On Teaching

Gavin Black can be reached at gavin [email protected].

Repertoire, part 3: Mailbag
This month’s column is devoted to answering a few questions from readers, arising out of the two recent columns about repertoire. The questions all have to do with one basic point—namely, how it can be possible for students to work effectively on pieces that are “too hard.” These questions have led me to believe that I should discuss this further, especially since I also consider it a very important point. I will revisit certain things that I have already said, looking at them from somewhat different angles, and add a few new ideas.

What is too hard?
I begin by quoting at length from a set of questions sent to me by Don Stoner, a reader from Pennsylvania who studied organ in college and has taught high school and middle school music for many years. From his perspective as an experienced teacher, he has provided interesting feedback on different matters over the past couple of years, and in this instance his questions bring up essentially everything that I want to address here. He wrote as follows:

Thanks once again for your articles in The Diapason. I would like to ask you several questions that I was thinking about, especially in the paragraphs about the issue: What is too hard? . . . Here goes!

Should a teacher first access what the technical and theory abilities a student has at the keyboard? For example: You get a student that wants to play the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But he doesn’t have the “finger power” (for lack of a better way to describe it) to negotiate the manual runs, the pedal work, and so on. It would, I think, be like throwing someone in 10 feet of water and tell him to swim!! While I think that we need to let people play music they enjoy, they need to have certain amount of technical ability to be able to “make it through” to the end of the piece. Would you in this case say to a student “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think that we need to start with a smaller prelude and fugue (little 8) and then build up to this larger selection”? Do you think that all organ students are ready to “make the decision” that “I can play this piece no matter what anyone thinks”?

The essence of the matter is this: if it is true—as I believe—that it is important to encourage students to work on music that they really like and want to work on, then it must be OK to let those students (some of the time at least) work on music that is harder than what we as teachers might consider prudent. It also must mean, again some of the time, being willing to throw out any sense that it is necessary to work on pieces in some particular order. In general, it seems to call for taking a somewhat improvisatory approach to the business of using repertoire as material for making technical progress. In order for any of this to work, it is necessary to discover a way to use any piece—regardless of its degree of difficulty—as the material for teaching and learning at any stage. The essence of this, in turn, is the ability to break each piece down into simple components and to figure out how to use those components as appropriate teaching materials. It can, as a matter of teaching technique, learning technique, and practicing strategy, be done successfully with any piece.
However, as Don Stoner suggests in the last line quoted above, part of the issue is psychological. This is true most fundamentally with respect to the root of this whole discussion: the reason for letting students work on whatever music they most want to work on is that the mind of the student will then become more focused and better able to work efficiently. I believe this because I have observed it over and over again in myself, in colleagues, and in students. I think that this effect can often be at work even in people who believe that it doesn’t apply to them—that is, who believe that they have the pure willpower to make themselves work regardless of their feelings about what they are working on.

Temperamental and psychological issues
However, there certainly are some psychological or temperamental points that run counter to this. The main one is that if a student is working, even very efficiently and effectively, on a piece that is very challenging—“too hard”—for that student, then the student has to have patience. It will clearly take many times as long to learn a piece that is lengthy and difficult than to learn a piece that is short and (relatively) easy. A student who asks to work on such a (long, difficult) piece must think carefully about whether he or she has the patience to defer the gratification of having completed the whole piece, perhaps not even to be able to predict how long it will take. If this student gets pleasure out of playing pieces for people along the way, then he or she will have to think about whether it is all right to do less of that for the time being—that is, to be learning fewer pieces in a given space of time and thus have fewer, or no, new pieces to perform during that time. (I am talking now about this as a source of pleasure, satisfaction, or motivation, not as a practical requirement. Of course some students are in a position where they need pieces for practical purposes, say for church or to meet the requirements of a structured academic program. If so, then of course those needs may intervene temporarily and deflect the student from simply studying what he or she wants to study.)
If a student comes to a teacher wanting to work on a very difficult piece, one that is exciting and interesting to that student, then the teacher should discuss the temperamental and psychological issues involved. That is, the teacher should remind the student that this will be a long project, will require patient and well-organized work, and will involve postponing the satisfaction of having completed and learned a piece. It is by no means necessary to end up working on that piece. However, it is necessary (where “necessary” means “much better for the learning process”) that the student be genuinely happy with whatever piece(s) he or she end up working on. And while there need not be an assumption that the longer or more difficult piece will be chosen, there should also not be an assumption, even as a starting point, that it will not be chosen.
In fact, if a student has a strong desire to work on a piece that is a stretch for that student, then the teacher can use that as a sort of bargaining chip: you may certainly work on this piece, but only as long as you practice it well, in the ways that I suggest, patiently, systematically, etc.
The other psychological dimension that I want to discuss is fear. Fear is a natural response to the prospect of doing something very difficult. At a minimum, fear of failure, in and of itself, comes into play. On top of that, there is fear of disappointing the teacher, fear of disapproval from others—the teacher, fellow students, others in the field, a kind of imaginary, externalized “superego,” one’s parents, and of course one’s self. There is also the fear, specifically, of being thought hubristic, arrogant, self-important, or just plain cluelessly unrealistic in your claims about what you can or can’t accomplish. These fears are all natural and more or less universal. However, acting on them, in particular by limiting the scope or ambition of what pieces one works on, seems to me to be a terrible loss. In discussing with a student the pros and cons of tackling a big difficult piece, a teacher should, I believe, encourage the student to think clearly about his or her motivation, temperament, style of working, and so on. The student should know as clearly as possible what it would feel like to dig in and work on a very challenging piece, and make a free decision about whether that is or is not something that he or she wants to do. But the teacher should also try very hard to help the student ignore any voice of fear, any voice suggesting that working on a harder rather than an easier piece is scary or risky.
In fact, helping our students to free themselves from fear is probably the most important thing that we can do as teachers. I have one anecdote to relate on that subject. At my first organ lesson in the spring semester of 1985—which was my second year as a graduate student—I placed on the music desk of the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College the Helmut Walcha organ edition of The Art of the Fugue. When Professor Eugene Roan arrived for the lesson, he just sat down in a nearby chair, nodded and smiled. He was telling me that, yes, it was OK for me to work on that (very) long, (excruciatingly) difficult piece for my upcoming degree recital. There was essentially nothing in the record of what I had done prior to that day to suggest that I could handle this project. His immediate, concise, friendly agreement that I could and should do it not only led to my lifelong involvement with that piece, it also signaled to me that I really was an organist, and that I could really aspire to do what I wanted to do.

The role of the teacher
This brings us to the next question. It is always important, essential in fact, that a teacher know as much as possible about the “technical and theory abilities a student has” as Don Stoner aptly puts it. The notion of letting students choose their own repertoire cannot be based on the teacher’s abdicating the responsibility to know both exactly where that student is in the learning process and as much as is humanly possible about the student’s abilities and aptitudes. This knowledge can be used either to help the student choose pieces to work on that will seem appropriate in a traditional way—neither too easy nor too hard, adding something to the student’s technical and musical learning without being overwhelming—or to help the student navigate the treacherous but fruitful waters of a very challenging piece. If Professor Roan had not known me very well—I had studied with him off and on for several years at that point—he would not have been able to agree without discussion that it was a good thing for me to work on The Art of the Fugue, and he certainly would not have been able to help me with the process as much as he did.
If anything, it is more important that the teacher be prepared—equipped with knowledge of the student and of the music, and in a frame of mind to pay very close attention—when a student is working on a “too hard” piece. Although such a piece approached properly can be at least as effective a teaching tool as several easier or shorter pieces, it is also true that it carries with it more danger. If the student approaches it the wrong way, it can turn into a waste of time or a source of discouragement, or, worse, a framework for developing bad technical habits. There is nothing intrinsic to a longer or harder piece that will make these pitfalls actually manifest themselves, but they can do so if the piece is not approached the right way. The teacher’s job is to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The more that a teacher knows about the strengths, weaknesses, and habits of the student, the better he or she can accomplish this.
As a matter of hour-by-hour practicing, week-by-week learning, or the overall pedagogic usefulness of any number of months or years of study, the act of working on short easy pieces is identical to the act of working on a longer or more difficult piece. A long, difficult piece is several shorter, easier pieces. It is up to the student to be willing to treat it that way and up to the teacher to use all of his or her teaching expertise to show the student how to do so.
The technique for doing this is conceptually simple. The long piece must be broken into shorter bits, and those bits then must be made easier by practicing them slowly, by separating hands and feet as much as necessary, and by doing enough analysis to render the piece well known to the student. For example—an extreme example—if a student who might naturally be working on a few Orgelbüchlein pieces or short preludes and fugues wants to learn the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that piece can be broken up into many pieces, none of which is (initially) any harder than, say, Ich ruf zu dir. The first of these might be the right hand part of the opening canon. The next might be the left hand part from the same section, noticing very explicitly the relationship between this line and the right hand part. The third “piece” might be any dozen measures of the pedal part from the middle of the toccata section. (I say that to make the point that a long piece that is being learned patiently does not have to be worked on in order from beginning to end.) The next might be, say, the alto voice of the fugue for the first two pages, and so on.
In this way, a long difficult piece can be built up, and it is the key to avoiding the “throwing someone in 10 feet of water” problem. Of course, this is really just everyday good practicing, but applied very seriously. In fact, the discipline of working on an extremely challenging piece can help to teach overall good practice habits. The easier the piece, the more tempting it is just to play it over any number of times in a row until it gets more or less learned. If it is obvious that this casual approach will not work with a given piece, then the student—who in this scenario is highly motivated to play the piece: after all, it was chosen specifically and only because the student really wanted to work on it—will be highly motivated to practice in a way that does work.
I will leave the subject of repertoire for a while after this month, though happy to answer further questions individually by e-mail. Sometime in the future I will write a fairly long series of columns going step by step, in considerable detail, through the process of learning a specific piece. As part of that series I will address particular individual practice strategies for students with different levels of experience. I welcome suggestions for what piece I should use for that project, though of course I will not be able to use them all.

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 has been teaching organ and harpsichord since 1979. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;

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

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

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

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

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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.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. During the 2014–2015 concert season he will be presenting a series of five recitals at the Center offering a survey of great keyboard repertoire from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Details about this and other activities can be found at www.gavinblack-baroque.com. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Several of my columns in the latter half of 2014 had their subject matter determined by things that had happened recently involving my own students and their lessons. This set of (two) columns also falls into that category. Over the last few months, three different new students have told me in our initial discussions that they needed to learn sight-reading or that they wanted to become better at it. The progress of those conversations and then the work that each of those students and I have done together—some of it focused on sight-reading—have caused me to think about that subject and to marshal some of my ideas about it in a column. This is another one of those areas that I have not addressed systematically before, though it is a central enough part of what people think about while working on playing that it has come up indirectly from time to time.

Some of the questions that I want to think about are: 1) What is sight-reading and what do people—students in particular—think that it is? 2) What are its uses and to what apparent uses should it (usually) not be put? 3) What is the role of sight-reading in learning pieces? and, finally, 4) What are some of the ways that sight-reading can be practiced systematically? I should first mention—or really confess—that I think I have always undervalued sight-reading. Or, at least, I have always focused too much on the ways in which the practice has been abused or overused and not enough on the ways in which it can be useful or can form a part of artistic development. And I will further confess that the reason for this is probably that I was, in the early to middle stages of my life as a musician, a really bad sight-reader. In my very early years of organ study—my mid-teens—I was such a bad sight-reader that I went through life feeling chronically mortified by that fact, and would (to avoid discovery) never venture upon sight-reading anything, however simple, if anyone could hear what I was doing. I needed the solitude of the empty church late at night. I was so nervous about sight-reading that I couldn’t approach it in anything like a fruitful state of mind. Since that time, I have become a fairly good sight-reader. It’s not one of my particular strengths, but I am at least average for a professional keyboard player: significantly better than average with music that belongs to a style or genre with which I am very familiar, a bit less than average, probably, with types of repertoire with which I am generally less engaged as a performer. This contrast is quite normal, and I will discuss it more later on. My own improvement as a sight-reader has come on my own watch, since it happened when I was already an adult and a professional performer. (It is also ongoing: I am a better sight-reader now than I was a year or two ago.) That means that I have a pretty good idea of what I was able to do to make that improvement happen, and that informs the way I organize my efforts to help students with sight-reading.

It was of great interest to me that each of the students who recently asked me about sight-reading actually meant something different by it. At one end of the spectrum was the use of the term to mean just being able to learn pieces from notation at all. That is, “reading” and feeling comfortable with the process of moving from a slow and perhaps halting first reading to secure performance. At the other end was what I would call real or hard-core sight-reading: putting on the music desk the score of a piece that you have actually never seen, played, or heard before and playing it without needing to stop. (There is one nuance to this that is worth commenting on: that the purest form of sight-reading is indeed of something that you haven’t even heard. If you have heard a piece then, to some extent, small or large, playing by ear will come to the assistance of the actual reading at sight. Though a departure from what might be called “theoretically pure” sight-reading, this is something that helps with a lot of real-life sight-reading when the player is in fact familiar with the piece by ear, as often happens.)

In a sense these distinctions are just semantic. We can use the word “sight-reading” to mean only what I am calling the “hard-core” thing and then use other words to refer to other aspects of playing music from notes. This more or less doesn’t matter, as long as it is clear what is meant in any context. However, with one of the students referred to above, I did waste a bit of time talking about approaches to what I meant by sight-reading, when what he wanted was various hints about how to read more efficiently as part of the process of learning a piece. It is important to know what you are aiming to practice—or asking a student to practice. If the goal is to practice real sight-reading, then, strictly speaking, a passage can only be used once for that practice. After that it is no longer sight-reading in the strict sense. It is important to get this straight with students. I have seen students (and myself, long ago) think that they were practicing sight-reading when they were really just practicing a piece—or perhaps not really practicing effectively at all. 

Sight-reading of some sort is a usual part of the learning process. That is, when you first undertake a new piece, you have to get your awareness of what the notes are supposed to be from something, and that something is usually the printed page. There will be a time when you read through some components of what you are trying to learn for the first time. This is a sort of sight-reading. (This is not the case for people who play by ear—which is rare in “classical” music—or who memorize pieces at the desk before sitting down to play: also rare.) One difference between this kind of reading (initially at sight) to begin learning a piece and sight-reading as such is that it is not cheating—and is in fact better, with the possible exceptions that I discuss below—for the former to be prepared reading. Ideally before starting to play a piece to learn it, a student should look it over, perhaps subject it to some sort of analysis, perhaps think about fingering and pedaling issues even before coming to the instrument—although that has to be rather abstract and held onto lightly. Then the first actual reading of the piece at the instrument should often be in component parts: separate hands, pedals alone—maybe even separate feet—short passages. Those component parts should be repeated a lot, right off the bat, taking the student farther and farther from sight-reading the passage. 

The role of hard-core sight-reading is real but quite circumscribed when the project is to work carefully on learning a piece. It could be described as fleetingly sight-reading some components of the piece, not as sight-reading the piece. I think that it is a bit of confusion about this that leads some students to feel some or all of the following: 1) I am not a good sight-reader, so I can’t learn pieces well; or even 2) I can’t become a good player at all; or 3) I didn’t succeed in sight-reading this piece well first thing, so I can’t learn it, or at least it will be disproportionately hard. None of these actually follow from anything about a student’s sight-reading of a particular piece or that student’s sight-reading in general. 

What about the role of sight-reading in the learning process for someone who is a good, advanced sight-reader? This is where opportunities and dangers come in. It also requires some clarification about what a good sight-reader is, or at least how that concept ties in with learning pieces. It seems to me that there is a continuum for each person as to how “sight-readable” something is and as to how the sight-readability relates to the learning process. Every person who can read music has some keyboard pieces that he or she can sight-read. For example, just to start at one extreme, see Example 1.

This “piece” could be sight-read by anyone. Of course this is, in a sense, absurd, but it is a jumping-off point. As pieces get more complicated—more real—the universe of people who could sight-read them accurately and comfortably gets smaller. If a student or any player can honestly sight-read a given piece accurately, securely, and comfortably, then that person can consider starting the process of learning that piece by sight-reading it and then continuing to read through it. This can involve skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart, and that can be all right. The important thing is the honesty—honesty with one’s self. 

This example may be officially twice as complicated as the above, but almost no one who has ever played a keyboard instrument would need to practice it with separate hands (see Example 2). 

Some people would need to separate the hands, at least briefly, for this “piece” (see Example 3)—and so on. 

As I said, if you are working on a piece that is well within the range in which you can sight-read it easily, then you can consider skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart. Someone who is an advanced sight-reader will have that option with a greater proportion of the repertoire—maybe most of it. This is a great time-saver, and for that reason it is useful and enviable. It also creates a temptation to perform pieces that the player simply doesn’t know very well—that is, doesn’t know very well interpretively, analytically, rhetorically. Is this a problem? Sometimes so, sometimes not, most likely. This is another area where there is no substitute for self-honesty, though for a performer who is tempted to play pieces for listeners on an essentially sight-read basis, it might be important to get feedback from trusted listeners about the artistic results, so that the self-honesty can be well-informed. 

I have two anecdotes about this aspect of the subject. 1) I once decided to play a piece in recital without having practiced it at all. It was one of the Frescobaldi hymn settings from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas. I did this as an experiment, after looking the piece over—away from the keyboard—just enough to feel certain that I could manage the notes that way. The goal of the experiment was to see whether the result could feel and sound more like an improvisation, and the experiment was inconclusive. The notes were no problem: I had guessed right about that. I noticed neither more nor less freshness and spontaneity—which is what I had been looking for—than I would normally expect out of my playing. This is music that is squarely in the middle of what I know best and perform most effectively, and it came out fine, but nothing special. However, I did sort of betray some at least subconscious concern on my own part because I had the thought afterward that if I ever had occasion to record that piece, I’d better get to know it better! 2) Someone I know who was present for a certain major recording project reported to me that the virtuoso harpsichordist making the recordings had played approximately one-third of the pieces by sight-reading them during the recording sessions. This was, of course, an all-time all-star sight-reader: the repertoire was not simple. My informant maintained that he could tell listening to the finished product which pieces were sight-read and which had been prepared. The latter, he felt, were categorically more convincing, the former accurate but kind of stiff. Of course this is not a blind or controlled study: there’s no way to confirm it or refute it.

Probably a really advanced sight-reader, or anyone dealing with a piece that is very well below his or her threshold for comfortable sight-reading, should feel free to start the learning process by sight-reading the whole texture of a piece, but slowly—distinctly slower than the fastest tempo that won’t fall apart, with the kind of focus that characterizes good sight-reading (which I will talk about next month) and with a willingness to go back to taking things apart if it starts to seem like a good idea. Anyone who is a very advanced, comfortable, reliable sight-reader has to be especially conscientious about studying a piece thoroughly alongside the process of simply reading the notes (with an ease that is enviable to the rest of us). This can include paper analysis, careful listening while playing—perhaps sometimes focusing on specific things, say the inner part of the texture, or the left hand, or the slower notes—and an optional taking apart of the texture, for example playing separate voices in contrapuntal music or playing hands separately not to learn notes, but to listen. 

To be continued next month.

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.