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in a way that was awkward. However, there is not always only one good answer, and the answer is not the same, necessarily, for any two players.
In any situation in which three voices are present and the notes of the alto voice can be reached by either hand—that is, generally, in which neither the soprano notes nor the tenor notes are more than an octave away from the alto notes—the player can, in a pinch, try it both ways. Generally it is nice to put “extra” notes with whichever other voice is less active. So, in m. 19, for example, I would play the first three notes of the alto voice in the right hand since the tenor voice has sixteenth notes, but then play the half note E in the left hand, since the soprano voice then has sixteenth notes. In m. 24 I would play the one alto voice (whole) note in the right hand, even though the soprano voice notes are a bit farther away, since the tenor voice is more active; in m. 25, however, I would shift the alto voice to the left hand since the soprano voice become much more active. Again, these choices are not right and other choices wrong. It is simply very important that each player—each student perhaps with the help of a teacher—work this out carefully and patiently, in a way that feels right.
After the “handing” and fingering have been worked out, it is possible to try an interesting challenge, namely to play the alto voice alone with the correct fingering. This involves letting that voice move from one hand to the other according to the plan that has been worked out. The goal is to play it in such a way that it sounds as natural and cantabile as it would sound played in one hand. It is simultaneously harder to do this outside the cushion of the other voices and good practice for playing that voice well when it is partly obscured by the other voices.

Practice procedures
Practicing the three-voice manual texture of course follows the usual pattern for any practicing. Each hand should be practiced separately, slowly, until it seems easy. The tempo should be allowed to rise only according to a pace that is comfortable: once a passage is learned well at one tempo, it can be played a little bit faster; playing it much faster will often lead to its falling apart. Once each hand is solid at a given tempo, the two hands can be put together at a slower tempo. This can then also be allowed to speed up gradually. The rule about not stopping or hesitating when you hear yourself make a wrong note is always utterly important.
After a player or student has carried out all of the above—individual voices, pairs of voices, pedal part, individual hands, left hand with pedal, and all the rest—there is an interesting exercise to try. Play the section—well learned, all parts together—and consciously listen only to one voice at a time. This is easiest with the soprano voice, next easiest with whichever voice is the lowest at a given time, quite hard with a real inner voice. The ability to do this and also keep the whole thing going accurately and with a feeling of ease will help to reveal the fruits of studying the voices thoroughly and also test the solidity of the overall practicing of the notes.
Next month I will discuss both the transition measures 47–50 and the free section that follows, beginning in m. 51. ■

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

Velocity IV

My approach to helping someone to play fast has been rooted in ways of discovering that the fingers of each hand separately can move very fast when playing one line or voice—one note at a time. There are two parts to this. One is discovering that our fingers can move as fast as the music requires—and thus the limitations on velocity are mental rather than physical. Another is exploring ways of knowing what’s coming up in a passage so that we don’t stumble or hesitate because of uncertainty. This permits us to turn the potential to move our fingers fast enough, or faster, into a reality in performance. 

There are several parallel next steps. One is achieving reliable velocity in one hand when that hand is playing more than one voice. There are two meaningfully different subcategories of this: a hand playing two or more contrapuntal lines, and a hand playing chords. (These can shade over into each other.) Another is achieving appropriate velocity with the two hands together. This can also be subdivided: each hand playing one voice, one hand playing a line and the other hand chords, each hand playing multiple-note texture, and so on. 

Fingering and relaxation

It is easier to achieve the physical and mental relaxation and focus that are necessary for velocity when you are only doing one thing. If a hand is only playing one note at a time, it is trivially easy for the hand to relax—playing one note at a time can’t require the hand to be in an awkward position, it can’t force tension-prone fingerings, and, in principle, it permits any finger that is not actually depressing a note to relax fully. (Psychologically that can be more easily said than done.) Playing more than one note at a time in a hand doesn’t satisfy any of the above, and it gives us more to think about. So fingering planning is both more constrained (the more notes you must play at once, the fewer different ways there are to deploy the fingers over those notes) and trickier in its relation to the comfort necessary to move quickly. And the need for preparation is even greater. 

The Gigue from Bach’s D minor English Suite is almost legendarily difficult. It is meant to be at least fairly fast in performance. It has a number of moments in which one hand keeps up a sustained trill while also playing other notes. Thus it is an interesting test case here. Example 1 shows this sort of writing.

There is a lot more like this in the movement, but this particular bit is best as a velocity exercise, since there is absolutely no way to isolate the trill in one hand. It is possible to play it in either hand (though significantly harder in the right). This can work as an exercise for the right hand, the left, and then for both together.

Let’s start with the trill into the left hand. Most people would play it that way, since the other material in the left hand is less complex than that in the right hand. (It is certainly how I would play it, but we are again using this passage as an exercise, and thus sort of exploiting it. We will also consider how it works with the trill in the right hand. Just as with the passage from the Toccata in C Major, BWV 564, which we looked at earlier in this series, our shameless exploitation of the passage as an example of unbridled velocity does not imply anything about a good tempo for performance of the piece.)

As Example 2 shows, the notes of the trill can be thought of for this purpose as thirty-second notes, and the trill fingering will almost certainly have to be 1/2. The other (bass) notes can be played with a selection of 3, 4, 5 based on the player’s particular hands, habits, and preferences. (Watch out for a fingering that cocks the wrist outward more than necessary. Avoiding this will probably be easier the more you use 4 and 5 rather than 3.) Once you have decided on fingering, this is the practice protocol for the present purpose:

1) Play middle C and the first seven notes of the trill. That is, get to the moment when you would play the G#, but don’t play that note. 

2) Repeat this, getting it ever faster. Try to feel the trill notes the same way that you did the single-voice velocity exercises from earlier—that is, keep them light, with the hand not bearing into the keys, but rather feeling like it is floating upward a bit. Try not to let playing and releasing the middle C affect you. Notice it just enough to make sure that when you release the note (more or less as you release the fourth note or play the fifth note of the trill) you don’t let that release gesture put any tension into the hand. 

3) After you have done this enough that it feels natural and is at a tempo that sounds and feels very fast, add the G#. Again, the point is not to let the addition of this note change the feeling of anything. Play it, but try not to notice that you are playing it. Keeping the release of the C light is the prerequisite for being able to play the G# lightly. 

4) When this is comfortable, add the next few trill notes, without playing the A, regardless of whether you are adding enough trill notes that you have in theory reached the moment for that note. 

The next step is to do the same thing starting elsewhere: on the second beat, where the prevailing notes are G# and F—going through the moment where the A is played, to the moment where the bass note is a B-natural—or beginning at the A and F, and going just over the barline. After you have done this with each segment, the next step is to string it together. First, remind yourself of the feeling of just the initial segment, then starting at the beginning and going through, say, a half-measure, then starting at the beginning and going through the whole measure. The point is to be doing this at a very fast tempo. As you cross each of the spots where you began drilling new segments, make sure to keep the feeling of relaxation going: use your memory of starting at that point to renew that feeling. 

Learning, practicing, 

and lightness

This process is really three things at once: a way of learning this passage; a template for practicing other fast passages with more than one thing going on in a hand; and a way to focus on the feeling of lightness, preparation, and keeping going. In time—that is, after practicing a number of passages this way—the third of these will come to predominate. It will become possible to recapture that feeling without going through a process of this sort or in this amount of detail. 

This is all akin to regular, everyday practicing, in which we break things into small units and add complexity as simpler things become solid. The main difference is that in regular practicing, we start very slowly and increase tempo gradually. It is important never to get ahead of a tempo that feels comfortable. Here, while we don’t want to use a practice tempo that makes things fall apart, we are eager to live in the region of high velocity as promptly and as much as possible. We learn to move our fingers very fast over the notes by—initially and for as long as necessary—keeping the segments that we are playing very short. This is an important difference in emphasis in the structure of practicing.

To use this Bach passage as an exercise for playing two voices together in the right hand at high speed, the procedure would be the same: use the trill notes as an anchor and add notes from the upper voice gradually. The trill will again probably be best played with fingers 1 and 2, and the upper notes probably mostly with 4 and 5: perhaps 5-4-5-5-4-5, etc. It might be a more useful exercise to double the number of trill notes in relation to the sixteenth notes of the upper voice (i.e., make them sixty-fourth notes). The first step is to play the A and the F together and keep the trill notes going without adding any more of the notes from the upper voice. The next step is to start this way, but add the second note of the upper voice—the G#—and so on, following the template that we used above for the left hand. Progress through this passage will be slower than it was for the left-hand version, because there are more notes.

It is equally interesting to use the passage as an exercise in working both hands together up to as fast a speed as you can. Start by going through the process described above for the lower two voices in the left hand. Then go over the upper voice by itself as a right-hand part. Then go back to the beginning and play the passage in extremely short bursts: as short as it takes to enable you to do it fast. This might be a dotted-eighth-note’s worth at a time, or less. The technique of holding a note as if there is a fermata while you remind yourself of the feeling of playing the next note or two, and then playing only that next little bit extremely fast, can work very well in this case.

Example 3 is a contrapuntal passage from Brahms’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. The student can combine various techniques. In the first quoted measure in the right hand, after working out fingering, one could play the second voice (B-A-G#-rest-F#) a few times, progressively faster, then add the upper voice one note at a time. Or play the two voices on the downbeat (E and B) holding those notes indefinitely long. Then, only when ready, play the second and third beats—both voices together—as fast as possible, not going past the third beat. Then start on the second beat, stopping on the D# in the upper voice. In something like the third quoted measure—with its more consistently active voices—the player can practice each voice separately, in the normal manner, but as a short enough sample that it can get quite fast quite efficiently. Practice each voice—with the intended fingering, in the ways that I outlined for individual voices in the last few columns—until it can go very fast. Then put the two voices together in chunks of perhaps three eight-notes-worth at a time. The principles are always the same: use an amount of planning that makes everything utterly predictable, focus on short bits (which makes the predictability easier to achieve in the first place and to maintain), and keep everything light and relaxed.

In a chordal passage, the notion of practicing voices separately doesn’t apply. In keeping with the principle of simplifying, if we aren’t going to practice separately notes that end up being played together, then it is even more important to practice in small increments. Example 4 is an excerpt from near the end of Scherzo, Sortie in D Major by Lefébure-Wely.

The right-hand part provides a good opportunity to practice chords. The fingering will probably fall into place quite naturally: a lot of 5-3-1, 5-2-1, 4-2-1, and so on, depending on one’s hand shape. Once fingering has been worked out, playing and holding a chord, then playing the next two chords as quickly as possible, will probably be the most fruitful technique. The left-hand part is a typical opportunity to practice playing octaves fast, using this same technique. 

What, in the end, is the point of this discussion of velocity? In using a passage from the repertoire as an exercise here, I have said that in doing so I am misrepresenting that passage—that we are exploiting it or latching onto it as parasites. This happens because no one can say whether a given (fast) passage is or isn’t meant to be played at the outer limits of a player’s ability to play fast. In order to practice playing as fast as we possibly can, we subject passages of music to being played (perhaps) faster than we really think they should go. (Even if a passage will be a candidate for actually being played that fast, we don’t know that until we have worked on getting it that fast.) The overriding purpose of doing this—and especially in its application to our teaching, and therefore to the learning process of our students—is to drive home through example the basic message: command of velocity is about preparation. With rare exceptions, limits on velocity are not inherent or physical. I actually think it is better to practice, as exercises for this purpose, pieces or passages that you know are not going to go that fast. That separates the work on velocity from a host of other normal, musical considerations. Then when you want to work on a passage that does indeed visit the outer reaches of how fast you ever want to play, you will know the techniques for getting it to be solid and comfortable at that sort of speed.

The old-fashioned and very sound idea that you must prepare your pieces beyond 100% (I first heard it in connection with Jascha Heifetz, a quintessential virtuoso performer) for them to be 100% in performance applies here. Certainly correct preparation is not just about speed—it is perhaps more importantly about the inner understanding of everything that you hope to bring to the music interpretively, rhetorically, expressively. But since it is harder to execute a piece faster than slower, it is always prudent to know that you could indeed play your pieces faster than you intend to. This should ideally lead to relaxation in performance—a relaxation born out of lack of fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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