On Teaching

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Continuo, Part 2

This month I am following up on the discussion of continuo playing, offering more specifics about how to read and understand continuo parts. I will wait until next month to describe my approach to the teaching of actual continuo playing at the keyboard to students who are not yet experienced in it. A combination of the approach outlined here to understanding the notation, and the approach that I will outline next month to drilling the playing can enable a keyboard player to begin to feel comfortable playing continuo on an improvised basis after something that could be described as “several hours” of study. Of course no one is fully accomplished at it after that little work, but many students are ready to apply what they have been working on to real music in that sort of time scale.

A continuo part is, as discussed last month, a bass line that is meant both to be played, in itself, and to be supplemented by other notes. A combination of the ordinary musical notes of that bass line and the numbers and other symbols written above or below that line (the “figures” in “figured bass”) guides the player in choosing what notes to add to the written line. (It makes no difference whatsoever whether the figures are written above or below the notes. Below is much more common, and I will use that style in my examples and assume it in this discussion. But everything that I say here applies equally to a continuo part in which the figures happen to be written or printed above the notes.) The first step in learning how to play a continuo line is to learn what that combination of notes and figures means. Continuo or figured bass notation is essentially simple, but it is open to various misunderstandings, and is, like so much in music, capable of seeming more complicated or mysterious than it actually is. 

The musical notes of a continuo line are, of course, normal musical notes and, being in the tradition of tonal music, have a key signature. The figures written below any note point to the pitches—or really the pitch classes—that you find by counting up from the written note by the number of steps indicated by the figures, counting the printed note as “1”, staying within the key signature. Here are some examples:

1) If there is a key signature of no sharps and no flats (that is, what we sometimes call “no key signature”), the printed note is C, and the figure is “4”, then the additional pitch being indicated is F-natural.

2) If there is a key signature of one sharp, the printed note is C, and the figure is “4”, then the additional pitch being indicated is F-sharp.

3) If there is a key signature of three flats, the printed note is C, and the figures are “6” and “3”, then the additional pitches being indicated are E-flat and A-flat.

4) If there is a key signature of one flat, the printed note is B-flat, and the figure is “4”, then the additional pitch being indicated is E-natural.

5) If there is a key signature of two flats, the printed note is B-flat, and the figures are “4” and “5”, then the additional pitches being indicated are E-flat and F-natural.

This way of describing what is going on with the figures is accurate and straightforward. Students sometimes ask, however, why we don’t describe the same thing using the terminology of intervals: that is, by saying that the figures point to the notes that are that interval above the printed note—again within the key signature. This would also be a valid way of describing what is going on. However, it is not necessary that the interval be one that we often or normally deal with as an harmonic interval, and sometimes describing it that way is just confusing or inefficient. For example, in 4) above, the harmonic interval is a tritone, or an augmented fourth. There is certainly nothing wrong with noticing this, or with describing it that way. But in practice, experience shows that it is more direct and in the end both easier and quicker—even if it is counterintuitive to some students at the beginning—just to notice that it is four steps above the printed note. (To put it more accurately, most players use some combination of these two ways of thinking about it—“this note is four notes up from the bass” and “this note is a fourth above the bass”—but it is useful at the beginning at least to emphasize the former way of describing it. It is important not to be misled, in incorporating the concept of intervals, by a sense of what an interval should be, when that is different from what the interval is. For example, in a piece in A Major, a G# with the figure “5” under it will give rise to a diminished fifth. Some students who are looking at continuo through the lens of harmonic intervals will be at least fleetingly tempted to raise the D to a D#, since the figure “5” looks, at first glance, like it should refer to a perfect fifth.)

Along with numbers, the figuring of continuo lines will sometimes include accidentals. These are used to take the realization of the continuo part out of the constellation of notes that are in the key signature. Here are some examples:

1) If there is “no key signature”, the printed note is C, and the figure is “4#”, then the additional pitch being indicated is F-sharp.

2) If there is a key signature of two flats, the printed note is B-flat, and the figure is “4#”, then the additional pitch being indicated is E-natural.

3) If there is a key signature of two flats, the printed note is C, and the figures are “3”, “5”, and “7#”, then the additional pitches being indicated are E-flat, G-natural, and B-natural.

4) If there is a key signature of three sharps, the printed note is E-flat (achieved with an accidental, of course) and the figures are “2”, “4#”, and “6b”, then the additional pitches being indicated are F-sharp, A-sharp, and C-natural.

5) If there is a key signature of two sharps, the printed note is F-sharp, and the figures are “3#” and “5”, then the additional pitches being indicated are A-sharp and C-sharp.

In 3) and 4) above, the pitches indicated, taken together, do not add up to a normal, or common, chord. This does not matter. Of course, in most Baroque chamber or vocal music, the prevailing harmonies are—most of the time—quite normal and recognizable. However, the notation of continuo parts works completely independently of any assumptions about what harmonies do or don’t make sense. Looking at it this way saves a lot of time and worry. A note in a continuo line that looked like Example 1 would indeed be inviting you to play all of the natural pitches. It wouldn’t matter that this, in some way, doesn’t make sense. I have never quite seen anything this extreme in the repertoire, but there are examples of figuring that are almost this unexpected, the chordal nature of which is hard to figure out quickly. What chord, for example, is indicated by the flat 9 and the natural 3 in this Bach cantata bass line? (Example 2)

This might take some sophistication or even inventiveness in harmonic analysis to figure out. (It is probably part of a diminished seventh chord combined with the dominant note of the tonic towards which that dominant seventh chord wants to resolve.) However, for the purpose of continuo playing, there is no need to answer the question, and the time taken to figure it out would be wasted as far as playing the continuo part was concerned. The notation is telling you that the notes available to play along with the G on the third beat of the measure are B-natural and A-flat. That is what you need to know.

I mentioned above that we are really talking not about pitches, but about pitch classes. Thus Example 3 is directing us towards E’s and G’s, not towards any specific E or G, in particular not towards the ones that are closest to the printed note. In the following example, the printed notes and their numbers are directing us towards any of the pitches where I have placed x’s. (Example 4)

It is important to remember that nothing about the notation tells us which of all the possible notes (x notes in the above example) actually to play. The decision to play any, some, most, or all of the possible notes at any give moment in a continuo accompaniment is made on the basis of a host of interpretive considerations, including texture, volume, accent, and more. Right now we are concerned just with the reading of the notation. Reading the notation fluently, and then learning to play from it equally fluently, are the prerequisites to making those interpretive decisions.

One good way to work on becoming fluent and comfortable at reading the notation—that is, just looking at it and knowing what it means—is to take a series of random bass notes and random figures and talk out in your head what those notes and figures are telling you. Here’s a place to start (Example 5).

The idea is to look at the first note and say “F”, the second note and say “A, C, and E”, the third note and say “F and C”, and so on. It is best to do this as quickly as possible without getting any of them wrong, and not to worry about what chords are made by the notes. Anyone can write out an infinite number of exercises like this. (If you write it out quickly enough, you can then do it as an exercise yourself, because you won’t have concocted them deliberately enough to have figured out the answers.) The next step is to do the same thing with various different key signatures. The point is very simply to train the mind to know instinctively what any combination of a note and some figures means. Since we already know what the notes themselves mean, this really amounts to becoming adept at quickly counting up from the note by the amount indicated by each figure. Most students will need to do only a small or medium amount of this, but it should be done until it seems trivially easy. This approach to drilling the notation ties in directly to the way of drilling the act of playing from that notation, which will be the subject of next month’s column.

Continuo notation in real life—as it was used every day in the Baroque period—involved a very large amount of abbreviation. That is, in order to save time and ink, certain conventions grew up about what figures could be left out or assumed. It is important for a student learning continuo notation not to worry about this phenomenon at first. However, once anyone has a clear and comfortable understanding of what the notation system means, the following things should be thrown into the equation:

1) Since the ordinary triad above the bass note is the most common note picture, the figuring for that note picture—8,5,3—was usually simply omitted. Therefore, when a note has no figures associated with it, it is assumed to be “8,5,3”.

2) Since most harmonies include the third, the figure “3” is often omitted and can usually be assumed. It is only incorrect to assume “3” if “4” or “2” is present. Thus, the figure “6”, for example, usually means “6,3”.

3) As a natural extension of 2), an accidental by itself means “3” plus that accidental.

4) It is usually acceptable to double the bass note itself unless the figure “6” is present. Thus the figure “8” is rarely used, and it is clear when it can be assumed.

5) If a note in the bass line is meant to be considered a passing tone and should not have any realization associated with it, or if the prevailing harmony from the previous note is meant to continue, it is “officially” supposed to have a dash written under it. This is often omitted, leaving the identification of such a passing tone to the judgment of the player.

Here is a fragment of a Handel Flute Sonata, first with figuring from the composer’s own time, then with a version of complete figuring (Examples 6 and 7). Anyone who has learned to understand the bass line and figuring from the second of these examples will, in the normal course of working on the actual playing of continuo parts, come to feel comfortable playing from the first. The two are identical in what they suggest or imply or require in performance.

In teaching the actual playing of continuo at the keyboard—the next step once the notation is basically understood—I do not ask students to write anything out, not even as a sort of transitional stage. A written part is antithetical to the art of continuo playing, even if it is an unimpeachably good realization. The whole point of continuo is flexibility, including last-minute flexibility. And the good news is that efficient learning of the art of continuo playing actually takes place best at the keyboard and at the keyboard alone. Also, oddly enough, it is possible to practice the art of continuo playing just as effectively whether you are reading the notation correctly or wrongly, and whether or not you fully understand the conventions about abbreviation. Therefore, once a student has a basic understanding of the notation, it is time to go on to playing, and we will do so next month.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center

Hard pieces and 

recalcitrant passages

This month I am writing about the phenomenon of pieces being difficult and the related phenomenon of specific passages being hard to learn: either difficult by any standard or surprisingly difficult—for reasons that may seem elusive—for a particular student. This is not a very systematic or methodological discussion: just a few ideas—almost just random thoughts—that I think are interesting or that may help some students or teachers. 

We all believe that some pieces are harder to learn or to perform than other pieces. This—just as a basic fact—is probably as close to uncontroversial as anything gets in the field of music and music teaching in general, or of organ-playing and organ teaching in particular. We don’t necessarily all agree as to which pieces are more difficult and which less so. Most of us, from our own experiences as players and from what we have seen with our own students or other performers, know that different pieces or sorts of pieces are more or less difficult for different players, and at different times in one player’s career.

Repertoire in order of difficulty

When I first acquired copies of one or two volumes of the Peters edition of the Bach organ music—in about 1971, at the age of about fourteen—I noticed that the separately bound Preface included a listing of all of the (non-chorale based) pieces arranged according to difficulty. I was excited about this, since it seemed both useful and authoritative. I allowed it to influence what pieces I chose to work on—though not in a logical or consistent way. Sometimes I would choose a piece because I thought it was easy enough to be within my grasp, sometimes I would spurn and reject pieces that were described as being “easy,” because I thought that working on them would be sort of embarrassing, classifying me as “not very good.” Needless to say, this was all rather silly. 

I did continue for a long time—after my studying had become at least a bit more systematic and effective—to cast sneaky glances at the list out of the corner of my eye. I would pat myself on the back just a little a bit whenever I put in some work on a piece in the top half or so of the difficulty scale. I pretty much stopped doing this when Eugene Roan, with whom I had by then started taking lessons, mentioned casually to me one day that an eminent recitalist he know thought that piece x was much more difficult than piece y—the opposite order from the Peters list. This introduced me to the idea that this whole difficulty thing could be relative, though at that point in my career I couldn’t have said how or why this might be so. 

Reger and Straube

Another way that the concept of difficulty as a kind of independent variable in pieces of music came to my attention when I was first getting interested in organ was through hearing the story of Max Reger and Karl Straube. The idea was that Reger had made his organ pieces more and more difficult in the hope of writing something that Straube, his good friend who was also the leading German organ virtuoso of the time, would be unable to play. It was also said that he never succeeded: that Straube “won.” There are a couple of interesting things about this. One is that, of course, it is trivially easy to write a piece that is unplayable, if that is really all that you want to do. All that you need to do is to write notes that are too far apart in compass to reach.  The music does not have to be particularly complex or intricate or fast. However, a piece that is really unplayable will, in fact, not be played. That is never in any composer’s interest. Not surprisingly, composers—whether they are writing for Karl Straube or not—tend to approach daringly close to that “unplayable” line, and then to decide not to cross it. This is as true of a composer like Beethoven, who stated bluntly that he didn’t care what performers could or couldn’t do, as it is of composers like Bach or Franck, whose keyboard compositions arose out of their own work as performers and improvisers. 

It is also interesting that Straube—as a student, before he had met Reger in person—was in fact drawn to Reger’s music in part because it was first presented to him as being too difficult to play. Straube’s teacher Heinrich Reimann showed him Reger’s then very recently published Suite in E Minor, op. 16, telling him that it was unplayable. This seems to have motivated Straube to learn it, which may or may not have been Reimann’s intention all along. I myself, when I was still more-or-less a student, occasionally started to work on a piece because someone had said to me that I could not learn it. (This was never, in my case, one of my own teachers.) I always learned something valuable from the attempt, although it did not necessarily result in my mastering the piece in question at that time.

Aspects of difficulty 

When we talk about a piece’s being very difficult, we are almost always talking about the learning and reliable playing of the notes: the right notes, in the right order, at a suitable tempo. That is not to say that anyone denies that other aspects of playing a piece can be difficult. In fact, performing even a simple piece in such a way that it is extraordinarily compelling, beautiful, interesting, thought-provoking, disturbing, whatever we want it to be, is probably as hard and (at least) as rarely achieved as playing a difficult piece competently. However, that is indeed a different thing. When students ask whether the Goldberg Variations or the Dupré Prelude and Fugue in G Minor is too hard for them, they are rarely inquiring about whether the teacher thinks that they can project the deepest meaning of the piece effectively. Of course, there is always this relationship between what might for the sake of simplicity be called the two types of difficulty: that the better-learned the notes of a piece can become for a given player—the closer the piece can come to feeling easy once it has been learned—the more of a chance there is that a performance can also be musically effective.

The piece that I happen to have been practicing the most in the week or so before I sat down to write this column is the “In Nomine” by John Bull that is found in volume 1 of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The makers of a list like the Peters Bach organ repertoire list would probably put this piece at the easy end of “moderate” or the somewhat high end of “easy.” It is in three voices throughout, but none of the voices is very busy or intricate. For much of the piece the middle voice lies in such a way that it could be taken by either hand, so there is a fair amount of fingering flexibility. It is (though this is obviously subjective) not a piece that many people would think should go very fast: certainly not fast enough to make playing it into an athletic challenge—which some of Bull’s pieces are. This is a piece that I used to play a lot and, as best I can remember, I did indeed initially choose it because it was not too athletic. Bull’s Walsingham or King’s Hunt would have seemed beyond me many years ago. However, it occurs to me that this piece is a good illustration of the relationship between note-learning difficulty and tempo. There is—literally—a set of tempos at which this short Bull piece would be harder to play than the Reger Opus 16: that is, a mind-bendingly fast tempo for the Bull and a glacial tempo for the Reger. In order to achieve my inverting of the difficulty of these two pieces, the tempos would have to be so extreme that they would both be well outside what anyone would ever do. However, within a more realistic range of performance tempos, the Bull can become a virtuoso challenge of its own, and the Reger can move from the “impossible” all the way down to the “very hard.”

Difficult passages

Many pieces that have a reputation for being very hard are as difficult as their reputations suggest only in spots. For example, the Bach F-major Toccata is considered one of his hardest organ pieces. It earned a very high place on “the list”—maybe at the very top, certainly close. However, long stretches of the piece are really not hard at all. The opening has nothing going on in the pedal, and the two manual lines are somewhat intricate, but not remotely beyond the bounds of the “intermediate” for anyone. Then there is a pedal solo, which is also quite learnable. The following two pages are essentially a recap of this opening: carefully designed by the always pedagogically aware composer to be a bit longer and a bit trickier than the opening itself, but similar in nature. Then, beginning at about the fifth page, the hands and feet start moving together, and things get more complex. Still, however, the notes fall into place quite naturally. Most players I know who have worked on this piece report that this section yields nicely to practicing and is not more difficult than other Bach prelude-type pieces. It is the three brief passages that involve the return of the opening motif of the piece, this time in manuals and pedal together, that seem really hair-raising to many of those who work on the piece. This is not everyone’s experience, but it is a common one. Other very difficult pieces can be analyzed this way as well: perhaps most of them. In the Goldberg Variations, for another example, probably about eighty percent of the writing is no more difficult than the average for The Well-tempered Clavier or Handel harpsichord suites. That is not, by any standards, “easy.” But it is the remaining fifth or so of the work that gives it its reputation as “only for advanced players.”

One source of difficulty in working on pieces of music is unfamiliarity with a particular style or the technical tendencies of a particular type of music. Ralph Kirkpatrick, in his preface to his edition of sixty Scarlatti sonatas, first outlines a set of rigorous ideas about how to work on the sonatas, both as to analysis and as to practicing. Then he says that if a student approaches six sonatas this thoroughly he or she will not have to do the same with the next sonata or later ones. The particular shapes of a given kind of music become ingrained. I myself, as a player who has worked more on Baroque music than on anything else, find it much easier both to sight-read and to learn Baroque pieces—even complex and difficult ones—than music from a later era. To me this suggests patience. If a student is working on his or her first piece from a particular genre or style or time period, then that piece is going to be harder than the next one will be. That should not be surprising.

Practice strategies

If a student is interested in working on a piece that seems too hard, I am extremely committed to letting him or her do so and to making it work. The first step for me is to try to figure out whether the difficulty is found in a few spots or more or less throughout. This affects learning strategy. In the first instance, I will suggest to the student that we break the piece up and completely abandon any thought that it is one unified piece—just for the time being of course, but with a lack of impatience as to how long that time will be. Then the easier—more “normal”—parts can be practiced and learned in a “normal” way, systematically and carefully, along the lines that I have written about before. The extremely hard passages can be treated as intensive exercises: analyzed, taken apart, put back together and practiced to within an inch of their lives. 

A piece that is quite difficult—perhaps too difficult for the student—and of much the same difficulty throughout simply needs to be taken apart and practiced well. The key here is to make sure that the student understands what the process will feel like. Anyone can practice anything effectively if it is kept slow enough. In this context, the meaning of a piece’s being “too hard” is simply that working on it correctly will take a long time. Would the student rather work on this piece for a very long time, or postpone it, work on other pieces in the meantime, and wait to work on the proposed piece later? This is simply a matter of what the student prefers: either approach is fine for helping him or her to become a more accomplished player. 

In fact, it can be perfectly useful and helpful for a student to work on a challenging piece even if he or she never really learns it—assuming that the failure to learn it is of the right sort. If the goal is to perform a piece then, by definition, that piece must be practiced until it is learned and secure and ready to go. However, if the goal is to use the process of working on a piece to become a better player in the long run, then it doesn’t matter whether the time put in practicing that piece is followed by more time with that same piece (eventually leading to its being learned) or by practicing a new piece. The choice to practice a hard piece up to a certain point and then let it go is perfectly acceptable, assuming that the student is happy with it, and understands that it is a process, not a failure. And of course, that same piece will be there for the student to come back to later. In fact, the first round of work on the piece will leave that piece in very good shape to be picked up again later: it will probably even get better during any time that the student takes off from it. It will be sinking into the subconscious mind. The only technical requirement for this approach to be fruitful is that the work done on the piece—or any section of it—be accurate and technically sound, but below tempo. If the piece is put aside in this way, it should be put aside at a slow tempo but otherwise exactly as it should be.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. A selection of Gavin Black’s organ performances can now be heard on YouTube by searching on his name at the YouTube website.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Leaving notes out

Last month I wrote about using altered rhythm as a practice technique. This month I am writing about another way of practicing that also involves changing the note picture away from what is actually on the page for the purpose of playing what is on the page better. Purposely leaving notes out of the texture of a piece at certain stages of practicing is very different from using altered rhythms. However, both techniques involve changing the notes—and both, therefore, are departures from “regular” practicing. The philosophy behind normal practicing at a keyboard instrument is, as I see it, simply that accurate repetition of a physical gesture will, in due course, lead to that gesture’s becoming second nature. Most of what I have conveyed about practicing is more or less a gloss on that idea. Therefore, I think it is worth pointing out when the physical gestures being suggested are actually not those that will directly lead to playing the passage or piece accurately. 

The positive effect on the learning process is less direct. Any student who is interested in altered rhythms as discussed last month, or in the technique discussed this month, must always remember that these techniques only supplement basic, regular practicing and cannot replace it. It is important to employ these unusual practice techniques in small doses, alternating with regular practicing of the same passages, so that the connection between the specialized practicing and the feeling of actually playing the passage being practiced is clear and vivid.

Expression through timing 

and articulation

At the organ—and also at the harpsichord—we cannot create accent, shape, phrasing, or rhythm by playing certain individual notes louder or softer than other notes. That is basic: in fact, for many pianists first coming to study organ or harpsichord it is almost the definition of those instruments. However, we can create accent, shape and so on at the organ or harpsichord—we do so by using, generally speaking, timing and articulation. (An interesting way to think of those two concepts, by the way, is this: that timing concerns initiating notes, and articulation concerns their release. This is also basic and perhaps obvious, but a good way of organizing thinking about execution of notes.) 

It is possible to spell out certain principles about the relationship between timing and articulation on the one hand, and accent, rhythm, phrasing, etc., on the other. For example, in general, notes that are held a bit longer than the metronome would suggest come out subjectively louder, notes that are preceded by a space—an articulation—likewise seem louder or accented, and so do notes that are delayed a little bit. Notes that are reached through strong legato often seem softer or unaccented, as do notes that are a bit shorter than the metronome would suggest, assuming that they are not so staccato as to draw attention to themselves. And so on: all of this is a bit over-simplified, though generally valid. None of it, however, is unfailingly true: a lot depends on the subtleties of the exact situation.

There is a lot that can be done, in any situation, to plan out the use of articulation and timing to create accent and shape, and doing so is important. However, there is also a danger. Schemes of articulation that are carefully thought out and mapped out can become stiff and lifeless. The act of thinking consciously about those schemes while actually playing can lead to stiff playing or can be a kind of distraction that decreases security and accuracy. I am deliberately somewhat overstating this problem: it happens sometimes to most of us; it is probably more of a problem for students. They often are vividly aware of their teachers paying attention, and they may be implementing articulation schemes and other performance ideas that the teacher helped to create or, in some case, just created. However, it is something that can happen to any player.

The point is this: if a player learning a passage can train the ears to hear more prominently those notes that are supposed to be in some way more prominent—accented notes, points of arrival, “louder” notes, notes that should seem to bloom or grow, as if a string player or singer were leaning into them after the initial attack—then the player’s subconscious mind will find ways to make those notes more prominent. This process can both supplement and to some extent bypass or replace the process of logically working out what notes should be longer or shorter and how exactly the timing should be adjusted to give the desired effect. This phenomenon—the direct link between hearing prominent notes and projecting them as prominent—has an intuitive, improvisatory feel to it, which is intrinsically non-stiff and which serves as an antidote to stiffness.

It was Professor Eugene Roan who first mentioned this idea to me—somewhat cryptically. He said that “if you can hear it, it will move through your elbows to your hands” (or something like that) and invoked the idea of “magic.” Whether it is magic or, as I suggested above, something to do with the subconscious—or both—I have found it very effective. From Prof. Roan’s remark I have developed some specific techniques. I routinely use these myself with most of the pieces that I learn. 

Practice procedures

Some musical lines lend themselves to the technique of leaving notes out in a way that seems almost too obvious, too easy—usually lines in which the rhythmic hierarchy of the notes is the clearest. The fugue subject from the Bach D-minor Toccata BWV 565 is such a line (Example 1).

The repeated A’s—all off the beat—are notes that almost everyone analyzing this line would agree should be lighter, less accented, than the (changing) on-the-beat notes. If the theme were being played by a violin, the player would almost certainly make those notes quiet. Leaving those lighter notes out gives a line that looks like Example 2 or perhaps a line that should be thought of as that in Example 3, with variably detached eighth notes.

Notice that I have made the judgment that the first three sixteenth notes of the theme form a three-note upbeat and should not be stripped down. Someone else might see that differently and render the beginning of the theme as Example 4 and so on. This would be fine. The exercise is not about right or wrong: it is about thinking about what you want to hear, and then moving your ears closer to being able to hear it.

Once you have made a decision about which notes to leave out, the procedure for practicing is something like this: 

1) Play the rewritten line several times. There is probably no reason not to use the fingering or pedaling that will be used for those notes when the whole thing is put back together. It is also not terribly important to do so. It is extremely important to keep the touch light—the success of this technique depends on that.

2) Put the missing notes back, and play the passage several times. At this stage (and always) it is still important to keep the touch light and fluid. Let your ears follow, as much as possible, the notes that you played in step 1. Don’t pay too much attention to the notes that you have added back.

3) Repeat 1) and 2) a couple of times if you wish.

4) Now do something else: practice another passage—this way or “normally”—or have supper or go for a walk. When you next play the passage that you have worked on this way, it may feel or sound a bit different—more vivid, or more relaxed, or both. You don’t have to scrutinize it or analyze it. If you happen to notice a difference, that is wonderful; if not, no harm done. The extra attention that you have paid to the passage will help solidify the learning of it in any case.

In the case of this Bach fugue subject, another step is putting the theme back together with the rest of the texture of the piece, or, to put it another way, continuing to use this technique as other voices come in. This immediately highlights the relationship between the fugue subject and the various eighth-note countersubjects. This piece is full to the brim of passages that can be approached this way—for example, the measures immediately following the second entrance of the fugue subject (Example 5).

In this passage, leaving out the off-the-beat sixteenth notes in the lower voice—both with and without also playing the upper voice—is a good way to explore the rhythmic relationship between the voices. It should clarify the interaction between the implied detached eighth notes of the lower voice and the actual eighth notes in the upper voice.

In the opening of the famous Widor Toccata there are all sorts of possibilities for leaving notes out (Example 6). Any of the following might be illuminating:

1) Play the first three sixteenth notes of each beat in the right hand and leave out everything else; play the left hand as is.

2) Play the notes found on the first and fourth eighth notes of each half-note beat, in both hands, and leave out everything else. (These are the places where the pedal plays when it comes in.)

3) Play the right hand as is, and in the left hand only play the chords that fall on half-note beats.

4) An idea that is quite specialized and geared to this passage: play the right hand as is on a loud sound, and in the left hand—on a softer sound—play the chord on each half-note beat, and hold it for the entire half note. When you restore the written rhythm and texture, this will perhaps guide you towards hearing all of the off-the-beat left-hand chords as growing out of the reverberation or bloom of the on-the-beat chords.

There are probably many more possibilities as well. The process of figuring out what scheme of omitting notes might make sense is itself a good learning opportunity.

In a passage whose rhythm is less regular, or in which the hierarchy of beats is less clear, it might take more analysis to discover what pattern of omitting notes makes sense, if any. It is also probably true that the less clear it is what notes might be omitted to create an exercise of this sort, the less compellingly useful the exercise will be. However, it never hurts to try it out. 

In the Franck Choral in A Minor, for example, there are several unusual ways of applying this idea. I like to hear each half of the opening measure as having a diminuendo to it, or, perhaps more accurately, I like to hear the last three sixteenth notes of each half measure as being an “after-beat” to the second or fourth quarter note. Therefore I would play the opening a few times like Example 7.

I like to think of the first note of measure 7 as being quiet: a diminuendo coming off the suspension over the bar line (Example 8). I would consider trying this phrase leaving the C#’s out. This would be jarring and unsatisfying harmonically, but might train the ears to play the notes “quietly.” In various passages that have writing like that in the right hand part here (Example 9) I would try leaving out the off-the-beat sixteenth notes. And in this passage (Example 10) I would try leaving out the (double) pedal sixteenth notes. In this case, it is important to release the octave E’s, which have temporarily become repeated notes, smoothly and in plenty of time, so that when you add the D#’s back in, your feet will not have grown accustomed to being stuck on the E’s.

There are, in any piece, many possibilities for leaving out notes that you think of as being quieter. As I am suggesting, there is nothing wrong with simply trying such things out. Even if a particular practice pattern ends up seeming not to have made much difference, the process of working on it still has not been wasted. As I alluded to above (and elsewhere), anything that makes you notice more of what is going on in a piece will contribute to the learning of the piece and to its becoming increasingly solid. Students—and teachers—can play around with the idea.

It is worth mentioning one more time the importance of light touch in this particular context. In order for the magic to work—or for the subconscious to guide the hands and feet to do subtle things, too subtle to describe analytically—it is important that there be no tension. Tension or tightness will make it much harder for the subtleties heard by the ear to express themselves in the fingers—perhaps impossible.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Additional practice techniques

This month and next month I will discuss a number of practice techniques that involve changing something in the music while practicing. This includes practicing in rhythms other than the true rhythm of the passage being practiced, and practicing passages with some of the notes actually omitted. (The former is the subject this month, and the latter next month.) Some of the techniques are generally quite familiar, although I may have my own twist on them. I have at least briefly alluded to some of them elsewhere, but I think that it is useful to bring them together here and to zero in on them in a bit more detail.

Any and all of the techniques that I will describe here are meant only to supplement the basic, solid way of practicing that I try never to miss a chance to describe: slow, careful repetition—with or without separating hands and feet, depending on the exact circumstances—with correct notes and correct rhythms, speeding up only gradually, in a way that is determined by the flow of the practicing itself, rather than by any predetermined schedule. This discussion of, among other things, practicing “wrong” rhythms comes the month after I talked about various ways of thinking about counting and the art of learning correct rhythms. Therefore it is important to remember that practicing in alternate rhythms is a technique that should have a well-focused purpose and that should be kept conceptually separate from playing the piece or passage as such. I will talk some about how to maintain this separation.

Alternate rhythms: dotted values

For me, the purpose of practicing in alternate rhythms is quite specific: it is a halfway point between a slow practice tempo and a faster tempo, which may be the performance tempo or may be even faster than that. When a rhythm is altered, some notes become faster and some slower. The faster notes are being practiced in isolation at a faster tempo than they would have otherwise; the slower notes, because they are slower than they would otherwise be, provide an opportunity to rest and regroup between fast notes. The classic form of this sort of practice is, therefore, to create pairs of practice rhythms, in each of which half the notes are fast and the other half slow, and between which all of the notes get a chance to be the ones that are being played (extra) fast. 

In turn, the classic form of that technique is to take a passage in which the note values are uniform and to make those note values dotted. So a passage that looks like that in Example 1 will be played first like Example 2, and then like Example 3.

The purpose of this, again, is technical. The first rhythm offers a chance to practice half of the movements from one note to the next quickly; the second offers the chance to practice the other half equally quickly. Because this kind of practice allows the player to stop and rest, in effect, after each fast gesture, it is usually possible to include and drill those fast gestures sooner in the process of learning the piece than it would be possible to boost the overall tempo to that same speed.

A modification of this technique that I think makes it even more useful is to replace the dotted rhythms (“regular” and “reverse”) with a kind of unmeasured over-dotting. So, in the above rhythmic templates, the dotted eighth-notes would all be replaced with fermata-ed notes to be held as long as you want, and the sixteenth-notes would be replaced with notes as short, quick, and light as you can make them. This approach creates an even more intense drilling of the quick gestures and an even more effective rest between those gestures. It also, by virtue of its being farther from any sort of regular pulse, has less ability to affect or possibly undermine the regular steady rhythm of the passage when the player returns to regular rhythm.

This sort of practicing can be applied very naturally to a line such as the opening of Bach’s Prelude & Fugue in G Major, BWV 541 (Example 4), which is in one voice only and in all or almost all one note-value. Practicing a line such as this in some version of dotted rhythm is most useful if you analyze what it is that you are gaining in each spot in the line. For example, when it is the on-the-beat sixteenth-notes that are held long, then going from the first beat to the second beat of the second measure (marked x) you will be practicing quickly moving the hand position in such a way as to reach the middle D reliably. 

In a passage such as Example 5—from the Vierne Divertissement (Pièces en Style Libre)—if a dotted rhythm is applied to the sixteenth-note line, the quarter-note chords will come along for the ride, and the practicing of those chords will also be affected. If the on-the-beat sixteenth-notes are being held long, then in spots like those marked with x’s the student must be fully ready to play the next chord, as well as the next sixteenth-note, before playing the (very fast) off-the-beat sixteenth-note. The actual gesture of moving from one chord to another will then be fast: probably faster than it will need to be in the piece. However, the student will have time, waiting on the “and of two,” to prepare that very fast gesture. The other half of the exercise—the reverse dotting—applied to this passage probably has less effect on the feel of the playing of the chords. In that case, moments like those marked with y’s will probably constitute the most intense and useful part of the exercise—playing wide intervals very quickly. 

In writing like Example 6—from the Bach Toccata & Fugue in F Major—these sorts of rhythms can be applied to one hand at a time and then to both hands together. Again, the student should analyze and pay attention to what exactly is being practiced at each moment in the passage. For example, going from the second beat to the third beat of the first measure of this excerpt, the left hand has a “stretch” or shift in hand position while the right hand does not; the opposite is true near the end of the fourth measure, or heading into the last measure. The use of the two complementary dotting patterns will highlight some of these technical details.

(Would it be a good idea to practice this passage or one like it using opposite dotting in the two hands? That is, first place the lengthened notes on the beats in the right hand and off the beats in the left hand, then reverse both of these. I have actually never tried that and I can’t recall a student’s doing it. The purely physical practice would be unchanged from the method described above, but the concentration required would be different—and it would probably be harder.)

Alternate rhythms: 

Groupings of notes

Another format for altering rhythms to create effective targeted practice strategies involves speeding up not one note at a time (every other note, as above) but clusters of notes. The classic way of organizing this is to play first all of the notes after each beat very fast, ending on and then holding the next beat, then to play all of the notes starting on each beat very fast, ending with the last off-the-beat note of each grouping. The template for doing this works as follows. For a set of notes written like Example 7, you would first play as shown in Example 8, with the notes under each slur played as fast as possible, and the notes under the fermatas held as long as necessary to feel ready to play the next cluster of fast notes; then Example 9.

In this case, the notes under the slurs should again be played as fast as possible. Then the last note of each grouping can be held until it feels comfortable to execute the next cluster of fast notes, or the note can be released, and the waiting can take place while not actually holding any notes: in effect a fermata in the gap between groups of notes. In the latter case, of course, it is a good idea not to let the hands or feet move too far above or away from the keys.

(As it happens, I myself have recently used the fast-cluster approach myself on this Buxtehude harpsichord passage, from the La Capricciosa Variations, which I have always found extremely hard—harder than I had originally expected [Example 10]. This measure is full of funny changes of direction and unexpected intervals. I was eventually able to get comfortable with it—and to get it to be reliable—and I believe that the fast-cluster practicing was the most important part of the process.)

How to use alternate rhythms

Practicing in “off” rhythms is, as I said above, a technical practice. The purpose is not to learn something about rhythm or any other artistic or interpretive aspect of the piece. It is to drill isolated gestures at a fast tempo in a focused way that does not demand that the fast tempo be kept up for very long. Therefore, it only makes sense to practice a passage this way (that is, in one of these ways) once the fingering and/or pedaling has been worked out and is indeed fairly well learned. If the fingering or pedaling is uncertain, then the fast moments in the rhythmic patterns are not going to work: they will be hesitant or actually fall apart. It also makes sense to practice this way only with a complete texture or with a part of the texture that involves the same fingering and pedaling as the complete texture. That is, it is fine—very useful in fact—to apply different rhythms to one hand at a time or to the feet alone, but not to separate voices extracted from a contrapuntal piece.

Since the technical purpose of this sort of practice is focused on the fast moments, the slow moments, whether they amount to every other note or to one note in a larger grouping, can be held for as long as the player wants. There does not need to be an overall tempo. Since every gesture—moving from one note to the next—takes its turn at being the fast gesture, everything gets practiced effectively regardless of how long—how slow—the held notes are. The less regular the timing of the held notes—the more the student simply waits on those notes until he or she feels ready to play the next fast gesture—the less this kind of practice will have any tendency to interfere with normal rhythm, because it will not be presenting an effective alternate rhythm.

It is easiest to apply this kind of practicing to passages in which rhythm is more or less even, as in all of the examples so far. In a passage such as Example 11, from Buxtehude’s Praeludium in C Major, BuxWV 136, the rhythm is less regular. There are beats in which the surface rhythm is two eighth-notes, in which it is four sixteenth-notes, and in which it is mixed. In the second beat of each of the first two measures of this excerpt, for example, if all of the notes within that beat are being played fast, then it would be conceivable either to try to maintain the rhythmic relationships within the beat, or just to play all of the notes as fast as possible and, therefore, as fast as one another, whether they are in fact eighth-notes or sixteenths. Either approach could be fine, as far as I can tell, and they would both amount to effective practicing. In fact, students can be encouraged to create their own short clusters of notes for very fast practicing, and to figure out how they would like to deal with rhythms within those clusters. As long as the clusters are not very long, and as long as they overlap by a note or two, the practicing should work well. 

Next month I will talk about a sort of practicing that is, in a sense, the opposite of what I have been discussing here, namely playing some notes of a passage while leaving the other notes out. The reasons for doing this are usually not technical, but rather about developing the ears’ relationship to the music in a way that enhances understanding of structure, rhythm, and pulse.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Rhythm and counting

The music that we as keyboard players work with on a daily basis involves time as well as pitch, timbre, and other qualities of sound. We are so used to this that it seems like something that does not need to be said. It is very close to the core of the way that we think about music. In fact, I have sometimes heard people define music as something like “sound with defined pitch organized according to regular time intervals” or words to that effect. This is, if not necessarily a valid definition of anything that could possibly be considered music, certainly a good start at defining one of the important components of the type of music that we typically hear and play. Of course, due to the nature of time and perception, whenever a sound succeeds some other sound, it has to do so on some kind of schedule, and indeed once in a while that schedule is irregular or subject to the whim (or judgment) of a player. But most of the time sounds in pieces of music follow one another at regular intervals. This phenomenon of pulse or rhythm or beat is as important as the notes (pitches) themselves, or close to it, in most musical situations.

And of course our system of notation includes indications for rhythm—that is, lengths of notes in relation to one another. It is actually hard to call to mind any standard way of notating pitch in post-medieval music that does not also notate something about rhythm. When a composer wants to suggest that, in some way, notes are not being presented as having a pre-determined set of rhythmic relationships, the composer has to borrow rhythmic notation and then somehow indicate that the usual rhythmic meaning of the notes is suspended. That is the case, for example, with the unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin and some other seventeenth-century composers, and with passages marked “free” or “unmeasured” or “molto rubato” or something to that effect.

However, organ teachers are rarely in the position of teaching students how to read rhythmic notation from scratch, or how to read notation at all. We usually take on students who have already learned “the basics” by studying piano—this includes notation along with at least some ideas about fingering, and of course a certain amount of actual keyboard dexterity. (Of course, many of us do teach these basics in settings other than organ instruction, and occasionally we are lucky enough to find a student who wants to study organ from the very beginning!)  On the other hand, there are many students whose sense of rhythm—even at the level of their comfort with reading the rhythmic dimension of the notation—is shaky. There are students who feel that they “can’t count” or who are at least not always confident about their reading of note values, and who are often right not to be confident. As with any other problems in studying or in playing, this usually stems from something’s having been taught inadequately or (and this might actually be more common) having been taught in a way that makes the matter seem more complicated than it has to be.

What follow here are ways to help students with some aspects of reading and producing correct rhythms. This is separate from, though in the end of course related to, the business of playing with a convincing sense of rhythm and pulse. Paradoxically or not, the convincing sense of pulse often comes from departing slightly from the scientifically (i.e., metronomically) correct reading of the rhythm. I am not talking about that here—rubato, timing, using accent to create pulse: all very important, but mostly for another time. One important aspect of the relationship is this: that all of the possible subtleties in the realm of rhythm are extremely difficult to execute for anyone whose playing is burdened by a fear that the basic rhythm is shaky—whether it actually is shaky or not. 

1) If it does fall to me to teach the basic meaning of the different “note values”—that is, the way that we indicate rhythm in written music—I try to do so in as simple and colloquial way as I possibly can. None of the jargon or the ways that we habitually put these things to ourselves in our heads once we know them really well is self-evident, and some of it is unnecessary. Take, for example, the phrase “note value” or the concept of the “value” of a note. It becomes second nature that this word refers to the aspect of the note that is the length of time that it occupies, but someone who has actually not studied the notation at all will not know this. I have actually seen someone more or less flummoxed by the statement that a dot “adds half the value of the note to the note.” And why not: unless you almost already know what that statement means, it is not particularly obvious what it means. I would rather say something like: “if you put a dot immediately to the right of a note, it makes that note one-and-a-half times as long as it would otherwise have been.” There are then two ways to concoct examples of this: first, if, say, a quarter-note takes as much time as two eighth-notes, then a quarter-note with a dot next to it takes as much time as three eighth-notes; and second, if a quarter-note is going to last a day, say, then a dotted quarter-note is going to last thirty-six hours.

2) The notation is all about ratios, and my last example above is meant as a reminder that a ratio is a ratio, regardless of the absolute times involved. A student learning the rhythmic notation from scratch needs to embrace the idea that the notation is all about ratios and not about absolute time—or for that matter about beats, pulses, measures, or time signatures. It is about the notion that some notes last twice as long—or three or four times as long—as others. That’s all. A whole-note lasts twice as long as a half-note; a half-note lasts twice as long as a quarter-note, and so on. Thus, if a quarter-note is going to last a second, then a half-note is going to last two seconds, and a whole-note, in turn, four seconds. If a sixteenth-note is going to last four years, then a thirty-second note is going to last two years, plus or minus an adjustment for the stray February 29. Once the student is comfortable with the idea of ratios, then learning which symbol is which note and what the ratios are is rather easy: there aren’t that many of them. Of course, the teacher must include in the discussion not just all of the “regular” notes, but also the concept of dotted notes, the meaning of ties, and the meaning of triplet signs. These are still all about ratios, and still do not amount to very many different things to learn.

3) By the way, as far as rhythm and counting are concerned, it is probably true to say that nothing would change if all of the time signatures and all of the bar lines were magically erased from all of (at least) western classical music. The note lengths and the rhythms that arise from them are fully described by the note-heads, stems and flags. The bar lines do not change anything about that, and a time signature is—for basic rhythms—either redundant or incorrect. Sometimes a time signature suggests something about what pulses or groupings will arise out of the basic rhythm. But even with respect to that, if the groupings or pulses would not be there or would not be convincing without the time signature, then they are probably not really there with it either. I mention this partly to reinforce the idea that no one learning how to read rhythm in our common notation should be thinking about time signatures or bars or measures. This is just a distraction. Also, when a player who is past the stage of learning notation—who is presumably comfortable with the rhythm side of music reading—nonetheless has a problem reading the rhythm of a passage or with feeling secure about that reading, it is almost always a distraction to be thinking about the time signature or the phenomenon of “measures”. I have seen many students effectively prevent themselves from reading a fairly straightforward rhythm because they were not sure right off the bat how to relate that rhythm to something about the time signature or meter or the placement of bars. This leads me to the next point, an especially important one.

4) If the systematic counting of a passage is going to be useful in creating an accurate rhythm, then of course the counting must happen at a steady pace. It does not, however, need to use numbers that relate it to the measures. Often using the ordinary “one and two and three and . . . ” system for counting a passage is enough of a distraction that it hinders rather than helps. Also, sometimes a student puts so much stock in the fact that the numbers are present and in the correct order that he or she forgets to keep them absolutely steady. So we hear something like this: “one and two . . . and three . . .  andfourand.” The student believes that the passage is being practiced correctly because, again, those numbers are there, and they are the right numbers in the right order. So rather than counting a passage as in Example 1, I would suggest something like that shown in Example 2.

This starts with deciding to use the eighth-note as the steady beat. (The correct choice for the steady counting beat at the beginning of the process of drilling a rhythm is the smallest fairly common note value, unless the passage needs to be kept slow enough that that note value is too slow to follow easily: see 7) below.) Then it expresses the length of each note in the number of eighth-notes that that note value actually includes. Of course, it is still necessary to be sure that the numbers come at an even pace. But the second example zeros in on what the player needs to understand and to work on. Of course, as the passage becomes better learned and can go faster, the next step with this type of counting looks like Example 3.

5) The kind of counting described in 4) is also one of the best exercises for teaching the basics of rhythm notation, once the simple rhythmic meaning of the different note shapes has been learned. Taking a large number of fairly straightforward but not trivial rhythms—say of about the level of my example—and counting them out this way serves to drill the meaning of the different note values quite efficiently. For this purpose it is not necessary to play anything, just to count, dropping back to “1” at the beginning of each new note. At the same time, this type of counting really does work well to straighten out a tricky or recalcitrant rhythm. It is not just for beginners: I use it myself when I encounter a rhythm that I want to count out.

6) Sometimes the idea arises of practicing the rhythm of a passage completely separately from the actual notes. This usually takes the form of tapping the rhythm on a table or clapping it. This can be a good idea. It is based on the clearly sound notion that a tricky rhythm should be practiced some—initially or whenever it becomes a problem—without the distraction of worrying about fingering and hand position. It is a form of isolating and simplifying something difficult, philosophically similar to practicing hands or feet separately. I would suggest, as a modification of this, that a student can in effect practice a rhythm in isolation by playing it with random easy notes, perhaps just five adjacent notes played up and down by the five fingers: no choices to make about notes or fingering, but a sonority to hear. This seems to me to be more “true to life” and probably just more interesting for many players. It also gets around a problem that clapping and tapping both have: that they are usually carried out as “repeated note” gestures, and that fast “notes” are therefore harder than they need to be. If a student is in fact going to tap a rhythm on the table, then he or she should use two hands alternating, or two or more fingers alternating in what amounts to keyboard-playing gestures.

7) Another way to practice the rhythm of a passage with difficult notes is to slow the passage down enough that the notes become easy. This is, of course, always the pillar of good practicing, as far as I am concerned, whatever the particular circumstances. Sometimes, however, in order to make the notes of a passage easy enough that the student can afford to think about the rhythm, the tempo has to become so slow that the rhythm begins to seem even more non-intuitive or not really there: almost as if the sixteenth-notes were indeed lasting years. The way to deal with this is not to be afraid of subdivision. If the line that I used for my examples above were hard enough that it had to be practiced at eight quarter-notes per minute, for example, then the correct choice for the counting beat would probably be the thirty-second note, at sixty-four per minute. This would indeed mean that the opening whole-note would be counted (steadily!) from one to thirty-two. This might seem—or indeed be—annoying. However, there is no shortcut to practicing slowly enough, and attempting to time a note that lasts half a minute by counting only “one and two and three and four and” is not going to succeed. The numbers and the “ands” are too far apart to be meaningfully related to one another in counting them out. 

8) There is sometimes a fear of subdivision or of building rhythms up by counting out the smallest components. The fear is, I believe, that too much of this will make a performance seem choppy, make it not convincingly reflect the underlying pulse. My own experience is that this is just not a problem. Having the player’s conception of what the rhythm actually is—what the note lengths and their relationships are—be both correct and really solid is the absolute requirement for achieving a convincing pulse. Counting small beats—subdivided beats—accurately is the most sure-fire way to be certain that the rhythm being drilled is accurate. As a passage becomes solid and as the tempo is able to approach performance tempo, the player’s focus on the smaller beats will naturally melt away. The ease with which both the correct notes and the correct rhythm can be executed will free the player up to listen for the beat groupings and the underlying pulse along with any and all other artistic or rhetorical aspects of the music. Also, any rhythm that needs to be slowed down a lot and treated to a really extreme subdivision will be the exception: an especially hard passage. Every player will have the experience of playing many passages that have been learned from the beginning counting only the time-signature beats. If it is indeed easier to get a convincing overall pulse and shape in these passages—which I rather doubt—then the player can consciously transfer the feeling of playing and hearing those passages to others that have had to be taken apart more finely.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Continuo, part I

The musical practice known as continuo playing was an integral part of ensemble music from about 1600 until about 1750—the dates that we assign to the “Baroque Period.” Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to define the Baroque specifically as the era in music history when continuo playing was the norm. During that period, almost every work of music that was not a solo keyboard or lute piece included a continuo part. (Exceptions, such as pieces for unaccompanied violin, or lute songs, probably amount to no more than five percent or so of the repertoire.) This includes sonatas, trio sonatas, works for larger instrumental ensembles, songs, cantatas, Masses, operas, and oratorios—arias, choruses, recitative, and so on. The practice of writing continuo parts certainly persisted into the second half of the eighteenth century—the “Classical” era—but became less common, less mainstream, less central to what was going on in the world of musical performance. Continuo died out early in the nineteenth century. (Mendelssohn, however, still included continuo parts in some of his sacred music in the 1830s.)

What is continuo? 

This month’s column will begin to answer that question, or, really, to address it in ways that I hope will be helpful to students. (Of course if any of us as organ teachers have students who have already studied continuo fairly deeply or who have specialized in it, then those students will already know or understand more than I am going to write about here. So this is, at least directly, for everyone else.) Next month I will outline in a fairly basic form my own approach to teaching the nitty-gritty practical side of creating and performing continuo parts at the keyboard, starting with how to read the notation, and I will discuss how to deal with the artistic choices that creating such a part entails.

I actually have a memory—a distant memory by now—of my own first encounters with the word “continuo.” These happened at a number of chamber music concerts on the Yale campus that I heard in the late 1960s, as a youngster just getting interested in music. There were pieces described as “Sonata for violin and continuo” or “Trio Sonata for violin, oboe, and b.c.” or other such phrases. (The word “continuo” and the expression “b.c.” are both abbreviations for basso continuo.) I noticed that some of these pieces turned out to have the wrong number of players, that is, a trio sonata might have four people playing. I still remember a sort of “Twilight Zone” feeling that I got looking at descriptions in the programs that seemed not to be written in any normal language that I could discern and that seemed not to correspond to what I was seeing on the stage. I vaguely remember asking someone (my father?) what it all meant and his not knowing either. I believe that we considered the possibility that it might be some sort of misprint.

I still get the very basic question—“What does ‘continuo’ mean?”—both from audience members at concerts and from (new) students. The basic answer is this: a continuo part is a line of music, mostly in the range of the bass clef, that forms the lowest part of the texture of a piece, that is meant to be played by one or more instruments in unison, and that is meant to be supplemented by notes not written by the composer: chords or bits of melody supplied by one or more of the performers. The choice of instrument or instruments is not, except in rare cases, specified by the composer. The performer’s process of deciding what “notes not written by the composer” to add is called “realizing” the continuo part. In the Baroque period this was almost always done by actual improvisation. Nowadays it is done either by improvisation or by planning and writing a part in advance.

Elements of improvisation

Part of this picture is that Baroque composers—from the most iconic such as Bach or Handel through thousands of others whom most of us have never heard of—expected the actual notes of their pieces to be different from one performance to another, with part of the note picture composed not by the “composer” but by any given performer. This often blows people’s minds: we associate the notion of a performer writing part of the music with certain kinds of twentieth-century experimental art—participatory or aleatory music. The music of the Baroque often seems to embody an opposite principle, one of rigorous form, often expressed through complex counterpoint. 

Sometimes the simple act of becoming aware of the nature of continuo accompaniment can reset a student’s sense of what Baroque music is all about, away from structure and control towards spontaneity and change, and, in a sense, away from the composer towards the performer. Of course, it is also true that a lot of Baroque keyboard and lute repertoire was improvised from scratch. In fact, we assume that something close to all of the keyboard playing that took place in the Baroque era was improvisation. However, in a funny way, improvised repertoire suggests a less radical departure from composer control than continuo accompaniment does, in that with improvised repertoire the performer is the composer.

Of course with continuo accompaniment, the additions to the music put in place by the performer exist within certain well-defined bounds—and we’ll come back to that below. However, it is clear from comparing all of the recordings of just about any piece of Baroque music that the differences between one player’s version of the keyboard continuo part and another’s can make a huge difference in the overall effect of a piece. And, again, this is something to which composers routinely ceded control.

The key to accompaniment

So why did composers give up control over a crucial aspect of their pieces—consistently and over a period of more than 150 years? I believe that the answer lies in the nature of accompaniment and in the nature of the instruments used for accompaniment during those years. There is a lot to say about accompaniment, whether of the continuo variety or of the obbligato variety, as represented by such things as Schubert song accompaniments. Great accompaniment requires all sorts of subtleties and sensitivities. However, one thing is absolutely fundamental, without which accompaniment runs the risk of being not just artistically sub-par but really grotesque: the ability to vary dynamics in a way that tracks what the other instruments or voices are doing. Without this basic ability an accompanist constantly runs the risk either of drowning out the other instruments or voices or of failing to support them adequately. If the keyboard instrument is one on which dynamic variation is inherently possible, say, the piano, then a composer can write accompaniments in which the note picture is fixed once and for all, that is, written by the composer as part of writing the piece. If, however, the accompanying instrument is, like the harpsichord or the Baroque organ, not capable of inherent dynamic flexibility, then it is important that the performer be allowed to change the number of notes being played at any one time in order to change the effective dynamics. A Schubert song piano part played as written on a harpsichord would be an almost pathetically ineffective accompaniment. It would fail to support a singer with a robust or just plain loud voice, it would drown out or at any rate compete too much with a light or delicate singer, and it would fail to reflect or mirror or complement nuances of dynamics executed by any singer. However, it is possible, in a piece with continuo accompaniment, to make the keyboard part of a whole passage louder or softer by choosing to play a thicker or thinner texture of added notes and chords. It is also possible to place an accent on certain notes or beats while allowing other notes or beats to be unaccented, again by actually playing more notes, a thicker texture, on the accented moments and fewer—or no—notes elsewhere. It is possible in the same way to respond appropriately to crescendo, diminuendo, and other dynamic gestures that singers or other players carry out.  

(I should mention that years ago I subscribed, without having really consciously thought about it, to the absurd idea that Baroque composers wrote continuo lines rather than obbligato accompaniments because their composing skills were too rudimentary to concoct complex accompaniments. In this story line, the development of “real” keyboard parts for chamber music and songs in the second half of the eighteenth century was a kind of progress, akin to the scientific progress that—genuinely—characterized that era. The notion that composers who wrote the elaborate, complex counterpoint that was routine in the seventeenth century couldn’t have written compositionally successful keyboard parts for their songs and chamber music is indeed absurd. However, I think that some people do fall into the trap of assuming some such thing, as we have a general tendency to believe that the passage of time brings progress. We feel that people of old simply couldn’t do a lot of what became normal or easy later on.) 

Some confirmation of the notion that the continuo texture really did serve the purpose I have described is found in this: when composers in the Baroque era wrote song accompaniments intended to be played on an instrument that had dynamic flexibility—namely the lute—they did write obbligato accompaniments. This gives us the lute song repertoire, with all of the notes of the pieces written by the composers.

Continuo instrumentation

The instrumentation of a continuo part is flexible. This is one of the reasons that the part is given the somewhat abstract name that it has. It is not the “organ” part or the “harpsichord” part. It was customary for a continuo part to be played by at least two instruments: a bass melody instrument playing the continuo line itself and a chordal instrument—keyboard or lute—also playing the written continuo line, but adding the extra notes and chords that we have been referring to. It was also common for more instruments to be involved. Typical combinations include cello and harpsichord; cello and organ; bassoon and organ; gamba, organ and lute; cello, double bass, and harpsichord, and so on. This flexible instrumentation is the source of my old confusion about the number of players on stage. A “solo” sonata can have anything from two players to four or, somewhat atypically, five; a “trio” sonata might indeed have only three players, but more usually will have four, often five or more. A continuo group for a large-scale piece—a cantata or oratorio or orchestral piece—can easily have half a dozen or more players.

Regardless of the exact instrumentation—which, again, is almost always at the discretion of the performers—the structure of the part is the same. The line actually written by the composer, the bass line, which is the foundation of the harmony of the piece, is played in unison by all of the instruments participating. Notes that are added by a keyboard player or lutenist are played only by that one instrument. Thus, most of the time it is the bass line itself that, within the texture of the continuo part, is the most prominent, with the added notes always somewhat in the background. (An organist performing a continuo part without the help of a melodic bass instrument should bear this in mind in planning registrations.)

Figured bass

So, if a keyboard player performing a continuo part is supposed to add notes to the texture, how is the choice of those notes to be made? The first answer is that they must be notes that are consistent with the prevailing harmony, and not in conflict with what is going on in the written parts. The player needs to have a way of knowing what that prevailing harmony is. This can be achieved by ear, for players who are skilled at such things, or by studying the score. However, this is also where the figures that are often written under the musical notes of a continuo part come into play. Those figures are in effect a short score of the harmonic picture of the piece. To some extent they indicate what notes the other instruments and voices are actually producing. Beyond that they indicate what other notes are consistent with the harmony implied by the notes being played or sung or by the harmonic logic of the piece. The system of figures is a system of abbreviations. As mentioned above, I will go into detail about how to read figures next month. The figures—or more accurately the figures in conjunction with the printed notes—never tell the keyboard continuo player what to play. They tell the player what the range of possibilities is for notes to be played, or, to put it another way, they tell the player by implication what notes are not available to be played. In many pieces the abbreviated nature of the figuring is taken to its logical extreme, that is, there are no figures. This in no way implies that the player is not meant to add notes and chords. It is not a situation in which anything different is going on. The player has to rely on other things—the listening and studying mentioned above—to glean the information that figures could have given.

From within the constellation of notes that would be acceptable to play at any given moment, then, how can a player make specific choices? This is both the most difficult part of continuo playing and its artistic/interpretive component. It is actually rare that a keyboard continuo player has to play notes—any notes—for the purpose of providing or filling out the harmony. This is true for two basic reasons. First, in most passages of chamber or vocal music, most of the harmony is provided anyway over the course of a beat or two, amongst all of the instruments or voices. (Clearly the thicker the texture, the closer this will come to being completely true.) Second, there is nothing in the rules or expectations of tonal music that says that every part of the theoretical harmony has to be present at all times. 

Instead, choices about exactly what notes to play (to add) at any given point are based on considerations that have nothing to do with completing the harmony as such. These are considerations of texture, volume, accent, rhythm, pulse, shaping of phrases or sections, and, very practically, both helping and not hindering the other performers. They all stem from the basic fact that adding more notes makes things louder and adding fewer notes or no notes makes things quieter. Thus “thicker chords on accented beats” is a simple but valid guideline, and there are plenty of others. More on this next month.