On Teaching

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

Memorization
I ended last month’s column with a list of some ideas about memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the keyboards. This month and next I will focus on the pros and cons of memorization as a learning tool. That is, I want to consider ways in which working on memorization—or not working on memorization—can help the teaching and learning process, and what can be learned from thinking about the phenomenon of memorization, whether a student memorizes music for performance or not. I will also consider the role of sight-reading, or reading in general, in performance, and how reading relates to knowing a piece thoroughly and well. I want to start with a brief account of my own history with memorization. This, of course, affects my thinking about memorization in general, as does the whole range of experiences of my students—and other students whom I have observed—over the years.

Personal experience
I have, to put the punch line first, done very little public performance from memory over the years. I have actually never played a piece in concert or in a recording session from memory. When I was applying to graduate school at Westminster—it was 1983—I had to play my audition partly from memory. This was a requirement for the organ performance program, though not for organists applying to the church music program. I was unaccustomed to memorizing, and I worked very hard at it. In the end, at the audition, I had a brief memory slip or two, from which I recovered fairly well. During my years in that graduate program, I also had to play a jury or two from memory. The experience was similar: that is, I worked very hard on the memorization, had a few brief memory slips, and more or less got through it.
Meanwhile, the rules of the organ performance program at Westminster, at the time I was a student, stated that I would have to play my master’s recital entirely from memory. Entering that program as someone who had done little or no work on memorization prior to my audition, I had no idea how I would manage to cope with that requirement. Either I would work very hard at it and hope that it went well—better, I would have hoped, than the audition or the juries, since noticeable memory slips in concert would have felt quite bad—or I would hope for some sort of miracle. That miracle came when the department decided to change the requirement. We were now allowed to choose either to give one recital from memory, or two playing from the scores. I chose the latter, which, among other things, permitted me to take on the challenge of learning The Art of the Fugue and playing it as one of those recitals. I could not even have considered trying, at that point in my life, to memorize something that long and complex.
Since the last of those juries that I played as a graduate student, I have not played a piece from memory with anyone listening. Clearly this means that I do not believe that memorization is a necessity for good performance: if I did believe that, then either I would have memorized repertoire for all these years or I would have been taking, and would still be taking, an ongoing blow to my self-esteem.
Furthermore, it would be hypocritical of me to believe that we teachers ought to expect—let alone force—our students to memorize. Indeed, after many years of teaching and playing, I cannot see any good reason to expect students or any players to perform repertoire from memory. This is, of course, a fairly extreme statement about a more or less “hot button” topic, and I hold onto it lightly: that is, while I feel quite convinced about this view, I am also open to being persuaded otherwise at some point. I have not been persuaded yet, though, in spite of both generally paying attention to writing and teaching on the subject and having conducted a review of the literature in preparation for writing this column.

The case against memorization
It makes sense to me that, in spite of the very strong tradition of memorization in piano playing and the weaker but persistent tradition of memorization in organ playing, the burden of proof must fall on the side of maintaining that performing from memory is necessary. This is in part because it is usually extremely time consuming. If I am going to ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time on anything—time which could be spent, among many other things, on learning and performing more pieces—then there must be a very good reason for it.
However, I have seen the imposition of a need to memorize do actual harm. Literally all of the auditions, juries, and student recitals that I have ever heard that were performed from memory have included memory slips—sometimes small, sometimes large—or passages that were clearly executed in a tight, hesitant way because of fears about memory. This is perhaps a small sample size, but it has been so consistent that it strongly reinforces my belief that if students are required to play from memory, the benefits of doing so must be unambiguous and compelling. I have also seen students do what I would have had to do with The Art of the Fugue if I had been required to play my degree recital from memory: that is, avoid certain pieces that they would really like to play because those pieces seem daunting to memorize. Many students go around in a constant state of tension and anxiety because of concern about memorization. And, worst of all, some people decide that they cannot aspire to be performers at the highest level because they do not—rightly or wrongly—believe that they could confidently perform from memory.

Is there a case for memorization?
Of course, playing music and being a performer is difficult and can be nerve-racking. But is the extra difficulty and tension caused by memorization justified? How good are the reasons for asking students to play from memory?
Some of these reasons are, it seems to me, either essentially stylistic or just practical and arguably rather superficial: that it looks more professional, that it saves the inconvenience of having to use a page turner, that if you use music you will feel like or look like a “student”, that memorization will save you if the music blows off the music desk, that it will enable you to give a recital at a moment’s notice when you are away from your library of printed music, that it will permit you to play at a social occasion at which you were not planning to play. (These specific reasons actually constitute the majority of what I have seen mentioned about the subject in my recent review of Internet-based discussions.) Some people mention that if a piece is fully memorized, it becomes easier to look steadily at the hands and feet and to look to find pistons, stop levers, etc. This is interesting and has more musical/technical substance to it than some, and I will discuss it more later.
However, the main claim for memorization is that only by memorizing a piece can you learn it really thoroughly. This claim takes several forms. The most direct is that it is only through the techniques of memorization that a piece can really be learned—that is, that experience shows that only after doing the kinds of things that lead to a piece’s being memorized will you really know the piece inside and out. Another claim, turning things the other way around, is that if a player engages in the act of learning a piece really thoroughly then he or she will indeed, almost automatically, have memorized it: therefore playing from the score is seen as a sign that the player can’t have learned the music very well. Both of these ideas have been incorporated into the ways that some people talk about learning and playing music. I have seen phrases like “learn the piece inside and out, backward and forward” used as a synonym for “memorize the piece.” I have encountered as a sort of aphorism: “get the music into your head and your head out of the music.” Indeed, in some circles, and in particular at certain times in music history, “learn a piece” has been used as a synonym for “memorize a piece.”
Furthermore, of course, we normally use the language in which we talk about performances or performers to imply, without necessarily having made a considered judgment about it, that playing from memory is playing of a higher order. “She was the first to play the works of so-and-so from memory,” “he had memorized such-and-such repertoire by the time he was 14.” Feats like this are impressive because they are difficult, and there is no reason not to acknowledge the work of people who accomplish them. (By the way, however, they also get more notice than they might otherwise, simply because they can be described objectively. If we try to say that “she was the first to play the works of so-and-so in an absolutely riveting manner” there is no way to establish objectively that this is actually true.) We are still just slipping around the question of whether playing from memory is in any way better—or, for our purposes here, whether asking students to play from memory really helps them to become better players.
Some observers report seeing performers—both students and others—playing pieces with their eyes intently, almost frantically, following the music, clearly needing that music to teach them the notes as they play. In fact, most of us know that this is common, that it always creates bad and insecure performances, and that it is a sign of poor preparation. However, in itself this doesn’t prove or even really suggest that performing from memory is the solution to this problem, although it points to the fact that some people misuse the circumstance of playing from music.

The bottom line of learning
So this all comes back to the same thing: that anyone who wants to play a piece should take on the responsibility of learning that piece extremely thoroughly, and that anyone who wishes to become an accomplished player must get into the habit of studying all pieces thoroughly and well. Much of what I have written about over the last several years—in particular the methods of analyzing and learning counterpoint and the technique of paying attention to elements, small or large, that recur in any piece—has been geared towards helping people to know their pieces very well musically by the time that they have learned the notes. Much of the rest of what I have written—about pedal learning, slow practicing, paying attention to hand choices and more—has been geared towards making sure that the physical side of playing will be secure enough that a player can take advantage of what he or she has learned by getting to know the piece really well, that is, not be distracted from it by physical problems or insecurity.
It seems to me that anyone with good practice habits and good physical technique who has put in the time to study a piece thoroughly will end up being able to play that piece from the score as well as anyone could play it from memory. Therefore my own approach—the bargain I would make with my students, so to speak, is this: that there should be no compromise on studying the music in depth, including taking things apart contrapuntally and motivically, noticing harmonic patterns, recurring rhythms, changes in texture, in what order voices enter, playing hands separately when that seems like a good idea for technical or musical reasons, and so on; but that this intense study should be for its own sake and for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of leading to full memorization.
Those who advocate memorization are right that the greatest source of wrong notes, insecurity, and hesitant, unconvincing playing is not knowing what is coming up next. Too strong a reliance on reading—only half-learning a piece and expecting to fill in the rest by quasi-sight reading in performance—is a trap into which many of us fall, experienced players as well as students. It does not often result in good performances. I would suggest avoiding that trap in the most direct way—by insisting to one’s self and to one’s students that pieces be studied thoroughly and carefully. It is, looking at it one way, overkill and perhaps a distraction to relate that process of thorough study to the act of playing from memory. The opposite of reading a piece that is ill prepared is, I would say, reading a piece that is extremely well prepared.
For some people, the act of studying a piece well will indeed lead naturally and apparently automatically to the musical text of the piece actually being memorized and the printed music’s becoming unnecessary. There is, most obviously, nothing wrong with this. However, there is also nothing wrong with the more common scenario in which even very thorough study of the music does not lead to real, note-perfect memorization. I would encourage teachers and students to be comfortable with that.
Next month I will continue this discussion, talking about some of what I consider to be beneficial ideas that have arisen from the tradition of memorization, such as studying music away from the keyboard, and also discussing the role of sight reading, some of the pitfalls that reading presents, and ways to avoid them.

§

On a completely different matter: I have recently had a fascinating conversation with several friends on the following question: who was the musician that you have heard live in performance who was born the earliest? This led to quite an interesting and far-ranging discussion about time and history, and the reach of living memory. I would like to open that discussion up to a wider group. I encourage anyone reading this to think about your own answer to that question, and to e-mail it to me at Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at . My own answer is as follows: that the earliest-born performer whom I heard in performance at all was Leopold Stokowski, born 1882, and that the earliest-born player that I heard was Arthur Rubinstein, by a margin of ten days over Eubie Blake, both born in 1887. I will include all of the answers that I get in a later column.

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

Memorization II
Last month I staked out a position about memorization that went something like this: that asking students to perform from memory is not in any way a necessary part of asking those students to perform well, or to become fully competent or indeed great players; that in many or most cases, a focus on memorization is damaging to the student’s work because it is disproportionately time-consuming and it leads to increased anxiety—anxiety that is often justified, since the attempt to play from memory does indeed often lead to reduced security and thus less command of the music; and that any meaningful advantages that are sometimes ascribed to memorization—which can be summed up as “knowing the music really well, inside and out”—can actually be achieved better by studying the music extremely thoroughly in a way that is governed by the idea of studying the music thoroughly, not by the goal of then being able to play it from memory. A substantial amount of what I have written in this column in the last few years has been geared towards helping students and their teachers develop ways of studying music very thoroughly, in a focused and efficient way. Further aspects of this study will of course occupy future columns as well.
In this month’s column I will write about a few more aspects of the memorization issue, including a (very) little bit about the history of memorization, the relationship between memorization and sight-reading, and some of what I think that we and our students can learn from thinking about the concept of memorization, even without taking the step of deciding to perform pieces from memory. I will also focus more on the other two aspects of playing—or learning to play—that I have mentioned as being related to memorization, that is, sight-reading and looking or not looking at the hands and feet.
It is commonly said that Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were the first keyboard players to play in public from memory. As far as I know, this is indeed true, although it is often the case that before the first famous person did any particular thing, there were less famous—or more-or-less unknown—people doing that same thing. In any case, when Schumann and, soon after her, Liszt began to play public piano recitals from memory, it was greeted as something new. It was also not greeted universally favorably. Both of these great performers were criticized for showing off, for putting their own displays of virtuosity ahead of the musical integrity of what the composers had written. (Apparently Clara Schumann came in for more of this criticism than Liszt, perhaps because she was the first, but, unfortunately, also because she was a woman.) It was probably largely the extraordinary popular success that Liszt enjoyed as a virtuoso performer—success that put him easily in the “rock star” category—that led to the spread of the practice of playing piano music from memory.
It is interesting to speculate for a moment about the relationship of memorization to the notion of authenticity to the composer. Of course, the most basic way to apply that type of “authenticity” to the memorization question would be to suggest that music should be memorized if the composer expected or wanted it to be memorized, and not memorized if the composer did not. It seems extremely unlikely that very many performers approach it this way. I have never myself noticed a pianist playing Liszt or other late nineteenth- or twentieth-century composers from memory, but not Beethoven, Brahms, or Schubert. Memorization seems as a normal matter to be associated with the identity of the performer rather than the identity of the composer. However, it is quite common for players who do regularly memorize their repertoire to report, as a matter of their experience, that older music is harder or in some way less natural to memorize than later music. On the whole, composers are probably more interested in having performers play their music promptly than in having them memorize it. It would make sense for composers to want good performers to be available routinely to learn new music rather than to spend their time on memorization. This, rather than any particular difficulty in memorizing the type of music, may explain why in the twentieth century there was an informal tradition against memorizing modern or avant-garde music.

Memorized works vs.
improvisations
After the growth of Lisztian memorized performance in the world of concert piano playing, the historical situation in the organ world was mixed. It is well known that Marcel Dupré played from memory and expected his students to do so; Maurice Duruflé did not. Surviving photographs of Alexandre Guilmant playing all show him with scores on the music desk. Pictures of Joseph Bonnet playing are always devoid of music, as are those of Günther Ramin. Of course Helmut Walcha, Jean Langlais, André Marchal, and other blind organists played from memory. Judging from photographs, Charles Tournemire played from music.
That is, Walcha, Langlais, and many others played from memory, or Tournemire played from music, when they were not improvising. The place of memorization in the history of organ playing must be seen, in part, in relation to the importance of improvisation in the work of organists over the centuries. If much of what is being done at the organ is improvisation, then the relative importance of playing music that other people have already written is reduced. Perhaps the sense of whether or not it is worth the time to memorize that music is affected by this.
At the same time, in a different way, I believe that the phenomenon of improvisation has shaped our perception of the meaning or importance of memorization in the opposite direction. Improvisation is a directly creative art, more directly creative than playing music that others have written, though not necessarily more important to the listening public or to the world of music as a whole. Improvisation is done without music on the music desk. I think that there is a chance that when some people react to performance from memory—without music on the music desk—as being on a higher artistic level than performance from printed music, they are being influenced in that judgment by the image of improvisation. At least, I think that this may be true—probably subconsciously—for some people, and it may shape the nature of the discussion about the supposed advantages or merits of playing from memory.

Related musical skills
There are also other ways in which playing from memory shares outward forms with other musical skills that themselves are often admired. For example, playing from memory is clearly easier for those who have perfect pitch, and when an audience sees a performance from memory, some of that audience probably react to that performer as being more professional, more of a musician even, because the memorized performance seems to imply perfect pitch. Or, to put it another way, it looks a lot like “playing by ear”, a skill that is often admired. (In fact, playing by ear is another one of those skills that are sometimes used almost to define great musicianship: “When he was only five years old he could hear something once and sit right down and play it,” etc.) Of course, playing by ear is an impressive skill, and it has uses in music-making. Perfect pitch can also be impressive, though its relationship to making music is complicated and not always positive. It is important, however, not to confuse these various issues. The impressiveness of the feat of playing by ear does not address anything about whether playing from memory leads to better performances.

Sight reading
Sight reading is, in a way, the opposite of playing from memory. It by definition requires the printed music, and the better a player is at it, the less he or she has to have studied the music before playing it. Good sight reading is a useful practical skill, especially for the most practical situations: the moment in church when the minister changes the hymn (to an unfamiliar one!) at the last minute, or the sudden request to participate in a vocal or chamber music recital. Ideally we can all choose our own repertoire in plenty of time to learn it the right way. In real life that does not always happen, and good sight-reading skills can come to the rescue. Good sight reading can also play an important part in the process of learning a piece carefully and well. Of course, learning any piece starts with reading something, whether that is a series of separate contrapuntal voices, or separate hands and feet, or a whole texture in small increments. The more accurate and comfortable that reading is, the more smoothly and, probably, the more quickly the process will go. That process can work perfectly well as long as the player can read music at all, but the earlier the reading is the faster the process will normally be.
However, really great sight reading—the kind that permits a player to sit down and perform a piece without having looked at it previously—can be a trap that leads to artistically unconvincing performances. This is because it allows players to short-circuit the process of really studying the music, discovering what is going on in the music, what the patterns are, what the overall shape is, what the rhetoric of each section or passage is about. Of course, this trap in its full form only lies in wait for a few of us, the most elite sight readers. (It is not a problem for me, for example.) However, it is a reminder of the major caution that I or any of us who do not practice or advocate memorization must give to ourselves. Since we allow ourselves to rely on the printed music in performance, we have a solemn responsibility not to use that music as a crutch propping up an inadequately prepared performance. This is what leads to the claim that un-memorized performance exists at a lower artistic level than memorized performance. I have been arguing that any suggested advantages to memorization in the realm of artistic quality of performance can actually be attributed to thorough study of the music, not to memorization itself. Obviously, in order for a non-memorized performance to express the fruits of thorough study, that study must have taken place. Over-reliance on reading ability is a threat to this, and we who do not memorize must be conscientious and honest with ourselves about this, and teach our students—and then expect them—to do the same.

Pros and cons
Although I have outlined reasons for not expecting our students to memorize or, certainly, requiring them to, I do not believe that memorization and performance from memory should be expunged from the life of the student and teacher. To start with, if a student wants to memorize pieces, I have no particular interest in discouraging that, let alone trying to forbid it. Some students, of course, come to their first organ teacher having already learned to memorize repertoire from the experience of studying piano. Some students do indeed find that they memorize fairly easily and naturally. However, just as we who perform from scores have a responsibility to be honest about the pitfalls of that approach, any student who wants to play from memory must realize the pitfalls of that approach. The first of these that can affect even very willing and successful memorizers is the time that it consumes. Is that worth it? The same time could be spent learning more music. Would, for example, learning all three Franck Chorals rather than memorizing one of them add to a student’s musical understanding of the Choral that the student might otherwise have memorized? Would the time spent memorizing the Bach “Dorian” Toccata be better spent learning a couple of Buxtehude Praeludia so as to understand better the background to Bach’s work? This particular question is less relevant the faster and easier a memorizer a student is, but it is of some relevance to anyone who expresses a preference for memorization.
Here’s another pitfall: Is a student memorizing only because he or she feels the need to look steadily at the keyboard? If so, then the time spent memorizing is clearly being misdirected. That student should, as a matter of overall security and reliability, learn to play with much less looking: the occasional glance rather than the eyes glued. After this has been accomplished—or indeed while it is being worked on—the commitment to memorization can be re-evaluated. Perhaps there will be other, better reasons for that student to continue to work on memorization, perhaps not. (Incidentally, learning to play with very little looking at the keyboard will greatly improve a student’s relationship to sight reading and to the early stages, at least, of working on a piece.)
Also, a student who chooses to memorize must be honest about whether that memorization work is really—really—correlated with thorough study of the music. It is certainly true that the process of memorization involves going over the music a lot in a way that can be short-circuited by those of us who play from score. However, to the extent that that repetition is training the muscle memory to react correctly and carry out the gesture that is supposed to come next, it isn’t necessarily about musical understanding at all. Also, if memorization is mostly physical—if the student would not be able to write the piece out from memory, or even to know and be able to describe away from the keyboard most of what comes next as the piece unfolds—then it is notoriously unreliable. In particular, it is subject to falling apart in the face of any distraction and then being very hard indeed to put back together.
Even a student who is not committed to memorization might be intrigued by trying it out as a special project or challenge on an occasional piece. I have no problem with this, as long as it is kept separate from an expectation that memorization will become the norm. It might make sense to start with a short piece—an Orgelbüchlein chorale, perhaps, or one of the short Vierne pieces. And this would be a particularly intense and interesting challenge if it were approached—at first—away from the keyboard. If, for example, a student memorizes each separate voice of a short chorale prelude away from the instrument—so that he or she could write it down—then brings each voice over to the console separately at first, and then puts those voices together from memory, that constitutes an intense and challenging mental workout. It is also a version of the kind of separate-voice study that I would recommend in any case.
Looked at this way, memorization has something in common with, for example, learning to read from seventeenth-century tablature, or making one’s own organ transcription of a song or a string quartet. It is a mental and musical exercise that might well be interesting and challenging, and that might yield some insights or unexpected results.
This topic of memorization is one about which I would particularly welcome feedback—ideas, anecdotes, reactions to anything that I have said. I will include some of that feedback in a future column. 

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

Buxtehude and Boëllmann—final thoughts (for now)
For the last year I have looked, in as much depth as space seemed to permit, at the process of studying and learning two contrasting and, I hope, complementary pieces—the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141 by Dietrich Buxtehude, and the Suite Gothique, op. 25 by Leon Boëllmann. This month I will share a few thoughts about this project as a whole; then next month I will turn to something new.
The goals of this long series of columns were really two: first, to provide a template for working on the two pieces, which, if followed, would help a student learn those pieces securely and comfortably; and second, to suggest ways of thinking about and working on organ repertoire that could be applied broadly to other pieces.

The learning process
The process of learning a piece of music on the organ can be thought of in three parts—parts that are not rigorously separate, but interact with and blend into one another. The first is the very practical: learning the notes by working out fingerings and pedalings, and by practicing the notes systematically and patiently—and practicing enough. The second is getting to know the piece as well as possible. This includes anything that permits the player to know, consciously or subconsciously, what is coming up next in the piece. This has a working relationship with the act of memorizing a piece, but doesn’t depend on memorization. (And indeed memorization does not guarantee really knowing the content of a piece musically.) This knowledge reinforces the learning that comes from practicing—makes it more secure. The third part comprises purely interpretive decisions that are made about how to play the piece: tempo, articulation, phrasing, and so on—and of course also registration.
In the columns of the last year I emphasized the first two of these, writing rather little about interpretation, for reasons that I will discuss below. Also, I only occasionally, when there seemed to be a particular reason for it, outlined a specific protocol for practicing a passage. That protocol is largely the same from one case to the next. Systematically organized and patiently carried out practicing is monumentally important. I will outline the most important points about it once more here.
1) Any student or other player can successfully play any passage right off the bat—sight read it—if he or she keeps it slow enough. The harder or more intricate a passage is, the slower it has to be at first. The simpler a passage is or the more it is broken down into simple parts, the less slow it needs to be.
2) The correct starting practice tempo for any passage is a tempo at which that passage is reliably accurate and feels easy. Again, the simpler a passage is, the less slow that tempo has to be. Practicing hands and feet separately allows the initial practice tempo to be less slow than it would have to be to cope with playing the whole texture from the very beginning. The most important thing to note is that an appropriate practice tempo is never defined in relation to the ultimate tempo of the piece or to anything about what sounds “musical.” Students can get into trouble because of a reluctance to practice too much more slowly than the tempo that they hear in their head for a piece. This should never be a consideration at this stage. The faster a piece is supposed to be in the end, the more important it is to practice it slowly enough in the beginning.
3) Once any passage, in any combination of hands and feet, has been played enough times at a given (appropriate) tempo, and feels really easy—essentially automatic—at that tempo, then it can always be played just a little bit faster. This is simply a fact about the human mind, brain, reflexes, muscles, and so on, which continues to be true as the passage increases in tempo towards (or beyond) where the player wants the piece to end up. Therefore:
4) Any passage or piece can always be learned—by anyone—by starting it at a slow-enough practice tempo and speeding it up in sufficiently small increments. Always—anyone. This only ever appears to have failed when the person claiming to have done it has not really done it. (I should know: I have from time to time been that person, led by busy-ness or laziness or distraction to cut corners. Most of us have done the same.) The teacher’s role in this process is to motivate the student to stick to practicing this way.
5) Choices about how much to simplify the increments in which a piece is practiced—that is, whether to practice a measure at a time, or a few measures, or half a piece or a whole piece, how much to practice separate hands, when to start putting things together, and so on—are really matters of the psychology and motivation of the student. Different choices will affect the trajectory of the learning of the piece, but not the final results, as long as the above principles are followed. Some students like working with larger or more complex chunks of music and are willing to keep them slow enough; other students would rather work with simpler or smaller bits and be able to have the “up-to-tempo” experience sooner with those bits.
(I want to mention, just by way of example, a recent experience that has come my way just by coincidence that touches on this. I have a student who has been working on the first Contrapunctus of The Art of Fugue—on harpsichord, and thus with all four voices in the hands—over the month or so prior to my writing this. She decided—after spending some time working out fingerings—that she would altogether skip the step of practicing hands separately. This was contrary to my assumption that she would work out each hand until it felt really ready before putting the two together. She did this because she found the whole texture fascinating and wanted to experience that texture from the beginning. And—this is crucial—she has made it work because she has been willing to keep the whole thing slow enough, and to crank it up to tempo very gradually indeed. I believe that it will take her longer to learn the piece this way, but she is finding it more interesting, and she will in the end learn it well. I should mention that she is playing through individual voices in the manner that I have often discussed, to learn them both aurally and structurally.)

Hand choices
I wrote quite a bit in recent columns about hand choices. These are a disproportionate and needless source of trouble for many students. Of course, if a passage involves the use of two keyboards, with one hand on each, then the player does not choose which hand plays which notes, and it was the composer’s job to make sure that the note patterns within each hand are plausible to finger and play. If both hands, and thus the whole manual part of the texture, are on the same keyboard, then it is extremely important that the student consider the two hands, ten fingers, to be one unit—a unit with the job of playing all of the notes in the most comfortable way, regardless of what note is printed in what staff. I have seen students classify whole pieces as un-learnable because of disadvantageous hand choices in a few salient difficult spots.

Getting to know the piece
In writing about getting to know the piece, I have tended to emphasize what might be called motivic analysis, but of an informal kind: simply noticing any melody, motif, theme, fragment, etc., that happens more than once. It has always been my experience that noticing things like this, even if this is not followed by the drawing of any particular analytic conclusions, leads both to more solid playing—by improving the ongoing remembering of what is coming up next in the piece as it goes along—and to more rhetorically convincing playing. However, getting to know the piece through noticing things about harmony or chord progressions, while not something that I tend to emphasize, can certainly also be useful.
A piece like the Toccata from the Suite Gothique is strongly chord-based. A trip through the piece, identifying chords by letter-name and type and also by relation to a local tonic or to the tonic of the piece, could aid in finding those chord shapes securely, and therefore in playing the piece well. A passage like the section of Buxtehude BuxWV 141 that begins at m. 60, though certainly conceived contrapuntally, can also be seen as organized around chord shapes, and taking note of what those chords are can also be useful in fixing the piece in the student’s mind.
Practice techniques
Practice techniques that I described in the last year’s columns might of course also suit other pieces. For example, in the final column on the Buxtehude, I discussed the technique of leaving out certain notes in a passage as a stage in practicing. This directs the attention of the ear to the stronger notes, and guides the player towards playing lighter notes lightly. I discussed this in connection with the fugue subject of the final section of the Praeludium. This approach could also be applied to the Boëllmann Toccata, leaving out the latter three sixteenth notes of each quarter-note beat in the right hand over the first nineteen measures of the movement, and similar passages, and playing the on-the-beat notes as (very) detached quarter notes. This would, among other things, elucidate the relationship between those notes and the left hand chords, which are in effect detached quarter notes.

Interpretation
I am very much a non-authoritarian when it comes to interpretation. I have no desire whatsoever for my students to play pieces the same way that I do, or in a way that I consider “right”. If a student of mine, or any other musician, plays a piece in a way that I really don’t like, or that I consider “wrong”, either based on analysis of the piece or historical considerations, then that is their business and not mine.
I am happy to share my reasons for liking or not liking anything, but only if the person with whom I am sharing those ideas is not going to feel obliged then to do things the way that I seem to want them done. I fear that the hand of a teacher’s artistic, aesthetic, and interpretive judgments can be a very heavy one for a student, even long after the teacher has modified or abandoned the particular opinion.
I try to consider any aesthetic judgment that I formed more than about five years earlier to be officially out-of-date and subject to being changed—or at least needing to be consciously re-thought before it is ratified. However, if I conveyed that judgment to a student with a kind of teacherly authority, then the student might have a hard time letting go of it, even if unknown to that student I have already done so. This is why I have tried to avoid statements of the sort—“this theme (or passage, or piece) should be played legato (or staccato, or with this or that phrasing)”—in these columns. Another reason for avoiding this is that my own interpretive thoughts about these pieces have changed at least somewhat as I have gotten to know them better by writing about them.
For example, I would now play the Prière à Notre-Dame a bit less slowly and significantly more freely than I would have expected to play it a year ago. It is also true that, outside of a certain level of generality, interpretive decisions in organ music depend on the instrument being used and on the acoustics of the performing space. The more solidly a piece has been learned, the more readily a performer can adapt his or her performance to the needs of a new instrument or a new acoustic situation.
I have enjoyed living with these two works for a year. They are both, beyond the nitty-gritty of working on them, expressive, exciting pieces that are viscerally fun to play as well as wonderful to hear and interesting to think about. Next month I plan to write about memorization. This is a subject that arises fairly naturally out of the attempt to learn a piece or two really well. The question of the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning of a piece is a complex and controversial one. I will try to explore a number of different ways of thinking about it, and give an account of my own views and my own experience. 

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 3

The core of this month’s column is a description of the approach that I suggest for drilling and learning the actual—improvised—creation of continuo parts at the keyboard. The fundamental reason that it is better to improvise continuo parts than to play from a part—a realization—written out in advance is that the most effective continuo accompaniment is one that is flexible. Even at the last minute, but certainly during any process of rehearsal and preparation, it is important to be able to make basic decisions about what notes to play in response to things that we hear from the other players: dynamics, accentuation, intonation, and so on. The earlier in the process the notes are fixed once and for all, the less flexible it is possible to be. So, in playing, unaltered, a continuo realization written by the editor of a published version of a piece, we are committing ourselves to having no flexibility whatsoever during the rehearsal and performance process. Most published realizations are very thick—four voices most of the time—and, in the judgment of many players and listeners, too busy, too noisy. (This is especially true when they are played on organ or harpsichord. At the piano the busy-ness can be made less of a problem by simply playing the part more quietly.) But any realization that is created beforehand, even a wonderfully musical and sensitive one, lacks this flexibility. A player who works out a continuo realization during preparation and rehearsal, and writes it down planning to play it as is, has the opportunity to make it a good realization. But in this approach, last-minute flexibility is still lacking. 

(Actual last-minute flexibility—the ability to change the notes of a continuo part in performance from what they were even a short time before in rehearsal—can be desirable for several reasons. Some of these are: a change in the room acoustics with the arrival of an audience; an unanticipated change in the way a colleague is playing his or her part; problems in performance that suggest that you must project the beat more forcefully; and—most happily!—the fact that a new and better idea occurs to you.)

It also turns out to be easier in the end to learn how to realize continuo parts at sight than either to write them out in advance or to edit existing, published realizations to make them suitable for a given occasion. (And “suitable” still doesn’t take the idea of flexibility into account.) My own reason for plunging into studying continuo realization in the first place—about twenty-five years ago—was not anything artistically significant, but rather extreme annoyance with the mechanics of writing out parts for myself: it was boring, and it took too long.

In the decades following the disappearance of continuo playing as a living art, the notation and technique of continuo realization—figured-bass realization—was borrowed to fill various roles in the teaching of theory, harmony, and counterpoint. It is routine, almost universal, nowadays that anyone who has studied music theory at the college level has spent time learning how to concoct and write out realizations of figured bass lines. Because this activity is done in order to further the learning of something other than actual continuo playing, the kind of realization that is being sought is very different from what is best in performance. Specifically, in theory class, or a similar setting, it is almost always considered necessary to realize in a certain number of contrapuntal voices—probably ideally four, or three to make it easier. The rules of voice leading of course must be followed, and perhaps it is expected that each voice will be kept mostly within a certain range. Often this kind of exercise is presented in two alternate versions: one with all of the added notes in what amounts to the right hand—say, middle C and above—and the other with the four voices more or less evenly distributed, creating a hymn-like texture. In any case, again, all of the rules must be followed. It is (mostly) the need to avoid parallel fifths and octaves that can make practitioners of this sort of exercise tear their hair out. 

It is often their experiences with figured-bass realization in such a context that leads students to believe that it is almost unimaginably hard to play continuo at sight. After all, if something is so difficult and awkward even when you have all day to puzzle over it, to try different things, and to write it out, study it, and think about it, then it must be effectively impossible to do it off the cuff while other musicians are actually playing and expecting you to keep up. This logic is good, but the facts are wrong. What you do when actually playing continuo bears very little relation to the “figured-bass as theory-learning tool” activity, and is in some ways directly opposed to it. The last thing that is desirable in a “real” continuo part is, of course, that the number of voices remain always the same. That immediately and utterly prevents us from using the realization process to influence rhythm, dynamics, texture, and so on. That is, it takes away the very reason for the existence of continuo accompaniment. 

The process of actually learning to play continuo, therefore, does not go through the kind of theory-oriented figured-bass study that I describe above. That kind of study can serve a purpose similar to the reading exercise that I included in last month’s column, that is, to bring a student to the point of knowing the meaning of the figures with real immediacy and ease. (It is overkill for that purpose, in the amount of time and effort that it takes, but it does accomplish it.) For every aspect of learning continuo playing after the meaning of the figures is well established, work on “continuo as theory/harmony/counterpoint” is actually taking us in the wrong direction.

If a student develops a strong sense—simultaneously conscious and instinctive—of what constellation of keys on the keyboard any given note/figure combination is pointing towards, and this sense directs the fingers towards those notes without the need to think much about it, then that student can play continuo at sight. That is, when the student who can already pick up the exercise from the last month’s column and “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’” can play those notes rather than say them, he or she can take on continuo parts from real pieces with other players also playing.

The most effective way to develop that sense goes like this:

1) Find a bass line with some figures. It doesn’t matter very much what the bass line is, although lines from harmonically dense choral or orchestral music can be harder to deal with than is ideal at this stage. Handel chamber music is one excellent source, among many. (A public domain edition can be found at this address: <http://216.129.110.22/files/imglnks/usimg/4/4d/IMSLP05632-Handel_19_Son…;. There are appropriate bass lines on more or less every page.) The bass line can come from a slow or a fast movement. For reasons explained below, this doesn’t matter at all. It need not be a complete movement of a piece or any coherent section, just some notes and figures.

2) Put this bass line up on the music desk of a keyboard instrument. For this purpose it doesn’t matter what instrument: harpsichord, organ, piano, electronic keyboard—anything with at least about four octaves of normal keys.

3) Prepare to play the line very slowly. Because the tempo at which you play this bass line and do this exercise bears no relation to anything about performing the piece from which you have extracted the line, it doesn’t matter what the tempo of that piece might normally be. Each note of the bass line must come along very slowly, regardless of whether it is printed as a whole note or a thirty-second note or anything else. For someone beginning this process, the notes of the bass line should come at a rate of no more than ten or twelve per minute. But that is just a guideline: slower is always fine; faster is also fine if it works.

4) As you play the bass line very slowly, try, for each note of the line, to play (in the right hand) some version—any version—of the notes suggested by the bass note and its figuring. Do not think about anything other than playing something that counts as the right notes: the playing equivalent of what you thought or said in doing the exercise from last month. Specifically, do not worry about the spacing of chords, the part of the compass of the instrument, or the nature of the transition from what you play with one bass note to what you play with the next. Do not worry in the least about parallel fifths or octaves or whether notes resolve correctly. 

5) If you cannot—more or less in tempo—think of any notes to add above a given bass note, simply move on. Do not worry about this. If, the first time through, you only add ordinary triads above the “8,5,3” notes—or even only above some of them—and nothing “fancier”, do not worry about this. 

6) After you have played the bass line and whatever notes you have added in this way once, do it again. Don’t increase the tempo. Try to add some notes where you didn’t the first time. Then, of course, do it a few more times. If it feels natural to let the tempo increase a little bit that is all right, but by no means necessary. However:

7) Do not play the same line more than several times. If after a while (four or five times through) you have not succeeded in providing right hand notes for all of the bass line, don’t worry about this either. The effectiveness of this drill does not depend on “solving” the entire bass line, but rather on developing a sense of spontaneity with those spots that you do solve. If you play over it too many times in a row, that sense of spontaneity will be lost and replaced by excessive concern for getting it all right. 

8) Choose another bass line, and do all of the above again. This can be another section from the same movement or piece, or something completely different. Practice this way with as many bass line passages as possible. Never stay with one of them so long that you feel like you know it and are simply repeating something that you have already learned: move on to another one. Try to use lines in different keys, but you need not seek out anything too unusual: two sharps or flats is far enough along the circle of fifths for now. If most of what you use is in keys with one or no sharps or flats that is OK. Just don’t stick to only one key. That can become a rut.

All of the details above are important, but clearly step 4 is the essence of this exercise. Here are a few more specific thoughts about how to carry out that step.

a) It is perfectly all right for the tempo of the bass line not to be entirely steady. (This is certainly different from most types of practicing.) It doesn’t exactly need a tempo, but only be not too fast. If you need to draw one note out a little bit longer to think about what to play over that note, that is OK, as long as it is only a little bit. If you are really, in effect, stopping to figure something out, then that defeats the purpose.

b) You need not play all the notes that you add at the same time as the bass note or together with one another, though as you do more of this exercise you should discover that you can add the relevant notes with or close to the bass note more of the time. Initially it is perfectly acceptable to do something like this: set a metronome to 60; allow each bass note to last for eight metronome beats; expect to play the added notes on or near the fifth metronome beat; use the last beat or two to begin to look ahead at the next note. The numbers are arbitrary; the principle of keeping it slow and careful is crucial.

c) If you make certain kinds of mistakes about what the figuring means or what notes would be appropriate to add over a particular bass note, this doesn’t matter! One extraordinary thing about this exercise is that it usually leads a student to the right place even if it is done wrong. The most common way that this comes up has to do with un-figured notes. If you mistakenly assume that a passing tone is not a passing tone, and therefore add chords to bass notes that are not supposed to have anything added, this just constitutes more (fully useful) practice. If you interpret as a passing tone a note that really should have something added, and don’t add anything, that is a very minor wasted opportunity. It doesn’t mislead or do any harm. If you forget, for example, that “7” usually implies “7,5,3” and just play the pitch seven degrees above the bass note, that is still useful practice in developing the spontaneity that we are looking for. There is time to refine and fill in gaps in your awareness of what the figuring means and what the abbreviation conventions were later on. 

d) Likewise, leaving out things that are too complicated or unexpected—for example a figuring like “9, 7#, 4, 3b”—is not a problem. You have simply utilized one less practice note: no harm done. Reading really elaborate, complicated, counterintuitive figures can come later. In any case they are extremely rare. It is of course OK not to leave them out, but only if they are accurate and don’t slow the process up very much.

e) Of course, really fundamental mistakes—taking “6,3” to mean the notes one and four steps above the bass, for example, or anything else really egregious—will lead to trouble. Real misunderstanding at a fundamental level will be hard to eradicate later on. Therefore this exercise should come, as I said above, only after the student has comfortably learned the basic meaning of the figures.  

f) It is extremely important to resist the temptation to write anything down about a realization. The sole purpose of this drill is to develop the reading faculties as they apply to figured bass lines. Any time you write anything—a note or chord or a reminder perhaps expressed as a letter-name for a pitch—you have lost the opportunity to develop that reading, and in fact you are training yourself to be unable to do it. 

g) It is perfectly OK, though, to flesh out the figuring itself. The relative completeness of the figuring of the line that you happen to be using for practice is arbitrary. If you make it more complete before playing from it that is fine. (See, for example, the two versions of the Handel bass line that I included in last month’s column. Either of them is good material for this sort of practice.)

After doing a certain amount of this work, the student will be ready to begin thinking about how to shape an accompaniment for “real life” use, and to begin playing pieces with other musicians. This “certain amount” is often something like 25 or 30 bass lines, each eight to sixteen measures, each played five or six times. That is not a lot, but this method is extremely efficient. Some students will need or want to do more than that; some will be ready to move on to the next stage sooner.  

I will return to the subject of continuo playing and deal with approaches to entering that next stage in a future column. Not next month, however; I want to give readers a chance to digest what I have written about it so far and, if so inclined, to try out the drill suggested here or to have their students do so. I welcome both questions about that process as it unfolds, from anyone who is trying it, and any other feedback.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at

Repertoire, part 2
Last month’s column was in large part an argument in favor of letting students work on whatever music they want to work on: that is, not believing that it is necessary for a student’s development that he or she work on any particular piece or pieces, or on any particular subset of the repertoire. I base this belief on several things: the large size and great diversity of the repertoire; the fact that any student works better—and any performer, no matter how accomplished, plays better—when he or she really likes and cares about the music involved; and that it is better—more interesting—for the world as a whole if organists learn and play as wide a variety of pieces as possible, rather than all focusing on a narrow “standard” repertoire.
This month I want to address some ways of implementing this philosophy. Letting students work on the music that they really want to work on does not, of course, mean just coming to lessons with no ideas about repertoire: just shrugging the shoulders and saying “work on whatever you want.” That would be abdicating our responsibility to help students find out what it is that they might like or want to work on. The point is to figure out how much help each student needs in exploring the repertoire, and then to offer that help in a way that is maximally helpful and minimally coercive. That way we will never lose the advantages created by the student’s own intense involvement with the music.

Determining what to study
It can be very productive to start the first session with a new student by asking a question more or less like this: “why are you interested in studying organ right now?” Many students will talk about the instrument as such, perhaps their love for organ sound. Some will also talk about something in their life experience, maybe some involvement with the church or with church music. But most will also talk about repertoire. They will say that they have always loved Bach, or Baroque music, or that they are fascinated by French Romantic or twentieth-century music. I have had students, at this early stage, mention something very specific and unusual: Messiaen, for example, or Rorem, or the Couperin organ Masses.
If this question does not evoke any response about repertoire, then it is a good idea to ask more specific, targeted questions: What music have you worked on in the last couple of years (for existing organists)? What organ music have you heard that you like (for new organists)? What non-organ music have you played by organ composers? What music do you like to listen to? Have you worked on any pieces that you found frustrating? Why were they frustrating (if you know)? One of the most fruitful questions of all is “What piece is it your dream to work on?” Or, to put it another way, “What piece would you love to work on right now, but you assume that it is too hard?”
These are all questions that can, of course, be asked and explored at any time, not just at the first lesson. Such a discussion will tell the teacher a lot about the student’s relationship to the repertoire and will give the teacher specific answers to specific questions: what music the student likes, already knows about, is interested in. It can be even more important, though, for the teacher to read between the lines. Does the student have strong opinions about music? Does he or she already know and talk about a wide range of repertoire? Has the student listened to or studied any non-keyboard music by organ composers? These are all things that can help a teacher make good judgments about how much guidance a particular student will need in looking for music, how much prodding and suggesting might be necessary, or, on the other hand, how much the student can be expected to use his or her own initiative. There are clues to look for beneath the surface. For example, if the student talks about a composer and you mention a related composer (Vierne to the student’s Widor, or Buxtehude to the student’s Bach—or vice versa) does the student respond with recognition or not? Does that conversation develop naturally or does it—without a lot of teacher input—just fizzle out? Does the student know about the relationships between different kinds of organs and different kinds of repertoire? Perhaps the most important thing to look for is this: that which makes the student look animated, happy, excited, involved.
It is not possible to say specifically and in advance exactly what a teacher can learn or will conclude from these conversations. In some cases, nothing will come of all of this except that the student and teacher will get to know one another better—always a good thing. Sometimes the teacher will both learn what music the student likes and begin to form a sense of how to get the student interested in other music. The point is to start the conversation, pay close attention, and see where it leads.
The two practical issues that are of most concern regarding letting students themselves decide what to work on are, first of all, the problem of pieces that are too hard, and, second, the teacher’s responsibility to help (or perhaps even force!) the student to become well-rounded.

Issue: What is too hard?
A friend of mine went, sometime around 1980, for her first meeting with an eminent harpsichord teacher with whom she was planning to study. Near the beginning of the lesson he asked her “What would you really like to work on?” Her response was “Well, of course the Goldberg Variations, but I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be, it’s so hard, imposing, virtuosic, etc., etc.” And his reply to this was “Put it up on the music desk—of course you should work on it now!” Her morale and her level of interest and commitment shot up through the roof right away. She reported on this glowingly, to me and to others. This was what first convinced me that it was important for a student to love the music that he or she was working on. It also impressed me a lot that an experienced teacher was not afraid to encourage a new student to reach for something very challenging indeed.
However, the question still is: what is and what isn’t too hard? Of course it makes sense that any student should, in some sense, work on pieces that are of an appropriate level of difficulty. That is, pieces that are somewhat challenging—that stretch the student’s abilities out, that teach something new—but that don’t create discouragement by being so hard that the feedback they give is only negative. If a student has no very particular ideas about what music he or she wants to work on, then the teacher is free to take level of difficulty into account in helping the student choose pieces. For a new student, the judgment about this matter can arise in part out of the kind of discussion described above. For an existing student, the teacher will already have knowledge and context to go on.
Sometimes, however, a student suggests some music that the teacher suspects might be so difficult or so complex that working on it would be at best unproductive and at worst actually damaging. There are several ways to deal with this. One way, of course, is to tell the student that the particular piece is inappropriate and should be postponed. In spite of my emphasis on letting students work on the music that they want to work on, I don’t believe that this is necessarily always wrong. To begin with, there is certainly no reason not to tell the student what you are thinking and to discuss it. If it honestly appears to you, after this discussion, that your student would be just as happy working on something else—perhaps something easier but musically similar to the original piece—then there is nothing wrong with proceeding that way. (However, it is important to remember that many students are reluctant to disagree [openly] with what the teacher suggests, and that most students will hide it if they are disappointed or discouraged. You as a teacher should require a fair amount of convincing that it is really all right with your student not to work on whatever it is that the student has brought in. You should not assume or accept this too readily.) If you are convinced that a piece is categorically too hard—regardless of how the student feels about it and taking into account some of the suggestions below—then it is important to explain to the student why the piece is not right, what you and he or she can work on to get ready for that piece, and, if possible, how long that is likely to take.
If you and your student decide to go ahead with a piece that seems, on paper, too hard, then there are several ways to structure the work on that piece to make it indeed fruitful and appropriate. The first thing to do is to make sure that the student understands that a too-hard piece has to be allowed to take time. That is, in exchange for working on a difficult piece, the student must be willing to be patient, to work hard, and to plan on not getting discouraged or bored if this one piece stretches out for months or longer. (My experience is that any number of months spent working well on one difficult piece will advance the student’s overall abilities at least as much as the same time spent working on several easier pieces. I don’t have any trouble reassuring students about this.)
Second, it is important that the student be willing to break the piece down in ways that make it easier: in effect turning it into several, or many, easier pieces. This means doing an especially good and thorough job of some of the things that we should all do anyway with all of our pieces: working on separate hands and feet; working on small sections; teasing out individual voices; practicing slowly; practicing even more slowly! Again, this can be part of a deal with the student: you may work on this (too hard) piece that you love, but only if you will work on it the right way. It is possible to consider a small section of a long difficult piece to be a piece in itself. The student can work on that section, and then student and teacher together can decide whether going on to the next part of the piece is the best way to use the student’s time, or whether it would be better to turn to something else.
Here it is worth mentioning the “two-way street” aspect of the act of working on repertoire. We work on pieces, in part, as a way of helping us get better as players—more skillful, more versatile, more confident. The pieces that we work on are the fodder for this process. At the same time, we strive to get more skillful, versatile, and confident so that we can better play the pieces that we want to play. A situation in which a student is working on a piece that he or she loves, that provides some challenges, and that he or she can learn well and perform is an ideal one. However, working on a section of a piece, even without ever going on to the rest of it, or working on aspects of a piece—just the pedal part, or just the separate voices, for example, or certain passages that present particular fingering issues—can be completely valid as a way of using repertoire to advance one’s playing ability. It is wonderful to learn complete pieces—obviously utterly necessary for anyone who wants to perform. However, it is not necessary to insist on finishing every piece that you start. It is all right sometimes only to work one side of this street. It can actually free a student up to try more things—both things that are more difficult and things that are unfamiliar or even unappealing at first—if the student knows that it is OK to re-evaluate the decision to work on something if that something turns out not to be rewarding.
Sometimes a student will bring in pieces that seem to be too easy. These are pieces that the student is interested in, but that the teacher fears would not really help the student to learn anything: that is, that they would not advance the student’s facility or technique, or teach any new skills. This is working the other side of the street. Pieces in this category can be used for relaxation, just to let the student have the pleasure of playing something that is fun to play. This can be important for morale and for pacing one’s efforts. However, it is also true that there is nothing—literally nothing—that is so easy that it can’t teach something to any student or even to any advanced player. A piece consisting of a single middle c held for a few beats (to reduce it to the absurd) could still afford an opportunity to work on touch, posture, relaxation, breathing, listening to sonority and to room acoustics, and probably a lot more. Any piece can be used to work on those things and also on technical and psychological performance values: accuracy, security, articulation, timing, rhythm, and so on. If a piece seems very easy, then the student can take on the challenge of playing it even better.

Issue: Becoming well rounded
It is certainly important for a teacher to offer students help in the matter of becoming well rounded—generally knowledgeable about the repertoire and the instrument. There are two reasons that I do not believe that the matter of what pieces a student works on and plays while studying is the crucial part of this process. (Of course, it is always part of the process.) One reason is that there is so much music in the repertoire that any attempt to get to know all of it in a fairly short time will inevitably be just a token. The other is that a student who is taught how to listen carefully and open-mindedly and how to practice well will have a lifetime to explore the repertoire. There is no hurry, and it is better for anyone to work on any given part of the repertoire at a time when he or she has become genuinely interested in it.
If the repertoire that a student really wants to work on (with whatever amount of prodding or guidance from the teacher seems helpful, but with no coercion) happens to cover quite a few different composers, from different time periods and geographic areas, that is fine. However, even in that case it is not actually true that the student has covered the whole repertoire. In fact, the difference between this student and one who has chosen to work on only German Baroque music (as I did in graduate school) or only Franck and Widor is small. It is not a difference worth pursuing at the expense of any of the student’s sense of joy and commitment.
However, it is a very good idea for a teacher to help students to know what repertoire is out there, and to offer them a chance to figure out what might be interesting to them. One of the best ways of doing this has always been to get students to listen to a lot of music. Listening is easy and non-time-consuming compared to practicing and learning pieces. In the past, the best way to talk about listening to a lot of organ music would have involved mentioning record libraries or used record stores—also perhaps friends with record collections, or organ concert series. These possibilities all still exist. However, recent technology has of course added to them. I will mention a few Internet-based approaches to exploring the organ literature. Of course, it is the nature of such things that these specific resources may vanish. But if so they may be replaced with others.
At the website orgelconcerten.ncrv.nl, under the heading Archief, are recordings of hundreds of performances by organists of the last several decades. Many of these are concert performances. This is an extraordinary resource for getting to know the playing of a wide variety of organists, but it is also a very good way to hear repertoire. The list of composers represented is over 250 in number and covers more than five hundred years. The assignment of listening to all of it (or, say, listening to a piece or two from each composer whose name is unfamiliar) would be highly informative and educational for any organist.
There are several ways to find (free) printed music on the Internet. Two of these are http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer.php and http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. These sites both have a fair amount of organ music. Of course, they can be used to acquire printed music for use: that is, for pieces that a student wishes to work on. They can also be used, however, to explore the repertoire. For example, a student equipped with a list of organ composers (which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_composers for example, or through traditional sources such as The New Grove or various books about organ history) can visit the Icking Archive, look for names of organ composers, and look at and begin to analyze representative pieces, or follow the scores while listening to a recording, or print out and (slowly) sight-read opening pages of many pieces just to get a sense of what they’re like.
Another way for students to get to know about, and perhaps become interested in, composers with whom they are not already familiar—especially with more recent composers—is to read the composers’ writings. There are writings in print by Saint-Saëns, Reger, Messiaen, Rorem, Dupré, and many others. Reading the thoughts of a composer—especially if those are provocative and interesting—is a wonderful way to spark interest in that composer’s music.

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

Seeing the Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggestions for seeing music
clearly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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