On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is gavinblack-baroque.com, and he can be reached by email at [email protected].

Helping Students Choose Fingerings IV

This is my tenth anniversary column, as the first one was published in The Diapason of September 2007. It has been a great pleasure all this time, and I look forward to more. I also take this occasion to mention, as I did at the beginning and as I have from time to time, how much I like getting feedback from readers, and how helpful it is. Please keep it coming!

In this column I am returning to the thread about fingering, musing about ways of introducing students to the art of choosing fingerings for themselves. My plan is to outline some thoughts and suggestions about how to make a success out of my own preferred model: one in which we come as close as possible to letting students work things out for themselves from the beginning. In previous columns on this topic I have sketched out what I see as some advantages and some pitfalls of this basic approach, and the same for a contrasting, more “hands on” or interventionist, approach. Here I try to be as concrete and specific as I can about how to maximize the advantages and, especially, avoid the pitfalls of suggesting to students that they operate with as much autonomy as possible from as early as possible.

General ideas or principles

The overall scheme that I use with most students can be described this way. I want the student to have a set of general ideas or principles to work with prior to working out fingerings for pieces in general or for any particular piece, though these can be somewhat flexible. I ask the student to think about, explain, justify, defend, or rethink specific fingering choices that they bring to me. And I want to be on the lookout not so much for fingerings that I would do differently or that I disagree with, as for fingerings that I think have the potential to be physically harmful. (If the principles that I suggest in advance are well enough thought out and if the student remembers them, then this last point should be moot.) 

The first and over-riding advance principle is simply this: that fingering matters. It should not be taken for granted that everyone knows this. I have two brief anecdotes. First, I recently spoke to someone I know, an accomplished and committed amateur pianist. She was musing about why certain aspects of her playing were going better recently than they had in the past. As we explored that, she mentioned that she had been paying more attention to fingering over the last couple of years than she had previously. I assumed at first that this meant some refinement about an exact approach to fingering, one that she had found subtly more fruitful than what she had been doing. But it turned out that she meant something more basic. She had not, until quite recently, made a practice of planning out fingering at all, or of writing fingerings into music, or of necessarily always playing a passage with the same fingerings. Furthermore, she remembered that when she was taking lessons in her high school years, a few decades ago, none of her teachers ever particularly mentioned fingering as something to think about or really as something that existed as a subject. 

Second, a day or two ago I encountered, poking around at random the way one does, an internet discussion about all sorts of aspects of organ playing: finding repertoire for church, choosing editions, aspects of pedaling, and so on. A couple of posts featured a fervent and well-crafted attempt by one (anonymous) writer to convince everyone else that it was worth paying attention to fingering, planning it, being systematic about it. No one, as far as I could see, was arguing against this, but it also wasn’t obvious to everyone or necessarily part of their way of thinking. We might not all realize or remember that this basic point sometimes has to be made, or that it is something about which some students might need to be reminded.

I see that in the cryptic notes that I made for this column over the last couple of weeks I included the line “everyone needs reminders about everything.” I think that that is a good working assumption. I know that I do!

Convincing arguments for systematic fingering

The starting point for convincing (or reminding) students that they should take systematic fingering seriously is simply this: that if you drill or practice or repeat a passage with the same fingering every time, you are learning a physical gesture, making it progressively more solid. But if you repeat the same notes over and over again with different fingerings, you are drilling, if anything, contradictory gestures. Some of that practicing actually cancels itself out. This is concrete, basic, and true, and tends to be convincing. In fact, it is usually so quickly and uncontroversially convincing that it feels more like “reminding,” even if the student hasn’t thought about it in that specific way before.

It might be worth talking to a student about the distinctions among three connected but different things: 1) working out fingerings in advance; 2) always practicing with the same fingering; and 3) writing fingerings in the score. Clearly no one of these leads inevitably to the others, and they relate in different ways to the project of learning a solid approach to fingering. Writing fingerings in is neither an absolute necessity nor a guarantee that the fingering process will proceed fruitfully. Remembering what fingerings you want to use is necessary. Some people achieve that by writing in everything and reading those markings carefully at first, more subliminally later on, in a way that tracks the note-reading process itself. Some people achieve it by writing in only key or transitional fingerings, or even a random subset of all of the fingerings, just as guideposts. Some people achieve it by just having a really good memory for fingering. All of these approaches are fine if they work. The last one is rare, but I use it myself. I remember fingerings extremely well, but I find written fingerings distracting, so I write in very few indeed, none for most pieces. I should emphasize that this does not mean that I do not use the same fingerings consistently. This approach does not work best for most students or players, but works well for some. It can conceal inconsistent use of fingerings, so that should be monitored. But writing fingerings in is no guarantee that those fingerings will always (or ever) be followed. One pitfall of writing in all fingerings is that that act itself can seem like learning the fingerings, so that it becomes subconsciously tempting to ignore the question of whether you are really following what you have written. 

A student who is fairly new to working out fingerings will probably do well to start by writing in more rather than less, bearing in mind the concerns mentioned above. This makes it easier for the teacher to see what the student has done and to offer feedback, and to observe along the way whether the student is in fact using the intended fingering. 

It seems logical that if you write in many or most fingerings, you must have worked them out. And this is true at the extreme: no one is going to lean over the page and write in numbers at random. But it is more than possible to write in fingerings that have been worked out partially, quickly, or with inadequate thought, analysis, or attention. Then the writing can become its own pitfall: once the fingerings are written in they take on a bit of authority, and inertia favors keeping them. It is important for every player to remember that writing fingerings is just a tool. If while you work fingerings out you write them in, even if only to make sure that you don’t forget them while working, then you must be willing to erase them just as readily as you wrote them. In fact, just to be safe, you should try to be eager and enthusiastic about erasing! (It is annoying that most pencils can still write long after their erasers have worn away. Make sure that you have a good eraser at all times. No fingering should ever be written in ink.)  

What students should bear in mind when starting to write fingering

Our main concern right now is the working out itself—neither the writing, which has no real meaning in itself beyond its service as a tool towards other goals, nor the practicing, although it is the essence of the learning process. So what are some of the thoughts specific to the act of working out fingerings that I want students to bear in mind before starting to work?

1) Hand position. This is always my starting place with fingering. If the hand is comfortable, the chance that a combination of fingers will be able to execute a note pattern comfortably is greatly enhanced. If hand position is good, no fingering can be actually bad, though some can be more appropriate to the situation than others. Good hand position is self-defining: if the hand isn’t tense, then the position is fine. However, there is a lot more to say about it than that. The main thing that I point out to students, early and (if necessary) often, is that for the wrists to be turned out is productive of strain and tension. If a fingering choice causes one of the wrists to be turned out more than just a little bit, it is important to rethink that choice.

The second most potent source of tension in the hand is too much stretching between fingers, not so much between fingers 1 and 5 as between other pairs, especially 2 and 5. (Almost all keyboard players are aware of what interval they can reach with 1 and 5. But many of us don’t pay attention to what we can reach with 2 and 5 or other shorter segments of the hand. An awareness of the feel of wide intervals with non-thumb fingerings can help us understand the connections between fingering choices and the comfortable use of the hand as a whole.) Hand position is a good place to start in helping students to approach fingering with independence and autonomy, since only the player can actually know and experience whether a position is comfortable or not. The rest of us can only guess or predict. 

2) Do not play black notes with the thumb. When the thumb plays a black note, it is quite likely that the hand will twist into an uncomfortable position. However, the point of this as a guideline is the comfortable hand position itself, not something primary or critical about not letting the thumbs touch the raised keys. It is also a good way to promote awareness and autonomy. Yes, the student should assume that the thumb will avoid black notes, but should also be on the lookout for those situations in which for one reason or another it would actually be more comfortable to contravene this “rule.” This happens typically with octaves, but can happen for miscellaneous reasons having to do with the notes around a given black note. It is the exception, by a wide margin, but not vanishingly rare.

3) Repeated notes. I have written at great length in the past about why I believe that changing fingers on repeated notes is a good standard practice. This is mostly about the effect of this approach on the shaping of the repeated notes themselves, especially the release of the note(s) to be repeated. But it is also true that the freedom to move, on repeating a note, to any finger other than that which is already holding that note can open up possibilities for the shape of the overall fingering of a passage. Sometimes it really unlocks the whole thing. Students should always be on the lookout for this. In some passages, looking first at moments when a note is repeated, and reasoning the fingering out from that moment, forward and backward, can be fruitful and efficient.

4) Analyze fingering both forward and backward. We often start at the beginning of a passage, with a fingering for that beginning that might be rigorously determined or might be somewhat arbitrary, and construct fingering by going forward from there. However, whenever it is possible to choose a finger for a note based not on what just happened, but on what needs to happen next, that can lead to ease and simplicity. You do have to get to that finger, but the question of how you get there should not be granted automatic priority. That automatic priority is often hard-wired into our thinking. I will occasionally ask a student, “What finger would you play that note with if it were the first note of the piece?” And still they start their answer by saying, “Well, it has to be x,” because they have decided that you can only get to it with x. So then I will intensify the question: “Never mind how to get there. We’ll figure that out later. What if it were the first note you ever had to play?” That gets the focus on what comes next, on going on. And the interesting thing is that indeed the “how we get there” is usually easy to solve.

5) Don’t avoid fingers because of a perceived intrinsic problem with that finger. Of course this applies mainly to 5, second most to 4. It is common to see a student finger a fairly busy or spread-out passage with all or mostly 1-2-3, just because the outside of the hand seems (or is) weaker or less agile. That can lead to intrinsically awkward fingerings, and actually using the outer fingers is part of the way to get them to work their best. (There are also exercises and other dedicated techniques for that.)

Next month I will continue from here. Meanwhile I want to report, as a sort of tangent or coda, on a couple of random interesting things about fingering that I have bumped into in my preparation for these columns. The first is about Marcel Dupré. He is, for better or worse, greatly associated in organ culture with the notion of fingering, since his Bach edition was so thoroughly fingered. I encounter, surprisingly often, debates among colleagues about whether his Bach fingerings are good or bad, or perhaps whether they are good, in a sense, but inauthentic, or various other nuances about how to think about or approach them. (This includes whether or not to use his edition at all.) None of this, I hope, overshadows his legacy as a composer. I find it interesting to note that in his own published organ compositions he provided really thorough fingerings only for some of his simpler, or “teaching” works, not for the virtuoso performance pieces. Did this mean that he assumed that players of the more difficult works were intrinsically able to think about fingering on their own, or that they would have already absorbed his fingering ideas from teaching pieces, or something else?

Second, I have been looking at the version of the Bach Fantasia, BWV 922 (no pedal, probably for harpsichord), which was fingered very thoroughly by Johann Gottlieb Preller (1727–1786). Very little is known about Preller, but he is not known to have had any direct connection to Bach. He is also not known to have studied with any of Bach’s own students. However, he was born and raised in the same general part of Germany as Bach, and clearly knew of his music, since he copied some of it out. He was 40 years younger than Bach, and grew up in a musical milieu in which Bach was already somewhat old-fashioned. So how do we regard those fingerings?

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

To look or not to look

During my months off from writing this column, I heard from several readers, partly with various stories or questions or comments about organ study, but also with some suggestions for topics for future columns. These suggestions included aspects of service playing, advice about how to get pieces up to a fast tempo, and on fingering, including how to plan fingering with ultimate tempo in mind, dealing with acoustics, and details about pedal playing (always at the forefront of concern about organ playing!). I will in due course cover these topics. This month, however, I begin with something I consider to be more important the more I observe students—and indeed the more I observe my own process of learning and performing music. This is the question of whether, when, and how to look at one’s hands and feet while playing.

In an early column, I noted that some day I would devote a whole column to this, and while I have mentioned aspects of it from time to time, I have not yet written that column. Furthermore, I have developed some new ideas about it over the last few years—ideas that supplement rather than contradict or change my thoughts from several years ago. So it seems like a good idea to take it on, in this column and the next, pulling together some of my long-standing ideas and supplementing them with some new thoughts.

I have always been—and still am—very skeptical of the practice of looking at the hands or (perhaps especially) the feet. However, I have become more open to the idea that looking can sometimes be all right—certainly neutral, if it is done correctly, perhaps even helpful in some cases. This has led to the other new turn in my thinking: how to be sure that when you occasionally look down at the keyboard(s), you don’t create any problems by doing so. I have also developed some exercises and practice techniques that address looking or not looking at the hands and feet, or deal with looking away from the music. 

Beyond the practical aspects of looking or not looking, one can learn about focus and concentration, and about the whole learning process, by thinking about the different approaches to the looking/not looking question. I will include a few thoughts about that here.

The fundamental, most important fact about looking at the hands and feet while playing is that a reliance on looking is extremely damaging to the learning process for someone who is still learning to play. This is probably one of the things that I have observed the most clearly in my years of teaching and that I am most sure about. It is also one of the few things that I am willing, if necessary, to ask students to believe on trust even if they don’t see it for themselves right away. Not every student will do that, especially since I always urge students not to take things on trust, but it is why I have tried to make the advantages of not looking seem clear and obvious.

There is a distinction between someone who is still learning and someone who is an accomplished player. The pitfalls of too much looking are the most hazardous for anyone who is still engaged in the early to middle stages of becoming comfortable with the instrument. This is why thinking about this issue is specifically an important part of the work of a teacher. For more experienced, comfortable, “advanced” players (whatever imprecise term seems best), looking or not looking becomes more of a personal choice, a matter of comfort—at least much of the time.

Most of us find it natural to look—that is, literally, with our eyes—for things that we want to find. Picking up our glasses off the table, reaching for the light switch, getting a stick of butter out of the fridge, anything normal and everyday, is usually achieved partly through looking. The keys of keyboard instruments—more than the technical components of string or wind instruments, I believe—seem to be things that are there and that we want to find. So it is natural to think something like: “OK, I need to play that ‘A-flat,’ so I should look for it” or even “so I’d better look for it.” This is a way of seeming to map normal experience onto the act of playing a keyboard instrument: it seems intuitive, at least as a starting point.

However, there are equally fundamental reasons not to accept that intuitive feeling, not to look at the hands and feet while playing—especially while first learning to play. First of all, it is impossible to find every note of every piece by looking in time to play that note on time. If all music were extremely slow, this whole discussion might well be different. Looking at the hands and feet might be a valid option as a way of feeling comfortable at the instrument. But with real-life repertoire and performance conditions this just won’t work: there just isn’t time. Only a strong and reliable kinesthetic sense of the keyboard can enable the fingers and feet to go where they need to go, when they need to go there. So learning to play has to be, in part, a matter of developing that kinesthetic sense. And (this is the most important point here) every time that a student finds a note by looking, he or she misses an opportunity to strengthen this all-important sense. 

It is a very clear distinction: if you move your hands and fingers, or your feet, directly from whatever position they have just been in to the position they need to be in to play the next notes or chords, then you establish in your mind a connection between those two positions. If you intervene between those two points with a glance at the new position, and then find that new position through that visual clue, you do not establish that connection, or you establish it weakly. Only by reinforcing these connections over and over and over again can we achieve the ability to execute them reliably in the infinitely varied circumstances created by an infinitely varied repertoire. Using our eyes to find notes makes this process of learning physical connections inefficient. Using the eyes a lot makes it extraordinarily inefficient, and possibly totally ineffective.  

Other reasons to be concerned about looking at the hands and feet are more practical, and apply beyond the learning stage. It is always a possibility that upon looking away from the music, the player will get lost and be unable to come back to the right place in the music. I will discuss ways of dealing with this later on. This is tied up with questions about memorization and about solid learning in general. Also, there is a strong tendency for looking away from the music to cause delay: very tiny delay that doesn’t add an amount of time to the playing that can really be counted, but that tends to undermine the sense of rhythmic momentum and continuity. This is something that an accomplished player can find ways to deal with, if it is addressed purposefully. I will also come back to this later.

The good news, especially for beginning students, is that a very basic level of awareness of the kinesthetics of the keyboard gets established surprisingly promptly. I tell students that anyone who has been playing any keyboard instrument for a few weeks essentially knows where the keys are, though he or she might not realize it. Of course, this sense of where the keys are needs to grow stronger, so that it can function reliably with ever more complicated (and faster) music. Also, crucially, the player needs to learn to believe in it. However, a basic version of this awareness is established much sooner than most people—most students—realize. How early may depend somewhat on the exact nature of the very beginning lessons and/or practicing that this student encountered. But it will be there as something to build on, even from random doodling around. The layout of keyboards seems to be intuitive and humane enough to make this happen.

Let me mention the analogy to the typing keyboard. I don’t know from personal experience how intuitive that layout is, since I have never learned “touch typing.” I type with, perhaps, two or three fingers, always looking at the computer keyboard. Sometimes I must spend appreciable time searching for a given letter or symbol: my sense of where they all are is that poorly developed. It has slowly improved over many years of typing that way; I now often find my fingers heading towards the correct letter before I have consciously thought about where it might be. But I never can pin a letter down exactly without looking. This means that I am an extremely slow typist, and that I effectively cannot type a copy of something that I would have to read while typing. I can only type while composing. It is interesting to me that the most common form of “real” typing involves always pressing (I originally wrote “playing”) any given key with the same finger. 

This is completely different from playing a keyboard instrument, where there is no linkage between specific fingers and specific keys. It is more analogous to fingering on a wind instrument. My own slow typing suits me: it matches the speed at which I think out what I want to type. This is analogous to the slow musical tempos that would be required if players were all to try to find all of their notes by looking, but in this case it is suitable—or at least it works for me. I am, however, very aware that my need to look imposes limitations. This informs my sense of how important it is not to be limited by looking while playing music. My awareness that (almost) everyone but me does indeed type without looking reinforces my belief that everyone can do the same with a musical keyboard.

The fundamental difference between the keys of a keyboard instrument (and the typing keyboard) and the other objects that I mentioned above—the stick of butter, and so on—is that the keys don’t move. We don’t come to the moment when we need to find them without knowing where they are to be found. This is a necessary condition for us to be able to find them without looking. Other things in everyday experience also have this quality, such as the gas pedal and brake arrangement in a car. Of course, no one has ever thought that they had to look to get a foot from one of those to the other. It would be courting death to do so, so we are motivated to learn and believe that we don’t have to! Various household situations work this way: reaching for the bedside alarm clock, or a light switch on the wall of a room that you always enter the same way. Anything that is always in the same place relative to your person is something that you might well be able to reach for and find without looking. In normal life we don’t always do so, since there is often (gas and brakes aside) very little reason not to supplement the spatial awareness with visual confirmation. But such things can help to persuade students that the keys of their instrument can also be routinely found without looking.

Another way of looking at it is this: when we talk about reliably finding notes, we are also talking about avoiding wrong notes. These are complementary ways of looking at the same thing. When a student feels a strong urge to look at the hands or feet, that student is trying not to play wrong notes. However, by far most actual wrong notes made by students—and by most of us—come specifically because we don’t really know what the correct note was supposed to be. I first learned this by observing myself. When I was still a beginning (or at most “intermediate”) player, it one day occurred to me that whenever I made a wrong note or a cluster of wrong notes, if someone had stopped me and asked me what the right notes were supposed to be, I would never have been able to answer that question. I have since observed this with students, fairly consistently. The proportion of wrong notes that happen when the student clearly knows what note or notes or chord is indicated—and could promptly tell you if you asked—but makes a wrong judgment about where to find the note(s) on the keyboard is very small. The proportion that happens when the student doesn’t quite really know what was supposed to be played is very high. It is exactly the information that is on the page that is most urgently needed at the moment when a passage might be about to go wrong, not the information found on the keyboard itself. 

When a student has played a number of wrong notes—especially if it happens to be a high number—and has been looking down at the hands or feet quite frequently, I ask the student to try playing the same thing without looking at all. If the student is reluctant to do that, I remind him or her that the worst that can happen is that the passage will fall apart dramatically—so badly that it will be funny. And if that happens, so what? We will have learned something. Of course, the most common result is that the accuracy improves immediately and dramatically, even if the student didn’t expect anything good, and even before he or she had any sort of chance to get comfortable doing this, or to believe that it was a good idea. This experience, repeated as often as necessary, will help to persuade the student that not looking is fruitful.

I will continue this discussion next month and include further ideas about how to convince or cajole students into taking advantage of not looking at the hands and feet. I will also talk about when and how it is OK to look, and I will give the exercises and practice techniques that I mentioned above.

Velocity I

This month and next I am writing about the quest to play fast: fast enough, faster than before, faster than the next person, fast and secure, fast and yet clear. This important thread runs through all aspects of learning to play music. It can also touch upon all sorts of insecurities and sensitive spots. Can I play fast enough? Will my soloist or the conductor insist on a tempo that is too fast for me—either one that feels wrong musically or one that I just plain can’t do? If I don’t play at least something—anything—fast, will listeners assume that I am not really in command of what I am doing?

No one’s self-esteem as a musician is ever undermined by the inability to play slowly enough. (Well, it rarely is. Perhaps this should happen more. Playing slowly effectively isn’t necessarily particularly easy.) But many of us worry whether we can play fast enough, either for what we want to do musically or for what we think listeners will expect of us. We also worry that if we choose a slower tempo for genuine musical/expressive reasons, people will assume we just can’t play it faster. We rarely worry that our listeners will assume that we can’t play more slowly.

Long ago I heard it recounted that Rachmaninoff had said that Alfred Cortot always decided that the really hard bits had to be played “expressively,” that is, slowed down. This was of course meant to be a withering criticism of Cortot: not only claiming that his keyboard facility was faulty when it came to velocity, but also claiming that his much-admired expressive playing was actually musically arbitrary, and just a way of covering up lack of skill. I have reacted to this by saying that often the hard bits are hard because they are musically involved and complicated, and maybe should be slowed down, for the listener’s sake as much as for the players. But not-fast-enough seems to open us to criticisms of this sort, and we often worry about it.

Fortunately this (like most things) can also be a source of humor. I recall a moment a long time ago when I was in the company of a fine young musician who was about to play in a youth orchestra concert. An older friend who was there clapped him on the back with a hearty “Play louder and faster than everyone else!”

As far as I can tell, conductors are not likely to be subjected to this sort of criticism if they are inclined to slow tempos. The physical gestures of conducting relate to the music and its speed in a different way. Also, keyboard continuo playing usually becomes actually easier as tempo goes up—assuming that the continuo part is being improvised by the player, or at least has been written by the player with the ultimate tempo in mind. This is because in general, the faster the tempo, the fewer notes or chords are needed in the continuo realization. (If the bass line itself is too difficult at a fast tempo, that can reverse this effect.)

Tempo and fingering

My decision to write about this subject comes specifically from a reader’s suggestion, in a recent e-mail, that a “discussion of fingerings that will work at faster tempos would probably be interesting.” This indeed seems to me to be a good point of entry into the topic. Is the quest to feel comfortable up-to-tempo—especially at fast tempos—best addressed at the point of choosing fingerings (and pedalings—though I am focusing mostly on manual playing here) or best addressed by process—that is, practicing, and specifically the pacing of work on tempo within practicing? The answer is “both.” But how exactly, and in what sort of proportions? Next month I will look at some specific passages and different fingerings, to try to address this aspect of the question directly.

There are different levels and types of playing “fast.” This is obvious, but worth noting. The act of getting notes right—and its important adjunct, which is having it feel comfortable or even easy—is almost always more likely the more slowly a passage is being played. That’s the fundamental fact of learning pieces: it’s why we start practicing passages slowly and then speed them up. For many pieces, speeding up will not take things past a comfortable level of velocity. For these pieces, that process will always work and is not really within the sphere of this discussion. If, however, the goal is to play a piece at a tempo that seems to tax what the player can do with velocity, then there can be different, perhaps more complicated issues. 

The question is how much continuity there is across these two areas. Is the process that we use to make a “normal” piece comfortable and reliable what we should also use to get something very fast—fast enough that the velocity alone makes it a challenge? How are these two processes related? The point of any normal systematic practice is to create predictability: that is, to make us feel certain, as we play the piece, that we know what is coming up. In “normal” situations, this predictability comes from a blend of things—so-called “muscle memory,” conscious familiarity with what is coming up in the piece (whether we are using notated music or not), and the ability to read ahead and combine memory with newly reviewed information. Fingerings and pedalings that have some logic to them or are simple or that use patterns of some sort can aid in this process.

Tempo and fingering

The key to playing fast is predictability. It is natural to believe that if we have trouble playing fast, it is because we just can’t quite move that fast. However, this is rarely the case. Most organ (and harpsichord) music doesn’t tax the physical ability of any player to move quickly. However, above a certain speed—which of course varies from person to person—the conscious elements of “knowing what’s coming next” simply can’t come into play: there isn’t time. The sources of rock-solid predictability that are below the level of conscious thought become more important.

Let’s take this one step at a time. How fast can you move your fingers? The most direct way to explore this is to drum your fingers on the table, the arm of your chair, or wherever is comfortable. That is, “play” five “notes”—away from any instrument—with the fingering 5-4-3-2-1. No beat, no timing: just drum those fingers as quickly and lightly as you can. Make sure that your arm is comfortable and that your wrist and fingers are not turned too much to either side. It is OK—even a good idea—to have your arm resting on whatever surface you are using. 

How fast do your fingers go in this exercise? You don’t need to come up with a number—just a sense of whether the velocity is greater than you are likely to need in playing music. It almost certainly is. See whether there is an appreciable difference between the two hands, either in how this feels overall or how fast you are able to move. There might be, but if one of them is slower, it is also probably still above the threshold of how fast you will ever need to move when playing.

Now try it the other way around: 1-2-3-4-5. This is no longer intuitive drumming on a table. It can feel a bit awkward, and the ceiling on velocity might be just a touch lower, but still comfortably above any real-life musical speed needs. It feels awkward in part because the thumb is more comfortable as a point of arrival than as a starting point: releasing the thumb almost infinitely quickly to go on to 2 is tricky. How does it feel if you just do four notes: 2-3-4-5? With just non-thumb notes, is the difference in feel between one direction or the other less noticeable? How about the difference between the two hands?

(5-4-3-2-1 drumming is basically the same gesture as closing your fist. However, 1-2-3-4-5 does not correspond to any naturally shaped hand gesture.)

Now try the same thing at a keyboard, (ideally an organ or harpsichord), so that you won’t be distracted by thoughts of dynamics. (If you are at a piano, play near the very top of the keyboard where the touch is lighter.) 

(Or whatever notes you want.)

See if you can let the fact that you are actually playing, not just drumming on a surface, not change the feel of what you are doing. Go through the same sequence of directions and hands. Predictability is at 100% through all of these slightly different ways of performing this exercise, but physical naturalness varies a bit. 

One next step in this exploration is to try up and down, or vice versa. That is, play (on the table at first) 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5. Then do the same, but keep it going for a while, several times back and forth. Then try starting on the thumb: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-3, etc. Is it easier to do this ongoing repeated table-drumming starting on 5 or starting on 1? After the first pass through all of the fingers, they resolve into the same thing, except for perhaps an underlying sense of where the strong beats are—even though in the absence of a musical context there aren’t exactly beats. (For me personally doing this, taking only one pass at the notes, 5-4-3-2-1 is easier, quicker, and more natural than 1-2-3-4-5; the repeated drumming seems easier and faster when I start on 1 rather than on 5. This difference is more pronounced in my right hand than the left. But, again, the fundamental point is that as long as it is utterly predictable, the possible velocity of any of these patterns is greater than the demands of repertoire.)

Another thing to try in exploring predictability and comfort is using the same five fingers, each playing once, but changing the order. You should decide clearly on an order before trying to play and then do so as quickly and lightly as possible. This is meant to be the opposite of improvisation: do not take yourself by surprise. So try, say 1-5-4-2-3, or 2-4-5-1-3—or anything. But again, know before you trigger the five notes exactly what you want them to be. Try this both drumming on a table and poised over five adjacent notes on a keyboard. Try to let those two feel as similar to each other as possible.

As you play around with this, you will probably notice that one time or another through a non-adjacent finger pattern of this sort you will feel a tiny hesitation or notice that the overall speed is less than you thought it would be. If this happens, try to recognize the feeling of whatever it is that is introducing that hesitation. It is probably a split-second of uncertainty about what is supposed to come next. Go back to straight (5-4-3-2-1) drumming for a time or two, then make double-sure of what you want your non-adjacent pattern to be. (Perhaps you will notice a hierarchy of non-adjacent finger patterns as to how easy it is to make them as predictable as scalewise patterns. For me, 5-1-4-2-3 is not appreciably different in feel from 5-4-3-2-1, but I need to think and prepare a bit more to make 2-1-5-3-4, for example, feel that predictable.)  

Another useful variation is to plan and then play non-adjacent note patterns with adjacent fingers, for example:

(or any note pattern that you like).

You can take all of this through the stages described above: each hand, both directions, back and forth once, back and forth repeatedly. Just never do anything that you haven’t mapped out in advance; use predictability to make very high-velocity playing function easily.

So far, predictability has been achieved—and physical ease of movement preserved at the same time—by using patterns in which the hand maintains the same five-finger position throughout. A further step is simple gestures that involve moving the hand. Think of your favorite (for this purpose, easiest) such gesture. For a lot of us that is a scale with the traditional modern fingering: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5 in one direction and 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 in the other. Try playing this—just in one direction for now—with exactly the same feeling that you used for the five-note exercises. Know for certain in advance what you are planning to do and execute it as one very fast unmeasured gesture. 

There are intermediate practice techniques that you can use to prepare for this—for example, drumming on the table with 5-4-3-2-1-3 without changing the position of 3, or drumming 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5, again without changing the position of the fingers on the table. Then 5-4-3-2-1-3, moving 3 over 1 for the last “note.” You can play around with this and invent new permutations, as long as the predictability, quickness, and lightness remain. ν

To be continued . . .

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VI

At the beginning of this series of columns I mentioned (warned?) that I was planning to let myself muse about the subject in a leisurely fashion, spread out over quite a few months. The importance of the subject justified this, and so did its open-endedness. There are many ways of looking at this aspect of our work that are worth talking about and taking seriously; there are several angles from which to approach it. I am beginning to feel, however, that six columns spread out over seven months is getting close to being enough for now. So this column and the next one—which constitute a long “to be continued” on the same specific aspect of our subject—will be the last ones on this matter for a while. 

The specific agenda for these two columns is to talk about what to do when a student comes back with a worked-out fingering. I will also address a couple of loose ends and include a random thought or two. I certainly have not exhausted the overall subject, and I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that exhausting the subject is never possible and is never the point. I will probably come back to it someday, perhaps in part to address some interesting and useful comments from readers that I have already gotten, and others that I may get. Meanwhile, in January’s column, I will move on to other things.

Feedback for student fingerings

If you have sent a student off to work out a fingering for a passage or a piece, perhaps with some guidelines similar to mine from the last two columns, then presumably that student will come back with the worked-out fingering. The next step, in which you give feedback, is crucial: that’s where a lot of the learning comes in.

The actual dynamic of this part of the process is subject to a host of variables: how much of the passage has the student felt comfortable actually fingering, and how much has been reserved for discussion? How much has already been practiced, and how close is it to being learned? (Included in the latter are questions as to whether the student has put the hands together yet, or added pedals, if that’s relevant, and at what sort of tempo is the piece in relation to a possible final tempo.) Questions about how the student relates to the particular piece or the sort of repertoire might be relevant. Is the piece an exemplar of a kind of music with which the student is already very familiar (their sixth Orgelbüchlein chorale, say, or eighth movement from a Widor symphony), or is it relatively uncharted territory, a first step into the twentieth century for a student who has been at home in the eighteenth, or vice versa? Does it happen to be a two-manual passage? 

Then there are the psychological/temperamental matters. Is the student one who is self-confident in general and likely to feel good about fingering choices, perhaps regardless of whether the choices seem good to the teacher? Can the student be relied on to push back against teacher suggestions that he or she really doesn’t like, or at least to be forthright about the rationale for choices? Or is it someone who is almost waiting to be told that they have gotten it wrong—someone whose first impulse will be to shut down in the face of any inquiry and be embarrassed to share the thought process that led to the fingering choices? Or is the situation somewhere in between? Do you know the student well, and are the two of you comfortable together? Or is it someone whom you are really still getting to know?

All of these are surprisingly practical concerns given our delicately balanced goal: to coax students into greater autonomy, confidence, and independence without letting them persevere with fingerings that are going to be really problematic. If we think that a fingering is just plain really bad (to put it bluntly), how do we tell that to the student? It is important not to seem to go back on the promise of autonomy and independence. But it is also important for the student to end up with good fingerings. (Well, maybe. I’ll talk about that more below.)

Of course this is a version, appropriate to this stage of the process, of the whole set of questions about how much autonomy to give students in choosing fingerings in the first place. The premise for now is that we are opting for a great deal of autonomy. But that takes on a different dynamic as the moment of solidifying fingerings in actual use draws closer.

At an earlier point in planning out these columns, I had thought that I would try to concoct a “case study,” that is, that I would choose a passage, create a fingering for it that a student might have come up with, and then go through the passage, reacting to that fingering as I might do with a “live” student. But as I thought about all the variables of the situation, I decided that that would be artificial and limiting. It is a process that perhaps could form the basis of a video or live class demonstration. To be useful it would need to be made up of multiple examples. I think that here it is more fruitful to keep discussing the process, again not expecting to be exhaustive, but to cover enough points to be useful.

To start with, let’s assume that the student comes back with a fingering with which they feel pretty comfortable and that they are ready to play, perhaps (or probably) below the eventual performance tempo. How should we watch and listen, and what should we be looking out for?

The answer to how we should watch and listen is “very carefully, very closely.” And although listening to what our students do is always critical­—this is music after all—in this situation watching is if anything more important. We need to see and keep track of a host of things: what the written fingerings are, what the actual fingerings are, where on the keys the fingers are landing, and, always, everything about the student’s physical being: hand position, tension or relaxation of the hand, and signs of tension or awkward or unnatural positioning of the rest of the body. For this specific kind of work with a student, the most practical use for listening is as an aid in noticing tension. A persistent wrong note, which we might either see or hear, can be a sign of a fingering problem that should be dealt with, but it is more often about practicing. (More about all of this below.) 

Concerns about student fingerings

The bedrock, non-negotiable concern about a student’s worked-out fingering is that it not be dangerous. Everything else is part of a discussion. Fingerings that are non-historical, or different from what the teacher would do, or that create certain articulations, or rule out certain articulations, and so on, might be good, bad, both: everyone will think about them a bit differently. Fingerings that are awkward and inefficient can still be made to work with enough practicing, though that practicing might be less enjoyable than it could or should be. That’s not to say that a fingering that is bad in that sense should go unnoticed or unchallenged: part of the point of this process is to get students to recognize such fingerings and get better and better at avoiding them. Fingerings that might hurt the hand, usually by an uncomfortable stretch or by twisting out, are fairly rare. But they deserve first mention here because it is absolutely out of the question to let them pass.

This does indeed shade over into the next item to pay attention to: anything that looks tense or awkward. Are there spots where the student looks uncomfortable or tense as a matter of overall attitude? Are there moments where you can see the hands, arms, neck, or (especially) shoulders appear to tighten? These signs can mean either that the fingering in those spots is actually a problem or that the student is uncertain about those fingerings. In any case, these are places that should be flagged for discussion. Even if the tension or awkwardness is not so severe that our judgment suggests that it could be harmful, it is still not best for musical performance and should be corrected if possible.

With awkward-looking fingerings, it is a matter of your judgment and the student’s whether they cross a line into being potentially physically harmful. You must bring this up and discuss it if you are concerned. That is one situation in which your sense of the student’s temperament and attitude comes into play. If the student says that something is not painful, is it OK to leave it at that? If a student needs to wring out a hand after playing a passage and says, “no, it’s all right,” is it acceptable to leave it at that? If a student is wearing a pained facial expression, is that more likely to be about general anxiety than an immediate extreme discomfort?

If a fingering is somewhat awkward and we can’t come up with a better one, then we are likely to stick with it and try to relax out of whatever tension it creates as promptly as possible. If the only possible fingering for a passage is one that honestly seems so wrong physically that it could be damaging, then that is actually a reason to consider not playing the piece or slightly rewriting it. This latter is rare—presumably because most keyboard composers write their music to be playable. When it does happen it is often because of a mismatch between the hand size of the player and the expectations of the composer. We are all lucky that composers with extra-wide hand spans mostly bore in mind the needs of the rest of us!

Hand position

Watching hand position is important and is really the foundation of all of what I have mentioned above. If you see an awkward hand position, then it is worth querying the fingering, pointing out what looks awkward, and asking the student about the rationale for the fingering. Sometimes bad hand position is the result not of actually bad fingering, but of holding notes longer than necessary or leaving fingers over notes that they have released when they should be free to float away and wait over other notes. This is actually a surprisingly important aspect of the relationship between fingering and hand position. No fingering in itself implies anything about where the relevant finger should be or what position that hand should be in once that finger has released its note. That can be clearly determined by the next note, but if it isn’t, then the situation is turned around, and the proper place for a finger to be is defined by the act of returning the hand to a relaxed comfortable position. It is possible to be misled as to how good or bad a fingering is by letting that fingering influence hand position more than it actually has to, and in an uncomfortable direction.

When bad hand position does stem directly from a questionable fingering, sometimes that in turn comes from the next thing to watch for: the student’s neglecting part of the hand for no particular reason. As I mentioned in one of my sample guidelines two months back, there is a tendency to avoid fingers 4 and 5, especially 5. If you see a student indulging that tendency, you should question it. And you will see this, whether or not you remind students in advance to think about it. If you see a busy passage being played with just fingers 1-2-3, and if it looks awkward, then ask the student about it. Often there will be a plausible musical logistic reason. Often that reason, though plausible, is in fact a false one: an excuse, not a reason. (And this is usually subconscious, so it is fruitful to alert the student to it.) The avoidance of “weak” fingers is instinctual and can be stubborn. It also reflects different realities for different students: that is, for some people, the fifth finger really is a problem, for some it is just a fear. This is a difference that should be sorted out. My Diapason column from September 2016 was all about the fifth finger and includes my ideas about how to work on it when it really is a problem in and of itself.

Avoiding use of certain fingers

A couple of side notes: I have only fairly recently become really comfortable playing trills, especially long trills, with fingers 4 and 5. I didn’t notice the moment when this happened, but it was probably in about my 25th or 30th year of performing and teaching. I have noticed that the availability of that fingering for trills sometimes can make the rest of the fingering for a passage remarkably more straightforward. This reminds me, in turn, that it is important in all circumstances not to avoid the use of any fingers arbitrarily. Sometimes the avoidance of certain fingers is indeed not arbitrary, but has a musical (often historical) purpose. If a student, in collaboration with you as the teacher, is applying some of the principles of “early” fingering to a piece, and therefore perhaps using at the least the thumb and maybe the fifth finger less than one might otherwise, it is important to do this in a way that is comfortable. That is, almost certainly, a significant part of the actual original purpose of that approach to fingering. The main enemy of comfort and natural hand position with fingerings of this sort is an attempt to hang on to legato when the fingering is specifically geared towards non-legato: for example in a 3-4-3-4 fingering in the right hand in a rising scale passage, turning the hand nearly upside-down between the second and third notes.

Another thing to look for is any place where your student is actually using a fingering different from the one that they have worked out and written in. This is one place where your watching closely comes into play! When this happens, it can be just a random one-off that doesn’t mean anything. It should be queried though, in case it is more than that. It can turn out that the written fingering is really best, and that the task for the student is to be more assiduous about following it. That often means slower, more targeted practice. (Though it can also be a sign that the student needs new glasses. That sounds flippant, but is actually a frequent serious issue. If you can’t read the notes easily, that is always a problem. If you can’t read the written-in fingerings easily and spontaneously, that is a problem as well: a source of inefficiency and potential insecurity.)

It can be useful to go over the reasoning behind the fingering again. This can help fix it in the semi-memory so that the need to read it in real time will recede and eventually go away entirely. It is also very possible that the actual fingering that you saw is better than the written-in fingering. This should be explored in discussion. If it turns out to be true, that creates an excellent opportunity for the student to learn through analyzing and comparing the two fingerings and analyzing why the written-in choices were made and why they don’t seem to be best in practice. 

Next month, in continuing this discussion, I will, among other things, write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. As an appetizer to that part of the discussion I include a couple of examples of spots where I happened upon ways of solving tricky fingering issues by what I like to think of as clever hand distribution. (See Examples 1 and 2.) These both arose in my practicing of pieces that I will be performing this fall, and indeed they both arose during the same days during which I have been writing this column. They are both Bach harpsichord pieces. The first is from the fugue of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the second from the fugue of the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro. No very specific pedagogic point to either of them: I just like them.

To be continued.

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached at [email protected].

Organ Method I

Note: This is the first excerpt from my Organ Method, as discussed in last month’s column. It is the Preface to that book, and, as such, is written with the audience of prospective readers and users of the book in mind. I strongly welcome any and all feedback from readers of this column.

Preface

This book is written and presented with one concrete purpose at its core. It is intended to offer to anyone who is interested a clear and reliable path towards becoming a highly competent player of the organ. I would like to examine a few of the specific implications of that concept.

1) First of all—and, in a way, most important of all—is the notion of “anyone who is interested.” One of the greatest joys of my years as a teacher of organ and harpsichord has been the discovery that no two people who develop an interest in something do so for the same reasons, with the same background, or with the same expectations. Any approach to teaching that suggests, even unwittingly, that some of those reasons, backgrounds, and expectations are more suitable than others will have the effect of excluding or discouraging a portion of those who are—or were, initially—interested. In the world of organ playing, some of the notions that can end up excluding or discouraging potential students are those derived from the world of music and music teaching in general: that after a rather young age it is essentially too late to become a truly competent and skillful musician, or that anyone who cannot develop perfect pitch, or become a good singer, or learn to take dictation cannot be or should not be a musician, or in general that only those “touched by the gods” can master the mysteries of understanding and playing great music. 

I am well aware that, fortunately, very few music teachers or working musicians hold this last attitude. Unfortunately, however, I also know very well that many prospective students do—people are scared off by it. No one should be. Some other of these notions are specific to the world of the organ, and many of them are indeed inadvertent or unwitting. (Certainly very few, if any, music teachers want to exclude or discourage anyone.) The assumption that anyone who wants to become an organist should specifically first become a pianist is one such notion. (It is one to which I am personally sensitive, as it almost derailed me from pursuing organ in my teenage years.) Certain approaches to the learning of pedal playing are so prohibitively uncomfortable to some people that they convince those people—wrongly—that they are just not cut out to be organists. I am also sensitive to this one. 

At an early point in my teaching career, I happened to encounter a couple of people who told me that they had really wanted to play the organ, but found it too uncomfortable to sit in some particular posture while learning to play the pedals. They had come to believe, perhaps because of something that they had read or that they had been told, that this posture was necessary, and they actually gave up. This felt to me at the time like a tragedy (both for their sakes and because I wanted there to be more organ students out there as I began my teaching career!) and it led to my developing my particular approach to pedal learning, the latest refinement of which is found in this book. Others are discouraged by being told that it is absolutely necessary that they work on some particular part of the repertoire that really—for the time being at least—doesn’t interest them. I don’t believe that there is any good reason for this—even for something as basic as requiring a student to play some Bach, for example—as I discuss later on in this book.

2) In order for it to be true that any interested party can work successfully on organ playing, it must also be true that this does not involve any “dumbing down.” If I am claiming that a particular approach to working on organ can be successful not just for selected students but for anyone who is interested, then I must mean that anyone can reach a high level of competence and understanding—not just dabble a little bit. I firmly believe this to be true. And I am reminded of the saying attributed to J. S. Bach, concerning organ playing that “All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.” I have always believed that he meant something quite specific by this: that it was not, as it perhaps sounds at first, a joke or some sort of dismissive remark. I believe that he meant that the organist does not have to create tone and intonation in the various ways that singers and many string and wind players do. The basic act of making a note happen on the organ, with its pitch and tone color intact, is simple. That is why it is appropriate for the world to provide us with such amazingly complicated music. It is also why learning to play organ very well—at least what we might call an “intermediate” level—is available to anyone who chooses to work at it.

3) The process of learning to play the organ is, I believe, natural, simple, very human, and available to all. I hope that this volume helps to make that convincing. It is not, however, easy. That is an important distinction, and its main implication for the student is that learning to play (well) requires both the time and the personal commitment to do a substantial amount of work—of practicing. To a large extent, an organ method should be a statement, fleshed out in considerable detail, that amounts to: this is how to practice. That statement should be clear—enough so that a student can follow it without already knowing everything that the writer of the method knows. If this is not the case, then the book has in fact failed to convey its message. It should be reliable: that is, the approach to practicing must really lead to results if it is followed. This latter point is indeed my main claim for this method. I certainly don’t make, and wouldn’t want to make, the ignorant and arrogant claim that other approaches and other methods don’t work—or even that they don’t work at least as well as this one. I will, however, make this claim, also arrogant unless it is true: that anyone who actually does all of the things described and suggested in this volume will—inevitably, everyone, every time—become a competent, skilled organist. This is another lesson that I have learned through thirty years or so of teaching, and it is one that gives me great joy. I hope, always, that anyone contemplating or starting the study of organ approaches it with optimism and joy. It has always been my goal as a teacher, and is my goal as the writer of an organ method, to help students feel that way about the process. But it is a process: it takes work, it takes time, and it takes patience.

Is there an ideal or core student to whom this book is addressed? The answer to that is yes and no. The “yes” side of the answer looks like this: a student who is old enough to think about matters of learning on his or her own, who can already read music, who has already done at least a bit of keyboard playing, on any instrument—that is, who starts with a basic sense of what it is to use fingers at a keyboard—and, of course, who is really interested in learning organ. I have tried to write in such a way that this student can use the book either with or without the guidance of a teacher, and that this student can, so to speak, plunge right in to work on organ. The section on pedal playing is completely “from scratch,” that is, designed in such a way that it can be used by someone who has never played a note on a pedalboard before.

Any student who does not fit that particular description can use this method just as fruitfully by bearing in mind a few things.

A student who does not read music must learn to do so, both to use this method and in general to function as an organist. That is not something that is dealt with directly in this volume. There are, as I write this, many online music-reading resources: there probably always will be, though of course they change all the time. Most or all community music schools—or colleges that offer music instruction to the public—have classes that include an introduction to reading music. These classes usually include other aspects of basic musicianship or elementary music theory that can be interesting and that are useful for beginners. Although I do not attempt to teach music reading here, I do, in side-notes, make suggestions for the benefit of those whose music reading is still new and not fully internalized. Such students should be able to feel all right about working on the early stages of learning to play while getting more and more comfortable reading.

In my opinion, a student who has never played any sort of keyboard instrument at all and who is interested in organ need not start with any instrument other than organ. There is certainly nothing actually wrong with starting on piano or harpsichord—except that for a student who is not particularly interested in those instruments or their repertoire it can be frustrating. But there is also no reason to do so. Everything practical that you need to know about organ playing can be learned by playing the organ. (There are certainly things to be learned artistically from an involvement with piano and its repertoire or harpsichord and its repertoire: also by any involvement with any other sort of music. I discuss this from time to time in the course of the later chapters of the book.) The relationship of this student to the pedal-playing work in this method will be exactly the same as that of the “core” student. However, the sections here about manual playing do not start absolutely from scratch—there are no basic exercises for just a few fingers, or similar things. A student who has never played before might very well want either to work with a teacher who can begin at the very beginning, or to consult a beginning keyboard method on his or her own—in print or online. I have tried to write in such a way that there is very little of this sort of preliminary work needed, the less so the more a student is able and willing to follow my suggestions about slow and systematic practice.

Students who have in fact already played organ—either a little bit or more than a little bit—can, I hope, also get something out of this method and this approach. This is true especially for anyone who finds pedal playing awkward. (As I have suggested above, my approach to pedal playing involves a kind of physical simplicity that some players find helpful.) It might also be especially true for a player who feels less than fully comfortable with the difficulties of grappling with complex counterpoint. Of course, an experienced or accomplished organist who is comfortable with all the main aspects of his or her playing is not likely in any case to need to consult an organ method. However, I have tried to include enough here in the way of generally interesting ideas, observations, and thoughts about the organ and the never-ending task of learning, that such a player might find it worth browsing through, as I myself have found it interesting to browse through a wide variety of organ methods, from at least Sir John Stainer on.

The method is organized as follows: 

1) A very brief introduction to the organ in general, geared mainly to what a student needs to know in order to start working. 

2) The section on pedal playing. This is the most categorical thing that a student who is already a pianist or harpsichordist needs to grapple with in order to begin the alchemical transformation into an organist. This section outlines, quite systematically, a comprehensive approach to playing pedals. It can certainly be used on a stand-alone basis by anyone whose main concern is either to learn pedal playing or to review and revise his or her approach to the pedals. This section includes—logically enough, though somewhat out of order—a set of protocols for practicing hands and feet together.

3) The section on manual playing. This section is largely about practicing, the most important aspect of work on organ playing. It includes, however, discussion of ways to approach work on counterpoint and other specific organ textures, thoughts about articulation and other interpretive matters, and discussion of registration. (My goal in addressing interpretive matters is always to help students create possibilities for themselves, never to tell them where they should end up.) For a student specifically hoping to make the transformation from non-organ keyboard player to organist, the second element of that transformation, less categorical than learning to play pedals, but just as important, is learning to manipulate the touch and sound of the organ in a way that is idiomatic and that opens up as wide a range of possibilities for expressive and communicative playing as possible. This is open-ended and subjective, but I try to provide a framework for thinking about it.

4) A longer discussion about the organ and its history and repertoire—not seen through the lens of “what a new student needs to know to sit at the console and get started” but rather as a slice of what an evolving organist might want to absorb about the instrument and its music. This includes a substantial number of suggestions for further research. It is characteristic of our times that information—say the detailed history of the evolution of a major historic organ—is easy to find, and that what is available changes (expands) rapidly. An organ method nowadays does not need to include, as a basic resource, a representative set of historic stoplists. It needs, instead, to inform the student about how best to find such information and how to understand it, and how to use it to create and expand possibilities.

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.