On Teaching

Gavin Black can be reached at gavin [email protected].

Repertoire, part 3: Mailbag
This month’s column is devoted to answering a few questions from readers, arising out of the two recent columns about repertoire. The questions all have to do with one basic point—namely, how it can be possible for students to work effectively on pieces that are “too hard.” These questions have led me to believe that I should discuss this further, especially since I also consider it a very important point. I will revisit certain things that I have already said, looking at them from somewhat different angles, and add a few new ideas.

What is too hard?
I begin by quoting at length from a set of questions sent to me by Don Stoner, a reader from Pennsylvania who studied organ in college and has taught high school and middle school music for many years. From his perspective as an experienced teacher, he has provided interesting feedback on different matters over the past couple of years, and in this instance his questions bring up essentially everything that I want to address here. He wrote as follows:

Thanks once again for your articles in The Diapason. I would like to ask you several questions that I was thinking about, especially in the paragraphs about the issue: What is too hard? . . . Here goes!

Should a teacher first access what the technical and theory abilities a student has at the keyboard? For example: You get a student that wants to play the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But he doesn’t have the “finger power” (for lack of a better way to describe it) to negotiate the manual runs, the pedal work, and so on. It would, I think, be like throwing someone in 10 feet of water and tell him to swim!! While I think that we need to let people play music they enjoy, they need to have certain amount of technical ability to be able to “make it through” to the end of the piece. Would you in this case say to a student “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think that we need to start with a smaller prelude and fugue (little 8) and then build up to this larger selection”? Do you think that all organ students are ready to “make the decision” that “I can play this piece no matter what anyone thinks”?

The essence of the matter is this: if it is true—as I believe—that it is important to encourage students to work on music that they really like and want to work on, then it must be OK to let those students (some of the time at least) work on music that is harder than what we as teachers might consider prudent. It also must mean, again some of the time, being willing to throw out any sense that it is necessary to work on pieces in some particular order. In general, it seems to call for taking a somewhat improvisatory approach to the business of using repertoire as material for making technical progress. In order for any of this to work, it is necessary to discover a way to use any piece—regardless of its degree of difficulty—as the material for teaching and learning at any stage. The essence of this, in turn, is the ability to break each piece down into simple components and to figure out how to use those components as appropriate teaching materials. It can, as a matter of teaching technique, learning technique, and practicing strategy, be done successfully with any piece.
However, as Don Stoner suggests in the last line quoted above, part of the issue is psychological. This is true most fundamentally with respect to the root of this whole discussion: the reason for letting students work on whatever music they most want to work on is that the mind of the student will then become more focused and better able to work efficiently. I believe this because I have observed it over and over again in myself, in colleagues, and in students. I think that this effect can often be at work even in people who believe that it doesn’t apply to them—that is, who believe that they have the pure willpower to make themselves work regardless of their feelings about what they are working on.

Temperamental and psychological issues
However, there certainly are some psychological or temperamental points that run counter to this. The main one is that if a student is working, even very efficiently and effectively, on a piece that is very challenging—“too hard”—for that student, then the student has to have patience. It will clearly take many times as long to learn a piece that is lengthy and difficult than to learn a piece that is short and (relatively) easy. A student who asks to work on such a (long, difficult) piece must think carefully about whether he or she has the patience to defer the gratification of having completed the whole piece, perhaps not even to be able to predict how long it will take. If this student gets pleasure out of playing pieces for people along the way, then he or she will have to think about whether it is all right to do less of that for the time being—that is, to be learning fewer pieces in a given space of time and thus have fewer, or no, new pieces to perform during that time. (I am talking now about this as a source of pleasure, satisfaction, or motivation, not as a practical requirement. Of course some students are in a position where they need pieces for practical purposes, say for church or to meet the requirements of a structured academic program. If so, then of course those needs may intervene temporarily and deflect the student from simply studying what he or she wants to study.)
If a student comes to a teacher wanting to work on a very difficult piece, one that is exciting and interesting to that student, then the teacher should discuss the temperamental and psychological issues involved. That is, the teacher should remind the student that this will be a long project, will require patient and well-organized work, and will involve postponing the satisfaction of having completed and learned a piece. It is by no means necessary to end up working on that piece. However, it is necessary (where “necessary” means “much better for the learning process”) that the student be genuinely happy with whatever piece(s) he or she end up working on. And while there need not be an assumption that the longer or more difficult piece will be chosen, there should also not be an assumption, even as a starting point, that it will not be chosen.
In fact, if a student has a strong desire to work on a piece that is a stretch for that student, then the teacher can use that as a sort of bargaining chip: you may certainly work on this piece, but only as long as you practice it well, in the ways that I suggest, patiently, systematically, etc.
The other psychological dimension that I want to discuss is fear. Fear is a natural response to the prospect of doing something very difficult. At a minimum, fear of failure, in and of itself, comes into play. On top of that, there is fear of disappointing the teacher, fear of disapproval from others—the teacher, fellow students, others in the field, a kind of imaginary, externalized “superego,” one’s parents, and of course one’s self. There is also the fear, specifically, of being thought hubristic, arrogant, self-important, or just plain cluelessly unrealistic in your claims about what you can or can’t accomplish. These fears are all natural and more or less universal. However, acting on them, in particular by limiting the scope or ambition of what pieces one works on, seems to me to be a terrible loss. In discussing with a student the pros and cons of tackling a big difficult piece, a teacher should, I believe, encourage the student to think clearly about his or her motivation, temperament, style of working, and so on. The student should know as clearly as possible what it would feel like to dig in and work on a very challenging piece, and make a free decision about whether that is or is not something that he or she wants to do. But the teacher should also try very hard to help the student ignore any voice of fear, any voice suggesting that working on a harder rather than an easier piece is scary or risky.
In fact, helping our students to free themselves from fear is probably the most important thing that we can do as teachers. I have one anecdote to relate on that subject. At my first organ lesson in the spring semester of 1985—which was my second year as a graduate student—I placed on the music desk of the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College the Helmut Walcha organ edition of The Art of the Fugue. When Professor Eugene Roan arrived for the lesson, he just sat down in a nearby chair, nodded and smiled. He was telling me that, yes, it was OK for me to work on that (very) long, (excruciatingly) difficult piece for my upcoming degree recital. There was essentially nothing in the record of what I had done prior to that day to suggest that I could handle this project. His immediate, concise, friendly agreement that I could and should do it not only led to my lifelong involvement with that piece, it also signaled to me that I really was an organist, and that I could really aspire to do what I wanted to do.

The role of the teacher
This brings us to the next question. It is always important, essential in fact, that a teacher know as much as possible about the “technical and theory abilities a student has” as Don Stoner aptly puts it. The notion of letting students choose their own repertoire cannot be based on the teacher’s abdicating the responsibility to know both exactly where that student is in the learning process and as much as is humanly possible about the student’s abilities and aptitudes. This knowledge can be used either to help the student choose pieces to work on that will seem appropriate in a traditional way—neither too easy nor too hard, adding something to the student’s technical and musical learning without being overwhelming—or to help the student navigate the treacherous but fruitful waters of a very challenging piece. If Professor Roan had not known me very well—I had studied with him off and on for several years at that point—he would not have been able to agree without discussion that it was a good thing for me to work on The Art of the Fugue, and he certainly would not have been able to help me with the process as much as he did.
If anything, it is more important that the teacher be prepared—equipped with knowledge of the student and of the music, and in a frame of mind to pay very close attention—when a student is working on a “too hard” piece. Although such a piece approached properly can be at least as effective a teaching tool as several easier or shorter pieces, it is also true that it carries with it more danger. If the student approaches it the wrong way, it can turn into a waste of time or a source of discouragement, or, worse, a framework for developing bad technical habits. There is nothing intrinsic to a longer or harder piece that will make these pitfalls actually manifest themselves, but they can do so if the piece is not approached the right way. The teacher’s job is to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The more that a teacher knows about the strengths, weaknesses, and habits of the student, the better he or she can accomplish this.
As a matter of hour-by-hour practicing, week-by-week learning, or the overall pedagogic usefulness of any number of months or years of study, the act of working on short easy pieces is identical to the act of working on a longer or more difficult piece. A long, difficult piece is several shorter, easier pieces. It is up to the student to be willing to treat it that way and up to the teacher to use all of his or her teaching expertise to show the student how to do so.
The technique for doing this is conceptually simple. The long piece must be broken into shorter bits, and those bits then must be made easier by practicing them slowly, by separating hands and feet as much as necessary, and by doing enough analysis to render the piece well known to the student. For example—an extreme example—if a student who might naturally be working on a few Orgelbüchlein pieces or short preludes and fugues wants to learn the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that piece can be broken up into many pieces, none of which is (initially) any harder than, say, Ich ruf zu dir. The first of these might be the right hand part of the opening canon. The next might be the left hand part from the same section, noticing very explicitly the relationship between this line and the right hand part. The third “piece” might be any dozen measures of the pedal part from the middle of the toccata section. (I say that to make the point that a long piece that is being learned patiently does not have to be worked on in order from beginning to end.) The next might be, say, the alto voice of the fugue for the first two pages, and so on.
In this way, a long difficult piece can be built up, and it is the key to avoiding the “throwing someone in 10 feet of water” problem. Of course, this is really just everyday good practicing, but applied very seriously. In fact, the discipline of working on an extremely challenging piece can help to teach overall good practice habits. The easier the piece, the more tempting it is just to play it over any number of times in a row until it gets more or less learned. If it is obvious that this casual approach will not work with a given piece, then the student—who in this scenario is highly motivated to play the piece: after all, it was chosen specifically and only because the student really wanted to work on it—will be highly motivated to practice in a way that does work.
I will leave the subject of repertoire for a while after this month, though happy to answer further questions individually by e-mail. Sometime in the future I will write a fairly long series of columns going step by step, in considerable detail, through the process of learning a specific piece. As part of that series I will address particular individual practice strategies for students with different levels of experience. I welcome suggestions for what piece I should use for that project, though of course I will not be able to use them all.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, and Projection I

With this month’s column, I begin to muse about some aspects of our jobs as teachers that involve helping students to work in ways that are best for their own enjoyment and motivation: how to help students integrate their playing into their own lives, and how to integrate the students’ lives into our teaching. This is partly about the big picture: how much time can a student find to play? How much of that should be real practicing, and how much can be other sorts of playing? How can a student’s own interests and motivations interact with the requirements, needs, or demands of others? But it can also be about the immediately musical. I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking “What do you most deeply want out of life?” That is perhaps sort of a joke, but not entirely, as I will discuss later on.

While I wish that any column of mine could be a discussion rather than just a one-way written piece (I ask for feedback from time to time, and often get some, for which I am grateful) this time around I wish that more than ever. The things about which I am musing this month are not concrete or demonstrably true (or false). They arise out of my own experience, and—much more than things like what practice protocol will produce the most efficient progress in learning a pedal line—they change or evolve over the months and years. That evolution is partly the result of new experiences with students, as well as an ongoing conversation between myself and others. I hope that a future column will consist of e-mails from readers about this column, with further thoughts of mine. Furthermore, I am trying to challenge or question some of my own thoughts or habits of thinking, and that process is made more fruitful by interaction with the ideas of others. You will notice that there are plenty of sentences here that end in question marks: more questions than answers.

Inspiring motivation 

I haven’t written much about how to keep students interested or motivated. That is in part because I—and to an extent all of us as organ teachers—have the luxury of working mostly with students who are well self-motivated. That doesn’t necessarily mean self-disciplined. Someone can be very well motivated and still not be very good at self-discipline and the kinds of efficiency and organization that we associate with that concept. I myself am a prime example. I am an organ, harpsichord, and keyboard repertoire “groupie.” But that often manifests itself in my perpetually distracting myself from focused work on practicing or writing with other things that are also about the kinds of music that I love listening to or reading. 

However, very few people are pushed into studying organ or harpsichord by circumstances beyond their control. Very few people go into any sort of music (especially “classical” music) because it seems like the best or easiest way to make a living. There always must be a large element of just plain loving it—being deeply interested. However, music teachers of piano, violin, some wind instruments, sometimes voice, perhaps other instruments, are often called upon to teach students—especially children—who are taking lessons because someone has twisted their arms to do so. This arm-twisting certainly isn’t necessarily or always bad. It is undeniable that young children don’t always know what they will end up wishing they had done or had learned, and very possibly one of the jobs of a parent is to introduce children to things that they can’t or probably won’t just find for themselves. That this creates a risk for over-coerciveness, for inappropriate pressure based on projection, and for all sorts of conflict and struggle to arise doesn’t mean that it isn’t also sometimes right and good. 

I have admiration and awe for music teachers who can make good things happen for students whose reasons for being there are not just their own genuine and deep interest. It is hard to find the balance between keeping interest, morale, and a sense of fun high and getting practical learning done. If there were not plenty of teachers able to navigate all of this extremely effectively then we wouldn’t have very many musicians around. But at the same time, I have always doubted how effective I could be in that situation. I think that it is not an accident that I teach a subspecialty that draws people who know that they want to be there (though I teach organ and harpsichord mainly because that is what interests me).

I don’t want to get too complacent about that. If our students are largely self-motivated, and if we can expect to take advantage of that in our teaching, how specific can we or should we get in understanding that self-motivation? Can we help students more the more we understand that motivation? Here I want to examine and challenge some of my own assumptions. One of them is that studying music is all about preparing for concert performance. This manifests itself in my own work: the only way I can make a bargain with myself to practice slowly enough (even though I know how important slow practice is, and have written about it here over many years), is to pretend while I am playing a passage slowly that I actually want to perform it at that speed. If I let myself admit what I actually know to be true, that I am playing slowly at that moment as a stage in practicing, I will begin to speed up, as much as I know that I shouldn’t. I strongly believe that every student should be working towards playing all of his or her pieces in concert. I wouldn’t explicitly say that this is what I think, but it operates in the background as an assumption. 

Concert vs. non-concert 

preparation

Of course, there are many reasons for working on pieces other than to play them in concert. One is simply interest—just to get to know the piece, or, to put it another way, to be able to play it for oneself. Another is to play it informally in a non-concert situation or in church. Yet another is to use a piece as material for becoming a better player overall, as an exercise. Another is to learn about a kind of repertoire or composer, or to learn something about the organ on which you are playing. Does an awareness of exactly why the student wants to work on a particular piece inform anything specific about how we teach that piece? Here’s an aspect of this that I think is delicate and interesting: if a piece is being prepared for performance, then we know that it should be prepared really well. That means several things—the notes are extremely reliable, the tempo is where the player really wants it to be (no fudging or pretending that a too-slow tempo is what is really desired, as in my own practice habits!), the interpretive elements are thought out and internalized enough to be reliable, and so on. 

Suppose that a piece is being played for a purpose other than performance? On the one hand, it might be questionable to insist on the same level of preparation. It is hard, often grueling work to get a piece into that sort of shape. Is it really necessary? On the other hand, is it patronizing (to the piece or to the student) to set a lower bar because there isn’t a concert in the offing? Would doing so encourage bad learning habits that might spill over? Does this imply lack of respect for whatever purpose the piece is actually being used for? Again, the answers might be different depending on whether the piece was being prepared for non-concert performance—informal playing for the student’s friends, parents, fellow students, church—or being worked on just to get some familiarity with that piece or a segment of the repertoire, or to get to know a particular organ, for example. 

I suspect that the answers to these questions may depend on the student’s state of mind. Is incomplete (or what might seem neglectful) playing the result of an attitude of neglectfulness, or is it the result of a decision about where effort should best be spent? If a piece of music is being used as fodder for studying something other than that piece, if it is being used as exercise material, for developing greater skill as a player, then arguably it doesn’t matter how well the student learns that piece. In other words, any given number of hours spent practicing can have the same result for the player’s development, regardless of whether those hours are spent practicing one piece enough to learn it, or practicing three pieces each for an amount of time that leaves them far from complete. 

Over the years I have had a few students say, right off the bat, that they don’t really care about fully learning their pieces. I remember one such student in particular. He was very talented and dedicated, yet preferred to work on a piece only up to a certain point—getting to know it pretty well, but not do all of the drilling necessary to get a piece performance-ready. It was of more interest to him, once he reached that stage with a piece, to go on to another piece. This was most decidedly not part of an attitude of neglectfulness. For one thing, he fingered every note very carefully and put as much time into that process as it needed. He was also analytical in his approach to the music, studying and becoming aware of all sorts of compositional features and thinking deeply about performance ideas. But at a certain point he preferred to do all of those things with the next piece, not to “finish” the existing piece. He had never given a public performance.

It was a challenge for me to accept this. For one thing, he was “so close”—he amply had the ability and had already done much of the work that it would have taken to get the pieces in shape for performance. What would be the harm in doing so? But this was my agenda, not his. Furthermore, it could have been influenced by our desire that we all must have at some level to have people out there hear our students play well—since that will reflect well on us as teachers. Again, this was my agenda, not his needs. Perhaps I was also influenced by the “if something is worth doing it is worth doing well” ideology, though at a conscious level I have long ago decided that that is at best an oversimplification. But even accepting the notion of doing something well, there’s still the question of what you are doing. 

Part of this student’s motivation was intellectual curiosity about the next piece, and the next, and then the next composer, and so on. Part of it was the desire to have fun playing. The fingering process he found to be fun because it was a set of interesting puzzles. The process of playing through a piece—with the well worked-out fingerings, slowly, tolerating some hesitations and wrong notes—he found to be fun because it sounded a lot like the piece: it felt like playing music. The process of drilling all of the difficult bits until they were really solid was not fun. He was doing—extremely well—what he wanted to be doing.

Of the students whom I remember who fit this description, most or perhaps all had not done any actual performing as of the time that they came to me for lessons and professed this attitude. This gives rise to a set of questions: how can they know that they don’t want to perform or wouldn’t get something out of working pieces up beyond a certain point if they have never tried it? What should the teacher do to offer at least a chance of exploring the logical next step in learning pieces without being coercive about it or acting according to the teacher’s own agenda rather than the students? Questions of this sort also apply to other areas in which I would most naturally want to suggest that we teachers should try to not push our students in pre-determined directions, most especially in choice of repertoire.

All this leads to the following question, which makes me uncomfortable enough to have to do some real thinking: what is the line between not imposing approaches or activities on our students that are driven by our needs rather than our students’ needs and making patronizing or even (subconsciously) dismissive assumptions about what a given student can or cannot do? In other words, if I decide not to coerce a student into framing his or her musical activities with reference to concert performance, am I respecting that student’s own wishes and giving him or her credit for being mature enough to know what is right, or am I somewhat type-casting the student as one who can’t perform or can’t be challenged beyond a certain point?

More questions, and perhaps more answers, next month.

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

Repertoire, part 2
Last month’s column was in large part an argument in favor of letting students work on whatever music they want to work on: that is, not believing that it is necessary for a student’s development that he or she work on any particular piece or pieces, or on any particular subset of the repertoire. I base this belief on several things: the large size and great diversity of the repertoire; the fact that any student works better—and any performer, no matter how accomplished, plays better—when he or she really likes and cares about the music involved; and that it is better—more interesting—for the world as a whole if organists learn and play as wide a variety of pieces as possible, rather than all focusing on a narrow “standard” repertoire.
This month I want to address some ways of implementing this philosophy. Letting students work on the music that they really want to work on does not, of course, mean just coming to lessons with no ideas about repertoire: just shrugging the shoulders and saying “work on whatever you want.” That would be abdicating our responsibility to help students find out what it is that they might like or want to work on. The point is to figure out how much help each student needs in exploring the repertoire, and then to offer that help in a way that is maximally helpful and minimally coercive. That way we will never lose the advantages created by the student’s own intense involvement with the music.

Determining what to study
It can be very productive to start the first session with a new student by asking a question more or less like this: “why are you interested in studying organ right now?” Many students will talk about the instrument as such, perhaps their love for organ sound. Some will also talk about something in their life experience, maybe some involvement with the church or with church music. But most will also talk about repertoire. They will say that they have always loved Bach, or Baroque music, or that they are fascinated by French Romantic or twentieth-century music. I have had students, at this early stage, mention something very specific and unusual: Messiaen, for example, or Rorem, or the Couperin organ Masses.
If this question does not evoke any response about repertoire, then it is a good idea to ask more specific, targeted questions: What music have you worked on in the last couple of years (for existing organists)? What organ music have you heard that you like (for new organists)? What non-organ music have you played by organ composers? What music do you like to listen to? Have you worked on any pieces that you found frustrating? Why were they frustrating (if you know)? One of the most fruitful questions of all is “What piece is it your dream to work on?” Or, to put it another way, “What piece would you love to work on right now, but you assume that it is too hard?”
These are all questions that can, of course, be asked and explored at any time, not just at the first lesson. Such a discussion will tell the teacher a lot about the student’s relationship to the repertoire and will give the teacher specific answers to specific questions: what music the student likes, already knows about, is interested in. It can be even more important, though, for the teacher to read between the lines. Does the student have strong opinions about music? Does he or she already know and talk about a wide range of repertoire? Has the student listened to or studied any non-keyboard music by organ composers? These are all things that can help a teacher make good judgments about how much guidance a particular student will need in looking for music, how much prodding and suggesting might be necessary, or, on the other hand, how much the student can be expected to use his or her own initiative. There are clues to look for beneath the surface. For example, if the student talks about a composer and you mention a related composer (Vierne to the student’s Widor, or Buxtehude to the student’s Bach—or vice versa) does the student respond with recognition or not? Does that conversation develop naturally or does it—without a lot of teacher input—just fizzle out? Does the student know about the relationships between different kinds of organs and different kinds of repertoire? Perhaps the most important thing to look for is this: that which makes the student look animated, happy, excited, involved.
It is not possible to say specifically and in advance exactly what a teacher can learn or will conclude from these conversations. In some cases, nothing will come of all of this except that the student and teacher will get to know one another better—always a good thing. Sometimes the teacher will both learn what music the student likes and begin to form a sense of how to get the student interested in other music. The point is to start the conversation, pay close attention, and see where it leads.
The two practical issues that are of most concern regarding letting students themselves decide what to work on are, first of all, the problem of pieces that are too hard, and, second, the teacher’s responsibility to help (or perhaps even force!) the student to become well-rounded.

Issue: What is too hard?
A friend of mine went, sometime around 1980, for her first meeting with an eminent harpsichord teacher with whom she was planning to study. Near the beginning of the lesson he asked her “What would you really like to work on?” Her response was “Well, of course the Goldberg Variations, but I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be, it’s so hard, imposing, virtuosic, etc., etc.” And his reply to this was “Put it up on the music desk—of course you should work on it now!” Her morale and her level of interest and commitment shot up through the roof right away. She reported on this glowingly, to me and to others. This was what first convinced me that it was important for a student to love the music that he or she was working on. It also impressed me a lot that an experienced teacher was not afraid to encourage a new student to reach for something very challenging indeed.
However, the question still is: what is and what isn’t too hard? Of course it makes sense that any student should, in some sense, work on pieces that are of an appropriate level of difficulty. That is, pieces that are somewhat challenging—that stretch the student’s abilities out, that teach something new—but that don’t create discouragement by being so hard that the feedback they give is only negative. If a student has no very particular ideas about what music he or she wants to work on, then the teacher is free to take level of difficulty into account in helping the student choose pieces. For a new student, the judgment about this matter can arise in part out of the kind of discussion described above. For an existing student, the teacher will already have knowledge and context to go on.
Sometimes, however, a student suggests some music that the teacher suspects might be so difficult or so complex that working on it would be at best unproductive and at worst actually damaging. There are several ways to deal with this. One way, of course, is to tell the student that the particular piece is inappropriate and should be postponed. In spite of my emphasis on letting students work on the music that they want to work on, I don’t believe that this is necessarily always wrong. To begin with, there is certainly no reason not to tell the student what you are thinking and to discuss it. If it honestly appears to you, after this discussion, that your student would be just as happy working on something else—perhaps something easier but musically similar to the original piece—then there is nothing wrong with proceeding that way. (However, it is important to remember that many students are reluctant to disagree [openly] with what the teacher suggests, and that most students will hide it if they are disappointed or discouraged. You as a teacher should require a fair amount of convincing that it is really all right with your student not to work on whatever it is that the student has brought in. You should not assume or accept this too readily.) If you are convinced that a piece is categorically too hard—regardless of how the student feels about it and taking into account some of the suggestions below—then it is important to explain to the student why the piece is not right, what you and he or she can work on to get ready for that piece, and, if possible, how long that is likely to take.
If you and your student decide to go ahead with a piece that seems, on paper, too hard, then there are several ways to structure the work on that piece to make it indeed fruitful and appropriate. The first thing to do is to make sure that the student understands that a too-hard piece has to be allowed to take time. That is, in exchange for working on a difficult piece, the student must be willing to be patient, to work hard, and to plan on not getting discouraged or bored if this one piece stretches out for months or longer. (My experience is that any number of months spent working well on one difficult piece will advance the student’s overall abilities at least as much as the same time spent working on several easier pieces. I don’t have any trouble reassuring students about this.)
Second, it is important that the student be willing to break the piece down in ways that make it easier: in effect turning it into several, or many, easier pieces. This means doing an especially good and thorough job of some of the things that we should all do anyway with all of our pieces: working on separate hands and feet; working on small sections; teasing out individual voices; practicing slowly; practicing even more slowly! Again, this can be part of a deal with the student: you may work on this (too hard) piece that you love, but only if you will work on it the right way. It is possible to consider a small section of a long difficult piece to be a piece in itself. The student can work on that section, and then student and teacher together can decide whether going on to the next part of the piece is the best way to use the student’s time, or whether it would be better to turn to something else.
Here it is worth mentioning the “two-way street” aspect of the act of working on repertoire. We work on pieces, in part, as a way of helping us get better as players—more skillful, more versatile, more confident. The pieces that we work on are the fodder for this process. At the same time, we strive to get more skillful, versatile, and confident so that we can better play the pieces that we want to play. A situation in which a student is working on a piece that he or she loves, that provides some challenges, and that he or she can learn well and perform is an ideal one. However, working on a section of a piece, even without ever going on to the rest of it, or working on aspects of a piece—just the pedal part, or just the separate voices, for example, or certain passages that present particular fingering issues—can be completely valid as a way of using repertoire to advance one’s playing ability. It is wonderful to learn complete pieces—obviously utterly necessary for anyone who wants to perform. However, it is not necessary to insist on finishing every piece that you start. It is all right sometimes only to work one side of this street. It can actually free a student up to try more things—both things that are more difficult and things that are unfamiliar or even unappealing at first—if the student knows that it is OK to re-evaluate the decision to work on something if that something turns out not to be rewarding.
Sometimes a student will bring in pieces that seem to be too easy. These are pieces that the student is interested in, but that the teacher fears would not really help the student to learn anything: that is, that they would not advance the student’s facility or technique, or teach any new skills. This is working the other side of the street. Pieces in this category can be used for relaxation, just to let the student have the pleasure of playing something that is fun to play. This can be important for morale and for pacing one’s efforts. However, it is also true that there is nothing—literally nothing—that is so easy that it can’t teach something to any student or even to any advanced player. A piece consisting of a single middle c held for a few beats (to reduce it to the absurd) could still afford an opportunity to work on touch, posture, relaxation, breathing, listening to sonority and to room acoustics, and probably a lot more. Any piece can be used to work on those things and also on technical and psychological performance values: accuracy, security, articulation, timing, rhythm, and so on. If a piece seems very easy, then the student can take on the challenge of playing it even better.

Issue: Becoming well rounded
It is certainly important for a teacher to offer students help in the matter of becoming well rounded—generally knowledgeable about the repertoire and the instrument. There are two reasons that I do not believe that the matter of what pieces a student works on and plays while studying is the crucial part of this process. (Of course, it is always part of the process.) One reason is that there is so much music in the repertoire that any attempt to get to know all of it in a fairly short time will inevitably be just a token. The other is that a student who is taught how to listen carefully and open-mindedly and how to practice well will have a lifetime to explore the repertoire. There is no hurry, and it is better for anyone to work on any given part of the repertoire at a time when he or she has become genuinely interested in it.
If the repertoire that a student really wants to work on (with whatever amount of prodding or guidance from the teacher seems helpful, but with no coercion) happens to cover quite a few different composers, from different time periods and geographic areas, that is fine. However, even in that case it is not actually true that the student has covered the whole repertoire. In fact, the difference between this student and one who has chosen to work on only German Baroque music (as I did in graduate school) or only Franck and Widor is small. It is not a difference worth pursuing at the expense of any of the student’s sense of joy and commitment.
However, it is a very good idea for a teacher to help students to know what repertoire is out there, and to offer them a chance to figure out what might be interesting to them. One of the best ways of doing this has always been to get students to listen to a lot of music. Listening is easy and non-time-consuming compared to practicing and learning pieces. In the past, the best way to talk about listening to a lot of organ music would have involved mentioning record libraries or used record stores—also perhaps friends with record collections, or organ concert series. These possibilities all still exist. However, recent technology has of course added to them. I will mention a few Internet-based approaches to exploring the organ literature. Of course, it is the nature of such things that these specific resources may vanish. But if so they may be replaced with others.
At the website orgelconcerten.ncrv.nl, under the heading Archief, are recordings of hundreds of performances by organists of the last several decades. Many of these are concert performances. This is an extraordinary resource for getting to know the playing of a wide variety of organists, but it is also a very good way to hear repertoire. The list of composers represented is over 250 in number and covers more than five hundred years. The assignment of listening to all of it (or, say, listening to a piece or two from each composer whose name is unfamiliar) would be highly informative and educational for any organist.
There are several ways to find (free) printed music on the Internet. Two of these are http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer.php and http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. These sites both have a fair amount of organ music. Of course, they can be used to acquire printed music for use: that is, for pieces that a student wishes to work on. They can also be used, however, to explore the repertoire. For example, a student equipped with a list of organ composers (which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_composers for example, or through traditional sources such as The New Grove or various books about organ history) can visit the Icking Archive, look for names of organ composers, and look at and begin to analyze representative pieces, or follow the scores while listening to a recording, or print out and (slowly) sight-read opening pages of many pieces just to get a sense of what they’re like.
Another way for students to get to know about, and perhaps become interested in, composers with whom they are not already familiar—especially with more recent composers—is to read the composers’ writings. There are writings in print by Saint-Saëns, Reger, Messiaen, Rorem, Dupré, and many others. Reading the thoughts of a composer—especially if those are provocative and interesting—is a wonderful way to spark interest in that composer’s music.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been teaching organ and harpsichord since 1979. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;

Repertoire, part 1
The issue about which I have gotten by far the most inquiries since I started writing this column is repertoire: that is (primarily) the question of what repertoire students should work on, or, to put it slightly differently, what repertoire teachers should ask or expect their students to work on. In this month’s column I will offer some general musings about that question, including some reminiscences and anecdotes that I think are relevant. Next month I will continue to muse, but also give more specific suggestions, including some guidance—as up to date as possible in a rapidly changing technological world—about the practical side of finding printed music, especially for students who do not have access to well-stocked music libraries.

Organ repertoire: size and scope
The first thing that stands out about the organ repertoire is its size and scope. The number of composers, the number of pieces, the number of centuries, the number of different types of instrument for which what we call “organ music” was written: it is all almost overwhelming. If you throw in hymns and various other sorts of accompaniment, and then remember that a substantial proportion of at least the pre-1750 keyboard repertoire not expressly written for the organ can be played perfectly well on the organ, the amount and diversity of music that an organist might be expected to master seems to spiral out of control.
There are several possible reactions to contemplating this overwhelming amount of music. One is panic over the seeming impossibility of learning all of it. This panic can set in when a student, perhaps because of something about the teacher’s real or perceived attitude or perhaps just from within the student, feels an obligation to know everything: a sense that one can’t be a real artist or a real “professional” without mastering everything. A lesser form of this—which I still sometimes feel myself—is sadness over the fact that it is impossible to learn all of the repertoire. This, of course, is just a part of life: it is also impossible to visit every town in the world, or to read every book, or to attend every baseball game. (Or at a deeper level, to spend enough time with all of one’s friends or loved ones, or to meet everyone who might have become a good friend.)
Another possibility, however, is to find the size and scope of the repertoire liberating. If the amount of music that exists is too great to make it possible to learn all of it, then we are all relieved of the obligation to learn all of it. In that case, each of us is perfectly free to work on the music that we really like or that we are really interested in, or that our experience shows us we can learn and play in a way that somehow makes a difference. This is what I have always done myself, and have always invited my students to do. There are other dimensions to this liberation. For example, within any style or type of music that happens to interest any one of us there is almost certain to be enough music to sustain that interest for a long time. Also, if anyone’s interests change or if a particular part of the repertoire loses its allure for a particular player (student or otherwise) there is an essentially infinite amount of other music to investigate. If I, as a performer who is mostly focused on Baroque music, feel a hankering to delve into the nineteenth century—as I have felt from time to time over the years—then I need not lament the fact that I am not a pianist or a player of an orchestral instrument. There is a whole panoply of organ music from that particular esthetic world for me to explore. If an organist who has mostly played nineteenth-century music develops an interest in late medieval music, then he or she can investigate the earliest known keyboard repertoire as an introduction to that musical world.

Personal responses
The relationship between all of this repertoire and people—people who might be organ students or organ teachers or organists or listeners to organ music—is complicated, multilayered, and interesting. Each person’s detailed experience, probably from before conscious memory on, colors his or her reaction to pieces of music and of course to all other experiences. I was remembering recently that whenever I hear the word “culpable” I get in my mind a flash of a strong image of a certain place: the gravel road at the back of the park in the shadow of East Rock in New Haven, where I grew up. (I know the source of this image, though I don’t know why I remember it so strongly: I was taking a walk there with my father when I was nine or ten, and he told me—joking, I assume—that the only sentence he knew or needed to know in French was “Ce n’est pas de ma faute.”) I mention this because it is essentially certain that I am, and will forever remain, the only person in the history of the universe who makes that particular connection. I believe that a vast number of connections like this color everyone’s reaction to all of music that they hear, as well as other experiences, and shape the course of one’s life with music, as an appreciator or as a player, professional or otherwise. Since everyone’s experiences, and the linkages that they form, are different from everyone else’s, it is quite impossible that any two people react to any music the same way, or, even at the most direct level, have the same experience as each other when hearing any given music. (After all, that scene in the park is part of my immediate, direct experience upon hearing the word “culpable,” and part of no one else’s.)
(Some more examples from my own experience, this time about music: I am a big fan of the rock group Jethro Tull. Although I honestly consider their music to be in every way as wonderful artistically as any other that I know of, including the organ repertoire and the rest of the “classical” repertoire, I also believe that I know why I became a fan of that music. During my freshman year of college, one of my roommates had a Jethro Tull record, and I, who at the time did not like any rock and roll, heard in a few passages in a few of the pieces, something that evoked very powerfully for me some of the feelings of the time I had recently [then] spent in England, and that music became part of my nostalgia for England, although I didn’t really get to know the whole Jethro Tull repertoire until about twenty years later. Also, when I hear or play older English music—Tallis or Gibbons, say—the feelings that come up in my mind are those of my experience at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, where I first heard music of that sort when I was in the choir there in the late 1960s: the smell and appearance of that church, the vastness [as it seemed to me then] of the New Haven Green outside, the sounds of cars and buses muffled by the thick stone walls. When I hear mid-twentieth-century chamber music I get an image in my mind of the cover of a particular LP. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think that it included a Poulenc trio. Along with this comes a memory of a certain kind of spring weather.)
I mention all of this in connection with the organ repertoire because it is important to remember that no two people experience, or can possibly experience, that repertoire in the same way: not even one piece, and certainly not any subset of or pathway through the whole repertoire. This is, to me, probably the most important thing to bear in mind when thinking about the vastness of the organ repertoire and when contemplating how to help students find their way through all of that music.
Practicing music is more fun when you really like the music. It is also, in my experience, better practicing: more efficient, more effective, much more likely to result in learning. It is also likely to lead to more practicing, to a real desire to work on more music, and even to a greater willingness to try new things. This observation is based on my own direct experience—practicing, learning music, trying to become a progressively better player—and also on my observation of many students (mostly my own) over many years.
Another anecdote to illustrate this point: my daughter took piano lessons for several years. She, coming from a home in which lots of unusual things went on musically, had unusual ideas about what music she wanted to play. For example, she brought to her lessons movements of Buxtehude harpsichord suites that I was in the middle of recording at the time, or, later, folk song melodies that she wanted to learn how to harmonize and then play. None of this was anything that any piano teacher would have expected to give to a beginning student. (This was in the second year or so of her studies, and she was nine or ten years old.) However, her teacher went along with this and let her work on whatever she was interested in at a given time. The result was that my daughter practiced a fair amount and looked forward to her lessons. She also cared about doing well and about pleasing her teacher. There was good give and take: an atmosphere was created in which it was also possible for the teacher to coax her into trying out various new things. Later on, when that teacher moved away, her new teacher, a very gifted and serious player and an experienced teacher, had a more traditional attitude about what was and what wasn’t OK for a student to work on. My daughter quit enjoying her lessons, quit practicing, and indeed quit the piano. Nowadays she can still play those Buxtehude movements: the way that she worked on them caused them to stay with her forever.
So, for me, the first thing to think about in choosing repertoire for students is to try to find music that the student will really like and want to practice. This is certainly not the only consideration, and it does not directly answer the question of how to find those pieces. After all, not every student comes with a list of pieces that he or she wants to work on. However, I think it is important to give this consideration first place, not to consider it a frill or a luxury or an afterthought.

Is there a standard repertoire?
Another consideration that normally comes up in talking about repertoire for teaching is what the “standard” repertoire is, what music students should know. To me, this is a complicated question, or a question with several different answers. In principle, I believe that there should be no assumption that every student will, even to a small extent, involve him- or herself with the same repertoire as other students or with a “standard” repertoire. This is for several reasons: because there is so much wonderful music out there, because everyone’s experience of that music is different, and because no one can work extremely effectively on music that they don’t like. Also because, for the benefit of the musical world at large, it is a more interesting situation if many performers perform as diverse a repertoire as possible. If there is music that somehow deserves to be more widely played than other music, that will take care of itself: more people will want to play it if it is indeed in some meaningful sense better or more interesting. It may seem to me, or to anyone in the field, that an organ student would be crazy not to want to play at least some Bach (to use the most obvious example). However if a student doesn’t want to, then, perhaps, there is no point in any way forcing them to. There will, presumably, be plenty of others who do want to play Bach.
On the other hand, there is a tremendous disadvantage to anyone in not even knowing what is out there (in any field or endeavor). If a student is not interested in playing something utterly standard, like Bach or Franck, only because he or she has essentially never encountered it in an engaging and interesting way, then that student is being impoverished unnecessarily. This is also true, however, if a student fails to become interested in non-standard repertoire (Cavazzoni, Ernst Koehler, Moondog, Lefébure-Wely, anyone) for the same reason. It is certainly important for a teacher to encourage a student to know about a lot of music, and to make choices based on that knowledge. That does not mean that those choices must settle to any very large extent on standard repertoire.
(Next month I will include some thoughts about ways of exposing students to lots of music and giving them the best chance of figuring out what might most interest them.)
Of course, there are real practical considerations to think about when considering “standard” repertoire. The first is really part practical and part psychological. If an organ student or organist bravely carves out a whole career without ever working on the music that is considered to define the organ repertoire, then that person will be called upon over and over again to explain, and will in fact not be thought well of by at least some people. “You can’t be a real organist if you’ve never worked on any Bach” would be a common refrain. Withstanding this in a happy frame of mind would require a lot of fortitude.
The other problem is more purely practical. It is the problem of auditions and other organized occasions for jumping through hoops. Obviously an organ student who might want to go on for advanced study or who might want to apply for a scholarship or fellowship, or who might want to enter a competition or, for that matter, apply for a job, might well have to produce some pieces that conform to certain rules. Many of these situations have an audition requirement that is more or less “something before Bach, something by Bach, something after Bach” or “something by Bach, something nineteenth century, something twentieth century.” Of course there is often flexibility, but almost always in the context of some such specificity. (I myself, if I were in charge of shaping an audition, would use the following prompt: “Play us about 25 minutes of whatever music you believe would best show us your recent work as an organist, and be prepared to talk to us about that music and the other music that you have studied over the last few years.”) It seems to me that the best approach in dealing with this is to consider it a practical problem with practical solutions. If the right pieces for such needs can be found among the repertoire that a student and his or her teacher are working on in any case, that is wonderful. If not, then the student might have to venture into the territory of playing pieces that he or she is not really interested in. However, this should be recognized as a simple practical task, and not given any more ethical, moral, artistic, or pedagogic weight than that.
Next month I will write more about how to incorporate this and other outside constraints into the teaching process as fruitfully as possible. I will also discuss the “two-way street” relationship between learning to play and repertoire as such (that is, that we learn to play in order to play repertoire and at the same time we work on repertoire in order to learn to play). And I will also consider how to help students explore the repertoire and make choices that are honestly their own, but also impeccably well informed.

.

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

Thoughts on teaching
interpretation
Interpretation is fascinating from many points of view. These include the relationship between interpretation and technique, how different approaches to the problems of authenticity affect interpretive choices, the history of different interpretive schools, the many elements of interpretive choices—tempo, registration, phrasing, articulation, rhythm, rubato and agogic accentuation or the relative lack thereof, and more—and in general, the strange phenomenon of how different performances of exactly the same notes can be.
With organ music in particular, interpretation begins with the choice of instrument and the venue—in effect, this is the beginning of the registration process. Sometimes—most of the time for most of us, in fact—the choice of venue and organ comes first. This part of the interpretive process is turned upside down: we choose music that suits the instrument and/or the room, or we make decisions about how much we feel that the music needs to be an exact fit for the situation or how much we can bend and stretch and compromise. This is all part of the interpretive process, and it shares with the rest of that process the fact that different players approach it quite differently from one another.

Conveying interpretation
to students
For teachers, primary questions about interpretation or interpretive stance are joined by questions about how to introduce students to matters of interpretation. These questions start with the over-riding one: whether or not a teacher should hope or expect or even insist that his or her students take a similar interpretive approach to that of the teacher. It often seems almost routine to do so. In listening either to established or to up-and-coming players, we often expect to be able to tell who studied with whom based on what the student’s interpretations are like. However, it is by no means clear that this is necessary or good. I will suggest below that teachers can be very happy with a wide variety of interpretive approaches on the part of their students. Another question might be put like this: if a teacher will not tell a student how to interpret and perform a piece—or a type of repertoire or repertoire in general—then how can that teacher help the student work out an interpretation of that repertoire, or how can the teacher help the student become a vivid and convincing interpreter of music in general? Yet another question is what sort of approach to interpretation to expect from students of different ages or levels of skill or experience. An intriguing question, to me, is this: does it matter whether or not a performance that a student gives is effective interpretively—or appeals to any particular listener’s taste—at the moment the performance is given, or is it more important that the performance be part of the long-term learning process? These two things are not always incompatible with each other, of course, but they are different, and they might suggest different kinds of input from the teacher. That is, if it is important that a given performance by a student be effective interpretively in a certain way, then it might be necessary for the teacher to coach the student in that way of playing the piece. If the goal of learning to perform a particular piece is geared only to the student’s longer-term development, then it might be better to allow the student to experiment, try things, listen, and learn, even if along the way this results in a performance that the teacher, other listeners, or perhaps even the student looking back on it later won’t like.
The question of whether a teacher should want his or her students to end up—as mature performers—playing the way the teacher does, that is, with respect to interpretive choices and overall interpretive stance, is philosophical. (I assume that every teacher wants his or her students to be as competent technically and as masterful in performance as that student can possibly be, whether that is more than the teacher, the same, or less.) Why is the teacher teaching? What does he or she consider important about music, about organ playing for church or for concert? What kind of contribution does the teacher want to make to the history of the organ over the next few decades or beyond, and does that contribution depend on nurturing a particular style of performance or approach to interpretation? Does the teacher feel that students represent the teacher: that colleagues, audiences, and possible future students will judge the teacher based on how existing students play—not, again, with respect to competence or mastery, but with respect to interpretation? If so, is this appropriate, or is it placing a responsibility on the students that is burdensome?
These are questions that every teacher must answer for himself or herself—or, perhaps more importantly, must ask and think about. The answers may change over time, and the questions may be supplemented by others—other ways of looking at it. I myself long ago came to feel that I don’t care at all what my students end up doing interpretively, as long as they feel that the act of playing music and making choices is satisfying to them. This is largely a matter of philosophy, and I don’t feel that it is necessarily the right way for every teacher to look at it. I also honestly don’t know what it says about other dimensions of my underlying attitude. Do I feel this way out of modesty—“my way is no better than other ways”—or something quite the opposite—“my way is so special that you need not even attempt it”—or selfishness—“it would be better if my students played like me, but I will withhold the information that they would need to achieve that”—or fear—“if I teach my students how to play like me they will do it better than I do, and render me superfluous”—or all of the above or none of the above? I am, in general, inordinately in favor of people thinking for themselves: my students, other players, other teachers, everyone—not just about music, but most definitely including music.
The more a teacher believes that his or her approach to interpretive matter is based on objective truth, the more likely it is that the teacher will want to try to pass that approach on to students. And, as a subset of that, we all have an obligation to pass on to our students anything that we honestly believe to be true—objectively true or likely to be so. A substantial amount of what falls into this category is information related to composers’ intentions or performance practices. I wrote at length about “authenticity” in my column of April 2010. In a sense, the principal thing is this: the most thorough knowledge about composers’ intentions and the circumstances of the composition and initial performances of a piece places surprisingly few limits on interpretive choice. That is, such knowledge may change the direction or nature of interpretive choices, but it does not effectively narrow the range of choice or tend to make different performances more similar to one another. This is like a comparison of infinities: the set of all possible performances of a piece is infinite; the set of all performances that respect whatever is known about the composer’s fingering and pedaling practices, tempo preferences, registration techniques, etc., is also infinite.
Analysis—contrapuntal, harmonic, or other theoretical analysis—can be another source of a feeling on the part of teachers that we have something objective to share with our students that might affect performance. Again, I think that it is very important to share such things with students, and I believe that this can be done in such a way as not to limit choices. For example, it is one thing to notice fugue subjects or other recurrent themes. (As I have written more than once, I believe that noticing anything that happens more than once is an extremely important and efficient tool for learning pieces.) However, it is something else entirely to move from noticing such things to reaching any hard and fast conclusions about what our analysis tells us to do in performance. (Again, comparative infinities: the set of possible performances by a player who has analyzed a piece for counterpoint and harmony is infinite, as is the set of possible performances by a performer who has not paid any explicit attention to those things.) As soon as we cross over into saying to a student something like: “of course you must phrase the subject the same way every time it comes in,” we have left the realm of the objective. This is one way of looking at it; however, it would also be possible to argue that the “sameness” of a theme from one instance of it to another lies in the notes themselves, and that phrasing and articulation of that theme can reasonably vary with the context. My point here is not to resolve a question like that, but just to suggest that we should all be as clear as possible as to what is neutral and objective and what reflects our own habits or biases. It is wonderful to share all of this with our students, but only if we are clear ourselves and candid with them about what we are sharing.

A sample interpretation
Many teachers who share my feeling that they do not aspire to have their students end up playing in their (the teacher’s) style still feel that the best way to teach interpretation is to ask the student to copy—more or less—the teacher’s performance for the time being and then to evolve later on from that to their own style and approach. This makes sense based on the notion that an inexperienced player—a student, especially a beginning student—does not yet have a basis of knowledge for shaping interpretations. This approach is also based on the idea that the best way to learn to think about performance and interpretation is to have the experience of doing something effective, and then either to react against it or to embrace it—or some mixture—later on, on the basis of other experiences and increasing knowledge.
In fact this is probably the most common approach and attitude, and most of those who expect their students to copy the teacher’s interpretive ideas also fully expect those students to move on from those ideas later on. I imagine that any approach to teaching interpretation has to include at least a dose of direct suggestion from the teacher to the students. Even when those suggestions are less than direct, they are not entirely absent. I myself have never said to a student “you should phrase this subject this way” or “play this eighth-note line detached.” However, when I invite students to play contrapuntal voices separately and in pairs, or to play a line omitting the unaccented notes, or to listen for the bloom in harpsichord sound when shaping a melody or a bass line, or to change fingers on repeated notes, or indeed just to play with a light touch, I am moving the student away from some interpretive possibilities and towards others.
My own reluctance to suggest—let alone require—specific interpretive choices stems from a feeling that such suggestions from a teacher have a tendency to have too great a weight of authority. We may honestly want our students to move beyond those suggestions, but the weight can be harder to shake off than we expect it to be. The whole dynamic of accepting, rejecting, debating, and evaluating the specifics of what we were told to do by (especially) an admired teacher can be a distraction for years or decades. Of course, every teacher has to become comfortable with his or her own approach to these things. My specific advice is just this: be open to the possibility of suggesting less and letting the students explore more, and make suggestions, when you make them, as lightly and informally as you can, consistent with getting the point across.
Here are a few suggestions for helping students to think about interpretation and learn about the effects of different interpretive choices.
1) Especially for beginning students, but also for any student who is not yet very familiar with a particular kind of repertoire, play something for the student two different ways, and ask simply which he or she likes better. With a line—recurring motive or not—the two ways will probably be two different phrasings or articulation patterns. In a full-textured passage, the differences might be of tempo or registration or again articulation or perhaps arpeggiation or something about rubato or timing. The differences should be noticeable but not a caricature, and the student should listen carefully, and then feel absolutely free to choose whichever he or she prefers.
2) Invite students to listen not just to what different interpretive decisions are like, but also to what they do. For example, does a line in an inner voice become easier to hear if it is articulated one way rather than another? Does it become easier to keep a sixteenth-note line steady if the accompanying chords are articulated one way rather than another or registered one way rather than another? Does a bit of rubato make a passage sound softer, or more suspenseful, or just static?
3) Ask students to listen—carefully—to at least six different performances of whatever they are working on. (Important note: listening to one performance is risky. It tends to lead to subconscious mimicking of that performance, which can then have the same difficult-to-shake weight of authority—perhaps for life—that performance suggestions from a teacher can have.) This listening can focus on a passage rather than a whole piece. Sometimes ask the student to write down anything they can think of to say about each performance, but sometimes don’t, so that the balance between pleasure and work remains healthy.
4) Ask the student to listen to a large number of performances of a short passage, paying very careful attention to something specific. For example, how do a dozen different players treat the rests between the several phrases on the first page of the Bach d-minor Toccata? How do several different performers treat the timing of the manual notes in the first sixteen measures of the Franck b-minor Choral? (I once, many years ago, sat with the great Canadian teacher and performer Mireille Lagacé, listening to the way that several different harpsichordists handled the transition from the first half to the second half of Variation 16 of the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting and rewarding.)
With items 3) and 4) it can be valuable to suggest that several students do these things together and discuss what they hear. Of course, nowadays it is easy to find many performances to listen to of just about anything. As I am writing this, YouTube has over 7,000 performances of the Bach d-minor Toccata, but also several performances of each of a few less famous pieces for which I searched. This changes all the time. 

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

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

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

Remembering Peter Williams

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

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

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

Now to get on with some questions . . .

Fingering

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

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

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

Authenticity

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

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

Relaxation

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

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

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

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

Other practice techniques

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

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

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

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