On Teaching

Therapy

I begin this month’s essay with an anecdote that will lead to some further reflections and questions arising out of my recovery from shoulder surgery. I am writing in mid-February, and yesterday I needed to go to the bank. Because of a student cancellation I had about an hour free for a ten-minute errand, without anything else on my schedule. As I turned into the bank parking lot I got a jolt of pleasure from noticing that the lot was empty. Maybe I would be the only person there! Maybe I could do what I needed to do quickly and get it over with! But, as I fished around in a compartment in my car for the papers that I needed, I realized that I was getting into a mild but real panic that someone else might drive up before I had a chance to go in. Why? I had a lot of time, it was too cold to take a walk or to do other errands. Yet, I was not aware of any other errands that I needed to do.

My arm still will not permit me to practice—no reason to rush back to the studio. If anything, it would make sense for me to want the bank errand to take a bit longer. I was experiencing impatience for its own sake: just manifesting a habit of being impatient or maybe behaving as if being impatient were something that I actually needed to practice. The latter is, unfortunately, not remotely true. I am habitually impatient, and I have trouble putting that aside. Increasingly I notice that most of the time when I am upset or having trouble with something, the underlying source of that trouble is impatience.

My long-term goal is to rid myself of impatience, which will in turn improve my character and temperament. It takes time, and that is difficult.

I have no idea where I stand on the human impatience scale—maybe no worse than average. Impatience is something that is woven into the fabric of our world. The desire or need to get a lot done can lead to impatience—although that connection is, I believe, illusory. Fervor, efficiency, commitment, concentration: those all can lead to getting more done; impatience cannot. Impatience may be a natural, or at least common, human feeling. But there are things about modern life in particular that seem to nurture it—commercials, for example, or the approbation given to multitasking.

Thankfully, this impatience does not manifest itself when working with students. Encouraging students to work fervently, efficiently, with commitment and concentration is important and good. Becoming concerned about a student’s productivity is appropriate. But impatience just clouds thought. Directed at others it can give rise to unhelpful and unnecessary interpersonal problems.

My own tendency towards impatience is directed at myself. For example, once in a while over the years I have thought it prudent to try to get my weight down. If I am lucky, I experience a day on which I eat lightly and healthy and maybe take a walk or play a round of golf. So far, so good. But if the next morning I have not demonstrably lost four or five pounds (and I have not) then I immediately decide that this is not working, and that I might as well give up. Or I should say that I experience the impulse to decide that. Once or twice over the years I have been able to fight against that impulse successfully. (I know that I am not the only one who has had this experience!)

So all of the above ties in to my current round of physical therapy, which in turn ties in to practicing and other aspects of musical life. When I wrote my March column about a month ago I had not yet started therapy. I wrote that the kind of patient, one-step-at-a-time work that I imagined it to be seemed like something that went against the grain of my temperament. This was in spite of whatever success I have had in making myself carry out similar tasks that add up to learning pieces of music or learning to be a performing musician. But I also thought that in this circumstance I would have a fairly easy time of overcoming any problems with impatience, distraction, or boredom due to the obvious high stakes. Here are a few observations from three weeks into the process:

1) There is an element in my physical therapy that resembles good systematic practicing—exercises that should be done on a consistent, regular schedule and that allow progress to happen. This progress has, in both situations, the quality of sometimes being difficult to see day to day. Some days are different that way from others. Sometimes you think that you can feel the small increments, and sometimes you can experience the progress sort of “catch up.” I have done what I would say is a “B+” job of complying with the home exercise schedule, maybe “A–.” It is not quite as easy to make myself do it as I had expected, even with an awareness of the consequences of not doing it. I believe that I am doing enough that my progress is what the therapist expected.

2) And speaking of that, there is an important element here of the need to put faith in the skill and (perhaps even more importantly) in the judgment of the physical therapists. There are levels to this. The first is faith in the knowledge, judgment, and experience of the establishment and of everyone involved in creating the program. The second is faith in the overall skill and judgment of my particular therapist. Third is faith in my therapist specifically to know whether what she sees happening is right.

When we do various exercises, there is often pain involved. (There is a big difference between this and practicing organ or harpsichord, by the way!) I have discovered that when I am doing exercises at the facility or having my shoulder worked on by my therapist, I can relax about the meaning of that pain. I trust her to know for certain whether any given pain is what has to be expected or if there is a problem. (So far there has been none of the latter, I am glad to say.) When doing exercises at home I do not feel that I can trust myself to make that same judgment. So it is nerve-racking. I do these exercises more cautiously than I need to. As the repair to my shoulder heals and I know that the risk of re-injury is fading, I am less worried. But early in the process the fear that I would do something to set the whole process back had a tendency to constrain my work quite a lot.

Trusting in the judgment of the professionals is one of the parallels between physical therapy and music lessons. I muse about whether this experience has changed my thinking about teaching. I believe that it has clarified something for me. Physical therapy is analogous to the part of music teaching in which we try to guide our students toward learning the notes reliably, as to one piece or as to gain general skill. But it does not include anything about interpretation, rhetoric, or style. I have realized that I do want my students to trust me implicitly and thoroughly about note-learning techniques but that I specifically do not want them to trust me about interpretation, and so on. This is a slightly different lens through which to view what I have always said about not wanting my students to play like me or to copy me or anyone else.

If a student does not believe me when I say that a practice protocol will work, or that it is acceptable to work on this “difficult” piece if (and only if) we approach it in this specific way, or that if you do this exercise you can learn to play 5/4 trills comfortably, then the whole process becomes inefficient or ineffective. Just as I have no idea what works and what does not work in physical therapy, the student may not know what does or does not work in note-learning.

Why do I trust my physical therapist, and why should a student trust me? It is partly about institutions and partly about individual experience. I assume that if I go to a reputable physical therapy establishment, I will find that the therapists there are good at what they do. This kind of reasoning is often valid, but sometimes trips us up. We also trust training and education. My physical therapist has certain degrees and certificates. I do not know anything about the schools and programs that she attended; again, we are largely trusting institutions. This often works, yet sometimes does not.

(It occurs to me that if anyone assumed that they could trust me as a teacher specifically because I am the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, then they would be falling into a circular trap. I founded PEKC, and it is a small operation. If PEKC vouches for me as a trustworthy teacher, then I am just vouching for myself!)

The next step is the experience itself. If we discover that we were wrong to trust someone’s judgment and expertise, it is likely that we will find out too late. In the physical therapy situation as well as other medical situations this could have terrible consequences. It is difficult not to see any choice other than to do the best we can in making that judgment. I should say that as far as I can tell, my therapist is extraordinarily good and everything is proceeding exactly as it is supposed to.

(It occurs to me that if I could trust my students not to trust me about interpretive matters—that is, not take anything I say as authoritative—I would probably talk to them more about such things than I do. That seems to be a fruitful idea about which to muse further.)

3) The interpersonal side of the physical therapy process has something in common with that of music lessons. It is a partnership and a kind of artificial friendship. I am not at all sure that I am putting this particularly well, as it is something that I am in the midst of experiencing and just beginning to think about. By artificial I do not necessarily mean false, but rather forged by circumstances that are not themselves about friendship. It is of necessity hierarchical. It is time-limited—it is likely that after another month, I will never see my therapist again, nor any of the other people at the office whom I have gotten to know. This happens all the time with business or practical connections. But it seems like more of a “thing” in this case perhaps because the business at hand is important and personal, perhaps because it is time-intensive while it is going on. I have had a previous bout of physical therapy in my life. I remember being quite sad, even briefly kind of forlorn, when it ended.

This makes me ponder the time element of music teaching. I have rarely had a student who came for lessons as often per week or for as long each time as I am going to physical therapy now. But on the other hand I have had students stay with me for a very long time indeed. As best I can figure it, I have had students whose study has been as short as one lesson and as long as twenty-five years. The former has occasionally (rarely) been a failed connection—always determined by the student, not by me—but more often been a planned one-time consultation. Decades-long study needs to be thought about very carefully and conscientiously by the teacher. Is the lesson process still useful for the student? Is the balance between the interpersonal and the pedagogic successful?

To be continued.

Playing slowly

I ended last month’s column with an anecdote that I suggested would lead nicely into what I wanted to write about this month:

One day Gene Roan and I were walking along the corridor chatting when he stopped near a practice room door. He told me to listen, and then after a couple of minutes said, “Even his very slow practice has a sense of direction.” I did not know who was practicing. I think that I was shy about actually peering through the little window, or maybe it was papered over. But that was a significant lesson to me. I have tried to make sure that my slow practicing has a sense of direction ever since!

This month I discuss playing slowly—slow practice, students and their relationship to tempo, and various questions related to choice of tempo in performance. Concerning slow practice, which I have written about at some length in the past, I have some new things to say and some new ideas about how best to describe it to students.

First I want to flesh out the anecdote a little bit. After writing last month’s column, I wondered whether Professor Roan might have been engaging in a bit of stealth teaching at that moment. He certainly knew that I was a fervent believer in slow practice and that I had a tendency to prefer somewhat slow tempos for performance. Was he reminding me to take care that my slow playing incorporated as much direction and purpose as possible? Clearly one of the characteristic dangers of slow playing is that of plodding along.

But I have had a few further questions. Is it actually good to imbue your very slow practice with a sense of direction? The point of slow practicing is to learn the notes. Is listening for or trying to project a sense of direction a distraction from that? Does it reduce the efficiency of slow practice and delay the time at which the player will be able to move closer to a performance tempo and eventually all the way there?

Furthermore, what is the relationship between a sense of direction that works at one tempo and one that would work at a very different tempo? Is it possible to hear interpretive or rhetorical gestures in slow motion, so that what you are doing to shape the music four or eight times slower than you end up playing it is genuinely analogous to what you will want to do when you are playing faster? The assumption that there is a strong analogy of this sort with the physical gesture of playing is the foundation of the belief that slow practice is efficient. But that does not tell us anything directly about rhetorical or interpretive matters.

One way of expressing a fairly agreed-upon view of the relationship between systematic slow practice and end results in performance is that the slow practice leads to such solid, reliable, and controllable playing that the ears, mind, judgment, taste, etc., of the player can ask the fingers and feet to do anything and they will respond. This is certainly correct in my experience. And a logical conclusion from this formulation is that expressive content of very slow practice is essentially neither here nor there.

Perhaps the point of playing with a sense of direction or any expressive purpose and effect when practicing very slowly is not about the music that you are practicing. Maybe it is about the next very slow piece that you want to play. It is about learning to hear musical shape and direction in very slow passages in general, not particularly with reference to the piece that you are practicing. Or perhaps it is just about keeping the ears focused. In any case, these are questions to muse about rather than to answer, and it pleases me that an event that took about ninety seconds thirty or so years ago is still causing me to reflect today.

The earlier columns in which I wrote the most systematically about slow practice were those of February and March 2009. Perusing those now I see that I did not talk about one technique that I have used to help students settle in to slow practicing—in particular, not to speed up inadvertently during the process. That is a conscious focus on the sonority of individual notes. If we are lucky, the actual sound of an organ or harpsichord that we are playing is beautiful, interesting, or somehow compelling. Savoring that sound can be an antidote to a tendency to rush or hurry. This is very true on the harpsichord, where the middle to late part of the blooming and decaying sound can be fascinating and the best part. On the organ, decay does not happen. Sounds are still interesting, and the relationship between what the pipes are doing and what the room is doing can be fascinating, and it often develops over the length of even a long, slow note.

This points to a concern that I have tended to gloss over. Since organ sounds can theoretically last forever, very slow organ practice creates the risk that the inexorability of each note’s sound will become annoying. Not everyone feels this. I think that I do so only when there are other people who can hear me practicing, and I am worried that they might find the sounds annoying. This can be largely solved by using soft sounds. In fact, in the great centuries-old debate about whether to do initial practicing on a soft neutral sound or on the sound that you want for the music, this may provide a new wrinkle. Look for a sound that makes the sustained tones of slow practice as interesting as possible!

Concerning choice of tempo for performance, why ask the question, “Is it okay to play slowly?” Surely that question should in principle be a neutral one: “What is the most effective tempo for this piece or passage?” It is possible for a performance tempo to be too slow, and the telltale sign of that is that listeners react to the music as plodding or boring, but it is also possible for music to be too fast, resulting in the music being perceived as hectic or unpleasant or conveying a sense that the performer wants to get it over with. However, if music is slow, there can always be some suspicion that it is that way because the player cannot play any faster. We rarely suspect that someone who plays very fast cannot play any slower. I believe this is often a bigger issue for students than we realize. The pressure to play as fast as you have heard someone else play can be intense.

I recently witnessed a comment on a YouTube performance of a Bach piece that said, more or less, if one cannot play this any faster, one should not play. This was rather unfriendly, and it was accompanied by some other nasty comments. (One of these comments concluded this certainly was not Bach’s tempo, something about which the commenter could not possibly have actually known.) I am perfectly happy that I scrolled away from it before I noted exactly what it was or how to find it again.

I had the great good fortune to hear the pianist Mieczysław Horszowski in concert quite a few times in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was in his nineties. His tempos were usually a bit slower than the average that you would have found by surveying available recordings of the pieces, especially newer ones. His playing was also thoughtful and expressive, natural and unforced. I never suspected that he had to play slowly because of his age or for any other reason. I also noticed that he would often include something very fast among the encores. It struck me that perhaps he was trying to give us listeners the message that, yes, he was playing the way he played because that is how he wanted the music to be heard—that his fingers could indeed move as fast as ever, or as fast as anyone’s.

I tend to like slow tempos. I think that this is in part because my whole orientation to playing music and to listening to music is sonority-based. I am an organist because I fell in love with the sounds of certain organ stops very early in life, and the same with the harpsichord just a bit later. I gravitate toward instruments that sound so interesting and compelling that the experience of listening is powerful almost regardless of what the pieces are like. This is not the only way to listen, and some people would justly criticize it as insufficiently respectful of the importance of composition. But the savoring of the sonority that I recommend as a way of keeping slow practice slow is an everyday part of my listening and playing. This tends to keep my playing slower than it might be, and that can be received either well or badly by any given listener.

In Widor’s recording of his own famous “Toccata” he slows down fairly significantly in measure nine when the pedal enters. I believe this is because he wants to give the long pedal notes a chance to bloom, to savor their sounds. This is a reminder that sometimes slower notes need to be slower, as a matter of underlying tempo, than quicker notes. Sometimes slow notes need to bloom, and quick notes need to be subsumed into larger beats. I measured the Widor tempo change. The opening passage is in the mid-nineties per quarter note, measure nine is in the mid-eighties, but I had not noticed it spontaneously. The rhetoric of the tempo change is convincing.

I have noticed that when I finish listening to a piece of music, if the piece continues to go through my head, it is almost always slower than the performance I just heard. I only focused on this recently, and I do not have a precise explanation for it. It cannot be a reaction to sonority, since I am not actually listening to anything at that moment. And it is not coupled with any conscious sense of having disliked the tempo of what I just heard. It just seems to be something about my own temperament as a musician and listener. For whatever reasons in each person’s history, one has a different temperament as a listener and as a player. I believe that one’s stance as a listener should inform one’s playing perhaps more than we let it sometimes. When in doubt, play it the way you want to hear it. For some people—me, for example, and plenty of students I have known—this means in part being willing to not worry about whether someone else would have played it faster.

Not everyone’s tendency is to want to play slowly or “moderately.” But a desire to play fast is never going to be met with suspicion about the player’s level of competence. The choice to play fast is never going to be invalidated as one that was not in fact a free artistic choice.

Is it a good thing, some of the time, for really fast playing to sound like it is at the cutting edge of difficulty? Or is it necessary that if you are going to play very fast you make it seem easy? I remember a rather ironic story from my life that touches on that. Around 1981 I traveled to Binghamton, New York, at the invitation of Paul Jordan, my former teacher and good friend, to give a concert. One of the pieces that I played was the Sweelinck Chromatic Fantasy. Late in the piece there is a passage of sextuplet sixteenth notes in the top voice against slower notes in the other voices. As part of his feedback after the concert, Paul said that he thought I should play the piece faster. One reason he gave was that he thought those sextuplets should sound like they were at the very edge of what the player could execute. They should sound in that sense difficult, challenging. The irony was I thought that they already were at the limit of what I could do. I would have been terrified to try them any faster, and indeed probably would not have succeeded in pulling that off. But it interested me that they came across to Paul as being serene, too serene!

I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a late bloomer as a player. Even in early adulthood I honestly could not play every piece as fast as I wanted to hear it. It has been a long time now since that was true for me, except perhaps for some extreme cases. But remembering the Binghamton event and my limitations as to velocity back in those days leads me to a couple of thoughts that will close this thread for now. First, is it all right for a teacher to allow or to encourage a student to learn pieces that the student will realistically never be able to get up to tempo? This question should be technically meaningless, since anyone can learn any piece or passage by practicing it the right way. But not everyone is actually going to practice everything enough to learn it. This can be true as a choice or option. A student may be interested in exploring a piece, but only so far. Or it may be a real or realistic limitation. If a piece is so vastly difficult that the most careful, conscientious, systematic practicing would only permit it to be learned over decades, then learning it is probably not a real possibility.

I find it a good idea for a student to work on a piece yet only get it some of the way up to tempo. For one thing, any careful practicing is good practice in the art of practicing. For becoming better at practicing and for becoming a better player, I am tempted to say that it does not matter at all whether you get the pieces that you work on along the way fully learned or not. And the best way of not fully learning a piece is to learn it below tempo. This also allows students to get to know pieces that are for the time being, at least, beyond where they are technically. It is interesting. It also creates a situation in which the piece is primed to be fully learned later on. In fact, learning a piece solidly but well under tempo and then letting it sit for a while, even a long while, is a very effective way of ending up getting it to be a secure, well-thought-out performance when it is eventually learned. Also, being willing to keep a piece under tempo can allow a student to encounter more difficult works by a composer whose less challenging works they may want to learn more fully.

Stories and conversation

In mid-March, when I last sat down to write a column, the current health crisis was at a relatively early and very uncertain stage. I wrote that I hoped that by the time that column appeared in The Diapason things would be much better. I sit here writing now a week or two after that last column appeared, and this one will not be read for nearly another six weeks. It seems accurate to say that the situation remains dire and that the sense of uncertainty remains as high as it was then. While society is slowly starting to reopen, we will not know the effects of this action for quite some time. This very morning there are hopeful headlines about a vaccine, but we have no idea whether that hope will pan out or, if so, what sort of timeframe this will take.

I still cannot consider it prudent to schedule concerts. I wrote in my March column (written in mid-January) that I did not have any concerts scheduled at all, a first in nearly thirty-five years. I stated that that was “odd: simultaneously peaceful and eerie.” Today it feels more eerie than peaceful: the latter has been partially replaced by impatience and the fear that it will never seem right to schedule events. Looking back, as of a couple of weeks ago I have not played in public for over a year. That arises out of a chain of mostly unrelated circumstances: first I kept my schedule clear for several months so that I could practice for planned performances of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue; then I had to deal with my shoulder surgery and recovery; then the current phase in the history of the world set in. The last time that I went more than a year without playing in public was prior to 1980. 

Over the last several weeks there has been a lot of discussion, much of it deeply anguished, about choirs and choral singing. This does not affect me directly at this point in my life except as a listener, though I know it is deeply affecting many of my friends and colleagues. In fact, it may be two years before widespread choral singing will be possible again. I hope very much that by the time you are reading this that hypothesis will have turned out to be overly pessimistic.

There is a lot of variation in how people react to this uncertainty when it comes to the parts of their lives and daily activities that are subject to discretion. Some colleagues are using their extra free time to learn new music or new skills—the technique required to work on new and unfamiliar repertoire or even a new instrument. Some are taking up new activities or hobbies—perhaps ones that they have always meant to pursue. So far, I have done none of the above. My reaction to the situation has been to put much of my motivation to tackling preexisting projects. I mentioned in my previous column that I needed “to take a deep breath.” At that point, early in this whole scenario, I felt that my students needed that as well, and that it was a good thing for all of us. Shortly after writing that, I did start to offer various forms of remote lessons or consultations to my students. However, I have not felt my own motivation returning, either to plunge back into practicing or to explore anything new. Most of what I have been doing has been “comfort food,” as we have been baking a fair amount of bread and cooking a bit more elaborately.

I am not certain why this is. It may be partly a direct reaction to the sadness and difficulty of what is happening. If so, it is not necessarily entirely a depressive reaction or a reaction of feeling indifferent. I suspect that in the face of so much tragedy right around me I am afraid that I will find the music that I might normally be playing too intense. That has been my reaction to the little bits of playing that I have done and also to much of the music that I have heard. Also, I have always had better practice habits when I have performances coming up. That impetus is gone for now. I do feel certain that the motivation will come back. But the main point is this: that any such reaction is okay. I am overjoyed that so many of my colleagues are, for example, posting videos of performances from their homes. That is generous and helpful. I have been an avid viewer and listener, and that is helping me get through certain days. However, I believe it is important that no one feels pressure to cope in ways that are unnatural. In general getting a lot done is more admired in society than not getting anything done. And I am confessing to embracing the latter, though just for now, and claiming that I am within my rights to do so. 

But if it is self-serving, it is not selfish since I hope very much to help persuade everyone to give themselves the same leeway, as much as they need. Doing the things that we have to do is enough as far as fulfilling obligations is concerned. 

At the same time, I have been thinking about counterpoint and The Art of the Fugue. It feels like the odd times in which we live are encouraging me to engage in ever more speculative thinking. Rather than indulging in the technical aspects of counterpoint, I have been pondering more about images and ideas around the concept of counterpoint. Ideally the images and ideas will inform the way that I think about the technicalities. 

One very powerful idea about counterpoint is that it is related to conversation. If two musical entities are engaged with one another, doing different things at the same time, it is natural for us to hear what is happening as analogous to human verbal conversation. This is not an idea of mine, but has been the subject of articles and books as well as informal discussion. It is intuitively convincing. When counterpoint is being produced by separate instruments the conversational aspect is enhanced by the visual and the conceptual: we see and are aware of a different source for each musical line, just as we see and are aware of each different speaker in a conversation. In vocal counterpoint, we see and hear something that is remarkably similar to conversation, down to the humanity of the sources of the sound and the expressions and gestures. At a keyboard instrument the conversational aspect is something that presumably arises solely from the sound. Visually, and often spatially, everything comes from pretty much the same place. The extent to which it is up to the performer and to performance choices to make the conversational aspect of the music convincing is not necessarily very different from the parallel concerns with ensemble counterpoint.

For the performer, one of the great strengths of conceptualizing counterpoint as conversation is that it brings home the need to make each line in and of itself an effective piece of communication—something that has “meaning” though not dictionary or visual-image based meaning. At a minimum this is psychologically helpful, even inspiring, for many performers. For me it serves as a reminder to behave as if every note matters. In conversation every word matters, in that it can be heard by someone and may affect that person. That does not mean that every word is serious, solemn, or weighty. Some are funny, light-hearted, rhetorical rather than meaning-laden. But they are all there and all have an effect.

I have a few caveats about counterpoint as conversation. For one thing, it seems important to me to remember that, as I just mentioned, music in itself does not have dictionary meaning, semantic, idea-based meaning, and that it does not mean anything that can be encapsulated in a visual image. It is liberating and powerful to accept that Example 1 means exactly what it says and nothing else. This freedom from word-like meaning gives a line of music the ability to do things that words cannot do and the flexibility to be used in ways that words are not used. 

Related to that is the first major difference between verbal conversation and musical contrapuntal conversation. In the latter, we not only allow but expect material to be used multiple times. Although the essence of counterpoint is found in two different things happening at the same time, it is habitual for identical or similar things to happen at different times. This can be recurrence, repetition, echoing, answering, returning, and so on. But all of these techniques play a minor role in anything like normal conversation and a limited though sometimes important role in poetry, drama, and literary narrative. They are pervasive and important in music.

In verbal conversation, we do not expect many voices to be sounding at the same time. We expect them to take turns and occasionally overlap, which is fascinating in verbal conversation. Sometimes, it functions to create continuity and an overall arc. At times it is an interruption, which can be a sign of enthusiasm and can constitute rudeness. It is common and normal for interruption to take the form of one person’s finishing another’s thought—not necessarily in the way that the first speaker would have finished it. It is not normal for two or more people simply to talk steadily at the same time as one another for a substantial amount of time. This would cease to be conversation. But it is the norm for musical contrapuntal conversation. 

With words, we do not expect to be able to follow even two let alone three or more lines of thought at the same time. With counterpoint, that is exactly what we expect to do: it is a major concept of the exercise. It is not necessarily easy, and it is not necessarily something at which we always fully succeed. It is almost certainly both common and unproblematic for some of that following to be subconscious or subliminal. People differ in the extent to which they are consciously, specifically aware of following and really parsing the separate lines of counterpoint as it goes by. And, of course, different performances of the same piece or passage can seem to make it easier or harder to follow in that way. (And interestingly different performances can seem different in that respect to different listeners.) I think that it is a pitfall of the counterpoint-as-conversation idea that it can tempt us to try to make the analogy fit even more closely than it naturally does. This might involve downplaying the significance of the simultaneity of lines or even denying that following multiple lines at once is possible. I have heard people suggest that the way we listen to counterpoint should fundamentally involve switching focus from one line to another, as we would presumably have to do if we were trying to listen to two or more people talk at the very same time. 

Questions of how many lines we can listen to simultaneously are complex. Does it vary from one person to another? If so, is that somehow intrinsic—or of life-long standing—or does it arise specifically from music-based training? Can almost everyone follow two voices? Can anyone really follow six? eight? forty? Do people mainly listen to or notice the beginnings of notes, or are the sustained portions of notes important as well? In counterpoint is one line ever more “important” than another, and, if so, what does that mean and what should a performer do about it? Whatever these questions are, I believe it is important not to let the speech analogy influence our answers to them, or how we frame them, more than it should.

Another concern about the conversation analogy is that musical conversational counterpoint is mostly experienced by listeners, whereas verbal conversation is fundamentally experienced by those who participate in it. We who love counterpoint love playing it. It is interesting to contemplate how much we function as listeners while we play and how much of our experience is the pure experience of playing. But the vast majority of music listening is done by listeners. Listening to a spoken conversation in which you have no part happens and is perfectly normal, but not the most usual or common.

The completely different model of counterpoint that has come to interest or even preoccupy me over the last few years is one that is harder to encapsulate in words: counterpoint in music is a model for the whole phenomenon of the existence of the universe. This model was suggested to me by some of my experience as a theater attendee.

Over the last several years I have attended quite a few theater events that are organized in what amounts to contrapuntal layers: different parts of the story going on in different or overlapping spaces, perhaps threads sometimes coming together in one space or passing near one another, sometimes remaining separate. Together they all add up to the complete story. Some such pieces that I have experienced are Sleep No More, Then She Fell, The Grand Paradise, Ghost Light, Here, Seeing You, and versions of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

I was initially puzzled by why I found this sort of story-telling so powerful. Events of this sort seem very much like closed worlds: nothing from the outside gets in or interferes. This helps the audience to concentrate and stay committed. It also means that the world built up inside the walls of the event has the chance to feel complete—it is temporarily defined as being all that there is, and it is structured according to its own content.

I realized after a while that the structure always felt, through a number of different styles and each time with a different story, like an analogy to the “real” world: layered and complex enough for that analogy to seem valid and emotionally convincing. 

At some point I realized that the experience of being at this sort of show reminded me strongly of closing my eyes and becoming totally absorbed in a piece of contrapuntal music. In such a piece of music there might be only three or four component lines; in a show such as the ones that I am talking about there might be any number of component storylines weaving their ways around one another. In the universe as a whole there are infinite numbers. But the analogy still seems to hold.

This image neither contradicts nor directly complements the conversation analogy. It is simply another angle and one that I along with some of my students have found particularly interesting and powerful.

It is my intention—uncertainties aside, for the moment—to return next month to some nitty-gritty motivic analysis of The Art of the Fugue, not without some speculation about the role of memory in creating structure.

Interruption

I am typing this column slower than usual—with one hand. About three weeks ago I had surgery, apparently entirely successful, to repair a rather large rotator cuff tear in my left shoulder. I am now about halfway through the time I need to keep my left arm immobilized in a sling. This has not just impeded my typing, but has also kept me from playing music. In mid-October, about the time when I was writing my December column, I began to find the pain in my shoulder severe enough that I could not play for more than a few minutes at a time. It was about then that I acknowledged that I had already been shying away from practicing or playing much for a month or two. Depending on how rehab goes, I will not have played regularly for a period of from five to six months or longer.

I have had to cancel—or postpone—four planned performances of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Fortunately, only one had been publicly announced when I was forced to make that decision. As far as I can remember, this is the first time that I have not had any concerts scheduled in about thirty-five years. It feels odd: simultaneously peaceful and eerie.

My right arm bears the burden of doing everything for the time being and is beginning to complain. Typing has become painful, and I can only type for a few minutes at a time. Hence this column is a short one. I am a slow typist anyways; I never learned to type. I peck away with one finger at a time—usually, one finger on each hand, but for now, one finger, period. I estimate that typing with just my right hand makes it take three times as long—some of that just because I am bringing fewer resources to bear, some of it compounded out of the greater number of wrong keys that I hit and the need to make corrections. It interests me to ponder: would the need to type one-handed make more or less of a difference to someone who could “really” type? I suspect more.

I am occasionally asked why I never learned to type. Given that I do a similar but arguably more complicated task with my hands, they I assume that I could pick it up naturally. Either I just never happened to get around to it, did not need it enough to be motivated to do it, or I was (subconsciously) afraid that it would somehow confuse me as to my keyboard playing!

There are two reasons that this month’s column does not continue my discussion of The Art of the Fugue. That I can only type a sentence or two at a time before I need a break makes trying to construct the arc of a serious discussion frustrating or impossible. The breaks are too distracting, as is the heightened need to correct typographical errors. I would feel strong pressure to keep it short, or not to be overly conscientious if I suspected that I had written something the wrong way or left something out.

But also, I am still not that far removed from the brief but intense period right around surgery when I was in a lot of pain. I still do not feel ready to think connectedly about matters that are important enough to deserve and need the respect of careful, connected thought. I expect to get back to The Art of the Fugue next month, if all goes well, and pick up where I left off. This column, then, is just a few notes or jottings from the middle of an interlude.

It is interesting to take a hiatus from performing at this time. Even though I know that it is just temporary, it feels like a change, it feels different. I seem to be experiencing an enhanced set of memories of, and a kind of affinity for, my late childhood and teenage years. That was a time when I knew that I cared deeply about music and spent a lot of time daydreaming about being a musician and a performer, but did not really believe that I ever could be. Why not? That question has always interested and even haunted me, and I do not have a clear or complete answer. Perhaps this current experience will make me search for one. That could be fruitful and enriching, and also intensely relevant to thinking about teaching, learning, and motivation.

In those years I was a listener more than a performer. Right now, though, I find it difficult to listen. I have not listened through a piece of music in weeks. I suspect that this may be because I am not quite yet up to scratch mentally. However, I notice that when I hear music casually, mostly as movie or television soundtracks, I hear it very intensely. I am noticing more detail and responding emotionally in a more vivid way than I expect in that situation. Of course, that is in short bursts—low demands on concentration, no need to try for that longer arc that is normally so important to me. Perhaps that explains this focus. But I wonder whether sometimes I let my focus on the music that I am working on, or that I am working on with students, partially block my commitment to really hearing other music. I suspect that this is true, and I want to observe it as I get back to playing.

I still always have music going through my head. During the last few weeks this has been essentially all piano music: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. I react to this as being also a bit of a return to my much earlier years. This was most of what I listened to as a teenager.

Concerning motivation

I am very aware that I have a fairly long and intense stint of physical therapy coming up. It will begin in two or three weeks, as soon as my sling is removed. I really, really need and want to do it right. I gather that the success of the whole enterprise of returning my arm to full function will depend significantly on this stage. I care a lot about getting back to a state in which I do not feel any physical constraints on my organ and harpsichord playing. I care a lot about returning to playing golf (see my column from December 2014); and, of course, I care about just being okay in day-to-day life.

I was surprised when two or three friends of mine independently said to me something like, “Of course the rehab will be easy for you. You’re a musician. You’re used to working patiently, systematically, etc.” The reason I am surprised is that I am usually terrible at that. I know something about how to describe that sort of systematic work, at least when it forms part of organ or harpsichord learning, precisely because it does not come easily to me. I have had to puzzle it out very deliberately.

That is why this is about motivation. I am actually serenely confident that I will do the physical therapy assiduously and thoroughly. But that is only because, first, I am very strongly motivated to do it, and, second, I understand that the only time to do it is now—one chance. The structure will be externally imposed, as it has to be. The physical therapists know what I need to do; I do not.

If there is an analogy between this and learning music, it involves the very practical side of the latter: the part about “if you follow these steps, you will learn the notes, you will develop the skill;” not the parts about interpretation, rhetoric, communication. In a way, physical therapy is like systematic practicing, but one step farther back. It is, because of the particular circumstance, the practical thing that I must do in order to achieve the practical things that I am used to doing and that I try to help other people accomplish.

That is all for now. I expect my discussion of The Art of the Fugue will resume next month.

Taking stock

I had intended to make this, finally, a normal column, and as recently as a couple of days ago that was still my plan. I was going to write on toccata form, or as I conceive it, the “toccata principle,” a topic I have wanted to write about for some time. This is an approach to constructing pieces and to creating continuity that is crucially important and, I believe, somewhat under-discussed. It segues quite well out of my long, though interrupted, discussion of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue that has occupied this column for the last year, since it stands mostly in contrast with the construction of that work. I will get back to that plan, probably next month. 

However, following discussions with readers, colleagues, friends, and students, I have decided to return once more to discussing the current crisis and some of its effects on our kind of work. I have recently been on a bit of a vacation, and that has been a good opportunity to ponder some ideas. Since this has been a time of reduced responsibilities and very little distraction, it has been impossible not to think through things. For at least some people, morale and motivation are newly problematic as this situation goes on for longer than a lot of us had anticipated, and in particular, as a new school year and church year loom right around the corner. 

I want to write about some of my own concerns, problems, and experiences. I have become increasingly aware as the last few weeks have gone by of changes in my own patterns of motivation, morale, and focus, and in how I make choices about allotting energy and time. I wish to share some of this, not because I believe I have solutions or that my experiences are typical or atypical. In writing this I hope to elicit feedback to help me understand better how to think about and deal with what is going on. We are all in this together.

Every case study is potentially valuable when difficult things are occurring. I have heard from a number of people that they are having trouble staying motivated to do even what little they can do with their music or any aspect of their work, and they are not sure whether they are alone in feeling this way and are therefore feeling guilt. To me, not feeling guilty about any difficulties that one experiences in this sort of crisis is crucially important. No one is alone in any worries or concerns right now. Knowing that we are not alone should alleviate any guilt.

For those of us deeply involved in music, what is it that motivated or interested us in the first place? In normal times, what keeps us motivated? A lot of answers to these questions are universally straightforward and similar. For most of us there were early experiences of hearing music. Some of this early experience of music was about melody, harmony, rhythm—the elements of composition. Some of it was about instruments, voices, sounds, and sonorities. Some of these early experiences are tied to places, people, or activities that were valuable or emotionally forceful independent of the music itself. For a lot of those who end up drawn in particular to the organ this included the experience of church and church music. For some of us playing or singing music, this was an early source of connection to others. For others it was a source of approbation, solace, or refuge. For some it tied in to a sense of history or connection beyond the circle of people around us.

Continuing motivation comes from all of the above. Love of or interest in the music itself is a part of the picture. For me, my love of the sounds of organs and harpsichords is a major continuing source of motivation as well as joy. The connection to other people is often important. This can be through singing or playing together, through offering music to others or receiving music from others. It can also stem from being fellow students at a school or of a particular teacher, from talking about music together, agreeing, disagreeing, reinforcing one another’s feelings, changing one another’s minds, or agreeing to disagree.  

There is also the matter of earning a living from music. Related to this is the fact that we who work hard on our music and try hard to be good at what we are doing have invested some of our self-esteem in that.

My point is that all of this is currently under threat, except the pure love of the music itself. Not every detail of what keeps each of us enthralled with music is utterly gone for now; but a lot of it is, and all of it has been made to feel fragile. Thus we all have trouble feeling motivated.

I have a one-manual, one-stop practice organ with pull-down pedals in my home. The sound is beautiful, and the action is sensitive. Normally I love practicing on it, but I have learned that there is a bargain that I have made with myself without knowing that I was doing so. I can enjoy practicing on that instrument because I know that I will also get to go out and immerse myself from time to time in some of the infinitely varied and magnificent organ sounds that drew me to the instrument in the first place. Not being able to do that, I find myself looking at my beautiful practice instrument with a bit of a jaundiced eye. A couple of students have said something similar to me about their own harpsichords in relation to the now-forbidden instruments at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio.

There is also the matter of hearing music. Most of us listen to recordings. Earlier in life, I loved recordings more than I loved live music, and I still do. But they’re not the same. For one thing, the spatial dimension is not there. Imagine (or remember) sitting in a big room listening to an organ. The sounds come from all around: not only when there are antiphonal divisions or other wide separations. Even if the organ is all in one place, it is a wide and deep place, and the sound jumps and swirls and bounces. In the last few years I had rediscovered the pleasures of hearing symphony orchestras in concert. I grew up doing a fair amount of that but had gotten out of the habit. I was newly amazed at how magnificent that experience can be. In a good hall the sound is simultaneously clear and enveloping. I miss this as much as I do the organ.

Continuing to look forward

I find it very exciting that so many musicians are streaming performances via the internet. Certainly there are dimensions to this that will be worth continuing to explore once this crisis is over, for example, the coupling of performance with discussion, or giving listeners the ability to see things close up that are pretty remote in live concerts. Also the proliferation of interesting online performances may draw listeners in who would not otherwise have thought to go to concerts. But I believe that there can also be some strain involved in trying to feel that this is the same as live performance. Again, the spatial aspect of the sound simply cannot be the same, and as with all recording the sonorities as such cannot quite be either, even if they can be beautiful and interesting in themselves.

The current situation has caused me to clarify in my head a bargain I made with myself beginning about ten years ago. At a point where I was planning to step up the frequency of my public performances, I began to step up the amount of live artistic content that I took in. The hope was that I would become a better performer by absorbing as many as I possibly could. My emphasis was on things other than classical music, though that was not by any means excluded. I found myself emphasizing dance, theater (mostly small scale and somewhat non-mainstream), poetry readings, movies and TV, art galleries, gardens, and various sorts of unconventionally structured music.

I believe this plan has worked. While I cannot really know whether my performances over the last eight or ten years have been better than those of the preceding thirty years or so, I know they have felt more energetic and committed, and I have felt more energized. I have come closer to doing with the music that I play what I actually want to do with it. The bargain that seems to have arisen out of the plan is this: that I will feel excited about performing and give as much energy and commitment to performing as I possibly can as long as I can nourish that performing life with a steady diet of great artistic content from others. Of course, it is now all gone. Every few days or so over the last four months I have received an email confirming that something that I had planned to go to has been cancelled. 

I think that this is for me the biggest specific source of doubt or wavering about my status as a performer or even as a musician. I am willing to believe that there will be a moment for all of us to resume giving concerts, so I should be practicing avidly toward that moment. In fact, I could be savoring the fact that I have extra time to learn that which I plan to perform. Instead I feel like I have no idea how to grapple with artistic output when I have no artistic input. I could/should feel like what I took in over ten years was enough. I certainly would not claim to have assimilated and manifested all of the possible lessons from all of that content. One reason it is hard to do that is that it would have to be too analytical—like “I learned from this concert or that play to do the following with this sort of music or in that sort of performance situation.” This is artificial if it has to be forced. There have been some concrete describable lessons like that along the way. But the process has largely been subconscious.  

Uncertainty is part of the situation, and the inability to respond to uncertainty is part of the problem. Most of the time I feel if I knew for sure that the things I miss most would someday come back I could be very patient with that process, regardless of how long it took. And some things will—maybe most. I will be surprised if in a year I have not been to a New Jersey Symphony concert. I am purposely mentioning a very well-established institution. Some organizations, especially less established, more experimental or controversial ones, may not come back. This will inevitably include some of the things that are most important to us. But not knowing means that neither can I just be patient and get on with what there is to get on with, nor can I mourn. 

The specifics of what I am describing are idiosyncratic. I know that many are experiencing the same thoughts, particularly organists and choristers. Here, too, there is uncertainty. For me recognizing that the uncertainty itself is difficult, separate from the loss or potential loss, is helpful. 

From the world of teaching I have one thing to recount that I recently experienced. A student wrote to me that she was frustrated working on a certain piece on her own because it was too difficult. She wanted to know whether it would make sense to put it aside and work on a few more straightforward projects. This is often a relevant question; however, I have a kind of sub-specialty in helping people figure out how to make difficult pieces seem manageable. But I realized I cannot conceive of how to do that other than in person. The process is too subtle and too specific. It depends on close observation of what fragments of the piece are the most difficult, what can be broken down into subsections, what changes can be made in hand distribution, based on the player’s particular hand size and shape, and a host of other small details. These have to be worked out by very close observation. For the first time I can remember, I simply could not come up with an alternative to “Yes, let’s put this one off for now.” Not a calamity, but frustrating. Of course, we are looking forward to picking that piece up as soon as circumstances allow!

Thinking about Gene Roan

This month I share thoughts about my teacher Gene Roan, as the ninetieth anniversary of his birth took place recently. He was born June 8, 1931, and died in 2006 at the age of 75. This recent birthday, significant yet also sad, has led me to think about him quite a lot. On June 8, I posted a lengthy commemoration of Gene on Facebook, recounting some of my interactions with him and reflections on what he meant to me. This was met with a gratifyingly large amount of favorable comment, with many colleagues and friends chipping in with some of their own memories. It was this experience that led me to feel that I should not miss the opportunity to commemorate Gene here. I studied with him formally off and on from the fall of 1974 through 1986. Gene and I remained colleagues in and around Westminster Choir College and close friends until his death on September 21, 2006, after a long illness.

I wrote a column about my other principal organ teacher, Paul Jordan, on the occasion of his death in early 2015. I had been studying with Paul, formally and informally, in New Haven, where I grew up and he worked, for several years when in the summer of 1974 I faced the prospect of going off to college at
Princeton. That was all very well, but working with Paul was so compelling that I was distraught about having to make any sort of change. As I recall, I initially assumed that I would continue to study with him, taking lessons when I was home, and maybe keeping in touch by phone. However, he made plans to leave New Haven that summer, taking a faculty job at the State University of New York at Binghamton, so I asked him to recommend a teacher in Princeton. Paul phoned his friend, the renowned choral conductor and teacher Helen Kemp, who was on the Westminster faculty at the time. He described what I was like as a student and what I might be looking for, and she remarked, “Well, I think Gene Roan is interested in Baroque music.” And thus, very casually, the whole rest of the course of my professional life was set.

I was pretty shy as a seventeen-year-old, so it took me a few weeks to call Professor Roan, even though I was very eager to resume organ lessons. (I also arrived at Princeton with a very nice letter of introduction to William Scheide from a mutual friend. I was too shy to follow up on that, which I have always regretted.) Roan and I arranged to meet at the console of the organ in the Princeton University Chapel. When we had both arrived we talked for a few minutes and then repaired to a small diner a few blocks away to continue chatting over tea. I felt comfortable with him right away. But I also had a concern; he had not asked to hear me play. Did this mean that he had already decided against taking me as a student? I could not imagine that an experienced, august teacher would agree to start working with a student without experiencing their playing. I had assumed that this event was in part going to be an audition. But none of this was true, and we made an appointment for our first actual lesson shortly thereafter. I was left a bit nervous that perhaps when he heard me play some doubt would creep in.

In fact, Gene had taught me his first lesson: how a prospective student already plays is the least important matter about that student. What matters is that they have decided that they want to study. By the time I started teaching regularly around 1985, I had really absorbed that idea. As far as I can remember I have never specifically asked anyone who inquired about lessons to play for me before agreeing to take them on as a student. I am pretty sure I have never declined to take someone on for any reason. If I did it would be because I suspected that they did not really want to be there, but normally it is up to the student to make that judgment.

Sometime soon into our work together, probably at that first real lesson, Gene explained to me that he never expected a student to play a piece the same way that he did. That fit in nicely with my own temperamental approach. I was very stubborn about doing things the way that I wanted to, and my mind was pretty closed to ideas about interpretation that I had not somehow already absorbed by then. (In the aforementioned Facebook post I wrote: “I am at this point the most open-minded person I know of as to artistic matters—maybe to a fault, in some people’s eyes—but when I was seventeen and had only been playing organ for a couple of years I was pretty sure that I knew how things should be done.”)

Everything that I “knew” about “how things should be done” I had gotten from somewhere, largely from Paul Jordan and the approach that he taught, and also from various non-organ musical influences. There is an interesting paradox involved in wanting to do things my way as a kind of declaration of independence when “my” way has been absorbed entirely from others. These kinds of conflicts are probably universal and inevitable, especially early in life. Maybe they are not really conflicts: just the stuff of which our various approaches are made. At first I greeted Gene’s disavowal of any intention of directing me to play a certain way with relief, because I did not want my existing notions to be challenged or changed. What he taught me over many years, starting with that declaration at our first lesson, was open-mindedness itself. And in doing so he opened me up to radical changes in my own playing, all of which came about organically. I was never at a stage where I was doing something just because someone else was requiring me to do it when I found it unconvincing. If you who are reading this today have read this column over the years, you know how much this approach of Gene’s has influenced my own teaching and thinking about teaching.

I have wondered whether one of his reasons for not expecting his students to play the way he did was that he needed for his own way of doing things to be flexible and subject to change. If you lock in an interpretive stance by convincing your students that it is right and necessary, then what happens when you evolve away from that stance? Nothing happens exactly, as a practical matter, but it seems like kind of an awkward state of affairs. I know that Gene was always a bit worried, in “one off” teaching situations like workshops, that the ideas presented might come across to the students as too cut and dried, too clearly “true” when they were really just part of a long thought process. When he taught workshops, as he did a lot over many years, he was careful to present his teaching in a way that avoided this as much as possible.

I know that Gene’s overriding concern in teaching was to give each student what that student specifically needed. As I evolved towards being more open to interpretive approaches other than those I had absorbed from almost the cradle, we had many talks in which I thanked him for his flexibility and non-dogmatic approach. And while he certainly did not remotely disavow that approach, he also took pains to remind me that there are all sorts of different approaches that might be needed for different students. In my case he never directly criticized ideas that I brought to lessons, even ones that I later figured out he thought were flawed, limited, or with which he disagreed. Constantly over many years he pointed me toward all sorts of other manners of hearing things and thinking about music—not so much to get me to adopt any of them as to get me to be open to various interpretations. There are students who perhaps need to be guided a bit more directly. There are also students who think that they need to be guided more directly but who really do not. There are students who learn most from the teacher, and there are students who learn most from other students. There are students who learn by listening, others who learn through analysis, and still others through just trying things. Gene probably thought more consciously and conscientiously about respecting these different needs than anyone else I have known.

Gene Roan was a very fine and accomplished player. During the years that we were both in Princeton he did not give many full-length organ recitals there. I believe that I heard him in such a recital only twice. The first of those was on the Casavant organ at Westminster in the same fall when he and I first met: a recital that included the Bach Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578. I had only ever heard that piece as light, clear, and relaxed—though with building intensity. (This was, to be honest, because I had only listened to the Walcha recording, and maybe tried to play it myself.) Gene played it fast and loud—magnificent, but also shocking to me. I remember that I asked him about it afterwards. I took it for granted that he knew that his way of playing it was kind of “out there” (though as far as I have any reason to believe now, it wasn’t!). He said that this was what he did with the piece when he wanted to shock people. I think that he was partly indulging my limited perspective on the piece by putting it that way, though it was likely also true.

Gene was a great admirer of Mendelssohn’s organ repertoire. We had several fascinating lessons on a couple of the sonatas and maybe a prelude and fugue or two, though I never did much with those pieces in performance myself. In a way that seemed to arise directly out of his love for and affinity with those works, as he was easily the finest Mendelssohn performer that I have ever heard. I heard more suppleness, expressivity, singing quality, and general sense that something consequential was going on with his playing of Mendelssohn than I have heard before or since. He was also especially interested in Reincken, and his analysis of the massive fantasia on An Wasserflüssen Babylon over the course of a couple of lessons was my introduction to the rhetoric of pre-Bach form.

Like many organists, Gene was interested in and focused on sonority. He knew a lot about organ design, both its history and how it works or can work in practice. He had an extraordinary ability to remember specific organ stops. He once told me that if he heard a particular Doppelflöte stop (just an example, but a favorite of his), he would recognize that specific stop forever, should he hear it again. I think that this in part led him to focus more on actual sound than on stop names. He used to delight in telling students that on one old electronic organ, the best-sounding diapason was the stop labeled French Horn. Not that this approach was unique to him or is unique to those who were his students, but it was eye-opening and influential to me and I believe to many others.

He also taught me a lot about the relationship between sonority and interpretation. In a column from 2008 I wrote in these terms about one salient example of that:

In the spring of 1979 I was studying . . . with Prof. Eugene Roan. . . . I played one of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugues for him on my new harpsichord, and he commented that he couldn’t hear a certain motif when it came in in the top voice. I think that I said something about harpsichord voicing, or acoustics, but he suggested that I simply make the theme a bit more detached, and he demonstrated that it could indeed be heard better that way. He floated the idea that the sound of the instrument was telling me something about how to play the piece. At the time I was very committed to the notion that this theme should be articulated a certain way, and that it should be played exactly that way every time that it came in. I didn’t want the instrument to try to force me to depart from my plan. However, that moment was the beginning of my considering the idea that interpretation could be, in effect, a collaboration between analytically derived ideas and acoustic- or instrument-derived sonic realities, and that neither side of that picture should be ignored.

When Professor Roan became head of the organ department at Westminster in 1995 he invited me to join the faculty as an adjunct, initially to teach harpsichord, but soon after also to teach organ and segments of various classes. He retired in 2000, and I left at the same time. These years were extraordinary. He was an extremely supportive “boss”—quotation marks meant to convey, of course, that he did not really feel or behave like a boss, but rather a very supportive colleague with lots of resources to make good things happen. I brought a lot of harpsichords to the campus, and there were a lot of organs there in those days. We had non-stop informal interaction among students and faculty over all sorts of instruments and repertoire. (This interaction was so fruitful and real that I sometimes cannot remember for sure whether a student whom I knew then actually took lessons from me or not.) I was given a lot of freedom to do whatever I thought was right with my students, guided by the notion that this is never the same from one student to another. I had students who didn’t play Bach over a whole year, or nothing but Bach, or who worked on only one piece for a whole semester or even a whole year, or who, for a while at least, just dabbled in many pieces in a row without really learning any; students who played in class every week, and students who did so very rarely: whatever was going to work psychologically and pedagogically to help that student get the most out of the experience. I would tend to run unconventional things by Gene expressly, and he would make sure that I could articulate what I was going for. There was never any top-down decision making.

As I mentioned above, we were good friends for about thirty-two years. He was a presence around Princeton and Westminster for over fifty years, and there are countless people there and spread out through the world who remember him vividly and miss him as I do.

Leonard Eugene Roan, Jr., was born June 8, 1931, in Albany, Georgia, and died September 21, 2006, in Princeton, New Jersey.