On Teaching

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.

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].

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 director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. He writes a blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method IX

This excerpt begins the section on manual playing, in which I offer guidance to the student who has already played piano or harpsichord, on how to adapt that playing to the organ. This is, as I wrote in the Preface to the method—which appeared as the October 2012 column—mostly about how to practice. One model for an approach to learning organ (manual) playing for a student who is already a keyboard player is this: sit down at the organ, play around, and see what you notice. Of course, this is potentially inefficient. There is no reason that a student should lack the advantage of some guidance from someone more experienced, in person or through writing. However, this hands-off, unguided approach is in fact the essence of what a musician/student should do. The way to learn what sounds and touch on the organ are like is to play the organ, notice everything that you hear and feel, and respond to what you notice. Although I think that at least on grounds of efficiency it is a good idea for a student to accept guidance from teachers (or for that matter from method-writers), I also think that such guidance should remove as little autonomy and initiative from the student as possible. The opening of the section on manual playing—the part included this month—is a general guide to starting the process. 

I should mention that, whereas in the column from last October I wrote that the work on playing manuals and pedals together would form part of the section on pedal-playing (the section that was printed in several columns ending last month), I have since decided to shift it to after the section on manual playing. This seems to me to make more sense, although of course in the end students can uses chapters of this book in any order that they want.

Position

Take a seat on the organ bench. If you have already begun to work on pedal playing, then remember to position yourself on the bench—and to position the bench itself—in the way that you have found best for pedal work. It is not a good idea to get accustomed to a different bench position for manuals-only music, pedals-only music, and the large segment of the organ repertoire that uses hands and feet together. (Though once in a while, later on, it might be a good idea to change position for a particular piece that presents some sort of unusual challenge.) If you are coming to this section of the book without yet having begun to work on pedal playing, then position the bench at a height that allows you to relax your legs completely either without depressing any pedal keys, or only depressing them lightly with your toes. Of course, while practicing manuals without pedal, you should rest your feet in whatever way that the organ you are playing provides. Usually there is a bar low down on the bench that is meant to accommodate the feet when they are not being used to play. 

Since the vast majority of organs have at least two—often three—manuals, there is no way to sit that gives you one position in relation to the manual keys. The higher manuals are both higher and farther away. In trying to work out the right distance from the manuals at which to sit, it is important to make sure that you do not feel cramped. If you are too close to a keyboard, it is extremely difficult to play without tension. You should never feel that your shoulders need to be drawn upwards or back in order to give your hands and arms room to address the keyboards. Your shoulders should also, however, not be hunched forward. Your posture on the bench should be as relaxed and comfortable as possible. As you get accustomed to playing, you may make changes in the exact distance from the keyboards that you choose to sit. There is no “correct” posture for your arms while playing the organ. That is, your elbows, for example, do not have to be in one particular place or one particular alignment with your torso; your wrists need not be consistently above, below, or even with your forearms or hands. These things will vary with your own physique and habits.   

Once you are seated on the bench, notice where on each keyboard each of your hands most naturally falls—the place on the keyboard at which your forearms, the middle three fingers of each hand, and the keys themselves line up straight, while your shoulders and elbows are in a comfortable place. This will probably be roughly an octave below middle C for the left hand and an octave above middle C for the right hand: a bit farther out from the center for players who are particularly broad-shouldered or who prefer to keep their elbows out from their sides. This is the place on the keyboard where it is easiest to play without tension. Therefore, it is the best place to use as a sort of laboratory for learning or trying out various aspects of organ touch and various fingering skills. 

Begin to play

Now draw a stop or two (you can revisit the Introduction for a reminder about drawing and combining stops) and play some individual notes in the region of the keyboard described above. What do you notice? What is the touch like? How does it compare to the instruments with which you are most familiar—piano, harpsichord, or others? Is it heavy or light or in-between? Try playing a few notes with your fingers as far out on the keys as possible—almost slipping off to the front—and then with your fingers in the middle of the keys. Do these different positions feel different? Try playing notes in this same region of each of the different keyboards of the organ at which you are seated. Do the keyboards feel different from one another? Try engaging a coupler. Does this change the feel of either of the keyboards involved? If you depress a key very slowly, with as little force as possible, does that seem to sound or feel different from what you experience if you strike a key with more force? The answers to these questions will vary—sometimes a lot—from one organ to another. Whatever you notice or learn at the first organ keyboard at which you sit and play is, of course, only a beginning. 

Next play some simple note patterns, one hand at a time, along the lines of these, the first for the right hand, the second for the left (Examples 1 and 2). I have located these short exercises in the region of the keyboard that I have identified as the most natural for your arms and hands to reach. However, if for you that region is a little bit higher or lower, then start out playing the same four-note pattern using whatever specific notes seem most comfortable. (Stick to natural notes for the moment.) Try the following different fingerings—right hand: 2-3-4-5-4-3-2 or 1-2-3-4-3-2-1; left hand: 5-4-3-2-3-4-5 or 4-3-2-1-2-3-4.

What do you notice about the different fingerings? Do they seem to result in differences in hand position or in where on the key you play each note? Does one feel more comfortable or more natural than the other? 

Next, try the same exercise about a fifth closer to the center of the keyboard. If you started on the notes that I pictured, move to this (Examples 3 and 4). Try the same different fingerings, and look out for the same things. Then play the same pattern near the middle of the keyboard, perhaps with each hand crossing or including the note middle C. Try this on all of the keyboards of the organ that you are playing. 

In playing this short exercise bear the following in mind:

1) Keep everything relaxed: hands, arms, shoulders, and your entire body.

2) As long as you are physically relaxed, do not worry for now about the shape or position of the hand: the relationship between the fingers and the rest of the hand; the height of the wrist; the height of the wrist or hand in relation to the arm. All of these things are individual and flexible. There might turn out to be right and wrong ways for you to approach these things, but they will be right or wrong for you specifically: they will emerge in the course of your learning—they can’t be dictated in advance. There are aspects of sideways hand position—that is, how the hand is turned or cocked side-to-side—that are important, and that tend to work out the same way for most players. You will begin to work on this a bit later on.

3) The fingers need not always be parallel to the keys. It is fine for the finger playing a note to be at any angle to that key, as long as the part of the finger actually playing the note touches the key solidly. 

4) Keep the tempo slow, and listen to the sound of each note: savor each note. There is nothing to be gained by speed.

5) Try different articulations. Some of the time, make the exercise legato: release each note as you play the next note. Other times, try an exaggerated legato: let notes overlap to such an extent that you hear adjacent notes sounding together, perhaps for nearly the full length of the latter note, even though this will sound odd. Then try it detached: release each note long enough before playing the next note that you hear a gap. Then also try it very detached: release each note as soon as possible after you play it, only making sure that you do really hear the sound of each note. (Even these very short notes should be played without extra force or tension.) 

6) In trying out all of these articulations, do not worry about precision or making everything come out the same. Just keep relaxed and listen. This will lead to the most control—and precision when it is desired—later on.

Next, add some raised keys—sharps and flats—to the exercise. Start with one of the following, and take it through all of the steps described above (Examples 5 and 6). 

Two hands together

These simple exercises are meant to be played one hand at a time. The next step is to put the two hands together, keeping the note picture simple. As always, you the student can construct such exercises yourself. Here are a few possibilities derived from the exercises above (Examples 7, 8, 9, and 10).

Concerning the fingering for these exercises, bear the following in mind:

1) Use the same sorts of fingerings for each hand of these exercises that you used for the separate-hand exercises above; that is, sometimes 1-2-3-4, etc., sometimes 2-3-4-5, etc. 

2) Mix and match these fingerings between the two hands. Sometimes use the thumb-based fingering in both hands, sometimes use the second-finger-based fingering in both hands, and sometimes use one of those in each hand. 

3) Note that when the notes are parallel, the fingerings are mirrored, or nearly mirrored; when the notes are mirrored, the fingerings are parallel or nearly parallel.

4) Before you play through an exercise, be absolutely sure that you know what fingering you are about to use. If it would help, write the fingering in—but lightly, in pencil. When you want to try a different fingering, erase what you have written and write in the new fingering. 

Keep these exercises slow: it is not useful to practice this sort of material if, in doing so, you feel that you have to scramble to find the next note, or if you actually make wrong notes, or if you have to hesitate in order to get it right. There is no disadvantage to keeping the notes very slow indeed. Listen to the sounds, and to the intervals. Savor the sounds of the registrations that you use. 

Continue to try different articulations, as described above. If you feel comfortable doing so, you may try different articulations in each hand. In doing this, again don’t expect for the results to be measured or precise: just keep the feel of the hands relaxed and natural, and listen carefully.

About heel playing (with many exercises), and dealing briefly with double pedal and with pedal substitution

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

Organ Method VIII

This month’s excerpt continues the discussion of heel playing, with many exercises. It then deals briefly with double pedal and with pedal substitution. This wraps up the chapter on pedal playing as such. The next part of the method is about manual playing—aspects of keyboard technique specific to organ, and ways of getting comfortable at the organ keyboard for players who come from a piano or harpsichord background. Later on I will deal with putting hands and feet together, and with overall organ practice techniques and habits.

Here are several other exercises along similar lines. Each one gives you the chance to try out the heels with a different note pattern. For the moment, the principle that the toes take the raised keys and the heels take the natural keys remains (Examples 1 and 2).

In the six short exercises above, I have provided pedalings that allow each foot to play notes that are in the region of the pedal keyboard where that foot automatically falls as you sit on the bench. However, these very same note patterns can also be played by the opposite feet, as follows (Examples 3 and 4).

Each of the gestures in these exercises—playing a natural note with the heel after having played a sharp or a flat with the toe, then again playing a sharp or flat (the same one or a different one) with the toe, turning the foot—feels different and of course requires different planning, depending on which foot is involved. It is not necessarily true that a gesture is easier or more natural if it is carried out by the foot that is “proper” to the side of the keyboard where the notes are found. As you play these exercises notice whether you find the note patterns easier with one foot or with the other. Also notice which exercises, with which pedaling, can most easily be played legato. In some cases it may seem nearly impossible to keep a full legato through the turns of the foot. However, after you have practiced the exercise enough with detached articulation, and your feet have become adept at following the shape of the notes, the execution of the same exercise with full legato may begin to seem possible. This will vary from one player to another. (Note: do not try to connect notes with a strong legato in these exercises if doing so is awkward or creates tension in the feet, legs, or ankles.)

Posture

Everything about your posture will affect how you carry out these exercises: that is, which parts of the toe and heel region of each foot you actually bring in contact with the keys. You must pay attention to this and work it out consciously for yourself. It is different for each player. In general, as with the “toes only” exercises, the more that you prefer to hold your knees close to each other, the more you will find it comfortable to play from the inside of the foot; the more that you prefer to let your knees move away from the center and follow the feet towards the notes, the more you will find it comfortable to play with the outside of the foot. However, this varies greatly with individual posture and physique. Only you, the player, can figure out what works best for you.

The following exercises ask the foot to span slightly longer distances between the toe and the heel—still with the toes playing the sharps and flats, and the heels playing the naturals (Examples 5 and 6). Again you can try these note patterns with the feet reversed, as in the following (Examples 7 and 8), and so on.

This might seem like a bit of a stretch. It will certainly be necessary to turn the body a lot to reach the opposite sides of the keyboard with the heels. Each of these exercises should be done slowly, paying maximum attention to foot position, especially during any turns.

The next step is to use the heel on natural notes following the use of the toe on other nearby natural notes. This feels different from playing a natural with the heel when the toe has just been on a sharp or flat. The angles at which the feet need to be held are different. The following exercises begin to address this sort of playing (Examples 9 and 10).

These should be played slowly and, at first, non-legato. As you become comfortable with the shapes of the gestures you can try connecting the notes. You may find some of the pedalings in these exercises uncomfortable. Again, this is something that varies with the posture and physique of the player. If you do, then move away from that exercise for now. It may (or may not) feel more comfortable later. You should make up short exercises of your own in which you play simple chains of notes with alternating toe and heel, or with irregular patterns of toe and heel.

Toe and heel together 

Here is an example of a short phrase in which toes and heels can used in an irregular pattern geared to the shape of the particular melody (Examples 11, 12, 13, and 14). I give it, however, with four different pedalings. Which one do you like best? Can you devise another that you like better?

After you have become comfortable with the basic gesture of playing successive notes with the toe and heel, you can begin to look at pedal passages from the repertoire in which a combination of toe and heel pedaling can be used. (Note that it is rare for a passage to be played with heels only. Any passage that is best played without the application of alternating toe and heel is normally played with toes alone, not heels alone. Also, the heels rarely play raised keys, so any passage that is not all-naturals will be played either by toes alone or by a combination of toe and heel.) 

Here are two examples of such passages, with possible pedalings. The first is from Franck’s Choral No. 3 in E, beginning at m. 138 (Example 15). The second is from the chorale setting Alles ist an Gottes Segen, op. 67, no. 2, by Max Reger, beginning at m. 2 (Example 16). The pedalings that I have provided for each of the complete passages are just suggestions: each is one way that an organist might configure the pedaling, but not the only plausible way, and also not necessarily the best way for any given player. Try each of these passages slowly and carefully with the pedalings that I have given. Then try to find other pedalings for at least part of each passage that would also work—perhaps that feel better to you. For the purpose of this exercise, assume that you want to use pedalings that would in theory allow you to play legato: that is, do not use the same part of the same foot for two successive notes in such a way as to require a break between those notes. 

Can you find other pedalings that you like as well as or better than those that I have given? In the Franck, I have had each foot remain on its “proper” side of the pedal keyboard—the left foot plays tenor C and lower notes, the right foot plays tenor C and lower notes. In the Reger, I have written in more crossing of the middle of the keyboard, especially involving the right foot’s reaching for some of the lower notes. Could you pedal either passage differently by crossing the middle line of the keyboard either more or less than I have done? Are there pairs of successive natural notes that I have assigned to the heel and the toe of the same foot for which you would find it more comfortable to reverse that heel and toe (for example, the A and the C in the seventh measure of the Franck)?

Here are a few more pedal passages that can or should be played by a mix of heel and toe. They are from Mendelssohn Sonata #3, first movement (Example 17); Vierne Symphony #3, first movement (Example 18); and Elgar Organ Sonata, op. 28, first movement (Example 19). In each case, work out a few different possible pedalings, and practice them slowly and carefully. 

In general, organ music written after about 1800 is likely to make more use of the heel than that written before then. (Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the last section of this book.) The music of the composers excerpted here and their contemporaries will provide you with a treasure trove of passages with which to practice the use of the heels.

Double pedal and substitution

There are two special pedal playing techniques that should be mentioned here: double pedal and pedal substitution.

A small number of pieces in the organ repertoire have pedal parts in which for some of the time or all of the time two notes are to be played at once by the feet—or two ongoing independent contrapuntal lines in the pedals. Here is an example from a Bach chorale setting—Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 686 (Example 20).

Once the second—higher—pedal line comes in here in the fourth measure of this excerpt, each of the two pedal lines has to be played in its entirety by one foot. This is the norm for a double-pedal part. For anyone who has learned to look at pedal parts on a one-foot-at-a-time basis, as we have done here, this actually presents no conceptual challenge, and no more physical challenge than a similarly intricate single pedal part would.

In order to practice a double-pedal part, first work out a pedaling for each separate pedal line: the upper line in the right foot, of course, and the lower line in the left foot. The pedaling will of necessity be a mix of same-toe pedaling—which is intrinsically non-legato—and heel/toe pedaling. Once the pedaling has been worked out separately for each foot, each foot should be practiced separately. This is exactly the same process as practicing each foot separately when the two feet will end up being combined into one pedal line. 

Next, you should practice putting the two feet together, but with the notes staggered, so that you are not yet trying to play two notes at the same time, but are tracing the outline of the two-voice pedal part as it will be. This step in the process is unmeasured: you are following the physical shape of the pedal parts, but not their rhythm or the way that they will actually fit together. For the sixth measure of this Bach example, the practice line would look like Example 21.

This should be practiced slowly and reasonably steadily, without worrying about any particular rhythm. I have not indicated a specific pedaling here because that will be up to the particular player, and makes no difference in principle for the working out of this approach. After the patterns of the two feet have become comfortable interspersed with each other in this way, they can be brought into the proper rhythmic alignment and the passage can be practiced as written. 

Substitution in pedal playing is either 1) changing feet on one key silently: that is, bringing the right foot onto a note that is being held by the left foot and then removing the left foot from that note, without releasing the note, or the same with the roles of the feet reversed; or 2) moving the heel of one foot onto a note being held by the toe of that foot, or vice versa, again while holding the note—not releasing and repeating it. 

Substitution is a natural outgrowth, technically, of the act of repeating a note using the other foot, as practiced in Exercise V of the March 2013 column. The change is, in a sense, just one of articulation: instead of putting a space between the “two” notes, you make them, in effect, legato—playing the second one before the first one has been released. Planning is required whenever you play two notes that are close together: which foot should be closer to the instrument and which closer to the bench? Should the new foot take over the key behind the old foot, or in front of it? Above or below? Try Exercise V this way, not repeating any of the notes that are the same as one another, slipping the foot that would have played the second note onto the key and then—but only then—silently removing the first foot and sending it on its way to its next note. This should feel like a natural outgrowth of the work that you have already done.