On Teaching

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. His recording of The Art Of The Fugue by J. S. Bach in a version for two harpsichords (with George Hazelrigg) has just been released: <www.theartofthefugue.com&gt;. He can be reached by e-ail at <[email protected]>.

Playing hymns, part 2
Last month I outlined a protocol for practicing and learning hymns. In essence, this simply amounts to remembering to take them seriously and to practice them carefully. However, there are a few special features to the approach I suggested, especially that the player should concentrate most heavily on putting together the left hand and the pedals. That combination is important in practicing any music, but seems to be even more so with hymns. This month I want to talk about some musical/interpretive aspects of hymn playing, and how they tie in with the learning process and the type of technical command that the player develops through careful practicing. In particular, among other things, I want to talk about repeated notes and the role that they play in all of this.
There are several things to say about the musical role of the organist in playing hymns in church. First of all—to express a very positive goal in usefully negative terms—the organist must not upset the singers (the congregation) or make it hard for them to sing. This is not to say that the organist should never challenge preconceptions, or do things in a way that wakes people up and asks them to see (hear) things in a new way. But the organist must not allow shakiness or wrong notes or unconvincing rhythm to make it hard for people to sing. No one wants to make wrong notes in repertoire pieces: however, everyone does so at least once in a while, and as long as those wrong notes are minor, and as long as the player keeps things going, it is never a catastrophe. In accompanying hymns it is important—more so than in playing pieces—not to make wrong notes, especially in the line that carries the hymn tune itself. It is extraordinarily important not to break rhythm or to let an occasional wrong note interfere with everything that is going on around it.
(This of course is a further reason to take the practicing of hymns very seriously: not only are they not as easy as it sometimes seems that they should be, but the stakes in the realm of basic accuracy are higher than with other types of playing.)
The second responsibility of the hymn accompanist is to provide a rhythmic foundation for the singers. In a sense, this part of the role of the organist is a combination of that of a conductor, a continuo-player, and the rhythm section of a rock group. If a room full of people who are not trained musicians are going to sing together with a feeling of confidence and relaxation, it helps for them to hear a strong, convincing pulse in the accompaniment. This serves the basic function of orienting the singers to where they are in the music. It enables them to use the accompaniment rather than their fellow singers as a reference point. It also, apart from the purely practical, gives a sense of liveliness and energy that will keep people awake and make them feel that they want to sing.
In fact, it is usually not the job of the organist to teach the hymn tune or to lead the melody as such. Most of the time, most of the congregation already knows most of the hymns being sung. When this is the case, the role of the organist’s playing of the hymn melody is like the role of the printed music in a piece that a player knows well: it is a touchstone or a reminder, not a practical, note-by-note, source of information. If a hymn is utterly new to the congregation, then the accompanying of that hymn in the service comes essentially too late to teach the tune to the congregation. Some people will pick it up, some people won’t. (In a church in which new hymns are introduced regularly, it might be nice to create an opportunity for interested members of the congregation to learn those new hymns. This could take the form of a once a month hymn-sing during which some old favorites—perhaps ones that don’t make it into the service very often—can be sung for fun, and the new hymns planned for the coming month can be taught. Of course some churches indeed do things of this sort.)
Another responsibility of the organist is to create and sustain the appropriate mood for each hymn. This is accomplished in part by registration (about which more below), in part by tempo, and in part by the same repertoire of interpretive tools that are available in playing any kind of music: timing, phrasing, rubato, articulation, agogic accent, arpeggiation, and so on. Certainly the tools that cause the music to depart from the metronomic accent—rubato, agogic accent, etc.—raise the concern that they will make it hard or impossible for untrained singers, with no rehearsal, to follow. However, it seems to me that, within reason (that is, within what experience shows to work) a convincing rhythm is easier to follow than a merely steady rhythm. Some shaping of beats and phrases using departures from strict metronomic rhythm will draw the singers along and orient them as to where the music is going. Of course this must be approached carefully and within a given student’s overall approach to articulation and rhythm.
(I myself used to play “For All the Saints” in a way that involved a greater or lesser degree of ritard in the couple of measures leading to the “Alleluia” in each of the six verses, culminating in an amount of “extra” time that was nearly a measure’s worth by the last verse. My impression is that no one had trouble following this, and that it intensified the emotional impact of the experience.)
So how do repeated notes fit in to all of this? Of course there is a long tradition in hymn playing of treating repeated notes as an issue unto themselves. Almost every student with whom I have worked—who has previously played or studied hymns—has picked up along the way the idea that repeated notes should be tied under certain defined circumstances: when they are in inner voices, in the pedal, in voices that don’t carry the hymn tune, within a given measure (i.e., not crossing a bar line), or some other rule. Or, on the other hand, that tying repeated notes is “old-fashioned” and that accuracy demands that they all be played as written. Some of these ideas have reflected the views of teachers or writers about organ playing, some have been heard “on the street” among fellow students or colleagues. For some, the overall effect of having heard many different ideas about how to play repeated notes in hymns has been to make the whole subject seem intimidating and confusing: yet another opportunity to get something wrong.
The main problem with repeated notes in hymns is that, if they are actually repeated, they can create a feeling of “choppiness.” This is one of the greatest enemies of singing, and, in organ playing, one of the effects that is least conducive to helping people sing. If a hymn is being played with full-fledged, traditional legato, then a repeated note that is repeated crisply will sound quite different from the notes around it. If there are many repeated notes—as there usually are in the inner voices of hymns for the reasons mentioned last month—then this can certainly lead to an overall effect of choppiness. If the style of playing a particular hymn is non-legato, then repeated notes will stand out less. Still, however, if the repetitions are done too crisply or with any degree of stiffness, they will stand out somewhat, and contribute some of the same kind of choppiness. It is almost certainly this fear of choppiness that has led organists and organ teachers over the years to develop systems for avoiding, to a greater or lesser extent, the actual playing of repeated notes in hymns.
On the other hand, on the organ in particular, with its sustaining power, long held notes have the potential to deaden rhythmic motion and to create heaviness. This is probably why some organists consider it a very bad idea to ever tie over any repeated notes in hymns. (No one ever suggests, as far as I know, tying over any repeated notes in pieces of repertoire!) Also, of course, if members of the congregation happen to be singing voices other than the hymn tune, and it is in those voices that the organist sustains rather than repeats some notes, then those singers will not be getting the rhythmic reinforcement that is the best help that the organist can offer to any singers. They will be getting their pitches, but, some of the time, only their pitches.
I think that it is useful for students to have all of this sketched out for them, not as a situation that is governed by rules, and especially not as a situation in which not knowing or somehow violating the rules will lead to having done something wrong, but rather as a situation in which there are competing musical needs that perhaps can be reconciled, or that at least need to be juggled.
The key to reconciling those needs is—or begins with—playing any repeated notes with as much musical control and as little inherent choppiness as possible. This is best served I believe (see The Diapason January 2009) by changing fingers or feet on repeated notes as much as possible, and also by using as light and smooth a touch as possible. As I mentioned last month, the ideal fingering for a pair or group of repeated notes cannot always be achieved in the right hand part of a hymn when that part includes both of the two upper voices—though it can sometimes or often be achieved, with ingenuity and practice—but the lightness always can be. A note that needs to be repeated should always be released lightly, and released in time that the next note (the repetition) can be played on time. The amount of space between repeated notes can be varied over a very wide spectrum: from as close to legato as is consistent with releasing the first note comfortably to fully staccato, with the first note released as quickly as physically possible. The very act of treating different repeated notes differently in a passage that contains many repeated notes will help prevent them from seeming stiff or choppy, and from deadening the rhythm.
All of this is especially important in hymns because a musically fruitful articulation of repeated notes without abruptness or choppiness but with pulse, accent and rhythm can greatly enhance the overall sense of pulse of the playing. This in turn enhances the usefulness of the playing for those singing. A student should be encouraged to listen for the rhythm of repeated note passages in particular, and to experiment with varying the amount of articulation between repeated notes in a way that gives the right rhythmic shape to the line. The most direct way of practicing this is the best:
1) Select a hymn that has, if possible, an almost exaggerated number of repeated notes, such as the tunes known as Webb, Finlandia, Bishopgarth, or Rest.
2) Choose a voice to work on that has a lot of repeated notes, for example the tenor voice in Webb (“The Morning Light Is Breaking” and other words) or the pedal line of Lancashire (“Lead on, O King Eternal” and others).
3) Play that line by itself, shaping the repeated notes in such a way that the line all by itself has direction and pulse, and is interesting to listen to. This can be done with subtlety, but also can be exaggerated, just for practice. In any case, it should be based on making strong beats longer than weak beats, making sure that upbeats move effectively to their points of arrival, and putting breaths between phrases. Whatever amounts of space are placed between different repeated notes, the physical gestures should be light and smooth.
4) Then add back the rest of the texture, but listen primarily to the repeated-note-heavy line that was just practiced. Try to hear the rhythm of those repeated notes enlivening the pulse from within.
In a hymn whose overall style is upbeat or jaunty, the articulations of repeated notes, shaped in accordance with the dictates of the meter, pulse, and rhythm, should probably be greater (even perhaps actually corresponding to the “exaggerated” practice). In calmer, quieter, more languid hymns, they should be less, more subtle. If the student feels, having gone through a process like this, that some repeated notes still sound out of place, choppy or disruptive, so that the pulse and flow would be better served by tying them, then he or she should probably go ahead and tie them. Since a “hymn”—in the sense in which we are talking about it—is a practical accompaniment, it should not be considered against any sort of law to alter it: the point is to find what really works. I myself have certainly tied repeated notes in hymns, but only occasionally, and only after trying it out “as written.”
Approached this way, I believe that repeated notes in hymns, while they will still present questions about which there might be disagreement, can cease to be a problem or a worry. In fact I think that repeated notes can lead the way in suggesting convincing rhythmic shape in a hymn.
(To some extent, the organist’s awareness of whether or not congregation members are in fact singing inner voices must influence choices about changing the rhythm of those inner voices: if people are singing them, it is a courtesy to those singers to make sure that those voices are clear and as vivid as possible.)
When it comes to registration, the essential problem presented by hymns is that the practical needs of the situation limit choices about volume. A hymn must be loud enough that everyone can hear it easily and be “conducted” by it without having to strain. It should not be so loud that it drowns out the singers, especially in their own ears. This can be a frustrating set of limits, especially if the organ is smallish. It can seem as if there are very few acceptable hymn registrations. This in turn comes into conflict with a desire for the registrations not to seem too much the same. If they are, this can be deadening to the overall mood for singing, or just plain boring. Certainly it seems like a good idea to change sounds from one verse to another as much as possible, and also for all of the hymns sung on a given day not to sound too much the same. The main two points that I think students can bear in mind are the following: it is worth trying out registrations during practice, patiently, more or less in the ways I discussed in The Diapason in April–June 2008, taking the process as seriously as one would with a concert piece; and, it is usually better to make very small changes in registration from one verse to another than to make no change at all: that is, a small or subtle change in sound is usually enough to enliven the listening and singing experience.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 2:
Fingering, pedaling, and
practicing, part 1
In this month’s column, we will look at the opening section of the Buxtehude E major Praeludium in great detail as to fingering and pedaling, and outline ways of practicing that section. When we return to this piece, after beginning our look at the Boëllmann Suite Gothique, we will analyze the section that begins in m. 13 with regard to practicing and learning that section. These two sections offer several different textures and types of writing; each suggests a different approach to the very practical act of learning the notes. These textures include the one-voice opening, the multi-voiced but not strictly contrapuntal measures that immediately follow, and the rigorously contrapuntal—fugal—section that begins in the soprano voice in m. 13. Each of these textures recurs in this piece, and of course throughout the repertoire as well.
This and the next few Buxtehude columns will focus on the steps necessary to learn the right notes securely and efficiently. I will try my best to do this in a way that leaves open as many different interpretive possibilities as possible. In particular, I do not mean to take sides in any debate about how much to incorporate “authentic” fingerings and pedalings, or about what those are or might be in any particular case. That does not mean that I will not mention them or include them among the possibilities. As I hinted but did not quite state last month, I will not discuss any work on memorization. (I have, like many performers and teachers, somewhat mixed and complicated feelings about memorization, but I do not consider it to be a necessary or integral part of learning a piece well and performing it in a way that is both solid and artistically worthwhile. I will discuss memorization as an issue unto itself in a later column.)

Fingering
Since the opening of our Praeludium (see Example 1) is a monophonic statement of three rather long measures—49 notes—the first question that arises is which hand or hands should play it. (This foreshadows the most important practical question about any passage of keyboard music; namely, which notes should go in which hand. This question must precede detailed questions about fingering, and it is often overlooked or shortchanged by students. More about this later.) Since the passage is basically high—in the right hand region of the keyboard—and is probably not going to be played in a way that is prohibitively fast for one hand, it makes sense to start out by assuming that it is a right-hand passage.
However, it also makes sense to look for places where taking some of the notes in the left hand would make things easier. Each student can look the passage over and make this judgment for him- or herself. It might, for example, make sense to take the four sixteenth notes of the third beat of m. 3 in the left hand. These notes are lower than the rest and using the left hand to play them would put that hand in a good position to participate in playing the chord on the first beat of m. 4.
It is also possible to share the notes more or less equally between the hands, though I myself have not been in the habit of doing so in this passage. An advantage of sharing the notes between the two hands is that it is just easier to execute. This becomes more important the faster a player wants the passage to go. A disadvantage to dividing the passage up between the hands is that it gives more to think about in the learning process and to remember in playing, and probably takes longer to learn.
On a more positive note, an advantage to keeping the passage in one hand is that it is probably easier or more natural to project the overall rhetorical shape of the line when the shape and spacing of the notes is felt in the most direct physical way by the player. None of these considerations is absolute, and a teacher and student can think about them and work them out.
Just for the record, the fingering that I myself would use to play this passage is shown in Example 2. This is largely a common-sense and hand-position-based fingering. For example, the choice of 1-3 to begin the passage is entirely based on the way that my own fingers happen to fall over those notes, given my posture and my arm angle. (The arm angle stems from my preference for letting my elbows float out from my sides, which in turn is—for me—part of a relaxed posture.) The first four notes could just as well be played 1-2-3-4 or 2-3-4-5. The choice of 3 rather than 4 for the D-natural 32nd note late in m. 1 is designed to make it easier to reach the coming G# with 4 (rather than 5). The point of playing that G# with 4, in turn, is twofold: first, to place the (long) third finger on the F# and the (shorter) second finger on the E; second, to make it easier then to reach the high B on the final half-beat of the measure with finger 5. (It would also be fine to play those notes—G#-F#-E—with 3-2-1.) For me, keeping the thumb off of raised keys is a guiding principle.
A reason for not playing the third beat of m. 1 with 2-1-2-5, etc. (but rather with 4-3-2-5, etc.) is that the gesture of turning the second finger over the thumb to play the G# moves the hand away from the upcoming (high) E, and therefore makes the playing of that note awkward—at least, that is how it works with my hand. In m. 3, the non-adjacent fingerings of each of the beat groupings are all designed to move the hand in the correct direction for whatever is coming up next.
This fingering is not intended to be a recommendation or even a suggestion: it is just how I would probably do it. There are many other ways. (Some of these might be more historically minded—with more disjunct or pair-wise fingerings—or less so—with substitution or more use of the thumb, even occasionally on a black note.) The important thing is that teacher and student work out a fingering that is appropriate for that student. Sometimes that process involves a lot of specific input from the teacher, sometimes little or none. A teacher should always look for ways to let the student assume increasingly more responsibility for working out fingerings. I tend to give very few specific fingering suggestions, but keep an eye out for spots where a student may not have succeeded in finding something that works well. In those cases, I will invite the student to analyze the spot again, perhaps with more input from me.
So in this case, once a fingering has been worked out, the most effective approach to practicing the passage is clear. That is, since it is only one line and one hand—at least, certainly one hand at a time—there is no concern about how to combine parts, and in what order. The plan is just to practice it. First, choose a very slow tempo: slow enough that playing the right notes with the planned fingering is actually easy. This might, for one player, be sixteenth note equals 60, for another 80, for another 45. For an advanced player or a good reader it might be faster, and it might be all right to think about a pulse for the eighth note even from the beginning. Anything is all right, as long as the student does not start with too fast a tempo. Then, having played the passage several times at this starting tempo, the student should play it several times a little bit faster, then a little bit faster still. At some point, the beat in the student’s head will naturally shift from the sixteenth note to the eighth note, then to the quarter note. The crucial thing is not to get ahead of a tempo that honestly feels easy. This, if practiced rigorously, will lead to unshakeable security.
Meanwhile, the rest of the opening section is multi-voiced, a mix of not very strict counterpoint and homophonic writing. In this passage, the main practical question is which hand should play some of the inner-voice notes. As I mentioned above, this is extraordinarily important. I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make an easy passage almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in an awkward way. This is usually caused by assuming too readily that the notes printed in the upper staff should be played by the right hand and those printed in the lower staff should be played by the left hand. In fact, there should never be such an assumption unless the two hands are meant to be on different keyboards, providing different sounds for different parts of the texture. In general, the two manual staves between them present a note picture, and we have ten fingers with which to play that note picture in the most reliable way possible.
In each of the measures in Example 3, there are notes in what is more or less the alto voice that are printed in the upper staff; some of these might be best played in the left hand. The notes that I have highlighted are those that I would choose to play in the left hand. Again, this is not by any means the only way to do it. The first criterion that I use in working this out is that “extra” notes should be placed in the hand that otherwise has less to do. That is at work very strikingly in mm. 7-8, and the beginning of m. 9, but also elsewhere. Sometimes hand choices are made based on the need to prepare what comes next. That applies here in m. 11, where I am not taking several notes in the left hand that could, or in a sense should, be in the left hand, so as to make it possible for the left hand to play the (tenor) E in the chord in m. 12. (There would be other ways to deal with this, involving substitution.)
Sometimes the notes of a passage in a middle voice can be divided between the hands just to make that passage easier—less inclined to get tangled. This is the case here in m. 5 and to some extent in m. 10. An overriding consideration is hand position: how can notes be divided between the hands in a way that best allows each hand to remain in a natural, comfortable position?
After the hand assignments have been worked out, the next step is to work out fingering. (In the process, some hand choices may be changed.) As always, fingering will depend in part on factors that differ from one player to another, including the size and shape of the hands, existing habits or “comfort zones,” and artistic goals concerning articulation, tempo, and other matters. Example 4 shows a possible sample fingering for one of the more convoluted of these measures. As always, there is a lot here that could be done differently. For example, it could make sense to play the E that is the first note in the top voice of the first full measure with 5, or the D#/B right-hand chord later in that measure with 2/1. It would also be possible to take the A#-B in the first full measure with the left hand, probably with 2-1. The above is just one way of doing it.

Practicing
Once the fingering has been worked out, the next step is practicing. The principles of practicing are always the same, and they are both so important and so difficult psychologically (for most of us, certainly including me) that they can’t be repeated too often: break the music down into manageable units—short passages, separate hands and feet; practice slowly enough; speed up gradually and only when the unit being practiced is really ready for it. In the case of the passage under discussion, one sensible way to divide things up might be as follows:
1) the right hand from the last few notes of m. 3 through the downbeat of m. 9
2) the left hand from the downbeat of m. 4 through the second beat of m. 9
3) the right hand from the first high B in m. 8 through m. 12
4) the left hand from the half note D# in m. 8 through m. 12, and
5) the pedal part, which I will discuss in its own right just below.
(Notice that the sections are designed to dovetail, not to bump into one another. This guarantees that practicing in sections will not cause fissures or awkward transitions to develop. This is quite important. It also applies to practicing across page turns.)
Each of these units should be played many times at, initially, a very slow tempo: as always, slow enough that it feels easy. For most students it would probably make sense, given the somewhat complex texture of this passage, to start with a beat—in the student’s head or from a metronome—that will represent the 32nd note, so that each of the sixteenth notes will receive two of those beats. This 32nd-note beat might initially be at 100, or 80, or 120: whatever feels comfortable. Then each unit should be sped up gradually.
(Some musicians express concern that starting the practicing procedure with beats that represent very short notes—many levels down from the “beat” suggested by the time signature—will result in playing that lacks a sense of underlying pulse, that is too divided into small fragments. However, it is insecurity as to the notes, fingerings, and pedalings that is by far the greatest cause of rhythmically unconvincing playing. At the early to middle stages of learning a passage, the best thing that we can do to predispose that passage towards convincing rhythm is whatever will get the notes learned the most securely. The use of very small note values early in practicing is so removed from later performance, in time and in feel, that I have never known it to come back and haunt or influence the quality of a that performance.)
Some variation is possible in the mode of reconnecting the separate hands. In general, the slower you are willing to keep things, the more promptly you can let yourself put components of the whole texture together. There is some speed at which any given student could indeed skip the step of separating hands. For most of us, in moderately or very difficult passages, this tempo is very slow indeed, and in general it is not a good idea to aim to do this. (Not a good idea partly because it taxes our boredom threshold and partly because separate-hand practicing also allows us to hear things clearly.) In general, if each hand feels really solid at a certain tempo—ready in theory to be performed by itself at that tempo—then it is possible to put those hands together at a somewhat slower tempo. How much slower varies from one situation to another. The overriding principle is a familiar one: when you put the hands together, the tempo should be such that the results are accurate and the experience feels easy—no scrambling, no emergencies, no near misses.

Pedaling
The pedal part in mm. 4–12 of this piece is simple though non-trivial. I would play the fifteen pedal notes with the following feet, all toes:
l-r-r-r-l-r-l-r-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
Other possibilities involve, for example, playing the first note of m. 5 with left toe (crossing over) or playing the second note of that measure with right heel; or playing some of the two-note groupings that span bar lines (between mm. 6–7, 7–8, 8–9) with one foot, either all toes or toe and heel. Once a student has decided on a pedaling, he or she should play through the pedal part slowly, not looking at the feet, until it is second nature. Since the note values are all long, getting the pedal part up to tempo will not take as long or go through as many stages as it would with some other passages. However, it is extremely important not to shortchange the practicing of even this fairly simple pedal line. This is all the more true because in general lower notes and slower notes play the greatest part in shaping the underlying pulse and rhythm in organ music. This pedal line is both.
When the pedal part seems very solid, then it is time to begin practicing it with the left hand. It is often true—for most players—that “left hand and pedal” is the combination of parts that requires the most work. Therefore it should be started as soon as each of those parts is ready. It is also often true that once left hand and pedal is very secure, and the right hand part is well learned, and the two hands together are secure, then the whole texture will fit together without too much trouble. However, it certainly never hurts to practice right hand and pedal as well. In the case of this section, there are a couple of places where the strongest rhetorical and rhythmic interaction is between the something that is being played by the right hand and the bass line in the pedal. This is the case, for example, with the transition from m. 3 to m. 4, and also the middle of m. 10. Practicing the right hand and pedal together will draw the attention of the ears to these spots.
Next month we will start looking at the Boëllmann, concentrating on understanding the overall shape of the piece and looking for connections and contrasts.

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

Boëllmann Suite Gothique Part 3:
Menuet Gothique
This month’s column focuses on the Menuet Gothique, the second movement of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique.
The Menuet Gothique is an extraordinarily tuneful piece of music. It has always been right at the top of my list of pieces which, when I am teaching them or otherwise have them on my mind, tend to run through my head as I am walking along the street or relaxing. I believe that this—although it is just a subjective reaction on my part—provides a clue about some effective ways to practice the piece, as I will discuss below. I will start out, however, with a few thoughts about the overall shape and structure of the Menuet.

Structure
The form of the piece starts out as that of a classic minuet. That is, it is in triple time, neither very fast nor very slow, and it begins with two phrases, each of which is repeated. (In this piece, the first time through a phrase and its “repeat” are not identical, but I am treating them as identical for this brief analysis. I will also discuss this below.) The lengths of the two phrases are in a traditional, classic proportion: the first phrase eight measures, the second sixteen. Furthermore, the opening of the second phrase is a variant of the second half of the opening phrase, or perhaps a kind of answer to it. This way of linking the two halves of a binary keyboard dance—minuet or any other—was common at least from the time of Froberger, that is, from the mid-seventeenth century.
The next section of the piece—beginning with the upbeat to m. 49—continues the classical minuet structure, at least at first. Since it is in the same triple time, but presents different thematic material, it has the feeling of the traditional trio section of the classic “minuet and trio” form. (This was a form in which one minuet was followed by another, which in turn was followed by a literal repeat of the first minuet. This was one solution to the issue—always present in music—of the balance between contrast and continuity, or between the familiar and the new. Typical examples of a minuet and trio can be found, for example, in the first “French Suite” or the fourth “English Suite” of Bach. And this form was commonly used in the Classical period, in symphonies and other orchestral music as well as in keyboard music. Because the third section in this form is exactly the same as the first, it can also be thought of as a rondo or ritornello form.) The section beginning at m. 49, which I am considering evocative of the “trio” of the minuet and trio form, opens with another eight-bar phrase, which is, like the opening phrase of the piece, then repeated. This in turn is followed by a new eight-bar phrase. According to the model that we are developing, that is, according to the way that phrases have been dealt with in the piece so far, this phrase—mm. 65–72—should also be repeated. If Boëllmann had repeated these measures and then directed the player to return to the beginning and play to measure 48, ending the piece there, then the whole work would have been in the most traditional, old-fashioned, minuet and trio form.
(I suspect that the classic structure of the beginning of this piece, something not by any means found in all minuets written in the late nineteenth century, reflects the composer’s intention to write a piece that deserves to be called “Gothique”. Of course, the minuet was a Baroque rather than Gothic form, but this is, at least at the beginning, an old-fashioned piece, evocative of old-fashioned style.)
However, Boëllmann does not repeat the second half of the “trio” or return to the beginning just yet. Instead of the repeat of mm. 65–72, the composer gives us new material loosely based on what has come just before it. The next 40 or so measures of the piece consist of material derived from what I am considering the “trio” section, interrupted occasionally—three times—by short bursts of material derived from the opening theme. This also makes a sort of rondo or ritornello form. It sets up a final return of the opening theme, without the repeats that characterized its appearance in mm. 1–48, but otherwise essentially the same. This “da capo”—mm. 113–136— brings the piece to a close.
(To me the penultimate section of this piece, mm. 73–110, is strangely reminiscent of the middle section of the fugue from Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548. In that [much longer] section, rather free-sounding passagework is also occasionally interrupted by brief, almost abrupt-sounding, statements of the opening theme.)
The passages that I have been calling “repeats” are, as I suggested above, not actually identical to the passages being repeated (or, so to speak, not quite repeated). They differ in the following ways: the bass lines migrate from manuals to pedal, or vice versa; the right hand parts, bearing the treble melodies, change octaves; and left hand parts, essentially doubling the right hand in octaves, come and go. Meanwhile, the treble melodies and the bass lines remain, as far as the note patterns are concerned—octaves aside—identical. These note changes on the repeats are accompanied by changes in the suggested registrations, and all of the changes work in sync with one another. The phrases in which the treble is higher, the bass is in the pedals, and the texture is thicker are also the passages in which the registrations are louder, that is Grande Orgue with couplers, marked ff. The manuals-only phrases—treble lower, texture thinner—are marked to be played on the Récit, p or pp. Either the changes in registration alone or the changes in the note picture alone would create a noticeable forte/piano contrast in the repeats. Together they reinforce one another and make that contrast stronger. To me it makes sense to think of the changes in the note picture in these repeats to be a change in registration rather than a change in the music. I am pretty sure that listeners hear it that way.

Tunefulness
The tunefulness of this piece derives from two things, I believe. First of all, the melody in the upper voice is memorable and easy to sing or hum or whistle. It is a tune that would probably make a good hymn (more so, I would say, than the melody of the first movement of the suite, even though that movement is marked “Choral”). Second, the bass line is—like a quintessential continuo line from the late Baroque, say of Handel or Telemann—a line that combines convincing melodic direction with strong unambiguous underlining of the harmony. It is a line that exists to support and bring out the melodic strength of the upper voice. In this respect it also resembles the bass line of many hymns, though it covers a much wider range. Also, the piece is—except for the interaction between the treble and the bass, and that only in parts of the piece—unambiguously non-contrapuntal. The inner voices are important, but their importance is in the way that they provide harmonic support for primarily the melody and secondarily the bass line, and in the ways that they influence volume through the changes in texture described above. There is no moment in this piece when the listener’s attention is meant to focus primarily on an inner voice or when that attention is meant to perform the feat of dividing itself among several voices in a way that shortchanges none of them. There is always a principal melody, and, with the exception of a couple of measures around m. 78, it is always in the top voice.

Practicing
This suggests a starting point for practicing the piece. The equivalent for this piece to playing and learning separate voices in a contrapuntal work is first to play and learn the soprano melody. That is, by playing it all by itself, without the rest of the right hand part: playing it as naturally and easily as possible, letting it become second nature, a tune that will go through your head when you least expect it. For this purpose the repeats, with changed octaves and thicker texture, don’t matter. The next step is to practice the bass line, in the left hand, enough to get comfortable with it, and then put the bass and the melody together, still without the inner-voice chords. This is a straightforward enough procedure that it doesn’t really need a formal protocol, but if it had one, it might look like this:
1) play the melody from mm. 1–8 a dozen times
2) do the same with the melody from mm. 17–32
3) play the left-hand part from mm. 1–8 a dozen times
4) do the same with the left hand part from mm. 17–32
5) put #1 and #3 together about a dozen times
6) put #2 and #4 together about a dozen times
(Then do the same thing with any other measures where new material is introduced, such as mm. 49–52 or 73–78.)
The purpose of this is the same as that of practicing each voice in a fugue and then putting those voices together in pairs. It is to get the ears to follow the most important melodic and rhythmic elements of the piece so naturally, so instinctively, so strongly, that it will be nearly impossible not to bring those elements out convincingly in performance, even when the complication of playing all the notes is added back in.

Articulation
At this stage it is time to think about the meaning of the various indications for articulation given by the composer. Such signs are almost entirely absent from both the first and the last movements of the Suite Gothique. They are found throughout the third movement, the Prière à Notre- Dame, but only to do one thing, namely to delineate long phrases with slurs. In this movement, articulation is used at several levels. First of all, the entire piece is marked non-legato. That is, the marking occurs at the very beginning and is never contradicted. Non-legato articulation is the context for the whole piece. However, within that context, a certain number of notes are marked either with slurs or with staccato dots. The vast majority of the slurs are written over two-note groupings, the first two quarter-notes of a measure. This happens in the quarter-note bass line at the beginning (Example 1). And in the treble elsewhere (Example 2).
Staccato dots are used mostly in two of the ways shown in the examples above: either on a third beat quarter-note following a pair of slurred quarter-notes or in the four-beat eighth-note upbeat pattern that is characteristic of what I have been calling the trio sections.
What is the purpose of all this articulation? Of course it is not particularly ambiguous what it means. The slurs mean real, perhaps even overlapping, legato; the dots mean very short notes, perhaps as short as they can be without losing pitch sense and sonority. Non-legato, which would seem to apply to notes that have neither of the other markings, is somewhere in between. There can be, within the meaning of the terms, some variation in legato and staccato and a lot of variation in non-legato. However, what is it all in aid of? This is a question that does not ever necessarily have—or require—an answer. But if it does have an answer, that answer might help the student/performer make specific decisions about how to carry out the articulations, and might make it easier for those articulations to come out sounding natural and convincing. I suspect that in this case there is an answer or two to that kind of question.
The slurs over pairs of quarter-notes sometimes occur when the rest of the notes in the texture are half-notes (Example 3) and otherwise occur, when they are in the treble as in Example 2 above, in such a way as to join a second beat to a downbeat and emphasize that downbeat. Both of these uses of the slur seem to be designed to create or to bring out the kind of lilt associated with the minuet. This is a triple-meter rhythm that is better represented by this:
than by this:

I would say that interpreting these slurs as saying “feel and express a lilting motion” rather than as anything more technical than that would be the best guide to playing them naturally and flexibly.
When the bass line moves to the pedal, beginning in m. 8 and then throughout, the articulation marks are absent. There are no articulation marks anywhere in the pedal part. Does this mean that the bass line should not express the same articulation when it is in the pedal that it has when it is in the left hand? Or does it mean that the composer has assumed that the player will take the articulation given in the left hand as a guide for how that line is meant to be played? I am not sure that it is possible to decide this by rigorous logic. To me the second possibility makes more artistic sense. The concept that I outlined above—articulation in service of the minuet-like lilt—can guide the ears and feet in shaping the pedal line. That is, the specifics of legato and staccato—how much overlap, or how short certain notes can be or need to be to get the right effect—will be different with the deeper sounds of the pedal, but the concept can be the same.

Fingering and pedaling
When it comes to the practical side of working on this movement—that is, working out fingerings and pedalings—the (practical) truth is that the overall non-legato articulation creates great flexibility and choice. It makes things just plain easier than they would be if the long chains of chords had to be played legato. Legato in that case would have to mean legato as to non-repeated notes, with the many repeated notes as close to legato as possible. This would be entirely doable, with lots of substitution: there would not be a lot of different ways to do it. As it is, planning on an overall non-legato, each player can pretty much look at each chord separately and decide what fingering fits that chord shape the most comfortably. As usual, hand position is the main guide. Then non-legato transitions from one chord to another can be made in a way that is physically comfortable.
There are two important things to remember about this process. First, non-legato passages, whether single-note lines or chords, end up sounding more natural, closer to cantabile, less choppy, the more comfortable and relaxed the hands and feet are. This is because choppiness and a lack of cantabile are caused not by space between notes but by choppy releases and physically tense attacks. The second thing concerns the physical or technical act of putting spaces between notes or chords. If the player, having worked out a fingering or pedaling, practices at first with so much space between notes that it is easy—blissfully, unambiguously easy—to move from one note to the next, then, when those fingering or pedaling patterns are well learned, it will never be difficult to reduce the amount of space between the notes.
In the case of this Menuet, the act of playing the simple treble melody until it is a familiar old friend—as suggested above—will guide your ears in shaping the articulation in a way that expresses the lilting minuet-like feeling of the piece. The act of practicing the notes and chords without, at first, trying to make them anything other than very detached will create the physical, technical basis for projecting that feeling when playing all of the notes.
Next month we will look at the Prière à Notre-Dame. In the case of that movement, the major technical concern is indeed the shaping of long legato lines, some with one note at a time, some with more complicated textures, and therefore with more involved fingering problems. ■

This continues without a break from last month’s column. (In fact, it begins with a repetition of the last paragraph of that column, for continuity).

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

After you have completed this process with the passage that you have chosen, move on to the next increment of the piece and do the same thing. While you are working in an intense way on this next passage you should continue playing through the passage that you have already learned. In this way you can build up an entire piece. Note that it is normal for different sections of a piece to be at different tempos during the learning process. If the naturally comfortable tempo for one section is faster at a particular moment in time than the naturally comfortable tempo for another section, then, if you wish to play those sections continuously with one another, you have to choose the slower tempo. (This only applies if the two passages are adjacent in the piece). It is all right for a passage to be unnecessarily slow; it is not all right for a passage to be inappropriately fast.

There is a preliminary exercise—or set of exercises—that you can do to become accustomed to using the hands and feet together, before you start to work in the manner described above on your first piece or passage for hands and feet together:

1) Choose a short piece or passage for manuals only that you already know and with which you feel very comfortable. Play through this piece or passage a couple of times so that it is fresh in your mind.

2) Start this piece again, but as you do so, play one pedal key with one foot, but silently—no pedal stops on at all. Release this pedal key at the end of the piece. Then do the same thing, but playing a silent pedal note with the other foot.

3) Start the piece again, and play a silent pedal note at the beginning. At some point approximately halfway through the piece, switch to a silent pedal note in the other foot. Then do this again with the feet in the other order. The timing of the switch from one foot to the other should be planned in advance. It doesn’t matter when you do it, but you should not be worrying about when you should do it while you are playing.

4) Next, play the piece changing from a note in one foot to a note in the other foot several times during the piece (all still silent). Again, these changes should be planned in advance, perhaps according to a regular rhythm or pattern: in any case, in such a way that you don’t have to think very much about them as they happen.

The purpose of this is to give yourself practice with the physical feeling of playing keys with your feet while playing on the manuals, without the difficulty of actually negotiating a pedal line and without the distraction of the pedal sound. It can be surprising that it can be more challenging to play a piece that you know well with one foot holding down a pedal key than it is to play that piece with both feet resting under the bench. 

You can also try this same exercise with a very quiet pedal stop on: ideally something so quiet that it is almost not there, but in any case the quietest stop that you have. (This is often a soft 16′ stop all by itself.) This adds the distraction of sound, without requiring you (yet) to pay any particular attention to what you are actually doing with your feet. 

The approach to actually practicing hands and feet together outlined above (from last month’s column) will work well with any piece, any sort of music. It is of course crucial that you know absolutely for certain what the distribution of notes between the two hands is, before you attempt to practice each hand with pedal. (It is also crucial to know this when you work on learning a manuals-only piece. When a pedal part is involved the overall complexity goes up, and the importance of being certain about all of the component parts is heightened.) The simplest or most straightforward sort of piece with which to begin practicing hands and feet together is a trio: that is, a piece in which each hand plays one line (not chords and not more than one voice within the hand) and in which the pedal line is also one voice. This short piece by Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (Example 1) is a good example among many.

It can be practiced with the hands on one keyboard or on two. If you play it on two manuals, make sure that you use a registration in which the two hands balance well—that is, that neither drowns the other out, and that they are different enough that the overall effect is interesting. The pedal line can have its own sound altogether, or can, as is often useful especially on smaller organs, have a sound which is created in part by coupling. (Notice that, in this piece, if the pedal part is using stops that are also part of the left hand sound, then on the second beat of the third measure, the pedal is taking over a note that the left hand has been playing. It is important not to let the sound of this confuse you when you put those parts together). 

A number of fingerings and pedaling are possible. Two pedalings are shown in Examples 2 and 3. (And you can of course create one of your own.) This short piece is from Lemmens’s École d’Orgue (1862), which includes many other such useful pieces. 

Bach’s setting of the chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir from the Orgelbüchlein is a longer and more intricate piece; it is also very suitable for working on combining voices in a trio texture. Example 4 shows the opening of the piece.

The texture remains the same throughout: the eighth-note line in the pedal, evocative perhaps of a continuo line played by a stringed instrument, the largely chord-derived sixteenth-note middle voice, and the slower ornamented chorale melody in the soprano voice. The piece presents interesting musical and technical questions overall, about how to render the groupings suggested by the slurs, what sort of articulation to apply to the pedal line (bowed strings as an inspiration, or pizzicato? or perhaps not a stringed instrument after all), how to create a pedaling for the repeated notes that make up so much of the pedal line, and so on. You will come up with solutions to these questions as you practice each separate line. You must be very secure with the notes of each line before you work on putting any two lines together. However, you also have to be comfortable enough with your approach to some of these basic interpretive matters—articulations, phrasings, and so on, that you need not worry about them as you are putting complex lines together carefully. However, it is a true and inevitable part of learning music that you will have to be open to changing at least the subtleties of some of these choices as you get to know the piece better and specifically as you hear how the separate parts interact with one another. You don’t have to force these changes, but they are likely to come.

As always, there is no reason to require that the whole piece be ready to put together before you start putting any of it together, nor is there any reason to start the process of putting the piece together with the beginning and go to the end. In fact, it is important to remember that you can start putting together any passages from this (or any other) piece as soon as they are ready, based on your progress in learning the separate parts. The longer the piece, the more of an issue this will become. In this instance, measure 3—in which the motion of the pedal line is the most straightforward of any in the piece—might be the first measure in which you want to try to combine the pedal with one and then the other of the manual parts. Measures 10–12 in which the pedal line is consistently moving by step might be next. This should be shaped by your own experience as you work on the separate lines. This is a piece that must be worked on patiently, as there is a lot going on. (There are as many pedal notes in two measures of Ich ruf’ zu dir as there are in the whole Lemmens piece above). It is probably appropriate to work on combining parts in this piece in units of at the very most two measures. It is absolutely fine, and might well be best for parts of the piece, to work in units as small as the half measure.

In pieces in which the manuals have a texture of more than two voices—either more complex counterpoint or chord-based or other non-contrapuntal textures—the process of putting hands and feet together is exactly the same as what we have been discussing. The difference (not really a difference) is that you must be especially honest with yourself about whether each of the more complex manual parts is comfortably learned before you start putting it together with other parts. Pieces of this sort make up most of the organ repertoire. There are a host of different particular textures possible, some of which are:

1) a single voice in one hand and chords in the other hand;

2) a single voice in one hand and two or more voice counterpoint in the other hand;

3) three contrapuntal voices in the hands, the middle of which migrates between the two hands;

4) miscellaneous changing non-contrapuntal texture.

Brief excerpts illustrate different textures. Example 5, from the Fugue à 5 of de Grigny’s Livre d’Orgue, is a passage with two voices in each hand and one in the pedal. This is meant to be played on two manuals and pedal, as the manual parts overlap considerably.

Example 6 is a passage from Résignation from the Pièces de fantaisie by Louis Vierne. Here the manuals have three voices, meant to be played together on one manual. The middle voice would most comfortably be shared between the hands. Since there is no one correct way to do this—it will naturally work out differently from one player to another—it is especially important to work out your own hand choices and fingering and practice each hand thoroughly before beginning to combine hands and feet.

Example 7 is from Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf by Bach—from the Orgelbüchlein. In this case the left hand has one (quite virtuosic) line, and the right hand has a texture which, like a typical hymn, is simultaneously contrapuntal and chordal.

This is again a piece that must be played on two separate manuals (and pedal) since the swooping tenor voice in the left hand often occupies the same space as the right hand voices/chords.

Hymns that are presented in the traditional manner—four-voice arrangements with the hymn tune in the soprano voice and each of the other voices following that voice rhythmically and supporting it harmonically—provide good material for practicing the art of playing hands and feet together. The process is the same as that described above. For convenience and simplicity in using hymns for this purpose, it is perfectly all right to assume that the tenor voice, printed as the upper line in the lower staff, constitutes the left hand part, and that the soprano and alto voices, printed together in the upper staff constitute the right hand part. The bass line is the pedal part. Playing the three pairs of component parts of many hymns—after going though the individual parts enough to learn them, and without even necessarily putting all the parts together—is good drill for combining hands and feet in general.

(In some hymns there are notes in the alto part that could more conveniently be played in the left hand, but it is not important to work that out in order to use hymns as practice material at this stage. If the fingering of a hymn that you are looking at appears particularly awkward, you can move on to a different one. Of course, for this purpose we are ignoring the notion of “soloing out” the hymn tune, or rearranging the notes of the hymn in any other way).

The left hand and pedal parts of the version of the Old Hundredth that we have looked at before, written out as separate lines, are shown in Example 8. 

You might or might not find it useful to write out the lower two voices of a few hymns this way. It is entirely possible to read the same information off the “normal” way of printing out the hymn, however if at first you find that at all confusing or if it seems less obvious to follow the two separate voices that way, you might find it useful to write those voices out explicitly for the first few hymns that you look at.

If you use hymns as practice material for the overall project of learning to play with hands and feet together, you will also become increasingly comfortable with the process of playing hymns. There is nothing wrong with using hymns or any other music just as practice material. For example, if you wish to go through a hymnal or a selection of any repertoire simply working on the left hand and pedal aspect of the pieces, without progressing to learning the entire pieces, this can be fine practice. You can return to the pieces as a whole another time if you wish. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 2: First movement
This month’s column looks at the first movement—Introduction-Choral—of the Suite Gothique. In the main, we will outline an approach to practicing the movement, starting of course with working out fingerings and pedalings. We will also consider some interpretive questions, mainly as they interact with or affect choices that must be made about fingering and pedaling.
Several technical features of this movement immediately stand out:
• Many thick chords in the hands—both hands;
• Double pedal for several measures;
• Except for the double pedal passages, the pedal part is strikingly low in compass, with the E-flat in the middle of the pedal keyboard as the highest note;
• Very little indication for swell pedal use;
• The hands sometimes more or less double each other in octaves;
• Conceptually each hand seems to be more of its own part than is usually true in a contrapuntal piece, where voices often wander from hand to hand—however, that does not mean that the hands cannot help each other out a bit;
• Very few chords do not include raised notes;
• There are no explicit instructions from the composer about articulation or phrasing, except for commas in three places, and one important slur, with its repeat.

Articulation
The thick chords raise one important technical issue right away, namely the matter of fingering in relation to articulation. It is essentially always easier—more natural as to hand position—to play successive chords of three or more notes non-legato. Sometimes it is actually impossible to do otherwise, more so the more notes there are in the chords, of course, but also depending on other matters, such as the placement within chords of raised notes. However, in a typical passage made up of successive chords, there are almost always some that can be played legato fairly easily, others that can be played legato with some sort of extra effort, and some that really cannot be played legato at all. This is of course different, around the margins at least, for different players, with hands of different sizes.
In music that we believe to be basically non-legato in overall style, none of this presents particular problems. Chord fingerings can be chosen based largely on the comfort of each chord—in turn based mostly on hand position—and the non-legato transition from one chord to the next can be practiced until it is, while non-legato, still smooth and cantabile, if that is what is desired. In a piece or a passage that we want to play legato, we must grapple with finding the best way to make connections between chords when it is not easy to do so. (By contrast, it is, from a technical point of view, almost trivially easy to play at least most of the upper voice melody in the third movement—Prière—legato, as per the marked phrases. The fingers of the right hand are simply available to do so.)
The question of whether this movement is meant to be legato, or the question of whether a given player wants or prefers to play it legato is unclear, or, more accurately, it is one that different students, teachers, and players will answer differently from one another (and from me). I am not interested in prejudging questions like this—that is, I want to try as best I can to leave all sorts of interpretive possibilities open as we consider how to work on the pieces under discussion. Also, there is a close relationship in a piece like this between articulation and room acoustics. In a very resonant room, a thick texture will come across as essentially legato even if the fingers and feet put small spaces between the notes and chords. If the player literally connects notes and chords, then there is a chance that the result will be enough beyond legato to sound unintelligible. This is an important consideration, especially since most organ repertoire, certainly including the pieces of Boëllmann, was written to be played in very resonant rooms. Of course, we must play in the rooms that are available to us.

Fingering
A fingering for the chords of the opening, in the right hand, that is designed to be comfortable, accepting that most of the chords will be non-legato, might look like Example 1. This happens to suit my hands. For another player, the best fingering might be a little bit different. In m. 5, for example, some players would rather do this (Example 2):

To achieve more full legato, substitution might be used, especially, for example, in the second and sixth measures (Example 3). (I find this fingering awkward, but possible with practice.)
A player with large hands might be able to do this (Example 4),

releasing the lower two notes of the opening chord early, but joining the upper two notes to the notes of the second chord. (I cannot quite do this one. Don’t try it unless it is really comfortable. The stretch could cause injury.)
In the passage at m. 13 (Example 5), the left hand can take some of the notes printed on the upper staff. I have put boxes around a few that I think make sense treated this way, although there are others that are possible. The decision to do this would make it easier to play the upper notes of the right-hand part legato, at the expense of some legato in the inner voices. This is an artistic judgment call, but notice the slurs in m. 18 and later its echo in m. 25. These are the only slurs in the entire movement, and are probably an important part of the rhetoric of this phrase.
Any student must make decisions and choices about fingering matters such as these, perhaps in consultation with a teacher. There are two important technical practicing points to make about some of these fingerings. First, non-legato fingerings will end up sounding smoother and most natural the more they are practiced, at first, with large rather than small breaks between the notes. That is, a gesture such as this (where the asterisks are) (Example 6),

should be practiced with the A-flat/
E-flat/C chord released almost as soon as it is played (but released gently), so that the motion to the next (B-flat/F/D) chord is as easy as possible. Then it will also be easy, later in the practicing process, to close that gap and make the articulation very small and unobtrusive. If you try to make the articulation too small from the beginning—waiting until the last instant and then quickly moving to, almost lunging at, the next chord—then it is likely to end up sounding awkward and stiff, no matter how much you practice it.
Second, it is important to remember to use the correct order in any fingering that includes multiple substitutions. For example, in this triple substitution (Example 7),

it is necessary to execute the substitutions from the lowest to the highest: 2-1, then 3-2, then 5-4. In every case, it is important to carry out substitutions in such a way that the hand moves inward—becomes smaller—rather than moving outward and stretching out. This can always be worked out by trial and error, and getting it right can make the difference between a substitution’s being impossible and its being easy.

Pedaling
One advantage of double pedal is that it resolves any doubt as to which foot should play which note. In effect there are two pedal lines—in the case of the first four measures of this piece, identical to one another except for being an octave apart—and each line has to be executed by one foot. An approach to pedal playing that involves paying attention to the position of each foot with respect to itself (as outlined in my earlier columns on pedal playing) not just, or mainly, in relation to the other foot, tends to make double pedal passages not seem as different from “regular” pedal as they might otherwise. In the case of this passage, as with the manual part, there is a relationship between pedaling and articulation. If this were a line from a Buxtehude piece (which it, unlike the manual part, could just as well be) then any comfortable pedaling would be fine: perhaps all toe, perhaps some heels when the angle was such as to make that comfortable. If, in keeping with an overall interpretive approach, we want to play this line legato, then a pedaling like this for the right foot part might work (Example 8).
The two quarter notes could be played by rolling the toe area of the foot, that is, playing the B-flat with the outside of the foot and the A-flat with the inside. The first note (G) of the second measure could be played with the toe, creating what should be a small articulation before that note. I might also play the first note of the passage with the toe initially, to make a clean, crisp beginning easier to achieve, before substituting the heel to prepare for the next note. There are other possible variations. The left foot could well use exactly the same pedaling as the right.
For the non-double segments of the pedal line, different players will choose different pedalings based largely on personal preference. Here are two different pedalings for mm. 5–8 (Examples 9 and 10); and of course there are other possibilities.

Practicing
The most efficient procedure for practicing this movement is the same as for almost any piece: work out fingerings and pedalings; divide the piece into manageable sections (in this piece, it makes sense to work with the phrases suggested by commas and by fermatas, although it is certainly fine to subdivide those units into smaller ones); practice these sections with separate hands and feet, very slowly; put hands together, or hands and feet together, only when the separate components are very well learned; increase tempo only when a given tempo has become almost trivially easy. This procedure can never be mentioned too often, and it can never be stressed enough that, if it is followed thoroughly and patiently, it always works.
In the case of this movement, I would strongly suggest that at every stage of working on the piece, until it is really ready to go at approximately the composer’s suggested tempo of half note equals 50, the beat in the student’s head, or coming from the student’s metronome, be equal to an eighth note. The quarter note will be too slow to be followed easily until close to a performance tempo.

Special procedures
In the case of this movement, there are a few special procedures that can enhance the learning of the piece—that is, getting to know it musically—while the notes are being learned securely. These are analogous to the practicing of separate voices in a contrapuntal piece, but modified to reflect the texture and structure of this piece: one in which the melody—the top voice—is indeed musically the most important thing, and in which the interaction between that melody and the bass line is the main source of motion.
So the first special practice technique is simply to play the melody and the bass line together, omitting all of the other voices or chordal notes. This can be done with the bass line in the pedal—as soon as the pedal is well enough learned—or with the bass line in the left hand, read from the pedal line or extracted from the left hand part of the manuals-only phrases. It can also be done with the melody in the left hand—since the left hand often doubles the melody—and the bass in the pedal. This can be done before the fingering of the chords has been practiced and made comfortable, since the extracted individual lines are fairly easy to play. But I would also suggest continuing to do it at later stages of work on the piece as a listening exercise and a way of keeping focused on the architecture of the piece, rather than just the complexities of learning it.
In the passages in which the left hand doubles the right hand an octave lower (this is a slightly oversimplified description of the texture), it is difficult for the ears of the performer to follow the left-hand part. The higher sounds of the right-hand part predominate. And, although the left hand in these passages is in a meaningful sense somewhat subordinate to the right hand, the overall texture will benefit from the left hand’s being played in as interesting and nuanced a way as the right hand, and from the two hands really being in sync. One way to work on this is to play the two hands together—once they have been practiced and are secure!—on different keyboards, with the left hand significantly louder. The right hand should be almost but not quite actually drowned out. Of course this only applies to some passages (mm. 1–8, 16–23, and 33–37, more or less). Then, when next practicing on a “normal” sound, try to focus on listening to the left-hand part, and let the right hand take care of itself.
Next month I will return to the Buxtehude Praeludium, looking at the first contrapuntal section beginning at m. 13. We will return later to the Boëllmann, looking at the Menuet.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 3: Practicing the first fugal section
This month we return to the Buxtehude Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, looking at the second section of the piece, which begins at m. 13 and goes through about m. 50. This—except for its last three measures or so, which are a transitional passage, cadential in nature, and which we will in the main discuss next month—is a contrapuntal, essentially fugal, section, a fact which has implications for studying, practicing, and learning the music. Much of what I will suggest here will involve revisiting the ideas that I discussed in the series of columns about counterpoint that began in September 2008, applying those ideas to this specific passage.
The fugal section that begins in m. 13 is in four voices. The musical text could by and large be written out on four staves, accounting for all of the notes, with each staff presenting a coherently “melodic” melody. (It departs from this briefly in mm. 32–33 with the addition of a few “extra” notes, and again in the transitional passage.) The voices behave like the voices of a contrapuntal piece: each of the four voices has a different compass, each of the voices is present most of the time but not all of the time, and, melodically, the voices do the same things at different times and different things at the same time. The section is “fugal” in that the voices enter one at a time, each with a version of the same theme, and that theme recurs a lot during the section.

Theme
This theme is as follows, in its first iteration:

It enters first in the top voice, and then in the other voices in descending order. It is present in 24 of the measures of the section, and a motive identical to the second half of this fugue subject is present in another 3½ or 4 measures. The longest stretch without any of this theme present—prior to the transitional/cadential section at the end—is about one measure.
(There is an interesting side note about this theme, one that in a sense is irrelevant to the piece on its own terms because of the chronology, but which should be intriguing to organists nonetheless. The first half of the theme is the same as the fugue subject of Bach’s Fugue in E-flat Major, BWV 552, and the second half of the Buxtehude theme is essentially the same as a recurrent pedal motive in the Prelude, BWV 552. This Buxtehude work seems like a more likely source of Bach’s inspiration for the so-called “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue than is William Croft’s hymn tune, which Bach most likely never heard.)

Bass voice in pedal?
The first practical question about working on this section is whether or not the bass voice belongs in the pedal. This is often a question with Buxtehude, since the sources for his music do not often indicate pedal explicitly, and in any case are rather far removed in origin from the composer. In this section, there are several reasons to believe that the bass voice was indeed intended as a pedal part. First, it works on the pedal keyboard, and, in order to make it work, the composer has shaped it a little bit differently from any of the three other voices. That is, there is no scale-wise writing in the bass voice that is any faster than the eighth-note, whereas there is such writing in each of the other voices. Second, there are many places in this passage where it is awkward to play all four of the voices in the hands and where the fingering is much more natural without the lowest voice. (This is true, for example, in m. 33 or mm. 42–43.)
There is, as far as I can see, only one spot prior to the transitional/cadential section where it is actually impossible to play all four voices in the hands, namely the second eighth note of m. 44. Someone else might be able to find a clever way to make it work, and it is certainly possible to do so by fudging the duration of some of the longer notes. (Someone with larger hands than mine would have no trouble with it, but the stretch of a tenth is beyond what is normally found in music of this time.) Furthermore, the transitional section ending in m. 50 certainly requires pedal—really physically requires it—and there is no particularly good place to shift the bass line to the pedal if that line has been played in the hands from m. 20 on. So on balance this seems to me to be a section to be played with pedal.
(The closing fugue of the Praeludium in E Minor, BuxWV 142, presents an interestingly different picture. There the fingering is made dramatically easier, more natural, and more idiomatic to the organ playing of the time by not including the bass voice in what the hands are expected to play. However, at the same time the bass line itself is, if not unplayable in the pedal, still extraordinarily difficult and well outside what would have been the norm at the time.)

Learning protocol
The protocol for learning this fugal section starts with the approach that I outlined in the columns on counterpoint mentioned above; that is, playing through each voice separately and then playing pairs of voices. Here are some specific points about applying that approach to this passage:
1) The section that we are looking at is about 34 measures long—long enough that it should be broken up into smaller sections for this kind of practicing. It doesn’t really matter how it is broken up. It is fine to practice separate voices and pairs of voices in chunks of just a few measures, or in significantly larger chunks. One average way to do it would be to have breaks at around m. 23 and at around m. 36. Each voice will naturally break at a slightly different place. So, for example, it would make sense to play the soprano voice from m. 13 to m. 20, the alto from m. 15 to the middle of m. 23, the tenor from m. 17 through the first beat of m. 25, and the bass from m. 20 through m. 24. Then these sections of these voices can be combined in pairs.
2) When playing individual voices, it is fine to finger those voices in ways that will not be used when later putting the voices together. This is especially necessary and important with inner voices—typically the alto voice in a piece or passage that has three voices in the hands. Such an inner voice will almost certainly end up migrating from one hand to the other. However, at this stage it is important to play each voice in a way that is comfortable and natural, and that makes it as easy as possible to hear that voice as a coherent melody. It is also necessary to be flexible about playing inner voices in either hand. So, of course, when putting soprano and alto together it will be necessary to play the alto in the left hand, but when putting alto together with tenor it will be necessary to play the alto in the right hand.
3) At this stage, it is also not necessary to play the pedal part in the pedals. Practicing the pedal line as a pedal line (see below) can come later or can start in parallel with this process of getting to know the voices. However, for carrying out this approach to learning the voices, just as it doesn’t matter what fingering is used, it also doesn’t matter whether the feet play the bass voice or the left hand does. The important thing is that the student be able to listen carefully and hear the voices well while playing them.
4) In putting voices together in pairs it is a good idea some of the time to play the two voices on two manuals, in order to hear them with extra clarity. This is especially useful when voices cross or, as for example with the soprano and alto voices at mm. 38–39, come very close. The two sounds should be similar in volume and different in character.

Pedaling
While studying individual voices and pairs of voices, it is emphatically not a good idea also to finger and practice the manual part of the texture. That will come a little bit later. It is perfectly fine to practice the pedal part, however. It is interesting that in this piece the pedaling choices are more straightforward, and in fact the pedal part is probably easier overall, in the more active fugue subject and subject fragments, than in the measures in which the pedal is playing long-held notes.
The fugue subject can easily be played with alternate toes, starting with the right foot; the subject fragment that occurs in m. 33 and elsewhere can also be played with alternate toes, starting with the left foot. These pedalings are natural enough that I would expect essentially every student or player to use them. (There are other possibilities: for example, using the same foot to play some of the successive quarter notes, or occasionally using heel to play some of the sixteenth notes that are on white keys when the immediately prior note was on an adjacent black key. On the whole, I doubt that many players would find these variants easier or better, but perhaps some would. They could certainly be OK.) This consistent alternate toe pedaling implies nothing in particular about articulation, phrasing, timing, or other interpretive/performance matters.
However, when the pedal part moves more slowly, particularly from m. 43 on, pedaling choices both affect and depend on choices about articulation. To the extent that the player prefers or can accept spaces between these long notes, he or she can apply the principal of playing each note with whatever foot happens to lie most comfortably above that note. As an example that would lead me to the following succession of toes for the eleven pedal notes beginning with the first note of m. 44 and going to the end of m. 50:
l-r-r-l-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
For someone else it might be a little bit different. Creating more legato in this passage would involve different pedaling choices—for example, crossing the left foot under to play the E in m. 44, and then playing the C# in m. 45 with the right foot.
Of course, practicing the pedal line once pedaling choices have been made involves the usual things: keep it slow and accurate; look at the feet as little as possible—ideally not at all; repeat small-enough passages that the memory of the feeling of the passage does not fade before you get back to it. When the pedal part has become secure, join it first to the tenor voice, then to the left hand part as such—once that has also been practiced as outlined below—then to the hands together. (Of course, it is fine also to practice pedal with right hand alone. However, as always, left hand and pedal is most important. Usually if left hand and pedal has been practiced enough, then adding the right hand is something that feels natural and almost easy.)
And do not forget what might be the cardinal rule of practicing: if you hear yourself make a wrong note while practicing, do not stop or hesitate or go back and correct it. By the time that your ears have heard the wrong note, your mind should already have moved on to playing the next note. Next time through the passage you can make sure to adjust what needs to be adjusted to correct what was wrong.

Fingering choices
Once you have played through all of the voices and all of the pairs of voices, it is time to work out a fingering for the three voices that will be in the hands. And, as I discussed in the column from last July, the first task is to decide which notes belong in which hand. This must come before making specific fingering choices, and it must be done in such a way as to make those fingering choices as easy and natural as possible. As I wrote before: I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make a passage that could be fairly easy almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in a way that was awkward. However, there is not always only one good answer, and the answer is not the same, necessarily, for any two players.
In any situation in which three voices are present and the notes of the alto voice can be reached by either hand—that is, generally, in which neither the soprano notes nor the tenor notes are more than an octave away from the alto notes—the player can, in a pinch, try it both ways. Generally it is nice to put “extra” notes with whichever other voice is less active. So, in m. 19, for example, I would play the first three notes of the alto voice in the right hand since the tenor voice has sixteenth notes, but then play the half note E in the left hand, since the soprano voice then has sixteenth notes. In m. 24 I would play the one alto voice (whole) note in the right hand, even though the soprano voice notes are a bit farther away, since the tenor voice is more active; in m. 25, however, I would shift the alto voice to the left hand since the soprano voice become much more active. Again, these choices are not right and other choices wrong. It is simply very important that each player—each student perhaps with the help of a teacher—work this out carefully and patiently, in a way that feels right.
After the “handing” and fingering have been worked out, it is possible to try an interesting challenge, namely to play the alto voice alone with the correct fingering. This involves letting that voice move from one hand to the other according to the plan that has been worked out. The goal is to play it in such a way that it sounds as natural and cantabile as it would sound played in one hand. It is simultaneously harder to do this outside the cushion of the other voices and good practice for playing that voice well when it is partly obscured by the other voices.

Practice procedures
Practicing the three-voice manual texture of course follows the usual pattern for any practicing. Each hand should be practiced separately, slowly, until it seems easy. The tempo should be allowed to rise only according to a pace that is comfortable: once a passage is learned well at one tempo, it can be played a little bit faster; playing it much faster will often lead to its falling apart. Once each hand is solid at a given tempo, the two hands can be put together at a slower tempo. This can then also be allowed to speed up gradually. The rule about not stopping or hesitating when you hear yourself make a wrong note is always utterly important.
After a player or student has carried out all of the above—individual voices, pairs of voices, pedal part, individual hands, left hand with pedal, and all the rest—there is an interesting exercise to try. Play the section—well learned, all parts together—and consciously listen only to one voice at a time. This is easiest with the soprano voice, next easiest with whichever voice is the lowest at a given time, quite hard with a real inner voice. The ability to do this and also keep the whole thing going accurately and with a feeling of ease will help to reveal the fruits of studying the voices thoroughly and also test the solidity of the overall practicing of the notes.
Next month I will discuss both the transition measures 47–50 and the free section that follows, beginning in m. 51. ■