On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part III

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1

In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="http://[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Authenticity
This month’s column is about authenticity in the study and performance of music. Or, more accurately, it suggests ways that teachers can help students grapple with questions of authenticity. As with the teaching of other technical or specific aspects of playing, I think that teaching about authenticity should be done in a way that respects students’ individuality and autonomy, that increases rather than limits choice, and that helps students to feel ever more comfortable making choices of their own. This might seem to be a paradox, since the concept of “authenticity” might seem to carry with it an air of “authority,” of “right or wrong,” of “we know how it was done and (therefore) how it should be done.” In fact, however, ideas, information, concepts, and modes of analysis that one way or another reside in the realm of authenticity—historical authenticity or concern for the composers’ intentions—are neither more nor less authoritarian in nature than any other ideas that might arise in the work of a musician. They can be thought about, accepted, rejected, used in different ways by different performers, and used in different ways by the same performer at different times or under different circumstances.
What follows is not an outline for a curriculum about historical authenticity. Rather, it is a somewhat personal miscellany of questions, ideas, and interesting quotes. I have always liked and admired the approach of Peter Williams as described in the Preface to the Second Edition of his extraordinary book The Organ Music of J. S. Bach: “[this book’s] style and method still work towards framing questions rather than defining answers.” Answers are important, but questions are even more so. Answers quite properly change, as new information comes in or as circumstances change. Questions normally shouldn’t go away, though new ones should always be expected to arise.

Why does authenticity matter?
The first question, logically, is this: why do we or should we care about authenticity? Ways of thinking about this question seem to me to hold the key to freeing the concept of authenticity from the burden of authoritarianism. In fact, as far as I am concerned there is no reason that we should care about authenticity—emphasis on the word “should”. There are many ways in which caring about authenticity can be rewarding. There are also ways in which we automatically and inevitably care about authenticity whenever we study or play music that we are not ourselves improvising at that moment. In fact, questions about whether or not—and how—to care about authenticity are really questions about how far to take our concern for authenticity and how to shape it. However, if anyone who plays music wishes to say, in effect “thank you, composer, for having provided me with a set of notes; I will now do the rest,” I believe that this is perfectly OK: not immoral, dishonest, or inartistic, though also not my own choice. Between this attitude and what might be considered its polar opposite—“I will never play anything unless I can be convinced that my performance is literally indistinguishable from that of the composer”—there lie all of the real-life possibilities for approaches to authenticity.
Not surprisingly, I have never actually known anyone to articulate either of these extreme positions as their own, though Wanda Landowska came close to the former position late in her life. (This was not exactly out of lack of respect for composers or their intentions, but out of the interesting but perhaps questionable idea that she had by then come to know the music so well that she was as much of an authority on it as the composers could have been.) The latter attitude—hyper-authenticity—I have only heard as a parody of historical-mindedness by people who were themselves essentially against it. It seems to me that any underlying philosophical attitude towards historical authenticity can be artistically rewarding if it is honestly and joyously held by the musician—student or experienced player. The attempt, on the part of a teacher or of any “expert” or (worst of all) of the student’s own superego, to impose a particular attitude about authenticity creates the danger that authenticity will be felt as a burden or a constraint.

What is authenticity?
What is this “authenticity” then, about which we each have a somewhat different attitude? After all, the nature of what is being sought must have some influence on our attitudes about seeking it. One way to look at historical authenticity is, as I alluded to above, as a simple amplification of the basic question: “what is this piece?” If we tell our audience that we are playing such-and-such a piece, then we expect ourselves—and they have the right to expect us—to play that piece. If I (just to put it absurdly) announce that I am going to play the Bach F-major Toccata and then sit down at the organ and play the note middle C hundreds of times in a row, I have not done what I said I was going to do. If I make the same claim and then play most of the notes of the actual BWV 540, but omit the pedal solos, then I have probably also not done what I said I was going to do. If I attempt to play the piece but make a truly astonishing number of wrong notes, then I have perhaps also not done so. If I play all of the notes, accurately and completely, but really slowly—sixteenth-note equals 32, say—then have I performed the piece? Suppose I play a slow piece mind-bendingly fast, so that cantabile lines become lightening-fast passage work and the listener can’t recognize pitches. How off-tempo must a piece be to cease being that piece?
Now, less absurdly, suppose that I make legato that which the composer clearly intended to be detached, or the other way around? Suppose that I make lines so detached that the overlapping of the notes of suspensions is lost? Suppose that I make very strict and metronomic a piece or passage that the composer has clearly marked as free or molto rubato? Suppose that the piece isn’t marked that way, but that we know that the composer expected it to be played that way? Suppose that I change the sonority, perhaps playing the Widor Toccata on an 8-foot Gedeckt throughout? Suppose that the changes in sonority, rhythm, or articulation are quite subtle? At what point does a piece become not that piece?
There are no definitive answers to questions like this. And the point of asking them is not to suggest that they can or must be answered before we can just relax and play music. The point is to suggest that the information that we might seek in the name of authenticity is not the stuff of some arcane intellectual pursuit, but rather a common-sense extension of what we do anyway when we open up a score and start to learn it. For some pieces, we do not even know for sure what the basic note picture is, in every detail. This can be true because of misprints or other problems in transmission, or because a composer left alternate versions. With aspects of “what the piece really is” that go beyond the notes themselves, of course the proportion of i) what we can know for sure, ii) what we know fairly well, and iii) what we honestly don’t know shifts toward the latter two. This can be a source of frustration or a source of freedom—probably both for most of us.

Finding authenticity
However, for me, knowing as much as I can about anything that might legitimately be part of “what the piece really is” is liberating. If I know all that can be known about a piece or a segment of the repertoire—no more and no less—then I can make my own decisions about how I want to play that piece or that repertoire. To the extent that I don’t know all that there is to be known, I am letting my performance of that piece be shaped by forces that are not my own, the nature of which I might not even understand. These forces include arbitrary or incorrect traditions that have grown up around a piece or a part of the repertoire, judgments by an editor that might be correct or incorrect but that shouldn’t pre-empt my own judgments, and unconscious habits of my own that I might want to change or to apply differently if I thought them through.
(If I pick up a novel that I want to read, I expect to be able to read the text of that novel as is. If, in the copy I have, a previous reader has written notes—“this character is odd,” “the best part is coming up!,” “I’m not sure I believe this,” etc.—then, in effect, I cannot do my own reading of the book. I can’t help filtering my reading through those comments. This is so unsatisfying that I will either look for another copy or not read the book at all. Even if I would have ended up agreeing with the comments—in fact even if I wrote them myself years before—they destroy my autonomy in reading the book. For me anything other than knowing what there is to know about a piece of music—again, no more and no less—creates a similar situation.)
As one interesting example, consider wanting to learn and play some Reger on an organ in a church in the U.S.—any organ, but let us assume it is not an accurate re-creation of an organ that Reger would have known. How would one’s approach differ in each of the following circumstances:
1) never heard of swell pedal, crescendo pedal or Rollschweller
2) heard of swell pedal and crescendo pedal but not Rollschweller
3) heard of swell pedal only
4) heard of all three, and have a good sense of what each one does
5) believe that Reger wrote in the eighteenth century, and that dynamic markings must have been added by an editor
6) have never seen dynamic markings before and don’t know what they mean.
Perhaps the last two seem silly, but each of us starts with that lack of knowledge with respect to at least some repertoire; I have certainly done so over the years. In any case, the task would be the same under each condition, that of adapting Reger’s intentions and the rhetoric of the music to an instrument different from the ones for which it was conceived. But the approach and the results would probably be quite different.
So the search for accurate historical information is, at one level, just a tool for creating the conditions for thinking honestly and with autonomy about how to interpret and play a piece. As such, this search implies literally nothing about how the information should be used. It is perfectly possible to say “yes, this piece probably was meant (by its composer) to go this way, but I want it to go that way,” as long as one is honest about this thought process. (I mean honest with one’s self. It is not particularly anyone else’s business unless you want it to be.) The next level of the search for authenticity is this: that, for some people, the very phenomenon of being in sync with the artistic intentions of another person—say of a great composer—is desirable and satisfying in itself. Most of us have had this feeling to some extent, and some of us have to a very great extent indeed. For some, it is a large part of the joy of being involved with music—for others, it is more or less a spice or a bonus: satisfying, but of fairly little importance.
The presence or absence of this feeling will certainly inform anyone’s decisions about how to use any valid historical information. It is through this connection, perhaps, that certain kinds of second-level or “meta” historical information become important. For example, we may know that Bach played his pieces on a certain kind of organ or harpsichord, but what do we know of his attitude towards the playing of his music on other instruments? We know that he did a fair amount of transcribing: violin pieces for harpsichord, and so on. Or do we? Many or perhaps all of those transcriptions may have been done by others in his circle, though perhaps with his knowledge. He certainly traveled and played organs other than the ones in his immediate home area. On one trip he played on a “piano”, though one that sounded more like a harpsichord than like a modern piano. What did he think of this experience? We don’t know.
What was Bach’s own attitude towards the question of how essential different aspects of music creation were? That is, did he believe that the note-picture of a piece and the theoretical structure that it creates are the entire essence of a piece, or did he believe that the sonority, for example, is equally essential. Here’s a paradox: if Bach believed the former, but I as a modern performer believe the latter, then am I coming closer to being “in sync” with Bach if I pursue all the knowledge that I can find about instruments, playing techniques, etc., or if I don’t? (This is hypothetical, since we really don’t know Bach’s attitude on this point.) Certainly most composers over the centuries have not been predominantly interested in discovering and (authentically) performing old music. Does this mean that if we use historical research to try to answer the question of “what the piece really is,” but the composer of that piece would never have used or advocated those techniques, we are being unfaithful to the composer while being faithful to the piece? Is this another paradox?

Historical re-creation
At this point I want to say something about historical re-creation. One criticism of the whole enterprise of seeking authenticity in playing music is that “we don’t live in their times, therefore we just can’t make their music.” This implies that the search for an accurate historical understanding of the pieces that make up our repertoire is somehow intended as an attempt to turn back the clock and re-create the times in which the pieces were written, or that it ought to be intended that way, but that at the same time this is impossible and absurd. So, if we want to try to find fingerings and hand positions that facilitate the execution of notes inégales in the music of Couperin, we must also eat what Couperin ate, and forswear cars, etc. (I understand that this is a rare criticism, but it is sort of “in the air” and I have indeed known students to shy away from seeking historical information for fear of being subject to it in their own minds or others.) Certainly some people find it fascinating to try, in a circumscribed way, to re-create things about living in the past or to re-enact aspects of life in distant times. There is certainly nothing wrong with that. However, that is not the point of gathering accurate historical information about musical repertoire and performance. The point is, once again, to know what the piece is, and then to use that knowledge and that piece in your own life and times in whatever ways are fruitful and useful. It is in every way analogous to cleaning an old painting that has become grimy. It is not necessary to live like Rembrandt in order to prefer to see his paintings without a layer of grease and dirt.
Many years ago, my teacher and friend Paul Jordan said something to me along the following lines: that the act of doing something in performance because you yourself honestly believe in it artistically is categorically different from the act of doing something because you have been told that it is “right”. This has always seemed to me to be true, certainly at an artistic level, but also at a practical level: performing is hard, and performing while trying to remember a way of doing things that you have only learned externally is astonishingly hard. I myself have become convinced of the artistic value of honestly seeking accurate historical information through a circumstance that more or less bypasses analysis: my own true experience has been that when I discover something about the playing of a piece that seems to be a more authentic expression of what the composer intended, I believe that it made the piece better: more expressive, more intense, more moving. This is not, on reflection, surprising. Composers by and large know what they are doing, and most of them, being practical musicians, develop consummate skill at working with the materials at hand.
If however I try something—fingering, registration, an approach to rhythm, phrasing, or articulation—that I believe to be an accurate reflection of what the composer intended, and, in good faith, I don’t or can’t like it, then my own choice (mindful of what Paul said, and of my own experience) is to refrain from implementing it for now, but rather to play the piece or passage in the way that I find convincing. As I said, I have not actually had this conflict very often. And when I do have it, I still feel respectful of whatever it is that I have decided not to do, and I am always open to revisiting it later. I am quite comfortable with this approach—more so than either with shying away from seeking historical knowledge for fear that having it would force me to be overly academic, or with making myself play in ways that are not deeply, personally convincing for fear of being considered “wrong”. 

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

Helping Students Choose Fingerings II

This month I want to pose a most fundamental question: should we give fingerings to our students, or should we instead ask them to work out their own fingerings, with guidance from us? It is likely that with most teachers, for most students, the answer will be some of both. But that leaves the question of how to arrive at the right balance. And it also leaves a whole set of questions about how best to carry out each approach. This is not a cleanly separate issue from questions of what constitutes good fingering or what good procedure for working on fingering would be in general. But it is interesting to try to tease it out a bit on its own. 

I will start by confessing my own bias, the same bias that governs my thinking about most matters. My orientation is always towards letting students figure things out for themselves. It seems logical to let students start as soon as possible (not sooner) practicing whatever it is that we want them to learn to do. And that is (almost) always the act of working something out, not the act of executing something. This is true as to interpretive matters, concrete ones such as registration or choice of tempo, and more diffuse or flexible ones such as timing, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, and so on. It is more important for a student to engage in the process of learning how to work out interpretive matters than to give a performance today or tomorrow that you or I would like, or even that the student would endorse or enjoy listening to some years down the road. This is a version of the old “teach someone to fish” idea. 

This is subject to all sorts of nuance. For example, when does someone stop being a student? When does the execution of an effective performance become the most important priority? Are we not all to some extent continuing to learn the various processes, and don’t we all hope that our performances will get better and better, whatever that means to each of us? Looking back on our past performances, we should probably hope not to like them entirely, but to be grateful for what we learned from them. It is not a bad idea to invite your students to reinvent the wheel if you are hoping to teach them not how to use wheels or how to make wheels but how to invent wheels.

I confess this bias not to embrace it, but to push back against it or at least to examine whether and how it makes sense here. There are some things that need to be taught in a different way. The clearest of these tend to be practical. For example, if someone asks me to show them how to make the loop at the end of a harpsichord string, I will not just hand them a piece of wire and suggest that they figure it out. I will make a loop for them and describe to them in detail what I am doing. Then I will repeat that as necessary before asking them to try. There are some wheels that really don’t need to be reinvented. Likewise I don’t leave students to figure out entirely for themselves what sort of practice protocols and strategies work best. I can show a student many things that do work, but it is open-ended; they can also figure out others for themselves. I do take a sort of “re-invent the wheel” approach to the art of registration, for another example, but not to showing a student how the combination system works. When I have out-and-out information that a student does not have, I share it.

Even though no one would disagree that the long-term goal is to teach students how to work out fingerings, rather than to teach them fingerings, there is room for debate about how best to do that. Does an approach of letting students come up with their own fingerings with some discussion of principles, some feedback, and maybe occasional suggestions (what I might call my approach just for short) actually lead students most efficiently towards being able to work out fingerings for themselves? Or does it work better to show the student many examples of really good fingering, in one piece after another, and let the student learn from observation what good fingering is and how to achieve it? 

For the moment, we are taking this to be independent of the question of what good fingering is. For the latter, more teacher-oriented, approach to work, it has to be understood that the teacher knows a lot about how to concoct good fingerings. I will deal with that more directly in subsequent columns, and in the end it interacts with what we are discussing here.

Advantages of two approaches

I would like to outline some pluses and minuses of each approach, as I see it. I start this with a few thoughts about my approach and continue next month with corresponding thoughts about the more interventionist approach. First, a few advantages or strong points about the approach of largely letting students concoct their own fingerings: 

1) It is an opportunity to practice autonomy and thinking for oneself. This is particularly relevant because, largely as a result of editors’ fingerings being found in so many printed editions of music, it is easy for fingering to take on an oppressive feeling of authority. The particular form in which a student asks a question about fingering is often this: What is the fingering for this passage? That reflects an unconscious acceptance of the notion that there “is” a fingering, that the fingering for the passage is somehow a given, handed down by those who know. There is plenty in life that must be treated this way. Fingering doesn’t. Sometimes when I respond to that question with “there ‘is’ no fingering. The fingering will be what you work it out to be.” That is immediately and significantly liberating to the student, even a revelation.

2) It involves practicing as directly as possible what the student needs to learn to do. As I said above, I have a bias in favor of this in general, all else being equal. Every instance of a student’s thinking, “Does this feel better or does that? Does it sound different with fingering x from fingering y? Does using this finger here make it easier to get to that finger there? What specific part of the passage demands a particular finger, and how can I shape the fingering around that, before and after?” makes it easier and more natural for the student to apply that kind of thinking later. 

3) A student knows his or her hands best, or can learn to. Sometimes no matter how self-evident it is to me that a given finger lies naturally over a given note, that conclusion indeed turns out to be just about my hand, and for the student it is different. Take this chord:

If the student and I would both put 2 on the F# and 5 on the C, we might comfortably put any of the remaining three fingers on the A. I would play it with 3, assuming that there was nothing before or after to make that problematic. I could also be happy with 1: definitely not 4. But I have known a player to find 4 much more comfortable than the other two choices in this exact situation. This is something that no one but the actual player knows, whether that player is a student or not. And the differences can be subtle. For this:

I would definitely want 1 on the A, not either 3 or 4. Others could prefer any of the three. A note about this example: I would respect any student’s choice about a finger for that A. However, I would try to convince the student not to play the F# with 1. See #1 below!

4) Working out a detailed, specific fingering in as analytical a manner as possible is a magnificent way to learn the notes of a piece, or to solidify that learning. It is so effective in this respect that if a player becomes accomplished to the point of not needing to work out fingerings in a purposeful manner, that dimension of learning the piece has to be replaced by something else. This is related to the fact that a danger for really great sight-readers is that of giving un-thought-out performances. Executing a fingering that has been provided by someone else doesn’t fulfill this function.

There is an interesting paradox to be found here. If you work out fingerings really well and carefully for a passage, the learning that that process entails would also make it easier and more secure for you to get through the passage without a systematic fingering. But that stage is by then already past. However, it is possible that working out careful fingerings oneself leads to better sight-reading of subsequent pieces.

5) Some students enjoy this process, find it intellectually interesting, challenging, and satisfying. 

6) Every student will from time to time think of a really good fingering that the teacher would not have thought of. Thus learning can become a two-way street.

Disadvantages

What are some disadvantages of this approach, or things to watch out for? 

1) The student may create and use fingerings that are actually physically damaging. That is almost always a result of hand positions that involve twisting the wrists too far outward, or that are otherwise stiff or painful. A teacher should always be on the lookout for this and be prepared to explain to the student what is wrong with such fingerings. If fingering creates a physiologically bad hand position, then it is not acceptable to live with that fingering even briefly.

2) More often than the above, a student will devise fingerings that are just not the best musically or logistically. It simply reflects that we are dealing with something that has to be learned, and that we are in the early stages of that learning. To the extent that we choose to let students work out, and then drill and use, their own fingerings, we are saying that the advantages of that approach make it worth it for the student to live through a period of using “bad” fingerings, fingerings that a more expert player would not have chosen. When these are fingerings that do not have the characteristic of being physically harmful, then that is possibly an acceptable situation. But it needs to be thought about.

3) This approach takes more time. For a student to work out fingerings carefully takes longer than for the teacher, an experienced player, to lean over the music desk and write fingerings. (Even quicker is for the teacher to have worked out fingerings for pieces in advance, independent of who the student is going to be. The quickest of all is for there already to be fingerings in the edition. Both of these are problematic, though, for reasons that I will get to later on.) The trade-off here is between this concern about time and point #4 above. Is the time that is put in this way repaid by learning, or is it just time that could have been spent better—for example, working on more pieces?

4) Some students specifically don’t want to work out their own fingerings. This can come from different places, and an awareness of where it comes from can help us think about how to deal with it. A student may feel incompetent to think independently about fingering. This in turn may be a simple acknowledgement of the fact of inexperience, or may come from a temperamental lack of comfort with autonomy. It is never actually true, it’s just about comfort. A student may be aware of the time-consuming nature of careful fingering work and prefer to spend that time a different way. A student may be unconvinced of the notion that different players’ hands, and other aspects of their playing, may require different fingerings, and therefore simply not be aware of the value of chipping in his or her own perspective. The student may feel unprepared to think about fingering for a specific reason, like an awareness of the historical component of fingering, coupled with an awareness of the student’s own lack of the relevant historical knowledge. 

I will continue this discussion from this point next month. However, I toss in here one fingering example. It is a bit random, just a sort of souvenir of the column. It is a rare fingering that I was specifically proud of when I first thought of it. It helped me turn what had been a difficult-to-impossible passage for me into something at least bordering on easy, and certainly very reliable. It was quite a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly, a milestone for me in deriving fingering from hand position and in thinking outside of what was at the time quite a small box. I suppose that my particular excuse for including it here is this: that one of the pleasures of fingering is that of sharing neat, surprising, useful discoveries with other people who happen to share this arcane interest. That can be our students, among others, and remembering simply to enjoy that is part of the pleasure of teaching. This is the upper two voices of a bit from very near the end of the fugue from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, in the right hand. (See preceding page at top.) Try it out. Does it work for your hand? Enjoy!

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 at .

Registration and teaching—Part IV
In this column—the last on registration for now—I will offer suggestions for ways in which teachers can help students choose sounds for particular pieces. This is, of course, the practical essence of registration. The main point of the systematic approach to understanding organ stops and becoming familiar with organ sounds that was outlined in the last three columns is to enable students to feel confident choosing sounds for pieces and to end up choosing sounds that they will be happy with. The discussion in this column assumes that the student has done some of the analysis, the thinking, and the listening practice described in the last three columns. This student will have a good understanding of what stops are likely to combine well with one another, and will also be open-minded about trying combinations that are unconventional and that might or might not work. He or she will also be in the habit of listening to sounds carefully, and will expect to have a reaction to sounds—an aesthetic and/or emotional reaction—and to give importance and respect to that reaction. A significant part of the process of choosing appropriate sounds for pieces consists of noting one’s aesthetic or emotional reactions to those pieces and allowing those reactions to suggest sounds that evoke similar, compatible, or complementary reactions. This will be the focus of this column. Another part of the process consists of learning about outside factors that might influence registration. The most important of these are any registration instructions that a composer may have given, along with any information about organs or types of organs that a composer knew. I will make a few comments about this below, but it will receive much more attention in future columns devoted to the (often vexing) subject of authenticity.
There are two principles that serve as a foundation for my thinking about the teaching of this phase of the art of registration. The first of these is that no registration is “right” or “wrong.” Rather, any registration has a whole host of things that can be said about it that are descriptive rather than judgmental. Some of these might be simple descriptions of the sounds, such as “loud,” “soft,” “bright,” “mellow,” “pungent,” “hollow,” “beautiful,” etc. Some might be more situational or practical, like: “louder than the previous piece,” or “so muddy that you can’t hear the inner voices,” or “not to our pastor’s taste.” Some might be musicological or historical, like: “not what the composer had in mind,” or “uncannily like the mid-17th-century plenum.” Any of these descriptions might be important to note, and might serve as a basis for choosing or rejecting a registration. However, none of them is the same as “good” or “bad.” Most of us (I emphatically do include myself in this!) have an instinct to call a registration “bad” or “wrong” when what we mean is that it is “not what I am used to” or “not what I would do myself” or, more simply, that “I do not like it.” It is of course absolutely fine and good—and inevitable—for each of us to have developed such tastes and preferences, especially if we recognize them as such. However, if we pass them on to our students as “right” and “wrong,” with the weight of our authority behind them, we are in great danger of limiting and constraining our students rather than liberating and empowering them. We are also in danger of making registration—which has the capacity to be tremendous out-and-out fun—into a source of anxiety: yet another opportunity to get something wrong, in a world that has too many such opportunities.
(Here’s an anecdote about the weight of authority. Many years ago, when I was still a student, I had a friendly but heartfelt argument with a fellow organ aficionado about what was the “right” registration for the long middle section of one of the Bach organ fugues. We both had all sorts of musical, musicological, analytical, even philosophical reasons to give in favor of our preferred sound. We were each convinced that the other’s sound was wrong. Of course it turned out that we were each simply advocating a sound just like the one used in the recording of the piece that each of us happened to have heard first and gotten used to!)
The second principle is this: that the primary purpose of a student’s actions in choosing a registration for a piece is not the attainment of a registration that the teacher likes, or that any other listener would like, or that the composer would have liked, or even that the student likes. The actual registration is not the goal at this stage. Rather the goal is for the process to move the student along towards being more comfortable, confident, and skillful at choosing registrations for pieces. Therefore the teacher, in guiding the student in this process, should be very hesitant about actually giving specific registrations. It is easy for a student to use the stops that a teacher has pulled out, and in so doing to play a piece with a registration that the teacher likes and that some other listeners will also like. It is unlikely that this kind of transaction will teach the student very much. (The same criticism also applies to a student’s using registrations that are found in a printed edition.) If, however, a student goes through a process of listening to stops, listening to combinations, and thinking about the aesthetic of a piece and about possible sounds, the student will always learn a great deal. This is true even if no listener likes the registrations that are found along the way. If he or she creates registrations that listeners do like, the student will also learn a great deal, all the more so if such a registration is significantly different from others that the student may have heard or heard about.
There is one caveat that applies to this second principle. There are times when someone who is still a student, and for whom the work of registration should indeed be mostly about learning and trying things, does indeed—for some practical reason—have to devise a registration that will be acceptable in a particular circumstance. This need will be more compelling the more the circumstance is extra-musical. For example, in a church service, or a funeral or wedding, the student has to use sounds that will enhance rather than disrupt anything that is being accompanied. Also, in these settings, a student might have to respect certain traditions or needs as to the role of music in the service, for example having to do with dynamic levels during communion. A teacher might have to step in and suggest solutions that fit these circumstances, if the student is not yet ready to come up with appropriate registrations directly. A somewhat more cynical practical reason might be this: that the student needs to prepare an audition, and the teacher knows how to help the student match the known tastes of those who will be judging the audition. These practical circumstances should be recognized as limited exceptions to the general principle that it is a better learning experience for students to work on coming up with their own sounds, and then to try those sounds out in performance and see how effective they are.
In an earlier column I mentioned “what I consider to be the soundest and most artistically thorough approach [to choosing stops for a piece]: simply trying the piece out on every possible sound, listening carefully and with attention, and deciding which sound you like best.” This is possible on the harpsichord, but almost never, just as a practical matter, on the organ. If the goal is to allow and encourage students to come as close as possible to this open and un-predetermined approach, the teacher can suggest something like the following procedure:
(This is essentially for pieces that do not have registration suggestions that come directly from the composer, and has to be modified for those that do.)
1) Try, while learning a new piece, either to stay away from recordings and other performances of the piece, or to listen to several, three at least.
2) During the earliest stages of learning a piece, begin to form a sense of what it seems like in mood or feeling, in a very basic way: calm, excited, jaunty, disturbing, anxious, jubilant, peaceful, “in your face,” mellow, etc. (As always with adjectives that describe a piece of music, these are probably best used within the mind of one person to help that person consolidate thoughts about the piece. Different people use adjectives so differently that they can easily be misleading in conveying anything in the aesthetic realm from one person to another.) Do not worry about whether you can prove these feelings or reactions to be correct. (You cannot.) Also, don’t be surprised if you later change them. If you honestly can’t come up with any such feelings about the piece at this stage, choose a concept for the piece at random. (This will probably work out just as well in the end for your performance of the work itself, and certainly will serve just as well as a learning experience.)
3) Remembering the fruits of all of your prior exploration of organ stops and combinations for their own sake, choose a sound that seems to match the mood or feeling that you are discerning in the piece—that is, concoct such a sound: it is not necessary or desirable to remember a specific sound from before—and play the piece with that sound.
4) Find another such sound. That is, a sound that also fits your basic sense about the mood or feeling, but that is easily distinguishable from the first sound. (An easy-to-describe example of this might be, in a quiet and gentle piece, first an 8? Gedeckt alone, then an 8? Dulciana alone; or in a loud, forthright piece, first a principal chorus-based combination, then a combination based on strong reeds; or for a pungent but quiet sound, first the quietest available reed, then a Quintadena.) Play the piece a few times with this second sound.
5) Go back to the first sound and listen to it with ears that have now been influenced by the second sound. Perhaps introduce a third and fourth sound and go back and forth among all of them. Listen for the differences and similarities. Has this exercise enabled you to refine your sense of what the piece is like? Do you prefer one of the sounds to another? If you initially chose your concept of the piece at random, do you now find that concept convincing? If not, how might you want to modify or replace it? If you chose your concept not at random, do you still find it convincing? If not, in what way has your concept changed? If it has changed, then you should follow the same procedure but with stop combinations that reflect your new concept of the piece.
One of the points of asking a student to go through a procedure like this is to make sure that registration does not happen by habituation, that is, that a student does not just come upon a registration more or less at random and then get used to it, the way my friend and I each got used to the registration that we had heard on the Bach fugue recordings, as mentioned above. It is fine to discover some registrations at random, but it is important to be systematic about listening to them, and to be committed to trying others as well.
Although it seems that choosing stops would be easier when the composer has provided a registration, this is often not true. Assuming that we accept the notion that it is right to play a piece the way the composer wanted it to be played, then the composer’s registration probably narrows down the choice of plausible sounds. In effect the composer’s registration does the work of step 2) above. However, it is important to remember that the exact stop names given by a composer do not usually correspond perfectly to the stops available on whatever organ the student is using. This is always true unless the student is playing the organ that the composer had in mind or one very much like it indeed. (Again, I will discuss the ramifications of this at great length in future columns about authenticity.) In trying to recreate the effect asked for by a composer, it is best to do something like the following:
1) Glean from the composer’s suggested registration, and of course from the notes of the piece, as much as you can about what the composer thought the piece was like aesthetically and emotionally. (Again, a student who had already spent a fair amount of time trying many different sounds and listening carefully will have a good notion about how to approach this.)
2) Try out registrations that your own sense of organ sound tells you will express that mood or feeling well. As much as possible you should favor, or at least start with, registrations that resemble what the composer has suggested—for example, for a quiet pungent sound, try a quiet reed first if the composer’s registration is a reed or try a Quintadena or string first if the composer’s registration is a Quintadena or string; or for a bright “tinkly” sound try an 8?+ 11?3? first if that’s what the composer suggested, or an 8?+ 2? first if that is. But all the while, listen to the sounds with the same alert ears that you would apply to any sound that you chose yourself. Do not use a sound unless it works: that is, unless the components of the sound blend properly, the various balances are right (between different sounds if there is more than one, among the different regions of the compass of the keyboard, between inner and outer voices, between melody and accompaniment—whatever is relevant), and the emotional/aesthetic impact of the sound strikes you as right for the piece. A sound is not right just because the stop names are right. Stop names are just a beginning wherever they come from, even the composer.
That is all for now. Since the subject of registration is so multifaceted, I have posted on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website <www.pekc.org&gt; an annotated version of this column, with examples drawn from specific pieces, and further discussion.

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.