On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. During the 2014–2015 concert season he will present a series of five recitals at the center, offering a survey of keyboard repertoire from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Details about this and other activities can be found at www.gavinblack-baroque.com. Gavin can be reached by email at [email protected].

Keeping It Going II

This month I continue my musings about how to approach the important goal of always keeping your playing going through wrong notes or other distractions. Most of this month’s column consists of suggestions that I would offer to students about concrete ways of practicing the art of keeping it going. These practice approaches are, in a sense, a bit odd or unusual, since they are predicated on making wrong notes. Normally we practice not making wrong notes in the first place. A student who doesn’t ever naturally generate the wrong notes necessary to do the things described below is, first of all, both very accomplished and very lucky. He or she is also almost certainly someone who has already mastered the art of keeping the playing going through wrong notes—as well as through other distractions—because unless you have learned to do that, you are unlikely to reach a state of playing with accuracy and security.

Keep it slow

The overriding technique or method for practicing keeping a passage going through wrong notes is, not surprisingly, the same thing that makes all sorts of practicing work best: keeping it slow enough. And there is, of course, an element of trial and error about this. If a student practicing a passage is making a lot of wrong notes, then the practice tempo is too fast: that is always the most essential fact about practice procedure. However, if the student is making some—a few—wrong notes while practicing and having trouble keeping the passage going through the wrong notes—that is, having trouble recovering from them while moving forward, rather than being derailed by them and going back—then that is a further and even stronger case for slowing the practicing down. For most students with most pieces, there will probably be a tempo at which a wrong note will occur now and then, and at which there is time to remember to keep playing through that wrong note. If a student is practicing a passage and making no wrong notes, that is commendable and suggests that the practice tempo is fine or even ripe for being shifted up a notch. 

Other techniques for working to assuage a student’s feeling that it is impossible or too difficult to keep a passage going through a wrong note or a series of wrong notes should only kick in after the passage has been slowed down. If things are too fast, it is unnecessarily difficult to do this: maybe even impossible (but it’s only ever impossible if it is too fast). This slowing down in itself will make the process sufficiently easier that nothing else may be needed—nothing except the student’s commitment to keeping the concentration and the hands and feet moving along in the music. However, there is still a lot to be gained by analyzing in some detail the thought process involved in keeping a passage going—or really the several different possible thought processes, which work separately and together. Different students will get more out of some of these than others.

Aural analysis

The most rigorous and challenging way of figuring out what to do with your hands or feet once you perceive that you have made a wrong note is to analyze by ear what the physical nature of the wrong note was and to compensate for it physically. (This is oddly analogous to what a GPS system will do if you take a wrong turn, only without the synthesized voice calling out the word “recalculating.”) A wrong note at a keyboard instrument can only be one of two things: too high or two low. Or, to be even more physically matter-of-fact about it, too far to the left or too far to the right. Correcting for this is conceptually simple, and is simple as a practical matter as well when the music is straightforward.

If you are supposed to play what is shown in Example 1, but instead start with what is shown in Example 2, then as soon as you hear the d″ you should think: “OK, I played one note too high. In order to reach the next note correctly, I have to move one note farther down than I would otherwise have had to.” And you end up having played what is shown in Example 3.

The physical reality of this will depend on the planned fingering. If you were going to play the second and third notes of this example (Example 3) with 5–4 (fairly likely) then you will have to open the space between 5 and 4 up a little bit more than you would have had to after playing the c″ with 5; if by any chance you were planning to play both notes with 5, then you will have to move 5, or in a sense your whole hand, over a bit farther than you had planned to.

If you are supposed to play Example 1 and instead start with what is shown in Example 4, then you should be able to notice that the note you have just played is the same as the note that you should be playing next, and just repeat it.

This is all 1) basic and probably sort of obvious; 2) very easy to forget about, or just not focus on, in the flurry of trying to respond to having heard a wrong note—especially for less experienced players; and 3) easier to do in a clear simple situation like that in this exercise than it would be in a more complex texture. 

It is not a bad idea to use simple passages like this to purposely practice keeping going when you play a wrong note. (Though, as I mentioned, this can seem like an odd sort of practice, since it is actually based on making wrong notes.) Start by choosing something straightforward—that is, one line per hand, at least for the most part, not too intricate, and in a harmonic idiom that you are familiar with. (Or a passage that fits this description for one of the hands but not the other: this can be used to practice this technique with that one hand.) It can be something that you know or something that you are more-or-less sight-reading. It can also be a simple exercise such as the above, that you write yourself. The extent to which you already know the passage will determine the right tempo at which to play it. The choice of that tempo is tricky, or at least it is done on an unusual basis. You have to try to choose a tempo at which you are reasonably likely to make some wrong notes—at least if you purposely relax your attention a little bit—but at which you can expect to be able to think (in plenty of time) about how to respond to the wrong notes. 

Play this passage analyzing every note that you hear for its relationship to the correct notes, and make the necessary adjustments. Do this one hand at a time at first, if you are working with a manual passage, then hands together; then, if the passage is for manuals and pedals, the pedal part, and finally everything together. If you are using a passage that you already know, either from having played it or from having heard it, then you will intuitively and promptly know whether a note is wrong. If you are using a less familiar passage, then pay attention to your sense of what the notes on the page tell you that the sound should be. This adds an element of an ear-training exercise to this protocol. Most students—especially people who are or who think that they are “beginners”—have a lot of doubt as to whether they can do this. But in fact, by paying attention, most people can.

Doing just some of this can attune the student to the importance of listening systematically for where the wrong notes are, and remembering that the keyboard is still where it was, and is laid out logically. This is not just a technique for actually finding the next note, but also an antidote to any tendency simply to freak out in the face of wrong notes. 

Visual reminders

For the purposes of the above exercise, it is very important not to look down at the hands at all, ever, since its express purpose is to work on adjusting back to the correct note by ear and through your awareness of the physical layout of the keyboard. However, as I wrote last month, the situation in which you have just heard yourself play a wrong note—or a cluster of wrong notes—and you feel very committed to not hesitating or stopping, but you feel flummoxed about where the next note or notes can be found is one situation in which looking down at the hands can be the best solution. If you feel the need to do this, then you must make sure to do it in a focused and efficient way. First of all, by the time you think that you hear a wrong note you are no longer concerned with getting that note right (or shouldn’t be.) So, when you look at your hands or feet, you should not be looking to check or confirm anything about the note that you have just heard. You should be specifically and only looking for the next note. That of course means that your eyes have to have told you, before they leave the page, what that next note is supposed to be. In general, as I have written before, not knowing what the next note is supposed to be is a much greater source of wrong notes than not knowing where on the keyboard the next note is to be found. In this situation, by definition, the player is at least uncertain about where the next note is to be found, but the focus on what the next notes are supposed to be shouldn’t be lost.

Also, if you are going to look down for the next note, this must be a quick glance, prior to which you make sure to be absolutely grounded in your awareness of your place on the page, and after which you return to that place on the page immediately. For me there is a feeling of not shifting weight. The eyes, head, and shoulders remain anchored where they should be to continue reading the music, and the glance down feels light. 

Continuing through

The final technique for becoming increasingly sure about keeping a passage going is nearly entirely mental, but can be subjected to planned practice. It is to be willing, whether in a practice situation or in performance, to hear a lot of wrong notes in a row rather than to hear yourself stop. A student should be encouraged to believe that keeping the fingers—quite possibly the right fingers, according to the planned fingering—moving over random notes in the correct rhythm is a good and productive thing to do. This will lead to the development of more accurate and reliable playing. 

So a student can take an extended passage or create an extended exercise, like that shown in Example 5, say, and move the hand at random at some point, to get something that starts like Example 6, and purposely take a while to get back on track. This can seem silly, but it is useful practice for real-life situations. (A teacher can also use it to demonstrate that an extended passage of wrong notes, in rhythm, with an eventual return to the correct notes, sounds a lot better than even a little bit of hesitation or stopping.)

Other distractions

We certainly live in an era when distraction is celebrated. The computer term “multitasking”—which seems to date from only the late 1990s—serves as propaganda in favor of being primed for perpetual distraction. It is possible that it is actually harder for people who wish to concentrate well on their practicing to do so now, when there is a certain amount of pressure always to answer the phone, and so on, than it used to be. Or perhaps this is a red herring, since real focus and concentration has always been difficult. To be honest, I am easily distracted, and I have learned to close the curtains on any windows that are nearby when I am practicing (or writing). I also like to have the phone off or not even present in the practice studio. This is tricky, since sometimes worrying about whether there might be a phone call waiting can be more distracting than just checking the phone once in a while, or even letting it ring and answering if necessary. These things work a bit differently from one person to another. However, it is a good idea to invite students to think honestly about how best to set things up for focused practice. During lessons I have always tried to sit or stand where the student can’t see me too easily (while playing), and I certainly try to keep as quiet as possible when a student is playing. 

However, since we are primarily talking about distraction that arises during and from the act of playing, I will mention an exercise that I sometimes perform with a student. I will have the student play something that he or she knows quite well. The task is to keep it going and play as well and accurately as if there were nothing unusual going on. Then, however, I will do things like arbitrarily change stops, get up and leave, turn lights on and off, perhaps sharpen a pencil, and so on. The changing of stops—including the most dramatic and disturbing, like adding something much too loud, or taking off all of the stops (briefly) or making something noisy happen with pistons—is a very apt and useful sort of distraction to ask a student to try to ignore. 

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

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

Sight-reading II

The first thing that is required for effective sight-reading is that the reading process itself not be impeded by anything practical. It is inefficient—and unfair to yourself and to your efforts—to work on sight-reading when there is too little light, or when you are trying to read from music that is small, cramped, poorly photocopied, annotated in a way that obscures the notes, or for any other reason difficult to see. There are times when we can’t avoid problems of this sort. It is easy to forget that these things matter, but they do: it is worth some trouble to get all of this right if possible. Copying onto clearer paper, enlarging, erasing unneeded notes: all good ideas. Setting up good lighting: an extremely good idea. (And of course, good light should light the pages evenly, not cast bright light here and shadows there.) If there is a choice of edition, large size and clarity should be taken into account. (They don’t trump accuracy of the musical text and any of its historical or musicological aspects when it comes to learning and performing pieces, of course, but they might for practicing sight-reading.)

It is also worth remembering to position the music in the most sensible way along the music desk. It is natural to put the beginning of a passage at the exact spot that seems easiest to read from (very possibly the middle) and then to have to cope with the fact that two-thirds (or so) of the music is sort of off to one side. It is fine to slide music about to get the part that you are currently reading into the best position, if there is time to do so. This can’t always come out perfectly, but it is worth remembering to think about.

Visual factors

It is interesting that the best position at which to read music is not the same from one person to another. This has to do in part with eyesight, and in part with habit. But it also has to do with the matter of the dominant eye. There is a simple test that you can do to determine which of your eyes is dominant. Sit or stand comfortably with your arms at your side. Look at something in the middle distance. Point to that thing with one of your index fingers—fairly quickly and spontaneously, without stopping to think about anything. Without moving your arm, hand, or finger, close first one eye and then the other. You should observe that with one eye open your index finger is actually pointing to the spot that you tried to point at, and that with the other eye open it is not. The eye that shows your finger pointing at the object is your dominant eye. This is completely different from the vision that is tested by an eye doctor or optometrist. You can see music more easily on the side of your dominant eye than on the other side.

Speaking of vision tests, it is most important that your eyes’ focus on the music as it sits on the music desk be correct. Or in other words, that your glasses’ prescription be right. Most reading glasses are designed to focus too near to the reader’s eyes—maybe about fifteen inches—to be good for reading music on the music desk of a keyboard instrument. That distance is usually more like twenty-two inches. It is not a problem for an optometrist to create glasses that focus for reading at twenty-two inches, but you must ask for this. These should specifically focus at whatever distance you think is right for you, or that you actually measure. They should be traditional single-focus glasses, not part of any sort of bi- or tri-focal or progressive lenses. Not everyone needs to make a change in this department. But if your visual focus on the music desk is uncomfortable, then correcting that is crucial.

All things considered:

Practice vs. performance

I am writing this about sight-reading. It is also true of any playing: just even more important for sight-reading. The same is true of other aspects of work on playing. To turn it around for a minute, much of what I have written about recently (and over the years) in connection with playing and learning to play is applicable to working on sight-reading, or just to the act of sight-reading, only more so. This is true, for example, of not needing to look at the hands and feet very much, and of being committed to keeping the music going, as well as of having an openness to seeing the keyboard score as being one texture played by ten fingers (rather than the upper staff’s being the right hand part and the lower staff the left hand) and being in the habit of paying attention, in the pedals, to what each foot has last been doing, not just to what the last note of the pedal part was. 

It is also true that any habitual approach to fingering can be an aid to sight-reading. It is likely that part of the reason for the existence of “normal” fingerings for certain kinds of passages—scales and chord shapes, primarily—is that those fingerings can, by their very nature as unconsciously available defaults, make sight-reading easier. The details of those fingerings have varied with time and place, for reasons that don’t in themselves have anything to do with sight-reading. It is the very fact of their being learned defaults that makes them relevant to sight-reading. 

On the other hand, there is one major theoretical conflict between sight-reading and ideal performance. In sight-reading, keeping the piece going is an absolute requirement. It should be in any performance as well, of course, and also in practicing. However, in sight-reading, by definition, no interpretive decisions have been made, and no interpretive ideas have been brought to bear on fingering and pedaling choices. So it must be very clear that interpretive dimensions of the “performance” do not have any priority. If in order to get the next notes you must use a fingering that creates a detached articulation when you might have preferred legato, or a pedaling that undermines clarity, or if an ornament has to be too slow or too fast or badly timed, or, for that matter, omitted, that must be judged to be OK. Likewise if, as you hear the music go by, you have what might be called interpretive reactions—“how would this sound if I . . . ?” or “this should be more free, or more clear, or more jaunty, or . . . ” then you should just ignore those feelings. In any case, nothing except getting the next note or notes on time and in the right rhythm has any priority whatsoever. This also includes anything having to do with registration, being on a keyboard other than the one you want to be on, swell pedal position, and so on. Finally, if you have to omit part of the texture—notes, chords, inner voices, one and/or the other, or the feet, or conceivably one foot—then that is all right: much better than breaking rhythm.

This stance or approach or attitude is very different from what we want in “real” performance. However, it is uncannily similar to what performance can feel like if something starts to go wrong (as it really does at least once in a while for everyone). When playing feels like this, we indeed often actually say, “It was as if I had never seen that piece before.” Therefore, practicing sight-reading with this attitude also constitutes practice keeping any playing going when doing so partakes (fleetingly, we all hope) of that feeling of hanging on for dear life. 

A system for sight-reading

So what does it take to practice sight-reading systematically? As with aspects of doing sight-reading, practicing sight-reading is not so different from practicing any other keyboard skill (in particular, practicing pieces to learn them) but just requires being mindful of what the emphasis should be. 

First of all, in order to practice real sight-reading, it is necessary to have a fairly extensive source of printed music available to you that you have never played and don’t know very well (or at all) by ear. Very few of us want to purchase a lot of music expressly for the purpose of playing through it exactly once: that seems wasteful. There are a few ways to approach this. Of course you can acquire music that you are going to want to learn or to use for something beyond sight-reading practice, and then use it (once) for sight-reading practice. You can download free music, print it out, and then, if you don’t have a musical use for it later on, use the reverse sides as scrap paper. You can put a computer— perhaps a tablet or something—on the music desk and sight-read directly off the screen. You can get music from the library, or find old volumes out of which you played just some of the pieces. (Just be careful to avoid the ones that you did play before: that really wouldn’t be sight-reading.)

The good news is that, just as anyone can work on any piece no matter how difficult or “advanced” it is—if he or she will keep the tempo slow enough—likewise any music can be used for sight-reading practice if you are willing to use an appropriate tempo. There is nothing wrong with using music that is fairly simple—simple enough that you can sight-read it at a tempo that makes it “sound like music.” However, there is no reason to stick only to that sort of music. Since really well-developed sight-reading is a coping skill of sorts, it is not a bad idea to work on practicing sight-reading with anything that you can throw at yourself at random. However, again, it is only good practice if you keep the tempo realistic: the more difficult the sight-reading, the slower the tempo.

I should mention here that there are nowadays quite a few websites that offer music for sight-reading practice. I will not mention specific ones, as I don’t have enough experience with any one of them to offer an assessment (let alone an endorsement) and, of course, they are likely to change all of the time. At any moment when you are undertaking to practice sight-reading systematically (or a student is), it is not a bad idea to do a search on a phrase such as “sight-reading materials” or “sight-reading resources” and see what turns up. Some of these services offer music that you or the student will certainly not have seen before, since it is generated for the purpose. They mostly do seem to offer music arranged according to a difficulty scale. I would probably recommend some of the time sticking to the next few pieces up in that scale, and some of the time leap-frogging ahead a bit, and slowing the tempo down.

So, once there is music on the desk and you are ready to drill sight-reading, what should you do? Essentially just start playing, but slowly, with a very strong commitment to moving your eyes forward systematically, and keeping the playing going. 

Again, this is not so different from practicing a piece. In a sense, the main difference is just that you have purposely put a piece in front of your eyes that you have not seen before. Some differences in emphasis are these: 

—You should just ignore and forget whatever just happened (no need to try to remember any problems in the back of your mind to inform future practice, as we would do when playing a piece that you are working on to learn);

—You should use your eyes very purposefully, scanning a note or two ahead, scanning steadily up and down—all the voices or components of the texture; perhaps you should use a voice in your head to explicitly mention pitch names as they come up (I seem to find this helpful, though I could also imagine its being a distraction); 

—You should be consciously aware of not expecting any pre-awareness (or so-called “muscle memory”) to kick in; 

—As we have said, you should neither look at and study the pieces and passages in advance, nor use the same material more than once.

“Not looking” is important, but also creates a sort of paradox. If in order to practice sight-reading strictly you need to have the sight-reading moment be the first time you so much as glance at a piece, but you also want to do the sight-reading practice at a slow enough tempo, then how do you determine, even approximately, what that slow enough tempo will be? This involves compromise, and different people can find their own exact ways. I would say that choice of tempo can depend in part on key signature—which you should look at in advance—and on a very rough scan of the overall density of notes. For some people this rough scan should include noticing how active the pedal part is, how many accidentals there seem to be, how much is chordal and how much is scale or passage-work, and what the smallest common note-value is. The correct slow enough tempo has to do not with the “beat” as defined by the time signature, but with the smallest prevailing note value.

I mentioned last month that I myself can do a spiffier job of sight-reading pieces that are in styles most familiar to me as a performer than I can music with which I have less learning and performance experience. I can sight-read Buxtehude or Scheidemann or Froberger more readily (which essentially means at a tempo closer to performance tempo) than I can Reger or Widor or Rheinberger. I am certain that this is about my experience and the expectations that it creates, not about anything intrinsic to the repertoire. The “hardest” Reger pieces, for example, are probably harder than the hardest Buxtehude pieces, but I believe that in developing my understanding of my own experience with sight-reading I am correcting for that. I do believe that most players can more readily sight-read music that is closer in compositional style to music that they have studied and played. I assume that the mechanism of this is that a kind of generalized “muscle memory” kicks in: that you can anticipate what the composer probably did next, even though you don’t know what the composer actually did next. Subconsciously your mind narrows down the possibilities and likelihoods about where your fingers and feet should be heading. This also explains why different people find different repertoires difficult. But, since we are talking here about sight-reading, we should note that these perceived differences in difficulty are often mediated by assumptions or experiences of trying to sight-read different types of repertoire, rather than trying to practice it patiently and systematically. Practicing sight-reading unfamiliar repertoire can be fruitful in de-mystifying that repertoire and in making the real learning process for that repertoire seem more accessible, if that sight-reading is done (again) slowly enough and with good focus. 

Listening carefully

It seems to me that there exists a set of challenges and opportunities that arise from questions about how to listen to one’s own playing while playing, both when practicing and while actually performing. This is only one way of framing or organizing those issues, some of which might otherwise seem only loosely related, if related at all. I think that this is useful and interesting, however, and it helps me think both about aspects of my own learning, playing, and performing, and about ways of inviting students to approach all sorts of aspects of their work that are not directly about note-learning or other basic, practical things. I will focus on different sides of this range of questions this month and next.

Listening during playing

This is a good thing—something that everyone who creates music tries to do most of the time, I would think. Almost no one would say (again, at least within my experience) that we should all just learn our pieces very solidly, physically, and then play them physically without paying attention to the sound. Thus it would be arrogant and silly for me to claim to have come up with anything brand new here—just a few ideas about how to think about it or to apply it. 

At the same time, being honest about it in my own case (which I think does generalize to many other players), I realize that I don’t always listen to what I am doing while I play—at least not with real focus and/or not in any great detail. If it is an ideal to do so, then it is one that I don’t live up to. And I think that this is sort of a mixed bag. Some of the time when I am practicing or performing and I notice that I have gone a few beats or a few measures without really registering anything much with my ears, I realize that I have just spaced out. This is certainly not best for keeping my playing sharp or for avoiding technical pitfalls. And it is dangerous: carried to any sort of extreme it can lead to full-on falling apart. It is a normal human thing to do, however, and the main thing to say about it is that it is a good idea to gain some experience noticing it and keeping playing through it.

Sometimes, it is a practical necessity to quit listening with real attention (obviously we always hear what we are doing, at least out of the corner of our ears) on purpose and focus hard on something technical and difficult, or something that seems about to go wrong. If a passage suddenly seems to be slipping away in performance, then it is important to take whatever emergency rescue action seems likely to work. (This happens to just about everyone from time to time.) This is unlikely to include listening carefully to sonority or acoustics, or anything of that sort. It is more likely to include things like redoubling focus on reading the notes and remembering fingerings and pedalings, possibly glancing at the keys, being careful not to speed up, and so on. 

Furthermore, there are moments during a performance (or just while playing through a piece) when everything seems to be flowing easily, comfortably, and naturally. During some of these moments, the listening that I am doing is somewhat detached—not close or analytical. And this is probably OK at those moments. The important thing is to make sure that this sort of calm, “in the zone” not-really-listening does not shade over into a spaced-out lack of paying attention.

It is also important not to listen with a kind of misdirected focus that involves any hesitation or stopping to think. If we are listening carefully—especially during any sort of performance, but also during practicing—then we should be listening in order to react and to learn, not to analyze on the spot. Analysis has to be done afterwards from memory, otherwise it can lead to hesitation or a sort of timidness about going on. (This works out differently from one person to another, and it is important not to become hung up on listening in a way that causes hesitation—if you sense that you are having a problem of that sort. I sometimes do myself; some people will, some won’t.)

But what might we be listening to or listening for when we do listen carefully to our own playing—on organ in particular?

With any way of making music, there are things that the musician can control, and things that he or she cannot. This profile is different for each type of instrument. On unfretted bowed string instruments, for example, the player can set pitch freely and change pitch freely during the course of a note, and can also shape dynamics fairly freely during the middle of a note. Changes of timbre are possible over a somewhat limited range, either at the beginning of the note or across the note’s duration. The player of a fretted string instrument can change pitch slightly, and can set the initial volume of a note, but cannot change the volume of an ongoing note freely—only by determining when and how to end the note. He or she can adjust the timbre of a note at its beginning over a fairly wide range, but cannot adjust that aspect of the sound during the note. A harpsichordist cannot change the sound of an ongoing note in any way at all until it is time to release the note. On organ, the player can mostly not influence a note once it has been started, again, that is, until it is time to release it. There are some exceptions to this—changing stops during a held note, for example, and changing swell pedal position, which does not change what the pipes are doing but changes the way that the sound reaches the listeners. There is also the somewhat specialized but occasionally important phenomenon of influencing wind pressure during a sustained note by playing other (faster) notes. 

Still, in listening carefully to our own playing, we are mostly listening to an established sound for the purpose of reacting to that sound, not for the purpose of changing it. One thing that it is important to remember about this act is that we should develop the habit of listening to the whole sound, not just the beginning of the note, and also not just the beginning and then the end. It is the beginnings of notes that almost define “playing” as a physical act on keyboard instruments. We have “played” a note on the organ when we have initiated it. When the note reaches its end we “release” it. The part in the middle is non-active for the player. These circumstances create a constant pull not to pay attention to that middle part. 

The middle portion of notes

However, the middles of notes actually constitute most of what a listener hears: more so with organ than with most other means of music production, since the middle portion of a note does not die away. This, in and of itself, seems to suggest that it is important to remember to listen to this part of what we play. What do I think that we can achieve by paying more conscious attention to that part of our sound? When it comes to really long notes—say half-notes or longer in a contrapuntal texture that has a lot of eighth-notes—the presence of the sustained sound of those longer notes might influence how we play the faster notes. The articulation and timing of those notes does not take place in a vacuum, but rather against the sound of the sustained notes. There is an ebb and flow of dissonance and consonance between the moving notes and the held notes. This might especially influence choices about timing—rubato and/or agogic accentuation—but also articulation. With what we might call “medium-sized” notes—notes that do not even approach seeming like pedal points, but are long enough that a subconscious tendency to short-change our attention to the middle part of the note might kick in—the middle forms an integral part of the overall shape. A more conscious attention to that middle might affect decisions about articulation and timing, or, on sensitive mechanical action instruments, even about how (as opposed to just when) we attack and release notes.

Room acoustics

Another thing that we can listen to more consciously than we sometimes do is acoustics. The importance of room acoustics to organ sound and organ playing is well known. At the simplest level it is essentially this: the more resonant the room, the more it is possible for notes with articulation between them to sound effectively legato. Or, to put it another way, the more resonant the room, the more space you need between notes to achieve any given level of detached or articulated sound. 

However, something more technical and specific also takes place. The sound of the beginning instant of each note lingers in the room for a length of time determined by the acoustics of the room. The sound from each subsequent instant of the sound does the same. Thus the sound of each note will continue to grow until the lingering sound from the first instant of that note has died away. From that point on the sound will remain constant until the note is released. That means that the specific timing of the resonance of the room actually helps to create the specific shape of notes. Since this acoustic timing is, for a given space, defined in absolute time—not through anything about the beat of whatever piece you are playing—its relationship to the notes that you are playing varies with tempo and note length. This effect is most noticeable with medium-length notes. Quick notes are likely to be over before this acoustic accumulation has peaked; very long notes have most of their duration after the sound has leveled off. Of course, “quick” and “long” are not rigorous terms. The point is that, in any given space, you can systematically listen to the bloom of sound created by the acoustics. The best way to approach this is probably the most direct and simple. Play an isolated note and listen to the first few seconds of it carefully. Can you hear it grow and then level off? Can you hear this better with your eyes closed, or facing one way or another? (Those are probably just tricks to shift the focus of your listening, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work.) Does this effect seem different with a note of different pitch, volume, or sonority? 

You can also practice listening directly to the acoustics of a room by playing notes, releasing them, and listening to what happens after you have let the key up. Can you hear the sound linger? Does the dying away of the sound seem linear, or does it die away in waves? What is the longest-out point from releasing the note where you can convince yourself that you still hear something? Does all of this vary with pitch, volume, sonority, how long you have held the note before you release it? 

One side effect of doing some of this sort of listening is that you will begin not to consider your pieces over until some little while after you have released the final sound. It is not at all uncommon for students to behave as if a piece is over as soon as the last note has been “played”—that is, initiated. Sometimes someone will press down the keys for the final notes and begin talking about the piece before releasing those notes. Of course this is not a terrible sin: any such person knows perfectly well not to do that in performance. Still, there is something to be gained by listening until the sound is really, entirely gone. For one thing, the shaping of a final cadence or other ending gestures should be based on a timing that includes the post-release effect of the acoustics on the sound.

Focusing one’s listening on specific elements of a piece can be a useful practice technique. This applies to identifiable motives: for example, once you know the notes of a fugue (or other piece with melodic motives) rather well, you can play through it focusing on listening only to the fugue subject whenever it comes in, or to a particular countersubject, or to more than one such melodic component, but not consciously listening to the whole texture. Or, you can even go through a passage or piece only playing one particular melodic component—or more than one, but not the whole texture—listening carefully to it/them and hearing everything else in your head as best you can. After you do this, when you put all the rest of the texture back, see whether your overall listening and hearing experience has changed a little bit. 

Many questions revolve around the project of listening for the overall impact of what you are doing. This is a large subject, and one which involves questions that are hard to tackle: How much and in what ways can you experience the emotional or affective content of your playing while you are playing? Should a performer even be trying to do so? If so, why, if not, why not? What are the risks to letting yourself listen as if you were one of your own listeners? Does this set of questions shed any light on the relationship between players and listeners, perhaps by seeming to have different answers for different performance situations? And, at a more concrete level, what about listening for your registrations, balance, and so on?

Next month I will muse further about some of this.

Spring break

This month’s column is, in a way, a lark or a diversion. It is a winter visit from next spring or from last summer. I am writing about, of all things, my golf game. I am doing this not really—or not entirely—as a break from writing about organ teaching, but because I believe that I have learned a lot about teaching, as well as about my own playing and performing, from my involvement with golf—an involvement that means a lot to me: nearly as much as my involvement with music. My forty-year golf project has served as one of my best teachers, alongside my “official” music teachers, my students, and my colleagues. These are a few brief thoughts—a column’s worth, among many more—about some of the ways in which it has done that.

I should start by describing a little bit what I am like as a golfer—how “good” or “bad” I am. I do this in part so that it will be clear that when I talk about working on my golf game I am not in any danger of bragging: I am by no means very accomplished at golf. Even though I have been playing pretty seriously for decades, my best nine-hole score ever is 43, and I’ve only done that once or twice. During my best seasons, I have had scores right around 50—again for nine holes, which is half the full-length golf round of eighteen holes. (My best ever eighteen-hole score is 92.) Scoring in the upper thirties for nine holes or less than 80 for eighteen would usually be considered quite good, and someone who can do that fairly regularly is probably considered quite a good golfer. I have never accomplished either of those things. However, I have hit a lot of really good golf shots. In fact, some of them have been, for those who care about such things, quite beautiful. I have also hit a lot of really bad shots: more of those than of the good ones, in fact. 

I have a caveat: nothing that I write about my golf game, or any conclusions or lessons that I seem to be trying to draw from meditating on my golf game, is meant in the slightest to imply that anyone else should do anything in particular. I certainly don’t think that a person must play golf in order to develop as a teacher or as a musician. Not everyone likes golf, or would like it. And there are an infinite number of other activities that can be rewarding and challenging and that can inform aspects of a person’s life and work in way similar to what I am writing about here. However, I wouldn’t even assert that everyone—or anyone—should do anything analogous—that “everyone should have a hobby,” or anything like that. I am simply writing about an ongoing and complex experience of my own, and I am doing so because it occurred to me one day recently while on the golf course that it would be interesting to do so. 

Mental vs. physical

The first analogy between golf and music-making is that both are physical skills that are fundamentally mental. In music this is most true for keyboard playing, since with keyboard instruments the task is laid out for you in a concrete and specific way by the presence of the keys. (As Bach said, “There is nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” That is, there is no need to create intonation or sonority with one’s own body.) The task of playing is, like the task of executing a golf shot, a set of physical gestures. In both cases, those gestures can be intricate, and the timing of them has to be right. In both cases this whole package can seem difficult. However, the difficulty is one of focus and concentration—once you basically know what to do—rather than this being physically difficult. (As, for example, the skills involved in gymnastics or figure skating or opera singing or violin playing might be—or, in another way, lifting weights or wrestling.) 

A short paragraph is not enough to discuss this thoroughly, as it applies to organ playing or other keyboard playing, or as it applies to golf. The point for now is that there is a balance between the need for physical skill or ability and the need to be in an appropriate mental state to execute that skill. This balance feels remarkably similar as it applies to playing a passage on organ or harpsichord and as it applies to executing a golf swing. 

This includes the basic question of how much it is possible to think consciously while playing/swinging, and the question of timing, not in this case the physical timing of gestures, but the timing of thoughts that lie behind those gestures. In making a golf swing this is essentially a one-part, or one-time, timing question. The swing is a thing that happens once, rather quickly. It contains a natural pause—after you have raised the club back over your head, and before you have brought it down to the ball—when you can briefly remember what you need to do to continue and complete the swing. Once the swing is over you can fully let go of concentration. It is a challenge not to let the conscious thought process cause hesitation during the brief period of the swing itself. In playing a piece at a keyboard instrument, those moments of possible conscious thought—with their attendant dangers, in particular the danger that the thought will introduce hesitation or distraction—are recurrent. They dovetail and overlap, and it is not safe to let go of concentration at any time during a piece. So, for me, the conscious and instant concentration during the golf swing is sort of a laboratory for working in isolation on a mental tool that I apply, in an ongoing way, at the keyboard. 

The need for physical relaxation while doing something difficult that also requires intense focus is uncannily similar in making a golf swing and in playing organ or harpsichord. The consequences of losing that relaxation are partly analogous, partly different. In the golf swing, a small amount of physical tension that develops during a swing will almost certainly lead to a really bad shot. Probably most or nearly all of the bad shots that I ever hit have this as their cause. (The tension literally pulls the golf club out of the path along which you think you are swinging it. So the club can’t hit the ball squarely.) In keyboard playing, physical tension causes a host of problems, including changing the feeling of a gesture in such a way that the hand (or foot) comes down in the wrong place, but also including slight changes to rhythm and, in some cases, the creation of a bad sonority. Again, with the golf swing, this relaxation has to be maintained through one gesture that takes a second or so. In playing at a keyboard, the relaxation has to be maintained longer. So the golf swing is a simplified but intense drill for what is needed while playing music. It is also a drill in which the consequences of getting it wrong are painfully obvious: a golf ball that bounces into the woods, or dribbles along the ground!

Relaxation and velocity

Related to the need for relaxation as such is the relationship between relaxation and velocity. There are benefits to a golf swing’s being fast. That is true both because a faster swing makes more powerful contact with the ball and sends it farther, and because in some cases the actual shape and direction of the shot—independent of the distance—can be right only if the club comes through the ball quickly. At the keyboard, we sometimes need to play fast: fast enough that it is a challenge. The first requirement for being able to execute a fast golf swing—or a fast keyboard passage or trill, for example—is that the physical gesture remain as relaxed as possible. And since there is a natural (if subconscious) correlation in our minds between the ideas “fast” and “strong,” and since it is very easy for “strong” to shade over into “tense,” it takes some doing to remember that lightness and relaxation lead to greater possibilities for speed: tension is a roadblock that slows things down. For me, the process of learning how to feel light and relaxed standing over a golf ball and how to recognize that that lightness actually gives me full access to the amount of swing speed that my body can create has been a helpful supplement to the work that I have done at the keyboard itself. 

This also applies to the role of breathing in the shaping of physical gesture, or in creating the conditions that allow a physical gesture to take place with relaxation and appropriate speed. There is always time to remember to breathe properly before initiating a golf swing. (You are always able to decide when you begin your golf swing yourself: there’s no clock, and no other player doing something to which you respond.) There is less time to remember to breathe properly once the swing has started, but it is possible to learn how to plan on doing so. Both of these elements are present in the act of playing a keyboard instrument.

So, in ways that include the ones that I have described, these two physical acts—physical skills—seem to have a lot of analogies to one another in the kind of mental work that they involve and in how the mental work relates to the physical act itself. There are also various interesting psychological or motivational connections or analogies. 

One of these concerns honesty. Golf occupies an odd position as regards honesty. On the one hand, the idea that golfers cheat is sort of legendary or axiomatic. There are jokes about it; it comes up in fiction and in commercials. At the same time, there is a tradition in golf of some of the purest and least self-interested honesty that is found anywhere. It is well known that golfers call penalties on themselves: that is, if they have accidentally moved a ball, or done something else that should be penalized according to the rules, but have done so where no one else can possibly have seen them, they report this themselves to their playing partners or competitors, or to officials, if it is an “official” situation, and accept the penalty. In many competition sports, players are expected to try to convince the officials that whatever they just did was whatever would have been to their—or their team’s—advantage. An outfielder who has just barely not caught a ball may try to signal to the umpire that he has caught it, or a base-stealer who was clearly thrown out will try to assume a posture and demeanor that makes him look safe. This is a bit like a system of courtroom advocacy, where each side’s job is to present their own case and the authority makes the judgment. But in golf, there is nothing at stake for anyone else. What is at stake for you is that you really, honestly know and acknowledge what you really, honestly just did. (And there is no authority.) If I, for example, swing at a ball that is partially buried in vegetation, and actually miss it, then, if I don’t count that stroke, I still know that I took it. As I look myself in the mirror later that day, saying proudly “I only took four strokes on that hard hole,” then, if I am not counting that missed shot, whatever I say, I know that I really got a 5. 

This kind of honesty that is really accuracy—honesty with yourself, for your own sake—comes up in practicing. You know whether you are practicing slowly enough; you know whether you have really gone over that passage enough times; you know whether the passage that you just played accurately really felt uneasy just below the surface; you know whether you just practiced a passage enough times in a row, but with different fingerings, so that the times through cancelled each other out. If you—or I—let these things slide, then we are only cheating ourselves—and we know that we are.

I have always been my own golf teacher. Or, more accurately, I have mostly tried to teach myself golf and to work on my swing and my game myself, with some input from people with whom I play. I have never put myself in the hands of a teacher. Why not? I have never been sure why not. It’s partly the high cost of golf lessons, partly just that I love being out on the golf course, and, when my schedule allows me to do something golf-like I always want to be out there playing. However, it is also something more than that. I like the challenge and satisfaction of analyzing the physical and mental aspects of something like the golf swing for myself: something about which I am not an expert, still less any sort of authority, but as to which I want to feel some autonomy and ownership. I would probably shoot lower scores if I went to a good teacher and did what that teacher told me. But I wouldn’t find it as deeply satisfying.

What does this tell me about my own work as a teacher? Again, I’m not sure. Not that I should dismiss all of my students and tell them that they would find their musical study more satisfying if they did it on their own. If they wanted to approach it that way—if it happened to fill that role for them, as golf does for me—then they wouldn’t be looking for lessons. However, it does remind me to respect my students’ need to feel involved in the process, to take as much ownership of the learning process as they can take and want to take, not just to sit back and do something that I tell them to do. In fact, this leads me to encourage (but not force) students in that direction, since I believe that many people come to lessons scared to direct their own work as much as they in fact could. 

Creating beauty

So, what is a “beautiful” golf shot? There is always a practical goal with a golf shot: to get the ball to some spot that has been chosen as best for rolling the ball into the hole in as few strokes as possible. A beautiful shot presumably has done a good job of achieving that goal. But for me it is more than that: it has to feel right—relaxed, focused, appropriately fast and strong; it has to sound right—a club striking a ball in the right way has a metallic, musical pinging sound; the shot has to have a pleasing shape. In fact, the shape of a well-struck golf shot was one of my own first models for what I wanted out of harpsichord sound: starting crisply, rising, curving, eventually falling—it’s a surprisingly close analogy. I do occasionally hit such shots, though not many. I hit more that are serviceable, that send the ball pretty much to where I wanted to send it, but without the pleasing shape. The beautiful shots are almost random, but not quite: I do know what I am trying to do, and I do know that when I do it, it is because I have succeeded at something quite hard. That is satisfying indeed. This also tells me something about my students. As they work on becoming “better,” on getting closer to achieving what they want with their playing, they can, along the way, do things with music that are as beautiful and as effective as what a more advanced or accomplished player would do—perhaps not as often as that player might do it. If they understand what they have done to make that happen, then they have learned something and can feel very good about it. 

Listening Carefully II 

As I wrote last month, I want to continue to muse about aspects of listening carefully to one’s own playing while actually playing. I say “muse” because this is not cut-and-dried. It is about the psychology of playing, of motivating one’s self, of being honest with one’s self, of trying to shape the playing beyond what can be planned for or expressed through specific ideas. At least that is what it is about in part—it is also about just plain knowing what is going on and keeping things together. 

At the end of last month’s column, I said specifically that I wanted to muse about “the project of listening for the overall impact of what you are doing.” This is, I would say, the most potentially fascinating part of listening closely while playing, the most philosophical or theoretical, and perhaps the most controversial or subject to being thought about very differently by different players, teachers, and students. I myself divide it into two components, clearly related to each other but somewhat distinct: first, listening to make sure that what you are trying to do interpretively (rhetorically, expressively: there are a number of ways to describe it) is coming across; second, listening in such a way that you yourself are actually moved or affected by the expressive/interpretive impact of what you are playing, in a way that is analogous to what you hope and expect that the (other) listeners are experiencing. 

It is the second of these that I think is actually potentially controversial. I should say that it is also something that greatly intrigues me, and that I try to do myself, when I think that I can. I believe that it is actually an integral part of my performance process, and that I would have trouble playing effectively without being—at least much of the time—open to experiencing directly the feelings, moods, thoughts, affects, etc., that I hope that my playing will create in other listeners.

Rhythmic inflection

Part of the reason for this is specific and concrete as a set of performance techniques. Some of the time—not at every instant during any piece, but recurrently and frequently—I try to create (or enhance) expressiveness through the use of rhythmic inflection. This happens on both a small scale—individual notes of small rhythmic grouping being made a little bit longer than other notes, for various sorts of emphasis—and on a longer scale—stretching the rhythm or timing of phrases or sections, slowing down the tempo, cranking it back up, and so on. (I should acknowledge that I didn’t create this idea. I think that I do more of it than many players, especially with Baroque keyboard music, where a tendency has existed for many years to deny or limit these sorts of interpretive possibilities. That is a large subject, and one for another day.) 

These are all gestures that cannot, as far as I can tell, be completely defined or measured or completely planned out in advance. It is necessary to get them right at the very moment that you are performing them, on a quasi-improvised basis. (Or planned up to a point and refined on a quasi-improvised basis). Since the goal of these sorts of gestures is affective or emotional, at least one way to gauge the rightness of the gesture is to let yourself experience the emotion and to shape what you are doing accordingly. 

There are two other, less technical or concrete, reasons why I am interested in embracing the idea of trying to experience the emotional content of what I am playing while I am playing it. One of these is that I know that if I am getting something meaningful out of what I am playing, then it is possible for someone else to do so. If I am not, then I can’t be sure. I can try to know. I can rely on people telling me that they got something out of a performance. I can make predictions about what ought to work in performance and then try to do that in such a way that I can know that I did it. (Both of these are very real and important). There’s the faith in the music, the pieces: if I am playing a great piece, and playing it basically well, with appropriate sounds, and so on, then most likely something good is going to come across. I suppose that the desire to allow myself to be caught up in or swept up by what I am playing is in part a desire to go as far as possible towards making a performance as powerful and effective
as possible.

Motivation 

The second of these two other reasons is one of motivation. Of course I can be motivated by “professionalism,” by a sense of responsibility, by wanting to be seen to give good performances (“heard”, really), by finding it gratifying to get reports from listeners that they got something out of a piece or a concert, and so on. (Also to justify whatever I am being paid!) However, actually experiencing directly a version of what I think I can get out of the kind of music that I play is an important component of what keeps me wanting to do it, and what motivates me to work hard at it and to accept the inevitable tension that comes with public performance. This may be selfish or self-indulgent. It is powerful, however, and probably does no harm, even if selfish. (It does have pitfalls, however, which I will get to below.)

Here’s a very personal story about this—one that has an essential component or two missing because of the lapse of time, but that I still find important. One of my two graduate degree recitals consisted of The Art of the Fugue. I played the whole work on the organ (the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College, just for the record). It was by far the hardest thing I had done up to that point. It is almost certain that I “shouldn’t” have done it. My level of skill and experience at that point was such that it would have been difficult to predict with any confidence that I could pull this off, even at a minimal level of success. However, I was highly motivated in advance by my existing very strong—and very emotional—relationship with that piece as a listener. Clearly my teacher, Eugene Roan, thought that I could do it or that it would be worth trying. I believe he had a lot of respect for the motivation factor, and in general believed in letting people do or try that which interests and excites them the most (as do I). 

The main moment that I remember from that performance is the very end. The Art of the Fugue is incomplete: Bach died before he could compose (or perhaps just before he could dictate) the final section. The piece actually breaks off in the middle of a line. Everything is unresolved. To me at the time (and still now) this moment when the counterpoint abruptly breaks off and there is silence where there should have been music is one of the most powerful moments in all of the arts. Of course it is a moment that the composer didn’t intend. It was created by a coming together of random things, not all of them good. And it is certainly possible to debate whether it is a good idea to finish the piece, as many people have done over the centuries. Clearly any such completion is not, cannot be, what the composer intended, but the abrupt breaking off that I find so powerful is not what the composer intended either. I recall being essentially overwhelmed by the effect of the premature end of the long piece that evening. I was in a state of collapse and had to spend quite a while collecting myself before I turned around to the audience. Now, amongst the things that I can’t re-capture from that day is whether my performance was in fact particularly effective—of the piece as a whole or of the moment that I found so powerful. I also don’t know whether I was in a similar state of enrapture with the emotional content of some or many earlier passages in the work: probably so, but I don’t have a vivid memory of it. I also don’t know how well I avoided the pitfalls of being that caught up in what I was playing: very possibly not very well. (I didn’t record that performance, or else I would know some of this.) 

So I am telling this somewhat unsatisfyingly incomplete story because of this: the memory of how I felt as that performance of The Art of the Fugue ended has been a significant and very specific motivating factor for my work as a player ever since, including through various moments of frustration or what seemed to me like loss of direction. Therefore, to return expressly to the world of teaching, I encourage students to allow themselves to create this same sort of motivation for their work. 

I often suggest to students the following practice tool. Once they have identified a spot where they want to make a rhythmic gesture (usually of the sort that might be described as “rubato”) they practice that gesture, in the privacy of the studio, in as exaggerated a manner as possible: take the risk of executing a gesture that is utterly tasteless, mannered, “schmaltzy.” This is to counter the fact that we usually only visit the gestures that we think we want to make “from below” (so to speak), that is, only compared to and judged in comparison to not making such a gesture, or to a modest version of the gesture. This stems from and then reinforces a philosophy that teaches a kind of reluctance about such gestures. If you hear a rhythmic inflection from both sides, you get a different sense of exactly how it might be effective. I mention this because the only way I know of to make that judgment as to when something is exaggerated, when it is too slight, and when it is just what you want is by experiencing the actual result. Only if a student is willing and able not just to listen, but to feel, to experience, can that student say “Yes, that was effective,” or “That was too exaggerated: the intensity burst and was lost,” or “That wasn’t enough to do anything for me.” The ability to do this is a step in moving away from too much reliance on other people’s reactions to your playing—not that those can’t then also be taken into account. 

Other opinions

So what are the drawbacks? Well, I have recently been asking fellow musicians, “What do you think about actually experiencing the emotional content of what you are playing, while you are playing it?” And when I have gotten concerned or skeptical responses, the reservations expressed have been mostly one of these: that if you are looking to experience the emotion behind the music directly yourself, you are likely to make that emotion come across too strongly, and this sort of listening and reacting can distract you from just plain accurate playing. In other words, if you get too caught up in what you are hearing, you will forget to stay on top of the notes, fingers, and pedalings. (I should say that it surprised me what a large percentage of the responses to this question were skeptical or negative. My own desire to embrace this sort of approach to the player as listener is by no means shared by everyone.) 

I think that my own response to these concerns is something like this. As to the first one, I would suggest not worrying about it until there is a reason to. I think that most listeners want more expressive rather than less expressive playing, and that the dynamic that might lead some players to overdo emotion in performing if they are caught up in hearing that emotion themselves is perhaps in fact just a corrective to a common tendency for reticence and shyness about expressivity. If there is feedback from trusted listeners—or from your own experience listening to recordings, assuming that they are accurately engineered—telling you that what you are doing is overblown, then you can take that into account. It would be a shame to assume in advance that this will be the case.

As to the second concern, I think that preparation is the main key. If a piece or passage is solidly learned, then the need to think consciously about the next fingering or pedaling or note is limited, and the vulnerability to distraction is small. The particular kind of distraction that comes from the content of the music itself is also at least correlated with what is going on in the notes of the piece. It is always necessary to be ready to pull back and shift focus to just keeping it going, and an emotional or affective involvement in the content of the music is only one sort of thing from which a player might sometimes have to pull back. I don’t think that there is any particular reason to be afraid of being unable to do so when the need arises.