On Teaching: Alfred Brendel

Random

Last month, as I was finishing up the column recounting my youthful discovery of the playing of Alfred Brendel and discussing some of the effects of that discovery on my life and work, it occurred to me that my affinity for Brendel was something that came about utterly at random. I alluded to this briefly at the end of the column, but I have continued to muse about it.

Randomness is a flexible concept as well as one that is subject to various interpretations or restraints. I would not expect to be able to sort all of that out here. Instead, I will posit some of the ways this randomness affected my own story—some aspects of music making that seem to engage the idea of randomness in a fruitful way, and how this might benefit teaching.

I invested a lot of time in 1970 listening to BBC 3 and thus hearing its broadcasts of Brendel Beethoven records was itself random. It was also a matter of chance that I was then at a particularly receptive moment to encounter that music and those performances. In other words, that receptivity did not arise out of, or have any connection to, my having injured my back, my wanting to skip school as much as I could get away with, my family being in London at the time, or the BBC’s choice to program that music. I wrote last month, “As a ‘classical music person’ in the latter third of the twentieth century and thereafter, I would certainly have been familiar with Alfred Brendel.” But at a later time, I may have gotten little or even nothing out of my encounter with that playing. Or I might have gotten more. In any case it would have been something different. By that point, perhaps I would have more-or-less given up on piano listening and not paid any attention; or at another time, maybe I would have been so inspired that I would have decided to rededicate myself to actually learning piano, and would thus not have ended up as an organist or harpsichordist.

Another development in my education as a musician came about at random and yet was of tremendous importance. I took bassoon lessons during the 1968–1969 school year. Late in that year my teacher, JoAnn Wich, downsized her record collection and gave me a pile of LPs. Among those was the recording of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, conducted by Paul Paray with Marcel Dupré at the organ. At some point I listened to this at random: I had essentially never heard of Saint-Saëns and thought of myself as someone who did not like post-Classical-era music. I could easily have never listened to this record. In fact, I fell head-over-heels in love with it: the music, the performance, the sonorities, even the discussion on the record jacket of the recording technology that was used. I became an instant Saint-Saëns fanatic—I still am—and Paray became one of my favorite conductors, which he still is. In discovering Saint-Saëns I allowed the first crack to form in this resistance that I had to music from after the Classical era.

It would be impossible to overstate how strong that resistance had been up to that time. I can still remember the feeling that music after Beethoven engendered in me (come to think of it, maybe music after early Beethoven). It was a kind of fear of chaos or anarchy—probably, really, death. I thought that it would be wrong as well as dangerous to engage with that sort of music.

I do not know where those feelings came from. I suspect that I got from Baroque and early Classical music more of a sense of order and reassurance than I would want to get out of that music now, and that later music challenged or upset that sense in a way that I was not ready for. It took a while for that crumbling of my resistance to bear fruit. As I wrote last month it was in 1974 that I first became receptive to Schumann, and later to Liszt, for example, or for that matter Brahms.

Most germane to my work at the organ was that I discovered Dupré, and this is where it gets particularly interesting, since the story is not that I became a great devotee of him or his playing, as much as I do indeed admire both. The first thing my exposure to his playing of the magnificent Saint-Saëns organ part did was to help push me away from the bassoon and back toward keyboard playing. I was forcefully reminded that I was excited about the organ, even though the return to keyboard playing meant, for the time being, going back to piano lessons.

Second, it got me interested in Dupré and the kinds of organs that he was generally associated with. As I grew up and became generally a bit more diligent, that led to a significant amount of time reading about and listening to Romantic organs, especially in France, but also Germany and England. I already knew that in my own playing I wanted to focus on Baroque music and the instruments that pertained most directly to that repertoire. This is something that has never wavered. But the chance encounter with that Saint-Saëns recording is the specific source of my awareness of organs and organ music beyond my own performing specialties. If I never had that encounter but had returned to and stuck with study of the organ I would someday have had to learn about all manner of details about the organ and its music. Perhaps my interest in doing so would have been sparked by another chance encounter; after all, I grew up less than a mile from the Woolsey Hall organ at Yale University. But maybe I would have simply had to grapple with that music as a part of my education, understood to be necessary. It occurs to me now that discovering something by chance or at random can give an extra jolt of excitement and can help it to feel more personal.

Randomness in music

So what about randomness in music itself, be it performance, improvisation, perhaps composition, and maybe even instrument design? I will not write about composition or improvisation here, since randomness in those settings is complicated, and I do not have direct experience with these concepts myself. Besides, other scholars have canvassed these topics at great length. But I have some thoughts about instruments and performance.

One of these concerns harpsichord voicing. In the case of harpsichords, voicing means causing the plectra to be the way that you want them to be. It is about size, shape, and relative rigidity or flexibility. It affects volume of sound, character of sound, and touch. The plectra are relatively ephemeral, and voicing has to be reworked or touched up on harpsichords rather regularly. Many harpsichordists do most or all of their own voicing, and I have done so for several decades. In thinking about voicing, the voicer probably has a template in mind for all the notes of a stop on a harpsichord. That could be that all the notes should be the same strength as one another; or that the middle two octaves should be even and the volume and touch should gradually ascend in the high and low outer octaves; or that the middle should be even, the top notes gradually louder, and the bass notes slightly quieter; and so on. I feel convinced from my own experience that whatever the template may be, the result is more effective musically if there is a small amount of random variation from that template. When I do a total voicing of a harpsichord stop, I do the initial, rough voicing as carefully as I can, according to whatever plan I have in mind. Then I wait until the following day to do the final refining of that voicing, which rarely needs to be done.

I believe that these very slight deviations from the theoretical ideal help to enliven the sound and compensate for any aesthetic stiffness that might come from the lack of player control over dynamics. But there is something about the way that this works that I had not sorted out until now. It is actually critical that it be genuinely random, not a planned-out slight deviation from the plan. That would just be a second, more detailed version of the template. The randomness is what makes it feel alive. Random variation will relate in various ways to different pieces in different keys, without any danger that the voicer will favor one over another. 

I suspect that there are similar things to say about organ voicing. This logically should relate differently to a wide variety of harpsichords or organs. It is a subjective reaction, but still an example of the way that randomness can come into play in music.

This puts me in mind of an aspect of the sound old natural horns make. Some notes have a sonority that is completely different from the adjoining notes—vastly different, on the scale of placing a few Vox Humana pipes throughout a stop that is otherwise a Gedeckt, for example. These notes are distributed at random with respect to any given piece and add a surprisingly vivid color dimension to the effect of a performance.

I have observed similar concepts about interpretation and performance. As players we often have templates for how we want pieces to go: tempo and registration, but also details like articulation, phrasing, rubato, dynamics or dynamic inflections, voicing of chords on piano (a different use of that word, of course), arpeggiation, and so on. We map these things out; doing so is an important part of the process of creating our interpretation. Drilling the results of this planning into our fingers and feet is an important part of making an interpretation into a performance. However, my own experience tells me that a bit of random deviation from what we have planned and drilled so diligently is usually a good thing. It is as a listener rather than as a player that I have noticed this. In particular, I realized that performances in which a fugue-subject phrasing or the shaping of a recurring motif is exactly repeated without change tends to sound sterile, boring, and, eventually, annoying. There can be planned deviation from one instance of a theme to another. However, I feel that a little bit of random variation, including from the planned variation, brings the results closer to feeling alive and human.

Random choice of repertoire

Another aspect where randomness seems to be a fruitful lens through which to ponder is that of finding repertoire for students. There are various ways of approaching that task. At one extreme is the concept of having a list of pieces that you expect all students to work on, perhaps in a set order. (This is, I believe, rare as a practice, but is a concept that can inform the process.) At the other is simply letting students bring in and work on any pieces that they happen to like. (I am temperamentally inclined to this, though I do recognize the glaring problem with it, namely, that it fails to introduce students to pieces that they do not already know about or happen to hear or otherwise discover.) Most approaches are a hybrid, and many approaches can work. But it is fun to ponder how to randomize this process: line up all of the pieces ever written on the desk, swirl around until dizzy, then lunge over and pick one! Or put them all on a dartboard and throw! These are joking ways of describing the idea. But I wonder whether choosing the occasional piece utterly at random might be a way to enliven study and might not teach both the student and the teacher something about the learning process.

If the actual experience of working on the randomly chosen piece was boring or fruitless it might be humane to let the student drop it after a while. But in order for this to be a good experience or experiment, the student would have to want to give any such piece an honest try.

I plan on choosing my own next piece this way. I need to concoct an actual method for doing the random choosing. But I am very curious to see how it feels to work on a piece for none of the sorts of reasons that I usually have. That should mean starting the work itself with fewer preconceptions or expectations. That is part of what is intriguing about it, and I will report back at some point.

Next month I will write about some of the feedback that I have received about my pedal method column from several months ago. I have not done that yet because other things have come up and because that feedback is still coming in. Interestingly, most of it by far, though not all, has been about shoes.

So, I shall kick off the discussion in May by talking about shoes.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Inc., in Princeton, New Jersey (www.pekc.org). 

Utterly miscellaneous

This month’s column is a grab bag of topics: a paragraph or so on several matters that have been on my mind but have not developed into columns of their own. Some ideas are about pedal playing and are a sort of follow up to last month’s column. However, because of the timing of the column-writing process, I cannot yet respond to any of the feedback I hope to receive from my December column. Most of the topics here are more-or-less random, connected with one another and with the phenomenon of this column only in that they could shape at least indirectly some of what we say or do with our students.

Pedal playing

Two things about pedal playing have been going through my mind recently. The first is the question of how to help people get comfortable going from one sort of pedalboard to another. For the most part this means flat versus concave/radiating. I tend to call the latter “round,” just because that is more concise. There are also differences among pedalboards within each of those categories. The Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, has a round pedal keyboard, but with slightly different proportions than American Guild of Organists standard. That instrument was my “go-to” organ for many years, and I probably performed over thirty recitals on it. So whereas a lot of my colleagues found it annoying to adjust to that instrument, I had, if anything, a bit of trouble when I wanted to play on a different round pedalboard. Also, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time playing flat pedal keyboards, and they differ a lot from one another. I believe that the key to success in moving from one pedalboard to another is to think of the act of playing a pedal note as involving points rather than lines. That is, it is the spacing of the spots on the keyboard where you are playing that matters, not which way the rest of the key is pointing. This is not rigorously true, and in particular, its application to heel playing is a bit complicated. But I think that it is a better starting point than a preoccupation with overall layout. This ties in with everything else about my approach to pedaling, especially the emphasis on keeping track of the motion of each foot with respect to itself.

The second point is about the concept of sitting comfortably. Something that I do not believe I have dealt with adequately in my earlier writings about pedal playing is the issue of sitting comfortably. Is it good enough just to do this intuitively: sit there and do what feels comfortable? Or is it possible that one has to learn how to sit comfortably, perhaps with advice from a trainer, physical therapist, orthopedist, or other professional—or perhaps with the aid of practices such as yoga, Pilates, Alexander Technique, and so on? I have always used the intuitive approach, and I honestly do not know as much as I could or should about the latter. I worry that learning anything non-intuitive about how to sit comfortably could converge with “you must sit this way,” of which I am very skeptical indeed.

Background music

Here is the first of my random points for this month. I have never, over thirteen-plus years, played music in the background while I was writing this column. But today I have done so. Why does that seem right this time? Perhaps I have become better at multitasking. There are two reasons I have not previously played background music. I am afraid that it will distract me more than it will relax me and put me in the right mood to concentrate; and some of the time, I am afraid that other music will confuse me when I write about some particular music, or even just about musical or music-tangential issues. Am I fooling myself? Can I really write this way? So far, so good.

Is the performer deeply engaged?

I recently attended a couple of recitals with some friends, both by the same solo performer. (Well, not too recently, alas.) And we all thought the performances were tremendous. We agreed that the performer played as if she cared deeply about every note. This crystallized for me how important it is to as a listener. It is also something that I try to convey in my own playing. But for a listener it is a feeling. It might not be literally true of the performer whom I am remembering, and, even more likely, it might well be true of many or most performances that do not happen to come across that way to me. It would be unfair and inaccurate, often, to assume that if I do not come away from a performance with that feeling, the performer was actually kind of indifferent to or uninvolved with the music, or took a cavalier or perfunctory approach. But that does not mean that it is not important. And what about with students? I like the idea of conveying to a student that this might be a value worth embracing. But how does one do that without it seeming to direct a particular style or type of playing? That would inevitably be the style or approach that the teacher responded to as conveying that feeling.

I wonder whether we are more likely to come away with this feeling from attending a concert than from listening to a recording. If so, is this because of the effect of the recording situation on playing or, more likely, because we listen differently in person at a performance venue than we do at home or in the car?

This may be one source of my commitment to helping students with music that they care about deeply and to avoid the situation of working on anything because someone has told them that they must. But I need to avoid conveying the message that it is insufficiently important to work on music about which you are curious, and which you may or may not come to care deeply about.

One thing that I have noticed about teaching during this Covid period is that some students have become more autonomous in choosing music. I usually help students choose music through discussion, which can be partially duplicated remotely, but not in as free-ranging and flexible a way, and through pulling music off the shelf and playing through different pieces. That we cannot duplicate.

A love of the sound

A while ago I was talking with a harpsichord builder, someone who reliably creates stunningly beautiful-sounding instruments. He commented that there was often a problem with organists that arose out of their love for the sound: that it could become self-indulgent, too sensual, and thus too inward-looking. At the time—quite a few years ago, in fact—my main reaction to this was to think that if anything this applied more to harpsichord, especially since the gorgeous, sensually compelling sounds of a great instrument are at such close quarters. More recently I have come to this question: why is this not a good thing? These gorgeous sounds exist to be heard and to convey the music and its associated feelings. Lately, I have been thinking about this, partly because I have spent months listening to recorded music at an even greater pace than I had over the pre-pandemic years, and trying very hard to delve into that experience as deeply as I can. But also, I suspect, it does have something to do with the point above. The sensory or sensual dimension of the organ and harpsichord is about conveying emotion. Therefore, it may be a disproportionately large part of what it takes to create that feeling I was talking about just above.

Surface level appeal

Related to this, it seems to me that often there is a surface level to a work of art that can be either appealing or unappealing to a particular person who tries to experience that art. And that if the art contains a message or meaning, that is in some way deep or important or lasting, that will only be accessible to someone who happens to respond well to what is on the surface. For example, I have never liked The Simpsons. I have experienced all sorts of people whose views I respect, and often agree with, tell me that this show is really good: funny, literate, witty, and with underlying social and political views that I would approve. I do not doubt any of this, though I also do not know firsthand that it is true. I find the drawing style of the characters really off-putting, and, in particular, I cannot stand the voices. That is not to say that I think that the performers and directors are not talented and skillful and doing a great job. It is a matter of my particular taste, based on upbringing, experiences, psychology, etc. I have tried viewing a few times and cannot get through a single episode. I am blocked from getting to know whatever really lies deeper within the show.

I recently had another similar experience with a modern dance performance that I interacted with the way we do for now—on my computer screen. I watched the event, and I certainly thought that I detected really interesting narrative, emotional content, perhaps philosophical questions being dealt with. But the out-and-out style, the way people moved, was one that I found annoying and disturbing. After watching this piece I happened upon a description of it by one of its creators. I read that, hoping that it would be interesting (and it was), and that it would unlock the piece itself to me. When I summoned it back up and tried to watch it again, I still found it annoying and disturbing: actually more so, since I now knew that there were things at the deeper level that I would have liked to connect with but still could not.

What’s in a name?

I have always wondered what his friends called J. S. Bach. Did he have a nickname or informal version of his name? I have heard that “Basti” is and has been for many years a diminutive of Sebastian. Did anyone call him that? Or a different informal name? He may have only been called “Sebastian” and presumably some version of “Father” by his children. As far as I can tell we simply do not know. But I do not want not to assume that because we think of him as so august and unapproachable he cannot have been addressed other than formally. The point of this line of thought is to try to get away from thinking of him that way. (For me that project was greatly helped along by taking a look at the facial reconstruction of Bach done several years ago at Dundee University. You can find it by doing an internet image search on “Bach reconstruction.”)

There is evidence that Johann Christian Bach was known to his family as “Christel.” This comes from the top page of a stack of J. S. B. cantata manuscripts that we know were divided between
C. P. E. Bach and J. C. Bach. An inscription there says “Carl u. Christel,” the first name in the handwriting of J. C. Bach himself, and then his name in the hand of his mother Anna Magdalena Bach. I learned recently that James Madison, also someone whom we might have trouble thinking of as “just” a person rather than an august historical figure, was called Jemmy. I would love to have more of these little windows into history.

Competition-based model

I was recently reminded by something that I heard on a televised golf game of the story that Arthur Rubinstein used to tell about his first time hearing Vladimir Horowitz. The gist of it was that he thought to himself, “This young man is really good. I’d better practice more!” As best I remember it, Rubinstein was indeed talking about the most basic thing: that he was hearing someone who was better than he was at the “right notes at the right tempo” side of playing, and that he had better work to get equally good at that. I have always shied away from, and encouraged others to shy away from, that sort of competition-based model. My fear about it is that it encourages too much of an emphasis on the things that can be measured and copied and discourages emphasis on playing one’s own way. But that is another thing that I want to muse about a bit. The things that can be measured and copied are also part of the picture. Is an awareness that others might be better at some things always a toxic way to motivate oneself? I have always felt it to be. But the amount of anxiety that such comparisons give to me may be higher than it necessarily is for others. Maybe I am too afraid that if I hear something that is clearly better than what I am doing my response will be to give up rather than to practice more. Or, more to the point, I have not sorted out a way to discern how this works for each student: it has to vary quite a lot.

If this kind of comparison- or competition-based model can ever work it has to be very clear that one is being spurred on to do an even better job of what one wants to do, of what constitutes one’s own individual contribution: not to copy as such. All this will bear a good deal more thinking about.

And that is all for this month.

Students’ Listening II

Why should anyone ever listen to music?

That is, of course, a ridiculous question. It is obvious from history that listening to music is fundamentally human: a desire or even a need, and maybe a definitional part of human experience. Yet, I think it is important to continually remind ourselves that recordings, in addition to live performances, help us to strive to become better musicians. Musicians are often subject to self-doubt. (There is a cartoon that I see once in a while that shows a pie chart of the mind of a musician. The section labeled “crippling self-doubt” covers about 90% of the space.) That self-doubt comes from several questions, not the least of which is: “is this all worthwhile?” Yet, listening to great music provides us with an affirmative answer. The sort of self-doubt regarding the quality of one’s own playing can be exacerbated by listening—something that I will try to grapple with below.

One concrete reason for listening to music is to gain familiarity with diverse repertoire. This was the point of that “listening test” I encountered in college that I referenced last month. What repertoire? There are expanding circles ranging from music from a specific time period written specifically for our instrument to the entirety of written music. It is potentially frustrating and, for me, quite liberating to realize that it is impossible to know all of the music that is out there. Frustrating because of the inevitability of missing things that are wonderful. Liberating because, if we cannot experience everything, then we do not have to aspire to have experienced everything. We can hope to experience a substantial and meaningful subset of what there is.

How should any given student navigate the world of listening for learning about repertoire? Listening to music that you already know and like is a wonderful thing to do, but that’s not really part of this process. Going out in circles is always a good idea: if you love and listen to Brahms symphonies, try his chamber music; try symphonies by someone who influenced Brahms or whom he influenced. Then try their chamber music, piano music, and so on. If you like Schütz, listen to Gabrieli. If you like Beethoven, listen to Albrechtsberger. There need not be anything obscure, complicated, or subtle about constructing these circles. Fruitful connections can be found by perusing Wikipedia articles or CD booklets.

This is fairly obvious, and we all probably do it normally as we seek out things to listen to. But still, you should encourage your students to follow the process consciously, maybe in ways that are partly teacher-guided, perhaps with a written outline to keep track. But another idea is to seek out new things to listen to not by affinity but by opposition. If you love Brahms, listen to Wagner or Liszt. If you love Debussy, listen to a selection of music by Les Six, who consciously rejected his influence. If you love Bach, seek out the music of Marchand, who was apparently intimidated by Bach and fled from a possible competition with him. Or, if you have not already done so, listen to Handel, whose life, career, temperament, and music were so different from those of Bach.

Keeping a distance

Another way to find things to listen to is to search for music that is completely different from your norm. Whatever you have just been listening to and enjoying, move as far away as possible. If you have been listening to the Telemann Paris Quartets, find some late nineteenth-century Russian choral music. If you have been listening to a Bruckner symphony, find a clavichord performance of early seventeenth-century dances. This is a controlled randomness and guarantees avoiding ruts.

If a friend, teacher, critic, or scholar says that particular music is not worth getting to know (boring, pedestrian, unpleasant, lacking in importance), then try it out! This suggestion is not based on the notion that that friend or critic is someone of bad judgment or likely to be wrong. It is just a way of shaking things up. People of equal discernment and experience end up reacting differently to artistic experience as often as they end up reacting similarly, and that is just as true when they agree that they are people of similar tastes.

Some of my most important, rewarding, and long-term fruitful listening as a youngster came from LPs that an older musician had discarded as being of little or no interest. And the musician in question was someone from whom I learned a lot and whose taste and judgment I admired. We should never base our exploration on the assumption that any two people see things the same way.

When we talk about listening to music to broaden or deepen our familiarity with repertoire, we are mostly talking about listening to recordings. We expect to be able to find recordings of just about anything, whereas the concert offerings in any one locale can only cover a tiny amount of music, even over several concert seasons. The changes in the ways in which we encounter recordings that have taken place in the last several years are interesting to consider, especially as they influence the experience of students.

The revolution in the listening experience

In my experience, I would say that for at least five years now, 85% of the time that a student has come to a lesson and told me that they have listened to a piece, that listening has taken place on YouTube. A lot of listening is now done without any money changing hands. That opens music up to more listeners, though the effect on creators of performances is more problematic. I remember spending several days while I was in college agonizing over whether to spend, I believe, $4.99 on Ralph Kirkpatrick’s LP of four Bach harpsichord toccatas. I vividly recall going back to the Princeton University Store several times to look it over. (I did buy it.) Now anyone can find many performances of those pieces on YouTube.

When a student comes to a lesson and tells me that they have been looking into a particular piece by listening to a YouTube performance, I always ask who was playing. And never once in that situation has anyone been able to say who the performer was. Of course, that information is usually there to be found. And furthermore, all of the students in question have been extremely smart and clever people who pay attention to the world around them and care about artistic matters. It is just that expectations have changed; the ethos of how we listen has changed. YouTube is seen, for purposes like this, as a sort of neutral encyclopedia of music. It isn’t any more obvious that you would check on who was playing than it would be to dig into the question of who wrote a given encyclopedia or Wikipedia article.

Is this good, bad, neither, or both? I am not sure. I have an extreme interest in performers. Probably too extreme, in that it can get in the way; if I do not know who is playing, I have trouble feeling comfortable listening. But that is a foible of mine. If listening is being done only or mostly to learn something about what music is out there, then the identity or background of the player is perhaps best thought of as only one piece of information about what is going on, not necessarily more important than information about instruments, acoustics, recording technology, edition used, and so on. If a piece seems less interesting or compelling than you had hoped that it would be, it is often worth looking for a different performance before shelving your interest in that piece.

This modern paradigm has the effect of taking away some of the feelings of authority that we have traditionally bestowed on those performers who were invited to make recordings. Part of the dynamic of record listening over the twentieth century was that we assumed, by and large, that the recording artists were the most talented players and thoughtful interpreters. No matter how inspiring it can be to listen to great recordings, it can also be limiting. This limiting tendency has its feel-good side: getting accustomed to a certain undeniably effective performance approach and experiencing the satisfaction of absorbing and then perhaps recreating it. I would argue that the limiting nature of this outweighs the good feeling that it engenders. But even worse, there is the outwardly discouraging side: feeling intimidated by the reputed greatness of the recording artists, not just by liking their performances better than you anticipate liking your own, but being daunted by their celebrity and publicly heralded greatness. It is possible that the more democratic performance model that has taken hold now will have the psychological effect of freeing students to include themselves more easily in the universe of those whose performances are valid.

Listening to interpretation

In former days, a student might ask, “how can I hope to play as well as Marcel Dupré, Helmut Walcha, Fernando Germani, Marie-Claire Alain, etc.” Now we can say “you don’t even know who that player was. It could just as easily have been you. You can do that just as well!” This is an over-simplification, but not an unrealistic or inapt one, based on what I have seen.

This brings us to another major aspect of listening: to learn interpretation. As anyone will know who has read this column over the years, I am a strong believer in encouraging everyone to feel free to play as they want. This includes students, to such an extent that I want even beginners to make their own interpretive decisions. That is a big subject, and this is not the place to go into it fully. The role of listening to recordings in shaping interpretation or in learning how to think about the art of shaping interpretation is essentially two-fold. On the one hand, anyone’s playing can be a direct source of ideas about playing. There is nothing wrong with listening to someone else play and thinking about what that player did, the choices that he or she made, the effects that those choices seemed to have, etc. If a student is doing this as a conscious choice then it can be used in the ways that the student wants, with whatever guidance from the teacher seems useful. The teacher might do well to remind the student that anything heard in someone else’s performance is just one person’s choice.

But there is only so much that we can do by taking hold of this sort of listening consciously. To a greater or lesser extent from one person to another, but to a significant extent for almost everyone, performances heard repeatedly exert a subconscious influence, sometimes a very strong one. If we have heard a passage or a piece exactly the same way over and over again, our minds can define the piece as being what we heard as much as we define it by the notes on the page. This is true not only as defined by performance gestures—tempo, articulation, timing, etc., but also about registration or the often-irreproducible effects of acoustics. I recall an earnest conversation that I once had with an organist a bit older and more experienced than I was about what the registration “should” be for the middle section of a certain piece. I was arguing that the nature of the music called for something clear and light; he was equally sure that it needed a more “quinty”-rich sound. It turned out that each of us had had as our favorite recorded performance of that piece one that led us to these diverging conclusions. The point is not that we each liked the sound we were used to, but that we had absorbed it so deeply that we were prepared to argue that it was part of the definition of the piece.

As another example, I love the piano music of Schubert. However, I have lately realized that I so deeply absorbed Alfred Brendel’s approach to that music growing up that I have a hard time listening to anyone else playing it. For years I have sought out records or occasional live performances of Schubert by pianists whom I admire greatly. But I always react as if something is just not quite right—an interpretive/rhetorical analogue to pervasive wrong notes or bad tuning. I consider this a loss for me, and it may fade or otherwise change someday. It is not a big deal; rather, it is part of the give and take of life. But if I were trying to play that music, I would have the following bad choice: either I would play in a way that was a copy of someone else, or I would not like the way I played.

So the first antidote to getting one performance approach stuck in one’s head is to listen more or less equally to multiple performances. If you have heard each of five or six performances of a piece approximately the same number of times, then it is quite impossible that one of them can have established itself in your mind as the very definition of the piece. But this is also part of the give and take of life. If we listen to half a dozen performances of every piece that we might want to play, then we have that much less time to listen to other things. It is a question of managing what we want to do. I personally focus on pieces that I am actively working on or feel sure that I want to play some day. I solve the problem for those pieces by not listening to them at all. That is the opposite solution to listening to multiple performances. They both work for this purpose. For other music I sort of let the chips fall where they may.

Most of us spend much less time listening to live concerts in person than we do listening to recordings. Probably the major advantage of live performance is that when all is said and done, the sonorities, the effect of acoustics, and the spontaneity are simply different. A recording is not an “I couldn’t tell the difference” recreation of a concert or other live performance, and it is at least a common experience that concerts at their best are even better than recordings. This is kind of a cliché, and in this case it is only sometimes true. A given concert even by a great performer can happen to be uninspired, or something can go wrong: noise, tuning, acoustic. But there is a particular advantage to live concerts. If you hear a piece in concert and are intrigued or excited by it—a piece of the sort that you might want to play—then the chances are that you will not remember all specifics of the interpretation well enough or in enough detail to be overly influenced by them. They certainly cannot imprint themselves on your subconscious with the weight of authority that comes from repetition if that repetition has not happened.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and I will come back to it. For the next column, I will turn to J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Some of the features of this piece that make it particularly interesting inspire me to think and write while working on creating a performance of it, as there are some important things about the work that we do not know. For instance, we do not know the order of the movements, what instrument or instruments it was intended for, what title the composer meant for it to have, or, since it is incomplete, how it was meant to end. We do know that Bach worked on it for years, right up to his death, and that his heirs worked thereafter on getting it published. As to all of these things that we do not know, we can make highly educated guesses or assumptions—enough to make it interesting to discuss and to be getting on with for performance.

Playing slowly

I ended last month’s column with an anecdote that I suggested would lead nicely into what I wanted to write about this month:

One day Gene Roan and I were walking along the corridor chatting when he stopped near a practice room door. He told me to listen, and then after a couple of minutes said, “Even his very slow practice has a sense of direction.” I did not know who was practicing. I think that I was shy about actually peering through the little window, or maybe it was papered over. But that was a significant lesson to me. I have tried to make sure that my slow practicing has a sense of direction ever since!

This month I discuss playing slowly—slow practice, students and their relationship to tempo, and various questions related to choice of tempo in performance. Concerning slow practice, which I have written about at some length in the past, I have some new things to say and some new ideas about how best to describe it to students.

First I want to flesh out the anecdote a little bit. After writing last month’s column, I wondered whether Professor Roan might have been engaging in a bit of stealth teaching at that moment. He certainly knew that I was a fervent believer in slow practice and that I had a tendency to prefer somewhat slow tempos for performance. Was he reminding me to take care that my slow playing incorporated as much direction and purpose as possible? Clearly one of the characteristic dangers of slow playing is that of plodding along.

But I have had a few further questions. Is it actually good to imbue your very slow practice with a sense of direction? The point of slow practicing is to learn the notes. Is listening for or trying to project a sense of direction a distraction from that? Does it reduce the efficiency of slow practice and delay the time at which the player will be able to move closer to a performance tempo and eventually all the way there?

Furthermore, what is the relationship between a sense of direction that works at one tempo and one that would work at a very different tempo? Is it possible to hear interpretive or rhetorical gestures in slow motion, so that what you are doing to shape the music four or eight times slower than you end up playing it is genuinely analogous to what you will want to do when you are playing faster? The assumption that there is a strong analogy of this sort with the physical gesture of playing is the foundation of the belief that slow practice is efficient. But that does not tell us anything directly about rhetorical or interpretive matters.

One way of expressing a fairly agreed-upon view of the relationship between systematic slow practice and end results in performance is that the slow practice leads to such solid, reliable, and controllable playing that the ears, mind, judgment, taste, etc., of the player can ask the fingers and feet to do anything and they will respond. This is certainly correct in my experience. And a logical conclusion from this formulation is that expressive content of very slow practice is essentially neither here nor there.

Perhaps the point of playing with a sense of direction or any expressive purpose and effect when practicing very slowly is not about the music that you are practicing. Maybe it is about the next very slow piece that you want to play. It is about learning to hear musical shape and direction in very slow passages in general, not particularly with reference to the piece that you are practicing. Or perhaps it is just about keeping the ears focused. In any case, these are questions to muse about rather than to answer, and it pleases me that an event that took about ninety seconds thirty or so years ago is still causing me to reflect today.

The earlier columns in which I wrote the most systematically about slow practice were those of February and March 2009. Perusing those now I see that I did not talk about one technique that I have used to help students settle in to slow practicing—in particular, not to speed up inadvertently during the process. That is a conscious focus on the sonority of individual notes. If we are lucky, the actual sound of an organ or harpsichord that we are playing is beautiful, interesting, or somehow compelling. Savoring that sound can be an antidote to a tendency to rush or hurry. This is very true on the harpsichord, where the middle to late part of the blooming and decaying sound can be fascinating and the best part. On the organ, decay does not happen. Sounds are still interesting, and the relationship between what the pipes are doing and what the room is doing can be fascinating, and it often develops over the length of even a long, slow note.

This points to a concern that I have tended to gloss over. Since organ sounds can theoretically last forever, very slow organ practice creates the risk that the inexorability of each note’s sound will become annoying. Not everyone feels this. I think that I do so only when there are other people who can hear me practicing, and I am worried that they might find the sounds annoying. This can be largely solved by using soft sounds. In fact, in the great centuries-old debate about whether to do initial practicing on a soft neutral sound or on the sound that you want for the music, this may provide a new wrinkle. Look for a sound that makes the sustained tones of slow practice as interesting as possible!

Concerning choice of tempo for performance, why ask the question, “Is it okay to play slowly?” Surely that question should in principle be a neutral one: “What is the most effective tempo for this piece or passage?” It is possible for a performance tempo to be too slow, and the telltale sign of that is that listeners react to the music as plodding or boring, but it is also possible for music to be too fast, resulting in the music being perceived as hectic or unpleasant or conveying a sense that the performer wants to get it over with. However, if music is slow, there can always be some suspicion that it is that way because the player cannot play any faster. We rarely suspect that someone who plays very fast cannot play any slower. I believe this is often a bigger issue for students than we realize. The pressure to play as fast as you have heard someone else play can be intense.

I recently witnessed a comment on a YouTube performance of a Bach piece that said, more or less, if one cannot play this any faster, one should not play. This was rather unfriendly, and it was accompanied by some other nasty comments. (One of these comments concluded this certainly was not Bach’s tempo, something about which the commenter could not possibly have actually known.) I am perfectly happy that I scrolled away from it before I noted exactly what it was or how to find it again.

I had the great good fortune to hear the pianist Mieczysław Horszowski in concert quite a few times in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was in his nineties. His tempos were usually a bit slower than the average that you would have found by surveying available recordings of the pieces, especially newer ones. His playing was also thoughtful and expressive, natural and unforced. I never suspected that he had to play slowly because of his age or for any other reason. I also noticed that he would often include something very fast among the encores. It struck me that perhaps he was trying to give us listeners the message that, yes, he was playing the way he played because that is how he wanted the music to be heard—that his fingers could indeed move as fast as ever, or as fast as anyone’s.

I tend to like slow tempos. I think that this is in part because my whole orientation to playing music and to listening to music is sonority-based. I am an organist because I fell in love with the sounds of certain organ stops very early in life, and the same with the harpsichord just a bit later. I gravitate toward instruments that sound so interesting and compelling that the experience of listening is powerful almost regardless of what the pieces are like. This is not the only way to listen, and some people would justly criticize it as insufficiently respectful of the importance of composition. But the savoring of the sonority that I recommend as a way of keeping slow practice slow is an everyday part of my listening and playing. This tends to keep my playing slower than it might be, and that can be received either well or badly by any given listener.

In Widor’s recording of his own famous “Toccata” he slows down fairly significantly in measure nine when the pedal enters. I believe this is because he wants to give the long pedal notes a chance to bloom, to savor their sounds. This is a reminder that sometimes slower notes need to be slower, as a matter of underlying tempo, than quicker notes. Sometimes slow notes need to bloom, and quick notes need to be subsumed into larger beats. I measured the Widor tempo change. The opening passage is in the mid-nineties per quarter note, measure nine is in the mid-eighties, but I had not noticed it spontaneously. The rhetoric of the tempo change is convincing.

I have noticed that when I finish listening to a piece of music, if the piece continues to go through my head, it is almost always slower than the performance I just heard. I only focused on this recently, and I do not have a precise explanation for it. It cannot be a reaction to sonority, since I am not actually listening to anything at that moment. And it is not coupled with any conscious sense of having disliked the tempo of what I just heard. It just seems to be something about my own temperament as a musician and listener. For whatever reasons in each person’s history, one has a different temperament as a listener and as a player. I believe that one’s stance as a listener should inform one’s playing perhaps more than we let it sometimes. When in doubt, play it the way you want to hear it. For some people—me, for example, and plenty of students I have known—this means in part being willing to not worry about whether someone else would have played it faster.

Not everyone’s tendency is to want to play slowly or “moderately.” But a desire to play fast is never going to be met with suspicion about the player’s level of competence. The choice to play fast is never going to be invalidated as one that was not in fact a free artistic choice.

Is it a good thing, some of the time, for really fast playing to sound like it is at the cutting edge of difficulty? Or is it necessary that if you are going to play very fast you make it seem easy? I remember a rather ironic story from my life that touches on that. Around 1981 I traveled to Binghamton, New York, at the invitation of Paul Jordan, my former teacher and good friend, to give a concert. One of the pieces that I played was the Sweelinck Chromatic Fantasy. Late in the piece there is a passage of sextuplet sixteenth notes in the top voice against slower notes in the other voices. As part of his feedback after the concert, Paul said that he thought I should play the piece faster. One reason he gave was that he thought those sextuplets should sound like they were at the very edge of what the player could execute. They should sound in that sense difficult, challenging. The irony was I thought that they already were at the limit of what I could do. I would have been terrified to try them any faster, and indeed probably would not have succeeded in pulling that off. But it interested me that they came across to Paul as being serene, too serene!

I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a late bloomer as a player. Even in early adulthood I honestly could not play every piece as fast as I wanted to hear it. It has been a long time now since that was true for me, except perhaps for some extreme cases. But remembering the Binghamton event and my limitations as to velocity back in those days leads me to a couple of thoughts that will close this thread for now. First, is it all right for a teacher to allow or to encourage a student to learn pieces that the student will realistically never be able to get up to tempo? This question should be technically meaningless, since anyone can learn any piece or passage by practicing it the right way. But not everyone is actually going to practice everything enough to learn it. This can be true as a choice or option. A student may be interested in exploring a piece, but only so far. Or it may be a real or realistic limitation. If a piece is so vastly difficult that the most careful, conscientious, systematic practicing would only permit it to be learned over decades, then learning it is probably not a real possibility.

I find it a good idea for a student to work on a piece yet only get it some of the way up to tempo. For one thing, any careful practicing is good practice in the art of practicing. For becoming better at practicing and for becoming a better player, I am tempted to say that it does not matter at all whether you get the pieces that you work on along the way fully learned or not. And the best way of not fully learning a piece is to learn it below tempo. This also allows students to get to know pieces that are for the time being, at least, beyond where they are technically. It is interesting. It also creates a situation in which the piece is primed to be fully learned later on. In fact, learning a piece solidly but well under tempo and then letting it sit for a while, even a long while, is a very effective way of ending up getting it to be a secure, well-thought-out performance when it is eventually learned. Also, being willing to keep a piece under tempo can allow a student to encounter more difficult works by a composer whose less challenging works they may want to learn more fully.

Further thoughts about rhythm

In the very late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first interested in the organ and listening to a lot of organ music, I had an LP recording of late-nineteenth-century French organ selections, pieces and excerpts of pieces by several composers, played by several different organists. It was a miscellany, a real sampler. All of the pieces were new to me then, as were the organs and the performers. The piece that impressed me most was the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, played by Xavier Darasse. I should probably say that the passage that impressed me was the opening of that movement (Example 1). I remember quite clearly, fifty years later, that I listened to the opening of that track over and over again. I probably destroyed that part of the LP, but it helped to solidify my love for the organ; thus it was worth it!

Several weeks ago, as I decided to write a column or two focusing on various aspects of rhythm, that passage started going through my head again. It has scarcely been out of my head since, except when I have been listening to something else. Every passage of music has some relationship to the concept of rhythm. In spite of my early love for it, the first movement of that Widor symphony is not one that I have performed or analyzed. But thinking about it now and finally analyzing it a little bit, I think that there are all sorts of interesting things occurring with the rhythm of those first few measures. In particular, there are fascinating relationships between the rhetorical and theoretical aspects of rhythm, and this is part of what I address in this column.

The rhythm of the striking opening chords of the movement is demonstrated in Example 2. The rhythm of those powerful chords, and of the melody that is their treble line, is treated as a motive throughout the movement. But the surface rhythm, the rhythm of new notes, whatever voice or part of the texture they come from, is demonstrated in Example 3. That extra quarter note is a passing note in the pedal part, the bass line.

This is all straightforward, just a description of what is in the score. But it is fascinating to me that I hear two things going on at once, two different ways to describe the rhythm of this passage, both valid and meaningful. This seems to be a wrinkle in the relationship between counterpoint and rhythm. Lines of counterpoint, in the way that we usually conceive of them, are almost always characterized in part by having at least some rhythmic difference one to another. But here we have a passage that is seemingly homophonic. But the fact that the rhythm of that last quarter note of the second measure comes across as being on a lower level of importance rhythmically injects an element of counterpoint. This is subjective, but it is an interesting confirmation that the bass/pedal line is used over the next few measures to open the passage into more and more palpable counterpoint, as shown in Example 4.

If we do not know where notes are coming from rhetorically, then our sense of what the rhythm of a passage is can only be the surface rhythm. Turning that the other way around, if we notice hierarchies of rhythmic importance in different notes within a texture, that may be a clue as to some of what is going on rhetorically and contrapuntally in that passage.

For me, this is a new and slightly different way of looking at the relationship between rhythm and counterpoint. This means that I have not yet worked out how to help students apply it to pieces they are working on. There is a lot of music—from Byrd fantasias through Beatles songs, and including a lot of organ repertoire from all time and places—that is clearly not fully, rigorously contrapuntal, but in which counterpoint keeps breaking through. It is probably true that the vast majority of tonal music falls into this category. But nonetheless I have always had a problem feeling comfortable with it conceptually. Is it counterpoint or is it not? I understand that this is just the imposition of a rigid framework. But still, the concept that I am sketching out here seems to be able to help me get more comfortable with counterpoint flowing in and out of a piece or a passage.

My second answer to why this passage started going through my head has to do with the relationship between rhythm and rhythm as rhetoric. The rhythm of the notes at the beginning of this piece is well-defined and clear. But what is that rhythm doing? In a lot of circumstances, the rhythm of the first measure—just two half notes—would suggest a downbeat and an upbeat. But the way that I hear this first measure is something different and harder to describe. I hear each of those chords as a kind of world in itself, neither coming from anywhere rhythmically nor leading anywhere, but just rather insistently being. It is as if the second chord has so much gravity and weight that it refuses to be in a hierarchical relationship to the first chord or to the downbeat of the next measure. This is subjective, my way of hearing it. Assuming for the moment that this is correct or at least meaningful, is it about rhythm? A plausible and normal answer to that would be no. The rhythm is what it is, and everything else is a different aspect: affect, aesthetic, sonority, the push and pull of the harmony, interpretive choices, and so on. But it strikes me that it might be more interesting to expand the concept of rhythm to include more about what the rhythmic pulses and impulses are doing.

I believe that this concept or image could be interesting and helpful to students. It might provide a way of broadening the comfort zone of some students who are making choices about how to precisely execute rhythms on the page. If so, that would probably be through allowing choices about freedom of rhythm, bending and stretching the notated rhythm to feel more like an essential part of the rhythm itself. It might also provide me or any teacher with a way of helping the student to think about interpretive rhythmic choices without simply suggesting details of those choices to the student. I am now eager to work with a student on this piece!

In a way, I have put the cart before the horse, describing some ideas that occurred to me once I decided to write a column about a certain subject. As a result of one conversation with colleagues and a few interactions with students, I revisited a few of my ideas about rhythm, the relationship between notated rhythm and rhythm in practice, and certain practical matters about teaching rhythm. The latter include metronome use, counting, how to approach counting during slow practice, and a few other matters. The core of what I plan to write about is a concept that intrigues me: the possibility of deriving rhythm fundamentally, though only in part, from something other than the notation. I will talk about this at length in my next column.

I finish this column with a few more circumscribed yet fascinating points. The first is an anecdote from well over thirty years ago that has stayed with me all this time. I was then beginning to look for ways to participate in chamber music, and I connected with various colleagues as best I could. There was one player with whom I had a session or two of running through pieces and with whom I started to talk about giving concerts. As I came out of one such session, another colleague caught sight of me and said concerning my rehearsal partner, “You know, she really can’t count.” I did not know what to say, and I ended up with something like “Umm . . . ok,” and I did not let that comment affect my decision to go ahead and work with this fine and interesting musician. That comment was false in experience. This player had no more tendency to misread a rhythm or waver in rhythm or tempo than anyone else. But she was someone who often played purposely and quite freely. I learned a lot from her in this respect. I was left wondering what the real source of the uncalled-for carping criticism was. Did that other colleague have a bad experience with the person with whom I was working? Or misremembered or mistaken her for someone else? Or had it been a case of mistaking intentional, interpretive rhythmic freedom for an inability to count?

This latter idea always intrigues me and can be confounding. How do we know whether something that we hear (as to rhythm, for the purposes of this discussion) that departs from the most literally accurate is a mistake or a purposeful gesture? What different attitudes do we bring to such an event if it is one or the other? Is there a gray area in between? The attitude that we bring to mistakes that our students make is pretty clear—it is part of our job to point them out and help the student to understand what the problem is, how to correct it or to avoid similar things, and so on.

But what if the student says, “No, I meant to do that?” There is a strong pull to ask why and to accept that any deviation from what seems to be on the page is all right if there is a good reason. The discussions that arise from grappling with situations like this can be very fruitful indeed, but I have always thought that it is too restrictive. I hope that the concepts I will discuss next time can be used to help students understand what is going on rhythmically when they feel the pull to do something other than what seems to be the literal meaning of the notation but cannot express why. Furthermore, I hope that this can also help teachers address this situation with students without simply dictating outcomes.

I am reminded of a review that I read once of Joseph Szigeti’s recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas for violin. I apologize, as I have been unable to find this review, an unusual issue for the internet era. I am certain that it was written by B. H. Haggin. As best I remember, Haggin liked the recording and got a lot out of the playing and the pieces. But he also felt that the pieces themselves were not very interesting, that Szigeti, with his rhythmically free and idiosyncratic approach to Bach interpretation, had made great music out of pieces that were intrinsically dull exercises. I believe that this assessment was not as unexpected at that point in history as it would be now, though I do not agree with it. It seems to cast an interesting light on rhythm in performance. The reviewer’s perspective was that the player’s striking rhythmic choices were what we might call “wrong” in the sense that they were not really based on anything intrinsic to the music. They were imposed upon the music and thereby made the music great when it really was not. Is this a good situation or a bad one? How would we react if we thought we heard this happening with our students?

The last item that I mention here is an observation that I made while driving recently. I rolled down the window and shortly thereafter heard the sound of two cars passing me in quick succession going the other way. There were two whooshing sounds probably about 0.7 seconds apart. There had not been any cars ahead of them for a while, nor were there any following behind. So the two sounds were isolated. Although translated into the terms of musical rhythm this was just two notes out of any context, and it immediately evoked for me a very specific moment, namely the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata in E Minor for piano, opus 90 (Example 5).

The two car sounds seemed to deliver the rhythm of this opening gesture. Why and how? Two notes in a row is so commonplace in music that it is almost silly to evoke a specific instance of it as a thing in itself at all! Even if the two cars sounded clearly like an upbeat and a downbeat, that hardly narrows things down at all. And it cannot be harmony or sonority—what I heard had no pitch or harmony, and the sonority was that of a couple of cars. So what made that passage come into my head? I do not have an answer, but it adds to my sense that there is something more to rhythm than what we see notated on the page or can describe in words.

A special note: I will be playing selections from J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on harpsichord as part of the New York City concert series Midtown Concerts on Thursday, October 28, at 1:15 p.m. at the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 East 29th Street, New York, New York. I take the liberty of mentioning this since I have written extensively in these pages about my Art of the Fugue project. This will be the first public manifestation of that project and my first public concert in two-and-a-half years. If any readers can make it, I would of course be overjoyed to see you there

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey.

Students’ Listening I

Through the first years of this column’s existence, much of what I wrote about was practical, specific material regarding teaching—what I often refer to as nitty-gritty: an approach to teaching pedal playing, hand distribution, practice techniques, registration, etc. I would often go through pieces in great detail, suggesting how to put these ideas into practice.

However, over the last year or so, I have found myself interested in writing in a more general vein, tossing out ideas and questions about music, and admittedly, the relationship this has to the day-to-day teaching process is perhaps more distant or indirect. I would argue that even if more distant, that connection is crucial. One of the reasons that I have moved in this direction is that I feel more strongly that everything is about learning and, therefore, also about teaching. I increasingly notice that some of the most important things that I learned from my formal music teachers came from things that they said or did that had nothing to do with fingering, phrasing, or practice techniques, even though all of those things were crucially important as well. And much of what I have learned about my own work as a musician and teacher has come from outside formal or informal lessons.

I am also aware that there is some limit to how much there is to say about the purely practical. There might be a limitless number of approaches to pedal pedagogy, but there is a limit to how much one person should go on saying it! There are good reasons that method books are not as long as encyclopedias. At a certain point a teacher says what needs to be said, and it is time for the student to get on with it. Having started in September 2007, my column as a whole is approaching 400,000 words.

That is not to say that I do not expect to write about the “nitty-gritty” again. There are things in that area that I have not gotten to yet. (And if anyone reading this has suggestions for something that you would like me to address, I would be overjoyed to read them.) There are also things that I have written about that I want to revisit someday. The distinction between the practical and the fruitfully speculative is not absolutely clear-cut.

When I started the column, and for a while thereafter, I was typically writing about things that I knew about before the column ever started. My technical approach to pedal learning, my way of conceptualizing the importance of relaxation, my concerns about memorization, or any number of other subjects for writing and discussion were all there in some fairly thoroughly worked-out form prior to 2007. I may have rethought them in the course of writing them up, and I needed to subject them to organization. But more recently, a lot of what I have wanted to write about has been more in the category of things that are pending in my mind—new ideas that I am in part working out by the very process of writing about them. For me this is an interesting, exciting process. It exposes the very process of trying to evolve as a teacher and thinker about music and teaching.

In the next several months, I will write about issues that are either directly about specifics of teaching or related to that; and the following part of this column falls into that latter category. In subsequent articles, I will systematically explore my own current project as a player, namely relearning and performing J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Rather than being a detailed and systematic set of suggestions about how to approach a particular piece, it will be an actual account of my own grappling with the work of learning a piece. Be sure to watch for it in the May issue of The Diapason.

Music listeners

I was originally planning to call this column “What should students listen to?,” but I put that aside because of my aversion to the concept of “should,” and that title did not represent the scope of what I want to think about. The question is, what is the role of listening to music in the life of someone who is studying music, studying an instrument, or, specifically, studying organ? What has some of my own experience with this been, and what can we as teachers do to guide students in their lives as music listeners, if we should do anything?

When I was a student in a second-year music theory class in college, near the beginning of the school year, the teacher administered a listening test to all students. He played twenty recorded excerpts of classical pieces, and we had to try as best we could to identify each piece. I remember the number of examples well, because my results made it an intense and disturbing experience for me. Even as a classical music junkie and aspiring musician, I was able to recognize and identify only one out of the twenty. I was mortified by how badly I had done. But when the teacher went over the results with me in private, he said something in a very kind, concerned way about how I really should start listening more to music. I shifted from being mortified to being indignant. Prompted by that comment, I belatedly became aware of how narrow and biased the examples were. All but one or two were from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was probably one Bach selection, and that was probably the one that I got right, and maybe one from either Mozart or Beethoven that probably sounded familiar to me, but which I could not pin down.

I would have been able to make up on the spot a similar test with Buxtehude, Schütz, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Pachelbel, Scheidt, de Grigny, Westhoff, Mainerio—and, of course, Bach. I told him, rather annoyingly, that I listened a lot, even maybe too much, and exclusively to classical music, but just not to the repertoire he thought one should know. I remember being impressed by the fact that he immediately conceded the point. He not only expressed agreement, even though that perspective had not occurred to him, but he acknowledged that he learned something from the exchange. I also learned something, although I was entirely within my rights to consider that test unfair and to maintain that I was an avid music listener, it was also true that I would benefit from expanding my own listening habits. There is great merit in the ability to differentiate Brahms, Chopin, or Stravinsky. One should always be open to listening to new music, but that there is also no reason to assume that any set of assumptions about what “should” be listened to are any better than any other set.

It makes perfect sense for a college music professor to believe that a student, otherwise unknown to him, might not be an avid music listener and might need some prodding to become one. After all, college students take classes for all sorts of reasons. As far as he knew, maybe it just fit my schedule, or maybe I thought that it would be easy. However, if someone has come for organ lessons and seems involved and committed to that process, it is likely that they have fairly strong ownership of their music listening habits. If we become aware that someone has focused somewhat narrowly—listening only to the music of one era, or perhaps listening only to organ music, or only to vocal music, while ignoring oratorios, or any electronic music—then we should certainly consider nudging them in the direction of whatever has been lacking. Or, I should say, some of what has been lacking, since there is always an infinite amount out there, and we can never fill in all of it. It is possible to push too hard, and this is about a student’s (or anyone’s) psychology. I became aware in that teacher’s office that it would behoove me to broaden my listening habits. I embraced that and internalized it as a concept. But nonetheless, I did not and could not jump right into listening to music that I did not like or that bored or annoyed me. I had to wait for the time to be right, for my mind to be ready.

The listening that I did back then was limited though extensive. I was listening to music that was associated pretty directly with the music that I most wanted to play. I listened to the composers listed above along with many others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I listened to their organ and harpsichord music, to their chamber and orchestral music, and to their (mostly sacred) vocal music. These were the years when I was officially a student. But I do not think that the reason this pattern developed was related to the study of the music. The reason was that I chose to play music I liked best, and I chose to listen to music I liked best. Not surprisingly, the two were related. It was not a conscious choice; I did not say, “If I want to play Baroque keyboard music, I should listen mostly to Baroque music.” I was just drawn to that repertoire whether I was functioning as a listener or as a player.

Nowadays, it is not just chance, a change in my tastes, or an attempt to practice broadmindedness that has me listening mostly to music from outside the realm of what I mostly play. I have come to a different kind of relationship with various sorts of music. When I encounter new music by hearing about it, or reading through it, happening to notice the cover of a volume, or indeed actually hearing it, any music that is squarely at the center of what I most care about playing, my immediate relationship to that experience is framed by questions of performance. What would I want to do with that theme? How would I try to make those voices dance around each other? How much would I want to draw out that moment? Should that bit be viscerally exciting or more calm and considered?

When I was a student, my relationship to that repertoire as a listener was pure, intense, and primary; now that relationship has been somewhat eclipsed. It is replaced by my own attempts to play the repertoire. I am not quite sure how to describe this fully and accurately. It is not that I do not think that I would like or admire performances or performers, nor is it a diminution of the intensity of my involvement with that music or of my liking of it: quite the opposite. But one could argue that I am not objectively listening to the repertoire I am most interested in playing. I suspect that if I listen to a recording of Baroque organ music, I am doing that recording a disservice. I am not being faithful to it as a listener. I am over-writing the performance with my own imagined performance. This is paradoxically true with performances that I think are really good by players whom I admire and respect.

Whether to listen to other performances, that is the question.

To tie this in to our work with students: the question often arises of whether someone who is working on a particular piece should listen to other performances of that piece. My own answer is almost always the same: either listen to no other performances or listen to at least half a dozen. These are the two ways to avoid being, consciously or subconsciously, over-influenced by what you hear. If the listening process only reinforces a link between these notes on the page and that one particular sound, it is very difficult to break that link. Not necessarily impossible, though sometimes nearly so, but always a source of indirectness or inefficiency in working out interpretation. Half a dozen performances will, in this respect, cancel one another out.

There is a lot of pressure on students (and on the rest of us) to look for objective reasons for doing what we are doing. That is abundantly useful and good. It is always a part of the process of performing a piece that we have learned. The notes and rhythms are (usually uncontroversially) part of the objective. So is at least some of what we know about a composer’s particular intentions, often as to choice of instruments or registration, sometimes as to tempo, articulation, etc. But there is also always the less objective, fundamentally personal part of interpretation and performance. Fully manifesting performance decisions that are not objective can be difficult psychologically and emotionally: this is really me, this is what I really want to say to you, this is me trying my hardest to make you feel something. So I wonder whether a student’s identification of himself or herself as still in large part a listener might connect in various ways with the difficulties that leap into exposure. This connection could be helpful or it could be limiting. The limiting aspect of it is very likely to arise with the practice of listening to or identifying with only one performance. (“I am not really doing this, I am just serving as a conduit for something that someone else concocted.” I feel fairly certain that I had a great deal of that feeling when, in my high school and early college years, I was a devotee of the playing of only a small number of favorite performers. If in those days I tried to play a Bach piece, I was really trying to recreate Helmut Walcha’s performance of that piece. I would not have owned up to that, but it is what was happening.) The helpfulness might be that of hiding the personal nature of performance from oneself in a way that avoids a too frightening feeling of exposure.

My thoughts about this are most certainly evolving, but I suspect that helping students detach themselves, in some ways and in part, from a primary identification as listeners could be a useful if non-obvious project for a teacher. This could apply even when imitating recordings is not a problem.

Soon I will start with a discussion of authority in recorded performances, YouTube (a surprisingly important issue all by itself), listening to live performance, listening for instruments and acoustics, and circles of connectedness in music.