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].

This and that
This month’s column is a grab bag or miscellany of sorts. I will add to what I have already written about each of my last two subjects—memorization and interpretation—based partly on feedback and discussions that I have had about those subjects over the last few months and partly on my own further thoughts. By coincidence, a couple of things have arisen in my own performing life and in my teaching recently that shed some specific light on the issues that I discussed in July, August, and September, and I will recount those anecdotes. I will also provide a brief introduction to what will be the subject of next month’s column: figured bass realization and continuo playing.

Memorization vs. thorough learning
The first anecdote that I want to mention comes from my own recent performing life. It bolsters my existing views about memorization, or, more particularly, about the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning. (That is, it is a bit self-serving of me to recount it!) I recently needed to choose one of the larger Bach pieces to be part of a recital program. There were three in particular that I was interested in playing: the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548; the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542; and the Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540.
The first two are pieces that I memorized for auditions or juries at Westminster in the early 1980s. The Toccata and Fugue is a piece that I first learned at about that same time but that I have never tried to memorize. I did, however, study the F-major more intensely and in more detail than I had ever studied anything up to that point. I did all sorts of motivic and other analysis, including an analysis of proportion in both the Toccata and the Fugue, which suggested to me that the two pieces are more closely related than they are sometimes thought to be. I also practiced it to within an inch of its life, using every strategy that I knew at the time, but relying mainly on good old-fashioned repetition. I feared at the time that it was “too hard” for me, but it was an absolute favorite of mine and I was determined to learn it.
I performed all three pieces from time to time in the 1990s, and had not looked at any of them within the last ten years. When I began exploring them in order to choose one to play, I discovered very quickly that the F-major was much more solid—retained much more of what I had once put into it—than either of the other two. In fact, right off the bat I could play through it at about 80% tempo and have it come out quite accurate and steady. The process of working it up to a performance tempo and getting it to feel solid and ready to play was as smooth and easy as I can remember that process ever being with any piece. Furthermore, I noticed that when I tried to play chunks of each of these three pieces from memory—at page turns, for example, in order not always to stop at the same place—I could do more of that with the F-major than with pieces that I had explicitly memorized all those years ago. This probably in part reflects my having done a less than stellar job of memorizing them, but it is also, I believe, a reminder of the power of really studying and working on a piece.

Reading or sight-reading
One of the ideas that I have encountered persistently in discussions about memorization after I finished writing my recent columns on the subject (before as well, but more after, for some reason) is that if you haven’t memorized, you are sight-reading. I discussed sight-reading in July and in August. However, at the moment I feel even more impressed that we must make clear to our students that the alternative to memorized performance is not or should not be anything that earns the description of sight-reading. “Reading,” yes; “sight reading,” no. The role of reading in a well-prepared performance is hard to describe. I would try some of the following:
1) Reading confirms what you already know or remember at a (slightly) subconscious level about what is coming up next, and therefore enables you to bring that knowledge to the conscious level in an untroubled manner.
2) Reading gives you something to latch on to if you feel that the performance is slipping away. In fact, the security—or perhaps the rescue—that players are sometimes tempted to achieve by looking at their hands when a passage seems about to unravel can usually be achieved better by zeroing in on the music and explicitly reading what the next notes are supposed to be. This sometimes takes a leap of faith—it can feel like tightrope-walking—but it works.
3) The experience of playing a piece from the score resembles the experience of listening to a long, complicated song (or oratorio or opera) that you know well. You would not be able to write out all of the words or the whole libretto, but as it unfolds you know with certainty at each moment what is coming up next.
4) There are many things in everyday life that we experience this way: for example, the road signs along a familiar route. I could never list from memory the content of all of the signs along, say, the Connecticut Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway. But as I drive along, I know what is coming up next, and I know right away if I see that one of them has been changed.

Semi-memorization
I describe this particular state of knowing something—a piece of music or a pattern of exit signs or anything—as semi-memorization. It results naturally from really thorough study of a piece of music. Reading with attention and focus a piece of music that you have semi-memorized is neither sight-reading nor playing from memory. It is its own thing, as different from each of them as they are from each other. It is the most common and natural mode of performance for most of us most of the time.

Page turns
I have become increasingly impressed by the extent to which full-fledged memorization is mentioned as a necessity specifically to avoid dealing with page turns. Page turns can be annoying indeed, but, as I mentioned in July, wholesale adoption of memorization seems to me to be a disproportionate response to this annoyance. It is especially disproportionate as something to ask of our students as a major part of what they work on.
(At this moment in history, it seems possible that the practical side of page turning will change dramatically, perhaps quite soon. There are already electronic music reading systems that work very well on orchestral-type music stands, and that can work also on piano or harpsichord music desks. They eliminate the need to turn pages by hand. I have started using such a system in my harpsichord playing. It is useful in concert, and also sort of a conversation piece, given that it is still fairly rare. However, the most important difference that it makes is in practicing. After all, no one ever employs a regular page-turner for practice sessions. I have often in the past had the experience of playing through a piece without page-turning breaks for the first time when I played it in concert. These new music-reading/page-turning systems make that unnecessary. It is trickier to devise a system like this for organ, mainly because the organist cannot spare the feet for operating page-turning pedals. However, it seems certain that any practical obstacles to this will be figured out and that systems like this will some day be commonplace.)
However, page turns do create a real musical problem, and one approach to solving that problem involves a modest selective use of memorization. If a player—student or otherwise—always stops at a specific point, turns the page, and picks up the piece immediately after that specific point, then that moment in the music will often be permanently technically insecure or musically hesitant or unconvincing, or both. I have seen students struggle with short passages that seem puzzlingly difficult, for which no fingering, no way of practicing, no way of thinking about it seems to help. Then we have realized that the page-turning break has been actually training the student to become anxious and distracted at that spot. He or she has literally never played or heard that moment in the music without a break. (This is easy to miss in lessons where the teacher is routinely doing the page turns.)
The solution to this is straightforward. The student must vary the placement of the page turn break while practicing. This can be done by selective copying—taping a copy of the final line of the earlier page to the top of the later page and a copy of the first line of the later page to the earlier page, and then pausing to turn that page at all sorts of different places. It can also be done by memorizing the last few measures of the earlier page and the first few measures of the later page and again pausing to turn at various different spots, randomly distributed. This little bit of memorization should be anxiety-free, since is it never intended to be brought out in performance.

Teaching interpretation
Here is another recent story, this one relevant to teaching interpretation. It is also, I am afraid, intended to confirm or bolster what I have recently written, so it too is a bit self-serving. A young student of mine—middle-school age, a somewhat experienced and very talented pianist with so far just a little bit of harpsichord and organ experience—was working on a piece that was manuals only, two voices, with a left-hand bass line in steady eighth notes and a more florid right-hand part in sixteenths and thirty-seconds. After she had worked on the notes a certain amount, when it was almost time to put the hands together, I did the following. I played the first several measures of the left-hand part for her three different ways: legato, staccato, and in-between, that is, mildly but distinctly detached. I asked her to think about which she liked better: nothing about which I preferred, or about historical authenticity, or about anything else (supposedly) authoritative. I did say to her that in the end there was no reason that these approaches couldn’t be combined and the results varied. She took this home to think about.
Over the next week or two of practicing and the next couple of lessons, she not only, in a sense, chose one of my options (the middle one) but more importantly worked out—on her own—a completely varied and nuanced articulation with some notes held longer than others and certain phrases or passages played overall more or less legato than others. This exercise pointed her in the direction of listening carefully to what her playing was doing and to thinking about what she wanted out of the piece and each of its constituent passages. It also led—without my saying anything else—to her beginning to make similar choices about other pieces that she was playing and to her listening more closely to what she was doing in those pieces.
I believe that none of this would have happened if I had said to her something like “why don’t you try this phrasing and these articulations,” and had written various markings into her music. Of course this happens a lot—otherwise this approach would not be the essence of what I recommend, as discussed last month. I mention this case because the student was young enough—and sufficiently inexperienced at the particular instrument—that any teacher might easily have misgivings about leaving so much to the student’s choice, because it happened to arise while I was thinking and writing about these things, and because it worked out especially well.

Figured bass realization
Next month’s column will be about figured bass realization and continuo-playing at the keyboard. This skill is not necessarily directly relevant to the day-to-day work of most organists or to what our students come to us to learn. It is normally thought of as part of the constellation of skills that might be taught to those studying harpsichord, though of course in the days when continuo was a universal practice, much continuo playing took place at the organ. Certainly any organist who feels comfortable realizing continuo parts himself or herself (rather than relying on printed realizations found in modern editions) will have both greater flexibility and greater musical possibilities open to him or her in playing any non-solo Baroque music. This includes many anthems and other music that church choirs might sing. It is even relevant to the playing of many hymns. Understanding continuo playing is also a window to understanding a lot of what is going on in (at least) Renaissance and Baroque music in general. It is also a step towards undertaking the art of improvisation, since it is itself a form of improvisation, though one conducted within defined limits.
Figured bass realization is often taught as part of the teaching of harmony, counterpoint, or theory in general. In that context it is considered a good idea to think of continuo realizations as being in effect pieces of music that should follow the rules or customs of composition especially as to voice leading. This is an approach that is nearly the exact opposite of what works best in actual performance. The reasons for this lie in the nature of what a keyboard continuo part contributes to a performance. An understanding of this is the key to learning to play continuo comfortably, not least because it actually has the effect of making the process easier than it can seem to be in theory class. I will discuss this in detail next month. That discussion will also include a very practical protocol for working on continuo playing and of course for introducing it to students of various levels and backgrounds. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. During the 2014–2015 concert season he will be presenting a series of five recitals at the Center offering a survey of great keyboard repertoire from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Details about this and other activities can be found at www.gavinblack-baroque.com. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Several of my columns in the latter half of 2014 had their subject matter determined by things that had happened recently involving my own students and their lessons. This set of (two) columns also falls into that category. Over the last few months, three different new students have told me in our initial discussions that they needed to learn sight-reading or that they wanted to become better at it. The progress of those conversations and then the work that each of those students and I have done together—some of it focused on sight-reading—have caused me to think about that subject and to marshal some of my ideas about it in a column. This is another one of those areas that I have not addressed systematically before, though it is a central enough part of what people think about while working on playing that it has come up indirectly from time to time.

Some of the questions that I want to think about are: 1) What is sight-reading and what do people—students in particular—think that it is? 2) What are its uses and to what apparent uses should it (usually) not be put? 3) What is the role of sight-reading in learning pieces? and, finally, 4) What are some of the ways that sight-reading can be practiced systematically? I should first mention—or really confess—that I think I have always undervalued sight-reading. Or, at least, I have always focused too much on the ways in which the practice has been abused or overused and not enough on the ways in which it can be useful or can form a part of artistic development. And I will further confess that the reason for this is probably that I was, in the early to middle stages of my life as a musician, a really bad sight-reader. In my very early years of organ study—my mid-teens—I was such a bad sight-reader that I went through life feeling chronically mortified by that fact, and would (to avoid discovery) never venture upon sight-reading anything, however simple, if anyone could hear what I was doing. I needed the solitude of the empty church late at night. I was so nervous about sight-reading that I couldn’t approach it in anything like a fruitful state of mind. Since that time, I have become a fairly good sight-reader. It’s not one of my particular strengths, but I am at least average for a professional keyboard player: significantly better than average with music that belongs to a style or genre with which I am very familiar, a bit less than average, probably, with types of repertoire with which I am generally less engaged as a performer. This contrast is quite normal, and I will discuss it more later on. My own improvement as a sight-reader has come on my own watch, since it happened when I was already an adult and a professional performer. (It is also ongoing: I am a better sight-reader now than I was a year or two ago.) That means that I have a pretty good idea of what I was able to do to make that improvement happen, and that informs the way I organize my efforts to help students with sight-reading.

It was of great interest to me that each of the students who recently asked me about sight-reading actually meant something different by it. At one end of the spectrum was the use of the term to mean just being able to learn pieces from notation at all. That is, “reading” and feeling comfortable with the process of moving from a slow and perhaps halting first reading to secure performance. At the other end was what I would call real or hard-core sight-reading: putting on the music desk the score of a piece that you have actually never seen, played, or heard before and playing it without needing to stop. (There is one nuance to this that is worth commenting on: that the purest form of sight-reading is indeed of something that you haven’t even heard. If you have heard a piece then, to some extent, small or large, playing by ear will come to the assistance of the actual reading at sight. Though a departure from what might be called “theoretically pure” sight-reading, this is something that helps with a lot of real-life sight-reading when the player is in fact familiar with the piece by ear, as often happens.)

In a sense these distinctions are just semantic. We can use the word “sight-reading” to mean only what I am calling the “hard-core” thing and then use other words to refer to other aspects of playing music from notes. This more or less doesn’t matter, as long as it is clear what is meant in any context. However, with one of the students referred to above, I did waste a bit of time talking about approaches to what I meant by sight-reading, when what he wanted was various hints about how to read more efficiently as part of the process of learning a piece. It is important to know what you are aiming to practice—or asking a student to practice. If the goal is to practice real sight-reading, then, strictly speaking, a passage can only be used once for that practice. After that it is no longer sight-reading in the strict sense. It is important to get this straight with students. I have seen students (and myself, long ago) think that they were practicing sight-reading when they were really just practicing a piece—or perhaps not really practicing effectively at all. 

Sight-reading of some sort is a usual part of the learning process. That is, when you first undertake a new piece, you have to get your awareness of what the notes are supposed to be from something, and that something is usually the printed page. There will be a time when you read through some components of what you are trying to learn for the first time. This is a sort of sight-reading. (This is not the case for people who play by ear—which is rare in “classical” music—or who memorize pieces at the desk before sitting down to play: also rare.) One difference between this kind of reading (initially at sight) to begin learning a piece and sight-reading as such is that it is not cheating—and is in fact better, with the possible exceptions that I discuss below—for the former to be prepared reading. Ideally before starting to play a piece to learn it, a student should look it over, perhaps subject it to some sort of analysis, perhaps think about fingering and pedaling issues even before coming to the instrument—although that has to be rather abstract and held onto lightly. Then the first actual reading of the piece at the instrument should often be in component parts: separate hands, pedals alone—maybe even separate feet—short passages. Those component parts should be repeated a lot, right off the bat, taking the student farther and farther from sight-reading the passage. 

The role of hard-core sight-reading is real but quite circumscribed when the project is to work carefully on learning a piece. It could be described as fleetingly sight-reading some components of the piece, not as sight-reading the piece. I think that it is a bit of confusion about this that leads some students to feel some or all of the following: 1) I am not a good sight-reader, so I can’t learn pieces well; or even 2) I can’t become a good player at all; or 3) I didn’t succeed in sight-reading this piece well first thing, so I can’t learn it, or at least it will be disproportionately hard. None of these actually follow from anything about a student’s sight-reading of a particular piece or that student’s sight-reading in general. 

What about the role of sight-reading in the learning process for someone who is a good, advanced sight-reader? This is where opportunities and dangers come in. It also requires some clarification about what a good sight-reader is, or at least how that concept ties in with learning pieces. It seems to me that there is a continuum for each person as to how “sight-readable” something is and as to how the sight-readability relates to the learning process. Every person who can read music has some keyboard pieces that he or she can sight-read. For example, just to start at one extreme, see Example 1.

This “piece” could be sight-read by anyone. Of course this is, in a sense, absurd, but it is a jumping-off point. As pieces get more complicated—more real—the universe of people who could sight-read them accurately and comfortably gets smaller. If a student or any player can honestly sight-read a given piece accurately, securely, and comfortably, then that person can consider starting the process of learning that piece by sight-reading it and then continuing to read through it. This can involve skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart, and that can be all right. The important thing is the honesty—honesty with one’s self. 

This example may be officially twice as complicated as the above, but almost no one who has ever played a keyboard instrument would need to practice it with separate hands (see Example 2). 

Some people would need to separate the hands, at least briefly, for this “piece” (see Example 3)—and so on. 

As I said, if you are working on a piece that is well within the range in which you can sight-read it easily, then you can consider skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart. Someone who is an advanced sight-reader will have that option with a greater proportion of the repertoire—maybe most of it. This is a great time-saver, and for that reason it is useful and enviable. It also creates a temptation to perform pieces that the player simply doesn’t know very well—that is, doesn’t know very well interpretively, analytically, rhetorically. Is this a problem? Sometimes so, sometimes not, most likely. This is another area where there is no substitute for self-honesty, though for a performer who is tempted to play pieces for listeners on an essentially sight-read basis, it might be important to get feedback from trusted listeners about the artistic results, so that the self-honesty can be well-informed. 

I have two anecdotes about this aspect of the subject. 1) I once decided to play a piece in recital without having practiced it at all. It was one of the Frescobaldi hymn settings from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas. I did this as an experiment, after looking the piece over—away from the keyboard—just enough to feel certain that I could manage the notes that way. The goal of the experiment was to see whether the result could feel and sound more like an improvisation, and the experiment was inconclusive. The notes were no problem: I had guessed right about that. I noticed neither more nor less freshness and spontaneity—which is what I had been looking for—than I would normally expect out of my playing. This is music that is squarely in the middle of what I know best and perform most effectively, and it came out fine, but nothing special. However, I did sort of betray some at least subconscious concern on my own part because I had the thought afterward that if I ever had occasion to record that piece, I’d better get to know it better! 2) Someone I know who was present for a certain major recording project reported to me that the virtuoso harpsichordist making the recordings had played approximately one-third of the pieces by sight-reading them during the recording sessions. This was, of course, an all-time all-star sight-reader: the repertoire was not simple. My informant maintained that he could tell listening to the finished product which pieces were sight-read and which had been prepared. The latter, he felt, were categorically more convincing, the former accurate but kind of stiff. Of course this is not a blind or controlled study: there’s no way to confirm it or refute it.

Probably a really advanced sight-reader, or anyone dealing with a piece that is very well below his or her threshold for comfortable sight-reading, should feel free to start the learning process by sight-reading the whole texture of a piece, but slowly—distinctly slower than the fastest tempo that won’t fall apart, with the kind of focus that characterizes good sight-reading (which I will talk about next month) and with a willingness to go back to taking things apart if it starts to seem like a good idea. Anyone who is a very advanced, comfortable, reliable sight-reader has to be especially conscientious about studying a piece thoroughly alongside the process of simply reading the notes (with an ease that is enviable to the rest of us). This can include paper analysis, careful listening while playing—perhaps sometimes focusing on specific things, say the inner part of the texture, or the left hand, or the slower notes—and an optional taking apart of the texture, for example playing separate voices in contrapuntal music or playing hands separately not to learn notes, but to listen. 

To be continued next month.

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. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Thoughts on teaching
interpretation
Interpretation is fascinating from many points of view. These include the relationship between interpretation and technique, how different approaches to the problems of authenticity affect interpretive choices, the history of different interpretive schools, the many elements of interpretive choices—tempo, registration, phrasing, articulation, rhythm, rubato and agogic accentuation or the relative lack thereof, and more—and in general, the strange phenomenon of how different performances of exactly the same notes can be.
With organ music in particular, interpretation begins with the choice of instrument and the venue—in effect, this is the beginning of the registration process. Sometimes—most of the time for most of us, in fact—the choice of venue and organ comes first. This part of the interpretive process is turned upside down: we choose music that suits the instrument and/or the room, or we make decisions about how much we feel that the music needs to be an exact fit for the situation or how much we can bend and stretch and compromise. This is all part of the interpretive process, and it shares with the rest of that process the fact that different players approach it quite differently from one another.

Conveying interpretation
to students
For teachers, primary questions about interpretation or interpretive stance are joined by questions about how to introduce students to matters of interpretation. These questions start with the over-riding one: whether or not a teacher should hope or expect or even insist that his or her students take a similar interpretive approach to that of the teacher. It often seems almost routine to do so. In listening either to established or to up-and-coming players, we often expect to be able to tell who studied with whom based on what the student’s interpretations are like. However, it is by no means clear that this is necessary or good. I will suggest below that teachers can be very happy with a wide variety of interpretive approaches on the part of their students. Another question might be put like this: if a teacher will not tell a student how to interpret and perform a piece—or a type of repertoire or repertoire in general—then how can that teacher help the student work out an interpretation of that repertoire, or how can the teacher help the student become a vivid and convincing interpreter of music in general? Yet another question is what sort of approach to interpretation to expect from students of different ages or levels of skill or experience. An intriguing question, to me, is this: does it matter whether or not a performance that a student gives is effective interpretively—or appeals to any particular listener’s taste—at the moment the performance is given, or is it more important that the performance be part of the long-term learning process? These two things are not always incompatible with each other, of course, but they are different, and they might suggest different kinds of input from the teacher. That is, if it is important that a given performance by a student be effective interpretively in a certain way, then it might be necessary for the teacher to coach the student in that way of playing the piece. If the goal of learning to perform a particular piece is geared only to the student’s longer-term development, then it might be better to allow the student to experiment, try things, listen, and learn, even if along the way this results in a performance that the teacher, other listeners, or perhaps even the student looking back on it later won’t like.
The question of whether a teacher should want his or her students to end up—as mature performers—playing the way the teacher does, that is, with respect to interpretive choices and overall interpretive stance, is philosophical. (I assume that every teacher wants his or her students to be as competent technically and as masterful in performance as that student can possibly be, whether that is more than the teacher, the same, or less.) Why is the teacher teaching? What does he or she consider important about music, about organ playing for church or for concert? What kind of contribution does the teacher want to make to the history of the organ over the next few decades or beyond, and does that contribution depend on nurturing a particular style of performance or approach to interpretation? Does the teacher feel that students represent the teacher: that colleagues, audiences, and possible future students will judge the teacher based on how existing students play—not, again, with respect to competence or mastery, but with respect to interpretation? If so, is this appropriate, or is it placing a responsibility on the students that is burdensome?
These are questions that every teacher must answer for himself or herself—or, perhaps more importantly, must ask and think about. The answers may change over time, and the questions may be supplemented by others—other ways of looking at it. I myself long ago came to feel that I don’t care at all what my students end up doing interpretively, as long as they feel that the act of playing music and making choices is satisfying to them. This is largely a matter of philosophy, and I don’t feel that it is necessarily the right way for every teacher to look at it. I also honestly don’t know what it says about other dimensions of my underlying attitude. Do I feel this way out of modesty—“my way is no better than other ways”—or something quite the opposite—“my way is so special that you need not even attempt it”—or selfishness—“it would be better if my students played like me, but I will withhold the information that they would need to achieve that”—or fear—“if I teach my students how to play like me they will do it better than I do, and render me superfluous”—or all of the above or none of the above? I am, in general, inordinately in favor of people thinking for themselves: my students, other players, other teachers, everyone—not just about music, but most definitely including music.
The more a teacher believes that his or her approach to interpretive matter is based on objective truth, the more likely it is that the teacher will want to try to pass that approach on to students. And, as a subset of that, we all have an obligation to pass on to our students anything that we honestly believe to be true—objectively true or likely to be so. A substantial amount of what falls into this category is information related to composers’ intentions or performance practices. I wrote at length about “authenticity” in my column of April 2010. In a sense, the principal thing is this: the most thorough knowledge about composers’ intentions and the circumstances of the composition and initial performances of a piece places surprisingly few limits on interpretive choice. That is, such knowledge may change the direction or nature of interpretive choices, but it does not effectively narrow the range of choice or tend to make different performances more similar to one another. This is like a comparison of infinities: the set of all possible performances of a piece is infinite; the set of all performances that respect whatever is known about the composer’s fingering and pedaling practices, tempo preferences, registration techniques, etc., is also infinite.
Analysis—contrapuntal, harmonic, or other theoretical analysis—can be another source of a feeling on the part of teachers that we have something objective to share with our students that might affect performance. Again, I think that it is very important to share such things with students, and I believe that this can be done in such a way as not to limit choices. For example, it is one thing to notice fugue subjects or other recurrent themes. (As I have written more than once, I believe that noticing anything that happens more than once is an extremely important and efficient tool for learning pieces.) However, it is something else entirely to move from noticing such things to reaching any hard and fast conclusions about what our analysis tells us to do in performance. (Again, comparative infinities: the set of possible performances by a player who has analyzed a piece for counterpoint and harmony is infinite, as is the set of possible performances by a performer who has not paid any explicit attention to those things.) As soon as we cross over into saying to a student something like: “of course you must phrase the subject the same way every time it comes in,” we have left the realm of the objective. This is one way of looking at it; however, it would also be possible to argue that the “sameness” of a theme from one instance of it to another lies in the notes themselves, and that phrasing and articulation of that theme can reasonably vary with the context. My point here is not to resolve a question like that, but just to suggest that we should all be as clear as possible as to what is neutral and objective and what reflects our own habits or biases. It is wonderful to share all of this with our students, but only if we are clear ourselves and candid with them about what we are sharing.

A sample interpretation
Many teachers who share my feeling that they do not aspire to have their students end up playing in their (the teacher’s) style still feel that the best way to teach interpretation is to ask the student to copy—more or less—the teacher’s performance for the time being and then to evolve later on from that to their own style and approach. This makes sense based on the notion that an inexperienced player—a student, especially a beginning student—does not yet have a basis of knowledge for shaping interpretations. This approach is also based on the idea that the best way to learn to think about performance and interpretation is to have the experience of doing something effective, and then either to react against it or to embrace it—or some mixture—later on, on the basis of other experiences and increasing knowledge.
In fact this is probably the most common approach and attitude, and most of those who expect their students to copy the teacher’s interpretive ideas also fully expect those students to move on from those ideas later on. I imagine that any approach to teaching interpretation has to include at least a dose of direct suggestion from the teacher to the students. Even when those suggestions are less than direct, they are not entirely absent. I myself have never said to a student “you should phrase this subject this way” or “play this eighth-note line detached.” However, when I invite students to play contrapuntal voices separately and in pairs, or to play a line omitting the unaccented notes, or to listen for the bloom in harpsichord sound when shaping a melody or a bass line, or to change fingers on repeated notes, or indeed just to play with a light touch, I am moving the student away from some interpretive possibilities and towards others.
My own reluctance to suggest—let alone require—specific interpretive choices stems from a feeling that such suggestions from a teacher have a tendency to have too great a weight of authority. We may honestly want our students to move beyond those suggestions, but the weight can be harder to shake off than we expect it to be. The whole dynamic of accepting, rejecting, debating, and evaluating the specifics of what we were told to do by (especially) an admired teacher can be a distraction for years or decades. Of course, every teacher has to become comfortable with his or her own approach to these things. My specific advice is just this: be open to the possibility of suggesting less and letting the students explore more, and make suggestions, when you make them, as lightly and informally as you can, consistent with getting the point across.
Here are a few suggestions for helping students to think about interpretation and learn about the effects of different interpretive choices.
1) Especially for beginning students, but also for any student who is not yet very familiar with a particular kind of repertoire, play something for the student two different ways, and ask simply which he or she likes better. With a line—recurring motive or not—the two ways will probably be two different phrasings or articulation patterns. In a full-textured passage, the differences might be of tempo or registration or again articulation or perhaps arpeggiation or something about rubato or timing. The differences should be noticeable but not a caricature, and the student should listen carefully, and then feel absolutely free to choose whichever he or she prefers.
2) Invite students to listen not just to what different interpretive decisions are like, but also to what they do. For example, does a line in an inner voice become easier to hear if it is articulated one way rather than another? Does it become easier to keep a sixteenth-note line steady if the accompanying chords are articulated one way rather than another or registered one way rather than another? Does a bit of rubato make a passage sound softer, or more suspenseful, or just static?
3) Ask students to listen—carefully—to at least six different performances of whatever they are working on. (Important note: listening to one performance is risky. It tends to lead to subconscious mimicking of that performance, which can then have the same difficult-to-shake weight of authority—perhaps for life—that performance suggestions from a teacher can have.) This listening can focus on a passage rather than a whole piece. Sometimes ask the student to write down anything they can think of to say about each performance, but sometimes don’t, so that the balance between pleasure and work remains healthy.
4) Ask the student to listen to a large number of performances of a short passage, paying very careful attention to something specific. For example, how do a dozen different players treat the rests between the several phrases on the first page of the Bach d-minor Toccata? How do several different performers treat the timing of the manual notes in the first sixteen measures of the Franck b-minor Choral? (I once, many years ago, sat with the great Canadian teacher and performer Mireille Lagacé, listening to the way that several different harpsichordists handled the transition from the first half to the second half of Variation 16 of the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting and rewarding.)
With items 3) and 4) it can be valuable to suggest that several students do these things together and discuss what they hear. Of course, nowadays it is easy to find many performances to listen to of just about anything. As I am writing this, YouTube has over 7,000 performances of the Bach d-minor Toccata, but also several performances of each of a few less famous pieces for which I searched. This changes all the time. 

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has recently finished taping Bach’s Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords, with George Hazelrigg. He can be reached at .

Practicing I
When I was a graduate student at Westminster Choir College in the early eighties, there was a piece of graffiti written over the door leading to the basement corridors where the organ practice rooms were found. It said: Take Responsibility: Really Practice! I was always impressed by that. For one thing, it was the only graffiti that I had ever seen, or have ever seen, that had practicing music as its subject. But also it seemed to point to a real truth about practicing and about the act of being a musician. Unless you do what it takes both to develop your overall skills to the fullest and to learn—really learn— the pieces that you are working on, you haven’t really taken responsibility for your contribution to the world of music, or for your contribution as a musician to the world.
Failure to practice enough or in the right way can have a number of consequences. The most basic one is that a given piece will be learned only partially or with inadequate security, and will fall apart in performance. The lesser case of this is that a piece will be insecure enough that it can only be kept from really falling apart by a kind of tense focus on getting the right notes. This will in turn make the performance sound tense and will rule out, or at least limit, any freedom or spontaneity. Inadequate practice can both force the performer to fall back entirely on consciously chosen interpretive gestures—rather than allowing those gestures to be modified on the spur of the moment to reflect the conditions of the particular performance or a new feeling or idea—and make the execution of those interpretive gestures tentative and unconvincing.
Learning a piece extraordinarily well—by practicing it well and practicing it enough—greatly increases (perhaps paradoxically) the chance that the performance of that piece can have the feeling of an improvisation to it. One hallmark of good improvisation, in music, public speaking, conversation, or anything, is that the next thing that happens comes without hesitation. This is what practicing makes possible in playing an already-composed piece. Furthermore, practicing, even if it is primarily aimed at making the practical side of the mastery of a piece as secure as it can be, also involves repeated exposure to the whole picture of what is going on musically in the piece. The performer who has the ability to play a given piece accurately without having really practiced it (that is, someone who is a really good sight-reader) always runs the risk of giving an offhand and superficial performance of that piece. (I hasten to add that this certainly does not always happen, but it can happen and sometimes does.)
Analysis and study of the musical content of a piece can happen before, during, and after the process of rigorously practicing the notes. The particular kind of contrapuntal analysis that I wrote about in several recent columns is intended to take place for the most part before the practicing of the complete note-picture of the piece with appropriate fingerings and pedalings. However, since it is carried out largely through playing, it is also a form of practicing, and part of its purpose is to make the subsequent practicing both easier and more effective.
Analysis along other lines—melodic analysis of non-contrapuntal (melody-and-accompaniment) passages, harmonic analysis, etc.—can be done prior to the start of nitty-gritty note practicing, and also ought to make that practicing easier and more effective. This happens, of course, because if the mind already knows to some extent what is coming next—and if that is also, according to some musical logic, what ought to come next—then the fingers will tend to find it more directly, with less hesitation or fumbling. Then, during practicing, the sound and feel of the notes will reinforce whatever was learned by analysis, if that analysis was sound, or perhaps suggest ways in which to modify it.
Real practicing also ought to be (most of the time) fun and (always) absorbing. It should also be the case, as much of the time as possible, that a player finds efficient, effective practicing to be deeply satisfying because it so clearly leads to real accomplishment. A teacher can greatly help a student to feel this way by making the relationship between practicing and real learning very clear, and by teaching practice techniques that work.
Indeed, practicing that does not seem to be working—where there is a goal but that goal is not getting any closer, or where there isn’t a clear goal and over time nothing much seems to be happening—is so discouraging and demoralizing that experiencing too much of it will often lead to a student’s giving up, discovering that he or she isn’t really that interested in the instrument after all. This is a shame, because without the experience of practicing well, a student actually doesn’t know what the instrument is, what the repertoire is, what the experience of playing music can be.
So, what is good practicing? What works under what circumstances? Part of the answer, as it applies to organ and harpsichord, comes from J. S. Bach. He said about organ playing that:
“All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”
When I first read this comment, I assumed that Bach was being flippant, either in a way that was meant to be dismissive to whomever he was speaking with, or in a way that was meant to be funny and modest. However, I have since realized that he probably meant something specific. In most musical situations, the performer has to create aspects of the content of the musical sound directly. This is obviously the case with singing, since the performer creates and controls everything about the sound, both sonority and intonation. With non-fretted string instruments, the performer has complete responsibility for intonation, and with bowed string instruments, responsibility for shaping the sound of the note over its entire duration. With blown instruments, the player likewise has the job of creating and sustaining the sonority, and has some responsibility for intonation.
Organ and harpsichord come much closer to fitting the following description: if anyone or anything pushes the key down, the note will sound. (This is also true of the piano except in the very important area of volume, and it is surprisingly untrue of the clavichord, but that’s a subject for another day.) Of course on some organs and most harpsichords, the player can influence subtleties of the beginnings and ends of notes—attacks and releases—by subtle variations in technique. This can be very important artistically, but it does not define as big a proportion of what the player has to do or to think about technically as similar subtleties do with some of the types of instruments mentioned above. I believe that Bach was pointing to this distinction: other musicians have to create their sound and tuning, we keyboard players just have to push the keys down and the instrument does the rest!
This means, first of all, that the physical act of playing—the thing that we are practicing when we practice—can be thought of in simple mechanical terms, more so with keyboard instruments than with most others. This leads to another fruitful paradox. The more we approach the act of practicing as if it were a simple mechanical task, the more artistic control we will end up having over the end results of that task.
Also, and most fruitfully of all, the physical act of playing organ or harpsichord can be slowed down to any extent whatsoever without changing its essential physical nature. This, again, is not true of most means of producing music. A singer or wind player can only slow down a little bit without changing the relationship between the musical note-picture and the act of breathing. This is a crucial change. A player of a bowed string instrument cannot slow down too much without changing the relationship between the note-picture and the bowing. This is almost as crucial. An organist or harpsichordist can slow down any passage any amount and still be executing a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result, however fast that result might be intended to be.
In general, any physical gesture that someone can execute at a given speed, can be learned to be played faster: much faster, if the process of learning is approached the right way. This is quite reliable, and not something that varies much from one person to another. It is also not specific to music or to artistic endeavor, but it happens to apply very well to the particular physical demands of organ and harpsichord playing. There is certainly some limit beyond which one simply can’t move any faster. There is only a small amount of keyboard music that goes beyond that limit for most people. The limits that we experience on how fast we can play in general, or on whether or not we can play a given piece up to tempo have to do with our lack of immediate, transparent awareness of what is coming next in the piece, not with physical inability to play fast enough.
Furthermore, there is in fact some speed, some tempo, at which anyone can play any given keyboard piece. That is, anyone who can basically read music and who knows the order of the keys on the keyboard can sit down at the keyboard and sight-read any piece perfectly the first time with no previous keyboard-playing experience if he or she adopts a slow enough tempo. This includes everything from the first exercise at the beginning of a keyboard primer to the most complicated works by Liszt, Reger, or Duruflé. Of course, in these latter cases, the tempo might have to be really monstrously slow: one thirty-second note per minute, or maybe even slower. This is an extreme case, almost a reductio ad absurdum, but it is quite true, and the principle, applied more moderately, is very important.
All of the principles discussed in the last few paragraphs come together to suggest the most efficient and reliable protocol for practicing organ and harpsichord pieces. I will sketch out this approach in a basic way here, and elaborate upon it next month.
Prior to practicing a piece or a passage, it is necessary to have worked out the fingering and pedaling. For the moment we will take this for granted. Fingering and pedaling choices can legitimately be made for all sorts of reasons, from the historical to the aesthetic to the personal, and I will devote more than one future column to the subject. Even a “bad” fingering or pedaling can become pretty reliable by being practiced well. This is not always a good thing, but it is in a sense a necessary thing, because we do not always come up with the best fingering or pedaling the first time or, for that matter, ever. Any fingering or pedaling, no matter how well thought out, may need to be changed as a piece becomes more familiar. This can, if it is extensive or tricky, require backing up and re-practicing.
In any case, once you—the student—have worked out a fingering and pedaling for a passage, the next step is to select an appropriately manageable amount of music to practice. It is usually a good idea to work on fairly small units: a page, a few lines, a section, or, looking at it a different way, the left-hand part, the right-hand part, the feet, or even one foot at a time.
The next step is to play that unit of music slowly enough. The concept of “slowly enough” is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord. Ideally, every time that you play anything—but certainly during a session of real practicing—that playing should be done at a tempo at which a) you get all of the right notes, and b) getting all of the right notes feels easy: no hesitation, no panic, no scrambling. Achieving point b) is a matter only of honesty with one’s self: if, on a given time playing through a passage, you hear yourself make all of the right notes, then it is very easy not to notice whether you were getting those right notes serenely or by the skin of your teeth! It is important to notice this and to be honest about it.
Once the unit that you are practicing feels serene and easy and is reliably accurate at this first tempo, then it is time to try it a little bit faster. The concept of “a little bit faster” is the second most important thing about practicing. The new practice tempo should be just enough faster that you can tell that it is faster, but not enough faster that the passage falls apart. It is OK for it to require a bit more concentration to get it right at first—in fact this is a good sign, since it means that you have increased the tempo enough to make a difference—but not for it to fall apart. If it does, then it was premature to speed up, or you sped up too much. In this case it is necessary to slow back down just a bit.
Once you have played the passage at the new (very slightly faster) tempo enough times in a row for it to have become once again utterly comfortable and reliable, then it is time to speed it up, again by a very small amount. By patiently following this procedure enough times in a row, it is possible to move a passage from any tempo to any other tempo. This is true whether the music is simple or complicated. It is true even if the initial practice tempo is so slow that it would be difficult for a listener to follow it as music at all.
If the unit of music that you are practicing is not the whole texture—that is, if you are practicing separate hands or feet—then at some point it becomes appropriate to put the hands or feet back together, or to put the whole thing together. The rule of thumb is this: the sooner in the process you put things together, the slower you have to keep your practice tempo. Different ways of practicing a piece or passage—for example, keeping all of the parts together and starting with a very slow practice tempo or, on the other hand, practicing hands separately and being able to start each hand at a somewhat faster practice tempo—usually end up being equally effective. One might be better than another only because the player happens to find it more interesting. The crucial thing is to remember and abide by the definition of a correct practice tempo: slow enough.
I will continue this discussion next month.