On Teaching

Keeping It Going I

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

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

Why this matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus and concentration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . . 

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. 

Hand Distribution III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening Carefully II 

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

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

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

Rhythmic inflection

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

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

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

Motivation 

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

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

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

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

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

Other opinions

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

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

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

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Thoughts on teaching
interpretation
Interpretation is fascinating from many points of view. These include the relationship between interpretation and technique, how different approaches to the problems of authenticity affect interpretive choices, the history of different interpretive schools, the many elements of interpretive choices—tempo, registration, phrasing, articulation, rhythm, rubato and agogic accentuation or the relative lack thereof, and more—and in general, the strange phenomenon of how different performances of exactly the same notes can be.
With organ music in particular, interpretation begins with the choice of instrument and the venue—in effect, this is the beginning of the registration process. Sometimes—most of the time for most of us, in fact—the choice of venue and organ comes first. This part of the interpretive process is turned upside down: we choose music that suits the instrument and/or the room, or we make decisions about how much we feel that the music needs to be an exact fit for the situation or how much we can bend and stretch and compromise. This is all part of the interpretive process, and it shares with the rest of that process the fact that different players approach it quite differently from one another.

Conveying interpretation
to students
For teachers, primary questions about interpretation or interpretive stance are joined by questions about how to introduce students to matters of interpretation. These questions start with the over-riding one: whether or not a teacher should hope or expect or even insist that his or her students take a similar interpretive approach to that of the teacher. It often seems almost routine to do so. In listening either to established or to up-and-coming players, we often expect to be able to tell who studied with whom based on what the student’s interpretations are like. However, it is by no means clear that this is necessary or good. I will suggest below that teachers can be very happy with a wide variety of interpretive approaches on the part of their students. Another question might be put like this: if a teacher will not tell a student how to interpret and perform a piece—or a type of repertoire or repertoire in general—then how can that teacher help the student work out an interpretation of that repertoire, or how can the teacher help the student become a vivid and convincing interpreter of music in general? Yet another question is what sort of approach to interpretation to expect from students of different ages or levels of skill or experience. An intriguing question, to me, is this: does it matter whether or not a performance that a student gives is effective interpretively—or appeals to any particular listener’s taste—at the moment the performance is given, or is it more important that the performance be part of the long-term learning process? These two things are not always incompatible with each other, of course, but they are different, and they might suggest different kinds of input from the teacher. That is, if it is important that a given performance by a student be effective interpretively in a certain way, then it might be necessary for the teacher to coach the student in that way of playing the piece. If the goal of learning to perform a particular piece is geared only to the student’s longer-term development, then it might be better to allow the student to experiment, try things, listen, and learn, even if along the way this results in a performance that the teacher, other listeners, or perhaps even the student looking back on it later won’t like.
The question of whether a teacher should want his or her students to end up—as mature performers—playing the way the teacher does, that is, with respect to interpretive choices and overall interpretive stance, is philosophical. (I assume that every teacher wants his or her students to be as competent technically and as masterful in performance as that student can possibly be, whether that is more than the teacher, the same, or less.) Why is the teacher teaching? What does he or she consider important about music, about organ playing for church or for concert? What kind of contribution does the teacher want to make to the history of the organ over the next few decades or beyond, and does that contribution depend on nurturing a particular style of performance or approach to interpretation? Does the teacher feel that students represent the teacher: that colleagues, audiences, and possible future students will judge the teacher based on how existing students play—not, again, with respect to competence or mastery, but with respect to interpretation? If so, is this appropriate, or is it placing a responsibility on the students that is burdensome?
These are questions that every teacher must answer for himself or herself—or, perhaps more importantly, must ask and think about. The answers may change over time, and the questions may be supplemented by others—other ways of looking at it. I myself long ago came to feel that I don’t care at all what my students end up doing interpretively, as long as they feel that the act of playing music and making choices is satisfying to them. This is largely a matter of philosophy, and I don’t feel that it is necessarily the right way for every teacher to look at it. I also honestly don’t know what it says about other dimensions of my underlying attitude. Do I feel this way out of modesty—“my way is no better than other ways”—or something quite the opposite—“my way is so special that you need not even attempt it”—or selfishness—“it would be better if my students played like me, but I will withhold the information that they would need to achieve that”—or fear—“if I teach my students how to play like me they will do it better than I do, and render me superfluous”—or all of the above or none of the above? I am, in general, inordinately in favor of people thinking for themselves: my students, other players, other teachers, everyone—not just about music, but most definitely including music.
The more a teacher believes that his or her approach to interpretive matter is based on objective truth, the more likely it is that the teacher will want to try to pass that approach on to students. And, as a subset of that, we all have an obligation to pass on to our students anything that we honestly believe to be true—objectively true or likely to be so. A substantial amount of what falls into this category is information related to composers’ intentions or performance practices. I wrote at length about “authenticity” in my column of April 2010. In a sense, the principal thing is this: the most thorough knowledge about composers’ intentions and the circumstances of the composition and initial performances of a piece places surprisingly few limits on interpretive choice. That is, such knowledge may change the direction or nature of interpretive choices, but it does not effectively narrow the range of choice or tend to make different performances more similar to one another. This is like a comparison of infinities: the set of all possible performances of a piece is infinite; the set of all performances that respect whatever is known about the composer’s fingering and pedaling practices, tempo preferences, registration techniques, etc., is also infinite.
Analysis—contrapuntal, harmonic, or other theoretical analysis—can be another source of a feeling on the part of teachers that we have something objective to share with our students that might affect performance. Again, I think that it is very important to share such things with students, and I believe that this can be done in such a way as not to limit choices. For example, it is one thing to notice fugue subjects or other recurrent themes. (As I have written more than once, I believe that noticing anything that happens more than once is an extremely important and efficient tool for learning pieces.) However, it is something else entirely to move from noticing such things to reaching any hard and fast conclusions about what our analysis tells us to do in performance. (Again, comparative infinities: the set of possible performances by a player who has analyzed a piece for counterpoint and harmony is infinite, as is the set of possible performances by a performer who has not paid any explicit attention to those things.) As soon as we cross over into saying to a student something like: “of course you must phrase the subject the same way every time it comes in,” we have left the realm of the objective. This is one way of looking at it; however, it would also be possible to argue that the “sameness” of a theme from one instance of it to another lies in the notes themselves, and that phrasing and articulation of that theme can reasonably vary with the context. My point here is not to resolve a question like that, but just to suggest that we should all be as clear as possible as to what is neutral and objective and what reflects our own habits or biases. It is wonderful to share all of this with our students, but only if we are clear ourselves and candid with them about what we are sharing.

A sample interpretation
Many teachers who share my feeling that they do not aspire to have their students end up playing in their (the teacher’s) style still feel that the best way to teach interpretation is to ask the student to copy—more or less—the teacher’s performance for the time being and then to evolve later on from that to their own style and approach. This makes sense based on the notion that an inexperienced player—a student, especially a beginning student—does not yet have a basis of knowledge for shaping interpretations. This approach is also based on the idea that the best way to learn to think about performance and interpretation is to have the experience of doing something effective, and then either to react against it or to embrace it—or some mixture—later on, on the basis of other experiences and increasing knowledge.
In fact this is probably the most common approach and attitude, and most of those who expect their students to copy the teacher’s interpretive ideas also fully expect those students to move on from those ideas later on. I imagine that any approach to teaching interpretation has to include at least a dose of direct suggestion from the teacher to the students. Even when those suggestions are less than direct, they are not entirely absent. I myself have never said to a student “you should phrase this subject this way” or “play this eighth-note line detached.” However, when I invite students to play contrapuntal voices separately and in pairs, or to play a line omitting the unaccented notes, or to listen for the bloom in harpsichord sound when shaping a melody or a bass line, or to change fingers on repeated notes, or indeed just to play with a light touch, I am moving the student away from some interpretive possibilities and towards others.
My own reluctance to suggest—let alone require—specific interpretive choices stems from a feeling that such suggestions from a teacher have a tendency to have too great a weight of authority. We may honestly want our students to move beyond those suggestions, but the weight can be harder to shake off than we expect it to be. The whole dynamic of accepting, rejecting, debating, and evaluating the specifics of what we were told to do by (especially) an admired teacher can be a distraction for years or decades. Of course, every teacher has to become comfortable with his or her own approach to these things. My specific advice is just this: be open to the possibility of suggesting less and letting the students explore more, and make suggestions, when you make them, as lightly and informally as you can, consistent with getting the point across.
Here are a few suggestions for helping students to think about interpretation and learn about the effects of different interpretive choices.
1) Especially for beginning students, but also for any student who is not yet very familiar with a particular kind of repertoire, play something for the student two different ways, and ask simply which he or she likes better. With a line—recurring motive or not—the two ways will probably be two different phrasings or articulation patterns. In a full-textured passage, the differences might be of tempo or registration or again articulation or perhaps arpeggiation or something about rubato or timing. The differences should be noticeable but not a caricature, and the student should listen carefully, and then feel absolutely free to choose whichever he or she prefers.
2) Invite students to listen not just to what different interpretive decisions are like, but also to what they do. For example, does a line in an inner voice become easier to hear if it is articulated one way rather than another? Does it become easier to keep a sixteenth-note line steady if the accompanying chords are articulated one way rather than another or registered one way rather than another? Does a bit of rubato make a passage sound softer, or more suspenseful, or just static?
3) Ask students to listen—carefully—to at least six different performances of whatever they are working on. (Important note: listening to one performance is risky. It tends to lead to subconscious mimicking of that performance, which can then have the same difficult-to-shake weight of authority—perhaps for life—that performance suggestions from a teacher can have.) This listening can focus on a passage rather than a whole piece. Sometimes ask the student to write down anything they can think of to say about each performance, but sometimes don’t, so that the balance between pleasure and work remains healthy.
4) Ask the student to listen to a large number of performances of a short passage, paying very careful attention to something specific. For example, how do a dozen different players treat the rests between the several phrases on the first page of the Bach d-minor Toccata? How do several different performers treat the timing of the manual notes in the first sixteen measures of the Franck b-minor Choral? (I once, many years ago, sat with the great Canadian teacher and performer Mireille Lagacé, listening to the way that several different harpsichordists handled the transition from the first half to the second half of Variation 16 of the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting and rewarding.)
With items 3) and 4) it can be valuable to suggest that several students do these things together and discuss what they hear. Of course, nowadays it is easy to find many performances to listen to of just about anything. As I am writing this, YouTube has over 7,000 performances of the Bach d-minor Toccata, but also several performances of each of a few less famous pieces for which I searched. This changes all the time. 

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part III

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1

In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.