On Teaching

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. 

Keeping It Going I

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

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

Why this matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus and concentration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . . 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. 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.

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

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

Organ Method XVIII

This month, I begin a section on putting hands and feet together. It is surprisingly straightforward. That is, if a student has become a comfortable player of pedal parts, is also comfortable playing music at a keyboard, and has not tried to put manual parts and pedal parts together prematurely (which can result in a loss of confidence and developing of bad habits), then the act of putting hands and feet together is quite natural. Learning to play manuals and pedals together in the first place requires a lot of work, and learning any given organ piece might require patient work at any stage of a player’s career. But it is possible for that effort to feel comfortable, and it should yield prompt and easily discernible results. I am trying to frame this for students in such a way that they can use this approach themselves without a teacher, but also so that a teacher can participate in the process, keep track of how it is going, and help it along. 

Before they reach this point, students should be quite accustomed to keeping track of such things as hand position, overall posture, foot angle, leg position, and everything to do with tension. Therefore they should also be able to keep track of those things in the slightly more complex circumstance of playing with both feet and all fingers. To aid the student’s understanding of the process and being able to monitor his or her own work, I include a lot of discussion (in general, but here in particular). Whether this discussion seems at all dense or overly complicated, and whether the ratio of discussion to exercises seems right, are two points about which I would find reader feedback especially useful. This month’s excerpt has, just by chance, no examples; next month’s continuation will discuss those that are referred to in the first sentence immediately below.

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

We now come to some exercises and discussion aimed at helping you to get comfortable putting your hands and feet together, that is, learning to play pieces for manuals and pedals. This is what is considered “typical” or “real” organ playing—though of course a healthy proportion of the organ repertoire is for manuals alone. It is what uniquely characterizes organ playing technically, and what defines the organ musically for many people. It is also what makes organ playing an activity that requires so much of the whole physical person of the performer. In putting together all of the components of a complex organ piece, your habits of physical relaxation become the most important—important though they already are even when playing a simple pattern of notes with one hand. If any tension creeps in at this stage, it will of course be damaging to the music—to your ability to control timing and articulation, to your ability to play complex note patterns reliably, and perhaps to the sound of the instrument itself. Since putting all the components of a piece together is of necessity more complicated than playing any one of the component parts by itself, the mental pressures to tense up are greater than ever. This is why it is particularly important to approach this stage systematically and patiently, both when learning it in the first place and when learning pieces thereafter. The approach outlined here should enable you to be systematic and to feel patient, but at the same time to make prompt and very solid progress. 

The cardinal rule behind any good procedure for practicing hands and feet together is the same as it is for practicing anything complex that can be thought of as having simpler components: Make sure that each of those simpler components is learned fully and well before trying to put any of them together. In most organ pieces with pedal, the components to be put together are three: the right hand, the left hand, and the feet. The first step in starting to put those components together to form a whole piece is to make absolutely sure that each one is solid. 

(Note: It is my experience that, although practicing separate feet in learning pedal parts can be extremely valuable, as discussed in the earlier section on pedal playing, it is not particularly necessary or even a good idea to try to play the separate-foot parts individually with the hands, or to think of the two feet as separate components at this stage. The role of separate foot practice is to assist in learning the pedal part. Then it is that integrated pedal part that is available to be joined to the hands.)

Practicing pairs

Since there are three components to be combined in practicing, there are also three pairs of components: right hand and pedal, left hand and pedal, and the two hands together. Practicing each of these pairs is the crucial step in learning a piece for manuals and pedals—if you do enough of it, then the final step of putting all three parts together will be easier and more natural than you could have imagined. 

Furthermore, of these three pairs of components, one tends to be the most important, most foundational in putting the whole texture together, and therefore should be practiced the most. This is the left hand and pedal. Of course, this varies from piece to piece. It also varies from player to player, since some of the reasons that this part of the process is so important have to do with mental habits. However, it is true as a rule, and it is a good idea to assume that left hand and pedal should get a disproportionate share of the practice time.

Oddly enough, this is an area in which prior keyboard experience can make things trickier. Many keyboard players come to organ playing with a strong pre-existing tendency to hear the lowest pitch as belonging to the outer fingers of the left hand. This instinctive reaching for low notes in the left hand—even when they are really pedal notes—is a source of confusion that is more powerful the “better” your ears are and the more fluent a keyboard player (and in particular, a sight-reader) you happen to be. Making a habit of practicing left hand and pedal is the best way to counteract this habit. (This habit, by the way, can be a particular problem for some players in playing hymns specifically. I will address that later on.)

Practicing pairs of component parts is important, partly to teach your ears to follow those separate parts when they are heard in the whole texture. (In this way, it is analogous to practicing separate voices in a contrapuntal piece or separate hands in any keyboard piece.) Since the left hand tends to play inner voices, or notes or chords that are neither the highest nor the lowest pitches being played at a particular time, the left-hand part is the component of the texture that you might need the most help to hear. That is one of the reasons that practicing left hand and pedal together is important. Another reason to emphasize this part of the practice protocol is that it will counteract the slight but persistent feeling that the left hand is not quite as nimble and secure as the right hand in general. (This feeling probably has nothing to do with handedness in normal life—since it is experienced by people of both types of handedness—but rather with the left hand’s being disproportionately given simpler material to play than the right hand in the repertoire and in accompaniments, hymns, and exercises. This happens in part because the notes in the left-hand region of a keyboard—in a situation where there is no pedal—are carrying the harmony, and in part because on many sorts of keyboard instruments, especially older ones, the lower keys are themselves less nimble physically—harder to play—than the higher keys.) 

Putting hands and feet together

Here are the steps to follow in practicing putting hands and feet together in a piece of organ music:

1) Choose a unit of the piece to work on. The more complex or difficult the piece seems to you, the shorter this unit should be. When in doubt, smaller units make for more focused practicing. The shorter the unit that you are practicing, the more frequently you come to each moment within that unit as you repeat the whole. This creates a more effective drill.

2) Make sure that each of the three parts is secure—that is, accurate and feels easy. Remember that this is always related to tempo. There will be a tempo that is too fast to make these elements of the piece work, no matter how well you have prepared them. For the parts to be secure means that there is a tempo at which they are secure and at which you are willing to play them. (If the only tempo at which one or more of the parts feels secure is so slow that it is tedious to play, then you must continue to practice that part until you are happy with it at a tempo that you can accept. This is a matter of your preference: for learning the instrument or any particular piece, there is no such thing as a practice tempo that is intrinsically too slow.)

3) Play through the pedal part and the left hand part of your chosen section once each. This is just to make sure that they are both fresh in your mind. Now, choosing a slower tempo than the one at which you played these parts (or the slower of them), start putting them together. As you play, keep your eyes on the music, being very conscious about reading those two parts (and not being distracted by the right hand part: we’ll get to that soon). You may want your eyes and your attention to move in a well-defined way from the left-hand line to the pedal line, and back and forth, or you may feel that you can essentially read both at once. This is a matter of your own habit and reading style. If playing these lines together “works”—that is, is accurate and steady and feels rather easy—then your practice tempo is good. If this is the case, then repeat this unit of practicing over and over, as many times as you can without losing concentration. When you take a break from it, expect to come back to it. As noted above, it is important to give left hand and pedal a lot of attention, and to allow it to become really solid. If it does not seem to work, and you feel quite confident that each separate part was well learned, then slow it down. There will be a tempo at which it feels right. Then:

4) Do the same thing with the right hand and pedal. The practice tempo for this need not be the same as the practice tempo for step 3. It could be faster, if indeed putting the right hand and the pedal together seems easier, or it could be slower if, for example, the right-hand part itself is more elaborate or just plain harder. The particular challenge of playing right hand and pedal together is visual—the two lines are not printed next to each other. You will probably have to be fairly conscious of scanning from one to the other and skipping the left-hand line as you read and play. Again, if it doesn’t seem to be working, slow it down. 

5) Practice the two hands together. This is something to which you are already accustomed.

6) When you have practiced each of the three pairs to the point where they are all accurate and reliable and feel good to you, then you are ready to try the three parts together. Of course, you should expect to slow the tempo down from where you left it with each of the three pairs. I would suggest playing through the left hand and pedal once, and then adding in the right hand. This concept—that you are adding the right hand to the left-hand-and-pedal combination, rather than that you are adding the pedal to the hands, is often the most efficient way to think about it as you start to play all of the notes of your passage together. If the result that you get either is inaccurate or seems uncomfortable—walking on a thin edge—then slow it down. When you are learning a new skill or practicing something complicated there is no such thing as practicing too slowly. 

After you have completed this process with the passage that you have chosen, move on to the next increment of the piece and do the same thing. While you are working in an intense way on this next passage you should continue playing through the passage that you have already learned.

Next month’s excerpt will continue this directly, and will move on to specific examples drawn from repertoire and from hymns.