On Teaching: Gene Roan

Westminster Choir College: memories and reflections

This column marks my return from a seven-month break—a sabbatical that I took to catch up on various things and to think about and plan for the future direction of this column. I return quite eager and feeling relaxed and energized.

During these seven months a lot has happened in the world—not surprisingly. But a few things that have occurred during my break are of particular interest to organists and of some relevance to this column. In early June, Rider University of New Jersey announced various cuts in programs. These cuts were university-wide, but they had a particular effect on Westminster Choir College since they included the elimination of the organ performance and sacred music degree programs. The organ department and its performance program constituted my professional home for many years, and even though I have not had much direct connection to Westminster for the last twenty years or so, this change feels momentous to me. It occasions most of the reflections in this column.

Also during these same months, two former longtime Westminster organ professors passed away: Robert Carwithen on May 11 and Donald McDonald on August 5 (see McDonald’s obituary in this issue). I did not study with either of them, but I knew them and would see each of them a few times most weeks for decades. I would not be the right person to write a thorough tribute to either of them. But I want to mention here that I got a lot of joy from knowing each of them and had deep respect and admiration for their knowledge and insight, as well as their kindness to me as a student and later as a young colleague.

I should mention that I do not intend to analyze or discuss the whole arc of the changes that have taken place with respect to Westminster Choir College over the last several years, which are massive in nature and extent. I share the visceral sadness that many friends and colleagues experience at the thought of the Westminster campus in Princeton vacant and void of college life. This sadness is especially vivid and present for me since the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio is across the street from that campus, and I see it most days. I am not privy to much real information about what has been going on at Westminster, and I have no idea how things will evolve going forward. Nonetheless, I have used the announced end of the Westminster organ program as an occasion for me to look back on some of what that program meant to me over the many years when I was closely and deeply involved with that program as a visitor, student, and teacher.

In a recent column I described how my then-teacher Paul Jordan helped me find a new teacher in Princeton as I was about to head off to college from my home in New Haven, Connecticut. He did so by speaking to Helen Kemp of the Westminster faculty, whom he knew and had worked with. As far as I recall, this was the first time I had heard of Westminster Choir College. What I get from this memory now is a reminder that I was somewhat insular in my approach those days. I am pretty certain I had never heard of Gustav Leonhardt or Virgil Fox, to name two examples from different corners of the world that I hoped to inhabit. The performers whom I happened to encounter I delved into deeply—Helmut Walcha, E. Power Biggs, Marcel Dupré—but my overall approach was one of an innocent lack of curiosity. I believe that it is also at least tangentially related to something that is probably a strength, a well-developed lack of interest in being buffeted about by fashion or influence. That youthful lack of curiosity (or laziness about looking into things and expanding horizons) might be related to my insistence on working things out for myself. This is something I believe in very strongly and commend urgently to students.

As I have also recounted elsewhere, I started studying privately with Eugene Roan shortly after I started at Princeton University. We had our lessons at the university chapel, so the first time that I set foot on the Westminster campus was at a recital that Professor Roan gave in the fall of 1974 on the Casavant organ in the basement of Dayton Hall. That building was a dormitory above ground, but below the surface was the central venue of the organ department. The recital hall was at one end, and along various corridors were faculty offices and practice rooms. One thing that I get now out of remembering that first visit is an awareness of how long that space indeed stayed much the same. I am fairly sure that the offices housed mostly the same faculty members, and the practice rooms the same organs, for about twenty years after that day.

But the Westminster organ department was a place. I care a lot about the sense of place.

The place that was the Westminster organ department was labyrinthine. The basement that I mentioned was the hub. But corridors connected that space to other basement spaces where there were also practice organs. There was even an organ in a small room that was located in a corridor between buildings. The web extended to other buildings—a couple of other dormitories, nearby though not connected, where there were practice rooms; the chapel building, where there was an organ in the upstairs chapel space itself, and other organs in smaller rooms on the ground floor level, and, if I remember correctly, a closet for the organ maintenance department. This is the kind of interconnected and spread-out space that I love.

With so many practice rooms and students, faculty members, and visitors, one had to expect practicing to be overheard as a matter of course. During the time when I was a student at Westminster in the 1980s this sense of being overheard helped me to overcome or at least to manage performance anxiety and a general kind of shyness about playing and about artistic expression. These are indeed two separate things. There is the stage fright sort of anxiety, the fear of making mistakes, even falling apart, or of being judged a “bad” player by someone who hears you play. I had been consumed by that fear at least all the way through high school and well into my college years. I got a great deal of help in this department from Professor Roan in lessons and discussion, and from simply making myself perform. I also got a lot out of the particular Westminster approach to teaching performance, which I wrote about in these terms in February 2018 issue:

With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals . . . .

This starts with the awareness of being overheard. That awareness also exists to be ignored—doing so is good concentration practice.

The practice organs at Westminster exhibited a great deal of variety. The two very small two-manual Flentrops were the instruments that interested me the most. They were of the same design—upper manual featured only a 4′ flute, the lower manual consisted of 8′ + 2′, the pedal consisted of a lone 8′, and there were the usual couplers—but sounded and felt a bit different. Those of us who focused on these instruments tended to have one of them that was our favorite. They both had an extremely sensitive action along with flexible (or what some would call “unsteady”) winding. The action was sensitive in that the shape and nature of the attacks and releases varied a lot with different sorts of touch. Each of these organs could sound like a different instrument based on the minutiae of how they were being played.

A certain small Noack practice organ in a nearby room also had a very sensitive action, but in a different way: the action was light enough that it was painfully easy to make notes sound by barely brushing up against them from the side. This made it an ideal instrument for drilling notes and in general for developing accuracy and straightforwardly clean playing habits. I should probably have spent more time than I did in that room.

The Flentrops, however, had the shortest pedal sharps that I have ever encountered. That, combined with the sensitive wind supply, made them really intense training tools for pedal accuracy, in particular for those who wanted to play on flat pedalboards. The presence of a variety of pedalboards—flat, American Guild of Organists standard, other sorts of concave and/or radiating with various levels of sensitivity—helped train me not to care very much about pedal differences. Sometime in the course of my student days I realized that I could go back and forth among pedal keyboards as different as they come without any trouble. This led to some of the specifics of my approach to teaching pedal playing, in particular conceiving of the physical act of pushing down pedal keys as being a point rather than a line.

In addition to being a place, the Westminster organ department was also a community. Everyone who was a member of that community had their own feelings about it at the time and subsequently has their own memories of it. I have no sense that mine are the same as others. I also know that school is difficult, and that students and faculty members can experience tensions arising out of overwork, competitiveness, envy or jealousy, fear about career prospects, and so on. However, my own experience of the department as a community when I was a student and later as a faculty member was that it was relaxed, friendly, nurturing, conducive of cooperation rather than conflict, and in general a social and academic environment in which I could thrive. I do not mean this as boilerplate, but rather as something quite specific. As I have written before from time to time, I was a “late bloomer” as a practical musician. I was deeply interested in music from a very early age, but it took me ages to develop the focus and discipline to practice particularly well or indeed very much at all. When I was ready to go to college, I was not a developed enough player to consider applying to music schools. During my undergraduate years at Princeton I spent a lot of time and mental effort on remedying this with help from Professor Roan via the private lessons that I took with him. When in due course I was ready to apply to graduate school, I had reached a stage where I could play some music very well. But I was not anything like a polished virtuoso as I had a small repertoire and was an atrocious sight reader. I was subject to lapses in concentration that made it pretty much hit-or-miss whether I would play anything like my best any given time. The atmosphere of graduate school could easily have been crushing to my spirit. Among the older musicians I knew there were several who advised me not to put myself into that kind of situation. At Westminster I found a kind of infectious joy in whatever each member of the community could do well, a sense that not everyone had to be good at or even involved with the same things, and an awareness that there is plenty of time to learn whatever you still need to learn. This was exactly what I needed to thrive at that point in my life, rather than wither away or shrivel up. These ideas form one of the cores of my own approach to teaching.

I picked up a lot of “little random stuff” while at Westminster. I know that there are many pieces that I first became interested in because I walked by a room in which someone was practicing something that was unfamiliar to me and that intrigued me. I believe that I became interested in Messiaen that way. There was a time when a fellow student whom I did not particularly know opened the door of his practice room as I was passing by and asked if I would come in and listen to him play the Buxtehude Praeludium in D Major and give him my feedback. I did not know why at the time—I probably filled in the “why” with the assumption that he thought that I was a great Buxtehude expert. Just as likely he just wanted to practice playing under the pressure of someone’s listening. Maybe he was asking for feedback just to be polite. This was a significantly more skilled (advanced) player than I was at that point, so I was rather stunned that he wanted my help. It was a small thing, but it actually contributed a little bit to my sense that I could be an effective teacher someday.

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 the practicing student was. 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! And as that happens to tie in with what I will be writing about next month, I will leave it at that for now.

Influence—a first look

By an odd and fascinating coincidence, on the day I received my copy of the October issue of The Diapason in the mail, I also read a short but significant piece of news about organ study at Westminster Choir College. As I understand, there is a plan in the works to reestablish the organ as a presence at Westminster. I do not know any details. I like the conceit that my column may have coaxed Westminster organ study back into existence, but I am not quite ready to attribute supernatural powers to myself. I was excited to hear the news, and I hope that it goes stupendously well.

I was prompted to think again about that October column and was reminded of one point I want to write about this month. The opening word at the top of the column here is “Influence.” What I am getting at is the whole range of things that shape or change what we are like as musicians. Under that heading I include several phenomena, quite different from one another, that can be sorted roughly into three categories: the influence of individual moments, whether planned/engineered by someone or just fortuitous; the cumulative influence of the ongoing pattern of our lives as they happen to unfold; and the influence of those who, in planning their interactions with us, make conscious decisions to try to influence us. These are all critically important, and all have the potential to be constructive and difficult, but also fruitful, harmful, or mixed.

I believe that many of us give too little attention to influences of the first kind. Something happens, and everything changes—this is a very common experience, if we take “everything” with a grain of salt. We tend to notice something like this only when it is on a very big scale—and perhaps most of all when it is catastrophic. There are small instances of this going on at any time, and any one of them can be deeply consequential, even though almost too small to notice at the time.

My first particular example concerns Dr. Donald MacDonald, whose passing was acknowledged in that same October issue of The Diapason (see pages 7, 20). One day perhaps thirty-five years ago or so, he and I passed each other in one of those organ department corridors at Westminster and chatted briefly. I had a recital coming, and he asked me what I was performing. I mentioned the Bach Trio Sonata in C Major, and I noted that I found it to be really hard. He nodded and then sighed, shook his head, and said “all those white notes.” Immediately everything about my thinking about organ playing took a small but important turn. It had never occurred to me that black notes—raised keys—help the hands by providing architectural guideposts, or that it was something to which I should pay specific attention. Something clicked in my thinking about hand position and its relationship to fingering. I believe that I also made a note in my mind about the falseness of the everyday belief that C major is an easy key!

As another example, in the summer of 1968 when I was 11, I attended a music and arts day camp outside New Haven, Connecticut. There, I met Paul Jordan, who would become a tremendous influence on me as my “official” organ teacher for a while and as a lifelong friend and colleague. One day I asked Paul how long it should take to “learn” Handel’s Messiah. What I meant was to learn to play the Schirmer piano reduction. My copy of that score was one of my very first musical possessions. Paul laughed, looked thoughtful for a second or two, and said, “Seven years.”

I took this very seriously, and for quite a while believed that this was simply the correct answer to that question. I was also pleased that Paul—whom I did not really know yet and who seemed to me to be a deeply established and rather august citizen of the musical world—took my question seriously and gave me an answer. I think that in fact he was taking me seriously, though not in as straightforward a way as I thought at the time. Any simple answer to that question does not really have any meaning to it, and the one he gave was probably kind of random, though well designed to seem neither unrealistic nor too daunting. However, he was certainly taking seriously my need and desire to engage with the question.

For the first few of those ensuing seven years I fretted about whether I was on track to learn Messiah on time. But then it began to occur to me that someone starting out where I was as a player did not learn something like this by working on it for seven years. Rather they got to be a progressively more skillful player through studying and practicing, and then learned this material in less than seven years. This incident also made me think about what Messiah was—that the piano reduction was not the real texture. (This saddened me at first.) As time went by, I discovered that to the extent that I was going to participate in accompanying that work, it was going to be as a continuo player.

In any case, I learned so much from such a brief, simple moment. I believe that over the years I have not consciously focused enough on how significant moments like that can be a great part of the learning process. I am not entirely sure what to do about that as a teacher, since it is hard to engineer something of this sort on purpose. These two moments stand out because they were isolated from other interactions. I was not studying with either of the others involved, nor did I see them to interact with regularly at those times. It is hard to know when something of this outsized significance has taken place as the teacher/catalyst, the party of the second part, so to speak. It may be powerful to the student right away or may seem so only in retrospect. For me the interaction with Dr. MacDonald was clear as to its importance right away, the interaction with Jordan seemed striking enough at the time but only revealed layers of significance later.

It is difficult to create a brief but telling interaction like those discussed above. But the sustained influence that we teachers have on our students, my third category, is something that we work on creating over the entire duration of our interaction with a student. Each of us has a somewhat different philosophy about how that influence should be established and maintained and what the scope of it should be. I am inclined to worry about influencing students too much or in the wrong ways. One of the reasons I am focusing on this issue right now is that I want to review as honestly as I can the question of whether I go too far in my attempts to avoid influencing my students. I am not talking about practical issues such as influencing a student to practice efficiently and learn music securely. I am largely willing to take that for granted. Rather I am talking about influencing students to more subjective and fluid matters: interpretation of every sort, choices about repertoire, answers to questions about what sorts of instruments are best for what circumstances, ethical or philosophical considerations about how to approach music, what school of thought one belongs to as to various matters, and so on. I am by no means expecting to give up my basic sense that we need to be very careful about influence and deeply aware of the possibility of heavy-handedness, of influence becoming a burden or constraint. However, I am in the midst of trying to review the whole subject as open-mindedly as I can. It is a fraught area, and each of us brings the influence of our own experiences to thinking about it or approaching it a certain way without consciously thinking about it; and that is what I am trying to revisit. Are my thoughts just habit, and how will they respond to conscious rethinking?

When I return to this subject, it will be to dig into this in detail. I am going to finish this column with a few stray thoughts and stories that are germane to my evolving thinking about this.

Several years ago a friend of mine told me about a conversation he had just had with the members of a string trio, people whom he had not previously met. They were preparing a performance of an arrangement of The Goldberg Variations—perhaps only the movements in three or fewer voices, though I do not recall. A question came up about some interpretive point, perhaps about tempo, and one of the players said, “Well, in the recording it goes like [such-and-such],” My friend asked, “What recording?” (After all, it is one of the most-recorded pieces around.) The string players said, “Oh, Gould.” This reflected a feeling, really an assumption, that the Glenn Gould recording of the work (not clear which one) was so standard, so obviously the point of reference, that one did not need to specify that, even talking to a stranger. This feels unambiguously to me like too much influence for one player or one performance to have.

My father used to tell a story of himself as a young child, maybe six years old or so. Apparently, his mother once said to him, in an exasperated tone, “You always want your way.” And he replied, “If I didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be my way.” He was making fun of himself for having been an obnoxious child, a brat. But his six-year-old self had a point, if a complicated and sometimes controversial one. This story of my father’s is one of the reference points for my own very well-developed feeling that I want to do things my own way. I am well aware that there are areas of life where this is either literally not possible or a bad idea. But it is possible, at least as an ideal, in interpreting music. My feeling so strongly about this for myself is one source of my belief that I should try to offer students the chance to do it as well. It is not rare for any teacher to feel that way in relation to final results. But my impulse has always been to start there as well. Even with absolute beginners and certainly for students starting new pieces at any stage I am almost flatly unwilling to answer questions of the sort, “How should this go?” Is this a strength or a problem? Do I take this approach too far?

Another brief story that I read somewhere years ago was about Artur Schnabel. A prospective student recounted that when he approached Schnabel for lessons, Schnabel asked him, “Have you listened to my Beethoven recordings?” The musician recounting this experience certainly took Schnabel to be suggesting that his recordings should serve as an interpretive model. This might not be true, or not entirely so, though it is unlikely that Schnabel was directing the student to those recordings in order that he might then ignore them. Certainly the student was suggesting that this was the point in recounting the story.

This brings to mind the whole business of “schools,” that is, not institutions, but traditions of playing passed down the teacher/student generations. “He studied with Serkin, so he plays like this.” “She studied with Dupré, so she plays like that.” This is common, of greater or lesser force with respect to different teachers. Is it good or bad? Or to put that another way, why am I so uncomfortable with it?

I noted above that I accept that influencing a student about practical matters is different from doing so with interpretive or other subjective and flexible points. But is this utterly true? I ask students to practice contrapuntal music in part by playing separate voices and pairs of voices. That is highly pragmatic, and I can sell it to myself that way. But is it true that it is neutral to the areas I am trying to tread lightly in influencing students? Or does it inevitably lead to a certain kind of playing or emphasis in playing? If it does, is that so different from a teacher telling a student to use this or that tempo, registration, phrasing, and so on? Am I being hypocritical?

I try hard to avoid “spoilers.” That is, if I am going to read a book, watch a movie, view a painting, or hear or play through a piece of music, and it is something new to me, I do not want to know anything about it beforehand. This is not just about plot twists: it is not only that I do not want to know how a story turns out. I do not want anything in even the back of my mind that might predispose me to one sort of experience rather than another. I do not even want to know that someone liked or disliked the artistic entity that I am about to grapple with or that the creator of it was or was not highly esteemed. Knowing none of this sort of thing is usually an unreachable goal, but I want absolutely as little as possible. This is a temperamental thing of mine. It has taken me a long time to begin to believe that some people really do not feel that way. Is this bias one reason that I want to offer students the chance to encounter as much as they can of our shared artistic world with as little outwardly sourced preconception as possible?

I will leave this here for now and take it up again soon.

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.

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.

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.