On Teaching

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

Repertoire, part 2
Last month’s column was in large part an argument in favor of letting students work on whatever music they want to work on: that is, not believing that it is necessary for a student’s development that he or she work on any particular piece or pieces, or on any particular subset of the repertoire. I base this belief on several things: the large size and great diversity of the repertoire; the fact that any student works better—and any performer, no matter how accomplished, plays better—when he or she really likes and cares about the music involved; and that it is better—more interesting—for the world as a whole if organists learn and play as wide a variety of pieces as possible, rather than all focusing on a narrow “standard” repertoire.
This month I want to address some ways of implementing this philosophy. Letting students work on the music that they really want to work on does not, of course, mean just coming to lessons with no ideas about repertoire: just shrugging the shoulders and saying “work on whatever you want.” That would be abdicating our responsibility to help students find out what it is that they might like or want to work on. The point is to figure out how much help each student needs in exploring the repertoire, and then to offer that help in a way that is maximally helpful and minimally coercive. That way we will never lose the advantages created by the student’s own intense involvement with the music.

Determining what to study
It can be very productive to start the first session with a new student by asking a question more or less like this: “why are you interested in studying organ right now?” Many students will talk about the instrument as such, perhaps their love for organ sound. Some will also talk about something in their life experience, maybe some involvement with the church or with church music. But most will also talk about repertoire. They will say that they have always loved Bach, or Baroque music, or that they are fascinated by French Romantic or twentieth-century music. I have had students, at this early stage, mention something very specific and unusual: Messiaen, for example, or Rorem, or the Couperin organ Masses.
If this question does not evoke any response about repertoire, then it is a good idea to ask more specific, targeted questions: What music have you worked on in the last couple of years (for existing organists)? What organ music have you heard that you like (for new organists)? What non-organ music have you played by organ composers? What music do you like to listen to? Have you worked on any pieces that you found frustrating? Why were they frustrating (if you know)? One of the most fruitful questions of all is “What piece is it your dream to work on?” Or, to put it another way, “What piece would you love to work on right now, but you assume that it is too hard?”
These are all questions that can, of course, be asked and explored at any time, not just at the first lesson. Such a discussion will tell the teacher a lot about the student’s relationship to the repertoire and will give the teacher specific answers to specific questions: what music the student likes, already knows about, is interested in. It can be even more important, though, for the teacher to read between the lines. Does the student have strong opinions about music? Does he or she already know and talk about a wide range of repertoire? Has the student listened to or studied any non-keyboard music by organ composers? These are all things that can help a teacher make good judgments about how much guidance a particular student will need in looking for music, how much prodding and suggesting might be necessary, or, on the other hand, how much the student can be expected to use his or her own initiative. There are clues to look for beneath the surface. For example, if the student talks about a composer and you mention a related composer (Vierne to the student’s Widor, or Buxtehude to the student’s Bach—or vice versa) does the student respond with recognition or not? Does that conversation develop naturally or does it—without a lot of teacher input—just fizzle out? Does the student know about the relationships between different kinds of organs and different kinds of repertoire? Perhaps the most important thing to look for is this: that which makes the student look animated, happy, excited, involved.
It is not possible to say specifically and in advance exactly what a teacher can learn or will conclude from these conversations. In some cases, nothing will come of all of this except that the student and teacher will get to know one another better—always a good thing. Sometimes the teacher will both learn what music the student likes and begin to form a sense of how to get the student interested in other music. The point is to start the conversation, pay close attention, and see where it leads.
The two practical issues that are of most concern regarding letting students themselves decide what to work on are, first of all, the problem of pieces that are too hard, and, second, the teacher’s responsibility to help (or perhaps even force!) the student to become well-rounded.

Issue: What is too hard?
A friend of mine went, sometime around 1980, for her first meeting with an eminent harpsichord teacher with whom she was planning to study. Near the beginning of the lesson he asked her “What would you really like to work on?” Her response was “Well, of course the Goldberg Variations, but I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be, it’s so hard, imposing, virtuosic, etc., etc.” And his reply to this was “Put it up on the music desk—of course you should work on it now!” Her morale and her level of interest and commitment shot up through the roof right away. She reported on this glowingly, to me and to others. This was what first convinced me that it was important for a student to love the music that he or she was working on. It also impressed me a lot that an experienced teacher was not afraid to encourage a new student to reach for something very challenging indeed.
However, the question still is: what is and what isn’t too hard? Of course it makes sense that any student should, in some sense, work on pieces that are of an appropriate level of difficulty. That is, pieces that are somewhat challenging—that stretch the student’s abilities out, that teach something new—but that don’t create discouragement by being so hard that the feedback they give is only negative. If a student has no very particular ideas about what music he or she wants to work on, then the teacher is free to take level of difficulty into account in helping the student choose pieces. For a new student, the judgment about this matter can arise in part out of the kind of discussion described above. For an existing student, the teacher will already have knowledge and context to go on.
Sometimes, however, a student suggests some music that the teacher suspects might be so difficult or so complex that working on it would be at best unproductive and at worst actually damaging. There are several ways to deal with this. One way, of course, is to tell the student that the particular piece is inappropriate and should be postponed. In spite of my emphasis on letting students work on the music that they want to work on, I don’t believe that this is necessarily always wrong. To begin with, there is certainly no reason not to tell the student what you are thinking and to discuss it. If it honestly appears to you, after this discussion, that your student would be just as happy working on something else—perhaps something easier but musically similar to the original piece—then there is nothing wrong with proceeding that way. (However, it is important to remember that many students are reluctant to disagree [openly] with what the teacher suggests, and that most students will hide it if they are disappointed or discouraged. You as a teacher should require a fair amount of convincing that it is really all right with your student not to work on whatever it is that the student has brought in. You should not assume or accept this too readily.) If you are convinced that a piece is categorically too hard—regardless of how the student feels about it and taking into account some of the suggestions below—then it is important to explain to the student why the piece is not right, what you and he or she can work on to get ready for that piece, and, if possible, how long that is likely to take.
If you and your student decide to go ahead with a piece that seems, on paper, too hard, then there are several ways to structure the work on that piece to make it indeed fruitful and appropriate. The first thing to do is to make sure that the student understands that a too-hard piece has to be allowed to take time. That is, in exchange for working on a difficult piece, the student must be willing to be patient, to work hard, and to plan on not getting discouraged or bored if this one piece stretches out for months or longer. (My experience is that any number of months spent working well on one difficult piece will advance the student’s overall abilities at least as much as the same time spent working on several easier pieces. I don’t have any trouble reassuring students about this.)
Second, it is important that the student be willing to break the piece down in ways that make it easier: in effect turning it into several, or many, easier pieces. This means doing an especially good and thorough job of some of the things that we should all do anyway with all of our pieces: working on separate hands and feet; working on small sections; teasing out individual voices; practicing slowly; practicing even more slowly! Again, this can be part of a deal with the student: you may work on this (too hard) piece that you love, but only if you will work on it the right way. It is possible to consider a small section of a long difficult piece to be a piece in itself. The student can work on that section, and then student and teacher together can decide whether going on to the next part of the piece is the best way to use the student’s time, or whether it would be better to turn to something else.
Here it is worth mentioning the “two-way street” aspect of the act of working on repertoire. We work on pieces, in part, as a way of helping us get better as players—more skillful, more versatile, more confident. The pieces that we work on are the fodder for this process. At the same time, we strive to get more skillful, versatile, and confident so that we can better play the pieces that we want to play. A situation in which a student is working on a piece that he or she loves, that provides some challenges, and that he or she can learn well and perform is an ideal one. However, working on a section of a piece, even without ever going on to the rest of it, or working on aspects of a piece—just the pedal part, or just the separate voices, for example, or certain passages that present particular fingering issues—can be completely valid as a way of using repertoire to advance one’s playing ability. It is wonderful to learn complete pieces—obviously utterly necessary for anyone who wants to perform. However, it is not necessary to insist on finishing every piece that you start. It is all right sometimes only to work one side of this street. It can actually free a student up to try more things—both things that are more difficult and things that are unfamiliar or even unappealing at first—if the student knows that it is OK to re-evaluate the decision to work on something if that something turns out not to be rewarding.
Sometimes a student will bring in pieces that seem to be too easy. These are pieces that the student is interested in, but that the teacher fears would not really help the student to learn anything: that is, that they would not advance the student’s facility or technique, or teach any new skills. This is working the other side of the street. Pieces in this category can be used for relaxation, just to let the student have the pleasure of playing something that is fun to play. This can be important for morale and for pacing one’s efforts. However, it is also true that there is nothing—literally nothing—that is so easy that it can’t teach something to any student or even to any advanced player. A piece consisting of a single middle c held for a few beats (to reduce it to the absurd) could still afford an opportunity to work on touch, posture, relaxation, breathing, listening to sonority and to room acoustics, and probably a lot more. Any piece can be used to work on those things and also on technical and psychological performance values: accuracy, security, articulation, timing, rhythm, and so on. If a piece seems very easy, then the student can take on the challenge of playing it even better.

Issue: Becoming well rounded
It is certainly important for a teacher to offer students help in the matter of becoming well rounded—generally knowledgeable about the repertoire and the instrument. There are two reasons that I do not believe that the matter of what pieces a student works on and plays while studying is the crucial part of this process. (Of course, it is always part of the process.) One reason is that there is so much music in the repertoire that any attempt to get to know all of it in a fairly short time will inevitably be just a token. The other is that a student who is taught how to listen carefully and open-mindedly and how to practice well will have a lifetime to explore the repertoire. There is no hurry, and it is better for anyone to work on any given part of the repertoire at a time when he or she has become genuinely interested in it.
If the repertoire that a student really wants to work on (with whatever amount of prodding or guidance from the teacher seems helpful, but with no coercion) happens to cover quite a few different composers, from different time periods and geographic areas, that is fine. However, even in that case it is not actually true that the student has covered the whole repertoire. In fact, the difference between this student and one who has chosen to work on only German Baroque music (as I did in graduate school) or only Franck and Widor is small. It is not a difference worth pursuing at the expense of any of the student’s sense of joy and commitment.
However, it is a very good idea for a teacher to help students to know what repertoire is out there, and to offer them a chance to figure out what might be interesting to them. One of the best ways of doing this has always been to get students to listen to a lot of music. Listening is easy and non-time-consuming compared to practicing and learning pieces. In the past, the best way to talk about listening to a lot of organ music would have involved mentioning record libraries or used record stores—also perhaps friends with record collections, or organ concert series. These possibilities all still exist. However, recent technology has of course added to them. I will mention a few Internet-based approaches to exploring the organ literature. Of course, it is the nature of such things that these specific resources may vanish. But if so they may be replaced with others.
At the website orgelconcerten.ncrv.nl, under the heading Archief, are recordings of hundreds of performances by organists of the last several decades. Many of these are concert performances. This is an extraordinary resource for getting to know the playing of a wide variety of organists, but it is also a very good way to hear repertoire. The list of composers represented is over 250 in number and covers more than five hundred years. The assignment of listening to all of it (or, say, listening to a piece or two from each composer whose name is unfamiliar) would be highly informative and educational for any organist.
There are several ways to find (free) printed music on the Internet. Two of these are http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer.php and http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. These sites both have a fair amount of organ music. Of course, they can be used to acquire printed music for use: that is, for pieces that a student wishes to work on. They can also be used, however, to explore the repertoire. For example, a student equipped with a list of organ composers (which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_composers for example, or through traditional sources such as The New Grove or various books about organ history) can visit the Icking Archive, look for names of organ composers, and look at and begin to analyze representative pieces, or follow the scores while listening to a recording, or print out and (slowly) sight-read opening pages of many pieces just to get a sense of what they’re like.
Another way for students to get to know about, and perhaps become interested in, composers with whom they are not already familiar—especially with more recent composers—is to read the composers’ writings. There are writings in print by Saint-Saëns, Reger, Messiaen, Rorem, Dupré, and many others. Reading the thoughts of a composer—especially if those are provocative and interesting—is a wonderful way to spark interest in that composer’s music.

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

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

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

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

Gavin Black is 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 .

This & that
As I mentioned in last month’s column, this month I will provide a sort of miscellany or potpourri of brief thoughts, ideas, and anecdotes that will amount to “light summer fare,” but which I hope will be interesting. Some of this column will introduce subjects that I will take up more fully later on.

Organ pedagogy
When I was a graduate student in organ performance at Westminster Choir College in the mid-80s, I took—as was required—the course in organ pedagogy. This course was, in those days, set up in an extraordinary way, and it ended up having a strong influence on the way that I think about teaching. The course was not a step by step traversal through a particular method of teaching. It did not purport to teach us how to teach in any technical sense. Rather, it was a kind of colloquium loosely organized around the notion of teaching but really concerned with what it means to be a musician, an organist, a performer, a colleague, and, indeed, a teacher. The course—and this was the crucial part as far as I was concerned—was taught by all six members of the organ department in turn, each one taking two or three weeks, and sharing whatever he or she thought was interesting, useful, or important for us to know.
Structured this way, the course taught us two lessons before we even stepped into the classroom. The first of these was that learning to be a teacher did not consist of learning some other (presumably older) teacher’s method, or, more broadly, did not necessarily consist of learning a method at all. The second was that diverse or divergent points of view were worthy of respect, and that anyone who had experience and something to say was worth listening to, even if he or she was not your own teacher, and—especially—even if he or she was rumored to have an approach or a philosophy that was different from your own, from your teacher’s, or from what you were used to.
(The Westminster organ faculty at that time was such an extraordinary group and represented such a great amount and diversity of experience that I would like to record here, even though it is already of course a matter of public record elsewhere, the names of the teachers who made up that group, in order of their seniority at the time. They were Donald McDonald, Eugene Roan, Joan Lippincott, Robert Carwithen, William Hays, and Mark Brombaugh.)

Two kinds of teaching
The whole phenomenon of declaring that “there are two kinds of” something—usually “people”—is somewhere between a joke and an oversimplification. My notion that there are two kinds of teaching is the latter: an admitted oversimplification that, if it is recognized as such, might be interesting. The first kind of teaching is the normal kind: a student comes for a lesson more or less every week, and practices regularly. The work of these lessons is organized in a fairly systematic way, and the teacher’s job in large part is to help the student make systematic progress, with each lesson building upon what came before. This will always be the largest and most important part of what goes on in the teaching/learning process, especially when that process addresses an area that involves technical skill.
The second kind of teaching is that in which a teacher says or does one simple thing that—very quickly, almost suddenly, with little or no need for follow-up or amplification—makes a significant or even crucial difference to the student. This is a kind of teaching by “revelation” or “enlightenment.” Of course—as I have experienced myself!—this concept can lead towards arrogance (“I will bestow Pearls of Wisdom upon my students as if I were a great Guru”) and laziness (“I need not undertake the grinding work of helping my students develop a systematic lesson and practice plan”).
(I should mention that I think that laziness can be quite useful sometimes—more about that below—but that arrogance probably cannot.) The antidote to this arrogance and laziness is the realization that, if sometimes something that you say or do as a teacher can have a revelatory effect upon a student and can create as much progress for that student as you might expect to achieve in a semester of work, it is always impossible to know or even guess in advance what might have that effect or serve that role for a particular student. It is not really something that you can do on purpose!
Here are four almost offhand remarks made to me over the early years of my own organ and harpsichord study, by four different people, some of whom were official teachers of mine and some of whom were not, each of whom turned out to be about as important to my learning as any given few months of studying and practicing:
1) After listening to me play a bit of a Bach fugue on the organ in my first year of organ study, an astute listener commented that I should listen to my playing of the subject in the pedals, and then try to recreate that effect in the voices that were on the manuals. This taught me that sometimes the visceral, kinesthetic, dance-like feeling of pedal playing can be a good intuitive source of rhythm, shape, and liveliness.
2) Early on in the time when I was studying organ with Paul Jordan—probably in about 1973—I was trying to play a short piece for him. Whenever I made a wrong note, I hesitated, or stopped, or tried to go back. Paul said to me that I should always know before I started a passage whether I was, on the one hand, playing it, or, on the other hand, drilling it. If the former, then I should be utterly committed to keeping it going, never breaking rhythm, always thinking about the next thing, not worrying about what just happened. If the latter, then I should know in advance what bit of the music I was drilling, and indeed go back and repeat it as many times as I needed to, but on purpose, not as a result of letting myself be derailed. This brief comment was, I believe, the source of at least half of my own ability to practice effectively and to perform, and to help others learn how to do the same.
3) A young but experienced virtuoso harpsichordist with whom I was chatting one day in the late ’70s, commented that any gesture that a person could perform at any given (slow) speed, could also—absolutely certainly—be performed at any (faster) speed, given appropriate practicing. I had no way of actually evaluating the truth of this claim at the time, but I kept it in mind. In the end it provided more or less the other half of my own ability to practice effectively and to teach effective practicing.
4) In the spring of 1979 I was studying privately with Prof. Eugene Roan, a few years before I studied with him as a graduate student. I played one of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugues for him on my new harpsichord, and he commented that he couldn’t hear a certain motif when it entered in the top voice. I think that I said something about harpsichord voicing, or acoustics, but he suggested that I simply make the theme a bit more detached, and he demonstrated that it could indeed be heard better that way. He floated the idea that the sound of the instrument was telling me something about how to play the piece. At the time I was very committed to the notion that this theme should be articulated a certain way, and that it should be played exactly that way every time that it came in. I didn’t want the instrument to try to force me to depart from my plan. However, that moment was the beginning of my considering the idea that interpretation could be, in effect, a collaboration between analytically derived ideas and acoustic- or instrument-derived sonic realities, and that neither side of that picture should be ignored.

Laziness
We clearly live in an era when everyone is expected to work all of the time. In fact, on the day when I am writing this, there are news stories floating around about attempts to get people to “turn off their BlackBerries” at least while they are at the beach or at a ball game. The need for such an attempt says a lot. In some fields the essential source of pressure to work all the time is external: the corporation, the boss, the client. For an enrolled student there is the pressure of grades, prizes, recommendations, etc. For any student there is the pressure of pleasing the teacher. In a field that specifically requires technical prowess, like playing a musical instrument or a sport, there is also the inner pressure of wanting to get better and better—to become more accomplished than it is actually possible to be, in order to hold at bay the fear of not being accomplished enough.
I myself have had exactly one period in my life when I actually practiced about ten hours a day, on average, for quite a few weeks in a row. This was when I was first learning to play the Art of the Fugue on the organ. It was, and is, that hard: I practiced for eight hours on the very day when I first performed it. Obviously this is not normally recommended. I believe that I or just about anyone would burn out before too long on this kind of schedule. It was certainly exhilarating to do it for a while, though.
I am, however, fundamentally quite lazy. I love sitting on the couch watching TV or reading or chatting with friends, and I believe that doing a reasonable amount of that kind of thing is clearly good. Resting and recharging is good (crucial!) for work, and doing things that are not work is good for life. However, I want to point in particular to one way of harnessing laziness that I think is really useful. The impulse towards laziness can be used to help us (and our students) to become aware of what is really important to us and what is not. Certainly it was important to me to learn the Art of the Fugue. I behaved like a working fiend then, long before the invention of the BlackBerry. Many other things that I think about doing also turn out to be important enough to me that they overcome whatever inertia I may have. And of course some things one just has to do. However, in the areas of life and of musical work that are optional—choices about what pieces we want to work on, or whether to get a harpsichord and learn how to keep it tuned and working, or whether to learn clavichord technique, or whether to try to become a good golfer or to read all of Joyce or Dante or Wodehouse—we should always be attuned to the voice that keeps us informed as to whether we would actually rather be napping. Sometimes, to be sure, this voice is misleading, and represents only a fleeting bit of tiredness or inertia. Sometimes, however, it can help us not bother with things that are really not valuable enough to bother with, and to focus on the things that are (and to take an occasional nap).
This ties in with the last subject for this month:

Motivation
I am convinced that working on learning a piece of music is a totally different experience depending on whether you do or do not really want to be working on it. And, as an extension of that, I am convinced that the whole project of working on becoming a musician (organist, harpsichordist, or anything else) is a completely different project depending on whether you are by and large working on music that you really, truly want to be working on or you are not.
I also believe that the artistic results that a performer can achieve—and the level of likelihood that it will be a worthwhile experience for a listener to hear that performer’s performance—are proportional in large part to how much the performer likes the music and really wants to be playing it.
I have seen evidence for this with myself and with every student that I’ve ever worked with. But one story illustrates it very clearly and strikingly.
I came to know an organ student, not my own, who had an interesting life history. He had been a member of the clergy, and cared about both the church and church music. He had always been a musician, but had lately decided to shift his work into music as such, rather than the ministry. He was still a young man, though old for a student. He had made this decision thoughtfully and was certainly highly motivated. However, for the first year or so of formal study, during which time his teacher asked him—quite reasonably, by usual standards—to work on a cross-section of standard repertoire, he found it all to be a chore, and grew less interested. He tried to be conscientious about his work, but no one found his performances all that exciting, and he became uncertain about his choice to enter into this kind of work.
Later on, after a year or so of study, his teacher decided that it was OK to let him focus, exclusively for the time being, on a certain, admittedly very narrow, slice of the repertoire that he had always particularly loved. At this point his demeanor and manner changed—much for the better—he abandoned his thoughts of abandoning his musical calling, and, most interestingly, he began for the first time to give performances that were exciting and interesting, that really contributed something artistically and enhanced the lives of those who heard them.
This was a long time ago: before I started teaching. It left me with a suspicion that whenever I did start teaching, I would have a strong bias in favor of letting students choose essentially all of the music that they wanted to work on. I have indeed followed that practice—100% as far as I can remember—and I think that it works extraordinarily well. Of course it raises issues about how students can inform themselves of what music is out there, and it confronts such ultimate questions as “what if someone never plays any Bach in their whole life? Can they be considered a real organist??” These are valid concerns, and I will, at some point in the future, write a column or two on exploring and choosing repertoire. My point here is just that the motivation provided by genuine inner excitement about the music being worked on is a powerful force that we should never ignore.
Next month I will start the new school year with a series on the teaching of contrapuntal keyboard music.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, and Projection I

With this month’s column, I begin to muse about some aspects of our jobs as teachers that involve helping students to work in ways that are best for their own enjoyment and motivation: how to help students integrate their playing into their own lives, and how to integrate the students’ lives into our teaching. This is partly about the big picture: how much time can a student find to play? How much of that should be real practicing, and how much can be other sorts of playing? How can a student’s own interests and motivations interact with the requirements, needs, or demands of others? But it can also be about the immediately musical. I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking “What do you most deeply want out of life?” That is perhaps sort of a joke, but not entirely, as I will discuss later on.

While I wish that any column of mine could be a discussion rather than just a one-way written piece (I ask for feedback from time to time, and often get some, for which I am grateful) this time around I wish that more than ever. The things about which I am musing this month are not concrete or demonstrably true (or false). They arise out of my own experience, and—much more than things like what practice protocol will produce the most efficient progress in learning a pedal line—they change or evolve over the months and years. That evolution is partly the result of new experiences with students, as well as an ongoing conversation between myself and others. I hope that a future column will consist of e-mails from readers about this column, with further thoughts of mine. Furthermore, I am trying to challenge or question some of my own thoughts or habits of thinking, and that process is made more fruitful by interaction with the ideas of others. You will notice that there are plenty of sentences here that end in question marks: more questions than answers.

Inspiring motivation 

I haven’t written much about how to keep students interested or motivated. That is in part because I—and to an extent all of us as organ teachers—have the luxury of working mostly with students who are well self-motivated. That doesn’t necessarily mean self-disciplined. Someone can be very well motivated and still not be very good at self-discipline and the kinds of efficiency and organization that we associate with that concept. I myself am a prime example. I am an organ, harpsichord, and keyboard repertoire “groupie.” But that often manifests itself in my perpetually distracting myself from focused work on practicing or writing with other things that are also about the kinds of music that I love listening to or reading. 

However, very few people are pushed into studying organ or harpsichord by circumstances beyond their control. Very few people go into any sort of music (especially “classical” music) because it seems like the best or easiest way to make a living. There always must be a large element of just plain loving it—being deeply interested. However, music teachers of piano, violin, some wind instruments, sometimes voice, perhaps other instruments, are often called upon to teach students—especially children—who are taking lessons because someone has twisted their arms to do so. This arm-twisting certainly isn’t necessarily or always bad. It is undeniable that young children don’t always know what they will end up wishing they had done or had learned, and very possibly one of the jobs of a parent is to introduce children to things that they can’t or probably won’t just find for themselves. That this creates a risk for over-coerciveness, for inappropriate pressure based on projection, and for all sorts of conflict and struggle to arise doesn’t mean that it isn’t also sometimes right and good. 

I have admiration and awe for music teachers who can make good things happen for students whose reasons for being there are not just their own genuine and deep interest. It is hard to find the balance between keeping interest, morale, and a sense of fun high and getting practical learning done. If there were not plenty of teachers able to navigate all of this extremely effectively then we wouldn’t have very many musicians around. But at the same time, I have always doubted how effective I could be in that situation. I think that it is not an accident that I teach a subspecialty that draws people who know that they want to be there (though I teach organ and harpsichord mainly because that is what interests me).

I don’t want to get too complacent about that. If our students are largely self-motivated, and if we can expect to take advantage of that in our teaching, how specific can we or should we get in understanding that self-motivation? Can we help students more the more we understand that motivation? Here I want to examine and challenge some of my own assumptions. One of them is that studying music is all about preparing for concert performance. This manifests itself in my own work: the only way I can make a bargain with myself to practice slowly enough (even though I know how important slow practice is, and have written about it here over many years), is to pretend while I am playing a passage slowly that I actually want to perform it at that speed. If I let myself admit what I actually know to be true, that I am playing slowly at that moment as a stage in practicing, I will begin to speed up, as much as I know that I shouldn’t. I strongly believe that every student should be working towards playing all of his or her pieces in concert. I wouldn’t explicitly say that this is what I think, but it operates in the background as an assumption. 

Concert vs. non-concert 

preparation

Of course, there are many reasons for working on pieces other than to play them in concert. One is simply interest—just to get to know the piece, or, to put it another way, to be able to play it for oneself. Another is to play it informally in a non-concert situation or in church. Yet another is to use a piece as material for becoming a better player overall, as an exercise. Another is to learn about a kind of repertoire or composer, or to learn something about the organ on which you are playing. Does an awareness of exactly why the student wants to work on a particular piece inform anything specific about how we teach that piece? Here’s an aspect of this that I think is delicate and interesting: if a piece is being prepared for performance, then we know that it should be prepared really well. That means several things—the notes are extremely reliable, the tempo is where the player really wants it to be (no fudging or pretending that a too-slow tempo is what is really desired, as in my own practice habits!), the interpretive elements are thought out and internalized enough to be reliable, and so on. 

Suppose that a piece is being played for a purpose other than performance? On the one hand, it might be questionable to insist on the same level of preparation. It is hard, often grueling work to get a piece into that sort of shape. Is it really necessary? On the other hand, is it patronizing (to the piece or to the student) to set a lower bar because there isn’t a concert in the offing? Would doing so encourage bad learning habits that might spill over? Does this imply lack of respect for whatever purpose the piece is actually being used for? Again, the answers might be different depending on whether the piece was being prepared for non-concert performance—informal playing for the student’s friends, parents, fellow students, church—or being worked on just to get some familiarity with that piece or a segment of the repertoire, or to get to know a particular organ, for example. 

I suspect that the answers to these questions may depend on the student’s state of mind. Is incomplete (or what might seem neglectful) playing the result of an attitude of neglectfulness, or is it the result of a decision about where effort should best be spent? If a piece of music is being used as fodder for studying something other than that piece, if it is being used as exercise material, for developing greater skill as a player, then arguably it doesn’t matter how well the student learns that piece. In other words, any given number of hours spent practicing can have the same result for the player’s development, regardless of whether those hours are spent practicing one piece enough to learn it, or practicing three pieces each for an amount of time that leaves them far from complete. 

Over the years I have had a few students say, right off the bat, that they don’t really care about fully learning their pieces. I remember one such student in particular. He was very talented and dedicated, yet preferred to work on a piece only up to a certain point—getting to know it pretty well, but not do all of the drilling necessary to get a piece performance-ready. It was of more interest to him, once he reached that stage with a piece, to go on to another piece. This was most decidedly not part of an attitude of neglectfulness. For one thing, he fingered every note very carefully and put as much time into that process as it needed. He was also analytical in his approach to the music, studying and becoming aware of all sorts of compositional features and thinking deeply about performance ideas. But at a certain point he preferred to do all of those things with the next piece, not to “finish” the existing piece. He had never given a public performance.

It was a challenge for me to accept this. For one thing, he was “so close”—he amply had the ability and had already done much of the work that it would have taken to get the pieces in shape for performance. What would be the harm in doing so? But this was my agenda, not his. Furthermore, it could have been influenced by our desire that we all must have at some level to have people out there hear our students play well—since that will reflect well on us as teachers. Again, this was my agenda, not his needs. Perhaps I was also influenced by the “if something is worth doing it is worth doing well” ideology, though at a conscious level I have long ago decided that that is at best an oversimplification. But even accepting the notion of doing something well, there’s still the question of what you are doing. 

Part of this student’s motivation was intellectual curiosity about the next piece, and the next, and then the next composer, and so on. Part of it was the desire to have fun playing. The fingering process he found to be fun because it was a set of interesting puzzles. The process of playing through a piece—with the well worked-out fingerings, slowly, tolerating some hesitations and wrong notes—he found to be fun because it sounded a lot like the piece: it felt like playing music. The process of drilling all of the difficult bits until they were really solid was not fun. He was doing—extremely well—what he wanted to be doing.

Of the students whom I remember who fit this description, most or perhaps all had not done any actual performing as of the time that they came to me for lessons and professed this attitude. This gives rise to a set of questions: how can they know that they don’t want to perform or wouldn’t get something out of working pieces up beyond a certain point if they have never tried it? What should the teacher do to offer at least a chance of exploring the logical next step in learning pieces without being coercive about it or acting according to the teacher’s own agenda rather than the students? Questions of this sort also apply to other areas in which I would most naturally want to suggest that we teachers should try to not push our students in pre-determined directions, most especially in choice of repertoire.

All this leads to the following question, which makes me uncomfortable enough to have to do some real thinking: what is the line between not imposing approaches or activities on our students that are driven by our needs rather than our students’ needs and making patronizing or even (subconsciously) dismissive assumptions about what a given student can or cannot do? In other words, if I decide not to coerce a student into framing his or her musical activities with reference to concert performance, am I respecting that student’s own wishes and giving him or her credit for being mature enough to know what is right, or am I somewhat type-casting the student as one who can’t perform or can’t be challenged beyond a certain point?

More questions, and perhaps more answers, next month.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He was organist and Senior Choir director of the Hillsborough Reformed Church in the Borough of Millstone, New Jersey from 1988 to 1994. He can be reached by e-mail at .

Playing hymns, part 1
This month and next I want to share a few thoughts about hymns and the teaching of hymn playing. There are a few special factors that influence my thinking about hymns and how to learn and teach them. First, I have been a church organist for a smaller proportion of my career than many colleagues—for about six years all together, less than many of my students and many or most readers of this column. I have engaged in the act of accompanying a congregation in singing a hymn probably about eleven- or twelve-hundred times. Many organists have done ten times that much. Although I believe that I have learned a lot about hymn playing from my own experience with it, I have probably learned more from the experiences of my students and from my own experience in helping them with their church work.
Second, I especially love hymns as pieces of music. They resonate, as I think anyone’s favorite music often does, with strong early memories: of time spent as a schoolboy in England, when we sang hymns in assembly every morning; of a couple of years spent as a boy soprano in the choir of Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven in the late 1960s; of travels through Europe, especially Germany, where I looked in on many church services for the purpose of hearing the music. This early exposure was fairly eclectic, and so is my own taste in hymns.
The playing of hymns in church—that is, when you as organist are accompanying people who are singing the hymns but who are there for the whole experience of the church service—is one of the (for me) rather few performance situations in which someone other than the performer has a legitimate interest in questions of what the playing is like, even, in fact, a right to help determine what the performance is like. A listener at a concert might prefer that a piece be louder, softer, faster, slower, registered differently, phrased differently, etc. That is fine: that listener’s perspective might constitute interesting feedback for the performer. If the performer genuinely finds that feedback useful, then he or she should take it into account next time. On the other hand, the performer has every right indeed to ignore that listener’s perspective, and the listener has every right not to come to the next concert! However, in church the pastor, members of the choir, members of the congregation, members of the music committee, perhaps even visitors, all have the right to care about how the hymns are played and to try to influence that playing.
(Bach was involved in a famous conflict about his hymn-playing style, in which he was criticized by the authorities for harmonizations that were too dissonant and too rhythmically complex for members of the congregation to follow. Although we all quite rightly venerate Bach, I myself would not like to try to sing to the few surviving hymn accompaniments from his pen. They are indeed dissonant, in a way that undermines the strong harmonic drive of the chorales, and there are virtuoso flourishes interrupting the rhythmic momentum not just between verses, but between phrases! Bach also got into conflict with church authorities because he wanted to choose the hymns himself, and the clergy wanted to do so.)
It is difficult to predict in any general way what stylistic or performance qualities a particular church will favor, request or require. It is also by no means true that a church organist must always agree to do things in the way that the pastor or music committee or a particular member of the congregation wants. In fact those might well differ from one another within any church situation: an organist can easily get caught in the middle. An organist must, however, be prepared to treat any opinions or suggestions with respect and consider how best to accommodate tastes, habits, and traditions that are found in a given church. It seems to me to make sense for an organist or aspiring organist to do the following: learn to play hymns so well that any stylistic or interpretive approach that that organist favors and wants to suggest will be presented as convincingly as possible, and thus have the best chance of being accepted by the others involved. And, at the same time, learn to play the hymns so securely that the act of changing some aspects of the playing—tempo, articulation, timing between verses, etc.—in such a way as to fit in comfortably with what the church wants will not be onerous.
Fortunately these two things are in fact the same. So how should a student work on learning to play hymns?
As pieces of music to learn on the organ, hymns have certain characteristics. They are essentially written to be sung. Therefore the writing is not necessarily idiomatic or comfortable keyboard writing. Hymns should be “easy” compared to all but the easiest repertoire, in that they have limited range, limited velocity, very limited rhythmic variation, little or no need to try for independence of line of the sort needed for playing counterpoint. However, they often seem, especially for relative beginners, harder than “hard” pieces. Pieces written as organ repertoire are usually written with at least half an eye on the question of what is physically, technically idiomatic to the instrument, so that even hard pieces are often natural and comfortable. This cannot usually be a concern in writing or setting a hymn when the setting is meant to be sung in four parts. (While in many or most situations hymns are not in fact sung in parts, traditional hymn settings are designed as four-voice harmony.) Of course hymns are fully learnable. The point of recognizing that they are sometimes surprisingly difficult is to avoid getting discouraged if they indeed seem that way, and, also, to make a note that it is worth working on them carefully.
Hymns typically have a top voice that is a charismatic or attractive melody—the hymn tune itself—and a bass line that is shaped by the need to provide unambiguous harmonic foundation. Since in turn these voices have to be singable by non-trained singers, they can be neither too high nor too low. This is what causes the inner voices to be (usually) confined within a strikingly small range. This confinement results in inner voices of hymns being characteristically boring (to put it bluntly) as melodies. This can lead to frustration on the part of choir or congregation members who feel that they are supposed to sing those parts, thus missing out on the attractive melody. It also leads those lines, often, to have a remarkably high proportion of repeated notes. This is a well-known issue in playing hymns, one that I will discuss a little bit below and more next month.
There are many ways to arrange the four voices of a typical hymn on the organ. The most common and, I think, indeed most useful is to play the bass voice in the pedals and the other three voices together on one manual. (This is also clearly the best starting place for students working on hymn playing.) It is also possible to play all four voices on one manual (no pedals), or to play the bass in the pedal, the alto and tenor on one, presumably somewhat quiet, manual, and the soprano on a louder manual. Another way of thus “soloing out” the hymn tune itself is to play it (the soprano voice) on the pedals with an appropriately high-pitched stop, and to play the three remaining voices in the hands. Although all of these ways of arranging a hymn on the organ are useful, and although it is never a good idea to rule out anything that might provide greater variety of effect in any kind of music-making, I think that the traditional way of playing hymns offers these advantages: the use of pedal and 16′ sound in the bass emphasizes the harmony in a way that helps keep singers together rhythmically and on pitch (it also makes the sound less directional and helps it to fill the room well); the hymn melody itself will, by virtue of being on the top of the texture, be heard clearly in any case, while the inner voices will—if not relegated to a softer sound—help to enrich the texture, again helping to project harmony and rhythm forcefully.
A student learning his or her first hymns should approach them as if they were pieces of organ repertoire, and challenging ones at that. This means several things:
1) First, the student should learn the pedal part (the bass voice, let us assume for now). This involves, of course, working out a pedaling and then practicing it carefully, by itself, perhaps one foot at a time (see The Diapason, December 2007), slowly and without looking. Pedaling choices at this early stage should be based on what the student is used to and finds comfortable, with a slight bias in favor of pedalings that do not rule out legato, but with a willingness to locate non-legato pedalings (such as the same toes playing two successive notes) in places where the rhythm and meter suggest that subtle breaks will be unobtrusive. Since we are talking about the early stages of learning something new, it should be considered OK if the results are not musically perfect in this respect. Technical, physical comfort at this stage will lead to more secure and flexible hymn-playing in the long run.
2) Second, the student should learn the tenor voice in the left hand. This is often a task that seems trivially easy: the line is essentially sight-readable for even not very advanced players. However, the point is to learn it extremely well, to get it so nearly memorized that it is impossible to imagine not playing it correctly. Also, by working on this one line carefully, it is possible to learn to play it (musically) really well. This involves, among other things, treating the repeated notes in the way that I discussed in this column in January 2009, that is, changing fingers and executing the repetitions smoothly with natural-sounding articulation.
3) When the pedal line and the left hand are really well learned, the next step is to practice the two together. This is the most important step in learning a hymn, and doing this systematically in learning many hymns is the most important technical step in learning to play hymns securely. This is because (even for experienced organists who happen not to have yet delved into hymn playing, but especially for anyone new to the organ) there is a strong tendency for the bass/pedal line and the tenor/left hand line to interfere with each other. This can take the form of the tenor line getting lost in the shuffle and becoming inaccurate or unclear. It also can take the form of the left hand reaching for and playing some notes of the bass line instead of or in addition to the notes of the tenor line. This latter is extremely damaging to the development of an aspiring organist, not just as to hymn playing. Even though it may not hurt the sound of a given hymn (if the manual sound is coupled to the pedal it may be literally inaudible), it can damage or destroy a player’s ability to execute an independent pedal line in any kind of music. Practicing hymns as described here, however, will enhance a player’s overall independence of hands and feet in any kind of music.
4) Meanwhile, the right hand part, consisting of the two upper voices, should be practiced. It is trickier in this case to finger all of the repeated notes in the best possible way, because the hand is responsible for two voices at all times. It is a good idea to come as close as possible to this, again without insisting on perfection.
5) Once steps 3) and 4) are complete—step 3) having been done really thoroughly, no compromise—then it is time to put all four voices together. The experience of most students is that if the pedal and left hand have been prepared really well, and the right hand basically learned, then putting it all together is not only easy but more-or-less automatic. If this stage does not feel easy, then the student should revisit the previous two steps and/or slow the tempo down.
Once a student has worked on a number of hymns this way—six, eight, ten maybe—he or she will be able to learn the next hymn noticeably more quickly. First, this procedure itself will start to take less and less time. Then it will no longer be necessary: the student will be able to learn new hymns simply by reading through them slowly enough, with all the parts, and working them up to tempo gradually. Trying to do that prematurely—that is, without having taken enough hymns apart and worked on them in the way described here—will derail the learning process, but the process should in due course make itself obsolete.
Next month I will discuss various other aspects of hymn playing: rhythm, articulation, repeated notes, registration, accompanying part-singing, accompanying unison singing, “soloing out” lines, and more.

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

Memorization
I ended last month’s column with a list of some ideas about memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the keyboards. This month and next I will focus on the pros and cons of memorization as a learning tool. That is, I want to consider ways in which working on memorization—or not working on memorization—can help the teaching and learning process, and what can be learned from thinking about the phenomenon of memorization, whether a student memorizes music for performance or not. I will also consider the role of sight-reading, or reading in general, in performance, and how reading relates to knowing a piece thoroughly and well. I want to start with a brief account of my own history with memorization. This, of course, affects my thinking about memorization in general, as does the whole range of experiences of my students—and other students whom I have observed—over the years.

Personal experience
I have, to put the punch line first, done very little public performance from memory over the years. I have actually never played a piece in concert or in a recording session from memory. When I was applying to graduate school at Westminster—it was 1983—I had to play my audition partly from memory. This was a requirement for the organ performance program, though not for organists applying to the church music program. I was unaccustomed to memorizing, and I worked very hard at it. In the end, at the audition, I had a brief memory slip or two, from which I recovered fairly well. During my years in that graduate program, I also had to play a jury or two from memory. The experience was similar: that is, I worked very hard on the memorization, had a few brief memory slips, and more or less got through it.
Meanwhile, the rules of the organ performance program at Westminster, at the time I was a student, stated that I would have to play my master’s recital entirely from memory. Entering that program as someone who had done little or no work on memorization prior to my audition, I had no idea how I would manage to cope with that requirement. Either I would work very hard at it and hope that it went well—better, I would have hoped, than the audition or the juries, since noticeable memory slips in concert would have felt quite bad—or I would hope for some sort of miracle. That miracle came when the department decided to change the requirement. We were now allowed to choose either to give one recital from memory, or two playing from the scores. I chose the latter, which, among other things, permitted me to take on the challenge of learning The Art of the Fugue and playing it as one of those recitals. I could not even have considered trying, at that point in my life, to memorize something that long and complex.
Since the last of those juries that I played as a graduate student, I have not played a piece from memory with anyone listening. Clearly this means that I do not believe that memorization is a necessity for good performance: if I did believe that, then either I would have memorized repertoire for all these years or I would have been taking, and would still be taking, an ongoing blow to my self-esteem.
Furthermore, it would be hypocritical of me to believe that we teachers ought to expect—let alone force—our students to memorize. Indeed, after many years of teaching and playing, I cannot see any good reason to expect students or any players to perform repertoire from memory. This is, of course, a fairly extreme statement about a more or less “hot button” topic, and I hold onto it lightly: that is, while I feel quite convinced about this view, I am also open to being persuaded otherwise at some point. I have not been persuaded yet, though, in spite of both generally paying attention to writing and teaching on the subject and having conducted a review of the literature in preparation for writing this column.

The case against memorization
It makes sense to me that, in spite of the very strong tradition of memorization in piano playing and the weaker but persistent tradition of memorization in organ playing, the burden of proof must fall on the side of maintaining that performing from memory is necessary. This is in part because it is usually extremely time consuming. If I am going to ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time on anything—time which could be spent, among many other things, on learning and performing more pieces—then there must be a very good reason for it.
However, I have seen the imposition of a need to memorize do actual harm. Literally all of the auditions, juries, and student recitals that I have ever heard that were performed from memory have included memory slips—sometimes small, sometimes large—or passages that were clearly executed in a tight, hesitant way because of fears about memory. This is perhaps a small sample size, but it has been so consistent that it strongly reinforces my belief that if students are required to play from memory, the benefits of doing so must be unambiguous and compelling. I have also seen students do what I would have had to do with The Art of the Fugue if I had been required to play my degree recital from memory: that is, avoid certain pieces that they would really like to play because those pieces seem daunting to memorize. Many students go around in a constant state of tension and anxiety because of concern about memorization. And, worst of all, some people decide that they cannot aspire to be performers at the highest level because they do not—rightly or wrongly—believe that they could confidently perform from memory.

Is there a case for memorization?
Of course, playing music and being a performer is difficult and can be nerve-racking. But is the extra difficulty and tension caused by memorization justified? How good are the reasons for asking students to play from memory?
Some of these reasons are, it seems to me, either essentially stylistic or just practical and arguably rather superficial: that it looks more professional, that it saves the inconvenience of having to use a page turner, that if you use music you will feel like or look like a “student”, that memorization will save you if the music blows off the music desk, that it will enable you to give a recital at a moment’s notice when you are away from your library of printed music, that it will permit you to play at a social occasion at which you were not planning to play. (These specific reasons actually constitute the majority of what I have seen mentioned about the subject in my recent review of Internet-based discussions.) Some people mention that if a piece is fully memorized, it becomes easier to look steadily at the hands and feet and to look to find pistons, stop levers, etc. This is interesting and has more musical/technical substance to it than some, and I will discuss it more later.
However, the main claim for memorization is that only by memorizing a piece can you learn it really thoroughly. This claim takes several forms. The most direct is that it is only through the techniques of memorization that a piece can really be learned—that is, that experience shows that only after doing the kinds of things that lead to a piece’s being memorized will you really know the piece inside and out. Another claim, turning things the other way around, is that if a player engages in the act of learning a piece really thoroughly then he or she will indeed, almost automatically, have memorized it: therefore playing from the score is seen as a sign that the player can’t have learned the music very well. Both of these ideas have been incorporated into the ways that some people talk about learning and playing music. I have seen phrases like “learn the piece inside and out, backward and forward” used as a synonym for “memorize the piece.” I have encountered as a sort of aphorism: “get the music into your head and your head out of the music.” Indeed, in some circles, and in particular at certain times in music history, “learn a piece” has been used as a synonym for “memorize a piece.”
Furthermore, of course, we normally use the language in which we talk about performances or performers to imply, without necessarily having made a considered judgment about it, that playing from memory is playing of a higher order. “She was the first to play the works of so-and-so from memory,” “he had memorized such-and-such repertoire by the time he was 14.” Feats like this are impressive because they are difficult, and there is no reason not to acknowledge the work of people who accomplish them. (By the way, however, they also get more notice than they might otherwise, simply because they can be described objectively. If we try to say that “she was the first to play the works of so-and-so in an absolutely riveting manner” there is no way to establish objectively that this is actually true.) We are still just slipping around the question of whether playing from memory is in any way better—or, for our purposes here, whether asking students to play from memory really helps them to become better players.
Some observers report seeing performers—both students and others—playing pieces with their eyes intently, almost frantically, following the music, clearly needing that music to teach them the notes as they play. In fact, most of us know that this is common, that it always creates bad and insecure performances, and that it is a sign of poor preparation. However, in itself this doesn’t prove or even really suggest that performing from memory is the solution to this problem, although it points to the fact that some people misuse the circumstance of playing from music.

The bottom line of learning
So this all comes back to the same thing: that anyone who wants to play a piece should take on the responsibility of learning that piece extremely thoroughly, and that anyone who wishes to become an accomplished player must get into the habit of studying all pieces thoroughly and well. Much of what I have written about over the last several years—in particular the methods of analyzing and learning counterpoint and the technique of paying attention to elements, small or large, that recur in any piece—has been geared towards helping people to know their pieces very well musically by the time that they have learned the notes. Much of the rest of what I have written—about pedal learning, slow practicing, paying attention to hand choices and more—has been geared towards making sure that the physical side of playing will be secure enough that a player can take advantage of what he or she has learned by getting to know the piece really well, that is, not be distracted from it by physical problems or insecurity.
It seems to me that anyone with good practice habits and good physical technique who has put in the time to study a piece thoroughly will end up being able to play that piece from the score as well as anyone could play it from memory. Therefore my own approach—the bargain I would make with my students, so to speak, is this: that there should be no compromise on studying the music in depth, including taking things apart contrapuntally and motivically, noticing harmonic patterns, recurring rhythms, changes in texture, in what order voices enter, playing hands separately when that seems like a good idea for technical or musical reasons, and so on; but that this intense study should be for its own sake and for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of leading to full memorization.
Those who advocate memorization are right that the greatest source of wrong notes, insecurity, and hesitant, unconvincing playing is not knowing what is coming up next. Too strong a reliance on reading—only half-learning a piece and expecting to fill in the rest by quasi-sight reading in performance—is a trap into which many of us fall, experienced players as well as students. It does not often result in good performances. I would suggest avoiding that trap in the most direct way—by insisting to one’s self and to one’s students that pieces be studied thoroughly and carefully. It is, looking at it one way, overkill and perhaps a distraction to relate that process of thorough study to the act of playing from memory. The opposite of reading a piece that is ill prepared is, I would say, reading a piece that is extremely well prepared.
For some people, the act of studying a piece well will indeed lead naturally and apparently automatically to the musical text of the piece actually being memorized and the printed music’s becoming unnecessary. There is, most obviously, nothing wrong with this. However, there is also nothing wrong with the more common scenario in which even very thorough study of the music does not lead to real, note-perfect memorization. I would encourage teachers and students to be comfortable with that.
Next month I will continue this discussion, talking about some of what I consider to be beneficial ideas that have arisen from the tradition of memorization, such as studying music away from the keyboard, and also discussing the role of sight reading, some of the pitfalls that reading presents, and ways to avoid them.

§

On a completely different matter: I have recently had a fascinating conversation with several friends on the following question: who was the musician that you have heard live in performance who was born the earliest? This led to quite an interesting and far-ranging discussion about time and history, and the reach of living memory. I would like to open that discussion up to a wider group. I encourage anyone reading this to think about your own answer to that question, and to e-mail it to me at Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at . My own answer is as follows: that the earliest-born performer whom I heard in performance at all was Leopold Stokowski, born 1882, and that the earliest-born player that I heard was Arthur Rubinstein, by a margin of ten days over Eubie Blake, both born in 1887. I will include all of the answers that I get in a later column.