On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. The first recording in which he participated was an LP made around 1968 by the Hamden Hall Country Day School French Singers (“participated” almost certainly means “stood there mouthing some words silently”). He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Recording Notes I

At the end of last month’s column, I noted that I was scheduled to make a recording of Frescobaldi harpsichord music during the week when my usual plan would have been to write this June column. I had decided to let those two projects interact with and enhance each other: during the last week or so of preparation for the recording sessions, and then during the week of the sessions themselves, I would take notes—keep a journal of my thoughts, experiences, and reactions arising out of the recording project. Those notes would be the basis for a column describing the process and relating it to a wider web of thoughts about playing and teaching music. 

The sessions occurred as planned, and I did keep notes. This column is the beginning of what has arisen from that process; it is randomly organized, or in a stream-of-consciousness style. One thing that I hadn’t realized when I conceived this idea was that each day’s taping was quite tiring. Thus those notes taken on recording days were jotted down, more often than not, in a state of exhaustion. Looking them over afterwards, I realized while organizing and fleshing them out, I needed to give them a jolt of energy! (Or to tease out what I had meant by something rather cryptic.) I have decided that these notes should form not just a single column, but a short series. 

This column is a set of questions and musings organized around a particular period of my musical life—the weeks of preparation leading up to these recording sessions. My notes from the week of the sessions will come along later.

Why make recordings? 

If I had expressly asked myself that question when I was quite little and first getting into music, I would probably just have thought it was definitional: making recordings was what it meant to be a musician. That was because, with few exceptions, recordings were my way of encountering music. Of course there was some live music in the air—at school, for example—but it was the music that I encountered on records that really captivated me. I heard Beethoven symphonies, Messiah, Bach organ music, and so on, through the stereo system before I ever heard anything of that sort live. So my own feeling of being drawn to recording is informed largely by nostalgia for what my earliest interactions with music felt like. 

And that nostalgia is also for the physical form of the recordings. I remember that the box that constituted Volume II of Helmut Walcha’s complete recording of the organ music of Bach was, just as an object, something that I craved before I got a copy of it and loved and doted on thereafter. That nostalgia leads me to crave making recordings that have a physical manifestation. I seem to have successfully transferred that feeling from LPs to CDs. But what about beyond CDs? What does it mean nowadays to release a recording? Once I have taped (a technically inappropriate word, but one that I still use) this set of harpsichord pieces, what next? A traditional CD? (Funny that CDs should be traditional.) Downloads? If the latter, through an established company or just on a website that my producers and I set up? If I tape pieces and toss them up onto the internet and allow people to download them and listen to them have I “made a recording” in the sense that Heifetz and Brendel and Walcha “made recordings?” Does that matter? If it does matter, is that only in relation to the nostalgia that I referenced above?

Is there a way to make money from recording? Has there ever been? (Not sure.) Is it true that modern expectations about how music will be disseminated have rendered the notion of making money from recording almost delusional? I have heard people use that very word. Does this matter? Is it less “real”—Heifetz/Brendel/Walcha-like—if it is not a process that involves anything financial? Must a recording have the imprimatur of a company to be “legit?”

Form and content

How does the form of a released recording affect the content? Over the years recording formats have defined certain aspects of what music was or was perceived to be. A long time ago, the three-minute 78-rpm record shaped society’s sense of how long a song should be. When I was growing up the natural unit of a body of music—whether a long piece or a compilation—was the duration of the LP: rather less than an hour, with a break about halfway through—a break that you sometimes had to pretend wasn’t there. I believe that it is really the image of the LP that shapes my sense of what “a concert” is: a full-length concert has two halves, the first of which is regular LP length, the second of which is like a somewhat short LP. A non-intermission concert is the length of a rather long LP. 

As I was preparing this program, I realized that I didn’t know how to use any image of a finished product to govern my choice of what pieces to record or even how much to record. I didn’t know—and still don’t know—whether this project will be (in part or in full) a CD. If it is, that would suggest about 70 minutes of music, with suitable pieces to serve as beginning and ending and a satisfying shape and progression in between. 

What if we want to release the music as downloads? If so, there is no particular reason to tape any particular amount. Also, there is no way to govern the order in which people listen to the pieces. (Of course there never was, but it used to be routine to suggest an order through the construction of the LP or CD track list.) Is there any point in thinking about the program as an overall shape? I find myself doing two things at once: first, just putting together a list of the Frescobaldi pieces that I currently find most interesting and that I know (assuming that I will just tape them and then see what happens), and second, constructing various orders and track lists in my head—just in case.

If anything, this latter activity has informed my recent concert playing more than it will necessarily end up affecting anything about a record release. I have played several concerts recently drawn from the list of pieces that I have been planning to tape. My musings about possible CD track order have taught me various things about how I might want to order these pieces in concert. Nonetheless, it seems pretty likely that we are entering an era in which there will be a growing lack of connection between making and disseminating recordings and planning concerts. 

Prior to a recording session

What should I listen to in the run-up to a recording session? The first answer: not Frescobaldi keyboard music. There are two rather contradictory things that I know to be true of me. First, I really care about playing this music the way that I want to play it and hear it. If I play on this recording like someone else, then my doing this project at all is pretty much a waste of time. The other person’s way of doing it is already out there, and they probably do it better that I will, since they’re the original and I am a copy. However, I am also very impressionable. If I hear something about the specific music that I am playing close to the time when I will play it, then I am likely either to copy that unconsciously or to play while preoccupied with whether I am copying unconsciously. I must avoid that whole set of traps by not doing such listening at all.

How about ensemble music or vocal music from the same era—the kinds of music that Frescobaldi would have heard in the air around him when he was writing and playing? That would make sense, and I can’t see any pitfalls. It’s not close enough to what I will be actually playing to create a problem. What about other keyboard music? Later harpsichord, organ, or piano repertoire? That’s all clearly related to what I am doing, but different enough that it shouldn’t interfere. That would also make sense. Come to think of it, earlier keyboard repertoire would make particularly good sense, since some of it is what Frescobaldi grew up with. It helped to shape him. Is it similar enough to the music that I will be playing to trigger my copying fears? Not sure.

What did I in fact listen to during the couple of weeks prior to the recording sessions? Almost exclusively the sound track to the Broadway musical Hamilton. Why? Because I discovered it and got really excited about it. So rather than learning or trying to absorb anything that makes sense musicologically as an aide to understanding Frescobaldi and keyboard playing, I did something different because I couldn’t resist it. I listened to something that reminded me that music can be extraordinarily gripping, emotionally powerful, and can sometimes feel like the most important thing in the world. Did this have an effect on the sessions, good or bad? Not sure.

Practicing

I did much of my practicing for this project on the clavichord because of logistics. The harpsichord that I used for the recording lives at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio—and, for various reasons, has to. I have a small clavichord at home. The harpsichord in question has a C/E short octave; so does this clavichord. I think that it would be a mistake to practice on a chromatic keyboard anything that I’m planning to play—especially record—on a short-octave keyboard. I want instincts for the fingering of the low notes to be utterly well established. So practicing on this particular clavichord made sense.

The sound and touch of the clavichord are both very different from those of the harpsichord. I had to resist using the dynamics of the clavichord while practicing. That could mislead me into thinking that I had successfully internalized something that had rhetorical or expressive effect when for harpsichord purposes, I hadn’t. I probably have less trouble with this than some people would, because my own normal conception of how I want to use the clavichord relies less on dynamic inflection as an interpretive tool than is the case with some players. The crispness of the attack of the clavichord echoes that of this particular harpsichord rather well. The gentleness and beauty of the clavichord sound reminds me of qualities that I hope to put into my playing of these pieces on the harpsichord. Those qualities are almost hard to avoid on the clavichord, and though they are abundantly available on the harpsichord, they have to be worked for a bit more.

Preparation

Is it necessary to know a piece well in order to record it? That question is absurd: who could defend not knowing our pieces well? However, there is a reason that it arises as a question—editing! The defining characteristic of recording is that you can edit as endlessly as you have patience. I’ve known record producers to joke that they only need to ask the musicians to play each note once, and they can create the performance from that in the editing studio. Maybe that’s not quite true. But it is true that you can sit there playing with the microphones on and have most of what you do come out badly—wrong notes, unsuccessfully executed ornaments, bits that fall flat interpretively, tuning or technical problems, and so on—and as long as there is a good version of each bit and as long as the tempos and tunings match, you can piece it together afterwards in a way that really sounds fine.

So, how does an awareness of that possibility affect preparation? I want the answer to be this: that it doesn’t affect it at all. I feel quite certain that knowing a piece really well is the best way to open up possibilities for expressiveness, interpretive/rhetorical interest, and subtlety that are beyond what you can consciously plan for. I would be astonished if I could make a great recording of a piece below my sight-reading threshold by sight-reading it. (There are people whose sight-reading thresholds are a lot higher than mine, and once in a while someone does make a recording by sight-reading.) So I want to pretend to myself that editing doesn’t exist. However, I don’t want an inappropriate fear that small technical glitches will ruin the recording process to make me anxious. 

It is wonderful to learn and prepare all of our pieces in such a way that we can play them really well. That always means with real command of what we want to do interpretively. For concert performance, it also means with only occasional, rather fleeting wrong notes. In a live performance—which goes by once and is over—an occasional wrong note is usually not a big deal. For most of us, the anxiety created by an obsessive insistence on never playing a wrong note would be an overall loss. It would tighten and constrain interpretation. In a recording, since our performance can be listened to over and over, even a small fleeting wrong note can become an annoyance. (Or worse. On the LP of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that I listened to growing up, there was a place that stuck. I would hear the same half-second of music until I went and pushed the needle along. Random though that was, it still leaves me hearing that passage as awkward in any performance all these decades later.) So to me the possibility of editing serves to reduce anxiety about wrong notes or other glitches to something like the level that it occupies for live performance: worth trying to plan against and keep to a minimum, but not worth allowing to interfere with a focus on vivid, communicative, expressive playing.

Concentration

Speaking of wrong notes, two things came into focus during the preparation for these sessions. First, I noticed that when I concentrate really well on a passage—when I don’t play on any sort of autopilot and when I specifically don’t let stray thoughts come close to the center of my focus—I make fewer wrong notes. This applies whether the stray thoughts are obviously irrelevant (“I wonder what I should put on my pizza later?”) or deceptively legitimate-seeming (“So how did that passage that I just played go?”). 

Concentrating well is certainly important. But I am reminded that accurate, competent playing is a result of preparation (which I have done amply with this project) and concentration, much more than it is the result of some sort of pure talent. (That is perhaps an oversimplification, but I think that we have a tendency to shortchange the role of concentration). I am also reminded that that is especially true of me. My history as a player is that I have a strong tendency to let my attention wander, and when that happens, my playing comes the farthest from being what I want it to be. I have to remember this about myself in these recording sessions and elsewhere, and think about what it says about my students and how I can help them. Of course, it is also possible to concentrate too hard on remembering to concentrate . . . 

I also have discovered that if I play a passage evenly with no rhythmic inflection and with no attempt to think about or feel or project what I want to do with the piece interpretively, then I make essentially no wrong notes. The point of noticing this is to remind myself that that is not how I want to play. I have to look elsewhere for security and accuracy. 

One practice technique that I am using more for this preparation than I would usually use it is that of opening a piece to a random spot, or even opening a volume of music to a random piece from among the ones that I am preparing, and starting to play at that point. When I do this, I don’t take any time to orient myself to where I am or what’s coming up: I just play. This is a check on how well I know things and also a bit of concentration practice. Practice on letting real focus kick in quickly, without context. I now suspect this is a useful thing to do in practicing in general. But it is particularly relevant for recording, because a fair number of takes will indeed start at musically random places, as determined by things like page turns and what is interrupted by noise, or a note slipping out of tune, and so on.

To be continued . . . 

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

Recording Notes III

Before my Frescobaldi recording sessions began, I found my thoughts drifting to the golf course, as they often do. For better or worse, we had scheduled the sessions for a time of year when being out on the golf course is at its nicest: early spring, not too hot or cold, no fear of snow or hurricanes. This is not just coincidence. That kind of weather is also best for location recording. Our venue is an old, modernized barn out in the country. It has thick walls—pretty good for keeping out noise and for keeping the climate stable, but not as perfect for either as an actual studio might be. It’s nice to record at a time when we don’t need heat or air conditioning—when, if we turn off the refrigerator in this barn to get rid of its noise, the items in it won’t heat up too promptly, with a good chance there won’t be thunder, and so on. But though it’s nice to be recording then, it’s also tempting not to be recording, not to be indoors.

So back to the golf course. It occurs to me that the concept of the “mulligan” has something to say about the recording process. For those who don’t know, a mulligan is a shot that does something that the golfer doesn’t like—gets the golf ball into a bad situation or causes the ball to be lost altogether—and that the player then decides not to count. It is a “do-over.” It is a violation of the formal rules, a form of cheating, strictly speaking. It is also a common informal practice and one that isn’t necessarily unethical—isn’t really cheating if you have agreed with anyone against whom you are playing that you will let one another do it. I have never allowed myself to take mulligans, not because I am temperamentally devoted to rules—which I am not—but because I find that a commitment to counting every shot helps me focus on my shot-making in the way that I want and strive to do. A little voice in my head telling me that if I don’t like the shot I won’t count it would undermine what I am trying to work on when I play golf.

So, with its theoretically endless possibilities for editing, is the recording process a cornucopia of mulligans? There’s always a chance for a do-over. As I wrote back in June, editing is a defining characteristic of recording. Endless mulligans without penalty. Can I learn anything about performance during recording sessions and about the editing process from my feeling about mulligans or from thinking about what the differences are between those situations? The difference is this: that the legacy of any one trip through the golf course or through a particular hole is the awareness and then the memory of what happened. The legacy of the recording process is the artifact that results from it. If I try a certain golf shot a dozen times and lose the ball on the first eleven, only to finally get it right on the twelfth, then that story is the story of what happened, regardless of whether or not I call most of those shots mulligans and don’t write the big number of strokes on my scorecard. If I try a passage in a piece that I am recording a dozen times and only get it the way I want it on the last of those times, then I have still fully succeeded in getting it the way I want it. No compromise, and no one needs to know how long it took! If I am afraid that on the golf course a willingness to take mulligans would make it hard for me to focus and concentrate the way I want, then in the recording studio, where repeated takes and editing possibilities are useful, good, and necessary, then I must be sure that the opportunity to try things over and over again doesn’t also make me lose focus.

I will now turn to my daily notes.

Day 1

I am heading to a rural spot in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about an hour from my house, where I will record ninety minutes or so of Frescobaldi keyboard music on a seventeenth-century Italian harpsichord. The venue is the same one where I recorded The Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords with my colleague and former student George Hazelrigg several years ago. George is serving as recording engineer and producer for this project, and he will also help with the tuning and general care of the harpsichord during the sessions. 

The instrument is in my car on this drive, and we will begin by getting it inside and setting everything up. Since this instrument is so old and utterly irreplaceable, I am glad it is not raining. It is out of the question to get any rain on this harpsichord, even at the cost of delaying the start of things. I am not saying that I need to be especially careful with this instrument on the grounds that it is particularly fragile. It really isn’t: it is remarkably sturdy and stable. It’s important that it not suffer any damage or stress. 

Moving the harpsichord inside goes very smoothly. Since we have used this space before, we have a sense of where it might be best acoustically and logistically to place the harpsichord. The process of setting up recording equipment and generally preparing the room—which is mostly about noise, turning off appliances, and so on—serves to give the instrument time to relax and get used to the room. This is a very stable harpsichord and doesn’t seem to change at all from being driven about or from being placed in a new space. I’m not talking about tuning: every harpsichord is perpetually going out of tune and needing to be tuned, whether it is being moved or not.

Microphone placement: this is important, but until the day’s work was over, I had no idea how important. To make a long story less long, it took the whole day. To start with, we placed the microphones that we had decided to use in a position that made sense. (I wanted the sound to be a bit less dry than the sound of The Art of the Fugue recording, so our starting point had the microphones a bit farther out from the instrument than what we had done in that session.) I played a bit, and we listened to the results. It sounded good, but maybe not quite exactly what we wanted. We moved the mics around, changing distance and angle, playing, listening, conferring. After a while the more professional recording-oriented ears in the room began to feel that what we felt lacking in these various samples was caused by an over-sensitivity of the microphones to a somewhat bass-heavy quality in the room. So we switched to a pair of microphones that we had earlier considered for the project, but initially decided against. We then spent another long while placing them in many different ways. We even tried unconventional placements in which the mics were quite far apart or on different sides of the instrument. 

This was all fascinating and fun. It gave me a chance to practice the same short passage over and over again and to get used to playing in that room. It also allowed the nervous side of my character to fantasize that this would actually go on forever, and that I would never have to buckle down to the business of playing and recording for real. 

However, the most interesting thing was this: the instrument sounded really different depending on which microphones we used and how we placed them. One of the criteria that we used in trying to decide what was best was how much we thought that what we heard through the speakers with each attempt reminded us of what the instrument sounded like in person. (And I think that in the end we did a good job of that.) But it was made vivid to me that the recorded sound of an instrument is in part a construct, not an objective fact. This ties in with the set of questions about whether a recording is a document or “record” of something in the world outside that recording or an object of its own, an artistic artifact to be understood on its own terms. There is no conflict between these things philosophically for me with respect to this project in particular, since the authentic, accurate sound of this particular harpsichord is magnificent. I take it for granted that the more accurately we represent the sound, the better it is likely to come across artistically for most listeners. But it is quite telling to be reminded and to have it demonstrated so vividly that the sound as it comes across on the recording is something that we have very purposefully constructed and taken quite a while to construct.

Day 2

This day I am thinking about the nature of the seclusion that I need to record. When I am teaching or writing, I can and do take breaks in which I interact with the world. In between lessons I will check my phone or, if there is enough time, go for a walk or do an errand, or whatever presents itself. If someone I know is present in another part of the church where the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio is located, I might go chat. In between bursts of writing a column I will orient my computer to the outside world and check the news, my e-mail, or Facebook. These breaks recharge my concentration, and I never have any trouble shifting back from such things to the focus on teaching or on writing. For the recording project, however, I find that I want to feel sequestered or secluded. I want the hour of driving to the venue to feel like it is taking me away from all of the interactive electronics and even from interactions with people. I want to be heading towards a sort of cloister. I am not sure why this difference exists, but I feel it very vividly. 

I have not brought my computer, and I find that I can detach myself enough from the world to restrict checking my phone to about twice during the seven-hour recording session. No one has called.

Today we are doing the pieces that I want to play on two 8′ stops. This instrument has two 8s, like most Italian harpsichords. However, there is no working stop mechanism. In concert it is effectively impossible to change stops. Every time that I have used this instrument in live performance I have had to decide in advance whether to use both 8s or only one of them for the whole event. For the recording we can remove and replace jacks between pieces. Of course for efficiency we don’t want to do that more often than is necessary. So part of my preparation has been to decide in advance on the registration for each piece and to use that in determining recording order: 2x8′ pieces first, then the pieces for one of the 8′ stops, then the pieces for the other. This does misrepresent what the instrument can and can’t do. It does not misrepresent what an instrument of this sort might possibly do, or what this instrument could be made to do if I were willing to alter it. This ties in with the questions about the documentary nature of a project like this.

I feel that I have done a medium-level job at best of relaxing while I play. I am trying too hard to get everything right: notes, ornaments, and interpretive gestures. I am letting a focus on those things cause me to tense up a bit. I think that this becomes less of a problem with successive takes of the same passage. Will the later takes indeed tend to sound the best? Will this slight tension also get better over the longer scale on successive days?

Day 3

On the way to the sessions today I am thinking about what to listen to in the car. Is there anything I can do with the car sound system that will get me to the barn in the right frame of mind to play? Probably not the radio (in keeping with the cloister idea). Music? What kind? Feeling unsure about that, I am trying the nothing solution, leaving the sound off and trying to hear my own music in my head. 

I am thinking about a question that is of importance to the outcome of this whole project: the matter of evenness of voicing. Should every note feel and sound the same as to dynamics? It is a theory of mine that, especially with harpsichords that have a crisp and robust sound as this one does, a bit of unevenness in voicing is actually good, that it gives extra life and fluidity to the overall effect. It has to be kept within certain bounds: there is such a thing as too uneven. But I like more unevenness than some people would. I have definitely decided to treat the instrument this way for this project. (I did the voicing and regulation myself.) Essentially I voice the instrument to the point where all it needs is a final refinement. Then I don’t do that refinement. How will that sound for the microphones? There certainly won’t be time to make wholesale changes. That is the approach to which we are committed. 

Day 4

Continuing about voicing: when I am going to play on the two 8′ stops together I like to achieve the net sound and feel of each note with somewhat of a random difference in the balance of the two stops. That is, one note may be 55% one stop and 45% the other, another note may be 52%/48%, or exactly even. This creates a pleasing variety of color up and down the keyboard for the 2x8′ sound. However, as we take the jacks of one 8′ stop out to record on the other, I am reminded that for use alone that stop is a bit too uneven, even for me. So a small amount of voicing is needed. I have to be quite aware of getting back into the sequestered player mode once I have dealt with the voicing. 

At one point today, April 21, 2016, George looks up from his computer and tells me that Prince has died. The world is there regardless of how sequestered I want to feel. The thought comes to me that he is another person about whose work I will probably find out more now that he is gone than I knew while he was alive. (I certainly had no hostility towards his work. I just had never happened to get into it much.) And that puts me in a similar relationship to him that I am in perforce with the Baroque composers whose music I play. 

Today I suspect that a couple of the pieces will work as single takes. However, that brings to mind an old question. It seems fine to me, normal, probably necessary, to use editing to lower the level of tension during sessions, so that any little glitch need not feel like an emergency. However, how should editing then be used to create the final result? If I have a take that went well and that I like, should I look for other takes that have even more effective versions of some passages and build up a sort of super-performance made up of the very best bits of different takes? Or should I just use editing to get around real problems, but fundamentally let performances be what they were on the day as much as possible? Is one of those better philosophically? Will one of them lead to a better finished product?

Day 5

We have had a lot of noise over the last few days, mostly airplanes. That, plus other issues like time spent tuning and the decision to do lots of takes—partly of necessity when things have gone wrong, partly for safety and to provide more choice—is going to lead us to leave out a couple of short pieces. My starting list was very long: much too long for a CD, and about 50% more music than I have recorded for any of my previous projects. The remaining music is still too much for a CD.

Today I feel noticeably more relaxed, better able to play as I would in a normal concert for which I felt well prepared. This has probably been sneaking up on me throughout the week. I am presumably noticing it because we are almost done. I would quite like to go back and re-do the rest of it with this feeling. Will pieces recorded today sound more relaxed? 

Conclusion

There is no conclusion. That’s all for now about this experience. I will edit the pieces over the summer, and we will see what sort of dissemination seems best. You can find a couple of pieces (lightly edited, not necessarily identical to what I will consider the final release) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELHjLVh1hlk.

Next month I will return to the directly pedagogic!

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.

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. His website is gavinblack-baroque.com, and he can be reached by email at [email protected].

What is Performance? Part 1

What is performance? This is certainly a daunting question that is not only difficult to frame but can invite pompous answers. It is also one that we are all, as players, going to answer by our actions whether we know it or not. Therefore it is not a bad idea to try to grapple with it explicitly once in a while. Our students are also going to grapple with it: most obviously those who want to be performers, but also those who play music but, at a given moment, are not drawn to public performance. For the latter, this is true if only because they must have a concept of what performance would be in order to feel that they are not drawn to it.

There are many different ways to answer the question “what is performance?” Some of those differences are the sort that arise out of the answers’ being partial in nature—and I would say that answers to this question should be partial. To strive to give a complete or all encompassing answer to the question risks coming across as pretentious or pompous. Some of the differences may arise out of details about what sort of performance we are asking about in the first place, or from who is asking, or on whose behalf the asking is taking place. And some, of course, arise out of disagreement.

The question “what is performance?” shades over into such questions as “what does performance feel like to me?,” “how do I know whether I am performing or not?,” “who am I when I am performing?,” and others even more arcane. The approach of any one musician to performance is most likely a mosaic of answers or tentative answers to questions such as these. The answers to these smaller component questions and any answer that feels like it pertains to the bigger over-arching question will almost certainly change over time for any one person. I was pleased to notice that literally yesterday (from the vantage point of my sitting here writing today) I had an experience that enabled me to fit one more tile into my own mosaic—that gave me a slightly new answer to a particular question about my own identity as a performer that has puzzled me for a long time.

This month and next, I will poke and prod at this question from several angles. You will notice that I pose more questions than answers and that I have not forbidden myself to include thoughts or ideas that may be unconventional.

Two defining aspects of performance

Performance is playing when you know or think that someone is listening. We usually know whether or not we are playing, though, especially if we are not really singers, we may not always know when we are singing, not to mention humming, whistling, tapping our fingers to some unheard music, or even trying out fingerings on the table when we think that no one is watching, and so on. But we don’t always know for sure whether someone is listening.

If we are giving a concert, and there are clearly people in the hall, and they are not in any obvious way doing things that are inconsistent with listening, we have the right to assume that they are listening. In reality some are and some are not. But in this situation—pure performance, so to speak—our feeling that people are listening helps to shape what we do. It can create nervousness or anxiety and can also create focus. Do we respond to an awareness of listeners mostly by becoming anxious or even scared? If so, what causes anxiety?  Perhaps we are afraid of missing notes, falling apart, or perhaps we simply fail to convey inner musicality.

The awareness that people are listening can also be inspiring. If we not only are performing but also want to be performing, then there must be something about conveying music to those listeners that we really care about. In real life the vividness of this feeling will come and go. Does it help us to achieve this feeling to have a conscious awareness that the listeners are listening? That is, some of the time to be playing to the listeners as if perhaps we were conversing with them? Or is it more effective to commune not so much with the listeners as with the music itself, as we have come to know it and care about it? In many organ performance situations, there are limits to how much of the audience we can see. Does this affect our awareness of them or the ways in which that awareness interacts with our playing? For each player/performer there will be a different set of answers to any of these and similar questions that seem the most fruitful.

What if we don’t know whether anyone is listening? Realistically this doesn’t often mean that we have literally no information about whether anyone is in the room. But it is still a concept that can be germane. For one thing, our sense of whether anyone is listening in the sense of really paying attention can wax and wane while we are in the very act of performing. The room can seem “dead” or “alive.” Is it right to be aware of this? It is realistic to be unaware of it at least some of the time. When we are, how might we respond? It might be better to try to look away from that awareness and to focus more on ourselves and the music. We might be able to use that awareness to get motivated to communicate even more intensely.

There can arise in church playing, specific situations in which we wonder whether anyone is listening and if so how or how much. Are people listening during a prelude or postlude, or are they talking, or just focusing on and experiencing other things? There may be a situation in which we actually don’t know whether anyone is there: people sometimes leave during the postlude! Does that matter? Can we practice keeping up our commitment to really performing even if the sense that people are listening has become shaky? 

In some situations we know that people are physically there and not expressly turning their attention away from what we are doing, but we also know that the point of everyone’s focus is not just the music in and of itself. This can be true of a variety of circumstances: church services during offertories and other mid-service musical moments, weddings and funerals, receptions, school events, sporting events, anything where the music is background. What do we make of knowing that the listening is not as focused and intense as it might be? Perhaps this can be a time to shift the balance of our own focus from communing with the listeners to communing with the music itself. 

Recording is another circumstance in which we don’t know who the listeners are. They are not physically there, rather, they exist somewhere else in time and space­—at least we hope that they do. The act of playing specifically for them is at its most abstract. Therefore, perhaps this is a form of performance in which the notion of playing the music for its own sake can assert itself. It is certainly a way to expand and perhaps redefine what it feels like to be a performer. It seems like a very good thing that recording has been sort of “democratized.” Anyone who plays can make recordings that have a reasonable shot at being heard by that unknown audience out there, through various platforms under the umbrella of social media. The distinction between those who are and those who are not recording artists has been largely broken down, and with that the societal definition of performer and performance has altered. 

Who is the performer?

Who are we when we perform? Are we the composer? I am not talking about the rather specialized case in which we are literally the composer. In that case, I imagine that the answer to the question is still a bit complex. Does a composer performing his or her own music feel in some ways like a different person during that act than during the act of composing? Can a composer discover, through performing new things in pieces, new things about himself or herself as a musician? I imagine so, though I have never been in that position myself.

Let’s say that we are playing music of others. Do we feel like, or want to feel like, a stand-in for the composer? I mentioned last month an idea about playing the role while performing not specifically of the composer by name, but of a theoretical someone who could have improvised the music that we are playing. I find that idea intriguing and fruitful for getting into a mode of feeling that enables me to perform the music of others. Do some of us find it useful in some sense to inhabit the identity of the composer by name? Not, of course, as a real “I am Napoleon”-style delusion, but as something perhaps akin to some of the ways in which actors inhabit roles? 

Or do we want to be ourselves as much as we possibly can, but ourselves engaged in a particular act for which we are well trained, well prepared, and talented? It may be that performance in the sense of playing music when we believe listeners to be listening is crucially different from performance that is acting in exactly this way. We are not inhabiting a character, we are trying as best we can to be ourselves. Perhaps for some of us it is only by being ourselves that we can connect with whatever it is about the music that makes us care enough about it to take on the challenges of performing in the first place. It seems certain to me that this works out differently from one person to another and is often a mix.

Three illustrative stories

I heard the following story many years ago from a colleague. I admit that it was something heard third-hand, and therefore I cannot swear that it is factual and accurate. But I believe that it is, since I know something about the trustworthiness of the people who transmitted it. And since it is by no means disparaging to anyone, I will let that be enough basis for telling it without suppressing names. 

An organist, active, well trained, with lots of playing and listening experience, was also working as a carpenter and builder. He happened to be on a job at a venue where, a day or two later, Virgil Fox was to play a recital. He saw and overheard Fox practicing, and he reported that his practicing was calm, sober, systematic, focused, totally without flamboyance. The way my colleague put it in telling the story was this: that it was only in the concert that Virgil Fox became VIRGIL FOX! His persona as a charismatic and extroverted performer was something that he indeed purposely put on in concert as a technique for getting across what he wanted to get across.

Does each of us do some of that? Certainly some more than others and some with more consciousness of it than others. Is this a dimension of our playing, or rather of our performing, that we might do well to think about more explicitly? Probably so for many of us. I say that without implying anything about the specifics of how some of us might want to shape this aspect of our performing lives differently. That will vary dramatically from one of us to another.

Here is another story. I am acquainted with a dancer who, at a young age but well within her prime, no longer a student or beginner, was participating in a performance. She and the other performers were in very specific and defined characters, and from time to time interacted directly, in character, with audience members. This performance, unlike most dance performances, included a small amount of speaking. I asked her whether she thought of this as dancing or as acting. She replied very firmly that she thought of it as dancing and only dancing, because if she thought of it as acting it became terrifying. The very same actions, ones which she was as well-trained to do as anyone could be and which she repeated with complete command night after night, seemed like something different based solely on the concept of what sort of performer she was.

The last story for this month is the one to which I alluded above. As a performing musician I have always specialized in music from about 1550 to about 1750. This is long enough ago that everything about the culture of that time seems historical rather than current or modern, and this is a source of all sorts of questions and things to think about. But in particular there are sometimes performances of this Renaissance/Baroque repertoire that are cast as historical recreations—perhaps of a specific performance, perhaps of a specific sort of concert or court or home or church musical event, or perhaps just as an evocation of the milieu and aesthetic of the time. This kind of event might well involve the musicians’ wearing period-appropriate clothes. I have been to performances of that sort as an audience member and enjoyed them, sometimes getting something out of the recreation of the historical trappings that indeed added to the music.

However, I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea of participating in anything like that as a player. I have never been willing to perform in costume or in historical clothing. My identity as a musician, person, and performer seems like it would be violated by dressing in period clothing. I do not know exactly why this is, and I certainly have no interest whatsoever is saying that it is right or in persuading other people to feel this way. To execute a convincing performance, I need to feel like myself.

Here is the interesting new thing, however. I went to see the new play Farinelli and the King in New York. Since it is in large part about a musician—the real-life Carlo Bruschi, who performed under the stage name Farinelli—there was live music in the theater. (And the music was quite wonderful, by the way.) The performers, on harpsichord, guitar, various strings, were dressed in eighteenth-century attire, as were the actors. I realized right away that if I were asked to participate in something exactly like this, I would happily do so and would wear the old-style garb without hesitation. Something about its being a part in a play rather than a concert seems to overcome completely the discomfort that I described above. Why? I don’t really know. But I know that it sheds some light on my own answers to the question of who I am when I am performing. 

Before I sign off for this month and continue this discussion next month, I note that I made a typographical error near the end of the February column. Where I wrote “Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece,” I meant “would not” rather than “would.” I want to go on record with this, since only that way does what I wrote (I hope) make sense.

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!