On Teaching

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

Helping Students Choose Fingerings 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!

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.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, and Projection I

With this month’s column, I begin to muse about some aspects of our jobs as teachers that involve helping students to work in ways that are best for their own enjoyment and motivation: how to help students integrate their playing into their own lives, and how to integrate the students’ lives into our teaching. This is partly about the big picture: how much time can a student find to play? How much of that should be real practicing, and how much can be other sorts of playing? How can a student’s own interests and motivations interact with the requirements, needs, or demands of others? But it can also be about the immediately musical. 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?” That is perhaps sort of a joke, but not entirely, as I will discuss later on.

While I wish that any column of mine could be a discussion rather than just a one-way written piece (I ask for feedback from time to time, and often get some, for which I am grateful) this time around I wish that more than ever. The things about which I am musing this month are not concrete or demonstrably true (or false). They arise out of my own experience, and—much more than things like what practice protocol will produce the most efficient progress in learning a pedal line—they change or evolve over the months and years. That evolution is partly the result of new experiences with students, as well as an ongoing conversation between myself and others. I hope that a future column will consist of e-mails from readers about this column, with further thoughts of mine. Furthermore, I am trying to challenge or question some of my own thoughts or habits of thinking, and that process is made more fruitful by interaction with the ideas of others. You will notice that there are plenty of sentences here that end in question marks: more questions than answers.

Inspiring motivation 

I haven’t written much about how to keep students interested or motivated. That is in part because I—and to an extent all of us as organ teachers—have the luxury of working mostly with students who are well self-motivated. That doesn’t necessarily mean self-disciplined. Someone can be very well motivated and still not be very good at self-discipline and the kinds of efficiency and organization that we associate with that concept. I myself am a prime example. I am an organ, harpsichord, and keyboard repertoire “groupie.” But that often manifests itself in my perpetually distracting myself from focused work on practicing or writing with other things that are also about the kinds of music that I love listening to or reading. 

However, very few people are pushed into studying organ or harpsichord by circumstances beyond their control. Very few people go into any sort of music (especially “classical” music) because it seems like the best or easiest way to make a living. There always must be a large element of just plain loving it—being deeply interested. However, music teachers of piano, violin, some wind instruments, sometimes voice, perhaps other instruments, are often called upon to teach students—especially children—who are taking lessons because someone has twisted their arms to do so. This arm-twisting certainly isn’t necessarily or always bad. It is undeniable that young children don’t always know what they will end up wishing they had done or had learned, and very possibly one of the jobs of a parent is to introduce children to things that they can’t or probably won’t just find for themselves. That this creates a risk for over-coerciveness, for inappropriate pressure based on projection, and for all sorts of conflict and struggle to arise doesn’t mean that it isn’t also sometimes right and good. 

I have admiration and awe for music teachers who can make good things happen for students whose reasons for being there are not just their own genuine and deep interest. It is hard to find the balance between keeping interest, morale, and a sense of fun high and getting practical learning done. If there were not plenty of teachers able to navigate all of this extremely effectively then we wouldn’t have very many musicians around. But at the same time, I have always doubted how effective I could be in that situation. I think that it is not an accident that I teach a subspecialty that draws people who know that they want to be there (though I teach organ and harpsichord mainly because that is what interests me).

I don’t want to get too complacent about that. If our students are largely self-motivated, and if we can expect to take advantage of that in our teaching, how specific can we or should we get in understanding that self-motivation? Can we help students more the more we understand that motivation? Here I want to examine and challenge some of my own assumptions. One of them is that studying music is all about preparing for concert performance. This manifests itself in my own work: the only way I can make a bargain with myself to practice slowly enough (even though I know how important slow practice is, and have written about it here over many years), is to pretend while I am playing a passage slowly that I actually want to perform it at that speed. If I let myself admit what I actually know to be true, that I am playing slowly at that moment as a stage in practicing, I will begin to speed up, as much as I know that I shouldn’t. I strongly believe that every student should be working towards playing all of his or her pieces in concert. I wouldn’t explicitly say that this is what I think, but it operates in the background as an assumption. 

Concert vs. non-concert 

preparation

Of course, there are many reasons for working on pieces other than to play them in concert. One is simply interest—just to get to know the piece, or, to put it another way, to be able to play it for oneself. Another is to play it informally in a non-concert situation or in church. Yet another is to use a piece as material for becoming a better player overall, as an exercise. Another is to learn about a kind of repertoire or composer, or to learn something about the organ on which you are playing. Does an awareness of exactly why the student wants to work on a particular piece inform anything specific about how we teach that piece? Here’s an aspect of this that I think is delicate and interesting: if a piece is being prepared for performance, then we know that it should be prepared really well. That means several things—the notes are extremely reliable, the tempo is where the player really wants it to be (no fudging or pretending that a too-slow tempo is what is really desired, as in my own practice habits!), the interpretive elements are thought out and internalized enough to be reliable, and so on. 

Suppose that a piece is being played for a purpose other than performance? On the one hand, it might be questionable to insist on the same level of preparation. It is hard, often grueling work to get a piece into that sort of shape. Is it really necessary? On the other hand, is it patronizing (to the piece or to the student) to set a lower bar because there isn’t a concert in the offing? Would doing so encourage bad learning habits that might spill over? Does this imply lack of respect for whatever purpose the piece is actually being used for? Again, the answers might be different depending on whether the piece was being prepared for non-concert performance—informal playing for the student’s friends, parents, fellow students, church—or being worked on just to get some familiarity with that piece or a segment of the repertoire, or to get to know a particular organ, for example. 

I suspect that the answers to these questions may depend on the student’s state of mind. Is incomplete (or what might seem neglectful) playing the result of an attitude of neglectfulness, or is it the result of a decision about where effort should best be spent? If a piece of music is being used as fodder for studying something other than that piece, if it is being used as exercise material, for developing greater skill as a player, then arguably it doesn’t matter how well the student learns that piece. In other words, any given number of hours spent practicing can have the same result for the player’s development, regardless of whether those hours are spent practicing one piece enough to learn it, or practicing three pieces each for an amount of time that leaves them far from complete. 

Over the years I have had a few students say, right off the bat, that they don’t really care about fully learning their pieces. I remember one such student in particular. He was very talented and dedicated, yet preferred to work on a piece only up to a certain point—getting to know it pretty well, but not do all of the drilling necessary to get a piece performance-ready. It was of more interest to him, once he reached that stage with a piece, to go on to another piece. This was most decidedly not part of an attitude of neglectfulness. For one thing, he fingered every note very carefully and put as much time into that process as it needed. He was also analytical in his approach to the music, studying and becoming aware of all sorts of compositional features and thinking deeply about performance ideas. But at a certain point he preferred to do all of those things with the next piece, not to “finish” the existing piece. He had never given a public performance.

It was a challenge for me to accept this. For one thing, he was “so close”—he amply had the ability and had already done much of the work that it would have taken to get the pieces in shape for performance. What would be the harm in doing so? But this was my agenda, not his. Furthermore, it could have been influenced by our desire that we all must have at some level to have people out there hear our students play well—since that will reflect well on us as teachers. Again, this was my agenda, not his needs. Perhaps I was also influenced by the “if something is worth doing it is worth doing well” ideology, though at a conscious level I have long ago decided that that is at best an oversimplification. But even accepting the notion of doing something well, there’s still the question of what you are doing. 

Part of this student’s motivation was intellectual curiosity about the next piece, and the next, and then the next composer, and so on. Part of it was the desire to have fun playing. The fingering process he found to be fun because it was a set of interesting puzzles. The process of playing through a piece—with the well worked-out fingerings, slowly, tolerating some hesitations and wrong notes—he found to be fun because it sounded a lot like the piece: it felt like playing music. The process of drilling all of the difficult bits until they were really solid was not fun. He was doing—extremely well—what he wanted to be doing.

Of the students whom I remember who fit this description, most or perhaps all had not done any actual performing as of the time that they came to me for lessons and professed this attitude. This gives rise to a set of questions: how can they know that they don’t want to perform or wouldn’t get something out of working pieces up beyond a certain point if they have never tried it? What should the teacher do to offer at least a chance of exploring the logical next step in learning pieces without being coercive about it or acting according to the teacher’s own agenda rather than the students? Questions of this sort also apply to other areas in which I would most naturally want to suggest that we teachers should try to not push our students in pre-determined directions, most especially in choice of repertoire.

All this leads to the following question, which makes me uncomfortable enough to have to do some real thinking: what is the line between not imposing approaches or activities on our students that are driven by our needs rather than our students’ needs and making patronizing or even (subconsciously) dismissive assumptions about what a given student can or cannot do? In other words, if I decide not to coerce a student into framing his or her musical activities with reference to concert performance, am I respecting that student’s own wishes and giving him or her credit for being mature enough to know what is right, or am I somewhat type-casting the student as one who can’t perform or can’t be challenged beyond a certain point?

More questions, and perhaps more answers, next month.

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!

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 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?