On Teaching

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

Helping Students Choose Fingerings II

This month I want to pose a most fundamental question: should we give fingerings to our students, or should we instead ask them to work out their own fingerings, with guidance from us? It is likely that with most teachers, for most students, the answer will be some of both. But that leaves the question of how to arrive at the right balance. And it also leaves a whole set of questions about how best to carry out each approach. This is not a cleanly separate issue from questions of what constitutes good fingering or what good procedure for working on fingering would be in general. But it is interesting to try to tease it out a bit on its own. 

I will start by confessing my own bias, the same bias that governs my thinking about most matters. My orientation is always towards letting students figure things out for themselves. It seems logical to let students start as soon as possible (not sooner) practicing whatever it is that we want them to learn to do. And that is (almost) always the act of working something out, not the act of executing something. This is true as to interpretive matters, concrete ones such as registration or choice of tempo, and more diffuse or flexible ones such as timing, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, and so on. It is more important for a student to engage in the process of learning how to work out interpretive matters than to give a performance today or tomorrow that you or I would like, or even that the student would endorse or enjoy listening to some years down the road. This is a version of the old “teach someone to fish” idea. 

This is subject to all sorts of nuance. For example, when does someone stop being a student? When does the execution of an effective performance become the most important priority? Are we not all to some extent continuing to learn the various processes, and don’t we all hope that our performances will get better and better, whatever that means to each of us? Looking back on our past performances, we should probably hope not to like them entirely, but to be grateful for what we learned from them. It is not a bad idea to invite your students to reinvent the wheel if you are hoping to teach them not how to use wheels or how to make wheels but how to invent wheels.

I confess this bias not to embrace it, but to push back against it or at least to examine whether and how it makes sense here. There are some things that need to be taught in a different way. The clearest of these tend to be practical. For example, if someone asks me to show them how to make the loop at the end of a harpsichord string, I will not just hand them a piece of wire and suggest that they figure it out. I will make a loop for them and describe to them in detail what I am doing. Then I will repeat that as necessary before asking them to try. There are some wheels that really don’t need to be reinvented. Likewise I don’t leave students to figure out entirely for themselves what sort of practice protocols and strategies work best. I can show a student many things that do work, but it is open-ended; they can also figure out others for themselves. I do take a sort of “re-invent the wheel” approach to the art of registration, for another example, but not to showing a student how the combination system works. When I have out-and-out information that a student does not have, I share it.

Even though no one would disagree that the long-term goal is to teach students how to work out fingerings, rather than to teach them fingerings, there is room for debate about how best to do that. Does an approach of letting students come up with their own fingerings with some discussion of principles, some feedback, and maybe occasional suggestions (what I might call my approach just for short) actually lead students most efficiently towards being able to work out fingerings for themselves? Or does it work better to show the student many examples of really good fingering, in one piece after another, and let the student learn from observation what good fingering is and how to achieve it? 

For the moment, we are taking this to be independent of the question of what good fingering is. For the latter, more teacher-oriented, approach to work, it has to be understood that the teacher knows a lot about how to concoct good fingerings. I will deal with that more directly in subsequent columns, and in the end it interacts with what we are discussing here.

Advantages of two approaches

I would like to outline some pluses and minuses of each approach, as I see it. I start this with a few thoughts about my approach and continue next month with corresponding thoughts about the more interventionist approach. First, a few advantages or strong points about the approach of largely letting students concoct their own fingerings: 

1) It is an opportunity to practice autonomy and thinking for oneself. This is particularly relevant because, largely as a result of editors’ fingerings being found in so many printed editions of music, it is easy for fingering to take on an oppressive feeling of authority. The particular form in which a student asks a question about fingering is often this: What is the fingering for this passage? That reflects an unconscious acceptance of the notion that there “is” a fingering, that the fingering for the passage is somehow a given, handed down by those who know. There is plenty in life that must be treated this way. Fingering doesn’t. Sometimes when I respond to that question with “there ‘is’ no fingering. The fingering will be what you work it out to be.” That is immediately and significantly liberating to the student, even a revelation.

2) It involves practicing as directly as possible what the student needs to learn to do. As I said above, I have a bias in favor of this in general, all else being equal. Every instance of a student’s thinking, “Does this feel better or does that? Does it sound different with fingering x from fingering y? Does using this finger here make it easier to get to that finger there? What specific part of the passage demands a particular finger, and how can I shape the fingering around that, before and after?” makes it easier and more natural for the student to apply that kind of thinking later. 

3) A student knows his or her hands best, or can learn to. Sometimes no matter how self-evident it is to me that a given finger lies naturally over a given note, that conclusion indeed turns out to be just about my hand, and for the student it is different. Take this chord:

If the student and I would both put 2 on the F# and 5 on the C, we might comfortably put any of the remaining three fingers on the A. I would play it with 3, assuming that there was nothing before or after to make that problematic. I could also be happy with 1: definitely not 4. But I have known a player to find 4 much more comfortable than the other two choices in this exact situation. This is something that no one but the actual player knows, whether that player is a student or not. And the differences can be subtle. For this:

I would definitely want 1 on the A, not either 3 or 4. Others could prefer any of the three. A note about this example: I would respect any student’s choice about a finger for that A. However, I would try to convince the student not to play the F# with 1. See #1 below!

4) Working out a detailed, specific fingering in as analytical a manner as possible is a magnificent way to learn the notes of a piece, or to solidify that learning. It is so effective in this respect that if a player becomes accomplished to the point of not needing to work out fingerings in a purposeful manner, that dimension of learning the piece has to be replaced by something else. This is related to the fact that a danger for really great sight-readers is that of giving un-thought-out performances. Executing a fingering that has been provided by someone else doesn’t fulfill this function.

There is an interesting paradox to be found here. If you work out fingerings really well and carefully for a passage, the learning that that process entails would also make it easier and more secure for you to get through the passage without a systematic fingering. But that stage is by then already past. However, it is possible that working out careful fingerings oneself leads to better sight-reading of subsequent pieces.

5) Some students enjoy this process, find it intellectually interesting, challenging, and satisfying. 

6) Every student will from time to time think of a really good fingering that the teacher would not have thought of. Thus learning can become a two-way street.

Disadvantages

What are some disadvantages of this approach, or things to watch out for? 

1) The student may create and use fingerings that are actually physically damaging. That is almost always a result of hand positions that involve twisting the wrists too far outward, or that are otherwise stiff or painful. A teacher should always be on the lookout for this and be prepared to explain to the student what is wrong with such fingerings. If fingering creates a physiologically bad hand position, then it is not acceptable to live with that fingering even briefly.

2) More often than the above, a student will devise fingerings that are just not the best musically or logistically. It simply reflects that we are dealing with something that has to be learned, and that we are in the early stages of that learning. To the extent that we choose to let students work out, and then drill and use, their own fingerings, we are saying that the advantages of that approach make it worth it for the student to live through a period of using “bad” fingerings, fingerings that a more expert player would not have chosen. When these are fingerings that do not have the characteristic of being physically harmful, then that is possibly an acceptable situation. But it needs to be thought about.

3) This approach takes more time. For a student to work out fingerings carefully takes longer than for the teacher, an experienced player, to lean over the music desk and write fingerings. (Even quicker is for the teacher to have worked out fingerings for pieces in advance, independent of who the student is going to be. The quickest of all is for there already to be fingerings in the edition. Both of these are problematic, though, for reasons that I will get to later on.) The trade-off here is between this concern about time and point #4 above. Is the time that is put in this way repaid by learning, or is it just time that could have been spent better—for example, working on more pieces?

4) Some students specifically don’t want to work out their own fingerings. This can come from different places, and an awareness of where it comes from can help us think about how to deal with it. A student may feel incompetent to think independently about fingering. This in turn may be a simple acknowledgement of the fact of inexperience, or may come from a temperamental lack of comfort with autonomy. It is never actually true, it’s just about comfort. A student may be aware of the time-consuming nature of careful fingering work and prefer to spend that time a different way. A student may be unconvinced of the notion that different players’ hands, and other aspects of their playing, may require different fingerings, and therefore simply not be aware of the value of chipping in his or her own perspective. The student may feel unprepared to think about fingering for a specific reason, like an awareness of the historical component of fingering, coupled with an awareness of the student’s own lack of the relevant historical knowledge. 

I will continue this discussion from this point next month. However, I toss in here one fingering example. It is a bit random, just a sort of souvenir of the column. It is a rare fingering that I was specifically proud of when I first thought of it. It helped me turn what had been a difficult-to-impossible passage for me into something at least bordering on easy, and certainly very reliable. It was quite a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly, a milestone for me in deriving fingering from hand position and in thinking outside of what was at the time quite a small box. I suppose that my particular excuse for including it here is this: that one of the pleasures of fingering is that of sharing neat, surprising, useful discoveries with other people who happen to share this arcane interest. That can be our students, among others, and remembering simply to enjoy that is part of the pleasure of teaching. This is the upper two voices of a bit from very near the end of the fugue from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, in the right hand. (See preceding page at top.) Try it out. Does it work for your hand? Enjoy!

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 the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at gavinblack@mail.com.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

This month I will continue questioning, musing, speculating—almost free-associating—about aspects of our ways of working with our students, and about how that process connects with the students’ lives and their many paths to learning music and to getting something important out of that learning and that music.

Remembering Peter Williams

However, a sad coincidence makes me start with a comment or two, and an anecdote, about Peter Williams. Just before I sat down to write this, the news came across the computer screen that Peter Williams had died. [See Nunc Dimittis, page 10 in this issue.] That made me remember my first introduction long ago to the first few of his many books: my teacher Eugene Roan mentioned that he valued Peter Williams’s writings especially because he asked more questions than he gave answers. I was jolted by this realization: that in starting last month’s column noting that I would be asking more questions in this series of columns than giving answers, I was subconsciously paying tribute to that aspect of Williams’s work. And indeed, Gene Roan was not the only person to notice that about Peter Williams. Several comments I have read online say exactly that about him. My own feeling (not based on anything he said to me, since, to my regret, I never spoke to him or communicated directly with him) is that his approach was simultaneously based on the perpetual asking of questions—the refusal to view anything as settled or determined in the way that can seem like ossification—and on valuing real and copious information as a spur to understanding and to art. This seems to me to be a very fruitful and also rather life-affirming combination. 

I once attended a combination lecture/demo and masterclass that Peter Williams conducted at the Schuke organ in Voorhees Chapel at Rutgers University. It was thirty-something years ago, and I don’t remember the specific topic. I do remember being (as someone very young and very much a beginner) astonished that someone so august, with actual books to his name (and impressive ones at that) could be so relaxed, friendly, and informal. I think I was still then in the grip of a youthful reluctance to believe that anything with the authority of the printed page could have flexibility to it. I had heard what Gene Roan had said, and knew that I liked that approach. But I still couldn’t quite believe that an “authority” really thought that way. His tone at this class helped me begin to internalize that as a possibility.

Furthermore—and this impressed me a lot—he conducted this class wearing sandals and other very informal summer gear. When he sat down to play the organ, he played in those sandals. I don’t remember what I thought then about organ playing and footwear. I am not sure whether this confirmed for me or actually started me thinking that simple comfort while playing might be an underrated value. Since I base much of my thinking about technique and teaching on the importance of comfort, naturalness, and relaxation, I consider that moment in Voorhees Chapel to have been quite significant for me. 

Now to get on with some questions . . .

Fingering

I wrote last month that “I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking ‘what do you most deeply want out of life?’” And, as I said last month, this is sort of a joke—but not entirely. Questions about fingering are often phrased like this: “What is the fingering here?” or “What is the fingering for this passage?” Of course this way of putting it is predicated (probably subconsciously) on the assumption that there is a “correct” fingering, or at any rate that other people have already deemed what the fingering should be. I understand that most students who ask such a question are not strongly asserting that they believe that there can be only one correct fingering and that someone else has already worked it out. It’s just an underlying flavor to the thinking. But in any case, my first response is to examine the question. Whose job is it to know what the fingering should be then and there for that student? Shouldn’t it be the student—of course with help from me, since I am there and can interact, not the kind of help that just gives one answer. However, if a student wants to work within a particular tradition, or has habits that stem from a particular tradition, then perhaps that student’s comfort will be enhanced by hearing about ways in which others with more experience in that approach have worked things out. I am inclined to be uncomfortable with this, and to believe that what a student should actually be learning is specifically how to work things out from scratch for him- or herself. However, that is of course one of my biases that I need to acknowledge and re-examine. 

Once or twice I have had a student who specifically wanted to use, by default, Marcel Dupré’s fingerings for Bach. This could have been because of something that a previous teacher suggested, because of something that they read, or just because those fingerings have the authority of something printed in a real book. My initial impulse is to be against this way of working out fingerings. Even if it is done with flexibility—with a willingness to view those fingerings as just a jumping-off point—it still strikes me as an inefficient path for arriving at what is right for a given student. However, if I myself have the flexibility to let that student start with something by which he or she is intrigued, then I discover a few things. One is a more complete picture of what is gained or lost by a particular approach to fingering. I also discover something about my student’s thinking, and about where past work and study have brought that student. And, most importantly, the student and I together learn something about the philosophy of fingering and of learning fingering. Will any of this outweigh the loss of efficiency when working on fingering is filtered through the ideas of a very different player—one who can’t participate actively in the discussion? I don’t know. But if it is in keeping with the student’s interests—and thus keeps the student interested and involved—it might work out well. 

Suppose that the Dupré fingerings are not for Bach but for a piece by Dupré himself? Then it might seem obvious that the fingerings are very fittingly authoritative—literally so. This leads, however, to questions about what fingering is for. Is fingering mainly about the piece and its interpretation, or is it mainly about logistics and comfort for the player (including how fingering habits might create predictability and repeatability)? Or is it about the instrument, and techniques for making the instrument speak? (All of the above?) Furthermore, suppose that the Dupré piece in question (such as Opus 28) was written for the express purpose of teaching a student how to begin working on Bach, and that the student does not want to adopt Dupré’s approach to playing Bach? 

Authenticity

This all leads to the question of authenticity, and why we should care about it. These can probably be summarized in two camps: authenticity for its own sake—seeking out and appreciating an awareness that what we are doing is what the composer would have done or wanted; and authenticity because we assume that what the composer really wanted is likely to be the most artistically effective, convincing, beautiful, communicative, and so on. (The former of these constitutes giving the composer authority, the second, trusting the composer.) Neither of these is demonstrably right or wrong, or excludes the other. Some players wish to start with the artifact as such—the music on the printed page—and reserve little or no role for authenticity or a reconstructed sense of what the composer would have done as a performer. 

The point here is not to sort all of that out. It is just that a student’s approach to fingering will inevitably reflect his or her approach to all of this—that is, to the student’s philosophy of life and of art. And as that approach evolves (perhaps with the help of the teacher), the approach to fingering should evolve as well (likewise with the help of the teacher).

Relaxation

What about relaxation? I have staked out (and mentioned repeatedly over the years) a position that relaxation is crucial to playing and to the learning process. I want students to be relaxed and happy and do things that they want to do not just because that seems like a nice state of affairs in itself, but also because I think that it leads to better learning. But I have no clear answer to how you induce relaxation. There is a paradox in that sentence—one that was embodied in a self-help book that was around when I was growing up called “Relax Now!”—the title sort of slashed across the cover in garish red letters. It looked like an attempt to intimidate people into relaxing. That, I imagine, can’t be done. 

The similar paradox in music learning is that we want students to relax, but also to believe that what they are doing is very hard, that almost no one ever succeeds, that they must be extraordinarily disciplined, practice a lot and always very well, that they must have succeeded by a very young age or they might as well give up, and so on. I or any other teacher may be quite good at not conveying that long list of dangers—it helps if, like me, you don’t actually believe in it. But it is still all there in our culture and its approach to music, especially music as a profession. 

And of course the basic part about work is not false: really learning music requires plenty of work. Part of my reason for wanting to make this work as efficient as possible—effective practice strategies—is to keep the process from being overwhelming in its sheer amount. However, I have to ask myself whether an emphasis on really good practicing can’t lead to pressure of its own. If I am not practicing perfectly, then maybe I’m losing out in some way. If not, why not? How can practicing be a relaxed or relaxing experience?

One thing that can help with relaxation is out-and-out silliness. What part can that play in learning an instrument or even in practicing? Quite a bit, I think. For example (minor silliness), it is quite a good thing for anyone who practices occasionally to play a piece focusing on nothing but physical relaxation. That is, let the hands, feet, and the whole self be almost completely lacking in muscle tone—almost slumped over. Certainly try to play the notes of the passage or piece, but give absolute top priority to being as over-relaxed as I have described. This will almost certainly lead to plenty of wrong notes. But it is a delightfully pure way to feel relaxed while playing. 

Other practice techniques

This is also good practice in keeping things going when you make a wrong note—possibly the single most important performance skill. Another paradox of working on music is this: if you really practice perfectly all the time you will in fact never make a wrong note. Technically, practicing well means keeping everything slow enough and broken down into small enough units that you never do anything wrong. But how can you ever practice the very thing that I just said was the most important performance skill? Surely that is the last thing that you want never to have practiced. So, is it possible to make wrong notes on purpose and recover from them? Is that a good idea as part of a practice regimen? I think that it probably is. (I continually demonstrate to students how much better it sounds when there are obvious wrong notes but no break in rhythm as compared to minor, fleeting wrong notes that the player allows to disrupt the flow of things.) Of course it isn’t pure: practicing making wrong notes on purpose and then continuing isn’t exactly the same as keeping going when a wrong note takes you by surprise. But it is useful, and, again, silly enough to be relaxing.

Practicing while it is really noisy is also a good idea—that is, a “bad” idea that can be fun and also serve as good training for some aspects of our work. A student can try practicing while there’s other music on—at home this can be the stereo, at the organ console it might be a device with headphones. I recently spent some time practicing clavichord while a recording of piano music played. It was interesting: I could tell that the (very quiet) clavichord was making sound, but I couldn’t tell that that sound had pitch. It was a great concentration exercise. (This reminds me of what Saint-Saëns reported, namely that in his days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire the piano practice facility contained twenty-four pianos in one big room. Everyone could hear everyone, and you really learned to concentrate and to listen.)

How about playing too fast? That is, playing a passage faster than you can play it and faster than you would want it to be. This of course can be fun. One of the big obstacles to students’ practicing slowly enough is that it is often just plain more fun to play fast. So perhaps playing too fast should be separated out: when you are really practicing a passage, do all of the things that I have described in past columns: slow enough, fingerings that are well-planned, and so on. But once in a while just let something rip. This ties in with the previous few paragraphs: if and only if you keep things physically relaxed are you able to go really fast, and if you try to tear through a passage much too quickly, you will make wrong notes, so you can practice keeping things going. (If you don’t make wrong notes, it may be fast but it is not too fast. So go faster!)

I have noticed (this month I seem to be writing more than ever about the production schedule of these columns) that during the part of next month when I usually write the column, I have a recording session. It is for a Frescobaldi harpsichord recording that has been in the works for quite a while. This juxtaposition has given
me the following idea: I am going to keep notes, a sort of diary of the latter stages of my preparation for those sessions, and then of the sessions themselves. The June column will be an edited selection of those notes—an account of some of my thoughts and experiences from the recording process. It will end up being a natural extension of some of the musings
of these last two columns. Its relationship to teaching as such will be, I assume, tangential but real: examples of thinking and working and trying
to make things come out well in a certain kind of musical situation. In any case, I hope that it will be interesting.

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

Helping Students Choose Fingerings IV

This is my tenth anniversary column, as the first one was published in The Diapason of September 2007. It has been a great pleasure all this time, and I look forward to more. I also take this occasion to mention, as I did at the beginning and as I have from time to time, how much I like getting feedback from readers, and how helpful it is. Please keep it coming!

In this column I am returning to the thread about fingering, musing about ways of introducing students to the art of choosing fingerings for themselves. My plan is to outline some thoughts and suggestions about how to make a success out of my own preferred model: one in which we come as close as possible to letting students work things out for themselves from the beginning. In previous columns on this topic I have sketched out what I see as some advantages and some pitfalls of this basic approach, and the same for a contrasting, more “hands on” or interventionist, approach. Here I try to be as concrete and specific as I can about how to maximize the advantages and, especially, avoid the pitfalls of suggesting to students that they operate with as much autonomy as possible from as early as possible.

General ideas or principles

The overall scheme that I use with most students can be described this way. I want the student to have a set of general ideas or principles to work with prior to working out fingerings for pieces in general or for any particular piece, though these can be somewhat flexible. I ask the student to think about, explain, justify, defend, or rethink specific fingering choices that they bring to me. And I want to be on the lookout not so much for fingerings that I would do differently or that I disagree with, as for fingerings that I think have the potential to be physically harmful. (If the principles that I suggest in advance are well enough thought out and if the student remembers them, then this last point should be moot.) 

The first and over-riding advance principle is simply this: that fingering matters. It should not be taken for granted that everyone knows this. I have two brief anecdotes. First, I recently spoke to someone I know, an accomplished and committed amateur pianist. She was musing about why certain aspects of her playing were going better recently than they had in the past. As we explored that, she mentioned that she had been paying more attention to fingering over the last couple of years than she had previously. I assumed at first that this meant some refinement about an exact approach to fingering, one that she had found subtly more fruitful than what she had been doing. But it turned out that she meant something more basic. She had not, until quite recently, made a practice of planning out fingering at all, or of writing fingerings into music, or of necessarily always playing a passage with the same fingerings. Furthermore, she remembered that when she was taking lessons in her high school years, a few decades ago, none of her teachers ever particularly mentioned fingering as something to think about or really as something that existed as a subject. 

Second, a day or two ago I encountered, poking around at random the way one does, an internet discussion about all sorts of aspects of organ playing: finding repertoire for church, choosing editions, aspects of pedaling, and so on. A couple of posts featured a fervent and well-crafted attempt by one (anonymous) writer to convince everyone else that it was worth paying attention to fingering, planning it, being systematic about it. No one, as far as I could see, was arguing against this, but it also wasn’t obvious to everyone or necessarily part of their way of thinking. We might not all realize or remember that this basic point sometimes has to be made, or that it is something about which some students might need to be reminded.

I see that in the cryptic notes that I made for this column over the last couple of weeks I included the line “everyone needs reminders about everything.” I think that that is a good working assumption. I know that I do!

Convincing arguments for systematic fingering

The starting point for convincing (or reminding) students that they should take systematic fingering seriously is simply this: that if you drill or practice or repeat a passage with the same fingering every time, you are learning a physical gesture, making it progressively more solid. But if you repeat the same notes over and over again with different fingerings, you are drilling, if anything, contradictory gestures. Some of that practicing actually cancels itself out. This is concrete, basic, and true, and tends to be convincing. In fact, it is usually so quickly and uncontroversially convincing that it feels more like “reminding,” even if the student hasn’t thought about it in that specific way before.

It might be worth talking to a student about the distinctions among three connected but different things: 1) working out fingerings in advance; 2) always practicing with the same fingering; and 3) writing fingerings in the score. Clearly no one of these leads inevitably to the others, and they relate in different ways to the project of learning a solid approach to fingering. Writing fingerings in is neither an absolute necessity nor a guarantee that the fingering process will proceed fruitfully. Remembering what fingerings you want to use is necessary. Some people achieve that by writing in everything and reading those markings carefully at first, more subliminally later on, in a way that tracks the note-reading process itself. Some people achieve it by writing in only key or transitional fingerings, or even a random subset of all of the fingerings, just as guideposts. Some people achieve it by just having a really good memory for fingering. All of these approaches are fine if they work. The last one is rare, but I use it myself. I remember fingerings extremely well, but I find written fingerings distracting, so I write in very few indeed, none for most pieces. I should emphasize that this does not mean that I do not use the same fingerings consistently. This approach does not work best for most students or players, but works well for some. It can conceal inconsistent use of fingerings, so that should be monitored. But writing fingerings in is no guarantee that those fingerings will always (or ever) be followed. One pitfall of writing in all fingerings is that that act itself can seem like learning the fingerings, so that it becomes subconsciously tempting to ignore the question of whether you are really following what you have written. 

A student who is fairly new to working out fingerings will probably do well to start by writing in more rather than less, bearing in mind the concerns mentioned above. This makes it easier for the teacher to see what the student has done and to offer feedback, and to observe along the way whether the student is in fact using the intended fingering. 

It seems logical that if you write in many or most fingerings, you must have worked them out. And this is true at the extreme: no one is going to lean over the page and write in numbers at random. But it is more than possible to write in fingerings that have been worked out partially, quickly, or with inadequate thought, analysis, or attention. Then the writing can become its own pitfall: once the fingerings are written in they take on a bit of authority, and inertia favors keeping them. It is important for every player to remember that writing fingerings is just a tool. If while you work fingerings out you write them in, even if only to make sure that you don’t forget them while working, then you must be willing to erase them just as readily as you wrote them. In fact, just to be safe, you should try to be eager and enthusiastic about erasing! (It is annoying that most pencils can still write long after their erasers have worn away. Make sure that you have a good eraser at all times. No fingering should ever be written in ink.)  

What students should bear in mind when starting to write fingering

Our main concern right now is the working out itself—neither the writing, which has no real meaning in itself beyond its service as a tool towards other goals, nor the practicing, although it is the essence of the learning process. So what are some of the thoughts specific to the act of working out fingerings that I want students to bear in mind before starting to work?

1) Hand position. This is always my starting place with fingering. If the hand is comfortable, the chance that a combination of fingers will be able to execute a note pattern comfortably is greatly enhanced. If hand position is good, no fingering can be actually bad, though some can be more appropriate to the situation than others. Good hand position is self-defining: if the hand isn’t tense, then the position is fine. However, there is a lot more to say about it than that. The main thing that I point out to students, early and (if necessary) often, is that for the wrists to be turned out is productive of strain and tension. If a fingering choice causes one of the wrists to be turned out more than just a little bit, it is important to rethink that choice.

The second most potent source of tension in the hand is too much stretching between fingers, not so much between fingers 1 and 5 as between other pairs, especially 2 and 5. (Almost all keyboard players are aware of what interval they can reach with 1 and 5. But many of us don’t pay attention to what we can reach with 2 and 5 or other shorter segments of the hand. An awareness of the feel of wide intervals with non-thumb fingerings can help us understand the connections between fingering choices and the comfortable use of the hand as a whole.) Hand position is a good place to start in helping students to approach fingering with independence and autonomy, since only the player can actually know and experience whether a position is comfortable or not. The rest of us can only guess or predict. 

2) Do not play black notes with the thumb. When the thumb plays a black note, it is quite likely that the hand will twist into an uncomfortable position. However, the point of this as a guideline is the comfortable hand position itself, not something primary or critical about not letting the thumbs touch the raised keys. It is also a good way to promote awareness and autonomy. Yes, the student should assume that the thumb will avoid black notes, but should also be on the lookout for those situations in which for one reason or another it would actually be more comfortable to contravene this “rule.” This happens typically with octaves, but can happen for miscellaneous reasons having to do with the notes around a given black note. It is the exception, by a wide margin, but not vanishingly rare.

3) Repeated notes. I have written at great length in the past about why I believe that changing fingers on repeated notes is a good standard practice. This is mostly about the effect of this approach on the shaping of the repeated notes themselves, especially the release of the note(s) to be repeated. But it is also true that the freedom to move, on repeating a note, to any finger other than that which is already holding that note can open up possibilities for the shape of the overall fingering of a passage. Sometimes it really unlocks the whole thing. Students should always be on the lookout for this. In some passages, looking first at moments when a note is repeated, and reasoning the fingering out from that moment, forward and backward, can be fruitful and efficient.

4) Analyze fingering both forward and backward. We often start at the beginning of a passage, with a fingering for that beginning that might be rigorously determined or might be somewhat arbitrary, and construct fingering by going forward from there. However, whenever it is possible to choose a finger for a note based not on what just happened, but on what needs to happen next, that can lead to ease and simplicity. You do have to get to that finger, but the question of how you get there should not be granted automatic priority. That automatic priority is often hard-wired into our thinking. I will occasionally ask a student, “What finger would you play that note with if it were the first note of the piece?” And still they start their answer by saying, “Well, it has to be x,” because they have decided that you can only get to it with x. So then I will intensify the question: “Never mind how to get there. We’ll figure that out later. What if it were the first note you ever had to play?” That gets the focus on what comes next, on going on. And the interesting thing is that indeed the “how we get there” is usually easy to solve.

5) Don’t avoid fingers because of a perceived intrinsic problem with that finger. Of course this applies mainly to 5, second most to 4. It is common to see a student finger a fairly busy or spread-out passage with all or mostly 1-2-3, just because the outside of the hand seems (or is) weaker or less agile. That can lead to intrinsically awkward fingerings, and actually using the outer fingers is part of the way to get them to work their best. (There are also exercises and other dedicated techniques for that.)

Next month I will continue from here. Meanwhile I want to report, as a sort of tangent or coda, on a couple of random interesting things about fingering that I have bumped into in my preparation for these columns. The first is about Marcel Dupré. He is, for better or worse, greatly associated in organ culture with the notion of fingering, since his Bach edition was so thoroughly fingered. I encounter, surprisingly often, debates among colleagues about whether his Bach fingerings are good or bad, or perhaps whether they are good, in a sense, but inauthentic, or various other nuances about how to think about or approach them. (This includes whether or not to use his edition at all.) None of this, I hope, overshadows his legacy as a composer. I find it interesting to note that in his own published organ compositions he provided really thorough fingerings only for some of his simpler, or “teaching” works, not for the virtuoso performance pieces. Did this mean that he assumed that players of the more difficult works were intrinsically able to think about fingering on their own, or that they would have already absorbed his fingering ideas from teaching pieces, or something else?

Second, I have been looking at the version of the Bach Fantasia, BWV 922 (no pedal, probably for harpsichord), which was fingered very thoroughly by Johann Gottlieb Preller (1727–1786). Very little is known about Preller, but he is not known to have had any direct connection to Bach. He is also not known to have studied with any of Bach’s own students. However, he was born and raised in the same general part of Germany as Bach, and clearly knew of his music, since he copied some of it out. He was 40 years younger than Bach, and grew up in a musical milieu in which Bach was already somewhat old-fashioned. So how do we regard those fingerings?

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, and Projection I

With this month’s column, I begin to muse about some aspects of our jobs as teachers that involve helping students to work in ways that are best for their own enjoyment and motivation: how to help students integrate their playing into their own lives, and how to integrate the students’ lives into our teaching. This is partly about the big picture: how much time can a student find to play? How much of that should be real practicing, and how much can be other sorts of playing? How can a student’s own interests and motivations interact with the requirements, needs, or demands of others? But it can also be about the immediately musical. I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking “What do you most deeply want out of life?” That is perhaps sort of a joke, but not entirely, as I will discuss later on.

While I wish that any column of mine could be a discussion rather than just a one-way written piece (I ask for feedback from time to time, and often get some, for which I am grateful) this time around I wish that more than ever. The things about which I am musing this month are not concrete or demonstrably true (or false). They arise out of my own experience, and—much more than things like what practice protocol will produce the most efficient progress in learning a pedal line—they change or evolve over the months and years. That evolution is partly the result of new experiences with students, as well as an ongoing conversation between myself and others. I hope that a future column will consist of e-mails from readers about this column, with further thoughts of mine. Furthermore, I am trying to challenge or question some of my own thoughts or habits of thinking, and that process is made more fruitful by interaction with the ideas of others. You will notice that there are plenty of sentences here that end in question marks: more questions than answers.

Inspiring motivation 

I haven’t written much about how to keep students interested or motivated. That is in part because I—and to an extent all of us as organ teachers—have the luxury of working mostly with students who are well self-motivated. That doesn’t necessarily mean self-disciplined. Someone can be very well motivated and still not be very good at self-discipline and the kinds of efficiency and organization that we associate with that concept. I myself am a prime example. I am an organ, harpsichord, and keyboard repertoire “groupie.” But that often manifests itself in my perpetually distracting myself from focused work on practicing or writing with other things that are also about the kinds of music that I love listening to or reading. 

However, very few people are pushed into studying organ or harpsichord by circumstances beyond their control. Very few people go into any sort of music (especially “classical” music) because it seems like the best or easiest way to make a living. There always must be a large element of just plain loving it—being deeply interested. However, music teachers of piano, violin, some wind instruments, sometimes voice, perhaps other instruments, are often called upon to teach students—especially children—who are taking lessons because someone has twisted their arms to do so. This arm-twisting certainly isn’t necessarily or always bad. It is undeniable that young children don’t always know what they will end up wishing they had done or had learned, and very possibly one of the jobs of a parent is to introduce children to things that they can’t or probably won’t just find for themselves. That this creates a risk for over-coerciveness, for inappropriate pressure based on projection, and for all sorts of conflict and struggle to arise doesn’t mean that it isn’t also sometimes right and good. 

I have admiration and awe for music teachers who can make good things happen for students whose reasons for being there are not just their own genuine and deep interest. It is hard to find the balance between keeping interest, morale, and a sense of fun high and getting practical learning done. If there were not plenty of teachers able to navigate all of this extremely effectively then we wouldn’t have very many musicians around. But at the same time, I have always doubted how effective I could be in that situation. I think that it is not an accident that I teach a subspecialty that draws people who know that they want to be there (though I teach organ and harpsichord mainly because that is what interests me).

I don’t want to get too complacent about that. If our students are largely self-motivated, and if we can expect to take advantage of that in our teaching, how specific can we or should we get in understanding that self-motivation? Can we help students more the more we understand that motivation? Here I want to examine and challenge some of my own assumptions. One of them is that studying music is all about preparing for concert performance. This manifests itself in my own work: the only way I can make a bargain with myself to practice slowly enough (even though I know how important slow practice is, and have written about it here over many years), is to pretend while I am playing a passage slowly that I actually want to perform it at that speed. If I let myself admit what I actually know to be true, that I am playing slowly at that moment as a stage in practicing, I will begin to speed up, as much as I know that I shouldn’t. I strongly believe that every student should be working towards playing all of his or her pieces in concert. I wouldn’t explicitly say that this is what I think, but it operates in the background as an assumption. 

Concert vs. non-concert 

preparation

Of course, there are many reasons for working on pieces other than to play them in concert. One is simply interest—just to get to know the piece, or, to put it another way, to be able to play it for oneself. Another is to play it informally in a non-concert situation or in church. Yet another is to use a piece as material for becoming a better player overall, as an exercise. Another is to learn about a kind of repertoire or composer, or to learn something about the organ on which you are playing. Does an awareness of exactly why the student wants to work on a particular piece inform anything specific about how we teach that piece? Here’s an aspect of this that I think is delicate and interesting: if a piece is being prepared for performance, then we know that it should be prepared really well. That means several things—the notes are extremely reliable, the tempo is where the player really wants it to be (no fudging or pretending that a too-slow tempo is what is really desired, as in my own practice habits!), the interpretive elements are thought out and internalized enough to be reliable, and so on. 

Suppose that a piece is being played for a purpose other than performance? On the one hand, it might be questionable to insist on the same level of preparation. It is hard, often grueling work to get a piece into that sort of shape. Is it really necessary? On the other hand, is it patronizing (to the piece or to the student) to set a lower bar because there isn’t a concert in the offing? Would doing so encourage bad learning habits that might spill over? Does this imply lack of respect for whatever purpose the piece is actually being used for? Again, the answers might be different depending on whether the piece was being prepared for non-concert performance—informal playing for the student’s friends, parents, fellow students, church—or being worked on just to get some familiarity with that piece or a segment of the repertoire, or to get to know a particular organ, for example. 

I suspect that the answers to these questions may depend on the student’s state of mind. Is incomplete (or what might seem neglectful) playing the result of an attitude of neglectfulness, or is it the result of a decision about where effort should best be spent? If a piece of music is being used as fodder for studying something other than that piece, if it is being used as exercise material, for developing greater skill as a player, then arguably it doesn’t matter how well the student learns that piece. In other words, any given number of hours spent practicing can have the same result for the player’s development, regardless of whether those hours are spent practicing one piece enough to learn it, or practicing three pieces each for an amount of time that leaves them far from complete. 

Over the years I have had a few students say, right off the bat, that they don’t really care about fully learning their pieces. I remember one such student in particular. He was very talented and dedicated, yet preferred to work on a piece only up to a certain point—getting to know it pretty well, but not do all of the drilling necessary to get a piece performance-ready. It was of more interest to him, once he reached that stage with a piece, to go on to another piece. This was most decidedly not part of an attitude of neglectfulness. For one thing, he fingered every note very carefully and put as much time into that process as it needed. He was also analytical in his approach to the music, studying and becoming aware of all sorts of compositional features and thinking deeply about performance ideas. But at a certain point he preferred to do all of those things with the next piece, not to “finish” the existing piece. He had never given a public performance.

It was a challenge for me to accept this. For one thing, he was “so close”—he amply had the ability and had already done much of the work that it would have taken to get the pieces in shape for performance. What would be the harm in doing so? But this was my agenda, not his. Furthermore, it could have been influenced by our desire that we all must have at some level to have people out there hear our students play well—since that will reflect well on us as teachers. Again, this was my agenda, not his needs. Perhaps I was also influenced by the “if something is worth doing it is worth doing well” ideology, though at a conscious level I have long ago decided that that is at best an oversimplification. But even accepting the notion of doing something well, there’s still the question of what you are doing. 

Part of this student’s motivation was intellectual curiosity about the next piece, and the next, and then the next composer, and so on. Part of it was the desire to have fun playing. The fingering process he found to be fun because it was a set of interesting puzzles. The process of playing through a piece—with the well worked-out fingerings, slowly, tolerating some hesitations and wrong notes—he found to be fun because it sounded a lot like the piece: it felt like playing music. The process of drilling all of the difficult bits until they were really solid was not fun. He was doing—extremely well—what he wanted to be doing.

Of the students whom I remember who fit this description, most or perhaps all had not done any actual performing as of the time that they came to me for lessons and professed this attitude. This gives rise to a set of questions: how can they know that they don’t want to perform or wouldn’t get something out of working pieces up beyond a certain point if they have never tried it? What should the teacher do to offer at least a chance of exploring the logical next step in learning pieces without being coercive about it or acting according to the teacher’s own agenda rather than the students? Questions of this sort also apply to other areas in which I would most naturally want to suggest that we teachers should try to not push our students in pre-determined directions, most especially in choice of repertoire.

All this leads to the following question, which makes me uncomfortable enough to have to do some real thinking: what is the line between not imposing approaches or activities on our students that are driven by our needs rather than our students’ needs and making patronizing or even (subconsciously) dismissive assumptions about what a given student can or cannot do? In other words, if I decide not to coerce a student into framing his or her musical activities with reference to concert performance, am I respecting that student’s own wishes and giving him or her credit for being mature enough to know what is right, or am I somewhat type-casting the student as one who can’t perform or can’t be challenged beyond a certain point?

More questions, and perhaps more answers, next month.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VI

At the beginning of this series of columns I mentioned (warned?) that I was planning to let myself muse about the subject in a leisurely fashion, spread out over quite a few months. The importance of the subject justified this, and so did its open-endedness. There are many ways of looking at this aspect of our work that are worth talking about and taking seriously; there are several angles from which to approach it. I am beginning to feel, however, that six columns spread out over seven months is getting close to being enough for now. So this column and the next one—which constitute a long “to be continued” on the same specific aspect of our subject—will be the last ones on this matter for a while. 

The specific agenda for these two columns is to talk about what to do when a student comes back with a worked-out fingering. I will also address a couple of loose ends and include a random thought or two. I certainly have not exhausted the overall subject, and I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that exhausting the subject is never possible and is never the point. I will probably come back to it someday, perhaps in part to address some interesting and useful comments from readers that I have already gotten, and others that I may get. Meanwhile, in January’s column, I will move on to other things.

Feedback for student fingerings

If you have sent a student off to work out a fingering for a passage or a piece, perhaps with some guidelines similar to mine from the last two columns, then presumably that student will come back with the worked-out fingering. The next step, in which you give feedback, is crucial: that’s where a lot of the learning comes in.

The actual dynamic of this part of the process is subject to a host of variables: how much of the passage has the student felt comfortable actually fingering, and how much has been reserved for discussion? How much has already been practiced, and how close is it to being learned? (Included in the latter are questions as to whether the student has put the hands together yet, or added pedals, if that’s relevant, and at what sort of tempo is the piece in relation to a possible final tempo.) Questions about how the student relates to the particular piece or the sort of repertoire might be relevant. Is the piece an exemplar of a kind of music with which the student is already very familiar (their sixth Orgelbüchlein chorale, say, or eighth movement from a Widor symphony), or is it relatively uncharted territory, a first step into the twentieth century for a student who has been at home in the eighteenth, or vice versa? Does it happen to be a two-manual passage? 

Then there are the psychological/temperamental matters. Is the student one who is self-confident in general and likely to feel good about fingering choices, perhaps regardless of whether the choices seem good to the teacher? Can the student be relied on to push back against teacher suggestions that he or she really doesn’t like, or at least to be forthright about the rationale for choices? Or is it someone who is almost waiting to be told that they have gotten it wrong—someone whose first impulse will be to shut down in the face of any inquiry and be embarrassed to share the thought process that led to the fingering choices? Or is the situation somewhere in between? Do you know the student well, and are the two of you comfortable together? Or is it someone whom you are really still getting to know?

All of these are surprisingly practical concerns given our delicately balanced goal: to coax students into greater autonomy, confidence, and independence without letting them persevere with fingerings that are going to be really problematic. If we think that a fingering is just plain really bad (to put it bluntly), how do we tell that to the student? It is important not to seem to go back on the promise of autonomy and independence. But it is also important for the student to end up with good fingerings. (Well, maybe. I’ll talk about that more below.)

Of course this is a version, appropriate to this stage of the process, of the whole set of questions about how much autonomy to give students in choosing fingerings in the first place. The premise for now is that we are opting for a great deal of autonomy. But that takes on a different dynamic as the moment of solidifying fingerings in actual use draws closer.

At an earlier point in planning out these columns, I had thought that I would try to concoct a “case study,” that is, that I would choose a passage, create a fingering for it that a student might have come up with, and then go through the passage, reacting to that fingering as I might do with a “live” student. But as I thought about all the variables of the situation, I decided that that would be artificial and limiting. It is a process that perhaps could form the basis of a video or live class demonstration. To be useful it would need to be made up of multiple examples. I think that here it is more fruitful to keep discussing the process, again not expecting to be exhaustive, but to cover enough points to be useful.

To start with, let’s assume that the student comes back with a fingering with which they feel pretty comfortable and that they are ready to play, perhaps (or probably) below the eventual performance tempo. How should we watch and listen, and what should we be looking out for?

The answer to how we should watch and listen is “very carefully, very closely.” And although listening to what our students do is always critical­—this is music after all—in this situation watching is if anything more important. We need to see and keep track of a host of things: what the written fingerings are, what the actual fingerings are, where on the keys the fingers are landing, and, always, everything about the student’s physical being: hand position, tension or relaxation of the hand, and signs of tension or awkward or unnatural positioning of the rest of the body. For this specific kind of work with a student, the most practical use for listening is as an aid in noticing tension. A persistent wrong note, which we might either see or hear, can be a sign of a fingering problem that should be dealt with, but it is more often about practicing. (More about all of this below.) 

Concerns about student fingerings

The bedrock, non-negotiable concern about a student’s worked-out fingering is that it not be dangerous. Everything else is part of a discussion. Fingerings that are non-historical, or different from what the teacher would do, or that create certain articulations, or rule out certain articulations, and so on, might be good, bad, both: everyone will think about them a bit differently. Fingerings that are awkward and inefficient can still be made to work with enough practicing, though that practicing might be less enjoyable than it could or should be. That’s not to say that a fingering that is bad in that sense should go unnoticed or unchallenged: part of the point of this process is to get students to recognize such fingerings and get better and better at avoiding them. Fingerings that might hurt the hand, usually by an uncomfortable stretch or by twisting out, are fairly rare. But they deserve first mention here because it is absolutely out of the question to let them pass.

This does indeed shade over into the next item to pay attention to: anything that looks tense or awkward. Are there spots where the student looks uncomfortable or tense as a matter of overall attitude? Are there moments where you can see the hands, arms, neck, or (especially) shoulders appear to tighten? These signs can mean either that the fingering in those spots is actually a problem or that the student is uncertain about those fingerings. In any case, these are places that should be flagged for discussion. Even if the tension or awkwardness is not so severe that our judgment suggests that it could be harmful, it is still not best for musical performance and should be corrected if possible.

With awkward-looking fingerings, it is a matter of your judgment and the student’s whether they cross a line into being potentially physically harmful. You must bring this up and discuss it if you are concerned. That is one situation in which your sense of the student’s temperament and attitude comes into play. If the student says that something is not painful, is it OK to leave it at that? If a student needs to wring out a hand after playing a passage and says, “no, it’s all right,” is it acceptable to leave it at that? If a student is wearing a pained facial expression, is that more likely to be about general anxiety than an immediate extreme discomfort?

If a fingering is somewhat awkward and we can’t come up with a better one, then we are likely to stick with it and try to relax out of whatever tension it creates as promptly as possible. If the only possible fingering for a passage is one that honestly seems so wrong physically that it could be damaging, then that is actually a reason to consider not playing the piece or slightly rewriting it. This latter is rare—presumably because most keyboard composers write their music to be playable. When it does happen it is often because of a mismatch between the hand size of the player and the expectations of the composer. We are all lucky that composers with extra-wide hand spans mostly bore in mind the needs of the rest of us!

Hand position

Watching hand position is important and is really the foundation of all of what I have mentioned above. If you see an awkward hand position, then it is worth querying the fingering, pointing out what looks awkward, and asking the student about the rationale for the fingering. Sometimes bad hand position is the result not of actually bad fingering, but of holding notes longer than necessary or leaving fingers over notes that they have released when they should be free to float away and wait over other notes. This is actually a surprisingly important aspect of the relationship between fingering and hand position. No fingering in itself implies anything about where the relevant finger should be or what position that hand should be in once that finger has released its note. That can be clearly determined by the next note, but if it isn’t, then the situation is turned around, and the proper place for a finger to be is defined by the act of returning the hand to a relaxed comfortable position. It is possible to be misled as to how good or bad a fingering is by letting that fingering influence hand position more than it actually has to, and in an uncomfortable direction.

When bad hand position does stem directly from a questionable fingering, sometimes that in turn comes from the next thing to watch for: the student’s neglecting part of the hand for no particular reason. As I mentioned in one of my sample guidelines two months back, there is a tendency to avoid fingers 4 and 5, especially 5. If you see a student indulging that tendency, you should question it. And you will see this, whether or not you remind students in advance to think about it. If you see a busy passage being played with just fingers 1-2-3, and if it looks awkward, then ask the student about it. Often there will be a plausible musical logistic reason. Often that reason, though plausible, is in fact a false one: an excuse, not a reason. (And this is usually subconscious, so it is fruitful to alert the student to it.) The avoidance of “weak” fingers is instinctual and can be stubborn. It also reflects different realities for different students: that is, for some people, the fifth finger really is a problem, for some it is just a fear. This is a difference that should be sorted out. My Diapason column from September 2016 was all about the fifth finger and includes my ideas about how to work on it when it really is a problem in and of itself.

Avoiding use of certain fingers

A couple of side notes: I have only fairly recently become really comfortable playing trills, especially long trills, with fingers 4 and 5. I didn’t notice the moment when this happened, but it was probably in about my 25th or 30th year of performing and teaching. I have noticed that the availability of that fingering for trills sometimes can make the rest of the fingering for a passage remarkably more straightforward. This reminds me, in turn, that it is important in all circumstances not to avoid the use of any fingers arbitrarily. Sometimes the avoidance of certain fingers is indeed not arbitrary, but has a musical (often historical) purpose. If a student, in collaboration with you as the teacher, is applying some of the principles of “early” fingering to a piece, and therefore perhaps using at the least the thumb and maybe the fifth finger less than one might otherwise, it is important to do this in a way that is comfortable. That is, almost certainly, a significant part of the actual original purpose of that approach to fingering. The main enemy of comfort and natural hand position with fingerings of this sort is an attempt to hang on to legato when the fingering is specifically geared towards non-legato: for example in a 3-4-3-4 fingering in the right hand in a rising scale passage, turning the hand nearly upside-down between the second and third notes.

Another thing to look for is any place where your student is actually using a fingering different from the one that they have worked out and written in. This is one place where your watching closely comes into play! When this happens, it can be just a random one-off that doesn’t mean anything. It should be queried though, in case it is more than that. It can turn out that the written fingering is really best, and that the task for the student is to be more assiduous about following it. That often means slower, more targeted practice. (Though it can also be a sign that the student needs new glasses. That sounds flippant, but is actually a frequent serious issue. If you can’t read the notes easily, that is always a problem. If you can’t read the written-in fingerings easily and spontaneously, that is a problem as well: a source of inefficiency and potential insecurity.)

It can be useful to go over the reasoning behind the fingering again. This can help fix it in the semi-memory so that the need to read it in real time will recede and eventually go away entirely. It is also very possible that the actual fingering that you saw is better than the written-in fingering. This should be explored in discussion. If it turns out to be true, that creates an excellent opportunity for the student to learn through analyzing and comparing the two fingerings and analyzing why the written-in choices were made and why they don’t seem to be best in practice. 

Next month, in continuing this discussion, I will, among other things, write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. As an appetizer to that part of the discussion I include a couple of examples of spots where I happened upon ways of solving tricky fingering issues by what I like to think of as clever hand distribution. (See Examples 1 and 2.) These both arose in my practicing of pieces that I will be performing this fall, and indeed they both arose during the same days during which I have been writing this column. They are both Bach harpsichord pieces. The first is from the fugue of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the second from the fugue of the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro. No very specific pedagogic point to either of them: I just like them.

To be continued.