On Teaching

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

Clavichord

When I wrote several columns about tuning and temperament beginning in July 2009, I introduced the series with the following:

Most organists do not have to do any tuning as such, or at least can do without tuning if they prefer. However, it is very convenient indeed for any organist to be able to touch up a tuning . . . . Beyond that, however, it is very useful and enlightening for any organist to understand the role of tuning, temperament, and the nature of different intervals in the esthetics of organ and harpsichord sound and repertoire, and in the history of that repertoire.

I can say something similar about the relationship between the organist’s calling and the history, technique, and musical nature of the oldest stringed keyboard instrument—and the one that is in many ways the most mysterious as it appears in modern musical culture—namely, the clavichord. It is utterly possible to be an organist, organ student, organ teacher, organbuilder, organ tuner, organ aficionado, and so on, without ever studying or playing­—or even hearing or just thinking about—the clavichord.

Organists are very often called upon to play the piano in any number of different performance situations. They are less often but not too infrequently called upon to play harpsichord. And, of course, electronic keyboard instruments are found everywhere: anyone who is a working keyboard player is likely to be asked to use them from time to time. However, I have never once heard any report of a modern-day organist being required, or even asked, to use a clavichord in a practical performance situation.  

It can be illuminating for an organist to get to know something about the clavichord. This is true partly because learning or knowing anything can be illuminating. (Finding out more about trombone or hammered dulcimer or painting or dance or baseball could end up shedding light on something about organ study or organ performance.) The clavichord is also a fellow keyboard instrument, with a history going back to the very earliest days of the surviving keyboard repertoire. It is abundantly clear that organists over many centuries typically spent at least as much time playing the clavichord as they did playing the organ. If all of any given person’s experiences tend to inform one another, then everything that went on in the interlocking worlds of organbuilding, organ playing, organ improvisation, organ composition, and all other aspects of church music between some time in the early fifteenth century and some time in the eighteenth was influenced by players’ experiences with clavichord. 

It can be hard to sort out or analyze in any concise way what the nature of that influence was. There are few if any contemporary written sources that discuss that issue. (“Here is how my clavichord playing influences my organ playing.”) For the purposes of this introduction, I describe the instrument itself. There are things about the construction, design, and acoustics of clavichords that are fascinating and that raise issues that feel almost philosophical to me. Next month I will discuss some of those issues, talk about some aspects of playing technique and some of my own evolving thoughts about how my own clavichord experiences have affected other things about my musical life. I will also provide a bit of a bibliography and discography.

I should mention that it has been my experience that many organists have not had much opportunity to encounter clavichords in person or to learn very much about them. When I give workshops to groups of organists about early keyboard instruments, I ask, “Who here has played harpsichord?” and usually get 80–100% percent positive response. With the same question as to clavichord, the most usual response is zero, sometimes a person or two. So I am optimistic that these couple of columns will fill a need.

Clavichord construction

The clavichord is a stringed keyboard instrument. As with every string instrument, its principal sound-producing element is a set of strings drawn tight enough to be able to vibrate at a defined pitch. And as with almost every string instrument, those strings rest on mostly wooden elements that amplify and color the sound that the strings make. Specifically, the strings rest directly on a bridge, which is sort of like a short wall, and the bridge rests on the soundboard, which is a flattish plank built in such a way as to be resonant, sort of like a wooden drum head. There are metal pins on the bridge that hold the strings in place and participate in shaping the sound. When a string is made to vibrate, it passes those vibrations through the pins to the bridge and then to the soundboard. The sound that the listener hears is the amalgam of what the string throws off into the air directly and what the pins, bridge, and soundboard create. This description fits pianos, violins, guitars, harpsichords, dulcimers, banjos, and so on.

The pitch of a note on a string instrument is determined in part by the material of the strings and in part by how tightly it is drawn. It is also determined, importantly, by the length­—not the length of the whole piece of string, but by the length of the portion that is being made to vibrate. In pianos and harpsichords, among other instruments, the strings have speaking lengths that are fixed when the instrument is built. You can observe that length, as it is between two pinned bridges. String outside those bridges doesn’t vibrate. With violins and many other instruments, changing the speaking length of strings is part of the act of playing. 

Most clavichords have strings in unison pairs. When I talk about making “the string” sound or determining the speaking length of “a string,” I mean the unison pair if there are such pairs or an individual string if there are not unison pairs. You can see the overall layout of a clavichord in photograph 1, and a close-up of the bridge resting on the soundboard, with pairs of strings crossing it, in photograph 2. 

Each string instrument also has some way in which the strings are made to vibrate. With guitars, lutes, autoharps, and so on, the strings are plucked by hand or by a hand-held implement. With the harpsichord and its variants, the strings are plucked indirectly through a keyboard. With instruments of the violin and gamba families, the strings are made to vibrate by being rubbed with a bow, and something similar happens with a hurdy-gurdy. With hammered dulcimer and piano, the strings are struck.

This is where things get interesting as to the clavichord. Clavichord strings are made to vibrate by being struck. But whereas on a piano or with a hammered dulcimer, the device that strikes a string (the hammer) moves away from that string instantly, with the clavichord the element that strikes the string (a piece of brass called a tangent, that is found at the back of each key) remains in contact with the string until the key is released. Pretty much everything that is different or interesting about the clavichord, that which makes a clavichord a clavichord, stems directly from this setup. Here are some aspects of this:

1) When the tangent touches the string to make it vibrate, it also blocks sound waves from traveling across the spot where it touches the string. 

2) This means that the speaking length of the string starts specifically where the tangent is touching it. 

3) In turn, this also means that logically the tangent would seem to divide the string into two separate speaking lengths, one to its left, one to its right. It would indeed do this, except that:

4) In order to avoid the tangent’s causing two separate notes to sound, the strings to one side of the tangents are permanently damped by cloth wound between them. Only the other sides of the strings are allowed to sound, and the strings pass over a bridge and soundboard only on that side. You can see tangents, strings, and the damper cloth (known as listing cloth) in photograph 3. 

5) Since the tangents define one end of the sounding string, they are also initiating the sound of the string at its very end. This is different from other stringed keyboard instruments, where the action that makes the strings sound is located some ways away from either end of the strings. You can observe this by looking inside any harpsichord or piano. On non-keyboard string instruments, the player can make choices, within a certain range, about where along the strings to initiate the sound. 

6) The very end of a string is by far the least efficient place to try to make it sound; the middle is the most efficient. The loudest sound that you can try to make from the end of a string will be a lot quieter than a sound that you could get from elsewhere on the string. It is this fact, and not anything else about the construction of the instrument, that is the source of the clavichord’s overall low volume: not the bridge or soundboard design, not the size of the instrument, not the cloth wound around the strings, nothing about the shape or design of the keyboard.

Here are a couple of experiments that you can do that relate to this. If you have access to a violin or guitar or something similar, try plucking a string at the very end, either end. Then try plucking it at the middle, then elsewhere. You will easily get more volume near the middle than you can possibly get at either end. You can do the same at a harpsichord by playing and holding a note to gets its damper out of the way and then plucking that string at various points. Then try this with a clavichord: play and hold a note to get the tangent in position on its string. Then pluck that string near its middle. You will observe that you can get a lot more volume that way than you can get by actually playing that note from its key.

7) The speed or force with which a tangent touches a string is directly correlated with the volume of sound that it produces. That means that with the clavichord as with the piano you can shape the dynamics of individual notes by using different amounts of pressure or force in playing. The subtlety with which you can modulate dynamics on the clavichord is in every way equal to the same on the piano. The dynamic range is much, much narrower, going from “nearly inaudible” to something that might be called “mezzo piano.” The upper volume limit varies from one clavichord to another, but is always determined by #6 above.

8) The tangents in striking the strings can also distend them enough to change their pitch. If you play a note on a clavichord first gently and then very hard, you will sometimes notice that the latter is a bit higher in pitch than the former, or that the pitch wavers or seems unsettled. This varies from one clavichord to another, but it can place limits on the effectiveness of varied dynamics or on the useful dynamic range of a particular clavichord. 

9) On a brighter note, this same attribute can be used to create a musical effect that is surprising for a keyboard instrument, namely a sort of vibrato. If after you play a note, while you are holding it, you vary the pressure on the key, the pitch will waver. Next month, I will talk about this as an interpretive/expressive effect, and about how to execute it. 

10) As you release a note on a clavichord, the sound waves try to go out across the entire length of the string. In doing so they meet the cloth that has been wound around the strings for the main purpose of keeping the left-hand side of each string from sounding, as point 4 explains above. This cloth immediately damps the sound. Whereas on every other keyboard instrument the dampers descend on the strings to cause them to stop sounding, with the clavichord the dampers are already lying in wait, and the sound goes to meet them. 

11) Since the speaking length of a clavichord string is determined by the placement of the tangent, it follows that the same string can be made to play more than one different note. If you place tangents at different points along the length of a string, each of those tangents will define a different end-point for the speaking length of that string, and therefore make a different pitch. In theory, there is no reason that you couldn’t get all of the notes across the whole compass of an instrument from a total of one string, each note made by a tangent at the back of its key, at the right place on the string to create the correct pitch for that note. An instrument set up like this could only play one note at a time and would be of limited relevance to playing what we think of as the keyboard repertoire. 

However:

12) It is, by extension, also possible to group several adjacent notes, short of the entire compass of the instrument, onto the same string by placing their tangents all on that string, in the correct alignment to produce the desired pitches. This was extremely common in clavichord design from the very earliest days through the early to mid-eighteenth century. Some of the earliest clavichords have some or all of their notes sharing strings in groups of four, perhaps E-flat, E, F, F-sharp.

Later, well into the eighteenth century, it was common for certain notes to be grouped in pairs, with, for example, C and C-sharp, E-flat and E, F and F-sharp, G and G-sharp, and B-flat and B sharing strings. This was musically acceptable because it was not considered necessary to write or improvise music in which those adjacent semitones were played together. (If you play two adjacent keys whose notes share a string together, you hear the higher note, plus an odd clicking noise.) It is entirely possible to play the two notes that share a string in very quick succession, even to trill on them. 

You can see pairs of tangents addressing different places on the same strings in photograph 4. Reading left to right tangents 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 6 and 7 are in pairs. Tangent 5 is alone on its pair of strings. The first two play F and F-sharp, the next two play G and G-sharp, the next one plays A, and the last two play B-flat and B.

A clavichord on which some notes are grouped in pairs or larger units sharing strings is called a fretted clavichord. A clavichord on which every note has its own string or pair of strings is called an unfretted clavichord. Unfretted clavichords only became common in the mid-eighteenth century.

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, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. He can be reached by email at [email protected].

Helping Students Choose Fingerings

After two months spent on something interesting and useful yet rather tangential to organ teaching (the clavichord), I have decided to tackle something probably the most direct and nitty-gritty of anything in the whole field: how to help students choose fingerings for their pieces. This topic is tricky and subject to different approaches.

I have certainly alluded to this from time to time while writing about other things. But I have yet to write about it directly and systematically, or in a sustained way. It is fundamentally important. To start with, there is no such thing as a student’s playing a piece, even playing through it first time slowly, or playing one hand or a brief passage, without there being a fingering. (The fingering on an initial play-through might be largely random, and that might be a problem or might be fine. That is part of this discussion.) There is also a way of talking about what it takes to learn a piece that though laughably formulaic is also not untrue: namely, if you have a fingering and then practice efficiently you will learn the piece. I have written a lot about efficient practicing. I now focus on the first part of that formula.

All of the above also applies to pedaling. I focus on fingering here because I think that the technical issues involved in making fingering choices and those involved in making pedaling choices are different enough that juggling a discussion of both would just be confusing. (Confusing for the writer!) Fingering choices are more multifaceted and the questions more complex, though similar in some principles. I hope that the process of thinking about not teaching fingerings but teaching how to devise fingerings will suggest a useful framework for thinking about the same thing with respect to pedaling. I will write about that in the future, separately.   

It was a premise of the way that this column was originally established nearly ten years ago, fairly short, but appearing every month, that I could afford to write in a leisurely way about an important topic, and that I wouldn’t have to try to get any subject sorted in any one column. I take full advantage of that now. We will probably spend the whole summer analyzing and musing about fingering. If you have a fruitful approach to guiding your students towards making good fingering choices for themselves and also can help them learn how to practice well (and can cajole them into wanting to practice well, at least much of the time), then you have done by far the largest part of what you can or should do as to the practical core of the teaching process. The more soundly and smoothly this can unfold, the easier it then is to delve into interpretive, artistic, historical, philosophical, matters, and to issues arising out of the particular musician-like personality of each student and his or her goals and aspirations.

This month I write about fingering and some of the issues involved in choosing fingerings. Along the way I will mention a few somewhat random ideas, thoughts, or images that I think are interesting.

Let’s start with one of those. I have always found it hard to grasp the notion that the “fingering” used by legendary great composers or performers of the past was the very same kind of thing that we do when we come up with fingerings and apply them. Did Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Widor really just push keys down with the fingers of perfectly normal hands, and in so doing choose from among the same kind of patterns that we work with? Yes, of course they did. But as with every aspect of the notion that the great figures of old were people just like the rest of us, this is something that I find it hard to comprehend. (This is especially true as to Bach, but otherwise it tends to feel more difficult the farther back I go in time. Did Cabezón or Schlick have hands much like mine and sometimes sit there wondering whether to reach for that note with 4 or 5? Yes!) One point of musing about this is to try to demystify fingering itself a little bit. Everyone who has ever played a keyboard instrument has had to think about fingering and has faced the same broad constraints about how fingers can or cannot grapple with keys.

Not everyone has always been grappling with the physical act of fingering, its logistic limitations as well as its possibilities, towards the same ends. This is true along the various axes of performance style. Some player/composers and their musical cultures were looking to create a lot of legato, others were not. Some were frequently required to deal with thick chords, other much less so, or nearly not at all. And so on. One of the big questions about fingering and about the challenge of guiding students toward being able to choose fingerings is how to integrate our awareness of how any composer might have approached fingering with other (logistic, musical, practical) considerations.  

But there are also two distinctions related to each other that are perhaps even more interesting. First, most players of the past were mostly improvising. This is probably truer the farther back you go. The relationship between fingering-planning (which is pretty much what we mean when we talk about fingering as an act) and the music must be different if you don’t know what the music will be before you sit down to play. That suggests a concept of the act of fingering that must include some blend of real planning and maintaining habits that permit fingering on the fly. Fingering on the fly is something that we mostly discourage when helping students to learn repertoire. What does the ubiquity of that practice over many centuries tell us about possible approaches to planned fingering?

The second point about old-time performing circumstances is that for the first many centuries in the history of organ playing, it was not the norm for players to play much old music or to be concerned at all with playing old music in the way that the creators of that music would have played it. That is not to say that no one prior to, say, the early nineteenth century ever paid attention to music of earlier eras. Some musicians studied such music. We know that Bach studied Frescobaldi and de Grigny, for example, as well as composers who were more recent or more directly part of his own musical lineage, such as Buxtehude and Pachelbel. But there is no reason to believe either that he engaged in public performance of their music or that when he looked through their pieces he was thinking about their fingering or other performance practice issues. He may have done so, and other composer/performers who paid some attention to older music may have done so, but if so it was under the radar screen of history.

The first issue that we have to think about in teaching fingering to students is what students. And the answer is a usual one: that the more of a beginner a student is the more systematically we need to address things that are practical and basic. This is both an obligation and an opportunity. If someone is studying with a teacher as a beginner, then that teacher can do things “right” from the beginning, whatever that means. A student who has already accomplished some playing or who is already quite advanced will already have an approach to fingering. That approach may be fully worked out and successful, or may be deeply problematic, or somewhere in between. It may be intuitive and successful, but still benefit from being made more analytical. It may be intuitive and insufficiently efficient or fit any number of different patterns. Then with organ (and harpsichord or clavichord), unlike with piano, we have the situation that seems like a special case but is in fact the most common—namely, that a student comes to us as an established player of the piano with established piano fingering habits. In this situation, work on fingering necessarily keeps coming back to questions of the differences in fingering considerations between piano and organ. 

I want to sketch out my thoughts about all of this with an eye mainly on the student who is at least near the beginning of studying. It seems like the best way to teach myself or to invite any other teacher to think about how to teach fingering is to start with a conceptually complete picture. How can we teach a student good fingering habits from scratch? What is the overall framework or concept involved in that work? But the notion of re-shaping, steering, helping someone who already has well-established relevant skills, but also possible problematic habits, always must be kept in mind.

Factors in choosing fingerings

What considerations shape fingering choices? There are quite a few, and they sometimes complement one another but also sometimes seem to push in different directions. Some of them are: 

1) What would the composer have done? I mention this first not because I think that it is most important, but because it ties in with some of what I have already discussed above. What do we know about how a composer would have fingered his or her music? Do we know that from the composer directly or from students or contemporaries of that composer? How much detail do we have? How much are we filling in or extrapolating? Whatever we know, or reasonably believe, that a composer did, do we know why? Can we make plausible deductions about why? What were the musical goals if there were any? Or were the goals more practical or logistic?

2) What about physical logistics or comfort? Are there ways of executing passages that are easier than others? The answer to this is sometimes yes. Also, quite often the answer is a modified yes: there isn’t one fingering that is the easiest or most comfortable, but there are some that are more so and some that are less so. The comfort or ease of fingerings may well differ between one player and another. When it seems to differ, the question is whether that results from some legitimate difference that should be respected or just of habit, which perhaps should be respected or perhaps challenged.

3) Habit. This is worthy of its own category. Anyone who has ever played at all has certainly become more accustomed to some patterns and approaches than to others. Some of these habits are limiting. For example, it is common to observe players avoiding the fifth finger as a general rule. That can be a very bad idea: endless problems can cascade from this. Many players have habits when it comes to trill fingerings, usually using fingers 2 and 3 as a default and avoiding 4 and 5, or sometimes orienting trills around the thumb just by habit when that is actually physically awkward. It is crucial, especially when working with established players, to think about what habits can be relied on for ease and comfort and which ones should be questioned. (Come to think of it, this is most important and most difficult working with oneself!) 

4) Hand position. I have written about this in passing quite a bit. In this series of columns I want to explore the relationship between hand position and fingering directly, and with an eye on how it shapes choices. There are ways of holding the hand in relation to the wrist and arm that are physiologically sound and other ways that produce tension and possibly pain, and that can even lead to injury. Since the keyboard is fixed and the player’s sitting position is more or less fixed, addressing keys with particular fingers ties in very closely with hand position. It is interesting to think about the causality going both ways: “this is the fingering I want, so let’s see what it implies about hand position,” but also “this is the hand position I want, so let’s see what it implies about fingering.”

5) Repetition. If the exact same passage is repeated, it probably makes sense to use the same fingering. Sometimes there maybe a reason that it does not, but it’s always worth thinking about.

6) Patterns. Passages that are similar in shape to one another might well suggest similar fingerings. Sometimes patterns that are musically very similar or identical are not the same physically, usually because of something different about sharps and flats. Patterns are useful but should not tie us in to doing things that are actually not the best. 

7) Memorability. Repetitions and other patterns are useful for fingering planning in that they increase our ability to remember fingerings without extra effort. If it is possible to take ease of remembering into account in planning fingerings, that can be useful. 

8) Interpretive considerations. The most common and straightforward of these is articulation. If two successive notes need to be really legato, then the first one must be played in such a way that it can be held through the beginning of the second one. This usually means that the two notes must be played by two different fingers. If two notes don’t have to be legato, or if the choice interpretively is for them not to be, then that fingering restriction is lifted. 

9) The instrument. Are there some instruments that suggest different fingerings? Are there situations in which working out a fingering in the abstract, however conscientiously, will not help produce the best fingerings when it comes time to play on a particular instrument? This could be about feel and keyboard logistics, or about intrinsic instrument sound, or about room acoustics. It can also be about controlling pipe speech or winding in instruments that are sensitive to such things.

These are some considerations about the content of fingering choices. That is a separate thing from how we help students learn to think about these choices, a necessary precursor. The main fork in the road about working with students about fingering is this: how much should I as a teacher give my students fingerings directly, and how much should I talk to them about principles but ask them to concoct their own fingerings? I will discuss that next month.

People’s hands are more different physically than you might think. This has to do with overall size and with the relative long/thin or short/stubby aspect of the fingers. But it also has to do with specifics that affect keyboard fingering directly, like the length and position of the thumb with respect to the second finger, the length of the fifth finger, the question of which is longer as between the fourth and second fingers, and how they both relate to the third finger. The accompanying scan is of my hands: short thumbs, long fifth fingers, fourth and second fingers very close to each other in length.

Take a look at your own!

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 (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. 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!