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 II

Last month I recounted some musings that passed through my mind during preparation for my recent Frescobaldi recording sessions, about why one might want to make recordings. Now I offer related musings about what exactly a recording is or should be. This is a pastiche of notes that I took during the weeks before the recording sessions began, blended with some later thoughts arising from perusal of those notes and out of my memories of what I was thinking during that time. 

So, what is a recording or what should a recording be? Should it be a simple record (in the colloquial sense) of something that happened? That is the source of the name that we use for the process of playing music in the presence of machinery that enables someone else later to listen to some other music that is closely derived from what was played in the presence of that machinery. (Notice that it’s hard even to describe the process without actually using the word “record.” I didn’t want to write “that is the source of the name that we use for the process of recording . . .,” so I had to devise something convoluted.) The original concept seems to be simple: this is happening, let’s make a record of it, as we might make a written or photographic record of something. I would think that photography, which existed first, could easily have decided to claim the word “record” to be used as we now use the word “photo.” 

But recording is also something else (as is a photograph). It is the source of artistic experience on the part of a listener. Should that experience be the same as what it would have been for the listener to have been in the room where the recording took place? Or at a similar performance of the same music? Is that possible? Does trying to achieve that lead to a better or a worse potential artistic experience for that listener? Do the answers to any of this tell me anything practical or specific about how to approach this recording? Or anything not too practical or not that specific, but still meaningful?

Overhearing the battle

I once listened in on a conversation about the nature of recording that has remained with me for a long time. I have measured and understood some of my own feelings about music by referring back to this conversation. The ways I relate to what I remember was said then have changed. In this conversation, which took place about 1980 and involved two older colleagues of mine, as I remember it, I didn’t have much of my own to say. That was probably just as well: I didn’t have the relevant experience to know what to think. The point was this: two musicians, older and more experienced than I was, both harpsichordists among other things, were discussing Ton Koopman’s recording of harpsichord music of Giovanni Picchi. As it happened, they were both themselves specialists in Picchi. They had studied and performed his music and had various thoughts, feelings, and ideas about it.

The conversation began when one of them commented that the Koopman recording, then quite recent, struck him as too quirky. (At that time there was a lot about Koopman’s approach to rhythm and articulation that was new and seemed startling to many.) Beyond just not liking Koopman’s approach, he asserted that a recording should be objective—that it should present the music “as is” without the imposition of personal whim. The other member of the discussion strongly disagreed. She felt that if a performer were to embrace the idea of recording in an impersonalized way, stripping away whatever that performer would normally add out of his or her own artistic stance and experience, then the result would almost certainly be boring. That approach wouldn’t result in recordings that gave a pure unvarnished version of the music, but with recordings that misrepresented the music as stiff and not alive.

Each of these musicians (both teachers) felt that performers who wanted to approach recording the other way shouldn’t make recordings. “If you are going to make a record of something, show the music as itself without imposing anything on it. If you can’t do that, don’t record,” as opposed to “If you are going to make a record of something, play it the way you really feel it, otherwise there’s no point, so don’t record.” Diametrically opposed ideas. (There was anger involved, something that surprised and disturbed me at the time, especially since each discussant turned to me looking for agreement!) At the time, I tended towards the first view, though with an uncomfortable awareness that it could lead to boring recordings. Now I am only interested in approaching things the second way: a complete reversal for me that has happened gradually over more than thirty years.

There is a concept that people turn to once in a while of a “reference” recording. That phrase can mean a number of things. It probably most often means what the first member of the above-referenced conversation meant: a recording that has an air of objectivity to it, that is trying to stake a claim to be “just the music” and not a performance with any quirkiness to it. As an ideal this has to be based on a feeling that certain ways of playing are more objective than others. That’s complicated. Does objective mean moderate—medium tempi, only a little bit of rubato, and so on—or does it mean specifically true to what the composer wanted? That opens up problems that come with trying to know what the composer wanted.

But there’s another thing: sometimes recordings that are clearly quirky and personal become established as reference recordings because of something about their circumstances. That is true of the Bach recordings of both Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Neither of those performers was striving for a middle of the road objectivity. And although one or the other of them might have wanted to dispute this, it’s clear that neither of them was doing specifically what the composer would have done or would have expected to hear. Nonetheless, many listeners assume that these recordings are somehow “definitive,” and many students assume they should listen to these recordings for the express purpose of learning how they should play the pieces. 

So, either a self-consciously objective or an unapologetically personal recorded performance can come to exercise a substantial influence on how people think about and play a particular repertoire.

As the years go by, one’s viewpoint evolves

When I was growing up, I reacted to the Bach recordings of Helmut Walcha as having a quality of objectivity, of being some sort of settled reality, rather than just how one amazingly gifted and thoughtful performer chose to play the music. I got a lot of excitement from basking in the feeling as I listened to his records (drawn from the boxes that I loved so much as physical objects), that I was hearing something as close as would ever be possible to the fingers and feet of Bach himself. Now, as much as I admire Walcha’s extraordinary artistry and skill and still enjoy listening to his recordings, I have moved away from hearing or wanting to hear the for-the-ages objective correctness in his way of playing. 

A little bit later I reacted to Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven recordings in a similar way. I don’t know in retrospect how much any of this came from something intrinsic to those recordings and how much came from something about the circumstances in which I encountered them or about me as a listener at that time.

Like it or not, the past influences the present

What does any of this say about how I should approach recording now? I have to remember two things that tug in opposite directions. First, I really don’t want to think of what I am doing as having that “reference” quality. I don’t want any of what I create to have a feeling of objectivity, and I really don’t want it to be used to create a sense that this is how it should be. I understand that the amount of dissemination that any recording of mine will have will be modest enough to limit the damage that could come from anyone’s taking it that way, unlike with Gould, Landowska, Walcha, or Brendel. But (ideally) I don’t want anyone to take it that way. Whether I am right, wrong, or neither, to feel that way I have no idea. But I do feel that way. On the other hand, stemming from the relationship for me between recording and nostalgia, I do feel the tug of trying to create the kind of edifice that I thought I was encountering in those Walcha Bach boxes, even as I avowedly don’t want to do so.

That probably means that when I find myself actually sitting there with the tape rolling (so to speak), I have to remind myself not to tighten up, not to mimic, unconsciously, some sort of image of the magisterial, objective, for-the-ages performer. It’s not that I think that those recording artists whose work I react to as having that objective quality necessarily felt that way during recording sessions. They probably didn’t. It’s that I am aware of a pull to try to feel that way, though I know that I shouldn’t, and don’t want to. If I give in to that pull and sit there playing, thinking, “this is a well-crafted, definitive performance,” that will only lead to stiffness. It would also likely be a distraction.

In concert performance, I want there to be an element of spontaneity, something that at least part of the time leaves people reacting as they would to improvisation. (That’s not only my idea, of course: it’s a common ideal and often a fruitful one.) Sometimes this means being willing to do very specific performance and interpretive things that are unplanned and that the player might not do again. Certainly in the areas of arpeggiation, articulation, some sorts of rubato, shaping of certain ornaments, etc., I might do something in a performance that I hadn’t planned in advance and don’t consciously plan even as I am doing it. Some of these things come out as noticeably quirky. Is it OK for that to happen in a recording session? If I play a piece in concert a dozen times and in each of those performances a particular spot in the piece is discernibly different, is it acceptable if the finished recorded product has one of those and not the others? Of course it has to, but does there have to be some sort of hierarchy of how suitable those interpretive quirks are to be “immortalized?” If there is such a hierarchy, does that feed into the quest to make the recording sound “objective?” 

There’s a spot in one Frescobaldi piece where I really love the effect that I get by eliding a certain repeat, actually omitting the final chord of a particular section the first time through and replacing it with the beginning of the repeat of that section. It is appropriate harmonically and can be made to work rhythmically. In no way does the composer indicate this or suggest it. (It could have been indicated with a “first ending—second ending” setup.) I know of no musicology to back it up. It is hauntingly beautiful to me. I usually do it in concert. Should I do it on the recording?

(Did I? Of course as I sit here writing I know the answer . . .)

There are places where I am convinced that the surviving sources have made a small mistake: that something—a note, an accidental, a rhythm—should be different. (Usually by that I mean that the composer actually intended it to be different and that the “mistake” is an out-and-out typo. Sometimes I mean I believe that on further reflection, the composer probably would have done something a little bit differently.) In concert I usually feel absolutely fine about changing the passage to be what I think it should be. What about in a recording? Again the “for the ages” idea comes into play. Any one concert performance is ephemeral. If I try out something that may be “wrong” (Frescobaldi surely meant C# there—the C-natural sounds odd) there’s a limit to how much artistic damage that can be done if it is in fact I rather than the composer or copyist who was wrong. Is it different in a recording because it will be listened to repeatedly (if I’m lucky!) or because it will still be around many years from now? 

We allotted a whole five-day workweek for this series of recording sessions. That’s rather a long time. There’s a bit more than ninety minutes of music in this project. If I want to play everything five times—which is somewhere between average and safe for getting good takes of it all and for having choices among takes—that is about eight hours. In a pinch one could do eight hours of taping in one day. (My first recording for the PGM label was taped in one day, since we only had the venue for that long, and the producer was very eager to use that particular venue. It was a very grueling day!) But we want to allow for noise, tuning, regulation issues, periods of time when I space out and fail to play adequately for several takes in a row, stretching, relaxing, lunch breaks, and in general for it not to be too grueling—no more so than is necessary.

Next month I will present the fruits of the note-taking that I did during each of those five days and close with some thoughts that stem from where I am now: taping done, a bit of listening done (more by the time I am writing for next month), editing begun, but with a long way to go.

Here, as a sort of appetizer, is a link to a short video from the final day of the sessions. The piece is the second Galliarda from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQgs1m5Hls.

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

Five

This month I am writing a little bit about an old antagonist of mine, and of others—namely, the fifth finger—and suggesting a few exercises to address any problems with it. It is almost axiomatic among keyboard players that the fifth finger is “weaker” than the others and that it can be a recurrent source of problems. I felt that way quite strongly in past years, and many students of mine feel that way—at least they do prior to our doing something about it. Over the years I have come to realize gradually how much various concerns about the fifth finger can interfere with the process of learning to be a solid, comfortable keyboard player. It is important to offer students both the techniques for getting fifth fingers to be as agile and useful as possible and ways of thinking about how and when to decide, if ever, that the fifth finger is not right for a particular purpose and should be partially avoided. 

I have a clear but fragmentary memory from a long time ago that helps to frame my thinking about this. It was some few years after I had stopped taking formal lessons from Paul Jordan. I was still quite uncertain about many aspects of the direction that I wanted my playing to take, and I was still inclined to be very worried indeed about whether I could develop enough skill and comfort at the organ to be a real performer. I happened to be talking to Paul on the phone, and I said something to him along the lines of “I don’t think that I can become a really good player, because I can’t get my fifth fingers to work well enough.” And he replied, treating the matter with no alarm, as was his way, that the fifth finger was a bit less useful than others, for every player, and that we just all worked on it as best we could and got it to be good enough. (This is a paraphrase, remembered as best I can after thirty-five years or so.) I was skeptical that I could join the ranks of those who had worked well enough on their fifth fingers that they could be “real” players, but I took the idea to heart. That brief conversation is the germ of this column.

This problem does not arise with every student. Almost by definition, more “advanced” players are likely to have less trouble with and less fear about the fifth finger. However, when students are overly afraid of using the fifth finger, it is usually manifested in this way: the student avoids the fifth finger for high notes in the right hand or low notes in the left hand when using the fifth finger would make everything else about the fingering of the passage easier, and usually has an ostensible reason for avoiding that finger each time that doesn’t really amount to anything: “It just seems more natural” or “It feels better that way” or even “I don’t know.” 

I hasten to say I am not making fun of these students. This is a completely natural state of affairs for any student until he or she zeros in specifically on the fifth finger situation and figures out what is up with that finger. It is natural not to say “I am avoiding my fifth finger because I haven’t yet figured out how to develop its potential adequately” until you have had it pointed out to you that that is what’s going on.

Fifth finger versus thumb

A comparison between the fifth finger and the thumb is interesting. These are clearly both fingers that are meaningfully different from the other (middle) three. However, the differences between the thumb and the other fingers are much more dramatic. The thumb is, to start with, hinged the “wrong” way. The natural motion of the thumb—flexing at the knuckles as we do with any other finger—is in a direction that won’t play a key on a keyboard instrument. The gesture that we use to play a note with the thumb is different, and in general marked with a bit less agility or subtlety of control. Also the thumb is short enough that using it has—with many sorts of note patterns—a major effect on hand position. The first of these concerns doesn’t apply to the fifth finger at all. Its functioning and orientation are the same as with the three middle fingers. And while it is shorter than the others, it is not enough shorter that in itself changes anything about how it can be used or creates any particular issues. 

What creates issues is the slight weakness or lack of agility—a small but meaningful feeling that the fifth finger wants to go its own way, that it is a bit recalcitrant about moving up and down along the axis that we are trying to tell it to cover in playing a key. Also there is a sense that it needs a bit more time to recover and be ready to do something else after it has been used. 

(If you ask someone who is not a keyboard player to drum one non-thumb finger up and down on a tabletop as fast as possible—which, as always, doesn’t mean faster than possible, just reasonably fast, but only such that it can be even—and then try another finger and finally try the fifth finger, the chances are that he or she will be able to go faster with 2, 3, and 4 than with 5. Also, most likely, the drumming with the fifth finger will be seen to involve more lifting and lowering of the whole hand than with any of the other fingers.)

Strength and agility

The first step toward helping a student to realize the best potential of the fifth finger is to remember that with organ and harpsichord we are not looking for—and don’t need to be training—strength. On piano the fifth finger, if it is going to be fully useful, sometimes has to create a loud sound. This of course reqauires more force than making a soft sound, and the player must be able to bring the techniques for creating that force to bear on that finger. (The ins and outs of this as a technical matter are outside the bounds of my competence either to do or to teach, since I am not a pianist.) With organ, we need to be interested only in agility, not strength beyond a very basic level. 

The practical aspect of this is that any work done to develop the agility of the fifth finger should be done lightly and without tension. This is the same as with any exercises, technical work, practicing, or playing on the organ. But it can be relevant to remind students of this in particular in the case of a finger that is perceived as “weak.” The opposite of “weakness” (if we want to put it that way) is not “strength” but “dexterity” or “agility.”

(Here’s an interesting side note. The clavichord is often a good diagnostic tool for technical matters about the hand and the fingers, since the usual result of any technical problem with the clavichord is that the note that we are trying to play will just not sound at all as a musical note, but rather as a little clicking or spitting sound. It is quite routine for the fifth finger to have a hard time making notes sound resonant and full—avoiding that spitting noise—and sometimes this can be such an intractable problem that avoiding the fifth finger seems to be necessary. This varies a lot from one clavichord to another and from one specific note to another on some clavichords. It can also vary with the musical situation, and—sometimes, but not always—with the skill and experience of the player. But the issue is not force as such, and it is not really agility. It is a sort of minute-level steadiness, since the problem arises from tiny changes in finger pressure on the key in the first very small fraction of a second after a note is played. I myself find it easier to make the fifth finger work well on the clavichord if I play standing up—without raising the instrument higher than it would normally be. I honestly don’t know why.) 

Exercises

I suggest a couple of exercises for working on fifth-finger agility. Beyond that, I suggest working on passages of music, thinking systematically about how to use those passages to address the particular issue. Example 1 shows the most basic exercise.

The point here is only partly the actual notes, which constitute a simple or even obvious exercise pattern—simply moving to and away from the fifth finger. The point is more the way in which they are used. It is important to start slowly: slowly enough that it is easy to keep the pattern steady and even, and that it be very light. 

The thing to guard against is that the student will try to make it even by playing too firmly—sort of pounding down each note to be sure that it happens at the right time. This is all the more of a possibility because of the fear that the fifth finger won’t function on time or as crisply as the other fingers—and because of the influence of the idea that we are trying to “strengthen” the finger. The purpose of playing it slowly is to make it possible, ideally not even particularly hard, to keep it even without that extra force. By careful listening and paying attention to feel, the student should make sure that the return to the fifth finger is not accomplished by letting the finger (or the side of the hand) just fall onto the keys, but rather by playing the note cleanly in a way that matches the other fingers playing their notes. (In this case the listening is for timing. If the hand is falling onto the key, the note will tend to be early.) It is quite important to speed the exercise up gradually, hoping to get it quite fast, but never getting ahead of a tempo that works.

I have placed this in the right hand, starting at a place on the keyboard where the orientation of the body—arm and hand—to the keyboard should be comfortable. The pattern can be continued down the keyboard indefinitely, and the student can notice how the feel changes as the hand approaches and perhaps crosses the middle C region. The left hand can play an exercise that is the mirror image of this note-wise and identical to it as to fingering (Example 2).

It is interesting for the student to notice whether the fifth finger of one hand starts off more agile than that of the other hand, or whether it seems harder or easier to do this exercise with one hand than with the other. I myself find, after decades of playing, that my left fifth finger seems more like its adjacent fingers in the feel of playing it than my right fifth finger does. Some people feel that this is correlated with handedness, though many report that it is not. (It is not for me: I am right-handed.) For me it may be because of my experience doing a substantial amount of continuo playing, where the left fifth finger is a first among equals in anchoring the harmony and rhythm.

Example 3 is the next step in the sequence of exercises. (The added whole notes are also in the right hand, just to be clear.)

The point is to keep the eighth-note line, with the same fingering as above, feeling the same as it did prior to the addition of the whole-note lower voice. The moment at which each of the whole notes is released is a particular danger point when tension can be added to the hand. It is important for the student to try not to let this happen. Sometimes breathing in the right way at the right time can help, though I tend to believe that the details of this differ from one person to another. I like to release each of those long notes right at the transition between breathing in and breathing out or the opposite: either one seems to focus my mind on keeping the fingers relaxed. Anyone doing this exercise should play around with that. It is also interesting to play around with the articulation between the whole notes. Is it easier to keep the eighth-note line smooth and light if the whole notes overlap a bit, or if they are exactly legato without overlapping, or if they are a little bit detached, or quite detached? It is a good idea to work on getting all of those articulations to feel natural, and that starts with observing the differences in the way that they feel right off the bat.

Another modification of this exercise is the addition of some quick notes, a sort of trill, once the tempo gets fast, as shown in Example 4.

Then the same extra voice in whole notes can be added as in Example 3. Now the quick notes immediately follow the change in the lower note. This is a good test for the absence of tension in that exchange. All of these modifications should also be made to the left-hand version.

The other exercise that can be useful in inviting the fifth finger to become as dexterous as possible is my so-called trill exercise. I have written about it before in these pages and won’t do so again here. You can find it described in detail in the column from February 2010 and also in the column from November 2012 that was part of my organ method. You can also see it at http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf. It starts with “choose any two fingers.” If you choose 4 and 5, then it serves to work on fifth-finger agility very efficiently.

August interlude

I have decided to take a partial break from my sequence of columns about helping students to develop fingerings and instead write about a few miscellaneous matters that have been on my mind. These are all small but interesting things that are hard to fit into columns that are about something well defined. So this month’s column is a grab bag or smorgasbord. I am influenced to construct this sort of column right now by the following confluence: it happens that I am writing this during a real heat wave (early summer mid-90s temperatures, with lots of sun and little wind), and this column will be distributed in August, when, around where I live, this sort of weather would be more typical. So it feels like time for a bit of summer relaxation and catching up.

A couple of things that I am writing about this month tie in with the business of teaching fingering. That may not be too surprising, since, as I wrote a few months ago, there is no such thing as keyboard playing without fingering. I will note these connections, but not go into them at great length, and then pick up those threads as well in the coming months.

As I looked over my notes about some of these points and thought about a few more things that have passed through my mind recently, I noticed that some of what I want to discuss is even more personal than usual: my playing, my own reactions to things, some of what I think has gone well in my work, and some of what has gone not so well. I believe most of us find it challenging to say openly: “Yes, I did this well. This was a success.” or “That didn’t work out. I am not (yet?) good at that.” Grappling with framing certain things in one of those ways is a reminder that everything that we do performing and teaching is a result and a reflection of our makeup and experiences. It is extraordinarily important that we remember that this is true of our students as well.

Forced into sight-reading . . .

I recently played a harpsichord recital for which I forgot to bring some of my music. (Is this going to be a trend? Do I have to do something about it? Not sure yet.) In particular, I simply didn’t have any way of obtaining a copy of a Froberger toccata that I had programmed. This is a piece that I have played in recital a dozen times or more over the last couple of years, more on harpsichord than on organ. It is also a piece that I know extremely well. I could probably write out at least chunks of it, and write in what I know to be my fingerings for those bits.

But that doesn’t mean I could play the piece from memory. (This is my first experience of bumping up against this particular practical disadvantage to my preferred approach of not performing from memory.) I noticed that in a Froberger volume that I had with me, from which I was going to play a suite, there was another toccata in the same key as my missing one. That meant that I could play it instead of the programmed one without making the printed program inaccurate or misleading. 

The only problem was that I had never learned this piece. I have probably read through it at some point in the past, since I have specialized in Froberger for decades and have read through all or close to all of his music. But if so, I didn’t remember that, and it would have been years ago. But I read through the piece once during my tuning and warming-up session and decided I could go ahead and play it in the concert. I did so, and it went fine: basically accurate, a wrong note or two, but not necessarily more than I or another performer might make in any piece; rhythms certainly accurate; tempos in the faster bits perhaps slower than I would want them following a normal amount of preparation, but not by much. It was a successful performance, though I hope that it was not as effective as it would have been if I had worked on it. If it was, then that casts some doubt upon my whole normal learning and preparation strategy!

So, what did I get out of this? I am certainly not recounting this to suggest that I am a particularly great sight-reader. Really I am not. I figure that by the standards of professional keyboard performers, I am probably about a “B-plus” sight-reader, and if not exactly that, then more likely “B” than “A-minus.” And I suspect that the several other toccatas in the volume would have been a stretch for me to sight-read in performance. They looked more intricate. It was a lucky coincidence for me that the one in the correct key was the simplest-looking one. But it is also important not to remain trapped in a sense of what we cannot do or what we are not good at. When I was in college, it would have been utterly out of the question for me to perform this piece without having practiced it for weeks. Could I have performed it after one read-through fifteen years ago? Five? I am not sure. But I was correct to intuit that I could do so now. 

We should also never remain trapped in a sense of what our students cannot do. What they (and we) can and cannot do should be changing all the time. While I was actually performing this piece, the feeling of playing it was more comfortable and serene than what I often experience while performing a piece that I know well, that I have prepared obsessively, that I feel ready to perform or record, that I consider part of my identity as a player. Why? How is this even possible? There has to be something to learn there about concentration, expectation, and anxiety. I do not yet know exactly what that is. It must start from the awareness that I had to pay close attention all of the time, every fraction of a second, like driving on a slippery road. But what about that would be good to import into the act of playing a well-prepared piece? Would there be a down side to doing so? Less spontaneity? My thinking about this is new and evolving, especially since this was the most recent concert that I have played as I sit here writing.

This also reminds me that there is such a thing as sight-reading fingering, or even a sight-reading approach to fingering. Fingering will be a different sort of phenomenon depending on whether you do or don’t know what is coming up next. To some extent this has to tie in with patterns and templates for how to play what sort of passage. How does this, or doesn’t this, have the potential to inform work on carefully planned fingerings?

 . . . and improvisation.

I am not much of an improviser. Long ago I was intimidated by improvisation and never even considered studying it systematically. That may or may not be a loss or a problem for me—after all, nobody does everything. However, I can play rather meandering chord progressions that often sound perfectly pleasing and that serve to enable me to explore the sounds of instruments without needing to put music in front of me. This very limited improvisation, or noodling around, is really derived from my continuo-playing experience. I am in effect generating bass lines, more or less at random, and then realizing them as continuo parts. I recently noticed that when I do this with a pedal line as the bass line, I find it almost impossible to involve my left hand. The influence of the feel of ordinary continuo playing is so strong that I can’t get any intuition going as to how to add chords and notes other than in the right hand. I find this interesting, just as a kind of archeological dig into my modest history of improvisation. But it also makes me think that I should try to make myself sit on my right hand when playing this sort of thing and force my left hand to get involved. Furthermore, I should urge any student doing this sort of thing to emphasize the left hand, or at least to be sure to give it equal weight.

Learning a magnum opus

I have played Bach’s French Overture, BWV 831, in three recitals over the last several months. This is a piece that I have loved for many years. I initially tried playing it when I first had regular access to a harpsichord on which to practice, about 40 years ago. It was beyond challenging for me at that point, so it pleases me that I can work on it, learn it, and perform it now. In order to do so, I have had to get past a little bit of the trap mentioned above: getting stuck in a sense of what I cannot do. But what has been most interesting to me about actually playing this piece in concert is that it is long, about 40 minutes, and quite intricate, dense, and varied. Since I have played many concerts that are a lot longer than that, even those that have halves longer than that sometimes, it never occurred to me that stamina might be an issue. However, in each of the three performances, my playing of the last movement, a sprightly and excited piece with the non-traditional title of “Echo,” has been influenced (really I should say undermined) by stamina issues. I believe that what happens is that as I get through the end of the previous movement, the Gigue, I feel my energy and/or concentration lessen, and, in trying to boost it back up, I start the Echo too fast. It is then hectic, helter-skelter, and more prone to note inaccuracy than I would like. Although I identified this concern after the first time I played the piece in recital, I was not able to prevent it from happening each of the next two times as well, though it has been progressively less severe. 

I have learned from this that the little opportunities to regroup in a concert that are afforded by breaks between pieces are significant and useful. Also, regardless of how well learned the various sections and movements of a program are, and no matter how tempting (and genuinely important) it is to focus on practicing hard passages, it is a good idea not to neglect playing through the whole thing. (Not that I have neglected that completely in preparing for these concerts, but I think that I underestimated how much of it I should do.) This reminds me to review my approach to any similar issues with my students.

The familiar and the unfamiliar

A few months ago I played a short lunchtime recital at the Princeton University Chapel. This is an extraordinary venue, for music or for anything else, and home to a justly famous and wonderful organ. But for me it is something more: a place where I spent thousands of hours playing the organ during the years when I was an undergraduate at the university. In the years since then, I have mostly pursued performance on mechanical-action organs and on harpsichord and clavichord, and the large Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner/Mander organ is not the most familiar sort of beast to me nowadays. On the other hand, this particular organ, rebuilt though it has been, and most especially this setting, evoke as much feeling of familiarity and as much deep nostalgia as any place or any instrument could. I was playing, in part, music of Moondog that day. Moondog is my second specialty along with music of the Baroque. I first encountered all of his pieces that I played this recent day during or shortly before my time as a student at Princeton, and I played them all frequently in the chapel back then. This was a powerful reminder to me that individual experience is what most informs our feelings about music, as about everything else, and that no two people—teachers, students, listeners, players—ever bring the same set of experiences to the way that they take in music.

I was also reminded that everything about technique, as well as about interpretation, is in part about the instrument. (That is, the instrument as a separate entity alongside the music, the interpretive stance of the player, the player’s habits and preferences, and so on.) Of course I know this, and have written about it. But this was a vivid real-life experience of it, with interesting twists because of the unusual blend of familiar and unfamiliar.

Hearing wrong notes 

I recently heard about a (not particularly recent) study that showed quite systematically that most listeners don’t consciously hear or notice most wrong notes. The study involved asking several talented graduate student pianists to record several piano pieces. These were pieces that they had not studied before, and that they were given a fairly short time to learn. This was to try to secure enough wrong notes to make the study meaningful. The listeners were undergraduate pianists, some of whom were and some of whom weren’t familiar with the pieces. The gist of the result was that the listeners reported only a very small fraction of the wrong notes. (Here is the link to the article about this study to which someone directed my attention: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audience….) 

This study tended to confirm my feeling that we as players exaggerate the importance of wrong notes. Of course there are questions. Does what this study found about piano apply equally well to organ, to harpsichord, or to instruments outside of our specific concern here, or to singing? Should we actually embrace for ourselves or for our students, caring less about accuracy than we might feel required to do? Is that a slippery slope? Preparation and practicing, and planning fingering, are in part about striving for accuracy. In fact it is easy to fall into thinking that that is all that they are about. Is there a way to juggle successfully both motivating ourselves and our students to try with all our might to prepare for extraordinary accuracy and wearing the need for that accuracy very lightly? Does a clear-cut study like this add to our intuitive sense? All of that planning, to the extent that it is not just about reliable accuracy, is about gaining enough control to do what we want to do expressively. Can we separate out those two goals and emphasize one more than the other? Are there differences in fingering choices that might arise out of this distinction? Or different ways of approaching the whole matter of fingering choices? How can we best help students sort this out?

The next generation

A short while ago I was visited in my harpsichord studio by a few students of a fine local piano teacher. These students were second- and third-graders. After they had played around a bit on several instruments, one of them commented to me that she liked the antique Italian harpsichord the best. That made sense to me, as a lot of people have that reaction. She then said, in explanation, “it has an intelligent sound.” I was really taken with that way of putting it or that way of hearing the sound. I had never encountered that particular image before. It resonated with one of my ways of experiencing instrument sound, especially that of organs and harpsichords.

I want to have the subjective experience, if I listen closely and without distraction, that the sonority seems to me to come directly from, or in a sense to be, a sentient being. Although this young girl had no prior experience with harpsichords, it reminded me of the description by the very experienced Keith Hill of clavichord sound, which I quoted in last April’s column. It includes the statement that “clavichords should have the sound of thought.”

Next month I will buckle down, so to speak, and get back to work on our extended look at fingering.

A particular performance

This month, I take a slight detour from the map that I laid out for myself when I began this series of columns, because by coincidence I am writing this on the day after I played a concert, and I believe that some of my reactions to that particular experience are relevant to what I have been discussing. As usual, a great deal of this is questions, not answers. I will also discuss here a couple of ideas that are part of my roster of planned discussion points, and that connect directly to what I want to say about this concert. Next month I will wrap up this particular series, tying up some loose ends, but also leaving open some that I think are intrinsically open-ended.

As I noted in an earlier column, I seem to be playing more concerts over the last several years than I have in previous decades. It’s not that this particular concert was unique. After all, I hope to learn something new from every performance experience. It is unique, however, because this was the first full-length organ recital that I have given in approximately eighteen months. Just by happenstance most of my concerts during that time have been harpsichord recitals, a couple have been mixed recitals (some pieces on harpsichord, some on organ), a couple have involved my contributing organ pieces to programs that also involved other performers, and a couple have indeed been organ recitals, but quite short. It was also the first full-length organ recital that I have given in Princeton in about a decade. That means it was a different focus of attention for my students and other people whom I know in the community where I teach and where I frequently perform on harpsichord. 

The importance of the event

All of that meant I had to deal with a certain amount of non-musical baggage, though no one imposed that baggage on me. Was I in danger of making this event too important to me? Did that become a distraction from learning and performing the music? I suggested in a previous column that one way to frame a performance is that the playing creates a chance that some of the listeners will find the experience important. Is it then necessary that it be important to me as well? If so, how much of that involves framing the project in advance as being an important one, how much involves how I feel about it while it is going on? Or is that whole set of thoughts a problem or a distraction? If so, I think that it is an important one to be aware of. I am hereby confessing that in the weeks leading up to this concert I flirted with giving it an amount of importance in my own mind that was paralyzing, though I was always able to pull myself back to practicing and preparing. There is some sort of fruitful area in between “every note must be so meaningful and expressive that it will knock people’s socks off” and “this is routine: I know the music and I am just going to go play it.” That can be hard to get right. I do not know that I got it just right for this event. But the particular circumstances made me particularly aware of it.

That leads me to one of the most important issues of all—and the issue about performance that I think about the most. If a listening experience is going to be, or have the potential to be, really important to a listener, a large and significant part of that importance will arise out of the emotion conveyed by the music. Or perhaps the music conveys something in the general realm of feeling that leaves the listener a slightly different person after hearing it than he or she was before. This is true for a variety of performances where things other than the music participate in shaping those feelings, but the music very much does so as well. Is it good, bad, important, optional, dangerous, or just what, for the performer to feel while actually playing some version of whatever emotions he or she is trying or hoping to convey to others through the music?

When I have asked this question of colleagues, students, friends, etc., the predominant answer that I receive is that it is dangerous. The following scenario can easily play out: that if you as a performer are too caught up in the feeling of the music that you are playing, you will become distracted and mess up. While this might manifest itself in wrong note clusters, it might also paradoxically cause you to forget to do some of the interpretive gestures that you have mapped out and on which you are depending to convey the very feelings that you are experiencing. This can be a version of something that happens with certain kinds of technique, such as playing physically harder on harpsichord or organ and thereby giving yourself a false feeling of conveying more energy. That is, you can mistake feeling the emotion yourself for conveying it to the listeners. It is also possible that by feeling the music in this way you can unconsciously make choices that actually limit the range of feelings that another listener can experience.

Another danger also exists. If you are in the grip of feeling the emotions of a passage that you are playing, perhaps you will exaggerate the gestures that you expect to convey that emotion. This can mean exaggerating to the point of parody, or upsetting the balance between different things that you are trying to convey. Your judgment about how the music is coming across might be impaired. 

The alternative to feeling what the music is conveying while you are playing is to plan out the whole panoply of interpretive choices that you most conscientiously think will make happen what you want to happen, and then to concentrate in as focused and sober a way as possible on executing those choices. This involves having faith that the choices you have made will produce something like the effects that you want them to have, and that you can carry them out effectively based on planning and practicing. This is always going to be an important part of the way that anyone performs.

In spite of the dangers that are definitely a consensus concern among people who have thought about this, I am increasingly committed to trying to feel everything that I want to express in the music while I am playing, or to being open to doing so. This is an important difference: my experience suggests that being open to those feelings is manageable, but that making a kind of purposeful effort to experience anything specific is both a distraction and too contrived to be real. 

One of my reasons I’m interested in this approach is a sort of pure self-indulgence. I will enjoy the experience of playing more if I am viscerally getting something out of the music. I genuinely want to enjoy the experience of performing and avoid thinking of it as a stressful or mundane task. I think that at this level the feeling that I am describing is both good and bad as it affects my ability to offer something meaningful to the audience. I want to enjoy performing partly out of self-indulgence, but also partly because I honestly think that I play better when I am enjoying it. However, it is dangerous if I focus too much on enjoying being a player or listener. For instance, if something starts to go wrong or to feel wrong, I will not be able to pull myself together and play the music competently. If I want to be open to experiencing the music as an involved listener while I play, I have to be willing and able to drop that at an instant’s notice if I see that I need to.

Another set of reasons to not just listen to my playing while performing but also to feel whatever the music is conveying is that some of what I do interpretively depends on what I feel while I am listening. Again, this is quite specific to me. I have approached things differently in the past, and will do so in the future. But right now I am trying to derive some of what I do with timing—rubato, agogic accent, arpeggiation, various kinds of overlapping—directly from the emotional experience of the sound. There are moments when I do not know when to play the next note until I know how the feeling of listening to the current note is evolving. Perhaps that is a slightly oversimplified way of describing it, and there is a lot more to say about that—including problems or limitations of that approach, as well as what I believe to be its strengths. This is not the time for that. The point is that some of what I am trying to do when I perform at a very specific, concrete level depends not just on my hearing what the notes are doing but also feeling what they are doing. So I need to be open to those feelings and the hypothesis is that if I can do so, I will be able to offer more to the audience than I would otherwise.

This approach is one that I have applied more to harpsichord than to organ thus far. That is another source of the particular importance that I attached to this concert. 

The desire to be able to allow myself to become an engaged listener while I am playing is a source of motivation to try to be seriously well prepared. It is self-evident that we should all be well prepared for public performance. The fear of abject humiliation that I mentioned in an earlier column—referencing an experienced performer to whom I was talking about it years ago—should be motivation enough. There are also loftier motivations like wanting to offer something wonderful to the audience. I believe that for me wanting to indulge myself in listening, in getting caught up in the music, is the strongest source of motivation to practice really conscientiously and become really well prepared. That way I can let myself listen and react without it being too dangerous. If I succeed at that, even if I classify it as somewhat self-indulgent, then the audience only benefits.

Practical considerations 

for the event

Then there are the practical things. I made the following mistakes in connection with the concert: 

1) There was a need for page turning. I have become unaccustomed to this, since for harpsichord concerts I now use a computer and a foot-pedal automatic page turning device. Someone whom I knew to be very reliable offered to turn pages for this program. I felt completely comfortable with that: so comfortable that I didn’t think that we needed to practice the page turns. We went through two or three of them in advance, just to make sure that she was comfortable with the physical setup, that she could see, reach, and so on. She did a perfect job of turning. However, what I didn’t realize was that I was the one who needed the practice. Once in the course of the concert my eyes failed to follow the smooth and perfectly timed transition from one page to the next. I lost my place and had to fumble around a bit. Another time, for no good reason, I became anxious about an upcoming page turn and also lost focus, performing a short stretch of notes badly. In each of the places where we had practiced the page turning, my reading through the page turns was fine. Likewise it was fine through the ones where the music was straightforward or my memory was the strongest. I would have avoided trouble if I had accepted my page-turner’s offer to go over all of the spots. 

2) During intermission—when I had to remember consciously that, unlike with a harpsichord recital, there was nothing for me to tune—a few audience members came up to the organ console and looked at the keyboards, stop knobs, etc. That is wonderful: people are often interested in those things, and it is great that they are. However, I discovered as I started the most challenging piece in the second half, the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that the organ bench had been moved a tiny bit closer to the keyboards. The space through which my feet and legs could move was slightly but meaningfully restricted. That is not good. In writing years ago about pedal playing I emphasized that correct placement of the bench is really important. I still know that. However, I failed to pay attention to it here. I could not manage to scoot the bench back while playing; I did not think that it would be prudent to try. It would have been disruptive to stop, even between the movements, and adjust the bench. As far as I know, nothing drastic happened to the piece as a consequence of this, though I was physically uncomfortable, and I had to concentrate more on making the pedal part work. It is possible that something about timing or articulation in that part was less well crafted than I would have hoped.

The moral of those two stories is: don’t forget to line the small practical things up properly.

I have a recording of the concert, but I am not sufficiently removed from the experience to be able to accurately listen to it yet. I am fairly certain that the beginnings of some of the pieces were not shaped the way that I wanted them to be. Related to some of what I discussed above, this is about an idea that I have been trying out. This involves not having a beat in my head before I play the first note of a piece or a movement, but letting the sonority of that note tell me when to play the next note, and then to derive tempo from that. I suspect that I sometimes fall into the characteristic trap of that approach, namely that I hold the first sonority too long. I also suspect this represents a practical performance issue, not a fundamental musical issue.

I don’t always take enough time before I start a piece to clear my mind of distractions and focus on the music. When I intend to start a straightforward piece, this inappropriate direction of attention will manifest itself in a slightly wrong tempo, more likely too fast than too slow. This in turn is probably a characteristic danger of something that I mentioned in an earlier column: namely that I prefer not to be sequestered prior to the beginning of a concert, but to mix with people as they come in, and to try to remain relaxed and “myself.” That is well and good, and I believe that it is absolutely right for me. But it does require a certain moment of focusing on the music and allowing time for that to work. My guess, and only a guess, is that I did a sort of “B-minus” job of that. So it is something that I have to work on remembering next time.

Excerpts from the concert discussed in this column will be posted on Gavin’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/gavinblack1957.

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

Clavichord II

Last month’s column ended with a description of the fretted clavichord, a clavichord in which for at least part of the compass some adjacent pitches are grouped onto the same strings as one another. This practice has some musical implications. The most important compositional implication of fretting on clavichords is that certain groups of notes cannot be expected to sound together. On a very early clavichord that has some notes grouped in fours, there are even minor thirds that cannot be used as harmonic intervals. Designers of instruments have always worked with an awareness of what was going on in the musical culture as a whole, and the choices about what notes to group together were made, like tuning choices, in sync with what composers and performers needed or wanted. If the four notes grouped together were B-flat, B, C, C-sharp, then the minor third that was lost would be B-flat to C-sharp (D-flat). This interval was not likely to be used anyway in the era of meantone tuning: composers had already accepted that limitation because of the various perceived advantages of that tuning. Over the years, composers began to wish to use more intervals and to use them more freely and flexibly. That led both to the development of more flexible tuning systems and to the evolution of clavichord fretting towards, at first, smaller groupings, and then no fretting at all. On a fully unfretted clavichord, common in the mid- to late-18th and early 19th centuries, you can play any or all of the notes together you may wish, as on any harpsichord, piano, or organ. 

A fretted clavichord has the following features, some of which may be considered advantages—ones that were lost, as time went on, in exchange for the flexibility of the unfretted instrument. It has fewer strings than an unfretted clavichord with the same compass, and therefore needs less work to tune it. Since the fretting—in particular, how far apart the tangents playing different notes on the same strings are placed— determines some of the details of the tuning, the amount of judgment about temperament that a tuner must make is reduced. However, the possibility of tuning the same instrument in different temperaments from one time to another is also reduced.

There is an interesting tie-in there with the organ. Any harpsichord or piano can be retuned to any temperament whatsoever quite easily as part of a normal tuning. In fact, with a harpsichord, changing temperament is not an added bit of work at all in the grand scheme of things, since you have to retune the whole instrument frequently anyway. Re-tempering an organ is, like re-tempering a fretted clavichord, a long, involved, difficult project, not often undertaken.

Because they have fewer strings, fretted clavichords are smaller and lighter than unfretted ones. This was, and still can be, an advantage wherever space was limited and an advantage for travel. Smaller instruments tend to be louder than larger ones, and also to have a more pungent, intense sound that is often perceived as having more “character.” That concept is subjective and also subject to considerable variation in individual cases. 

The existence of this kind of fretting had a particular limited but important influence on keyboard-playing technique that can be used in teaching. We have seen that on a fretted instrument some notes cannot be played together. However, it is entirely possible to play those notes in quick succession, in either direction or in any order. Practicing playing two notes that are bound together on one string both promptly one after the other and cleanly is good training for clean, accurate, precisely timed playing in general. If you have access to a fretted clavichord, find two adjacent notes that use the same strings and try a few things with those notes. First play them back and forth in succession with one finger. The effect will be generously detached. Then switch to a non-disjunct fingering, but still play them detached. Then try making them closer and closer to legato, and also faster and faster in alternation. This will converge on being a trill. You will hear clearly if you violate the autonomy of the two notes by trying to play one before you have released the other.

But in sketching out that exercise I am getting a little bit ahead of myself. That is because of one feature that distinguishes the clavichord from all other keyboard instruments. At any other sort of keyboard instrument, the act of moving a key down from its resting position will always and inevitably cause the instrument to produce its sound. On harpsichord and organ, the pressing of a key will give the full normal sonority, regardless of anything whatsoever about how that pressing is done or who is doing it. It need not even be a human: ask Scarlatti’s cat. On the piano, a deliberate effort to push the key down slowly will give very little volume, perhaps even none. But no particular skill, technique, or experience is necessary to push a key down and make a note sound. On the clavichord, it is entirely possible to press a key down and get, not a musical note, but rather a sort of funny clicking or spitting noise. As with string or wind instruments, there is a particular technical requirement that underlies the basic act of getting the instrument to produce musical sound. A description of that technique can be elusive, partly because it seems to feel and act rather differently from one clavichord to another. The gist of it is that since the key—really, the tangent—remains in contact with the string while the string is sounding, the finger pressure on the key has to start out right and remain right. If it wavers, the tangent is likely to rebound briefly from the string and then damp the sound or fail to make the sonority happen in various other ways.    

There are five clavichords on which I have done a lot of practicing over the last several years. On one of them, a modern-built instrument that deviates a fair amount from historical practice, it is fairly easy to produce real tone. Only by violating in a pretty extreme way some of the technical imperatives that I will mention below can you make the instrument not give a legitimate basic sound. On at least two of the others, including an instrument built in the eighteenth century, I have to focus very intensely and do everything right that I possibly know how to do right in order to get consistent basic sound. As I mentioned briefly in a recent column about the fifth finger, even then I have recurrent trouble making a beautiful, full sound with the fifth finger of either hand. (And I am a pretty adept keyboard player with a tremendous amount of experience with clavichord in general and with these particular instruments.)  

Most of the time, the more firmly you play, the easier it is to get legitimate tone out of a clavichord. However the sound that you get by playing hard enough to be certain of a real and sustained tone is not often the most beautiful sound that the instrument can make. Furthermore, needing to play firmly all of the time restricts the expressive use of dynamics. (It might also tend to throw the pitch of notes off.) More useful is this: the farther out on the keys you play, the more likely you are to produce real sound. Playing at the outer edge of the key also increases rather than limits control over every aspect of the sound, including dynamic nuance. Tone production is also aided by keeping the hand relaxed and by using hand positions that permit playing the keys from above, not from the side. All of these things are good and useful in organ and harpsichord playing as well. But in those contexts they only increase control over the subtleties of attack and release sounds. On the clavichord they are necessary for basic tone production. This is probably the essence of why the clavichord has always been considered a good practice and preparation instrument. It requires you to do, and therefore reinforces your awareness of doing or not doing, things that are very good but not as obvious in playing other instruments.

Acquiring my first clavichord

I had never actually played a clavichord, not even individual notes, before the day when I took delivery nearly 35 years ago of the first clavichord I ever owned. The instrument was a small late-Renaissance style fretted clavichord with a wonderful dry resonant sound. I still have it, and it is still a favorite of mine. Not surprisingly, as I tried to play it that day I had no idea what I was doing. And that lack of any idea manifested itself in my not being able to get a real musical sound or, on some notes, a recognizable pitch from the instrument. As best I remember, I panicked a bit about whether there was something wrong with the instrument, which I had bought used based on a description and a recommendation, not on having heard, seen, or played it. Then I also panicked about whether I was or wasn’t someone who could ever learn to control something like this. But I kept playing, and as I did so, I found myself reinventing that which we call “early fingering.” 

In an initially desperate effort to get sound out of the instrument, I started playing out near the edges of the keys. Then I realized that I had to keep my hand in a comfortable position, not twisted appreciably, especially not twisted outward, which locks the wrist. I also realized that it was difficult to get the fifth finger to make a good sound. Meanwhile, the combination of playing out on the keys and the necessary hand position made it awkward or sometimes impossible to use the thumbs. This began to add up to an unsystematic but pretty close version of the sorts of fingering that we see in 16th and 17th century manuscripts and treatises. This in turn suggested to me that perhaps those fingerings were at least as much about instrument and technique, that is, technique for creating sound, as they were about music and interpretation, though they deeply influence the latter.

This is how I came to acquire that clavichord. In the early spring of 1982 I visited Buffalo, New York, in order to attend as an auditor a series of master classes given by the pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He was and still is a musical hero of mine. I believe I had traveled significantly farther than anyone else who came to the week of events, and the staff members at SUNY Buffalo were sort of impressed and pleased by that. They were friendly and welcoming to me, helping me find a room and so on. In fact, I was asked if I wanted to ride along to the motel on the first day that I was there to pick up Mr. Horszowski and his wife, Bice Costa. Of course I went along, scared, shy, and nervous. In the car I explained who I was: a student of harpsichord and organ, hoping to make a career as a player and teacher. Horszowski, almost ninety years old and one of the great late-Romantic pianists with a career beginning in the 19th century, frowned a bit and said, “there is one beautiful keyboard instrument that you do not play.” I sunk as deep as I could into my seat in the car and began to figure out how to respond to the inevitable chiding about not playing the piano. After all, that was the late 19th-century perspective. It was also pretty much the late 20th-century perspective, and I had fielded that question many times, though never from such an august source. 

He then emphatically and joyfully exclaimed the word “clavichord!” 

I mumbled something about how I was planning to learn clavichord, but hadn’t found exactly the right instrument yet, etc., trying not to feel like too much of an early music fraud. The immediate and most important lesson for me was not to make assumptions about what other people’s perspectives were. The longer lesson was that perhaps I ought to get involved with the clavichord. I believe that it was actually during that week that I started making phone calls looking for a good used clavichord that I could afford to buy. That brought me to the day I acquired my first such instrument.

Playing the clavichord   

In playing the clavichord, it is possible to introduce a sort of vibrato to the sound. This is unique among keyboard instruments, and it is another consequence of the tangent’s remaining in contact with the string for as long as you hold a note. If you change the pressure on the key and thus the pressure that the tangent puts on the string, you will change the amount that the string is stretched and thus change its pitch. You can change this pressure by pushing a bit farther down after you have played a note and then relaxing that extra push, doing this back and forth at the speed that you want for your vibrato, for as long as you wish your vibrato to last. You can also do it by keeping your ostensible finger pressure steady, but sliding the finger back and forth along the length of the key. This latter technique seems to be less common, certainly in practice today, perhaps historically. It usually results in a gentler vibrato. That is, it produces a gentle vibrato, whereas the up-and-down technique can produce a stronger one. There is certainly a risk of the vibrato’s being strong enough to come across as out-of-tune, and it is up to the performer to control this appropriately. The historical record leaves it unclear how widely this vibrato was applied at different times and in different places. However, it was an important and well-documented part of the expressive technique of the clavichord in the late 18th century, as the piano was gaining importance and the harpsichord and clavichord were waning. 

The photograph on the preceding page shows the keyboard of an 18th-century clavichord that I was lucky to acquire a few years ago. It is unsigned and undated. The fairly wide compass, four and a half octaves, from CC to f′′′, suggests that it is not from too early in the century. It is double-fretted, which suggests a date that is not too late. It is probably from the second quarter of the 18th century from somewhere in the German-speaking regions of Europe. This instrument was once owned by the American instrument dealer and collector Morris Steinert, who exhibited it at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The instrument is normally housed at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio.

These two columns are just a very brief introduction to the clavichord. I strongly recommend sitting at an instrument, whenever you can track one down, and just playing, bearing in mind the few technical matters that I mentioned above. Like me years ago, at first, you (and your students) may think that it is impossible. But that will melt away rather naturally with patient experience.

I direct your attention to a few further resources about the clavichord. There is a book by Bernard Brauchli called The Clavichord, which is a thorough and well  laid-out introduction to the history of the instrument, including iconography and written mentions. It is heavily illustrated and a magnificent reference. There is a publication called De Clavicordio, which is the proceedings of the International Clavichord Symposium. It has been published every two years or so since 1994 and is full of interesting material. The website of the Boston Clavichord Society (http://www.bostonclavichord.org) has information about the instrument and about activities in that region. A highlight of that website is a series of videos featuring performer and teacher Peter Sykes. One of those videos is a concise demonstration of two instruments, one fretted and one unfretted. It covers some of what I have written about here, with the advantage of allowing you to see and hear what is going on. The website also has an impressively thorough clavichord discography.

The Australian instrument maker Carey Beebe has a website that is a cornucopia of information about harpsichords, clavichords, and related matters. It is well written and organized; see www.hpschd.nu/clav.html. From there you can navigate to anything else on the site. The website of instrument builder Keith Hill has an interesting essay about clavichords: keithhillharpsichords.com/clavichords/. I was struck by a comment that I found there, and I quote it to close for this month:

At their very best, clavichords should have the sound of thought. If this idea is new to you, focus for a while on your own thoughts and calculate how “loud” they are. Thought sounds extremely intense when empassioned with meaning.