On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Princeton, New Jersey.

The way of the world

The meta theme of this column over the last several months has been unpredictability. As I have recounted, it was as early as October that I became aware that a shoulder injury was preventing me from working on upcoming performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. This was a bit awkward, as the subject of the column was supposed to be the process and progress of my work on that piece. Then after surgery in December, I found myself unable to write, which precluded my January and February columns. When I was ready to resume writing, I found that I could not find a fruitful way to write about The Art of the Fugue or about music and teaching in general—partly because I still was not actually playing, and partly because of my state of mind as I recuperated. I started recounting some of my experience of that recuperation, particularly of physical therapy, which had some interesting implications for the music learning process and teaching.

Then the current public health crisis hit. As I write this, a scheduled presidential primary is not taking place, sections of the country are in quarantine, most businesses in the area where I live are closed, and various curfews are in place. My practice of watching a bit of a baseball game or golf tournament to take a break from writing is in abeyance—most of what we all do is in abeyance. When you read this, six weeks or so further on, things will likely be different, but we do not know in what ways they will be different. All of our mid-March selves hope that by early May things will have turned the corner. But we do not know.

I am not sick, nor is anyone I know personally. That is one of the things that may change. My shoulder feels almost fine—close enough not to impede most activities—and I have gotten past the malaise that accompanied my early recovery period. Therefore, I should be able to focus well on writing and on practicing. Indeed I should be able to take advantage of the relative absence of things to do to catch up. But rather than that, I find it harder to concentrate and focus right around now than at any other time that I can remember. So do many people.

I have written about my attempts to be assiduous during my physical therapy exercises, and that those attempts have been fairly successful, if not quite as successful as I had hoped or even assumed. I can report that on one recent day I simply forgot to do them; I forgot that I was a physical therapy patient. The next day, my initial reaction was to wonder whether I should bother to start them up again. I did, though it was a kind of half-hearted job.

This is a global concern that affects everyone’s focus. I have read and agree that teachers in general should not evaluate or judge their students right now. Perhaps we need to do away with grades and exams for now and tolerate mediocre or late work. For this week and next, I am not seeing students for any sort of regularly scheduled lessons, not even remote ones. These are said to be the two weeks when we either will or will not turn things around. Nothing about long-distance teaching would violate the kinds of measures that we are being asked to accept and implement. My reason for taking a short break is about focus. As I recently put to a colleague, I need to take a deep breath. I believe that a number of my students also need this, though I am aware that for some of them lessons right now would be a good distraction. (I have balanced that possibility with my own needs at the moment by making it clear that I am happy to chat with anyone informally or answer questions by email.)

My time off has reminded me of something. While this is a global concern, every student always has their own concerns. I think that I try to be aware of that as a general matter and to react to whatever a student brings to a lesson based on their life circumstances. Music is a part of life, interconnected with everything else. Our awareness of this is heightened at a time like this, but so is our awareness of the complexities. Some people would like for the time being to put lessons aside and focus on the gravity of the situation; others would like to delve even more deeply into music as a distraction or as an affirmation of life, or as some of both. Some people use their involvement with music to help them with difficult things by heightening emotions and awareness, while others use that involvement as a way of gaining access to joy or peace or certain kinds of understanding.

A few random thoughts from the last month or so:

1) I mentioned in an earlier column that during my convalescence I was experiencing music more by hearing it in my head than by actual listening. I later realized that most of the time whatever piece was going through my head was doing so at a very slow tempo. For example, there was a time when the piece in question was Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca,” the last movement of the Sonata in A Major, K. 331. This is a piece that I have never played. I tapped out the beat in my head at about quarter note equals 95 beats per minute. The slowest recordings that I found of it in a brief survey were at about 120. Another time, the piece was one that I have played a lot: Bach’s Fughetta super Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot, BWV 679. As it went through my head, I discovered that the eighth notes were going at about 110 beats per minute. Recordings of it that I checked were all between two and three times that fast.

So I began to speculate, are these the tempos that I really want? I certainly like the admittedly abstract experience of “hearing” them that way internally. Each of those pieces, and others, seemed to have a wonderful feeling of suspense and freedom as well as a convincing overall arc. But this is imaginary. Would I like actually hearing them this way? These tempos were extremely slow. If I really would like them this slow, does that mean that I could expect other people to? Or is it something quirky about me, or about how one hears one’s own playing as opposed to anyone else’s? As I get back to playing and teaching, I want to re-think tempo, mainly as a matter of influence. Where should we get our tempos? Our own innermost thoughts? If not that, why not? Do students feel free to try to get in touch with their own innermost feelings about tempo? What about other interpretive matters? Where might those feelings come from? How can I help students connect with them?

2) There are periods in history that have seen the creation of music that reflects difficult times. Composers in the seventeenth century lived through the Thirty Years War. I have always assumed that this is one source for the sadness and intensity of much of the organ music of Scheidt, for example. The mid-twentieth century was of course another such time, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is one response to it. As I write this it is much too soon to know what scale of misery, dislocation, and sadness the current public health emergency will end up creating. But I find that this current state of affairs gives me a more real and human awareness of how such things might have affected people—even those great artistic figures whom we struggle to know not just as names or monuments but as people—all those years ago.

3) I noticed something interesting in my approach to physical therapy exercises. It is usually not the exercises that are new, difficult, or painful that I am tempted to skip or shortchange. Rather, the ones that have become easy, that seem to have “worked.” Take, for example, rolling a big ball along a table. I essentially could not do this at all a month ago. But now it seems so effortless that after I have done it once or twice, it takes more willpower than I can always manage to do it the prescribed thirty times. This reminds me of one of the characteristic dangers of the practicing and learning process: that a piece or a passage that has become basically learned—or seems to have done so—will be neglected thereafter. I do this, and students do this. When there is limited time or concentration, it is tempting to focus on whatever seems to need the most work. That is not always a source of danger, but it has to be monitored for becoming one. Often the passages that seemed easy in the first place or that seemed to get learned easily end up being the shakiest in performance.

I say that I am prone to doing this, and that is true. But it is fascinating to see myself falling prey to the same temptation in a situation when I am without any particular expertise or overarching awareness of the dynamic of what is going on. To put it another way, I am doing the work at someone else’s behest, something that I never do when playing music. This may change my way of thinking in my own practicing or conversations about it.

4) I have been trying to turn back these last few weeks to thinking about the music that I want to play. That means The Art of the Fugue, of course, at least in large part for now. However, I find myself thinking more about counterpoint in very general terms, that is, about the concept of counterpoint as a part of life. This is abstract and, perhaps, just the musings of someone who was abstracted from normal life and activity for a couple of months for one reason and now expects to be for another couple of months for different reasons. But I have felt strongly the force of what I think of as the basic definition of counterpoint, namely two or more things that are different from one another happening at the same time. This is a way of looking at it that at least somewhat downplays such specifics as voices, motifs, and subjects, not to mention answers, inversions, countersubjects, cancrizans, diminutions, and so on. It requires us only to have an awareness of what it means for things to happen at the same time and of what it means for things to be different from one another. There can be interesting things to say about each of these around the edges, since they are both recognizable, familiar concepts that arise not out of music but out of life.

I had that thought vividly the first time I entered the physical therapy clinic. Here were people (the patients), none of whom had ever met or heard of each other, and who were not exactly meeting now. They were there doing similar but different things in a kind of dance or counterpoint. Of course, this is a clichéd or trite point.

As far as music is concerned, this reminds me of several ideas about counterpoint that occurred several years ago, mainly as a result of my experiences with theater, in particular immersive or participatory theater. (I have briefly alluded to this in prior columns, and will soon—the Fates permitting—write about it at length and relate it to memory, to the passage of time, and to The Art of the Fugue.) The notion is that whereas it is normal, valid, and important to think of counterpoint as a conversation between two voices or among more than two voices, it makes a different kind of sense and has a different kind of power to see counterpoint as a representation of or analogue to all experience, whether of people passing through the physical therapy center together or of the planets circling one another—or millions of people working from home and staying in touch as best they can.

To be continued.

An idea or two

This month I follow on a few loose ends from last month’s column, about the word “performance” and related words, and then discuss a few more aspects of the relationship between musical performance and other forms of performance. Recently I overheard someone say in passing, “Yes, that was performative.” I heard enough of the surrounding context to confirm what I would normally assume from the word “performative;” the suggestion was that something was being done for a reason other than the ostensible one. There was something manipulative or hypocritical going on. Things were not as they seemed. 

To put it a bit less judgmentally, the person who had engaged in the action that was designated “performative” did so in order to get something across that was not the same as what they were ostensibly trying to do or convey. Perhaps this is performance where there should not be performance. But two lines that run through certain uses of the word performance, related but separable, are falseness and negativity. Referring to my example from last month about the person who berated his companions and stalked off, if that person had stood up and said, apropos of nothing in the prior conversation, a lot of extravagantly complimentary things about the others in the room and then departed, no one would have said, “That was quite a performance.”

I have a really strong aversion to being misrepresented. For this purpose, I am not talking about misrepresentation along major societal grounds. Nor am I talking specifically about important things—just ordinary encounters. For example, if someone hears me comment that I do not like eggs but mishears and thinks that I especially love eggs, that really bothers me—not particularly because they might serve me eggs, but just as a matter of principle. The misrepresentation does not have to be negative or neutral. If someone kindly held a door for someone else and the latter person looked around and thought wrongly that it had been I who did it, that would make me uncomfortable. I have a fairly traditional fear of airplanes and flying, but I do travel around a fair amount, mostly by car. If someone knew the latter about me and said, “Gavin must really know his way around all the airports,” that would bother me in this manner, even though being afraid of flying is in itself unfortunate and something that I would love to get over. 

I believe that this is one of the reasons, and perhaps the fundamental reason, that I am so intent on playing pieces the way that I really want to play and feel them. More importantly, it is the reason that I am extremely reluctant to ask a student to do something that does not come from inside them even as a stage in learning. Does this way of looking at it suggest that it would be good, even better, to ease up on that standard a little bit? Would students tolerate more than I can in a sense “misrepresenting” themselves as part of learning? If so, is it then a good idea to let that happen or is it still better not to? Is my concern in fact well grounded in everyone’s psychology, or is it more specific to me than I have realized? I should muse about all of this. This may be a bit of a digression, but since it is this notion that “performance” can sometimes be false—indeed that sometimes the word itself has that connotation—that put me in mind of it, perhaps it is not irrelevant.

As another random observation from theater and music, there are many performing groups that use the word “Players” in their title. Just a few days ago I attended a very fine performance of Othello by the New Place Players in New York City. Near where I live in New Jersey there are theater companies called Spotlight Players, Broad Street Players, and Somerset Valley Players, and the Baroque ensemble, The Raritan Players. At the beginning of the Jethro Tull album Minstrel in the Gallery there is the line, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling players.” It is very hard, though, to find performing groups or ensembles that are “The so-and-so Performers.” (I just tried and didn’t find any.) And the Tull line would seem very different if they had written, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling performers.”

Willing suspension of disbelief

I have pondered the expression, “willing suspension of disbelief.” Continuing to follow these columns’ premise of looking at words and their history, not just concepts as we think we have received them, I have discovered that this phrase was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. When he used it, he appeared to mean primarily the suspension of disbelief, in the context of reading literature, especially poetry, regarding things that would be false in real life—that is, a fantasy, mythology, or various sorts of surrealism. However, the concept has always been used in a different way, to mean the willing suspension of the awareness that fiction is fictional. We know at some level that Nero Wolfe, Elizabeth Bennett, or Basil Fawlty “don’t exist,” even though each of them could exist, unlike, say, Gandalf, Morgan le Fay, or Sabrina Spellman. But during the time when we are engaging with the fictional world in which such characters are presented, we palpably feel as if they do exist. I have countless times sat on the edge of my seat in front of the television desperately scared that someone who does not exist will do or say something that is against my wishes. At times, I can even tremble at the situation. If it goes the wrong way, I can have trouble sleeping that night. I suppose that the only thing that I am really discovering when the story reveals the fate or behavior of the characters is that a writer or show-runner was of a mind to make up that particular story. Yet we do not react in this real-world meta level.

There was a period when I was having trouble reading. This was not an eyesight issue, but rather a lack of mental focus, and it manifested itself in part by a suspension of disbelief. I would read a sentence such as, “Sarah came down the stairs at a trot, alarmed by what she thought she had heard,” and think, “No she didn’t; there is no such person. Why did someone write that?” I do not know why this started, and I do not know exactly how or why I got over it—though I definitely did. It never applied to fiction being performed—television, movies, theater. It did not apply to music—not to listening, not to practicing and playing.

In drama, part of “performance” is the ability to lead viewers into this state. I have noticed that some commentators maintain that “willing suspension of disbelief” puts the burden of making fiction work on the audience-member or reader. I suspect that this is only partly true. As my experience recounted above shows, the state of mind of the person receiving the fictional content can matter. But the content matters just as much; it has to be “convincing.” In writing this comes mostly from the author, though typesetting, illustration, and other design features might play a part. But with performance-based arts, though composing plays a significant part, it comes mainly from the performance. A corollary of this is that the willing suspension of disbelief is not always fully willing. Of course, you can always opt out—put down a book or leave the theater. Meanwhile, the content that you are taking in is supposed to be in itself strongly pulling and pushing you toward that state of non-disbelief.

Is there anything comparable in music to the willing suspension of disbelief? Let’s leave aside for the moment vocal music that has fictional characters in it—there the phenomenon of the “music” as such and the verbally mediated concrete images are separable, and the latter can be just as susceptible to this matter as any other verbally delivered fiction. But what about music in and of itself?

In Examples 1 and 2, is there something that can be believed or disbelieved? Clearly not, I think. So, is there anything comparable in music to the concept? One way of looking at that is that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is probably usually better described as “willing choice to be affected as if one believed.” And with instrumental music the corresponding phenomenon is perhaps the willing choice to be affected, just as such—to let the music inside of one’s self and one’s emotional life. Perhaps one of the roles of performance is to help nurture that willingness.

Playing a character

I keep returning to this notion of playing a character or not. It is in drama that “playing a character” can be most clearly what is going on. It is the norm. When Patrick Stewart plays Vladimir in Waiting for Godot he is playing a character; likewise, when he plays Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek franchise. Stephen Colbert played Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report. (I once had the good fortune to hear Stephen Colbert doing a long Q&A—out of character—in front of an audience. Someone asked him, about some little routine or shtick that the character Stephen Colbert occasionally did on the show: “Do you ever just do that in real life?” Colbert just laughed a bit and said, “No.” No complicated explanation, he just is not his character.) How much “in character” is Stephen Colbert as host of The Late Show? In that capacity he is not ostensibly fictional. How identical is he to the person that he is when he wakes up at home and has breakfast each morning? How much is Patrick Stewart in character during an audience talk-back after a play or during a non-fiction personal appearance with audience questions?

It is a habit of audience members and fans to conflate the character and the actor, and this probably is not something that happens with performers of music. There is no character with which to conflate the player. And what of the composer? If anything, listeners retain a very strong awareness that the player and the composer are very different (leaving aside relatively rare cases where they are literally the same). This is why the question of how well a performer realizes a composer’s intentions not only exists as a question at all, but often looms very large; sometimes it is given as almost the definition of performance.  

I have mentioned over the years that I sometimes attend immersive theater, in which the performers and the audience intermingle and interact. The setup is different from one production to another, but it is not uncommon for there to be moments where by design or by chance an audience member is alone with a performer/character, with the latter acting out a scene. I wonder how many people there are in that room? I think that I can count five: the character, the performer him- or herself, the audience member as a “regular” person, the audience member in whatever slightly different persona they feel themselves to be in, in this artificial setting, and sometimes the audience member in a role that the performer is temporarily casting themself into via the content of the scene being played out. (For example, I have had a character in a play greet me as if I were her son and talk to me in that vein for a while.) 

Am I exactly the same person when I perform in concert as I am when I stroll into my kitchen alone to make a cup of tea or when I sit on the porch in the sun for an hour reading? How about when I am sitting and typing this column? On the one hand I see a clear distinction—an actor playing a part is in character, and everyone else is not. Given this clear distinction, I see a question: is “performance” that does not involve playing a character the same thing as performance that is all about playing a character? I am actually more interested in the areas in between. If we are not exactly the same person while we are performing that we are at another moment, does that help or hinder our ability to present our performance? How does that relate to the notion that performance should be “authentic?”

Since that word is used to mean all sorts of things, some of them even possibly in conflict with one another, I will say that I am talking about “authentic” meaning both “true to oneself and one’s own vision” and “convincing,” having an air of authenticity that in itself tends to create communication. I am not talking about “authentic” in the sense of “what the composer would have done or wanted.” That is also often important, but different. It is possible that when either or both of these two forms of authenticity are perceived to be present in performance, that creates an ability on the part of listeners to trust the performer and also the composer.

The other idea is one that appeals to me and that I have written about before: that when we perform music that someone else has written, we are in a sense playing the character of “someone who could be improvising this music.” It feels more subtle to me than trying to feel like we are playing the character of the actual specific composer of the piece. I would in a sense hesitate to suggest this idea to a student. Or more accurately, since I have shared it with students fruitfully, I would try to be very careful to make it clear that I do not believe that it is necessary or something that any one player would find fruitful—I just happen to. It seems to be a technique that I can use to feel committed to music and my own vision of it and to justify to myself that feeling of commitment. It seems to help with the question of whether I am exactly myself while performing or playing some sort of part. It is very important to hold onto this idea lightly, not to make it too serious or literal.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Inc., in Princeton, New Jersey (www.pekc.org). 

Utterly miscellaneous

This month’s column is a grab bag of topics: a paragraph or so on several matters that have been on my mind but have not developed into columns of their own. Some ideas are about pedal playing and are a sort of follow up to last month’s column. However, because of the timing of the column-writing process, I cannot yet respond to any of the feedback I hope to receive from my December column. Most of the topics here are more-or-less random, connected with one another and with the phenomenon of this column only in that they could shape at least indirectly some of what we say or do with our students.

Pedal playing

Two things about pedal playing have been going through my mind recently. The first is the question of how to help people get comfortable going from one sort of pedalboard to another. For the most part this means flat versus concave/radiating. I tend to call the latter “round,” just because that is more concise. There are also differences among pedalboards within each of those categories. The Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, has a round pedal keyboard, but with slightly different proportions than American Guild of Organists standard. That instrument was my “go-to” organ for many years, and I probably performed over thirty recitals on it. So whereas a lot of my colleagues found it annoying to adjust to that instrument, I had, if anything, a bit of trouble when I wanted to play on a different round pedalboard. Also, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time playing flat pedal keyboards, and they differ a lot from one another. I believe that the key to success in moving from one pedalboard to another is to think of the act of playing a pedal note as involving points rather than lines. That is, it is the spacing of the spots on the keyboard where you are playing that matters, not which way the rest of the key is pointing. This is not rigorously true, and in particular, its application to heel playing is a bit complicated. But I think that it is a better starting point than a preoccupation with overall layout. This ties in with everything else about my approach to pedaling, especially the emphasis on keeping track of the motion of each foot with respect to itself.

The second point is about the concept of sitting comfortably. Something that I do not believe I have dealt with adequately in my earlier writings about pedal playing is the issue of sitting comfortably. Is it good enough just to do this intuitively: sit there and do what feels comfortable? Or is it possible that one has to learn how to sit comfortably, perhaps with advice from a trainer, physical therapist, orthopedist, or other professional—or perhaps with the aid of practices such as yoga, Pilates, Alexander Technique, and so on? I have always used the intuitive approach, and I honestly do not know as much as I could or should about the latter. I worry that learning anything non-intuitive about how to sit comfortably could converge with “you must sit this way,” of which I am very skeptical indeed.

Background music

Here is the first of my random points for this month. I have never, over thirteen-plus years, played music in the background while I was writing this column. But today I have done so. Why does that seem right this time? Perhaps I have become better at multitasking. There are two reasons I have not previously played background music. I am afraid that it will distract me more than it will relax me and put me in the right mood to concentrate; and some of the time, I am afraid that other music will confuse me when I write about some particular music, or even just about musical or music-tangential issues. Am I fooling myself? Can I really write this way? So far, so good.

Is the performer deeply engaged?

I recently attended a couple of recitals with some friends, both by the same solo performer. (Well, not too recently, alas.) And we all thought the performances were tremendous. We agreed that the performer played as if she cared deeply about every note. This crystallized for me how important it is to as a listener. It is also something that I try to convey in my own playing. But for a listener it is a feeling. It might not be literally true of the performer whom I am remembering, and, even more likely, it might well be true of many or most performances that do not happen to come across that way to me. It would be unfair and inaccurate, often, to assume that if I do not come away from a performance with that feeling, the performer was actually kind of indifferent to or uninvolved with the music, or took a cavalier or perfunctory approach. But that does not mean that it is not important. And what about with students? I like the idea of conveying to a student that this might be a value worth embracing. But how does one do that without it seeming to direct a particular style or type of playing? That would inevitably be the style or approach that the teacher responded to as conveying that feeling.

I wonder whether we are more likely to come away with this feeling from attending a concert than from listening to a recording. If so, is this because of the effect of the recording situation on playing or, more likely, because we listen differently in person at a performance venue than we do at home or in the car?

This may be one source of my commitment to helping students with music that they care about deeply and to avoid the situation of working on anything because someone has told them that they must. But I need to avoid conveying the message that it is insufficiently important to work on music about which you are curious, and which you may or may not come to care deeply about.

One thing that I have noticed about teaching during this Covid period is that some students have become more autonomous in choosing music. I usually help students choose music through discussion, which can be partially duplicated remotely, but not in as free-ranging and flexible a way, and through pulling music off the shelf and playing through different pieces. That we cannot duplicate.

A love of the sound

A while ago I was talking with a harpsichord builder, someone who reliably creates stunningly beautiful-sounding instruments. He commented that there was often a problem with organists that arose out of their love for the sound: that it could become self-indulgent, too sensual, and thus too inward-looking. At the time—quite a few years ago, in fact—my main reaction to this was to think that if anything this applied more to harpsichord, especially since the gorgeous, sensually compelling sounds of a great instrument are at such close quarters. More recently I have come to this question: why is this not a good thing? These gorgeous sounds exist to be heard and to convey the music and its associated feelings. Lately, I have been thinking about this, partly because I have spent months listening to recorded music at an even greater pace than I had over the pre-pandemic years, and trying very hard to delve into that experience as deeply as I can. But also, I suspect, it does have something to do with the point above. The sensory or sensual dimension of the organ and harpsichord is about conveying emotion. Therefore, it may be a disproportionately large part of what it takes to create that feeling I was talking about just above.

Surface level appeal

Related to this, it seems to me that often there is a surface level to a work of art that can be either appealing or unappealing to a particular person who tries to experience that art. And that if the art contains a message or meaning, that is in some way deep or important or lasting, that will only be accessible to someone who happens to respond well to what is on the surface. For example, I have never liked The Simpsons. I have experienced all sorts of people whose views I respect, and often agree with, tell me that this show is really good: funny, literate, witty, and with underlying social and political views that I would approve. I do not doubt any of this, though I also do not know firsthand that it is true. I find the drawing style of the characters really off-putting, and, in particular, I cannot stand the voices. That is not to say that I think that the performers and directors are not talented and skillful and doing a great job. It is a matter of my particular taste, based on upbringing, experiences, psychology, etc. I have tried viewing a few times and cannot get through a single episode. I am blocked from getting to know whatever really lies deeper within the show.

I recently had another similar experience with a modern dance performance that I interacted with the way we do for now—on my computer screen. I watched the event, and I certainly thought that I detected really interesting narrative, emotional content, perhaps philosophical questions being dealt with. But the out-and-out style, the way people moved, was one that I found annoying and disturbing. After watching this piece I happened upon a description of it by one of its creators. I read that, hoping that it would be interesting (and it was), and that it would unlock the piece itself to me. When I summoned it back up and tried to watch it again, I still found it annoying and disturbing: actually more so, since I now knew that there were things at the deeper level that I would have liked to connect with but still could not.

What’s in a name?

I have always wondered what his friends called J. S. Bach. Did he have a nickname or informal version of his name? I have heard that “Basti” is and has been for many years a diminutive of Sebastian. Did anyone call him that? Or a different informal name? He may have only been called “Sebastian” and presumably some version of “Father” by his children. As far as I can tell we simply do not know. But I do not want not to assume that because we think of him as so august and unapproachable he cannot have been addressed other than formally. The point of this line of thought is to try to get away from thinking of him that way. (For me that project was greatly helped along by taking a look at the facial reconstruction of Bach done several years ago at Dundee University. You can find it by doing an internet image search on “Bach reconstruction.”)

There is evidence that Johann Christian Bach was known to his family as “Christel.” This comes from the top page of a stack of J. S. B. cantata manuscripts that we know were divided between
C. P. E. Bach and J. C. Bach. An inscription there says “Carl u. Christel,” the first name in the handwriting of J. C. Bach himself, and then his name in the hand of his mother Anna Magdalena Bach. I learned recently that James Madison, also someone whom we might have trouble thinking of as “just” a person rather than an august historical figure, was called Jemmy. I would love to have more of these little windows into history.

Competition-based model

I was recently reminded by something that I heard on a televised golf game of the story that Arthur Rubinstein used to tell about his first time hearing Vladimir Horowitz. The gist of it was that he thought to himself, “This young man is really good. I’d better practice more!” As best I remember it, Rubinstein was indeed talking about the most basic thing: that he was hearing someone who was better than he was at the “right notes at the right tempo” side of playing, and that he had better work to get equally good at that. I have always shied away from, and encouraged others to shy away from, that sort of competition-based model. My fear about it is that it encourages too much of an emphasis on the things that can be measured and copied and discourages emphasis on playing one’s own way. But that is another thing that I want to muse about a bit. The things that can be measured and copied are also part of the picture. Is an awareness that others might be better at some things always a toxic way to motivate oneself? I have always felt it to be. But the amount of anxiety that such comparisons give to me may be higher than it necessarily is for others. Maybe I am too afraid that if I hear something that is clearly better than what I am doing my response will be to give up rather than to practice more. Or, more to the point, I have not sorted out a way to discern how this works for each student: it has to vary quite a lot.

If this kind of comparison- or competition-based model can ever work it has to be very clear that one is being spurred on to do an even better job of what one wants to do, of what constitutes one’s own individual contribution: not to copy as such. All this will bear a good deal more thinking about.

And that is all for this month.

Further thoughts about rhythm

In the very late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first interested in the organ and listening to a lot of organ music, I had an LP recording of late-nineteenth-century French organ selections, pieces and excerpts of pieces by several composers, played by several different organists. It was a miscellany, a real sampler. All of the pieces were new to me then, as were the organs and the performers. The piece that impressed me most was the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, played by Xavier Darasse. I should probably say that the passage that impressed me was the opening of that movement (Example 1). I remember quite clearly, fifty years later, that I listened to the opening of that track over and over again. I probably destroyed that part of the LP, but it helped to solidify my love for the organ; thus it was worth it!

Several weeks ago, as I decided to write a column or two focusing on various aspects of rhythm, that passage started going through my head again. It has scarcely been out of my head since, except when I have been listening to something else. Every passage of music has some relationship to the concept of rhythm. In spite of my early love for it, the first movement of that Widor symphony is not one that I have performed or analyzed. But thinking about it now and finally analyzing it a little bit, I think that there are all sorts of interesting things occurring with the rhythm of those first few measures. In particular, there are fascinating relationships between the rhetorical and theoretical aspects of rhythm, and this is part of what I address in this column.

The rhythm of the striking opening chords of the movement is demonstrated in Example 2. The rhythm of those powerful chords, and of the melody that is their treble line, is treated as a motive throughout the movement. But the surface rhythm, the rhythm of new notes, whatever voice or part of the texture they come from, is demonstrated in Example 3. That extra quarter note is a passing note in the pedal part, the bass line.

This is all straightforward, just a description of what is in the score. But it is fascinating to me that I hear two things going on at once, two different ways to describe the rhythm of this passage, both valid and meaningful. This seems to be a wrinkle in the relationship between counterpoint and rhythm. Lines of counterpoint, in the way that we usually conceive of them, are almost always characterized in part by having at least some rhythmic difference one to another. But here we have a passage that is seemingly homophonic. But the fact that the rhythm of that last quarter note of the second measure comes across as being on a lower level of importance rhythmically injects an element of counterpoint. This is subjective, but it is an interesting confirmation that the bass/pedal line is used over the next few measures to open the passage into more and more palpable counterpoint, as shown in Example 4.

If we do not know where notes are coming from rhetorically, then our sense of what the rhythm of a passage is can only be the surface rhythm. Turning that the other way around, if we notice hierarchies of rhythmic importance in different notes within a texture, that may be a clue as to some of what is going on rhetorically and contrapuntally in that passage.

For me, this is a new and slightly different way of looking at the relationship between rhythm and counterpoint. This means that I have not yet worked out how to help students apply it to pieces they are working on. There is a lot of music—from Byrd fantasias through Beatles songs, and including a lot of organ repertoire from all time and places—that is clearly not fully, rigorously contrapuntal, but in which counterpoint keeps breaking through. It is probably true that the vast majority of tonal music falls into this category. But nonetheless I have always had a problem feeling comfortable with it conceptually. Is it counterpoint or is it not? I understand that this is just the imposition of a rigid framework. But still, the concept that I am sketching out here seems to be able to help me get more comfortable with counterpoint flowing in and out of a piece or a passage.

My second answer to why this passage started going through my head has to do with the relationship between rhythm and rhythm as rhetoric. The rhythm of the notes at the beginning of this piece is well-defined and clear. But what is that rhythm doing? In a lot of circumstances, the rhythm of the first measure—just two half notes—would suggest a downbeat and an upbeat. But the way that I hear this first measure is something different and harder to describe. I hear each of those chords as a kind of world in itself, neither coming from anywhere rhythmically nor leading anywhere, but just rather insistently being. It is as if the second chord has so much gravity and weight that it refuses to be in a hierarchical relationship to the first chord or to the downbeat of the next measure. This is subjective, my way of hearing it. Assuming for the moment that this is correct or at least meaningful, is it about rhythm? A plausible and normal answer to that would be no. The rhythm is what it is, and everything else is a different aspect: affect, aesthetic, sonority, the push and pull of the harmony, interpretive choices, and so on. But it strikes me that it might be more interesting to expand the concept of rhythm to include more about what the rhythmic pulses and impulses are doing.

I believe that this concept or image could be interesting and helpful to students. It might provide a way of broadening the comfort zone of some students who are making choices about how to precisely execute rhythms on the page. If so, that would probably be through allowing choices about freedom of rhythm, bending and stretching the notated rhythm to feel more like an essential part of the rhythm itself. It might also provide me or any teacher with a way of helping the student to think about interpretive rhythmic choices without simply suggesting details of those choices to the student. I am now eager to work with a student on this piece!

In a way, I have put the cart before the horse, describing some ideas that occurred to me once I decided to write a column about a certain subject. As a result of one conversation with colleagues and a few interactions with students, I revisited a few of my ideas about rhythm, the relationship between notated rhythm and rhythm in practice, and certain practical matters about teaching rhythm. The latter include metronome use, counting, how to approach counting during slow practice, and a few other matters. The core of what I plan to write about is a concept that intrigues me: the possibility of deriving rhythm fundamentally, though only in part, from something other than the notation. I will talk about this at length in my next column.

I finish this column with a few more circumscribed yet fascinating points. The first is an anecdote from well over thirty years ago that has stayed with me all this time. I was then beginning to look for ways to participate in chamber music, and I connected with various colleagues as best I could. There was one player with whom I had a session or two of running through pieces and with whom I started to talk about giving concerts. As I came out of one such session, another colleague caught sight of me and said concerning my rehearsal partner, “You know, she really can’t count.” I did not know what to say, and I ended up with something like “Umm . . . ok,” and I did not let that comment affect my decision to go ahead and work with this fine and interesting musician. That comment was false in experience. This player had no more tendency to misread a rhythm or waver in rhythm or tempo than anyone else. But she was someone who often played purposely and quite freely. I learned a lot from her in this respect. I was left wondering what the real source of the uncalled-for carping criticism was. Did that other colleague have a bad experience with the person with whom I was working? Or misremembered or mistaken her for someone else? Or had it been a case of mistaking intentional, interpretive rhythmic freedom for an inability to count?

This latter idea always intrigues me and can be confounding. How do we know whether something that we hear (as to rhythm, for the purposes of this discussion) that departs from the most literally accurate is a mistake or a purposeful gesture? What different attitudes do we bring to such an event if it is one or the other? Is there a gray area in between? The attitude that we bring to mistakes that our students make is pretty clear—it is part of our job to point them out and help the student to understand what the problem is, how to correct it or to avoid similar things, and so on.

But what if the student says, “No, I meant to do that?” There is a strong pull to ask why and to accept that any deviation from what seems to be on the page is all right if there is a good reason. The discussions that arise from grappling with situations like this can be very fruitful indeed, but I have always thought that it is too restrictive. I hope that the concepts I will discuss next time can be used to help students understand what is going on rhythmically when they feel the pull to do something other than what seems to be the literal meaning of the notation but cannot express why. Furthermore, I hope that this can also help teachers address this situation with students without simply dictating outcomes.

I am reminded of a review that I read once of Joseph Szigeti’s recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas for violin. I apologize, as I have been unable to find this review, an unusual issue for the internet era. I am certain that it was written by B. H. Haggin. As best I remember, Haggin liked the recording and got a lot out of the playing and the pieces. But he also felt that the pieces themselves were not very interesting, that Szigeti, with his rhythmically free and idiosyncratic approach to Bach interpretation, had made great music out of pieces that were intrinsically dull exercises. I believe that this assessment was not as unexpected at that point in history as it would be now, though I do not agree with it. It seems to cast an interesting light on rhythm in performance. The reviewer’s perspective was that the player’s striking rhythmic choices were what we might call “wrong” in the sense that they were not really based on anything intrinsic to the music. They were imposed upon the music and thereby made the music great when it really was not. Is this a good situation or a bad one? How would we react if we thought we heard this happening with our students?

The last item that I mention here is an observation that I made while driving recently. I rolled down the window and shortly thereafter heard the sound of two cars passing me in quick succession going the other way. There were two whooshing sounds probably about 0.7 seconds apart. There had not been any cars ahead of them for a while, nor were there any following behind. So the two sounds were isolated. Although translated into the terms of musical rhythm this was just two notes out of any context, and it immediately evoked for me a very specific moment, namely the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata in E Minor for piano, opus 90 (Example 5).

The two car sounds seemed to deliver the rhythm of this opening gesture. Why and how? Two notes in a row is so commonplace in music that it is almost silly to evoke a specific instance of it as a thing in itself at all! Even if the two cars sounded clearly like an upbeat and a downbeat, that hardly narrows things down at all. And it cannot be harmony or sonority—what I heard had no pitch or harmony, and the sonority was that of a couple of cars. So what made that passage come into my head? I do not have an answer, but it adds to my sense that there is something more to rhythm than what we see notated on the page or can describe in words.

A special note: I will be playing selections from J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on harpsichord as part of the New York City concert series Midtown Concerts on Thursday, October 28, at 1:15 p.m. at the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 East 29th Street, New York, New York. I take the liberty of mentioning this since I have written extensively in these pages about my Art of the Fugue project. This will be the first public manifestation of that project and my first public concert in two-and-a-half years. If any readers can make it, I would of course be overjoyed to see you there

What is rhythm? That question has recurred to me as I have thought about and written about rhythm over the last few months. This is a prime example of putting the cart before the horse. After all, how have I been thinking about rhythm without first sorting out what it is? But there is no one answer to this very fundamental question, and we all work with rhythm without having established a clear definition.

I searched the internet with phrases such as “What is rhythm?” and “rhythm in music.” I was not looking for any answers as such, but to get an idea of some of the “headline” ways in which any sort of definition of rhythm is encapsulated. The results were very interesting. There were two basic kinds of results: 1) simple descriptions of some of the mechanics of the way that rhythm is depicted in some sorts of music, such as “Rhythm in music is the regular motion of half-notes, quarter-notes, etc.” or “Music has a regular beat sometimes indicated by a metronome marking;” and 2) complex but certainly intriguing philosophical discussions of concepts of rhythm.

One set of answers to the question of rhythm is contained in the fact that we work with rhythm when we make music. Music moves through time. Rhythm is predicated on the phenomenon of time passing as we listen to music or create it.

Music moves through time in a way essential to its nature. The same can be said for dance, though I have less experience talking to people who have had a deep involvement with it. Drama—live theater, television, movies—also moves through time, but in a way that seems meaningfully different as much of what is going on is dialogue. The semantic content influences the way one experiences the flow. (This is in part also true of vocal music.) Painting, drawing, sculpture, and other visual and graphic arts do not move through time the same way. Time passes as one experiences that sort of artwork, but visual focus is up to the viewer, as is shifting of that focus as a viewer encounters the work of art. There is no set time that the rhythm of viewing a painting, for example, will occupy overall, and no set ratio between times allotted to different parts of the whole. There is also no set order in which those parts will make themselves felt to the viewer, including any aspects of repetition.

I have always thought it fascinating that if you hit the pause button while a CD or any music file is playing, there is silence, whereas if you do the same on a video recording, a still image is displayed. Music has no existence without the passage of time, without motion and change.

Would a piece of music that existed in time but never changed seem to have rhythm in any sense we would recognize? This is an abstraction, since we do not encounter music that never changes. Maybe the closest we could come would be to play a note on an organ and hold it forever. But even that would change. There is always a miscellaneous fluctuation in the sound or in the way that the sound reaches the ears. Maybe a computer-based instrument could create a sound that really would never change even at the level of what the most sensitive instruments could measure or any ears could hear. If someone were to listen to (part of) such a piece would there be anything that they would experience as rhythm? Maybe not, but what occurs to me is that they would experience the inner rhythm of their own shifting reaction to the unchanging sound.

I see from framing the last thought the way I did that I want something to happen in order to accept that the quality of “rhythm” is present. So possibly rhythm is not just music moving through time, but things happening—things that we can hear—as music moves through time. I understand that this is sort of obvious and phrased in a deliberately simple or even naïve way. Maybe it is even really a tautology: if we are listening and something happens, we notice it. Since it happens across time, there is rhythm to it, if we define rhythm broadly or just decide to apply that word to that phenomenon.

But as the first set of answers that I found in my internet search reminds us, there is something specific about how we use rhythm, ​​not necessarily what rhythm is in most of the music that organists, pianists, harpsichordists, or other classical musicians grapple with. That has to do with regular beat, which presumably means that the “something happening” happens at regular time intervals, and some sort of way of grouping that regularity. This is expressed with a naïve pretense that we do not know it perfectly well already. It points to a vast set of questions as to why this should be standard. How did it evolve? What does it do that is different from what we might be able to do with musical sounds not organized that way? Are there necessary relationships between this regularity and other aspects of music in this range of styles: melody, harmony, texture, and so on? To answer these questions is not the point here, since the truth is that no one knows, although there has been a lot of interesting research and speculation.

So where does any of this leave us as to the teaching or grappling with rhythm in our own playing? Grappling with rhythm means deciding when to play notes. The thought that has formed in my mind over the last few years is that there are two fundamental ways to do this, and they are opposite. They are both important, but very different in how straightforward they are to describe.

The first of these is the normal one for most music that we play. It is the one that we engage with all the time, the regular beat and meter phenomenon. I like to describe it this way: there is a regular beat that exists outside of the piece and before the beginning of the piece; the notes of the piece will fit in with that beat once the piece begins. That beat defines one note value, and the other note values are all clearly defined in relation to that one. There could be many other ways of describing this same thing. And to avoid its being a caricature, we should add that although the regular beat exists before the piece begins, it is in a sense a separate entity from the piece itself, and to a large extent governs the motion of the piece.

This is consistent with this concept that the actual notes sometimes deviate from the place where that regular beat says they should have been. That then becomes a matter of taste, of judgment, of awareness of a composer’s intentions and so on. Although this deviation is normal and frequent, it is defined as an aberration, and therefore it is often felt to require specific justification.

The second, opposite pole is a lot harder to describe. At any instant in a piece of music, there is some prevailing sound—a note, more than one note, the dying away of released notes, the ambient room sound, any combination of these things and others—and something about that sound will suggest when it feels right for the next sound to happen. That suggested moment is the appropriate time to play or sing the next note or notes. This perceived sense may sometimes be caused by the phenomenon of notes having come at a certain regular pace up until that moment. But it may also be caused by other factors that have nothing to do with regular pulse. These could include something about the inner behavior of the sound in the time since anything was last expressly played, shaped by the nature of the performing medium or by the room acoustics; anything about harmonic development and the ebb and flow of harmonic tension; something arising out of the desire for a certain kind of forward momentum; a need either to sustain a mood or to change the mood; and so on.

Each of these two poles can be found to a greater or lesser extent in any piece or passage that we play, and they interact in an infinite number of ways. The second idea is often most obviously at work in recitative. This only starts with “official” sung recitative. It also includes instrumental passages that imitate recitative and are marked as such—for example, the section in the first movement of Widor’s Sixth Symphony that immediately follows the opening about which I wrote in my September 2021 column (pages 10–11), or sections of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903, or Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565.

More interestingly, perhaps, it includes passages that strike us as being in recitative style without being marked as such. This applies to many other sections of those same Bach pieces, for example. The opening of BWV 565 is full of fermatas, unmeasured and written-out arpeggios, and tempo changes, all of which add up to making it an absolute necessity to find some source other than a grid of beats and accents to figure out when each successive note is best played.

The opening of Bach’s Fantasia in G Minor, BWV 542, is not aesthetically like the opening of BWV 565. It has no fermatas, tempo changes, or other direct suggestions that the rhythm suggested by the mapping of the notes onto the regular meter is not perfectly viable. When I played this piece decades ago, that was how I derived my sense of when the notes came. I recall being very focused on counting it correctly. Now, when I sit and read through it, I am more focused on listening to each sonority and trying to feel or intuit when what comes next should occur. This is not in the absence of an awareness of how the different note values stack up against one another or where the strong beats are. In this case it supplements that. The feeling of pressure or momentum to move to the next note or cluster of notes comes in part from an awareness of the imperatives of the beat structure. For example, everything about the opening chord and the act of moving away from the opening chord comes from sonority, ideally including whatever I can hear of room acoustics.

So how does this concept differ from a simple acknowledgement that it is possible to play ordinary measured music either rather strictly or more freely? This is a common though not uncontroversial subject to debate, be it in a friendly or heated way. One point I like about this approach is that it seems to be true. That is, whether it is something a composer intends or a performer tries to bring out, it is palpably the case that each moment in a piece of music has some sort of inherent momentum. It can vary in strength and be perceived differently by one person and another. After all, this momentum is something that arises in part from what a given performer or listener wants to do with a piece, their prior aesthetic predilections and tastes, and a host of other factors. This is never something that can be defined by one person for another: it must be heard and felt.

One way to demonstrate that this intrinsic momentum is real is to stop a piece at a random place. A jarring quality that experience creates comes from unfulfilled expectation or broken momentum. That momentum cannot be just that of a regular beat pattern—they stop all the time, and it does not bother us.

Another matter that I like about this concept is that it ties in with the notion of playing a piece as if you were improvising it. Even if your sense of the directionality and momentum of the sonorities does not lead you to do anything very different from a fairly strict rhythm, as soon as you start listening for that momentum you are behaving like someone who is creating the piece.

Also, just as a matter of my own discipline, trying to listen like this prods me not to let my attention and hearing faculties wander too much, to pay attention and to care about each note. This is one of the key points in working with students around this idea.

Next time I will write in some detail about that: how to introduce this idea to students, what some if its advantages are, and what some of its pitfalls are, how to help students reconcile this approach with whatever amount of respect to the notated rhythm is due, if that ever rises to the level of conflict. I will end this series about rhythm with notes on a few stray ideas and observations about rhythm that are either germane to the above ideas or interesting on their own account.

Further thoughts on
counterpoint II: a miscellany

I mentioned at the end of last month’s column that I have been rethinking some of my ideas and practices about teaching rhythm and counting. This is the result of recent experiences teaching students contrapuntal voices. I have noticed—more than I previously observed—that moving from an understanding of the rhythm of individual voices to an understanding of the way the rhythms of those voices fits together is not always easy or natural for everyone. It is helpful to address it directly, and I developed some new ideas about how to do so.

As outlined in my April 2012 column, my approach to teaching rhythm and counting involves ignoring time signatures, bar lines, and the “one-and-two-and” structure that we often employ. Rhythm is about ratios, and my experience has suggested that grappling with ratios directly—understanding that a dotted quarter note lasts as long as three eighth notes, that a half note lasts twice as long as a quarter note, and so on—is the best way for a student to become comfortable with rhythm. This is true for a beginner learning to understand rhythmic notation for the first time and also for a more experienced student who is having trouble with a particular rhythm or needs a refresher course. This has the advantage of being simple and completely accurate. I have seen much more trouble arise when students worry about whether a particular note is “on the ‘and’ of two” than I have seen clarity arising out of this way of describing rhythm.

This is an over-simplified summary of an approach that differs from other approaches in emphasis, since the learning of note ratios is always fundamental. This is not the place for a complete restatement of what I wrote six years ago, or to explain why I believe that it is a good approach. You can find it in the above-mentioned issue of The Diapason, which I have posted at http://gavinblack-baroque.com/Diapason column April 2012.pdf.

When a student needs to work out the rhythm of a passage, I suggest counting individual notes in relation to a suitable short note value. For example, if that short unit is the eighth note, then each eighth note is counted as “one,” each quarter note is counted “one-two,” each half note “one-two-three-four,” and so on. This does not involve denying that those beats also relate to positions in a measure, but it just deemphasizes that at first. In learning the rhythm of a single line or passage, the texture of which involves all of the notes, voices, chords, etc., being in the same rhythm as one another (say in the manner of many hymns), this approach is very successful.

Therefore, it is also successful when learning individual voices of what will be a contrapuntal texture, regardless of its eventual level of complexity. So the following two “voices” (the pitches are not important) could each be counted as indicated in Examples 1 and 2. As with any rhythmic counting, the numbers have to come at an even pace.

Each of these examples contains nineteen eighth notes, and the two of them fit together. But the sort of counting that I have suggested would be extraordinarily hard, if not impossible, to follow in Example 3.

The first-order solution is that the rhythm of each voice should be internalized before the voices are put together. This is a goal worth striving for in the practicing process. However it seems sensible to readmit traditional measure-based counting at this point.

I have purposely created an example that is not divided into measures. But it could be, like Example 4, which then allows for the regular (“one-and-two-and”) approach to counting.

I believe that it is a good idea for this sort of counting to be secondary. To the extent that working out the rhythm of each voice separately is something that must be approached consciously and deliberately, I think that my per-note way of counting is useful. In addition to being sensible and effective in itself, it can promote an awareness of the importance of the middle and ends of notes, whereas “one-and-two-and” counting, especially with counterpoint, can focus attention disproportionately on the beginnings of notes. As soon as the measure-based number for a note has been spoken or thought, the next step is to see what notes in other voices correspond to the next counting numbers. This can shift a player’s overall focus toward a more homophonic feeling.

Thinking about applying the normal measure-based templates to counting multi-voiced pieces has made me more open to other ways of keeping track of the rhythm of pieces that are not derived from a strict awareness of the voice structure. For example, there is net or overall rhythm. Sometimes, while the rhythm of each voice in a contrapuntal passage is different from all the others, the surface rhythm is quite simple. That rhythm might be thought of as a new note every eighth note.

Here are a few examples of writing in which this concept might make things easier. Example 5 is from Bach, Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 8. Example 6 is from Mendelssohn, Prelude and Fugue, op. 37, no. 1 (fugue). Example 7 is taken from Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, Fugue #2.

In the last of these, the net rhythm is more complicated, but still simpler than each individual rhythm. It is interesting that the first three measures of each piece have the same overall surface rhythm, which in turn is the rhythm of the fugue subject. In the opening measure, the fugue subject is alone, in the second it is combined with a countersubject that does not change the surface rhythm, and in the third measure only the surface rhythm alludes to or quotes that subject.

If the printing is neatly aligned, it is possible to derive all of the rhythm from the surface rhythm by how things line up. Sometimes it is useful to picture a cursor line going steadily from left to right and to identify whatever it touches as what is to be played at that moment. But this should all be secondary, understood to be forms of assistance, not a primary way of understanding rhythm.

Some observations

Here are a few more observations about counterpoint, some of which may be a bit abstract:

It is natural to think of counterpoint as being something that is easily differentiable from harmony. After all, there is counterpoint that exists outside the norms and expectations of tonality or functional harmony. But for most of the music that we play on the organ and other keyboard instruments, pieces that are rigorously contrapuntal are also completely embedded in harmony. This is something essential about the meaning of the counterpoint itself: that is, the way that the flow of contrapuntal voices/melodies comes across to us, and therefore the way that the directionality of the different voices interact with one another function, is determined crucially by where the voices are moving harmonically.

For this discussion, I have invented an exercise. Try playing a piece of contrapuntal music with all but one of the voices transposed, and not each transposed by the same amount. The simplest case would be something like Example 8, from the opening of the first Bach Two-Part Invention.

This is going to sound discordant, to put it mildly. But that reaction or judgment is not necessary. The point is that it sounds radically different from the “real” version, although, analytically, a good deal of the counterpoint itself remains unchanged. A little bit of this exercise, possibly even just the amount that I have written out here can be eye-opening for a student. (It is not bad as an odd sort of sight-reading exercise either, and it is much harder with more than two voices.)

A bit of exposure to this oddity can also make the ears more sensitive to the ebb and flow of harmony-based motion or pressure in contrapuntal works. Even though the interaction of voices is always shaped in some way by the separate voices’ harmonic direction, the evident force of that phenomenon is stronger in some places, yet weaker in others. It is also more divergent in some places and more in sync in others. The places where the force of the harmonic direction of different voices is most in sync are cadences and moments that feel cadential.

Many years ago, probably when I was still in high school, an older friend of mine recounted something that a friend of hers had said. This friend once removed was an extremely erudite and thoughtful music listener, thinker about music, and keyboard player. The comment that was relayed to me was: “Helmut Walcha’s problem is that he is too focused on the counterpoint.” I immediately felt that I was learning something—not so much about music or playing or performance, but about attitudes toward musical work. The first thought that occurred to me was that Helmut Walcha was not the one with the “problem!” The phrase “Helmut Walcha’s problem is . . .” really meant, “The reason that I do not like Walcha’s playing is . . . .” That comment and my reaction to it at the time taught me that many people take their own reactions for objective truth, and that it made me uncomfortable. That in turn has shaped a great deal of my own approach to my development as a player and teacher.

What does that comment tell us about counterpoint? I have never thought that it was an apt description of anything I heard in Walcha’s playing. That may be in part because I grew up listening to him, and, at that time, his approach was my own default. But it has made me sensitive to the question of what it would mean to pay too much attention to counterpoint and too little to other things.

My guess is that this commentator was probably referring to Walcha’s relatively steady approach to rhythm, and also, just as importantly, to his focus on consistently phrasing subjects. (For what it is worth, he was also reacting to hearing recordings, not to any conversations with Walcha or to any direct knowledge of the roots of his approach.)

This leads to a host of questions:

Is it correct that relatively steady metronomic playing is associated with bringing out counterpoint clearly, whereas playing that is rhythmically free is associated with harmonically derived music, or with an approach to playing music that is more focused on harmony?

What about the business of “subject phrasing?” If a phrase, theme, or motif happens more than once in a piece, is it important to articulate and phrase it consistently? Does doing that enhance the extent to which the counterpoint seems like counterpoint?

Is it important, or is it good or bad, for the notes of different voices that are written ostensibly at the same time to happen at exactly the same time? Could there be something good or necessary about notes being somewhat staggered at times? The reason that I associate this question with the Walcha-related anecdote is that in his playing, notes do line up rhythmically to a great extent. Furthermore, the above-mentioned commenter believed that Walcha was too focused on counterpoint. But there are many players and theorists who believe that counterpoint is enhanced by staggering: it is difficult for the ears to follow separate lines if the notes of those lines coincide with one another exactly. Which of these is true? Does it depend in part on habits of listening? Is it really about clarity of counterpoint, or is it about some other aspect of style?

How does this relate to thoughts about basic counting in counterpoint expressed above? I suppose that I feel most interested in the notion that any melody including a contrapuntal voice has some logic by which it might be stretched out or otherwise inflected rhythmically. Also, two voices that occur at the same time might have different logic. They might not line up all the time, but not because the phenomenon of their not lining up should be sought out, rather, because the internal logic of each has them manifesting slightly different timing. This may be why I am more interested in counting individual voices that are somewhat removed from each other and from the template of measures. But then all voices have to be together enough in the end so that the piece is coherent.

I present all of this as questions or ideas that are interesting to think about or, more to the point, to engage with in conjunction with students. None of it is hard and fast; none of it represents answers or conclusions.

One last topic: notes that we play have overtones. On the organ some of those are the inherent overtones of the pipes, while some are the higher stops added for a particular purpose. Especially in the former category, there are often overtones that, while they blend in enough to make the sound coherent, can also be heard as faint separate notes. And the rather cool thing is this: different overtones are relatively audible on different notes. So in playing a theme you might hear the twelfth over the first note, the fifteenth over the second note, the twelfth again, then the seventeenth, and so on. In Example 9, in this melody, you might happen to hear the higher (gray) notes as very faint, audible accompaniment to the “official” theme.

This is a kind of shadow overtone counterpoint that is always present, at a greater or lesser degree of audibility, and is present separately in multiple contrapuntal voices when they combine.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by email at [email protected].