On Teaching

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

Some thoughts on ornaments I
The playing of ornaments is one of those areas that many—maybe most—students find intimidating. This is only partly because it can be genuinely difficult. It certainly can be difficult, although, like most physical tasks, it can be made much less so through the right kind of technical preparation and through an adequate amount of well-targeted practice. The intimidation factor with ornamentation comes, I believe, mostly from a fear of getting it wrong. There seems to be so much data about how this kind of trill was played in Italy in 1620 or how that kind of appoggiatura was played in Austria in the early nineteenth century that it can seem impossible to keep up with it all. One well-known book on ornamentation is nearly 600 pages long, and that is just one book of very many. Also, impeccably credentialed experts on the subject can disagree. It is easy, looking at a piece of music, to know what the “regular” notes are, though of course it may not be easy to play them. But it is not necessarily easy, or even possible, to know for sure what the notes of ornaments are or what the exact rhythmic shape of a given ornament should be. It is also a common experience for even very talented and “advanced” students to feel that they have learned to play certain ornaments, but that those ornaments just don’t sound very good. This is always frustrating, and extraordinarily so when it happens more or less all the time.
I believe that part of this frustration comes from, or is made worse by, a confusion among some of these issues. That is, students often assume that their ornaments sound bad because they don’t know what the notes of those ornaments should be, or they have gotten something else wrong in the realm of the historical or the musicological, when in fact they sound bad because the execution is awkward or the preparation before the ornament itself is wrong. It may be important to know whether a given trill should start on the main note or the upper note, or how long or how fast it should be, or whether a certain appoggiatura should be long or short. However, any of the above should be able to sound good—natural, fluid, graceful—whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the composer’s intent. It is important to sort these different aspects of playing ornaments out from one another in order to be able to work effectively on learning to play ornaments well.

So, let us consider several issues.
First of all, what is an ornament? On one level an ornament is a note pattern indicated by a sign, rather than by notes as such. If, for example, the three notes c–b–c are indicated by ordinary notes, they amount to an ordinary bit of music, a phrase or perhaps part of one. If those same notes are indicated—as they could be—by a mordent sign on the note c, then that entity is an ornament. Likewise, the three notes c–d–e could be indicated by three ordinary notes or by the note e with the sign for a slide, or the notes d–c–d–c–d–c by six notes or by a trill sign over the note c. This is basic and well known. So, what is the difference between notes indicated by an ornament sign and the same notes written out? Sometimes there might be little or no difference. In fact, there are plenty of pieces in the repertoire with parallel passages in which the same notes are one time written out and another time marked by ornament signs, with no reason to believe that they should be different one time from the other. (This may make it appear that our distinction between ornaments and other notes is at least sometimes arbitrary. This is true, and actually can be helpful in teaching students to play ornaments well and to be comfortable playing them. A significant part of the fear of ornaments comes specifically from identifying them as ornaments, as something other than just some notes to play.) However, when there is a difference, it is likely to be that notes indicated by ornament signs are meant to be quick and light or to deviate subtly from any rhythm that could be spelled out by notes in our rather simple system of rhythmic notation, or both of these.
In fact, from the point of view of execution or performance, ornaments are simply “quick, light notes” or perhaps the greatest exemplar of that kind of passage. This means that playing ornaments well can be achieved by applying the same kind of light, fluid touch that is in fact best for playing any note patterns on the organ. It also means that working on playing ornaments effectively can be one of the best ways of improving lightness of touch and freedom from tension in all playing.
There is an exercise that I use with students that I refer to as a trill exercise. It is extraordinarily effective at helping a player to develop the right kind of touch for playing trills. However, it is equally useful for teaching a light touch for any kind of fast playing, including both non-trill ornaments and any other kind of rapid passage. (It is in fact the only actual exercise that I normally suggest to students, given that in general I believe that it is best to practice pieces or note patterns drawn from pieces.)

A trill exercise
This exercise is not written in music notation, and, although it involves playing notes at the keyboard, it is really a kind of relaxation/breathing/meditation exercise. It can be carried out at the organ or at the harpsichord. It can also work on the piano, as long as the player remembers not to care about producing a robust or loud sound. It goes like this:
1) Sit at the keyboard, and identify the place on the keyboard where each hand can meet the keys with the arm, wrist, hand, and fingers more or less in a straight line. This is usually at the notes written near the top of the treble clef for the right hand and at the notes near the bottom of the bass clef for the left hand, though it varies a bit from one person to another. It is fine to let the elbows float away from the sides. If you are sitting at an instrument with more than one keyboard, choose the keyboard that it is most natural and comfortable to reach.
2) Pick two adjacent (natural) notes and two fingers. Initially it is a good idea to use adjacent and “good” fingers, perhaps 2–3 or 3–4. Later it is fine to do the exercise with any pair of fingers with which you might ever want to play a trill. The two notes should feel as similar to each other as possible. On many organs this is not an issue, though it is on some. It certainly is an issue on many harpsichords. Choose a quiet registration: a Gedeckt or Dulciana, perhaps, or, on a harpsichord, one 8-foot stop by itself.
3) Play one of the notes lightly and comfortably with the finger assigned to it, and hold the note. While holding this note, let your hand relax as much—as thoroughly—as you possibly can. This can be aided by moving the arm around a bit in the air—still holding the note—or by flexing the wrist a little bit, up and down, or by taking calm deep breaths. When you feel that your hand is fully relaxed:
4) Play the other note and then the first note again, as quickly and as lightly as you can. As you do this, you should have as little as possible of a feeling that your hand is bearing down into the keys. Instead, it should feel as if the hand is almost floating up and away—just failing to do so enough to allow the fingers to play the notes that they are trying to play.
5) After you have played these two rapid notes, you will notice that your hand has lost at least a little bit of its relaxation, that it has picked up a bit of tension or at least a bit more muscle tone than it had just before playing those two notes. So, the next step is, while continuing to hold the note that you are holding, again wait for your hand to become fully relaxed. You should then repeat the process described above, that is, the rapid playing of two notes. It can be repeated several times—four or five, maybe up to a dozen. It should never happen according to a beat or a schedule. Each time, while holding the note chosen as the first note, you must wait until your hand is perfectly relaxed before executing the rapid two-note gesture for the next time.
6) After doing this several times in a row, do the same thing but start with the other note and the other finger.
This exercise should be done with each hand, with various combinations of fingers. It is not a good idea to segue directly from doing this exercise to practicing or playing a trill or any other note pattern. Rather, it should simply be done by itself, perhaps for ten minutes or so at some point—or at two different points—during each practice session. Then, when actually practicing or trying to play a given trill (or other rapid ornament or other rapid passage), the idea is to remember and recapture the feeling in the hand, wrist, arm, shoulders, and body that you experienced during this exercise.
I have never known this exercise to fail to help a student, or any player, beginner or advanced, who spent some time with it. It can be used not just to develop a better feeling for the touch of trills, but also to train recalcitrant fingers to play trills and to play rapidly with control. In particular, it is very fruitful to do this exercise with 4–5, after having first done it with more “normal” trill fingers. Almost everyone I know believes that he or she “can’t” play trills with those fingers. In fact, almost everyone can after having applied this exercise to the task.
(I should mention that the original idea behind this exercise was suggested to me by my friend the late David Margeson in the early 1980s when he was a graduate student in organ at Yale. I have refined the idea and adapted it somewhat to the specifics of organ and harpsichord.)

Fingerings
A real necessity in playing ornaments well is planning good fingerings. This has several elements to it. First, of course, is choosing fingers for the notes of the ornament itself. In spite of the claim I made just above, it is a good idea to use the “best” fingers whenever possible. For most people, these are the middle three fingers, or indeed specifically 2 and 3. It is a good idea to use whatever fingers the player is most comfortable with—why compound difficulty by not doing so?—but it is also important not to be so tied to those fingers that passages before and after an ornament end up suffering from convoluted and unnecessarily difficult fingerings. For example, a player who can only play trills or rapid mordents with 2–3 will frequently get into trouble of this sort. A player who is also comfortable using 3–4 will get into much less trouble. Fingerings such as 4–5, 1–2, 1–3 are also useful, though the actual need for them arises less often. A consideration in choosing fingering for an ornament should always be the effect of that fingering on hand position and, in particular, the ability of the player to keep the fingers from migrating too deeply into the keyboard. So, for example, if one note of an ornament is a raised key and the other a natural, then it is wonderful to end up playing the raised note with 3 and the natural with 2 or 4 as appropriate. Reversing this leads to some kind of awkward hand position, and thus makes it harder to maintain a light, comfortable touch. The logistics of this vary at different points along the compass of the keyboard and also from one player to another depending on the relative lengths of the different fingers. The important thing is to remember to pay attention to the hand position that results from a fingering choice with an ornament.
If the note immediately before an ornament is the same note that actually begins the ornament, it is very important indeed to play the two successive iterations of that note with different fingers. This is an approach that I always prefer with repeated notes (see The Diapason, January 2009), but for preparing ornaments it is especially crucial. This is because, again, a light touch and a relaxed hand are absolutely essential to playing ornaments in a way that feels and sounds good. It is very common for a trill that should begin with the upper note to be preceded by that same note. The best way to work out this fingering is to decide first on the best fingering for the trill, based on the player/student’s preferences and on the logistics of the particular notes, then select a finger to play the preceding (same) note from among the fingers not designated to play the first note of the trill. This choice should be made based on the shape of the passage leading into the trill. If it is impossible to make that passage work without using the same finger for the final note before the trill and for the note that starts the trill itself, then the trill fingering should be changed if at all possible. I have very rarely indeed been unable to devise a good solution in this very common situation—perhaps never. The point for the teacher to make to the student is that it is both fairly easy to work this out and abundantly worth doing so. Awkward starts to trills are usually the result of simply not having thought out the fingering both of the trill itself and (especially) of the notes leading into the trill.
It is also very common for the note before an appoggiatura to be the same as the note of the appoggiatura itself. In this situation, using different fingers for the two iterations of that note will not only make the whole pattern of notes sound more natural and give greater control over timing and articulation, but it will specifically create the right accent relationship amongst the three notes: the note before the appoggiatura, the appoggiatura itself, and the note following it (the “main” note). Trying this example with each of the indicated fingerings (both for the right hand) can make this difference seem clear.
One of my frequent chamber music colleagues recently made the following comment to me about a (non-keyboard) musician with whom we both play a lot: “I’ve figured out why so-and-so’s ornaments always sound so good. He plays them quietly.” The above discussion about fingering and the suggested exercise are essentially aimed at helping students to develop an organ and harpsichord equivalent of playing ornaments quietly. Next month I will deal with the sometimes vexing questions about what the notes and rhythms of ornaments should be—on the beat or before, starting on main or auxiliary notes, and so on. I will also address how to use that information to help students feel freer in their playing of ornaments rather than more constrained, and how to help them approach the subject creatively. 

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 [email protected].

Velocity III

As a brief addendum to the latter part of last month’s column, I must mention that among famous organ pieces, the Widor Toccata is almost preternaturally well designed for the kind of practicing in altered rhythms that I mentioned in that column. Playing those sixteenth-note mordent-and-arpeggio figures first in fast groups of eight notes starting on the beat, then in fast groups of eight notes starting just after each beat, is remarkably effective for learning the piece itself and is also a good test case for my method. It is also undeniably fun to try to get at least a stretch of that piece as fast as you possibly can—and again a good test case for this approach. As with the Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which we examined last month, it is not by any means necessary or even good to play the piece as fast as you possibly can. And with the Widor, there is an interesting history about tempo, since the composer changed the metronome markings through different editions, and he recorded it at a slightly different speed—slower than his slower metronome suggestion. 

This piece—or specifically the passages that are in the shape of the opening in the right hand—is also a good one for practicing stringing together smaller very fast gestures: seeing how long you can keep it going at a tempo defined not by what the music requires, but by simply trying to transfer the “fast, light drumming on a table” feeling to patterns on the keyboard. Once you have practiced two or three adjacent half-notes worth of the sixteenth-note pattern, try going through all of that material, again sometimes playing sixteen or twenty-four notes with the beat, sometimes playing the opening note and holding it for an unmeasured time, and then playing the following two or three groups in one gesture as fast as you can, ending on, and holding, the next downbeat. 

Utter predictability

Of course, this is all based on having achieved the utter predictability that is the foundation of being able to play fast. For one-note-at-a-time lines, that comes from a combination of sensible fingering and enough slow practice to get the elemental learning of the patterns to be way beyond just solid. The reason for considering building a potentially fast passage up out of smaller components (specifically as part of the process of getting it fast, or of testing and figuring out how fast it can be) is that the smaller the bit of music, the more promptly utter predictability can be achieved. In practicing a passage for really learning it—rather than as an exercise in moving around notes as quickly as possible—a player can decide to learn a longer stretch of music and move it up to tempo gradually (this is probably the most common method) or to learn very small bits, and get them up to (or beyond tempo) more quickly, and then work on putting them together. 

Achieving lightness

This feeling that we get from the drumming-fingers exercise of being able to move the fingers even more quickly than playing pieces will actually require is based quite crucially on keeping things light. It is easy to experience what happens if this lightness is compromised. Go back to simple drumming, then selectively tighten up various component parts of the physical mechanism that delivers your fingers to the table or chair-arm: shoulders, biceps, wrist, the fingers themselves. Each of these tightenings will have some effect on the ease, speed, and fluency of the drumming. The tightening of the fingers will be the worst, and will probably bring the drumming down below the velocity that you would like to be able to achieve. It will also most likely hurt. (Don’t do too much of it.) 

Playing lightly is always a good idea, always important. However, in trying to play anything that is fast enough that its speed is an issue, lightness is beyond just a good idea: it is a necessity. (Light, for this purpose, means with not too much more force than you need to make the keys go down, and with no tension whatsoever. It is the absence of tension that is the most important. The actual force of the downstroke of each finger is not as significant, as long as it is reasonably light, and as long as nothing in that downstroke predisposes the finger to have trouble coming back up, which is an impediment to velocity. Holding on to the keys after you have played them is to be avoided altogether. Experimenting with using so little force that you are almost not quite depressing the keys is a good idea, just to get the feel of it.)  

My so-called trill exercise (about which I wrote most recently in the December 2013 issue) is really about incorporating lightness and absolute lack of tension into fast playing. The trill in that case stands in for any fast playing, and, of course, as with the patterns that we have been dealing with here, it is fully predictable. (That exercise can also be found online here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf). It works well to do a session of this exercise, then do something else for a while (practice something else, or get away from the keyboard altogether) and then play short excerpts from whatever passage you are working on playing at a challenging fast tempo, trying to remember and recapture the feeling of the trill exercise.

Tension and playing fast

Here are a couple of useful points to remember about the interaction between tension and fast playing. Physical tension, which physically inhibits speed, can have mental tension as one of its causes. And in turn, of course, nervousness about the ability to play a passage fast enough or to play it well at the appropriate tempo can be a cause of mental tension. This creates a sort of downward spiral or pernicious feedback loop. Part of the point of using the “drumming on a table” model to convince players that absolute velocity is not often the problem is to break this feedback loop. Also, there is a statement that goes like this: “If we want to accomplish something more, we have to exert ourselves more; playing faster is a form of accomplishing more, therefore to play faster we have to exert ourselves more; and exerting ourselves more means pushing harder.” Of course no one is going to spell this out: when you do it is obvious that it doesn’t add up. But it is a surprisingly pervasive underlying assumption, and we can help our students to let go of it by pointing it out.

(Playing very fast can seem like a tightrope act. The most instinctive way to avoid falling when we are afraid of falling is to hang on tight. This hanging on tight physically is, as I said above, fatal to velocity and to ease of playing in general. But hanging on tight while playing must be mental only: focus, concentration, paying attention to the music or to memory, and so on.) 

Transition points

Transition moments, where the hand has to move in some way, rather than just present fingers to the keyboard in one place, are a big part of the challenge when it comes to velocity. If there were no such moments, we could pretty much just transfer the drumming on a table feeling directly to at least any one-line passages. (But music would be much less interesting!) In real music these transition moments happen sometimes because we effectively just run out of fingers in one position: that is, they happen of necessity. Sometimes they happen because although we could encompass a certain set of successive notes in one position, that is not the most comfortable way to do so. But sometimes also they happen because the change in hand position creates an interpretive effect that we want. This latter situation is found in abundance in “early” fingering, that is, certain fingering patterns that were common and characteristic during and before the early eighteenth century. (Any identification of fingering approaches with any time period is really about tendencies, not absolutes.) These patterns involve using smaller chains of fingers to play small groups of notes, and then turning or moving the hand to present the next small group of fingers to the next set of notes. This was probably done to create articulation or to keep the hands in positions that enabled them to control the sensitive action of the prevailing kinds of instruments as minutely as possible, or some combination of these things. In any case, these fingerings routinely deprive the hand of the ability to sit over a group of notes and just drum those notes out. How does this relate to velocity?

Examples 1 and 2

Considering Examples 1 and 2, do these two fingerings for a basic scale fragment have significantly different ceilings to the tempo at which they can be played? Based on experience with the “drumming on a table” model, I would say that most players could execute the first fingering in not much more than half or two-thirds of a second. (That’s a “tempo” of quarter-note equals 700 or more.) The second fingering? I can’t picture anyone playing it that fast. Someone could surprise me, but certainly for most of us it can’t go at that speed. It is not the “drumming on a table” situation, because the transition points are too many and too frequent: every other note. 

Examples 3 and 4

Now considering Example 3, I feel pretty sure that most people could execute this one, including the transition moment going across the bar line, almost as fast as they could execute example 1: not quite, but almost. So in part it seems to be recovering from the transition, or executing multiple transitions in a row that lowers the ceiling on velocity. 

Practicing this sort of early fingering with a view to getting it fast can involve breaking things up into small units, and applying some of the principles of both my trill exercise and the sort of altered-rhythm practicing that we have been looking at. I have given two fingerings (for the right hand) for this pattern in Example 4. The upper one, with the hand remaining in one position, is for comparison. 

Using the lower fingering, try playing only the first note, then, in an untimed manner, only when you feel relaxed and ready, play the next two notes quickly. Prior to actually playing, map out the feeling of the fingering in your mind. There should be a small articulation between the second note and the third note. (There also can be one between the first note and the second note.) It doesn’t matter exactly how large or small these articulations are as long as the feeling is comfortable. The second finger should be released lightly before moving 3 over it. Don’t hold 2 to the point where the whole hand begins to turn upside down. Try doing the same thing starting on the third note and going to the first note of the second measure. Then try adding notes: start on the first note, wait until you feel relaxed and ready, and play four successive notes. 

Try various small units like this. (You can always try the same groups of notes using the upper fingering, to be reminded of the differences in the feeling.) After you have gone over all sorts of smaller groupings like this, try playing the passage itself as lightly and quickly as you can. (It can repeat indefinitely. Just do it several times, and don’t keep going if it feels stiff.)

Another aspect of the relationship between this sort of fingering and velocity turns things around. If you want an articulation at a certain point, then if you program that articulation into the fingering—using fingers that create a transition moment that makes a space or breath—then that articulation will automatically be there at any tempo. In Example 3 with the given fingering, you will create a small articulation at the bar line. That articulation is not dependent on anything that you do other than executing the fingering. It will be there, proportionate to the tempo, at any tempo. If you change the fingering to 5-4-3-2-1, and still want that articulation (between 2 and 1) then you have to remember to do it on purpose, consciously lifting 2 early by just the right amount. Above a certain speed it becomes very hard; above another, higher tempo, it actually becomes quite impossible. 

In the course of working out these last couple of columns, I have realized that it would be a mistake to try to include a discussion of velocity in more complicated textures here. That would constitute giving it short shrift. Therefore, I will devote a fourth column to that, next month. In addition to talking about two-voice and multiple-voice textures and chords, and a bit about getting comfortable playing fast in both hands together, I will return to some of the questions from the beginning of the first column in this series and talk a bit about the connections between gaining greater ability to play with great velocity and aspects of interpretation and effective performance.

Organ Method XIV

This month’s column is a continuation of last month’s discussion of learning to play contrapuntal passages.

In the second movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Sonata in C Minor, Opus 65, No. 2, the left-hand part is mostly in two voices. Any part of that movement makes wonderful material for practicing multiple voices in one hand in the way that we have been discussing. Here are the first several measures of that piece, shown in Example 1.

There are more than thirty measures that are constructed like this. Each of the two left-hand voices (marked Clav. I) is quite intricate by itself, so, in practicing each of them separated into two hands, you will have to take some care with the fingering and a fair amount of time. For using this piece to explore this method of practicing, it is not necessary to work on all of it at once: any few measures will be fruitful.

Example 2 shows another Bach passage with two voices in the right hand. It is from the Sinfonia in D Major, BWV 789, beginning just after the downbeat of m. 5.

In this passage, the two right-hand voices briefly cross, and in one spot, one voice passes through a note that is being held by the other voice. In playing the two voices separately on two keyboards, none of this causes any problems or is particularly noteworthy. Can you use this exercise to make it possible—or more natural—to hear those voices clearly as they cross, when you put them back together?

We now move on to three special issues in manual playing. Two of them are approaches to fingering that apply to certain types of writing that are common in the repertoire. These are 1) the fingering of repeated notes, and 2) substitution. The other is an exercise designed to help with the playing of trills and other passages that call for rapid, light playing. I will describe the trill exercise first, and then move on to the other two, which are in fact closely related to one another. 

This exercise is not written in music notation, and does not involve playing passages of music, but rather only simple pairs of notes. Its purpose is to create an awareness of a feeling of lightness and ease of touch, which can then be carried into the playing of other exercises and passages of music, especially of trills, other rapid ornaments, and rapid passages in general. It is physically easy to do, though it requires a certain kind of focus that can take a while to achieve. It is equally appropriate and helpful for seasoned players, for absolute beginners, and for anyone in between. It goes like this:

1) Choose two fingers on the same hand. (The first time you play this exercise, the fingers should be 4/3 or 3/2, in either hand. Later on it is especially valuable to play it with 5/4, and any two fingers can be suitable, even non-adjacent fingers.)

2) Choose two notes—at first they should be adjacent naturals, but later on it is valuable to include sharps/flats as well. As with some of the exercises from earlier in this series, it is important that you choose notes that lie in the part of the keyboard where your arm and hand are naturally more-or-less straight when you are playing (that is, your wrist not cocked or twisted). This is, of course, normally near the top of the treble clef in the right hand and near the bottom of the bass clef in the left hand. It is a good idea to position the fingers near the ends of the keys, and to let the thumb float in the air in front of the keyboard. (But see below for using this exercise with the thumb.)

3) Once you have chosen the two notes and the two fingers, rest the two fingers on the notes and relax your hand, arm, neck, shoulders, etc. Sit in a comfortable  position, and take a deep breath or two. Then play one of the notes—either one—lightly and smoothly, and hold it. When you feel completely relaxed, then:

4) Play the other note and the original note in succession, as quickly and as lightly as you can: a quick, light two-note gesture. While you are playing these two notes, your hand and wrist should feel more as if they are floating upwards than as if they are bearing down. This two-note gesture will leave you holding the same note that you played first, and it will have created at least a little bit of tension in your hand. Once again you should wait for your hand, arms, etc., to completely relax. Then repeat the two-note gesture, and do this a few times in a row. It is crucial to wait each time for your fingers, hand, arm, shoulders, neck, back, etc., to completely relax. Thus, it is not appropriate to develop a steady rhythm or beat in doing this exercise. If you do, you are probably not allowing yourself to relax thoroughly enough between playing notes.

5) After you have done this a few times with a particular pair of fingers and notes in one order, play it with the same fingers and notes in the opposite order. It is important to stop before it begins to feel “routine” and thus impossible to achieve a combination of concentration and relaxation. Usually it makes sense to play it about 4 to 6 times each (up/down and down/up) and then leave it. This varies from one person to another. It is better to do a little bit of this often than to do a lot of it in one sitting.

6) It is not necessary to segue from this exercise directly into playing a trill or other fast passage. Rather, the point is to remember the feeling of the exercise when you next play a trill or fast passage. If you do a little bit of this exercise most days, spreading it around to several pairs of fingers (not neglecting 5/4), and working with both hands an approximately equal amount, the feeling of it will spill over quite naturally into your playing.

7) The following “special cases” of the exercise require extra thought: the thumb, sharps and flats, and non-adjacent fingers. In these cases, particular care must be taken about hand position. Make sure that the alignment of the fingers with respect to the notes permits the hand to remain in (or constantly regain) a tension-free state. For example: using 2/1 on adjacent naturals is usually too awkward to be good for this exercise; however, using 2/1 or 3/1 on a natural and a sharp/flat is often very comfortable, and indeed a good thing to practice (thumb on the natural, obviously). Using 4/2 on F# and D (right hand) is usually fine, but using 4/2 on A and F# (right hand) is usually not. Using 3/2 on a natural and a sharp/flat is usually OK if 2 is on the natural, but not if 3 is on the natural. The point is to make sure that the wrist is not cocked or twisted outwards very much (ideally not at all), that the fingers are not so curved that they don’t have good leverage in pushing down the keys, and that it is possible to remain near the ends of the keys. (These are all normal considerations in organ fingering, but this exercise only retains its purpose if the hands are very comfortable, whereas in playing repertoire, the complexity of the music often makes some compromise in comfortable
fingering unavoidable.)

An important note: In 4) above, I use the phrase “as quickly and as lightly as you can.” The most important part of this is “as you can.” Quickness is the point, but it cannot be pushed. If you try to execute this simple gesture faster than you can comfortably do it, you will defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Playing repeated notes

Repeated notes on the organ are often seen as something of a problem—and with some reason. In order to repeat a note on organ, you must release it all the way. This is also true on harpsichord, but not on piano, and not consistently on other instruments. When you combine this need to release a note before you can sound it again with the sustaining quality of organ sound, you get a situation in which repeated notes can stick out: they can sound disconnected from the rest of the sonority, texture, and musical shape of a piece or passage. If a line or passage is being played fully legato, then two notes in a row that are the same will be articulated differently from the non-repeated notes around them. Repeated notes cannot be fully legato. Even in a line or passage that is being played in an overall detached style, repeated notes can stand out, since the way in which they are detached can sound different—more crisp or abrupt. 

It is a reasonable goal to be able to play repeated notes as naturally as possible, that is, to reduce as much as possible the extent to which they stand out or draw attention to themselves. It is also a good thing to be able to control and shape the playing of repeated notes—timing, articulation, sonority—with as much flexibility as possible. This is true of all notes and all playing, but with repeated notes it calls for some extra thought. 

In general, the discovery made by organists over many centuries and through all sorts of different schools of organ composition and organ playing is that it is a good idea, when possible, to play repeated notes with different fingers—to change fingers from one note to the repetition of that same note. This is not always possible to do. Repeated notes that are octaves or that are embedded in chords, especially four- or five-note chords, sometimes must be played using the same fingers. However, the changing of fingers on repeated notes is a practice that is important to learn and to get used to.

If you have just played a note with a given finger and you are still holding it, then in order to repeat it with that finger you must do all of the work of releasing and replaying the note with that finger. You need time to move the finger up off the note, and then bring it back down. This sets a limit on how little time there can be between the release of the first note and the playing of the second. Not only must there be a break between the two (same) notes, but that break must be a certain length. Also, the gesture of moving a finger up and back down is likely to produce tension. The shorter you try to make the break between the two notes, the more at risk you are for introducing tension into the hand. The paradox arises that trying to make the repetition more “legato” actually makes it more abrupt: more of a conspicuous break. 

If you repeat a note with a different finger, then you can be preparing the new finger to play the note before you have released it with the old finger, and you can release the note smoothly. Sometimes it will make sense to release down and towards your body sitting on the bench or off to one side, rather than straight up above the note that you are holding and that you need to play again. The new finger can move in and replace the old finger smoothly. This gesture creates less tension and gives you the greatest possible flexibility in timing and articulation. The repeated note still must be detached, but, if you want, it can be only slightly detached—
almost imperceptibly. 

Start getting used to using different fingers on repeated notes with the simplest possible exercises, such as that shown in Example 3.

You can move this to different notes and use different fingering patterns. (For example, try 2-3-4-3-2-3-4-3, or 2-1-2-1-3-1-3-1.) Remember to keep hands, arms, shoulders, and so on completely relaxed. Release notes smoothly but cleanly: that is, do not inadvertently slip the new finger onto the note prior to releasing it. If you do that, you are in fact practicing substitution—which we come to next—but not playing repeated notes with different fingers. Experiment with different amounts of articulation, and with patterns of differing articulation between the different notes.

Another useful pattern for practicing is illustrated in Example 4. The fingering given is just one set of possibilities. You can devise and try others, preserving the principle of changing fingers on the repeated notes. Try different things with articulation: making the non-repeated notes legato, with different amounts of break at the repeated notes; articulating all of the notes the same; using varied detached articulation for all of the notes, and so on. ν

To be continued.

Organ Method XIII

This follows directly from last month’s column. For those with little or no prior keyboard experience, I have made this method’s exercises simple, direct, and systematic. At the same time, assuming that the student can remember and build on what has come before, the student should be able to take the right approach to practicing the exercises and be able to concoct his or her own exercises to some extent. A student who is already experienced on another keyboard instrument should be able to get something important out of this section, since the feel and sound of playing in chords and multiple voices is critically different on organ from what it is on other instruments. 

Before we look at exercises designed to get each hand used to playing patterns of more than one note at a time, there are a few general points to consider.

1) The clearest physical difference between playing one note at a time in one hand and playing more than one note in a hand, is that the latter places more limits on fingering choices. If you are called upon to play five notes at once in one hand—which is rare but not unheard of—then there is little or (usually) no actual choice about fingering. In the more common situation of two or three notes at once in one hand, there are often different fingering possibilities, but not as many choices as when playing only one line in a hand.

2) Hand position, already discussed earlier in this column, can be even more important when playing multiple notes at once than when the hand is playing one line, and can also be more difficult to manage well. In particular, the role of fingering choices for raised keys—sharps and flats—in determining comfortable hand position is crucial. In some passages, the position of the notes necessitates some compromise in hand position. Part of gaining experience and comfort with playing the most complex repertoire is learning how to manage these situations well. If a hand position is not ideally comfortable, then it is important to relax the hand away from that position promptly and smoothly.

3) In a piece of music, or a passage, in which each hand is playing only one note at a time, each hand’s part is a musical line or voice or melody. When either hand has more than one note at a time, that texture can be multiple voices or it can be chords, or it can be some combination of the two. 

4) Playing two or more separate melodies or voices with one hand in a way that sounds to an attentive listener like simultaneous melodies rather than chords is mostly a matter of attentive listening by the player. Exercises designed to address that aspect of playing are essentially listening exercises.

5) In most contrapuntal pieces with more than two voices in the hands, at least one voice migrates from one hand to the other. When this is the case, it almost always means that the piece, or that part of the piece, should be played on one manual: otherwise the sonority of that voice changes at essentially arbitrary times. It is also important that choices about which notes will be played by which hand be made carefully and sensibly. (In particular, it is important not to assume that every note printed in the upper staff should be played by the right hand, and that every note printed in the lower manual staff should be played by the left hand. These will be the tendencies, but the whole texture should be divided between the ten fingers in whatever way is most comfortable and gives the best musical results.)

6) Chordal passages often present articulation issues. If a series of chords in one hand is meant to be played legato, that presents fingering challenges, often involving finger substitution—a technique that will be dealt with later. If chords in one hand are meant to be played detached, then more fingering choices are available. Any detached fingering should be practiced first with enough space between the notes that the physical motion from one chord to the next feels easy. Once the gestures have been established, the spaces between the notes can be made smaller without abrupt gestures or tension.

7) Just as it makes sense to practice hands or feet separately, it makes sense to practice individual components of the note picture within one hand separately. Sometimes it also can make sense to focus on listening to one component of the texture of the part being played by one hand over the other parts.

Examples 1 and 2 are simple exercises with which to begin playing more than one note in each hand.

I have placed these exercises in regions of the keyboard that, for most players, will permit the note patterns to feel most comfortable, with the forearm and hand aligned well. However, as with earlier exercises in this chapter, you should move them around: up or down by octaves, or by other intervals, mixing versions with few or no sharps or flats with versions that have more. 

There is an obvious fingering for these exercises. For the right hand: 3/1–4/2–3/1–4/2–5/3–4/2, repeat; and for the left hand: 3/5–2/4–3/5–2/4–1/3–2/4, repeat). However, you should also try different fingerings, for example, playing all of the two-note chords with the same pair of fingers, and simply moving the hand smoothly and gently from one chord to the next, or a mixed fingering such as (for the first exercise) 3/1–4/2–3/1–4/2–4/2–3/1 (repeat). In any case, whenever you pick up the same pair of fingers to play the next chord, make that gesture as light, relaxed, and smooth as possible. In particular, do not try to make the space between the chords particularly short: use as much space as you need to allow the gesture to be completely without tension or any feeling that you are “snapping” from one chord to the next.

Keep the tempo slow for now, and do not worry if you hear the two notes of each chord not quite sounding at exactly the same time as each other. This is important: of course in the long run you need to be able to make multiple notes in one hand sound exactly together, and also indeed to make them sound not quite together in ways that you have decided on for musical effect. However, any attempt to ensure that each finger depresses its note at exactly the same time as each other finger does —before you have developed a fair level of comfort playing note patterns of this sort—will lead to a touch that is too crisp and too focused on driving each key to the bottom. This can sometimes lead to real physical tension and, in the long run, pain. The good news is this: any tendency of multiple fingers to play notes somewhat out of kilter with one another will go away naturally and of its own accord as you continue to practice. 

If you have studied other keyboard instruments, you might be impatient with the simplicity of these first exercises. However, the touch and sound of the organ are different enough from piano, harpsichord, and clavichord that both the physical act and the listening aspect of playing more complex textures is very different indeed.

After taking a first look at these exercises and moving them around on the keyboard a bit, you should practice them in a couple of different ways that involve breaking them up. For example, play each line (upper note and lower note of each chord) separately, as shown in Example 3. (And similarly for the other parts of the exercise.)

Or stagger the upper and lower notes, as in Example 4. (And similarly for the other parts of the exercise. Don’t make this too fast: for this purpose, the rhythm doesn’t much matter.)

Note that these deconstructed versions of this two-voice chord exercise are themselves simpler than the exercises and pieces that you have already been playing. 

Try playing three-note chord patterns,  such as those in Example 5. In this case, the fingering can well be 1–3–5 (or 5–3–1), and the same for each chord. It is important to move from one chord to the next smoothly, allowing the breaks between chords to be as long as necessary to keep the motion comfortable. Are there other fingerings that are possible or, perhaps, better? Play around with it. Move these patterns around to other notes and other regions of the keyboard as you have done with other exercises.

This set of exercises can also be broken into component parts—the lower two notes, the outer notes, the upper two notes—or played staggered. You can devise ways of moving from one of these components to the full three-voice texture yourself, as in Examples 6 and 7. Make sure that you use the same fingers for the components that you want to use for those notes when they are put back into the full texture.

An exercise such as that shown in Example 8 combines some of the above:

A traditional four-part chorale harmonization, such as that of Old Hundredth (shown in Example 9), provides material for continuing to practice moving each hand from one two-voice chord to another.

For the current exercise, you should break this hymn into short sections, and into separate hands. Then work out a comfortable, sensible fingering for each section, assuming that it is acceptable to allow a breath or break between each two successive chords: that is, to play detached. Do not worry at this point about how detached the chords are, but, no matter how much space you leave between chords, keep your hands light and flexible at all times. Release notes/chords smoothly and gently, and move to the next note or chord calmly. Do not necessarily expect to put the whole hymn together or to put the hands together: that is not the point at this stage, though you may very well return to it later and learn it as a piece, probably with pedal. You can find ample material for this sort of practice in any collection of chorales or hymns. ν

Next month’s column will continue this discussion, moving on to techniques for practicing the art of playing truly independent voices together in one hand.

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

Practicing II
Last month I wrote that the “concept of ‘slowly enough’ is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord.” This month I want to explore that concept further. I will also discuss a couple of other aspects of the art of practicing.
In urging that students practice their pieces slowly, I want to avoid giving particular, specific practice-tempo suggestions, and I also want to advocate that teachers not expect, by and large, to give their students such specific suggestions. One of the keys to really efficient practicing is to develop a feeling for what the right practice tempo is. That is, literally, a feeling, since the right tempo at which to practice a given passage at a given moment is the tempo at which that passage feels a certain way. The way to guide a student towards being able to practice well—and to know how to go on practicing well for the rest of his or her playing career—is to help the student learn to recognize that feeling.
When a student (or anyone) plays through a passage, whether it is a few notes or an entire long piece, and whether it is the whole texture or separate hands or feet, one of a number of things can happen. If the playing is clearly wrong—wrong notes, missing notes, wrong rhythm—then that is easy to notice and easy to describe. A student who is very inexperienced indeed, or, more commonly, a student who is scared or self-conscious, or who has been trained to leave all matters of judgment to the teacher, might not notice such things at first. But he or she will not have any trouble noticing them if they are pointed out, and can be taught and reminded to notice them directly. They are there for the taking. If a passage being practiced shows such problems, beyond just a few, then it should be practiced more slowly. That is clear.
However, it is extremely common for a student—especially a student with good powers of analysis and of concentration—to be able to play a passage correctly, perhaps even many times in a row, but to have that correctness be a sort of high-wire act: that is, for there to be some or many “near misses” in which the student comes very close to getting a wrong note, but manages to remember and play the right note at the very last second. Playing a passage this way is emphatically not good practicing. (I will discuss this more below.) As I wrote last month, it takes honesty with one’s self to admit that a passage that sounded at least “OK” to the listening world was in fact not OK. We are all motivated not to admit this, first of all because it is always more friendly to our self-esteem to believe that something we just did was done well, not badly, and second because this admission seems to let us in for more work!
In addition to honesty or self-awareness, however, it is necessary for a student to know how to recognize, while playing, specific signs that a passage is in this “high-wire” state. This can be tricky both for beginning students and for anyone else who has never been in the habit of looking out for this problem. Some of the phenomena to watch out for include:
1) Very slight hesitations, especially—but not exclusively—before strong beats. This is an outward, audible sign, but a subtle one that a listener can easily miss. It can be confused with interpretive inflections that might even be musically effective. Only the player can know for sure.
2) Significant departures from worked-out fingering, especially lots of substitution that wasn’t part of the plan.
3) Tension: in the hands for manual parts, probably in the legs and back for pedal parts, but possibly also in the feet.
4) Playing certain notes with more physical force than others: banging. When a particular note takes the player by surprise and is only achieved by dint of great last-minute concentration, then that note will often be banged down hard.
5) Breathing problems or frequent catching of the breath.
(Some of the items on this list are hard for the student to notice unless he or she is otherwise playing in a relaxed manner, both physically and psychologically. This is one of the most compelling practical reasons both for cultivating a relaxed, friendly atmosphere in the teaching studio and for encouraging a light, tension-free physical approach to playing.)
To put the same thing the other way around—accentuating the positive—the playing should seem calm and serene, the hands and feet should be able to move from one spot in the music to the next at a fairly even pace, the player should be able to remain relaxed and keep a light touch. In fact, the whole thing should feel easy. Performing is not easy; having the patience to practice well is not easy; the act of practicing should be easy.
(It is also important to note that an occasional or rare wrong note that happens while practicing a passage is not necessarily a problem or a reason to slow down. A recurring wrong note usually is. Clusters of wrong notes are. But the scrambling, uncomfortable feeling described here is the most compelling reason to try a slower tempo.)
If a teacher guides a student towards recognizing that a passage or piece is being practiced at too fast a tempo—without specifically suggesting a practice tempo, but instead inviting the student to try it more slowly and to be on the lookout for all of the signs described above, negative and positive—then the teacher will be helping that student to develop a lifelong ability to guide his or her own practicing effectively.
It is important for students to know that when you play though a passage in a way that has an element of scrambling to it—the “high-wire” or emergency feeling—you are actually not practicing the passage at all. Practicing a physical gesture, or set of physical gestures, of the sort we are talking about here is a matter of repeating that gesture until it becomes second nature. (I believe—from conversations I’ve had with people who have studied the subject—that this is at least in part a matter of imprinting something on the cerebellum as opposed to the cerebrum. In any case, it is something quite real and specific neurologically.) When you play a passage wrongly you are actually making the wrong gestures second nature: you are imprinting (on your cerebellum?) the acts of scrambling, getting the wrong notes, hesitating, hitting keys too hard, using unnecessarily complicated fingerings, having trouble breathing, etc. In the end you will have learned to do those things.
On the other hand, if you start off at an appropriate tempo, then you can practice, as I put it last month, “a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result.” Then, following the procedure that I outlined last month, you can work it up to any desired tempo.
There are two other issues about practicing that are important to discuss alongside the basic procedure proposed in these two columns: 1) keeping it going, and 2) (not) looking.
It is always a good idea to keep whatever bit of music you are playing going steadily, in tempo (plus or minus any purposeful interpretive rubato), without letting anything distract you or derail your playing. In the context of practicing a passage, however short or long, it is important to know where you plan to stop—in order to go back and play it again—and both to keep it going until that point and in fact to stop there and go back and repeat the passage as many times as you have planned. If you allow yourself to be distracted by anything—a noise outside, your teacher’s cell phone, a light flickering—then you are in part practicing letting yourself be distracted. This is the last thing that you want to prepare yourself to do in performance. However, if you allow yourself specifically to be distracted by hearing a wrong note, that is even worse. If you are planning to stop, or allow yourself the possibility of stopping, when you hear yourself make a wrong note, then as you play you will inevitably divert some of your concentration onto monitoring each note for “wrongness” and to deciding whether or not something that you have just heard justifies stopping. All of your focus, however—all of it—should be on what comes next. As soon as your fingers or feet are committed to playing a given note, your mind should be on to the next note.
I have known students to stop abruptly upon hearing themselves play a particular right note. Either they had already programmed themselves to stop, assuming that the note would be wrong, or, again expecting a wrong note, they were astonished into stopping by the unexpected sound of the correct note! In any case, it is just a distraction. Also, often a student will hear a wrong note, stop, and play the correct note and go on. This does not even constitute actually practicing that note effectively, since practicing a particular moment in a piece actually consists of practicing getting to that moment from whatever came before it.
If a student has trouble bringing him- or herself to keep playing through wrong notes in lessons, this often comes from a desire to signal to the teacher that he or she knew that the note was wrong. It can feel humiliating to make a wrong note without, in a sense, atoning for it right away. It is worth reminding students that there is plenty of time to discuss what was good or bad about a particular time through a passage when that passage has ended, and that the teacher will think more rather than less of a student for waiting!
It is, I believe, quite important not to look at the hands or feet while practicing, and it is worth trying to learn not to, or trying to get into the habit of not doing so. But it is also important not to become so preoccupied with not looking that that becomes a distraction in itself. It is, in the end, OK to glance down a little bit, while bearing in mind the reasons to try not to do so very much.
The problems with looking at the hands or feet during practicing are several:
1) If you find a note, or several notes, or a chord—or whatever—by looking for that note (those notes) and then putting the fingers or feet in the right place and pushing, you have essentially not practiced the act of finding and playing those notes at all. The physical gesture that you are trying to imprint has not happened, or, at least, your mind has not focused on it and followed it. The brain has used an alternate, visual, route to the ostensibly correct note. Practicing that involves a significant amount of looking is inefficient: it will probably get you there eventually, but it will take longer.
2) Whenever you take your eyes away from the page, you run the risk of not finding your place again.
3) If you are playing a passage and you are (even subconsciously) expecting to find a fair number of the notes by looking, then there will almost certainly be a large amount of hesitation in the playing. Even when your hands or feet have in fact traveled correctly, and on time, to the next note, you may well hesitate to play it until you have checked it out visually. There is often an overall jerkiness and lack of convincing pulse to playing that involves a lot of looking. This will usually go away immediately if the player quits looking so much.
4) The vast majority of wrong notes happen not because the player does not know where the notes are on the keyboard (and thus needs to look for them), but because the player does not honestly know what the next note is supposed to be.
This last point is one of the most important about the act of practicing and about learning to play. The keyboard is basically very simple, and it stays in place. Anyone who has played a little bit has, even if unknowingly, developed a strong instinct for where the keys are. Many players, including most students and almost all beginners, do not believe this. They assume that wrong notes and insecurity come about because they don’t know where the next note is. The wrong note count in a passage, if it is at all high, will almost always go down immediately upon the player’s starting to keep his or her eyes (by and large) on the music. In working on helping a student to practice effectively, this should be taken into account before choices are made about what practice tempos are appropriate.
Specifically, if there is a fairly persistent wrong note in a passage being practiced, but that passage feels generally secure enough that the tempo does not need be slowed down, a student will want to start correcting that wrong note by looking, or will assume that looking is the only technique for getting the note right. Instead of looking, however, the student should try this: first notice in which direction the note is wrong. A wrong note can only come about because of moving a finger, hand, or foot either too far or not far enough. Once it is clear which of these has happened, the student should, on the next time through the passage, simply think “all right, I’ve been moving too far, so I’ll move a little bit less,” or the opposite, as needed. This simple thought—mechanical rather than musical in nature—will almost always work. Coupled with this, the student should keep his or her eyes on the music and not lose the information that is found there.
One final thought. These two columns have been intended to outline a rigorous and efficient approach to practicing. It is certainly a good idea for students to follow this approach, or one that incorporates some of its ideas, a good deal of the time. Practicing every piece this way—in small increments, always starting slowly enough, speeding up only gradually, keeping the eyes on the music—will lead to the most efficient learning of pieces and the quickest and most secure development of a player’s ability. This kind of practicing is satisfying since it gives such prompt and evident results. It should also be just plain fun for people who love the repertoire and the instruments. However, it is important to remember that not every minute at the keyboard has to be spent doing the most disciplined work. It is a very good idea for any player, student or not, to have some out-and-out frivolous fun at the keyboard as well: play pieces you already know too fast and see how well you can keep them going; sight read pieces that are too hard, just slow enough that it’s plausible, and don’t worry too much about wrong notes; play easy pieces on all sorts of different registrations, including outlandish ones.
Every player—and every student, perhaps with input from a teacher—can decide how great a proportion of time spent at the keyboard should be spent on well-designed rigorous practicing and how much on other kinds of playing. An awareness that you are doing enough of the former should permit you to relax and enjoy the latter!

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.