On Teaching

Organ Method X

This follows directly from the end of last month’s column.

Take the same approach and follow the same procedures with these additional exercises. These are also four-finger exercises that allow for choices of fingering (2-3-4-5 and 1-2-3-4) and therefore for comparing the feel of different fingerings. They add different, slightly more complicated, note patterns (Examples 1 and 2).

Each of these can also be moved to different positions on the keyboard: moving to a different C as a starting place gives you a chance to practice the feel of the same patterns with different arm angles. When you start on other pitches, change the key signature in such a way as to keep the melodies the same. This will give you a chance to experience different physical shapes with these exercises. Try each of the eight short exercises starting on F, with B-flats, and starting on D, with F-sharps. These flats and sharps may very well change the feel of some of the alternate fingerings, perhaps making some of them distinctly uncomfortable—be on the lookout for this.

You can also start any of the exercises described so far on a raised key. For example, try starting on F#, with the full F# major key signature. Again, be aware of difference in the feel of the fingerings. Keep everything light and relaxed, and remember all of the points listed above.

As you move these exercises to different places on the keyboard, whether by octave or by transposing into another key, make a clear decision as to whether you should write out the new notes, or whether you can effect those changes at sight and by memory. There is nothing wrong with either approach: it is important, however, that you not be distracted from the playing and practicing by worrying about the notes. If the transposing at sight is even a little bit distracting, please go ahead and write things out. (This is absolutely crucial for a student who is new to keyboard playing, and should be done without fail at this stage in the learning process.) The same applies to trying different fingerings: write them in for now. You cannot practice a variety of fingerings effectively if you—even some of the time—don’t quite remember what fingering you are using. Again, if you are beginning your keyboard study with this work on organ, thinking about fingering is something that you can do—for yourself, in large part—even from the very beginning. Remembering your fingerings, especially different ones for the same passage, is tricky at first, though both necessary and completely feasible in the long run.

The following exercises expand the scope of the notes that you are playing: that is, the notes range a little bit farther over the keyboard (Examples 3 and 4). Each of these eight exercises suggests a slightly different approach to fingering. For example, the second and sixth exercises can be played simply by positioning the five fingers above the five different notes, and then playing those notes. (This gives, for the second exercise in the right hand the fingering 1-3-5-4-2-3-2-1; and for the seventh of these exercises—in the left hand—the fingering 5-3-1-2-4-3-4-5.) The first exercise, for the right hand, and the corresponding fifth, for the left hand, are the first pair that we have seen in which the fingerings in the two hands cannot mirror each other. This fingering works very naturally in the right hand: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-1-3-5. In the left hand the closest corresponding fingering—which would start out 5-4-3-2-1—ends up getting us into trouble (try it and see). Other fingerings will work, for example 4-3-2-1-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-2-1.

Playing scales

The last of these exercises for each hand is a scale. (In the physical act of playing, a scale is just a stepwise pattern that spans an octave. It is not intrinsically different from other stepwise patterns.) You should try playing this scale with a number of different fingerings. For example:

R.H.: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 

L.H.: 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5

R.H.: 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1

L.H.: 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4

R.H.: 3-4-3-4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3-2-3-2-3

(quite detached: basically eighth notes with eighth-note rests in between; light and relaxed)   

L.H.: 3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-3-4-3 

(likewise)

The first of these in each hand is the standard (piano) scale fingering. The second is a variant of that, which might be appropriate in some situations, but is included here simply to afford more practice with a variety of fingerings. The third is a version of the sort of scale fingering that was prevalent before about 1700. 

You should also try this scale—and any transpositions of it that you want to make—playing every note with the same finger. The three middle fingers are more natural for this than the thumb or the fifth finger. In doing this, you should expect the notes to be detached—but just enough that the motion from one note to the next is smooth, no “lurching”. You should also keep it slow—again so that the motion can be smooth. (It would indeed be quite unusual to play a long stepwise passage all with one finger, however, playing two or more notes in a row with one finger is common, and this is a good systematic way to practice it.) 

The third and seventh of these exercises are the first ones in which you are asked to spread the fingers in such a way that adjacent fingers do not necessarily play adjacent notes, though this happens only briefly. The first three notes of exercise two or six and the first three notes of exercise three or seven are the same: C, E, G. However, the exercises go on to different places, which suggests different fingerings. Exercises two and six can start like this:

Right hand: 1-3-5 [-4]

Left hand: 5-3-1 [-2]

However, exercises three and seven should probably start like this:

Right hand: 1-2-3[-5]

Left hand: 5-4-2 [-1]

The latter two measures of the third exercise—right hand—could be played with the “standard” scale fingering 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, or, just to practice a different feel, a variant: for example, 5-4-1-4-3-2-1-3. 

Thoughts on fingering

It should be clear by now that I am asking you, the student, to think about the fingering of these fairly simple exercises for yourself, albeit with some guidance. This is, of course, on purpose. Learning to devise your own fingerings is one of the most important aspects of your learning to play organ—or any keyboard instrument. The primary purpose of these exercises is to help you begin to explore the touch and sound of the instrument. However, while you are doing that, you can begin to gain experience thinking about fingering—rather than just implementing fingerings devised by someone else. This may take more time now, but it will save you a lot of time later on.  

For the beginner

If you are a beginner—having more or less never touched a keyboard instrument before—you should nonetheless have been able to do everything that you have encountered so far, if you have taken it slowly and carefully, and paid attention to the suggestions and instructions. It is extremely important that you feel very comfortable with everything that you have encountered so far before you go on. There is no harm in spending extra time with these beginning steps.  

Articulation

There can be a very direct relationship in organ playing in particular between fingering and articulation. Simply put, if a fingering does not allow you to keep holding one note in a passage while you start to play the next note, then going from that first note to that next note will be detached rather than legato. This is simply a fact, not a judgment or even a suggestion about what to do in any situation. There are many places in the organ repertoire where a fingering that actually requires a detached articulation and makes legato impossible—that is, a disjunct fingering—is appropriate or necessary or good. There are also many places where a legato fingering is a good idea or necessary, though there are indeed places where a legato fingering is impossible. The clearest example of disjunct fingering is, of course, playing successive notes with the same finger. Note that if a fingering allows legato, it usually does not require legato: you can release notes early.

If you neither need nor want legato in a particular situation, it is not necessary to create a legato fingering. A legato fingering is often—though certainly not always—more difficult than a disjunct fingering. A disjunct—non-legato—fingering that is comfortable will allow you to create a wide variety of articulations, short of full legato.

Other considerations

Physical comfort and logistic convenience are crucially important first principles of fingering. When you are trying to come up with a fingering for a passage—whether it is fairly simple, like the exercises above, or as complicated as the repertoire gets—the first step is to examine where the hand most naturally lies, what is the most comfortable hand position, what has the fewest steps and can thus be most easily remembered. This does not give all of the answers to all of the fingering questions, but is a good place to start. 

All else being equal, it is useful to plan fingering based on what is going to come next. (For example, that is the point of the different fingerings for the notes C-E-G in exercises three and seven.) Of course, fingering is also about where you have just come from, but the more you can plan fingering based on where you are going, the better.

When either hand is playing only one note at a time, fingering choices are usually very flexible. The more notes or voices a hand is playing, the more constrained the fingering will be. It is often better to change fingers on repeated notes—that is, to play successive notes that are the same as one another with different fingers. This is important enough that I will discuss it at some length later on.

For the experienced player

If you are coming to the organ having already studied and played another keyboard instrument, and if you have previously played pieces that are in two voices—that is, pieces in which there is indeed only one note at a time in each hand—find such a piece that you already know and bring it to the organ now. Work out fingering that is comfortable and in accordance with the discussion above, as much as possible. (This may be largely the same as the fingering that you have used for the piece previously on piano or harpsichord; it may differ from it somewhat.) Then practice the piece hands separately, slowly and carefully. Look at the keyboard as little as possible; an occasional glance is fine, but by and large keep your eyes on the music. As with the exercises above, you should listen carefully for articulation, and you should listen to the sonority. 

Try out different registrations. Do not assume in advance that a certain kind of sound will be right for the piece and other sounds wrong: try things and listen. A strictly two-voice piece is always a candidate to play on two manuals. Try your piece out that way, in all sorts of different configurations. Does it feel more comfortable or natural to have the right hand on a higher manual than the left or the other way around? Or are they both equally comfortable?

(The next section, which will constitute next month’s excerpt, consists of a short two-voice piece by Samuel Scheidt, with a discussion about fingering it and practicing it. It is geared towards those students who have little or no prior keyboard experience but who have gone through the exercises and practicing described so far. That is followed by exercises in which each hand plays more than one note at a time, with further discussion about how to make fingering choices and how to practice.)

Organ Method VI

As usual, this month’s excerpt follows directly from the end of last month’s. It includes the most important practical parts of the beginning of work on pedal playing. It covers similar ground to the columns on pedal playing that I wrote several years ago, but in a way that is addressed to the student directly. In preparing this excerpt I have been reminded of the importance of explaining everything to the student in as thorough a way as possible—not simply saying “play this exercise because I tell you to: you’ll learn why later on.” This is especially true for a Method that will mostly be used by highly motivated adult students, and that may be used without a teacher. However, I also want to be sure that this thorough explanation is not cumbersome and does not make for heavy reading. I would appreciate reader feedback about this, as well as about anything else.

This stage—the introductory practicing described above—is extremely important, and you should spend enough time with it so that it becomes easy and natural, as if you had been doing it your whole life. Though it is simple—just two or three notes at a time, slow, unmeasured—it is actually the most significant step in learning to play pedals. Stay with it long enough to master it: if that occupies several hours of practice time, or if it spreads out over days or weeks, that is fine. This will save you time later on.

Playing pedal scales

When you are comfortable with this playing of small groups of adjacent notes, then you are ready for the next pedal exercise—longer groups of adjacent notes: those that we call scales. Or, really, one set of scales in particular. 

Find the note “A” nearest to where your left foot rests naturally. This is the lowest A on the pedal keyboard. Now play—slowly, lightly, and steadily—an A-natural-minor scale starting on that note. That is, the natural keys from that A up to the next A. Play the first four notes (A,B,c,d) with the left-foot toes, the next four notes (e,f,g,a) with the right toes. Observe all that you have already learned and practiced about foot position—make appropriate decisions about which way to tilt each foot, and how much to tilt it. Move from one note to the next in the kind of small, smooth arc that you have already practiced. 

Playing this scale this ways adds one new element: in the middle of the scale, going from d to e, you follow a note in one foot with a note in the other foot. Many students initially fail to move the right foot in close enough—that is, far enough left—and accidentally play an f instead of the e. If this happens to you, then be conscious of the need to move the right foot a bit farther left when it is time for that foot’s first note. Again, it is not important, and in fact not fruitful, to be too calculating about this. Just move the foot closer to where the correct note should be.  

You will notice that as the right foot moves in to play the e, the two feet need to avoid bumping into each other. This can be accomplished in a number of ways: tilting the feet enough; releasing one note early enough to allow the next note to be played cleanly; or playing the two notes at different places along the length of their pedal keys—one closer to the sharps and flats, one closer to you on the bench. This is (like choices about whether and which way to tilt the feet) an individual matter: each player has to devise a method that is effective and correct for him or her, since it can vary with the individual physique of the player. For example, the larger your feet are, the more you will have to work consciously to keep them clear of each other when they are playing notes that are close together. In general, separating the feet along the length of the keys—one forward, one back—is the approach that is the most certain to be effective. In the case of the two middle notes of this scale, try that separation both ways: left foot forward/right foot back, and right foot forward/left foot back. Is one of them more comfortable than the other? (Here in the middle of the pedal keyboard it is quite likely that both will be comfortable. This is not always the case elsewhere on the keyboard or in more complicated passages of music. Later on I will discuss approaches to figuring this out under various conditions.) How far do you have to separate them to feel sure about the feet not bumping into each other? How does it change the situation if you tilt the feet more or less, or to the other side? (In general if you are playing both feet off the big toe side, they are less inclined to bump into each other than if you are playing them off the little toe side). 

After you have practiced this scale going up, try it also going down. The technical issues are exactly the same.

To recap, in playing this A-natural-minor scale you are continuing to work on moving each foot over the distance that takes you from one natural note to the next, but through more of the keyboard, and you are beginning to experience the feeling of playing two adjacent notes with your two feet in succession. You are also continuing to notice carefully the position of each foot in all aspects. All of the distances between notes are, so far, the same. The next step, however, is to begin to introduce different distances, by changing the minor scale to a major one. Both of these scales/exercises are encapsulated in Example 1. (Note: The key signature in parenthesis means that the exercise should be played both with and without that key signature. For most exercises that I notate this way it is best to start with all-naturals, since any sharps or flats change distances and introduce irregularities, which are better dealt with after the regular pattern has been learned.)

It is important to stay with this set of scales until they all feel really solid—minor, major, up, down. It is also important not to allow this exercise to become particularly fast. The awareness of distance on the pedal keyboard that this sort of practicing is meant to develop will be imprinted on the brain more efficiently and more lastingly the more slowly you carry out the physical gestures. The half notes in this exercise should probably never get any faster than 60 per minute, and should certainly start much slower than that: as slow as necessary to allow accuracy and comfort.

Alternating feet

The next exercise is shown in Example 2. Each foot is in fact doing exactly the same thing that you have already been working on: moving up or down by step. The new elements are these: that the feet are interpolated with each other—so that you have to keep track of both feet at more or less the same time—and each foot moves farther away from its natural side of the keyboard than it did with the first exercise. The first of these differences is one that requires only good concentration. The second also requires that you plan properly for the turning of each foot and for the positioning of the feet with respect to each other as you move up and down the keyboard. As you go up the keyboard, the left knee, leg, and foot naturally move away from the bench; as you go down, the right knee, leg, and foot do so. Pay attention to this in making choices about tilting and other positioning of the feet. 

An absolutely secure sense of what the distance between two adjacent notes feels like—for the toes of one foot travelling from one note to the next through a small arc in the air above the keys—is the foundation of confident, accurate pedal playing. It is extremely important that you stick with the exercises that I have outlined thus far until they have become utterly well learned, easy, comfortable, natural, and automatic. As always, keep everything slow and relaxed, and don’t look.

Larger intervals on the pedals

The next step is, of course, to begin to move each foot over a distance greater than that from one note to the next. The first exercise for this is shown in Example 3. Here each foot takes a turn moving the distance of a third: the left foot on the way up, the right foot on the way down. Meanwhile, the other foot continues to practice what we have already learned. The correct way to begin to learn and internalize the feeling of moving the foot from one note to the note a third higher is this: simply tell yourself that you must move that foot a little bit farther than you moved it to go to the adjacent note. If this doesn’t work the first time—if you move your foot too little and only play the next note, or over-shoot to the third note or beyond—then correct the motion the next time by moving farther or less far. This way of thinking about it works. It is not necessary to try to analyze the distances more precisely than this: that will happen at a not-quite-conscious level, and trying to be conscious about it is distracting. It is necessary to avoid looking, and to avoid bumping the feet along the keys counting notes or otherwise trying to rely on physical cues. Simply move the feet from one note to the next.

Example 4 is a similar exercise with the roles of the feet reversed. As you practice each of these exercises, notice everything that you can about the alignment and positioning of the feet. For example, do you want to tilt either foot differently depending not just on what note it is playing, but on what note it is going to play next? On whether it is moving up or down? How is this (or anything else about posture or foot position) different between the “all natural” and the “three sharps” versions? Notice that in any exercise (or passage) in which the feet move across the body (left foot high, right foot low) it can be necessary to turn your body. At this stage it is a good idea to use your arms on the bench to brace yourself while turning, to the extent that this feels necessary or helpful. Later on, when putting hands and feet together in pieces of music, this is of course impossible. That will not turn out to be a problem: the need to do it will largely melt away with practice and familiarity.

Each of these last two exercises, and all similar pedal passages whether exercises or pieces of music, can be practiced with separate feet. In fact this can be quite important. It is physically analogous to practicing manual parts (or piano or harpsichord pieces) with separate hands. It differs from that musically in that the separate foot parts are less likely to make sense on their own. However, separate foot practice is an extremely efficient technique for learning pedal parts, and following the sometimes bewilderingly abstract separate parts is good listening practice, and good practice at concentrating. For Exercise III, for example, the separate left foot part starts like this: Each of the quarter notes is to be played detached—more or less as eighth notes, but precise counting is not necessary. Just make them as detached as physical comfort suggests. You can extract other single-foot parts from these and all other exercises and from pedal passages in the repertoire.

Practicing repeated pedal notes

Example 5 is an exercise for practicing repeated notes on the pedal keyboard. Notice that each foot separately is doing similar things to what it does in Exercises III and IV. The feet are moving in thirds and by step. However, the way in which the two feet are interpolated with each other is different, in such a way that it creates a repeated note pattern. The repeated notes, always played with different feet, will be detached, as repeated notes always are. Try varying the degree of detachment for the repeated notes—everything from as smooth as they can be while still repeating on time to as short as they can be while still allowing the pipes to speak. Also try various articulations for the notes that are not repeated. They can be slurred, which creates pairs of slurred notes, divided by the repeated notes, or they can be articulated in a way that exactly matches what you are doing with the repeated notes, or they can be played in any number of other ways. 

Once you have practiced these exercises until they feel easy and reliable, you are ready both to go on to a selection of pedal parts from pieces—ones that are appropriate to play with toes alone—and to begin to work on a few simple exercises for heel playing. I cannot stress enough that it is important to become fully comfortable with the exercises above before moving in these two other directions. In most pedal parts in the organ repertoire—including in hymns and other accompaniment situations—almost all of the notes are accounted for by each foot moving no more than the distance of a third. Of course there are larger intervals between feet. But something like eighty percent of the time, or a bit more, each foot moves by step, or by a third, or repeats the note that it just played. The comfort with moving each foot over these distances that these exercises develop is the foundation for learning pedal parts from the repertoire and in general for playing pedals securely. 

You the student can find appropriate pedal parts to work on as material for continuing to learn pedal playing. Almost any pedal line from a pre-1750 piece can be played by toes alone, and therefore can work as practice material at this stage. Here are a few suggestions to start you off—though the best passage to work on is one that you like and enjoy, or one which is part of a piece that you would like to learn in full later on:

J. S. Bach, Pedal Exercitium

J. S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in F Major, long pedal solos

Johann Pachelbel, Praeludium in D Minor (Perreault listing 207), opening pedal solo

Dietrich Buxtehude, almost any pedal passage, especially from free (non-chorale based) works

Georg Böhm, Praeludium in C Major, opening pedal solo

Vincent Lübeck, pedal solos from any praeludium, especially those in C major and D minor.

Next month’s excerpt will discuss how a beginning pedal player should approach pedal passages such as these, and go on to the beginnings of heel playing.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. See his blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method XI

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

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

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

Some important guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practicing and fingering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An introduction to understanding organ sounds, and to pedal playing

Organ Method IV

This follows directly—without a break—from the last sentence of last month’s column. The first part of this month’s excerpt is again aimed at the student who is new to the instrument, and I am trying to explain enough to enable that student to start to practice and learn, without making anything too complicated for the earliest days at the console. Everything here is presented in a simplified way that I hope is neither over-simplified nor inaccurate. The second part of this column is the beginning of the chapter on pedal playing.

The best way for any keyboard player new to the organ to begin to understand organ sounds—organ stops—and therefore to begin to feel comfortable with organ registration is indeed to pull stops out essentially at random and to listen. In order to do this efficiently and to get the most out of it you should start by following a few guidelines:

1) Make sure that you know which group of stop controls applies to which keyboard. (See below about
keyboard names.)

2) Start by drawing one 8′ stop—on any keyboard—and playing a few notes. (For this purpose, it doesn’t make the slightest difference what you play: if you are an absolute beginner, just play separate individual notes; if not, play something short and simple that you are comfortable with—a bit of a scale, chords, a passage from a piece, etc. Elaborate or fast passages are not better for this purpose, by any means.)

3) Draw a different 8′ stop on the same keyboard. Play a few notes. Listen for the sound: how does it compare to the first stop that you tried? Is it very different, somewhat different, or surprisingly similar? 

4) Draw these two 8′ stops together. The combined sound will be louder than either of the two stops by itself, though not necessarily very much louder. It will create a different sonority. Does this combined sonority sound more different from one of the separate stops than from the other?

(Of course you can do this same exercise with further 8′ stops from this same keyboard, if there are any, and then with 8′ stops from other keyboards.)

5) Draw a 4′ stop from any keyboard. Play a few notes. Notice that this stop is an octave higher than the 8′ stop. Play a few notes in the octave below middle C, then play a few notes on an 8′ stop in the octave above middle C. Try some other 4′ stops—alone and in pairs or larger groupings if there are enough 4′ stops to make this possible. Pay attention to all of the different sonorities, noticing that, as long as you are only using 4′ stops, the pitch level of everything that you play is one octave above unison.

6) Draw out an 8′ stop and a 4′ stop together on the same keyboard. Listen to this sound, then try other combinations of 8′ + 4′, both on that keyboard and on others. 

7) Draw out an 8′ stop along with anything higher-pitched, in any amount and combination: 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, etc. Play some notes, chords, or passages, changing the higher-pitched component of the sound from time to time. As you do this, the sonority will change, but the sense of pitch level should not. Then, remove the 8′ stop. When you do this, the pitch level of what you are playing will jump up to the level of the lowest-pitched stop that remains in the stop combination that you have drawn. 

Beyond these specific suggestions, however, you can simply play around with stops in any way that occurs to you or that you discover at random. It is only important, at this stage, that you be aware of the pitch designations: know whether you are playing an 8′ stop alone, something higher (or lower: 16′), or some combination. As I have said, very little about the organ is “always.” However, the pitch numbers are: what they mean is very specific and concrete, and it is always the same. In the later chapter on registration, I will discuss the more elastic situation regarding the stop names and the relationship of those names to sonorities and to musical applications. 

Once you feel comfortable pulling out stop knobs, knowing that you can find sounds that are coherent and at the right pitch, you are close to being ready to start practicing organ. That is, you are almost ready to turn to Chapter 1 and beyond. However, there are just a few more things that you need to know about first.

First of all, manual keyboards on most organs have names. The most common names in English are probably Great, Swell, Choir, and Positive (or Positif). Some organs in predominately English-speaking countries have keyboard names in other languages, with words such as Hauptwerk, Oberwerk, Rückpositiv, Brustwerk, Récit, Grand Orgue, and various others. On some organs—usually smaller ones—the keyboards have numbers rather than names. There is a lot to say about the history and meaning of these names and naming practices. Some of this can be found in later chapters of this book, along with suggestions for further research. However, for now you just need to note the names of the keyboards on any organ that you are using, and correlate that name with that keyboard’s group of stop controls.

Along with the stop knobs—or tabs, or buttons, or whatever it is—there are controls, similar in look to the stop controls, that do things that are a little bit different. Some knobs or tabs are labeled with something like this: “Swell to Great” or “II/I” or “CH to GT,” that is, with names, numbers or abbreviations that refer to whole keyboards. These are couplers, and they are one of the ways in which stops proper to one keyboard can be shared by a different keyboard. What they mean, specifically, is usually dictated by common sense. If a knob says “Swell to Great,” then drawing that knob causes any stops that are drawn on the Swell keyboard to be playable also from the Great keyboard. There are couplers bringing the stops of manual keyboards to the pedal keyboard—“Swell to Pedal” or “I/Ped,” for example. Couplers bringing the pedal stops to a manual keyboard—“Pedal to Great,” say—are extremely rare, though not impossible or unheard of. Most organs have several couplers, but do not have all of the couplers that might be possible in theory.

Couplers are sometimes controlled by toe studs or pedals of some sort. There is also sometimes duplication: a coupler will be controlled both by a button or knob of some sort and by a toe stud. This is just for convenience. Don’t be worried by it: if two controls appear to do the same thing as each other, they are probably meant to do so.

Many organs have rows of buttons—usually between the keyboards—and/or toe studs—above the pedal keyboard—that are numbered with Arabic numerals. These are combination pistons. They operate to turn on pre-selected groups of stops, turning off all of the other stops. When you first sit down at an organ, try pushing the combination pistons one at a time. Observe the stop controls going on and off as you do so, and try out the resulting sounds. It is likely that any organists who use this instrument regularly have set up the pistons to bring on combinations of stops that they have found particularly useful, though as it is usually quite easy to change the combinations, the ones that you find have not necessarily been there very long, and are not necessarily intended to be used very much or for very long. The proprietor of the organ that you are using can show you how to set combinations of your own if and when that becomes relevant.

A stop control that is labeled “Tremulant” or some variation of that word does not bring on an organ sound of its own. Instead, it gives a vibrato-like quality to the stops that are drawn. (There are several different mechanisms for making this happen.) A tremulant may apply to the whole instrument or to one division.

Many organs have pedals that are not keys on a keyboard, that are set above the pedal keyboard itself, and that more or less resemble gas pedals in cars. These have two main functions, both intended to alter the sound that the instrument is making. The more common type of pedal is called the swell pedal—or sometime the “expression pedal.” It makes sounds louder or softer. On a pipe organ, this can only be accomplished by enclosing pipes in a box, and creating a setup for opening and closing that box. Many organs have this arrangement for some or, less commonly, all of the divisions. On an electronic organ, the loud/soft technology is analogous to the ordinary volume control on a stereo. When the swell pedal is all the way up—the top of it as far from the player as it goes—the sound is at its loudest, the same volume that it would have if there were no swell pedal. When it is all the way down—the top as close to the player as possible—the sound is at its softest. Some organ music explicitly calls for the use of the swell pedal; much of the repertoire does not.

The other sort of pedal that affects the sound of the instrument is the crescendo pedal. This is a device that brings on combinations of stops in a pre-determined order, quiet to loud. If the crescendo pedal is all the way down, it has no influence on the sound. As it is moved towards the up position, it brings on more and more stops. When it is all the way at the top, it has engaged a loud registration. The order in which stops are brought on is set either by the organ builder or by someone else, prior to the player’s sitting down to play. There is some organ music that expressly calls for the use of crescendo and diminuendo made by adding or subtracting stops in the manner of a crescendo pedal: most organ music does not. Many organs do not have a crescendo pedal.

To a large extent, the point of learning a little bit about these features and devices as you first sit down at the organ is to make sure that they do not confuse you as you begin to practice and to become adept at the basics of actually playing organ. For example, if you are certain that you have only one quiet stop drawn, but you are hearing a very loud, brash sound, you should know to check whether the crescendo pedal is really all the way off. If you think the sound you are playing should be loud, but it is in fact rather soft, check the swell pedal. If you move your legs around a bit, and suddenly the position of all of the stop knobs change, you might suspect that you have accidently hit a toe stud combination piston. 

For the earliest stages of practicing and learning the organ, you need to work directly with the stop controls and the keyboards. That is not to say, by any means, that you can’t experiment with the swell pedal, couplers, and all the rest. However, it is as you get to know the instrument better and better, and start to work on organ repertoire, that you will explore all of this and more in greater and greater detail and complexity.

One more thing: the bench itself. 

An organ bench should be adjustable in two directions: up and down, and back and forth. I have never seen an organ bench that couldn’t be slid back and forth at least a bit. Some benches can be moved up and down with a crank or other device that is built in. Others are, so to speak, solid. These should be provided with blocks. There are clever organ bench block designs that build different heights into the same blocks oriented differently. Some organ benches have multiple blocks that can be used separately or together. It is extremely important that blocks, and the bench as a whole, be stable: not rickety or inclined to wobble. If they are, this should be fixed. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that an organ bench would actually fall over. However, a wobbly bench makes playing more difficult, and can lead to physical tension for the player who has to struggle to remain in the right orientation to the keyboards.

If the bench seems all right, sit down and look towards your feet!

Chapter 1: Pedal Playing

Organ playing that includes pedals involves the whole body. It is one of the most athletic of musical performance activities, and therefore it is especially important that it be carried out comfortably, without tension. It is important, in other words, that it be done correctly. However, it is important to understand that it has to be done in a way that is correct for each player, and that this will not necessarily be the same for everyone. Different bench heights, postures, positions of the legs and feet, and, to some extent, technical practices will be right for different students. This is true even before we think about differences in musical goals, since it arises at least in part out of the differences in physical type of different people who want to play organ. Those differences in musical goals also play a part in determining aspects of the type of pedal technique that a player needs to develop. However, a student new to the instrument cannot yet (or at least probably should not yet) know exactly what those goals are going to be or where his or her involvement with the instrument may lead. 

On any given organ the distance between the pedal keys and the manual keys is fixed by the builder long before anyone sits down at the instrument. This distance is important, since it determines the way in which your height above the pedal keys affects your orientation to the manual keyboards. The height of the bench—that is, of the player sitting on the bench—above the pedal keys is important. It is difficult to play the pedal keyboard comfortably if that height is wrong. If it is too low, then you have to hold your feet and legs up artificially in order to avoid playing notes by accident. This is a great source of tension, and it is very important not to let it happen. If you are sitting too high, then it can be hard to reach notes easily with simple, comfortable gestures of the feet, especially with the heels. This can also destabilize your manual playing, since it can lead to a slight but annoying sense that you might be about to fall forward. 

However, on the whole, sitting too high is usually less of a problem than sitting too low. You will discover, as you play more and more, what bench height is best for you. Initially, you should adjust the bench in such a way that if you relax your legs entirely—especially the big muscles above the knees—the bottoms of your toes just barely touch the tops of the natural keys, and your heels don’t. This is just a starting point. You will see, as the process of learning pedal playing proceeds, how to determine what changes to make in this, if any.

You should start out centered on the bench—along the left-to-right (or bass-to-treble) axis—and positioned on the front-to-back axis in such a way that you feel stable. (This may also be essentially centered, but it need not be. This will depend on the depth of the bench, as well as the way that the size of the bench relates to your own size.) You should sit comfortably. This is extraordinarily important. It is neither practical for playing nor healthy for the player to slump far forward or to lean to one side or the other while trying to play. However, it is also neither necessary nor healthy to sit in a way that is stiff or artificially tall, or with the shoulders, back, and arms under any tension, or with your legs or knees so close together that you need to work to maintain the position.

As soon as you have sat upon the organ bench in what you think of as a good position, with the bench at a good starting height, take a few deep but relaxed breaths. Then look down at the pedal keyboard. Notice what note appears to be directly below your nose. Notice what note appears to be directly below each of your feet. For the purpose of learning to play pedals, this should be the last time that you look down at the pedal keyboard or at your feet while playing the organ.

I will end here, for reasons of space. Next month I will continue with the discussion of pedal playing, and introduce beginning pedal exercises.

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

Velocity III

As a brief addendum to the latter part of last month’s column, I must mention that among famous organ pieces, the Widor Toccata is almost preternaturally well designed for the kind of practicing in altered rhythms that I mentioned in that column. Playing those sixteenth-note mordent-and-arpeggio figures first in fast groups of eight notes starting on the beat, then in fast groups of eight notes starting just after each beat, is remarkably effective for learning the piece itself and is also a good test case for my method. It is also undeniably fun to try to get at least a stretch of that piece as fast as you possibly can—and again a good test case for this approach. As with the Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which we examined last month, it is not by any means necessary or even good to play the piece as fast as you possibly can. And with the Widor, there is an interesting history about tempo, since the composer changed the metronome markings through different editions, and he recorded it at a slightly different speed—slower than his slower metronome suggestion. 

This piece—or specifically the passages that are in the shape of the opening in the right hand—is also a good one for practicing stringing together smaller very fast gestures: seeing how long you can keep it going at a tempo defined not by what the music requires, but by simply trying to transfer the “fast, light drumming on a table” feeling to patterns on the keyboard. Once you have practiced two or three adjacent half-notes worth of the sixteenth-note pattern, try going through all of that material, again sometimes playing sixteen or twenty-four notes with the beat, sometimes playing the opening note and holding it for an unmeasured time, and then playing the following two or three groups in one gesture as fast as you can, ending on, and holding, the next downbeat. 

Utter predictability

Of course, this is all based on having achieved the utter predictability that is the foundation of being able to play fast. For one-note-at-a-time lines, that comes from a combination of sensible fingering and enough slow practice to get the elemental learning of the patterns to be way beyond just solid. The reason for considering building a potentially fast passage up out of smaller components (specifically as part of the process of getting it fast, or of testing and figuring out how fast it can be) is that the smaller the bit of music, the more promptly utter predictability can be achieved. In practicing a passage for really learning it—rather than as an exercise in moving around notes as quickly as possible—a player can decide to learn a longer stretch of music and move it up to tempo gradually (this is probably the most common method) or to learn very small bits, and get them up to (or beyond tempo) more quickly, and then work on putting them together. 

Achieving lightness

This feeling that we get from the drumming-fingers exercise of being able to move the fingers even more quickly than playing pieces will actually require is based quite crucially on keeping things light. It is easy to experience what happens if this lightness is compromised. Go back to simple drumming, then selectively tighten up various component parts of the physical mechanism that delivers your fingers to the table or chair-arm: shoulders, biceps, wrist, the fingers themselves. Each of these tightenings will have some effect on the ease, speed, and fluency of the drumming. The tightening of the fingers will be the worst, and will probably bring the drumming down below the velocity that you would like to be able to achieve. It will also most likely hurt. (Don’t do too much of it.) 

Playing lightly is always a good idea, always important. However, in trying to play anything that is fast enough that its speed is an issue, lightness is beyond just a good idea: it is a necessity. (Light, for this purpose, means with not too much more force than you need to make the keys go down, and with no tension whatsoever. It is the absence of tension that is the most important. The actual force of the downstroke of each finger is not as significant, as long as it is reasonably light, and as long as nothing in that downstroke predisposes the finger to have trouble coming back up, which is an impediment to velocity. Holding on to the keys after you have played them is to be avoided altogether. Experimenting with using so little force that you are almost not quite depressing the keys is a good idea, just to get the feel of it.)  

My so-called trill exercise (about which I wrote most recently in the December 2013 issue) is really about incorporating lightness and absolute lack of tension into fast playing. The trill in that case stands in for any fast playing, and, of course, as with the patterns that we have been dealing with here, it is fully predictable. (That exercise can also be found online here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf). It works well to do a session of this exercise, then do something else for a while (practice something else, or get away from the keyboard altogether) and then play short excerpts from whatever passage you are working on playing at a challenging fast tempo, trying to remember and recapture the feeling of the trill exercise.

Tension and playing fast

Here are a couple of useful points to remember about the interaction between tension and fast playing. Physical tension, which physically inhibits speed, can have mental tension as one of its causes. And in turn, of course, nervousness about the ability to play a passage fast enough or to play it well at the appropriate tempo can be a cause of mental tension. This creates a sort of downward spiral or pernicious feedback loop. Part of the point of using the “drumming on a table” model to convince players that absolute velocity is not often the problem is to break this feedback loop. Also, there is a statement that goes like this: “If we want to accomplish something more, we have to exert ourselves more; playing faster is a form of accomplishing more, therefore to play faster we have to exert ourselves more; and exerting ourselves more means pushing harder.” Of course no one is going to spell this out: when you do it is obvious that it doesn’t add up. But it is a surprisingly pervasive underlying assumption, and we can help our students to let go of it by pointing it out.

(Playing very fast can seem like a tightrope act. The most instinctive way to avoid falling when we are afraid of falling is to hang on tight. This hanging on tight physically is, as I said above, fatal to velocity and to ease of playing in general. But hanging on tight while playing must be mental only: focus, concentration, paying attention to the music or to memory, and so on.) 

Transition points

Transition moments, where the hand has to move in some way, rather than just present fingers to the keyboard in one place, are a big part of the challenge when it comes to velocity. If there were no such moments, we could pretty much just transfer the drumming on a table feeling directly to at least any one-line passages. (But music would be much less interesting!) In real music these transition moments happen sometimes because we effectively just run out of fingers in one position: that is, they happen of necessity. Sometimes they happen because although we could encompass a certain set of successive notes in one position, that is not the most comfortable way to do so. But sometimes also they happen because the change in hand position creates an interpretive effect that we want. This latter situation is found in abundance in “early” fingering, that is, certain fingering patterns that were common and characteristic during and before the early eighteenth century. (Any identification of fingering approaches with any time period is really about tendencies, not absolutes.) These patterns involve using smaller chains of fingers to play small groups of notes, and then turning or moving the hand to present the next small group of fingers to the next set of notes. This was probably done to create articulation or to keep the hands in positions that enabled them to control the sensitive action of the prevailing kinds of instruments as minutely as possible, or some combination of these things. In any case, these fingerings routinely deprive the hand of the ability to sit over a group of notes and just drum those notes out. How does this relate to velocity?

Examples 1 and 2

Considering Examples 1 and 2, do these two fingerings for a basic scale fragment have significantly different ceilings to the tempo at which they can be played? Based on experience with the “drumming on a table” model, I would say that most players could execute the first fingering in not much more than half or two-thirds of a second. (That’s a “tempo” of quarter-note equals 700 or more.) The second fingering? I can’t picture anyone playing it that fast. Someone could surprise me, but certainly for most of us it can’t go at that speed. It is not the “drumming on a table” situation, because the transition points are too many and too frequent: every other note. 

Examples 3 and 4

Now considering Example 3, I feel pretty sure that most people could execute this one, including the transition moment going across the bar line, almost as fast as they could execute example 1: not quite, but almost. So in part it seems to be recovering from the transition, or executing multiple transitions in a row that lowers the ceiling on velocity. 

Practicing this sort of early fingering with a view to getting it fast can involve breaking things up into small units, and applying some of the principles of both my trill exercise and the sort of altered-rhythm practicing that we have been looking at. I have given two fingerings (for the right hand) for this pattern in Example 4. The upper one, with the hand remaining in one position, is for comparison. 

Using the lower fingering, try playing only the first note, then, in an untimed manner, only when you feel relaxed and ready, play the next two notes quickly. Prior to actually playing, map out the feeling of the fingering in your mind. There should be a small articulation between the second note and the third note. (There also can be one between the first note and the second note.) It doesn’t matter exactly how large or small these articulations are as long as the feeling is comfortable. The second finger should be released lightly before moving 3 over it. Don’t hold 2 to the point where the whole hand begins to turn upside down. Try doing the same thing starting on the third note and going to the first note of the second measure. Then try adding notes: start on the first note, wait until you feel relaxed and ready, and play four successive notes. 

Try various small units like this. (You can always try the same groups of notes using the upper fingering, to be reminded of the differences in the feeling.) After you have gone over all sorts of smaller groupings like this, try playing the passage itself as lightly and quickly as you can. (It can repeat indefinitely. Just do it several times, and don’t keep going if it feels stiff.)

Another aspect of the relationship between this sort of fingering and velocity turns things around. If you want an articulation at a certain point, then if you program that articulation into the fingering—using fingers that create a transition moment that makes a space or breath—then that articulation will automatically be there at any tempo. In Example 3 with the given fingering, you will create a small articulation at the bar line. That articulation is not dependent on anything that you do other than executing the fingering. It will be there, proportionate to the tempo, at any tempo. If you change the fingering to 5-4-3-2-1, and still want that articulation (between 2 and 1) then you have to remember to do it on purpose, consciously lifting 2 early by just the right amount. Above a certain speed it becomes very hard; above another, higher tempo, it actually becomes quite impossible. 

In the course of working out these last couple of columns, I have realized that it would be a mistake to try to include a discussion of velocity in more complicated textures here. That would constitute giving it short shrift. Therefore, I will devote a fourth column to that, next month. In addition to talking about two-voice and multiple-voice textures and chords, and a bit about getting comfortable playing fast in both hands together, I will return to some of the questions from the beginning of the first column in this series and talk a bit about the connections between gaining greater ability to play with great velocity and aspects of interpretation and effective performance.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VI

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

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

Feedback for student fingerings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerns about student fingerings

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

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

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

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

Hand position

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

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

Avoiding use of certain fingers

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

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

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

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

To be continued.