On Teaching

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

Disjunct Motion III

For reasons that were random and fleeting, I did not write columns for November 2016 or January 2017. Thus these three columns on disjunct motion have themselves been presented in a disjunct manner . . . .

As I have mentioned a couple of times in passing, disjunct motion can be created by an interval’s being too wide for the player to get to the new note(s) before releasing the old. This is common. It is usually (always?) about an interval in one hand (or in one foot, but see below for a few thoughts about how all of this applies to the pedals), and it is easy to encapsulate in Example 1 for almost everyone and in Example 2 and Example 3 for everyone.

One interesting thing often occurs in these situations. Having purposely not decided, for any interpretive reason, to make the interval detached and therefore not “owning” the feeling that it should be non-legato, a student will do something physical that represents a doomed effort to make it legato. For example, in Example 1 (assuming right hand), someone might play the middle C with finger 1, and then stretch the hand out as much as possible, maybe getting the fifth finger as far as the air space over the E before having to release the C in order to play the G.

In the third example, someone might finger the first chord with 1-2-4 or 1-2-3, and try to stretch upward, with the fifth finger or with the fourth and fifth, while holding the chord, in an (again utterly doomed) effort to find a way to start the second chord sounding before the first chord is gone. These sorts of efforts twist the hand into uncomfortable positions for no actual gain or purpose.

Effect of articulation

For me, the first principle of comfortable execution of wide intervals is a fish-or-cut-bait attitude about articulation. If an interval is, though a real skip, one that you can physically play legato, and if you in fact want it to sound legato, then by all means it is important to choreograph that legato gesture in a way that works, even if it is difficult or (fleetingly) awkward. If legato is impossible, as in the case of the intervals discussed here, then a half-way attempt to connect the notes will create considerable awkwardness and tension. This is likely to lead to a more disjunct-sounding, more abrupt result. Embrace the non-legato happily!

So, in the examples above, the first question is what fingerings make the most sense. If we abandon the effort to stretch fingers 1 to 5 to make the leap (I’ll come back to that word below) from C to G, then very likely any fingering that creates a comfortable hand position for each note is acceptable. It could be 1-5, of course. But maybe 2-5 or 2-4 would be more comfortable—might, in particular, allow for a more natural and relaxed hand position. This will differ from one player to another. The student should try all of these, especially any that initially seem counterintuitive specifically because they are farther from the unsuccessful legato attempt. The overriding point is this: where distance makes joining two successive events impossible, the fingering that is on paper closest to one that would have joined them is no more likely to give a musically successful result than a fingering that is maximally disjunct.

If this interval is in some context like Example 4 or Example 5 then that context might suggest something about fingering. And it is important that that fingering choice not be distorted by the false pull of legato. In the first instance, 2-1-2-5 or perhaps 3-2-3-5 might make sense. In the second case, perhaps 2-1-2-3-4-5 or 1-2-1-3-4-5 or even 3-2-3-3-4-5. The fixed points in the process of choosing fingerings are the notes before and after the “leap,” not that interval itself. 

In the chord example, the “obvious” fingering of 1/3/5—1/3/5 would probably work well. There are not as many other possibilities here as there can be with a one-note-at-a-time passage. For some players, 2/3/5­—1/2/4 would work; it happens to feel especially comfortable to me. There are a couple of other possibilities, all of them entirely disjunct, as they must be for this note pattern.

Once a student has accepted the notion of not trying for doomed legato fingerings when legato is physically impossible, the next step is to work on executing these fingerings in ways that takes full advantage of their potential to be comfortable. A starting point in thinking about this is the following empirical observation: if you start out practicing a disjunct interval with the break between the two events as big as is needed to feel comfortable, then it will (always) be possible to close that break up substantially as you practice it and get used to it. And, related to that, if, even with a comfortable fingering, you try as hard as you can to make a physically necessary break as small as possible too early in the practicing process, it will sound abrupt and disruptive from the beginning, and it may be hard to move it towards sounding smooth and natural. 

So in the chord example above, the starting point is to allow it to come out, at first, something like Example 6, even if you want it in the end to sound like Example 7.

These notations are approximate. In particular the point of the first one is not for the chord to be a measured sixteenth-note, but for the player/student to allow it to be as short as necessary for the gesture to be comfortable. Again, practicing like this at first is the way to end up with the most convincing and non-disruptive breaks between distant notes or chords. 

Leap or jump or . . . ?

The words “leap” or “jump” for certain intervals have always bothered me. They refer to intervals above a certain size (not well defined) that is probably pretty similar to the size at which an interval becomes necessarily non-legato. The problem is that these words suggest extra energy and an approach in which the crucial or active moment is the leaving of the first note or chord of the interval. After all, a leap or jump happens when you push off from the ground or trampoline or diving board or whatever. The rest—the landing—happens of its own accord. For playing a large and disjunct interval on a keyboard instrument this imagery is wrong. The more the gesture that constitutes negotiating the interval can feel normal—no extra energy, no pushing off, no landing (in other words, no leaping, no jumping)—the more chance there is that the execution of the interval will be accurate and that the shaping of the articulation and timing will be under the player’s control.

The key to this is the realization that, exactly opposed to the imagery of a leap or a jump, in playing a necessarily disjunct interval you actually don’t have to do anything to release the first note or chord. It will be released whether it wants to or not: that is what it means for it to be a disjunct interval. The less you do to make that release happen, the better a chance it has of sounding natural, of avoiding sounding cut off or choked off, or of creating a feeling of brokenness in the line. 

Practicing releases

There are two good and complementary ways to practice the feeling of releasing a note without a leaping or jumping gesture when that note will be followed, after the silence that defines disjunct motion, by a note that is far away. The first practice technique is to omit that first note, but start with the hand hovering over where that note would have been. So, based on the first exercise above, we would let the (right) hand hover over the middle C area of the keyboard, and count 1-2-3-4-1, and then on the next “2” just play the high G. This should be one smooth simple gesture. This can (should) start out slowly and then speed up. A variant of this is to play the first note or a cluster of notes in that region of the keyboard, early and unmeasured. Then do the same counting and playing of (in this case) that high G, starting with the hand not hovering above the keyboard, but, in effect, hovering on the keyboard, as in Example 8.

Try not to be aware that your fingers are playing any notes. It helps for the sound to be a quiet one, or perhaps for there to be no stops on at all.

The second approach is to play the first note or chord without any planning when you will release it. Hold the note(s) until you have felt yourself relax, perhaps after a comfortable breath or two. When you are completely relaxed, release the note(s) by letting your arm float upwards off the keyboard, drawing (inevitably) your fingers with it. Again, there is no need for a separate felt release of a note if you are moving to a region on the keyboard that is far away. Let your arm float in the direction of the note that is to be played next, but don’t actually play it.

Example 9 presents a special case of disjunct motion created by a wide interval. At least there is a particular way of thinking about it that is fruitful. The wide interval that we seem to see is the low D to the middle B: an interval of an octave and a sixth. It is entirely likely, absent any other context, that the low note would be played with finger 5 and the high note with 1, though 2 could also make sense for the B. If these notes are to be played at anything other than a very slow tempo, it will be a challenge to get from the lowest to the highest note in a natural and smooth way. In part this is because the hand has just been moving downward, away from the direction of the “leap” that it must take. This observation, however, is the key to making the gesture work. If we don’t let the hand really move or turn down, and in particular if we play the low note lightly, essentially just brush it, then the whole thing becomes easier. It should feel as if the wide interval being negotiated is actually from the G to the B, and the low D is sort of an afterthought, just hooked on lightly as the hand goes by. 

We can practice this by leaving the low D out a few times, as demonstrated in Example 10. The fingering is determined by our awareness that we are going to add the low D back, but in every other respect we should forget about that for now. Keep the hand position comfortable, and remember everything that we have been saying about executing disjunct motion without tension. After you have played this a few times, add the low D back—lightly, and almost without noticing that it is there.

Pedal disjunct motion

In principle, the goal in executing disjunct motion in the pedals is the same as the goal when executing it in the hands. The awareness that we are releasing a note into silence should not be allowed to create tension or to manifest itself in a release that doesn’t sound the way that we want it to sound. But the physical situation is different, for all of the usual reasons that pedal playing is different: we are using a whole foot at a time, not the toes (which would be the analogy to fingers, but which could never work!) and therefore are using bigger muscles; the keys are bigger, and we are traveling longer distances; the sounds are (usually) deeper, and their relationship to the acoustics of the room accordingly different. Also, pedal lines are shared between the two feet a much greater proportion of the time than lines are shared between the two hands in manual playing. So quite often if we want to release a note early in a pedal line (that is, introduce an interpretive articulation) the foot releasing the note will remain, in effect, in silence for longer than that articulation, while the other foot plays the next note. The timing and feel of what that foot does often cannot be shaped as directly by the placement of the next note in the musical line.  

The meaning of large, disjunct intervals in pedal playing is also different. In a passage that looks like Example 11, nothing about the articulation of the wide intervals is determined by the physical side of pedal playing and, conversely, nothing about the physical side of pedal playing either helps or hinders us in making articulation choices. Only for the last motion, middle D to middle C, are there interesting choices to be made about pedaling, and possible implications of those choices for articulation. If this were a passage to be played in one hand, this situation would be exactly reversed.

An exercise such as Example 12 can be used in the manner of some of the manual exercises from the last couple of columns. First play it a few times as is—all the notes, alternating toes. Then leave out first the right-foot notes, then the left-foot notes. The purpose here is to try to let the releases of the notes feel the same whether the other notes are there or not. Try the same exercise, through the same stages, but playing all the notes with the heel, then alternating toe and heel in each foot’s line. Is the comfortable control of releases easier with one part of the foot than with another? Do the two feel similar or different? Is it easier to keep the feeling of the releases the same when playing in only one foot with heel or with toe? Or is it the same?

It is important to be sitting at the right height to enable pedal note releases to be tension-free. In general, if a player is sitting too low, the act of releasing a note involves too much work on the part of the upper leg, and can become tense, even to the point of being painful. This is true for releases that are not disjunct. But with releases into silence it is more exposed and easier to notice. If you are sitting too low, you may notice yourself releasing by pushing off rather than by floating up. 

Sitting too high tends to be less common. It creates problems playing notes in the first place, which are easy to notice. But it also creates problems for releasing notes. If you are sitting too high, then a release may seem to lead inevitably to toppling over towards the keyboards. The effort to avoid this can cause tension in pretty much every muscle of the body. This is a problem whether the release is to silence or to a next note. It is circular but still true that the correct height can be recognized by the absence of the problems created by sitting either too high or too low. Releasing notes into silence is the most focused way to observe these issues.

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

Disjunct Motion II

If we observe that some of our students treat notes that are released into silence differently from notes that are released into other notes, we can be fairly sure that this is a mental/psychological issue. There is nothing physical that actually requires that these notes be treated differently. Rather, the situation presents itself to the student’s mind as being different in a way that leads to a different physical behavior. The mental issue is probably, to a large extent, one of awareness and listening. But it can also be about not (yet) knowing how to extend the feeling of “normal” playing—playing one note after another—to playing notes that are followed by a silence that can seem like aimlessness on the part of the hands or feet. 

Why is it important for notes that are released to silence to feel the same as notes that are released to other notes? Is it possible that these situations should feel different? The goal should be for the player to exercise a wide range of control over the timing and sound of the releases of notes. I would say a “full” range of control, except that we should all expect to learn more and more, and we should never look for an end-point at which our control of anything is “full.”

Controlling releases

The starting point for control is always lack of tension. The different feeling that some students experience when releasing a note into a silence is usually one created by tension. The analogy to the feel of “regular” playing is an efficient way of learning to ease or avoid that tension. The actual range of sounds that we want to create and feelings that we use to create them when releasing a note to silence may be in part different from what we want otherwise. But that difference should never come about through inadvertence and especially never as a result of tension. It should be the result of listening, choice, and control.

In a kind of fruitful, paradoxical cycle, since the endings of notes that are followed by silence are more exposed—easier to hear—if we get truly comfortable releasing those notes lightly and smoothly, we can then take that feeling back to other situations, even if we derived the feeling initially from those other situations and learn even better how to play without tension overall. If there are ways of approaching the release of notes into silence that seem really different and particular to that situation, and that arise out of something other than reflex or tension, then adding those things to our technical arsenal cannot help but be valuable.

Here are several brief exercises to help with extending the feeling of “normal” playing to situations of disjunct motion, or of beginning to recognize what it feels like to do so. As usual with my exercises, the point is not so much the specific notes as the way(s) in which they are to be used. Most of these exercises have the unusual feature that part of working on them consists of selectively leaving some of the notes out.

Examples 1 and 2

With Example 1, play this a couple of times, slowly and with as light and relaxed a touch as possible. Keep it more-or-less legato, but don’t worry too much about articulation or style. The fingering 1-2-3-4-5 is fine to start with. Then play just the first four notes, leaving out the G, but trying not to change anything about the feeling of playing the four notes in the first measure, including (this is the main point) the feeling, timing, and sound of the release of the F. Go back and forth between playing the final note and not doing so. That final G will also be released to silence. But the focus for the moment is not on that, since we are focusing on a sort of “A/B” comparison. After you have done this as described a few times, you can play all five notes and try to bring the feeling of releasing the F that you have just been working on to the act of releasing the G. You can vary the length of that G, though I have printed it one way. Give it a fermata, in effect.

Then play all five notes with this fingering: 1-2-3-4-3. Let the release of the final note of the first measure be as smooth and light as it can be, and let the timing of that release be determined physically: that is, release it early enough that moving 3 onto the next note—G—is comfortable. Don’t worry about what the articulation that this creates sounds like—how large an articulation it is. Just let it feel light and smooth. Next, omit the final note. This time let the release of the F by the fourth finger feel the way it did when you were moving to the G with finger 3. This will be a bit different from the feeling of that release when you were about to play the G with finger 5. Both of these should be relaxed and light.

Note that in this case—the 1-2-3-4-3, followed by 1-2-3-4—[nothing]—you are releasing the fourth finger on F into silence either way, but in different contexts. One creates an articulation, the other ends the passage. Do those feel intrinsically different? Can they feel the same? Should they?

Try something similar with the note pattern found in Example 2. Start with the fingering 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1, and keep it slow, light, and basically legato. Then omit various notes—any of them, except for the first. Try to let the feeling of releasing the note immediately prior to any note that you omit be the same as the feeling of releasing that note when you go on to playing another note. Alternate between keeping a given note in and leaving it out to give yourself the most direct experience of keeping that feeling the same. 

Does it feel consistently different when you omit a note that is on the beat and when you omit one that is off the beat? If so, can you describe this difference to yourself? Can you make them feel the same? If so, is it by converging on one or the other of those feelings, or on either or both, or on something different?

All of this can be done on other notes and should also be done with the left hand. It is best to start in a place on the keyboard where your hand position is comfortable: perhaps as written or a fifth or an octave higher in the right hand, an octave or so lower in the left hand.

The principle behind the across-the-barline 4-3 fingering above is that of certain aspects of “early” fingering. If you play a longer passage with that sort of fingering there are various lessons to learn from the recurrent disjunct motion that that creates.

Examples 3 and 4

Try executing the fingerings in Example 3 a number of different ways. Make the 3-4 or 3-2 groupings legato, and place a break between those groupings and the next (third-finger) notes. At first let that break be defined only by feel. Make the release of finger 4 or 2 light and comfortable without worrying about the timing. Then try the same thing, but making those breaks larger—the notes played by finger 4 or 2 shorter. This is the crucial point: when you consciously make those breaks larger, keep the feeling the same. Don’t make the releases any more crisp or perform them with any more force or tension. Then move it in the other direction. Make those breaks as small as you possibly can without making the 4-3 or 2-3 motion into an awkward lurch. This will still be disjunct, and indeed it might not be very different from the first mode, governed entirely by feel. Experiment with amounts of break that are in between.

The next step is this: move away from legato for the 3-4 and 3-2 pairs. Try to make the articulation of all eight note-to-note transitions feel and sound (but especially feel) the same as one another.

Example 4 demonstrates a pattern with more than one note at a time, for trying out similar things. A good starting fingering is 1/3-2/4-3/5-2/4-1/3. Start by playing as written. Move on to leaving out the final chord, then experiment with leaving out other chords. Try this fingering as well: 2/4-3/5-2/4-1/3-2/4. This has something in common with the “early” scale fingering and can be put through the same paces.

Example 5

There is a specialized use to which any of the above exercises can be put, especially if they are elongated a bit, as you will see in Example 5. Start playing this with the usual light, relaxed touch. Allow yourself to start playing more firmly as you go, something like what you would do if you were playing on the piano and making a crescendo. Over the last few notes, move back toward playing as lightly as possible (diminuendo). By the time you reach the last note, you should be playing very lightly indeed and should release that note with a sense that the hand is floating gently off the key. You might want to do this over more ups and downs than I have notated.

You can create your own note patterns for doing this sort of practice. Alternate between moving from a given note to another note and moving from that note to silence. Sit comfortably, remain relaxed, breathe deeply but naturally.

Examples 6 through 8: Patterns and trills

Repeated note patterns and trills are special cases that allow for this sort of practice. Consider now Examples 6 and 7, alternating between the two. You have to make sure that you execute the first pattern lightly and release each finger as smoothly as possible before playing the same note with the other finger. Then, in the second pattern, try to keep the feeling the same.

For our purposes, there are a few uses to which you can put a trill, as in Example 8. After you choose a fingering for it—3/2, perhaps, or 4/3—you can play the trill pattern for an amount of time (a number of iterations of the two notes) that you haven’t settled on before you start playing it. Then at some point simply release a note and end the trill by letting your hand float lightly up off the keys. Don’t plan when you are going to do this, and don’t worry about which pitch it is that sounds last. Just do it when your hand feels light enough. This is another way of addressing the notion of getting used to releasing a note without any downward energy and without allowing the released note to feel accented. There is a bit of kinship between using a trill pattern this way and my so-called trill exercise, which is outlined in my column of February 2010, and can also be found here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf.

Next, you can do the same thing, but add to it the crescendo/diminuendo idea that I described above. Start playing very lightly (“quietly”) and increase pressure (get “louder”) in the middle of the trill. Then lighten back up as much as possible and allow that increasing lightness to move into the untimed release of the trill.

If you leave out every other note of a trill, it of course becomes a repeated note pattern. The fingering for those repeated notes that arises out of the trill fingering is one that does not involve changing fingers. If you have been playing the upper note of the trill with finger 4, for example, and you then leave out the lower note, you are left with repeating that upper note with 4. This is a non-optimal, or out-and-out bad, fingering for the repeated notes, especially if they are fast—and half-trill speed is still fast for this purpose. It is interesting to notice the difference in feel between these obvious repeated notes played with one finger and the same notes hidden, so to speak, in the trill itself. The chances are that the rocking motion of the trill renders the same-finger fingering of the hidden repeated notes perfectly fine, but that without that rocking motion the fingering is awkward at best.

You can try playing a trill for a while, or a few separate times in a row, and then moving directly to playing just one of the notes. How comfortable can that fingering be for that repeated note pattern? Is it possible to transfer anything—any feeling—from the comfortable rocking motion of the trill to the potentially awkward same-finger repeated-note fingering to make it as comfortable as possible? Does that teach anything about how to make those disjunct releases smooth? This exercise might be helpful in applying the feeling of a smooth, comfortable release for repeated notes to situations where an ideal different-finger approach is for some reason impossible.

Next month I will discuss, among other things, situations in which disjunct motion is created specifically by big leaps. I will extend some of this to pedal playing, where the physical situation is a bit different.

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.

Organ Method X

This follows directly from the end of last month’s column.

Take the same approach and follow the same procedures with these additional exercises. These are also four-finger exercises that allow for choices of fingering (2-3-4-5 and 1-2-3-4) and therefore for comparing the feel of different fingerings. They add different, slightly more complicated, note patterns (Examples 1 and 2).

Each of these can also be moved to different positions on the keyboard: moving to a different C as a starting place gives you a chance to practice the feel of the same patterns with different arm angles. When you start on other pitches, change the key signature in such a way as to keep the melodies the same. This will give you a chance to experience different physical shapes with these exercises. Try each of the eight short exercises starting on F, with B-flats, and starting on D, with F-sharps. These flats and sharps may very well change the feel of some of the alternate fingerings, perhaps making some of them distinctly uncomfortable—be on the lookout for this.

You can also start any of the exercises described so far on a raised key. For example, try starting on F#, with the full F# major key signature. Again, be aware of difference in the feel of the fingerings. Keep everything light and relaxed, and remember all of the points listed above.

As you move these exercises to different places on the keyboard, whether by octave or by transposing into another key, make a clear decision as to whether you should write out the new notes, or whether you can effect those changes at sight and by memory. There is nothing wrong with either approach: it is important, however, that you not be distracted from the playing and practicing by worrying about the notes. If the transposing at sight is even a little bit distracting, please go ahead and write things out. (This is absolutely crucial for a student who is new to keyboard playing, and should be done without fail at this stage in the learning process.) The same applies to trying different fingerings: write them in for now. You cannot practice a variety of fingerings effectively if you—even some of the time—don’t quite remember what fingering you are using. Again, if you are beginning your keyboard study with this work on organ, thinking about fingering is something that you can do—for yourself, in large part—even from the very beginning. Remembering your fingerings, especially different ones for the same passage, is tricky at first, though both necessary and completely feasible in the long run.

The following exercises expand the scope of the notes that you are playing: that is, the notes range a little bit farther over the keyboard (Examples 3 and 4). Each of these eight exercises suggests a slightly different approach to fingering. For example, the second and sixth exercises can be played simply by positioning the five fingers above the five different notes, and then playing those notes. (This gives, for the second exercise in the right hand the fingering 1-3-5-4-2-3-2-1; and for the seventh of these exercises—in the left hand—the fingering 5-3-1-2-4-3-4-5.) The first exercise, for the right hand, and the corresponding fifth, for the left hand, are the first pair that we have seen in which the fingerings in the two hands cannot mirror each other. This fingering works very naturally in the right hand: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-1-3-5. In the left hand the closest corresponding fingering—which would start out 5-4-3-2-1—ends up getting us into trouble (try it and see). Other fingerings will work, for example 4-3-2-1-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-2-1.

Playing scales

The last of these exercises for each hand is a scale. (In the physical act of playing, a scale is just a stepwise pattern that spans an octave. It is not intrinsically different from other stepwise patterns.) You should try playing this scale with a number of different fingerings. For example:

R.H.: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 

L.H.: 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5

R.H.: 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1

L.H.: 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4

R.H.: 3-4-3-4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3-2-3-2-3

(quite detached: basically eighth notes with eighth-note rests in between; light and relaxed)   

L.H.: 3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-3-4-3 

(likewise)

The first of these in each hand is the standard (piano) scale fingering. The second is a variant of that, which might be appropriate in some situations, but is included here simply to afford more practice with a variety of fingerings. The third is a version of the sort of scale fingering that was prevalent before about 1700. 

You should also try this scale—and any transpositions of it that you want to make—playing every note with the same finger. The three middle fingers are more natural for this than the thumb or the fifth finger. In doing this, you should expect the notes to be detached—but just enough that the motion from one note to the next is smooth, no “lurching”. You should also keep it slow—again so that the motion can be smooth. (It would indeed be quite unusual to play a long stepwise passage all with one finger, however, playing two or more notes in a row with one finger is common, and this is a good systematic way to practice it.) 

The third and seventh of these exercises are the first ones in which you are asked to spread the fingers in such a way that adjacent fingers do not necessarily play adjacent notes, though this happens only briefly. The first three notes of exercise two or six and the first three notes of exercise three or seven are the same: C, E, G. However, the exercises go on to different places, which suggests different fingerings. Exercises two and six can start like this:

Right hand: 1-3-5 [-4]

Left hand: 5-3-1 [-2]

However, exercises three and seven should probably start like this:

Right hand: 1-2-3[-5]

Left hand: 5-4-2 [-1]

The latter two measures of the third exercise—right hand—could be played with the “standard” scale fingering 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, or, just to practice a different feel, a variant: for example, 5-4-1-4-3-2-1-3. 

Thoughts on fingering

It should be clear by now that I am asking you, the student, to think about the fingering of these fairly simple exercises for yourself, albeit with some guidance. This is, of course, on purpose. Learning to devise your own fingerings is one of the most important aspects of your learning to play organ—or any keyboard instrument. The primary purpose of these exercises is to help you begin to explore the touch and sound of the instrument. However, while you are doing that, you can begin to gain experience thinking about fingering—rather than just implementing fingerings devised by someone else. This may take more time now, but it will save you a lot of time later on.  

For the beginner

If you are a beginner—having more or less never touched a keyboard instrument before—you should nonetheless have been able to do everything that you have encountered so far, if you have taken it slowly and carefully, and paid attention to the suggestions and instructions. It is extremely important that you feel very comfortable with everything that you have encountered so far before you go on. There is no harm in spending extra time with these beginning steps.  

Articulation

There can be a very direct relationship in organ playing in particular between fingering and articulation. Simply put, if a fingering does not allow you to keep holding one note in a passage while you start to play the next note, then going from that first note to that next note will be detached rather than legato. This is simply a fact, not a judgment or even a suggestion about what to do in any situation. There are many places in the organ repertoire where a fingering that actually requires a detached articulation and makes legato impossible—that is, a disjunct fingering—is appropriate or necessary or good. There are also many places where a legato fingering is a good idea or necessary, though there are indeed places where a legato fingering is impossible. The clearest example of disjunct fingering is, of course, playing successive notes with the same finger. Note that if a fingering allows legato, it usually does not require legato: you can release notes early.

If you neither need nor want legato in a particular situation, it is not necessary to create a legato fingering. A legato fingering is often—though certainly not always—more difficult than a disjunct fingering. A disjunct—non-legato—fingering that is comfortable will allow you to create a wide variety of articulations, short of full legato.

Other considerations

Physical comfort and logistic convenience are crucially important first principles of fingering. When you are trying to come up with a fingering for a passage—whether it is fairly simple, like the exercises above, or as complicated as the repertoire gets—the first step is to examine where the hand most naturally lies, what is the most comfortable hand position, what has the fewest steps and can thus be most easily remembered. This does not give all of the answers to all of the fingering questions, but is a good place to start. 

All else being equal, it is useful to plan fingering based on what is going to come next. (For example, that is the point of the different fingerings for the notes C-E-G in exercises three and seven.) Of course, fingering is also about where you have just come from, but the more you can plan fingering based on where you are going, the better.

When either hand is playing only one note at a time, fingering choices are usually very flexible. The more notes or voices a hand is playing, the more constrained the fingering will be. It is often better to change fingers on repeated notes—that is, to play successive notes that are the same as one another with different fingers. This is important enough that I will discuss it at some length later on.

For the experienced player

If you are coming to the organ having already studied and played another keyboard instrument, and if you have previously played pieces that are in two voices—that is, pieces in which there is indeed only one note at a time in each hand—find such a piece that you already know and bring it to the organ now. Work out fingering that is comfortable and in accordance with the discussion above, as much as possible. (This may be largely the same as the fingering that you have used for the piece previously on piano or harpsichord; it may differ from it somewhat.) Then practice the piece hands separately, slowly and carefully. Look at the keyboard as little as possible; an occasional glance is fine, but by and large keep your eyes on the music. As with the exercises above, you should listen carefully for articulation, and you should listen to the sonority. 

Try out different registrations. Do not assume in advance that a certain kind of sound will be right for the piece and other sounds wrong: try things and listen. A strictly two-voice piece is always a candidate to play on two manuals. Try your piece out that way, in all sorts of different configurations. Does it feel more comfortable or natural to have the right hand on a higher manual than the left or the other way around? Or are they both equally comfortable?

(The next section, which will constitute next month’s excerpt, consists of a short two-voice piece by Samuel Scheidt, with a discussion about fingering it and practicing it. It is geared towards those students who have little or no prior keyboard experience but who have gone through the exercises and practicing described so far. That is followed by exercises in which each hand plays more than one note at a time, with further discussion about how to make fingering choices and how to practice.)

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

Velocity IV

My approach to helping someone to play fast has been rooted in ways of discovering that the fingers of each hand separately can move very fast when playing one line or voice—one note at a time. There are two parts to this. One is discovering that our fingers can move as fast as the music requires—and thus the limitations on velocity are mental rather than physical. Another is exploring ways of knowing what’s coming up in a passage so that we don’t stumble or hesitate because of uncertainty. This permits us to turn the potential to move our fingers fast enough, or faster, into a reality in performance. 

There are several parallel next steps. One is achieving reliable velocity in one hand when that hand is playing more than one voice. There are two meaningfully different subcategories of this: a hand playing two or more contrapuntal lines, and a hand playing chords. (These can shade over into each other.) Another is achieving appropriate velocity with the two hands together. This can also be subdivided: each hand playing one voice, one hand playing a line and the other hand chords, each hand playing multiple-note texture, and so on. 

Fingering and relaxation

It is easier to achieve the physical and mental relaxation and focus that are necessary for velocity when you are only doing one thing. If a hand is only playing one note at a time, it is trivially easy for the hand to relax—playing one note at a time can’t require the hand to be in an awkward position, it can’t force tension-prone fingerings, and, in principle, it permits any finger that is not actually depressing a note to relax fully. (Psychologically that can be more easily said than done.) Playing more than one note at a time in a hand doesn’t satisfy any of the above, and it gives us more to think about. So fingering planning is both more constrained (the more notes you must play at once, the fewer different ways there are to deploy the fingers over those notes) and trickier in its relation to the comfort necessary to move quickly. And the need for preparation is even greater. 

The Gigue from Bach’s D minor English Suite is almost legendarily difficult. It is meant to be at least fairly fast in performance. It has a number of moments in which one hand keeps up a sustained trill while also playing other notes. Thus it is an interesting test case here. Example 1 shows this sort of writing.

There is a lot more like this in the movement, but this particular bit is best as a velocity exercise, since there is absolutely no way to isolate the trill in one hand. It is possible to play it in either hand (though significantly harder in the right). This can work as an exercise for the right hand, the left, and then for both together.

Let’s start with the trill into the left hand. Most people would play it that way, since the other material in the left hand is less complex than that in the right hand. (It is certainly how I would play it, but we are again using this passage as an exercise, and thus sort of exploiting it. We will also consider how it works with the trill in the right hand. Just as with the passage from the Toccata in C Major, BWV 564, which we looked at earlier in this series, our shameless exploitation of the passage as an example of unbridled velocity does not imply anything about a good tempo for performance of the piece.)

As Example 2 shows, the notes of the trill can be thought of for this purpose as thirty-second notes, and the trill fingering will almost certainly have to be 1/2. The other (bass) notes can be played with a selection of 3, 4, 5 based on the player’s particular hands, habits, and preferences. (Watch out for a fingering that cocks the wrist outward more than necessary. Avoiding this will probably be easier the more you use 4 and 5 rather than 3.) Once you have decided on fingering, this is the practice protocol for the present purpose:

1) Play middle C and the first seven notes of the trill. That is, get to the moment when you would play the G#, but don’t play that note. 

2) Repeat this, getting it ever faster. Try to feel the trill notes the same way that you did the single-voice velocity exercises from earlier—that is, keep them light, with the hand not bearing into the keys, but rather feeling like it is floating upward a bit. Try not to let playing and releasing the middle C affect you. Notice it just enough to make sure that when you release the note (more or less as you release the fourth note or play the fifth note of the trill) you don’t let that release gesture put any tension into the hand. 

3) After you have done this enough that it feels natural and is at a tempo that sounds and feels very fast, add the G#. Again, the point is not to let the addition of this note change the feeling of anything. Play it, but try not to notice that you are playing it. Keeping the release of the C light is the prerequisite for being able to play the G# lightly. 

4) When this is comfortable, add the next few trill notes, without playing the A, regardless of whether you are adding enough trill notes that you have in theory reached the moment for that note. 

The next step is to do the same thing starting elsewhere: on the second beat, where the prevailing notes are G# and F—going through the moment where the A is played, to the moment where the bass note is a B-natural—or beginning at the A and F, and going just over the barline. After you have done this with each segment, the next step is to string it together. First, remind yourself of the feeling of just the initial segment, then starting at the beginning and going through, say, a half-measure, then starting at the beginning and going through the whole measure. The point is to be doing this at a very fast tempo. As you cross each of the spots where you began drilling new segments, make sure to keep the feeling of relaxation going: use your memory of starting at that point to renew that feeling. 

Learning, practicing, 

and lightness

This process is really three things at once: a way of learning this passage; a template for practicing other fast passages with more than one thing going on in a hand; and a way to focus on the feeling of lightness, preparation, and keeping going. In time—that is, after practicing a number of passages this way—the third of these will come to predominate. It will become possible to recapture that feeling without going through a process of this sort or in this amount of detail. 

This is all akin to regular, everyday practicing, in which we break things into small units and add complexity as simpler things become solid. The main difference is that in regular practicing, we start very slowly and increase tempo gradually. It is important never to get ahead of a tempo that feels comfortable. Here, while we don’t want to use a practice tempo that makes things fall apart, we are eager to live in the region of high velocity as promptly and as much as possible. We learn to move our fingers very fast over the notes by—initially and for as long as necessary—keeping the segments that we are playing very short. This is an important difference in emphasis in the structure of practicing.

To use this Bach passage as an exercise for playing two voices together in the right hand at high speed, the procedure would be the same: use the trill notes as an anchor and add notes from the upper voice gradually. The trill will again probably be best played with fingers 1 and 2, and the upper notes probably mostly with 4 and 5: perhaps 5-4-5-5-4-5, etc. It might be a more useful exercise to double the number of trill notes in relation to the sixteenth notes of the upper voice (i.e., make them sixty-fourth notes). The first step is to play the A and the F together and keep the trill notes going without adding any more of the notes from the upper voice. The next step is to start this way, but add the second note of the upper voice—the G#—and so on, following the template that we used above for the left hand. Progress through this passage will be slower than it was for the left-hand version, because there are more notes.

It is equally interesting to use the passage as an exercise in working both hands together up to as fast a speed as you can. Start by going through the process described above for the lower two voices in the left hand. Then go over the upper voice by itself as a right-hand part. Then go back to the beginning and play the passage in extremely short bursts: as short as it takes to enable you to do it fast. This might be a dotted-eighth-note’s worth at a time, or less. The technique of holding a note as if there is a fermata while you remind yourself of the feeling of playing the next note or two, and then playing only that next little bit extremely fast, can work very well in this case.

Example 3 is a contrapuntal passage from Brahms’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. The student can combine various techniques. In the first quoted measure in the right hand, after working out fingering, one could play the second voice (B-A-G#-rest-F#) a few times, progressively faster, then add the upper voice one note at a time. Or play the two voices on the downbeat (E and B) holding those notes indefinitely long. Then, only when ready, play the second and third beats—both voices together—as fast as possible, not going past the third beat. Then start on the second beat, stopping on the D# in the upper voice. In something like the third quoted measure—with its more consistently active voices—the player can practice each voice separately, in the normal manner, but as a short enough sample that it can get quite fast quite efficiently. Practice each voice—with the intended fingering, in the ways that I outlined for individual voices in the last few columns—until it can go very fast. Then put the two voices together in chunks of perhaps three eight-notes-worth at a time. The principles are always the same: use an amount of planning that makes everything utterly predictable, focus on short bits (which makes the predictability easier to achieve in the first place and to maintain), and keep everything light and relaxed.

In a chordal passage, the notion of practicing voices separately doesn’t apply. In keeping with the principle of simplifying, if we aren’t going to practice separately notes that end up being played together, then it is even more important to practice in small increments. Example 4 is an excerpt from near the end of Scherzo, Sortie in D Major by Lefébure-Wely.

The right-hand part provides a good opportunity to practice chords. The fingering will probably fall into place quite naturally: a lot of 5-3-1, 5-2-1, 4-2-1, and so on, depending on one’s hand shape. Once fingering has been worked out, playing and holding a chord, then playing the next two chords as quickly as possible, will probably be the most fruitful technique. The left-hand part is a typical opportunity to practice playing octaves fast, using this same technique. 

What, in the end, is the point of this discussion of velocity? In using a passage from the repertoire as an exercise here, I have said that in doing so I am misrepresenting that passage—that we are exploiting it or latching onto it as parasites. This happens because no one can say whether a given (fast) passage is or isn’t meant to be played at the outer limits of a player’s ability to play fast. In order to practice playing as fast as we possibly can, we subject passages of music to being played (perhaps) faster than we really think they should go. (Even if a passage will be a candidate for actually being played that fast, we don’t know that until we have worked on getting it that fast.) The overriding purpose of doing this—and especially in its application to our teaching, and therefore to the learning process of our students—is to drive home through example the basic message: command of velocity is about preparation. With rare exceptions, limits on velocity are not inherent or physical. I actually think it is better to practice, as exercises for this purpose, pieces or passages that you know are not going to go that fast. That separates the work on velocity from a host of other normal, musical considerations. Then when you want to work on a passage that does indeed visit the outer reaches of how fast you ever want to play, you will know the techniques for getting it to be solid and comfortable at that sort of speed.

The old-fashioned and very sound idea that you must prepare your pieces beyond 100% (I first heard it in connection with Jascha Heifetz, a quintessential virtuoso performer) for them to be 100% in performance applies here. Certainly correct preparation is not just about speed—it is perhaps more importantly about the inner understanding of everything that you hope to bring to the music interpretively, rhetorically, expressively. But since it is harder to execute a piece faster than slower, it is always prudent to know that you could indeed play your pieces faster than you intend to. This should ideally lead to relaxation in performance—a relaxation born out of lack of fear.

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!