On Teaching

To look or not to look, part II

To recap from last month, it has been my observation that making a practice of looking at the hands or feet while learning to play the organ will hinder a student’s becoming comfortable at the instrument and of developing skill at playing. In some cases this practice actually prevents a prospective player from ever developing reliable facility and technique. At the same time, though, it is  natural and essentially universal for students to want to look at their hands or feet, and to do so quite a lot, often more than they know. 

This affects different students in different ways. Some people have been so systematic and efficient in their ways of practicing from when they first sat at a keyboard that they have, even very early on, no insecurity, very little tendency to make wrong notes, no tendency for the few wrong notes to throw off the rhythm or overall flow of the music, or to snowball out of control. These are likely to be students who did very little or no looking at the keyboard from the very beginning. On a basic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle, any student who presents a teacher with this situation doesn’t need help with the task that we are talking about here. 

Most students who come to an organ teacher, however, present a more mixed picture, in which wrong notes, insecurity about notes, and a habit of looking at the keyboards all play a part. This is true of students with plenty of talent and potential, as well as some whose potential has been well hidden by badly conceived habits and approaches. One crucial point is this: that some students who think that they are just plain not very good—and whose playing indeed presents as not very good—also think that they have to look at the keyboards a lot specifically to try to fight against being not very good. However, if they can be taught to stop looking at the keyboards, they will discover that their talent and potential are a lot better than they thought. The existence of this psychological trap or paradox is one of the main reasons that I think that this is so important.

Why look at a keyboard?

There are, I think, three specific reasons for looking at the keyboards that are different enough from one another for us to distinguish them. One of these is pure habit, probably driven by fear or insecurity, and sustained perhaps by never having thought about the issue. The next is the one that most people would cite as the main reason: namely, to find a note or notes when you know from the music or your memory what the note(s) should be. The third is to check that whatever you just played was right or was what you thought it was. Each of these might sometimes require a different approach.

What a teacher can do

Anyone who has read this column knows that I am not very big on prohibitions or rules. Although I often have no choice but to ask students to take my word at first about the benefits of not looking—because they have to try it in a pretty committed way before they will know from their own experience that it works—I do prefer to cajole them or persuade them as much as possible. For this purpose there are two things that I have tried that are always available to the teacher and that seem to be effective as starters. One is simply to notice how much a student is looking at the hands or feet, and let the student know. With a student who has not yet been consciously thinking about this subject, it is often sort of mind-boggling how much looking is going on: every note, every second or third note, twice a measure: things like this are quite common, and the student usually has no idea. Just pointing that out—which often is sort of intrinsically humorous and can always be done quite good-naturedly—can help inspire a student to want to reduce the reliance on looking. When a student is pretty much bobbing his or her head down to the keys and back up to the music with great frequency and doesn’t quite know that this is happening, it is probably something that is being done just as a habit. And because it is being done just as a habit, it is very likely not actually giving the student much information. If you stop the student on the way back up and ask what note he or she just found (by looking) and played, the student often won’t be able to answer. You are also likely to be able to find plenty of instances of the student’s looking down at the keys and making a wrong note anyway. It is a good idea to point this out to the student when you see it: it is pretty telling.

The second simple preliminary thing that the teacher can do is to choose a passage that the student has been a) playing with a lot of looking, and b) playing with a fair number of wrong notes, and ask the student to try it once without looking at all. The passage should be short, and should if possible be one that does not have any of the more plausible reasons for looking, like big leaps or chord shapes with awkward hand positions. When the student plays through this passage with a 100% not-looking approach, he or she will probably notice a few interesting things right away. First of all, it is hard to make oneself do this. A student who is really trying not to look at all may reduce looking from, say, two or three times a measure to once every two or three measures, but not likely to zero. This might reflect just old habit, and is worth pointing out. It might sometimes be a way of pinpointing the bits that are indeed harder to play without looking, or that seem that way. Only the student can really figure out which of these it is (since it is never clear to one person, even a teacher, what another person will find hard) and focusing on that is a useful exercise. 

Second, the student will observe that the wrong-note count goes down. Often it goes down dramatically; it almost always goes down some. (And that is without the student’s having had a chance yet to get used to this approach.) This is what people don’t expect, assuming, as we all tend to, that looking will reduce wrong notes. Therefore, it can be a powerful tool for convincing students that looking less or not at all is worth pursuing. Doing this with several passages, doing it from time to time—making a sort of deal: “just this once don’t even glance down at all, and we’ll see what happens”—is a good idea. Sometimes the result will be that most of the passage becomes more accurate, but that a spot or two will stubbornly remain inaccurate or get worse. This provides a reason to examine those passages—what is hard about them, are the planned fingerings and hand positions well thought out, are those plans really being carried out, and so on?

Speaking of doing this, or anything, “from time to time,” it is a good idea to remember that this isn’t something that must be changed or solved right away. It is unrealistic to expect that it can be. Any reduction in the amount of looking by a student who is over-relying on it is good; more should come as time goes by. I do sometimes say to a student something like “take a good look at those keyboards, ‘cause that’s the last time you will see them.” But that is just an attempt to keep the atmosphere light and relaxed. It is always a balancing act: focusing too intensely on something like not looking at the keyboards can distract from other things and can lead to tension (mental, perhaps leading to physical); however, thinking about it and working on it is important. The balance will have to be different for each student.

Additional suggestions

One approach that I have used to start working on this, either with a student who is really convinced or one who still needs persuading, is to suggest a quota for looking at the hands or feet. This seems silly, in a way; at the moment when I suggest it to a student, it actually often comes across as rather silly or funny. That’s one of its advantages—again, a relaxed atmosphere. The student may think that it is a joke, but it is a good, practical idea. 

With the passage in question, first ask the student to play through it once not looking at all, regardless of what seems to be happening. (If that goes really well, then that passage may not be the right one for this exercise.) If there are some rough spots or the student feels really uncomfortable with certain spots, ask the student to do one of the following: 1) Choose in advance a few places to look (maybe a number that averages once every five or six measures: not much more frequent than that). Try to base the choice on an estimate of where looking can be most helpful. Then play the passage moving in and out of the looking according to the plan. Or 2) Set a quota for looking—maybe six times in a short piece, or whatever seems fair—but then look at the hands or feet as it seems necessary along the way, trying not to use up the quota too quickly.

The more planned—not just habitual—the looking is, the more likely it is that the student will actually get something out of it. Both forms of the quota exercise will help the student make looking count: that is, really know what notes should be played, and then really find them with the eyes. (Note that these quota approaches tend to get the student looking to find notes, not looking to check on the notes just played.) The first approach makes this happen most efficiently, since it analyzes which notes the student thinks that he or she will have to look for. The second approach is more of a motivator. Since the looking quota shouldn’t be squandered, the student will want to use it well. 

The drawback to looking

Looking to find notes is usually unnecessary and introduces tiny delays that undermine the overall sense of rhythm. Looking to check on the notes just played should be rarely necessary, if ever. It introduces really serious delays, since the process of checking visually on what notes were just played and comparing that to a sense of what the notes should have been takes a long time. 

This looking to check is something that reflects a student’s low assessment of his or her abilities. That is, the student doesn’t realize that he or she knows by ear what the right notes should be. In general, if we know a passage of music, we also know what isn’t in that passage: if something is wrong we will probably hear it. This doesn’t happen all of the time, even with experienced and accomplished players, but it happens more of the time for inexperienced players than they may realize. Most people would know immediately if they heard a wrong note in, say, The Star Spangled Banner, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, or Jingle Bells—or any number of other tunes and pieces of music. You do not need to be a beginner at playing music, let alone experienced or “advanced,” to recognize rightness or wrongness of notes in a piece that you have heard a few times. This assumes paying attention—both when first hearing the piece a few times, and when playing through it and being on the lookout for wrong notes. This is all part of the process of getting to know pieces and plays out a bit differently from one student to another and from one piece to another. Most students, especially beginners, underestimate their own ability to know whether they are playing what they want to have played and do unnecessary looking to compensate for that. Even if a student must stop and think about whether what was just played was correct, it is worth challenging that student to make that judgment by ear not by eye, if at all possible.

Looking versus not looking

Here’s a good exercise for getting a vivid sense of the difference between looking and not looking—the difference in how it feels to the player. This is not just for beginners or students. As with many efficient exercises, it is mostly just a way of clearing the mind and looking at something as simply as possible. Take a very short passage, perhaps just a measure or two, plus the next downbeat—or any short unit that makes sense. It should be one that you know well. This particular exercise is more focused (or at least easier) with a passage that is either manuals-only or a pedal solo. It should not be difficult or present any virtuosic challenges. Play the passage a few times in a row, keeping your eyes on the music in a way that is almost exaggeratedly focused. Actually say some of the letter names as you go. (I get something out of opening my eyes extra wide for this purpose, as if I were doing a comic turn as someone looking astonished.) Then, look the passage over and start playing it, keeping your eyes only on the keyboard. This will only work completely if you have the passage memorized. If you need to glance up at the music, go ahead. Make sure to remind yourself exactly where on the page the passage is, so that you can get right to it if you need to glance up. Do this several times in a row. Now play the passage several times in a row alternating—one time to the next—between looking only at the music, and looking only at your hands. By now you will probably have the passage memorized if you didn’t already, so you shouldn’t have to glance at the music much, if at all. The memorization is the main reason for keeping the passage short. If the passage is well memorized, you can add this in: play it with your eyes closed! This can feel a bit tightrope-like, and can really intensify the focus on the mental side of not looking. In what ways do these modes of playing feel different to you? Are there differences in security? In how well you can listen while playing? In what you think the effectiveness of the playing to a listener would be?

After you have subjected a passage to this treatment, you will know it very well and can use the same passage for this trickier exercise in looking. Play the passage, and go back and forth from looking at the music to looking at your hands or feet at random times. This is the very thing that I am suggesting that we should mostly not do (but especially not do while learning). The reason for doing it here is to practice getting back to the same place in the music that you have just left, smoothly and without delay. For me the trick to this is in knowing an instant before I am going to look down that I am about to do so, and sort of memorizing my place on the page. Then the gesture of looking down should be light and quick, and the return to the music should be governed in part by the physical feeling of return rather than by reading the music to find the spot. At least that’s how it seems to me. Play around with it and see what you think.

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.

Organ Method V

This follows directly from last month’s column. The approach to learning pedal playing that I am outlining here is not materially different from that in my columns on pedal playing between November 2007 and February 2008. Here it is recast as something addressed directly to the student, which the student can use with or without a teacher. This month’s column simply introduces the notion of learning the feeling of moving a foot from one note to the adjacent note. This feeling is, as far as I can tell, the best foundation upon which to build solid pedal facility.

Looking at the pedals while playing

Everyone is tempted to look at the feet, either from time to time or quite regularly. However, each time that you look at your feet while you are working on a pedal exercise or trying to learn a pedal part you deprive yourself of a chance to become more secure in your pedal playing. You might or might not increase your chance of accurately finding the note that you are looking for. Security at the pedal keyboard comes from a firm inner sense of the physical shapes and distances involved—the kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard. Any time that you do not rely on that sense, you fail to develop it further. Of course, the reason that players, especially beginners, are temped to look at the feet is the fear that this physical sense of where the pedal keys are will fail. In fact, this sense can become extraordinarily reliable: it must, since the practice of looking at the pedal keyboard can be quite problematic if it is used at all regularly. (Looking at the feet makes it easy to lose your place in the music, and it tends to introduce small hesitations into playing.) The pedal exercises and learning strategy used here will enable you to rely on the kinesthetic sense from the very beginning—the sequence of exercises has been designed with that particularly in mind. In turn, relying on that sense from the very beginning will make it reliable. You will be comfortable looking at your feet very little indeed—or not at all. This approach asks you from the very beginning to understand what is going on physically in your pedal playing, and to participate quite consciously and actively in the creation of your own particular pedal technique. This has the added advantage of making the process more interesting.

Heel and toe

Playing pedals means pushing down pedal keys with the feet. In theory any part of the foot can be used to depress a pedal key, but the front and back of the foot—the toe area and the heel—are the most useful. Further, the toe area, at least, can be thought of as divided into parts: the inside of the foot, or big toe side, the outside of the foot, or little toe side, and the front or center of the foot, under the middle toes—the tip of the shoe. (The heel area could be thought of as divided into similar regions, however the shape and size of the heel makes it more natural to think of it as a continuum.) All of these areas are completely suitable for playing pedal keys. The choice of which particular part of the foot to use in playing which notes is referred to as pedaling—the pedal version of fingering. As with fingering, pedaling choices are influenced by many factors. Some of these are directly about the music: the shape of a musical line, considerations of tempo, articulation, and phrasing. However, pedaling choices are also affected by logistic factors that are independent of the music itself: the height of the bench, the exact shape and size of the pedal keyboard—including details such as the size of the sharps/flats in relation to the naturals—and the physique and habitual posture of the player. Pedaling choices for the same passage of music, and overall tendencies in pedaling choices, will vary from one player to the next depending on all of the factors mentioned above; plus different types of repertoire require different approaches to pedaling.

Flexing the foot

The physical gesture involved in playing a pedal key with the toes is a gesture that can take advantage of the full flexing ability of the foot. Playing with the heel can take much less advantage of that flexing, since the heel is located much closer to the ankle, and does not move up and down very much with the flexing of the foot. Playing with the heel is, therefore, a gesture that is controlled somewhat more with the leg. It is easier, in the earlier stages of learning to play pedals, to execute toe pedaling with a relaxed and fluid motion than it is heel playing. (In the long run it is just as possible to play in a relaxed and fluid manner with the heels: that is just something that comes about more naturally after a player is familiar with the pedal keyboard and comfortable on the organ bench.) It is also the case that the gesture of flexing the foot and, in a sense, reaching with the toes is a gesture that feels like pointing: it is easy and natural for even someone who is not yet a trained organist to know by feel where the toes are and where they are pointing. Again, it is not a problem—it is not difficult—to develop an equally secure sense of this for the heels: it just naturally comes later. Therefore, the first several pedal exercises that I provide are all meant to be played with the toes alone. Heel playing will be introduced shortly.

If we leave aside any artificial assistance, such as looking, or bumping the feet along the keys until you find the one you want, there are three ways to get a pedal note right: 

1) finding a note in relation to where the foot that will play that note last was; 

2) finding a note with one foot in relation to where the other foot is; and 

3) finding a note “from scratch,” in relation to where your body is on
the bench. 

The first of these—which includes both moving the toe area of the foot from one note to another, and playing a note with the heel when you have just played another note with the toe—is the most reliable, and the most powerful tool for developing secure pedal facility. The other two come into play once in a while. The exercises and practice techniques that we start with here rely on—and strengthen—the first way of finding notes. Later on we will address the other two. 

You have already noted which pedal key each of your feet rests on (or over) as you sit in a relaxed posture on the organ bench. Draw a pedal stop or two: make sure that you include at least one 8′ stop. Now, without looking, flex one of your feet in such a way that the toe area of that foot moves downward and plays something. What do you hear? You might hear a note; you might hear two adjacent notes. Notice what part of your foot actually touched and depressed the key. In general, most of us cannot play pedal notes “straight,” that is, with the tip of the shoe. Most feet are too wide for that. If you hear yourself playing two notes at once, then you need to turn your foot slightly so that one side or the other is touching the key. In general, people with wider feet need to turn more than people with narrower feet. There are some players whose feet are in fact narrow enough that they can play with the very end of the foot. If you find yourself to be one of those people, then you can ignore most of what I have to say about turning the foot to one side or another.

But assuming that you do need to turn your foot, which way should you turn? The fundamental answer to this is “whichever way is more comfortable.” Usually, in any given situation, one way will be definitely more comfortable than the other. If this is not the case—if they both feel much the same—then either will probably be fine. In general, however, if the note that you want to play is outside wherever your knee is then it will feel comfortable to turn the foot out and play from the big toe side; if the note that you want to play is inside wherever your knee is then it will probably work best to turn the foot in and play from the little toe side. (Outside means higher for a right-foot note and lower for a left-foot note; inside mean the opposite.) In first playing the note that lies under each foot, try turning each way. Is one easier or more comfortable? Which one? Does it conform to what I have suggested (outside/inside) or does it feel different from what that would predict? (Once you have turned each foot enough to play its note cleanly, make sure that you know what note it is. If you have perfect pitch, you will know. If not, play around on a manual keyboard until you match the pitch, then see what note it is. This is practice in not looking at your feet!) Fortunately, there are only two directions in which to turn your foot in order to play a pedal note, so it is always possible to try both and see which one works better. (Of course, by the time you perform a piece you should have worked this out long before.) There is enough variation among different people in the comfortable positioning of the knees—that is, in how close together or far apart the knees naturally fall while sitting on the organ bench—that it is not a good idea to try to come up with a general rule for which way a player should turn the feet for which notes. You the student must discover this for yourself. Furthermore, it is not something that is fixed. That is, you will not always turn each foot the same way for a given note, every time you play that note. Some particular musical or technical context may cause you to position a knee differently, which will change the angle of the foot, or something about the direction of a musical line—where the foot is going next—may affect things, perhaps in ways that can’t be predicted in advance.

From one note to another

Once you have played your one note with each foot, play the next natural note up and the next natural note down. You should achieve this in the following way: gently release the first note; then move the foot—in the air just above the pedal keyboard—through a very small arc that you guess might take it to the space over the next (natural) note. When you have arrived at that place, again flex your toes downward and play the note over which you have arrived. Let your ears tell you whether you have indeed come to the next note up or down. It is fairly likely that you will have gone too far. This is common, in fact almost universal at this stage. The gesture of moving one foot from one note to the next note is one of the smallest things that we humans ever do with our feet; it takes some getting used to. If you have gone too far—if the new note that you have just played is a third away from your starting note, or even more—then go back to your starting note and try again. Move less far. Don’t think that you have to know exactly how much less far you need to move before you try it: just move less far. This thought and gesture will probably bring you to the correct note. It might lead you to drop down into the space between your starting note and the note that you were hoping to play next. If so, then go back to the opening note and this time move your foot a little bit farther. 

This thought process is crucial to the work of learning to play pedals. In learning and in practicing you are trying things out. Everything will not be right the first time. The good news is that if you play a wrong note in working on a pedal exercise or a pedal part, only one of two things can have gone wrong: either you moved your foot too far or you didn’t move it far enough. Furthermore, you can tell by listening which of these things happened. The way to arrive at correct practicing is simply to go back to the starting point, and move the foot again, correcting that motion in whichever direction is indicated. If you went too far before, go less far now; if you didn’t go far enough before, go farther now. It is not necessary to try to calculate how much farther or less far to go: in fact, it is counterproductive to get too specific about it. It is always a small amount. 

This way of thinking about it always gives good results. 

After you have become comfortable moving each foot from the starting note (the note over which the foot naturally falls) to the adjacent notes up and down, try the same thing elsewhere on the keyboard. Move each foot around, to random places, in both directions. Then, after playing a note, move up, back, down, always moving by one step at a time, always moving the foot just up off the key that you have been playing and through the air to the next note. Always pay attention to the comfortable tilting of the foot to one side or the other. Note that this may change from one note to the adjacent note. Never accept an uncomfortable foot.

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 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?

Helping Students Choose Fingerings V

I ended last month’s column with a couple of short digressions. I open this column in the same way. Then I will return to the train of thought from last month.

To help myself muse about teaching the art of making purposeful fingering choices, I have done a certain amount of reading: not what I would call “research,” not looking for concrete information, but just part of the process of thinking, gathering, and examining ideas. I happened to come across some extremely interesting comments by the eminent Ukrainian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, who lived from 1848 to 1933.

De Pachmann became convinced during the course of his career that there was something blocking him technically. He eventually decided or figured out that he was allowing his hands to turn out too far, both out and in, from a position that was more or less straight with the forearm. His own discussion of this in an interview is fascinating. (“Should Piano Playing Undergo a Radical Reform?”, Vladimir de Pachmann, Etude, December 1923.) This is a short excerpt:

I discovered that the whole trouble lay in the wrist. The wrists were not free. Easily said—but WHY?

Perhaps a simple experiment will serve to illustrate. Put your elbow upon the table and let your forearm fall with your hand in comfortable playing condition. 

Now, with the hand and forearm in this position, move the hand (without moving the forearm) as far as possible to the left and hold it in that position for a few moments. You will notice at once that there is a strain at the joint of the wrist. Now move the hand in the opposite direction and there is likewise a strain. It is this strain that, to my mind, distorts the muscular and the nervous condition of the hand and the forearm and results in much horrible playing. The tone cannot be musical and beautiful if the wrist is stiff or strained in this manner. Therefore I never move the hand from side to side. 

Having discovered this, I began to find that, whereas I had been unable to practice for long periods in later years without fatigue, I was now able to play for hours and hours and ‘never feel it.’

What was the result? I resolved to rework, re-arrange my entire repertoire upon this new basis. This meant refingering hundreds and hundreds of pages of music.

This interests me because it ratifies what I have long observed about the problems with turning the wrist, though I feel sure that turning out is worse than turning in, whereas Pachmann does not distinguish between those. It is also interesting to me that he presented this as a new discovery. It seems to have been new in relation to his own work and to whatever he had learned from his teachers. Elsewhere, however, he says about Muzio Clementi, who lived from 1752 to 1832, that he “was against the use of the thumb on a black key. I wondered why, and thought it over until I discovered that Clementi’s reason was that there was an undue strain on the wrist, with consequent fatigue.” So, as with a lot about music and life, this was perhaps an instance of “what’s old is new again.”

Fingering principles to
offer to your students

I resume my list of suggestions of principles or ideas that we might offer students in advance of their working out their own fingerings for pieces. 

6) Don’t finger for something that you don’t want or need to do. That is, don’t make a fingering unnecessarily complicated by asking it to create a difficult result when that result is not what you really want. This usually manifests itself as something very specific: constructing an unnecessarily difficult fingering in order to achieve legato, when that legato is not actually wanted. If you do want legato, and the fingering necessary to achieve that is complex or tricky, then this gets turned around the other way: you have to accept the difficult fingering and practice it enough to make it work. But that is usually not the problem. It is definitely a problem for many students that they think that it is lazy or unconscientious ever to use a disjunct fingering. (Often this feeling is entirely subconscious or reflexive.) But that is only true if you honestly don’t like the musical results of that fingering. The most conscientious and efficient thing that you can do in sketching out a fingering for a passage is to give yourself the freedom to use any fingers whatsoever for any two successive notes or chords that are not meant to be legato, and take it from there. 

7) Concerning patterns: on the one hand, it can be very useful to finger something that is reiterated as a pattern in the same way each time it comes along. This is true first of all because perhaps that fingering is the best fingering, considering everything. But also, the patterned fingering is itself easier to remember because it stays the same, and this has the nice benefit that when you practice one instance of it, you are also practicing the others. This is efficient and enhances security. However, it is even more important to recognize that sometimes a musical pattern is not a physical pattern. This happens most of the time and most strikingly because of the presence of sharps and flats. If the keyboard were all white keys, then this concern would largely go away. The other cause, more subtle, is that the feeling and thus the fingering needs of a repeated pattern can also change because of position on the keyboard. The same note-shapes a couple of octaves apart have different implications for hand position in particular, and therefore, sometimes, for fingering.

The two examples above show situations in which the relationship between musical patterning and fingering come out different. In the first case (Example 1), there is probably something to be gained and little or nothing to be lost by playing each four-note grouping in the same way. For any number of reasons, such as relative finger length, some players might prefer 4-2-1-2, some 5-3-2-3. (Those are not the only possibilities, but they probably cover what would feel best for almost everyone.) 

However, in Example 2, with three sharps, the consistent application of a pattern of this sort would conflict with good hand position and create problems with the use of the thumb. I have put in a fingering that fits the native shape of the passage very well for me, and there are other possibilities. A student could make the choice that the pluses of repeated patterning outweigh the negatives of thumbs on black notes or other turnings of the hand. However, that should be thought about as a conscious and careful choice. (For me, the 4-2-1-2 fingering as a thorough-going pattern would be disastrously bad; the 5-3-2-3 would be rather bad, mainly a problem in the second group of four eighth notes.)

Another thought about patterns is that some students have learned default fingering patterns for certain note patterns prior to working on any given piece. These are usually scales and arpeggios, and the fingering patterns have been learned because the note patterns have served as exercises. This can be very useful and quite a time-saver if the learned fingerings actually work well, given all of the circumstances of the piece. They often will, but also often will not. It is important to use them only when they are right, and not to let them interfere otherwise. 

It is worth remembering that even though it can seem like a shame not to take advantage of the comfort of patterned fingering for patterned notes, abandoning that patterning only brings those passages to the level of fingering-complexity of the rest of the music. It is never a particular problem, just sometimes an opportunity that we would rather not pass up.

8) Don’t confuse unfamiliarity with difficulty. That is, don’t judge the easiness or difficulty of a fingering before having gotten somewhat used to it. In choosing between two or more fingerings, the one that seems the least comfortable right off the bat might just seem the best once you have explored them all a bit. On the other hand, if a student is more or less observing all of the precepts above, is trying out a possible fingering, and that fingering simply cannot get comfortable, then it is probably one that should be changed. And that leads to another principle:

9) If you can’t come up with a fingering that you are reasonably happy with, don’t accept an unhappy fingering or try to get used to one that is really awkward. It is better to leave the passage un-fingered and un-practiced until you have had a chance to bring it back to the teacher or, perhaps, just to go on thinking, analyzing, and finally finding something better.

Are these last two principles in actual conflict with each other? Not quite. Taken together they point to the need for a student to develop the ability to tell when a fingering seems wrong because it is wrong, and when it seems wrong because it is unfamiliar or conforms to a new idea, or just hasn’t been practiced enough yet. This is one of the senses that will be strengthened by independent work on fingering. It is fine if it takes a while to develop, and it will kick in earlier and earlier in the process with each piece that the student works on. 

A list can seem so cut-and-dried. Do these nine headings outline all of what I want to tell a student before that student goes off to create fingerings for a piece? Do I always outline all of these things in this exact way? No, of course not. This outline is in part an exercise in thinking about the sorts of things that I think that we can offer to students as pre-established guidelines in lieu of specific “use this fingering here” input. Someone else might have a different specific set of ideas, or ones similar to these but put rather differently. Someone might decide that a few of these are worth outlining and discussing quite specifically in advance and that others of them can be left to be added along the way, in response to particular situations. I have never yet written an outline like this to hand to students. I do it all verbally. But the act of writing it out for the column suggests to me that I might like to try that. The danger in writing something and presenting it as a sort of document, especially as from teacher (or any supposed authority or “expert”) to student, is that it will be interpreted too hard and fast.

I think that it is necessary, whether this is all done in discussion or partly in written outline, to be very careful to remind students about flexibility and balance. This is reflected in my brief comments about “no thumbs on black notes” last month. I am still very aware that I have sometimes seemed too adamant about that, right and important though it usually is, and that a student has wasted time or even risked tendon injuries by using awkward stretches to keep thumbs off black notes that they should indeed have been playing. (I would love to know exactly how Clementi framed that.)

Students working

autonomously

I have alluded a lot to a student’s going off to finger a piece, any piece, autonomously. There’s an interesting question as to whether is it ever useful to choose pieces in the first place not to (just) teach something about execution or rhetoric or even fingering as such, but as exercises specifically in thinking independently about fingering. I think that this can be a good idea, as long as it doesn’t shade over into asking a student to work on pieces that lack musical interest. What constitutes a good piece for working on fingering choice depends on the student. However, there are things to analyze about how a piece relates to the process of working out fingerings. How much will it be necessary to think about choices of hand as they differ from what the distribution on the staves seems to suggest? (As I have written before, I feel very strongly that staff distribution shouldn’t influence hand distribution in mapping out and playing organ music. But it doesn’t hurt to clear the decks, so to speak, for this kind of work by choosing pieces where that isn’t an issue.)

The next step is to see what sort of work each hand has to do. A student can and should learn to think about fingering with any sort of texture. But it is important to be clear about the fact that different textures require a somewhat different approach, or at least feel like they lead to somewhat different processes. For example, if either hand has only one note at a time, as is true of both hands in something like a Bach two-part Invention, then the hand is free of a whole host of constraints. It’s just a question of mapping five fingers onto a succession of notes. If a hand has actual chords, that is one thing. If it has a more-than-one-note texture that arises out of counterpoint, that is something else. (Maybe the principal practical fingering difference there is that chords often change over all notes at once, whereas counterpoint, almost by definition, does not.) Many or most pieces out there have a variety of these sorts of textures. To choose an example out of thousands, many of the pieces in the Vierne 24 Pièces en style libre have long stretches in which one hand is playing a single line while the other is playing chords or some other multi-note texture. 

It is possible that at first (when a student is relatively non-advanced overall or is not yet too comfortable choosing fingerings), pieces that have one sort of texture in each hand for long stretches might be the most comfortable. That situation allows a student to focus on one sort of analysis of what the texture requires of the hand. Within reason—that is, avoiding real blockbusters—I don’t think that overall easiness or difficulty is that much of a concern. A more difficult piece just takes more time and patience, as much during the fingering phase as during the practicing phase. In fact, an extremely challenging piece can be used as an interesting laboratory for thinking about fingering, whether or not the student goes on to practice it and learn it for performance. Using a piece this way can be a challenge to the yearning for completeness and closure that most of us have, but as a learning tool it is perfectly valid. The most compelling reasons to do it are, first, that a student might actually find it intellectually interesting to think about fingering a piece that would be a stretch to play, and that the student might simply like that piece and want to engage with it. If a beginner or intermediate student works carefully on the fingering of a piece, or part of a piece, that is a real (or unrealistic) stretch now, that student will be well positioned to go ahead and really learn that piece later. That is in contrast with the situation that can be set up by more or less just stumbling through a significantly difficult piece without dealing with its challenges seriously and systematically enough.

A brief closing return to de Pachmann. In my reading I encountered this statement, one that we should all always bear in mind: “If . . . a difficulty . . .
does not disappear after one hundred repetitions . . . play it a thousand times!” (Exclamation point mine!)