On Teaching

Hand Distribution II

I have suggested that beginning in the middle of measure 19 and going on for a while, it is best to take the upper voice—a somewhat wide-ranging eighth-note pattern—by itself in the right hand, and to group the other two voices—both of them slower, and occupying places in the keyboard compass very close to each other—in the left hand. This is logical and satisfies the various points that I listed last month. It also predisposes the important “hidden” repeated note at the beginning of measure 22 to work out to best advantage, with the left hand playing and discreetly releasing the on-the-beat quarter-note d′, and the right hand coming in to play the following eighth note. 

If, by any chance, it is important to the student/player to make all of the half notes and quarter notes of the lower two voices fully legato, then keeping those two voices together in the left hand throughout will require a substantial amount of substitution, which by definition makes the fingering more complex. This could to some extent undermine the gain in simplicity that comes from letting the right hand track the active upper voice unencumbered. It would be simplest to keep the lowest and middle voices in the left hand. (Also, a player whose performing style suggests keeping this passage strictly legato is probably a player who is quite adept at substitution—someone for whom it does not add much difficulty, if any.)

Example 2: Finding the middle voice

The next section is quite different. Example 2 shows that the three manual voices are for the most part doing similar things to one another.

The measure-long passage beginning at the second quarter note of measure 25 is an exception to this and has the same texture as the passage discussed above. It would be physically possible in this measure to take the middle-voice notes with either hand, but it seems clear that taking those notes in the left hand will make the playing of that measure much easier.

Throughout this passage—with no exception—both hands can reach the notes of the middle voice. The middle voice is somewhat more active than the other two—just for the record, thirty-two notes in the excerpt as it appears in the example, compared to twenty-seven for the upper voice and twenty-five for the lower. This is not enough to make a difference on its own. Active or not, it is the middle voice that can be, and perhaps should be, shared between the hands. It can’t be isolated. 

One way to approach a passage like this is to try it both ways: play the top two voices all in the right hand—probably two or three times, just to get used to the feeling; and then play the lower two voices together in the left hand, also a few times. The point of this is not to choose between those two absolutes, but to look for moments of tension. Where, in playing two voices in one hand, do you feel that it becomes awkward or difficult? If you are lucky, those spots will be complementary: places that are awkward in the right hand will seem natural in the left hand and vice versa. If this is the case, then you are very close to having found a pattern of hand distribution that will work and that will maximize comfort in playing. You can sketch out that pattern, create the specifics of the fingering, and begin to practice. You might want to change something as you go along—I will come back to that important concern below. 

In carrying out this procedure, I make a few discoveries for myself. I find it slightly awkward to reach the f#′ and the e′ in measure 24 with the right hand. I find it somewhat awkward to track the middle-voice notes beginning with the last quarter note of measure 27 and going on for about two measures with the left hand. However, I find it easier to get the c#′ at the end of measure 29 with the left hand than with the right. There are various other details. Again, this is all empirical, and it is just about me: no one else will necessarily experience the passage that way. (For one thing, my feeling for hands and fingers here inevitably bears the traces of my having played the piece for more than forty years, and of my initial encounters with the piece when I was very much a beginner, and tried to read through it and learn it without the guidance of a teacher!) However, anyone can discover a fair amount about what will work best by trying it out this way.

Here are a few more analytical or specific things to say about the passage:

1) If you take the a′ on the second quarter note of measure 23 in the right hand, expecting also to take the b′ immediately following it in the right hand, then that gesture—going from a′ to b′—involves contracting the hand. This is, all else being equal, relaxing and natural.

2) Measure 24 is perhaps an especially good place to alternate hands in the middle voice. If you play the d′ with 4 in the left hand, then the left hand can easily play the f#′ with 2, then the c#′ with 5 and the e′ with 3.

3) If you alternate in this way, then you can play from the beginning of measure 23 through the downbeat of measure 25 without changing the right hand’s position.

4) The g#′ in measure 26 will be easier for most players to take in the left hand. This is because it is far enough from the f#′′ in the right hand that the right hand must execute an uncomfortable stretch or assume an uncomfortable hand position in order to reach it.

Answers to questions about what hand distribution is the most comfortable— particularly in a case like this, where any number of things are possible—may depend in part on interpretive choices. Certainly in this passage, as I mentioned above concerning the earlier part of this section of the piece, if the player wants to make the lines truly legato, that choice will have implications for hand distribution that are different from what might apply if the notes are by and large detached. Full-fledged legato will tend to require more substitution and might in general lead to a need for more even sharing of the voices. It will be easier to finger the outer voices legato if neither hand has to track the middle voice for very long at once. (More substitution and a more even sharing of the middle voice might be alternatives to each other.) If the player wishes to keep the lines detached, a wider variety of hand distribution choices will work fluently and well. In effect, more fingers are available, since fingers that are already holding notes are nonetheless available to play the immediately following notes. Since interpretive choices can—and should—change as someone gets to know a piece better, and also just over the course of a player’s career, fingering choices and hand distribution choices have to be revisited from time to time. Even in the first stages of learning a piece, hand distribution choices might have to be revisited as the specifics of the fingering develop. This is sort of a paradox: you literally can’t create fingerings until you know which hand is going to play which notes, but you might want to make changes in your template as to which hand will play which notes based on the way the fingering works out in practice. (This is only a concern with passages like the one we are looking at now where the hand distribution choices are rather open.) There is no way around this: it is part of the process.

Example 3: Dividing the work

The next brief section of the piece is similar in principle to the opening several measures: there is an active outer voice, so if possible it is likely to be most suitable to group the other two voices in the other (in this case right) hand, as shown in Example 3.

This is true even though the two upper voices are quite spread out from one another for much of the time.  The b′ in the middle voice at the beginning of measure 34, for example, is much closer to the lower voice (left hand) notes than it is to the upper voice notes. However, it is very likely that most players would find it hard—or at least unnecessarily harder—to grab that note in the left hand, since doing so would tend to disrupt the flow of the playing of the eighth-note line. Also, of course, there are more of those “hidden” repeated notes, the playing of which can be especially effective if they are split between the hands.

Example 4: Room for questions

The next short section, shown in Example 4, is interesting. The middle voice is the active one, and here it is doing the most active thing that is represented in this Alla Breve section: outlining the chords in eighth notes, like those seen in the upper voice around measure 20 and elsewhere and in the lower voice around measure 32 and elsewhere. As in the passage found in Example 2, the middle voice is the most active, but here it is a lot more active than the outer voices. This raises several questions: which notes of that middle voice are closer to each of the outer voices? For which hand is it easier to play any given note? Is there a musical advantage to letting one hand track (so to speak) an intricate moving line, or this line in particular? Or is there a musical gain from the ease that might be created by splitting that line up? If so, how is it best to practice a fast or intricate line that moves from one hand to another? Is this an issue of its own, or is it essentially just a subset of practicing the notes as such?

Example 5: Xs and Ys

In this particular case, as shown in Example 5, clearly only the notes marked below with “x” can be reached easily by the left hand, though those marked with “y” can probably also be reached by the left hand, though less easily, for most players.

I would probably find it easiest to take the “x” notes in the left hand (possibly not the first one, f# ′) and all of the other middle-voice notes in the right hand. At each of the “x” spots, I would play the two left-hand notes with 3/1. This is predicated in part on my wanting to play the lowest line somewhat detached, and, for me at least, it clarifies and simplifies the right hand fingering quite a lot. I would also expect to play the upper voice detached, but less so. I want the freedom to close those gaps down quite a bit in response to the harmonic tension of the line. A player who wanted to make that line quite detached could more readily play all of the middle-voice eighth notes in the right hand, if that seemed desirable.

Example 6: A simple choice

The next section, shown in Example 6, is a classic case of the most active material being in an outer voice—the upper voice—and the other two voices having slower, simpler material, the notes of which are close to one another on the keyboard. There is little or no reason not to join the lower voices in the left hand throughout this example (after the first note printed here, which the left hand can’t reach).

Example 7: Upper vs. lower voice

The next several measures, as seen in Example 7, present a number of interesting questions, which can be answered a number of different ways. 

As in Example 5, the middle voice is the active and intricate one. The right hand can certainly reach all of the middle voice notes, and the left hand can reach most but not all of the measure. The difference, for purposes of thinking about hand distribution, is that the upper voice is all repeated notes. If the player wants (as I myself would) to change fingers on those notes in order to gain more control over the timing and articulation of the repetitions, then that might suggest taking some substantial number of the middle-voice notes in the left hand—though it might not make it necessary, depending on the player’s hand size and relative finger lengths. If the player does not care about changing fingers on the repeated notes or would positively prefer not to do so, then with (most likely) 5 playing all of those c′′ sharps, the remainder of the right hand is available to play the eighth-note line. This might in turn mean that on balance it makes the passage easier to free the left hand of the need to catch any of those notes and to allow it to track the quarter-note lowest voice, with its couple of fairly substantial jumps. That might in turn depend on articulation choices for the lower voice.

Next month I will continue this discussion and turn to discussing hand distribution choices in other textures. I will also discuss practice techniques for hand distribution choices that are technically sound, but musically counterintuitive. 

Hand Distribution I

In the last few months, several of my students have simultaneously wanted to zero in intensely on the question of how to decide which hand should play which notes of a passage, when there is any choice. I have been known to rely on a general comment, “if it’s unclear, try out different things, and go with what is most comfortable.” It is possible that I have over-relied on this level of generality; however, there is nothing wrong with this casual approach. It is the essence of what one should do in the end. Furthermore, just leaving it at that with a student could encourage that student to develop autonomy, to think for him- or herself. 

But there are also many more specific and analytical things to say about how notes might best fall between the two hands. (In the series of columns from a few years ago that I headed “Working”—in which I examined the process of learning two particular pieces—I touched on this a little bit. Those brief discussions were tied to the specifics of certain passages, and not as theoretical or general as what I want to do here.) One of the purposes of this kind of analysis should be to widen the range of possibilities that students can see, to move the student farther from making limiting assumptions about what the choices are likely to be.

In this column and the next, I will analyze in detail my thinking about this. This analysis may seem too detailed: sort of fussy, or making too much out of something that could in fact be done efficiently through trial and error. Some students will happily take to going over these issues with this sort of fine-toothed comb—finding it interesting in the manner of a puzzle or detective story. Others will not, but will probably still learn something from doing some of it. Probably no one will go on analyzing these situations exactly like this permanently: it is a stage in learning to think about it and to develop intuition for it.

It is inadvisable to create a fingering for a passage without first deciding or knowing which hand will play which notes. However, perhaps because we talk so much about “fingering” as a crucial step—the crucial step?—in preparing a piece, students naturally want to plunge in to the actual fingering process as soon as possible. This may be one reason that students (and many players who are not students) often give more weight than is appropriate to the assumption that the upper staff is “the right-hand part” and the lower staff is “the left-hand part.” It seems to give a ready-made answer to the question of hand distribution. It would be willfully silly not to notice that there is a correlation: higher notes are more likely to be within the reach of the right hand, lower notes within the reach of the left hand. However, I think that it serves the player well to try to separate that simple logistic fact from the typography. The first principle of hand distribution, for me, should be:

Try not to think of the two manual staves as representing the two hands. Instead think of the combined staff—ten lines, eight normal spaces, one larger space in the middle, ledger lines, and so on—as representing music for your ten fingers to play in the best way possible.

Of course this—and all of what I am going to be discussing here—does not apply to music that is expressly written for two manuals.

This is just a change of attitude, but it makes a difference. Part of the difference it makes, if you really internalize it, is that there is no longer a “burden of proof” assigned to the notion of playing notes with the “other” hand. The sort of question that goes something like this—“Is it OK to play that note with the other hand?” or “Would it be all right to take that note over with the right hand?”—simply goes away. This saves time, for one thing. I have known performers to debate with themselves and take a long time to believe that it is (morally, ethically, or practically) acceptable to “switch” some note or notes to the “other” hand, when that is clearly the natural way to do it, and when the composer’s original way of writing out the music very likely didn’t have the notes divided the same way between the staves anyway! 

Analysis for hand distribution

In order to determine how to distribute the notes between the hands, there is a sort of protocol that you can follow—a series of observations to make about the passage that will help you discover  the most comfortable hand distribution for you. The way I am going to present it here is too cut-and-dried, really: in practice, all of these interact with one another and sometimes with other considerations. But these questions are a good starting place:

1) Is the manual part in (only) two voices? If so, then there should be a strong assumption that each hand will play one of those voices. This is the simplest case. It is almost not worth talking about, except that it brings us to the second great principle of hand distribution: when it is possible, ask your hands to share the work pretty much evenly. Students should be reminded not to play two voices in one hand while the other hand does nothing—at least not to do that reflexively, just because both voices are in one staff (as they might often be) or are both high or both low. Once in a while, two voices should be combined in one hand for the most practical of reasons: to free a hand up to turn a page or to manipulate stop knobs or something like that. This should only be done if the loss of ease in playing is very small. 

2) If the passage is in three voices, then realistically the issue becomes “which hand will play the middle voice?” Again, this is a better way to ask the question than “where can one hand take over the middle-voice notes that seem to belong to the other hand?” This is probably the kind of texture in which these issues actually come up the most. The questions to ask in figuring out how to distribute the notes of a middle voice between the hands are:

i) To which outer voice are these notes closer?

ii) Is one outer voice more active, busier, or just plain harder than the other? If so, then can the inner voice be grouped with the less difficult outer voice?

iii) Is the middle voice more intricate than either of the outer voices? If so, then    what can be done to make it as simple as it can be: can it be split between the    hands, for example, or grouped with the simpler of the two outer voices?

iv) Are there ornaments—especially trills—in any voice, and does it make sense to isolate ornaments into their own hand, if possible?

v) Sometimes the need to prepare a good fingering for a repeated note suggests a way to proceed.

vi) Is there anything about hand position, independent of all of the above, that suggests that the middle voice notes can be played more comfortably with one hand than the other? This often comes about because of something to do with sharps or flats. Perhaps one hand would be forced to play a raised key with an awkward finger if also called upon to play the inner voice, while the other would not run into any such trouble.

Example 1 shows the Alla Breve section of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532, beginning on the last beat of m. 16 of the piece. It provides all sorts of material for thinking about hand distribution in three-voice manual textures. The rest of this column will be taken up with a detailed analysis of parts of this section. (For simplicity, from here on I will provide examples with only the manual staves, since we are only looking at the manual writing, though there is pedal almost throughout.) In this entire 80-measure section, there is no spot at which the right hand actually cannot play both the upper voice and the middle voice—though in many spots doing it that way would create awkward fingerings and articulations that would probably not make either the player or the listeners happy; the left hand can reach both the lower and the middle voices for all but an occasional measure or half measure. Therefore this is a good passage to think about what is best, not what is necessary or inevitable.

The middle-voice f#′ on the last beat of measure 16 can be taken very easily with either hand. It is almost equidistant from the upper and lower notes, and there is nothing in particular going on: on that beat, no voice is, or is about to become, busy or intricate. So, is there a way to make the choice, other than at random? (“At random” is fine when there is no reason to prefer one over the other: this is often the case. The point is to recognize when it is not the case.) The thing that I notice about this beginning is that there are several repeated notes coming up. I would prefer to finger them with different fingers for each repetition. Of course, different hands implies different fingers, so right away it seems as though there might be some good to be derived from moving the middle voice back and forth between the hands a bit. So, if we take that f#′ with the right hand, then the left hand is free to finger the repeated d′ in the lowest voice in whatever way seems best, and then the left hand can play the repetition of the f#′. Example 2 shows one specific version fingering modeled on that idea.

And there could be others. A player who does not want to change fingers on the repeated notes, might use fingerings shown in Examples 3 and 4, or something else.

At each point over the next few measures, we see one voice being more active than the others, as shown in Example 5.

In the first half of measure 18, it is clear that the middle voice should be taken in the left hand, both because that way the more active voice is left alone in one hand (point ii above), and because the notes of the middle voice are closer to those of the lower voice (point i above). In the second half of measure 18, the situation is more complicated, since the voice that is more active than the others is the middle voice itself. The three last eighth-notes in the middle voice, c#′′–b′–a′, can be reached by either hand. Does it matter which hand plays them? The c#′′ is closer to the upper voice, and the other two notes are closer to the lower. That might suggest splitting that line that way. However, the upper voice is in itself simpler than the lower voice through that part of the measure, which would suggest just playing the eighth-notes of the middle voice in the right hand. Here personal habit or something about the shape of the player’s own hand might determine the choice: therefore it is a place to try it a number of ways and see what works.

However, that might be influenced by what is coming up. The first few notes in the middle voice of measure 19 can also be reached by either hand. However, here the choices might make more of a difference to the musical effect than in the previous measure. The second eighth-note of the measure must first  sound like it slips in and takes over the position of the e′ that is being held: that is, in such a way that it doesn’t sound like that note is being repeated in the same voice, even though as a key on the keyboard it is in fact being repeated. (This notion comes up again very soon.) Then it has to be held over into the a′ half-note, just long enough to suggest that the lower voice is still there. Furthermore, the a′ half-note itself begins a new pattern (that is, through the lens that we are using here). It begins a long passage in which the upper voice is clearly more active than the lower two voices, and should therefore be left alone in the right hand if at all possible. It is possible: beginning on that second beat of measure 19, the two lower voices fit comfortably in the left hand for the rest of this excerpt. 

So if that a′ should be in the left hand, then so should the e′ that precedes it in the middle voice. (Otherwise there would be an unnecessary and awkward hand crossing.) If the three e′s in a row will be played in the left hand, then that hand needs all the flexibility it can get, in order to come up with a fingering that creates the right flow: in particular, this is a case where changing fingers on that note is a tremendous aid in creating the non-repeated note repetition that I described above. The left hand is the most free to finger those e′s if the right hand plays the g#′. That should then also be taken into account in planning the approach from the previous measure to the g# on the first beat of this measure. 

To be continued . . . ν

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

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.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. This spring he will be playing recitals around the Northeast. Details and contact information can be found at gavinblack-baroque.com.

Buxtehude BuxWV 141, Part 6: the final section
This month’s column wraps up our detailed look at Buxtehude’s Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by examining the final section, a 20-bar fugue lasting from m. 91 to the end. Next month we will look at the final movement of the Boëllmann Suite Gothique—the Toccata—and then in the column for May, I will provide an overview of the process of studying these two pieces that has occupied this column for about a year.

Analysis
The fugue subject (Example 1) is introduced in m. 91 of BuxWV 141, in what turns out to be the alto voice of a completely regular four-voice fugal texture. There are several interesting things for the student to notice about this subject and about the way the fugue based on this subject develops in Buxtehude’s hands. Before going through a few of them, however, I want to review what I think is the principal purpose of engaging in this kind of analysis for the student actually learning a piece. Analysis can serve many purposes. For one thing, it is—or should be—intellectually interesting and satisfying in and of itself. It also satisfies, specifically, the puzzle-solving or detective instincts that many of us have. It can help us understand—or move closer to understanding—why the composer wrote the piece the way that he or she did. This might, again, be interesting in itself. It might also lead to discoveries about interpretation, perhaps in conjunction with knowledge about performance practices that prevailed around that composer. Analysis of a piece can also help us learn about connections and influences among composers, and in particular to understand what it was that a subsequent composer learned—perhaps, if we are lucky, in specific detail—from the composer whose work we are analyzing.
However, for a student learning a piece or a passage, analysis of that piece or passage also serves simply to increase the student’s awareness, both conscious and unconscious, of what is in the piece and, in particular, of what is coming up next at any given moment. This awareness—which comes into play, in somewhat different ways, both with memorized and with non-memorized performance—is the most important prerequisite for playing a piece securely and comfortably, and thus for being able to project an interpretation in a convincing manner. This is why I tend to emphasize simple motivic analysis, which I describe as “noticing anything and everything that happens more than once.” There is nothing about a passage the noticing of which won’t contribute to security of performance.

Fugue subject
The first thing that stands out about the fugue subject of this final section is that it is intimately related to the opening four notes of the Praeludium, the short motif that I pointed out in my first column about this work (Example 2). In fact, it is probably fair to say that this subject is derived from that opening motif. This is explicit in the end of the fugue subject (Example 3), and implicit in the opening (Example 4), where it is inverted and decorated, but still meaningfully related to the opening motif.
Of course, it is possible to give a name to the four notes that we hear at the opening of the piece: they are a rising tetrachord, and the later instances of this motif that pervade the piece are tetrachords, perhaps rising, perhaps falling, perhaps augmented or diminished or decorated in some way. I am always a bit concerned that this kind of terminology can tend to trivialize the thing being observed. After all, every piece has tetrachords in it, usually many. It is so simple that it scarcely rises to the level of a theme, motif, or subject. However, the point isn’t that it is a tetrachord or any other particular theme, simple or complicated, common or (close to) unique. And the point isn’t to tie this theme to any other piece. The point is specifically that it happens to be the opening gesture of this piece, and that it is then found recurrently throughout the piece. The fugue subject under discussion here is the culmination of the development of that theme.
This fugue, twenty measures long and in four voices, has eight full and unambiguous subject entries. There are also, at mm. 100 and 101–2, three entries that are full-length but in which the second half of the theme is somewhat altered. (Are these “fugue subject entries”? Does it matter?) Beyond that, the first half of the theme occurs by itself, without the second half, approximately ten times; again there are a few spots that are hard to categorize precisely, such as the alto voice in the first half of m. 104 and again in m. 107. The second half of the theme also occurs several times by itself, for example in m. 98.

Tetrachord motif
Stepping back from the fugue subject or its halves to the tetrachord motif derived from the opening of the Praeludium, we see that this motif is found in almost every spot in this section where the fugue subject itself is not present. These spots are the second half of m. 98 into m. 99 in the tenor voice, m. 103 into
m. 104 in the alto voice, and elsewhere. If a student goes through these twenty measures highlighting the tetrachord motif every time it occurs in any genuinely plausible form—simple, inverted, ornamented—the moments in the piece that do not have at least one voice highlighted will be—at most—as follows: part of m. 103, the final whole-note chord, and (maybe) the two 32nd-note flourishes in mm. 106 and 109.
This section is, as noted above, a fully worked-out fugue in which the four voices all maintain integrity throughout and the rules of counterpoint are followed. However, looked at through the lens of the tetrachord motif, it also appears to be a piece of the sort that is built around the inexorable repetition of a single motif that is always present: that is, the kind of piece that might be described as a chaconne or passacaglia. Even though fugue is a quintessentially contrapuntal form and chaconne/passacaglia is fundamentally a harmonic form, the two can actually coexist, and many of Buxtehude’s fugues do indeed shade over into being chaconnes. This gives them, or tends to give them, a driving or hypnotic feeling.
(A wonderfully unambiguous example of this is the short fugal section that begins at m. 55 of the Praeludium in C Major, BuxWV 136. The subject is exactly one measure long, the section is seven measures long, and the subject is heard once in each measure, in one voice or another. This short passage can be analyzed as a fugue without compromise, but it is also—without compromise—a chaconne. The chaconne theme migrates from one voice to another, but that is only somewhat rare in chaconnes, not against the “rules”.)
The two flourishes that are constructed of 32nd-note rising scales, found in mm. 106 and 109, could be seen as the apotheosis of the tetrachord motif, constructed as they are out of two of them in a row, sped up. Is this a convincing connection? I am not sure; a scale is pretty basic and common, and clearly the main point of these flourishes is to heighten visceral excitement leading to the final cadence. The main point against considering these scales to be a direct outgrowth of the opening four notes of the Praeludium is that the scales begin on the beat, whereas the tetrachord motif most emphatically begins just after the beat. Nonetheless, in playing this piece myself, I have always found it meaningful to hear those two half-measures as being an outgrowth of the four-note half scale that has been so important in the construction of the work. I would again say that it doesn’t matter what conclusion a student comes to about this, or indeed whether he or she comes to any conclusion at all. The act of noticing and thinking about the question will help fix the piece in the student’s mind and make the performance more secure and convincing.

Practicing this section
So, how should a student approach the actual practicing of this section? I believe that there are several practice possibilities that work especially well for these measures. To start with, since this passage is both fairly short and extremely well worked out as a fugue, it is a good section to choose for a rigorous application of the technique of practicing separate voices and pairs of voices. I would organize this practicing as follows:
1) Divide the section into either two or three shorter bits. These will each be somewhere between six and ten measures. They do not have to correspond to natural musical divisions, though of course they can.
2) Choose one of these shorter passages and play each voice through several times, slowly and accurately. It is fine to keep the bass voice in the hands for the time being, even though it is certainly a pedal line. Each of the two inner voices should be played, at this stage, an equal number of times in each hand.
3) Combine the voices into pairs. With four voices there are always six pairs: SA, ST, SB, AT, AB, and TB. They are all equally important and should all be practiced a roughly equal amount. Note that for these combinations the alto voice and the tenor voice each have to be sometimes in the right hand and sometimes in the left. It is extremely important to keep the tempo slow enough that this process feels easy.
4) Repeat this with each of the other short sections.
As I have written elsewhere, I do not consider it particularly necessary or useful to try to put together the groups of three out of four voices. (There are four such groups of three.) Of course, the three upper voices may well be practiced as a group under the heading of “practicing the hands.” That is a practical/technical step rather than a musical/listening step, as the above exercise is.
Another specialized technique that can be incorporated into the learning of this passage is that of actually leaving out notes that are rhythmically lighter and that, on a piano or violin, for example, the player might well play quietly. This is an extremely useful technique on instruments that do not offer dynamic inflection of individual notes, that is, for keyboard players, on the harpsichord and organ—so much so that I will at some point devote a column to it. In this piece it has a special relevance to the motivic analysis that we did above. If the student plays the theme leaving out the off-the-beat sixteenth-notes, then the structure of the theme becomes abundantly clear. Then, when those unaccented notes are added back, they stand a good chance of coming across to a listener as light, without the player’s having had to do anything very calculated to make them light. The theme without the off-the-beat sixteenth-notes looks like this (Example 5, with the newly-created eighth-notes played detached).
Of course I have used some judgment about which notes to omit. You could actually make a case for leaving out—again, obviously just for purposes of this exercise—the first note of the theme. The student can play the theme this way one voice at a time and also with pairs of voices.

Fingering and pedaling
The next set of steps is the usual: working out fingering and pedaling, practicing hands and feet separately, putting hands together, putting each hand with the feet, and, finally, putting the whole texture together. The bass voice is clearly a pedal line here. (Remember that with Buxtehude, the sources do not always make this clear.) There are a few spots—I have found them in mm. 96 and 97—where the two hands alone cannot reach all of the notes, and the bass line is well suited to the pedal. The pedaling has a couple of interesting issues to work out. The first of these is the transaction in the middle of the theme in which the feet have to move down by two successive thirds (Example 6).
It seems inconceivable that the F-sharp would not be played by the right toe (though someone could prove me wrong about this). How should the D-sharp and the B then be played? There are a number of possibilities that the student can explore, and they have somewhat different implications for articulation. (I myself would play the D-sharp also with the right toe, trying to make the articulation that this pedaling automatically creates as subtle and light as possible. It is also possible to play the D-sharp with the left toe, and then the B either also with the left foot—creating a significant articulation—or, reaching under, with the right toe. This latter might be awkward or might not, depending on both the build and the habits of the player.)
There is also the question of how to pedal the last four notes of the theme, the rising tetrachord. In many passages in the repertoire, legato can be achieved equally well with toe/heel or alternate toes. Here alternate toe is made difficult, at least, by the pattern of sharps—at least if the left foot takes the low B. Since there were physical constraints against heel pedaling in the late seventeenth century—high benches, small pedal keys—a passage like this forms part of the evidence that in general in those days organists did not expect always to play legato. That is a big subject, beyond the scope of this series of columns, but it is something for a student and teacher to think about. Successive toe pedaling is easy here, and leads to a non-legato approach to, at least, the eighth notes. When the pedal plays the opening half of the fugue subject without the latter half, as it does repeatedly in the last third or so of the section, the pedaling is straightforward, as it also is with the quarter-note passages, since those notes are fairly slow. These pedalings are straightforward, but still have to be thought out carefully and practiced well.

Hand choices
Since all three upper voices belong in the hands, the same issue arises that we have discussed in the last few columns: the dividing of the middle of three voices between two hands. There are many places in this section where multiple solutions are possible, for example, mm. 93–94, 97, 102–3, and more. As always, the student should not forget to take a comfortable hand position into account in sketching out the hand choices for those spots. Another important consideration is that of allowing faster or more intricate notes to be played with as little interference as possible from other notes in the same hand. So, for example, in m. 101, I would have no temptation whatsoever to take any alto voice notes in the left hand, whereas in m. 105 and the identical m. 108, I would take both alto voice notes in the left hand. In mm. 106 and 109, I would take all of the tenor and alto notes in the left hand to facilitate the trills.
A special hand-choice issue in this piece is the fingering of the 32nd-note scales in mm. 106 and 109. They can be played in the right hand, split between the two hands, or even, somewhat counter intuitively, played by the left hand, with the right hand taking the high e′′ in m. 106 and the middle e′ in m. 109. This latter would only make sense for a player who finds it easier to play upward scales rapidly and fluently in the left hand than in the right hand. (This makes sense physiologically. Each hand can play more naturally going towards the thumb than going away from it. This is the “drumming on a table” effect.) These flourishes can work any number of ways, but it is, again, something that the student should make a point of thinking about and planning out well.
Everyone that I have known who has worked on this piece has found the passage in the second half of m. 102 (Example 7) to be the most difficult to finger and play securely. This is because of several things: it is impossible for both of the two voices playing sixteenth-notes to be unconstrained by other notes; the tenor voice and the alto voice keep bumping into each other; and the placement of the sharps makes some fingerings that would otherwise be possible impossibly awkward. This is a passage for the student to pick apart very thoroughly, with no preconceptions about which hand or which fingers should do what. It is important, probably, to change fingers on all of the hidden, that is voice-to-voice, repeated notes. It is almost certain that it is a good idea to divide the alto voice fugue subject fragment between the hands. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to that motif as it passes from one hand to another to make sure that it flows the same way in two hands that you would want it to flow in one.
This ends our detailed look at the Praeludium in E Major. Next month, back to Boëllmann.

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. ■