On Teaching

It has always struck me as interesting that changing fingers on repeated notes and substitution are so similar to one another in what they actually involve physically. Thus it makes sense to me to use one of them to introduce the other. It is also important to keep them straight: it is extremely common for students to fall into the habit of doing a substitution when they think that they are changing fingers from one note to the repetition of that note.   

This continues without a break from last month’s column.

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

A further practice step is to try patterns in which the hand plays more than one note at a time (Examples 1–4). The fingerings given above and below each line are alternates. There are other possibilities, for example, involving pairs such as 1/4 and 2/5. You can adapt these exercises in ways that occur to you, such as using black notes. Once again you should experiment with articulation. You can make non-repeated chords legato, and repeated chords any degree of non-legato; or try to match, as nearly identically as possible, the articulation of each of the motions from one chord to the next; or use a variety of non-legato articulations. Keep the hands light and relaxed, especially while releasing notes. Pay attention to the direction in which you release each finger when another finger is preparing to play that same note: up, down, slightly (or fully) to one side or the other. These logistic possibilities all have their place. They work out differently for players with varying relative finger lengths, and also for varying note patterns. It is your job to pay attention as you work on these exercises and figure out the most comfortable ways.

Repeated notes often occur in the context of ornaments, especially trills. The exercise in Example 5 allows you to practice that, assuming that you start each trill with the upper (auxiliary) note.You can play the opening note with 3 and each of the trills in succession with 4-3, or play the opening note with 2 and each of the trills with 3-2, or perhaps other patterns. You should adapt this exercise to other specific note patterns, including some involving black notes and the left hand. Do not worry about making the trills especially long or fast: the focus of practicing is the repeated note that initiates each trill.

Another ornament-based repeated note exercise, involving mordents, is shown in Example 6. You can play each quarter note with 3 and each mordent with 2-3-2, or other fingering patterns. For the purpose of this exercise it is only necessary that the final note of each mordent be played with a different finger from that which you want to use to play the following quarter note. Again, adapt this exercise to different specific note patterns and to the right hand.

Playing repeated notes with different fingers, in addition to giving the player more control over the timing, articulation, and sound of the repeated note patterns, also gives the player a free chance to re-position the hand. It can actually clarify and simplify fingering patterns for the passage around the repeated notes themselves. The excerpt from Rameau shown in Example 7 (part of the fifth of six variations on a Gavotte in A Minor) is an example of this, so extreme that if Rameau hadn’t written it, anyone discussing the fingering of repeated notes would have had to do so.

For all players except those with the very largest hands, changing fingers on the repeated notes in each group of four sixteenth notes is actually necessary to permit the playing of the other sixteenth notes. The same is true in the left hand sixteenth note pattern in the sixth variation from the same piece (Example 8).

But in being necessary it also guides the shaping of all of the rest of the fingering in such a way that the passages are actually quite natural and straightforward to play. Each decision about what fingers to use on the first and second notes of each pair of repeated notes should be based on where your hand is coming from and where it is going. Example 9 shows one possible fingering for the left hand part of the preceding example.

In Example 10, from the Brahms chorale Mein Jesu, der du mich, there is a moment, at the beginning of the second full measure, where the use of a different finger on a repeated note makes it possible to set up a simple and effective fingering for the succeeding passage. (My suggested fingering is not the only way to do it.)

The musical advantages of using different fingers to play repeated notes can only be heard and felt if the hand is very relaxed and the touch smooth and fluid. Any repeated-note moment (such as the one in this Brahms example) is a good place to remember, recapture, and apply the feeling of lightness gained from the trill exercise described above. 

Substitution

As opposed to changing fingers on repeated notes, the technique known as “substitution” is changing fingers on held notes. While these two techniques serve very different musical and technical purposes, and indeed are most typically associated with different historical periods and repertoire, they have so much in common technically as to be essentially versions of one another. 

There are several things to bear in mind when beginning to work on substitution:

1) A substitution can be either measured—the new finger placed silently on the note at a predetermined time, probably defined in relation to the beat of the passage, or instant—that is, the new finger slides in to replace the original finger as part of the gesture whereby the original finger played the note in the first place. (Whereas the timing of finger change in a repeated-note passage is determined by the timing of that passage’s notes.) A substitution can also be somewhat in-between: that is, not instant, not a one-gesture slide, but not specifically timed to be on a beat or subdivision of a beat. This latter is probably the most common in practice, though all are quite useful.

2) In any substitution there is likely to be something to observe about the specific direction in which the original finger departs and the direction from which the new finger arrives. It may make sense to get the original finger out of the way by lifting it up, moving it sideways, allowing it to curve downward, or something else, or some combination. The new finger can slide in under the old, or from above it, or from one side or the other. All of this affects or is affected by hand position and by the relative lengths of the fingers. It is not—since the substitution is silent in any case—something that affects the musical results. It is about comfort and reliability. 

3) Substitution is generally associated with legato. The usual reason for introducing an extra gesture into the act of playing is to permit the hand to be in a position to play the next note or notes without having to release the existing note(s) in a way that creates an unwanted break. Sometimes, however, substitution simply seems to make a passage easier. Different players develop different degrees of comfort with substitution and use it to differing extents. 

4) Substitution is more likely to be necessary or to provide an appropriate solution for creating true legato in situations in which a hand is playing more than one note: counterpoint or chords. In single line textures, substitution is rarely necessary to effect a particular musical result. (When it is necessary, that is usually a result of something having to do with very wide intervals.) That is not to say that it is not often comfortable or convenient. Sometimes it can serve the same function as changing fingers on repeated notes in that it can allow the hand to reposition itself efficiently.

5) Substitution—unlike most of what most performing musicians do while playing—creates physical gestures that do not correspond to anything that the player or the listener actually hears. This can break or weaken or generally interfere with the player’s ability to experience the rhythmic vitality of the music through the kinesthetic experience of playing. For some players this sense—almost of dancing to the music while playing, but doing so with the playing gestures themselves rather than by literal dancing—is a real and valuable aid to vivid and convincing performance. If the feeling that the hands (and perhaps feet) are doing things that aren’t part of the rhythmic flow of the music seems, to a particular player, like a problem, then that player might well be inclined to use substitution less than other players. There are also ways of counteracting or compensating for that effect. At an early stage of learning organ, and of becoming comfortable with substitution, this is something to file away at the back of the mind, in case it seems like an issue to be dealt with later.

6) Sometimes a tendency to rely on substitution as an all-purpose way of finding notes (scrambling for notes, in effect) can lead a player—whether a student or otherwise—to cut short the process of working out good, efficient fingerings and then practicing those fingerings with enough focus and dedication to learn them. In this way, a heavy reliance on substitution—especially by a beginning or “intermediate” student—can actually damage the learning process, sometimes seriously. This is far from being a reason not to learn and work on substitution, since it is a valuable tool, and for some purposes a necessary one. It is simply something to watch out for.

The second exercise given above for changing fingers on repeated notes can be adapted as a good beginning point for practicing substitution, simply by tying the repeated notes, and keeping the fingering the same (Example 11).

And this same note pattern can be used with an extremely wide variety of fingerings, since in principle any substitution is possible and is worth practicing. For example, the right hand fingering could be 3-4-5(1)-2-3-2-1(5)-4-3(5) (The parenthesis indicates substitution. In this fingering, the tied g’ going from the second to the third measure does not have a substitution.) Another possibility would be 1-2-3(1)-2-3(1)-4-3(1)-3-2(1). These fingerings are musically random: their purpose is to help you get the feeling of different substitution patterns.

The two-note chord exercises above can also be adapted as substitution exercises (Example 12). With the same-note chords tied, the fingerings would be carried out as substitutions rather than as changes of fingering on newly played notes. This can be tried with other specific fingerings, and other similar note patterns, and of course also in the left hand.

In carrying out substitutions with multiple notes, it is important to do the individual substitutions in the correct order. The correct order is the one that is the most comfortable and natural physically. (Again, since the substitutions are silent, this is about physical comfort and reliability rather than any audible result.) Usually that means the order that keeps the hand small: that doesn’t stretch the hand out any more than necessary. So, in the example above, the substitutions on the lower notes of the two note chords should be done first. It is always possible to figure out by trial and error which way is best. Sometimes it is also possible to figure it out in advance by analysis of hand position. Performing multiple substitutions in the correct order also has the effect of allowing the whole hand to move in one gesture towards the next note or notes or towards its next position. It is extremely important to get this right. That can make the difference between a substitution’s being easy and natural and its being both difficult and a potential source of strain or even of real injury.

Next month’s column will continue with more exercises for substitution and examples drawn from the repertoire.

Organ Method XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing repeated notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.

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

Disjunct Motion II

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

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

Controlling releases

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

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

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

Examples 1 and 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples 3 and 4

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

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

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

Example 5

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

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

Examples 6 through 8: Patterns and trills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some thoughts on ornaments I
The playing of ornaments is one of those areas that many—maybe most—students find intimidating. This is only partly because it can be genuinely difficult. It certainly can be difficult, although, like most physical tasks, it can be made much less so through the right kind of technical preparation and through an adequate amount of well-targeted practice. The intimidation factor with ornamentation comes, I believe, mostly from a fear of getting it wrong. There seems to be so much data about how this kind of trill was played in Italy in 1620 or how that kind of appoggiatura was played in Austria in the early nineteenth century that it can seem impossible to keep up with it all. One well-known book on ornamentation is nearly 600 pages long, and that is just one book of very many. Also, impeccably credentialed experts on the subject can disagree. It is easy, looking at a piece of music, to know what the “regular” notes are, though of course it may not be easy to play them. But it is not necessarily easy, or even possible, to know for sure what the notes of ornaments are or what the exact rhythmic shape of a given ornament should be. It is also a common experience for even very talented and “advanced” students to feel that they have learned to play certain ornaments, but that those ornaments just don’t sound very good. This is always frustrating, and extraordinarily so when it happens more or less all the time.
I believe that part of this frustration comes from, or is made worse by, a confusion among some of these issues. That is, students often assume that their ornaments sound bad because they don’t know what the notes of those ornaments should be, or they have gotten something else wrong in the realm of the historical or the musicological, when in fact they sound bad because the execution is awkward or the preparation before the ornament itself is wrong. It may be important to know whether a given trill should start on the main note or the upper note, or how long or how fast it should be, or whether a certain appoggiatura should be long or short. However, any of the above should be able to sound good—natural, fluid, graceful—whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the composer’s intent. It is important to sort these different aspects of playing ornaments out from one another in order to be able to work effectively on learning to play ornaments well.

So, let us consider several issues.
First of all, what is an ornament? On one level an ornament is a note pattern indicated by a sign, rather than by notes as such. If, for example, the three notes c–b–c are indicated by ordinary notes, they amount to an ordinary bit of music, a phrase or perhaps part of one. If those same notes are indicated—as they could be—by a mordent sign on the note c, then that entity is an ornament. Likewise, the three notes c–d–e could be indicated by three ordinary notes or by the note e with the sign for a slide, or the notes d–c–d–c–d–c by six notes or by a trill sign over the note c. This is basic and well known. So, what is the difference between notes indicated by an ornament sign and the same notes written out? Sometimes there might be little or no difference. In fact, there are plenty of pieces in the repertoire with parallel passages in which the same notes are one time written out and another time marked by ornament signs, with no reason to believe that they should be different one time from the other. (This may make it appear that our distinction between ornaments and other notes is at least sometimes arbitrary. This is true, and actually can be helpful in teaching students to play ornaments well and to be comfortable playing them. A significant part of the fear of ornaments comes specifically from identifying them as ornaments, as something other than just some notes to play.) However, when there is a difference, it is likely to be that notes indicated by ornament signs are meant to be quick and light or to deviate subtly from any rhythm that could be spelled out by notes in our rather simple system of rhythmic notation, or both of these.
In fact, from the point of view of execution or performance, ornaments are simply “quick, light notes” or perhaps the greatest exemplar of that kind of passage. This means that playing ornaments well can be achieved by applying the same kind of light, fluid touch that is in fact best for playing any note patterns on the organ. It also means that working on playing ornaments effectively can be one of the best ways of improving lightness of touch and freedom from tension in all playing.
There is an exercise that I use with students that I refer to as a trill exercise. It is extraordinarily effective at helping a player to develop the right kind of touch for playing trills. However, it is equally useful for teaching a light touch for any kind of fast playing, including both non-trill ornaments and any other kind of rapid passage. (It is in fact the only actual exercise that I normally suggest to students, given that in general I believe that it is best to practice pieces or note patterns drawn from pieces.)

A trill exercise
This exercise is not written in music notation, and, although it involves playing notes at the keyboard, it is really a kind of relaxation/breathing/meditation exercise. It can be carried out at the organ or at the harpsichord. It can also work on the piano, as long as the player remembers not to care about producing a robust or loud sound. It goes like this:
1) Sit at the keyboard, and identify the place on the keyboard where each hand can meet the keys with the arm, wrist, hand, and fingers more or less in a straight line. This is usually at the notes written near the top of the treble clef for the right hand and at the notes near the bottom of the bass clef for the left hand, though it varies a bit from one person to another. It is fine to let the elbows float away from the sides. If you are sitting at an instrument with more than one keyboard, choose the keyboard that it is most natural and comfortable to reach.
2) Pick two adjacent (natural) notes and two fingers. Initially it is a good idea to use adjacent and “good” fingers, perhaps 2–3 or 3–4. Later it is fine to do the exercise with any pair of fingers with which you might ever want to play a trill. The two notes should feel as similar to each other as possible. On many organs this is not an issue, though it is on some. It certainly is an issue on many harpsichords. Choose a quiet registration: a Gedeckt or Dulciana, perhaps, or, on a harpsichord, one 8-foot stop by itself.
3) Play one of the notes lightly and comfortably with the finger assigned to it, and hold the note. While holding this note, let your hand relax as much—as thoroughly—as you possibly can. This can be aided by moving the arm around a bit in the air—still holding the note—or by flexing the wrist a little bit, up and down, or by taking calm deep breaths. When you feel that your hand is fully relaxed:
4) Play the other note and then the first note again, as quickly and as lightly as you can. As you do this, you should have as little as possible of a feeling that your hand is bearing down into the keys. Instead, it should feel as if the hand is almost floating up and away—just failing to do so enough to allow the fingers to play the notes that they are trying to play.
5) After you have played these two rapid notes, you will notice that your hand has lost at least a little bit of its relaxation, that it has picked up a bit of tension or at least a bit more muscle tone than it had just before playing those two notes. So, the next step is, while continuing to hold the note that you are holding, again wait for your hand to become fully relaxed. You should then repeat the process described above, that is, the rapid playing of two notes. It can be repeated several times—four or five, maybe up to a dozen. It should never happen according to a beat or a schedule. Each time, while holding the note chosen as the first note, you must wait until your hand is perfectly relaxed before executing the rapid two-note gesture for the next time.
6) After doing this several times in a row, do the same thing but start with the other note and the other finger.
This exercise should be done with each hand, with various combinations of fingers. It is not a good idea to segue directly from doing this exercise to practicing or playing a trill or any other note pattern. Rather, it should simply be done by itself, perhaps for ten minutes or so at some point—or at two different points—during each practice session. Then, when actually practicing or trying to play a given trill (or other rapid ornament or other rapid passage), the idea is to remember and recapture the feeling in the hand, wrist, arm, shoulders, and body that you experienced during this exercise.
I have never known this exercise to fail to help a student, or any player, beginner or advanced, who spent some time with it. It can be used not just to develop a better feeling for the touch of trills, but also to train recalcitrant fingers to play trills and to play rapidly with control. In particular, it is very fruitful to do this exercise with 4–5, after having first done it with more “normal” trill fingers. Almost everyone I know believes that he or she “can’t” play trills with those fingers. In fact, almost everyone can after having applied this exercise to the task.
(I should mention that the original idea behind this exercise was suggested to me by my friend the late David Margeson in the early 1980s when he was a graduate student in organ at Yale. I have refined the idea and adapted it somewhat to the specifics of organ and harpsichord.)

Fingerings
A real necessity in playing ornaments well is planning good fingerings. This has several elements to it. First, of course, is choosing fingers for the notes of the ornament itself. In spite of the claim I made just above, it is a good idea to use the “best” fingers whenever possible. For most people, these are the middle three fingers, or indeed specifically 2 and 3. It is a good idea to use whatever fingers the player is most comfortable with—why compound difficulty by not doing so?—but it is also important not to be so tied to those fingers that passages before and after an ornament end up suffering from convoluted and unnecessarily difficult fingerings. For example, a player who can only play trills or rapid mordents with 2–3 will frequently get into trouble of this sort. A player who is also comfortable using 3–4 will get into much less trouble. Fingerings such as 4–5, 1–2, 1–3 are also useful, though the actual need for them arises less often. A consideration in choosing fingering for an ornament should always be the effect of that fingering on hand position and, in particular, the ability of the player to keep the fingers from migrating too deeply into the keyboard. So, for example, if one note of an ornament is a raised key and the other a natural, then it is wonderful to end up playing the raised note with 3 and the natural with 2 or 4 as appropriate. Reversing this leads to some kind of awkward hand position, and thus makes it harder to maintain a light, comfortable touch. The logistics of this vary at different points along the compass of the keyboard and also from one player to another depending on the relative lengths of the different fingers. The important thing is to remember to pay attention to the hand position that results from a fingering choice with an ornament.
If the note immediately before an ornament is the same note that actually begins the ornament, it is very important indeed to play the two successive iterations of that note with different fingers. This is an approach that I always prefer with repeated notes (see The Diapason, January 2009), but for preparing ornaments it is especially crucial. This is because, again, a light touch and a relaxed hand are absolutely essential to playing ornaments in a way that feels and sounds good. It is very common for a trill that should begin with the upper note to be preceded by that same note. The best way to work out this fingering is to decide first on the best fingering for the trill, based on the player/student’s preferences and on the logistics of the particular notes, then select a finger to play the preceding (same) note from among the fingers not designated to play the first note of the trill. This choice should be made based on the shape of the passage leading into the trill. If it is impossible to make that passage work without using the same finger for the final note before the trill and for the note that starts the trill itself, then the trill fingering should be changed if at all possible. I have very rarely indeed been unable to devise a good solution in this very common situation—perhaps never. The point for the teacher to make to the student is that it is both fairly easy to work this out and abundantly worth doing so. Awkward starts to trills are usually the result of simply not having thought out the fingering both of the trill itself and (especially) of the notes leading into the trill.
It is also very common for the note before an appoggiatura to be the same as the note of the appoggiatura itself. In this situation, using different fingers for the two iterations of that note will not only make the whole pattern of notes sound more natural and give greater control over timing and articulation, but it will specifically create the right accent relationship amongst the three notes: the note before the appoggiatura, the appoggiatura itself, and the note following it (the “main” note). Trying this example with each of the indicated fingerings (both for the right hand) can make this difference seem clear.
One of my frequent chamber music colleagues recently made the following comment to me about a (non-keyboard) musician with whom we both play a lot: “I’ve figured out why so-and-so’s ornaments always sound so good. He plays them quietly.” The above discussion about fingering and the suggested exercise are essentially aimed at helping students to develop an organ and harpsichord equivalent of playing ornaments quietly. Next month I will deal with the sometimes vexing questions about what the notes and rhythms of ornaments should be—on the beat or before, starting on main or auxiliary notes, and so on. I will also address how to use that information to help students feel freer in their playing of ornaments rather than more constrained, and how to help them approach the subject creatively. 

Organ Method X

This follows directly from the end of last month’s column.

Take the same approach and follow the same procedures with these additional exercises. These are also four-finger exercises that allow for choices of fingering (2-3-4-5 and 1-2-3-4) and therefore for comparing the feel of different fingerings. They add different, slightly more complicated, note patterns (Examples 1 and 2).

Each of these can also be moved to different positions on the keyboard: moving to a different C as a starting place gives you a chance to practice the feel of the same patterns with different arm angles. When you start on other pitches, change the key signature in such a way as to keep the melodies the same. This will give you a chance to experience different physical shapes with these exercises. Try each of the eight short exercises starting on F, with B-flats, and starting on D, with F-sharps. These flats and sharps may very well change the feel of some of the alternate fingerings, perhaps making some of them distinctly uncomfortable—be on the lookout for this.

You can also start any of the exercises described so far on a raised key. For example, try starting on F#, with the full F# major key signature. Again, be aware of difference in the feel of the fingerings. Keep everything light and relaxed, and remember all of the points listed above.

As you move these exercises to different places on the keyboard, whether by octave or by transposing into another key, make a clear decision as to whether you should write out the new notes, or whether you can effect those changes at sight and by memory. There is nothing wrong with either approach: it is important, however, that you not be distracted from the playing and practicing by worrying about the notes. If the transposing at sight is even a little bit distracting, please go ahead and write things out. (This is absolutely crucial for a student who is new to keyboard playing, and should be done without fail at this stage in the learning process.) The same applies to trying different fingerings: write them in for now. You cannot practice a variety of fingerings effectively if you—even some of the time—don’t quite remember what fingering you are using. Again, if you are beginning your keyboard study with this work on organ, thinking about fingering is something that you can do—for yourself, in large part—even from the very beginning. Remembering your fingerings, especially different ones for the same passage, is tricky at first, though both necessary and completely feasible in the long run.

The following exercises expand the scope of the notes that you are playing: that is, the notes range a little bit farther over the keyboard (Examples 3 and 4). Each of these eight exercises suggests a slightly different approach to fingering. For example, the second and sixth exercises can be played simply by positioning the five fingers above the five different notes, and then playing those notes. (This gives, for the second exercise in the right hand the fingering 1-3-5-4-2-3-2-1; and for the seventh of these exercises—in the left hand—the fingering 5-3-1-2-4-3-4-5.) The first exercise, for the right hand, and the corresponding fifth, for the left hand, are the first pair that we have seen in which the fingerings in the two hands cannot mirror each other. This fingering works very naturally in the right hand: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-1-3-5. In the left hand the closest corresponding fingering—which would start out 5-4-3-2-1—ends up getting us into trouble (try it and see). Other fingerings will work, for example 4-3-2-1-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-2-1.

Playing scales

The last of these exercises for each hand is a scale. (In the physical act of playing, a scale is just a stepwise pattern that spans an octave. It is not intrinsically different from other stepwise patterns.) You should try playing this scale with a number of different fingerings. For example:

R.H.: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 

L.H.: 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5

R.H.: 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1

L.H.: 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4

R.H.: 3-4-3-4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3-2-3-2-3

(quite detached: basically eighth notes with eighth-note rests in between; light and relaxed)   

L.H.: 3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-3-4-3 

(likewise)

The first of these in each hand is the standard (piano) scale fingering. The second is a variant of that, which might be appropriate in some situations, but is included here simply to afford more practice with a variety of fingerings. The third is a version of the sort of scale fingering that was prevalent before about 1700. 

You should also try this scale—and any transpositions of it that you want to make—playing every note with the same finger. The three middle fingers are more natural for this than the thumb or the fifth finger. In doing this, you should expect the notes to be detached—but just enough that the motion from one note to the next is smooth, no “lurching”. You should also keep it slow—again so that the motion can be smooth. (It would indeed be quite unusual to play a long stepwise passage all with one finger, however, playing two or more notes in a row with one finger is common, and this is a good systematic way to practice it.) 

The third and seventh of these exercises are the first ones in which you are asked to spread the fingers in such a way that adjacent fingers do not necessarily play adjacent notes, though this happens only briefly. The first three notes of exercise two or six and the first three notes of exercise three or seven are the same: C, E, G. However, the exercises go on to different places, which suggests different fingerings. Exercises two and six can start like this:

Right hand: 1-3-5 [-4]

Left hand: 5-3-1 [-2]

However, exercises three and seven should probably start like this:

Right hand: 1-2-3[-5]

Left hand: 5-4-2 [-1]

The latter two measures of the third exercise—right hand—could be played with the “standard” scale fingering 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, or, just to practice a different feel, a variant: for example, 5-4-1-4-3-2-1-3. 

Thoughts on fingering

It should be clear by now that I am asking you, the student, to think about the fingering of these fairly simple exercises for yourself, albeit with some guidance. This is, of course, on purpose. Learning to devise your own fingerings is one of the most important aspects of your learning to play organ—or any keyboard instrument. The primary purpose of these exercises is to help you begin to explore the touch and sound of the instrument. However, while you are doing that, you can begin to gain experience thinking about fingering—rather than just implementing fingerings devised by someone else. This may take more time now, but it will save you a lot of time later on.  

For the beginner

If you are a beginner—having more or less never touched a keyboard instrument before—you should nonetheless have been able to do everything that you have encountered so far, if you have taken it slowly and carefully, and paid attention to the suggestions and instructions. It is extremely important that you feel very comfortable with everything that you have encountered so far before you go on. There is no harm in spending extra time with these beginning steps.  

Articulation

There can be a very direct relationship in organ playing in particular between fingering and articulation. Simply put, if a fingering does not allow you to keep holding one note in a passage while you start to play the next note, then going from that first note to that next note will be detached rather than legato. This is simply a fact, not a judgment or even a suggestion about what to do in any situation. There are many places in the organ repertoire where a fingering that actually requires a detached articulation and makes legato impossible—that is, a disjunct fingering—is appropriate or necessary or good. There are also many places where a legato fingering is a good idea or necessary, though there are indeed places where a legato fingering is impossible. The clearest example of disjunct fingering is, of course, playing successive notes with the same finger. Note that if a fingering allows legato, it usually does not require legato: you can release notes early.

If you neither need nor want legato in a particular situation, it is not necessary to create a legato fingering. A legato fingering is often—though certainly not always—more difficult than a disjunct fingering. A disjunct—non-legato—fingering that is comfortable will allow you to create a wide variety of articulations, short of full legato.

Other considerations

Physical comfort and logistic convenience are crucially important first principles of fingering. When you are trying to come up with a fingering for a passage—whether it is fairly simple, like the exercises above, or as complicated as the repertoire gets—the first step is to examine where the hand most naturally lies, what is the most comfortable hand position, what has the fewest steps and can thus be most easily remembered. This does not give all of the answers to all of the fingering questions, but is a good place to start. 

All else being equal, it is useful to plan fingering based on what is going to come next. (For example, that is the point of the different fingerings for the notes C-E-G in exercises three and seven.) Of course, fingering is also about where you have just come from, but the more you can plan fingering based on where you are going, the better.

When either hand is playing only one note at a time, fingering choices are usually very flexible. The more notes or voices a hand is playing, the more constrained the fingering will be. It is often better to change fingers on repeated notes—that is, to play successive notes that are the same as one another with different fingers. This is important enough that I will discuss it at some length later on.

For the experienced player

If you are coming to the organ having already studied and played another keyboard instrument, and if you have previously played pieces that are in two voices—that is, pieces in which there is indeed only one note at a time in each hand—find such a piece that you already know and bring it to the organ now. Work out fingering that is comfortable and in accordance with the discussion above, as much as possible. (This may be largely the same as the fingering that you have used for the piece previously on piano or harpsichord; it may differ from it somewhat.) Then practice the piece hands separately, slowly and carefully. Look at the keyboard as little as possible; an occasional glance is fine, but by and large keep your eyes on the music. As with the exercises above, you should listen carefully for articulation, and you should listen to the sonority. 

Try out different registrations. Do not assume in advance that a certain kind of sound will be right for the piece and other sounds wrong: try things and listen. A strictly two-voice piece is always a candidate to play on two manuals. Try your piece out that way, in all sorts of different configurations. Does it feel more comfortable or natural to have the right hand on a higher manual than the left or the other way around? Or are they both equally comfortable?

(The next section, which will constitute next month’s excerpt, consists of a short two-voice piece by Samuel Scheidt, with a discussion about fingering it and practicing it. It is geared towards those students who have little or no prior keyboard experience but who have gone through the exercises and practicing described so far. That is followed by exercises in which each hand plays more than one note at a time, with further discussion about how to make fingering choices and how to practice.)