On Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard pieces and 

recalcitrant passages

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

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

Repertoire in order of difficulty

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

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

Reger and Straube

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

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

Aspects of difficulty 

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

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

Difficult passages

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

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

Practice strategies

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

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

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

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

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. 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 has been teaching organ and harpsichord since 1979. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;

Repertoire, part 1
The issue about which I have gotten by far the most inquiries since I started writing this column is repertoire: that is (primarily) the question of what repertoire students should work on, or, to put it slightly differently, what repertoire teachers should ask or expect their students to work on. In this month’s column I will offer some general musings about that question, including some reminiscences and anecdotes that I think are relevant. Next month I will continue to muse, but also give more specific suggestions, including some guidance—as up to date as possible in a rapidly changing technological world—about the practical side of finding printed music, especially for students who do not have access to well-stocked music libraries.

Organ repertoire: size and scope
The first thing that stands out about the organ repertoire is its size and scope. The number of composers, the number of pieces, the number of centuries, the number of different types of instrument for which what we call “organ music” was written: it is all almost overwhelming. If you throw in hymns and various other sorts of accompaniment, and then remember that a substantial proportion of at least the pre-1750 keyboard repertoire not expressly written for the organ can be played perfectly well on the organ, the amount and diversity of music that an organist might be expected to master seems to spiral out of control.
There are several possible reactions to contemplating this overwhelming amount of music. One is panic over the seeming impossibility of learning all of it. This panic can set in when a student, perhaps because of something about the teacher’s real or perceived attitude or perhaps just from within the student, feels an obligation to know everything: a sense that one can’t be a real artist or a real “professional” without mastering everything. A lesser form of this—which I still sometimes feel myself—is sadness over the fact that it is impossible to learn all of the repertoire. This, of course, is just a part of life: it is also impossible to visit every town in the world, or to read every book, or to attend every baseball game. (Or at a deeper level, to spend enough time with all of one’s friends or loved ones, or to meet everyone who might have become a good friend.)
Another possibility, however, is to find the size and scope of the repertoire liberating. If the amount of music that exists is too great to make it possible to learn all of it, then we are all relieved of the obligation to learn all of it. In that case, each of us is perfectly free to work on the music that we really like or that we are really interested in, or that our experience shows us we can learn and play in a way that somehow makes a difference. This is what I have always done myself, and have always invited my students to do. There are other dimensions to this liberation. For example, within any style or type of music that happens to interest any one of us there is almost certain to be enough music to sustain that interest for a long time. Also, if anyone’s interests change or if a particular part of the repertoire loses its allure for a particular player (student or otherwise) there is an essentially infinite amount of other music to investigate. If I, as a performer who is mostly focused on Baroque music, feel a hankering to delve into the nineteenth century—as I have felt from time to time over the years—then I need not lament the fact that I am not a pianist or a player of an orchestral instrument. There is a whole panoply of organ music from that particular esthetic world for me to explore. If an organist who has mostly played nineteenth-century music develops an interest in late medieval music, then he or she can investigate the earliest known keyboard repertoire as an introduction to that musical world.

Personal responses
The relationship between all of this repertoire and people—people who might be organ students or organ teachers or organists or listeners to organ music—is complicated, multilayered, and interesting. Each person’s detailed experience, probably from before conscious memory on, colors his or her reaction to pieces of music and of course to all other experiences. I was remembering recently that whenever I hear the word “culpable” I get in my mind a flash of a strong image of a certain place: the gravel road at the back of the park in the shadow of East Rock in New Haven, where I grew up. (I know the source of this image, though I don’t know why I remember it so strongly: I was taking a walk there with my father when I was nine or ten, and he told me—joking, I assume—that the only sentence he knew or needed to know in French was “Ce n’est pas de ma faute.”) I mention this because it is essentially certain that I am, and will forever remain, the only person in the history of the universe who makes that particular connection. I believe that a vast number of connections like this color everyone’s reaction to all of music that they hear, as well as other experiences, and shape the course of one’s life with music, as an appreciator or as a player, professional or otherwise. Since everyone’s experiences, and the linkages that they form, are different from everyone else’s, it is quite impossible that any two people react to any music the same way, or, even at the most direct level, have the same experience as each other when hearing any given music. (After all, that scene in the park is part of my immediate, direct experience upon hearing the word “culpable,” and part of no one else’s.)
(Some more examples from my own experience, this time about music: I am a big fan of the rock group Jethro Tull. Although I honestly consider their music to be in every way as wonderful artistically as any other that I know of, including the organ repertoire and the rest of the “classical” repertoire, I also believe that I know why I became a fan of that music. During my freshman year of college, one of my roommates had a Jethro Tull record, and I, who at the time did not like any rock and roll, heard in a few passages in a few of the pieces, something that evoked very powerfully for me some of the feelings of the time I had recently [then] spent in England, and that music became part of my nostalgia for England, although I didn’t really get to know the whole Jethro Tull repertoire until about twenty years later. Also, when I hear or play older English music—Tallis or Gibbons, say—the feelings that come up in my mind are those of my experience at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, where I first heard music of that sort when I was in the choir there in the late 1960s: the smell and appearance of that church, the vastness [as it seemed to me then] of the New Haven Green outside, the sounds of cars and buses muffled by the thick stone walls. When I hear mid-twentieth-century chamber music I get an image in my mind of the cover of a particular LP. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think that it included a Poulenc trio. Along with this comes a memory of a certain kind of spring weather.)
I mention all of this in connection with the organ repertoire because it is important to remember that no two people experience, or can possibly experience, that repertoire in the same way: not even one piece, and certainly not any subset of or pathway through the whole repertoire. This is, to me, probably the most important thing to bear in mind when thinking about the vastness of the organ repertoire and when contemplating how to help students find their way through all of that music.
Practicing music is more fun when you really like the music. It is also, in my experience, better practicing: more efficient, more effective, much more likely to result in learning. It is also likely to lead to more practicing, to a real desire to work on more music, and even to a greater willingness to try new things. This observation is based on my own direct experience—practicing, learning music, trying to become a progressively better player—and also on my observation of many students (mostly my own) over many years.
Another anecdote to illustrate this point: my daughter took piano lessons for several years. She, coming from a home in which lots of unusual things went on musically, had unusual ideas about what music she wanted to play. For example, she brought to her lessons movements of Buxtehude harpsichord suites that I was in the middle of recording at the time, or, later, folk song melodies that she wanted to learn how to harmonize and then play. None of this was anything that any piano teacher would have expected to give to a beginning student. (This was in the second year or so of her studies, and she was nine or ten years old.) However, her teacher went along with this and let her work on whatever she was interested in at a given time. The result was that my daughter practiced a fair amount and looked forward to her lessons. She also cared about doing well and about pleasing her teacher. There was good give and take: an atmosphere was created in which it was also possible for the teacher to coax her into trying out various new things. Later on, when that teacher moved away, her new teacher, a very gifted and serious player and an experienced teacher, had a more traditional attitude about what was and what wasn’t OK for a student to work on. My daughter quit enjoying her lessons, quit practicing, and indeed quit the piano. Nowadays she can still play those Buxtehude movements: the way that she worked on them caused them to stay with her forever.
So, for me, the first thing to think about in choosing repertoire for students is to try to find music that the student will really like and want to practice. This is certainly not the only consideration, and it does not directly answer the question of how to find those pieces. After all, not every student comes with a list of pieces that he or she wants to work on. However, I think it is important to give this consideration first place, not to consider it a frill or a luxury or an afterthought.

Is there a standard repertoire?
Another consideration that normally comes up in talking about repertoire for teaching is what the “standard” repertoire is, what music students should know. To me, this is a complicated question, or a question with several different answers. In principle, I believe that there should be no assumption that every student will, even to a small extent, involve him- or herself with the same repertoire as other students or with a “standard” repertoire. This is for several reasons: because there is so much wonderful music out there, because everyone’s experience of that music is different, and because no one can work extremely effectively on music that they don’t like. Also because, for the benefit of the musical world at large, it is a more interesting situation if many performers perform as diverse a repertoire as possible. If there is music that somehow deserves to be more widely played than other music, that will take care of itself: more people will want to play it if it is indeed in some meaningful sense better or more interesting. It may seem to me, or to anyone in the field, that an organ student would be crazy not to want to play at least some Bach (to use the most obvious example). However if a student doesn’t want to, then, perhaps, there is no point in any way forcing them to. There will, presumably, be plenty of others who do want to play Bach.
On the other hand, there is a tremendous disadvantage to anyone in not even knowing what is out there (in any field or endeavor). If a student is not interested in playing something utterly standard, like Bach or Franck, only because he or she has essentially never encountered it in an engaging and interesting way, then that student is being impoverished unnecessarily. This is also true, however, if a student fails to become interested in non-standard repertoire (Cavazzoni, Ernst Koehler, Moondog, Lefébure-Wely, anyone) for the same reason. It is certainly important for a teacher to encourage a student to know about a lot of music, and to make choices based on that knowledge. That does not mean that those choices must settle to any very large extent on standard repertoire.
(Next month I will include some thoughts about ways of exposing students to lots of music and giving them the best chance of figuring out what might most interest them.)
Of course, there are real practical considerations to think about when considering “standard” repertoire. The first is really part practical and part psychological. If an organ student or organist bravely carves out a whole career without ever working on the music that is considered to define the organ repertoire, then that person will be called upon over and over again to explain, and will in fact not be thought well of by at least some people. “You can’t be a real organist if you’ve never worked on any Bach” would be a common refrain. Withstanding this in a happy frame of mind would require a lot of fortitude.
The other problem is more purely practical. It is the problem of auditions and other organized occasions for jumping through hoops. Obviously an organ student who might want to go on for advanced study or who might want to apply for a scholarship or fellowship, or who might want to enter a competition or, for that matter, apply for a job, might well have to produce some pieces that conform to certain rules. Many of these situations have an audition requirement that is more or less “something before Bach, something by Bach, something after Bach” or “something by Bach, something nineteenth century, something twentieth century.” Of course there is often flexibility, but almost always in the context of some such specificity. (I myself, if I were in charge of shaping an audition, would use the following prompt: “Play us about 25 minutes of whatever music you believe would best show us your recent work as an organist, and be prepared to talk to us about that music and the other music that you have studied over the last few years.”) It seems to me that the best approach in dealing with this is to consider it a practical problem with practical solutions. If the right pieces for such needs can be found among the repertoire that a student and his or her teacher are working on in any case, that is wonderful. If not, then the student might have to venture into the territory of playing pieces that he or she is not really interested in. However, this should be recognized as a simple practical task, and not given any more ethical, moral, artistic, or pedagogic weight than that.
Next month I will write more about how to incorporate this and other outside constraints into the teaching process as fruitfully as possible. I will also discuss the “two-way street” relationship between learning to play and repertoire as such (that is, that we learn to play in order to play repertoire and at the same time we work on repertoire in order to learn to play). And I will also consider how to help students explore the repertoire and make choices that are honestly their own, but also impeccably well informed.

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Sight-reading II

The first thing that is required for effective sight-reading is that the reading process itself not be impeded by anything practical. It is inefficient—and unfair to yourself and to your efforts—to work on sight-reading when there is too little light, or when you are trying to read from music that is small, cramped, poorly photocopied, annotated in a way that obscures the notes, or for any other reason difficult to see. There are times when we can’t avoid problems of this sort. It is easy to forget that these things matter, but they do: it is worth some trouble to get all of this right if possible. Copying onto clearer paper, enlarging, erasing unneeded notes: all good ideas. Setting up good lighting: an extremely good idea. (And of course, good light should light the pages evenly, not cast bright light here and shadows there.) If there is a choice of edition, large size and clarity should be taken into account. (They don’t trump accuracy of the musical text and any of its historical or musicological aspects when it comes to learning and performing pieces, of course, but they might for practicing sight-reading.)

It is also worth remembering to position the music in the most sensible way along the music desk. It is natural to put the beginning of a passage at the exact spot that seems easiest to read from (very possibly the middle) and then to have to cope with the fact that two-thirds (or so) of the music is sort of off to one side. It is fine to slide music about to get the part that you are currently reading into the best position, if there is time to do so. This can’t always come out perfectly, but it is worth remembering to think about.

Visual factors

It is interesting that the best position at which to read music is not the same from one person to another. This has to do in part with eyesight, and in part with habit. But it also has to do with the matter of the dominant eye. There is a simple test that you can do to determine which of your eyes is dominant. Sit or stand comfortably with your arms at your side. Look at something in the middle distance. Point to that thing with one of your index fingers—fairly quickly and spontaneously, without stopping to think about anything. Without moving your arm, hand, or finger, close first one eye and then the other. You should observe that with one eye open your index finger is actually pointing to the spot that you tried to point at, and that with the other eye open it is not. The eye that shows your finger pointing at the object is your dominant eye. This is completely different from the vision that is tested by an eye doctor or optometrist. You can see music more easily on the side of your dominant eye than on the other side.

Speaking of vision tests, it is most important that your eyes’ focus on the music as it sits on the music desk be correct. Or in other words, that your glasses’ prescription be right. Most reading glasses are designed to focus too near to the reader’s eyes—maybe about fifteen inches—to be good for reading music on the music desk of a keyboard instrument. That distance is usually more like twenty-two inches. It is not a problem for an optometrist to create glasses that focus for reading at twenty-two inches, but you must ask for this. These should specifically focus at whatever distance you think is right for you, or that you actually measure. They should be traditional single-focus glasses, not part of any sort of bi- or tri-focal or progressive lenses. Not everyone needs to make a change in this department. But if your visual focus on the music desk is uncomfortable, then correcting that is crucial.

All things considered:

Practice vs. performance

I am writing this about sight-reading. It is also true of any playing: just even more important for sight-reading. The same is true of other aspects of work on playing. To turn it around for a minute, much of what I have written about recently (and over the years) in connection with playing and learning to play is applicable to working on sight-reading, or just to the act of sight-reading, only more so. This is true, for example, of not needing to look at the hands and feet very much, and of being committed to keeping the music going, as well as of having an openness to seeing the keyboard score as being one texture played by ten fingers (rather than the upper staff’s being the right hand part and the lower staff the left hand) and being in the habit of paying attention, in the pedals, to what each foot has last been doing, not just to what the last note of the pedal part was. 

It is also true that any habitual approach to fingering can be an aid to sight-reading. It is likely that part of the reason for the existence of “normal” fingerings for certain kinds of passages—scales and chord shapes, primarily—is that those fingerings can, by their very nature as unconsciously available defaults, make sight-reading easier. The details of those fingerings have varied with time and place, for reasons that don’t in themselves have anything to do with sight-reading. It is the very fact of their being learned defaults that makes them relevant to sight-reading. 

On the other hand, there is one major theoretical conflict between sight-reading and ideal performance. In sight-reading, keeping the piece going is an absolute requirement. It should be in any performance as well, of course, and also in practicing. However, in sight-reading, by definition, no interpretive decisions have been made, and no interpretive ideas have been brought to bear on fingering and pedaling choices. So it must be very clear that interpretive dimensions of the “performance” do not have any priority. If in order to get the next notes you must use a fingering that creates a detached articulation when you might have preferred legato, or a pedaling that undermines clarity, or if an ornament has to be too slow or too fast or badly timed, or, for that matter, omitted, that must be judged to be OK. Likewise if, as you hear the music go by, you have what might be called interpretive reactions—“how would this sound if I . . . ?” or “this should be more free, or more clear, or more jaunty, or . . . ” then you should just ignore those feelings. In any case, nothing except getting the next note or notes on time and in the right rhythm has any priority whatsoever. This also includes anything having to do with registration, being on a keyboard other than the one you want to be on, swell pedal position, and so on. Finally, if you have to omit part of the texture—notes, chords, inner voices, one and/or the other, or the feet, or conceivably one foot—then that is all right: much better than breaking rhythm.

This stance or approach or attitude is very different from what we want in “real” performance. However, it is uncannily similar to what performance can feel like if something starts to go wrong (as it really does at least once in a while for everyone). When playing feels like this, we indeed often actually say, “It was as if I had never seen that piece before.” Therefore, practicing sight-reading with this attitude also constitutes practice keeping any playing going when doing so partakes (fleetingly, we all hope) of that feeling of hanging on for dear life. 

A system for sight-reading

So what does it take to practice sight-reading systematically? As with aspects of doing sight-reading, practicing sight-reading is not so different from practicing any other keyboard skill (in particular, practicing pieces to learn them) but just requires being mindful of what the emphasis should be. 

First of all, in order to practice real sight-reading, it is necessary to have a fairly extensive source of printed music available to you that you have never played and don’t know very well (or at all) by ear. Very few of us want to purchase a lot of music expressly for the purpose of playing through it exactly once: that seems wasteful. There are a few ways to approach this. Of course you can acquire music that you are going to want to learn or to use for something beyond sight-reading practice, and then use it (once) for sight-reading practice. You can download free music, print it out, and then, if you don’t have a musical use for it later on, use the reverse sides as scrap paper. You can put a computer— perhaps a tablet or something—on the music desk and sight-read directly off the screen. You can get music from the library, or find old volumes out of which you played just some of the pieces. (Just be careful to avoid the ones that you did play before: that really wouldn’t be sight-reading.)

The good news is that, just as anyone can work on any piece no matter how difficult or “advanced” it is—if he or she will keep the tempo slow enough—likewise any music can be used for sight-reading practice if you are willing to use an appropriate tempo. There is nothing wrong with using music that is fairly simple—simple enough that you can sight-read it at a tempo that makes it “sound like music.” However, there is no reason to stick only to that sort of music. Since really well-developed sight-reading is a coping skill of sorts, it is not a bad idea to work on practicing sight-reading with anything that you can throw at yourself at random. However, again, it is only good practice if you keep the tempo realistic: the more difficult the sight-reading, the slower the tempo.

I should mention here that there are nowadays quite a few websites that offer music for sight-reading practice. I will not mention specific ones, as I don’t have enough experience with any one of them to offer an assessment (let alone an endorsement) and, of course, they are likely to change all of the time. At any moment when you are undertaking to practice sight-reading systematically (or a student is), it is not a bad idea to do a search on a phrase such as “sight-reading materials” or “sight-reading resources” and see what turns up. Some of these services offer music that you or the student will certainly not have seen before, since it is generated for the purpose. They mostly do seem to offer music arranged according to a difficulty scale. I would probably recommend some of the time sticking to the next few pieces up in that scale, and some of the time leap-frogging ahead a bit, and slowing the tempo down.

So, once there is music on the desk and you are ready to drill sight-reading, what should you do? Essentially just start playing, but slowly, with a very strong commitment to moving your eyes forward systematically, and keeping the playing going. 

Again, this is not so different from practicing a piece. In a sense, the main difference is just that you have purposely put a piece in front of your eyes that you have not seen before. Some differences in emphasis are these: 

—You should just ignore and forget whatever just happened (no need to try to remember any problems in the back of your mind to inform future practice, as we would do when playing a piece that you are working on to learn);

—You should use your eyes very purposefully, scanning a note or two ahead, scanning steadily up and down—all the voices or components of the texture; perhaps you should use a voice in your head to explicitly mention pitch names as they come up (I seem to find this helpful, though I could also imagine its being a distraction); 

—You should be consciously aware of not expecting any pre-awareness (or so-called “muscle memory”) to kick in; 

—As we have said, you should neither look at and study the pieces and passages in advance, nor use the same material more than once.

“Not looking” is important, but also creates a sort of paradox. If in order to practice sight-reading strictly you need to have the sight-reading moment be the first time you so much as glance at a piece, but you also want to do the sight-reading practice at a slow enough tempo, then how do you determine, even approximately, what that slow enough tempo will be? This involves compromise, and different people can find their own exact ways. I would say that choice of tempo can depend in part on key signature—which you should look at in advance—and on a very rough scan of the overall density of notes. For some people this rough scan should include noticing how active the pedal part is, how many accidentals there seem to be, how much is chordal and how much is scale or passage-work, and what the smallest common note-value is. The correct slow enough tempo has to do not with the “beat” as defined by the time signature, but with the smallest prevailing note value.

I mentioned last month that I myself can do a spiffier job of sight-reading pieces that are in styles most familiar to me as a performer than I can music with which I have less learning and performance experience. I can sight-read Buxtehude or Scheidemann or Froberger more readily (which essentially means at a tempo closer to performance tempo) than I can Reger or Widor or Rheinberger. I am certain that this is about my experience and the expectations that it creates, not about anything intrinsic to the repertoire. The “hardest” Reger pieces, for example, are probably harder than the hardest Buxtehude pieces, but I believe that in developing my understanding of my own experience with sight-reading I am correcting for that. I do believe that most players can more readily sight-read music that is closer in compositional style to music that they have studied and played. I assume that the mechanism of this is that a kind of generalized “muscle memory” kicks in: that you can anticipate what the composer probably did next, even though you don’t know what the composer actually did next. Subconsciously your mind narrows down the possibilities and likelihoods about where your fingers and feet should be heading. This also explains why different people find different repertoires difficult. But, since we are talking here about sight-reading, we should note that these perceived differences in difficulty are often mediated by assumptions or experiences of trying to sight-read different types of repertoire, rather than trying to practice it patiently and systematically. Practicing sight-reading unfamiliar repertoire can be fruitful in de-mystifying that repertoire and in making the real learning process for that repertoire seem more accessible, if that sight-reading is done (again) slowly enough and with good focus.