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].

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 5: Toccata
In this month’s column we look at some aspects of the fourth and last movement of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, the Toccata. This is the last column in this series to deal in detail with a specific movement. Next month’s column will wrap up the yearlong series with a discussion of some general points.
The Toccata is probably the best-known and most popular movement of the Suite Gothique. (One singularly modern measure of popularity suggests that it is: it has far more entries on
YouTube than any of the other movements.) It is a true perpetuum mobile, in that there is one note value (in this case the sixteenth note) that is both always present and never superseded by a quicker note value—that is, until the last several measures, where the intensity is ramped up for a dramatic ending. The relentlessness of those sixteenth notes, along with a sense that the piece at least comes across as being difficult to play—virtuosic—is part of what makes it fit the genre of “toccata” as that genre was understood in the late nineteenth century. There are, of course, other organ toccatas from about the same time as the Boëllmann that are constructed similarly, in particular the work by Boëllmann’s mentor Eugène Gigout—the Toccata in B Minor from 1890—and the famous Widor Toccata from 1879.
It is interesting to remember that in the Baroque period, the word “toccata” was understood entirely differently. A toccata was a piece in several sections, with contrast between the sections. The Buxtehude Praeludium that is the other subject of these columns is in toccata form, though under a different name. Whereas we sometimes think of a toccata as a piece that is meant to show off virtuosity, in the sense of speed, dexterity and general flashiness, originally the word denoted a piece that was meant to show off the variety of possibilities inherent in a keyboard instrument. Of course in this Boëllmann Suite, the work as a whole, amongst all of its movements, shows off a generous subset of what the organ of the composer’s time could do, with different textures being assigned to different movements rather than to different sections of a continuous piece.

Textures
The sixteenth-note perpetuum mobile of this movement manifests itself in three different specific textures, with slight variants. The first texture, found initially in the opening, occupies about 55 measures out of the total of 111 (Example 1). The second texture involves the sixteenth notes’ moving to the left hand and the introduction of syncopation (Example 2). This texture is present in 32 measures. In both of these textures, the sixteenth notes are in chord patterns and remain within one hand-span. That is, the hand does not have to turn over to reach the notes of each chord shape. This is a crucial factor in the technical learning of the movement. The third texture displays more variety within itself. It first shows up in measure 26 (Example 3). With its variants, it accounts for 18 measures, only three of which occur before measure 67. It more or less takes over the ending of the piece.
Each of these three textures is first introduced in a manuals-only passage. The pedal, whenever it comes in, is providing slower-moving motifs, starting with what most listeners familiar with the piece would probably identify as the principal theme (Example 4). This theme returns several times, sometimes as is, sometimes in octaves. Other than this, the pedal provides quarter-note or slower harmonic foundation.

Hand placement
What from amongst these initial observations about texture might have interesting implications for learning the piece? Several things stand out.
Although the two hands are never meant to be played on separate manuals (all of the several manual changes, at m. 20, 28, 35, 53, 61, etc., involve moving the whole texture to a new keyboard), there is never any ambiguity about which hand should play which notes. I have scarcely ever seen a piece about which I would so confidently predict that every player would make the same hand choice decisions. The hand choice that makes sense is that represented by the placement of notes on staves in the Durand edition (and for that matter every other edition that I have seen). There are a very few spots where it would not be actually impossible to take an isolated left hand note in the right hand—the first note of m. 10, a few notes in m. 20 and similar passages—but it would always be awkward. This is interesting, since working out hand choices has been a focus of our discussion of several of the previous movements of the Boëllmann and also of the Buxtehude. It is a step that is just not relevant here.
For the majority of the quarter-note beats of this piece, each hand is playing a chord shape that fits under the hand without a change of hand position. Each of the manual examples above illustrates this. (In two beats of Example 3, the right hand’s notes are not chord shapes: this is the exception. In any case, the notes fit under the hand without a shift in hand position.) This means that fingering choices are also subject to less variation than usual, though not as little variation as the hand choices.
Most of these quarter-note-long chord-shaped note patterns succeed one another without the need for any planning. That is, the transition from one to the next is self-evident or, at least, straightforward. This manifests itself in different ways. For the long stretches of the left hand that resemble Example 1—eighth-note chords separated by eighth-note rests, or, looking at it another way, detached quarter-note chords—it is obvious that the rests give the hand an opportunity to regroup between chords and to play each chord with whatever fingering is simply the most comfortable. Furthermore, the chords are never very distant from one another on the keyboard. There are no scary leaps.
When the right hand has the pattern of the beginning measures, the transition from the last note of one (spread out) chord shape to the next is also easy. This is because the new beat begins in the direction in which the hand is already deployed, and the first note of the new beat is never too far away. After the thumb has played the fourth right-hand note of the piece, for example, the hand could easily play any note from c#′ to, say, e′′′. The actual next note, g′′, is extremely easy to find. It lies right under a finger, the fourth or fifth, most likely. This situation is repeated throughout the piece. If the fifth right-hand note of the piece were a middle C, for example, then the fingering and execution of that spot would go from being natural and easy to being extremely difficult. It would require careful planning and a lot of practice, and would indeed set a lower ceiling on tempo. If that note were a very high note, say a′′′ or even c′′′′, then the logistics and planning would still be straightforward but the execution would be much more difficult.
When the left hand has spread-out chords, as in Example 2, those chords are also arranged in a way that lends itself to simple and predictable fingering, much like the opening right-hand motif, though the specific chord shapes are different. In many of these measures—mm. 20, 22, 24, 28 and several similar spots—the right hand has mostly scale-wise quarter-note or slower melodies for which fingering is again straightforward. However, in a few places—mm. 26, 34, 59, and quite a few measures near the end of the piece—there is a new element. The right hand has to play a legato melody in the top part of the compass while playing sixteenth notes below that melody. This is seen in Example 3. These are the spots in the piece where the fingering becomes somewhat involved. The solution, assuming that the legato of the upper line is to be preserved, is to use substitution in those upper notes, so that each note can be played by the most available finger and then held by the fifth finger. This leaves the rest of the hand free to carry out the sixteenth-note patterns (Example 5).
(Of course this is just one way of doing it, based, as usual, on my particular hand. Others might want to use 2/5 on the first beat of the new measure, for example.)
So, this piece—at least the manual part of it—is constructed out of surprisingly simple elements, easy to plan out as to fingering and also easy to execute. That does not mean that a student can play it well without working hard on it. For one thing, the coordination with the pedal is potentially quite challenging; for another, it is all meant to go quite fast—fast enough that it ceases to be easy, even though it is made up of easy elements. In fact, any student should be over-conscientious about mapping out the fingering for all of these simple elements, and also should practice all of the parts amply: short sections, one hand at a time, until each hand for each section has become second nature. Only then should the hands be put together. This is in principle exactly the same as with any other piece.

Pedal part
The pedal part, unlike the hands, does provide the opportunity to make choices that will vary among different players. The opening pedal theme (Example 4) can be played with alternate toes and come out as legato as the player might wish. This way of playing it feels quite natural. Furthermore, there are no indications for use of the swell pedal or other non-note-playing uses of the feet during the passages in which the pedal plays this theme. However, there are also a number of different heel-and-toe-based pedalings that could also make sense. Given the time and place of the creation of this piece, any of the above could represent the composer’s assumptions about how it might be played. Since it is important that this theme be played easily with spontaneity, it is key that the student feel comfortable with the chosen pedaling.
During the middle measures of the piece, the pedal line is often a harmonically based quarter-note bass line. Again, the pedaling can be worked out a number of different ways, none of them particularly complicated. For example, in mm. 29 and 31 the third-beat quarter note can be played with right heel or left toe, consistent with its being legato. Or the choice could be made to play the quarter notes detached, in which case all of the quarter notes could be played with the right toe.
Measures 73–75 are a particularly interesting case. Clearly, the higher notes will all be played with the right foot and the lower notes with the left. The choice as to whether to get the heels involved will be based on personal preference and also on the intended articulation. These notes have no articulation marked. The overall sound and texture at this point in the piece is loud and energetic. Are these notes an energetic driving bass, or a kind of quasi misterioso chromatic near-trill? Or something else? Choices about articulation here will possibly depend in part on acoustics. This is a good place for a student to try different things and listen carefully to different effects.
Near the end of the piece, the opening pedal theme comes back in octaves. (This starts in m. 85.) Needless to say, by physical necessity, the left foot will play the lower octave and the right foot will play the upper. And again, choices about toe and heel will be made based on both personal preference about technique and decisions about articulation. If the student has conceived the theme as legato from the beginning, then it perhaps makes sense to play it legato here. However, the fact that the texture here is very loud and emphatic might suggest a somewhat more emphatic articulation. On the other hand, the composer has altered the upper line, changing it from sixteenth notes to quarter notes (Example 6). What does this suggest about the pedal articulation? This is another place where it would be interesting for a student to try different things and listen carefully.

Pedals in octaves
There are two things to mention about practicing a pedal part that is in octaves. The first is that, all else being equal, it is easier both to learn the part and to execute it in performance if the toe and heel choices are the same for both feet. This is certainly not absolutely necessary, but it will happen naturally here, since the black note/white note patterns largely determine the heel placement. The second thing—more crucial—is that practicing the feet separately is useful and important. Doing enough of that will make everything about putting all of the parts together easier and more secure. The protocol for practicing a passage like this should include practicing each foot separately with each (separate) hand, as well as the feet as a unit with each hand. Probably practicing each foot separately with the left hand is the most important component of practicing the passage.

Crescendo marking
The composer has, rather considerately, limited crescendo marking (mostly, see m. 76) to places where the pedal line is both low and slow. That makes it as easy as it can be to choreograph the use of the swell pedal or, on a modern organ, of the toe studs or the crescendo pedal. This should be incorporated into the separate pedal practicing from the beginning, not left to the step of putting parts together.

Practice strategies
It is always important to practice parts and combinations of parts thoroughly enough so at each step of the way the material being practiced becomes easy and natural. A specific reason that it is important to do so with this piece is that it is meant to go fast. Of course, no one must play it at the given metronome marking. It can be very effective slower than that, and also faster if it is executed well. However, at any tempo, it is important that the feeling of the piece not be at all deliberate, that it trip along lightly but—as it goes on—powerfully. In particular, it is important that the quick upbeat notes in the pedal part slip into the stream of sixteenth notes in the right hand in a way that has energy and momentum, and doesn’t interrupt the flow of those notes. This can be achieved only if everything is very solidly—extra solidly—prepared.
This ends our trek through some aspects of the study and practicing of two very different important works of the organ repertoire. Next month I will give an overview of what we have learned and observed, and try to draw some general conclusions.

Using excerpts from repertoire as pedal exercises, and a bit about pedal playing

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached, to offer thoughts about the column or for any other purpose, at [email protected].

Organ Method VII

This month’s column starts with a discussion of the ways of using excerpts from repertoire as pedal exercises—even very early in the process of learning to play pedals. I have always suggested this to my own students, and, as long as it is approached correctly from a technical point of view, it has the great advantage of being really interesting, more so than most scales and exercises. 

We are, these days, in a kind of flux about availability of printed music, and it is not absolutely clear how to best provide students with written musical material. I am inclined to direct students to the various ways of finding pieces, especially those that are Internet-based, and thus convenient, being almost instant. That is, I do not expect to include as part of this method an anthology of pieces or to publish one separately. The wide and easy availability of music makes it simple for students to choose their own pedal passages, for example, though of course with as much guidance as a teacher (or a method) needs to give. All the passages that I mentioned at the end of last month’s column, for example, can be found through the Internet with ease. I am very interested in readers’ thoughts and experiences on this point.

The method will contain several “sidebars” or charts and explanations of various practical matters. These will include a definition of the pedaling notation—including mention of my own preference for O for heel, rather than U. (I think that it is less likely to be confused with or mistaken for V), and a description of the pitch notation that I employ (C meaning the lowest c on the keyboard, c′ meaning middle c, and so on). These are all matters that are not needed in the context of these column excerpts, and the question of where and how to include them will in the end be one of layout and typography. However, if anyone reading these columns sees something that I appear to have failed to explain, I would certainly appreciate hearing about it.

This month’s excerpt ends with a bit about heel playing, which will then be the main subject of next month’s excerpt. That will round off the chapter on learning pedal playing, though of course pedal playing will be discussed later on in the context of putting hands and feet together and learning pieces.

Analyzing a pedal passage

The key to using passages from repertoire for pedal practice in the early stages of learning to play pedals is to approach the process systematically. Working on passages like this will move your pedal playing along most quickly and lead to the most solid results.

As an example of how to analyze and practice a pedal passage, let us look at the Bach Pedal Exercitium. The opening of the piece is shown in Example 1. Through this much of the piece, and indeed for most of the rest of it as well, a pedaling in which the toes of the two feet alternate—an “alternate-toe pedaling”—is suitable. If the left toes play the first note, and the toes alternate from then on, the pedaling is very comfortable. Once a pedaling is set, then it is possible to practice the feet separately. This is often a good idea for learning any pedal part, even for experienced players. It is a crucial part of good practice technique for the early stages of learning pedal playing. 

The left-foot part of the opening of the Pedal Exercitium begins as shown in Example 2, and the right-foot part begins as shown in Example 3.

(I have written these as eighth notes. They should be played detached, since they represent sixteenth notes and, in effect, sixteenth-note rests in between the notes. Of course, the pedaling in which you use the same toes for successive notes creates detached articulation. If you keep your pedal touch light, the detached articulation will not seem choppy or artificial or abrupt. Move each foot from one note to the next with the small arc motion that you learned from the exercises above [see February and March issues]. Note that these right-foot notes would be staggered against the beat in the piece itself.)

Each foot’s part should be practiced separately—slowly, lightly, not looking at the pedal keyboard, bearing in mind all of the things that you have learned about foot position—until it feels comfortable. Then the two feet should be combined, that is, you should play the passage as written—all of the notes, still slowly and lightly. Work on a little bit at a time—a measure or two at first, then three or four measures. 

Later on in this piece there is a passage that requires a different sort of pedaling (see Example 4). With these notes it is not possible to use a consistent pattern of alternate toes. There is a common-sense pedaling that is probably appropriate musically and is certainly right when using the exercise for practice: right foot on the high notes, left foot on the low notes (see Example 5). 

With this pedaling the separate feet will play as shown in Examples 6 and 7. When the feet have been practiced separately for long enough that the passage feels comfortable, they can be put together. Notice that in this case, the intervals required of the right foot are quite normal: seconds, thirds, repeated notes. The left foot is challenged to play a very unusual and wide interval, a major seventh.

Later still in this piece is a passage that does not have an obvious common-sense pedaling (see Example 8). Assuming that for now we want to use this passage as an exercise in all-toe pedaling, a solution like that shown in Example 9 would work. In this pedaling, all the sharps and flats are played by the left foot. This will enable the left foot to remain forward and the right foot back when you put the two feet together and they have to cross one another. However, the feet should first be practiced separately, until each foot’s part is thoroughly learned.

The opening pedal solo from the Pachelbel D-minor Praeludium is a passage in which the pedaling is not completely regular, but is fairly straightforward. The passage with a pedaling sketched in is shown in Example 10. (The unmarked middle section can be played with alternating toes.) In beginning to practice the separate feet for this passage, notice that each foot goes fairly far in the “opposite” direction. Take this into account when planning for the tilt of the feet and other aspects of positioning and posture. 

The Bach Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, has two very long pedal solos near the beginning. Both suggest extremely regular pedaling—alternating toes, starting with the right foot. (The last notes of the first solo probably constitute an exception to this.) The separate foot parts are easy to extract and to practice. Since the solos are long, it is best to use only a few measures at a time as exercises. One passage in the second solo requires the left foot to go extremely high indeed, and therefore requires a lot of attention to foot position. This passage looks like Example 11; the left foot part (assuming alternate toes) looks like Example 12. In practicing this left-foot part you must be extra attentive to foot and leg position. Many players will turn in such a way that the comfortable part of the left toe for playing these very high notes is the very outside edge, with the foot almost perpendicular to the floor. 

Ground rules

Let us recap the things to bear in mind when using pedal parts extracted from pieces as material for the early stages of learning to play pedals:

1) For working on toe-only pedaling, music written before about 1750 is an abundant source of material. 

2) For use as exercises, pedal passages should be broken up into fairly short segments: typically, increments involving about 25 or 30 notes per foot are suitable.

3) The first step is to decide on a pedaling. For the purpose under discussion here, any pedaling that feels comfortable is fine. (Of course it could well happen that later on, revisiting the same passage for the purpose of learning and performing the piece, you will want to approach the pedaling differently.)

4) Once you have worked out a pedaling, you will know what each foot’s separate part is. Practice each foot separately, noticing what intervals each foot travels through as it goes from one note to the next. 

5) This practicing should be kept extremely slow. If one foot’s part is not—in the context of the piece itself—rhythmically regular, then it is OK to practice it without a steady beat. Just practice the shape of the notes.

6) When each foot’s part is well-learned and comfortable, then it is time to put the two feet back together. At this stage you should observe correct rhythm, and keep the tempo slow enough that the notes come accurately and easily. You may have to change something about foot position in spots where the two feet come close together. If so, it is a good idea to practice the separate feet again briefly in those spots, taking account of the new choices about foot position, before putting them together again.

Mastering the exercises with which this chapter began, and then practicing—and also mastering—several pedal passages in this way will give you a strong and reliable sense of the geography and kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard: how to find notes. 

Playing with heels

The first step in becoming adept at playing pedal notes with the heels is to practice a type of simple exercise that allows the heels to play without asking them yet to find any notes from scratch or to do anything too complex. This involves finding a raised key—sharp or flat—with the toe, and playing adjacent notes with the heel. See Examples 13 and 14. These can be adapted easily to other similar groups of notes. In playing short patterns like this, observe the following:

1) When you play the first note (the raised key), if you relax your leg and foot, where does your heel naturally fall? What part of the heel? Is it over the next note that you want to play? If not, can you bring the heel to the desired key by turning the ankle, or is it necessary to change the position of the leg a little bit? 

2) What choice have you made about which part of the toe to use to play the first note? Could you change this? What difference would that make in going on to play the second note? 

3) Does the gesture of moving from the third note to the fourth feel different from the gesture of moving from the first note to the second (apart from its simply being in the opposite direction)?

4) Try playing the notes of the exercise lightly detached, as you have been doing with the toe-only exercises, but then also try making the notes fully legato. Even experiment with audible overlapping from one note to the next—though this may sound odd. Does this feel comfortable? Does it suggest anything different about foot or leg position? 

(To be continued)

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. He is at work on a pedal-playing method that will probably be available in the fall of 2008. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links, along with downloadable PDFs of these and other pedal exercises, can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Pedal playing, part III:
expanding the scope
The scale-based beginning pedal exercise that I discussed at length last month is intended to develop a student’s sense—intuitive and kinesthetic—of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step on the pedal keyboard. The careful procedure that I outlined then for introducing a new student to this exercise is important, since the effectiveness of the exercise is predicated on its feeling easy and natural from the beginning. However, the gist of the exercise can be expressed in music notation as follows (see Example I).
The odd notation of the key signature—that is, that the signature itself is in parenthesis—is a way of expressing concisely that the exercise should be played both without any sharps or flats and with whatever the given key signature suggests. (Remember that it almost always makes sense to practice the “naturals only” version first, since it presents more regularly spaced intervals.) This is nothing but a way of saving space and time, and of course it would be possible to write out any exercise of this sort twice, once with and once without a key signature. However, I have found that students easily get used to this notation.
Every pedal exercise that has as its point the development of a student’s sense of the geography of the pedal keyboard should always be practiced at a slow tempo. This is for two reasons that almost contradict each other but that nonetheless both apply. The first is the normal reason for practicing slowly: it is easier to play an unfamiliar passage slowly than to play it quickly; practicing is more effective if what you are practicing is correct rather than wrong; and it always makes sense to practice any passage as slowly as you need to in order to get it right. Of course as a passage becomes familiar it can—normally—be sped up. With this kind of kinesthetic pedal exercise, however, it is also true that the slower one plays the simple notes of the exercise, the more intense a level of focus is required to feel and internalize the shape of the physical intervals that your feet are negotiating. Such an exercise is actually harder mentally, and more intensely efficient as a drill and as a learning tool, the slower it is played. There can be some point to speeding up exercises such as these—especially as part of the process of learning to play faster without developing tension, and indeed to disentangle velocity from tension or force—but that is not relevant to the stage at which a student is first learning pedal playing.
Once this sense of the distance, shape, and feel of one step has been well established, there are two logical next steps. The first of these is to invite the student to use this sense in more complicated musical contexts. The second is to build on this sense to establish an equally secure feeling for the moving of one foot over two steps, then over three and more.
A simple way to set the moving of each foot by one step in a slightly more complicated context is shown in Example II. In this exercise, each foot does exactly what it does in Exercise I above: that is, it moves slowly by step. (This motion is, in effect, still in half notes, though of course the notation is arbitrary.) Two things are added here. First, the whole process is a bit more challenging conceptually, since the student must think about both feet at the same time. The student can deal with this by keeping it slow, by focusing well in general, and by consciously alternating focus from one foot to the other as appropriate. The need for this latter will melt away with practice.
The second new thing that the student has to deal with is the consequences of having the feet closer to one another. When the two feet are placed in such a way as to be in some danger of pushing each other out of the way or blocking one another’s access to the keys that need to be played, then the student must learn how best to separate the feet and prevent them from causing problems for each other. This causes additional complexity for the student, but it is also a very good opportunity for learning about the logistics of pedal playing and the comfortable use of the feet. In each situation that brings the feet perilously close together, the student can figure out—by common sense, and with help from the teacher—what solutions will work. For example, early on in this exercise, when the left foot first needs to play the note B, the right foot has just played c, and might be in the way. (This will vary a bit from student to student because of the kind of differences in foot size, posture, and habits that I discussed in November’s column.) If there is a problem at this point, the student can think about ways to solve it, such as a more detached articulation, or separating the feet along the length of the keys—either “left foot back/right foot forward” or “right foot back/left foot forward” depending, again, on the particular student’s posture and the angle from which he or she naturally approaches that part of the pedal keyboard—or by holding the foot itself at a different angle (i.e., flexing the ankle more or less), or perhaps by switching from “little toe” to “big toe” or vice versa in one or both feet, if that addresses the problem and is comfortable. The teacher and the student can discuss the pros and cons of any of these, and this kind of discussion will move the student closer to being able to think about such things for himself or herself.
The teacher can make up new exercises along these same lines. They should be simple melodies in which each foot moves mostly by step. The interpolation of the two feet need not be utterly regular, as it is in exercise II above. Some students might want to make up their own such exercises, and can certainly do so, as long as they understand the principle of following carefully what each foot is doing. Example III introduces the moving of one foot over the interval of two steps.
In the first half of this exercise, going up, the left foot is asked to take on the new task of moving over the interval of two steps, while the right foot is still just moving by one step. In the second half, coming down, this is reversed. For completeness one might also try the following variation, in which the roles of the feet are reversed (see Example IV).
Since, when the student approaches these exercises, he or she will already have a very firm foundation in moving one foot over the interval of one step, a simple thought will almost always suffice to guide the feet to the correct distance for covering two steps: namely, that the distance traveled by the foot should feel greater than the accustomed distance of one step, but only just enough greater to notice the difference. If in the course of getting to know these exercises the student ever makes a wrong note (which is certain to happen), the best way to correct that is also with a simple thought: “I just moved my foot a little bit too far [or not far enough], so next time I will move it a little bit less far [or farther].” This simple, almost naïve, way of correcting wrong notes in pedal practicing always works (judging from my experience both with students and with myself). It is also by far the best way of using the experience of making and then correcting wrong notes to imprint a correct feeling for the geography of the pedal keyboard on the brain of the player, and to lead efficiently to reliable, accurate playing. It is always possible to get the next note right—or to correct an actual or anticipated wrong note—by looking. However, that does nothing to improve the student’s command of the pedal keyboard, and the sense that it gives of having gotten something right is illusory.
(I will devote a whole future column to the subjects of looking at the keyboard and not looking at the keyboard. These are both important tools, which are sometimes not thought about systematically enough.)
Example V shows an exercise that asks each foot to move over the interval of two steps. It also provides practice in dealing with repeated notes. (The playing of repeated notes with separate feet, which has musical and technical advantages of its own, is also a way to practice being aware of the position of the feet with respect to each other—not the main focus of this approach to learning pedal playing, but not something worthy of neglect either—and it is good training for learning pedal substitution later on. It is essentially the same gesture as a substitution: the difference can be thought of as one of articulation.)
Again, teachers and students can certainly write other exercises that will work as well as these or that can supplement them. It is only important to bear in mind the patterns of what each foot is doing and to make sure that exercises expand the scope of what each foot is doing in a logical and systematic order.
In fact, after any student has become completely comfortable with the exercises in this column or another similar set of exercises, it should be possible for that student to begin using pedal lines from repertoire as pedal practice material. This can include even very difficult pedal parts if they are approached the right way. This transition will be the main subject of next month’s column, which will also discuss the Bach Pedalexercitium and touch briefly upon the heel.

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

More about pedals:
looking at heels
This month I am returning to the subject of pedal playing, this time to discuss heel playing. I have some general thoughts to share with students, and a few practical suggestions and exercises.
It is interesting that the use of the heel in pedal playing is an artistic issue that has a history of lending itself to controversy, becoming a political and, almost, an ethical matter. I have had students come to me who believed—or who had heard—that it was out of the question to use heels in music written before a certain date: that is, essentially in Baroque music. On the other hand, I have heard students and others say that failure to use the heels in Baroque music could only be motivated by a pedantic insistence on academic correctness at the expense of artistic considerations. I once heard two musicians passionately agreeing with each other that “heel and toe” was the only way to play the organ, even though neither of them was an organist! I thought that this was—quite apart from the merits of the notion—a fascinating example of how ideas or ideologies can spread beyond their original home turf. It was also revealing how heated this discussion was and how angry (good-naturedly angry, as I remember it, but still angry) the two of them seemed at people who might disagree.
I have also had students come to me convinced that “heel and toe” pedaling is intrinsically legato, whereas “alternate toe” pedaling is intrinsically detached. (I’m not sure about the concept of “alternate heel”!) In fact, alternate toe pedaling is usually capable of creating a full (even overlapping) legato. It has trouble doing so only in some patterns involving sharps and flats. It is same-toe pedaling (using the same toe on successive notes) that is inherently detached. Also, while heel and toe pedaling can often create legato—and sometimes in places where all-toe pedaling cannot—it is also true that the use of the heel is often most natural in detached situations, where the heel can be used without resorting to an uncomfortable foot position.

Stylistic authenticity
Questions about heel pedaling are bound up, as are many other technical matters, with questions of historical authenticity. These apply in several ways, of which the most prevalent is the above-mentioned concern about using the heel in older music. Questions of authenticity do arise in connection with later music as well, for example, whether a legato achieved using alternate toes is or isn’t acceptable in music written by a composer who is known to have used, or explicitly called for, heels. Is it enough for the player’s judgment—or that of a teacher or any listener—to conclude that the effect is suitable or perhaps actually identical to what the composer intended, or is it in some sense necessary (ethically, artistically) for the composer’s technical suggestions to be followed literally?
It is certainly generally true that earlier organ playing probably made less use of the heels (short pedal keys, giving little room for the heels; relatively restricted use of sharps and flats, and of pedal scale passages; non-legato style attested through surviving fingerings, among other things) and later organ playing more (big and, eventually, “AGO”-type pedal boards; more sharps and flats and scale passages; legato style; the need, some of the time, to assign one foot to the swell pedal), though, as with so many issues, we do not know everything about the historical situation, and what we do know contains intriguing anomalies. These include, for example, the Schlick work Ascendo ad Patrem from about 1512, which has a four-voice pedal part clearly requiring the use of heels, and the (mid-to-late-nineteenth century) organ playing of Saint-Saëns, who apparently never used heels.
(If the one surviving pedaling by Saint-Saëns,1 along with contemporaries’ comments on his playing, were all that we knew about nineteenth-century organ playing, we would assume that Franck, Widor, Reger, and the rest all used only toes! If the Schlick Ascendo were the only surviving organ piece from before, say, 1610, we would assume that in the late Renaissance, multi-voiced pedal parts and heel-based pedal playing were the norm!)
When I was first getting interested in the organ in the early 1970s, I did not, for a long time—a year or two at least—become aware that there were these sorts of historical or musicological polemics—or such strong feelings—surrounding heel playing. I did absorb, however, the idea that it was more difficult to create clarity and precision with the heels than with the toes, and that, any concern for authenticity aside, a player has to be sure that heel pedalings in any given situation really work to create the desired effect. This is an issue with heel pedaling in a way that it is not with toes.
I recall hearing that Helmut Walcha insisted, with his students, that the famous pedal solo in Buxtehude’s G-minor Praeludium, BuxWV 149, be played with all toes, the left toe moving up to play the off-beat F-sharps. (See Example 1.) The purpose of this was to achieve the greatest possible crispness and accuracy of timing, not necessarily to be historically accurate, although it probably was that too, or at least might well be. (Other players might use the right foot to play all of the upper notes—heel and toe—while the left foot remains in the lower half of the pedal keyboard rather serenely catching what might be called the melody of the passage. It is an interesting exercise to work the passage up both ways and listen to the difference(s) in articulation, timing, and pacing between the two.)

Anatomical issues
The fact that playing with the heel is, in general, harder to control with great precision than playing with the toe stems from the basic anatomical fact that the foot is hinged in a way that gives the toes more leverage, a better mechanical advantage. In other words, the heel is closer to the ankle than the toes are: simple, but very important for organ playing. To some extent, whereas the toes play a pedal key through the flexing of the ankle, there is a tendency for the heel to play a key by dropping the leg onto the key.
The approach to teaching pedal playing that I outlined in four columns in The Diapason (November 2007–February 2008) relies on using the instinctive pointing gesture of the toes as a starting place for developing a strong kinesthetic sense of the pedal keyboard. It is mainly for this reason that the various strategies deployed there and the various exercises suggested do not include any work with heel. In spite of this, however, the approach laid out in those columns actually sets a student up to learn heel playing efficiently and with great security. This can happen best after the student has become truly comfortable with the techniques developed through that approach.
Each student—each player, in fact—has a somewhat different physique, which suggests a somewhat different physical orientation towards the pedal keyboard. Some people can more comfortably play off the inside of the foot, some the outside; some people can most comfortably keep the knees fairly close together, some people are more comfortable with the knees farther apart, and so on. The key to incorporating heel playing into this overall approach is to remind the student always to monitor and make decisions about the exact physical approach of the heels to the keys: which side of the heel for which notes, where on the keys the heels should land (perhaps different for each key or different depending on previous or subsequent notes), where the knees should be in relation to the feet in a given passage, etc. These are things that only the student can judge, since that judgment depends on how things feel.

Some practice exercises
The first step in practicing heel playing is to choose a simple passage—taken from a piece or written as an exercise—and to play some of the (appropriate) notes with heel, trying out different positions and placements along the lines mentioned above. It is by far the easiest to use the heels on a natural key that is being played just before or just after a sharp or flat, so it is best to start with such a passage. The Buxtehude quoted above is a good example. It is clear that, if the right heel is going to be used in this passage, it will be used on the G that is the second overall note and its reiterations. A student can try—slowly and keeping everything physically relaxed, as always—to play G–F#–G with heel-toe-heel, using first the inside of the foot, then the outside, letting the knee move to where it is most comfortable. (To play on the outside of the right foot the right knee will probably need to be farther out—to the right—than to play on the inside of the foot.) A player with slender feet might find that the center of the foot works. For most players, one of these configurations will be the most comfortable and should be practiced until it feels reliable. If more than one feels equally comfortable, then both, or all, should be practiced.
A short exercise like Example 2 can be used in the same way, again trying out different angles and positions for the feet and keeping track of what is comfortable. (Note that this, on its own, can well be played like Example 3. It is interesting to compare the differences in sound and feeling, if any, between the different pedalings. In the context of a longer passage, one or the other might be better or actually necessary.)
Here are two matching exercises for heel at the extremes of the keyboard. (See Examples 4 and 5.) Again, they should be tried with every different alignment of inside/outside and knees. The teacher can help the student remember what all the possibilities are, but only the student can tell for certain what is and what isn’t comfortable. They should be tried both fully legato and lightly detached.
The well-known Vierne theme, from the Carillon from Op. 31, is an interesting one on which to try various different heel-based pedalings.2 (See Example 6.) It is possible, while keeping this completely legato, to use alternate toes (left first) except for left heel/left toe going across the bar line. It is also possible, however, to make more extensive use of the heel, for example, using left heel on all of the C’s and fitting the other notes around that. The student can try it a number of ways. For using this as a learning tool, it is crucial to remember to keep it slow and light.
Example 7 is a somewhat arbitrary heel-based pedaling for a scale. I’m not sure that I would use it in “real life,” but it works as an exercise. The challenges here are 1) to orient the left foot in such a way that the toe is aimed easily at the F-sharp after playing the D; 2) to reorient the left foot to execute the more difficult G–A with heel-toe; and 3) to move the right foot securely to the B after leaving the E.
In beginning to practice playing with the heels, as with any pedal practicing, it can be useful to practice separate feet, in the manner that I have discussed in earlier columns. In the above scale, for example, the right foot can practice moving from the E to the B. Really what this means is practicing moving the right heel from the position in which it rests while the right toe is playing the E to the position in which it (itself) plays the B, while turning the foot so that the toes are poised to play the C-sharp. This is a bit more abstract than moving the toe of one foot from one note to another, but equally subject to being analyzed and practiced systematically.
Students themselves, and their teachers, can create little exercises like this, and can extract bits of pieces with which to try out the use of the heel. I want to reiterate that the key to integrating heel playing comfortably into pedal playing is to pay attention to—and make choices about—the position and angle of the feet as they address the keys. This should be done, in the manner discussed at length in my earlier columns, without any particular preconceptions. It is in the end up to the student to determine what is comfortable and what works. The teacher can certainly make suggestions, and can help evaluate the results, but only the student can actually tell how it feels.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 2: First movement
This month’s column looks at the first movement—Introduction-Choral—of the Suite Gothique. In the main, we will outline an approach to practicing the movement, starting of course with working out fingerings and pedalings. We will also consider some interpretive questions, mainly as they interact with or affect choices that must be made about fingering and pedaling.
Several technical features of this movement immediately stand out:
• Many thick chords in the hands—both hands;
• Double pedal for several measures;
• Except for the double pedal passages, the pedal part is strikingly low in compass, with the E-flat in the middle of the pedal keyboard as the highest note;
• Very little indication for swell pedal use;
• The hands sometimes more or less double each other in octaves;
• Conceptually each hand seems to be more of its own part than is usually true in a contrapuntal piece, where voices often wander from hand to hand—however, that does not mean that the hands cannot help each other out a bit;
• Very few chords do not include raised notes;
• There are no explicit instructions from the composer about articulation or phrasing, except for commas in three places, and one important slur, with its repeat.

Articulation
The thick chords raise one important technical issue right away, namely the matter of fingering in relation to articulation. It is essentially always easier—more natural as to hand position—to play successive chords of three or more notes non-legato. Sometimes it is actually impossible to do otherwise, more so the more notes there are in the chords, of course, but also depending on other matters, such as the placement within chords of raised notes. However, in a typical passage made up of successive chords, there are almost always some that can be played legato fairly easily, others that can be played legato with some sort of extra effort, and some that really cannot be played legato at all. This is of course different, around the margins at least, for different players, with hands of different sizes.
In music that we believe to be basically non-legato in overall style, none of this presents particular problems. Chord fingerings can be chosen based largely on the comfort of each chord—in turn based mostly on hand position—and the non-legato transition from one chord to the next can be practiced until it is, while non-legato, still smooth and cantabile, if that is what is desired. In a piece or a passage that we want to play legato, we must grapple with finding the best way to make connections between chords when it is not easy to do so. (By contrast, it is, from a technical point of view, almost trivially easy to play at least most of the upper voice melody in the third movement—Prière—legato, as per the marked phrases. The fingers of the right hand are simply available to do so.)
The question of whether this movement is meant to be legato, or the question of whether a given player wants or prefers to play it legato is unclear, or, more accurately, it is one that different students, teachers, and players will answer differently from one another (and from me). I am not interested in prejudging questions like this—that is, I want to try as best I can to leave all sorts of interpretive possibilities open as we consider how to work on the pieces under discussion. Also, there is a close relationship in a piece like this between articulation and room acoustics. In a very resonant room, a thick texture will come across as essentially legato even if the fingers and feet put small spaces between the notes and chords. If the player literally connects notes and chords, then there is a chance that the result will be enough beyond legato to sound unintelligible. This is an important consideration, especially since most organ repertoire, certainly including the pieces of Boëllmann, was written to be played in very resonant rooms. Of course, we must play in the rooms that are available to us.

Fingering
A fingering for the chords of the opening, in the right hand, that is designed to be comfortable, accepting that most of the chords will be non-legato, might look like Example 1. This happens to suit my hands. For another player, the best fingering might be a little bit different. In m. 5, for example, some players would rather do this (Example 2):

To achieve more full legato, substitution might be used, especially, for example, in the second and sixth measures (Example 3). (I find this fingering awkward, but possible with practice.)
A player with large hands might be able to do this (Example 4),

releasing the lower two notes of the opening chord early, but joining the upper two notes to the notes of the second chord. (I cannot quite do this one. Don’t try it unless it is really comfortable. The stretch could cause injury.)
In the passage at m. 13 (Example 5), the left hand can take some of the notes printed on the upper staff. I have put boxes around a few that I think make sense treated this way, although there are others that are possible. The decision to do this would make it easier to play the upper notes of the right-hand part legato, at the expense of some legato in the inner voices. This is an artistic judgment call, but notice the slurs in m. 18 and later its echo in m. 25. These are the only slurs in the entire movement, and are probably an important part of the rhetoric of this phrase.
Any student must make decisions and choices about fingering matters such as these, perhaps in consultation with a teacher. There are two important technical practicing points to make about some of these fingerings. First, non-legato fingerings will end up sounding smoother and most natural the more they are practiced, at first, with large rather than small breaks between the notes. That is, a gesture such as this (where the asterisks are) (Example 6),

should be practiced with the A-flat/
E-flat/C chord released almost as soon as it is played (but released gently), so that the motion to the next (B-flat/F/D) chord is as easy as possible. Then it will also be easy, later in the practicing process, to close that gap and make the articulation very small and unobtrusive. If you try to make the articulation too small from the beginning—waiting until the last instant and then quickly moving to, almost lunging at, the next chord—then it is likely to end up sounding awkward and stiff, no matter how much you practice it.
Second, it is important to remember to use the correct order in any fingering that includes multiple substitutions. For example, in this triple substitution (Example 7),

it is necessary to execute the substitutions from the lowest to the highest: 2-1, then 3-2, then 5-4. In every case, it is important to carry out substitutions in such a way that the hand moves inward—becomes smaller—rather than moving outward and stretching out. This can always be worked out by trial and error, and getting it right can make the difference between a substitution’s being impossible and its being easy.

Pedaling
One advantage of double pedal is that it resolves any doubt as to which foot should play which note. In effect there are two pedal lines—in the case of the first four measures of this piece, identical to one another except for being an octave apart—and each line has to be executed by one foot. An approach to pedal playing that involves paying attention to the position of each foot with respect to itself (as outlined in my earlier columns on pedal playing) not just, or mainly, in relation to the other foot, tends to make double pedal passages not seem as different from “regular” pedal as they might otherwise. In the case of this passage, as with the manual part, there is a relationship between pedaling and articulation. If this were a line from a Buxtehude piece (which it, unlike the manual part, could just as well be) then any comfortable pedaling would be fine: perhaps all toe, perhaps some heels when the angle was such as to make that comfortable. If, in keeping with an overall interpretive approach, we want to play this line legato, then a pedaling like this for the right foot part might work (Example 8).
The two quarter notes could be played by rolling the toe area of the foot, that is, playing the B-flat with the outside of the foot and the A-flat with the inside. The first note (G) of the second measure could be played with the toe, creating what should be a small articulation before that note. I might also play the first note of the passage with the toe initially, to make a clean, crisp beginning easier to achieve, before substituting the heel to prepare for the next note. There are other possible variations. The left foot could well use exactly the same pedaling as the right.
For the non-double segments of the pedal line, different players will choose different pedalings based largely on personal preference. Here are two different pedalings for mm. 5–8 (Examples 9 and 10); and of course there are other possibilities.

Practicing
The most efficient procedure for practicing this movement is the same as for almost any piece: work out fingerings and pedalings; divide the piece into manageable sections (in this piece, it makes sense to work with the phrases suggested by commas and by fermatas, although it is certainly fine to subdivide those units into smaller ones); practice these sections with separate hands and feet, very slowly; put hands together, or hands and feet together, only when the separate components are very well learned; increase tempo only when a given tempo has become almost trivially easy. This procedure can never be mentioned too often, and it can never be stressed enough that, if it is followed thoroughly and patiently, it always works.
In the case of this movement, I would strongly suggest that at every stage of working on the piece, until it is really ready to go at approximately the composer’s suggested tempo of half note equals 50, the beat in the student’s head, or coming from the student’s metronome, be equal to an eighth note. The quarter note will be too slow to be followed easily until close to a performance tempo.

Special procedures
In the case of this movement, there are a few special procedures that can enhance the learning of the piece—that is, getting to know it musically—while the notes are being learned securely. These are analogous to the practicing of separate voices in a contrapuntal piece, but modified to reflect the texture and structure of this piece: one in which the melody—the top voice—is indeed musically the most important thing, and in which the interaction between that melody and the bass line is the main source of motion.
So the first special practice technique is simply to play the melody and the bass line together, omitting all of the other voices or chordal notes. This can be done with the bass line in the pedal—as soon as the pedal is well enough learned—or with the bass line in the left hand, read from the pedal line or extracted from the left hand part of the manuals-only phrases. It can also be done with the melody in the left hand—since the left hand often doubles the melody—and the bass in the pedal. This can be done before the fingering of the chords has been practiced and made comfortable, since the extracted individual lines are fairly easy to play. But I would also suggest continuing to do it at later stages of work on the piece as a listening exercise and a way of keeping focused on the architecture of the piece, rather than just the complexities of learning it.
In the passages in which the left hand doubles the right hand an octave lower (this is a slightly oversimplified description of the texture), it is difficult for the ears of the performer to follow the left-hand part. The higher sounds of the right-hand part predominate. And, although the left hand in these passages is in a meaningful sense somewhat subordinate to the right hand, the overall texture will benefit from the left hand’s being played in as interesting and nuanced a way as the right hand, and from the two hands really being in sync. One way to work on this is to play the two hands together—once they have been practiced and are secure!—on different keyboards, with the left hand significantly louder. The right hand should be almost but not quite actually drowned out. Of course this only applies to some passages (mm. 1–8, 16–23, and 33–37, more or less). Then, when next practicing on a “normal” sound, try to focus on listening to the left-hand part, and let the right hand take care of itself.
Next month I will return to the Buxtehude Praeludium, looking at the first contrapuntal section beginning at m. 13. We will return later to the Boëllmann, looking at the Menuet.