On Teaching

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

Counterpoint I
This month I will begin a series about the teaching of the playing of counterpoint on keyboard instruments. There are several reasons why this is an important subject, one that can and should be considered as something meaningfully separate from other aspects of keyboard playing—though of course related to them. I will discuss playing counterpoint on organ and harpsichord, but I hope that some of this will also be useful for the playing and teaching of counterpoint on piano, or for that matter on celesta, electronic keyboards, carillon, etc.
This month’s column will consist of some general thoughts, and ways for students and teachers to think about contrapuntal music. This is very much a beginning: it is a vast subject! Next month I will add specific practice suggestions and ways to develop both analytical strategies and playing exercises appropriate to particular pieces.
The first reason that the specific study of playing counterpoint on the keyboard is important is, rather obviously, that a lot of keyboard music is counterpoint. This is, broadly speaking, truer the farther back in time you go, and, also broadly speaking, truer of organ and harpsichord music than of piano music. The organ and the harpsichord repertoires are full of fugues, older fugue-like forms with names like “canzona” or “ricercar,” chorale preludes that are in a fixed number of voices and that involve motivic imitation and development, and other such things. Pieces written in these purely contrapuntal forms are still common in later music, but less so.
The second reason is that a lot of keyboard music that we would not consider contrapuntal in a formal way has elements of counterpoint embedded in it. This is clearly true, for example, of many Bach preludes (whereas Bach fugues are by and large “formal” counterpoint). It is true of many of the keyboard dance pieces that make up the Baroque keyboard suites, and of many toccatas, scherzos, pieces with fanciful “character” names, etc. These elements sometimes consist of lines of counterpoint that are surrounded or accompanied by other notes that are not part of the counterpoint, sometimes of implied contrapuntal lines in thicker textures, sometimes of short sections that are contrapuntal where the surrounding sections are not.
A further reason for studying counterpoint as a player is that listening to—or listening for—contrapuntal lines is extraordinarily good training for listening carefully to anything. Developing the ability to hear, especially, three or more simultaneous contrapuntal voices with some degree of independence is perhaps the best training for the ability to hear all parts of any musical texture, including inner or background harmonies in primarily melodic or homophonic music.
The final reason to mention here—I’m sure that there are more—is that practicing and playing counterpoint is the best training for dexterity and independence of fingers. The physical skills developed by playing counterpoint will improve the playing of any kind of music, usually both by making it seem easier and by making it sound better in the end (or, more meaningfully, by expanding the range of ways in which the player can play the music, by increasing control and security).
In teaching the playing of counterpoint to students who are not already steeped in the (theoretical) study of counterpoint or who do not have the experience of playing a lot of rigorously contrapuntal pieces, the first task is to make the concept of counterpoint as unintimidating as possible. There is no doubt that the formal theoretical study of counterpoint—or, more usually, an indirect impression of what that study is like—can make contrapuntal music seem so complicated, so intellectually rigorous, so arcane, and so steeped in analytical detail as to be prohibitively frightening to play. This fright, which usually comes in the first instance from a sense of what the music is like compositionally, is sometimes enhanced by hearing experienced virtuoso performers say that counterpoint is more challenging than other music: that even a relatively simple Bach fugue, or invention for that matter, is “harder” than Liszt or Brahms or Beethoven. This may well be true for that performer (usually a performer who was first trained on piano music from the Classical period and later); however, it can still be an unfortunate place for a student to start.
If the first source of a potentially crippling fear about playing contrapuntal pieces is a sense that those pieces are by definition intellectually (too) complex, then perhaps the first way to work on alleviating that fear is by trying to define contrapuntal music, and specific contrapuntal forms such as fugue, in as simple and commonsense a way as is possible consistent with accuracy. This would involve avoiding, at least at first, the laundry list of terms that are used to try to describe contrapuntally constructed pieces, or the building blocks of those pieces—terms such as subject, answer, inversion, augmentation, diminution, stretto, episode, perhaps many more. (Fortunately, it seems to me, a simple colloquial way of describing what is going on in a piece can often be in fact the most accurate for that particular piece: more about this later on.) Also, it would be nice if any such definitions could also be interesting and intriguing, and serve to connect contrapuntal music to the rest of our musical (and perhaps non-musical) experience.
So, what is counterpoint and what is contrapuntal music? Here are a few attempts at addressing that question, none of which is intended to be complete or definitive, or to exclude any others. They are all just ideas to be thought about.
Counterpoint is two or more different things happening at the same time. This way of looking at it is not necessarily specific to music. It can apply, for example, to a freight train chugging past a road on which cars are cruising, or to clouds at two different atmospheric levels moving in different directions, or to birds chirping outside the window of a room where the radio is on.
In music, if two “things” that are not the same are to happen at the same time, it is necessary to know what a “thing” is. For the kind of keyboard counterpoint that we are discussing here, the “thing” is a contrapuntal voice or, putting it a bit differently, a melody. It could in theory, however, be something different, like a rhythm (think, for example, of the opening of the John Fogerty song Centerfield, in which a repeated rhythm generated by clapping—rather than by any musical instrument—is joined after a while by the lead guitar and then the bass line) or even a sonority (as in, for example, the Jethro Tull song Mountain Men, in which the vocal line is accompanied by guitar, ostensibly in unison, but with an effect that is—–because of the sonority—not that of blending into one sound, but rather of counterpoint at the unison).
Counterpoint is also the same thing happening at different times, assuming that it is also coming from different places. That is, if in a piece of music we hear the same tune or melody or motif at different times, but we perceive that it is coming from the same instrument or singer, or from the same voice in a multi-voice texture, then that does not feel like counterpoint. If it seems to be coming from a different voice or a different instrument, then that is counterpoint. (For example, in the Vierne Arabesque, when the opening theme [m. 2] recurs, still in the upper voice, in m. 6, this is just a repetition, not counterpoint. When it enters in the lowest voice in m. 21 and thereafter, this is a contrapuntal event.)
A contrapuntal piece of music is one that has voices (regardless of whether they do the same thing as one another or different things). The concept of a voice in a contrapuntal texture can seem so intuitive or obvious to anyone who has gotten used to working with contrapuntal music that it can be hard to remember that it is new to many students—or at least that earlier explanations may have been incomplete or left them confused. It is not uncommon for a (beginning) keyboard student to assume that “voice” means “hand,” or to have trouble sorting out which notes belong to which voice. And, in fact, the contrapuntal voice is a concept that can be elusive. After all, if some music is being played, and, most of the time there happens to be more than one note sounding, then what is it exactly that allows us to say that certain notes follow one another in the same voice? Is it just that the composer’s notation suggests what the voices are? Isn’t that potentially pretty arbitrary? If I took a nicely contrapuntal piece or passage and rewrote various stem directions, or changed the placement of some notes on the different staves, so that the flow of the voices was ostensibly changed—but all the notes, rests, etc. remained exactly the same—would a listener hear it as a different piece? Would a performer need to do something different? If not, then what in the world is the meaning of this concept of a voice, anyway?
This elusiveness may well be one of the keys to understanding the job of the performer in playing contrapuntal music. If for whatever reason we grant that the phenomenon of voices is significant (artistically, philosophically, intellectually, emotionally) and if the concept is elusive or abstract, then presumably it is up to the performer to try to make the significance of the voice structure manifest and project it in a way that is (emotionally, artistically, etc.) meaningful and powerful.
The easiest way to introduce a student to the concept of a voice as it applies to keyboard music is probably by the traditional, straightforward analogy to singing, which is probably the original source of both the concept of a contrapuntal voice and the nomenclature. That is, a contrapuntal voice is a line of music—a melody—that could be sung by an individual singer or played by an individual melody instrument. Making the concept of a voice vivid and clear to a student can best be achieved through analysis and practicing of actual pieces, as I will discuss next month.
To sum up, a contrapuntal keyboard piece is one that is clearly in voices, which are usually doing different things at the same time and similar things at different times. The patterns according to which voices do similar and different things are probably meaningful or interesting. Usually, most of the notes form part of musical gestures that recur, and the voices sounding together make sense in the harmonic language that prevails in the musical culture in which the piece was written.
I will close this month with a story from my own earliest year studying music, which, I think, nicely frames some of the issues in practicing and learning contrapuntal music that I will begin to discuss in detail next month.
When I was about ten years old, I was known around my school as someone who was interested in music and was beginning to play piano. One of the older students (ninth grade, maybe) was kind enough to bring in some pieces that she thought I would like, and to help me work on them occasionally after school. Once she brought in a volume of what I seem to remember were simpler Bach fugues, arranged for four hands, and she and I sat at the piano trying them out. She told me that they were hard, and I found them hard. She also explained to me what fugues were, and that it was very challenging to play different voices at once, even though we were each playing only half the notes of the original pieces. All of a sudden sitting there I had a revelation: why not forget about this idea of “voices” and just make sure to position my hand above the notes as they came along, and play them! This idea made me think that I could even cope, at home, with trying to play all the notes of some of these pieces, which I did then try. I found it easier than I had been led to expect, especially if I kept it slow. After doing this for a while, however, something (I don’t remember what: probably something another student said) made me suddenly realize—or I should say, suddenly believe—that ignoring the voices this way was musically the worst thing I could do: actually really barbaric, creating a strong danger that I would be shown to be a charlatan! I was horrified with myself, and tried to flee as quickly as I could from that way of looking at it, even though it had made the learning of the pieces seem easier.
Many years later, I now think that some sort of synthesis of these two approaches is probably wise: that a student should simultaneously study, listen to, and understand the voices as thoroughly and vividly as possible, and eagerly embrace the easiest, most practical approach to fingering and to the practical side of learning the notes. I will take this up in detail next month.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work this fall on a recording of Bach’s Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

Counterpoint III
This month I want to outline, as systematically as I can, a method for taking any contrapuntal keyboard piece apart into separate voices, practicing those voices separately, and putting the piece back together. This builds on some of the ideas discussed in the last two columns. I will also begin to discuss motivic analysis, which I will expand upon next month in wrapping up this series on counterpoint.
To begin with, I will mention some of the reasons for approaching this kind of music in this way, since it involves, up front at least, more work than it would take just to finger and practice the piece. Any student who is being asked to put in this extra work deserves to know why it is being suggested, and thus to have a chance to become convinced of it and motivated, inwardly and enthusiastically, to do it. The first reason is in a sense philosophical. If a piece is convincingly contrapuntal—written in voices that are completely or very largely consistent, that is, each is a coherent melody from the beginning of the piece to the end—then the composer certainly wrote it that way on purpose. Therefore it makes sense to assume that the performer ought to understand it that way as well, at least as a point of departure for making decisions as to how best to play the piece. This is somewhat analogous to an actor’s knowing the grammar and syntax of the language in which a play is written before performing in that play. It is possible to learn a part phonetically, in a language that you do not understand, but this is unlikely to lead to convincing rendering of the phrases and sentences, or possibly even of the words.
A second reason arises out of the first one. An actor playing a part in a language that he or she doesn’t understand might be able to give a convincing performance of that part through coaching. That is, someone who does understand the language could demonstrate ways of speaking the words and phrases that are appropriate, and the actor could mimic that native speaker. This could perhaps provide one—but certainly only one—convincing performance. However, it would deny the actor any scope to vary and develop that performance or to opt for a different interpretation. Likewise, a student working on a contrapuntal piece can certainly be coached by someone—possibly the teacher—towards a performance of that piece, through that coach’s suggesting phrasings and articulations and other interpretive details. A conscientious student could realize those suggestions and thereby give a performance that might be well worth listening to. However, the student would not have much basis on which to vary or change that interpretation, and would not really have learned anything much about interpretation or performance. The notion that a teacher ought not to tell a student how to interpret a piece but rather let the student work out and discover interpretive ideas him- or herself is of course something that applies equally well (or equally poorly: it is in fact a controversial idea, though one that I believe in strongly) to any music, contrapuntal or not. If, however, we accept for the moment that a student should have maximum autonomy in shaping interpretation and performance, then certainly for counterpoint the more intimately familiar the student is with the voices the more he or she will be able to focus on shaping those voices and bringing them to life.
A third reason is that the ears and the mind can follow what they recognize. If you enter a room in which half a dozen people are talking out loud in six different languages that you do not know, you will hear a blur of sound, a cacophony. If, however, you do know one of the languages, you will be able to follow what the person speaking that language is saying. Those sounds will form themselves in your mind into words and phrases, and separate themselves out from the rest of the decibels. Likewise, if the ears and mind of a player know and can recognize each of the melodies that are going on at once in a contrapuntal passage, that player will have a good chance of being able to follow each of those voices as a discrete melody. The best way to predispose one’s ears to recognize each melody amongst all of the others is to have listened to it independently, enough times to have almost memorized it, not necessarily to be able to play it without music, but to be able to anticipate in the mind where it is going next. If a student, or any player, has only heard each voice while also hearing other voices then it will be unnecessarily difficult to hear the voices independently, and difficult to come up with—or indeed to implement—any interpretive ideas.
The fourth reason is of a different sort. I said above that working out a piece one voice at a time involves more work up front. The fortunate fact, however, is that this approach actually saves time and makes things easier in the long run. If a player’s ears and mind know—in the manner discussed in the previous paragraph—what the voices are doing and where they are going, then at the stage of fingering, pedaling, and learning the whole texture of the piece, the fingers and feet will have much less tendency to stumble or hesitate than they would if this first stage of learning has been omitted or shortchanged. This is emphatically true even though the fingerings will almost always be different for separate voices than for those same voices as part of the complete texture.
Working out a given piece this way saves time in learning that piece. It is also true that working out several pieces in this way saves a substantial amount of time in learning the next piece and the one after that, and so on. This is especially true within a particular style or compositional type. So, for example, if a student takes the time to learn three Bach fugues by studying the voices as rigorously as possible, then the next Bach fugue that he or she works on will go very quickly, and might even seem “easy,” or almost so! (certainly “easier”). Working on these Bach fugues will not help as much with a piece by Cavazzoni, Louis Couperin, Reger or Moondog. It will help some, but each new style or type of music has its own quirks and tendencies that can best be learned by working on that type of music. Also, any piece worked out in the manner described below will be very solidly learned, and not easily forgotten.
So here are the steps to follow in taking the voices of a contrapuntal piece apart and then putting them back together again:
1) First, it is important that the act of reading the voices not be an impediment to fluent practicing. The student should already have spent some time going over the art of reading individual voices in a keyboard score, as discussed last month. However, if the teasing out of the voices still seems difficult, then prior to practicing the voices, this reading should be made easier. This can be done by highlighting voices in the score, by acquiring several copies of the score and highlighting each voice in a different copy, or by writing out the piece in open score. (The latter can nowadays sometimes be done most easily by computer.) Some pieces are indeed available in open score, either through a bookstore or online. In any case, the literal reading of the voices should be made as little a problem as it can be. It is also a good idea, for the first few instances of a student’s working out a piece this way, to choose music that is easier rather than harder to read, say a three-part invention or a chorale prelude in which only the middle two voices are written together on a staff, rather than a five voice fugue on two lines.
2) It is a good idea, as with most kinds of practicing, to work with small and manageable sections of music. These can be as short as a few measures at a time. It is fine to let the working sections coincide with musical sections of a piece—a fugue exposition, or a phrase of a chorale—but this is also not necessary. It is also not necessary to start at the beginning of a piece.
3) Once a section of music has been chosen to work on, the student should go through and play each voice of that section as many times as necessary to make each voice seem familiar—really familiar. That is, the student should stick to separate individual voices until he or she could sing those voices in the shower without having to stop and think about it. Each voice should seem as familiar as “Happy Birthday” or “Jingle Bells.” The physical practicing of the separate voices, at this stage, need not correspond particularly to the way they will be practiced later as part of the whole texture. For example, an inner voice that will end up passing back and forth between the hands should be practiced—at this point—by one hand or the other. (In fact, both hands should take turns playing it, in preparation for 4) below.) It is also acceptable to play a pedal line in the left hand, if that would facilitate this process, while also spending time practicing it in the pedals. None of this, as I mentioned above, will end up creating problems. When the time comes to put the whole texture back together, the advantages gained by the ears’ extraordinary familiarity with the voices will outweigh any memory that the fingers might have of having played the notes with a wrong fingering. It is also OK to keep the voices slower than they will end up being later on.
4) Next, the student should put all of the possible pairs of voices together. This is the most important step in this process, and the prior steps really exist to make this step work as easily and thus as fruitfully as possible. In a three-voice piece there are three pairs of voices [SA, SB, AB]. In a four-voice piece there are six [SA, ST, SB, AT, AB, TB], and in a five-voice piece there are ten [SA, ST1, ST2, SB, AT1, and many more!]. (This count is a good reason to start with a three-voice piece in learning and implementing this technique.) In principle, all of the pairs of voices are equally important, and each pair has the potential to reveal interesting things about the ways in which the voices interact. It is important to practice all of the pairs an ample amount, but in particular not to short-change the pairs that are, just because of acoustics, harder to follow in the full texture. These are, usually, pairs involving inner voices or non-adjacent voices. Although the mere playing of these pairs of voices—with the ears becoming more and more attuned to them at a subliminal level—is the main point of this exercise, this is also a good stage at which to begin to notice specific things about the ways in which voices interact. In playing a particular pair of voices, do you hear echoes or repetition of motivic material, or anything that sounds like question and answer? Are there interesting rhythmic relationships between voices? Are there passages in which the phenomenon of quicker notes in one voice against slower notes in another voice is significant? This is a good time to notice anything and everything that happens more than once (something that I will discuss at much greater length next month). Is there a leap of a fourth in one voice, followed by a leap of a fourth in the other voice a little bit later? Are they both up, or down, or are they opposite? Is there a rhythm in one voice that is taken up later in the other voice? In augmentation or diminution? Does the soprano voice reach its highest note at the same time that the bass voice reaches its lowest? Or its highest? Everything like this is worth noticing, even though certainly not all of it has a definable or important theoretical role (and even though it is utterly impossible to notice everything: that cannot be the goal).
5) Once the pairs have all been played a lot and feel comfortable, the student should step back, work out fingerings and pedalings for the whole texture of the piece or passage, and begin to practice it in his or her normal way. This can, and usually should, include separate hands and feet (as opposed to separate voices), and slow practicing. I believe that it is not necessary to practice all of the groups of three voices in a four-voice piece, or all of the groups or three and four voices in a five-voice piece. If the player’s ears hear the individual voices and the pairs of voices clearly, then the whole texture will fall into place nicely.
Next month I will discuss approaches to motivic analysis and other kinds of analysis in learning contrapuntal music, and will wrap up a few odds and ends.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Counterpoint IV
A student who has worked on a piece of contrapuntal keyboard music in the ways outlined in my last few columns will be able to play the piece with great security, accuracy, and confidence. The student’s performance of that piece will project a strong sense of the contrapuntal lines as individual, autonomous melodies with shape and direction. This result is as close to being certain as anything in the realm of human endeavor ever is: this systematic working out of separate voices is an extremely powerful tool.
However, nothing in that method deals directly either with interpretive questions as such or with aspects of performance that might arise out of motivic or harmonic analysis. The method can work with many different interpretive stances as regards tempo, articulation, phrasing, registration, rubato (or lack thereof), agogic accentuation, etc., and many philosophies regarding memorization, concert programming, authenticity (or, again, lack thereof), fingering, pedaling, posture, etc. In this column I will discuss questions involving form and structure, and suggest an approach to motivic analysis—I prefer to call it motivic awareness—that I believe is useful and flexible, and that arises naturally out of the learning and practicing approach outlined in the last few columns.
Almost every piece of music deals in some way with issues of sameness and change. In some types of pieces, the way in which those opposite poles are presented is very clear. For example, in a chaconne or passacaglia, the repeated harmonic pattern provides sameness or continuity, while the various melodies, rhythms, and textures that unfold over that harmonic pattern provide change. In a rondo, the ritornello represents continuity and everything else represents change or development. In sonata-allegro form, on one level continuity is represented by a recapitulation, and change by the development section. However, the balance (or tension) between sameness and difference may also be manifested in other, more subtle ways, such as having two principal themes that are very different from one another. In general, in tonal music change is represented by departures from the tonic and continuity by the return to it.
In pieces that are largely or entirely contrapuntal—built up of melodies happening in different voices—questions of overall structure, including the handling of continuity and change, are dealt with in large part through recurring melodic themes or motives, and through the patterns of recurrence of those motives. A motive is a recognizable bit of melody, and when it recurs, it is recognizably the same, or close enough to being the same that a listener’s ears and mind will accept it as being the same. In some types of pieces, some recurrences of themes will be at least somewhat predictable. In a fugue, the beginning of the piece will be shaped by each voice entering in turn with the same theme—the fugue subject—and the end section of the piece will involve the return of that theme in some or all of the voices. In between there will almost always be passages—sometimes long, sometimes short—during which the fugue subject is more or less absent. A chorale-based contrapuntal piece will often have one or more recurring motives derived directly from the chorale melody. In a piece that is canonic, the different voices will present the same melodic material at different times.
(Notice that at least some of the reasoning in the above paragraph is circular. I wrote that “in a fugue” such-and-such will happen. I could just as well have written that if such-and-such happens, we will call it a fugue.)
In principle, a piece could be fully or partly contrapuntal without having very much—or indeed any—recurrence of themes. A piece could be written in three or four or more voices, and the voices could share no thematic material at all, and each voice itself could fail to repeat any recognizable themes. However, this essentially never happens. There are pieces—for example, several of the Orgelbüchlein chorales—in which motives are shared by only two out of the four voices (Puer natus, Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn) or in which the voices share little or no thematic material from one to another, but do each repeat and develop motives as they go along (Ich ruf’ zu dir). But a piece that is worked out rigorously in voices and in which melodic motives play no role is a rarity, to say the least. There seems to be, and to have been over the centuries, a strong consensus that a voice-based texture and a motive-based rhetorical structure go together.
This makes it natural to assume that the first goal in interpreting such pieces is to bring out the theme(s), (subject(s), motive(s). I have often had students who were pianists new to organ and harpsichord ask me how it could be plausible to play a fugue, for example, on those instruments, since they do not permit the player to use dynamics to make the fugue subject stand out from the rest of the texture. Of course it’s possible to do this occasionally, when the logistics of the notes and the fingering happen to line up just right, but it can not be done in a thoroughgoing way. However, sometimes students assume that there must indeed be a way to do this, and that it must be in fact the hidden art—the secret!—of playing counterpoint on harpsichord and organ. At first glance this seems to make sense: if themes and motives are important, even crucial, to contrapuntal keyboard music, then surely it is important or crucial that listeners be able to hear those themes.
However, this idea bumps up against an interesting historical reality. It was precisely during the time when the only keyboard instruments available for performance were those instruments on which the player cannot bring themes out explicitly that the writing of contrapuntal music for the keyboard most flourished. The decline in the predominance of rigorously contrapuntal music in the (newly written) repertoire after the Baroque period corresponded exactly to the rise of the piano and the replacement of the harpsichord with the piano in everyday use. So apparently composers have seen the piano’s ability to use dynamics to highlight particular parts of the texture to be inconsistent with, or at least not conducive to, the writing of counterpoint. Instruments on which the changing timbre up and down the keyboard helps to make individual voices clear and autonomous, but on which individual motives cannot be brought out have been seen by composers as most conducive to writing counterpoint for the keyboard.
This, in turn, seems to me to point to perhaps the most important concept for a student, or any performer, to bear in mind when thinking about shaping performances of contrapuntal pieces on a keyboard instrument. On the one hand, the music is at its very essence made up of motives or themes, not just notes. These motives are the philosophical and rhetorical building blocks of contrapuntal music. They are the words and phrases, while the individual notes are the phonemes. But, on the other hand, there is no reason to consider any one theme or motive or subject within a given piece to be more important than any of the others.
In the course of working on the separate voices of a contrapuntal keyboard piece, any student—even one who is not yet very experienced with this kind of music—will become, perhaps unwittingly, a real expert on the motivic content of that piece. Simply as a result of having listened a lot to each voice and, by definition, to all of that voice’s melodies, themes, motives, or subjects, that student will have become perhaps the world’s leading expert on what is going on melodically in that line. This expertise may well be largely subconscious. I believe that the best way to point a student towards making that awareness of the motivic content of contrapuntal voices explicit, and thus heighten its ability to help enliven the music, is to ask the student simply to try to notice anything and everything that happens more than once.
This is a deliberately simple, colloquial, almost naïve way of looking at themes in contrapuntal voices. One purpose of starting out by looking at voices this way is to avoid a prejudice in favor of motivic ideas that have what might be called a professionally sanctioned importance, such as fugue subjects, countersubjects, or motives derived from a chorale. If these things are present, then a neutral search for anything that happens more than once will certainly find them. If, in a particular piece, such themes really are the most important thing about the motivic structure of the piece, then that will become apparent, because those themes will occur more, and/or in more important contexts, than other recurring events that the student may find. But again, even themes that recur more frequently are not more important in performance than themes that recur less often. That is, there is no reason to treat them differently in performance than other motives. It is a good working assumption that anything that a composer took the trouble to do more than once should be treated as rhetorically important.
The question arises of how we know—how a student can tell—what actually constitutes something that happens more than once. In principle, what we are looking for is simple: intervals, melodic shapes, and rhythms that are the same one place in a voice as they are somewhere else (in that voice or in another voice). Some points to remember in looking for such things—or in helping a student to do so—are as follows:
1) It can be useful to make copies of a piece and use different copies to highlight different themes or other recurring events.
2) It makes sense to notice and highlight first of all anything that jumps out as being obvious. This will often include—but not be limited to—“official” motives such as fugue subjects or chorale phrases. Longer motives are the easiest to notice right off the bat.
3) It then makes sense to scan any as-yet unhighlighted sections of each voice looking first for rhythmic patterns that recur, since those are often easiest to spot, and then for intervals or melodic patterns that recur.
4) There is no harm in identifying something as a recurring theme when, according to someone else’s analysis, it might not be. It is more interesting to notice more similarities than to notice fewer. If something seems far-fetched (“there is a major sixth here in m. 4, and another one there in m. 7” or “the note A occurs in each of these three measures”) then it might be far-fetched—in which case it will probably melt away upon further consideration—or it might turn out to be real. If on reflection it seems real, then it might lead to some insight about the piece or to a more rhetorically convincing playing of the piece or of that part of it. It would be a shame to miss out on this.
5) At the same time, it is not necessary to expect to find everything the first time through. The act of looking through voices hoping to find recurring motives will almost certainly lead to playing all of the notes more meaningfully—more like words and phrases and not just phonemes—regardless of whether you do or don’t find all of the plausible recurring motives.

I have recently done (actually re-done) a quick analysis of two very basic Bach contrapuntal works, the first Two-Part Invention and the first fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In the former I have found that one half-measure in both voices together (m. 6, second half), one measure in the upper voice (m. 13, third beat through m. 14 second beat), and a further half measure in the upper voice (m. 21, second half) consist of material that is not part of any motive that recurs. That’s all: ten beats out of a total of 176 in the piece. Of those ten beats, six occur in cadences. In a cadence the relative importance of harmony goes up and the relative importance of counterpoint goes down. (Cadences express sameness or togetherness rather than diversity or change.)
In the fugue, there are 432 beats of voice-writing (27 measures, four beats per measure, four voices). Of these, no more than about 40 beats are constructed out of thematic material that does not recur, and there is no moment in the piece when there is not at least one voice presenting recurring material. The fugue subject occurs officially 23 times. However, part of the recurring material consists of fragments of the fugue subject. The analytic approach being described here makes it unnecessary to consider those notes anomalous or fragmentary, but still permits an understanding of how they relate to the rest of what is going on.
In both of these pieces I have now found more notes that seem to me to belong to recurring melodic ideas—i.e., more things that happen more than once—than I did the last time I looked them over some years ago. Our ability to notice should grow with experience.
Sometimes looking for anything that happens more than once can be revealing in unexpected ways. Years ago when I first studied the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude, I happened to notice that the opening four notes—the rising tetrachord b-c#-d#-e—recurred at least a time or two. I decided to look for this motive wherever I could find it in the piece. The recurrence of that simple, almost throwaway bit of melody turned out to provide a structural roadmap of the whole work. It occurs in one form or another at all of the important transition points in the piece, and actually serves as a guideline to the affect of the different sections. It would never, however, be identified as any kind of subject that is developed contrapuntally in the work.
(Since there is not space here to delve into the details of these three examples, I have posted them on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <A HREF="http:www.pekc.org">www.pekc.org</A&gt;, with highlighting in several colors, and thorough commentary. I have also posted some expanded discussion of the relationship between this kind of contrapuntal learning and various aspects of interpretation, including a perspective or two other than, and different from, my own.)
In essence, this approach is very simple, as simple as it sounds: notice everything that happens more than once; notice as much as you can, but don’t worry about noticing everything; let your awareness of musical words and phrases enliven your playing of the music.
Next month I will turn to the interesting and sometimes vexing—but comparatively circumscribed!—subject of the playing of repeated notes.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has recently finished taping Bach’s Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords, with George Hazelrigg. He can be reached at .

Practicing I
When I was a graduate student at Westminster Choir College in the early eighties, there was a piece of graffiti written over the door leading to the basement corridors where the organ practice rooms were found. It said: Take Responsibility: Really Practice! I was always impressed by that. For one thing, it was the only graffiti that I had ever seen, or have ever seen, that had practicing music as its subject. But also it seemed to point to a real truth about practicing and about the act of being a musician. Unless you do what it takes both to develop your overall skills to the fullest and to learn—really learn— the pieces that you are working on, you haven’t really taken responsibility for your contribution to the world of music, or for your contribution as a musician to the world.
Failure to practice enough or in the right way can have a number of consequences. The most basic one is that a given piece will be learned only partially or with inadequate security, and will fall apart in performance. The lesser case of this is that a piece will be insecure enough that it can only be kept from really falling apart by a kind of tense focus on getting the right notes. This will in turn make the performance sound tense and will rule out, or at least limit, any freedom or spontaneity. Inadequate practice can both force the performer to fall back entirely on consciously chosen interpretive gestures—rather than allowing those gestures to be modified on the spur of the moment to reflect the conditions of the particular performance or a new feeling or idea—and make the execution of those interpretive gestures tentative and unconvincing.
Learning a piece extraordinarily well—by practicing it well and practicing it enough—greatly increases (perhaps paradoxically) the chance that the performance of that piece can have the feeling of an improvisation to it. One hallmark of good improvisation, in music, public speaking, conversation, or anything, is that the next thing that happens comes without hesitation. This is what practicing makes possible in playing an already-composed piece. Furthermore, practicing, even if it is primarily aimed at making the practical side of the mastery of a piece as secure as it can be, also involves repeated exposure to the whole picture of what is going on musically in the piece. The performer who has the ability to play a given piece accurately without having really practiced it (that is, someone who is a really good sight-reader) always runs the risk of giving an offhand and superficial performance of that piece. (I hasten to add that this certainly does not always happen, but it can happen and sometimes does.)
Analysis and study of the musical content of a piece can happen before, during, and after the process of rigorously practicing the notes. The particular kind of contrapuntal analysis that I wrote about in several recent columns is intended to take place for the most part before the practicing of the complete note-picture of the piece with appropriate fingerings and pedalings. However, since it is carried out largely through playing, it is also a form of practicing, and part of its purpose is to make the subsequent practicing both easier and more effective.
Analysis along other lines—melodic analysis of non-contrapuntal (melody-and-accompaniment) passages, harmonic analysis, etc.—can be done prior to the start of nitty-gritty note practicing, and also ought to make that practicing easier and more effective. This happens, of course, because if the mind already knows to some extent what is coming next—and if that is also, according to some musical logic, what ought to come next—then the fingers will tend to find it more directly, with less hesitation or fumbling. Then, during practicing, the sound and feel of the notes will reinforce whatever was learned by analysis, if that analysis was sound, or perhaps suggest ways in which to modify it.
Real practicing also ought to be (most of the time) fun and (always) absorbing. It should also be the case, as much of the time as possible, that a player finds efficient, effective practicing to be deeply satisfying because it so clearly leads to real accomplishment. A teacher can greatly help a student to feel this way by making the relationship between practicing and real learning very clear, and by teaching practice techniques that work.
Indeed, practicing that does not seem to be working—where there is a goal but that goal is not getting any closer, or where there isn’t a clear goal and over time nothing much seems to be happening—is so discouraging and demoralizing that experiencing too much of it will often lead to a student’s giving up, discovering that he or she isn’t really that interested in the instrument after all. This is a shame, because without the experience of practicing well, a student actually doesn’t know what the instrument is, what the repertoire is, what the experience of playing music can be.
So, what is good practicing? What works under what circumstances? Part of the answer, as it applies to organ and harpsichord, comes from J. S. Bach. He said about organ playing that:
“All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”
When I first read this comment, I assumed that Bach was being flippant, either in a way that was meant to be dismissive to whomever he was speaking with, or in a way that was meant to be funny and modest. However, I have since realized that he probably meant something specific. In most musical situations, the performer has to create aspects of the content of the musical sound directly. This is obviously the case with singing, since the performer creates and controls everything about the sound, both sonority and intonation. With non-fretted string instruments, the performer has complete responsibility for intonation, and with bowed string instruments, responsibility for shaping the sound of the note over its entire duration. With blown instruments, the player likewise has the job of creating and sustaining the sonority, and has some responsibility for intonation.
Organ and harpsichord come much closer to fitting the following description: if anyone or anything pushes the key down, the note will sound. (This is also true of the piano except in the very important area of volume, and it is surprisingly untrue of the clavichord, but that’s a subject for another day.) Of course on some organs and most harpsichords, the player can influence subtleties of the beginnings and ends of notes—attacks and releases—by subtle variations in technique. This can be very important artistically, but it does not define as big a proportion of what the player has to do or to think about technically as similar subtleties do with some of the types of instruments mentioned above. I believe that Bach was pointing to this distinction: other musicians have to create their sound and tuning, we keyboard players just have to push the keys down and the instrument does the rest!
This means, first of all, that the physical act of playing—the thing that we are practicing when we practice—can be thought of in simple mechanical terms, more so with keyboard instruments than with most others. This leads to another fruitful paradox. The more we approach the act of practicing as if it were a simple mechanical task, the more artistic control we will end up having over the end results of that task.
Also, and most fruitfully of all, the physical act of playing organ or harpsichord can be slowed down to any extent whatsoever without changing its essential physical nature. This, again, is not true of most means of producing music. A singer or wind player can only slow down a little bit without changing the relationship between the musical note-picture and the act of breathing. This is a crucial change. A player of a bowed string instrument cannot slow down too much without changing the relationship between the note-picture and the bowing. This is almost as crucial. An organist or harpsichordist can slow down any passage any amount and still be executing a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result, however fast that result might be intended to be.
In general, any physical gesture that someone can execute at a given speed, can be learned to be played faster: much faster, if the process of learning is approached the right way. This is quite reliable, and not something that varies much from one person to another. It is also not specific to music or to artistic endeavor, but it happens to apply very well to the particular physical demands of organ and harpsichord playing. There is certainly some limit beyond which one simply can’t move any faster. There is only a small amount of keyboard music that goes beyond that limit for most people. The limits that we experience on how fast we can play in general, or on whether or not we can play a given piece up to tempo have to do with our lack of immediate, transparent awareness of what is coming next in the piece, not with physical inability to play fast enough.
Furthermore, there is in fact some speed, some tempo, at which anyone can play any given keyboard piece. That is, anyone who can basically read music and who knows the order of the keys on the keyboard can sit down at the keyboard and sight-read any piece perfectly the first time with no previous keyboard-playing experience if he or she adopts a slow enough tempo. This includes everything from the first exercise at the beginning of a keyboard primer to the most complicated works by Liszt, Reger, or Duruflé. Of course, in these latter cases, the tempo might have to be really monstrously slow: one thirty-second note per minute, or maybe even slower. This is an extreme case, almost a reductio ad absurdum, but it is quite true, and the principle, applied more moderately, is very important.
All of the principles discussed in the last few paragraphs come together to suggest the most efficient and reliable protocol for practicing organ and harpsichord pieces. I will sketch out this approach in a basic way here, and elaborate upon it next month.
Prior to practicing a piece or a passage, it is necessary to have worked out the fingering and pedaling. For the moment we will take this for granted. Fingering and pedaling choices can legitimately be made for all sorts of reasons, from the historical to the aesthetic to the personal, and I will devote more than one future column to the subject. Even a “bad” fingering or pedaling can become pretty reliable by being practiced well. This is not always a good thing, but it is in a sense a necessary thing, because we do not always come up with the best fingering or pedaling the first time or, for that matter, ever. Any fingering or pedaling, no matter how well thought out, may need to be changed as a piece becomes more familiar. This can, if it is extensive or tricky, require backing up and re-practicing.
In any case, once you—the student—have worked out a fingering and pedaling for a passage, the next step is to select an appropriately manageable amount of music to practice. It is usually a good idea to work on fairly small units: a page, a few lines, a section, or, looking at it a different way, the left-hand part, the right-hand part, the feet, or even one foot at a time.
The next step is to play that unit of music slowly enough. The concept of “slowly enough” is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord. Ideally, every time that you play anything—but certainly during a session of real practicing—that playing should be done at a tempo at which a) you get all of the right notes, and b) getting all of the right notes feels easy: no hesitation, no panic, no scrambling. Achieving point b) is a matter only of honesty with one’s self: if, on a given time playing through a passage, you hear yourself make all of the right notes, then it is very easy not to notice whether you were getting those right notes serenely or by the skin of your teeth! It is important to notice this and to be honest about it.
Once the unit that you are practicing feels serene and easy and is reliably accurate at this first tempo, then it is time to try it a little bit faster. The concept of “a little bit faster” is the second most important thing about practicing. The new practice tempo should be just enough faster that you can tell that it is faster, but not enough faster that the passage falls apart. It is OK for it to require a bit more concentration to get it right at first—in fact this is a good sign, since it means that you have increased the tempo enough to make a difference—but not for it to fall apart. If it does, then it was premature to speed up, or you sped up too much. In this case it is necessary to slow back down just a bit.
Once you have played the passage at the new (very slightly faster) tempo enough times in a row for it to have become once again utterly comfortable and reliable, then it is time to speed it up, again by a very small amount. By patiently following this procedure enough times in a row, it is possible to move a passage from any tempo to any other tempo. This is true whether the music is simple or complicated. It is true even if the initial practice tempo is so slow that it would be difficult for a listener to follow it as music at all.
If the unit of music that you are practicing is not the whole texture—that is, if you are practicing separate hands or feet—then at some point it becomes appropriate to put the hands or feet back together, or to put the whole thing together. The rule of thumb is this: the sooner in the process you put things together, the slower you have to keep your practice tempo. Different ways of practicing a piece or passage—for example, keeping all of the parts together and starting with a very slow practice tempo or, on the other hand, practicing hands separately and being able to start each hand at a somewhat faster practice tempo—usually end up being equally effective. One might be better than another only because the player happens to find it more interesting. The crucial thing is to remember and abide by the definition of a correct practice tempo: slow enough.
I will continue this discussion next month.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part III

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1

In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 4: Prière à Notre-Dame
Last month I wrote of the Menuet Gothique as an especially tuneful piece, one that I often find myself whistling or humming as I walk along. The next movement of the Suite Gothique—Prière à Notre-Dame—is also one in which the treble melody is a large part of the artistic effect of the piece. However, the mood of the piece is as different as can be, and the implications of the shape and nature of the treble melody for the act of learning the piece are also largely different.

Texture
In the Menuet, the treble melody should be practiced all by itself, as a single line, and then accompanied just by the bass line. This is both because of the essential tuneful nature of that melody, and because all of the other notes—the inner voices, so to speak, though they are not by and large organized as voices—serve primarily to reinforce the harmonies and rhythms of the melody. This approach to practicing the Menuet strikes me as being the equivalent for this piece of practicing the separate voices and pairs of voices of a fugue or other contrapuntal piece.
Looking at the texture of the Prière, it strikes me that the essential element is the whole texture itself. That is, the treble melody seems to float on the bed of the pedal and inner-voice chords in a way that is essential to the nature and effect of that melody. This is of course a subjective analysis. Perhaps it is supported by the somewhat odd fact that the composer has emphatically not “solo’d out” the melody. For almost all of the piece, both hands are meant to be on the same keyboard, sometimes the Récit, sometimes the Grand Orgue. And this is in spite of the fact that as early the first measure the treble line encroaches upon a note being held by the inner voices, forcing at least a brief departure from the legato with which that inner voice would otherwise be played. (Only near the end of the movement, when Boëllmann has the treble melody briefly swoop down low and then continue to cross the [fairly high] left-hand chords, does he ask that the two hands play on separate keyboards.) If I am right about this, or more meaningfully, if any other player, teacher, or student also wants to see it this way, that would suggest that practicing separate components—right hand, left hand, pedal—while almost certainly still a good idea and indeed still quite important, would serve primarily a technical rather than a musical function.
(A practical consequence of this idea: when practicing separate voices or one melody for the purpose of learning it musically, it is normal to use a fingering that is specifically not the fingering that will be used in learning the notes. When practicing separate components for technical reasons it is crucial to use the fingering that will be used in learning the notes.)
In the Menuet, the rather jaunty melody is presented as the upper line of a series of chords in the right hand, marked non legato. The notion of practicing the top line of notes, the melody, all by itself comes from the desire to allow the ear to engage with that melody as easily as possible. The nature of the melody and the non legato instruction from the composer then allow the fingering and execution of the melody and its chords to be performed in a technically very natural way. Each chord can be given whatever fingering feels most comfortable to the player, based primarily on hand position, and the transition from one such comfortable position to the next can be practiced. The situation with the Prière is almost exactly the opposite of all of this. The treble melody is a single line, not the upper note of a series of chords. In 45 out of the 55 measures of the piece, the upper line can be played all by itself in the right hand while the left hand takes care of the other manual notes. This is not always necessarily the best fingering by any means, though it often is. This line is clearly meant to be played legato. There is no overall articulation instruction at the beginning of this movement, however the melody exists under long slurs—some one measure, some two, a few slightly longer. This movement, marked Très lent at the beginning and Animato later, has no metronome marking, whereas all three of the other movements do. While pieces with metronome markings are certainly not meant to be played “metronomically,” and pieces without them certainly do not have to be played very freely, this state of affairs at least suggests the possibility that the composer meant for this piece to be freer or more fluid rhythmically than the other movements.
Meanwhile, whereas the pedal line in the Menuet is quite active and, just as a matter of note-learning, rather challenging, the pedal line in the Prière is slow-moving throughout and simple. Its note patterns could be learned by someone who had started pedal-playing that month, perhaps that week. (Furthermore, 49 of the 72 notes of the pedal line are on raised keys, which helps! In the Menuet it is eleven notes out of 165.) However, the non legato of the pedal line in the Menuet allows the player to address each note with the most comfortable (part of a) foot and, by and large, simply move from one note to the next. The legato of the Prière requires a different kind of planning and practicing.

Hand and fingering choices
So, what do any of these observations tell us about mapping out, practicing, and learning the piece? First of all, except in those few measures where the composer has done this for us—mm. 36–42 and the last two measures—the first task in the manual part is to work out which hand will play which notes. This is always the case, of course, unless the piece has been set up by the composer to be on two manuals. The first consideration is always this: what distribution between the hands makes it easiest and therefore most reliable for the fingers to get to the notes? In this piece, this should be supplemented by an awareness of the need to make the melody legato as indicated by the slurs, or, to put it perhaps more accurately, by an awareness of the implications of handing choices for the legato of all of the lines.
The beginning of the piece already provides opportunities to think about hand choices and other aspects of technical planning, as well as interpretation (Example 1). In the first measure, the dotted half-note E-flat on the fourth beat can be reached by either hand. Any player, but especially one with small hands, might want to take that note in the right hand. (Playing the entire chord in the left hand could create tension in the outer part of the left hand.) That would, however, make it harder, or more involved, to make the transition from the third to the fourth beats in the treble voice completely legato.
Here are some possible fingerings for that moment in the piece (Examples 2, 3, 4, 5), and there are many others. (In this and other fingering examples I have omitted the slurs and other markings to make more room for the fingering numbers.)
In mm. 5–6, the notes that are printed as the lower of two voices in the upper staff can be played by either hand. Of course those eight notes do not all have to be played by the same hand. Here is one way to divide the notes between the hands (Example 6).
There are, as usual, several other ways to do it. This one in particular is designed in part to minimize the extent to which the thumbs play black notes, and in part to feel comfortable. Of course, in general it is a good idea to keep the thumbs off of black notes, as I have discussed in other columns. However, in a piece written in a key with four flats, of course it will not be possible to accomplish this completely. It is also not necessary to be absolute about it, especially when all of the notes in one hand at a given moment are on black keys, as in the left hand in m. 1 above. Students should try several possibilities, especially in spots where the notes are all close enough on the keyboard that many of them could go into either hand, and make choices.

Interpretive/technical points
There are two interesting interpretive/technical points that arise in the opening measures. In m. 1 at the sixth quarter-note, the treble melody plays a note that is being held by an inner voice, probably in the left hand. There is one simple basic answer to what to do here: release the dotted half-note and play the quarter-note in the treble melody. It is fairly clear that the playing of this treble note is more important than the holding of the last quarter-note’s worth or so of the longer note. Of course this is not a rigorous, scientific truth. Some players might feel that holding the long note is more important, here, or, more likely, in various other places in the repertoire where this type of conflict arises. A student can certainly try it both ways: the holding of the long note, combined with the correct timing of the release of the treble A-flat might give an illusion that a new E-flat is being played at that moment. This illusion might or might not be convincing.
If the player is going to choose to release the E-flat and play it again on the sixth quarter-note, then it is important to do it the right way. To start with, it is only the inner voice E-flat that must be released early. It is surprisingly easy to borrow this release for the other voice that is involved: that is to release, in this case, the treble A-flat early, with the inner voice E-flat. This creates a discontinuity that is unnecessary and that is probably responsible for giving the whole phenomenon of voices bumping into each other like this a bad name! In fact, if the dotted half-note E-flat is released appropriately early, then the treble line can be played exactly as if it were the only thing being played, with whatever articulation and timing that implies. It is also important that the note be released as lightly and gently as possible. After all, the real goal is to release it without the listener even knowing that it is gone. It is better to release a note in this situation a little bit earlier than absolutely necessary than to release it abruptly. If the note being released draws attention to itself by snapping off, then the other voice will not sound cantabile or legato, no matter how it itself is played. It is important that the held note and the newly played
E-flat be played with different fingers. This is of course accomplished automatically if they are in different hands.
Then in m. 2, moving from the third quarter-note beat to the fourth, the inner voice takes over a note—D-flat—that has just been played by the treble melody. In this case, in order actually to play the inner voice D-flat, it is necessary to release the treble note early, breaking the legato of the upper voice. Again, the way that this is done can affect how disruptive it is: if different fingers are used, and the release of the treble eighth-note is made lightly and gently, then the interruption of the legato will be minimal, perhaps not really noticeable to a listener. There are also a couple of other possibilities. The treble eighth-note could be tied to the (no longer really) new dotted half-note D-flat. Or the three-note left-hand chord can be arpeggiated, thereby delaying the upper note of that chord and removing the conflict between that note and the upper voice. In general we do not necessarily think of arpeggiating chords or staggering notes on the organ, except as instructed to do so by the composer. However, the aesthetic of this movement suggests to me that this could be appropriate not only at this spot, where it also helps to solve a specific problem, but also elsewhere, where it might support a gentle flowing feeling in the piece. Of course this is quite a subjective interpretive choice, but something that a student can ponder.
This kind of analysis of the effect of hand and fingering decisions on the interpretive impact of the performance of the piece can be carried out throughout the Prière. This movement reveals itself to be perhaps the most complicated of the four movements of the Suite in this respect, and the one requiring the most meticulous work; though, because it is a fairly slow movement and because the pedal line is not virtuosic, it is probably not the most difficult in performance for most players.

Pedal line
The pedal line is, as I mentioned above, slow-moving and fairly simple. There are, as always, various possibilities for pedaling. A basic pedaling for the beginning might look like that shown in Example 7. It should be noted that Boëllmann in this piece only asks for the use of the swell pedal at times when the pedal part is on low sustained notes, as in m. 8 or m. 11, or during rests. In the above example, the main thing that could be different is the use of some same-foot substitutions for students who would rather strike notes initially with the toe (Example 8).
I myself would probably do the first of these substitutions but not the second. There are also places in the piece—mm. 6–8, mm. 25–29—where both-foot substitution is necessary to preserve complete legato. In this passage (Example 9), the student can listen to the difference between the strict legato created with the help of the indicated substitution and the slight articulation that would result from this pedaling (Example 10).
Practicing
As always, the practicing of separate components is crucial to the learning of the piece. After hand assignments, fingering, and pedaling have been worked out, the student should practice pedals, including the choreography of the swell pedal where it is indicated, and separate hands, as much as is needed: that is, until each of those components is absolutely secure. My guess is that with this particular texture, the first step in putting things together should be the two hands together, and that this can be followed by adding the pedals (again, assuming that each of these components is very well learned). That is, I think that practicing each hand separately with pedal is not as important here as it is with some pieces. Of course there is no harm in doing some of it. Everything should be kept slow enough to feel easy. Since the final tempo is not meant to be fast—très lent—the process of speeding up to tempo should happen naturally and fairly easily, but should not ever be rushed.
Next month I will return to the Buxtehude Praeludium in E Major, looking at some contrapuntal and some non-contrapuntal sections. ■