On Teaching

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at gavinblack@mail.com.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

This month I will continue questioning, musing, speculating—almost free-associating—about aspects of our ways of working with our students, and about how that process connects with the students’ lives and their many paths to learning music and to getting something important out of that learning and that music.

Remembering Peter Williams

However, a sad coincidence makes me start with a comment or two, and an anecdote, about Peter Williams. Just before I sat down to write this, the news came across the computer screen that Peter Williams had died. [See Nunc Dimittis, page 10 in this issue.] That made me remember my first introduction long ago to the first few of his many books: my teacher Eugene Roan mentioned that he valued Peter Williams’s writings especially because he asked more questions than he gave answers. I was jolted by this realization: that in starting last month’s column noting that I would be asking more questions in this series of columns than giving answers, I was subconsciously paying tribute to that aspect of Williams’s work. And indeed, Gene Roan was not the only person to notice that about Peter Williams. Several comments I have read online say exactly that about him. My own feeling (not based on anything he said to me, since, to my regret, I never spoke to him or communicated directly with him) is that his approach was simultaneously based on the perpetual asking of questions—the refusal to view anything as settled or determined in the way that can seem like ossification—and on valuing real and copious information as a spur to understanding and to art. This seems to me to be a very fruitful and also rather life-affirming combination. 

I once attended a combination lecture/demo and masterclass that Peter Williams conducted at the Schuke organ in Voorhees Chapel at Rutgers University. It was thirty-something years ago, and I don’t remember the specific topic. I do remember being (as someone very young and very much a beginner) astonished that someone so august, with actual books to his name (and impressive ones at that) could be so relaxed, friendly, and informal. I think I was still then in the grip of a youthful reluctance to believe that anything with the authority of the printed page could have flexibility to it. I had heard what Gene Roan had said, and knew that I liked that approach. But I still couldn’t quite believe that an “authority” really thought that way. His tone at this class helped me begin to internalize that as a possibility.

Furthermore—and this impressed me a lot—he conducted this class wearing sandals and other very informal summer gear. When he sat down to play the organ, he played in those sandals. I don’t remember what I thought then about organ playing and footwear. I am not sure whether this confirmed for me or actually started me thinking that simple comfort while playing might be an underrated value. Since I base much of my thinking about technique and teaching on the importance of comfort, naturalness, and relaxation, I consider that moment in Voorhees Chapel to have been quite significant for me. 

Now to get on with some questions . . .

Fingering

I wrote last month that “I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking ‘what do you most deeply want out of life?’” And, as I said last month, this is sort of a joke—but not entirely. Questions about fingering are often phrased like this: “What is the fingering here?” or “What is the fingering for this passage?” Of course this way of putting it is predicated (probably subconsciously) on the assumption that there is a “correct” fingering, or at any rate that other people have already deemed what the fingering should be. I understand that most students who ask such a question are not strongly asserting that they believe that there can be only one correct fingering and that someone else has already worked it out. It’s just an underlying flavor to the thinking. But in any case, my first response is to examine the question. Whose job is it to know what the fingering should be then and there for that student? Shouldn’t it be the student—of course with help from me, since I am there and can interact, not the kind of help that just gives one answer. However, if a student wants to work within a particular tradition, or has habits that stem from a particular tradition, then perhaps that student’s comfort will be enhanced by hearing about ways in which others with more experience in that approach have worked things out. I am inclined to be uncomfortable with this, and to believe that what a student should actually be learning is specifically how to work things out from scratch for him- or herself. However, that is of course one of my biases that I need to acknowledge and re-examine. 

Once or twice I have had a student who specifically wanted to use, by default, Marcel Dupré’s fingerings for Bach. This could have been because of something that a previous teacher suggested, because of something that they read, or just because those fingerings have the authority of something printed in a real book. My initial impulse is to be against this way of working out fingerings. Even if it is done with flexibility—with a willingness to view those fingerings as just a jumping-off point—it still strikes me as an inefficient path for arriving at what is right for a given student. However, if I myself have the flexibility to let that student start with something by which he or she is intrigued, then I discover a few things. One is a more complete picture of what is gained or lost by a particular approach to fingering. I also discover something about my student’s thinking, and about where past work and study have brought that student. And, most importantly, the student and I together learn something about the philosophy of fingering and of learning fingering. Will any of this outweigh the loss of efficiency when working on fingering is filtered through the ideas of a very different player—one who can’t participate actively in the discussion? I don’t know. But if it is in keeping with the student’s interests—and thus keeps the student interested and involved—it might work out well. 

Suppose that the Dupré fingerings are not for Bach but for a piece by Dupré himself? Then it might seem obvious that the fingerings are very fittingly authoritative—literally so. This leads, however, to questions about what fingering is for. Is fingering mainly about the piece and its interpretation, or is it mainly about logistics and comfort for the player (including how fingering habits might create predictability and repeatability)? Or is it about the instrument, and techniques for making the instrument speak? (All of the above?) Furthermore, suppose that the Dupré piece in question (such as Opus 28) was written for the express purpose of teaching a student how to begin working on Bach, and that the student does not want to adopt Dupré’s approach to playing Bach? 

Authenticity

This all leads to the question of authenticity, and why we should care about it. These can probably be summarized in two camps: authenticity for its own sake—seeking out and appreciating an awareness that what we are doing is what the composer would have done or wanted; and authenticity because we assume that what the composer really wanted is likely to be the most artistically effective, convincing, beautiful, communicative, and so on. (The former of these constitutes giving the composer authority, the second, trusting the composer.) Neither of these is demonstrably right or wrong, or excludes the other. Some players wish to start with the artifact as such—the music on the printed page—and reserve little or no role for authenticity or a reconstructed sense of what the composer would have done as a performer. 

The point here is not to sort all of that out. It is just that a student’s approach to fingering will inevitably reflect his or her approach to all of this—that is, to the student’s philosophy of life and of art. And as that approach evolves (perhaps with the help of the teacher), the approach to fingering should evolve as well (likewise with the help of the teacher).

Relaxation

What about relaxation? I have staked out (and mentioned repeatedly over the years) a position that relaxation is crucial to playing and to the learning process. I want students to be relaxed and happy and do things that they want to do not just because that seems like a nice state of affairs in itself, but also because I think that it leads to better learning. But I have no clear answer to how you induce relaxation. There is a paradox in that sentence—one that was embodied in a self-help book that was around when I was growing up called “Relax Now!”—the title sort of slashed across the cover in garish red letters. It looked like an attempt to intimidate people into relaxing. That, I imagine, can’t be done. 

The similar paradox in music learning is that we want students to relax, but also to believe that what they are doing is very hard, that almost no one ever succeeds, that they must be extraordinarily disciplined, practice a lot and always very well, that they must have succeeded by a very young age or they might as well give up, and so on. I or any other teacher may be quite good at not conveying that long list of dangers—it helps if, like me, you don’t actually believe in it. But it is still all there in our culture and its approach to music, especially music as a profession. 

And of course the basic part about work is not false: really learning music requires plenty of work. Part of my reason for wanting to make this work as efficient as possible—effective practice strategies—is to keep the process from being overwhelming in its sheer amount. However, I have to ask myself whether an emphasis on really good practicing can’t lead to pressure of its own. If I am not practicing perfectly, then maybe I’m losing out in some way. If not, why not? How can practicing be a relaxed or relaxing experience?

One thing that can help with relaxation is out-and-out silliness. What part can that play in learning an instrument or even in practicing? Quite a bit, I think. For example (minor silliness), it is quite a good thing for anyone who practices occasionally to play a piece focusing on nothing but physical relaxation. That is, let the hands, feet, and the whole self be almost completely lacking in muscle tone—almost slumped over. Certainly try to play the notes of the passage or piece, but give absolute top priority to being as over-relaxed as I have described. This will almost certainly lead to plenty of wrong notes. But it is a delightfully pure way to feel relaxed while playing. 

Other practice techniques

This is also good practice in keeping things going when you make a wrong note—possibly the single most important performance skill. Another paradox of working on music is this: if you really practice perfectly all the time you will in fact never make a wrong note. Technically, practicing well means keeping everything slow enough and broken down into small enough units that you never do anything wrong. But how can you ever practice the very thing that I just said was the most important performance skill? Surely that is the last thing that you want never to have practiced. So, is it possible to make wrong notes on purpose and recover from them? Is that a good idea as part of a practice regimen? I think that it probably is. (I continually demonstrate to students how much better it sounds when there are obvious wrong notes but no break in rhythm as compared to minor, fleeting wrong notes that the player allows to disrupt the flow of things.) Of course it isn’t pure: practicing making wrong notes on purpose and then continuing isn’t exactly the same as keeping going when a wrong note takes you by surprise. But it is useful, and, again, silly enough to be relaxing.

Practicing while it is really noisy is also a good idea—that is, a “bad” idea that can be fun and also serve as good training for some aspects of our work. A student can try practicing while there’s other music on—at home this can be the stereo, at the organ console it might be a device with headphones. I recently spent some time practicing clavichord while a recording of piano music played. It was interesting: I could tell that the (very quiet) clavichord was making sound, but I couldn’t tell that that sound had pitch. It was a great concentration exercise. (This reminds me of what Saint-Saëns reported, namely that in his days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire the piano practice facility contained twenty-four pianos in one big room. Everyone could hear everyone, and you really learned to concentrate and to listen.)

How about playing too fast? That is, playing a passage faster than you can play it and faster than you would want it to be. This of course can be fun. One of the big obstacles to students’ practicing slowly enough is that it is often just plain more fun to play fast. So perhaps playing too fast should be separated out: when you are really practicing a passage, do all of the things that I have described in past columns: slow enough, fingerings that are well-planned, and so on. But once in a while just let something rip. This ties in with the previous few paragraphs: if and only if you keep things physically relaxed are you able to go really fast, and if you try to tear through a passage much too quickly, you will make wrong notes, so you can practice keeping things going. (If you don’t make wrong notes, it may be fast but it is not too fast. So go faster!)

I have noticed (this month I seem to be writing more than ever about the production schedule of these columns) that during the part of next month when I usually write the column, I have a recording session. It is for a Frescobaldi harpsichord recording that has been in the works for quite a while. This juxtaposition has given
me the following idea: I am going to keep notes, a sort of diary of the latter stages of my preparation for those sessions, and then of the sessions themselves. The June column will be an edited selection of those notes—an account of some of my thoughts and experiences from the recording process. It will end up being a natural extension of some of the musings
of these last two columns. Its relationship to teaching as such will be, I assume, tangential but real: examples of thinking and working and trying
to make things come out well in a certain kind of musical situation. In any case, I hope that it will be interesting.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings III

I continue here the discussion of whether it is better to let students work out their own fingerings or to provide them fingerings to learn. In the former case they “learn by doing.” In the latter case they learn about the art of fingering from having been given and having learned (presumably good) representative fingerings. As I said last month, the “correct” option is likely a combination of both. I should also mention that in referring to each approach in a concise way, there is a danger of caricaturing a bit. When I talk about letting students, even beginning students, work out their own fingerings, I never mean that a teacher would or should just shrug their shoulders and say, “You’re on your own.” I wouldn’t expect any teacher who is inclined to work out fingerings in advance for students to do so with no regard to the student’s own hands or to insist on the student’s using a fingering that, in practice, was manifestly uncomfortable or that was clearly not giving good results. To a certain extent, the differences are those of emphasis. 

In last month’s column I looked at some advantages and disadvantages of the first approach. Here I want to start by doing the same with the second, more interventionist approach. To some extent the advantages here mirror the disadvantages of the first approach, and the disadvantages mirror the advantages. But it is interesting to look from the other direction, and some new wrinkles may appear. 

Advantages of providing fingerings to students

First, some of the advantages of the approach of largely giving students well worked-out fingerings and expecting them to learn them:

1) The main advantage has to be that the fingerings will be really good. As I wrote last month, I will get to the question of what it means for a fingering to be “good,” regardless of whether it is the teacher or the student who has come up with that fingering. This is a multifaceted concept and one about which there must a lot of flexibility. It should be a bedrock assumption that any fingering that a teacher writes into the music will be one of the good fingerings for the passage. 

2) The student will learn what good fingering is by being led to experience it. Modeling good fingering can teach good fingering. The process resembles the old (joking?) description of learning medical procedures in medical school: “Watch one, do one, teach one.” But it should be much more than one, as it really is in medical school. If a student plays the first passage that he or she works on with a really successful teacher-given fingering, a little bit of what was good about the fingering will rub off on the student’s awareness, consciously or subconsciously. That experience will then predispose the student to get a little bit more of the same from encountering the next such fingering, and so on. The ability to recognize what is successful about a given fingering will grow incrementally. 

3) The process can save time. The more experienced a teacher is, he or she should be able to come up with good fingerings quite efficiently. Even though the fingerings have to go through a filter of “How will this work for someone else?”, it should still be a quicker process than the student working everything out from scratch. 

4) Related to #3, there may be circumstances in which the teacher thinks it best for the student to focus on some aspect of the piece or of the learning process other than fingering. It might better clear the decks by letting the teacher largely take over the fingering task while the student concentrates on whatever that aspect is.

5) The teacher can incorporate historical, composer-derived, or otherwise specialized fingerings into the learning process without requiring the student to think about all of the complexities of incorporating historicity or other specialized concerns into the fingering decision-making process. (See below for more about this.)

5) The teacher’s providing fingerings may relieve anxiety for the student. This is sometimes very important, but it is also a bit of a potential trap. In the end the student has to learn not to greet the fingering project with anxiety, or at least to control that anxiety and work through it. 

Disadvantages of providing fingerings to students

What are some of the particular disadvantages of the teacher providing fingerings to the student?

1) There is the loss of an opportunity for the student to experience the joys (and anxieties) of autonomy. It is part of the give and take of the learning process for any student to operate with limited autonomy some of the time. The danger is in the student becoming too accustomed to (or addicted to) that state of affairs. Are we moving a student towards being a mid-career player who is still looking for an outside source of fingerings? 

2) There is a danger that the student will endow fingerings with too much of the weight of authority. That is, the student will have a permanent, at least mild, nagging feeling that this must be right because it is what I was taught. I suspect that in specific cases students are more reluctant to change, later on, fingering that they were given than fingering that they worked out themselves. But there is also the danger of drawing a wrong, more abstract, conclusion: that this way of approaching fingering must be right because it is what I was taught. This is a different concept to distill from the learning process than “this is how I have learned to understand what is going on with my fingers, this instrument, and this music.” (Note: Am I right to call this a “disadvantage?” That is partly a philosophical matter, and people can and should disagree and debate about it. As a practical matter, I feel pretty sure that any sense of authority behind fingering choices can dispose players, students or former students, to stick for too long to fingerings that are manifestly not successful. I will come back to this in talking both about editorial fingerings and about historical fingering.)

3) The student loses the opportunity to imprint the notes (learn the piece) more solidly by grappling with the logistics of notes and fingers. This mirrors advantage #4 from last month. I wrote then that if the note-learning and piece-learning advantages that come from working out careful fingerings are taken away, they need to be replaced: they are that important. There are general ways in which they can be replaced, other modes of intense study. But a teacher who is providing fingerings should, as much as possible, explain the rationale behind the fingerings to the student. This interacts with the time considerations: a teacher explaining about every fingering is likely to be prohibitively time-consuming. It can be reserved for fingerings that are either particularly tricky or particularly instructive about how to handle a certain situation.

4) The most fundamental disadvantage is that the student doesn’t get direct practice in working out fingerings. The question of how much of a disadvantage we think that this is as opposed to the question of whether it is outweighed by advantages depends on what we think about the relative effectiveness of the “work it out yourself” model and the “modeling” concept.

5) Finally, it is a serious problem if the teacher does not take into account any specific individual fingering needs of the student. I would be rather astonished if any teacher consciously attempts to not do this. When I have noticed myself occasionally falling into this trap it has been through inattention or an unconscious desire to save time. (My general preference for letting students work out their own fingerings has saved me from committing this particular error too often, but I have certainly done so from time to time.) 

You can probably think of advantages and disadvantages to each approach beyond the ones that I have suggested here. Think it over. Next month I will try to describe where I come down in synthesizing all of this. A “headline” version of that would be something like this: I want to leave as much as possible of the process up to the student, but with absolute certainty that we don’t let any actually harmful fingerings slip by, and with a humane attention to avoiding frustration and anxiety. I will discuss how that approach can be carried out efficiently and with avoidance of pitfalls. I will follow it with some thoughts about how a teacher can guide the student in taking a more interventionist approach, if and when that seems best.

Historical awareness in fingering

It is well known that in different times and places keyboard fingering has been approached in different ways, and there are a number of possible ways of discussing this. It is possible to talk about an overall difference between “early” or “old” fingering and “modern” fingering. It is also possible to talk about the difference between Chopin’s reputed fingering approach, in which each finger was understood to have its own different characteristics and which harkened back to practices that were already old-fashioned, and Liszt’s approach, in which the discipline of requiring each finger to be able to behave just like every other one was crucial and which was a harbinger of the development of piano fingering ever since. We get as specific as we want, and as available information allows, about approaches to fingering in different times and places. Was there a common approach to fingering in Italy in the 1630s and did it differ from the approach in England, say, at that same time? Did it differ from the approach in Italy in the 1670s? How did Brahms’s fingering relate to that of Chopin or Liszt (or Clara Schumann or Anton Rubinstein)? Was there a consistent difference between the way players deployed fingering on the harpsichord and on the organ in, say, 1720, or between the piano and the organ in 1860? 

Were there personal differences between players in the way that they used fingering in all eras (or in any era)? That is, not just between Chopin and Liszt or between different “schools,” but between individuals, even if in some sense they belonged to the same school? Were any of these differences not about fingering as it related to personal logistics or habits, but as it related to the response of instruments? Could this have been about very specific instruments, this or that particular organ or piano, harpsichord, or clavichord? Was there a difference among composer/players as to how much they thought of fingering as influencing interpretation and how much they thought of it as being about personal habit, logistics, or comfort? What did composers who were not players or not accomplished players think about fingering, not just as to details, but at a meta level? Did they have anything to say about it, or did they leave it to the performers?

Were there composers who thought very explicitly and clearly that they wanted every player to use the fingering that they themselves used? Were there composers who specifically thought the opposite?

There are so many questions of this sort that the subject is the basis of many books and articles, and indeed of many research careers. For me, the relevance of it to our subject has two dimensions. First, it seems to me that it is a necessary part of a student’s education about fingering at least to become aware that these sorts of issues exist. It is valid, as a way of getting started and keeping things from becoming overwhelming, to allude to some of the questions about historical fingering with a student, but frankly admit that you will not be suggesting a detailed historical approach for now. (This approach might be most relevant with beginners.) It is also entirely possible to introduce some historical fingerings from the very beginning of even a beginner’s study. There is not likely to be anything intrinsically harder or less suited to the learning process about the fingerings that a composer had in mind than about other fingerings. If this aspect of fingering study is not going to form an integral part of the early stages of learning the instrument or learning how to think about fingering, that is not because the fingerings are somehow less suitable. It is because the layers of different things to think about are complex.

The teacher’s suggesting some fingerings beyond what a student would be able to devise is a valid course of action. It should be remembered that because all these questions are complex, there isn’t necessarily a clear answer to what the “historically correct” fingering is. Sometimes there are possible fairly clear answers, sometimes not. And often a fingering that arises out of considerations of interpretation and of how the instrument responds will converge with fingerings that a composer might have used.

But the second point is important and interesting. A composer’s own fingerings, to whatever extent we know them, acknowledging the complexities about what composers wanted or expected, have a sort or type of authority that fingerings provided by anyone else cannot have. It is up to all players, including teachers and students, to establish some practice about how to receive and react to this authority. Any player’s ideas about this will and should evolve. But a composer’s fingering is part of the piece, its identity and meaning, in a way that an editor’s fingering, any great performer’s fingering, my fingering, your fingering, anyone’s teacher’s fingering, cannot be. I think that it is important for a student to take this idea in as part of the honest intellectual framework for working on fingering.

As I have suggested, I am always concerned that students not feel too much weight of authority. Therefore, I am tempted sometimes to downplay the importance, or even the interest, of knowledge about a composer’s own practices. This is in spite of my being in my own performing life an “early music” specialist, and even in a sense an “expert” on some of these matters.

I think it is more fruitful to separate out the different kinds of authority. Recognizing that by definition anything that the composer wanted is part of the piece, while anything that comes from somewhere else is not, enables us to do two important things. First, it allows us to make a conscious decision about how we want to treat that composer’s authority. There is nothing illegal or presumably immoral about making an informed choice to do something that is different from what a composer would have done. But it makes sense to be aware of what we know and what we don’t know before we make that decision. Second, an awareness of the proper authority of the composer should enable us to bear the burden of other sorts of authority more lightly. It is to me a pretty clear fork in the road. If I know that some information about a piece comes from the composer, then I want to make a decision about what to do with that information based on that knowledge. If I know that an idea about a piece came from someone else, then I want to feel free to regard that as someone’s opinion or idea: maybe an interesting one, maybe a well-informed and well-thought out one, but not by definition part of the meaning of the piece.

Performance

Something that has been on my mind for a while now is the relationship between being a player and being a performer. This has been on my mind in one way or another for most of my adult life, but it has recently come to the fore and presented itself as an interesting subject for this column.

There are a few reasons for this. I have been playing more concerts over the last five years or so than at any other period of my life. As a result, I have been focusing directly and intensely on my own experience of being a performer and my feelings about that experience. I have had a larger than usual influx of new students over the last several months, and whenever that happens I have to focus as consciously as possible on my own thinking about the goals and needs of those students. Over the last five or six years, I have also been a more frequent audience member both at concerts and at other sorts of artistic endeavors­—theater, dance, and so on—than I had been over the preceding couple of decades. In this I have looked for (not totally) offbeat, non-traditional, semi-improvisatory, some-
times mixed-media, or otherwise somewhat avant-garde sorts of performance. This has been partly for practical reasons (a lot of such things take place near where I live, tickets are usually easy to get, and much of this sort of work is not costly to attend) and partly because this is an area—or a set of overlapping areas—that I had previously neglected. This has given me an interesting look at new aspects on performance as a phenomenon. 

By and large this column has dealt with two sorts of things over the years: the really practical, such as a protocol for learning pedal playing, suggestions for solving hand distribution difficulties, general practice strategies, or exercises for trills; and the tangential but relevant, such as tuning and temperament, an introduction to the clavichord, or my thoughts on the ways in which trying to learn golf has informed my playing and teaching of music. What I have not dealt with very much is the whole set of questions that bridge the gap between playing and performance. Some of these perhaps boil down to what might be called the fundamental question of musical performance: how do I know that what I am doing is valuable to those who are hearing it? 

But this in turn expands to a host of specific questions and things to think about. This includes everything that we call interpretation. Interpretation as a part of actual performance includes not just interpretive choices that we know we are making (tempo, registration, articulation, approaches to rhythm, etc.), but also all sorts of intangibles that make the worked-out and describable interpretation seem compelling and convincing. This “compelling and convincing” phenomenon is probably one reason that a given listener can like so many different interpretations of the same piece. The describable interpretive choices are by no means all of what makes a performance effective: you can make a case that they are often only a small part, or that they essentially just set the stage for effectiveness rather than create it. 

The relevant questions might well include things about presentation. Is the way I look while playing important? Is it important that a written program be presented a certain way? Shall I talk to the audience? Looking at it from another point of view, is it better to pay as little attention as possible to those trappings and think only about how the music sounds? 

The strongest reason that I have not dealt very much with the question of “Is what I am doing valuable to the audience?” in these columns is that I feel I don’t want to dictate anything to my students about interpretive choices. I do not want to say, “This is right, and that is wrong,” or even “These could be right, but all of those are wrong.” Nor do I want to say, “This is how I do it. Why don’t you try that out?”

Helping a student to become a competent, eventually exceptionally accomplished, player or to become a well-educated, well-rounded musician, artist, and person, can all be addressed without prejudice as to interpretive stance. Can that also be said of helping students to deal directly with the question, “Will what I do be valuable to the listeners?” I think that it can. But I also feel that this is one of the most elusive aspects of teaching and among the most difficult to describe. I think that I have deliberately (or let’s say subconsciously deliberately) shied away from trying to address it over the years. Indeed I am not going to answer it in this or any future column. However, in raising and considering all sorts of questions about what performance is and what it is to be a performer, I will perhaps approach some ways of answering it over time. 

The other big matter about performing is nervousness. There are all sorts of ways to help students deal with that. To start with, helping a student to be highly competent at all of the practical dimensions of playing, and to know and to trust that, is a major part of that picture. Perhaps other aspects of understanding performance as such can also be helpful.

Thoughts about performance and being a performer

So here are various questions and thoughts about performance and being a performer. I will address more of them in future columns. And we will see how many of them wind their way to answers.

Should students be expected or required to perform? When I was very young and taking piano lessons, I used all of my wiles to avoid playing in any of my teachers’ studio classes or recitals. I am pretty sure that from the moment of my first piano lesson in the fall of 1965 when I was eight years old, no member of any public ever heard me perform so much as a note at a keyboard instrument until mid February 1974. I was then 16.

My debut that month involved my playing one organ piece at a Valentine’s Day-themed service at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. Do I think that my avoiding performing for all those years was good? Did it do any harm to my development as a musician? How do I square that history with the fact that I am now a more-than-average comfortable performer? (That is, regardless of whether a given listener likes my approach or doesn’t, I greet concert performance with very little nervousness these days, 40 years and more after the events described above.) 

Why did I not want to play for people in those days? It wasn’t for lack of interest in music or for lack of identifying myself as a musician. Both of those things were present in abundance. I spent a lot of time at the piano, not necessarily practicing what I was “supposed” to practice, but playing. I listened a lot to LP’s and to concerts. I even composed a bit. I think that I was influenced by a feeling that if I played for someone, it had to be perfect. The only thing I would have meant by that at the time was note perfect. This is an attitude that is very easy to pick up from our society and culture. 

There is a billboard that I often pass on the highway near where I live that says, “You don’t get medals for trying, you only get medals for results.” This may be literally true as to “medals,” but it strikes me as a harmful attitude to try to instill in people in general and certainly in aspiring musicians. To put it more neutrally, it is at least an attitude that has consequences. One way to frame how I felt when I was young and trying to play piano is that, in effect, if I would only get a medal for (perfect) results, then I might as well not try. That’s only about performing, not about engaging with music, which I did with great energy in private. 

I don’t believe that my early piano teachers (or other teachers or any adults in my circle) directly conveyed this fear of making mistakes in public to me. I imagine that many of them felt about the whole subject more or less the way I do now. But this is a reminder that being afraid of doing something wrong is a powerful force and one that we have to think about how to counter. One tremendous benefit to me from my memories of my own early refusal to perform is that I can tell the story to my students. Those who are more or less beginners and who are nervous about performing—and about whether they can ever learn to be comfortable performing—take a good deal of comfort from my history.

When I was a student at Westminster Choir College, the organ department was very systematic in introducing us to performance. With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals, shorter or longer, with or without memorization, depending on the student and his or her program. I credit this systematic and humane approach with a significant proportion of my evolution into a comfortable performer.

I have had students who start out thinking that they don’t want to perform.  Their interests in music or in playing organ or harpsichord are inner ones, and expecting to play for other people would only add a layer of tension to an experience that they want to be serene. I have a lot of respect for that sort of feeling. However, I can report that almost everyone who starts out saying something of this sort and whose inner-directed interest is strong enough to cause them to stick with their studies for a while ends up actually wanting to play for others, if only in an informal studio class, and getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing so. 

I am fairly certain that there is a different or competing reason that some people feel reluctant to perform or to be identified or to self-identify as performers rather than just as people who play music. In a way it’s the opposite of the fear of making mistakes or playing badly, but it also stems from a set of societal biases about performing. It is a fear of seeming arrogant, vain, or self-indulgent by putting oneself forward as a performer. This stems at least in part from the awareness that we tend to elevate performers to the rank of “celebrities.” It gives rise to such inhibiting questions as “Who am I to play this great piece?” or “Who would want to listen to me when they could be listening to X or Y?” Such thoughts probably exist and function mostly at a subconscious level. But I believe that for a lot of people they are present. The great, famous touring and recording virtuosi are doing things that many of our students are not going to do, and indeed that you and I might not do either.

The truth is that most of those things that are inevitably different are about circumstances. My experience is that almost any student can play at least as many pieces as effectively, with as much benefit to the listener, as any experienced or famous performer might play them. The chief difference is that the famous performer probably has a larger repertoire and performs more. There may be individual pieces that are too difficult for us to learn comfortably, at least given realistic limits on our practice time. But this knocks out only some of the repertoire and has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the performance of any other piece. The most beautiful and moving performance I have ever heard of Variation 25 from the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach was given recently by a student of mine at a studio class. That reaction of mine as a listener did not come about because the performance reflected my specific interpretive ideas. It aligned with them in part, but not in full. And I mention this example only because it is the most recent. It is one of many from over the years, on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. 

At any given moment in history, there are many listeners for whom the performances of certain pieces by well-known touring and recording artists are indeed the finest performances out there. Those performers are not excluded from the community of those who might give great or even transcendent readings of great music. But no one who gains some level of competence at an instrument is excluded from that community either. It can be liberating to students to be reminded of this. The answer to the question “Why is that performer so famous and successful?” is not always or exclusively because he or she does things on a piece by piece basis that the rest of us can only dream of—not at all. 

Performance as improvisation

I feel that a version of this dynamic has been at play in my own life in the area of improvisation. If it comes up in conversation, I always say that I am not someone who can improvise. This is true of me as I stand now. But why is it? Some time very early in my engagement with music I decided that I couldn’t become someone who could improvise. This was in spite of my being a developing organist, and the organ’s being one of the corners of the “classical” music world where improvisation is most likely to be found. Looking back, I am pretty sure that I never chose to study improvisation and thereby find out what I could and couldn’t do in that field (which would have been the logical approach) because of two inhibiting assumptions: I couldn’t learn to improvise music of the quality of the greatest pieces in the repertoire, and I couldn’t learn to improvise as well as the great and famous improvisers. Were these assumptions correct? I have no idea. But I know that they cut me off from trying.

I close with a stray idea about performance, though as you will see, a logical segue from the above, which came into my head at some point over the last year or so. It stems in part from my experience watching certain theater and dance performances that included an element of improvisation. It is in a way an effort to counter the notion that as performers we must always be humble and self-effacing with respect to the composer. Such an idea is not without merit: it makes a lot of sense, especially, for me, as a kind of specific practical point. The composer probably knew a lot about the essence of the piece, and it might very well turn out that that knowledge can be of use to us in figuring out how we want to play it. (How we tap into that knowledge is a complex subject.) But I also think that too much reverence for the composer, especially when it is specifically expressed as humility, can be inhibiting.

This is not utterly unlike the ways in which too much reverence for other, more famous performers can be. So here’s my thought: one of the ways to conceptualize a partial goal of live performance of repertoire is that the pieces should seem improvised. They should have a kind of spontaneity and ability to surprise performer as well as listener—that we would ideally associate with something that was being brand new. This notion, though paradoxical when applied to a piece that we have leaned through hours of practicing, can be a strong antidote to staleness. But if I play a piece that was actually written by Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Messiaen and I feel like I am improvising it, then I am embracing at that moment the idea that I am someone who could be improvising that extraordinary musical content.

I am in fact not such a person. Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece. In a way, I am playing the role of that person, in a way that is perhaps not the same as but also not completely alien to the way that an actor plays a role. This is just a concept. But it feels to me like one that can bridge the gap between respect for the composer and the fortitude necessary to perform.

More to come . . .

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

Helping Students Choose Fingerings

After two months spent on something interesting and useful yet rather tangential to organ teaching (the clavichord), I have decided to tackle something probably the most direct and nitty-gritty of anything in the whole field: how to help students choose fingerings for their pieces. This topic is tricky and subject to different approaches.

I have certainly alluded to this from time to time while writing about other things. But I have yet to write about it directly and systematically, or in a sustained way. It is fundamentally important. To start with, there is no such thing as a student’s playing a piece, even playing through it first time slowly, or playing one hand or a brief passage, without there being a fingering. (The fingering on an initial play-through might be largely random, and that might be a problem or might be fine. That is part of this discussion.) There is also a way of talking about what it takes to learn a piece that though laughably formulaic is also not untrue: namely, if you have a fingering and then practice efficiently you will learn the piece. I have written a lot about efficient practicing. I now focus on the first part of that formula.

All of the above also applies to pedaling. I focus on fingering here because I think that the technical issues involved in making fingering choices and those involved in making pedaling choices are different enough that juggling a discussion of both would just be confusing. (Confusing for the writer!) Fingering choices are more multifaceted and the questions more complex, though similar in some principles. I hope that the process of thinking about not teaching fingerings but teaching how to devise fingerings will suggest a useful framework for thinking about the same thing with respect to pedaling. I will write about that in the future, separately.   

It was a premise of the way that this column was originally established nearly ten years ago, fairly short, but appearing every month, that I could afford to write in a leisurely way about an important topic, and that I wouldn’t have to try to get any subject sorted in any one column. I take full advantage of that now. We will probably spend the whole summer analyzing and musing about fingering. If you have a fruitful approach to guiding your students towards making good fingering choices for themselves and also can help them learn how to practice well (and can cajole them into wanting to practice well, at least much of the time), then you have done by far the largest part of what you can or should do as to the practical core of the teaching process. The more soundly and smoothly this can unfold, the easier it then is to delve into interpretive, artistic, historical, philosophical, matters, and to issues arising out of the particular musician-like personality of each student and his or her goals and aspirations.

This month I write about fingering and some of the issues involved in choosing fingerings. Along the way I will mention a few somewhat random ideas, thoughts, or images that I think are interesting.

Let’s start with one of those. I have always found it hard to grasp the notion that the “fingering” used by legendary great composers or performers of the past was the very same kind of thing that we do when we come up with fingerings and apply them. Did Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Widor really just push keys down with the fingers of perfectly normal hands, and in so doing choose from among the same kind of patterns that we work with? Yes, of course they did. But as with every aspect of the notion that the great figures of old were people just like the rest of us, this is something that I find it hard to comprehend. (This is especially true as to Bach, but otherwise it tends to feel more difficult the farther back I go in time. Did Cabezón or Schlick have hands much like mine and sometimes sit there wondering whether to reach for that note with 4 or 5? Yes!) One point of musing about this is to try to demystify fingering itself a little bit. Everyone who has ever played a keyboard instrument has had to think about fingering and has faced the same broad constraints about how fingers can or cannot grapple with keys.

Not everyone has always been grappling with the physical act of fingering, its logistic limitations as well as its possibilities, towards the same ends. This is true along the various axes of performance style. Some player/composers and their musical cultures were looking to create a lot of legato, others were not. Some were frequently required to deal with thick chords, other much less so, or nearly not at all. And so on. One of the big questions about fingering and about the challenge of guiding students toward being able to choose fingerings is how to integrate our awareness of how any composer might have approached fingering with other (logistic, musical, practical) considerations.  

But there are also two distinctions related to each other that are perhaps even more interesting. First, most players of the past were mostly improvising. This is probably truer the farther back you go. The relationship between fingering-planning (which is pretty much what we mean when we talk about fingering as an act) and the music must be different if you don’t know what the music will be before you sit down to play. That suggests a concept of the act of fingering that must include some blend of real planning and maintaining habits that permit fingering on the fly. Fingering on the fly is something that we mostly discourage when helping students to learn repertoire. What does the ubiquity of that practice over many centuries tell us about possible approaches to planned fingering?

The second point about old-time performing circumstances is that for the first many centuries in the history of organ playing, it was not the norm for players to play much old music or to be concerned at all with playing old music in the way that the creators of that music would have played it. That is not to say that no one prior to, say, the early nineteenth century ever paid attention to music of earlier eras. Some musicians studied such music. We know that Bach studied Frescobaldi and de Grigny, for example, as well as composers who were more recent or more directly part of his own musical lineage, such as Buxtehude and Pachelbel. But there is no reason to believe either that he engaged in public performance of their music or that when he looked through their pieces he was thinking about their fingering or other performance practice issues. He may have done so, and other composer/performers who paid some attention to older music may have done so, but if so it was under the radar screen of history.

The first issue that we have to think about in teaching fingering to students is what students. And the answer is a usual one: that the more of a beginner a student is the more systematically we need to address things that are practical and basic. This is both an obligation and an opportunity. If someone is studying with a teacher as a beginner, then that teacher can do things “right” from the beginning, whatever that means. A student who has already accomplished some playing or who is already quite advanced will already have an approach to fingering. That approach may be fully worked out and successful, or may be deeply problematic, or somewhere in between. It may be intuitive and successful, but still benefit from being made more analytical. It may be intuitive and insufficiently efficient or fit any number of different patterns. Then with organ (and harpsichord or clavichord), unlike with piano, we have the situation that seems like a special case but is in fact the most common—namely, that a student comes to us as an established player of the piano with established piano fingering habits. In this situation, work on fingering necessarily keeps coming back to questions of the differences in fingering considerations between piano and organ. 

I want to sketch out my thoughts about all of this with an eye mainly on the student who is at least near the beginning of studying. It seems like the best way to teach myself or to invite any other teacher to think about how to teach fingering is to start with a conceptually complete picture. How can we teach a student good fingering habits from scratch? What is the overall framework or concept involved in that work? But the notion of re-shaping, steering, helping someone who already has well-established relevant skills, but also possible problematic habits, always must be kept in mind.

Factors in choosing fingerings

What considerations shape fingering choices? There are quite a few, and they sometimes complement one another but also sometimes seem to push in different directions. Some of them are: 

1) What would the composer have done? I mention this first not because I think that it is most important, but because it ties in with some of what I have already discussed above. What do we know about how a composer would have fingered his or her music? Do we know that from the composer directly or from students or contemporaries of that composer? How much detail do we have? How much are we filling in or extrapolating? Whatever we know, or reasonably believe, that a composer did, do we know why? Can we make plausible deductions about why? What were the musical goals if there were any? Or were the goals more practical or logistic?

2) What about physical logistics or comfort? Are there ways of executing passages that are easier than others? The answer to this is sometimes yes. Also, quite often the answer is a modified yes: there isn’t one fingering that is the easiest or most comfortable, but there are some that are more so and some that are less so. The comfort or ease of fingerings may well differ between one player and another. When it seems to differ, the question is whether that results from some legitimate difference that should be respected or just of habit, which perhaps should be respected or perhaps challenged.

3) Habit. This is worthy of its own category. Anyone who has ever played at all has certainly become more accustomed to some patterns and approaches than to others. Some of these habits are limiting. For example, it is common to observe players avoiding the fifth finger as a general rule. That can be a very bad idea: endless problems can cascade from this. Many players have habits when it comes to trill fingerings, usually using fingers 2 and 3 as a default and avoiding 4 and 5, or sometimes orienting trills around the thumb just by habit when that is actually physically awkward. It is crucial, especially when working with established players, to think about what habits can be relied on for ease and comfort and which ones should be questioned. (Come to think of it, this is most important and most difficult working with oneself!) 

4) Hand position. I have written about this in passing quite a bit. In this series of columns I want to explore the relationship between hand position and fingering directly, and with an eye on how it shapes choices. There are ways of holding the hand in relation to the wrist and arm that are physiologically sound and other ways that produce tension and possibly pain, and that can even lead to injury. Since the keyboard is fixed and the player’s sitting position is more or less fixed, addressing keys with particular fingers ties in very closely with hand position. It is interesting to think about the causality going both ways: “this is the fingering I want, so let’s see what it implies about hand position,” but also “this is the hand position I want, so let’s see what it implies about fingering.”

5) Repetition. If the exact same passage is repeated, it probably makes sense to use the same fingering. Sometimes there maybe a reason that it does not, but it’s always worth thinking about.

6) Patterns. Passages that are similar in shape to one another might well suggest similar fingerings. Sometimes patterns that are musically very similar or identical are not the same physically, usually because of something different about sharps and flats. Patterns are useful but should not tie us in to doing things that are actually not the best. 

7) Memorability. Repetitions and other patterns are useful for fingering planning in that they increase our ability to remember fingerings without extra effort. If it is possible to take ease of remembering into account in planning fingerings, that can be useful. 

8) Interpretive considerations. The most common and straightforward of these is articulation. If two successive notes need to be really legato, then the first one must be played in such a way that it can be held through the beginning of the second one. This usually means that the two notes must be played by two different fingers. If two notes don’t have to be legato, or if the choice interpretively is for them not to be, then that fingering restriction is lifted. 

9) The instrument. Are there some instruments that suggest different fingerings? Are there situations in which working out a fingering in the abstract, however conscientiously, will not help produce the best fingerings when it comes time to play on a particular instrument? This could be about feel and keyboard logistics, or about intrinsic instrument sound, or about room acoustics. It can also be about controlling pipe speech or winding in instruments that are sensitive to such things.

These are some considerations about the content of fingering choices. That is a separate thing from how we help students learn to think about these choices, a necessary precursor. The main fork in the road about working with students about fingering is this: how much should I as a teacher give my students fingerings directly, and how much should I talk to them about principles but ask them to concoct their own fingerings? I will discuss that next month.

People’s hands are more different physically than you might think. This has to do with overall size and with the relative long/thin or short/stubby aspect of the fingers. But it also has to do with specifics that affect keyboard fingering directly, like the length and position of the thumb with respect to the second finger, the length of the fifth finger, the question of which is longer as between the fourth and second fingers, and how they both relate to the third finger. The accompanying scan is of my hands: short thumbs, long fifth fingers, fourth and second fingers very close to each other in length.

Take a look at your own!

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 II

This month I want to pose a most fundamental question: should we give fingerings to our students, or should we instead ask them to work out their own fingerings, with guidance from us? It is likely that with most teachers, for most students, the answer will be some of both. But that leaves the question of how to arrive at the right balance. And it also leaves a whole set of questions about how best to carry out each approach. This is not a cleanly separate issue from questions of what constitutes good fingering or what good procedure for working on fingering would be in general. But it is interesting to try to tease it out a bit on its own. 

I will start by confessing my own bias, the same bias that governs my thinking about most matters. My orientation is always towards letting students figure things out for themselves. It seems logical to let students start as soon as possible (not sooner) practicing whatever it is that we want them to learn to do. And that is (almost) always the act of working something out, not the act of executing something. This is true as to interpretive matters, concrete ones such as registration or choice of tempo, and more diffuse or flexible ones such as timing, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, and so on. It is more important for a student to engage in the process of learning how to work out interpretive matters than to give a performance today or tomorrow that you or I would like, or even that the student would endorse or enjoy listening to some years down the road. This is a version of the old “teach someone to fish” idea. 

This is subject to all sorts of nuance. For example, when does someone stop being a student? When does the execution of an effective performance become the most important priority? Are we not all to some extent continuing to learn the various processes, and don’t we all hope that our performances will get better and better, whatever that means to each of us? Looking back on our past performances, we should probably hope not to like them entirely, but to be grateful for what we learned from them. It is not a bad idea to invite your students to reinvent the wheel if you are hoping to teach them not how to use wheels or how to make wheels but how to invent wheels.

I confess this bias not to embrace it, but to push back against it or at least to examine whether and how it makes sense here. There are some things that need to be taught in a different way. The clearest of these tend to be practical. For example, if someone asks me to show them how to make the loop at the end of a harpsichord string, I will not just hand them a piece of wire and suggest that they figure it out. I will make a loop for them and describe to them in detail what I am doing. Then I will repeat that as necessary before asking them to try. There are some wheels that really don’t need to be reinvented. Likewise I don’t leave students to figure out entirely for themselves what sort of practice protocols and strategies work best. I can show a student many things that do work, but it is open-ended; they can also figure out others for themselves. I do take a sort of “re-invent the wheel” approach to the art of registration, for another example, but not to showing a student how the combination system works. When I have out-and-out information that a student does not have, I share it.

Even though no one would disagree that the long-term goal is to teach students how to work out fingerings, rather than to teach them fingerings, there is room for debate about how best to do that. Does an approach of letting students come up with their own fingerings with some discussion of principles, some feedback, and maybe occasional suggestions (what I might call my approach just for short) actually lead students most efficiently towards being able to work out fingerings for themselves? Or does it work better to show the student many examples of really good fingering, in one piece after another, and let the student learn from observation what good fingering is and how to achieve it? 

For the moment, we are taking this to be independent of the question of what good fingering is. For the latter, more teacher-oriented, approach to work, it has to be understood that the teacher knows a lot about how to concoct good fingerings. I will deal with that more directly in subsequent columns, and in the end it interacts with what we are discussing here.

Advantages of two approaches

I would like to outline some pluses and minuses of each approach, as I see it. I start this with a few thoughts about my approach and continue next month with corresponding thoughts about the more interventionist approach. First, a few advantages or strong points about the approach of largely letting students concoct their own fingerings: 

1) It is an opportunity to practice autonomy and thinking for oneself. This is particularly relevant because, largely as a result of editors’ fingerings being found in so many printed editions of music, it is easy for fingering to take on an oppressive feeling of authority. The particular form in which a student asks a question about fingering is often this: What is the fingering for this passage? That reflects an unconscious acceptance of the notion that there “is” a fingering, that the fingering for the passage is somehow a given, handed down by those who know. There is plenty in life that must be treated this way. Fingering doesn’t. Sometimes when I respond to that question with “there ‘is’ no fingering. The fingering will be what you work it out to be.” That is immediately and significantly liberating to the student, even a revelation.

2) It involves practicing as directly as possible what the student needs to learn to do. As I said above, I have a bias in favor of this in general, all else being equal. Every instance of a student’s thinking, “Does this feel better or does that? Does it sound different with fingering x from fingering y? Does using this finger here make it easier to get to that finger there? What specific part of the passage demands a particular finger, and how can I shape the fingering around that, before and after?” makes it easier and more natural for the student to apply that kind of thinking later. 

3) A student knows his or her hands best, or can learn to. Sometimes no matter how self-evident it is to me that a given finger lies naturally over a given note, that conclusion indeed turns out to be just about my hand, and for the student it is different. Take this chord:

If the student and I would both put 2 on the F# and 5 on the C, we might comfortably put any of the remaining three fingers on the A. I would play it with 3, assuming that there was nothing before or after to make that problematic. I could also be happy with 1: definitely not 4. But I have known a player to find 4 much more comfortable than the other two choices in this exact situation. This is something that no one but the actual player knows, whether that player is a student or not. And the differences can be subtle. For this:

I would definitely want 1 on the A, not either 3 or 4. Others could prefer any of the three. A note about this example: I would respect any student’s choice about a finger for that A. However, I would try to convince the student not to play the F# with 1. See #1 below!

4) Working out a detailed, specific fingering in as analytical a manner as possible is a magnificent way to learn the notes of a piece, or to solidify that learning. It is so effective in this respect that if a player becomes accomplished to the point of not needing to work out fingerings in a purposeful manner, that dimension of learning the piece has to be replaced by something else. This is related to the fact that a danger for really great sight-readers is that of giving un-thought-out performances. Executing a fingering that has been provided by someone else doesn’t fulfill this function.

There is an interesting paradox to be found here. If you work out fingerings really well and carefully for a passage, the learning that that process entails would also make it easier and more secure for you to get through the passage without a systematic fingering. But that stage is by then already past. However, it is possible that working out careful fingerings oneself leads to better sight-reading of subsequent pieces.

5) Some students enjoy this process, find it intellectually interesting, challenging, and satisfying. 

6) Every student will from time to time think of a really good fingering that the teacher would not have thought of. Thus learning can become a two-way street.

Disadvantages

What are some disadvantages of this approach, or things to watch out for? 

1) The student may create and use fingerings that are actually physically damaging. That is almost always a result of hand positions that involve twisting the wrists too far outward, or that are otherwise stiff or painful. A teacher should always be on the lookout for this and be prepared to explain to the student what is wrong with such fingerings. If fingering creates a physiologically bad hand position, then it is not acceptable to live with that fingering even briefly.

2) More often than the above, a student will devise fingerings that are just not the best musically or logistically. It simply reflects that we are dealing with something that has to be learned, and that we are in the early stages of that learning. To the extent that we choose to let students work out, and then drill and use, their own fingerings, we are saying that the advantages of that approach make it worth it for the student to live through a period of using “bad” fingerings, fingerings that a more expert player would not have chosen. When these are fingerings that do not have the characteristic of being physically harmful, then that is possibly an acceptable situation. But it needs to be thought about.

3) This approach takes more time. For a student to work out fingerings carefully takes longer than for the teacher, an experienced player, to lean over the music desk and write fingerings. (Even quicker is for the teacher to have worked out fingerings for pieces in advance, independent of who the student is going to be. The quickest of all is for there already to be fingerings in the edition. Both of these are problematic, though, for reasons that I will get to later on.) The trade-off here is between this concern about time and point #4 above. Is the time that is put in this way repaid by learning, or is it just time that could have been spent better—for example, working on more pieces?

4) Some students specifically don’t want to work out their own fingerings. This can come from different places, and an awareness of where it comes from can help us think about how to deal with it. A student may feel incompetent to think independently about fingering. This in turn may be a simple acknowledgement of the fact of inexperience, or may come from a temperamental lack of comfort with autonomy. It is never actually true, it’s just about comfort. A student may be aware of the time-consuming nature of careful fingering work and prefer to spend that time a different way. A student may be unconvinced of the notion that different players’ hands, and other aspects of their playing, may require different fingerings, and therefore simply not be aware of the value of chipping in his or her own perspective. The student may feel unprepared to think about fingering for a specific reason, like an awareness of the historical component of fingering, coupled with an awareness of the student’s own lack of the relevant historical knowledge. 

I will continue this discussion from this point next month. However, I toss in here one fingering example. It is a bit random, just a sort of souvenir of the column. It is a rare fingering that I was specifically proud of when I first thought of it. It helped me turn what had been a difficult-to-impossible passage for me into something at least bordering on easy, and certainly very reliable. It was quite a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly, a milestone for me in deriving fingering from hand position and in thinking outside of what was at the time quite a small box. I suppose that my particular excuse for including it here is this: that one of the pleasures of fingering is that of sharing neat, surprising, useful discoveries with other people who happen to share this arcane interest. That can be our students, among others, and remembering simply to enjoy that is part of the pleasure of teaching. This is the upper two voices of a bit from very near the end of the fugue from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, in the right hand. (See preceding page at top.) Try it out. Does it work for your hand? Enjoy!

More on performance

As I listened to the recording of the concert that inspired last month’s column, the experience gave me a few further things to say about performance. This month I will discuss those matters, as they will constitute the first part of this article. Following that, I wish to present a few ideas about performance for specific occasions, partly derived from some recent personal experiences. As has been the case with the last few articles, I will leave you with more questions than answers, as this is a large, important, and difficult subject.

Emotion during the act of performance

Listening to the recording from my March 25 recital leads me to continue the thread from last month about one’s own experience of the emotion, message, or meaning of music during the act of performance. I cannot match what I hear on the recording to any detailed memory of when I was or was not feeling what, or how involved or detached I was.

I do remember something about a particular moment. The ending of Samuel Scheidt’s Warum betrübst du dich is a spot that I like to stretch out quite a bit. I remember executing that gesture in a much more extreme way than I had planned, because it felt right to do so in the moment. It is a strangely textured passage, and the feeling of some of the chords was one that I did not want to let go of for longer than I would have expected. Others I wanted to push through. The whole variation was also a bit slower and freer overall than what I intended. Was all of that effective? I don’t know: I like it, but of course I am biased. You may listen for yourself at the following link, where I have posted the very end of the penultimate variation, just to set the scene, and then the variation in question: www.gavinblack-baroque.com/Scheidt.wav.

I have also written that I am working on trying to derive rhythm, some of the time, from the shape of the sonority rather than (or in addition to) from a pre-established beat. At the beginnings of certain pieces, my listening confirms that this was not always effective. In several cases the openings of pieces or movements sounded too slow or lacked momentum. I am not sure whether the solution is to go back, in some cases, to simply establishing a beat in my head before I start or to do something like what I was trying, but to do it better. Doing it better could mean doing it in a more moderate way or different way, but it could also mean doing it in a more committed or “extreme” way.

Sometimes ineffectiveness comes not from exaggeration but from inadequate expression of an idea. I do believe that the problem may have a greater proportion of being about the approach itself or the execution of the approach, rather than just being an artifact of the concert situation, as I thought that it might be when I wrote about it a month ago.

Finally on this subject, I have experienced what feels like a major revelation about my stance as a performer, which I think was developing even during the preparation for the recent organ recital, and which I experienced during the recital itself, but which has crystallized over the last few weeks. At one level, it is quite specific to my own circumstances and indeed in a sense quite personal. I believe that it could be of interest to others, and I am thinking about how to apply it to some of my work with students.

There is a feeling that most of us have of something looking over us and judging what we are doing. This is perhaps a kind of externalized, collective superego or conscience. It may feel like something that is connected to specific people—former or current teachers, parents, colleagues, critics, friends, neighbors, people in authority, people in general—or it may well be related to ideas or feelings about the supernatural, eternal, or spiritual. It may not be about any of those specific things. This feeling is not necessarily one that is always good or always bad, always inhibiting or always motivating. For better or worse, it is often with us.

I have a strong feeling of such a watching presence when I am performing on harpsichord, but absolutely none of it when I am performing on organ. This could sound equivalent to “I am self-conscious and unsure about my harpsichord playing but not about my organ playing.” However, I believe that is a less accurate way of putting it. I am conscious of the feeling of others scrutinizing or paying attention, but I do not necessarily think that what these non-specific and fictional others will experience when they listen to my harpsichord playing will not please them. I just feel them as being there. But again, not at all when I play organ. This could all be correlated with my thinking that my harpsichord playing is not as good as my organ playing, whatever range of meanings “good” can take. But I honestly do not believe that I do feel that way. I have a very similar awareness in both realms of what I am trying to do and why, of what proportion of the time I think that it is relatively successful, of how it stacks up with respect to various schools of thought or approaches, of how much feedback and of what sort I get from listeners, and so on. I might be unhappy with my playing on one instrument or the other on a given day, but I do not believe that I am a better organist than a harpsichordist, or the other way around.

I suspect that this dichotomy is about things that are irrational, symbolic, and subconscious. Some of it may have to do with the “Wizard of Oz” sort of credentials. My degree is in organ. I write for an organ magazine. Many of my former organ students are working full-time in the profession as organists. Indeed many of my former harpsichord students are working as organists; fewer are working full-time as harpsichordists, if there even is such a thing. I had two great organ teachers, whereas I am more or less self-taught as a harpsichordist. When I was an undergraduate I had a key to the Princeton University Chapel and often went in there alone and played the organ through the night. Of course these things are not accurate assessments of my skill level. They are superficial, and none of them may in fact be the source of the feelings that I am describing. 

If my observation about my feelings while playing went the other way, I could perhaps come up with an equal list of superficial symbolic things that also went the other way: that I am lucky enough to be the proprietor of a seventeenth-century harpsichord, that my recordings are mostly on harpsichord, that my actual job or position is with an “early keyboard center,” and so on. I would not know in that case whether some of these symbols were or were not the reason behind the psychology that I observe.

What I do know is that whereas this overarching collective superego may have a valuable role in society as a whole, it feels like a definite impediment to my finding the truest version of myself as a performer. That is, both the version that I will find the most satisfying and the version that has the best chance of sometimes creating great performances. Since I feel that this impediment isn’t there when I am functioning as an organist, the urgent task for me at this moment in my life as a musician is to learn how I can also remove it from my harpsichord performing. Whereas I had been planning to enter a period of perhaps a couple of years during which I planned only organ recitals, I have realized that I have to avoid a hiatus in harpsichord performance. Perhaps I need to mix them up as much as possible, giving organ recitals and harpsichord recitals on successive days, for example, trying to pretend that one of them is the other.

As I say, this is very personal. This is so specific to me that I would not expect anyone reading to discover exactly the same state of affairs for herself or himself. Perhaps it will resonate in some way. I am just starting to digest the question of what this says to me about work with students. Is it an insight that can lead to fruitful evolution in what I offer as a teacher? I suspect that it is, but I have to avoid imposing anything on students via any sort of projection.

Performance for other occasions

I have a couple of thoughts about performance for occasions. I recently played harpsichord at two events that were not concerts and that were driven primarily by imperatives other than those of the music that I was playing, or indeed of any music. They were both events acknowledging a particular person, and in one case it was around a retirement. I knew each of the people, but not well enough to know anything about their musical taste or what they might or might not like in performance. They had each asked that I be there to play—neither occasion was a case of my just being hired as a professional. Likewise neither of them knew enough about the harpsichord repertoire to request any particular pieces. That was up to me.

I observed in these performances what I wrote a few months ago about my goal for performance: that it create the possibility that the experience will have been important to some of the people who are present. The shift was that I identified the particular honorees as a sort of primus inter pares. If anyone was going to find my playing important, I most wanted it to be the honorees. What did I then do with that? I am not sure. I suspect that I tried to play more fervently than I normally would—or to put it more accurately, I tried to give myself permission to play as fervently as I always want to; that I played with as much lucidity as I could manage; that the self-consciousness that I described above abated to a considerable extent. 

It occurred to me as a consequence of these two experiences that almost certainly anything that guides me as a player to make the music more expressive and communicative for a particular purpose also helps to make the music more effective in general. If I did succeed in enhancing the chance that either of the honorees felt that what they got out of my pieces was important to them, then I certainly enhanced that chance for everyone else present. 

I believe that this concept might, for me and perhaps for others, help to bridge the gulf between “I am playing this because something about the day’s schedule says that I should play it” and “I am playing this because I care about expressing what it can express. “

I also noticed that the self-consciousness largely went away. I believe that the reason may have been something like this: “I know what my goal is in playing this right now. I am here to offer something to these particular people, and I believe that I know how to do so. This performance doesn’t have to bear the burden of showing that I am this or that kind of harpsichordist, or that I understand x or can do y.”  

This is very personal. It may or may not resonate with what anyone else has experienced or thought. Once again, I am still mulling over what it might mean to share the fruits of these thoughts with students.

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I recently viewed the movie Seymour: an Introduction, which is about the pianist and renowned piano teacher Seymour Bernstein. It is a fascinating film, and he is a captivating, multifaceted, and appealing individual. At one point, he is discussing music lessons for children. He notes that just as children are required to go to school and do their homework—on pain of not being allowed to play with friends, perhaps, or to watch television—so, too, they should be required to practice for their music lessons. He mentions an hour a day of practicing before being allowed to go on to other, more enticing activities. I am only summarizing, and this was a brief moment in the film. I want to make it clear that I have no idea to what extent it represents his fully developed ideas. I mention it because, as anyone who has read this column for very long will not be surprised to read, these sentiments evoked immediate, strong disagreement from me. 

I have a great aversion to coercing anyone into doing anything. If no one finds a way to induce children to take music lessons, then many or most children will not; many of those who do not would have found it extremely rewarding to do so; if no one twists anyone’s arm to practice, then a lot of people will not practice; if you do not practice, taking lessons and trying to play will be more frustrating than it should be. There are problems with my stance about such things. In our society, organ and harpsichord teachers do not have to confront these questions as often as piano, violin, and voice teachers do.

The same dynamic applies to performance. I strongly believe that performing in front of listeners is an amazingly good learning experience for anyone at any level or with any relationship to music. I believe that abstract performing—concert playing in which there is nothing to hang your hat on other than making the music really work—is a great learning experience. I wish that more of my students had more opportunities to play concerts or to play in concerts. I observe that often once a student has played a piece in a concert situation, he or she plays that piece better and plays better overall. 

However, most students, especially those who still consider themselves beginners, are scared to perform, or at least approach performance with anxiety. Many, many students are convinced that they will never give concerts or even play for others informally. That is sometimes part of the bargain. If you throw in that I as a teacher do not want to coerce, that I believe that anxiety is counterproductive, and that my role is to help create relaxation and ease, then we have a certain kind of impasse. 

My attempt to solve this has always revolved around persuasion and coaxing. I have a strong sense that this works very well most of the time. I also have ideas about how to carry it out. Yet I am also aware that it may leave some people out, and that there is a set of questions about whether this approach is letting some people down. 

I have mentioned previously that I was deeply scared of performance as a child—terrified, really, and rather beyond childhood, as well. I also claimed in an earlier column that I successfully avoided ever playing in any of my teachers’ studio recitals through many years of piano lessons. I recently found the document that illustrates this column, the program from such a studio recital involving the students of Lois Lounsbery, the second of my three piano teachers. I am manifestly included in the program. I do have a memory that I was indeed physically present that day, but that I managed not actually to play—perhaps, honestly, by pretending to be injured or sick. That I may have done that is a measure of how much I did not want to perform. It is in part the memory and awareness of how I got from there to here that informs my ways of working with students on performance, and which I will come back to in future columns.

Excerpts from his March 25, 2018, organ recital can be found on Gavin’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/gavinblack1957.