On Teaching

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.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings V

I ended last month’s column with a couple of short digressions. I open this column in the same way. Then I will return to the train of thought from last month.

To help myself muse about teaching the art of making purposeful fingering choices, I have done a certain amount of reading: not what I would call “research,” not looking for concrete information, but just part of the process of thinking, gathering, and examining ideas. I happened to come across some extremely interesting comments by the eminent Ukrainian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, who lived from 1848 to 1933.

De Pachmann became convinced during the course of his career that there was something blocking him technically. He eventually decided or figured out that he was allowing his hands to turn out too far, both out and in, from a position that was more or less straight with the forearm. His own discussion of this in an interview is fascinating. (“Should Piano Playing Undergo a Radical Reform?”, Vladimir de Pachmann, Etude, December 1923.) This is a short excerpt:

I discovered that the whole trouble lay in the wrist. The wrists were not free. Easily said—but WHY?

Perhaps a simple experiment will serve to illustrate. Put your elbow upon the table and let your forearm fall with your hand in comfortable playing condition. 

Now, with the hand and forearm in this position, move the hand (without moving the forearm) as far as possible to the left and hold it in that position for a few moments. You will notice at once that there is a strain at the joint of the wrist. Now move the hand in the opposite direction and there is likewise a strain. It is this strain that, to my mind, distorts the muscular and the nervous condition of the hand and the forearm and results in much horrible playing. The tone cannot be musical and beautiful if the wrist is stiff or strained in this manner. Therefore I never move the hand from side to side. 

Having discovered this, I began to find that, whereas I had been unable to practice for long periods in later years without fatigue, I was now able to play for hours and hours and ‘never feel it.’

What was the result? I resolved to rework, re-arrange my entire repertoire upon this new basis. This meant refingering hundreds and hundreds of pages of music.

This interests me because it ratifies what I have long observed about the problems with turning the wrist, though I feel sure that turning out is worse than turning in, whereas Pachmann does not distinguish between those. It is also interesting to me that he presented this as a new discovery. It seems to have been new in relation to his own work and to whatever he had learned from his teachers. Elsewhere, however, he says about Muzio Clementi, who lived from 1752 to 1832, that he “was against the use of the thumb on a black key. I wondered why, and thought it over until I discovered that Clementi’s reason was that there was an undue strain on the wrist, with consequent fatigue.” So, as with a lot about music and life, this was perhaps an instance of “what’s old is new again.”

Fingering principles to
offer to your students

I resume my list of suggestions of principles or ideas that we might offer students in advance of their working out their own fingerings for pieces. 

6) Don’t finger for something that you don’t want or need to do. That is, don’t make a fingering unnecessarily complicated by asking it to create a difficult result when that result is not what you really want. This usually manifests itself as something very specific: constructing an unnecessarily difficult fingering in order to achieve legato, when that legato is not actually wanted. If you do want legato, and the fingering necessary to achieve that is complex or tricky, then this gets turned around the other way: you have to accept the difficult fingering and practice it enough to make it work. But that is usually not the problem. It is definitely a problem for many students that they think that it is lazy or unconscientious ever to use a disjunct fingering. (Often this feeling is entirely subconscious or reflexive.) But that is only true if you honestly don’t like the musical results of that fingering. The most conscientious and efficient thing that you can do in sketching out a fingering for a passage is to give yourself the freedom to use any fingers whatsoever for any two successive notes or chords that are not meant to be legato, and take it from there. 

7) Concerning patterns: on the one hand, it can be very useful to finger something that is reiterated as a pattern in the same way each time it comes along. This is true first of all because perhaps that fingering is the best fingering, considering everything. But also, the patterned fingering is itself easier to remember because it stays the same, and this has the nice benefit that when you practice one instance of it, you are also practicing the others. This is efficient and enhances security. However, it is even more important to recognize that sometimes a musical pattern is not a physical pattern. This happens most of the time and most strikingly because of the presence of sharps and flats. If the keyboard were all white keys, then this concern would largely go away. The other cause, more subtle, is that the feeling and thus the fingering needs of a repeated pattern can also change because of position on the keyboard. The same note-shapes a couple of octaves apart have different implications for hand position in particular, and therefore, sometimes, for fingering.

The two examples above show situations in which the relationship between musical patterning and fingering come out different. In the first case (Example 1), there is probably something to be gained and little or nothing to be lost by playing each four-note grouping in the same way. For any number of reasons, such as relative finger length, some players might prefer 4-2-1-2, some 5-3-2-3. (Those are not the only possibilities, but they probably cover what would feel best for almost everyone.) 

However, in Example 2, with three sharps, the consistent application of a pattern of this sort would conflict with good hand position and create problems with the use of the thumb. I have put in a fingering that fits the native shape of the passage very well for me, and there are other possibilities. A student could make the choice that the pluses of repeated patterning outweigh the negatives of thumbs on black notes or other turnings of the hand. However, that should be thought about as a conscious and careful choice. (For me, the 4-2-1-2 fingering as a thorough-going pattern would be disastrously bad; the 5-3-2-3 would be rather bad, mainly a problem in the second group of four eighth notes.)

Another thought about patterns is that some students have learned default fingering patterns for certain note patterns prior to working on any given piece. These are usually scales and arpeggios, and the fingering patterns have been learned because the note patterns have served as exercises. This can be very useful and quite a time-saver if the learned fingerings actually work well, given all of the circumstances of the piece. They often will, but also often will not. It is important to use them only when they are right, and not to let them interfere otherwise. 

It is worth remembering that even though it can seem like a shame not to take advantage of the comfort of patterned fingering for patterned notes, abandoning that patterning only brings those passages to the level of fingering-complexity of the rest of the music. It is never a particular problem, just sometimes an opportunity that we would rather not pass up.

8) Don’t confuse unfamiliarity with difficulty. That is, don’t judge the easiness or difficulty of a fingering before having gotten somewhat used to it. In choosing between two or more fingerings, the one that seems the least comfortable right off the bat might just seem the best once you have explored them all a bit. On the other hand, if a student is more or less observing all of the precepts above, is trying out a possible fingering, and that fingering simply cannot get comfortable, then it is probably one that should be changed. And that leads to another principle:

9) If you can’t come up with a fingering that you are reasonably happy with, don’t accept an unhappy fingering or try to get used to one that is really awkward. It is better to leave the passage un-fingered and un-practiced until you have had a chance to bring it back to the teacher or, perhaps, just to go on thinking, analyzing, and finally finding something better.

Are these last two principles in actual conflict with each other? Not quite. Taken together they point to the need for a student to develop the ability to tell when a fingering seems wrong because it is wrong, and when it seems wrong because it is unfamiliar or conforms to a new idea, or just hasn’t been practiced enough yet. This is one of the senses that will be strengthened by independent work on fingering. It is fine if it takes a while to develop, and it will kick in earlier and earlier in the process with each piece that the student works on. 

A list can seem so cut-and-dried. Do these nine headings outline all of what I want to tell a student before that student goes off to create fingerings for a piece? Do I always outline all of these things in this exact way? No, of course not. This outline is in part an exercise in thinking about the sorts of things that I think that we can offer to students as pre-established guidelines in lieu of specific “use this fingering here” input. Someone else might have a different specific set of ideas, or ones similar to these but put rather differently. Someone might decide that a few of these are worth outlining and discussing quite specifically in advance and that others of them can be left to be added along the way, in response to particular situations. I have never yet written an outline like this to hand to students. I do it all verbally. But the act of writing it out for the column suggests to me that I might like to try that. The danger in writing something and presenting it as a sort of document, especially as from teacher (or any supposed authority or “expert”) to student, is that it will be interpreted too hard and fast.

I think that it is necessary, whether this is all done in discussion or partly in written outline, to be very careful to remind students about flexibility and balance. This is reflected in my brief comments about “no thumbs on black notes” last month. I am still very aware that I have sometimes seemed too adamant about that, right and important though it usually is, and that a student has wasted time or even risked tendon injuries by using awkward stretches to keep thumbs off black notes that they should indeed have been playing. (I would love to know exactly how Clementi framed that.)

Students working

autonomously

I have alluded a lot to a student’s going off to finger a piece, any piece, autonomously. There’s an interesting question as to whether is it ever useful to choose pieces in the first place not to (just) teach something about execution or rhetoric or even fingering as such, but as exercises specifically in thinking independently about fingering. I think that this can be a good idea, as long as it doesn’t shade over into asking a student to work on pieces that lack musical interest. What constitutes a good piece for working on fingering choice depends on the student. However, there are things to analyze about how a piece relates to the process of working out fingerings. How much will it be necessary to think about choices of hand as they differ from what the distribution on the staves seems to suggest? (As I have written before, I feel very strongly that staff distribution shouldn’t influence hand distribution in mapping out and playing organ music. But it doesn’t hurt to clear the decks, so to speak, for this kind of work by choosing pieces where that isn’t an issue.)

The next step is to see what sort of work each hand has to do. A student can and should learn to think about fingering with any sort of texture. But it is important to be clear about the fact that different textures require a somewhat different approach, or at least feel like they lead to somewhat different processes. For example, if either hand has only one note at a time, as is true of both hands in something like a Bach two-part Invention, then the hand is free of a whole host of constraints. It’s just a question of mapping five fingers onto a succession of notes. If a hand has actual chords, that is one thing. If it has a more-than-one-note texture that arises out of counterpoint, that is something else. (Maybe the principal practical fingering difference there is that chords often change over all notes at once, whereas counterpoint, almost by definition, does not.) Many or most pieces out there have a variety of these sorts of textures. To choose an example out of thousands, many of the pieces in the Vierne 24 Pièces en style libre have long stretches in which one hand is playing a single line while the other is playing chords or some other multi-note texture. 

It is possible that at first (when a student is relatively non-advanced overall or is not yet too comfortable choosing fingerings), pieces that have one sort of texture in each hand for long stretches might be the most comfortable. That situation allows a student to focus on one sort of analysis of what the texture requires of the hand. Within reason—that is, avoiding real blockbusters—I don’t think that overall easiness or difficulty is that much of a concern. A more difficult piece just takes more time and patience, as much during the fingering phase as during the practicing phase. In fact, an extremely challenging piece can be used as an interesting laboratory for thinking about fingering, whether or not the student goes on to practice it and learn it for performance. Using a piece this way can be a challenge to the yearning for completeness and closure that most of us have, but as a learning tool it is perfectly valid. The most compelling reasons to do it are, first, that a student might actually find it intellectually interesting to think about fingering a piece that would be a stretch to play, and that the student might simply like that piece and want to engage with it. If a beginner or intermediate student works carefully on the fingering of a piece, or part of a piece, that is a real (or unrealistic) stretch now, that student will be well positioned to go ahead and really learn that piece later. That is in contrast with the situation that can be set up by more or less just stumbling through a significantly difficult piece without dealing with its challenges seriously and systematically enough.

A brief closing return to de Pachmann. In my reading I encountered this statement, one that we should all always bear in mind: “If . . . a difficulty . . .
does not disappear after one hundred repetitions . . . play it a thousand times!” (Exclamation point mine!)

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?

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. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. See his blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method XI

I ended last month’s column with the suggestion that experienced keyboard players who are using this book to begin their exploration of organ playing could now feel ready to bring to the organ any reasonably simple two-voice piece that they have already learned on another keyboard instrument. My experience suggests that this is a good idea. It can be tricky to transfer a piece from one instrument to another (very different) instrument, and there are pitfalls to watch out for, having to do with touch, sound, and idiomatic performance. Any student should also begin quite promptly to learn new pieces from scratch. However, already knowing the notes of at least a piece or two can provide added ease. When I am working with such a student, I always suggest a mix: initially a few pieces that are already under the student’s fingers, very soon a new piece or two, and a transition to mostly new pieces. 

In any case, this next excerpt is intended to ground a student with little or no keyboard experience in the practicing of what will of necessity be new pieces at the organ. It provides some general guidelines, and takes the student through the process of beginning to work on a short two-voice piece: one that is not trivially easy (and therefore that adds significantly to what the short exercises from the last few columns have provided) but that is also fairly straightforward: no tricks, nothing too unusual. It is also a piece in which the left-hand part is the more complex of the two voices.

If you have come to the organ without having played a keyboard instrument previously, and have gone over all of the above enough to feel comfortable with it, then you can now also start on simple pieces in two voices—one line of music per hand. These will not, of course, be pieces that you have played before. The repertoire is full of such pieces (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions are probably the best known) and they are appropriate to work on, if you are willing to be careful and systematic about it, and to keep practice tempos slow. A short piece by Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) from his collection Tabulatura Nova Part III of 1624 will serve as an example of how to work on such a piece at this stage in your learning process (Example 1).

Some important guidelines

1) At the beginning, work on each hand separately. In fact, at this stage—and indeed in many circumstances throughout your life as an organist—practice each hand separately until it is fully learned and comfortable before putting the hands together. (You will learn over time when this is, and isn’t, necessary or a good idea for you.)

2) Work in small chunks: maybe a measure or two at a time. It is always a good idea to practice in small enough increments so that when you return to the beginning of what you are practicing, you remember it well: that is, the repetition has a chance to impress itself on your subconscious memory. 

3) Work out fingering carefully. Your approach to fingering will evolve with experience. At this point you are using the piece and the fingering to help you become comfortable with the act of putting the two hands together. Later you will use what you have learned about fingering and practicing to give pieces the musical shape that you want.

4) Always practice slowly enough. This means that what you are playing should both be accurate and feel comfortable. If you hear yourself playing the right notes but feel yourself having to scramble to do so, you are playing too fast. There is no such thing, for purposes of effective practicing, as playing too slowly.

5) Keep your eyes on the music, not on your hands. Even when, in the course of practicing short simple lines, you find that you remember those lines well enough that you don’t need to look at the music, do not fall into the habit of watching your hands. It is OK to take an occasional glance, but that is all. Over-dependence on looking at the hands slows down the progress of becoming comfortable as a keyboard player.

6) And, of course, look the piece over in general before taking it apart and working. Notice rhythms, patterns, exceptions to patterns, wide intervals, repeated notes, compass, and so on.

(I am addressing these suggestions to those who are essentially new to keyboard playing, but any player new to the organ should read and consider them, especially when approaching new pieces.)

Practicing and fingering

In this piece, the left hand part is more active than the right hand. The right hand plays 28 notes, the left hand nearly five times that many. Thus you should probably expect to practice the left hand significantly more than the right hand. This piece also contains many repeated notes—mostly in half notes in the right hand, as in measure 3, for example, and mostly in eighth notes in the left hand, as in measures 3 and 4, and elsewhere. The compass of the right-hand part is one note under an octave; that of the left-hand part is an octave and a fourth. There is a spot in measure five where the two hands coincide on the same note, and a spot in measure nine where the left hand succeeds to the note that the right hand has just been holding. (These spots will feel different depending on whether you are playing the piece on one manual or on two.) 

The right-hand fingering can be worked out using the repeated notes as an anchor—bearing in mind what I have already mentioned about changing fingers on repeated notes. For example, if you play the first of the seven consecutive A’s starting in measure two with the second finger, and then alternate that with the third finger, the rest of the passage falls into place nicely. (This results in the first fourteen notes of the right-hand part fingered as: 2-4-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-4-3-2.) You should try a few different fingering possibilities, guided for the time being mainly by comfort and logistics.

The left hand is more complicated. You will have to spend more time working out fingerings, and you may want to change some of what you first work out as you practice it. This is, of course, normal and fine. If you have been practicing a passage with one fingering but want to change that fingering, it is necessary to back up and practice more slowly, focusing specifically on the notes where you have changed the fingering, and just a few notes before and after. Do not let fingering “change itself” at random as you practice. (To be honest, you will certainly do this later on when you have become more adept at playing and when the process of choosing fingering has become more ingrained and intuitive. But it is best not to let it happen for now.)

Take a look at the first four notes of the left hand. What fingers most naturally would play those notes? 4-3-2-4? 5-4-3-5? 3-2-1-3? Do these feel equally easy and comfortable? Does one fingering seem to create a more comfortable hand position than the others? Does one make it seem easier to go on to the next note than the others do? Or does one make it harder, while the other two seem about the same? What finger can most easily reach the middle D on the third beat of this measure? Is there more than one choice that might make sense? What about coming down from that D? 

Examples 2 and 3 are two fingering possibilities for the first part of this left-hand line. Can you devise another possibility that does not start on 4? Or that does not use 1 to play the fifth note of the line? Or that uses 1 for the first note of the second measure? Spend some time playing around with this. Try a number of fingerings a few times each. Don’t try to practice and learn each one—that comes when you have chosen one.

Later on in this left-hand part is a passage in which repeated notes occur not as groups of notes (as they do in mm. 3 and 4) but as part of moving lines. This creates interesting fingering choices, since every time that you change fingers from the first to the second note of a repeated-note pair you have a chance to reposition the hand. One possible fingering is shown in Example 4—you should try to find others.

Once you have thought about and explored the fingering of these passages and of the rest of the left-hand part, zero in on a small chunk of that line, say the first measure and a half, choose the fingering that you will learn, and begin to practice it. Practicing means repetition of the same thing done the same way, slowly and carefully, and many times in a row. As you break up a line such as this into sections for practicing and learning, bear in mind two important things: first, the increments must be small enough for the repetition to be meaningful; second, the increments should overlap or dovetail into one another, at least a little bit. The second of these is necessary to prevent the first of them from creating fragmentation or moments of insecurity in the passage. 

So, for example, if you start by practicing this left-hand part from the beginning through the middle beat of the second measure (middle D, quarter-note), then it is a good idea to begin your second increment for practicing with that same middle beat, or perhaps either two or four notes before that. The principle is that practice sections should overlap: the details should be worked out in each case in such a way that it feels natural. The exact extent of the overlap doesn’t matter. (This applies, by the way, equally to page turns. When you are working on a piece that requires a page turn, you must make sure that you do not always interrupt your practicing at the same spot. Either through brief bits of memorization or through the use of photocopying or something similar, you must practice across the page turn in a way that dovetails, so as not to create a moment of discontinuity.)

Start your practicing of any left-hand passage very slowly, so that it feels easy. Do not increase the tempo until 1) you have played the passage at least three times at the existing tempo and 2) the passage feels easy and natural at that tempo. Increase tempo a little bit at a time.

Once you have chosen fingering and practiced the same measure (or measure and a half) of each hand—remembering in this case that the left hand will require more attention and more repetition, and to practice each hand enough that it is really learned—then you are ready to put the two hands together. You will probably have to back the tempo up a bit from each hand’s separate tempo in the course of the individual practicing. (It is all right for the two hands to have reached different tempos in separate practicing, as long as you now slow things down to accommodate the extra complexity of putting both hands together.) The purpose of this exercise is to help you to become increasingly comfortable putting the two hands together. There is nothing to be gained by speed; there is a lot to be gained by good focus. 

In starting to put the hands together in a passage, make sure that you have reminded yourself in advance of the note on which each hand will start—especially if the two hands do not come in together. In the beginning of this piece, the right hand comes in well after the left hand, so you should be thinking ahead a little bit to avoid hesitation at that spot. 

(This discussion will be continued in next month’s column.)

Velocity II

Through the velocity exercises that I have outlined in last month’s issue, we have moved from the predictable 5-4-3-2-1 sequence to simple patterns, such as 5-1-4-2-3, or 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, which can be rendered predictable rather easily by studying them in advance. If predictability is the key to velocity, or the most important one, then one way to frame the quest to be secure and comfortable in playing fast is to ask how any passage can best be made fully and consciously predictable. This month I will continue to focus on looking at one-line passages.

Predictability 

The simple patterns that I suggested, beyond 5-4-3-2-1, were designed to be very easy to learn, where “learn” in this case means exactly the same thing as “make utterly predictable.” When we are dealing with pieces that are out there in the repertoire and that we haven’t concocted for this purpose, we have to do what we can to create this predictability for ourselves. This process can involve fingering choices and will always involve practice strategies and sometimes also various mental tips or tricks. 

I find it fruitful to approach this, in part, by building up from the little exercises of the sort that I wrote about last month. One way to make it possible to do this is to find ways of dividing passages into small, simple components. These components might then be sufficiently approachable as to predictability that they don’t feel that different from the simple exercises. Then the issue becomes, in large part, one of putting all of those components together without losing the predictability.

Dividing into components 

Example 1 shows the opening of J.S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, a useful laboratory for thinking about this. The two opening gestures, which we can assume are for the right hand, are very close to the kind of simple exercise that I have been presenting: more interesting musically, especially in the way in which they set up what follows, and a bit more complicated physically, but similar. You can come up with a straightforward fingering for each gesture and then execute it in the spirit of my procedure from last month. 

Once you know the fingering (maybe 1-3-5-1-5 for the first one, for example, or 1-3-5-1-4; maybe 1-2-4-1-5 for the second) you can practice that fingering on the table or the arm of your chair. Make sure that you have remembered exactly what you want to do before launching into actually doing it. Then do it in as fast a tempo, and as lightly, as you can. For this moment of practicing, it seems permissible to me to ignore the rhythm and just play five notes in a row, very fast and at the same pace as one another. Then do the same with those fingers at the keyboard. You have to add in the element of moving 1 and perhaps 5 to new (nearby) notes. This shouldn’t slow you down, again as along as you remember it very consciously before you do it. 

Notice, by the way, that the opening gestures of this piece work especially well for the right hand not just—or even mostly—because they are fairly high on the keyboard, but because the fastest notes are going down: the direction in which the right hand can take advantage of the closing-fist gesture that I discussed last month.

The gesture that begins measure 2 is longer. As he often does, Bach introduces technical elements in a way that is systematic enough that going through the passage from left to right is almost a sort of graded method. It will involve some moving or turning of the hand, one way or another, on the model of some of the latter exercises from last month. 

If you finger the first nine notes as 5-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1, then the moment of most concern as to predictability is between the f and the e, between 1 and 4. This is a routine gesture in keyboard fingering, but for the moment the point is to make it seem extra- or hyper-routine. This can be addressed by practicing smaller units that cross this spot. Initially away from the keyboard, perhaps: 5-4-3-2-1-4, of course; but also just 2-1-4; then 3-2-1-4, and so on. Then try units that allow you to practice recovering from that moment of enhanced potential unpredictability: 3-2-1-4-3; or 2-1-4-3; or 2-1-4-3-2, and so on.

Again, all of this can start away from the keyboard with that sense of light, fast drumming on a table. It can also mean, at the drumming stage, to practice a bit at first without doing the crossings: just “playing” the fingers in the requisite order. Then of course it should be brought back to the notes themselves, always with the same process: make sure that you know exactly what you are going to do before you do it, then carry it out as fast as physically possible. 

What about the next grouping, beginning on middle c, just after the fourth beat of this second measure? The seven notes beginning on that middle c might as well be one of my exercises from last month. Fingered 1-2-3-4-3-2-1 or 2-3-4-5-4-3-2, that cluster of notes is as predictable as can be. But there is a transition coming right up. Adding the first two notes of measure 3 seems trivially straightforward if we use 1-2-3-4-3-2-1-2-1 for the nine-note pattern. The transition there is just a change of direction. But then we have to do something, perhaps 3-2-3 on the following three notes, or perhaps 2-1-2. Or we can go back and rethink things, perhaps changing the whole pattern to 1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2 or even 2-3-4-5-4-3-2-3-2-1-2-3. Which of these seems best from the point of view of seamless predictability? Which of the quite different transition points in these different fingers seems easiest to execute quickly and fluently?

Fingering and velocity

The last of these questions brings us to the matter of fingering choices as they affect velocity: that is, the question that I got from a reader and which provoked this set of columns. That question presents itself a bit differently for different musical textures. As long as there is one note at a time in a given hand, in theory the player has a free choice of any of the five fingers of that hand to play any note. And striving for speed is certainly not the only consideration in choosing fingering. In fact it is not often the main one, though it might sometimes be. However, it is always an available consideration, one that matters more or less in different circumstances. 

Concerning the gestures from this toccata that we have looked at so far, just for “getting the notes,” we could play every note with 3 (which I mention first because it is the longest and most balanced finger) or with any other finger. This is also true of the next several measures. Not that we would, of course. This would be the fingering that made it hardest to get comfortable going fast (among other disadvantages). It locates a transition moment between every two notes and is as far from drumming on the table as you can get. 

Probably the opposite—groupings that are as large as possible and that permit simply playing fingers in large groups rather than turning or moving the hand frequently—are the fingerings that physiologically permit the fastest playing. Fingerings that have many transition points—including, sometimes, more than would be strictly necessary, most likely for interpretive reasons—give the player more to think about and therefore have to be analyzed and practiced that much more to achieve flawless predictability. The lesson of last month’s exercises, however, is that no gesture of this sort is beyond the threshold of how fast any of us can move our fingers. 

Here are several ways of fingering the first nine notes of the gesture that begins measure 4:

a) 5-4-3-2-3-2-1-2-3

b) 5-4-3-2-3-2-1-2-4

c) 5-4-3-2-3-2-1-3-4

d) 5-4-3-2-5-4-3-2-3

e) 5-4-3-2-5-4-3-2-4

f) 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-3

g) 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2

h) 3-2-1-3-4-3-2-1-2

i) 3-2-1-3-4-3-2-1-3

j) 3-2-1-4-5-4-3-2-3

Try going through each of these and evaluating the easiness—naturalness, potential for predictability, as best you can assess it—of each of the transition points. (I have indicated them by bold italics.) Not all of these fingerings would seem to make any particular sense in the context of the whole passage. (The last three don’t since you are coming from below and not going any higher.) But they are part of an experiment. You may discover that they all seem more or less equal in the respect that we are talking about. Or you may find some of the transition points decidedly easier than others. This will depend in part on your training and habits and in part on the shape of your particular hand. Never forget that your unique hand matters: if your fifth finger is relatively short, for example, you might find c) quite awkward; if your second finger is significantly shorter than your third you will probably find b) meaningfully easier than a). How do the relative lengths of fingers 1, 2, and 3 affect the feeling of executing d) as opposed to e)? If your fourth finger is quite short, you will probably find g) easier than h).

There are several layers to what is going on here. First of all, you can move your fingers over all these notes and through any of these transition points as fast as this or any piece will require you to. (That is the lesson of last month’s exercises and the central point of all of this.) Second, if one way of planning a transition point—one fingering—seems easier than others, it is worth considering using that. Third, however, it is also often true that some ways of executing these transitions are more suitable musically/interpretively than others—that is, more like what you want to hear. For example, here are some things that the above fingerings will tend to accomplish in performance:

a) easy to play legato seamlessly

b) puts an automatic subtle articulation before the note on the second beat of the measure

c) seamless like a), but sets you up to proceed differently

d) puts an automatic subtle articulation before the “and” of the first beat

e) combines the articulations of b) and e)—and so on.

Placement of sharps and flats can determine which transition-moment fingerings will likely work best—or, sometimes, which are really awkward or would be nearly impossible at high speed. For example, if the b-naturals in this excerpt were b-flats, then fingerings a), b), and c) would be close to impossible—let’s say disastrously awkward. The b-flat would also affect the relative awkwardness/naturalness of d) and e), of f) and g), or of h) and i). This will all vary from one person’s hand to another’s. And, again, this is really about velocity. At a slow enough tempo, even the thumb-on-a-flat fingering of a), b), or c) could be carried out successfully, though it might have implications for articulation. The differences between the members of those other pairs of fingerings would be minor or nothing at a slow speed.  Also, if the first note of the measure were an f-sharp rather than an f-natural, that might bring the last three fingerings into play for some people, since the third finger is longest and can reach raised keys the most easily and in the way that creates the best hand position. 

So far I have been talking about playing fairly short passages very fast and light, using the feeling of drumming on the table, and never playing more than you can plan out and remember in advance. One very good way of incorporating this idea into the practicing of longer passages is a particular form of practicing with altered rhythm. I wrote about this in some detail in the column of May 2012. I quote the most relevant part here, with a couple of examples:

Another format for altering rhythms to create effective targeted practice strategies involves speeding up not one note at a time (every other note, as above) but clusters of notes. The classic way of organizing this is to play first all of the notes after each beat very fast, ending on and then holding the next beat, then to play all of the notes starting on each beat very fast, ending with the last off-the-beat note of each grouping. The template for doing this works as follows. For a set of notes written like Example 2, you would first play as shown in Example 3, with the notes under each slur played as fast as possible, and the notes under the fermatas held as long as necessary to feel ready to play the next cluster of fast notes; then Example 4.

In this case, the notes under the slurs should again be played as fast as possible. Then the last note of each grouping can be held until it feels comfortable to execute the next cluster of fast notes.

In applying this to practicing passages of the sort that we are talking about here, once you have fingered them and analyzed the transition spots, you can relax the evenness of the groupings. Just make sure that the short fast bits cover the transition moments and overlap with one another so that you are not creating moments where you have trained yourself to stop.

In next month’s column I will continue this topic and add some discussion of multi-note or multi-voice textures, along with a few special details, like the relationship of velocity to fingering in early music.