On Teaching

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

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 . . .

Performance

Something that has been on my mind for a while now is the relationship between being a player and being a performer. This has been on my mind in one way or another for most of my adult life, but it has recently come to the fore and presented itself as an interesting subject for this column.

There are a few reasons for this. I have been playing more concerts over the last five years or so than at any other period of my life. As a result, I have been focusing directly and intensely on my own experience of being a performer and my feelings about that experience. I have had a larger than usual influx of new students over the last several months, and whenever that happens I have to focus as consciously as possible on my own thinking about the goals and needs of those students. Over the last five or six years, I have also been a more frequent audience member both at concerts and at other sorts of artistic endeavors­—theater, dance, and so on—than I had been over the preceding couple of decades. In this I have looked for (not totally) offbeat, non-traditional, semi-improvisatory, some-
times mixed-media, or otherwise somewhat avant-garde sorts of performance. This has been partly for practical reasons (a lot of such things take place near where I live, tickets are usually easy to get, and much of this sort of work is not costly to attend) and partly because this is an area—or a set of overlapping areas—that I had previously neglected. This has given me an interesting look at new aspects on performance as a phenomenon. 

By and large this column has dealt with two sorts of things over the years: the really practical, such as a protocol for learning pedal playing, suggestions for solving hand distribution difficulties, general practice strategies, or exercises for trills; and the tangential but relevant, such as tuning and temperament, an introduction to the clavichord, or my thoughts on the ways in which trying to learn golf has informed my playing and teaching of music. What I have not dealt with very much is the whole set of questions that bridge the gap between playing and performance. Some of these perhaps boil down to what might be called the fundamental question of musical performance: how do I know that what I am doing is valuable to those who are hearing it? 

But this in turn expands to a host of specific questions and things to think about. This includes everything that we call interpretation. Interpretation as a part of actual performance includes not just interpretive choices that we know we are making (tempo, registration, articulation, approaches to rhythm, etc.), but also all sorts of intangibles that make the worked-out and describable interpretation seem compelling and convincing. This “compelling and convincing” phenomenon is probably one reason that a given listener can like so many different interpretations of the same piece. The describable interpretive choices are by no means all of what makes a performance effective: you can make a case that they are often only a small part, or that they essentially just set the stage for effectiveness rather than create it. 

The relevant questions might well include things about presentation. Is the way I look while playing important? Is it important that a written program be presented a certain way? Shall I talk to the audience? Looking at it from another point of view, is it better to pay as little attention as possible to those trappings and think only about how the music sounds? 

The strongest reason that I have not dealt very much with the question of “Is what I am doing valuable to the audience?” in these columns is that I feel I don’t want to dictate anything to my students about interpretive choices. I do not want to say, “This is right, and that is wrong,” or even “These could be right, but all of those are wrong.” Nor do I want to say, “This is how I do it. Why don’t you try that out?”

Helping a student to become a competent, eventually exceptionally accomplished, player or to become a well-educated, well-rounded musician, artist, and person, can all be addressed without prejudice as to interpretive stance. Can that also be said of helping students to deal directly with the question, “Will what I do be valuable to the listeners?” I think that it can. But I also feel that this is one of the most elusive aspects of teaching and among the most difficult to describe. I think that I have deliberately (or let’s say subconsciously deliberately) shied away from trying to address it over the years. Indeed I am not going to answer it in this or any future column. However, in raising and considering all sorts of questions about what performance is and what it is to be a performer, I will perhaps approach some ways of answering it over time. 

The other big matter about performing is nervousness. There are all sorts of ways to help students deal with that. To start with, helping a student to be highly competent at all of the practical dimensions of playing, and to know and to trust that, is a major part of that picture. Perhaps other aspects of understanding performance as such can also be helpful.

Thoughts about performance and being a performer

So here are various questions and thoughts about performance and being a performer. I will address more of them in future columns. And we will see how many of them wind their way to answers.

Should students be expected or required to perform? When I was very young and taking piano lessons, I used all of my wiles to avoid playing in any of my teachers’ studio classes or recitals. I am pretty sure that from the moment of my first piano lesson in the fall of 1965 when I was eight years old, no member of any public ever heard me perform so much as a note at a keyboard instrument until mid February 1974. I was then 16.

My debut that month involved my playing one organ piece at a Valentine’s Day-themed service at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. Do I think that my avoiding performing for all those years was good? Did it do any harm to my development as a musician? How do I square that history with the fact that I am now a more-than-average comfortable performer? (That is, regardless of whether a given listener likes my approach or doesn’t, I greet concert performance with very little nervousness these days, 40 years and more after the events described above.) 

Why did I not want to play for people in those days? It wasn’t for lack of interest in music or for lack of identifying myself as a musician. Both of those things were present in abundance. I spent a lot of time at the piano, not necessarily practicing what I was “supposed” to practice, but playing. I listened a lot to LP’s and to concerts. I even composed a bit. I think that I was influenced by a feeling that if I played for someone, it had to be perfect. The only thing I would have meant by that at the time was note perfect. This is an attitude that is very easy to pick up from our society and culture. 

There is a billboard that I often pass on the highway near where I live that says, “You don’t get medals for trying, you only get medals for results.” This may be literally true as to “medals,” but it strikes me as a harmful attitude to try to instill in people in general and certainly in aspiring musicians. To put it more neutrally, it is at least an attitude that has consequences. One way to frame how I felt when I was young and trying to play piano is that, in effect, if I would only get a medal for (perfect) results, then I might as well not try. That’s only about performing, not about engaging with music, which I did with great energy in private. 

I don’t believe that my early piano teachers (or other teachers or any adults in my circle) directly conveyed this fear of making mistakes in public to me. I imagine that many of them felt about the whole subject more or less the way I do now. But this is a reminder that being afraid of doing something wrong is a powerful force and one that we have to think about how to counter. One tremendous benefit to me from my memories of my own early refusal to perform is that I can tell the story to my students. Those who are more or less beginners and who are nervous about performing—and about whether they can ever learn to be comfortable performing—take a good deal of comfort from my history.

When I was a student at Westminster Choir College, the organ department was very systematic in introducing us to performance. With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals, shorter or longer, with or without memorization, depending on the student and his or her program. I credit this systematic and humane approach with a significant proportion of my evolution into a comfortable performer.

I have had students who start out thinking that they don’t want to perform.  Their interests in music or in playing organ or harpsichord are inner ones, and expecting to play for other people would only add a layer of tension to an experience that they want to be serene. I have a lot of respect for that sort of feeling. However, I can report that almost everyone who starts out saying something of this sort and whose inner-directed interest is strong enough to cause them to stick with their studies for a while ends up actually wanting to play for others, if only in an informal studio class, and getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing so. 

I am fairly certain that there is a different or competing reason that some people feel reluctant to perform or to be identified or to self-identify as performers rather than just as people who play music. In a way it’s the opposite of the fear of making mistakes or playing badly, but it also stems from a set of societal biases about performing. It is a fear of seeming arrogant, vain, or self-indulgent by putting oneself forward as a performer. This stems at least in part from the awareness that we tend to elevate performers to the rank of “celebrities.” It gives rise to such inhibiting questions as “Who am I to play this great piece?” or “Who would want to listen to me when they could be listening to X or Y?” Such thoughts probably exist and function mostly at a subconscious level. But I believe that for a lot of people they are present. The great, famous touring and recording virtuosi are doing things that many of our students are not going to do, and indeed that you and I might not do either.

The truth is that most of those things that are inevitably different are about circumstances. My experience is that almost any student can play at least as many pieces as effectively, with as much benefit to the listener, as any experienced or famous performer might play them. The chief difference is that the famous performer probably has a larger repertoire and performs more. There may be individual pieces that are too difficult for us to learn comfortably, at least given realistic limits on our practice time. But this knocks out only some of the repertoire and has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the performance of any other piece. The most beautiful and moving performance I have ever heard of Variation 25 from the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach was given recently by a student of mine at a studio class. That reaction of mine as a listener did not come about because the performance reflected my specific interpretive ideas. It aligned with them in part, but not in full. And I mention this example only because it is the most recent. It is one of many from over the years, on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. 

At any given moment in history, there are many listeners for whom the performances of certain pieces by well-known touring and recording artists are indeed the finest performances out there. Those performers are not excluded from the community of those who might give great or even transcendent readings of great music. But no one who gains some level of competence at an instrument is excluded from that community either. It can be liberating to students to be reminded of this. The answer to the question “Why is that performer so famous and successful?” is not always or exclusively because he or she does things on a piece by piece basis that the rest of us can only dream of—not at all. 

Performance as improvisation

I feel that a version of this dynamic has been at play in my own life in the area of improvisation. If it comes up in conversation, I always say that I am not someone who can improvise. This is true of me as I stand now. But why is it? Some time very early in my engagement with music I decided that I couldn’t become someone who could improvise. This was in spite of my being a developing organist, and the organ’s being one of the corners of the “classical” music world where improvisation is most likely to be found. Looking back, I am pretty sure that I never chose to study improvisation and thereby find out what I could and couldn’t do in that field (which would have been the logical approach) because of two inhibiting assumptions: I couldn’t learn to improvise music of the quality of the greatest pieces in the repertoire, and I couldn’t learn to improvise as well as the great and famous improvisers. Were these assumptions correct? I have no idea. But I know that they cut me off from trying.

I close with a stray idea about performance, though as you will see, a logical segue from the above, which came into my head at some point over the last year or so. It stems in part from my experience watching certain theater and dance performances that included an element of improvisation. It is in a way an effort to counter the notion that as performers we must always be humble and self-effacing with respect to the composer. Such an idea is not without merit: it makes a lot of sense, especially, for me, as a kind of specific practical point. The composer probably knew a lot about the essence of the piece, and it might very well turn out that that knowledge can be of use to us in figuring out how we want to play it. (How we tap into that knowledge is a complex subject.) But I also think that too much reverence for the composer, especially when it is specifically expressed as humility, can be inhibiting.

This is not utterly unlike the ways in which too much reverence for other, more famous performers can be. So here’s my thought: one of the ways to conceptualize a partial goal of live performance of repertoire is that the pieces should seem improvised. They should have a kind of spontaneity and ability to surprise performer as well as listener—that we would ideally associate with something that was being brand new. This notion, though paradoxical when applied to a piece that we have leaned through hours of practicing, can be a strong antidote to staleness. But if I play a piece that was actually written by Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Messiaen and I feel like I am improvising it, then I am embracing at that moment the idea that I am someone who could be improvising that extraordinary musical content.

I am in fact not such a person. Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece. In a way, I am playing the role of that person, in a way that is perhaps not the same as but also not completely alien to the way that an actor plays a role. This is just a concept. But it feels to me like one that can bridge the gap between respect for the composer and the fortitude necessary to perform.

More to come . . .

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.

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.

August interlude

I have decided to take a partial break from my sequence of columns about helping students to develop fingerings and instead write about a few miscellaneous matters that have been on my mind. These are all small but interesting things that are hard to fit into columns that are about something well defined. So this month’s column is a grab bag or smorgasbord. I am influenced to construct this sort of column right now by the following confluence: it happens that I am writing this during a real heat wave (early summer mid-90s temperatures, with lots of sun and little wind), and this column will be distributed in August, when, around where I live, this sort of weather would be more typical. So it feels like time for a bit of summer relaxation and catching up.

A couple of things that I am writing about this month tie in with the business of teaching fingering. That may not be too surprising, since, as I wrote a few months ago, there is no such thing as keyboard playing without fingering. I will note these connections, but not go into them at great length, and then pick up those threads as well in the coming months.

As I looked over my notes about some of these points and thought about a few more things that have passed through my mind recently, I noticed that some of what I want to discuss is even more personal than usual: my playing, my own reactions to things, some of what I think has gone well in my work, and some of what has gone not so well. I believe most of us find it challenging to say openly: “Yes, I did this well. This was a success.” or “That didn’t work out. I am not (yet?) good at that.” Grappling with framing certain things in one of those ways is a reminder that everything that we do performing and teaching is a result and a reflection of our makeup and experiences. It is extraordinarily important that we remember that this is true of our students as well.

Forced into sight-reading . . .

I recently played a harpsichord recital for which I forgot to bring some of my music. (Is this going to be a trend? Do I have to do something about it? Not sure yet.) In particular, I simply didn’t have any way of obtaining a copy of a Froberger toccata that I had programmed. This is a piece that I have played in recital a dozen times or more over the last couple of years, more on harpsichord than on organ. It is also a piece that I know extremely well. I could probably write out at least chunks of it, and write in what I know to be my fingerings for those bits.

But that doesn’t mean I could play the piece from memory. (This is my first experience of bumping up against this particular practical disadvantage to my preferred approach of not performing from memory.) I noticed that in a Froberger volume that I had with me, from which I was going to play a suite, there was another toccata in the same key as my missing one. That meant that I could play it instead of the programmed one without making the printed program inaccurate or misleading. 

The only problem was that I had never learned this piece. I have probably read through it at some point in the past, since I have specialized in Froberger for decades and have read through all or close to all of his music. But if so, I didn’t remember that, and it would have been years ago. But I read through the piece once during my tuning and warming-up session and decided I could go ahead and play it in the concert. I did so, and it went fine: basically accurate, a wrong note or two, but not necessarily more than I or another performer might make in any piece; rhythms certainly accurate; tempos in the faster bits perhaps slower than I would want them following a normal amount of preparation, but not by much. It was a successful performance, though I hope that it was not as effective as it would have been if I had worked on it. If it was, then that casts some doubt upon my whole normal learning and preparation strategy!

So, what did I get out of this? I am certainly not recounting this to suggest that I am a particularly great sight-reader. Really I am not. I figure that by the standards of professional keyboard performers, I am probably about a “B-plus” sight-reader, and if not exactly that, then more likely “B” than “A-minus.” And I suspect that the several other toccatas in the volume would have been a stretch for me to sight-read in performance. They looked more intricate. It was a lucky coincidence for me that the one in the correct key was the simplest-looking one. But it is also important not to remain trapped in a sense of what we cannot do or what we are not good at. When I was in college, it would have been utterly out of the question for me to perform this piece without having practiced it for weeks. Could I have performed it after one read-through fifteen years ago? Five? I am not sure. But I was correct to intuit that I could do so now. 

We should also never remain trapped in a sense of what our students cannot do. What they (and we) can and cannot do should be changing all the time. While I was actually performing this piece, the feeling of playing it was more comfortable and serene than what I often experience while performing a piece that I know well, that I have prepared obsessively, that I feel ready to perform or record, that I consider part of my identity as a player. Why? How is this even possible? There has to be something to learn there about concentration, expectation, and anxiety. I do not yet know exactly what that is. It must start from the awareness that I had to pay close attention all of the time, every fraction of a second, like driving on a slippery road. But what about that would be good to import into the act of playing a well-prepared piece? Would there be a down side to doing so? Less spontaneity? My thinking about this is new and evolving, especially since this was the most recent concert that I have played as I sit here writing.

This also reminds me that there is such a thing as sight-reading fingering, or even a sight-reading approach to fingering. Fingering will be a different sort of phenomenon depending on whether you do or don’t know what is coming up next. To some extent this has to tie in with patterns and templates for how to play what sort of passage. How does this, or doesn’t this, have the potential to inform work on carefully planned fingerings?

 . . . and improvisation.

I am not much of an improviser. Long ago I was intimidated by improvisation and never even considered studying it systematically. That may or may not be a loss or a problem for me—after all, nobody does everything. However, I can play rather meandering chord progressions that often sound perfectly pleasing and that serve to enable me to explore the sounds of instruments without needing to put music in front of me. This very limited improvisation, or noodling around, is really derived from my continuo-playing experience. I am in effect generating bass lines, more or less at random, and then realizing them as continuo parts. I recently noticed that when I do this with a pedal line as the bass line, I find it almost impossible to involve my left hand. The influence of the feel of ordinary continuo playing is so strong that I can’t get any intuition going as to how to add chords and notes other than in the right hand. I find this interesting, just as a kind of archeological dig into my modest history of improvisation. But it also makes me think that I should try to make myself sit on my right hand when playing this sort of thing and force my left hand to get involved. Furthermore, I should urge any student doing this sort of thing to emphasize the left hand, or at least to be sure to give it equal weight.

Learning a magnum opus

I have played Bach’s French Overture, BWV 831, in three recitals over the last several months. This is a piece that I have loved for many years. I initially tried playing it when I first had regular access to a harpsichord on which to practice, about 40 years ago. It was beyond challenging for me at that point, so it pleases me that I can work on it, learn it, and perform it now. In order to do so, I have had to get past a little bit of the trap mentioned above: getting stuck in a sense of what I cannot do. But what has been most interesting to me about actually playing this piece in concert is that it is long, about 40 minutes, and quite intricate, dense, and varied. Since I have played many concerts that are a lot longer than that, even those that have halves longer than that sometimes, it never occurred to me that stamina might be an issue. However, in each of the three performances, my playing of the last movement, a sprightly and excited piece with the non-traditional title of “Echo,” has been influenced (really I should say undermined) by stamina issues. I believe that what happens is that as I get through the end of the previous movement, the Gigue, I feel my energy and/or concentration lessen, and, in trying to boost it back up, I start the Echo too fast. It is then hectic, helter-skelter, and more prone to note inaccuracy than I would like. Although I identified this concern after the first time I played the piece in recital, I was not able to prevent it from happening each of the next two times as well, though it has been progressively less severe. 

I have learned from this that the little opportunities to regroup in a concert that are afforded by breaks between pieces are significant and useful. Also, regardless of how well learned the various sections and movements of a program are, and no matter how tempting (and genuinely important) it is to focus on practicing hard passages, it is a good idea not to neglect playing through the whole thing. (Not that I have neglected that completely in preparing for these concerts, but I think that I underestimated how much of it I should do.) This reminds me to review my approach to any similar issues with my students.

The familiar and the unfamiliar

A few months ago I played a short lunchtime recital at the Princeton University Chapel. This is an extraordinary venue, for music or for anything else, and home to a justly famous and wonderful organ. But for me it is something more: a place where I spent thousands of hours playing the organ during the years when I was an undergraduate at the university. In the years since then, I have mostly pursued performance on mechanical-action organs and on harpsichord and clavichord, and the large Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner/Mander organ is not the most familiar sort of beast to me nowadays. On the other hand, this particular organ, rebuilt though it has been, and most especially this setting, evoke as much feeling of familiarity and as much deep nostalgia as any place or any instrument could. I was playing, in part, music of Moondog that day. Moondog is my second specialty along with music of the Baroque. I first encountered all of his pieces that I played this recent day during or shortly before my time as a student at Princeton, and I played them all frequently in the chapel back then. This was a powerful reminder to me that individual experience is what most informs our feelings about music, as about everything else, and that no two people—teachers, students, listeners, players—ever bring the same set of experiences to the way that they take in music.

I was also reminded that everything about technique, as well as about interpretation, is in part about the instrument. (That is, the instrument as a separate entity alongside the music, the interpretive stance of the player, the player’s habits and preferences, and so on.) Of course I know this, and have written about it. But this was a vivid real-life experience of it, with interesting twists because of the unusual blend of familiar and unfamiliar.

Hearing wrong notes 

I recently heard about a (not particularly recent) study that showed quite systematically that most listeners don’t consciously hear or notice most wrong notes. The study involved asking several talented graduate student pianists to record several piano pieces. These were pieces that they had not studied before, and that they were given a fairly short time to learn. This was to try to secure enough wrong notes to make the study meaningful. The listeners were undergraduate pianists, some of whom were and some of whom weren’t familiar with the pieces. The gist of the result was that the listeners reported only a very small fraction of the wrong notes. (Here is the link to the article about this study to which someone directed my attention: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audience….) 

This study tended to confirm my feeling that we as players exaggerate the importance of wrong notes. Of course there are questions. Does what this study found about piano apply equally well to organ, to harpsichord, or to instruments outside of our specific concern here, or to singing? Should we actually embrace for ourselves or for our students, caring less about accuracy than we might feel required to do? Is that a slippery slope? Preparation and practicing, and planning fingering, are in part about striving for accuracy. In fact it is easy to fall into thinking that that is all that they are about. Is there a way to juggle successfully both motivating ourselves and our students to try with all our might to prepare for extraordinary accuracy and wearing the need for that accuracy very lightly? Does a clear-cut study like this add to our intuitive sense? All of that planning, to the extent that it is not just about reliable accuracy, is about gaining enough control to do what we want to do expressively. Can we separate out those two goals and emphasize one more than the other? Are there differences in fingering choices that might arise out of this distinction? Or different ways of approaching the whole matter of fingering choices? How can we best help students sort this out?

The next generation

A short while ago I was visited in my harpsichord studio by a few students of a fine local piano teacher. These students were second- and third-graders. After they had played around a bit on several instruments, one of them commented to me that she liked the antique Italian harpsichord the best. That made sense to me, as a lot of people have that reaction. She then said, in explanation, “it has an intelligent sound.” I was really taken with that way of putting it or that way of hearing the sound. I had never encountered that particular image before. It resonated with one of my ways of experiencing instrument sound, especially that of organs and harpsichords.

I want to have the subjective experience, if I listen closely and without distraction, that the sonority seems to me to come directly from, or in a sense to be, a sentient being. Although this young girl had no prior experience with harpsichords, it reminded me of the description by the very experienced Keith Hill of clavichord sound, which I quoted in last April’s column. It includes the statement that “clavichords should have the sound of thought.”

Next month I will buckle down, so to speak, and get back to work on our extended look at fingering.

Performance

Rockport, Maine, is a quiet, picturesque village nestled between the bustling towns of Rockland and Camden. It’s on the west shore of Penobscot Bay, which forms the east end of the region known as mid-coast Maine, and like the surrounding towns, Rockport is a combination of a working fishing harbor and home to many private pleasure boats. There are a couple of active boatbuilding workshops there, and dozens, if not hundreds, of moorings bedeck the enclosed harbor. The area is home to many high-end vacation residences, so there’s a strong market for good musical performances, and Rockport, with two excellent restaurants and a vintage opera house within a few doors of each other, is known for the many outstanding concerts presented each summer.

But not last Tuesday. After a terrific dinner, Wendy and I took our seats in the opera house for a concert presented by a string quartet that’s resident in the area, and we were immediately stricken by the backstage sounds of the cellist, feverishly practicing a narky passage that started with a very high note, followed by a dramatic downward flourish. He played it over and over, right through the concert’s starting time, never getting the high note quite right, and sounding more frantic with each repetition. It was a dreadful display.

Finally, the quartet took the stage. Their concert attire was sloppy, and their progress from stage door to their chairs was haphazard. They opened the program with a few lofty remarks about the piece they were about to play, and offered a lackluster reading. Though the printed program indicated that they would play two pieces before intermission, they left the stage after the first piece, and the cellist went right back to his nervous and ineffectual practicing, still never quite reaching that high note. The audience was left to wonder if this was the intermission. There were no cues offered by house lights and no announcement about alteration of the program. The quartet would be joined by a singer for the final two pieces, so I suppose it made sense to present them together without break, but the sequence was strange and unsettling, especially as it was accompanied by dozens more missed chances at that pesky high note. Dozens.

Once again, it was a relief when the anguish stopped and they took the stage. The singer was a young woman who grew up in the area and made good. She has performed in several major opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and she knew how to dress appropriately. Her beautifully chosen dress and carefully coiffed hair was in stark contrast to the sloppy, uncoordinated garb heaped on the four chairs. The first piece they offered together was by Respighi, an erudite work with elusive structure, and none of them managed to pull out any sense of form. Finally, in Samuel Barber’s shimmering Dover Beach, the soprano got some traction and pulled the quartet toward meaningful playing. Inexplicably, the gullible audience gave them a standing ovation. Must have been the singer’s family. At least we had a wonderful dinner.

Rockport is 45 minutes from our place in Newcastle, and we had them in shreds by the time we got home. The quartet has been resident in the area for over 20 years, and they’re supported by a not-for-profit board that raises funds and organizes their concerts. Maybe things are a little too easy for them. Their performance lacked any sense of passion or commitment to the music.

The Salt Bay Chamberfest is an annual event in Damariscotta, Maine, which adjoins our town of Newcastle. The concerts are held in a barn owned by the Damariscotta River Association. It’s not a converted barn, it’s just a barn with wood walls and roof, cement floor, folding chairs, and a concession stand selling wine and cheese. Last summer, we heard a program that included three pieces by Kaija Saariaho: Nocturne, Cloud Trio, and Je sens un deuxième coeur. (Later in the year, her opera, L’amour de Loin, was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera written by a woman to be presented there in more than a century.)

That concert ended with Arnold Schoenberg’s mystical Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, with Alan Gilbert, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, playing viola. Those musicians were used to performing in central formal venues, but they gave the same level of energy and commitment to their performance in the barn. It was rich and rewarding.

§

I’ve long admired The Bobs, an a cappella vocal quartet formed in 1981 and now preparing their farewell tour. They write their own material in a rapid-fire hipster style, and they sing brilliantly in close harmony. I heard them live in a concert at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, a thousand-seat venue in Memorial Hall, just up the street from the museum formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger, home of E. Power Biggs’s iconic Flentrop organ. As we left the room after the concert, I was exhausted and assumed that most people present felt the same way. I reflected that those four performers spent enough energy to wear out the entire audience.

Just what is performance? Of course, performance is an artist presenting before an audience. Performers are actors, musicians, dancers, comedians, and various combinations of all those elements. But there’s more to it than sitting at an instrument, playing pieces of music. And, for the audience, the performance is more than simply sitting in a chair and listening.

There’s some kind of deal, some kind of relationship set up between performer and audience. Perhaps it’s tension—the audience is expectant and the performer intends to sate them. Perhaps it’s trust—the audience relies on the performer to present the music freely and accurately. Perhaps it’s risk—the performer interprets familiar passages in new ways, causing the audience to sit on the edge of their seats. And perhaps it’s the baring of soul—the performer exposes his inner person to the audience, willing to share his private thoughts from the stage.

Some years ago, Wendy and I saw Tony Kushner’s play Homebody/Kabul at the Trinity Repertory Theater. One scene involved a male character, a diplomat in a position of power, who offered to provide the woman the visa she sought in return for sex. There was a struggle of wills until the actress tore off her blouse and, naked from the waist up, consented to the humiliation. That act took my breath away as an expression of a performer, baring herself both literally and figuratively. Her nakedness was metaphorical, a shout of anger at the ugly behavior of the diplomat. Her ability and willingness to do that in anger, apparently spontaneously, was one of the most eloquent instants in any performance I have witnessed.

Oh yes, I hear you sniggering out there. Of course he would never forget that. But how many of us have had performance anxiety dreams in which we are sitting at the organ in front of a room full of people and realize in horror that we are naked? Given the number of times I’ve heard friends and colleagues relate similar dreams, I’ll answer my own question. Lots of us. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a psychiatrist to realize that those images are related to the requirement and expectation that when we perform, we are baring our souls and our artistic psyches before our audiences. Are we ready for that?

One concept of performance, often repeated, is that the performer is a vessel through which the music passes. An iconic painting hangs on a wall, open to the enjoyment and interpretation of the viewer. There is no need for a middleman between the artist and the consumer. The greatness of a composer is nothing but squiggles on a page until an artist brings them to life. And in my experience, the best performers and the most exciting performances happen when the artist-as-vessel is a conveyor of energy. Not only do the squiggles become organized sound, but they become energized, dancing, flitting, or tearing across the room. The artist transforms the squiggles into force, and topknots are uprooted.

That’s the sign of a great actress, who seems to be a completely different person in every role she plays. Think of the great Maggie Smith as the imperious, scathing Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, and compare that to the homeless Mary Shepherd in The Lady in the Van. You Downton Abbey fans, if you haven’t met Mary Shepherd, you must.

Bigger than yourself

Sometimes, the artist-as-vessel gets carried away and grows bigger than the music. Physical histrionics are purposefully created, supposedly adding to the artistic experience. The unvarying result is the opposite. The music takes a back seat to the performer, and the audience is the poorer. It’s as if you’re watching a gymnastics meet rather than an artistic performance. I don’t mind an occasional flourish, or a toss of the head at the end of an exciting passage, but I dislike unnecessary movement that seems theatrically planned.

Le Poisson Rouge is a trendy performance venue on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It’s downstairs (one can only imagine what would happen if there was a fire), and you sit at tables where you can order (pretty good) food and (very good) drinks. It’s within walking distance of our apartment, and we’ve heard quite a few wonderful performances there. But there was this duo-piano concert, two sisters who were personifications of the too-flashy, too-theatrical musician. The first chord made me cringe: the pianos were not in tune with each other. Wendy put her hand on my elbow, and hissed, “Behave.” She was right. I consoled myself by scrawling commentary on the program throughout their performance. The two pianists spent the evening tossing their hair, throwing their hands in the air, and making what their coaches must have thought were alluring facial expressions. We often talk about that performance in social settings, and we invariably call them “The Kissy Sisters.”

In professional football, a team is penalized when a player displays histrionics. It’s officially called “excessive celebration.” What if you had a button on the armrest of your concert hall seat that allowed you to vote? Artists whose first and last names are the same would be banned from the field.

Distraction

Did I mention that the pianos were not in tune with each other? Those who present concerts must accept the responsibility to create a suitable setting for performers and listeners. There were several hundred of us in that room, in fifty-dollar seats with twenty-dollar drinks. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t money to hire a piano tuner. There were two lovely Steinway “B’s” on the stage—at least they brought in good instruments. But had the pianos been in good tune, it might have taken me two or even three measures to dislike the performance.

During performances at Carnegie Hall in New York, there are huge glass snifters full of Ricola™ lozenges placed throughout the lobbies and corridors, a nice touch of consideration for all concert-goers. I remember hearing a radio story years ago about the London Symphony introducing “Silent Sweets,” little hard candies wrapped in paper specially designed to be quiet when opening.

Coughing and rustling candy wrappers are small fry when compared to cell phones. We’re all used to the public announcements before performances, reminding audiences to silence their cell phones. Look across the audience of a big formal concert and guess how many cell phones are in the room. Out of 2,500 people, I bet there are fewer than a hundred who don’t have phones with them.

On Thursday, January 12, 2012, The New York Times reported: 

They were baying for blood in the usually polite precincts of Avery Fisher Hall. The unmistakenly jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept going on, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor. 

You can read the story at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/nyregion/ringing-finally-stopped-but-….

Coughing, crying babies, cell phones, and late arrivals are all intrusions into the relationship between performer and audience. Some are unavoidable. There are times when you just can’t help coughing. But thoughtful audience members must do their best to preserve the full experience for those around them. There’s a lot to be said for bringing children to concerts, but there’s a continuum between the child’s gain and the collective loss of hundreds of listeners whose experience was marred. Cell phones? No excuse. But the poor guy whose phone spoiled the New York Philharmonic’s concert had a plausible explanation. The New York Times reported that his company had replaced his Blackberry with an iPhone that day. He thought he had silenced it at the start of the concert, but didn’t realize that the alarm was set.

The consummate performer

We all have memories of spectacular live performances. Organist Stephen Tharp played the closing concert of the 2014 convention of the American Guild of Organists. Boston’s 3,000-seat First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) was filled to capacity with what must be the most critical audience an organist can face, and Tharp let loose with a performance that was dazzling both technically and artistically. His reading of his own transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring took the audience places they’d never been. In the three years since, I’ve discussed that concert with dozens of others who were there, most recently last night. And while you’d think that the wide world could dredge up one fussbudget who would criticize, I’ve never heard it. The concept of organ concerts changed that night, and everyone present knew it.

Another instance displaying the consummate performer was the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires’s experience with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1999. She was engaged to play a Mozart concerto, checked which one by referring to the orchestra’s published schedule, and prepared the piece. Not a good source, apparently. Amazingly, the first reading with the orchestra was during an open rehearsal in front of an audience. Conductor Riccardo Chailly began Mozart’s Concerto No. 20 in D Minor. Pires gave a shocked look, buried her face in her palm, then told Chailly that there was a problem. As the orchestra played, he turned to her and said something like, “You played it last year. You’ll be fine.” And she was. By the time the orchestra’s introduction was over, she had pulled herself together, dredged her memory for the correct piece, and played it flawlessly. You can see a video of that incredible moment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS64pb0XnbI.

I doubt that I fully understand the physiology that makes some people able to perform. How can a major league pitcher throw a strike in a tense situation when millions of people are watching? How can an actress toss aside all modesty to be someone else in front of an audience? How can a musician maintain control of her body to perform such intricate motions in front of thousands? What drives people to do that? What expansiveness of spirit is necessary? What generosity? What intense concentration?

I may not understand it, but I sure am grateful for every opportunity I’ve had to hear someone play beautifully. All of us who perform at any level need to witness others doing it as often as possible.