On Teaching: The Art of the Fugue, part 4

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.

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.

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

The way of the world

The meta theme of this column over the last several months has been unpredictability. As I have recounted, it was as early as October that I became aware that a shoulder injury was preventing me from working on upcoming performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. This was a bit awkward, as the subject of the column was supposed to be the process and progress of my work on that piece. Then after surgery in December, I found myself unable to write, which precluded my January and February columns. When I was ready to resume writing, I found that I could not find a fruitful way to write about The Art of the Fugue or about music and teaching in general—partly because I still was not actually playing, and partly because of my state of mind as I recuperated. I started recounting some of my experience of that recuperation, particularly of physical therapy, which had some interesting implications for the music learning process and teaching.

Then the current public health crisis hit. As I write this, a scheduled presidential primary is not taking place, sections of the country are in quarantine, most businesses in the area where I live are closed, and various curfews are in place. My practice of watching a bit of a baseball game or golf tournament to take a break from writing is in abeyance—most of what we all do is in abeyance. When you read this, six weeks or so further on, things will likely be different, but we do not know in what ways they will be different. All of our mid-March selves hope that by early May things will have turned the corner. But we do not know.

I am not sick, nor is anyone I know personally. That is one of the things that may change. My shoulder feels almost fine—close enough not to impede most activities—and I have gotten past the malaise that accompanied my early recovery period. Therefore, I should be able to focus well on writing and on practicing. Indeed I should be able to take advantage of the relative absence of things to do to catch up. But rather than that, I find it harder to concentrate and focus right around now than at any other time that I can remember. So do many people.

I have written about my attempts to be assiduous during my physical therapy exercises, and that those attempts have been fairly successful, if not quite as successful as I had hoped or even assumed. I can report that on one recent day I simply forgot to do them; I forgot that I was a physical therapy patient. The next day, my initial reaction was to wonder whether I should bother to start them up again. I did, though it was a kind of half-hearted job.

This is a global concern that affects everyone’s focus. I have read and agree that teachers in general should not evaluate or judge their students right now. Perhaps we need to do away with grades and exams for now and tolerate mediocre or late work. For this week and next, I am not seeing students for any sort of regularly scheduled lessons, not even remote ones. These are said to be the two weeks when we either will or will not turn things around. Nothing about long-distance teaching would violate the kinds of measures that we are being asked to accept and implement. My reason for taking a short break is about focus. As I recently put to a colleague, I need to take a deep breath. I believe that a number of my students also need this, though I am aware that for some of them lessons right now would be a good distraction. (I have balanced that possibility with my own needs at the moment by making it clear that I am happy to chat with anyone informally or answer questions by email.)

My time off has reminded me of something. While this is a global concern, every student always has their own concerns. I think that I try to be aware of that as a general matter and to react to whatever a student brings to a lesson based on their life circumstances. Music is a part of life, interconnected with everything else. Our awareness of this is heightened at a time like this, but so is our awareness of the complexities. Some people would like for the time being to put lessons aside and focus on the gravity of the situation; others would like to delve even more deeply into music as a distraction or as an affirmation of life, or as some of both. Some people use their involvement with music to help them with difficult things by heightening emotions and awareness, while others use that involvement as a way of gaining access to joy or peace or certain kinds of understanding.

A few random thoughts from the last month or so:

1) I mentioned in an earlier column that during my convalescence I was experiencing music more by hearing it in my head than by actual listening. I later realized that most of the time whatever piece was going through my head was doing so at a very slow tempo. For example, there was a time when the piece in question was Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca,” the last movement of the Sonata in A Major, K. 331. This is a piece that I have never played. I tapped out the beat in my head at about quarter note equals 95 beats per minute. The slowest recordings that I found of it in a brief survey were at about 120. Another time, the piece was one that I have played a lot: Bach’s Fughetta super Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot, BWV 679. As it went through my head, I discovered that the eighth notes were going at about 110 beats per minute. Recordings of it that I checked were all between two and three times that fast.

So I began to speculate, are these the tempos that I really want? I certainly like the admittedly abstract experience of “hearing” them that way internally. Each of those pieces, and others, seemed to have a wonderful feeling of suspense and freedom as well as a convincing overall arc. But this is imaginary. Would I like actually hearing them this way? These tempos were extremely slow. If I really would like them this slow, does that mean that I could expect other people to? Or is it something quirky about me, or about how one hears one’s own playing as opposed to anyone else’s? As I get back to playing and teaching, I want to re-think tempo, mainly as a matter of influence. Where should we get our tempos? Our own innermost thoughts? If not that, why not? Do students feel free to try to get in touch with their own innermost feelings about tempo? What about other interpretive matters? Where might those feelings come from? How can I help students connect with them?

2) There are periods in history that have seen the creation of music that reflects difficult times. Composers in the seventeenth century lived through the Thirty Years War. I have always assumed that this is one source for the sadness and intensity of much of the organ music of Scheidt, for example. The mid-twentieth century was of course another such time, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is one response to it. As I write this it is much too soon to know what scale of misery, dislocation, and sadness the current public health emergency will end up creating. But I find that this current state of affairs gives me a more real and human awareness of how such things might have affected people—even those great artistic figures whom we struggle to know not just as names or monuments but as people—all those years ago.

3) I noticed something interesting in my approach to physical therapy exercises. It is usually not the exercises that are new, difficult, or painful that I am tempted to skip or shortchange. Rather, the ones that have become easy, that seem to have “worked.” Take, for example, rolling a big ball along a table. I essentially could not do this at all a month ago. But now it seems so effortless that after I have done it once or twice, it takes more willpower than I can always manage to do it the prescribed thirty times. This reminds me of one of the characteristic dangers of the practicing and learning process: that a piece or a passage that has become basically learned—or seems to have done so—will be neglected thereafter. I do this, and students do this. When there is limited time or concentration, it is tempting to focus on whatever seems to need the most work. That is not always a source of danger, but it has to be monitored for becoming one. Often the passages that seemed easy in the first place or that seemed to get learned easily end up being the shakiest in performance.

I say that I am prone to doing this, and that is true. But it is fascinating to see myself falling prey to the same temptation in a situation when I am without any particular expertise or overarching awareness of the dynamic of what is going on. To put it another way, I am doing the work at someone else’s behest, something that I never do when playing music. This may change my way of thinking in my own practicing or conversations about it.

4) I have been trying to turn back these last few weeks to thinking about the music that I want to play. That means The Art of the Fugue, of course, at least in large part for now. However, I find myself thinking more about counterpoint in very general terms, that is, about the concept of counterpoint as a part of life. This is abstract and, perhaps, just the musings of someone who was abstracted from normal life and activity for a couple of months for one reason and now expects to be for another couple of months for different reasons. But I have felt strongly the force of what I think of as the basic definition of counterpoint, namely two or more things that are different from one another happening at the same time. This is a way of looking at it that at least somewhat downplays such specifics as voices, motifs, and subjects, not to mention answers, inversions, countersubjects, cancrizans, diminutions, and so on. It requires us only to have an awareness of what it means for things to happen at the same time and of what it means for things to be different from one another. There can be interesting things to say about each of these around the edges, since they are both recognizable, familiar concepts that arise not out of music but out of life.

I had that thought vividly the first time I entered the physical therapy clinic. Here were people (the patients), none of whom had ever met or heard of each other, and who were not exactly meeting now. They were there doing similar but different things in a kind of dance or counterpoint. Of course, this is a clichéd or trite point.

As far as music is concerned, this reminds me of several ideas about counterpoint that occurred several years ago, mainly as a result of my experiences with theater, in particular immersive or participatory theater. (I have briefly alluded to this in prior columns, and will soon—the Fates permitting—write about it at length and relate it to memory, to the passage of time, and to The Art of the Fugue.) The notion is that whereas it is normal, valid, and important to think of counterpoint as a conversation between two voices or among more than two voices, it makes a different kind of sense and has a different kind of power to see counterpoint as a representation of or analogue to all experience, whether of people passing through the physical therapy center together or of the planets circling one another—or millions of people working from home and staying in touch as best they can.

To be continued.

Taking stock

I had intended to make this, finally, a normal column, and as recently as a couple of days ago that was still my plan. I was going to write on toccata form, or as I conceive it, the “toccata principle,” a topic I have wanted to write about for some time. This is an approach to constructing pieces and to creating continuity that is crucially important and, I believe, somewhat under-discussed. It segues quite well out of my long, though interrupted, discussion of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue that has occupied this column for the last year, since it stands mostly in contrast with the construction of that work. I will get back to that plan, probably next month. 

However, following discussions with readers, colleagues, friends, and students, I have decided to return once more to discussing the current crisis and some of its effects on our kind of work. I have recently been on a bit of a vacation, and that has been a good opportunity to ponder some ideas. Since this has been a time of reduced responsibilities and very little distraction, it has been impossible not to think through things. For at least some people, morale and motivation are newly problematic as this situation goes on for longer than a lot of us had anticipated, and in particular, as a new school year and church year loom right around the corner. 

I want to write about some of my own concerns, problems, and experiences. I have become increasingly aware as the last few weeks have gone by of changes in my own patterns of motivation, morale, and focus, and in how I make choices about allotting energy and time. I wish to share some of this, not because I believe I have solutions or that my experiences are typical or atypical. In writing this I hope to elicit feedback to help me understand better how to think about and deal with what is going on. We are all in this together.

Every case study is potentially valuable when difficult things are occurring. I have heard from a number of people that they are having trouble staying motivated to do even what little they can do with their music or any aspect of their work, and they are not sure whether they are alone in feeling this way and are therefore feeling guilt. To me, not feeling guilty about any difficulties that one experiences in this sort of crisis is crucially important. No one is alone in any worries or concerns right now. Knowing that we are not alone should alleviate any guilt.

For those of us deeply involved in music, what is it that motivated or interested us in the first place? In normal times, what keeps us motivated? A lot of answers to these questions are universally straightforward and similar. For most of us there were early experiences of hearing music. Some of this early experience of music was about melody, harmony, rhythm—the elements of composition. Some of it was about instruments, voices, sounds, and sonorities. Some of these early experiences are tied to places, people, or activities that were valuable or emotionally forceful independent of the music itself. For a lot of those who end up drawn in particular to the organ this included the experience of church and church music. For some of us playing or singing music, this was an early source of connection to others. For others it was a source of approbation, solace, or refuge. For some it tied in to a sense of history or connection beyond the circle of people around us.

Continuing motivation comes from all of the above. Love of or interest in the music itself is a part of the picture. For me, my love of the sounds of organs and harpsichords is a major continuing source of motivation as well as joy. The connection to other people is often important. This can be through singing or playing together, through offering music to others or receiving music from others. It can also stem from being fellow students at a school or of a particular teacher, from talking about music together, agreeing, disagreeing, reinforcing one another’s feelings, changing one another’s minds, or agreeing to disagree.  

There is also the matter of earning a living from music. Related to this is the fact that we who work hard on our music and try hard to be good at what we are doing have invested some of our self-esteem in that.

My point is that all of this is currently under threat, except the pure love of the music itself. Not every detail of what keeps each of us enthralled with music is utterly gone for now; but a lot of it is, and all of it has been made to feel fragile. Thus we all have trouble feeling motivated.

I have a one-manual, one-stop practice organ with pull-down pedals in my home. The sound is beautiful, and the action is sensitive. Normally I love practicing on it, but I have learned that there is a bargain that I have made with myself without knowing that I was doing so. I can enjoy practicing on that instrument because I know that I will also get to go out and immerse myself from time to time in some of the infinitely varied and magnificent organ sounds that drew me to the instrument in the first place. Not being able to do that, I find myself looking at my beautiful practice instrument with a bit of a jaundiced eye. A couple of students have said something similar to me about their own harpsichords in relation to the now-forbidden instruments at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio.

There is also the matter of hearing music. Most of us listen to recordings. Earlier in life, I loved recordings more than I loved live music, and I still do. But they’re not the same. For one thing, the spatial dimension is not there. Imagine (or remember) sitting in a big room listening to an organ. The sounds come from all around: not only when there are antiphonal divisions or other wide separations. Even if the organ is all in one place, it is a wide and deep place, and the sound jumps and swirls and bounces. In the last few years I had rediscovered the pleasures of hearing symphony orchestras in concert. I grew up doing a fair amount of that but had gotten out of the habit. I was newly amazed at how magnificent that experience can be. In a good hall the sound is simultaneously clear and enveloping. I miss this as much as I do the organ.

Continuing to look forward

I find it very exciting that so many musicians are streaming performances via the internet. Certainly there are dimensions to this that will be worth continuing to explore once this crisis is over, for example, the coupling of performance with discussion, or giving listeners the ability to see things close up that are pretty remote in live concerts. Also the proliferation of interesting online performances may draw listeners in who would not otherwise have thought to go to concerts. But I believe that there can also be some strain involved in trying to feel that this is the same as live performance. Again, the spatial aspect of the sound simply cannot be the same, and as with all recording the sonorities as such cannot quite be either, even if they can be beautiful and interesting in themselves.

The current situation has caused me to clarify in my head a bargain I made with myself beginning about ten years ago. At a point where I was planning to step up the frequency of my public performances, I began to step up the amount of live artistic content that I took in. The hope was that I would become a better performer by absorbing as many as I possibly could. My emphasis was on things other than classical music, though that was not by any means excluded. I found myself emphasizing dance, theater (mostly small scale and somewhat non-mainstream), poetry readings, movies and TV, art galleries, gardens, and various sorts of unconventionally structured music.

I believe this plan has worked. While I cannot really know whether my performances over the last eight or ten years have been better than those of the preceding thirty years or so, I know they have felt more energetic and committed, and I have felt more energized. I have come closer to doing with the music that I play what I actually want to do with it. The bargain that seems to have arisen out of the plan is this: that I will feel excited about performing and give as much energy and commitment to performing as I possibly can as long as I can nourish that performing life with a steady diet of great artistic content from others. Of course, it is now all gone. Every few days or so over the last four months I have received an email confirming that something that I had planned to go to has been cancelled. 

I think that this is for me the biggest specific source of doubt or wavering about my status as a performer or even as a musician. I am willing to believe that there will be a moment for all of us to resume giving concerts, so I should be practicing avidly toward that moment. In fact, I could be savoring the fact that I have extra time to learn that which I plan to perform. Instead I feel like I have no idea how to grapple with artistic output when I have no artistic input. I could/should feel like what I took in over ten years was enough. I certainly would not claim to have assimilated and manifested all of the possible lessons from all of that content. One reason it is hard to do that is that it would have to be too analytical—like “I learned from this concert or that play to do the following with this sort of music or in that sort of performance situation.” This is artificial if it has to be forced. There have been some concrete describable lessons like that along the way. But the process has largely been subconscious.  

Uncertainty is part of the situation, and the inability to respond to uncertainty is part of the problem. Most of the time I feel if I knew for sure that the things I miss most would someday come back I could be very patient with that process, regardless of how long it took. And some things will—maybe most. I will be surprised if in a year I have not been to a New Jersey Symphony concert. I am purposely mentioning a very well-established institution. Some organizations, especially less established, more experimental or controversial ones, may not come back. This will inevitably include some of the things that are most important to us. But not knowing means that neither can I just be patient and get on with what there is to get on with, nor can I mourn. 

The specifics of what I am describing are idiosyncratic. I know that many are experiencing the same thoughts, particularly organists and choristers. Here, too, there is uncertainty. For me recognizing that the uncertainty itself is difficult, separate from the loss or potential loss, is helpful. 

From the world of teaching I have one thing to recount that I recently experienced. A student wrote to me that she was frustrated working on a certain piece on her own because it was too difficult. She wanted to know whether it would make sense to put it aside and work on a few more straightforward projects. This is often a relevant question; however, I have a kind of sub-specialty in helping people figure out how to make difficult pieces seem manageable. But I realized I cannot conceive of how to do that other than in person. The process is too subtle and too specific. It depends on close observation of what fragments of the piece are the most difficult, what can be broken down into subsections, what changes can be made in hand distribution, based on the player’s particular hand size and shape, and a host of other small details. These have to be worked out by very close observation. For the first time I can remember, I simply could not come up with an alternative to “Yes, let’s put this one off for now.” Not a calamity, but frustrating. Of course, we are looking forward to picking that piece up as soon as circumstances allow!

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.

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.