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.

Disjunct Motion I

Allow me to begin with a word about terminology. I have long used the expression “disjunct motion” to refer to the relationship between one musical event and the next in the act of playing; this includes, but is not limited to, “non-legato.” The details of what I mean by disjunct motion are the main focus of this column; I will return to them at some length below. To avoid confusion and because it suggests an interesting thing to talk about, I want to acknowledge that the term “disjunct motion” is also sometimes used to mean something different—what I would call “motion by skip” (as opposed to “by step”), that is, melodic intervals that are larger than any kind of “step,” intervals where the two notes have other notes “in between.”

Skips and steps

Observe two Bach pedal lines, the first (Example 1) from the Prelude section of BWV 533, the second (Example 2) from the Fantasia section of BWV 542. In Example 1, the notes alternate skip and step, whereas the next group of sixteenth notes is all in motion by skip. However, as a musical/esthetic/artistic reality, they are the same melody, rewritten to create a difference in sonority, or perhaps in acoustics or registration, in effect, or something analogous to greater stereo separation.

Example 2 shows a pattern of eight notes descending by step, followed by a big upward skip. This happens three times in a row. What Bach was almost certainly getting at was the effect of a long descending scale with each of the upward leaps being somewhat concealed by acoustics, registration, and performance, so as to trick the listener into hearing an impossibly long descending scale, descending impossibly low. (This effect seems to have something in common with the phenomenon of breaks in mixtures, and also perhaps to be helped out by the breaks in the mixtures with which it is played.)

Sometimes the skip/step divide is taken to imply something about performance or execution, usually that stepwise motion should normally be played legato, and motion by skip should normally be detached. I doubt that anyone applies this slavishly or automatically, or would maintain that it should be an absolute rule rather than a guideline. I have always been skeptical of it even as a guideline. Articulation choices seem to be more about rhythm and harmonic direction than about melodic shape. Since non-stepwise intervals are more likely than stepwise intervals to form part of the same harmony, you could make the case that, all else being equal, they are more likely to work legato or even with noticeable overlap. (This also depends on registration and acoustics.) The point is that the relationship between melodic shape and articulation is fluid and changeable, very susceptible to being handled differently, with great success, by different players. 

Of course on organ (manuals in particular) and harpsichord, some intervals are wide enough that their performance must be non-legato. This is, as far as any inherent link between “skip” and “non-legato” is concerned, a particular case that doesn’t imply anything about musical necessity in other cases. Interestingly, it will prove directly useful as part of the work on issues discussed below.

(Here’s another tangent. I did a bit of Internet searching to remind myself of what people were saying about certain aspects of melodic intervals. And I reminded myself that it is extremely easy to find someone saying in an overly simplified manner that such-and-such always should be done in a certain way—for example, that skips always ought to be detached. It is important to be aware that any student at any time may have unknowingly absorbed a too simple, too categorical, insufficiently nuanced way of looking at any aspect of what we do. This kind of thing has always happened, but it used to take a personal encounter with someone who seemed to be an “authority” combined with some inadequate communication. Often the “authority” didn’t want what he or she said to be taken too categorically, but the opportunity to explore nuance wasn’t there. It is just plain easier now for information to seem more solid than it is, or even to seem right when it is wrong. I write this as someone who is by no means anti-computer or anti-internet. I am continually astonished at the good that these technologies can do, and I use them all the time. But there are also pitfalls.)

Defining disjunct motion

For the purpose of this discussion, by disjunct motion I mean any playing situation in which a note is released not directly to another note, but to silence or space. This can be about articulation; any sort of detached playing is an example of disjunct motion, whether it is specified by the composer, a choice by the player, or physical necessity (very wide intervals or something to do with many notes in one hand). Disjunct motion is also found where there are notes followed by rests and at the ends of pieces, sections, or movements. Repeated notes, on organ and harpsichord but not on piano or necessarily on other instruments, also fall into this category, all but the last note of any string of repeated notes. There is disjunct motion that covers all of the prevailing sound, when there is only one note being played and it is released into silence, or when there are multiple notes being played and they are all released into silence, whether they are conceived of as a chord or as notes in different voices. There is also disjunct motion that occurs in one voice or one part of a texture, where the release into silence is conceptual, a release into the absence of a next note in that voice or that part of the texture, while sound continues elsewhere. Any release into silence is really a release into background sound, including the ambient sounds that we don’t think of as being relevant to our music, but most importantly including the sounds or reverberation created by acoustics.

Another way of looking at it is this: that disjunct motion occurs when notes are released to the feeling of not playing a next note, rather than to the feeling of playing a next note. That is, the feeling as distinct from the sound. This maps one-to-one onto the above way of describing it, I believe. But it gets at something important to the player. Every note that we ever play is going to be released, eventually, even the notes of this performance: http://www.aslsp.org/de/home.html. And the nature of the release of every note is important. That has to do with the placement in time of the conceptual moment of release, and also, in many cases, the timing of the release itself: how slowly or quickly the player carries out the act of releasing the note(s). But when the note is being released into silence, the stakes are different: maybe higher, since the actual release of a note that is being followed by another note is partially covered up. Or maybe not higher but just different: the release of one note and the initiation of the next note are part of a transaction, and the way that transaction is carried out is important (and can vary meaningfully). In any case, the experience to the player of releasing a note to “not playing” is quite different from the experience of releasing a note to “playing.” This difference is both physical and psychological. It doesn’t have to be physical. There is nothing about the absence of a next note that really, physically, dictates anything about the nature of a release. But it can feel and be different physically because of ways in which it is different psychologically. This difference is present regardless of whether the release is a result of an articulation decision or comes about because of the presence of rests or because a piece is over. It is the fact that releasing a note into silence feels different from moving into a next note that unites all of these situations.

Tension in releasing notes

When disjunct motion is a problem or an issue for a player—including when that player is our student—it is usually because that player has developed an unconscious tendency to approach the release of a note into silence with extra tension. This tension can occur right at the moment of release, or it can begin to build in anticipation. This tension can accumulate whenever it begins. When the disjunct motion arises from an articulation choice by the student (or given to the student by the teacher), tension will probably manifest itself in the release’s being both a bit early and a bit too quick. This is because of a sort of urgent desire to make sure that the articulation really happens. It can feel like “this is something I have to do, whereas up till now I have just been playing the notes as they’re written.” 

When a note is released into the silence of rests that are part of a composition, the effect of this tension may well be the opposite, to make extra sure to hold notes long enough, “as written,” and thus to release some of the notes late. It can also lead to all such releases being too much the same, since they are all being measured and compared to a “correct” ideal. When the notes that we are talking about are released into the end of a piece, movement, or section, the result of this tension is (surprisingly often) to make the student manifestly quit listening or paying attention before releasing the note or chord, as if the impending end means that the prevailing sound doesn’t matter. 

Problems in releasing notes

Not everyone experiences these issues, nor experiences them in the same way. As with other technical or mental performance issues, this only needs to be addressed as a problem when it is a problem. But I see many students who do one or more of the following: play a passage beautifully and with enviable relaxation, but then come to an articulation and make the release of that note with a nearly-whole-body gesture that breaks the rhythm and sounds awkward; hold a note or chord before a rest a bit too long into the time allotted to the rest and then release it by pushing down at the keys and rebounding off of them; look at me or even talk about how a piece or passage went before releasing the final note or chord. I don’t think that more experienced players are immune to this either: I myself am not, although an awareness of it has certainly led me to work on it and to avoid it most of the time. (I will confess that I am sometimes complicit in a student’s quitting mentally on the last note of a piece. I will nod, smile, point at something in the music, perhaps even talk, before the final note or chord has been released and the sound has died away. This is a significant mistake and sends the message to the student that everything that needs to be done is over and that the impending release doesn’t matter or is trivial to execute. I try not to do this, but do not always succeed. Writing a column about it should help!)

Next month I shall give several exercises and practice strategies for addressing these issues. I close here with one simple exercise, shown in Example 3, for noticing the difference in feel between releasing notes when the hand is moving on to another note and doing so when the hand is going into rest. Execute both of the following and notice how they feel.

This should be done lightly and not too fast, the first line basically legato, but without worrying too much about the exact articulation or other aspects of the musical shape. For some of us the feeling of the releases will be quite different, for others less so. This is a diagnostic tool or a way of beginning to engage with this issue. It can also be used when it seems to be a problem that needs to be worked on. I will take it from here next month. ν

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].

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

Velocity III

As a brief addendum to the latter part of last month’s column, I must mention that among famous organ pieces, the Widor Toccata is almost preternaturally well designed for the kind of practicing in altered rhythms that I mentioned in that column. Playing those sixteenth-note mordent-and-arpeggio figures first in fast groups of eight notes starting on the beat, then in fast groups of eight notes starting just after each beat, is remarkably effective for learning the piece itself and is also a good test case for my method. It is also undeniably fun to try to get at least a stretch of that piece as fast as you possibly can—and again a good test case for this approach. As with the Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which we examined last month, it is not by any means necessary or even good to play the piece as fast as you possibly can. And with the Widor, there is an interesting history about tempo, since the composer changed the metronome markings through different editions, and he recorded it at a slightly different speed—slower than his slower metronome suggestion. 

This piece—or specifically the passages that are in the shape of the opening in the right hand—is also a good one for practicing stringing together smaller very fast gestures: seeing how long you can keep it going at a tempo defined not by what the music requires, but by simply trying to transfer the “fast, light drumming on a table” feeling to patterns on the keyboard. Once you have practiced two or three adjacent half-notes worth of the sixteenth-note pattern, try going through all of that material, again sometimes playing sixteen or twenty-four notes with the beat, sometimes playing the opening note and holding it for an unmeasured time, and then playing the following two or three groups in one gesture as fast as you can, ending on, and holding, the next downbeat. 

Utter predictability

Of course, this is all based on having achieved the utter predictability that is the foundation of being able to play fast. For one-note-at-a-time lines, that comes from a combination of sensible fingering and enough slow practice to get the elemental learning of the patterns to be way beyond just solid. The reason for considering building a potentially fast passage up out of smaller components (specifically as part of the process of getting it fast, or of testing and figuring out how fast it can be) is that the smaller the bit of music, the more promptly utter predictability can be achieved. In practicing a passage for really learning it—rather than as an exercise in moving around notes as quickly as possible—a player can decide to learn a longer stretch of music and move it up to tempo gradually (this is probably the most common method) or to learn very small bits, and get them up to (or beyond tempo) more quickly, and then work on putting them together. 

Achieving lightness

This feeling that we get from the drumming-fingers exercise of being able to move the fingers even more quickly than playing pieces will actually require is based quite crucially on keeping things light. It is easy to experience what happens if this lightness is compromised. Go back to simple drumming, then selectively tighten up various component parts of the physical mechanism that delivers your fingers to the table or chair-arm: shoulders, biceps, wrist, the fingers themselves. Each of these tightenings will have some effect on the ease, speed, and fluency of the drumming. The tightening of the fingers will be the worst, and will probably bring the drumming down below the velocity that you would like to be able to achieve. It will also most likely hurt. (Don’t do too much of it.) 

Playing lightly is always a good idea, always important. However, in trying to play anything that is fast enough that its speed is an issue, lightness is beyond just a good idea: it is a necessity. (Light, for this purpose, means with not too much more force than you need to make the keys go down, and with no tension whatsoever. It is the absence of tension that is the most important. The actual force of the downstroke of each finger is not as significant, as long as it is reasonably light, and as long as nothing in that downstroke predisposes the finger to have trouble coming back up, which is an impediment to velocity. Holding on to the keys after you have played them is to be avoided altogether. Experimenting with using so little force that you are almost not quite depressing the keys is a good idea, just to get the feel of it.)  

My so-called trill exercise (about which I wrote most recently in the December 2013 issue) is really about incorporating lightness and absolute lack of tension into fast playing. The trill in that case stands in for any fast playing, and, of course, as with the patterns that we have been dealing with here, it is fully predictable. (That exercise can also be found online here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf). It works well to do a session of this exercise, then do something else for a while (practice something else, or get away from the keyboard altogether) and then play short excerpts from whatever passage you are working on playing at a challenging fast tempo, trying to remember and recapture the feeling of the trill exercise.

Tension and playing fast

Here are a couple of useful points to remember about the interaction between tension and fast playing. Physical tension, which physically inhibits speed, can have mental tension as one of its causes. And in turn, of course, nervousness about the ability to play a passage fast enough or to play it well at the appropriate tempo can be a cause of mental tension. This creates a sort of downward spiral or pernicious feedback loop. Part of the point of using the “drumming on a table” model to convince players that absolute velocity is not often the problem is to break this feedback loop. Also, there is a statement that goes like this: “If we want to accomplish something more, we have to exert ourselves more; playing faster is a form of accomplishing more, therefore to play faster we have to exert ourselves more; and exerting ourselves more means pushing harder.” Of course no one is going to spell this out: when you do it is obvious that it doesn’t add up. But it is a surprisingly pervasive underlying assumption, and we can help our students to let go of it by pointing it out.

(Playing very fast can seem like a tightrope act. The most instinctive way to avoid falling when we are afraid of falling is to hang on tight. This hanging on tight physically is, as I said above, fatal to velocity and to ease of playing in general. But hanging on tight while playing must be mental only: focus, concentration, paying attention to the music or to memory, and so on.) 

Transition points

Transition moments, where the hand has to move in some way, rather than just present fingers to the keyboard in one place, are a big part of the challenge when it comes to velocity. If there were no such moments, we could pretty much just transfer the drumming on a table feeling directly to at least any one-line passages. (But music would be much less interesting!) In real music these transition moments happen sometimes because we effectively just run out of fingers in one position: that is, they happen of necessity. Sometimes they happen because although we could encompass a certain set of successive notes in one position, that is not the most comfortable way to do so. But sometimes also they happen because the change in hand position creates an interpretive effect that we want. This latter situation is found in abundance in “early” fingering, that is, certain fingering patterns that were common and characteristic during and before the early eighteenth century. (Any identification of fingering approaches with any time period is really about tendencies, not absolutes.) These patterns involve using smaller chains of fingers to play small groups of notes, and then turning or moving the hand to present the next small group of fingers to the next set of notes. This was probably done to create articulation or to keep the hands in positions that enabled them to control the sensitive action of the prevailing kinds of instruments as minutely as possible, or some combination of these things. In any case, these fingerings routinely deprive the hand of the ability to sit over a group of notes and just drum those notes out. How does this relate to velocity?

Examples 1 and 2

Considering Examples 1 and 2, do these two fingerings for a basic scale fragment have significantly different ceilings to the tempo at which they can be played? Based on experience with the “drumming on a table” model, I would say that most players could execute the first fingering in not much more than half or two-thirds of a second. (That’s a “tempo” of quarter-note equals 700 or more.) The second fingering? I can’t picture anyone playing it that fast. Someone could surprise me, but certainly for most of us it can’t go at that speed. It is not the “drumming on a table” situation, because the transition points are too many and too frequent: every other note. 

Examples 3 and 4

Now considering Example 3, I feel pretty sure that most people could execute this one, including the transition moment going across the bar line, almost as fast as they could execute example 1: not quite, but almost. So in part it seems to be recovering from the transition, or executing multiple transitions in a row that lowers the ceiling on velocity. 

Practicing this sort of early fingering with a view to getting it fast can involve breaking things up into small units, and applying some of the principles of both my trill exercise and the sort of altered-rhythm practicing that we have been looking at. I have given two fingerings (for the right hand) for this pattern in Example 4. The upper one, with the hand remaining in one position, is for comparison. 

Using the lower fingering, try playing only the first note, then, in an untimed manner, only when you feel relaxed and ready, play the next two notes quickly. Prior to actually playing, map out the feeling of the fingering in your mind. There should be a small articulation between the second note and the third note. (There also can be one between the first note and the second note.) It doesn’t matter exactly how large or small these articulations are as long as the feeling is comfortable. The second finger should be released lightly before moving 3 over it. Don’t hold 2 to the point where the whole hand begins to turn upside down. Try doing the same thing starting on the third note and going to the first note of the second measure. Then try adding notes: start on the first note, wait until you feel relaxed and ready, and play four successive notes. 

Try various small units like this. (You can always try the same groups of notes using the upper fingering, to be reminded of the differences in the feeling.) After you have gone over all sorts of smaller groupings like this, try playing the passage itself as lightly and quickly as you can. (It can repeat indefinitely. Just do it several times, and don’t keep going if it feels stiff.)

Another aspect of the relationship between this sort of fingering and velocity turns things around. If you want an articulation at a certain point, then if you program that articulation into the fingering—using fingers that create a transition moment that makes a space or breath—then that articulation will automatically be there at any tempo. In Example 3 with the given fingering, you will create a small articulation at the bar line. That articulation is not dependent on anything that you do other than executing the fingering. It will be there, proportionate to the tempo, at any tempo. If you change the fingering to 5-4-3-2-1, and still want that articulation (between 2 and 1) then you have to remember to do it on purpose, consciously lifting 2 early by just the right amount. Above a certain speed it becomes very hard; above another, higher tempo, it actually becomes quite impossible. 

In the course of working out these last couple of columns, I have realized that it would be a mistake to try to include a discussion of velocity in more complicated textures here. That would constitute giving it short shrift. Therefore, I will devote a fourth column to that, next month. In addition to talking about two-voice and multiple-voice textures and chords, and a bit about getting comfortable playing fast in both hands together, I will return to some of the questions from the beginning of the first column in this series and talk a bit about the connections between gaining greater ability to play with great velocity and aspects of interpretation and effective performance.

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.