On Teaching

More on performance

As I listened to the recording of the concert that inspired last month’s column, the experience gave me a few further things to say about performance. This month I will discuss those matters, as they will constitute the first part of this article. Following that, I wish to present a few ideas about performance for specific occasions, partly derived from some recent personal experiences. As has been the case with the last few articles, I will leave you with more questions than answers, as this is a large, important, and difficult subject.

Emotion during the act of performance

Listening to the recording from my March 25 recital leads me to continue the thread from last month about one’s own experience of the emotion, message, or meaning of music during the act of performance. I cannot match what I hear on the recording to any detailed memory of when I was or was not feeling what, or how involved or detached I was.

I do remember something about a particular moment. The ending of Samuel Scheidt’s Warum betrübst du dich is a spot that I like to stretch out quite a bit. I remember executing that gesture in a much more extreme way than I had planned, because it felt right to do so in the moment. It is a strangely textured passage, and the feeling of some of the chords was one that I did not want to let go of for longer than I would have expected. Others I wanted to push through. The whole variation was also a bit slower and freer overall than what I intended. Was all of that effective? I don’t know: I like it, but of course I am biased. You may listen for yourself at the following link, where I have posted the very end of the penultimate variation, just to set the scene, and then the variation in question: www.gavinblack-baroque.com/Scheidt.wav.

I have also written that I am working on trying to derive rhythm, some of the time, from the shape of the sonority rather than (or in addition to) from a pre-established beat. At the beginnings of certain pieces, my listening confirms that this was not always effective. In several cases the openings of pieces or movements sounded too slow or lacked momentum. I am not sure whether the solution is to go back, in some cases, to simply establishing a beat in my head before I start or to do something like what I was trying, but to do it better. Doing it better could mean doing it in a more moderate way or different way, but it could also mean doing it in a more committed or “extreme” way.

Sometimes ineffectiveness comes not from exaggeration but from inadequate expression of an idea. I do believe that the problem may have a greater proportion of being about the approach itself or the execution of the approach, rather than just being an artifact of the concert situation, as I thought that it might be when I wrote about it a month ago.

Finally on this subject, I have experienced what feels like a major revelation about my stance as a performer, which I think was developing even during the preparation for the recent organ recital, and which I experienced during the recital itself, but which has crystallized over the last few weeks. At one level, it is quite specific to my own circumstances and indeed in a sense quite personal. I believe that it could be of interest to others, and I am thinking about how to apply it to some of my work with students.

There is a feeling that most of us have of something looking over us and judging what we are doing. This is perhaps a kind of externalized, collective superego or conscience. It may feel like something that is connected to specific people—former or current teachers, parents, colleagues, critics, friends, neighbors, people in authority, people in general—or it may well be related to ideas or feelings about the supernatural, eternal, or spiritual. It may not be about any of those specific things. This feeling is not necessarily one that is always good or always bad, always inhibiting or always motivating. For better or worse, it is often with us.

I have a strong feeling of such a watching presence when I am performing on harpsichord, but absolutely none of it when I am performing on organ. This could sound equivalent to “I am self-conscious and unsure about my harpsichord playing but not about my organ playing.” However, I believe that is a less accurate way of putting it. I am conscious of the feeling of others scrutinizing or paying attention, but I do not necessarily think that what these non-specific and fictional others will experience when they listen to my harpsichord playing will not please them. I just feel them as being there. But again, not at all when I play organ. This could all be correlated with my thinking that my harpsichord playing is not as good as my organ playing, whatever range of meanings “good” can take. But I honestly do not believe that I do feel that way. I have a very similar awareness in both realms of what I am trying to do and why, of what proportion of the time I think that it is relatively successful, of how it stacks up with respect to various schools of thought or approaches, of how much feedback and of what sort I get from listeners, and so on. I might be unhappy with my playing on one instrument or the other on a given day, but I do not believe that I am a better organist than a harpsichordist, or the other way around.

I suspect that this dichotomy is about things that are irrational, symbolic, and subconscious. Some of it may have to do with the “Wizard of Oz” sort of credentials. My degree is in organ. I write for an organ magazine. Many of my former organ students are working full-time in the profession as organists. Indeed many of my former harpsichord students are working as organists; fewer are working full-time as harpsichordists, if there even is such a thing. I had two great organ teachers, whereas I am more or less self-taught as a harpsichordist. When I was an undergraduate I had a key to the Princeton University Chapel and often went in there alone and played the organ through the night. Of course these things are not accurate assessments of my skill level. They are superficial, and none of them may in fact be the source of the feelings that I am describing. 

If my observation about my feelings while playing went the other way, I could perhaps come up with an equal list of superficial symbolic things that also went the other way: that I am lucky enough to be the proprietor of a seventeenth-century harpsichord, that my recordings are mostly on harpsichord, that my actual job or position is with an “early keyboard center,” and so on. I would not know in that case whether some of these symbols were or were not the reason behind the psychology that I observe.

What I do know is that whereas this overarching collective superego may have a valuable role in society as a whole, it feels like a definite impediment to my finding the truest version of myself as a performer. That is, both the version that I will find the most satisfying and the version that has the best chance of sometimes creating great performances. Since I feel that this impediment isn’t there when I am functioning as an organist, the urgent task for me at this moment in my life as a musician is to learn how I can also remove it from my harpsichord performing. Whereas I had been planning to enter a period of perhaps a couple of years during which I planned only organ recitals, I have realized that I have to avoid a hiatus in harpsichord performance. Perhaps I need to mix them up as much as possible, giving organ recitals and harpsichord recitals on successive days, for example, trying to pretend that one of them is the other.

As I say, this is very personal. This is so specific to me that I would not expect anyone reading to discover exactly the same state of affairs for herself or himself. Perhaps it will resonate in some way. I am just starting to digest the question of what this says to me about work with students. Is it an insight that can lead to fruitful evolution in what I offer as a teacher? I suspect that it is, but I have to avoid imposing anything on students via any sort of projection.

Performance for other occasions

I have a couple of thoughts about performance for occasions. I recently played harpsichord at two events that were not concerts and that were driven primarily by imperatives other than those of the music that I was playing, or indeed of any music. They were both events acknowledging a particular person, and in one case it was around a retirement. I knew each of the people, but not well enough to know anything about their musical taste or what they might or might not like in performance. They had each asked that I be there to play—neither occasion was a case of my just being hired as a professional. Likewise neither of them knew enough about the harpsichord repertoire to request any particular pieces. That was up to me.

I observed in these performances what I wrote a few months ago about my goal for performance: that it create the possibility that the experience will have been important to some of the people who are present. The shift was that I identified the particular honorees as a sort of primus inter pares. If anyone was going to find my playing important, I most wanted it to be the honorees. What did I then do with that? I am not sure. I suspect that I tried to play more fervently than I normally would—or to put it more accurately, I tried to give myself permission to play as fervently as I always want to; that I played with as much lucidity as I could manage; that the self-consciousness that I described above abated to a considerable extent. 

It occurred to me as a consequence of these two experiences that almost certainly anything that guides me as a player to make the music more expressive and communicative for a particular purpose also helps to make the music more effective in general. If I did succeed in enhancing the chance that either of the honorees felt that what they got out of my pieces was important to them, then I certainly enhanced that chance for everyone else present. 

I believe that this concept might, for me and perhaps for others, help to bridge the gulf between “I am playing this because something about the day’s schedule says that I should play it” and “I am playing this because I care about expressing what it can express. “

I also noticed that the self-consciousness largely went away. I believe that the reason may have been something like this: “I know what my goal is in playing this right now. I am here to offer something to these particular people, and I believe that I know how to do so. This performance doesn’t have to bear the burden of showing that I am this or that kind of harpsichordist, or that I understand x or can do y.”  

This is very personal. It may or may not resonate with what anyone else has experienced or thought. Once again, I am still mulling over what it might mean to share the fruits of these thoughts with students.

§

I recently viewed the movie Seymour: an Introduction, which is about the pianist and renowned piano teacher Seymour Bernstein. It is a fascinating film, and he is a captivating, multifaceted, and appealing individual. At one point, he is discussing music lessons for children. He notes that just as children are required to go to school and do their homework—on pain of not being allowed to play with friends, perhaps, or to watch television—so, too, they should be required to practice for their music lessons. He mentions an hour a day of practicing before being allowed to go on to other, more enticing activities. I am only summarizing, and this was a brief moment in the film. I want to make it clear that I have no idea to what extent it represents his fully developed ideas. I mention it because, as anyone who has read this column for very long will not be surprised to read, these sentiments evoked immediate, strong disagreement from me. 

I have a great aversion to coercing anyone into doing anything. If no one finds a way to induce children to take music lessons, then many or most children will not; many of those who do not would have found it extremely rewarding to do so; if no one twists anyone’s arm to practice, then a lot of people will not practice; if you do not practice, taking lessons and trying to play will be more frustrating than it should be. There are problems with my stance about such things. In our society, organ and harpsichord teachers do not have to confront these questions as often as piano, violin, and voice teachers do.

The same dynamic applies to performance. I strongly believe that performing in front of listeners is an amazingly good learning experience for anyone at any level or with any relationship to music. I believe that abstract performing—concert playing in which there is nothing to hang your hat on other than making the music really work—is a great learning experience. I wish that more of my students had more opportunities to play concerts or to play in concerts. I observe that often once a student has played a piece in a concert situation, he or she plays that piece better and plays better overall. 

However, most students, especially those who still consider themselves beginners, are scared to perform, or at least approach performance with anxiety. Many, many students are convinced that they will never give concerts or even play for others informally. That is sometimes part of the bargain. If you throw in that I as a teacher do not want to coerce, that I believe that anxiety is counterproductive, and that my role is to help create relaxation and ease, then we have a certain kind of impasse. 

My attempt to solve this has always revolved around persuasion and coaxing. I have a strong sense that this works very well most of the time. I also have ideas about how to carry it out. Yet I am also aware that it may leave some people out, and that there is a set of questions about whether this approach is letting some people down. 

I have mentioned previously that I was deeply scared of performance as a child—terrified, really, and rather beyond childhood, as well. I also claimed in an earlier column that I successfully avoided ever playing in any of my teachers’ studio recitals through many years of piano lessons. I recently found the document that illustrates this column, the program from such a studio recital involving the students of Lois Lounsbery, the second of my three piano teachers. I am manifestly included in the program. I do have a memory that I was indeed physically present that day, but that I managed not actually to play—perhaps, honestly, by pretending to be injured or sick. That I may have done that is a measure of how much I did not want to perform. It is in part the memory and awareness of how I got from there to here that informs my ways of working with students on performance, and which I will come back to in future columns.

Excerpts from his March 25, 2018, organ recital can be found on Gavin’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/gavinblack1957.

A particular performance

This month, I take a slight detour from the map that I laid out for myself when I began this series of columns, because by coincidence I am writing this on the day after I played a concert, and I believe that some of my reactions to that particular experience are relevant to what I have been discussing. As usual, a great deal of this is questions, not answers. I will also discuss here a couple of ideas that are part of my roster of planned discussion points, and that connect directly to what I want to say about this concert. Next month I will wrap up this particular series, tying up some loose ends, but also leaving open some that I think are intrinsically open-ended.

As I noted in an earlier column, I seem to be playing more concerts over the last several years than I have in previous decades. It’s not that this particular concert was unique. After all, I hope to learn something new from every performance experience. It is unique, however, because this was the first full-length organ recital that I have given in approximately eighteen months. Just by happenstance most of my concerts during that time have been harpsichord recitals, a couple have been mixed recitals (some pieces on harpsichord, some on organ), a couple have involved my contributing organ pieces to programs that also involved other performers, and a couple have indeed been organ recitals, but quite short. It was also the first full-length organ recital that I have given in Princeton in about a decade. That means it was a different focus of attention for my students and other people whom I know in the community where I teach and where I frequently perform on harpsichord. 

The importance of the event

All of that meant I had to deal with a certain amount of non-musical baggage, though no one imposed that baggage on me. Was I in danger of making this event too important to me? Did that become a distraction from learning and performing the music? I suggested in a previous column that one way to frame a performance is that the playing creates a chance that some of the listeners will find the experience important. Is it then necessary that it be important to me as well? If so, how much of that involves framing the project in advance as being an important one, how much involves how I feel about it while it is going on? Or is that whole set of thoughts a problem or a distraction? If so, I think that it is an important one to be aware of. I am hereby confessing that in the weeks leading up to this concert I flirted with giving it an amount of importance in my own mind that was paralyzing, though I was always able to pull myself back to practicing and preparing. There is some sort of fruitful area in between “every note must be so meaningful and expressive that it will knock people’s socks off” and “this is routine: I know the music and I am just going to go play it.” That can be hard to get right. I do not know that I got it just right for this event. But the particular circumstances made me particularly aware of it.

That leads me to one of the most important issues of all—and the issue about performance that I think about the most. If a listening experience is going to be, or have the potential to be, really important to a listener, a large and significant part of that importance will arise out of the emotion conveyed by the music. Or perhaps the music conveys something in the general realm of feeling that leaves the listener a slightly different person after hearing it than he or she was before. This is true for a variety of performances where things other than the music participate in shaping those feelings, but the music very much does so as well. Is it good, bad, important, optional, dangerous, or just what, for the performer to feel while actually playing some version of whatever emotions he or she is trying or hoping to convey to others through the music?

When I have asked this question of colleagues, students, friends, etc., the predominant answer that I receive is that it is dangerous. The following scenario can easily play out: that if you as a performer are too caught up in the feeling of the music that you are playing, you will become distracted and mess up. While this might manifest itself in wrong note clusters, it might also paradoxically cause you to forget to do some of the interpretive gestures that you have mapped out and on which you are depending to convey the very feelings that you are experiencing. This can be a version of something that happens with certain kinds of technique, such as playing physically harder on harpsichord or organ and thereby giving yourself a false feeling of conveying more energy. That is, you can mistake feeling the emotion yourself for conveying it to the listeners. It is also possible that by feeling the music in this way you can unconsciously make choices that actually limit the range of feelings that another listener can experience.

Another danger also exists. If you are in the grip of feeling the emotions of a passage that you are playing, perhaps you will exaggerate the gestures that you expect to convey that emotion. This can mean exaggerating to the point of parody, or upsetting the balance between different things that you are trying to convey. Your judgment about how the music is coming across might be impaired. 

The alternative to feeling what the music is conveying while you are playing is to plan out the whole panoply of interpretive choices that you most conscientiously think will make happen what you want to happen, and then to concentrate in as focused and sober a way as possible on executing those choices. This involves having faith that the choices you have made will produce something like the effects that you want them to have, and that you can carry them out effectively based on planning and practicing. This is always going to be an important part of the way that anyone performs.

In spite of the dangers that are definitely a consensus concern among people who have thought about this, I am increasingly committed to trying to feel everything that I want to express in the music while I am playing, or to being open to doing so. This is an important difference: my experience suggests that being open to those feelings is manageable, but that making a kind of purposeful effort to experience anything specific is both a distraction and too contrived to be real. 

One of my reasons I’m interested in this approach is a sort of pure self-indulgence. I will enjoy the experience of playing more if I am viscerally getting something out of the music. I genuinely want to enjoy the experience of performing and avoid thinking of it as a stressful or mundane task. I think that at this level the feeling that I am describing is both good and bad as it affects my ability to offer something meaningful to the audience. I want to enjoy performing partly out of self-indulgence, but also partly because I honestly think that I play better when I am enjoying it. However, it is dangerous if I focus too much on enjoying being a player or listener. For instance, if something starts to go wrong or to feel wrong, I will not be able to pull myself together and play the music competently. If I want to be open to experiencing the music as an involved listener while I play, I have to be willing and able to drop that at an instant’s notice if I see that I need to.

Another set of reasons to not just listen to my playing while performing but also to feel whatever the music is conveying is that some of what I do interpretively depends on what I feel while I am listening. Again, this is quite specific to me. I have approached things differently in the past, and will do so in the future. But right now I am trying to derive some of what I do with timing—rubato, agogic accent, arpeggiation, various kinds of overlapping—directly from the emotional experience of the sound. There are moments when I do not know when to play the next note until I know how the feeling of listening to the current note is evolving. Perhaps that is a slightly oversimplified way of describing it, and there is a lot more to say about that—including problems or limitations of that approach, as well as what I believe to be its strengths. This is not the time for that. The point is that some of what I am trying to do when I perform at a very specific, concrete level depends not just on my hearing what the notes are doing but also feeling what they are doing. So I need to be open to those feelings and the hypothesis is that if I can do so, I will be able to offer more to the audience than I would otherwise.

This approach is one that I have applied more to harpsichord than to organ thus far. That is another source of the particular importance that I attached to this concert. 

The desire to be able to allow myself to become an engaged listener while I am playing is a source of motivation to try to be seriously well prepared. It is self-evident that we should all be well prepared for public performance. The fear of abject humiliation that I mentioned in an earlier column—referencing an experienced performer to whom I was talking about it years ago—should be motivation enough. There are also loftier motivations like wanting to offer something wonderful to the audience. I believe that for me wanting to indulge myself in listening, in getting caught up in the music, is the strongest source of motivation to practice really conscientiously and become really well prepared. That way I can let myself listen and react without it being too dangerous. If I succeed at that, even if I classify it as somewhat self-indulgent, then the audience only benefits.

Practical considerations 

for the event

Then there are the practical things. I made the following mistakes in connection with the concert: 

1) There was a need for page turning. I have become unaccustomed to this, since for harpsichord concerts I now use a computer and a foot-pedal automatic page turning device. Someone whom I knew to be very reliable offered to turn pages for this program. I felt completely comfortable with that: so comfortable that I didn’t think that we needed to practice the page turns. We went through two or three of them in advance, just to make sure that she was comfortable with the physical setup, that she could see, reach, and so on. She did a perfect job of turning. However, what I didn’t realize was that I was the one who needed the practice. Once in the course of the concert my eyes failed to follow the smooth and perfectly timed transition from one page to the next. I lost my place and had to fumble around a bit. Another time, for no good reason, I became anxious about an upcoming page turn and also lost focus, performing a short stretch of notes badly. In each of the places where we had practiced the page turning, my reading through the page turns was fine. Likewise it was fine through the ones where the music was straightforward or my memory was the strongest. I would have avoided trouble if I had accepted my page-turner’s offer to go over all of the spots. 

2) During intermission—when I had to remember consciously that, unlike with a harpsichord recital, there was nothing for me to tune—a few audience members came up to the organ console and looked at the keyboards, stop knobs, etc. That is wonderful: people are often interested in those things, and it is great that they are. However, I discovered as I started the most challenging piece in the second half, the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that the organ bench had been moved a tiny bit closer to the keyboards. The space through which my feet and legs could move was slightly but meaningfully restricted. That is not good. In writing years ago about pedal playing I emphasized that correct placement of the bench is really important. I still know that. However, I failed to pay attention to it here. I could not manage to scoot the bench back while playing; I did not think that it would be prudent to try. It would have been disruptive to stop, even between the movements, and adjust the bench. As far as I know, nothing drastic happened to the piece as a consequence of this, though I was physically uncomfortable, and I had to concentrate more on making the pedal part work. It is possible that something about timing or articulation in that part was less well crafted than I would have hoped.

The moral of those two stories is: don’t forget to line the small practical things up properly.

I have a recording of the concert, but I am not sufficiently removed from the experience to be able to accurately listen to it yet. I am fairly certain that the beginnings of some of the pieces were not shaped the way that I wanted them to be. Related to some of what I discussed above, this is about an idea that I have been trying out. This involves not having a beat in my head before I play the first note of a piece or a movement, but letting the sonority of that note tell me when to play the next note, and then to derive tempo from that. I suspect that I sometimes fall into the characteristic trap of that approach, namely that I hold the first sonority too long. I also suspect this represents a practical performance issue, not a fundamental musical issue.

I don’t always take enough time before I start a piece to clear my mind of distractions and focus on the music. When I intend to start a straightforward piece, this inappropriate direction of attention will manifest itself in a slightly wrong tempo, more likely too fast than too slow. This in turn is probably a characteristic danger of something that I mentioned in an earlier column: namely that I prefer not to be sequestered prior to the beginning of a concert, but to mix with people as they come in, and to try to remain relaxed and “myself.” That is well and good, and I believe that it is absolutely right for me. But it does require a certain moment of focusing on the music and allowing time for that to work. My guess, and only a guess, is that I did a sort of “B-minus” job of that. So it is something that I have to work on remembering next time.

Excerpts from the concert discussed in this column will be posted on Gavin’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/gavinblack1957.

What is Performance? Part 2

I continue here the speculative, general, question-based, and perhaps somewhat philosophical discussion of performance. Next month I shall write about some practical aspects of this subject that tie into teaching in concrete ways, like helping students to grapple with nervousness, or to understand some of the ways in which performance as opposed to just learning and playing pieces can help with student development while enhancing the enjoyment and satisfaction that they get out of music. I will also continue the discussion, begun here, about performance as ritual and performance in the context of ritual.

Why do you perform?

Last autumn I attended a family party at which I saw a long-time friend of mine and my family’s. I hadn’t seen her in person in about 20 years, and therefore we were hurriedly catching up. Furthermore, since over those years we had moved into different phases of life—her from youth to middle age, me from early to late middle age—we canvassed some of the rather big questions. At one point she asked me, “So why do you perform? What do you want to happen when you are up there performing?” And my spontaneous answer (no time to make notes and an outline or to sleep on it) was, “I want to create the possibility that having been there will be important to at least some of the people in the audience.” 

That is not necessarily the spontaneous answer that I would give at another time. I say this not to suggest that I disavow it, or that I don’t think that it is a “good” answer, whatever that means. It’s just that there are probably many answers to that question that are valid at any given moment. This one took me by surprise when it popped into my head.

I believe that what I said that day is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it presents a nice mix of the self-important and the modest. It is immodest of me to suggest that what I do could be “important.” It also reminds us that when we offer ourselves to audience members as being worth their time and sometimes their money, we are making a claim that there is something good about what we are going to do. We should be upfront with ourselves about that and deal in whatever ways we think are best with the possible psychological implications of this for ourselves, hoping to be able to have a healthy self-esteem, leavened by questioning and working to get better, rather than vanity or hubris. 

We all know about the existence of unappealingly self-important performers. Perhaps some if not most of the people who come across to us that way seem very different to those who know them well. Maybe they would seem very different to us if we could see inside their heads. Famous performers are by definition both the people whose public personas we know the best, and people whom we don’t really, actually know. Perhaps some of them have let self-importance get the better of them. The awareness that I am staking a claim on listeners’ lives serves to remind me that I have an obligation to be serious about doing my absolute best—to try as hard as I can to make that claim on people’s time a legitimate rather than a vain one. 

However, my answer to my old friend was relatively modest, in that I didn’t say that I could make an entire room of listeners always have a guaranteed great experience. Maybe I should aspire to that, but I don’t really think so. To do so expressly seems to me like a denial of one of the most constant and true things about art, whether performing art or any other kind: namely that each person brings different needs, desires, tastes, expectations, etc., to any artistic encounter.

I am afraid that if I try to guarantee that I can reach every audience member, I will lose my focus on doing what I can do best, and on doing it as well as I can. Either I will be afraid to do what I really want and feel interpretively, for fear that it will run counter to what some part of the audience likes, expects, or wants, or that I will try to be sensationalistic in the way that I play. Either of these would open up a real risk of not reaching anyone. This is not to mention the possibility of utterly boring some listeners, annoying them, or leaving some people convinced that I am a bad performer, a bad musician, or even (since we sometimes make this leap) a bad person. Worrying about such things would make it impossible for me to perform in a way that expressed my own choices and feelings about the music that I was playing.

There are many things that I didn’t say in that answer that I could have said. For example, that I hoped to present as accurate a version as possible of the composers’ intentions; or that I hoped to give the audience pleasure—different from an “important” experience; or that I hoped to recreate the feeling of the time at which the music had been written; or that I wanted to elucidate the counterpoint or otherwise help listeners to understand the music from a compositional or structural point of view; or that I wanted to show the instrument(s) off to best advantage. All of these, and an infinite number of others, are wonderful possibilities. Each of the ones that I have listed here are things that I do think about and take into account. For me, they are perhaps secondary or instrumental. Any of them might help me to achieve the goal that I mentioned to my friend. For someone else, one of them or something entirely different might be a primary goal. 

I didn’t say that I wanted to garner the admiration of the listeners, or to be seen as a great virtuoso, or to get a good review. Omitting things like this is always under suspicion: perhaps I really feel them, but would be embarrassed to admit it.

The desire in performance

Years ago, a very fine performer once said to me that when he went out onto the concert stage the one desire that he had consciously in his mind was to avoid utter, abject humiliation. I was very young and inexperienced then, and my reaction to this was simply to be stunned: too much so, unfortunately, to ask him to explain further. My assumption now about what he meant then is something like this: that he knew that the combination of instrument, repertoire, preparation, worked-out interpretive choices, and so on, was such that if he could avoid just plain falling apart, the results would be very good. There was no middle ground. Part of what I took from this was that performing is hard. Not even the best performers can afford to take anything for granted.

How would you answer the question that my friend asked me? Would you consider it a good thing to ask your students? What sort of answers would you expect? What sort, if any, would you want? Are there possible answers that would raise a red flag?

All of the above is most directly about “pure” or abstract performance: that is, playing music for people who are there to listen to that music and who are in fact actually listening to it. Answers to any questions about what we are trying to achieve might be different for performance linked to an occasion or to a specific describable purpose. Accompaniment is such a situation. Settings in which the music itself is part of an overarching sequence, such as a church service, graduation ceremony, or sports event are also in this category. In these cases answers like “to help the soloist to feel comfortable” or “to enhance rather than undermine what the soloist is trying to do” or “to intensify the effect on the listeners (members of a congregation) of the words that they are singing and hearing” or “to make the graduates happy” come to mind. (Or “to help the Mets win?”)

Performance and ritual

What is the relationship between performance and ritual? Is every performance a ritual? Does thinking of performance as ritual help or hurt, or sometimes help and sometimes hurt, or perhaps some of both at the same time? I realize, thinking about the question and answer described above, that for me personally, musical performance is likely to be more powerful, and to have a greater chance of seeming important to more of the people in the room, if it has an element of what I experience as ritual. We are in a territory where people use words differently, so the possibility exists of words creating misunderstanding. My understanding of ritual is some sort of overall shape to the event as it moves through time. To put it another way, a feeling that, because of the way that the individual details of what is being done relate to each other as they move through time, the whole is indeed more powerful and meaningful than the sum of the parts. This is not something that needs to have been prescribed in advance by someone other than the participants, although it can.

When I am performing in the form that is the most individual to me and over which I have the most control, a solo recital or concert of my own, and most especially one that I am presenting myself, I care a lot about the shape of the beginning and the end. It seems to me that the way that the transition from “normal” life into a performance is shaped can have a real effect on the listeners’ perceptions of the whole event. At the same time, that segue can have an effect on the performer’s focus. That may influence the feel and perhaps the performing results of only the beginning of the event, or it may carry over through the whole performance. 

Several years ago I decided to take notice of something that I had known about at the back of my mind for a long time: that I don’t like to be sequestered or hidden immediately prior to a concert. If I sit in a green room while the clock ticks towards the appointed time and audience members come in, I just get tense, nervous, distracted by thoughts that are not about the music. I can get into a state where I can’t quite feel or believe that I am someone who can play or whose playing deserves to be heard. I have now started to allow myself to arrange the pre-concert time the way that I like. I hang around the space, among or near the audience, or, on a nice day, outside the front door of the venue:  a place that feels relaxed and friendly to me. I am certain that this has resulted in at least the beginnings of my concerts being more effective. It may affect the whole of a concert. I don’t remotely think that this approach is the best for everyone, though I am sure that it would be for some. I believe that every performer should pay attention to this dimension of the act of performing and determine what feels and works best.

If I want to be out and about right before a concert, that implies that I am asking the audience to accept an opening ritual that is different from the traditional “lights dim and the performer walks in from the side, to applause.” I am comfortable with that. I like the feeling that the music arises from normal life and normal interaction, and my experience is that listeners also do. However, this is one of the reasons that I only expect to be able to shape the opening exactly the way I want to when I oversee the whole presentation. If at a particular concert venue there are expectations about the shape of the opening that are different from what I am describing and that are important to the audience, that is worthy of respect. The opening gestures can affect the listeners’ experience of the event, and the closing gestures can affect their memories of it.

There is one detail about the opening gesture/ritual of a concert or other performance that arises out of modern life, and it is tricky to handle—a mobile phone announcement. As an audience member, I react negatively to that warning, especially since it is the last thing that we hear before the beginning of a performance. But I am aware that there is a good reason to have it. If a cell phone goes off, that is very disruptive and damages the overall shape of the experience. Therefore, it is hard to decide not to do it. But I think that we tend to underestimate the effect on listeners’ appreciation of a performance when the beginning ritual is not about the music and is negatively tinged. (I do not have any cell phone warning at my own concerts, when it is just up to me. I have a feeling that as people get more and more used to engaging with their cell phones, remembering to turn them off will become such a matter of routine that no one in fact needs to be reminded.)

Composer, performer, and instrument

I have a thought about performance that I find interesting. There is a usual template that we apply to the whole process of musical consumption. The composer is the primary creator of the music. The performer is the “interpreter,” and thus the secondary creator: significantly less responsible for the reality of the music’s existence than the composer, but still with an important role to play. Instrument makers, when they are relevant, occupy third place. Their job is to create the tools that will best serve what the performer is trying to do, which serves the composer in turn. The instruments should always be borne in mind as part of the background to performance. I find it interesting to turn the whole thing around, by constructing an alternative template. Music exists in sound. Instrument makers create the means of producing sound, thereby creating musical possibilities. Performers make themselves adept at getting the best out of those instruments, thereby bringing the work of the instrument makers to life. Composers simply make suggestions as to various ways to get the best out of the instruments. 

I don’t expect any one to agree with this interpretation since it relegates the composer to a less important role. However, this way of looking at it seems to me to be an interesting corrective or means of achieving balance in thinking about what we are doing as performers. 

Finaly, a quick word about the illustration on the facing page. A few days ago, I was astonished to find a copy of the bulletin for the first church service I ever played. I wrote about that two months ago, and at that time never expected to see the program again. (It turned up in a box of items saved by my father.) I have included an excerpt here. I notice something that I didn’t remember: that the piece I played was divided into two sections, placed at two different spots within the service. This is a good example, if we accept that it was effective, of a ritual shape outside of the music itself changing the ways in which the music can work.

More to come . . .

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].

What is Performance? Part 1

What is performance? This is certainly a daunting question that is not only difficult to frame but can invite pompous answers. It is also one that we are all, as players, going to answer by our actions whether we know it or not. Therefore it is not a bad idea to try to grapple with it explicitly once in a while. Our students are also going to grapple with it: most obviously those who want to be performers, but also those who play music but, at a given moment, are not drawn to public performance. For the latter, this is true if only because they must have a concept of what performance would be in order to feel that they are not drawn to it.

There are many different ways to answer the question “what is performance?” Some of those differences are the sort that arise out of the answers’ being partial in nature—and I would say that answers to this question should be partial. To strive to give a complete or all encompassing answer to the question risks coming across as pretentious or pompous. Some of the differences may arise out of details about what sort of performance we are asking about in the first place, or from who is asking, or on whose behalf the asking is taking place. And some, of course, arise out of disagreement.

The question “what is performance?” shades over into such questions as “what does performance feel like to me?,” “how do I know whether I am performing or not?,” “who am I when I am performing?,” and others even more arcane. The approach of any one musician to performance is most likely a mosaic of answers or tentative answers to questions such as these. The answers to these smaller component questions and any answer that feels like it pertains to the bigger over-arching question will almost certainly change over time for any one person. I was pleased to notice that literally yesterday (from the vantage point of my sitting here writing today) I had an experience that enabled me to fit one more tile into my own mosaic—that gave me a slightly new answer to a particular question about my own identity as a performer that has puzzled me for a long time.

This month and next, I will poke and prod at this question from several angles. You will notice that I pose more questions than answers and that I have not forbidden myself to include thoughts or ideas that may be unconventional.

Two defining aspects of performance

Performance is playing when you know or think that someone is listening. We usually know whether or not we are playing, though, especially if we are not really singers, we may not always know when we are singing, not to mention humming, whistling, tapping our fingers to some unheard music, or even trying out fingerings on the table when we think that no one is watching, and so on. But we don’t always know for sure whether someone is listening.

If we are giving a concert, and there are clearly people in the hall, and they are not in any obvious way doing things that are inconsistent with listening, we have the right to assume that they are listening. In reality some are and some are not. But in this situation—pure performance, so to speak—our feeling that people are listening helps to shape what we do. It can create nervousness or anxiety and can also create focus. Do we respond to an awareness of listeners mostly by becoming anxious or even scared? If so, what causes anxiety?  Perhaps we are afraid of missing notes, falling apart, or perhaps we simply fail to convey inner musicality.

The awareness that people are listening can also be inspiring. If we not only are performing but also want to be performing, then there must be something about conveying music to those listeners that we really care about. In real life the vividness of this feeling will come and go. Does it help us to achieve this feeling to have a conscious awareness that the listeners are listening? That is, some of the time to be playing to the listeners as if perhaps we were conversing with them? Or is it more effective to commune not so much with the listeners as with the music itself, as we have come to know it and care about it? In many organ performance situations, there are limits to how much of the audience we can see. Does this affect our awareness of them or the ways in which that awareness interacts with our playing? For each player/performer there will be a different set of answers to any of these and similar questions that seem the most fruitful.

What if we don’t know whether anyone is listening? Realistically this doesn’t often mean that we have literally no information about whether anyone is in the room. But it is still a concept that can be germane. For one thing, our sense of whether anyone is listening in the sense of really paying attention can wax and wane while we are in the very act of performing. The room can seem “dead” or “alive.” Is it right to be aware of this? It is realistic to be unaware of it at least some of the time. When we are, how might we respond? It might be better to try to look away from that awareness and to focus more on ourselves and the music. We might be able to use that awareness to get motivated to communicate even more intensely.

There can arise in church playing, specific situations in which we wonder whether anyone is listening and if so how or how much. Are people listening during a prelude or postlude, or are they talking, or just focusing on and experiencing other things? There may be a situation in which we actually don’t know whether anyone is there: people sometimes leave during the postlude! Does that matter? Can we practice keeping up our commitment to really performing even if the sense that people are listening has become shaky? 

In some situations we know that people are physically there and not expressly turning their attention away from what we are doing, but we also know that the point of everyone’s focus is not just the music in and of itself. This can be true of a variety of circumstances: church services during offertories and other mid-service musical moments, weddings and funerals, receptions, school events, sporting events, anything where the music is background. What do we make of knowing that the listening is not as focused and intense as it might be? Perhaps this can be a time to shift the balance of our own focus from communing with the listeners to communing with the music itself. 

Recording is another circumstance in which we don’t know who the listeners are. They are not physically there, rather, they exist somewhere else in time and space­—at least we hope that they do. The act of playing specifically for them is at its most abstract. Therefore, perhaps this is a form of performance in which the notion of playing the music for its own sake can assert itself. It is certainly a way to expand and perhaps redefine what it feels like to be a performer. It seems like a very good thing that recording has been sort of “democratized.” Anyone who plays can make recordings that have a reasonable shot at being heard by that unknown audience out there, through various platforms under the umbrella of social media. The distinction between those who are and those who are not recording artists has been largely broken down, and with that the societal definition of performer and performance has altered. 

Who is the performer?

Who are we when we perform? Are we the composer? I am not talking about the rather specialized case in which we are literally the composer. In that case, I imagine that the answer to the question is still a bit complex. Does a composer performing his or her own music feel in some ways like a different person during that act than during the act of composing? Can a composer discover, through performing new things in pieces, new things about himself or herself as a musician? I imagine so, though I have never been in that position myself.

Let’s say that we are playing music of others. Do we feel like, or want to feel like, a stand-in for the composer? I mentioned last month an idea about playing the role while performing not specifically of the composer by name, but of a theoretical someone who could have improvised the music that we are playing. I find that idea intriguing and fruitful for getting into a mode of feeling that enables me to perform the music of others. Do some of us find it useful in some sense to inhabit the identity of the composer by name? Not, of course, as a real “I am Napoleon”-style delusion, but as something perhaps akin to some of the ways in which actors inhabit roles? 

Or do we want to be ourselves as much as we possibly can, but ourselves engaged in a particular act for which we are well trained, well prepared, and talented? It may be that performance in the sense of playing music when we believe listeners to be listening is crucially different from performance that is acting in exactly this way. We are not inhabiting a character, we are trying as best we can to be ourselves. Perhaps for some of us it is only by being ourselves that we can connect with whatever it is about the music that makes us care enough about it to take on the challenges of performing in the first place. It seems certain to me that this works out differently from one person to another and is often a mix.

Three illustrative stories

I heard the following story many years ago from a colleague. I admit that it was something heard third-hand, and therefore I cannot swear that it is factual and accurate. But I believe that it is, since I know something about the trustworthiness of the people who transmitted it. And since it is by no means disparaging to anyone, I will let that be enough basis for telling it without suppressing names. 

An organist, active, well trained, with lots of playing and listening experience, was also working as a carpenter and builder. He happened to be on a job at a venue where, a day or two later, Virgil Fox was to play a recital. He saw and overheard Fox practicing, and he reported that his practicing was calm, sober, systematic, focused, totally without flamboyance. The way my colleague put it in telling the story was this: that it was only in the concert that Virgil Fox became VIRGIL FOX! His persona as a charismatic and extroverted performer was something that he indeed purposely put on in concert as a technique for getting across what he wanted to get across.

Does each of us do some of that? Certainly some more than others and some with more consciousness of it than others. Is this a dimension of our playing, or rather of our performing, that we might do well to think about more explicitly? Probably so for many of us. I say that without implying anything about the specifics of how some of us might want to shape this aspect of our performing lives differently. That will vary dramatically from one of us to another.

Here is another story. I am acquainted with a dancer who, at a young age but well within her prime, no longer a student or beginner, was participating in a performance. She and the other performers were in very specific and defined characters, and from time to time interacted directly, in character, with audience members. This performance, unlike most dance performances, included a small amount of speaking. I asked her whether she thought of this as dancing or as acting. She replied very firmly that she thought of it as dancing and only dancing, because if she thought of it as acting it became terrifying. The very same actions, ones which she was as well-trained to do as anyone could be and which she repeated with complete command night after night, seemed like something different based solely on the concept of what sort of performer she was.

The last story for this month is the one to which I alluded above. As a performing musician I have always specialized in music from about 1550 to about 1750. This is long enough ago that everything about the culture of that time seems historical rather than current or modern, and this is a source of all sorts of questions and things to think about. But in particular there are sometimes performances of this Renaissance/Baroque repertoire that are cast as historical recreations—perhaps of a specific performance, perhaps of a specific sort of concert or court or home or church musical event, or perhaps just as an evocation of the milieu and aesthetic of the time. This kind of event might well involve the musicians’ wearing period-appropriate clothes. I have been to performances of that sort as an audience member and enjoyed them, sometimes getting something out of the recreation of the historical trappings that indeed added to the music.

However, I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea of participating in anything like that as a player. I have never been willing to perform in costume or in historical clothing. My identity as a musician, person, and performer seems like it would be violated by dressing in period clothing. I do not know exactly why this is, and I certainly have no interest whatsoever is saying that it is right or in persuading other people to feel this way. To execute a convincing performance, I need to feel like myself.

Here is the interesting new thing, however. I went to see the new play Farinelli and the King in New York. Since it is in large part about a musician—the real-life Carlo Bruschi, who performed under the stage name Farinelli—there was live music in the theater. (And the music was quite wonderful, by the way.) The performers, on harpsichord, guitar, various strings, were dressed in eighteenth-century attire, as were the actors. I realized right away that if I were asked to participate in something exactly like this, I would happily do so and would wear the old-style garb without hesitation. Something about its being a part in a play rather than a concert seems to overcome completely the discomfort that I described above. Why? I don’t really know. But I know that it sheds some light on my own answers to the question of who I am when I am performing. 

Before I sign off for this month and continue this discussion next month, I note that I made a typographical error near the end of the February column. Where I wrote “Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece,” I meant “would not” rather than “would.” I want to go on record with this, since only that way does what I wrote (I hope) make sense.

More to come . . .

Reflections from a trip

I recently returned from an unusually long vacation, and it has been around six weeks since I have taught or even played a note on the organ or harpsichord. For part of this time I was traveling in England—mostly London—with family members. I am in the process of discovering, as I get back to my regular routine, that there are aspects both of being off from work for that long and, especially, of visiting London that have lead me to reflections about teaching, playing music, the art of practicing, the business of helping to motivate students or to understand and work with their motivation, and various other tiles from the mosaic of the work that I do and that I write about. I want to set some of those reflections down here, before they have a chance to fade away. Admittedly, this column is a bit miscellaneous.

I grew up in an academic family, and we had various sorts of long breaks from our normal life at home. Some of those were the three-and-a-half month summer vacations that seemed to me growing up to be the norm. (More about that later.) But there was also an occasional sabbatical, when we would be away from home for eight or nine months, and really settle somewhere. During one of these periods, when I was thirteen years old, we lived in London. I also spent other, shorter, chunks of time in London in my teens, but, until a few weeks ago, I had not been there in forty-two years. (The reasons for this were varied and random: budget, logistics, other things going on, and my own aversion to air travel.)

The first, and biggest, phenomenon that I noticed being back there after all that time was just how powerful it felt to me—it was as if the years had melted away. It felt like a new and compelling combination of a dream and reality. Walking, and in some cases, re-walking the streets of London felt like one of the most important things that I had ever done. I knew that living in London had been important to me, but I was completely unprepared for how powerfully being there again after such a long time would hit me.

Early life experiences and later influences

What does that have to do with music, or with teaching? Well, it reminds me of, and sort of ratifies for me, the importance of early experience in shaping what we care about, how we think and feel, and what is more important and less important to us. Only some of that, of course, is about music—maybe little or none for some people, a lot for others. And it is not a point that is obscure or controversial, let alone specific to me. However, it came flooding back to me during this particular time, and that in turn reminds me to renew my commitment to helping students discover what it is that they most care about, what draws them to what they are proposing to do in music—why they are doing it—and to helping them to explore where that all come from.

In fact the first student whom I saw after I got back was a new student. And I felt like I could sharpen the focus of all of the questions that I like to ask, such as “Why are you here?” “What interests you about the instrument(s) and their repertoire?” “What is your first memory of being aware of organ/harpsichord/keyboard instruments?” and so on. I felt even more comfortable than I have in the past making such questions the center of the process of our beginning to work together.

Nevertheless, there were also things surrounding this trip that were much more specific to music and to my musical life. Not surprisingly, since I was thirteen, and the stay in London was, at seven months, quite a long one for someone at that formative age, I had a lot of experiences during that long-ago time that were directly part of my own early musical development. By and large, those resided in the fairly deep recesses of my mind, but they came flooding back. 

It was in London, during the fall of 1970, I really discovered the Beethoven piano sonatas. This was not so much as a player, but as a listener. I had the radio on much of the time that I was hanging around our apartment that year, and BBC Radio 3 happened to be playing, over part of that season, a large sample of Alfred Brendel’s early recording of the Beethoven sonatas. These performances were a revelation to me. I had certainly heard Beethoven’s piano music—and some of his other works—prior to that. Yet, until then, I found the pieces unsatisfying: sort of fragmented or arbitrary. Looking back it is almost certain that I was too young to appreciate them. My whole orientation to music started with Bach and Handel, and I think that Beethoven was frighteningly anarchistic to me as an eleven- or twelve-year-old. Occasional listening to a sonata played by Rubinstein, Schnabel, or Fischer had not enabled me to break through that. However, for whatever reason, these Brendel recordings made perfect sense out of the music for me, and in so doing opened up the whole world of post-Baroque music to me.

I noticed, a week or so after returning home from London, that the only music that had been going through my head since then were Beethoven piano sonatas! The experience of being in London has apparently re-awakened something amounting to a preoccupation with those pieces. I think that, if I had any piano (as different from organ, harpsichord, or clavichord) technique, or perhaps if I had a Beethoven-era piano to work with (and the requisite technique) I would quite possibly be interested in approaching those pieces as a player. Indeed perhaps I will sit down and read through some of them, though without expecting anything much in the way of rhetoric or interpretation, since I do believe that mastery of the instrument is as crucial as being able to learn the notes, and I definitely do not have that with piano.

So, in addition to the importance that early experience plays in shaping what we care about or are interested in, I am reminded of the notion that coming to something naturally, when the time is right, is a valuable process. I did indeed (try to) play a fair amount of Beethoven on the piano as a teenager. But, even though by then I loved listening to that music, I never felt any affinity for it as a player. Any work that I did on it felt forced, any practicing that I did of it (and I did much too little) was impatient and vulnerable to distraction. Of course perhaps I “should have” made myself work harder and better way back then, as a matter of discipline or dedication. Nevertheless, I could not or did not, and that process feels to me (even more so after the recent experiences that I am describing here) like a completely different one from working on something out of genuine interest and desire.

Early life experiences and later regrets

On the other hand, as I reflect on how the trip relates to my teaching, I wonder: What are the downsides to my strong focus on following one’s own deepest artistic interests? Would I, for example, have been better off if I had somehow found a way to get myself to practice Beethoven more effectively (and just plain more) when I was young? Suppose that specifically a teacher had managed to force or coerce me into doing so. Would that have been good or bad? Even if the process feels unnatural, is the long-term loss too great to indulge the preference for what feels to me natural, organic, inner-directed? Is it a shame that a fairly accomplished, middle-aged player feels regret about missing the chance to learn a particular part of the repertoire? There is always an infinite amount to regret and no one can do everything. Also it is impossible (isn’t it?) to know with respect to any given child, teenager, student of any age, what he or she will or will not wish that you had made them do along the way.

On another matter altogether: we walked past a house where Mozart lived for several weeks during 1764, when he was eight years old, and where he is said to have written his Symphony #1, K16. The house is located at 180 Ebury Street, just south of Sloane Square, which was a rural area at the time Mozart lived there. (As far as I can tell, it is indeed the same building that is there, on a quiet street very much in the middle of the city, now.) Mozart’s father, Leopold, was recovering from an illness at the time, and apparently this necessitated quiet, and thus his children were not allowed to play music. Thus, it was a good opportunity for Wolfgang Amadeus to focus on composition. 

There is a statue of Mozart in the square near the house and a plaque on the house itself. In fact, that block of Ebury Street has been renamed, or given the additional name of, Mozart Terrace. All of this happened a long time after the Mozart family’s residence there. Although Leopold Mozart was an esteemed musician, and both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his older sister Nannerl were known as child prodigy performers, none of them were earth-shaking celebrities back then.

This leads me to the principle thing that I was trying to achieve by visiting and contemplating the Mozartiana around Ebury Street: the elusive awareness that Mozart was a person—a real, regular (though phenomenally talented) person. When he lived in Ebury Street, Mozart walked with his own ordinary feet over the same ground that my family and I were walking on last month. Did he like to walk down to the river? Was he more worried about his father or consumed by his music? What was there to eat in the neighborhood? Did Mozart find the old buildings around London cool?

Standing in awe of geniuses like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, makes plenty sense. Their intellect is awe-inspiring, and there is something about perceiving their work as out of the ordinary that can be extraordinarily powerful. But this perspective is usually by default. It is important to remember that they were also ordinary humans with everyday lives.

By the way, on a perhaps somewhat macabre note, another spur towards trying to take in the sense of the great figures of the past as real people is to be found at Westminster Abbey and other places that house tombs of famous people. It is sobering and moving to walk past (or on!) the spaces that contain the actual mortal remains of, say, Elizabeth I,
or Dickens, or Handel. The very bones that held the pen that composed Messiah are right there . . . .

No one knows everything.

Thinking back to Beethoven and Mozart reminded me of something else, not from London directly, but about even earlier in my life. I recall that when I was something like six or seven years old, I came across both of those names—Mozart in a children’s book about composers, and Beethoven in the title of the song Roll Over Beethoven, which I probably heard sung by the Beatles. I remember being disturbed about the pronunciations of both of those names. I thought that “Mozart” should be pronounced with a “z” in the middle, and that “Beethoven” should be pronounced such that the first syllable rhymed with “beneath,” and the rest sounded like the appliance in which you might bake something. I was sure that the grown-ups had it all wrong. I had never thought of the notion of different languages using letters differently, or having different sounds.

My point is that this is an example of a simple fact that it is easy to forget: that you only know something if you know it. No one knows that which they have not yet learned. This is one bedrock reason, though certainly not the only one, for teaching at all. It is also, I believe, closely allied to this: that no one knows or can know everything. So knowing what we do know and what we do not is critically important. And knowing how to find things out is as important as, or maybe more important than, knowing things. 

Twice on the England trip I happened to walk through a space where someone was practicing the organ. One of these spaces was King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with its famous Harrison & Harrison, and the other was Bath Abbey, where there is a Klais organ from 1997. I knew a lot about the King’s organ already, but nothing about the instrument in Bath. As an organ groupie, I was excited to hear both. So in each case I stood there listening for a while, probably staying a bit longer than I would have otherwise.

The experience reminded me of something I wrote in this column back in March: Performance is playing when 1) you know that you are playing, and 2) you know or think that someone is listening. So what about overheard practicing? For me as a random casual listener, this was performance, even though for the person seated at each of those organs it was not! It certainly had some of the significance for me that we usually associate with having heard a performance. Here I am remembering it a month or so later. Each of those brief listening experiences added a little something to the edifice of what it means to me to have spent my life hearing music, and to my awareness of what the organ is.

The last thing that I will mention for now is that, back in London, I poked my head briefly into Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. In 1970 we lived a few blocks from this church, and I used to go to short organ recitals there. I don’t remember whether it was a daytime or evening series—and if the former, exactly how I squared that with going to school. But I do remember that the sound of that organ and the ambience of the place helped seal the deal regarding my interest in the organ. I also remember that there was a strong sense of history there, that I found mesmerizing. I would not have recognized all of the names then, I assume, but I have now read that Edwin Lemare, Walter Alcock, and John Ireland were organists of the church at one time or another. I do remember there being a picture of Jean Langlais on the wall, taken on a visit of his to the place. I did not know much about him at that point, but I was nonetheless impressed!

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

Seeing the Music

This month I write about seeing the music: vision, glasses, light, editions, page turns—things that have to do with the practical act of conveying the notes of a piece to the player through the player’s eyes. As the years have gone by, I have become more and more aware of the importance of all of this, and of the role in the learning process, and therefore also in the teaching process. Part of the reason for this growing awareness has been the evolution­—that is, the worsening—of my own eyesight as time passes. This has been, as far as I know, very much within normal bounds, as part of the process of growing up and growing older. But I have seen my own relationship to the physical act of reading notes change, gradually for the most part, but quite a lot over the years. This has made me aware that I should have been much more observant much earlier on in my career of the ways in which aspects of the physical reading of the notes have from time to time influenced the learning process for students. I have started paying more attention to these matters over the last several years.

It occurred to me as I typed the title of this column that the phrase “seeing the music” could also mean something more abstract: that is, perceiving and understanding, as deeply as possible, the content and, in some sense, the meaning of the music. And that in turn reminds me that I hope and intend at some point to write about the whole realm of analysis as it relates to performance and to teaching. In so doing, or perhaps after so doing, I may have to venture out onto the somewhat thin ice of relating interpretive choices to analytical conclusions. That discussion could include the whole set of questions as to whether it is acceptable to make interpretive choices without analysis, or even against the current of analysis. And from there it could go on to the general problem of interpretation, objectivity, and subjectivity.

Why am I even mentioning all of this now when it is decidedly not what I am going to write about here? Because getting right the things discussed here can make it easier to grapple with more abstract, difficult, sometimes controversial, and interesting questions such as these. It has this in common with good practicing and with everything else that allows notes to be learned well, and thereby opens up the doors to all the mysteries of performance. But the topics I am writing about this month also have these two features: they are so easy to get right that it is really a shame not to do so; and, nonetheless, most of us often ignore them or give them low priority. This is the source of utterly unnecessary and frustrating inefficiency in learning.

I recently included Buxtehude’s La Capricciosa variations on a harpsichord recital program. I have played this work over the last 25 years or so and recorded it in the mid-1990s. It is a piece that I have at various times practiced a lot and that I know very well. Sometimes I use a computer-based music reader these days (more on that later), and I set up this music to be visible on that computer, one page of the score at a time. As I started going through the piece to revive it and, as necessary, rework it on the particular instrument and for the particular performance, I began to have a disconcerting feeling. It felt like music that I had never played before—maybe I should say that I had never even seen before.

There are a couple of short passages in this piece that are very hard, up to tempo, just as to getting the notes. Those passages I drilled years ago thoroughly, and they came back pretty well on an almost unconscious basis. However, most of the piece was frighteningly shaky. And I do mean frightening: I had visions of a humiliatingly bad performance. (To be honest, this was all taking place closer to the concert date than it should have been. But after all, it is a piece that I know really well.) I was hesitating a lot over fairly easy notes and was not able to make anything sound natural. Not surprisingly, the punch line is this: I reconfigured the score in such a way that instead of there being two or three variations per page, each variation was its own page. This made the music about twice as big and much easier to see. My first read-through of the piece with this newly set-up score was more or less note perfect and very comfortable. The performance held together very well.   

In a column from a while ago (May 2010) I mentioned another event from some time in the 1990s. I heard a student at a masterclass ask the harpsichordist Colin Tilney what his preferred edition of The Well-Tempered Clavier was. I assumed that the questioner and the audience were expecting an answer that was about scholarship—accuracy of the printed text, suitably detailed critical notes, descriptions of sources, and so on. Tilney is, after all, a performer with a wealth of knowledge and a track record of scholarship of his own. However, he said that he had always liked the old Bach Gesellschaft edition because it is nice and big and therefore easy to read. He added something that I also liked a lot, namely, that ideally a player or student should consult all of the editions and sources and in effect create his or her own edition.

I have tried to buy a copy of the old BG Well-Tempered Clavier. It was published in 1866 and is long out of print, and I have yet to find one. It has been reprinted, but never, as far as I can tell, full size. When it is shrunk to be more or less a normal book, the text seems dark, cramped, and hard to read. The big old originals are indeed extremely easy to read, as much so as the Buxtehude on my computer.

In a similar vein, I like to play from the large format version of the Peters edition of the Bach organ works, also rather hard to find. The details have changed for me over the years and vary from person to person as well as over time. But the point is that if you can’t see the music easily, you are wasting time and effort. Sometimes this is out of necessity, and like all things that are necessary but not ideal, we deal with it as best we can.

Suggestions for seeing music
clearly

Here are some things that I suggest to students to clear the decks of unnecessary and destructive impediments to seeing the music clearly and easily:

1) Favor editions that are clear, large enough, easy to read. This is the first step, and it is the point of the Tilney anecdote above. It is not always possible: sometimes the edition that is the most readable is honestly not all that readable, and there’s nothing to do about that. But it is important to take this into account. It can seem mundane or not very interesting, but interesting or not, it is important. If there is a conflict between easy readability and other important characteristics of an edition, that can be a problem that does not have one good answer. If there is an edition that is clearer and more comfortable to read than others but has editorial changes (slurs, dynamics, etc.), I might, with regret, pass it up in favor of the next one down the readability list. If the additions were just fingerings and pedalings, as much as I do not like for these to be engraved in a score, I might accept that in order to achieve the easier reading. It can vary on a case-by-case basis, but the point is not to short-change the clarity of reading.

2) Use enough light and the right kind of light. This is something about which we sometimes have to compromise, but we should not simply fail to consider. I have failed to take enough account of this over the years, out of a combination of not wanting to be a nuisance—if a performing venue isn’t well-lit and getting good light seems to give trouble—and a kind of vanity, not really about my vision, but about my adaptability and my status as someone who can get along and make do. Concerning the right kind of light: many people like little spotlights that are affixed to music desks. This can be fine, but sometimes these lights are bright enough to cause squinting or cast shadows. Make sure that the light is really doing what you want it to do. Also, ensure that there is no extraneous light source in your field of vision that is bright enough to be distracting or to make your pupils close. This is a more likely problem with harpsichord or piano than with organ.

3) Glasses and eyesight: this is the big one. Wearing glasses, getting one’s eyes checked frequently, making choices about bi- or tri-focals or progressive lenses, contact lenses, and so on, is all complicated. It involves not just practical issues and their solutions, but matters of style and fashion, self-image, concern about age, the passage of time, and—back to the practical issue—expense. I like glasses. I find the technology cool. I always enjoy the moment of putting my glasses on and seeing whatever is in front of me become clear and crisp. I like having several pairs of glasses, and I am happy to juggle them as needed. This is all random and irrational and a matter of luck for me. Some people find glasses annoying or uncomfortable. I am lucky in that as my vision has changed over the years, it has done so quite slowly, and often in ways that enables me to re-assign rather than discard older glasses. For example, the glasses that I use nowadays to watch television are ones that used to be my real distance glasses, for use while driving or at a movie theater. They are not quite right for that now. It is often less costly when getting new glasses to get new frames rather than to place new lenses in existing frames. If you do it this way, you can keep the old glasses around and try them out from time to time for various purposes. Good music-reading glasses can emerge that way. 

It is a very good idea to have dedicated, single-prescription, music reading glasses that are focused at about the distance of a music desk. This is usually about 22 inches. Traditionally reading glasses are designed to focus closer than that. Glasses that focus at that longer distance are often described as computer glasses. But anyone measuring your eyes for eyewear prescription can set the focus wherever you ask them to. It is a good idea to describe what you want quite specifically. Glasses that are not single-prescription can be a problem for playing music. They can require the player to hold their head (and therefore really the whole body) in an awkward position. They can make it easy to read part of the page but hard to read other parts. They can make it hard to see the keyboard(s) on any instrument or the stop knobs on an organ. It is best not to depend on looking at the keyboard. However, somewhat paradoxically, the ability to see the keyboard peripherally out of the corner of the eye can be orienting and can reduce the amount of out-and-out looking directly at the keyboard that is (or feels) necessary.

This can also be about lighting. I feel much more inner pressure to look at the pedals playing an organ where the illumination of the pedal area is poor rather than playing one where it is bright.

My impression is that the glasses-buying process is in flux. It may well be that there are internet-based options that are less expensive than what we are accustomed to. I don’t know much about this and cannot say anything specific about it. It is also the kind of process that is bound to change quickly. Some people have health insurance that will cover glasses. What I do know is that reading music without the right glasses—that is, without being able to see easily and perfectly—is extraordinarily inefficient. It is worth doing whatever is possible to avoid it. I have said to students that, in a pinch, the right glasses are more important than any given dozen lessons. And it is better to download old, free, public domain editions of repertoire and read them with the right glasses than it is to buy the newest editions, pretty much regardless of how much better those new editions are. 

In the 1990s, I had a student for several years who had been a church organist for decades and who had studied with several teachers. This was out of insatiable curiosity and devotion to the organ. Two or three years into her lessons with me, she started to notice, as did I, that her playing was deteriorating. Hesitation, inaccuracy, poor rhythm: these were all creeping in where they had never been. On a bigger scale, it was like what I described above with me and the Buxtehude piece. She began to speak of giving up playing, at least playing in church. She was ready to believe that she was in decline due to age, though she was only in her early seventies at the time. She was fairly serene and philosophical about it. Then she got new glasses, and the problems went away instantly. (I honestly don’t remember whether I had known enough to suggest an eye exam for her, whether she thought of it specifically as a possible source of her problems playing, or whether it was random and well timed. I do know that watching what happened with her alerted me to the importance of vision in the playing and learning process. I don’t think that I began to act on that awareness with other students as promptly as I should have.) She kept playing after that for at least another dozen years, well into her eighties. 

4) Copying, enlarging, and computer music readers. In theory, a copier can be used to make music bigger than it is in its bound form. If the music is hard to read because it is too small, then this is worth doing, even at the cost of some time and even at the cost of more frequent page turns. Likewise a computer music reader allows flexibility about size and clarity. A tremendous advantage to the computer-based approach is that it makes page turns easier: more so with harpsichord, since the turning can be accomplished with pedals. For me as a harpsichord recitalist, this has actually been an extraordinary boon. It is not just a practical matter either. It often makes possible more artistically successful pacing of movements and pieces than can be achieved when paper page turns are necessary. On organ this is more complicated, of course, because of the pedal keyboard and pedal parts. (With the piano it is in-between, since the feet are sometimes otherwise occupied, but there is probably at least room to put the page-turning pedals.) However, the hand-driven computer page turning cannot be less convenient than paper page turning, I would think. On a device such as this, you can reconfigure pages, as I did with the Buxtehude, to fit as much or as little onto the page as you wish, and to locate page turns at more convenient spots. This process is all still rather new, and it will evolve. Perhaps in a few years it will be understood that everyone reads music this way. Or perhaps it will have turned out to be a fad, or have been superseded by something else. I would not say that everyone must rush out and get a system of this sort. It is not even nearly as important as clear, readable music, good lighting, and good glasses. But it has its uses.

Getting back to paper copying for a moment, if you are copying or printing out music onto paper that will be placed on the music desk as individual pages, use card stock. Ordinary typing paper will slip down or off the desk, will curl, blow away at the slightest provocation, get crumpled in transit, and so on. Card stock, paper with a rate of 60 pounds or greater, will behave beautifully on the music desk, in your brief case, everywhere. It is astonishing what a difference this can make. I have seen people play with the music obviously about to curl under itself and disappear down onto the pedalboard. They are clearly and appropriately anxious about this. That anxiety makes proper focus on playing impossible. Sometimes players tape or glue pieces of music to cardboard. Printing on heavy enough paper makes this unnecessary and saves time. 

I should note that with all copying and also with printing out music that you have found online there can be copyright issues. There is some sort of understanding that copying to facilitate page turns is usually permissible. However, I certainly don’t know the details of that in every jurisdiction and cannot make any specific comments or recommendations about it except that one must inform oneself as necessary.

5) About page turns: very often page turn moments, and even the move from the bottom of one page to the top of the next when the two are in view simultaneously, turn out to be weak spots in a student’s playing of a piece. This can be dealt with head on by specific practice. If the page turn goes from one measure to another, then copy these measures, place them next to the page with preceding and following measures, and practice thoroughly without a break. With two pages that are both in view, just be aware. Choreograph the motion of the eyes from the bottom of the left hand page to the top of the right.

All of the above is basically common sense, and any or all of us can figure it out or adapt it as necessary. I have written about this because my own experience shows that students often do not address these things until prompted to do so, and that teachers often do not give them as much weight as they deserve. And because they come from common sense, they are mostly quite easy and direct to address and can yield great benefits.