On Teaching

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey.

Students’ Listening I

Through the first years of this column’s existence, much of what I wrote about was practical, specific material regarding teaching—what I often refer to as nitty-gritty: an approach to teaching pedal playing, hand distribution, practice techniques, registration, etc. I would often go through pieces in great detail, suggesting how to put these ideas into practice.

However, over the last year or so, I have found myself interested in writing in a more general vein, tossing out ideas and questions about music, and admittedly, the relationship this has to the day-to-day teaching process is perhaps more distant or indirect. I would argue that even if more distant, that connection is crucial. One of the reasons that I have moved in this direction is that I feel more strongly that everything is about learning and, therefore, also about teaching. I increasingly notice that some of the most important things that I learned from my formal music teachers came from things that they said or did that had nothing to do with fingering, phrasing, or practice techniques, even though all of those things were crucially important as well. And much of what I have learned about my own work as a musician and teacher has come from outside formal or informal lessons.

I am also aware that there is some limit to how much there is to say about the purely practical. There might be a limitless number of approaches to pedal pedagogy, but there is a limit to how much one person should go on saying it! There are good reasons that method books are not as long as encyclopedias. At a certain point a teacher says what needs to be said, and it is time for the student to get on with it. Having started in September 2007, my column as a whole is approaching 400,000 words.

That is not to say that I do not expect to write about the “nitty-gritty” again. There are things in that area that I have not gotten to yet. (And if anyone reading this has suggestions for something that you would like me to address, I would be overjoyed to read them.) There are also things that I have written about that I want to revisit someday. The distinction between the practical and the fruitfully speculative is not absolutely clear-cut.

When I started the column, and for a while thereafter, I was typically writing about things that I knew about before the column ever started. My technical approach to pedal learning, my way of conceptualizing the importance of relaxation, my concerns about memorization, or any number of other subjects for writing and discussion were all there in some fairly thoroughly worked-out form prior to 2007. I may have rethought them in the course of writing them up, and I needed to subject them to organization. But more recently, a lot of what I have wanted to write about has been more in the category of things that are pending in my mind—new ideas that I am in part working out by the very process of writing about them. For me this is an interesting, exciting process. It exposes the very process of trying to evolve as a teacher and thinker about music and teaching.

In the next several months, I will write about issues that are either directly about specifics of teaching or related to that; and the following part of this column falls into that latter category. In subsequent articles, I will systematically explore my own current project as a player, namely relearning and performing J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Rather than being a detailed and systematic set of suggestions about how to approach a particular piece, it will be an actual account of my own grappling with the work of learning a piece. Be sure to watch for it in the May issue of The Diapason.

Music listeners

I was originally planning to call this column “What should students listen to?,” but I put that aside because of my aversion to the concept of “should,” and that title did not represent the scope of what I want to think about. The question is, what is the role of listening to music in the life of someone who is studying music, studying an instrument, or, specifically, studying organ? What has some of my own experience with this been, and what can we as teachers do to guide students in their lives as music listeners, if we should do anything?

When I was a student in a second-year music theory class in college, near the beginning of the school year, the teacher administered a listening test to all students. He played twenty recorded excerpts of classical pieces, and we had to try as best we could to identify each piece. I remember the number of examples well, because my results made it an intense and disturbing experience for me. Even as a classical music junkie and aspiring musician, I was able to recognize and identify only one out of the twenty. I was mortified by how badly I had done. But when the teacher went over the results with me in private, he said something in a very kind, concerned way about how I really should start listening more to music. I shifted from being mortified to being indignant. Prompted by that comment, I belatedly became aware of how narrow and biased the examples were. All but one or two were from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was probably one Bach selection, and that was probably the one that I got right, and maybe one from either Mozart or Beethoven that probably sounded familiar to me, but which I could not pin down.

I would have been able to make up on the spot a similar test with Buxtehude, Schütz, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Pachelbel, Scheidt, de Grigny, Westhoff, Mainerio—and, of course, Bach. I told him, rather annoyingly, that I listened a lot, even maybe too much, and exclusively to classical music, but just not to the repertoire he thought one should know. I remember being impressed by the fact that he immediately conceded the point. He not only expressed agreement, even though that perspective had not occurred to him, but he acknowledged that he learned something from the exchange. I also learned something, although I was entirely within my rights to consider that test unfair and to maintain that I was an avid music listener, it was also true that I would benefit from expanding my own listening habits. There is great merit in the ability to differentiate Brahms, Chopin, or Stravinsky. One should always be open to listening to new music, but that there is also no reason to assume that any set of assumptions about what “should” be listened to are any better than any other set.

It makes perfect sense for a college music professor to believe that a student, otherwise unknown to him, might not be an avid music listener and might need some prodding to become one. After all, college students take classes for all sorts of reasons. As far as he knew, maybe it just fit my schedule, or maybe I thought that it would be easy. However, if someone has come for organ lessons and seems involved and committed to that process, it is likely that they have fairly strong ownership of their music listening habits. If we become aware that someone has focused somewhat narrowly—listening only to the music of one era, or perhaps listening only to organ music, or only to vocal music, while ignoring oratorios, or any electronic music—then we should certainly consider nudging them in the direction of whatever has been lacking. Or, I should say, some of what has been lacking, since there is always an infinite amount out there, and we can never fill in all of it. It is possible to push too hard, and this is about a student’s (or anyone’s) psychology. I became aware in that teacher’s office that it would behoove me to broaden my listening habits. I embraced that and internalized it as a concept. But nonetheless, I did not and could not jump right into listening to music that I did not like or that bored or annoyed me. I had to wait for the time to be right, for my mind to be ready.

The listening that I did back then was limited though extensive. I was listening to music that was associated pretty directly with the music that I most wanted to play. I listened to the composers listed above along with many others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I listened to their organ and harpsichord music, to their chamber and orchestral music, and to their (mostly sacred) vocal music. These were the years when I was officially a student. But I do not think that the reason this pattern developed was related to the study of the music. The reason was that I chose to play music I liked best, and I chose to listen to music I liked best. Not surprisingly, the two were related. It was not a conscious choice; I did not say, “If I want to play Baroque keyboard music, I should listen mostly to Baroque music.” I was just drawn to that repertoire whether I was functioning as a listener or as a player.

Nowadays, it is not just chance, a change in my tastes, or an attempt to practice broadmindedness that has me listening mostly to music from outside the realm of what I mostly play. I have come to a different kind of relationship with various sorts of music. When I encounter new music by hearing about it, or reading through it, happening to notice the cover of a volume, or indeed actually hearing it, any music that is squarely at the center of what I most care about playing, my immediate relationship to that experience is framed by questions of performance. What would I want to do with that theme? How would I try to make those voices dance around each other? How much would I want to draw out that moment? Should that bit be viscerally exciting or more calm and considered?

When I was a student, my relationship to that repertoire as a listener was pure, intense, and primary; now that relationship has been somewhat eclipsed. It is replaced by my own attempts to play the repertoire. I am not quite sure how to describe this fully and accurately. It is not that I do not think that I would like or admire performances or performers, nor is it a diminution of the intensity of my involvement with that music or of my liking of it: quite the opposite. But one could argue that I am not objectively listening to the repertoire I am most interested in playing. I suspect that if I listen to a recording of Baroque organ music, I am doing that recording a disservice. I am not being faithful to it as a listener. I am over-writing the performance with my own imagined performance. This is paradoxically true with performances that I think are really good by players whom I admire and respect.

Whether to listen to other performances, that is the question.

To tie this in to our work with students: the question often arises of whether someone who is working on a particular piece should listen to other performances of that piece. My own answer is almost always the same: either listen to no other performances or listen to at least half a dozen. These are the two ways to avoid being, consciously or subconsciously, over-influenced by what you hear. If the listening process only reinforces a link between these notes on the page and that one particular sound, it is very difficult to break that link. Not necessarily impossible, though sometimes nearly so, but always a source of indirectness or inefficiency in working out interpretation. Half a dozen performances will, in this respect, cancel one another out.

There is a lot of pressure on students (and on the rest of us) to look for objective reasons for doing what we are doing. That is abundantly useful and good. It is always a part of the process of performing a piece that we have learned. The notes and rhythms are (usually uncontroversially) part of the objective. So is at least some of what we know about a composer’s particular intentions, often as to choice of instruments or registration, sometimes as to tempo, articulation, etc. But there is also always the less objective, fundamentally personal part of interpretation and performance. Fully manifesting performance decisions that are not objective can be difficult psychologically and emotionally: this is really me, this is what I really want to say to you, this is me trying my hardest to make you feel something. So I wonder whether a student’s identification of himself or herself as still in large part a listener might connect in various ways with the difficulties that leap into exposure. This connection could be helpful or it could be limiting. The limiting aspect of it is very likely to arise with the practice of listening to or identifying with only one performance. (“I am not really doing this, I am just serving as a conduit for something that someone else concocted.” I feel fairly certain that I had a great deal of that feeling when, in my high school and early college years, I was a devotee of the playing of only a small number of favorite performers. If in those days I tried to play a Bach piece, I was really trying to recreate Helmut Walcha’s performance of that piece. I would not have owned up to that, but it is what was happening.) The helpfulness might be that of hiding the personal nature of performance from oneself in a way that avoids a too frightening feeling of exposure.

My thoughts about this are most certainly evolving, but I suspect that helping students detach themselves, in some ways and in part, from a primary identification as listeners could be a useful if non-obvious project for a teacher. This could apply even when imitating recordings is not a problem.

Soon I will start with a discussion of authority in recorded performances, YouTube (a surprisingly important issue all by itself), listening to live performance, listening for instruments and acoustics, and circles of connectedness in music.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey.

Students’ Listening I

Through the first years of this column’s existence, much of what I wrote about was practical, specific material regarding teaching—what I often refer to as nitty-gritty: an approach to teaching pedal playing, hand distribution, practice techniques, registration, etc. I would often go through pieces in great detail, suggesting how to put these ideas into practice.

However, over the last year or so, I have found myself interested in writing in a more general vein, tossing out ideas and questions about music, and admittedly, the relationship this has to the day-to-day teaching process is perhaps more distant or indirect. I would argue that even if more distant, that connection is crucial. One of the reasons that I have moved in this direction is that I feel more strongly that everything is about learning and, therefore, also about teaching. I increasingly notice that some of the most important things that I learned from my formal music teachers came from things that they said or did that had nothing to do with fingering, phrasing, or practice techniques, even though all of those things were crucially important as well. And much of what I have learned about my own work as a musician and teacher has come from outside formal or informal lessons.

I am also aware that there is some limit to how much there is to say about the purely practical. There might be a limitless number of approaches to pedal pedagogy, but there is a limit to how much one person should go on saying it! There are good reasons that method books are not as long as encyclopedias. At a certain point a teacher says what needs to be said, and it is time for the student to get on with it. Having started in September 2007, my column as a whole is approaching 400,000 words.

That is not to say that I do not expect to write about the “nitty-gritty” again. There are things in that area that I have not gotten to yet. (And if anyone reading this has suggestions for something that you would like me to address, I would be overjoyed to read them.) There are also things that I have written about that I want to revisit someday. The distinction between the practical and the fruitfully speculative is not absolutely clear-cut.

When I started the column, and for a while thereafter, I was typically writing about things that I knew about before the column ever started. My technical approach to pedal learning, my way of conceptualizing the importance of relaxation, my concerns about memorization, or any number of other subjects for writing and discussion were all there in some fairly thoroughly worked-out form prior to 2007. I may have rethought them in the course of writing them up, and I needed to subject them to organization. But more recently, a lot of what I have wanted to write about has been more in the category of things that are pending in my mind—new ideas that I am in part working out by the very process of writing about them. For me this is an interesting, exciting process. It exposes the very process of trying to evolve as a teacher and thinker about music and teaching.

In the next several months, I will write about issues that are either directly about specifics of teaching or related to that; and the following part of this column falls into that latter category. In subsequent articles, I will systematically explore my own current project as a player, namely relearning and performing J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Rather than being a detailed and systematic set of suggestions about how to approach a particular piece, it will be an actual account of my own grappling with the work of learning a piece. Be sure to watch for it in the May issue of The Diapason.

Music listeners

I was originally planning to call this column “What should students listen to?,” but I put that aside because of my aversion to the concept of “should,” and that title did not represent the scope of what I want to think about. The question is, what is the role of listening to music in the life of someone who is studying music, studying an instrument, or, specifically, studying organ? What has some of my own experience with this been, and what can we as teachers do to guide students in their lives as music listeners, if we should do anything?

When I was a student in a second-year music theory class in college, near the beginning of the school year, the teacher administered a listening test to all students. He played twenty recorded excerpts of classical pieces, and we had to try as best we could to identify each piece. I remember the number of examples well, because my results made it an intense and disturbing experience for me. Even as a classical music junkie and aspiring musician, I was able to recognize and identify only one out of the twenty. I was mortified by how badly I had done. But when the teacher went over the results with me in private, he said something in a very kind, concerned way about how I really should start listening more to music. I shifted from being mortified to being indignant. Prompted by that comment, I belatedly became aware of how narrow and biased the examples were. All but one or two were from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was probably one Bach selection, and that was probably the one that I got right, and maybe one from either Mozart or Beethoven that probably sounded familiar to me, but which I could not pin down.

I would have been able to make up on the spot a similar test with Buxtehude, Schütz, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Pachelbel, Scheidt, de Grigny, Westhoff, Mainerio—and, of course, Bach. I told him, rather annoyingly, that I listened a lot, even maybe too much, and exclusively to classical music, but just not to the repertoire he thought one should know. I remember being impressed by the fact that he immediately conceded the point. He not only expressed agreement, even though that perspective had not occurred to him, but he acknowledged that he learned something from the exchange. I also learned something, although I was entirely within my rights to consider that test unfair and to maintain that I was an avid music listener, it was also true that I would benefit from expanding my own listening habits. There is great merit in the ability to differentiate Brahms, Chopin, or Stravinsky. One should always be open to listening to new music, but that there is also no reason to assume that any set of assumptions about what “should” be listened to are any better than any other set.

It makes perfect sense for a college music professor to believe that a student, otherwise unknown to him, might not be an avid music listener and might need some prodding to become one. After all, college students take classes for all sorts of reasons. As far as he knew, maybe it just fit my schedule, or maybe I thought that it would be easy. However, if someone has come for organ lessons and seems involved and committed to that process, it is likely that they have fairly strong ownership of their music listening habits. If we become aware that someone has focused somewhat narrowly—listening only to the music of one era, or perhaps listening only to organ music, or only to vocal music, while ignoring oratorios, or any electronic music—then we should certainly consider nudging them in the direction of whatever has been lacking. Or, I should say, some of what has been lacking, since there is always an infinite amount out there, and we can never fill in all of it. It is possible to push too hard, and this is about a student’s (or anyone’s) psychology. I became aware in that teacher’s office that it would behoove me to broaden my listening habits. I embraced that and internalized it as a concept. But nonetheless, I did not and could not jump right into listening to music that I did not like or that bored or annoyed me. I had to wait for the time to be right, for my mind to be ready.

The listening that I did back then was limited though extensive. I was listening to music that was associated pretty directly with the music that I most wanted to play. I listened to the composers listed above along with many others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I listened to their organ and harpsichord music, to their chamber and orchestral music, and to their (mostly sacred) vocal music. These were the years when I was officially a student. But I do not think that the reason this pattern developed was related to the study of the music. The reason was that I chose to play music I liked best, and I chose to listen to music I liked best. Not surprisingly, the two were related. It was not a conscious choice; I did not say, “If I want to play Baroque keyboard music, I should listen mostly to Baroque music.” I was just drawn to that repertoire whether I was functioning as a listener or as a player.

Nowadays, it is not just chance, a change in my tastes, or an attempt to practice broadmindedness that has me listening mostly to music from outside the realm of what I mostly play. I have come to a different kind of relationship with various sorts of music. When I encounter new music by hearing about it, or reading through it, happening to notice the cover of a volume, or indeed actually hearing it, any music that is squarely at the center of what I most care about playing, my immediate relationship to that experience is framed by questions of performance. What would I want to do with that theme? How would I try to make those voices dance around each other? How much would I want to draw out that moment? Should that bit be viscerally exciting or more calm and considered?

When I was a student, my relationship to that repertoire as a listener was pure, intense, and primary; now that relationship has been somewhat eclipsed. It is replaced by my own attempts to play the repertoire. I am not quite sure how to describe this fully and accurately. It is not that I do not think that I would like or admire performances or performers, nor is it a diminution of the intensity of my involvement with that music or of my liking of it: quite the opposite. But one could argue that I am not objectively listening to the repertoire I am most interested in playing. I suspect that if I listen to a recording of Baroque organ music, I am doing that recording a disservice. I am not being faithful to it as a listener. I am over-writing the performance with my own imagined performance. This is paradoxically true with performances that I think are really good by players whom I admire and respect.

Whether to listen to other performances, that is the question.

To tie this in to our work with students: the question often arises of whether someone who is working on a particular piece should listen to other performances of that piece. My own answer is almost always the same: either listen to no other performances or listen to at least half a dozen. These are the two ways to avoid being, consciously or subconsciously, over-influenced by what you hear. If the listening process only reinforces a link between these notes on the page and that one particular sound, it is very difficult to break that link. Not necessarily impossible, though sometimes nearly so, but always a source of indirectness or inefficiency in working out interpretation. Half a dozen performances will, in this respect, cancel one another out.

There is a lot of pressure on students (and on the rest of us) to look for objective reasons for doing what we are doing. That is abundantly useful and good. It is always a part of the process of performing a piece that we have learned. The notes and rhythms are (usually uncontroversially) part of the objective. So is at least some of what we know about a composer’s particular intentions, often as to choice of instruments or registration, sometimes as to tempo, articulation, etc. But there is also always the less objective, fundamentally personal part of interpretation and performance. Fully manifesting performance decisions that are not objective can be difficult psychologically and emotionally: this is really me, this is what I really want to say to you, this is me trying my hardest to make you feel something. So I wonder whether a student’s identification of himself or herself as still in large part a listener might connect in various ways with the difficulties that leap into exposure. This connection could be helpful or it could be limiting. The limiting aspect of it is very likely to arise with the practice of listening to or identifying with only one performance. (“I am not really doing this, I am just serving as a conduit for something that someone else concocted.” I feel fairly certain that I had a great deal of that feeling when, in my high school and early college years, I was a devotee of the playing of only a small number of favorite performers. If in those days I tried to play a Bach piece, I was really trying to recreate Helmut Walcha’s performance of that piece. I would not have owned up to that, but it is what was happening.) The helpfulness might be that of hiding the personal nature of performance from oneself in a way that avoids a too frightening feeling of exposure.

My thoughts about this are most certainly evolving, but I suspect that helping students detach themselves, in some ways and in part, from a primary identification as listeners could be a useful if non-obvious project for a teacher. This could apply even when imitating recordings is not a problem.

Soon I will start with a discussion of authority in recorded performances, YouTube (a surprisingly important issue all by itself), listening to live performance, listening for instruments and acoustics, and circles of connectedness in music.

A word

Over the last year or so I have attended more cultural and artistic events than I have in several years. I have had periods of doing more of this sort of thing than I had on average before the pandemic: catching up on theater, dance, music, art galleries, one figure skating exhibition, poetry readings, lectures, movies, etc. This has been extraordinarily satisfying, life-affirming, and a good antidote to a certain claustrophobia that had rather naturally set in before. I have noticed that as it seemed to become safe to go out and experience public life in these ways, I pursued doing so almost frantically. I get maybe 100 emails per day informing me about some sort of concert or play, and for quite a while I reacted to each such email by thinking “Yes, I have to do this!!” Recently I have noticed that this exaggerated fervor has simmered down to something more normal.

Upon attending theater, concerts, and such, I noticed that I was beginning to think about performance—not so much the phenomenon as the word itself. It felt like I was saying to myself things such as: “How nice to be attending a performance again;” “I haven’t been to a performance in a long time;” “I had never gone this long without experiencing a performance.” The word began to sound weird to me, the way a word does once in a while if you hear it enough. Yet, it also sounded interesting. I began to seek out instances of the words “performance,” “performer,” and “perform.” And though it was not the point initially, I became interested in the connections between that word and our relationship to it as musicians. In particular, I wonder what holding that word up to the light a bit might say about the perennial problem that we all face: that performance is hard, nerve wracking, and productive of anxiety. Certainly most of what is so difficult about performing music is intrinsic to the activity, not something that is created by the word itself. However, the word may shape expectations of feeling to some extent.

By chance these musings about the word “performance” tie in with something that I had planned to write about anyways, and that will form the subject of the next column.

Performance

So what about that word “performance?” Below is a potpourri of some of the ideas, observations, and questions that have been going through my head.

Performance is used in the arts (or the “performing arts”) to refer to a situation in which someone provides a public exhibition of their art. What are the performing arts? Is it interesting to suggest that they are arts that involve movement through time? That is, movement through time when they are being taken in by a patron, customer, or audience member. Everything exists in time, so a painting or sculpture exists in time. When someone looks at it and focuses on or appreciates it, that takes time. But the art is not using time.

There are some moving sculptures. If that is not “performance,” why not? Presumably because the sculpture has no consciousness or volition, and the person who made the sculpture is not the one doing the moving. So if something is a “performance,” someone has to be doing the performance in real time, though not necessarily at the same time that the audience is experiencing it. Acting in a movie or television show is just as much “performance” as acting in the theater.

We certainly would say that an orchestra gives “a performance.” But would we say that of an individual orchestra member? “I love (or hated) his performance of the oboe solo in such-and-such a symphony.” “She gave a great (or terrible) performance of the opening horn solo in Schubert’s Ninth.” Probably not. We would say, “I liked (hated) the way she or he played that passage.”

What about conductors? We might say, “That conductor gave a great performance of that symphony last night.”

What about in church? Would we say that someone gave a performance of a certain piece as prelude or offertory? Maybe, though I think that in reality we would be more likely to use a phraseology involving “playing” rather than “performing.” “That prelude that you played today was a favorite of mine.” How about with hymns? I would be astonished if anyone said, “I loved her performance of Hymn #284,” rather than “I loved how she played. . . .” If I am right about that, what does that tell us? When you accompany a hymn in church you are, first of all (like a member of an orchestra), not creating the whole of the musical, artistic entity. You are also doing something that is only partially directed at the listeners/audience, or in this case the congregation, whom we have stipulated as part of the “performance” situation—that is, only partly directed at them as listeners. You are helping them to sing, and in turn their singing is probably not what we would call a “performance;” the singing is essentially for the benefit of the people engaged in doing it.

So performance is presumably directed outward. Usually? Always?

Occasionally at one of these performances I have been so avidly attending, I find myself chatting afterwards with an actor or dancer. This is usually in a small group in the lobby or out on the street in front of the venue. Occasionally, I will say, “I am also a performer,” or something to that effect. What I find fascinating is that I always feel that in saying this I am being a bit presumptuous or even a bit of a fraud. Yet, I am a performer. So what’s up? I think that part of it is that we tend to put “performers” on pedestals; we do not think of them as being “regular” people, and I happen to know first-hand that I am a “regular” person! So at some visceral level I feel as though I am misrepresenting myself or perhaps impolitely trying to cut down the real performer to whom I am talking. There is also more neutrally just the feeling that using the concept of “performer” to equate two very different things is somewhat inaccurate and reductionistic.

The difference between the two things may come down to an actor plays a part pretending to be someone else, whereas performance of music does not. Is that really true? Is it a hard and fast difference? This is the thread that I will pick up next month.

The word performance is also used with respect to athletics. “That was a great pitching performance.” “He underperformed his career average.” In athletics the word almost always means what you achieve in relation to defined standards. If I say that a golfer’s performance in the final round of a tournament was amazing, I do not mean anything other than that they shot a great score and perhaps executed some shots along the way that were really difficult. That may not be a comprehensive way of putting it, but it is all about the concrete, measurable carrying out of defined tasks. I might very well appreciate the elegance of a golfer’s swing or something about their demeanor—maybe a particular look of concentration, but in this context that is not part of their “performance” on the golf course. 

This is one of the reasons that we think that we can compare how “great” different athletes are. It is not just that statistical descriptions exist of what each athlete did in their sport. (Sometimes that information is lacking, which makes the evaluation impossible as a practical matter, but does not change the concept.) It is that “performance” is defined as being those objective results. 

Picture this: you have been sitting around the living room visiting with some friends. All of a sudden one person stands up, starts to express displeasure with everyone else in the room, increasingly loudly and insistently, and walks out shouting, “I’m finished with the lot of you!” Let us say that this was unprovoked. Someone in the room might then look at the others and say, “Well, that was quite a performance!” If the person who left the room had instead just visited peacefully and eventually said a pleasant “Good night,” no one would have characterized that as a “performance.”  

When someone acts as the officiant at a wedding, their words, gestures, and signature make the marriage official. We might say that they have “performed” a wedding ceremony. However, we would probably not refer to that phenomenon as “a performance.” When shaking the hand of a member of the clergy or judge or ship’s captain, we might say, “I loved the way you spoke at the wedding” or “I loved the way you conducted the wedding.” Maybe, “I loved the way you performed the ceremony just now.” But certainly not “I loved your performance earlier this afternoon.” What does this tell us, and what does this mean? 

Performance vs. performance art

What about “performance art?” It resists definition, as the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the subject illustrates. That interesting article opens with statements such as, “Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants,” and “Its goal is to generate a reaction,” which do not really distinguish it from other art. That leads back to the question: why use the word “performance” as the defining title of an art form or art movement that is not any more about “performance” than any theater piece or piano recital? It seems an abstraction of the concept of performance, perhaps an assertion that the act of performance as such has a life and a meaning independent of the forms through which it has traditionally been channeled. Can that concept of performance as an independent entity then be turned back on our awareness of what performance is in any form?

There is a whole other set of uses to which the word “performance” is put. One that is found disproportionately in ads and commercials is a use like “performance motor oil,” “get the best performance from your stove,” or “high performance grass seed.” This is another abstraction or maybe just a more fundamental use of the word. It means something like, “How you do something (anything).” It is interesting that in this context the word “performance” implies “really good performance.” I suspect that this is fairly new, as is a similar way of using the word “quality.” This usage is related to the “performance” of a stock or mutual fund. Two characteristics of this sort of usage are that it has an unambiguous good-to-bad axis—no one would disagree about what’s good and what’s bad—and that it refers to inanimate entities. The things doing the performing have no consciousness or awareness.  

The second of these is clearly a departure from the way “performance” is used in the arts. The first is more intriguing. I wonder whether this is connected with our heightened feelings of expectation and nervousness when what we are doing at a given moment is a “performance” rather than just playing through a piece or reciting a poem out loud because we like the sound of it. There are many reasons to find performance difficult, reasons that are grounded in the content of what we are doing. But I wonder about the linguistic: “performance” is supposed to be good, can always be better, can be measured, and can be used to create rankings.

As an anecdote about my own recent experience, I have done very little performing since the pandemic began—just two short harpsichord recitals, a year or so ago. I feel confident that I will progressively get back to performing, but it still all feels rather abstract. On the other hand, I have been doing a lot of playing at home and in my studio, playing through things, sort of practicing, but usually not in a goal-directed way. My own ears are telling me that, for my own taste and in relation to what I want to try to make happen when I play, I am playing categorically more effectively than I ever have before. I suspect that what I am hearing in my playing is related to the sense of being free from the demands of performance. And if true, this is in large part due to the substantive anxieties and pressures of performance. But I suspect that the language plays a part. If we are contemplating a “performance,” we are at risk for thinking that we have to behave like “performance motor oil”; if we are just playing, we can just play.

An upcoming workshop

I will be offering a one-day workshop on J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on Saturday, April 1. The event, presented by Princeton Early Keyboard Center, will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. The workshop is free, and no advance registration is required. However, if you let me know in advance that you are coming, I will be able to keep you informed of any changes of plan, and I will also invite you to tell me about any specifics of what you would like to get out of the day. It has always been important for me to keep the exact content of workshops flexible so that we can end the experience having addressed the needs of each person who has attended. This event is open to anyone: keyboard players, other musicians, other artists, any person with any interest in The Art of the Fugue, from any background. I hope to be able to offer a valuable experience to people who already know the work very well as well as to those who know nothing about it but are interested. 

I will have at least one harpsichord at the event, and we will also be able to use the Paul Fritts organ in the chapel. I will not be giving a performance of The Art of the Fugue, but I will be playing substantial amounts of the piece. There should be opportunities for workshop attendees who wish to play a bit on various instruments.

There is information about the workshop on the PEKC website (pekc.org) and on my own website (gavinblack-baroque.com), and both of these will be kept up to date with any changes. There will likely still be some sort of Covid protocols in effect for visitors to the seminary at that time. This information will be found at both websites.

Please feel free to come, and also to let anyone know who you think might be interested. I hope to see you there!

Playing slowly

I ended last month’s column with an anecdote that I suggested would lead nicely into what I wanted to write about this month:

One day Gene Roan and I were walking along the corridor chatting when he stopped near a practice room door. He told me to listen, and then after a couple of minutes said, “Even his very slow practice has a sense of direction.” I did not know who was practicing. I think that I was shy about actually peering through the little window, or maybe it was papered over. But that was a significant lesson to me. I have tried to make sure that my slow practicing has a sense of direction ever since!

This month I discuss playing slowly—slow practice, students and their relationship to tempo, and various questions related to choice of tempo in performance. Concerning slow practice, which I have written about at some length in the past, I have some new things to say and some new ideas about how best to describe it to students.

First I want to flesh out the anecdote a little bit. After writing last month’s column, I wondered whether Professor Roan might have been engaging in a bit of stealth teaching at that moment. He certainly knew that I was a fervent believer in slow practice and that I had a tendency to prefer somewhat slow tempos for performance. Was he reminding me to take care that my slow playing incorporated as much direction and purpose as possible? Clearly one of the characteristic dangers of slow playing is that of plodding along.

But I have had a few further questions. Is it actually good to imbue your very slow practice with a sense of direction? The point of slow practicing is to learn the notes. Is listening for or trying to project a sense of direction a distraction from that? Does it reduce the efficiency of slow practice and delay the time at which the player will be able to move closer to a performance tempo and eventually all the way there?

Furthermore, what is the relationship between a sense of direction that works at one tempo and one that would work at a very different tempo? Is it possible to hear interpretive or rhetorical gestures in slow motion, so that what you are doing to shape the music four or eight times slower than you end up playing it is genuinely analogous to what you will want to do when you are playing faster? The assumption that there is a strong analogy of this sort with the physical gesture of playing is the foundation of the belief that slow practice is efficient. But that does not tell us anything directly about rhetorical or interpretive matters.

One way of expressing a fairly agreed-upon view of the relationship between systematic slow practice and end results in performance is that the slow practice leads to such solid, reliable, and controllable playing that the ears, mind, judgment, taste, etc., of the player can ask the fingers and feet to do anything and they will respond. This is certainly correct in my experience. And a logical conclusion from this formulation is that expressive content of very slow practice is essentially neither here nor there.

Perhaps the point of playing with a sense of direction or any expressive purpose and effect when practicing very slowly is not about the music that you are practicing. Maybe it is about the next very slow piece that you want to play. It is about learning to hear musical shape and direction in very slow passages in general, not particularly with reference to the piece that you are practicing. Or perhaps it is just about keeping the ears focused. In any case, these are questions to muse about rather than to answer, and it pleases me that an event that took about ninety seconds thirty or so years ago is still causing me to reflect today.

The earlier columns in which I wrote the most systematically about slow practice were those of February and March 2009. Perusing those now I see that I did not talk about one technique that I have used to help students settle in to slow practicing—in particular, not to speed up inadvertently during the process. That is a conscious focus on the sonority of individual notes. If we are lucky, the actual sound of an organ or harpsichord that we are playing is beautiful, interesting, or somehow compelling. Savoring that sound can be an antidote to a tendency to rush or hurry. This is very true on the harpsichord, where the middle to late part of the blooming and decaying sound can be fascinating and the best part. On the organ, decay does not happen. Sounds are still interesting, and the relationship between what the pipes are doing and what the room is doing can be fascinating, and it often develops over the length of even a long, slow note.

This points to a concern that I have tended to gloss over. Since organ sounds can theoretically last forever, very slow organ practice creates the risk that the inexorability of each note’s sound will become annoying. Not everyone feels this. I think that I do so only when there are other people who can hear me practicing, and I am worried that they might find the sounds annoying. This can be largely solved by using soft sounds. In fact, in the great centuries-old debate about whether to do initial practicing on a soft neutral sound or on the sound that you want for the music, this may provide a new wrinkle. Look for a sound that makes the sustained tones of slow practice as interesting as possible!

Concerning choice of tempo for performance, why ask the question, “Is it okay to play slowly?” Surely that question should in principle be a neutral one: “What is the most effective tempo for this piece or passage?” It is possible for a performance tempo to be too slow, and the telltale sign of that is that listeners react to the music as plodding or boring, but it is also possible for music to be too fast, resulting in the music being perceived as hectic or unpleasant or conveying a sense that the performer wants to get it over with. However, if music is slow, there can always be some suspicion that it is that way because the player cannot play any faster. We rarely suspect that someone who plays very fast cannot play any slower. I believe this is often a bigger issue for students than we realize. The pressure to play as fast as you have heard someone else play can be intense.

I recently witnessed a comment on a YouTube performance of a Bach piece that said, more or less, if one cannot play this any faster, one should not play. This was rather unfriendly, and it was accompanied by some other nasty comments. (One of these comments concluded this certainly was not Bach’s tempo, something about which the commenter could not possibly have actually known.) I am perfectly happy that I scrolled away from it before I noted exactly what it was or how to find it again.

I had the great good fortune to hear the pianist Mieczysław Horszowski in concert quite a few times in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was in his nineties. His tempos were usually a bit slower than the average that you would have found by surveying available recordings of the pieces, especially newer ones. His playing was also thoughtful and expressive, natural and unforced. I never suspected that he had to play slowly because of his age or for any other reason. I also noticed that he would often include something very fast among the encores. It struck me that perhaps he was trying to give us listeners the message that, yes, he was playing the way he played because that is how he wanted the music to be heard—that his fingers could indeed move as fast as ever, or as fast as anyone’s.

I tend to like slow tempos. I think that this is in part because my whole orientation to playing music and to listening to music is sonority-based. I am an organist because I fell in love with the sounds of certain organ stops very early in life, and the same with the harpsichord just a bit later. I gravitate toward instruments that sound so interesting and compelling that the experience of listening is powerful almost regardless of what the pieces are like. This is not the only way to listen, and some people would justly criticize it as insufficiently respectful of the importance of composition. But the savoring of the sonority that I recommend as a way of keeping slow practice slow is an everyday part of my listening and playing. This tends to keep my playing slower than it might be, and that can be received either well or badly by any given listener.

In Widor’s recording of his own famous “Toccata” he slows down fairly significantly in measure nine when the pedal enters. I believe this is because he wants to give the long pedal notes a chance to bloom, to savor their sounds. This is a reminder that sometimes slower notes need to be slower, as a matter of underlying tempo, than quicker notes. Sometimes slow notes need to bloom, and quick notes need to be subsumed into larger beats. I measured the Widor tempo change. The opening passage is in the mid-nineties per quarter note, measure nine is in the mid-eighties, but I had not noticed it spontaneously. The rhetoric of the tempo change is convincing.

I have noticed that when I finish listening to a piece of music, if the piece continues to go through my head, it is almost always slower than the performance I just heard. I only focused on this recently, and I do not have a precise explanation for it. It cannot be a reaction to sonority, since I am not actually listening to anything at that moment. And it is not coupled with any conscious sense of having disliked the tempo of what I just heard. It just seems to be something about my own temperament as a musician and listener. For whatever reasons in each person’s history, one has a different temperament as a listener and as a player. I believe that one’s stance as a listener should inform one’s playing perhaps more than we let it sometimes. When in doubt, play it the way you want to hear it. For some people—me, for example, and plenty of students I have known—this means in part being willing to not worry about whether someone else would have played it faster.

Not everyone’s tendency is to want to play slowly or “moderately.” But a desire to play fast is never going to be met with suspicion about the player’s level of competence. The choice to play fast is never going to be invalidated as one that was not in fact a free artistic choice.

Is it a good thing, some of the time, for really fast playing to sound like it is at the cutting edge of difficulty? Or is it necessary that if you are going to play very fast you make it seem easy? I remember a rather ironic story from my life that touches on that. Around 1981 I traveled to Binghamton, New York, at the invitation of Paul Jordan, my former teacher and good friend, to give a concert. One of the pieces that I played was the Sweelinck Chromatic Fantasy. Late in the piece there is a passage of sextuplet sixteenth notes in the top voice against slower notes in the other voices. As part of his feedback after the concert, Paul said that he thought I should play the piece faster. One reason he gave was that he thought those sextuplets should sound like they were at the very edge of what the player could execute. They should sound in that sense difficult, challenging. The irony was I thought that they already were at the limit of what I could do. I would have been terrified to try them any faster, and indeed probably would not have succeeded in pulling that off. But it interested me that they came across to Paul as being serene, too serene!

I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a late bloomer as a player. Even in early adulthood I honestly could not play every piece as fast as I wanted to hear it. It has been a long time now since that was true for me, except perhaps for some extreme cases. But remembering the Binghamton event and my limitations as to velocity back in those days leads me to a couple of thoughts that will close this thread for now. First, is it all right for a teacher to allow or to encourage a student to learn pieces that the student will realistically never be able to get up to tempo? This question should be technically meaningless, since anyone can learn any piece or passage by practicing it the right way. But not everyone is actually going to practice everything enough to learn it. This can be true as a choice or option. A student may be interested in exploring a piece, but only so far. Or it may be a real or realistic limitation. If a piece is so vastly difficult that the most careful, conscientious, systematic practicing would only permit it to be learned over decades, then learning it is probably not a real possibility.

I find it a good idea for a student to work on a piece yet only get it some of the way up to tempo. For one thing, any careful practicing is good practice in the art of practicing. For becoming better at practicing and for becoming a better player, I am tempted to say that it does not matter at all whether you get the pieces that you work on along the way fully learned or not. And the best way of not fully learning a piece is to learn it below tempo. This also allows students to get to know pieces that are for the time being, at least, beyond where they are technically. It is interesting. It also creates a situation in which the piece is primed to be fully learned later on. In fact, learning a piece solidly but well under tempo and then letting it sit for a while, even a long while, is a very effective way of ending up getting it to be a secure, well-thought-out performance when it is eventually learned. Also, being willing to keep a piece under tempo can allow a student to encounter more difficult works by a composer whose less challenging works they may want to learn more fully.

Influence—a first look

By an odd and fascinating coincidence, on the day I received my copy of the October issue of The Diapason in the mail, I also read a short but significant piece of news about organ study at Westminster Choir College. As I understand, there is a plan in the works to reestablish the organ as a presence at Westminster. I do not know any details. I like the conceit that my column may have coaxed Westminster organ study back into existence, but I am not quite ready to attribute supernatural powers to myself. I was excited to hear the news, and I hope that it goes stupendously well.

I was prompted to think again about that October column and was reminded of one point I want to write about this month. The opening word at the top of the column here is “Influence.” What I am getting at is the whole range of things that shape or change what we are like as musicians. Under that heading I include several phenomena, quite different from one another, that can be sorted roughly into three categories: the influence of individual moments, whether planned/engineered by someone or just fortuitous; the cumulative influence of the ongoing pattern of our lives as they happen to unfold; and the influence of those who, in planning their interactions with us, make conscious decisions to try to influence us. These are all critically important, and all have the potential to be constructive and difficult, but also fruitful, harmful, or mixed.

I believe that many of us give too little attention to influences of the first kind. Something happens, and everything changes—this is a very common experience, if we take “everything” with a grain of salt. We tend to notice something like this only when it is on a very big scale—and perhaps most of all when it is catastrophic. There are small instances of this going on at any time, and any one of them can be deeply consequential, even though almost too small to notice at the time.

My first particular example concerns Dr. Donald MacDonald, whose passing was acknowledged in that same October issue of The Diapason (see pages 7, 20). One day perhaps thirty-five years ago or so, he and I passed each other in one of those organ department corridors at Westminster and chatted briefly. I had a recital coming, and he asked me what I was performing. I mentioned the Bach Trio Sonata in C Major, and I noted that I found it to be really hard. He nodded and then sighed, shook his head, and said “all those white notes.” Immediately everything about my thinking about organ playing took a small but important turn. It had never occurred to me that black notes—raised keys—help the hands by providing architectural guideposts, or that it was something to which I should pay specific attention. Something clicked in my thinking about hand position and its relationship to fingering. I believe that I also made a note in my mind about the falseness of the everyday belief that C major is an easy key!

As another example, in the summer of 1968 when I was 11, I attended a music and arts day camp outside New Haven, Connecticut. There, I met Paul Jordan, who would become a tremendous influence on me as my “official” organ teacher for a while and as a lifelong friend and colleague. One day I asked Paul how long it should take to “learn” Handel’s Messiah. What I meant was to learn to play the Schirmer piano reduction. My copy of that score was one of my very first musical possessions. Paul laughed, looked thoughtful for a second or two, and said, “Seven years.”

I took this very seriously, and for quite a while believed that this was simply the correct answer to that question. I was also pleased that Paul—whom I did not really know yet and who seemed to me to be a deeply established and rather august citizen of the musical world—took my question seriously and gave me an answer. I think that in fact he was taking me seriously, though not in as straightforward a way as I thought at the time. Any simple answer to that question does not really have any meaning to it, and the one he gave was probably kind of random, though well designed to seem neither unrealistic nor too daunting. However, he was certainly taking seriously my need and desire to engage with the question.

For the first few of those ensuing seven years I fretted about whether I was on track to learn Messiah on time. But then it began to occur to me that someone starting out where I was as a player did not learn something like this by working on it for seven years. Rather they got to be a progressively more skillful player through studying and practicing, and then learned this material in less than seven years. This incident also made me think about what Messiah was—that the piano reduction was not the real texture. (This saddened me at first.) As time went by, I discovered that to the extent that I was going to participate in accompanying that work, it was going to be as a continuo player.

In any case, I learned so much from such a brief, simple moment. I believe that over the years I have not consciously focused enough on how significant moments like that can be a great part of the learning process. I am not entirely sure what to do about that as a teacher, since it is hard to engineer something of this sort on purpose. These two moments stand out because they were isolated from other interactions. I was not studying with either of the others involved, nor did I see them to interact with regularly at those times. It is hard to know when something of this outsized significance has taken place as the teacher/catalyst, the party of the second part, so to speak. It may be powerful to the student right away or may seem so only in retrospect. For me the interaction with Dr. MacDonald was clear as to its importance right away, the interaction with Jordan seemed striking enough at the time but only revealed layers of significance later.

It is difficult to create a brief but telling interaction like those discussed above. But the sustained influence that we teachers have on our students, my third category, is something that we work on creating over the entire duration of our interaction with a student. Each of us has a somewhat different philosophy about how that influence should be established and maintained and what the scope of it should be. I am inclined to worry about influencing students too much or in the wrong ways. One of the reasons I am focusing on this issue right now is that I want to review as honestly as I can the question of whether I go too far in my attempts to avoid influencing my students. I am not talking about practical issues such as influencing a student to practice efficiently and learn music securely. I am largely willing to take that for granted. Rather I am talking about influencing students to more subjective and fluid matters: interpretation of every sort, choices about repertoire, answers to questions about what sorts of instruments are best for what circumstances, ethical or philosophical considerations about how to approach music, what school of thought one belongs to as to various matters, and so on. I am by no means expecting to give up my basic sense that we need to be very careful about influence and deeply aware of the possibility of heavy-handedness, of influence becoming a burden or constraint. However, I am in the midst of trying to review the whole subject as open-mindedly as I can. It is a fraught area, and each of us brings the influence of our own experiences to thinking about it or approaching it a certain way without consciously thinking about it; and that is what I am trying to revisit. Are my thoughts just habit, and how will they respond to conscious rethinking?

When I return to this subject, it will be to dig into this in detail. I am going to finish this column with a few stray thoughts and stories that are germane to my evolving thinking about this.

Several years ago a friend of mine told me about a conversation he had just had with the members of a string trio, people whom he had not previously met. They were preparing a performance of an arrangement of The Goldberg Variations—perhaps only the movements in three or fewer voices, though I do not recall. A question came up about some interpretive point, perhaps about tempo, and one of the players said, “Well, in the recording it goes like [such-and-such],” My friend asked, “What recording?” (After all, it is one of the most-recorded pieces around.) The string players said, “Oh, Gould.” This reflected a feeling, really an assumption, that the Glenn Gould recording of the work (not clear which one) was so standard, so obviously the point of reference, that one did not need to specify that, even talking to a stranger. This feels unambiguously to me like too much influence for one player or one performance to have.

My father used to tell a story of himself as a young child, maybe six years old or so. Apparently, his mother once said to him, in an exasperated tone, “You always want your way.” And he replied, “If I didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be my way.” He was making fun of himself for having been an obnoxious child, a brat. But his six-year-old self had a point, if a complicated and sometimes controversial one. This story of my father’s is one of the reference points for my own very well-developed feeling that I want to do things my own way. I am well aware that there are areas of life where this is either literally not possible or a bad idea. But it is possible, at least as an ideal, in interpreting music. My feeling so strongly about this for myself is one source of my belief that I should try to offer students the chance to do it as well. It is not rare for any teacher to feel that way in relation to final results. But my impulse has always been to start there as well. Even with absolute beginners and certainly for students starting new pieces at any stage I am almost flatly unwilling to answer questions of the sort, “How should this go?” Is this a strength or a problem? Do I take this approach too far?

Another brief story that I read somewhere years ago was about Artur Schnabel. A prospective student recounted that when he approached Schnabel for lessons, Schnabel asked him, “Have you listened to my Beethoven recordings?” The musician recounting this experience certainly took Schnabel to be suggesting that his recordings should serve as an interpretive model. This might not be true, or not entirely so, though it is unlikely that Schnabel was directing the student to those recordings in order that he might then ignore them. Certainly the student was suggesting that this was the point in recounting the story.

This brings to mind the whole business of “schools,” that is, not institutions, but traditions of playing passed down the teacher/student generations. “He studied with Serkin, so he plays like this.” “She studied with Dupré, so she plays like that.” This is common, of greater or lesser force with respect to different teachers. Is it good or bad? Or to put that another way, why am I so uncomfortable with it?

I noted above that I accept that influencing a student about practical matters is different from doing so with interpretive or other subjective and flexible points. But is this utterly true? I ask students to practice contrapuntal music in part by playing separate voices and pairs of voices. That is highly pragmatic, and I can sell it to myself that way. But is it true that it is neutral to the areas I am trying to tread lightly in influencing students? Or does it inevitably lead to a certain kind of playing or emphasis in playing? If it does, is that so different from a teacher telling a student to use this or that tempo, registration, phrasing, and so on? Am I being hypocritical?

I try hard to avoid “spoilers.” That is, if I am going to read a book, watch a movie, view a painting, or hear or play through a piece of music, and it is something new to me, I do not want to know anything about it beforehand. This is not just about plot twists: it is not only that I do not want to know how a story turns out. I do not want anything in even the back of my mind that might predispose me to one sort of experience rather than another. I do not even want to know that someone liked or disliked the artistic entity that I am about to grapple with or that the creator of it was or was not highly esteemed. Knowing none of this sort of thing is usually an unreachable goal, but I want absolutely as little as possible. This is a temperamental thing of mine. It has taken me a long time to begin to believe that some people really do not feel that way. Is this bias one reason that I want to offer students the chance to encounter as much as they can of our shared artistic world with as little outwardly sourced preconception as possible?

I will leave this here for now and take it up again soon.

Repetition II

During the week after I finished writing my previous column, I had several experiences, each of which had some bearing on what I wrote about, so I will describe these before continuing and expanding the discussion from last month. One of them was a delightfully well-timed refutation of something that I wrote last month, the others more in sync with my thoughts.

First, a student asked me to review some of the music of Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer with him. We started with the Musicalischer Parnassus, a collection of nine suites published in 1738. I was reminded by reading through the collection that the prelude to the first of those suites follows almost exactly the same harmonic progression as the first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is in triple time. Thus it sounds a lot like my tripled version of that passage from last month: probably more so than the Bruhns excerpt that came to my mind when I contemplated my altered version of the Bach. The relevant measures of the Fischer are found in Example 1.

It is widely accepted that Bach knew Fischer’s music and was influenced by him. Fischer, about whose life not much is known, was probably nearly thirty years Bach’s senior. However, the collection that contains this passage was not published until twenty years or so after Bach wrote the WTC prelude that seems to echo it. Did Bach know this piece in manuscript? Did Fischer know the WTC, which of course was not actually published until decades later? Probably not. This is probably coincidence, and this passage is possibly just another interesting example of the use of repetition to create an aesthetic effect.

Next, I was coaching some musicians on a chamber music project, and I was surprised to be told that they had decided to make cuts to one of the pieces they were to play at an upcoming concert. Specifically, they were going to leave a movement or two out of the very long piece. However, in the longest movement, they were snipping out bits: a few measures here, a few measures there, based on a sense that the movement was too long and repetitive. This caught my attention since I had just written in my February column that, “. . . we essentially never find ourselves wanting to omit any part of a piece that isn’t a repeat. I have never had a student ask me about a through-composed piece ‘should I or should I not play mm. 9–16?’ or anything like that.” And indeed I cannot remember any previous instance of this.

A hypothetical discussion of the ramifications of this choice by these musicians would probably start by invoking respect for the composer and go on to talk about the shape and arc of the piece. It might emphasize “right” and “wrong,” or just attempt to characterize the nature of the changes brought about by this sort of editing. Some people would say that if they didn’t like this piece as is, they should play something else. I did not engage in very much of that discussion with these performers, at least not then. The choices had been made, practiced, and rehearsed. And I am not sure what I would say, beyond just that I was surprised and that I tip my hat to the Fates for delivering this to me at that exact moment.

I have heard debate from time to time about whether or not a performer should take the repeat in the long first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major. Performers and musicologists talk about the length and raise questions about balance. But since there is a fairly long first ending as part of the section that we either do or do not decide to repeat, part of the discussion is about the material in that first ending. I have heard people use it as a reason to take the repeat—so that one does not entirely omit material that the composer wrote. But I have also heard it given as a reason not to take the repeat—on the grounds that the first ending material is boring, not up to the standard of the rest of the piece. This again touches on the question of when we do and when we do not give ourselves permission to second-guess a composer.

Then a student of mine, a former player of a melody instrument, just now getting into keyboard playing, spontaneously asked why so much keyboard music has repeats: is it just because they want to make the pieces longer? I touched on that a bit in the February column as well. It is an idea that we tend to resist, since in a way it could be taken to be disparaging or belittling of the work of composers. That does not mean that it is not true. And whatever the intent, the effect of repeats on length is real. I found it interesting that the question came up naturally for someone whose take on this repertoire was fresh and unspoiled.

The last of these chance occurrences was about the Widor “Toccata” from Symphony V. I wonder how different this piece would seem if the first measure were repeated exactly as is before the (actual) second measure. That second measure starts out as a repeat of the first, but crucially changes on the final beat.

Further questions regarding repetition

One question that I find fascinating in repeat situations is whether the two instances of the same material, one after another, are a statement of something and then a restatement of it, or are a question and an answer. This question itself will not always or often have an answer. However, in some cases for us as players, and for our students, observing our own feelings about this, one case at a time, might be revealing.

It might seem counterintuitive that the exact same notes could be both the question and the answer. However, this is not impossible even with words:

“Really?”

“Really!”

or even more extended:

“Really?”

“Really.”

“For certain?”

“For certain.”

Each of these question and answer groups works. Furthermore, each word or phrase has its own particular feeling. The “really” answer in the second grouping feels different to me from that in the first, because it is not being asked to express finality.

In the realm of music without words, the question and answer attribute is more abstract, more elusive. Attributing this to a passage almost certainly cannot ever be right or wrong or subject to proof, or even perhaps to analysis. But because it cannot ever be wrong, it can always be potentially useful. If thinking of a repetition situation as a question and answer, or as a statement and restatement, perhaps in a different mood or by a different “person,” seems useful or seems to enliven the experience of playing the passage, then it is a fruitful and correct way of looking at it.

With words, the vast majority of attempts to use the same word or phrase as a question and its answer will fail:

“Would you like some toast?”

“Would you like some toast.”

and so on.

The possibility that a repeat will seem like a question and answer can never be subject to failure as such; it can just seem like an interesting idea or not. This brings us to one of the fascinating things about repetition, both signed repeats and the repetition or recurrence of any material, whatever the structure. The fact that we can accept the amount of repetition in music that we do accept invites us to think about the ways in which music resembles or does not resemble those forms of expression that use words or concrete visually based images.

In a work of theater—play, movie, television episode—if a structure in which something happened and then was literally repeated, then something else happened and was also literally repeated, and so on, were to be used, it would be at best some sort of special effect. It is not necessarily the case that this has never been done. But it is not routine or remotely common. It would be possible to go to dozens of plays and movies per year for a lifetime—and watch an almost infinite amount of television—without ever once encountering this form.

But in music it is routine. Why is this so? It should not be that the repetition is inoffensive—acceptable—because it is meaningless. If it were meaningless, then we would not have a vast repertoire in which a substantial amount of repetition has been perceived as valuable by a vast audience over many centuries. (At least that is a fair assumption or a reasonable hope.) But the meaningfulness is abstract, and that seems to be the big difference. The extent to which repetition in music engages our “why are they doing that again?” reflex is limited.

Perhaps because the repetition is abstract, it can also evoke a response to the very idea of repetition itself. That idea is powerful. As much as we like newness, we also like familiarity, and repetition gives a sense of connection to the past and future. It is possible that sometimes, at least when we hear the repeat of a passage, we react as we do when we see an old friend or go back to our favorite restaurant. Repetition may suggest something like resurrection or reincarnation, or hint at some of the things that we wonder about and crave having to do with eternity and infinity. This is especially true of recurrence in composition, as in rondo technique or recapitulation. Certainly these images are overblown and should not be taken too literally or even too seriously. But I am pretty sure that some of these sorts of feelings are there much of the time. It is part of the picture of what repetition can feel like or mean.

In music that has words and is in verses, we expect the music to repeat, but not the words. We can sing any number of verses in a row of a hymn and happily accept that the musical notes will be the same for every verse. However, if the words were exactly the same for each verse it would seem bizarre. A phrase in words might recur. But any sameness of that sort has to be dealt out very differently with words than with music.

The term “repetitive” is, in everyday usage, almost a synonym for “boring.” You never hear someone say “that was a wonderful book: really repetitive” or “that movie was the most repetitive I have seen in a long time. I loved it!” So that suggests that we need to feel a bit of caution about whether repetition, whatever its power, can lead to boredom. This is to some extent the domain of the composer. If we think that a composer’s use of repetition in a particular piece creates boredom, we might just not want to play that piece. But nonetheless as players, we need both to make sure that we do what is necessary to make repeated material interesting and to refrain from overreacting.

I believe that a lot of students tend to overreact to the fear that repeated or recurrent material will be boring. This can manifest itself in wanting to add ornamentation or change stops. There is a kind of fruitful paradox, that if you always change ornaments or change stops on repeats, that in itself becomes repetitive and potentially boring. So everyone should be motivated to limit those sorts of gestures or to think carefully and in an individually tailored manner about when they are the most valuable.

If a repeat—or material that comes back or resembles other material—seems intrinsically boring to you, is there a way of framing it aesthetically, philosophically, or through imagery, that brings it to life? Is there a way of playing it with more energy, or less energy, like a response, like an echo, like a reaffirmation, like something thoughtfully reconsidered? A serious engagement with ideas such as these should probably precede choices about out-and-out changes. Any changes in the notes (ornamentation) or the sound (registration) or performance values (articulation, phrasing, use of timing devices, rubato, and so on) will be based on taking the passage as seriously as it warrants, not on halfway giving up on it in advance.

A very practical though mysterious aspect of playing repeated passages or identical material is that the same exact notes can seem easier or more difficult to play depending on whether you are playing them for the first or second time. Sometimes, in a long piece in which something comes back after a long interval, this can be explained by stamina and concentration issues. This is something that I have to remember to think about consciously when I am playing the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, for example. In each movement there is an extended true da capo. And when the opening material comes back it manifestly does not feel the same. I need to remember consciously to give it an extra dose of concentration to compensate for the effects of playing non-stop for a long time. Also the return of familiar material in a case like that creates the danger of a letdown: “oh, it’s just that old passage again; I did that fine ten minutes ago.”

One way to avoid that letdown is to focus on the possible rhetorical differences alluded to above. Try to remember, whether it is an instant repeat or a return after a good deal of other musical wandering, that by virtue of its not being the initial statement it is a different thing that is going on and needs attention and interest. On a very practical note, if the fingering and pedaling of two passages that are identical in notes can also be identical, that should save time and work and lead to greater security. This is something that seems like it could go without saying, but that is also worth remembering consciously.As I said last month, a lot of this is speculation or ideas that I find interesting to try on for size. I would encourage students to think for themselves as much as possible about what it means to take an interesting and important musical idea and just plain do it again. The ways in which I have framed some of my thoughts about it might be useful to some people, but all the more so if they invite people to come up with their own.