On Teaching

Keeping It Going I

This month and next I shall muse in some detail about one transcendentally important aspect of practicing and some related matters. I say “muse” because this is largely about the psychology of the student and the teacher’s role in helping the student to do something important but difficult. Therefore, the question of how to work on it is unusually open-ended. I have been consolidating my own thoughts about it, and in so doing I have increasingly realized that the psychological and motivational dimensions are key, though there are also technical sides of it that need to be thought through. 

This aspect of practicing is keeping the playing going through any wrong notes or other problems or distractions. I have alluded to this in columns before, and it is something that is, stated simply, rather obviously necessary and good. However, continuing to play during practice (as opposed to performance, where it is also crucially important, but routinely recognized and considered obvious) seems to me to be of such great importance that I am tempted to describe it as being the most important thing about practicing—or the aspect of practicing that adds the most probability that the practicing will be effective. It is also not intuitively obvious to students that this makes a difference, and it is rather hard to do. I want to explore the reasons for this and to suggest strategies for helping students get comfortable implementing it. Not every student has a problem with this, so what I am writing applies to working with those who do.

Why this matters

The logical place to start is with a review of why and how this matters. First, although I mention “other problems or distractions” above, what I am really concerned with—the thing that has the potential to disrupt efficient learning—is the tendency to stop or hesitate upon perceiving a wrong note. Other distractions can be a problem, but they are easier to learn to ignore. In fact, as I will discuss next month, the ability to ignore other distractions can be cultivated as a help in learning to ignore one’s own wrong notes or other directly playing-related distractions. 

I want to start with some background. What is a wrong note? Why are we (and especially people who are learning or who are not yet secure about their abilities) so preoccupied with them? A wrong note is a note the pitch of which is wrong—different from what the printed music told us to play. (With keyboard instruments, we achieve this by pressing the wrong key—the matter of the pitch is categorical, no fudging.) Putting it this way is meant to highlight the following: that rhythm, sonority, timing, articulation, the role of the note in phrasing or the flow of a melody or the rhetoric of a passage can all be in place even if the “note” (pitch) is wrong. 

I recall my father telling me, a long time ago, probably when I was in high school, that Louis Armstrong—a hero of his—had once said “Play your wrong notes louder than your right notes.” To be honest, my attempts to do research about this have failed to find that quote or anything like it, from Armstrong or from anyone else who has come to the attention of search engines. At the time that I first heard it from my father, I assumed that it was a joke or meant to be sort of paradoxical or silly. Now I believe that it is quite serious, and should be taken to mean that if a note is “wrong” in some respect, probably pitch, but you are especially emphatic about making everything else about that note right, then the overall effect of that note can be surprisingly successful in spite of its “wrong”-ness. Indeed, it suggests that the main problem with wrong notes is that they induce timid, apologetic, or rhythmically inaccurate playing, not that they are themselves wrong. I think that this is extremely important, regardless of where that quote did or didn’t actually originate. Of course this is specifically  about the rhetoric of performance, not about practice.

The fact that a “wrong note” can be defined, detected, and measured is at least one principal reason that we as players (and perhaps as listeners) and our students place a strong value on them—albeit a negative one. If you play a piece and make no wrong notes, or three, or seven, or two hundred, then anyone can describe what was good or bad about the piece as to its wrong notes. Nothing else about performance, except tempo, can be measured as precisely. (And students are much less inclined to stop and go back because they hear their  articulation depart a little bit from what they intended, or that a mixture blends less well in the tenor register than they would like it to, or something else, than because they hear a wrong note. This kind of stopping happens, but it doesn’t happen very often.) 

It is probably this clarity that makes a wrong note during practice or during the moment when a student is playing a piece for the teacher so intrusive to the student’s concentration. Everything else is debatable; wrong notes are there on display. 

The main reasons that students give for stopping or hesitating at wrong notes are as follows:

1) I want you, the teacher, to know that I knew that that was wrong. Otherwise it’s  embarrassing.

2) The passage sounds better with the right notes (which it almost certainly does, of course) and I can’t stand not to hear it that way. 

3) I have just practiced it wrong, and I have to cancel out the negative effect of that by practicing it right, right away.

4) I actually can’t get to the next note correctly, because, as a consequence of    having played a wrong note, I am in the wrong position, or:

5) I simply don’t know where I am on the keyboard.

6) If I try to keep going I will make a string of further wrong notes. These are inexcusable, because I am making them knowingly.

And, not as a reason but as a sort of justification:

7) Of course I wouldn’t do that in a performance, but this is just a lesson run-through (or just practicing).

Each of these is inappropriate, though they are all psychologically very natural. Numbers 4, 5, and 7 are real technical points with which a teacher can help; the others are mental matters with which, I think, the teacher can also help.

First, as a matter of understanding and motivation, it is important to establish for a student why keeping the playing going is a good idea, or indeed a crucial practice. Part of this that is circular and experiential: it is a good idea because it makes practicing work better; if you start approaching your practicing and playing this way, you will learn your pieces more solidly and more quickly become a skillful and comfortable player. In other words, one practical effect of following this approach for long enough for it to start making a difference should be to convince the student that this approach is good. However, this is a sort of cart-before-the-horse motivation. It really amounts to saying “do this because I say to, and you’ll see later that it was a good idea.” There is often an element of this in teaching and learning, and that’s OK, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it too strongly.

The main way in which stopping on wrong notes and going back to repair them damages learning is that it takes focus away from what is coming up next. Some of the student’s concentration is always back on the last note, or the one before that, monitoring those notes for whether they were right or wrong, calculating whether or not to stop. This is not a small matter. I would say that for many students, more than half of their total attention at any given time is back on the last few notes of the passage. This can be enough that the student in effect just isn’t paying attention to the next bit: the bit that he or she should now be playing. Sometimes this is reflected in a student’s being unable to tell you what the next note was supposed to be. You can experiment with this: the next time that a student stops to go back to a wrong note (or hesitates substantially, or seems to be stopping to worry about a note that was just almost wrong), ask what the next note was supposed to be. The chances are the student won’t know. This can be a pretty compelling experience for the student. 

Focus and concentration

The notion that playing—practicing—requires full and genuine concentration is clear and convincing (in theory) to everyone. In fact, this is a sort of paradox that can be exploited fruitfully: students who are the most worried about and preoccupied with wrong notes are also likely to be those who are most convinced that what they are trying to do is hard and requires intense—even unrealistically intense—concentration. Simply pointing out and asking a student to notice and monitor how much focus is explicitly trained on what happened last and therefore lost to what should happen next can be powerful. Playing a passage with the conscious thought that “I am going to keep my eyes and mind focused on what is next” can feel very different from what the student is used to. It can feel dangerous, in a sense, as though walking a tight-rope. But it can also be liberating. (Of course, as an explicit thought held onto while playing, it is also potentially a distraction, so the hope is that it will become second nature.)

One way of describing the ideal location in time of a player’s focus is this: by the time the sound waves from the last notes have reached your ears, you are already so focused on what comes next that it would be impossible even to notice what happened with that last note. This is an exaggeration, of course, but still a useful image. There is also a good cautionary tale to be told. I have experienced more than one instance of a student’s stopping immediately after a note that was entirely correct because he or she had been expecting that note to be wrong, and had been in effect self-programmed to stop at that point. There can have been essentially no concentration on the next notes and on keeping the passage going.

A student who is convinced by this as a proposition will probably start to do it more of the time, and thus also begin to be convinced by the results. However, it is still important to deal with the specific concerns. This is some of what I say to a student about those concerns:

1) I will assume that you know that a wrong note was wrong, and in any case we can and will talk about it afterwards.

2) If you can’t stand to miss out on hearing a passage correctly, use that to motivate yourself to play as carefully and with as much attention as possible, so as to maximize the chance that you will hear yourself actually play it correctly. In fact, the sequence of making a wrong note, stopping, and playing a truncated version of what would have been correct is not the right thing anyway. 

3) For purposes of technical practicing, the wrong note–stop–play correct sequence is useless. The only way to counteract a passage that was off in some respect is to finish the passage and then, in an orderly way, practice it again. Practicing getting a note right must involve coming to that note from the place before it, where you would naturally be.

4) This is indeed a tricky one. If you have just played a wrong note, then the act of getting to the next note is different from what it should have been. On the other hand, it is actually impossible for it to be impossible. You may have to allow yourself to go on making wrong notes for a while, while you try to get back on track. You may very well have to change articulation and phrasing on the fly. If at all possible, try to judge by ear what the physical relationship is between the note that you should have played and the note that you actually heard yourself play and adjust accordingly. In a pinch, however, this is one situation in which glancing down at the hands can be the best solution. This should be done briefly—fleetingly—with proper attention to staying oriented on the printed music. 

5) If you feel completely at a loss as to where you are on the keyboard, then you  should certainly try to solve this by judicious looking. It is in general a good  idea not to look at the keyboard very much, and certainly not to become dependent on that for finding notes. However, in this case, it is clearly better than concluding that you have to stop.

6) As in #4 above, it is actually better to go on making a string of wrong notes than  to allow a wrong note to cause you to stop. It is actually a good practicing habit  in this situation to play any notes in the correct rhythm, keeping track of where you are supposed to be in the music, until you find a way back to the correct notes. In particular, this is much better than letting the initial wrong note derail you.

7) If you don’t practice keeping it going, you will not be able to keep it  going reliably in “real” performance!

To be continued . . . 

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. 

Organ Method XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hand Distribution III

Continuing our trek through the Alla Breve section of Bach’s D Major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 532—looking closely at issues involving hand distribution—we come to a brief section that is influenced by something other than the music itself:

Example 1 shows that if there were nothing else to think about, clearly there is reason not to distribute the two voices between the two hands. That is the first principle of hand distribution, after all. However, in most editions of this piece, there is a page turn right about here. Therefore, the player can gain a bit of ease with that page turn by taking all of these notes in one hand (most likely the right hand). It is entirely possible that the various editors have chosen to position these measures at a page turn in order to help out in this way. Of course, for a player who memorizes the piece this won’t matter in the long run, but it might still help during the learning process. 

This is a special case—sort of a diversion. In fact, analyzing it like this is a useful way to help a student to relax: talking about something practical and not artistically intense, but relevant. However, it is not an unreal concern, and there are other reasons for taking clusters of notes in one hand in order to deal with something else while playing. The main one is probably the act of changing stops. Even something as simple as grabbing all of the notes of the final chord of each verse of a hymn in one hand to change stops with the other is a branch of decision-making about hand distribution.

The rest of this Alla Breve section mainly presents the same issues that we have already seen, with perhaps a few twists. I will go through it all, but concisely, since it is more or less “review”. 

The next short passage (Example 2, measures 48–49) has an outer voice that is more active than the other voices. Therefore it will make sense to keep that voice by itself in one hand, for the most part. Some players may want to break up the middle voice by taking the d′ at the end of measure 48 in the right hand. There may be other modifications that could make sense, but tracking the entire middle voice in the right hand would significantly increase the difficulty of the passage.

Example 3 (measures 50–51) shows the next measure, which has an intricate middle voice. All of the notes of that voice can be reached by the right hand; however, it might make sense to take some or all of those notes that can also be reached by the left hand, to break up the physical act of combining that line with another. The candidate notes are probably the opening c#′, and the b and the a in measure 50.

The next, which is fairly lengthy, has the fast-moving figures in the upper voice. However, the two slower voices are not close enough to one another to be taken in the left hand, clearing the right hand just to track the intricate line (see Example 4, measures 52–59).

For most players, the easiest and most natural way to finger the passage will involve taking in the left hand all of the middle-voice notes that the left hand can actually reach, and taking the notes that the left hand cannot reach in the right hand. On the second quarter note of each of the odd-numbered measures, where the two higher voices come together, there is a special issue to think about. Which hand can best project to the listener the illusion that this is two notes, one of which moves away as part of the upper eighth-note line and one of which is part of the middle-voice quarter-note line? It is actually a trap in a spot like this to try to play the note with two fingers at once, one from each hand. (No one would suggest this on purpose, but students will indeed fall into doing it, probably through indecision.) The choice of hand (and finger) should be made clearly, even though it can be made either way.

For most of the next nine measures, there are no real questions to think about, either because the (manual) writing is in only two voices or because the balance of more intricate and simpler writing makes it clear. 

At measure 65 (Example 5) there is an interesting subtlety to examine. The middle voice takes over the note being held—presumably in the left hand—by the lower voice. Which hand should play the note? The left hand is right there, but with the “wrong” finger—since whatever finger is holding the note, the hidden repeated note will sound better if it is played with a different finger. This is not hard to manage. The articulation and timing of the move from the c#′ to the a in the middle voice might seem to be under more natural control if both those notes are played in the same hand. However, it is entirely possible to practice towards making that gesture effective across the two hands, as I will discuss below. It might seem better to take that eighth- note a with the left hand to give the right hand more time to get up to the c#′′ on the second quarter note of the measure. However, to me that “leap”—the tenth from the a to the c#′′ over the time-span of an eighth note—is the main reason to take the a in the right hand. The physical gesture of moving the right hand up the distance of that tenth will—like a bowing gesture in string writing—give the player the best chance of shaping the articulation and timing of the musical gesture in an effective and natural way.

At measure 69 (in Example 6) there is a brief passage in which any and all of the notes of the middle voice could be taken by either hand.

This is a good spot at which to remember once again that it doesn’t matter on which staff the notes are printed. The decision about which middle-voice notes to take in which hand should be based on comfort and logistics. This is not a bad time to mention that this will vary with the particular hand shapes of different players. For example, it is quite likely that a player with relatively short thumbs will gain more comfort from taking the d′ in measure 70 with the left hand than a player with relatively long thumbs will. 

Measures 71 through 78 display a texture in which the upper voice is mostly holding long notes, while the other two voices are fairly active. A sample of that passage is shown in Example 7.

It makes sense to take the eighth-note middle voice in the right hand, just accepting that one finger (the fifth finger) of that hand is unavailable since it has to hold long sustained notes. 

At measure 79 there is another opportunity to use hand distribution to make the playing of repeated notes sound natural, and to avoid letting those repeated notes disrupt the flow of the voices. My suggestions are indicated by letters, and are shown in Example 8.

The next complicated or involved spot begins at measure 89 (Example 9). This is a longer example of the sort of writing found at measure 36 and discussed in last month’s column. In this case, however, the eighth notes in the middle voice can all be reached by either hand. The player has a free choice as to which hand should play any of these notes and therefore what pattern to follow through the passage. The teacher’s role is mostly to point this out to the student, and to help the student notice the implications of different choices for hand position and articulation (and of course the implications of articulation preferences for hand distribution choices: the more interested a student is in playing the upper half-note line legato, for example, the more middle-voice notes the student will want to take in the left hand). I myself would probably take the third eighth note of each beat in the left hand—those that are a third higher than the lower voice left-hand notes, closest to them—and the others in the right hand. There are other ways to do it.

The next few measures (Example 10 measures 94–96) end the section of the piece that we are analyzing. Again, either hand can reach the middle-voice notes. Choices can be made based on the usual factors: closeness of notes to one another, hand position, and so on. However, this passage also has a special feature. A player might find that the shaping of the timing and articulation of the syncopations/suspensions in the upper voice feels more natural either 1) with those notes isolated on their own in the right hand, or 2) played with the middle-voice notes in the right hand, using a kind of rocking motion to reinforce the feeling of the pacing and articulation of those notes. This is an individual thing: I can easily imagine doing it either way.

When a student (or any player) has made all of the decisions about which hand should take which notes of a (middle) contrapuntal voice, and worked out the actual fingering, then the next step is to practice the passage in such a way that that voice sounds the way that the player wants it to sound. If the hand distribution and fingering are right (comfortable) then this should not be categorically different from practicing any other sort of passage. 

However, there is one concern. It is undeniably a little bit more difficult—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “less intuitive”—to shape the timing and articulation of the transitions from one note to the next in a contrapuntal voice when those notes are in different hands than when they are in the same hand. It is very important not to let this fact lead a player into making awkward hand distribution choices. (Sometimes it can and should influence those choices when other factors are fairly evenly split). But it should be kept in mind and addressed in practicing. 

The main way to address it is to practice that voice by itself, but split between the hands with the correct, worked-out fingering. This is partly physical practice, but even more it is listening practice. It is easiest to attune the ears to the flow of the line when the line is not covered by other notes, and this will make it easier to hear and follow the line in the context of the full texture. It is always straightforward to extract the line once the fingering process has been accomplished. It can be a good exercise for a student to write out—or type out—the line by itself, add the chosen fingerings, and practice it from that. However this is probably not necessary. 

For the bulk of this practicing it is important not to change the chosen fingering—and it is crucial not to do so accidentally or at random. (It is always OK to rethink fingering consciously, if there is a reason to do so.) It is also important to listen carefully during this practice to the transition moments, where the voice crosses from one hand to the other. It is possible, especially with a line that is physically not hard to play, to play short sections of the line in one hand at this stage to listen for the continuity, and then put it back into the correct (two-hand) fingering, trying to match the one-handed effect. It is probably a good idea not to do very much of this: just once or twice through a given short section of the line being practiced. If a student finds this to be disruptive (that is, if it is hard to go back to the fingering that is really being practiced after visiting the one-hand fingering) then he or she should not do it. 

When a student has practiced a line this way and is ready to put the whole texture back together, he or she should try at first to listen only to the line that passes between the hands and to pay no attention to the voices around it. (Unfortunately, it is impossible by definition to solo out this line, since in all of the passages of the kind that we have been studying both hands and all the voices are—and have to be—on one keyboard.) This is an exercise in focusing, and of course it can’t be achieved literally. You will always hear the other notes, but you should try to focus on the line that passes between the hands, to be conscious of that line and the sonority of all of its notes.

It can be a good exercise to take any line of music—say the top line of a hymn, or one voice of a two-part Invention, or a cantabile melody from the slow movement of a Mendelssohn sonata—assign it an arbitrary fingering that shifts back and forth between the hands, and practice that fingering. (The fingering can be worked out arbitrarily, but should be written in and not changed at random.) This is not to end up playing that line that way regularly, but as training in listening to and executing the transitions from one hand to the other.

Often the issue is not that of passing a line between the hands. In non-contrapuntal music, the question of how to divide the notes between the hands (assuming, as always in this context, that the whole texture is meant to be played on one keyboard) should usually be determined as simply as possible by trying out the physical comfort, simplicity, and convenience of any of the various possibilities. In fact, very often, just remembering that it is perfectly all right to distribute the notes between the hands however they fall most easily is the most important as well as the first step. The rest follows from that. 

It is interesting that the impulse to play upper staff notes in the right hand and lower staff notes in the left hand can be pervasive. I recently took part in a conversation about the wide left-hand chord on the fourth beat of measure 8 of the Widor Toccata (Example 11). For many players, it is impossible (or nearly so) to play all four notes of this chord in the left hand, and for even more players it is at least awkward. The player who initiated the discussion absolutely could not reach those four notes. Nonetheless, the conversation revolved around such issues as which note or notes it was best to leave out, or whether there was a solution based on arpeggiation, or whether Widor’s left hand was really big enough for him to be able to play this chord easily and nonchalantly. 

It took a while for someone to notice the obvious solution, namely that the highest note of the so-called “left hand” chord is within easy reach of the notes of the upper voice, and can perfectly well be played in the right hand. Doing it this way opens up some performance issues similar to some of those discussed above. The timing and articulation of that note must be just right, as a match to the other notes of the chord. That is intuitive if all of the notes of the chord are in the same hand—and less intuitive, more challenging, if the notes are split between the hands. This is analogous to the issues involved in passing a voice back and forth between the hands. It is also important to keep the articulation of the top line going the way you want it while adding an extra note for the right-hand thumb. A player who absolutely cannot reach the entire chord can take on the task of practicing to get these things right. A player for whom the chord is possible but awkward can decide where the balance lies as to what is easiest and what will give the best results. 

To look or not to look, part II

To recap from last month, it has been my observation that making a practice of looking at the hands or feet while learning to play the organ will hinder a student’s becoming comfortable at the instrument and of developing skill at playing. In some cases this practice actually prevents a prospective player from ever developing reliable facility and technique. At the same time, though, it is  natural and essentially universal for students to want to look at their hands or feet, and to do so quite a lot, often more than they know. 

This affects different students in different ways. Some people have been so systematic and efficient in their ways of practicing from when they first sat at a keyboard that they have, even very early on, no insecurity, very little tendency to make wrong notes, no tendency for the few wrong notes to throw off the rhythm or overall flow of the music, or to snowball out of control. These are likely to be students who did very little or no looking at the keyboard from the very beginning. On a basic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle, any student who presents a teacher with this situation doesn’t need help with the task that we are talking about here. 

Most students who come to an organ teacher, however, present a more mixed picture, in which wrong notes, insecurity about notes, and a habit of looking at the keyboards all play a part. This is true of students with plenty of talent and potential, as well as some whose potential has been well hidden by badly conceived habits and approaches. One crucial point is this: that some students who think that they are just plain not very good—and whose playing indeed presents as not very good—also think that they have to look at the keyboards a lot specifically to try to fight against being not very good. However, if they can be taught to stop looking at the keyboards, they will discover that their talent and potential are a lot better than they thought. The existence of this psychological trap or paradox is one of the main reasons that I think that this is so important.

Why look at a keyboard?

There are, I think, three specific reasons for looking at the keyboards that are different enough from one another for us to distinguish them. One of these is pure habit, probably driven by fear or insecurity, and sustained perhaps by never having thought about the issue. The next is the one that most people would cite as the main reason: namely, to find a note or notes when you know from the music or your memory what the note(s) should be. The third is to check that whatever you just played was right or was what you thought it was. Each of these might sometimes require a different approach.

What a teacher can do

Anyone who has read this column knows that I am not very big on prohibitions or rules. Although I often have no choice but to ask students to take my word at first about the benefits of not looking—because they have to try it in a pretty committed way before they will know from their own experience that it works—I do prefer to cajole them or persuade them as much as possible. For this purpose there are two things that I have tried that are always available to the teacher and that seem to be effective as starters. One is simply to notice how much a student is looking at the hands or feet, and let the student know. With a student who has not yet been consciously thinking about this subject, it is often sort of mind-boggling how much looking is going on: every note, every second or third note, twice a measure: things like this are quite common, and the student usually has no idea. Just pointing that out—which often is sort of intrinsically humorous and can always be done quite good-naturedly—can help inspire a student to want to reduce the reliance on looking. When a student is pretty much bobbing his or her head down to the keys and back up to the music with great frequency and doesn’t quite know that this is happening, it is probably something that is being done just as a habit. And because it is being done just as a habit, it is very likely not actually giving the student much information. If you stop the student on the way back up and ask what note he or she just found (by looking) and played, the student often won’t be able to answer. You are also likely to be able to find plenty of instances of the student’s looking down at the keys and making a wrong note anyway. It is a good idea to point this out to the student when you see it: it is pretty telling.

The second simple preliminary thing that the teacher can do is to choose a passage that the student has been a) playing with a lot of looking, and b) playing with a fair number of wrong notes, and ask the student to try it once without looking at all. The passage should be short, and should if possible be one that does not have any of the more plausible reasons for looking, like big leaps or chord shapes with awkward hand positions. When the student plays through this passage with a 100% not-looking approach, he or she will probably notice a few interesting things right away. First of all, it is hard to make oneself do this. A student who is really trying not to look at all may reduce looking from, say, two or three times a measure to once every two or three measures, but not likely to zero. This might reflect just old habit, and is worth pointing out. It might sometimes be a way of pinpointing the bits that are indeed harder to play without looking, or that seem that way. Only the student can really figure out which of these it is (since it is never clear to one person, even a teacher, what another person will find hard) and focusing on that is a useful exercise. 

Second, the student will observe that the wrong-note count goes down. Often it goes down dramatically; it almost always goes down some. (And that is without the student’s having had a chance yet to get used to this approach.) This is what people don’t expect, assuming, as we all tend to, that looking will reduce wrong notes. Therefore, it can be a powerful tool for convincing students that looking less or not at all is worth pursuing. Doing this with several passages, doing it from time to time—making a sort of deal: “just this once don’t even glance down at all, and we’ll see what happens”—is a good idea. Sometimes the result will be that most of the passage becomes more accurate, but that a spot or two will stubbornly remain inaccurate or get worse. This provides a reason to examine those passages—what is hard about them, are the planned fingerings and hand positions well thought out, are those plans really being carried out, and so on?

Speaking of doing this, or anything, “from time to time,” it is a good idea to remember that this isn’t something that must be changed or solved right away. It is unrealistic to expect that it can be. Any reduction in the amount of looking by a student who is over-relying on it is good; more should come as time goes by. I do sometimes say to a student something like “take a good look at those keyboards, ‘cause that’s the last time you will see them.” But that is just an attempt to keep the atmosphere light and relaxed. It is always a balancing act: focusing too intensely on something like not looking at the keyboards can distract from other things and can lead to tension (mental, perhaps leading to physical); however, thinking about it and working on it is important. The balance will have to be different for each student.

Additional suggestions

One approach that I have used to start working on this, either with a student who is really convinced or one who still needs persuading, is to suggest a quota for looking at the hands or feet. This seems silly, in a way; at the moment when I suggest it to a student, it actually often comes across as rather silly or funny. That’s one of its advantages—again, a relaxed atmosphere. The student may think that it is a joke, but it is a good, practical idea. 

With the passage in question, first ask the student to play through it once not looking at all, regardless of what seems to be happening. (If that goes really well, then that passage may not be the right one for this exercise.) If there are some rough spots or the student feels really uncomfortable with certain spots, ask the student to do one of the following: 1) Choose in advance a few places to look (maybe a number that averages once every five or six measures: not much more frequent than that). Try to base the choice on an estimate of where looking can be most helpful. Then play the passage moving in and out of the looking according to the plan. Or 2) Set a quota for looking—maybe six times in a short piece, or whatever seems fair—but then look at the hands or feet as it seems necessary along the way, trying not to use up the quota too quickly.

The more planned—not just habitual—the looking is, the more likely it is that the student will actually get something out of it. Both forms of the quota exercise will help the student make looking count: that is, really know what notes should be played, and then really find them with the eyes. (Note that these quota approaches tend to get the student looking to find notes, not looking to check on the notes just played.) The first approach makes this happen most efficiently, since it analyzes which notes the student thinks that he or she will have to look for. The second approach is more of a motivator. Since the looking quota shouldn’t be squandered, the student will want to use it well. 

The drawback to looking

Looking to find notes is usually unnecessary and introduces tiny delays that undermine the overall sense of rhythm. Looking to check on the notes just played should be rarely necessary, if ever. It introduces really serious delays, since the process of checking visually on what notes were just played and comparing that to a sense of what the notes should have been takes a long time. 

This looking to check is something that reflects a student’s low assessment of his or her abilities. That is, the student doesn’t realize that he or she knows by ear what the right notes should be. In general, if we know a passage of music, we also know what isn’t in that passage: if something is wrong we will probably hear it. This doesn’t happen all of the time, even with experienced and accomplished players, but it happens more of the time for inexperienced players than they may realize. Most people would know immediately if they heard a wrong note in, say, The Star Spangled Banner, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, or Jingle Bells—or any number of other tunes and pieces of music. You do not need to be a beginner at playing music, let alone experienced or “advanced,” to recognize rightness or wrongness of notes in a piece that you have heard a few times. This assumes paying attention—both when first hearing the piece a few times, and when playing through it and being on the lookout for wrong notes. This is all part of the process of getting to know pieces and plays out a bit differently from one student to another and from one piece to another. Most students, especially beginners, underestimate their own ability to know whether they are playing what they want to have played and do unnecessary looking to compensate for that. Even if a student must stop and think about whether what was just played was correct, it is worth challenging that student to make that judgment by ear not by eye, if at all possible.

Looking versus not looking

Here’s a good exercise for getting a vivid sense of the difference between looking and not looking—the difference in how it feels to the player. This is not just for beginners or students. As with many efficient exercises, it is mostly just a way of clearing the mind and looking at something as simply as possible. Take a very short passage, perhaps just a measure or two, plus the next downbeat—or any short unit that makes sense. It should be one that you know well. This particular exercise is more focused (or at least easier) with a passage that is either manuals-only or a pedal solo. It should not be difficult or present any virtuosic challenges. Play the passage a few times in a row, keeping your eyes on the music in a way that is almost exaggeratedly focused. Actually say some of the letter names as you go. (I get something out of opening my eyes extra wide for this purpose, as if I were doing a comic turn as someone looking astonished.) Then, look the passage over and start playing it, keeping your eyes only on the keyboard. This will only work completely if you have the passage memorized. If you need to glance up at the music, go ahead. Make sure to remind yourself exactly where on the page the passage is, so that you can get right to it if you need to glance up. Do this several times in a row. Now play the passage several times in a row alternating—one time to the next—between looking only at the music, and looking only at your hands. By now you will probably have the passage memorized if you didn’t already, so you shouldn’t have to glance at the music much, if at all. The memorization is the main reason for keeping the passage short. If the passage is well memorized, you can add this in: play it with your eyes closed! This can feel a bit tightrope-like, and can really intensify the focus on the mental side of not looking. In what ways do these modes of playing feel different to you? Are there differences in security? In how well you can listen while playing? In what you think the effectiveness of the playing to a listener would be?

After you have subjected a passage to this treatment, you will know it very well and can use the same passage for this trickier exercise in looking. Play the passage, and go back and forth from looking at the music to looking at your hands or feet at random times. This is the very thing that I am suggesting that we should mostly not do (but especially not do while learning). The reason for doing it here is to practice getting back to the same place in the music that you have just left, smoothly and without delay. For me the trick to this is in knowing an instant before I am going to look down that I am about to do so, and sort of memorizing my place on the page. Then the gesture of looking down should be light and quick, and the return to the music should be governed in part by the physical feeling of return rather than by reading the music to find the spot. At least that’s how it seems to me. Play around with it and see what you think.