On Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) miscellaneous changing non-contrapuntal texture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Organ Method XI

     I begin this column with the last two paragraphs of the previous, for better continuity and to allow the reader to follow the process I am describing easily without having to refer to last month’s issue. Also, I have again included the Scheidt piece as this discussion continues. My book will contain a repertoire list with annotations at the end of the method, and students will be given guidelines to find further two-voice pieces for practicing, as well as for other purposes.

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

     In putting the hands together in a passage, make sure that you remind yourself in advance of the note on which each hand will start—especially if the two hands do not come in together. In the beginning of this piece, the right hand comes in well after the left hand, so you should be thinking ahead a little bit to avoid hesitation at that spot. It is not necessary to have the correct finger actually touching the note before playing it, but it is important to be conscious of what the note will be and to keep your hand nearby.

     I will use this section starting at the end of measure three of the piece to discuss some details of the procedure for practicing hands together (Example __). First, there are two assumptions: that you have already worked out fingering, and that you have practiced each hand separately until it is thoroughly learned. (A very suitable fingering pattern for the right hand would be 2-3-2-3-2-3, but, since the notes don’t range very far, almost any fingering that respects the right way of playing the repeated notes will work well. For the left hand one good pattern is 4-3-4-3-4-2-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-1-2-1, and of course there are other possibilities.)

     Even though you have practiced each hand separately well enough to consider it learned, you should begin the process of putting the two hands together by playing through each hand once, starting with whichever hand you think is less difficult. As you do this, you should hear or imagine the other voice, especially its rhythm. With this passage, that is most important while running through the right hand part, since the left hand rhythm is more challenging (Example __). 

     After you have run through the hands separately—more difficult hand last—start playing the two hands together. Again, the tempo for this will have to be slower than the tempo at which you were able to play each hand separately, since the level of complexity has gone up. To find an appropriate beginning practice tempo, try starting with a steady slow beat in your head that represents the shortest (quickest) note value that is found in the passage. In this case, that is the sixteenth note. Get used to this beat before you start playing. (A slowly dripping water faucet is the image that I like to use for this kind of slow, steady beat.)

     You will find yourself counting four of these slow sixteenth notes between the time that you play the first note in the right hand and the moment when you are supposed to play the first left hand note, and then the same again before it is time to play the next note in each hand. Take advantage of this time to look ahead to what the next note(s) is/are: be ready to play it (them) on time. If it is impossible to do so, or if it feels like an emergency or a scramble, the tempo is too fast. If it happens comfortably, the tempo is right. It is important that the slow beat in your head be steady; it is not important for it to have numbers or syllables that relate it to the measures or to the time signature. If you want to do that sort of counting—one-eh-and-eh, or something similar—that is fine. However, it is not necessary or particularly relevant to this sort of practicing, and if it is even a little bit distracting or confusing, then you should certainly not do it. A steady beat just needs to be a steady beat.

     During this systematic early practicing, you should look at your hands as little as possible. In fact you probably don’t need to look at your hands at all. If you think you have to look to find a particular note, you should challenge yourself not to: at least try not looking every other time, or two times out of three. One purpose of not looking at your hands is to look at the music: to be very conscious and purposeful about knowing what notes come next. The cause of most wrong notes in keyboard playing is not knowing what the next note is supposed to be. The other compelling reason for not looking at your hands is that every time you find a note by looking, you pass up a chance to improve your kinesthetic sense of the keyboard and thus the security of your playing.

     The next step in putting the hands together is to increase the tempo gradually. After you have played through the passage several times at your extremely slow and comfortable starting tempo, and only when you feel that that has become really easy, you should increase the tempo a little bit. Let yourself hear your slow beat get a little bit faster in your head, and then start the passage at that new tempo. If you have increased the tempo by a small enough amount, then that new tempo should work: that is, playing the passage at that tempo should be possible with accuracy and without a sense of emergency, though it won’t at first be as easy or as nearly automatic as the slower tempo was. If the passage falls apart, then you hadn’t practiced enough at the slower tempo, or (more likely) you increased the tempo by too large an amount at once. If this happens, play the passage a few more times at your slow starting tempo, then increase that tempo by less than you did on the first attempt.

     After you have become accustomed to your new (second) tempo, you can increase the tempo a little bit more. This is the basic process for practicing anything, and any passage that you can play very slowly you can learn to play at any tempo. For the purpose of becoming comfortable putting two hands together, there is no reason to play this Scheidt piece (or other pieces) very fast. However, it is important to work on the process of speeding up gradually. You should expect to take each measure or measure-and-a-half section of the piece through three or four noticeable (though slight) increases in tempo.

     (It is certainly fine to organize your practice tempos with the help of a metronome: that is, to figure out the metronome marking of the tempo at which you start the practicing process, and then use the metronome to find the next tempo, and each of the subsequent slightly faster tempos. At this stage, however, it is better practice not to play along with the metronome, but rather to call on yourself to keep a steady beat in your head. I will discuss various aspects of metronome use later on.)

     When you have worked carefully on two adjacent short excerpts from this piece, then it is time to put them together: to start at the beginning of the first one and play both without stopping. In this way you will build up the whole piece. Of course, this is very careful and systematic, as practicing should always be. You will not, however, always have to break pieces up into small chunks. That is a good, effective way to begin, and you will always go back to it for pieces that are complex, long, or just plain hard.

     As you work on this Scheidt piece, alternate playing both hands on the same keyboard with playing each hand on a different keyboard, in all of the arrangements that are available on the organ that your are using: adjacent or non-adjacent keyboards, right hand higher, left hand higher. Practice with all sorts of different registrations—just make sure that neither hand drowns the other out. Notice that in the middle of measure 5, the fingering will be in effect a little bit different depending on whether you are playing on one keyboard or on two. That is, on one keyboard you need not play the f’ with both hands: choose one.

     Here is an excerpt from a two-voice piece by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) in which the two hands are in canon with each other, and therefore play parts that are similar in complexity (Example Sweelinck, Allein zu dir). You can work on this in the way that I have described above. A list of further repertoire suggestion for work on putting together two-voice pieces is found in an appendix near the end of the book.

     When you have become comfortable putting the hands together in pieces in which each hand plays one line, there are two next steps that can be worked on at the same time as one another: learning exercises and pieces in which each hand plays more than one note, and beginning to put the hands together with the pedals. Putting hands and feet together is the subject of the next chapter. What follows here is a discussion of playing more than one note in a hand, with some exercises and examples.

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

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 and Boëllmann—final thoughts (for now)
For the last year I have looked, in as much depth as space seemed to permit, at the process of studying and learning two contrasting and, I hope, complementary pieces—the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141 by Dietrich Buxtehude, and the Suite Gothique, op. 25 by Leon Boëllmann. This month I will share a few thoughts about this project as a whole; then next month I will turn to something new.
The goals of this long series of columns were really two: first, to provide a template for working on the two pieces, which, if followed, would help a student learn those pieces securely and comfortably; and second, to suggest ways of thinking about and working on organ repertoire that could be applied broadly to other pieces.

The learning process
The process of learning a piece of music on the organ can be thought of in three parts—parts that are not rigorously separate, but interact with and blend into one another. The first is the very practical: learning the notes by working out fingerings and pedalings, and by practicing the notes systematically and patiently—and practicing enough. The second is getting to know the piece as well as possible. This includes anything that permits the player to know, consciously or subconsciously, what is coming up next in the piece. This has a working relationship with the act of memorizing a piece, but doesn’t depend on memorization. (And indeed memorization does not guarantee really knowing the content of a piece musically.) This knowledge reinforces the learning that comes from practicing—makes it more secure. The third part comprises purely interpretive decisions that are made about how to play the piece: tempo, articulation, phrasing, and so on—and of course also registration.
In the columns of the last year I emphasized the first two of these, writing rather little about interpretation, for reasons that I will discuss below. Also, I only occasionally, when there seemed to be a particular reason for it, outlined a specific protocol for practicing a passage. That protocol is largely the same from one case to the next. Systematically organized and patiently carried out practicing is monumentally important. I will outline the most important points about it once more here.
1) Any student or other player can successfully play any passage right off the bat—sight read it—if he or she keeps it slow enough. The harder or more intricate a passage is, the slower it has to be at first. The simpler a passage is or the more it is broken down into simple parts, the less slow it needs to be.
2) The correct starting practice tempo for any passage is a tempo at which that passage is reliably accurate and feels easy. Again, the simpler a passage is, the less slow that tempo has to be. Practicing hands and feet separately allows the initial practice tempo to be less slow than it would have to be to cope with playing the whole texture from the very beginning. The most important thing to note is that an appropriate practice tempo is never defined in relation to the ultimate tempo of the piece or to anything about what sounds “musical.” Students can get into trouble because of a reluctance to practice too much more slowly than the tempo that they hear in their head for a piece. This should never be a consideration at this stage. The faster a piece is supposed to be in the end, the more important it is to practice it slowly enough in the beginning.
3) Once any passage, in any combination of hands and feet, has been played enough times at a given (appropriate) tempo, and feels really easy—essentially automatic—at that tempo, then it can always be played just a little bit faster. This is simply a fact about the human mind, brain, reflexes, muscles, and so on, which continues to be true as the passage increases in tempo towards (or beyond) where the player wants the piece to end up. Therefore:
4) Any passage or piece can always be learned—by anyone—by starting it at a slow-enough practice tempo and speeding it up in sufficiently small increments. Always—anyone. This only ever appears to have failed when the person claiming to have done it has not really done it. (I should know: I have from time to time been that person, led by busy-ness or laziness or distraction to cut corners. Most of us have done the same.) The teacher’s role in this process is to motivate the student to stick to practicing this way.
5) Choices about how much to simplify the increments in which a piece is practiced—that is, whether to practice a measure at a time, or a few measures, or half a piece or a whole piece, how much to practice separate hands, when to start putting things together, and so on—are really matters of the psychology and motivation of the student. Different choices will affect the trajectory of the learning of the piece, but not the final results, as long as the above principles are followed. Some students like working with larger or more complex chunks of music and are willing to keep them slow enough; other students would rather work with simpler or smaller bits and be able to have the “up-to-tempo” experience sooner with those bits.
(I want to mention, just by way of example, a recent experience that has come my way just by coincidence that touches on this. I have a student who has been working on the first Contrapunctus of The Art of Fugue—on harpsichord, and thus with all four voices in the hands—over the month or so prior to my writing this. She decided—after spending some time working out fingerings—that she would altogether skip the step of practicing hands separately. This was contrary to my assumption that she would work out each hand until it felt really ready before putting the two together. She did this because she found the whole texture fascinating and wanted to experience that texture from the beginning. And—this is crucial—she has made it work because she has been willing to keep the whole thing slow enough, and to crank it up to tempo very gradually indeed. I believe that it will take her longer to learn the piece this way, but she is finding it more interesting, and she will in the end learn it well. I should mention that she is playing through individual voices in the manner that I have often discussed, to learn them both aurally and structurally.)

Hand choices
I wrote quite a bit in recent columns about hand choices. These are a disproportionate and needless source of trouble for many students. Of course, if a passage involves the use of two keyboards, with one hand on each, then the player does not choose which hand plays which notes, and it was the composer’s job to make sure that the note patterns within each hand are plausible to finger and play. If both hands, and thus the whole manual part of the texture, are on the same keyboard, then it is extremely important that the student consider the two hands, ten fingers, to be one unit—a unit with the job of playing all of the notes in the most comfortable way, regardless of what note is printed in what staff. I have seen students classify whole pieces as un-learnable because of disadvantageous hand choices in a few salient difficult spots.

Getting to know the piece
In writing about getting to know the piece, I have tended to emphasize what might be called motivic analysis, but of an informal kind: simply noticing any melody, motif, theme, fragment, etc., that happens more than once. It has always been my experience that noticing things like this, even if this is not followed by the drawing of any particular analytic conclusions, leads both to more solid playing—by improving the ongoing remembering of what is coming up next in the piece as it goes along—and to more rhetorically convincing playing. However, getting to know the piece through noticing things about harmony or chord progressions, while not something that I tend to emphasize, can certainly also be useful.
A piece like the Toccata from the Suite Gothique is strongly chord-based. A trip through the piece, identifying chords by letter-name and type and also by relation to a local tonic or to the tonic of the piece, could aid in finding those chord shapes securely, and therefore in playing the piece well. A passage like the section of Buxtehude BuxWV 141 that begins at m. 60, though certainly conceived contrapuntally, can also be seen as organized around chord shapes, and taking note of what those chords are can also be useful in fixing the piece in the student’s mind.
Practice techniques
Practice techniques that I described in the last year’s columns might of course also suit other pieces. For example, in the final column on the Buxtehude, I discussed the technique of leaving out certain notes in a passage as a stage in practicing. This directs the attention of the ear to the stronger notes, and guides the player towards playing lighter notes lightly. I discussed this in connection with the fugue subject of the final section of the Praeludium. This approach could also be applied to the Boëllmann Toccata, leaving out the latter three sixteenth notes of each quarter-note beat in the right hand over the first nineteen measures of the movement, and similar passages, and playing the on-the-beat notes as (very) detached quarter notes. This would, among other things, elucidate the relationship between those notes and the left hand chords, which are in effect detached quarter notes.

Interpretation
I am very much a non-authoritarian when it comes to interpretation. I have no desire whatsoever for my students to play pieces the same way that I do, or in a way that I consider “right”. If a student of mine, or any other musician, plays a piece in a way that I really don’t like, or that I consider “wrong”, either based on analysis of the piece or historical considerations, then that is their business and not mine.
I am happy to share my reasons for liking or not liking anything, but only if the person with whom I am sharing those ideas is not going to feel obliged then to do things the way that I seem to want them done. I fear that the hand of a teacher’s artistic, aesthetic, and interpretive judgments can be a very heavy one for a student, even long after the teacher has modified or abandoned the particular opinion.
I try to consider any aesthetic judgment that I formed more than about five years earlier to be officially out-of-date and subject to being changed—or at least needing to be consciously re-thought before it is ratified. However, if I conveyed that judgment to a student with a kind of teacherly authority, then the student might have a hard time letting go of it, even if unknown to that student I have already done so. This is why I have tried to avoid statements of the sort—“this theme (or passage, or piece) should be played legato (or staccato, or with this or that phrasing)”—in these columns. Another reason for avoiding this is that my own interpretive thoughts about these pieces have changed at least somewhat as I have gotten to know them better by writing about them.
For example, I would now play the Prière à Notre-Dame a bit less slowly and significantly more freely than I would have expected to play it a year ago. It is also true that, outside of a certain level of generality, interpretive decisions in organ music depend on the instrument being used and on the acoustics of the performing space. The more solidly a piece has been learned, the more readily a performer can adapt his or her performance to the needs of a new instrument or a new acoustic situation.
I have enjoyed living with these two works for a year. They are both, beyond the nitty-gritty of working on them, expressive, exciting pieces that are viscerally fun to play as well as wonderful to hear and interesting to think about. Next month I plan to write about memorization. This is a subject that arises fairly naturally out of the attempt to learn a piece or two really well. The question of the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning of a piece is a complex and controversial one. I will try to explore a number of different ways of thinking about it, and give an account of my own views and my own experience. 

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. ■