On Teaching

Gavin Black

What is Performance? Part 2

I continue here the speculative, general, question-based, and perhaps somewhat philosophical discussion of performance. Next month I shall write about some practical aspects of this subject that tie into teaching in concrete ways, like helping students to grapple with nervousness, or to understand some of the ways in which performance as opposed to just learning and playing pieces can help with student development while enhancing the enjoyment and satisfaction that they get out of music. I will also continue the discussion, begun here, about performance as ritual and performance in the context of ritual.

 

Why do you perform?

Last autumn I attended a family party at which I saw a long-time friend of mine and my family’s. I hadn’t seen her in person in about 20 years, and therefore we were hurriedly catching up. Furthermore, since over those years we had moved into different phases of life—her from youth to middle age, me from early to late middle age—we canvassed some of the rather big questions. At one point she asked me, “So why do you perform? What do you want to happen when you are up there performing?” And my spontaneous answer (no time to make notes and an outline or to sleep on it) was, “I want to create the possibility that having been there will be important to at least some of the people in the audience.” 

That is not necessarily the spontaneous answer that I would give at another time. I say this not to suggest that I disavow it, or that I don’t think that it is a “good” answer, whatever that means. It’s just that there are probably many answers to that question that are valid at any given moment. This one took me by surprise when it popped into my head.

I believe that what I said that day is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it presents a nice mix of the self-important and the modest. It is immodest of me to suggest that what I do could be “important.” It also reminds us that when we offer ourselves to audience members as being worth their time and sometimes their money, we are making a claim that there is something good about what we are going to do. We should be upfront with ourselves about that and deal in whatever ways we think are best with the possible psychological implications of this for ourselves, hoping to be able to have a healthy self-esteem, leavened by questioning and working to get better, rather than vanity or hubris. 

We all know about the existence of unappealingly self-important performers. Perhaps some if not most of the people who come across to us that way seem very different to those who know them well. Maybe they would seem very different to us if we could see inside their heads. Famous performers are by definition both the people whose public personas we know the best, and people whom we don’t really, actually know. Perhaps some of them have let self-importance get the better of them. The awareness that I am staking a claim on listeners’ lives serves to remind me that I have an obligation to be serious about doing my absolute best—to try as hard as I can to make that claim on people’s time a legitimate rather than a vain one. 

However, my answer to my old friend was relatively modest, in that I didn’t say that I could make an entire room of listeners always have a guaranteed great experience. Maybe I should aspire to that, but I don’t really think so. To do so expressly seems to me like a denial of one of the most constant and true things about art, whether performing art or any other kind: namely that each person brings different needs, desires, tastes, expectations, etc., to any artistic encounter.

I am afraid that if I try to guarantee that I can reach every audience member, I will lose my focus on doing what I can do best, and on doing it as well as I can. Either I will be afraid to do what I really want and feel interpretively, for fear that it will run counter to what some part of the audience likes, expects, or wants, or that I will try to be sensationalistic in the way that I play. Either of these would open up a real risk of not reaching anyone. This is not to mention the possibility of utterly boring some listeners, annoying them, or leaving some people convinced that I am a bad performer, a bad musician, or even (since we sometimes make this leap) a bad person. Worrying about such things would make it impossible for me to perform in a way that expressed my own choices and feelings about the music that I was playing.

There are many things that I didn’t say in that answer that I could have said. For example, that I hoped to present as accurate a version as possible of the composers’ intentions; or that I hoped to give the audience pleasure—different from an “important” experience; or that I hoped to recreate the feeling of the time at which the music had been written; or that I wanted to elucidate the counterpoint or otherwise help listeners to understand the music from a compositional or structural point of view; or that I wanted to show the instrument(s) off to best advantage. All of these, and an infinite number of others, are wonderful possibilities. Each of the ones that I have listed here are things that I do think about and take into account. For me, they are perhaps secondary or instrumental. Any of them might help me to achieve the goal that I mentioned to my friend. For someone else, one of them or something entirely different might be a primary goal. 

I didn’t say that I wanted to garner the admiration of the listeners, or to be seen as a great virtuoso, or to get a good review. Omitting things like this is always under suspicion: perhaps I really feel them, but would be embarrassed to admit it.

 

The desire in performance

Years ago, a very fine performer once said to me that when he went out onto the concert stage the one desire that he had consciously in his mind was to avoid utter, abject humiliation. I was very young and inexperienced then, and my reaction to this was simply to be stunned: too much so, unfortunately, to ask him to explain further. My assumption now about what he meant then is something like this: that he knew that the combination of instrument, repertoire, preparation, worked-out interpretive choices, and so on, was such that if he could avoid just plain falling apart, the results would be very good. There was no middle ground. Part of what I took from this was that performing is hard. Not even the best performers can afford to take anything for granted.

How would you answer the question that my friend asked me? Would you consider it a good thing to ask your students? What sort of answers would you expect? What sort, if any, would you want? Are there possible answers that would raise a red flag?

All of the above is most directly about “pure” or abstract performance: that is, playing music for people who are there to listen to that music and who are in fact actually listening to it. Answers to any questions about what we are trying to achieve might be different for performance linked to an occasion or to a specific describable purpose. Accompaniment is such a situation. Settings in which the music itself is part of an overarching sequence, such as a church service, graduation ceremony, or sports event are also in this category. In these cases answers like “to help the soloist to feel comfortable” or “to enhance rather than undermine what the soloist is trying to do” or “to intensify the effect on the listeners (members of a congregation) of the words that they are singing and hearing” or “to make the graduates happy” come to mind. (Or “to help the Mets win?”)

Performance and ritual

What is the relationship between performance and ritual? Is every performance a ritual? Does thinking of performance as ritual help or hurt, or sometimes help and sometimes hurt, or perhaps some of both at the same time? I realize, thinking about the question and answer described above, that for me personally, musical performance is likely to be more powerful, and to have a greater chance of seeming important to more of the people in the room, if it has an element of what I experience as ritual. We are in a territory where people use words differently, so the possibility exists of words creating misunderstanding. My understanding of ritual is some sort of overall shape to the event as it moves through time. To put it another way, a feeling that, because of the way that the individual details of what is being done relate to each other as they move through time, the whole is indeed more powerful and meaningful than the sum of the parts. This is not something that needs to have been prescribed in advance by someone other than the participants, although it can.

When I am performing in the form that is the most individual to me and over which I have the most control, a solo recital or concert of my own, and most especially one that I am presenting myself, I care a lot about the shape of the beginning and the end. It seems to me that the way that the transition from “normal” life into a performance is shaped can have a real effect on the listeners’ perceptions of the whole event. At the same time, that segue can have an effect on the performer’s focus. That may influence the feel and perhaps the performing results of only the beginning of the event, or it may carry over through the whole performance. 

Several years ago I decided to take notice of something that I had known about at the back of my mind for a long time: that I don’t like to be sequestered or hidden immediately prior to a concert. If I sit in a green room while the clock ticks towards the appointed time and audience members come in, I just get tense, nervous, distracted by thoughts that are not about the music. I can get into a state where I can’t quite feel or believe that I am someone who can play or whose playing deserves to be heard. I have now started to allow myself to arrange the pre-concert time the way that I like. I hang around the space, among or near the audience, or, on a nice day, outside the front door of the venue:  a place that feels relaxed and friendly to me. I am certain that this has resulted in at least the beginnings of my concerts being more effective. It may affect the whole of a concert. I don’t remotely think that this approach is the best for everyone, though I am sure that it would be for some. I believe that every performer should pay attention to this dimension of the act of performing and determine what feels and works best.

If I want to be out and about right before a concert, that implies that I am asking the audience to accept an opening ritual that is different from the traditional “lights dim and the performer walks in from the side, to applause.” I am comfortable with that. I like the feeling that the music arises from normal life and normal interaction, and my experience is that listeners also do. However, this is one of the reasons that I only expect to be able to shape the opening exactly the way I want to when I oversee the whole presentation. If at a particular concert venue there are expectations about the shape of the opening that are different from what I am describing and that are important to the audience, that is worthy of respect. The opening gestures can affect the listeners’ experience of the event, and the closing gestures can affect their memories of it.

There is one detail about the opening gesture/ritual of a concert or other performance that arises out of modern life, and it is tricky to handle—a mobile phone announcement. As an audience member, I react negatively to that warning, especially since it is the last thing that we hear before the beginning of a performance. But I am aware that there is a good reason to have it. If a cell phone goes off, that is very disruptive and damages the overall shape of the experience. Therefore, it is hard to decide not to do it. But I think that we tend to underestimate the effect on listeners’ appreciation of a performance when the beginning ritual is not about the music and is negatively tinged. (I do not have any cell phone warning at my own concerts, when it is just up to me. I have a feeling that as people get more and more used to engaging with their cell phones, remembering to turn them off will become such a matter of routine that no one in fact needs to be reminded.)

 

Composer, performer, and instrument

I have a thought about performance that I find interesting. There is a usual template that we apply to the whole process of musical consumption. The composer is the primary creator of the music. The performer is the “interpreter,” and thus the secondary creator: significantly less responsible for the reality of the music’s existence than the composer, but still with an important role to play. Instrument makers, when they are relevant, occupy third place. Their job is to create the tools that will best serve what the performer is trying to do, which serves the composer in turn. The instruments should always be borne in mind as part of the background to performance. I find it interesting to turn the whole thing around, by constructing an alternative template. Music exists in sound. Instrument makers create the means of producing sound, thereby creating musical possibilities. Performers make themselves adept at getting the best out of those instruments, thereby bringing the work of the instrument makers to life. Composers simply make suggestions as to various ways to get the best out of the instruments. 

I don’t expect any one to agree with this interpretation since it relegates the composer to a less important role. However, this way of looking at it seems to me to be an interesting corrective or means of achieving balance in thinking about what we are doing as performers. 

Finaly, a quick word about the illustration on the facing page. A few days ago, I was astonished to find a copy of the bulletin for the first church service I ever played. I wrote about that two months ago, and at that time never expected to see the program again. (It turned up in a box of items saved by my father.) I have included an excerpt here. I notice something that I didn’t remember: that the piece I played was divided into two sections, placed at two different spots within the service. This is a good example, if we accept that it was effective, of a ritual shape outside of the music itself changing the ways in which the music can work.

 

More to come . . .

Andrew Keegan Mckriell

Renowned organbuilder GabrielKney, who celebrates his 86th birthday in November, is well known across North America for the many instruments, large and small, which he has lovingly built for universities, homes, concert halls, and churches. His career spans more than 60 years in Canada (and several before that in his German homeland).

Gabriel Kney immigrated to Canada in 1951 to work as an organbuilder and voicer with the Keates Organ Company, based in Lucan, Ontario (which had just taken over the assets of the Woodstock Organ Co., formerly Karn-Warren). Kney went on to found his own company with John Bright in 1955, with the vision of building tracker-action organs. At first they worked out of John Bright’s basement with John generally doing the electrical work and dealing with correspondence and Gabriel building the organs.

To quote Uwe Pape from his book The Tracker Organ Revival in America (Berlin, Pape Verlag, 1977): “Gabriel Kney was the first organ builder who built mechanical organs in the course of the tracker organ revival in Canada.” But as Gabriel himself says, he was somewhat ahead of his time, so he reverted to building electro-pneumatic and electric action instruments for a number of years before the mechanical action trend took off in the United States. Opus 1 (1955) and some unnumbered positivs were all mechanical action, and then from Opus 55 (1971) onward all of the Gabriel Kney organs have been mechanical action.

The idea of mechanical-action organs came to life again in the United States, more so than in Canada, which explains why most Gabriel Kney organs are located in the United States. In the 1960s, the late George Black made a recording on Opus 1, which was put on a small, hand-cut 7-inch vinyl record. Gabriel advertised this for sale in The Diapason. A reply came from the late Harald Rohlig at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, saying he wanted one of these recordings. Once Rohlig had listened to it, he told Gabriel that this was exactly the sound he was looking for, and so a contract was made to build four instruments for the college.

The first two of the four organs, Opus 23 (1962) and Opus 28 (1965), were electric action, but the next two were essentially Kney’s earliest trackers (Opus 41a and 41b). Opus 41a and 41b went to Huntingdon College in 1968, but it was not until the 1970s that Kney felt financially comfortable enough to build trackers exclusively. So that is how the story starts.

In 1967, Gabriel founded Gabriel Kney & Co. He and his own trained craftsmen, along with organbuilders from as far away as Hungary, Switzerland, England, and Germany (there were eventually seven), built more than 128 instruments. Gabriel Kney & Co. lasted until Gabriel’s “semi-retirement,” as he refers to it, in 1996. Kney’s last two instruments, Opus 129 and Opus 130 (completed in 2014), were built by Gabriel alone and are house organs for his London, Ontario, home and for the Michigan home of his wife, Dr. Mary Lou Nowicki.

In late 2013, Gabriel Kney sat down with Andrew Keegan Mackriell, director of music and cathedral organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, Ontario, to talk about his life and work and the meaning music has to him. The conversation was continued in May 2015.

Andrew Keegan Mackriell: Gabriel, I think many know that you were born in Germany; could you tell me something about your family and how you arrived at a life in music?

Gabriel Kney: Yes. I was born in Speyer-am-Rhein on November 21, 1929. I was the oldest of seven children. Four sisters were born after me and then twin brothers. At about the time I was born, the worldwide Great Depression was afflicting Germany, and jobs were scarce. My father was a master cabinet maker, but he had difficulty finding work. He was fortunate to find employment as manager at a kind of hostel, rather like a YMCA, where my mother helped him and where we also lived. At the time I was born, he was a member of a political party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) that opposed Hitler. As the National Socialist movemen t spread throughout Germany, members of this party were considered enemies, and the Brown Shirts came early one morning to the hostel and arrested him. He was incarcerated for a short period of time. After he was released from jail it was difficult for him to find work because he was blacklisted, and employers, afraid of the German authorities, would not hire him. 

As work became scarce during World War II, he was hired at an aircraft factory where Messerschmitts were repaired. Eventually he became head of the woodworking department there. As you can imagine, life during this period was difficult for our whole family. My father was professionally a cabinet maker, but he was also an amateur musician and played the bassoon. My mother was not musically educated, but she had a fine voice, and I often heard her sing as she went about her daily tasks. After the war my father and some of his friends would occasionally meet at our home to play chamber music such as Telemann, etc. So I grew up with both woodworking and music as an important part of my life.

 

Could you tell us something about your childhood, and what it was like growing up there?

Well, post-war the question arose as to what I was going to do. By the time World War II was over, there was no school system. I had to decide whether I was going to learn a trade or wait until school restarted. I kind of fell into organbuilding because, as it happened, my family lived next to the workshop of a master organ- builder. His name was Paul Sattel. Before the war Sattel had started building an organ for the Dom [cathedral] in Speyer. Naturally his work was interrupted by the war, but afterwards he continued his work there, and I became an apprentice to him at the time he completed the Dom organ. At the same time, I had the great opportunity to become an assistant to Franz Nagel, a very famous organ voicer for Steinmeyer Organs before the war, who had joined the Sattel firm. Franz had been injured in the war, lamed, and as a result he could not use the right side of his body. I literally became his “right-hand man.” At the time of my apprenticeship with Sattel, the Catholic Diocese of Speyer supported a diocesan school of church music, founded by an influential church musician named Erhard Quack. It met on weekends, and I was thrilled to be able to attend because I was so interested in music. We studied harmony, Gregorian chant, counterpoint, and composition. I also sang in the Dom choir so I had a very condensed education in the field of church music. 

Did you think about a career as a church musician?

It came to the point when I had to decide whether or not I was going to be a church musician. At the diocesan school I also studied organ. The school had acquired two organs, one built by Paul Ott, who later on became quite well-known in Germany. I had piano lessons as a child so I already had some keyboard skills. Well, I then had to decide whether to continue on and be a church musician or become an organbuilder. It was on the advice of my father, who was more practical in nature, that I decided to stay in organbuilding.

 

A practical suggestion to stay where there might be an income?

Exactly. So this is why I continued and finished my apprenticeship with master organbuilder Paul Sattel. My apprenticeship coincided with what we call the time of the Orgelbewegung [Organ Reform/Revival Movement], the movement of going back to building mechanical organs after the period of building Romantic-type organs. I was fortunate to encounter both Romantic and 18th-century instruments.

 

This was the time when the Werkprinzip was coming back into fashion, championed by Albert Schweitzer and looking to the Baroque organs of Silbermann and Schnitger?

At that time, yes, it came back into fashion, although in retrospect I think the pendulum had swung too far. Some of the organs we built at that time—which we considered wonderful, based on the Werkprinzip—sounded sometimes more like bacon frying! So it had to settle down from one extreme to the other. By the time I finished my apprenticeship, after four years, things had sort of found a middle point. My experience of old instruments in Southern Germany included such organs as those built by the firm of Stumm, considered the Silbermanns of the South. I had exposure to maintaining and rebuilding and restoring old instruments of the Stumm period.

I suspect people might not know much about Stumm. Can you say more?

The difference between Stumm and Silbermann—in North Germany where you find Silbermanns, the façade pipes are, for example, 80% tin, whereas in the South the façade pipes consist of a much higher lead content, which was a lot cheaper. Of course, they didn’t last as long and certainly began to deteriorate after many decades. The reason for the difference in the metal content was more a matter of the economy than of the sound. People in the South were poorer than the people in the North.

 

This is really interesting because it puts a clear distinction between North and South—between the bright-sounding and kind of glitzy Silbermann, and the slightly more rather job-oriented, cheaper, less flashy Stumm. Did this affect the music do you think?

Yes, exactly. And it also reflected on the personality of the musicians, too. I didn’t realize that until later, after I had expanded my knowledge in organ-building design and studied pipe scales and how all this translates into real music. For example, as I studied more organ literature, it became apparent that the melodic movement of the voices requires changes in the sound colors of certain organ stops between treble and bass. Some may need more brightness in the bass and more weight in the treble, and this would be achieved by variable-ratio pipe scales.

 

So that brings us to aspects of the design process in an instrument. I noticed that on your website [gabrielkney.com] you have a diagram of a pipe scale; it shows an unusual curve as opposed to a steady, straight line. Do you have a particular repertoire in mind when you are working on the tonal design of an instrument?

The diagram shown depicts the variable scales of the Principal chorus of the Great on the organ in Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Kansas City, Missouri. Different countries use different methods of pipe scaling. In my case, you know, I am very familiar with the music for which I am building instruments. This is what is important; it helps me envision how a sound should be. Naturally this changes from one organbuilder to another. Each has different ideas about the music. And this is what distinguishes one organ- builder’s sound from another. It is not a question of being better or worse; it is just different. But one has to live with the music in order to create a certain kind of instrument, and without knowing the music I would find it very difficult to do this.

 

Do you listen to a lot of music? Is it central to everything you do and are?

Yes, of course; it really forms my whole being.

The interest in the organ has never really been consistent, certainly in my experience, and, as a client of an organbuilder, one is talking in terms of quite a large financial commitment for an instrument in a church, or school, or house. And it’s not a steady flow of interest. So when there were difficult times what was the motivation to keep going as a builder?

It’s really all about the music. It certainly wasn’t the financial thing because I don’t know any organbuilders who became rich. I know some rich organbuilders, but they didn’t become rich from building organs. I found it a constant effort to build sounds that would accommodate the music, which, in a way, I found mind-boggling. And to do justice to that, this is what kept me going.

 

I’m just fascinated with the concept that music is your life and in the context of building an instrument, do you put an instrument into a church, or a university, or a home with a particular hope that it’s going to achieve something?

Well, yes, not that it necessarily does. But I hope it will do justice to the music played on it or the way in which it will be used. It’s not always the case, I must say, but there are some good examples I know of where this has indeed taken place. Some churches use their organ well, and it is used in the way I hoped it would be. I know that especially some of my smaller church instruments have contributed to raising higher standards of music and have been influential in not just attracting but requiring good musicians to play them.

 

Do you ask a client, when you’re building for them, what they want to use it for?

No. Well, I will know what kind of music they probably want to use it for, but in my mind I will envision the kind of music in which it will likely be used. You have to have a picture in your mind when you voice an organ. It may be a small instrument, maybe 12 or 15 stops, and right from the outset I envision that instrument will be especially suitable in a certain style, whether it’s Classic French or North European, or Spanish for that matter.

 

So this is tonal design.

You set out to design a distinct picture of what you hope to achieve, for example, the design of the pipe scales, as mentioned earlier. But you have to have a musical picture in your mind first. And then, of course, once that is established, my pipe makers can build exactly to my specifications. I send all the information to them: variable ratio scales, constant ratio scales; here are the Cs, and here are other points. It takes years to establish this kind of cooperation and understanding between pipe maker and builder. Over time it worked well for me, and I must say I was always happy when it worked as planned. So this is how it goes, and if it works out that the organ indeed will be used in the way I had envisioned, of course it is very satisfying. It’s not always the case, of course, but . . .

 

Is there a particular difference in approach between the house instrument, the school instrument, the church instrument, and the concert hall? Or is it the same, the same general approach?

Well, in the concert hall, of course, you have to consider that it will be used in many, many different ways. And so you have to make an effort to build an instrument that will do the best it can. With a smaller instrument you can be more specific.

 

How do you feel about your earlier instruments? Do you still enjoy the ones from earlier in your career?

As one gets older, as the years go by, you have a different vision. For example, if I go back to organs that I built, say, in the 1960s and I listen to recordings I still have, I have to say to myself, gosh, you know, I wouldn’t do this anymore like that, but at the time I thought this was ideal. So as one changes and hears things differently and you learn more about the music, you say, well, it was good at the time, but I wouldn’t do it again like that. It’s sort of an always-developing system. Life is not stationary. One does change.

 

I think our soundscape changes as well. And as your soundscape changes and the environment you live in changes, what one might need for and from an instrument changes. We haven’t talked about the Roy Thomson Hall instrument and acoustic design.

Of course acoustics have been a lifelong concern. In my case, the most vivid example probably would be Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. Right before even the first spade dug a hole in the ground, we talked about acoustics. The discussions weren’t always fruitful, but acoustics were always a concern. Working with acousticians can be challenging. The results can be disappointing as well as wonderful.

 

Yes. Your favorite instrument?

Picking favorites is a bit like picking your favorite child. Nevertheless, one of my favorites is certainly at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota. I worked with Robert Mahoney, an acoustician located in Boulder, Colorado. We had a wonderful cooperation, and that is why the acoustics at St. Thomas turned out so well. And not just for the organ. The choir sounds wonderful, and congregational singing—well, it’s just great! I think part of this is due to the fact that the acoustician is himself a musician, a horn player and a graduate of Juilliard. That is so helpful. An acoustician with a music background is different from one who knows how to install loudspeakers. The instrument at St. Thomas is the one I keep going back to because everything gels. If the acoustics are not part of the instrument it is very difficult to bring it off well.

 

If you could have done anything else, what would that have been?

I don’t know; I never thought about it. I know for sure I would make a lousy teacher. More than anything else it was my teachers who influenced me most. Apart from Erhard Quack there were other influential persons, one of whom was a composer who taught at the diocesan school. His name was Wilhelm Waldbroel. He wrote wonderful music. His compositions were by and large in polyphonic style for choir, sometimes choir and brass. In my mind these people were giants, not just as musicians, but as teachers and human beings and people who really influenced my life and music. They provided energy, and this is why I decided on organbuilding. These people provided the information and connections. I consider them my mentors. 

Of course, I think back to my father, too, and those Sunday afternoons when he and his friends—and I was included too, along with a few of my friends who played instruments—would get together and play chamber music. We didn’t have the distraction of TV, you know, and this was one thing we could do as a family and as a group. We enjoyed doing it.

 

One last comment. I see over the door to your music room a little sign that says “Schreinermeister—Gabriel Kney.” 

That is my father. His name was Gabriel Heinrich Kney. Schreinermeister means master cabinet maker. He carved this sign, and it hung on the wall by the front gate of our home for many years. If you look carefully at the picture of my family taken by that front gate you will see this little sign to the right. My father sent it to me for my 40th birthday. And with it he sent a letter, the only letter I ever received from him. I have attached it to the back of the sign.

 

Gabriel, this has been a fascinating conversation, and I feel privileged to have been able to play and enjoy a number of your organs. Thank you so much for your time, and for giving the world these 130 wonderful instruments—I’m sure, wherever they are, that they are loved and cherished and have many stories to tell!

Special thanks to Katharine Kney Timmins for transcribing the original interview and to John Allen, Mark MacBain, and Roland Schubert for photographic assistance.

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

Gavin Black

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

Recording Notes II

Last month I recounted some musings that passed through my mind during preparation for my recent Frescobaldi recording sessions, about why one might want to make recordings. Now I offer related musings about what exactly a recording is or should be. This is a pastiche of notes that I took during the weeks before the recording sessions began, blended with some later thoughts arising from perusal of those notes and out of my memories of what I was thinking during that time. 

So, what is a recording or what should a recording be? Should it be a simple record (in the colloquial sense) of something that happened? That is the source of the name that we use for the process of playing music in the presence of machinery that enables someone else later to listen to some other music that is closely derived from what was played in the presence of that machinery. (Notice that it’s hard even to describe the process without actually using the word “record.” I didn’t want to write “that is the source of the name that we use for the process of recording . . .,” so I had to devise something convoluted.) The original concept seems to be simple: this is happening, let’s make a record of it, as we might make a written or photographic record of something. I would think that photography, which existed first, could easily have decided to claim the word “record” to be used as we now use the word “photo.” 

But recording is also something else (as is a photograph). It is the source of artistic experience on the part of a listener. Should that experience be the same as what it would have been for the listener to have been in the room where the recording took place? Or at a similar performance of the same music? Is that possible? Does trying to achieve that lead to a better or a worse potential artistic experience for that listener? Do the answers to any of this tell me anything practical or specific about how to approach this recording? Or anything not too practical or not that specific, but still meaningful?

 

Overhearing the battle

I once listened in on a conversation about the nature of recording that has remained with me for a long time. I have measured and understood some of my own feelings about music by referring back to this conversation. The ways I relate to what I remember was said then have changed. In this conversation, which took place about 1980 and involved two older colleagues of mine, as I remember it, I didn’t have much of my own to say. That was probably just as well: I didn’t have the relevant experience to know what to think. The point was this: two musicians, older and more experienced than I was, both harpsichordists among other things, were discussing Ton Koopman’s recording of harpsichord music of Giovanni Picchi. As it happened, they were both themselves specialists in Picchi. They had studied and performed his music and had various thoughts, feelings, and ideas about it.

The conversation began when one of them commented that the Koopman recording, then quite recent, struck him as too quirky. (At that time there was a lot about Koopman’s approach to rhythm and articulation that was new and seemed startling to many.) Beyond just not liking Koopman’s approach, he asserted that a recording should be objective—that it should present the music “as is” without the imposition of personal whim. The other member of the discussion strongly disagreed. She felt that if a performer were to embrace the idea of recording in an impersonalized way, stripping away whatever that performer would normally add out of his or her own artistic stance and experience, then the result would almost certainly be boring. That approach wouldn’t result in recordings that gave a pure unvarnished version of the music, but with recordings that misrepresented the music as stiff and not alive.

Each of these musicians (both teachers) felt that performers who wanted to approach recording the other way shouldn’t make recordings. “If you are going to make a record of something, show the music as itself without imposing anything on it. If you can’t do that, don’t record,” as opposed to “If you are going to make a record of something, play it the way you really feel it, otherwise there’s no point, so don’t record.” Diametrically opposed ideas. (There was anger involved, something that surprised and disturbed me at the time, especially since each discussant turned to me looking for agreement!) At the time, I tended towards the first view, though with an uncomfortable awareness that it could lead to boring recordings. Now I am only interested in approaching things the second way: a complete reversal for me that has happened gradually over more than thirty years.

There is a concept that people turn to once in a while of a “reference” recording. That phrase can mean a number of things. It probably most often means what the first member of the above-referenced conversation meant: a recording that has an air of objectivity to it, that is trying to stake a claim to be “just the music” and not a performance with any quirkiness to it. As an ideal this has to be based on a feeling that certain ways of playing are more objective than others. That’s complicated. Does objective mean moderate—medium tempi, only a little bit of rubato, and so on—or does it mean specifically true to what the composer wanted? That opens up problems that come with trying to know what the composer wanted.

But there’s another thing: sometimes recordings that are clearly quirky and personal become established as reference recordings because of something about their circumstances. That is true of the Bach recordings of both Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Neither of those performers was striving for a middle of the road objectivity. And although one or the other of them might have wanted to dispute this, it’s clear that neither of them was doing specifically what the composer would have done or would have expected to hear. Nonetheless, many listeners assume that these recordings are somehow “definitive,” and many students assume they should listen to these recordings for the express purpose of learning how they should play the pieces. 

So, either a self-consciously objective or an unapologetically personal recorded performance can come to exercise a substantial influence on how people think about and play a particular repertoire.

 

As the years go by, one’s viewpoint evolves

When I was growing up, I reacted to the Bach recordings of Helmut Walcha as having a quality of objectivity, of being some sort of settled reality, rather than just how one amazingly gifted and thoughtful performer chose to play the music. I got a lot of excitement from basking in the feeling as I listened to his records (drawn from the boxes that I loved so much as physical objects), that I was hearing something as close as would ever be possible to the fingers and feet of Bach himself. Now, as much as I admire Walcha’s extraordinary artistry and skill and still enjoy listening to his recordings, I have moved away from hearing or wanting to hear the for-the-ages objective correctness in his way of playing. 

A little bit later I reacted to Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven recordings in a similar way. I don’t know in retrospect how much any of this came from something intrinsic to those recordings and how much came from something about the circumstances in which I encountered them or about me as a listener at that time.

 

Like it or not, the past influences the present

What does any of this say about how I should approach recording now? I have to remember two things that tug in opposite directions. First, I really don’t want to think of what I am doing as having that “reference” quality. I don’t want any of what I create to have a feeling of objectivity, and I really don’t want it to be used to create a sense that this is how it should be. I understand that the amount of dissemination that any recording of mine will have will be modest enough to limit the damage that could come from anyone’s taking it that way, unlike with Gould, Landowska, Walcha, or Brendel. But (ideally) I don’t want anyone to take it that way. Whether I am right, wrong, or neither, to feel that way I have no idea. But I do feel that way. On the other hand, stemming from the relationship for me between recording and nostalgia, I do feel the tug of trying to create the kind of edifice that I thought I was encountering in those Walcha Bach boxes, even as I avowedly don’t want to do so.

That probably means that when I find myself actually sitting there with the tape rolling (so to speak), I have to remind myself not to tighten up, not to mimic, unconsciously, some sort of image of the magisterial, objective, for-the-ages performer. It’s not that I think that those recording artists whose work I react to as having that objective quality necessarily felt that way during recording sessions. They probably didn’t. It’s that I am aware of a pull to try to feel that way, though I know that I shouldn’t, and don’t want to. If I give in to that pull and sit there playing, thinking, “this is a well-crafted, definitive performance,” that will only lead to stiffness. It would also likely be a distraction.

In concert performance, I want there to be an element of spontaneity, something that at least part of the time leaves people reacting as they would to improvisation. (That’s not only my idea, of course: it’s a common ideal and often a fruitful one.) Sometimes this means being willing to do very specific performance and interpretive things that are unplanned and that the player might not do again. Certainly in the areas of arpeggiation, articulation, some sorts of rubato, shaping of certain ornaments, etc., I might do something in a performance that I hadn’t planned in advance and don’t consciously plan even as I am doing it. Some of these things come out as noticeably quirky. Is it OK for that to happen in a recording session? If I play a piece in concert a dozen times and in each of those performances a particular spot in the piece is discernibly different, is it acceptable if the finished recorded product has one of those and not the others? Of course it has to, but does there have to be some sort of hierarchy of how suitable those interpretive quirks are to be “immortalized?” If there is such a hierarchy, does that feed into the quest to make the recording sound “objective?” 

There’s a spot in one Frescobaldi piece where I really love the effect that I get by eliding a certain repeat, actually omitting the final chord of a particular section the first time through and replacing it with the beginning of the repeat of that section. It is appropriate harmonically and can be made to work rhythmically. In no way does the composer indicate this or suggest it. (It could have been indicated with a “first ending—second ending” setup.) I know of no musicology to back it up. It is hauntingly beautiful to me. I usually do it in concert. Should I do it on the recording?

(Did I? Of course as I sit here writing I know the answer . . .)

There are places where I am convinced that the surviving sources have made a small mistake: that something—a note, an accidental, a rhythm—should be different. (Usually by that I mean that the composer actually intended it to be different and that the “mistake” is an out-and-out typo. Sometimes I mean I believe that on further reflection, the composer probably would have done something a little bit differently.) In concert I usually feel absolutely fine about changing the passage to be what I think it should be. What about in a recording? Again the “for the ages” idea comes into play. Any one concert performance is ephemeral. If I try out something that may be “wrong” (Frescobaldi surely meant C# there—the C-natural sounds odd) there’s a limit to how much artistic damage that can be done if it is in fact I rather than the composer or copyist who was wrong. Is it different in a recording because it will be listened to repeatedly (if I’m lucky!) or because it will still be around many years from now? 

We allotted a whole five-day workweek for this series of recording sessions. That’s rather a long time. There’s a bit more than ninety minutes of music in this project. If I want to play everything five times—which is somewhere between average and safe for getting good takes of it all and for having choices among takes—that is about eight hours. In a pinch one could do eight hours of taping in one day. (My first recording for the PGM label was taped in one day, since we only had the venue for that long, and the producer was very eager to use that particular venue. It was a very grueling day!) But we want to allow for noise, tuning, regulation issues, periods of time when I space out and fail to play adequately for several takes in a row, stretching, relaxing, lunch breaks, and in general for it not to be too grueling—no more so than is necessary.

Next month I will present the fruits of the note-taking that I did during each of those five days and close with some thoughts that stem from where I am now: taping done, a bit of listening done (more by the time I am writing for next month), editing begun, but with a long way to go.

Here, as a sort of appetizer, is a link to a short video from the final day of the sessions. The piece is the second Galliarda from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQgs1m5Hls.

Gavin Black

August interlude

I have decided to take a partial break from my sequence of columns about helping students to develop fingerings and instead write about a few miscellaneous matters that have been on my mind. These are all small but interesting things that are hard to fit into columns that are about something well defined. So this month’s column is a grab bag or smorgasbord. I am influenced to construct this sort of column right now by the following confluence: it happens that I am writing this during a real heat wave (early summer mid-90s temperatures, with lots of sun and little wind), and this column will be distributed in August, when, around where I live, this sort of weather would be more typical. So it feels like time for a bit of summer relaxation and catching up.

A couple of things that I am writing about this month tie in with the business of teaching fingering. That may not be too surprising, since, as I wrote a few months ago, there is no such thing as keyboard playing without fingering. I will note these connections, but not go into them at great length, and then pick up those threads as well in the coming months.

As I looked over my notes about some of these points and thought about a few more things that have passed through my mind recently, I noticed that some of what I want to discuss is even more personal than usual: my playing, my own reactions to things, some of what I think has gone well in my work, and some of what has gone not so well. I believe most of us find it challenging to say openly: “Yes, I did this well. This was a success.” or “That didn’t work out. I am not (yet?) good at that.” Grappling with framing certain things in one of those ways is a reminder that everything that we do performing and teaching is a result and a reflection of our makeup and experiences. It is extraordinarily important that we remember that this is true of our students as well.

 

Forced into sight-reading . . .

I recently played a harpsichord recital for which I forgot to bring some of my music. (Is this going to be a trend? Do I have to do something about it? Not sure yet.) In particular, I simply didn’t have any way of obtaining a copy of a Froberger toccata that I had programmed. This is a piece that I have played in recital a dozen times or more over the last couple of years, more on harpsichord than on organ. It is also a piece that I know extremely well. I could probably write out at least chunks of it, and write in what I know to be my fingerings for those bits.

But that doesn’t mean I could play the piece from memory. (This is my first experience of bumping up against this particular practical disadvantage to my preferred approach of not performing from memory.) I noticed that in a Froberger volume that I had with me, from which I was going to play a suite, there was another toccata in the same key as my missing one. That meant that I could play it instead of the programmed one without making the printed program inaccurate or misleading. 

The only problem was that I had never learned this piece. I have probably read through it at some point in the past, since I have specialized in Froberger for decades and have read through all or close to all of his music. But if so, I didn’t remember that, and it would have been years ago. But I read through the piece once during my tuning and warming-up session and decided I could go ahead and play it in the concert. I did so, and it went fine: basically accurate, a wrong note or two, but not necessarily more than I or another performer might make in any piece; rhythms certainly accurate; tempos in the faster bits perhaps slower than I would want them following a normal amount of preparation, but not by much. It was a successful performance, though I hope that it was not as effective as it would have been if I had worked on it. If it was, then that casts some doubt upon my whole normal learning and preparation strategy!

So, what did I get out of this? I am certainly not recounting this to suggest that I am a particularly great sight-reader. Really I am not. I figure that by the standards of professional keyboard performers, I am probably about a “B-plus” sight-reader, and if not exactly that, then more likely “B” than “A-minus.” And I suspect that the several other toccatas in the volume would have been a stretch for me to sight-read in performance. They looked more intricate. It was a lucky coincidence for me that the one in the correct key was the simplest-looking one. But it is also important not to remain trapped in a sense of what we cannot do or what we are not good at. When I was in college, it would have been utterly out of the question for me to perform this piece without having practiced it for weeks. Could I have performed it after one read-through fifteen years ago? Five? I am not sure. But I was correct to intuit that I could do so now. 

We should also never remain trapped in a sense of what our students cannot do. What they (and we) can and cannot do should be changing all the time. While I was actually performing this piece, the feeling of playing it was more comfortable and serene than what I often experience while performing a piece that I know well, that I have prepared obsessively, that I feel ready to perform or record, that I consider part of my identity as a player. Why? How is this even possible? There has to be something to learn there about concentration, expectation, and anxiety. I do not yet know exactly what that is. It must start from the awareness that I had to pay close attention all of the time, every fraction of a second, like driving on a slippery road. But what about that would be good to import into the act of playing a well-prepared piece? Would there be a down side to doing so? Less spontaneity? My thinking about this is new and evolving, especially since this was the most recent concert that I have played as I sit here writing.

This also reminds me that there is such a thing as sight-reading fingering, or even a sight-reading approach to fingering. Fingering will be a different sort of phenomenon depending on whether you do or don’t know what is coming up next. To some extent this has to tie in with patterns and templates for how to play what sort of passage. How does this, or doesn’t this, have the potential to inform work on carefully planned fingerings?

 

 . . . and improvisation.

I am not much of an improviser. Long ago I was intimidated by improvisation and never even considered studying it systematically. That may or may not be a loss or a problem for me—after all, nobody does everything. However, I can play rather meandering chord progressions that often sound perfectly pleasing and that serve to enable me to explore the sounds of instruments without needing to put music in front of me. This very limited improvisation, or noodling around, is really derived from my continuo-playing experience. I am in effect generating bass lines, more or less at random, and then realizing them as continuo parts. I recently noticed that when I do this with a pedal line as the bass line, I find it almost impossible to involve my left hand. The influence of the feel of ordinary continuo playing is so strong that I can’t get any intuition going as to how to add chords and notes other than in the right hand. I find this interesting, just as a kind of archeological dig into my modest history of improvisation. But it also makes me think that I should try to make myself sit on my right hand when playing this sort of thing and force my left hand to get involved. Furthermore, I should urge any student doing this sort of thing to emphasize the left hand, or at least to be sure to give it equal weight.

 

Learning a magnum opus

I have played Bach’s French Overture, BWV 831, in three recitals over the last several months. This is a piece that I have loved for many years. I initially tried playing it when I first had regular access to a harpsichord on which to practice, about 40 years ago. It was beyond challenging for me at that point, so it pleases me that I can work on it, learn it, and perform it now. In order to do so, I have had to get past a little bit of the trap mentioned above: getting stuck in a sense of what I cannot do. But what has been most interesting to me about actually playing this piece in concert is that it is long, about 40 minutes, and quite intricate, dense, and varied. Since I have played many concerts that are a lot longer than that, even those that have halves longer than that sometimes, it never occurred to me that stamina might be an issue. However, in each of the three performances, my playing of the last movement, a sprightly and excited piece with the non-traditional title of “Echo,” has been influenced (really I should say undermined) by stamina issues. I believe that what happens is that as I get through the end of the previous movement, the Gigue, I feel my energy and/or concentration lessen, and, in trying to boost it back up, I start the Echo too fast. It is then hectic, helter-skelter, and more prone to note inaccuracy than I would like. Although I identified this concern after the first time I played the piece in recital, I was not able to prevent it from happening each of the next two times as well, though it has been progressively less severe. 

I have learned from this that the little opportunities to regroup in a concert that are afforded by breaks between pieces are significant and useful. Also, regardless of how well learned the various sections and movements of a program are, and no matter how tempting (and genuinely important) it is to focus on practicing hard passages, it is a good idea not to neglect playing through the whole thing. (Not that I have neglected that completely in preparing for these concerts, but I think that I underestimated how much of it I should do.) This reminds me to review my approach to any similar issues with my students.

 

The familiar and the unfamiliar

A few months ago I played a short lunchtime recital at the Princeton University Chapel. This is an extraordinary venue, for music or for anything else, and home to a justly famous and wonderful organ. But for me it is something more: a place where I spent thousands of hours playing the organ during the years when I was an undergraduate at the university. In the years since then, I have mostly pursued performance on mechanical-action organs and on harpsichord and clavichord, and the large Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner/Mander organ is not the most familiar sort of beast to me nowadays. On the other hand, this particular organ, rebuilt though it has been, and most especially this setting, evoke as much feeling of familiarity and as much deep nostalgia as any place or any instrument could. I was playing, in part, music of Moondog that day. Moondog is my second specialty along with music of the Baroque. I first encountered all of his pieces that I played this recent day during or shortly before my time as a student at Princeton, and I played them all frequently in the chapel back then. This was a powerful reminder to me that individual experience is what most informs our feelings about music, as about everything else, and that no two people—teachers, students, listeners, players—ever bring the same set of experiences to the way that they take in music.

I was also reminded that everything about technique, as well as about interpretation, is in part about the instrument. (That is, the instrument as a separate entity alongside the music, the interpretive stance of the player, the player’s habits and preferences, and so on.) Of course I know this, and have written about it. But this was a vivid real-life experience of it, with interesting twists because of the unusual blend of familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Hearing wrong notes 

I recently heard about a (not particularly recent) study that showed quite systematically that most listeners don’t consciously hear or notice most wrong notes. The study involved asking several talented graduate student pianists to record several piano pieces. These were pieces that they had not studied before, and that they were given a fairly short time to learn. This was to try to secure enough wrong notes to make the study meaningful. The listeners were undergraduate pianists, some of whom were and some of whom weren’t familiar with the pieces. The gist of the result was that the listeners reported only a very small fraction of the wrong notes. (Here is the link to the article about this study to which someone directed my attention: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audience….) 

This study tended to confirm my feeling that we as players exaggerate the importance of wrong notes. Of course there are questions. Does what this study found about piano apply equally well to organ, to harpsichord, or to instruments outside of our specific concern here, or to singing? Should we actually embrace for ourselves or for our students, caring less about accuracy than we might feel required to do? Is that a slippery slope? Preparation and practicing, and planning fingering, are in part about striving for accuracy. In fact it is easy to fall into thinking that that is all that they are about. Is there a way to juggle successfully both motivating ourselves and our students to try with all our might to prepare for extraordinary accuracy and wearing the need for that accuracy very lightly? Does a clear-cut study like this add to our intuitive sense? All of that planning, to the extent that it is not just about reliable accuracy, is about gaining enough control to do what we want to do expressively. Can we separate out those two goals and emphasize one more than the other? Are there differences in fingering choices that might arise out of this distinction? Or different ways of approaching the whole matter of fingering choices? How can we best help students sort this out?

 

The next generation

A short while ago I was visited in my harpsichord studio by a few students of a fine local piano teacher. These students were second- and third-graders. After they had played around a bit on several instruments, one of them commented to me that she liked the antique Italian harpsichord the best. That made sense to me, as a lot of people have that reaction. She then said, in explanation, “it has an intelligent sound.” I was really taken with that way of putting it or that way of hearing the sound. I had never encountered that particular image before. It resonated with one of my ways of experiencing instrument sound, especially that of organs and harpsichords.

I want to have the subjective experience, if I listen closely and without distraction, that the sonority seems to me to come directly from, or in a sense to be, a sentient being. Although this young girl had no prior experience with harpsichords, it reminded me of the description by the very experienced Keith Hill of clavichord sound, which I quoted in last April’s column. It includes the statement that “clavichords should have the sound of thought.”

Next month I will buckle down, so to speak, and get back to work on our extended look at fingering.

Gavin Black

Reflections from a trip

I recently returned from an unusually long vacation, and it has been around six weeks since I have taught or even played a note on the organ or harpsichord. For part of this time I was traveling in England—mostly London—with family members. I am in the process of discovering, as I get back to my regular routine, that there are aspects both of being off from work for that long and, especially, of visiting London that have lead me to reflections about teaching, playing music, the art of practicing, the business of helping to motivate students or to understand and work with their motivation, and various other tiles from the mosaic of the work that I do and that I write about. I want to set some of those reflections down here, before they have a chance to fade away. Admittedly, this column is a bit miscellaneous.

I grew up in an academic family, and we had various sorts of long breaks from our normal life at home. Some of those were the three-and-a-half month summer vacations that seemed to me growing up to be the norm. (More about that later.) But there was also an occasional sabbatical, when we would be away from home for eight or nine months, and really settle somewhere. During one of these periods, when I was thirteen years old, we lived in London. I also spent other, shorter, chunks of time in London in my teens, but, until a few weeks ago, I had not been there in forty-two years. (The reasons for this were varied and random: budget, logistics, other things going on, and my own aversion to air travel.)

The first, and biggest, phenomenon that I noticed being back there after all that time was just how powerful it felt to me—it was as if the years had melted away. It felt like a new and compelling combination of a dream and reality. Walking, and in some cases, re-walking the streets of London felt like one of the most important things that I had ever done. I knew that living in London had been important to me, but I was completely unprepared for how powerfully being there again after such a long time would hit me.

 

Early life experiences and later influences

What does that have to do with music, or with teaching? Well, it reminds me of, and sort of ratifies for me, the importance of early experience in shaping what we care about, how we think and feel, and what is more important and less important to us. Only some of that, of course, is about music—maybe little or none for some people, a lot for others. And it is not a point that is obscure or controversial, let alone specific to me. However, it came flooding back to me during this particular time, and that in turn reminds me to renew my commitment to helping students discover what it is that they most care about, what draws them to what they are proposing to do in music—why they are doing it—and to helping them to explore where that all come from.

In fact the first student whom I saw after I got back was a new student. And I felt like I could sharpen the focus of all of the questions that I like to ask, such as “Why are you here?” “What interests you about the instrument(s) and their repertoire?” “What is your first memory of being aware of organ/harpsichord/keyboard instruments?” and so on. I felt even more comfortable than I have in the past making such questions the center of the process of our beginning to work together.

Nevertheless, there were also things surrounding this trip that were much more specific to music and to my musical life. Not surprisingly, since I was thirteen, and the stay in London was, at seven months, quite a long one for someone at that formative age, I had a lot of experiences during that long-ago time that were directly part of my own early musical development. By and large, those resided in the fairly deep recesses of my mind, but they came flooding back. 

It was in London, during the fall of 1970, I really discovered the Beethoven piano sonatas. This was not so much as a player, but as a listener. I had the radio on much of the time that I was hanging around our apartment that year, and BBC Radio 3 happened to be playing, over part of that season, a large sample of Alfred Brendel’s early recording of the Beethoven sonatas. These performances were a revelation to me. I had certainly heard Beethoven’s piano music—and some of his other works—prior to that. Yet, until then, I found the pieces unsatisfying: sort of fragmented or arbitrary. Looking back it is almost certain that I was too young to appreciate them. My whole orientation to music started with Bach and Handel, and I think that Beethoven was frighteningly anarchistic to me as an eleven- or twelve-year-old. Occasional listening to a sonata played by Rubinstein, Schnabel, or Fischer had not enabled me to break through that. However, for whatever reason, these Brendel recordings made perfect sense out of the music for me, and in so doing opened up the whole world of post-Baroque music to me.

I noticed, a week or so after returning home from London, that the only music that had been going through my head since then were Beethoven piano sonatas! The experience of being in London has apparently re-awakened something amounting to a preoccupation with those pieces. I think that, if I had any piano (as different from organ, harpsichord, or clavichord) technique, or perhaps if I had a Beethoven-era piano to work with (and the requisite technique) I would quite possibly be interested in approaching those pieces as a player. Indeed perhaps I will sit down and read through some of them, though without expecting anything much in the way of rhetoric or interpretation, since I do believe that mastery of the instrument is as crucial as being able to learn the notes, and I definitely do not have that with piano.

So, in addition to the importance that early experience plays in shaping what we care about or are interested in, I am reminded of the notion that coming to something naturally, when the time is right, is a valuable process. I did indeed (try to) play a fair amount of Beethoven on the piano as a teenager. But, even though by then I loved listening to that music, I never felt any affinity for it as a player. Any work that I did on it felt forced, any practicing that I did of it (and I did much too little) was impatient and vulnerable to distraction. Of course perhaps I “should have” made myself work harder and better way back then, as a matter of discipline or dedication. Nevertheless, I could not or did not, and that process feels to me (even more so after the recent experiences that I am describing here) like a completely different one from working on something out of genuine interest and desire.

 

Early life experiences and later regrets

On the other hand, as I reflect on how the trip relates to my teaching, I wonder: What are the downsides to my strong focus on following one’s own deepest artistic interests? Would I, for example, have been better off if I had somehow found a way to get myself to practice Beethoven more effectively (and just plain more) when I was young? Suppose that specifically a teacher had managed to force or coerce me into doing so. Would that have been good or bad? Even if the process feels unnatural, is the long-term loss too great to indulge the preference for what feels to me natural, organic, inner-directed? Is it a shame that a fairly accomplished, middle-aged player feels regret about missing the chance to learn a particular part of the repertoire? There is always an infinite amount to regret and no one can do everything. Also it is impossible (isn’t it?) to know with respect to any given child, teenager, student of any age, what he or she will or will not wish that you had made them do along the way.

On another matter altogether: we walked past a house where Mozart lived for several weeks during 1764, when he was eight years old, and where he is said to have written his Symphony #1, K16. The house is located at 180 Ebury Street, just south of Sloane Square, which was a rural area at the time Mozart lived there. (As far as I can tell, it is indeed the same building that is there, on a quiet street very much in the middle of the city, now.) Mozart’s father, Leopold, was recovering from an illness at the time, and apparently this necessitated quiet, and thus his children were not allowed to play music. Thus, it was a good opportunity for Wolfgang Amadeus to focus on composition. 

There is a statue of Mozart in the square near the house and a plaque on the house itself. In fact, that block of Ebury Street has been renamed, or given the additional name of, Mozart Terrace. All of this happened a long time after the Mozart family’s residence there. Although Leopold Mozart was an esteemed musician, and both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his older sister Nannerl were known as child prodigy performers, none of them were earth-shaking celebrities back then.

This leads me to the principle thing that I was trying to achieve by visiting and contemplating the Mozartiana around Ebury Street: the elusive awareness that Mozart was a person—a real, regular (though phenomenally talented) person. When he lived in Ebury Street, Mozart walked with his own ordinary feet over the same ground that my family and I were walking on last month. Did he like to walk down to the river? Was he more worried about his father or consumed by his music? What was there to eat in the neighborhood? Did Mozart find the old buildings around London cool?

Standing in awe of geniuses like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, makes plenty sense. Their intellect is awe-inspiring, and there is something about perceiving their work as out of the ordinary that can be extraordinarily powerful. But this perspective is usually by default. It is important to remember that they were also ordinary humans with everyday lives.

By the way, on a perhaps somewhat macabre note, another spur towards trying to take in the sense of the great figures of the past as real people is to be found at Westminster Abbey and other places that house tombs of famous people. It is sobering and moving to walk past (or on!) the spaces that contain the actual mortal remains of, say, Elizabeth I,
or Dickens, or Handel. The very bones that held the pen that composed Messiah are right there . . . .

 

No one knows everything.

Thinking back to Beethoven and Mozart reminded me of something else, not from London directly, but about even earlier in my life. I recall that when I was something like six or seven years old, I came across both of those names—Mozart in a children’s book about composers, and Beethoven in the title of the song Roll Over Beethoven, which I probably heard sung by the Beatles. I remember being disturbed about the pronunciations of both of those names. I thought that “Mozart” should be pronounced with a “z” in the middle, and that “Beethoven” should be pronounced such that the first syllable rhymed with “beneath,” and the rest sounded like the appliance in which you might bake something. I was sure that the grown-ups had it all wrong. I had never thought of the notion of different languages using letters differently, or having different sounds.

My point is that this is an example of a simple fact that it is easy to forget: that you only know something if you know it. No one knows that which they have not yet learned. This is one bedrock reason, though certainly not the only one, for teaching at all. It is also, I believe, closely allied to this: that no one knows or can know everything. So knowing what we do know and what we do not is critically important. And knowing how to find things out is as important as, or maybe more important than, knowing things. 

Twice on the England trip I happened to walk through a space where someone was practicing the organ. One of these spaces was King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with its famous Harrison & Harrison, and the other was Bath Abbey, where there is a Klais organ from 1997. I knew a lot about the King’s organ already, but nothing about the instrument in Bath. As an organ groupie, I was excited to hear both. So in each case I stood there listening for a while, probably staying a bit longer than I would have otherwise.

The experience reminded me of something I wrote in this column back in March: Performance is playing when 1) you know that you are playing, and 2) you know or think that someone is listening. So what about overheard practicing? For me as a random casual listener, this was performance, even though for the person seated at each of those organs it was not! It certainly had some of the significance for me that we usually associate with having heard a performance. Here I am remembering it a month or so later. Each of those brief listening experiences added a little something to the edifice of what it means to me to have spent my life hearing music, and to my awareness of what the organ is.

The last thing that I will mention for now is that, back in London, I poked my head briefly into Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. In 1970 we lived a few blocks from this church, and I used to go to short organ recitals there. I don’t remember whether it was a daytime or evening series—and if the former, exactly how I squared that with going to school. But I do remember that the sound of that organ and the ambience of the place helped seal the deal regarding my interest in the organ. I also remember that there was a strong sense of history there, that I found mesmerizing. I would not have recognized all of the names then, I assume, but I have now read that Edwin Lemare, Walter Alcock, and John Ireland were organists of the church at one time or another. I do remember there being a picture of Jean Langlais on the wall, taken on a visit of his to the place. I did not know much about him at that point, but I was nonetheless impressed!