On Teaching

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

Clavichord II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acquiring my first clavichord

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

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

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

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

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

Playing the clavichord   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disjunct Motion II

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

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

Controlling releases

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

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

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

Examples 1 and 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples 3 and 4

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

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

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

Example 5

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

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

Examples 6 through 8: Patterns and trills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recording Notes I

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

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

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

Why make recordings? 

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

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

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

Form and content

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

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

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

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

Prior to a recording session

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

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

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

Practicing

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

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

Preparation

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

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

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

Concentration

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . . 

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, 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.

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

Recording Notes III

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

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

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

I will now turn to my daily notes.

Day 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 2

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

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

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

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

Day 3

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

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

Day 4

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

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

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

Day 5

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

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

Conclusion

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

Next month I will return to the directly pedagogic!

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].