On Teaching

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. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Memorization
I ended last month’s column with a list of some ideas about memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the keyboards. This month and next I will focus on the pros and cons of memorization as a learning tool. That is, I want to consider ways in which working on memorization—or not working on memorization—can help the teaching and learning process, and what can be learned from thinking about the phenomenon of memorization, whether a student memorizes music for performance or not. I will also consider the role of sight-reading, or reading in general, in performance, and how reading relates to knowing a piece thoroughly and well. I want to start with a brief account of my own history with memorization. This, of course, affects my thinking about memorization in general, as does the whole range of experiences of my students—and other students whom I have observed—over the years.

Personal experience
I have, to put the punch line first, done very little public performance from memory over the years. I have actually never played a piece in concert or in a recording session from memory. When I was applying to graduate school at Westminster—it was 1983—I had to play my audition partly from memory. This was a requirement for the organ performance program, though not for organists applying to the church music program. I was unaccustomed to memorizing, and I worked very hard at it. In the end, at the audition, I had a brief memory slip or two, from which I recovered fairly well. During my years in that graduate program, I also had to play a jury or two from memory. The experience was similar: that is, I worked very hard on the memorization, had a few brief memory slips, and more or less got through it.
Meanwhile, the rules of the organ performance program at Westminster, at the time I was a student, stated that I would have to play my master’s recital entirely from memory. Entering that program as someone who had done little or no work on memorization prior to my audition, I had no idea how I would manage to cope with that requirement. Either I would work very hard at it and hope that it went well—better, I would have hoped, than the audition or the juries, since noticeable memory slips in concert would have felt quite bad—or I would hope for some sort of miracle. That miracle came when the department decided to change the requirement. We were now allowed to choose either to give one recital from memory, or two playing from the scores. I chose the latter, which, among other things, permitted me to take on the challenge of learning The Art of the Fugue and playing it as one of those recitals. I could not even have considered trying, at that point in my life, to memorize something that long and complex.
Since the last of those juries that I played as a graduate student, I have not played a piece from memory with anyone listening. Clearly this means that I do not believe that memorization is a necessity for good performance: if I did believe that, then either I would have memorized repertoire for all these years or I would have been taking, and would still be taking, an ongoing blow to my self-esteem.
Furthermore, it would be hypocritical of me to believe that we teachers ought to expect—let alone force—our students to memorize. Indeed, after many years of teaching and playing, I cannot see any good reason to expect students or any players to perform repertoire from memory. This is, of course, a fairly extreme statement about a more or less “hot button” topic, and I hold onto it lightly: that is, while I feel quite convinced about this view, I am also open to being persuaded otherwise at some point. I have not been persuaded yet, though, in spite of both generally paying attention to writing and teaching on the subject and having conducted a review of the literature in preparation for writing this column.

The case against memorization
It makes sense to me that, in spite of the very strong tradition of memorization in piano playing and the weaker but persistent tradition of memorization in organ playing, the burden of proof must fall on the side of maintaining that performing from memory is necessary. This is in part because it is usually extremely time consuming. If I am going to ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time on anything—time which could be spent, among many other things, on learning and performing more pieces—then there must be a very good reason for it.
However, I have seen the imposition of a need to memorize do actual harm. Literally all of the auditions, juries, and student recitals that I have ever heard that were performed from memory have included memory slips—sometimes small, sometimes large—or passages that were clearly executed in a tight, hesitant way because of fears about memory. This is perhaps a small sample size, but it has been so consistent that it strongly reinforces my belief that if students are required to play from memory, the benefits of doing so must be unambiguous and compelling. I have also seen students do what I would have had to do with The Art of the Fugue if I had been required to play my degree recital from memory: that is, avoid certain pieces that they would really like to play because those pieces seem daunting to memorize. Many students go around in a constant state of tension and anxiety because of concern about memorization. And, worst of all, some people decide that they cannot aspire to be performers at the highest level because they do not—rightly or wrongly—believe that they could confidently perform from memory.

Is there a case for memorization?
Of course, playing music and being a performer is difficult and can be nerve-racking. But is the extra difficulty and tension caused by memorization justified? How good are the reasons for asking students to play from memory?
Some of these reasons are, it seems to me, either essentially stylistic or just practical and arguably rather superficial: that it looks more professional, that it saves the inconvenience of having to use a page turner, that if you use music you will feel like or look like a “student”, that memorization will save you if the music blows off the music desk, that it will enable you to give a recital at a moment’s notice when you are away from your library of printed music, that it will permit you to play at a social occasion at which you were not planning to play. (These specific reasons actually constitute the majority of what I have seen mentioned about the subject in my recent review of Internet-based discussions.) Some people mention that if a piece is fully memorized, it becomes easier to look steadily at the hands and feet and to look to find pistons, stop levers, etc. This is interesting and has more musical/technical substance to it than some, and I will discuss it more later.
However, the main claim for memorization is that only by memorizing a piece can you learn it really thoroughly. This claim takes several forms. The most direct is that it is only through the techniques of memorization that a piece can really be learned—that is, that experience shows that only after doing the kinds of things that lead to a piece’s being memorized will you really know the piece inside and out. Another claim, turning things the other way around, is that if a player engages in the act of learning a piece really thoroughly then he or she will indeed, almost automatically, have memorized it: therefore playing from the score is seen as a sign that the player can’t have learned the music very well. Both of these ideas have been incorporated into the ways that some people talk about learning and playing music. I have seen phrases like “learn the piece inside and out, backward and forward” used as a synonym for “memorize the piece.” I have encountered as a sort of aphorism: “get the music into your head and your head out of the music.” Indeed, in some circles, and in particular at certain times in music history, “learn a piece” has been used as a synonym for “memorize a piece.”
Furthermore, of course, we normally use the language in which we talk about performances or performers to imply, without necessarily having made a considered judgment about it, that playing from memory is playing of a higher order. “She was the first to play the works of so-and-so from memory,” “he had memorized such-and-such repertoire by the time he was 14.” Feats like this are impressive because they are difficult, and there is no reason not to acknowledge the work of people who accomplish them. (By the way, however, they also get more notice than they might otherwise, simply because they can be described objectively. If we try to say that “she was the first to play the works of so-and-so in an absolutely riveting manner” there is no way to establish objectively that this is actually true.) We are still just slipping around the question of whether playing from memory is in any way better—or, for our purposes here, whether asking students to play from memory really helps them to become better players.
Some observers report seeing performers—both students and others—playing pieces with their eyes intently, almost frantically, following the music, clearly needing that music to teach them the notes as they play. In fact, most of us know that this is common, that it always creates bad and insecure performances, and that it is a sign of poor preparation. However, in itself this doesn’t prove or even really suggest that performing from memory is the solution to this problem, although it points to the fact that some people misuse the circumstance of playing from music.

The bottom line of learning
So this all comes back to the same thing: that anyone who wants to play a piece should take on the responsibility of learning that piece extremely thoroughly, and that anyone who wishes to become an accomplished player must get into the habit of studying all pieces thoroughly and well. Much of what I have written about over the last several years—in particular the methods of analyzing and learning counterpoint and the technique of paying attention to elements, small or large, that recur in any piece—has been geared towards helping people to know their pieces very well musically by the time that they have learned the notes. Much of the rest of what I have written—about pedal learning, slow practicing, paying attention to hand choices and more—has been geared towards making sure that the physical side of playing will be secure enough that a player can take advantage of what he or she has learned by getting to know the piece really well, that is, not be distracted from it by physical problems or insecurity.
It seems to me that anyone with good practice habits and good physical technique who has put in the time to study a piece thoroughly will end up being able to play that piece from the score as well as anyone could play it from memory. Therefore my own approach—the bargain I would make with my students, so to speak, is this: that there should be no compromise on studying the music in depth, including taking things apart contrapuntally and motivically, noticing harmonic patterns, recurring rhythms, changes in texture, in what order voices enter, playing hands separately when that seems like a good idea for technical or musical reasons, and so on; but that this intense study should be for its own sake and for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of leading to full memorization.
Those who advocate memorization are right that the greatest source of wrong notes, insecurity, and hesitant, unconvincing playing is not knowing what is coming up next. Too strong a reliance on reading—only half-learning a piece and expecting to fill in the rest by quasi-sight reading in performance—is a trap into which many of us fall, experienced players as well as students. It does not often result in good performances. I would suggest avoiding that trap in the most direct way—by insisting to one’s self and to one’s students that pieces be studied thoroughly and carefully. It is, looking at it one way, overkill and perhaps a distraction to relate that process of thorough study to the act of playing from memory. The opposite of reading a piece that is ill prepared is, I would say, reading a piece that is extremely well prepared.
For some people, the act of studying a piece well will indeed lead naturally and apparently automatically to the musical text of the piece actually being memorized and the printed music’s becoming unnecessary. There is, most obviously, nothing wrong with this. However, there is also nothing wrong with the more common scenario in which even very thorough study of the music does not lead to real, note-perfect memorization. I would encourage teachers and students to be comfortable with that.
Next month I will continue this discussion, talking about some of what I consider to be beneficial ideas that have arisen from the tradition of memorization, such as studying music away from the keyboard, and also discussing the role of sight reading, some of the pitfalls that reading presents, and ways to avoid them.

§

On a completely different matter: I have recently had a fascinating conversation with several friends on the following question: who was the musician that you have heard live in performance who was born the earliest? This led to quite an interesting and far-ranging discussion about time and history, and the reach of living memory. I would like to open that discussion up to a wider group. I encourage anyone reading this to think about your own answer to that question, and to e-mail it to me at Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at . My own answer is as follows: that the earliest-born performer whom I heard in performance at all was Leopold Stokowski, born 1882, and that the earliest-born player that I heard was Arthur Rubinstein, by a margin of ten days over Eubie Blake, both born in 1887. I will include all of the answers that I get in a later column.

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 the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has recently finished taping Bach’s Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords, with George Hazelrigg. He can be reached at .

Practicing I
When I was a graduate student at Westminster Choir College in the early eighties, there was a piece of graffiti written over the door leading to the basement corridors where the organ practice rooms were found. It said: Take Responsibility: Really Practice! I was always impressed by that. For one thing, it was the only graffiti that I had ever seen, or have ever seen, that had practicing music as its subject. But also it seemed to point to a real truth about practicing and about the act of being a musician. Unless you do what it takes both to develop your overall skills to the fullest and to learn—really learn— the pieces that you are working on, you haven’t really taken responsibility for your contribution to the world of music, or for your contribution as a musician to the world.
Failure to practice enough or in the right way can have a number of consequences. The most basic one is that a given piece will be learned only partially or with inadequate security, and will fall apart in performance. The lesser case of this is that a piece will be insecure enough that it can only be kept from really falling apart by a kind of tense focus on getting the right notes. This will in turn make the performance sound tense and will rule out, or at least limit, any freedom or spontaneity. Inadequate practice can both force the performer to fall back entirely on consciously chosen interpretive gestures—rather than allowing those gestures to be modified on the spur of the moment to reflect the conditions of the particular performance or a new feeling or idea—and make the execution of those interpretive gestures tentative and unconvincing.
Learning a piece extraordinarily well—by practicing it well and practicing it enough—greatly increases (perhaps paradoxically) the chance that the performance of that piece can have the feeling of an improvisation to it. One hallmark of good improvisation, in music, public speaking, conversation, or anything, is that the next thing that happens comes without hesitation. This is what practicing makes possible in playing an already-composed piece. Furthermore, practicing, even if it is primarily aimed at making the practical side of the mastery of a piece as secure as it can be, also involves repeated exposure to the whole picture of what is going on musically in the piece. The performer who has the ability to play a given piece accurately without having really practiced it (that is, someone who is a really good sight-reader) always runs the risk of giving an offhand and superficial performance of that piece. (I hasten to add that this certainly does not always happen, but it can happen and sometimes does.)
Analysis and study of the musical content of a piece can happen before, during, and after the process of rigorously practicing the notes. The particular kind of contrapuntal analysis that I wrote about in several recent columns is intended to take place for the most part before the practicing of the complete note-picture of the piece with appropriate fingerings and pedalings. However, since it is carried out largely through playing, it is also a form of practicing, and part of its purpose is to make the subsequent practicing both easier and more effective.
Analysis along other lines—melodic analysis of non-contrapuntal (melody-and-accompaniment) passages, harmonic analysis, etc.—can be done prior to the start of nitty-gritty note practicing, and also ought to make that practicing easier and more effective. This happens, of course, because if the mind already knows to some extent what is coming next—and if that is also, according to some musical logic, what ought to come next—then the fingers will tend to find it more directly, with less hesitation or fumbling. Then, during practicing, the sound and feel of the notes will reinforce whatever was learned by analysis, if that analysis was sound, or perhaps suggest ways in which to modify it.
Real practicing also ought to be (most of the time) fun and (always) absorbing. It should also be the case, as much of the time as possible, that a player finds efficient, effective practicing to be deeply satisfying because it so clearly leads to real accomplishment. A teacher can greatly help a student to feel this way by making the relationship between practicing and real learning very clear, and by teaching practice techniques that work.
Indeed, practicing that does not seem to be working—where there is a goal but that goal is not getting any closer, or where there isn’t a clear goal and over time nothing much seems to be happening—is so discouraging and demoralizing that experiencing too much of it will often lead to a student’s giving up, discovering that he or she isn’t really that interested in the instrument after all. This is a shame, because without the experience of practicing well, a student actually doesn’t know what the instrument is, what the repertoire is, what the experience of playing music can be.
So, what is good practicing? What works under what circumstances? Part of the answer, as it applies to organ and harpsichord, comes from J. S. Bach. He said about organ playing that:
“All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”
When I first read this comment, I assumed that Bach was being flippant, either in a way that was meant to be dismissive to whomever he was speaking with, or in a way that was meant to be funny and modest. However, I have since realized that he probably meant something specific. In most musical situations, the performer has to create aspects of the content of the musical sound directly. This is obviously the case with singing, since the performer creates and controls everything about the sound, both sonority and intonation. With non-fretted string instruments, the performer has complete responsibility for intonation, and with bowed string instruments, responsibility for shaping the sound of the note over its entire duration. With blown instruments, the player likewise has the job of creating and sustaining the sonority, and has some responsibility for intonation.
Organ and harpsichord come much closer to fitting the following description: if anyone or anything pushes the key down, the note will sound. (This is also true of the piano except in the very important area of volume, and it is surprisingly untrue of the clavichord, but that’s a subject for another day.) Of course on some organs and most harpsichords, the player can influence subtleties of the beginnings and ends of notes—attacks and releases—by subtle variations in technique. This can be very important artistically, but it does not define as big a proportion of what the player has to do or to think about technically as similar subtleties do with some of the types of instruments mentioned above. I believe that Bach was pointing to this distinction: other musicians have to create their sound and tuning, we keyboard players just have to push the keys down and the instrument does the rest!
This means, first of all, that the physical act of playing—the thing that we are practicing when we practice—can be thought of in simple mechanical terms, more so with keyboard instruments than with most others. This leads to another fruitful paradox. The more we approach the act of practicing as if it were a simple mechanical task, the more artistic control we will end up having over the end results of that task.
Also, and most fruitfully of all, the physical act of playing organ or harpsichord can be slowed down to any extent whatsoever without changing its essential physical nature. This, again, is not true of most means of producing music. A singer or wind player can only slow down a little bit without changing the relationship between the musical note-picture and the act of breathing. This is a crucial change. A player of a bowed string instrument cannot slow down too much without changing the relationship between the note-picture and the bowing. This is almost as crucial. An organist or harpsichordist can slow down any passage any amount and still be executing a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result, however fast that result might be intended to be.
In general, any physical gesture that someone can execute at a given speed, can be learned to be played faster: much faster, if the process of learning is approached the right way. This is quite reliable, and not something that varies much from one person to another. It is also not specific to music or to artistic endeavor, but it happens to apply very well to the particular physical demands of organ and harpsichord playing. There is certainly some limit beyond which one simply can’t move any faster. There is only a small amount of keyboard music that goes beyond that limit for most people. The limits that we experience on how fast we can play in general, or on whether or not we can play a given piece up to tempo have to do with our lack of immediate, transparent awareness of what is coming next in the piece, not with physical inability to play fast enough.
Furthermore, there is in fact some speed, some tempo, at which anyone can play any given keyboard piece. That is, anyone who can basically read music and who knows the order of the keys on the keyboard can sit down at the keyboard and sight-read any piece perfectly the first time with no previous keyboard-playing experience if he or she adopts a slow enough tempo. This includes everything from the first exercise at the beginning of a keyboard primer to the most complicated works by Liszt, Reger, or Duruflé. Of course, in these latter cases, the tempo might have to be really monstrously slow: one thirty-second note per minute, or maybe even slower. This is an extreme case, almost a reductio ad absurdum, but it is quite true, and the principle, applied more moderately, is very important.
All of the principles discussed in the last few paragraphs come together to suggest the most efficient and reliable protocol for practicing organ and harpsichord pieces. I will sketch out this approach in a basic way here, and elaborate upon it next month.
Prior to practicing a piece or a passage, it is necessary to have worked out the fingering and pedaling. For the moment we will take this for granted. Fingering and pedaling choices can legitimately be made for all sorts of reasons, from the historical to the aesthetic to the personal, and I will devote more than one future column to the subject. Even a “bad” fingering or pedaling can become pretty reliable by being practiced well. This is not always a good thing, but it is in a sense a necessary thing, because we do not always come up with the best fingering or pedaling the first time or, for that matter, ever. Any fingering or pedaling, no matter how well thought out, may need to be changed as a piece becomes more familiar. This can, if it is extensive or tricky, require backing up and re-practicing.
In any case, once you—the student—have worked out a fingering and pedaling for a passage, the next step is to select an appropriately manageable amount of music to practice. It is usually a good idea to work on fairly small units: a page, a few lines, a section, or, looking at it a different way, the left-hand part, the right-hand part, the feet, or even one foot at a time.
The next step is to play that unit of music slowly enough. The concept of “slowly enough” is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord. Ideally, every time that you play anything—but certainly during a session of real practicing—that playing should be done at a tempo at which a) you get all of the right notes, and b) getting all of the right notes feels easy: no hesitation, no panic, no scrambling. Achieving point b) is a matter only of honesty with one’s self: if, on a given time playing through a passage, you hear yourself make all of the right notes, then it is very easy not to notice whether you were getting those right notes serenely or by the skin of your teeth! It is important to notice this and to be honest about it.
Once the unit that you are practicing feels serene and easy and is reliably accurate at this first tempo, then it is time to try it a little bit faster. The concept of “a little bit faster” is the second most important thing about practicing. The new practice tempo should be just enough faster that you can tell that it is faster, but not enough faster that the passage falls apart. It is OK for it to require a bit more concentration to get it right at first—in fact this is a good sign, since it means that you have increased the tempo enough to make a difference—but not for it to fall apart. If it does, then it was premature to speed up, or you sped up too much. In this case it is necessary to slow back down just a bit.
Once you have played the passage at the new (very slightly faster) tempo enough times in a row for it to have become once again utterly comfortable and reliable, then it is time to speed it up, again by a very small amount. By patiently following this procedure enough times in a row, it is possible to move a passage from any tempo to any other tempo. This is true whether the music is simple or complicated. It is true even if the initial practice tempo is so slow that it would be difficult for a listener to follow it as music at all.
If the unit of music that you are practicing is not the whole texture—that is, if you are practicing separate hands or feet—then at some point it becomes appropriate to put the hands or feet back together, or to put the whole thing together. The rule of thumb is this: the sooner in the process you put things together, the slower you have to keep your practice tempo. Different ways of practicing a piece or passage—for example, keeping all of the parts together and starting with a very slow practice tempo or, on the other hand, practicing hands separately and being able to start each hand at a somewhat faster practice tempo—usually end up being equally effective. One might be better than another only because the player happens to find it more interesting. The crucial thing is to remember and abide by the definition of a correct practice tempo: slow enough.
I will continue this discussion next month.

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].

Memorization II
Last month I staked out a position about memorization that went something like this: that asking students to perform from memory is not in any way a necessary part of asking those students to perform well, or to become fully competent or indeed great players; that in many or most cases, a focus on memorization is damaging to the student’s work because it is disproportionately time-consuming and it leads to increased anxiety—anxiety that is often justified, since the attempt to play from memory does indeed often lead to reduced security and thus less command of the music; and that any meaningful advantages that are sometimes ascribed to memorization—which can be summed up as “knowing the music really well, inside and out”—can actually be achieved better by studying the music extremely thoroughly in a way that is governed by the idea of studying the music thoroughly, not by the goal of then being able to play it from memory. A substantial amount of what I have written in this column in the last few years has been geared towards helping students and their teachers develop ways of studying music very thoroughly, in a focused and efficient way. Further aspects of this study will of course occupy future columns as well.
In this month’s column I will write about a few more aspects of the memorization issue, including a (very) little bit about the history of memorization, the relationship between memorization and sight-reading, and some of what I think that we and our students can learn from thinking about the concept of memorization, even without taking the step of deciding to perform pieces from memory. I will also focus more on the other two aspects of playing—or learning to play—that I have mentioned as being related to memorization, that is, sight-reading and looking or not looking at the hands and feet.
It is commonly said that Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were the first keyboard players to play in public from memory. As far as I know, this is indeed true, although it is often the case that before the first famous person did any particular thing, there were less famous—or more-or-less unknown—people doing that same thing. In any case, when Schumann and, soon after her, Liszt began to play public piano recitals from memory, it was greeted as something new. It was also not greeted universally favorably. Both of these great performers were criticized for showing off, for putting their own displays of virtuosity ahead of the musical integrity of what the composers had written. (Apparently Clara Schumann came in for more of this criticism than Liszt, perhaps because she was the first, but, unfortunately, also because she was a woman.) It was probably largely the extraordinary popular success that Liszt enjoyed as a virtuoso performer—success that put him easily in the “rock star” category—that led to the spread of the practice of playing piano music from memory.
It is interesting to speculate for a moment about the relationship of memorization to the notion of authenticity to the composer. Of course, the most basic way to apply that type of “authenticity” to the memorization question would be to suggest that music should be memorized if the composer expected or wanted it to be memorized, and not memorized if the composer did not. It seems extremely unlikely that very many performers approach it this way. I have never myself noticed a pianist playing Liszt or other late nineteenth- or twentieth-century composers from memory, but not Beethoven, Brahms, or Schubert. Memorization seems as a normal matter to be associated with the identity of the performer rather than the identity of the composer. However, it is quite common for players who do regularly memorize their repertoire to report, as a matter of their experience, that older music is harder or in some way less natural to memorize than later music. On the whole, composers are probably more interested in having performers play their music promptly than in having them memorize it. It would make sense for composers to want good performers to be available routinely to learn new music rather than to spend their time on memorization. This, rather than any particular difficulty in memorizing the type of music, may explain why in the twentieth century there was an informal tradition against memorizing modern or avant-garde music.

Memorized works vs.
improvisations
After the growth of Lisztian memorized performance in the world of concert piano playing, the historical situation in the organ world was mixed. It is well known that Marcel Dupré played from memory and expected his students to do so; Maurice Duruflé did not. Surviving photographs of Alexandre Guilmant playing all show him with scores on the music desk. Pictures of Joseph Bonnet playing are always devoid of music, as are those of Günther Ramin. Of course Helmut Walcha, Jean Langlais, André Marchal, and other blind organists played from memory. Judging from photographs, Charles Tournemire played from music.
That is, Walcha, Langlais, and many others played from memory, or Tournemire played from music, when they were not improvising. The place of memorization in the history of organ playing must be seen, in part, in relation to the importance of improvisation in the work of organists over the centuries. If much of what is being done at the organ is improvisation, then the relative importance of playing music that other people have already written is reduced. Perhaps the sense of whether or not it is worth the time to memorize that music is affected by this.
At the same time, in a different way, I believe that the phenomenon of improvisation has shaped our perception of the meaning or importance of memorization in the opposite direction. Improvisation is a directly creative art, more directly creative than playing music that others have written, though not necessarily more important to the listening public or to the world of music as a whole. Improvisation is done without music on the music desk. I think that there is a chance that when some people react to performance from memory—without music on the music desk—as being on a higher artistic level than performance from printed music, they are being influenced in that judgment by the image of improvisation. At least, I think that this may be true—probably subconsciously—for some people, and it may shape the nature of the discussion about the supposed advantages or merits of playing from memory.

Related musical skills
There are also other ways in which playing from memory shares outward forms with other musical skills that themselves are often admired. For example, playing from memory is clearly easier for those who have perfect pitch, and when an audience sees a performance from memory, some of that audience probably react to that performer as being more professional, more of a musician even, because the memorized performance seems to imply perfect pitch. Or, to put it another way, it looks a lot like “playing by ear”, a skill that is often admired. (In fact, playing by ear is another one of those skills that are sometimes used almost to define great musicianship: “When he was only five years old he could hear something once and sit right down and play it,” etc.) Of course, playing by ear is an impressive skill, and it has uses in music-making. Perfect pitch can also be impressive, though its relationship to making music is complicated and not always positive. It is important, however, not to confuse these various issues. The impressiveness of the feat of playing by ear does not address anything about whether playing from memory leads to better performances.

Sight reading
Sight reading is, in a way, the opposite of playing from memory. It by definition requires the printed music, and the better a player is at it, the less he or she has to have studied the music before playing it. Good sight reading is a useful practical skill, especially for the most practical situations: the moment in church when the minister changes the hymn (to an unfamiliar one!) at the last minute, or the sudden request to participate in a vocal or chamber music recital. Ideally we can all choose our own repertoire in plenty of time to learn it the right way. In real life that does not always happen, and good sight-reading skills can come to the rescue. Good sight reading can also play an important part in the process of learning a piece carefully and well. Of course, learning any piece starts with reading something, whether that is a series of separate contrapuntal voices, or separate hands and feet, or a whole texture in small increments. The more accurate and comfortable that reading is, the more smoothly and, probably, the more quickly the process will go. That process can work perfectly well as long as the player can read music at all, but the earlier the reading is the faster the process will normally be.
However, really great sight reading—the kind that permits a player to sit down and perform a piece without having looked at it previously—can be a trap that leads to artistically unconvincing performances. This is because it allows players to short-circuit the process of really studying the music, discovering what is going on in the music, what the patterns are, what the overall shape is, what the rhetoric of each section or passage is about. Of course, this trap in its full form only lies in wait for a few of us, the most elite sight readers. (It is not a problem for me, for example.) However, it is a reminder of the major caution that I or any of us who do not practice or advocate memorization must give to ourselves. Since we allow ourselves to rely on the printed music in performance, we have a solemn responsibility not to use that music as a crutch propping up an inadequately prepared performance. This is what leads to the claim that un-memorized performance exists at a lower artistic level than memorized performance. I have been arguing that any suggested advantages to memorization in the realm of artistic quality of performance can actually be attributed to thorough study of the music, not to memorization itself. Obviously, in order for a non-memorized performance to express the fruits of thorough study, that study must have taken place. Over-reliance on reading ability is a threat to this, and we who do not memorize must be conscientious and honest with ourselves about this, and teach our students—and then expect them—to do the same.

Pros and cons
Although I have outlined reasons for not expecting our students to memorize or, certainly, requiring them to, I do not believe that memorization and performance from memory should be expunged from the life of the student and teacher. To start with, if a student wants to memorize pieces, I have no particular interest in discouraging that, let alone trying to forbid it. Some students, of course, come to their first organ teacher having already learned to memorize repertoire from the experience of studying piano. Some students do indeed find that they memorize fairly easily and naturally. However, just as we who perform from scores have a responsibility to be honest about the pitfalls of that approach, any student who wants to play from memory must realize the pitfalls of that approach. The first of these that can affect even very willing and successful memorizers is the time that it consumes. Is that worth it? The same time could be spent learning more music. Would, for example, learning all three Franck Chorals rather than memorizing one of them add to a student’s musical understanding of the Choral that the student might otherwise have memorized? Would the time spent memorizing the Bach “Dorian” Toccata be better spent learning a couple of Buxtehude Praeludia so as to understand better the background to Bach’s work? This particular question is less relevant the faster and easier a memorizer a student is, but it is of some relevance to anyone who expresses a preference for memorization.
Here’s another pitfall: Is a student memorizing only because he or she feels the need to look steadily at the keyboard? If so, then the time spent memorizing is clearly being misdirected. That student should, as a matter of overall security and reliability, learn to play with much less looking: the occasional glance rather than the eyes glued. After this has been accomplished—or indeed while it is being worked on—the commitment to memorization can be re-evaluated. Perhaps there will be other, better reasons for that student to continue to work on memorization, perhaps not. (Incidentally, learning to play with very little looking at the keyboard will greatly improve a student’s relationship to sight reading and to the early stages, at least, of working on a piece.)
Also, a student who chooses to memorize must be honest about whether that memorization work is really—really—correlated with thorough study of the music. It is certainly true that the process of memorization involves going over the music a lot in a way that can be short-circuited by those of us who play from score. However, to the extent that that repetition is training the muscle memory to react correctly and carry out the gesture that is supposed to come next, it isn’t necessarily about musical understanding at all. Also, if memorization is mostly physical—if the student would not be able to write the piece out from memory, or even to know and be able to describe away from the keyboard most of what comes next as the piece unfolds—then it is notoriously unreliable. In particular, it is subject to falling apart in the face of any distraction and then being very hard indeed to put back together.
Even a student who is not committed to memorization might be intrigued by trying it out as a special project or challenge on an occasional piece. I have no problem with this, as long as it is kept separate from an expectation that memorization will become the norm. It might make sense to start with a short piece—an Orgelbüchlein chorale, perhaps, or one of the short Vierne pieces. And this would be a particularly intense and interesting challenge if it were approached—at first—away from the keyboard. If, for example, a student memorizes each separate voice of a short chorale prelude away from the instrument—so that he or she could write it down—then brings each voice over to the console separately at first, and then puts those voices together from memory, that constitutes an intense and challenging mental workout. It is also a version of the kind of separate-voice study that I would recommend in any case.
Looked at this way, memorization has something in common with, for example, learning to read from seventeenth-century tablature, or making one’s own organ transcription of a song or a string quartet. It is a mental and musical exercise that might well be interesting and challenging, and that might yield some insights or unexpected results.
This topic of memorization is one about which I would particularly welcome feedback—ideas, anecdotes, reactions to anything that I have said. I will include some of that feedback in a future column.