On Teaching

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.

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 . . . 

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.

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 by e-mail at [email protected].

Recording Notes III

Before my Frescobaldi recording sessions began, I found my thoughts drifting to the golf course, as they often do. For better or worse, we had scheduled the sessions for a time of year when being out on the golf course is at its nicest: early spring, not too hot or cold, no fear of snow or hurricanes. This is not just coincidence. That kind of weather is also best for location recording. Our venue is an old, modernized barn out in the country. It has thick walls—pretty good for keeping out noise and for keeping the climate stable, but not as perfect for either as an actual studio might be. It’s nice to record at a time when we don’t need heat or air conditioning—when, if we turn off the refrigerator in this barn to get rid of its noise, the items in it won’t heat up too promptly, with a good chance there won’t be thunder, and so on. But though it’s nice to be recording then, it’s also tempting not to be recording, not to be indoors.

So back to the golf course. It occurs to me that the concept of the “mulligan” has something to say about the recording process. For those who don’t know, a mulligan is a shot that does something that the golfer doesn’t like—gets the golf ball into a bad situation or causes the ball to be lost altogether—and that the player then decides not to count. It is a “do-over.” It is a violation of the formal rules, a form of cheating, strictly speaking. It is also a common informal practice and one that isn’t necessarily unethical—isn’t really cheating if you have agreed with anyone against whom you are playing that you will let one another do it. I have never allowed myself to take mulligans, not because I am temperamentally devoted to rules—which I am not—but because I find that a commitment to counting every shot helps me focus on my shot-making in the way that I want and strive to do. A little voice in my head telling me that if I don’t like the shot I won’t count it would undermine what I am trying to work on when I play golf.

So, with its theoretically endless possibilities for editing, is the recording process a cornucopia of mulligans? There’s always a chance for a do-over. As I wrote back in June, editing is a defining characteristic of recording. Endless mulligans without penalty. Can I learn anything about performance during recording sessions and about the editing process from my feeling about mulligans or from thinking about what the differences are between those situations? The difference is this: that the legacy of any one trip through the golf course or through a particular hole is the awareness and then the memory of what happened. The legacy of the recording process is the artifact that results from it. If I try a certain golf shot a dozen times and lose the ball on the first eleven, only to finally get it right on the twelfth, then that story is the story of what happened, regardless of whether or not I call most of those shots mulligans and don’t write the big number of strokes on my scorecard. If I try a passage in a piece that I am recording a dozen times and only get it the way I want it on the last of those times, then I have still fully succeeded in getting it the way I want it. No compromise, and no one needs to know how long it took! If I am afraid that on the golf course a willingness to take mulligans would make it hard for me to focus and concentrate the way I want, then in the recording studio, where repeated takes and editing possibilities are useful, good, and necessary, then I must be sure that the opportunity to try things over and over again doesn’t also make me lose focus.

I will now turn to my daily notes.

Day 1

I am heading to a rural spot in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about an hour from my house, where I will record ninety minutes or so of Frescobaldi keyboard music on a seventeenth-century Italian harpsichord. The venue is the same one where I recorded The Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords with my colleague and former student George Hazelrigg several years ago. George is serving as recording engineer and producer for this project, and he will also help with the tuning and general care of the harpsichord during the sessions. 

The instrument is in my car on this drive, and we will begin by getting it inside and setting everything up. Since this instrument is so old and utterly irreplaceable, I am glad it is not raining. It is out of the question to get any rain on this harpsichord, even at the cost of delaying the start of things. I am not saying that I need to be especially careful with this instrument on the grounds that it is particularly fragile. It really isn’t: it is remarkably sturdy and stable. It’s important that it not suffer any damage or stress. 

Moving the harpsichord inside goes very smoothly. Since we have used this space before, we have a sense of where it might be best acoustically and logistically to place the harpsichord. The process of setting up recording equipment and generally preparing the room—which is mostly about noise, turning off appliances, and so on—serves to give the instrument time to relax and get used to the room. This is a very stable harpsichord and doesn’t seem to change at all from being driven about or from being placed in a new space. I’m not talking about tuning: every harpsichord is perpetually going out of tune and needing to be tuned, whether it is being moved or not.

Microphone placement: this is important, but until the day’s work was over, I had no idea how important. To make a long story less long, it took the whole day. To start with, we placed the microphones that we had decided to use in a position that made sense. (I wanted the sound to be a bit less dry than the sound of The Art of the Fugue recording, so our starting point had the microphones a bit farther out from the instrument than what we had done in that session.) I played a bit, and we listened to the results. It sounded good, but maybe not quite exactly what we wanted. We moved the mics around, changing distance and angle, playing, listening, conferring. After a while the more professional recording-oriented ears in the room began to feel that what we felt lacking in these various samples was caused by an over-sensitivity of the microphones to a somewhat bass-heavy quality in the room. So we switched to a pair of microphones that we had earlier considered for the project, but initially decided against. We then spent another long while placing them in many different ways. We even tried unconventional placements in which the mics were quite far apart or on different sides of the instrument. 

This was all fascinating and fun. It gave me a chance to practice the same short passage over and over again and to get used to playing in that room. It also allowed the nervous side of my character to fantasize that this would actually go on forever, and that I would never have to buckle down to the business of playing and recording for real. 

However, the most interesting thing was this: the instrument sounded really different depending on which microphones we used and how we placed them. One of the criteria that we used in trying to decide what was best was how much we thought that what we heard through the speakers with each attempt reminded us of what the instrument sounded like in person. (And I think that in the end we did a good job of that.) But it was made vivid to me that the recorded sound of an instrument is in part a construct, not an objective fact. This ties in with the set of questions about whether a recording is a document or “record” of something in the world outside that recording or an object of its own, an artistic artifact to be understood on its own terms. There is no conflict between these things philosophically for me with respect to this project in particular, since the authentic, accurate sound of this particular harpsichord is magnificent. I take it for granted that the more accurately we represent the sound, the better it is likely to come across artistically for most listeners. But it is quite telling to be reminded and to have it demonstrated so vividly that the sound as it comes across on the recording is something that we have very purposefully constructed and taken quite a while to construct.

Day 2

This day I am thinking about the nature of the seclusion that I need to record. When I am teaching or writing, I can and do take breaks in which I interact with the world. In between lessons I will check my phone or, if there is enough time, go for a walk or do an errand, or whatever presents itself. If someone I know is present in another part of the church where the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio is located, I might go chat. In between bursts of writing a column I will orient my computer to the outside world and check the news, my e-mail, or Facebook. These breaks recharge my concentration, and I never have any trouble shifting back from such things to the focus on teaching or on writing. For the recording project, however, I find that I want to feel sequestered or secluded. I want the hour of driving to the venue to feel like it is taking me away from all of the interactive electronics and even from interactions with people. I want to be heading towards a sort of cloister. I am not sure why this difference exists, but I feel it very vividly. 

I have not brought my computer, and I find that I can detach myself enough from the world to restrict checking my phone to about twice during the seven-hour recording session. No one has called.

Today we are doing the pieces that I want to play on two 8′ stops. This instrument has two 8s, like most Italian harpsichords. However, there is no working stop mechanism. In concert it is effectively impossible to change stops. Every time that I have used this instrument in live performance I have had to decide in advance whether to use both 8s or only one of them for the whole event. For the recording we can remove and replace jacks between pieces. Of course for efficiency we don’t want to do that more often than is necessary. So part of my preparation has been to decide in advance on the registration for each piece and to use that in determining recording order: 2x8′ pieces first, then the pieces for one of the 8′ stops, then the pieces for the other. This does misrepresent what the instrument can and can’t do. It does not misrepresent what an instrument of this sort might possibly do, or what this instrument could be made to do if I were willing to alter it. This ties in with the questions about the documentary nature of a project like this.

I feel that I have done a medium-level job at best of relaxing while I play. I am trying too hard to get everything right: notes, ornaments, and interpretive gestures. I am letting a focus on those things cause me to tense up a bit. I think that this becomes less of a problem with successive takes of the same passage. Will the later takes indeed tend to sound the best? Will this slight tension also get better over the longer scale on successive days?

Day 3

On the way to the sessions today I am thinking about what to listen to in the car. Is there anything I can do with the car sound system that will get me to the barn in the right frame of mind to play? Probably not the radio (in keeping with the cloister idea). Music? What kind? Feeling unsure about that, I am trying the nothing solution, leaving the sound off and trying to hear my own music in my head. 

I am thinking about a question that is of importance to the outcome of this whole project: the matter of evenness of voicing. Should every note feel and sound the same as to dynamics? It is a theory of mine that, especially with harpsichords that have a crisp and robust sound as this one does, a bit of unevenness in voicing is actually good, that it gives extra life and fluidity to the overall effect. It has to be kept within certain bounds: there is such a thing as too uneven. But I like more unevenness than some people would. I have definitely decided to treat the instrument this way for this project. (I did the voicing and regulation myself.) Essentially I voice the instrument to the point where all it needs is a final refinement. Then I don’t do that refinement. How will that sound for the microphones? There certainly won’t be time to make wholesale changes. That is the approach to which we are committed. 

Day 4

Continuing about voicing: when I am going to play on the two 8′ stops together I like to achieve the net sound and feel of each note with somewhat of a random difference in the balance of the two stops. That is, one note may be 55% one stop and 45% the other, another note may be 52%/48%, or exactly even. This creates a pleasing variety of color up and down the keyboard for the 2x8′ sound. However, as we take the jacks of one 8′ stop out to record on the other, I am reminded that for use alone that stop is a bit too uneven, even for me. So a small amount of voicing is needed. I have to be quite aware of getting back into the sequestered player mode once I have dealt with the voicing. 

At one point today, April 21, 2016, George looks up from his computer and tells me that Prince has died. The world is there regardless of how sequestered I want to feel. The thought comes to me that he is another person about whose work I will probably find out more now that he is gone than I knew while he was alive. (I certainly had no hostility towards his work. I just had never happened to get into it much.) And that puts me in a similar relationship to him that I am in perforce with the Baroque composers whose music I play. 

Today I suspect that a couple of the pieces will work as single takes. However, that brings to mind an old question. It seems fine to me, normal, probably necessary, to use editing to lower the level of tension during sessions, so that any little glitch need not feel like an emergency. However, how should editing then be used to create the final result? If I have a take that went well and that I like, should I look for other takes that have even more effective versions of some passages and build up a sort of super-performance made up of the very best bits of different takes? Or should I just use editing to get around real problems, but fundamentally let performances be what they were on the day as much as possible? Is one of those better philosophically? Will one of them lead to a better finished product?

Day 5

We have had a lot of noise over the last few days, mostly airplanes. That, plus other issues like time spent tuning and the decision to do lots of takes—partly of necessity when things have gone wrong, partly for safety and to provide more choice—is going to lead us to leave out a couple of short pieces. My starting list was very long: much too long for a CD, and about 50% more music than I have recorded for any of my previous projects. The remaining music is still too much for a CD.

Today I feel noticeably more relaxed, better able to play as I would in a normal concert for which I felt well prepared. This has probably been sneaking up on me throughout the week. I am presumably noticing it because we are almost done. I would quite like to go back and re-do the rest of it with this feeling. Will pieces recorded today sound more relaxed? 

Conclusion

There is no conclusion. That’s all for now about this experience. I will edit the pieces over the summer, and we will see what sort of dissemination seems best. You can find a couple of pieces (lightly edited, not necessarily identical to what I will consider the final release) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELHjLVh1hlk.

Next month I will return to the directly pedagogic!

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. During the 2014–2015 concert season he will be presenting a series of five recitals at the Center offering a survey of great 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 e-mail at [email protected].

Several of my columns in the latter half of 2014 had their subject matter determined by things that had happened recently involving my own students and their lessons. This set of (two) columns also falls into that category. Over the last few months, three different new students have told me in our initial discussions that they needed to learn sight-reading or that they wanted to become better at it. The progress of those conversations and then the work that each of those students and I have done together—some of it focused on sight-reading—have caused me to think about that subject and to marshal some of my ideas about it in a column. This is another one of those areas that I have not addressed systematically before, though it is a central enough part of what people think about while working on playing that it has come up indirectly from time to time.

Some of the questions that I want to think about are: 1) What is sight-reading and what do people—students in particular—think that it is? 2) What are its uses and to what apparent uses should it (usually) not be put? 3) What is the role of sight-reading in learning pieces? and, finally, 4) What are some of the ways that sight-reading can be practiced systematically? I should first mention—or really confess—that I think I have always undervalued sight-reading. Or, at least, I have always focused too much on the ways in which the practice has been abused or overused and not enough on the ways in which it can be useful or can form a part of artistic development. And I will further confess that the reason for this is probably that I was, in the early to middle stages of my life as a musician, a really bad sight-reader. In my very early years of organ study—my mid-teens—I was such a bad sight-reader that I went through life feeling chronically mortified by that fact, and would (to avoid discovery) never venture upon sight-reading anything, however simple, if anyone could hear what I was doing. I needed the solitude of the empty church late at night. I was so nervous about sight-reading that I couldn’t approach it in anything like a fruitful state of mind. Since that time, I have become a fairly good sight-reader. It’s not one of my particular strengths, but I am at least average for a professional keyboard player: significantly better than average with music that belongs to a style or genre with which I am very familiar, a bit less than average, probably, with types of repertoire with which I am generally less engaged as a performer. This contrast is quite normal, and I will discuss it more later on. My own improvement as a sight-reader has come on my own watch, since it happened when I was already an adult and a professional performer. (It is also ongoing: I am a better sight-reader now than I was a year or two ago.) That means that I have a pretty good idea of what I was able to do to make that improvement happen, and that informs the way I organize my efforts to help students with sight-reading.

It was of great interest to me that each of the students who recently asked me about sight-reading actually meant something different by it. At one end of the spectrum was the use of the term to mean just being able to learn pieces from notation at all. That is, “reading” and feeling comfortable with the process of moving from a slow and perhaps halting first reading to secure performance. At the other end was what I would call real or hard-core sight-reading: putting on the music desk the score of a piece that you have actually never seen, played, or heard before and playing it without needing to stop. (There is one nuance to this that is worth commenting on: that the purest form of sight-reading is indeed of something that you haven’t even heard. If you have heard a piece then, to some extent, small or large, playing by ear will come to the assistance of the actual reading at sight. Though a departure from what might be called “theoretically pure” sight-reading, this is something that helps with a lot of real-life sight-reading when the player is in fact familiar with the piece by ear, as often happens.)

In a sense these distinctions are just semantic. We can use the word “sight-reading” to mean only what I am calling the “hard-core” thing and then use other words to refer to other aspects of playing music from notes. This more or less doesn’t matter, as long as it is clear what is meant in any context. However, with one of the students referred to above, I did waste a bit of time talking about approaches to what I meant by sight-reading, when what he wanted was various hints about how to read more efficiently as part of the process of learning a piece. It is important to know what you are aiming to practice—or asking a student to practice. If the goal is to practice real sight-reading, then, strictly speaking, a passage can only be used once for that practice. After that it is no longer sight-reading in the strict sense. It is important to get this straight with students. I have seen students (and myself, long ago) think that they were practicing sight-reading when they were really just practicing a piece—or perhaps not really practicing effectively at all. 

Sight-reading of some sort is a usual part of the learning process. That is, when you first undertake a new piece, you have to get your awareness of what the notes are supposed to be from something, and that something is usually the printed page. There will be a time when you read through some components of what you are trying to learn for the first time. This is a sort of sight-reading. (This is not the case for people who play by ear—which is rare in “classical” music—or who memorize pieces at the desk before sitting down to play: also rare.) One difference between this kind of reading (initially at sight) to begin learning a piece and sight-reading as such is that it is not cheating—and is in fact better, with the possible exceptions that I discuss below—for the former to be prepared reading. Ideally before starting to play a piece to learn it, a student should look it over, perhaps subject it to some sort of analysis, perhaps think about fingering and pedaling issues even before coming to the instrument—although that has to be rather abstract and held onto lightly. Then the first actual reading of the piece at the instrument should often be in component parts: separate hands, pedals alone—maybe even separate feet—short passages. Those component parts should be repeated a lot, right off the bat, taking the student farther and farther from sight-reading the passage. 

The role of hard-core sight-reading is real but quite circumscribed when the project is to work carefully on learning a piece. It could be described as fleetingly sight-reading some components of the piece, not as sight-reading the piece. I think that it is a bit of confusion about this that leads some students to feel some or all of the following: 1) I am not a good sight-reader, so I can’t learn pieces well; or even 2) I can’t become a good player at all; or 3) I didn’t succeed in sight-reading this piece well first thing, so I can’t learn it, or at least it will be disproportionately hard. None of these actually follow from anything about a student’s sight-reading of a particular piece or that student’s sight-reading in general. 

What about the role of sight-reading in the learning process for someone who is a good, advanced sight-reader? This is where opportunities and dangers come in. It also requires some clarification about what a good sight-reader is, or at least how that concept ties in with learning pieces. It seems to me that there is a continuum for each person as to how “sight-readable” something is and as to how the sight-readability relates to the learning process. Every person who can read music has some keyboard pieces that he or she can sight-read. For example, just to start at one extreme, see Example 1.

This “piece” could be sight-read by anyone. Of course this is, in a sense, absurd, but it is a jumping-off point. As pieces get more complicated—more real—the universe of people who could sight-read them accurately and comfortably gets smaller. If a student or any player can honestly sight-read a given piece accurately, securely, and comfortably, then that person can consider starting the process of learning that piece by sight-reading it and then continuing to read through it. This can involve skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart, and that can be all right. The important thing is the honesty—honesty with one’s self. 

This example may be officially twice as complicated as the above, but almost no one who has ever played a keyboard instrument would need to practice it with separate hands (see Example 2). 

Some people would need to separate the hands, at least briefly, for this “piece” (see Example 3)—and so on. 

As I said, if you are working on a piece that is well within the range in which you can sight-read it easily, then you can consider skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart. Someone who is an advanced sight-reader will have that option with a greater proportion of the repertoire—maybe most of it. This is a great time-saver, and for that reason it is useful and enviable. It also creates a temptation to perform pieces that the player simply doesn’t know very well—that is, doesn’t know very well interpretively, analytically, rhetorically. Is this a problem? Sometimes so, sometimes not, most likely. This is another area where there is no substitute for self-honesty, though for a performer who is tempted to play pieces for listeners on an essentially sight-read basis, it might be important to get feedback from trusted listeners about the artistic results, so that the self-honesty can be well-informed. 

I have two anecdotes about this aspect of the subject. 1) I once decided to play a piece in recital without having practiced it at all. It was one of the Frescobaldi hymn settings from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas. I did this as an experiment, after looking the piece over—away from the keyboard—just enough to feel certain that I could manage the notes that way. The goal of the experiment was to see whether the result could feel and sound more like an improvisation, and the experiment was inconclusive. The notes were no problem: I had guessed right about that. I noticed neither more nor less freshness and spontaneity—which is what I had been looking for—than I would normally expect out of my playing. This is music that is squarely in the middle of what I know best and perform most effectively, and it came out fine, but nothing special. However, I did sort of betray some at least subconscious concern on my own part because I had the thought afterward that if I ever had occasion to record that piece, I’d better get to know it better! 2) Someone I know who was present for a certain major recording project reported to me that the virtuoso harpsichordist making the recordings had played approximately one-third of the pieces by sight-reading them during the recording sessions. This was, of course, an all-time all-star sight-reader: the repertoire was not simple. My informant maintained that he could tell listening to the finished product which pieces were sight-read and which had been prepared. The latter, he felt, were categorically more convincing, the former accurate but kind of stiff. Of course this is not a blind or controlled study: there’s no way to confirm it or refute it.

Probably a really advanced sight-reader, or anyone dealing with a piece that is very well below his or her threshold for comfortable sight-reading, should feel free to start the learning process by sight-reading the whole texture of a piece, but slowly—distinctly slower than the fastest tempo that won’t fall apart, with the kind of focus that characterizes good sight-reading (which I will talk about next month) and with a willingness to go back to taking things apart if it starts to seem like a good idea. Anyone who is a very advanced, comfortable, reliable sight-reader has to be especially conscientious about studying a piece thoroughly alongside the process of simply reading the notes (with an ease that is enviable to the rest of us). This can include paper analysis, careful listening while playing—perhaps sometimes focusing on specific things, say the inner part of the texture, or the left hand, or the slower notes—and an optional taking apart of the texture, for example playing separate voices in contrapuntal music or playing hands separately not to learn notes, but to listen. 

To be continued next month.