On Teaching

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

Some thoughts on ornaments II
Last month I shared some ideas about a general approach to playing ornaments and how to practice towards playing them well and comfortably. This month I will share more such thoughts and also discuss specific named ornaments. Next month I will write about the concept of “authenticity” and ways of introducing students to that concept.

Freedom in performance
Ornamentation is related to the idea of freedom in performance. There is a continuum of freedom in making music. At one end of that continuum is out-and-out improvisation—not that all improvisation is totally “free” in the sense of “unstructured” or with no rules. But if a player is improvising, then that player is essentially responsible for deciding what the notes will be, and also for the judgments about how to play those notes. Conceptually, as a matter of accuracy or authenticity, the player is not responsible to another musician—that is, a composer—or to any concept of fidelity to someone else’s ideas. When a player undertakes to learn an already written piece, that player accepts some level of responsibility to reproduce what the composer of that piece created in the first place. Of course, there are many different philosophical and practical approaches to this issue; but ornamentation occupies a place somewhere in between improvisation and simply “playing what the composer wrote.” Exactly where this place is can be hard to define, or, perhaps more accurately, cannot be defined because it is not just one place. But to some extent, ornaments are written as signs rather than just as notes because they are defined as intrinsically freer than the notes around them.
This freedom is of two different kinds; remembering both of them can be very helpful to students. The first is the freedom to add or subtract ornaments. To me, one of the most telling pieces of evidence for the existence of this freedom is that copyists—in the era when most music was copied by hand—felt free to add, remove or change ornaments. That is, clearly the philosophy of copying was that the “notes” should be copied exactly (of course, mistakes were made), but that “ornaments” could be treated with considerable discretion. There are surviving manuscripts of many pieces that differ greatly from one another in ornamentation. If they differed as much in the “real” notes, we would not consider them to be the same piece. Some of Bach’s students, and others in his circle, added copious ornaments to their copies of various of his pieces: the Inventions, for example, or the Canzona, BWV 588. Bach himself added a fair number of ornaments to his personal copy of the (already published) Goldberg Variations. This latter fact reminds us that we can’t even be sure that what we have of the composer’s own account of the ornaments in a piece always represents what that composer really—or finally—wanted.
François Couperin wrote that he considered it crucial that performers play exactly the ornaments that he wrote, neither adding any nor omitting any, and play them exactly the way he said that they were to be played. This suggests that—if we care by and large about respecting the wishes of composers—we should play all of, and only, Couperin’s own ornaments. However, his vehemence on this point—what seems to amount to his actual anger at performers for their approach to ornamentation in his music—also tells us that this was not the common practice at the time. (It is also true that even Couperin’s rather long and detailed ornament tables do not by any means resolve all of the questions about how exactly to play his ornaments. In fact, his “real note” explanations of his ornament signs are largely written in small notes with no time value to them, and therefore give little or no information about the timing or rhythm of the ornaments. More about this below.)

After 1800
One more confirmation of the notion that ornamentation—that is, ornament sign-based elaboration of written musical lines—is essentially defined by the performer’s freedom is this: over a period of time centered in the early nineteenth century, composers began to assume for themselves greater responsibility for determining all of the details of how their music should be played. This manifested itself in metronome markings, explicit phrasing and articulation marks, dynamic markings, more varied, explicit and expressive tempo markings, and, in organ music in particular, registrations. This was part of a long trend away from a performer/improviser-based musical culture towards a composer-based one. The fact that at this same time the use of ornament signs declined significantly—not totally, of course, but enough that we tend to think of ornamentation as being more essentially a part of Baroque music than of later music—suggests that those ornament signs were seen as leaving freedom—too much freedom—in the hands of performers. Thus we believe or assume that we should not, for the most part, add ornaments to music written after about 1800, or take away those that are there.

Ornament tables
Typical Baroque-era ornament tables (and there are quite a few that survive) are paradoxically a main source of confirmation for the second aspect of freedom in playing ornaments—that is, the freedom to play a given ornament in a number of different ways. This is because those ornament tables never give a complete, cut and dried, or even necessarily technically meaningful account of how to play an ornament, beyond the most basic. They give, for the most part, a bare account of what the notes of the ornament should be, sometimes with hints about the placement of the notes of the ornament with respect to the beat, sometimes not. They do not really address the rhythm or timing of ornaments. These tables serve as a guide to the most basic shape of ornaments for players who do not already know that shape, and they are now—and were when they were written—very valuable for that purpose. However, any practical attempt to use them to figure out the subtleties of playing any ornament simply doesn’t work. This suggests to me that it was understood and accepted that those subtleties would be figured out on a flexible basis by each performer as the occasion arose.
Now I would like to turn to some specific ornaments, with an emphasis on trills, offering a hodgepodge of musical/artistic thoughts and practical ones.

Trill
The trill is by far the most complicated ornament to understand and, especially, to execute comfortably. It is widely understood that trills are ornaments involving the printed note and the note above it. (It is possible that I have never had a student come to me who didn’t already know this—certainly almost never. It is always worth checking, though, to be sure that a student does understand this.) The big question, at least at the beginning of the process of learning any particular trill, is which note comes first, and the usual assumption is that in Baroque music trills should begin on the upper note, and in music later than the Baroque period, they should begin on the main note. There is absolutely no reason not to believe that this is basically true, and plenty of reason to believe that it is. I have to put this in a kind of half-fudging way for a reason, though: there are all sorts of exceptions, uncertainties, and ambiguities. One major exception is that by and large Italian Baroque trills probably were meant to begin with the main (printed) note. (In fact it is fairly likely that the reason that classical period and later trills begin on the main note is that in the mid to late eighteenth century, Italian style, especially as represented by Italian opera, spread widely throughout Europe and some of the conventions of that style with respect to ornamentation were adopted.) Another exception is that some North German Baroque composers who were influenced by Italian style probably also meant for many of their trills to begin on the main note.
Concerning this question, what I usually suggest to students is that they start by trying out a trill with the template suggested by the consensus about what was probably meant historically, and then feel free to change it if they find it unconvincing. If anyone finds him- or herself changing many or most trills away from what the composer(s) probably intended, that may suggest an esthetic bias, and it might be fruitful to try to challenge that bias. (For example, I—with my strong personal orientation towards playing Baroque music—have found myself wanting to play trills in Reger beginning with the upper note. I could try to justify this by pointing out that Reger himself had a strong orientation towards Baroque music. In fact, his music has more trills and other ornaments in it than other music from his historical period. However, it is actually quite unlikely indeed that he meant his trills to be played from the upper note. In fact, during his lifetime it was not even customary to play Baroque trills that way. The bias towards doing so in the music of Reger is mine, not his.)
Sometimes an intuitive desire to play a trill a certain way is related to articulation. For example, if a trill is approached from above, with the note immediately before the trill being the same as the upper note of the trill itself, then beginning the trill on that upper note will create an articulation, at least a subtle one. If the passage is one that the student wants to play with a strong, essentially overlapping, legato, then this articulation might seem jarring. Appropriate fingering (see last month’s column) and a light touch can be used to make the articulation as subtle and “musical” as possible. If a choice about articulation seems to force an interpretation of a trill that is inauthentic, then that might suggest rethinking that choice about articulation. However, this is always at the player’s discretion.
One interesting feature of trills is that, almost always, one of the notes of the trill is consonant and the other note dissonant against the prevailing harmony or against the notes of one or more other voices. It is interesting to notice which note stands in which relation to the harmony, and to observe the effect on a passage of starting the trill on the dissonant or the consonant note. Especially when starting on the dissonant note, it is interesting to try holding that note for different lengths before segueing into the rest of the trill, and listening for the effect of various lengths and overall trill shapes on the rhetoric of the passage.
In practicing trills, it often makes sense to start with a very even, “stilted” version of the trill. That is, once a basic decision has been made about the note shape of the trill, create a version of that shape which is rhythmically even, and not any faster than can be played easily. This may be eighth notes, or sixteenths, or sometimes thirty-seconds. Practice the trill that way at first. This will get the fingers accustomed to the correct note pattern. (In general, it is any hesitation or uncertainty about notes or fingering patterns that makes it impossible to play anything quickly and lightly, ornament or otherwise.) Then, as the passage itself gets up to speed, in many cases the trill will automatically become fast enough to “sound like a trill.” In some cases, the planned notes of the trill will have to speed up beyond the natural speeding up of the piece as a whole. At this stage, it is important to remember the feeling derived from the trill exercise that I described last month, and to recapture that feeling as the trill pattern speeds up and becomes a trill as such. The purpose of doing that exercise is to make that particular feeling of lightness, quickness, and floating—rather than descending into the keys—available to be recaptured at this stage in practicing a trill. The process of making a trill sound like a trill, while also allowing it to be comfortable and reliable, could be described as a coming together of the simple note-pattern of the trill and the feeling and technique learned through that exercise.
In general, students often attempt to play trills too fast, and in particular to start them too fast. The practice of holding the first note of a trill a little bit—dwelling on it—before proceeding to the next note and to the body of the trill is very useful for keeping trills relaxed and in the end allowing them to be faster and more incisive than they could otherwise be. I believe that often a student is unconsciously so worried, before actually starting to play a trill, that it won’t be fast enough, that he or she tries to get away from the first note almost before that note has been played. This only leads to tension. If the effect of dwelling a bit on the first note does not sound right as a final way of playing a given trill (and it often does sound right: I tend to do it myself on most trills, though to varying extents), then it can be abandoned later on, when the trill is comfortable and secure. At the stage of moving away from dwelling on the first note, if that is the choice, then it is extremely important not to let tension creep back in. The finger playing the first note should in a sense feel like it is relaxing into that note even if the second note of the trill is going to happen very soon indeed.

Appoggiatura
The appoggiatura is another ornament that raises issues of dissonance and consonance. Most often, the appoggiatura itself is the dissonant note. In deciding how long to make an appoggiatura—anything from a quick almost fleeting “grace note” to a note that occupies almost all of the allotted time—this dissonance is the most important thing to listen to. The more significant this dissonance seems, the more sense it usually makes to hear the appoggiatura/main note sequence as having a diminuendo effect. To achieve this, first, hold the appoggiatura just the right length, as determined by trial and error and careful listening, then make the motion from that note to the main note utterly legato, and finally, release the main note very gently if it is to be released before playing whatever is next.

Mordent
A mordent—the printed note, the note below it, and the printed note again—is perhaps the ornament that least disturbs the main note’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic identity. It is usually an “ornamental” ornament, that is, an ornament that does not increase the amount of harmonic motion—creation and release of tension—in the music. A player can experiment with different speeds in mordents. Often, perhaps paradoxically, a very fast mordent, assuming that it is played lightly and gracefully, sounds quieter than a slower one, and actually fits better with even a languid or cantabile melody. A mordent contains a hidden “almost repeated” note. Sometimes it is a good idea to change fingers, as if with a real repeated note. A fingering such as (rh) 1-2-3 or 4-2-3 or (lh) 1-3-2 or 3-4-2 will sometimes give more lightness and control. 

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

Organ Method XIV

This month’s column is a continuation of last month’s discussion of learning to play contrapuntal passages.

In the second movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Sonata in C Minor, Opus 65, No. 2, the left-hand part is mostly in two voices. Any part of that movement makes wonderful material for practicing multiple voices in one hand in the way that we have been discussing. Here are the first several measures of that piece, shown in Example 1.

There are more than thirty measures that are constructed like this. Each of the two left-hand voices (marked Clav. I) is quite intricate by itself, so, in practicing each of them separated into two hands, you will have to take some care with the fingering and a fair amount of time. For using this piece to explore this method of practicing, it is not necessary to work on all of it at once: any few measures will be fruitful.

Example 2 shows another Bach passage with two voices in the right hand. It is from the Sinfonia in D Major, BWV 789, beginning just after the downbeat of m. 5.

In this passage, the two right-hand voices briefly cross, and in one spot, one voice passes through a note that is being held by the other voice. In playing the two voices separately on two keyboards, none of this causes any problems or is particularly noteworthy. Can you use this exercise to make it possible—or more natural—to hear those voices clearly as they cross, when you put them back together?

We now move on to three special issues in manual playing. Two of them are approaches to fingering that apply to certain types of writing that are common in the repertoire. These are 1) the fingering of repeated notes, and 2) substitution. The other is an exercise designed to help with the playing of trills and other passages that call for rapid, light playing. I will describe the trill exercise first, and then move on to the other two, which are in fact closely related to one another. 

This exercise is not written in music notation, and does not involve playing passages of music, but rather only simple pairs of notes. Its purpose is to create an awareness of a feeling of lightness and ease of touch, which can then be carried into the playing of other exercises and passages of music, especially of trills, other rapid ornaments, and rapid passages in general. It is physically easy to do, though it requires a certain kind of focus that can take a while to achieve. It is equally appropriate and helpful for seasoned players, for absolute beginners, and for anyone in between. It goes like this:

1) Choose two fingers on the same hand. (The first time you play this exercise, the fingers should be 4/3 or 3/2, in either hand. Later on it is especially valuable to play it with 5/4, and any two fingers can be suitable, even non-adjacent fingers.)

2) Choose two notes—at first they should be adjacent naturals, but later on it is valuable to include sharps/flats as well. As with some of the exercises from earlier in this series, it is important that you choose notes that lie in the part of the keyboard where your arm and hand are naturally more-or-less straight when you are playing (that is, your wrist not cocked or twisted). This is, of course, normally near the top of the treble clef in the right hand and near the bottom of the bass clef in the left hand. It is a good idea to position the fingers near the ends of the keys, and to let the thumb float in the air in front of the keyboard. (But see below for using this exercise with the thumb.)

3) Once you have chosen the two notes and the two fingers, rest the two fingers on the notes and relax your hand, arm, neck, shoulders, etc. Sit in a comfortable  position, and take a deep breath or two. Then play one of the notes—either one—lightly and smoothly, and hold it. When you feel completely relaxed, then:

4) Play the other note and the original note in succession, as quickly and as lightly as you can: a quick, light two-note gesture. While you are playing these two notes, your hand and wrist should feel more as if they are floating upwards than as if they are bearing down. This two-note gesture will leave you holding the same note that you played first, and it will have created at least a little bit of tension in your hand. Once again you should wait for your hand, arms, etc., to completely relax. Then repeat the two-note gesture, and do this a few times in a row. It is crucial to wait each time for your fingers, hand, arm, shoulders, neck, back, etc., to completely relax. Thus, it is not appropriate to develop a steady rhythm or beat in doing this exercise. If you do, you are probably not allowing yourself to relax thoroughly enough between playing notes.

5) After you have done this a few times with a particular pair of fingers and notes in one order, play it with the same fingers and notes in the opposite order. It is important to stop before it begins to feel “routine” and thus impossible to achieve a combination of concentration and relaxation. Usually it makes sense to play it about 4 to 6 times each (up/down and down/up) and then leave it. This varies from one person to another. It is better to do a little bit of this often than to do a lot of it in one sitting.

6) It is not necessary to segue from this exercise directly into playing a trill or other fast passage. Rather, the point is to remember the feeling of the exercise when you next play a trill or fast passage. If you do a little bit of this exercise most days, spreading it around to several pairs of fingers (not neglecting 5/4), and working with both hands an approximately equal amount, the feeling of it will spill over quite naturally into your playing.

7) The following “special cases” of the exercise require extra thought: the thumb, sharps and flats, and non-adjacent fingers. In these cases, particular care must be taken about hand position. Make sure that the alignment of the fingers with respect to the notes permits the hand to remain in (or constantly regain) a tension-free state. For example: using 2/1 on adjacent naturals is usually too awkward to be good for this exercise; however, using 2/1 or 3/1 on a natural and a sharp/flat is often very comfortable, and indeed a good thing to practice (thumb on the natural, obviously). Using 4/2 on F# and D (right hand) is usually fine, but using 4/2 on A and F# (right hand) is usually not. Using 3/2 on a natural and a sharp/flat is usually OK if 2 is on the natural, but not if 3 is on the natural. The point is to make sure that the wrist is not cocked or twisted outwards very much (ideally not at all), that the fingers are not so curved that they don’t have good leverage in pushing down the keys, and that it is possible to remain near the ends of the keys. (These are all normal considerations in organ fingering, but this exercise only retains its purpose if the hands are very comfortable, whereas in playing repertoire, the complexity of the music often makes some compromise in comfortable
fingering unavoidable.)

An important note: In 4) above, I use the phrase “as quickly and as lightly as you can.” The most important part of this is “as you can.” Quickness is the point, but it cannot be pushed. If you try to execute this simple gesture faster than you can comfortably do it, you will defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Playing repeated notes

Repeated notes on the organ are often seen as something of a problem—and with some reason. In order to repeat a note on organ, you must release it all the way. This is also true on harpsichord, but not on piano, and not consistently on other instruments. When you combine this need to release a note before you can sound it again with the sustaining quality of organ sound, you get a situation in which repeated notes can stick out: they can sound disconnected from the rest of the sonority, texture, and musical shape of a piece or passage. If a line or passage is being played fully legato, then two notes in a row that are the same will be articulated differently from the non-repeated notes around them. Repeated notes cannot be fully legato. Even in a line or passage that is being played in an overall detached style, repeated notes can stand out, since the way in which they are detached can sound different—more crisp or abrupt. 

It is a reasonable goal to be able to play repeated notes as naturally as possible, that is, to reduce as much as possible the extent to which they stand out or draw attention to themselves. It is also a good thing to be able to control and shape the playing of repeated notes—timing, articulation, sonority—with as much flexibility as possible. This is true of all notes and all playing, but with repeated notes it calls for some extra thought. 

In general, the discovery made by organists over many centuries and through all sorts of different schools of organ composition and organ playing is that it is a good idea, when possible, to play repeated notes with different fingers—to change fingers from one note to the repetition of that same note. This is not always possible to do. Repeated notes that are octaves or that are embedded in chords, especially four- or five-note chords, sometimes must be played using the same fingers. However, the changing of fingers on repeated notes is a practice that is important to learn and to get used to.

If you have just played a note with a given finger and you are still holding it, then in order to repeat it with that finger you must do all of the work of releasing and replaying the note with that finger. You need time to move the finger up off the note, and then bring it back down. This sets a limit on how little time there can be between the release of the first note and the playing of the second. Not only must there be a break between the two (same) notes, but that break must be a certain length. Also, the gesture of moving a finger up and back down is likely to produce tension. The shorter you try to make the break between the two notes, the more at risk you are for introducing tension into the hand. The paradox arises that trying to make the repetition more “legato” actually makes it more abrupt: more of a conspicuous break. 

If you repeat a note with a different finger, then you can be preparing the new finger to play the note before you have released it with the old finger, and you can release the note smoothly. Sometimes it will make sense to release down and towards your body sitting on the bench or off to one side, rather than straight up above the note that you are holding and that you need to play again. The new finger can move in and replace the old finger smoothly. This gesture creates less tension and gives you the greatest possible flexibility in timing and articulation. The repeated note still must be detached, but, if you want, it can be only slightly detached—
almost imperceptibly. 

Start getting used to using different fingers on repeated notes with the simplest possible exercises, such as that shown in Example 3.

You can move this to different notes and use different fingering patterns. (For example, try 2-3-4-3-2-3-4-3, or 2-1-2-1-3-1-3-1.) Remember to keep hands, arms, shoulders, and so on completely relaxed. Release notes smoothly but cleanly: that is, do not inadvertently slip the new finger onto the note prior to releasing it. If you do that, you are in fact practicing substitution—which we come to next—but not playing repeated notes with different fingers. Experiment with different amounts of articulation, and with patterns of differing articulation between the different notes.

Another useful pattern for practicing is illustrated in Example 4. The fingering given is just one set of possibilities. You can devise and try others, preserving the principle of changing fingers on the repeated notes. Try different things with articulation: making the non-repeated notes legato, with different amounts of break at the repeated notes; articulating all of the notes the same; using varied detached articulation for all of the notes, and so on. ν

To be continued.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at .

Repeated notes
The playing of repeated notes on organ and harpsichord has always been an issue unto itself. If two notes in a row are the same, they cannot be treated like two notes in a row that are not the same. The reason for this is simple: in order to repeat a note that you are holding, you must first release it. This seems so obvious to those of us who play only these instruments that it is worth noting that this is not true in all kinds of musical performance. It is not true at the piano, except in situations that rule out the use of the damper pedal. It is not true with plucked string instruments. In singing, the repeated note phenomenon is only rarely an issue in itself. With bowed string instruments and most wind instruments, the relationships among articulation, technique, and pitch are complicated, with repeated notes as such only sometimes being a special concern.
One way to describe the situation with repeated notes at the organ or harpsichord is this: in general, any pattern of notes that doesn’t involve repeated notes can be played legato (though of course it doesn’t have to be), but repeated notes actually cannot be played legato. Therefore, patterns of non-repeated notes have, in theory, the full range of articulation available to them, from “as short as physically possible” to a full overlapping legato. Repeated notes have most but not all of that range of articulations available.
Since repeated notes cannot be (fully) legato, the more legato the overall style of a given performance is—whether because of the performer’s preference, or because of something that is known about the composer’s own style—the more any repeated notes are in danger of standing out, of sounding different at the very least and maybe stylistically wrong, and in any case amounting to a problem to be solved.
This, in turn, may be one reason that repeated notes have often been considered a problem—or again at least a particular issue that needs to be addressed—in hymn playing, since there is a strong tradition of playing hymns legato. Repeated notes are sometimes seen as a source of a disruptive choppiness in hymns, and thus, for some players in some circumstances, are considered worthy of being eliminated through tying.
In addition to obvious repeated notes—instances of the same note occurring two or more times in a row in one melody or one voice—there are various kinds of hidden repeated notes. These arise from voices crossing or from one voice playing a note that was just played by another voice or that is being held by another voice. They can also arise because of ornaments—when there is no repeated note printed on the page, but one arises from the notes implied by the ornament sign.
Of course, repeated notes occur in all sorts of rhythmic contexts. Sometimes the first note is an upbeat and the second a downbeat, sometimes the other way around; sometimes they are two successive weak or light beats, sometimes two successive downbeats. (Of course there are chains of more than two repeated notes in which more than one of the above may occur in succession.) Repeated notes can be fast or slow.
In all of these circumstances the same underlying fact applies: it is necessary to release the first note before playing the next one. It is certainly possible, and often necessary or a good idea, for a student or other player to think analytically about how long or short to make any note that is about to be repeated and to think about how the articulation and timing allows it to fit in to the rest of the music. This has been the subject of extensive discussion, analysis, and debate by teachers and players over many years. For example, David N. Johnson has a detailed and interesting discussion in his Instruction Book for Beginning Organists. Marcel Dupré is famous for having described a very clear-cut system for counting out the amount by which notes should be reduced prior to being repeated. (Perhaps I should say “infamous” since his system is widely considered to be too cut-and-dried to be artistically valid. However, it is worth remembering that he almost certainly intended his guidelines to be a stage in learning, not an end result.)
Rather than suggesting specific musical answers to repeated note issues, I would prefer to begin by helping students to do two things: first, to develop the greatest, most comfortable, and most reliable technical control over the physical act of playing repeated notes; and second, to develop the habit of listening closely to every part of any repeated note transaction—the articulation prior to the first note, the beginning, middle, and end of the first note, the space between the notes, the beginning, middle, and end of the second note, and so on. Once a student has made good progress on these things, then he or she will be able to make choices about how to play repeated notes in various different contexts, and these choices will be able to reflect the whole range of possibilities.
There is, I believe, a simple key to developing the greatest possible technical command of the playing of repeated notes: play them with different fingers, one from the other. That is, if you have played the first note with finger x and are holding it with finger x, then it is appropriate to play the second note (that is, the repetition) with any finger other than x. It is not OK to play it with x. This means that a note repeated more than once can be played with fingers x-y-x-y etc., or with fingers x-y-z-a-b-c etc., until the fingers run out, but not, again, x-x-x-x etc.
When a player repeats a note with the same finger that is holding it, that finger must travel both up, off the key, and back down, to play the note again, in the time that makes up the space between the two notes. This sets up a conflict between making that space short—playing the notes close to legato, at least—and executing the gesture comfortably. If the physical gesture involved is not comfortable, then the musical gesture will almost certainly sound awkward; playing a repeated note with the same finger greatly reduces the extent to which the gesture can come across as musically continuous. That is, either the repetition will have a large enough space between the notes to sound significantly disconnected, or it will have an awkward “hiccup” quality caused by an effort to push the two notes as close together as possible. The part of the “staccato to legato” spectrum that is unavailable to repeated notes intrinsically—because of the nature of the instrument, as discussed above—is made artificially greater by playing the notes with the same finger, and the range of possible, successful, articulations is narrowed.
It is also true that the act of moving one finger up and then back down is, among all of the gestures we make at the keyboard, one of the ones that is most likely to create tension in the hand. The “u-turn” that the finger makes at the top of that arc is a motion that is prone to tension. If it is not dealt with in some way, this tension can build up and, since essentially every passage of music has some repeated notes in it, this can lead to tense playing overall, even for a player who is consciously trying to play in a relaxed, light way.
In repeating a note with a different finger, the player can prepare the new finger in advance, and then release the initial finger smoothly while bringing the new finger into position to play the note and then playing the note. This is an intrinsically smooth, relaxed gesture, and it can actually serve to reduce tension that might have begun to accumulate in the hand.
François Couperin wrote in his L’Art de Toucher le Claveçin that he could tell by ear alone the difference between a note repeated with the same finger and one repeated with different fingers. (This was in the context of the playing of ornaments, which I will discuss briefly below.) When I first read that claim, years ago, I thought it was more or less impossible: that it was probably an exaggerated boast by someone whose eminence was great enough to permit him to get away with it. I would now make that same claim: I believe that, except in rare circumstances, I can detect that difference just by listening.
Once any teacher, student, or other player begins to be able to hear that difference, the motivation to work on playing repeated notes with different fingers follows automatically. Fortunately, it is an extremely easy thing to do. It is no harder, by and large, than playing those notes with the same finger. In fact, once it becomes second nature, then the fact that it is easier—that is, smoother, more natural—physiologically, makes it seem easier as a practical (and psychological) matter.

For a student to get accustomed to the feel and sound of repeated notes played this way, the best exercises are simple enough that they scarcely need to be written out (see Example 1). In this example, the student can play the notes at a variety of different tempos and with a variety of different fingerings: all the notes with any one finger (for comparison); pairs such as 2-3, 3-2, 3-4, 4-3, 3-1, or any others; or chains of fingers such as 2-3-4-5, 1-3-4-3, etc. The student should also experiment with repeating the same note but changing the rhythmic grouping. This can be done such that rhythmic groupings correspond to fingering patterns (that is, a duple grouping with a paired fingering such as 3-2, or a four-finger pattern such as 2-3-4-5; and a triple grouping with a three-finger pattern such as 4-3-2 or a six-finger pattern such as 2-3-4-5-4-3). Or it can be done with rhythmic groupings that are different from the fingering groups, such as a triple grouping with a paired fingering. In this case, the downbeat of each group shifts a finger from one time to the next.
It is very important to remember that repeating a note with a new finger does not mean slipping the new finger onto the note silently while still holding it and then repeating it with that (new) finger, which is now holding the note. This is a temptation—probably subconscious—that many students experience. Of course this is identical to repeating the note with the same finger: the supposedly new finger has become the incumbent finger.

Further exercises can put the experience into a musical context. These can begin with something simple, such as Example 2. This can be fingered in a number of ways, such as 2-3-4-5-4-3-4-3-2-3, or 3-4-5-4-3-2-3-2-3-4, or (again, for comparison) 2-3-4-4-3-2-2-1-1-2. The student should remember to keep everything as light, relaxed, and supple as possible. (It is possible to lose the advantages of using different fingers on repeated notes by playing with stiffness or tension.) The student should try different articulations: for example, making all of the non-repeated notes legato, and the repeated notes as smooth as possible; or making everything lightly detached so that the repeated notes are not articulated any differently from the rest of the line.
A chord pattern such as that in Example 3 can be tried with various fingerings, such as RH: 1,3,5/2,3,5, or LH: 5,3,1/4,2,1, and, for comparison, RH: 1,2,3/2,3,5, and LH: 5,3,2/3,2,1.
In Example 4 there is a hidden repeated note. If the two middle-Ds are played with the same finger, it will be difficult or impossible to make the two voices clear. The final quarter-note of the first measure will sound like a released and repeated note in the lower voice. A fingering such as 5,2/3/1//4,2 or 5,1/3/2//5,3 will make it possible for the middle-D to sound like it arises from the upper voice. This comes about because the necessary early release of the whole-note D can be smooth and unobtrusive. In this example, it would also work well for the left hand—any finger—to play the whole note, and for the right hand to play all of the other notes.
In many ornament situations such as this common one in Example 5, there are hidden repeated notes (assuming that the trill starts on C). A prudent way to work out a fingering here is to decide first of all which fingers should play the trill—say 3/2—and then to make sure that the note immediately before the trill is played with a different finger, say 4 or 2. Many problems that students (and others!) have playing ornaments are in fact problems with setting the ornaments up correctly. If, in this example, the student plays the C with the third finger and then repeats the C with that same finger as the first note of the trill, the attempt to play the trill will be undermined by tension before it has even begun. If the eighth-note C is played with 2, and the C that begins the trill is played with 3, then the trill will get off to a lighter, more fluent start.
Students and teachers can invent exercises to try different repeated-note fingerings, and can extract repeated-note situations from repertoire to use as exercises, before going on to finger and practice such passages in their original contexts. It is important to try different fingering, including those same-note fingerings that I would not recommend, in order to learn what the differences are between them. After a while, if a student finds the approach described here convincing it, becomes second nature, and, if anything, extra thought is required to play a repeated note with the same finger. (I sometimes need to do this as a demonstration, and I often fail to do so, out of habit!)
Sometimes a note pattern is such that it is actually impossible to change fingers on repeated notes. This is because the relevant fingers are doing something else. When this happens, then a student can draw on what he or she has learned through practicing the technique described here to be aware of what the goal is—in both feeling and sound—for those repeated notes. That awareness gives the student the best chance of coming close to achieving that sound or feeling even when the best technique for achieving it is not available. This can involve first isolating the repeated notes from the rest of the texture and practicing them separately with a good different-fingered fingering. After this, with all of the notes back in place, the memory of what the repeated notes would ideally sound like—and a generally very relaxed, smooth touch—will enable the student to get the best results under the circumstances.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center (www.pekc.org) in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Disjunct Motion II

If we observe that some of our students treat notes that are released into silence differently from notes that are released into other notes, we can be fairly sure that this is a mental/psychological issue. There is nothing physical that actually requires that these notes be treated differently. Rather, the situation presents itself to the student’s mind as being different in a way that leads to a different physical behavior. The mental issue is probably, to a large extent, one of awareness and listening. But it can also be about not (yet) knowing how to extend the feeling of “normal” playing—playing one note after another—to playing notes that are followed by a silence that can seem like aimlessness on the part of the hands or feet. 

Why is it important for notes that are released to silence to feel the same as notes that are released to other notes? Is it possible that these situations should feel different? The goal should be for the player to exercise a wide range of control over the timing and sound of the releases of notes. I would say a “full” range of control, except that we should all expect to learn more and more, and we should never look for an end-point at which our control of anything is “full.”

Controlling releases

The starting point for control is always lack of tension. The different feeling that some students experience when releasing a note into a silence is usually one created by tension. The analogy to the feel of “regular” playing is an efficient way of learning to ease or avoid that tension. The actual range of sounds that we want to create and feelings that we use to create them when releasing a note to silence may be in part different from what we want otherwise. But that difference should never come about through inadvertence and especially never as a result of tension. It should be the result of listening, choice, and control.

In a kind of fruitful, paradoxical cycle, since the endings of notes that are followed by silence are more exposed—easier to hear—if we get truly comfortable releasing those notes lightly and smoothly, we can then take that feeling back to other situations, even if we derived the feeling initially from those other situations and learn even better how to play without tension overall. If there are ways of approaching the release of notes into silence that seem really different and particular to that situation, and that arise out of something other than reflex or tension, then adding those things to our technical arsenal cannot help but be valuable.

Here are several brief exercises to help with extending the feeling of “normal” playing to situations of disjunct motion, or of beginning to recognize what it feels like to do so. As usual with my exercises, the point is not so much the specific notes as the way(s) in which they are to be used. Most of these exercises have the unusual feature that part of working on them consists of selectively leaving some of the notes out.

Examples 1 and 2

With Example 1, play this a couple of times, slowly and with as light and relaxed a touch as possible. Keep it more-or-less legato, but don’t worry too much about articulation or style. The fingering 1-2-3-4-5 is fine to start with. Then play just the first four notes, leaving out the G, but trying not to change anything about the feeling of playing the four notes in the first measure, including (this is the main point) the feeling, timing, and sound of the release of the F. Go back and forth between playing the final note and not doing so. That final G will also be released to silence. But the focus for the moment is not on that, since we are focusing on a sort of “A/B” comparison. After you have done this as described a few times, you can play all five notes and try to bring the feeling of releasing the F that you have just been working on to the act of releasing the G. You can vary the length of that G, though I have printed it one way. Give it a fermata, in effect.

Then play all five notes with this fingering: 1-2-3-4-3. Let the release of the final note of the first measure be as smooth and light as it can be, and let the timing of that release be determined physically: that is, release it early enough that moving 3 onto the next note—G—is comfortable. Don’t worry about what the articulation that this creates sounds like—how large an articulation it is. Just let it feel light and smooth. Next, omit the final note. This time let the release of the F by the fourth finger feel the way it did when you were moving to the G with finger 3. This will be a bit different from the feeling of that release when you were about to play the G with finger 5. Both of these should be relaxed and light.

Note that in this case—the 1-2-3-4-3, followed by 1-2-3-4—[nothing]—you are releasing the fourth finger on F into silence either way, but in different contexts. One creates an articulation, the other ends the passage. Do those feel intrinsically different? Can they feel the same? Should they?

Try something similar with the note pattern found in Example 2. Start with the fingering 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1, and keep it slow, light, and basically legato. Then omit various notes—any of them, except for the first. Try to let the feeling of releasing the note immediately prior to any note that you omit be the same as the feeling of releasing that note when you go on to playing another note. Alternate between keeping a given note in and leaving it out to give yourself the most direct experience of keeping that feeling the same. 

Does it feel consistently different when you omit a note that is on the beat and when you omit one that is off the beat? If so, can you describe this difference to yourself? Can you make them feel the same? If so, is it by converging on one or the other of those feelings, or on either or both, or on something different?

All of this can be done on other notes and should also be done with the left hand. It is best to start in a place on the keyboard where your hand position is comfortable: perhaps as written or a fifth or an octave higher in the right hand, an octave or so lower in the left hand.

The principle behind the across-the-barline 4-3 fingering above is that of certain aspects of “early” fingering. If you play a longer passage with that sort of fingering there are various lessons to learn from the recurrent disjunct motion that that creates.

Examples 3 and 4

Try executing the fingerings in Example 3 a number of different ways. Make the 3-4 or 3-2 groupings legato, and place a break between those groupings and the next (third-finger) notes. At first let that break be defined only by feel. Make the release of finger 4 or 2 light and comfortable without worrying about the timing. Then try the same thing, but making those breaks larger—the notes played by finger 4 or 2 shorter. This is the crucial point: when you consciously make those breaks larger, keep the feeling the same. Don’t make the releases any more crisp or perform them with any more force or tension. Then move it in the other direction. Make those breaks as small as you possibly can without making the 4-3 or 2-3 motion into an awkward lurch. This will still be disjunct, and indeed it might not be very different from the first mode, governed entirely by feel. Experiment with amounts of break that are in between.

The next step is this: move away from legato for the 3-4 and 3-2 pairs. Try to make the articulation of all eight note-to-note transitions feel and sound (but especially feel) the same as one another.

Example 4 demonstrates a pattern with more than one note at a time, for trying out similar things. A good starting fingering is 1/3-2/4-3/5-2/4-1/3. Start by playing as written. Move on to leaving out the final chord, then experiment with leaving out other chords. Try this fingering as well: 2/4-3/5-2/4-1/3-2/4. This has something in common with the “early” scale fingering and can be put through the same paces.

Example 5

There is a specialized use to which any of the above exercises can be put, especially if they are elongated a bit, as you will see in Example 5. Start playing this with the usual light, relaxed touch. Allow yourself to start playing more firmly as you go, something like what you would do if you were playing on the piano and making a crescendo. Over the last few notes, move back toward playing as lightly as possible (diminuendo). By the time you reach the last note, you should be playing very lightly indeed and should release that note with a sense that the hand is floating gently off the key. You might want to do this over more ups and downs than I have notated.

You can create your own note patterns for doing this sort of practice. Alternate between moving from a given note to another note and moving from that note to silence. Sit comfortably, remain relaxed, breathe deeply but naturally.

Examples 6 through 8: Patterns and trills

Repeated note patterns and trills are special cases that allow for this sort of practice. Consider now Examples 6 and 7, alternating between the two. You have to make sure that you execute the first pattern lightly and release each finger as smoothly as possible before playing the same note with the other finger. Then, in the second pattern, try to keep the feeling the same.

For our purposes, there are a few uses to which you can put a trill, as in Example 8. After you choose a fingering for it—3/2, perhaps, or 4/3—you can play the trill pattern for an amount of time (a number of iterations of the two notes) that you haven’t settled on before you start playing it. Then at some point simply release a note and end the trill by letting your hand float lightly up off the keys. Don’t plan when you are going to do this, and don’t worry about which pitch it is that sounds last. Just do it when your hand feels light enough. This is another way of addressing the notion of getting used to releasing a note without any downward energy and without allowing the released note to feel accented. There is a bit of kinship between using a trill pattern this way and my so-called trill exercise, which is outlined in my column of February 2010, and can also be found here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf.

Next, you can do the same thing, but add to it the crescendo/diminuendo idea that I described above. Start playing very lightly (“quietly”) and increase pressure (get “louder”) in the middle of the trill. Then lighten back up as much as possible and allow that increasing lightness to move into the untimed release of the trill.

If you leave out every other note of a trill, it of course becomes a repeated note pattern. The fingering for those repeated notes that arises out of the trill fingering is one that does not involve changing fingers. If you have been playing the upper note of the trill with finger 4, for example, and you then leave out the lower note, you are left with repeating that upper note with 4. This is a non-optimal, or out-and-out bad, fingering for the repeated notes, especially if they are fast—and half-trill speed is still fast for this purpose. It is interesting to notice the difference in feel between these obvious repeated notes played with one finger and the same notes hidden, so to speak, in the trill itself. The chances are that the rocking motion of the trill renders the same-finger fingering of the hidden repeated notes perfectly fine, but that without that rocking motion the fingering is awkward at best.

You can try playing a trill for a while, or a few separate times in a row, and then moving directly to playing just one of the notes. How comfortable can that fingering be for that repeated note pattern? Is it possible to transfer anything—any feeling—from the comfortable rocking motion of the trill to the potentially awkward same-finger repeated-note fingering to make it as comfortable as possible? Does that teach anything about how to make those disjunct releases smooth? This exercise might be helpful in applying the feeling of a smooth, comfortable release for repeated notes to situations where an ideal different-finger approach is for some reason impossible.

Next month I will discuss, among other things, situations in which disjunct motion is created specifically by big leaps. I will extend some of this to pedal playing, where the physical situation is a bit different.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141—Part 4:
Free writing and trillo longo—mm. 51–59
This month’s column is about just a little bit of music—the third overall section of the Praeludium, nine measures long, mm. 51–59. I will provide some analysis of the passage, and offer some thoughts and suggestions about fingering and pedaling.

The Praeludium that we are studying is, as I discussed in the column from June 2010, a one-movement work in several sections. There is both contrast and continuity amongst the sections. Sources of contrast are clear. Some sections are contrapuntal, some are not; some are regular in pulse and rhythm, some are free or essentially unmeasured; some use striking dissonance, some avoid it. Sources of continuity can be more elusive, but can include the use of similar motivic material, or recurring rhythms or harmonies. This is the classic form of the toccata or praeludium as practiced by Frescobaldi and Froberger, among others, and adopted and adapted by Buxtehude as the form of his organ praeludia. It was also used by Bach for organ and harpsichord pieces that we know or believe to come from early in his career: most of the harpsichord toccatas, the famous D-minor organ toccata, BWV 565, and some of the preludes and fugues such as BWV 551.
The section that we are looking at here is essentially non-contrapuntal, in that the writing is not in a set number of voices, although, as we will see, there are recurrent motives. There are fairly quick changes of texture, from one voice in m. 51 and elsewhere to four and five later. Chords are built up out of passagework. There are abrupt changes in the prevailing note values, as in m. 52, which starts with 32nd notes and then somewhat surprisingly sits on the third quarter-note beat with no motion. The lowest notes make up a true pedal part (always a question with Buxtehude, since the sources don’t make it clear, and also since the relationship between the sources and Buxtehude’s original intentions is not always known), since there are stretches that cannot be executed by two hands alone.

Four-note motive
In the following example, some of the notes have been highlighted with either rectangular or oval outlines (see Example 1). The rectangular outlines indicate either an exact form—nine instances, including inversions—or a plausible variant—six instances—of the four-note motive that begins the entire praeludium (see Example 2). This motive is found in crucial spots throughout the praeludium, sometimes as a marker of transitions or important moments, sometimes as part of “officially” motivic material, such as the second half of the fugue subject of the final section of the piece. The section that we are looking at here is clearly chock full of this short motive—it is present almost exactly half the time. This is one of the sources of continuity between this section and the rest of the praeludium.
It could well be argued that this motive is too simple, too ordinary, to count as a real, identifiable motive, or to serve as a source of continuity or unity within a piece. After all, every piece has plenty of short scale passages, and this one in particular is introduced in the most casual possible way. However, it seems to me that if the composer had not intended it to be heard, perhaps subliminally, as a significant motive, then we would not be able to find it quite so consistently through the whole piece. In any case, we do find it, and each teacher and each student—having initially noticed it—can muse about how significant it really is, and decide for him- or herself.

Connections
The second element of this short section that ties it to the rest of the piece is the cluster of notes in the first half of m. 57, highlighted with an oval box. This is a foreshadowing of the fugue subject of the last section of the praeludium (see Example 3), especially as that subject appears when it is in parallel with itself. This happens in several places, such as m. 104, for example (see Example 4).
This section is also clearly related to the rest of the piece by its similarities to the transitional passage that constitutes the end of the second overall section of the piece and that therefore comes just before this section. This transition occupies mm. 47–50. It arises out of the fugue that precedes it without break or interruption. The fugal texture just gives way to non-contrapuntal writing with passagework and built-up quasi-arpeggio chords. This texture resembles that of mm. 51–59, although it has the feeling of both a cadence and coda to the long fugue that has preceded it. The flourish that ends the transitional passage and the pedal solo that begins the third section are more or less versions of each other (see Examples 5 and 6).
(A similar way of linking the end of one section to the beginning of the next was employed by Bach in, for example, the Toccata in C Major, at the transition between the opening manual solo and the ensuing pedal solo, where the first four pedal notes seem to answer the last four manual notes [see Example 7], and in the F-major Toccata and Fugue, where the very last notes of the toccata are echoed in the mordent that begins the fugue subject.)

Trillo longo
One interesting feature of this passage is the use of the term trillo longo, placed over two spots in the pedal part, as seen in Example 1. Of course it seems obvious, on one level, what this term means: long trill. And in both instances it is written above notes that are in the shape of a trill, one that begins on the lower of its two notes. One surprising discovery about this term—trillo longo—is that there is no evidence that it was ever in common use as a technical musical term or as a piece of accepted musical jargon. A bit of research reveals that it is not listed as a musical term in any music dictionary or encyclopedia, and there are no papers or articles that discuss it as a term or that mention any piece in the entire history of music that uses it as a term, other than this piece. (A Google search on the term “trillo longo” returns seven results, one of them about a piece that does not in fact use the term, and all of the other six about this passage. Included in these search results is one prior column in this series.)
So if this term was not in particularly common use—even if its basic meaning is clear—why did Buxtehude (or his copyist: we can’t be sure) use it here? Was he simply observing that the printed notes constitute a “long trill”? Or was he instructing the player to execute a long trill beyond what the notes indicate? If so, is this to be accomplished by adding notes and time, or by adding notes and making them faster? Does the designation of a group of 32nd notes as a “long trill” suggest that they can or should be played freely, or given some particular grouping or shape? (For example, the 16th-note B that falls on “the ‘and’ of three” in m. 51 could be thought of as the beginning of a trill, and the 16th-note/32nd-note rhythm rendered freely, as the gradual beginning of the trill.) Or was he just reminding the player to resist the temptation to shorten or omit or simplify the trill due to its being in the pedal, and therefore tricky to execute? Here’s another possibility: perhaps Buxtehude wanted to employ some Italian language at this point to signify that the trills in question were Italian-style trills, that is, trills beginning on the main note.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, or whether any of these thoughts really apply. I throw them out there for the student—or teacher—to muse about. Meanwhile, the “long trill” continues to be important as the section goes along, especially as manifested by the (very long) trill in one of the inner voices in m. 56. In this spot, unlike in mm. 51, 53, 55, and 57, the trill is accompanied throughout by motion in other voices. This is also the measure in this passage that is in five voices—and five notes are actually sounding throughout the measure—therefore it is literally the loudest measure within this section. It has the largest number of total notes played of any measure at 32. (The following measure is second at 29.) All of this suggests that this measure might be the rhetorical climax or high point of the section. The major interpretive or performance issue in this measure concerns the trill. Should the notes that follow the pattern of a trill on E and D-sharp be played “as written,” that is, as more or less measured 32nd notes, or should they be untethered from that timing and played as a fairly free trill? The latter is, to put it plainly, harder. It requires that the trill pattern be learned and practiced so well that the fingers can execute it while the mind of the player is, in a sense, ignoring it. The player must let those notes go their own way rhythmically and concentrate on playing the other—right hand—notes in the desired rhythm, regardless of how those notes do or don’t line up with the notes of the trill. In any case, the student or player should initially practice the notes of this trill in the “as written” rhythm, learning them more and more securely while thinking about whether to try to set them free from the printed rhythm.

Pedaling
Pedalings in this passage are mostly straightforward. That is, there are easy pedaling solutions involving toes—mostly alternate toes—as would have been the norm in Buxtehude’s time. A possible pedaling—along with some fingering—is suggested in Example 8. The pedal notes marked with asterisks are (some of?) those that could very easily be played with heel if a player is so inclined, either because that happens to be more comfortable for the particular player or to avoid a disjunct articulation at those spots. (Just for the record, I believe that I have usually used the left heel on the asterisked note in m. 51, where my particular posture makes it extremely comfortable and natural to do so, but not on the one in m. 53.) The transaction that takes place between the second and third pedal notes of m. 51 (G# and F#) is interesting. The articulation created by simply using the right toe for both notes, as I have indicated it, is natural and “musical” in that it precedes a note that is on a beat, and confers a slight accent on that note.
However, if in a particular player’s conception of the passage that articulation seems jarring, then it is difficult (but probably not impossible) to figure out a way to avoid it that works. Players with very wide feet can play the G# with the extreme outside of the right toe and rotate the foot in order to play the F# with the inside of the foot—the big toe. Some players might be comfortable initially catching the F# with the left toe and quickly substituting the right toe, in order to free the left toe up to aim for the following note. It is hard to picture getting the heel involved since we are dealing with black notes. It is very possible to turn the logic of this around and say that since it is so much more natural to use a pedaling here that creates an articulation, perhaps that is how the passage was meant to be played.

Fingering
As always, the first step in creating a fingering is to figure out, where there is any possible doubt, which notes belong in which hand. I have indicated some “handing” choices in the example above, using curved lines. There are several other options. For example, it would be possible to take the 16th notes on the second beat of m. 52 in the left hand, or the B# and C# in the second beat of m. 54 in the right hand. In the third beat of m. 57, I have suggested taking the G# in the left hand. This is because I would find it extremely awkward to play the remaining upper-voice notes of that measure while holding the G#, all in the right hand. However, reaching the E/G# dyad with the left hand is indeed also tricky. It certainly involves a break immediately before those notes, and must be practiced carefully to avoid making that break sound jarring or abrupt.
I have included only a few fingerings as examples. Any of them can also be done a number of other ways. For example, changing the numerals printed above the upper staff in m. 52 from 2-3-4-5-4 to 2-3-1-4-5 would result in an also very good fingering (leaving the other fingers the same). In the right hand in m. 53 the fingering could be (instead of 4-3-1-2-1-4-3) 5-4-3-2-3-4-3 or 4-3-1-3-4-5-2 or a number of other possibilities. For that matter either or both D#’s could be taken in the left hand. Comfortable hand position is the main guiding principle, and this is something that varies from player to player, based on posture and the size and shape of the hands.
Notice, however, that in all of these (m. 53) examples I am carefully preserving the use of a different finger to repeat the D# from the one that is already holding it. The suggested fingering for the right hand in m. 56 is also designed to use different fingers on repeated notes. By and large, it is a good idea to keep the thumb off of black keys. In fact, the most physiologically comfortable use of the thumb at the keyboard is for playing white notes just before or just after another finger has played a black note. Much of my approach to fingering a passage like this—in a heavily “black note” key—is derived from this concept of the use of the thumb. This can be seen in essentially all of the fingerings that I have written in here.
The student and teacher can try some of my fingerings, but should primarily work fingerings out from scratch, bearing in mind the ideas discussed above. Then, of course, the next step is what it always is: careful and patient practice, starting with separate hands and feet—doing as much of that as turns out to be needed, better too much then too little—then putting things together at a comfortably slow tempo, speeding up gradually, keeping the hands and feet relaxed.
Next month we will return to Boëllmann, looking at the charismatic and popular Menuet Gothique.

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at . Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at .

Relax
At the end of last month’s column, I said that next time I would talk about relaxation, hand position, and posture, and would begin to address the business of teaching experienced pianists to play organ or harpsichord. Let’s start by discussing the latter of these, then the extraordinary or even transcendent importance of relaxation, a little bit about its relation to posture and hand position, and the role that the concept of relaxation can play in teaching.
Among the students who come to us, those who are already experienced pianists but not organists or harpsichordists present special opportunities. This is made clear by the question that a new student of this sort will almost always ask at the first lesson: “Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I already play piano?” The answer is “both.” The good part, of course, is the skill and experience in choosing fingerings, in practicing, and in just plain playing note patterns at the keyboard. This is a tremendous leg up, and can save a vast amount of time and work. The bad part is made up of any technical habits that are proper to the piano but unsuitable for the organ or the harpsichord. These usually have to do with weight or force, or with playing too far into the keys, but may also include over-reliance on the damper pedal or an approach to articulation that does not translate well from piano to other keyboard instruments, or various listening habits that, if unaltered, can limit a player’s ability to use organ or harpsichord sound expressively. These problems can, in theory, form a tremendous set of obstacles that would indeed negate the advantages from the student’s pre-existing keyboard facility.
Often, out of an understandable desire to not neglect the artistic in favor of the crassly practical, pianists who come for organ or harpsichord lessons will exaggerate in their own minds the obstacles or problems created by their piano-oriented technique and feel reluctant to embrace the advantages that their keyboard training gives them. Many students start out with an almost morbid fear of sounding like “a pianist trying to play the organ” rather than “an organist.” The good news is that it is actually quite easy to overcome all of these disadvantages and to reap the full benefit of any basically sound keyboard training. The key to doing this efficiently and indeed easily is relaxation.
This relaxation is essentially physical: that is, the complete absence of tension in all of the muscles, tendons, etc. that are directly involved in playing, the substantial absence of tension in the rest of the body, and the assumption of a posture or body position that can be maintained without conscious thought and without muscular effort. The ideal is that the player be as relaxed—physically—while playing as he or she would want to be while “relaxing” in his or her favorite and least demanding way: sitting back in an arm chair, lounging on the beach, taking a nice long bath, or whatever.
One exercise for getting to know the feeling of physical relaxation as it applies to the hands is this. Stand up in a posture that seems comfortable (not formal or “at attention”). Allow your arms to hang loosely at your sides. Now raise one arm up to about waist height, without raising or otherwise tightening the shoulders, letting the elbow move out to the side and letting the forearm point more or less toward where you are looking (probably tilted inward a bit: it should feel natural and comfortable). Do this as gently as possible. Let your hand hang loosely at the end of your arm. Now move your forearm up and down several inches, not too quickly, letting your hand flap up and down loosely without attempting to control it in any way. The feeling that you get in your hand by doing this fairly briefly is a lot like the way the hand should feel at the keyboard when it is quite relaxed. (If you do this exercise for too long, say more than twenty seconds at a time, it can get wearing on your arm and begin to create the kind of tension it is trying to expunge.)
(A longer discussion of this exercise can be found, along with several further exercises, at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <www.pekc.org&gt;.)
There are several ways in which extreme physical relaxation helps with organ and harpsichord playing. First, on instruments that have a touch that is in any way sensitive—that is, tracker organs with a good responsive action and at least somewhat flexible winding, and some but not all harpsichords—there is pretty good agreement that the sonority produced by a fluid touch without tension and as light as the action allows will be the most beautiful and the most useful musically. (Of course this is subjective and therefore subject to disagreement. I am reporting what has seemed to me to be a near unanimous reaction that I’ve observed over the years.) On organs and harpsichords whose sonority cannot be influenced directly by touch (non-tracker organs, tracker organs with a heavy or unresponsive action and some harpsichords) a light tension-free touch is neither good nor bad for the sound as such.
A light fluid touch also makes it possible to play faster, and for fast playing to sound less labored and thus more musically charismatic. One way to test this away from the keyboard is through the normal act of drumming one’s fingers on a table. (That is, in keyboard terms, playing 5-4-3-2 or 5-4-3-2-1 on the surface of the table over and over again quickly.) If you keep your hand very light while doing this you can do it very fast, almost infinitely fast, certainly faster than you would almost ever play notes at a keyboard. As you begin to tighten your hand up the drumming becomes slower and the “notes” become more distinct from one another, sort of clunkier.
However, the most important role of physical relaxation in organ and harpsichord playing—and the reason I said last month that I sometimes consider it to be the only technical imperative in playing these instruments—is that a very relaxed hand can make much more subtle distinctions of timing and articulation than can a hand with any tension in it. Whether these distinctions are being used to create accent through varied articulation or to shape a line through slight rubato or to create just the right amount of overlapping to adjust to a particular acoustic or to stagger the releases of the notes in a chord to create a gentle diminuendo or anything else, tension in the hand will force the player to choose between starkly different alternatives, whereas a truly relaxed hand will allow the player to make infinitely slight distinctions, while of course also easily permitting larger distinctions to be made.
There is a lot more to be said about this. In fact it will be the background to much of what is discussed in this column, and there will be more columns about it specifically. Right now, however, let us return to the former piano player who wishes to learn organ. I have found over the years that introducing such a student to the idea of relaxation—extreme relaxation—as early as the very first lesson is a remarkably effective way to do two important things: first, to allay the student’s anxiety about the process of adapting to the new kind of touch; second, to develop a very plausible—or occasionally even really good—organ or harpsichord touch right off the bat.
This does not mean, of course, that the student will instantly have nothing more to learn or will immediately become a knowledgeable or virtuosic performer of all sorts of different repertoire. It will, however, create, very promptly and with little or no anguish, a platform upon which the student can build. This will allow the student to take advantage of the years of piano training without falling prey to the actual problems that piano technique can create for aspiring organists or harpsichordists or to the anxiety created by fear of those problems.
Here are some practical steps when beginning to help a pianist study organ or harpsichord:
1) At the first lesson invite the student to sit at the keyboard and play something—anything—that he or she already knows. This might well not be a piece that is really appropriate to the instrument. This does not matter in the least. In fact, since part of the purpose of this beginning is to allay anxiety, it can be better if the issue of the piece’s sounding good or right on the instrument doesn’t even exist. (Of course most pianists have some Bach pieces under their fingers. These will almost always adapt well to any keyboard.) In any case, do remind the student that this is in no way a performance or audition, and that it doesn’t matter for now how the piece actually sounds. The piece should not be too fast, so if it is intrinsically fast, ask the student to play it under tempo for now.
2) Ask the student to sit in as relaxed and comfortable a way as possible. At the organ this might involve hooking the feet back under the bench or even letting them rest on and mutely play some pedal keys. At the harpsichord this might involve leaning back in the chair or slumping forward a bit or sitting with one foot up on the other knee. Some of these things might have to change later on—though I have a strong bias in favor of any player’s sitting in whatever way is most natural and comfortable for that person’s physique and habits—but for the moment the only role of the whole body other than the hands is to be subjectively comfortable and to provide the student with no distraction or worry.
3) As the student begins to play, remind him or her to think about nothing other than playing lightly. In particular, this means explicitly not caring about wrong notes and, especially, not caring if some notes actually fail to sound because the student has not pushed them down hard enough. I always tell students that if, when first working on organ or harpsichord, they play so lightly that some notes don’t sound, they will discover that after a short time this is simply no longer happening. They will have discovered, subconsciously, the right actual amount of force to play the keys, without having lost the feeling of lightness and fluidity. (I have actually never known this not to happen.) Any preoccupation at the very beginning with making sure that every note sounds will almost certainly lead to the “safe” adoption of a too strong and insufficiently relaxed touch.
4) Concerning hand position, the most important thing to mention to the student at this stage is that it is a good idea to keep the hand more or less in a line with the arm along the side-to-side axis, that is, not to cock the wrist in or out to any appreciable degree. This can be made difficult by certain fingerings, so as a practical matter the student should simply skip any (already learned) passages that seem to make it necessary to turn the hand in or out more than a little bit. In the next phase—that of learning new pieces—this idea can be taken into account from scratch in making fingering choices. I don’t believe that it matters, at this stage, where the hand is at on the up-and-down axis, as long as the shoulders and arms are comfortable. Issues such as high or low wrists or the position of the elbow will fall into place naturally or can be easily dealt with later on. It can be useful to remind the student that the fingers need not be parallel to the keys. Rather, the tips of the fingers must present themselves to the keys with the rest of the hand in a physiologically comfortable position.
For many students, one session along these lines is a revelation. They immediately hear themselves making beautiful sounds, and they hear any articulations that they make as being subtle and musical, not abrupt or jarring. Of course this is just a beginning, but it is a very good one. Needless to say, pianists coming to the organ also must begin to explore the joys of pedal playing. We will turn to that subject beginning with next month’s column.