On Teaching: the harpsichord, an introduction, part 1

The harpsichord: an introduction, part 2

At the end of my previous column (August 2024, page 8), I noted that I would next turn my attention to a detailed discussion of harpsichord sonority. In thinking about that subject recently, I have realized that I should start by returning to the question of variety or non-standardization. This can affect our understanding of what is and is not a harpsichord, and what is or is not harpsichord sonority. Some of this variety is about setup—keyboards, stops, compass—and I will address these issues in my next column, including discussion of the mechanism of the harpsichord and what that implies about touch and technique. But some of the variety has to do with the sound itself.

Sound variety

It can be useful to think of sound variety as existing along two separate axes. For over 300 years, the harpsichord was the predominant domestic keyboard instrument, and its sounds varied from both region and historical period. Surviving antique instruments are one principal source of knowledge we have about different geographic schools of harpsichord sound and how that sound evolved over the years. Examples built in modern times along the lines of the older, original instruments are another source of information. There are all sorts of interesting complexities about the conclusions we can draw from any of these instruments. For example, it is difficult to ascertain how the sounds of existing antique instruments have changed over the years, and it is also difficult to know how successful the sound of a given modern instrument is in recreating the sound of the harpsichord as it was in the Baroque period, assuming the modern builder is trying to do that.

This brings us to the other axis along which harpsichords vary in their sonority. As the modern rediscovery of the harpsichord began in the very late nineteenth century and especially as it became popular in the early twentieth century and thereafter, harpsichord builders made different choices about how to approach the rediscovery or reinvention of this long-dormant instrument. No one building a harpsichord in modern times has been working from an ongoing, living tradition of instrument building. The arc of this learning process was and still is very long. Some of the choices that builders have made have been motivated specifically by concepts relating to sonority. For example, some harpsichord builders, especially in the mid-twentieth century, were interested in tackling questions about tuning stability and mechanical reliability in a world with central heating and air conditioning. The gist is that there are many harpsichords out there that reflect different stages in their builders’ learning processes, and that manifests different choices or preferences about harpsichord sound as well as mechanics.

Much has been written about this modern history. Since there are many very different-sounding instruments out there that are identified as harpsichords, two important concepts should be considered. First, that one should not assume that one’s concept of what a harpsichord “should” sound like is necessarily indicative of all harpsichords. Second, the best way to know what is going on with the sound of a given harpsichord is to listen to that sound carefully, closely, and with as few preconceptions as possible.

There are two traps that are easy to fall into. One of these is hearing a harpsichord whose sound you do not like and deciding that you do not like the harpsichord, and the other is getting attached to the sound of the first harpsichord that you hear and thereafter never listening open-mindedly to other sorts of harpsichords. The first of these was very common indeed in the mid-twentieth century when there were many harpsichords around that were experimental and largely unsuccessful. The second, interestingly, is a trap that I fell into early in my harpsichord life. I was lucky enough that the first harpsichord I ever owned and spent a lot of time with was an instrument with a compelling, gorgeous sound. At the time I did not think that I understood how strongly that instrument shaped my sense of what harpsichord should be and thereby limited my ability to appreciate many of the very different beautiful and effective sounds that were made by other harpsichords. I eventually coaxed myself out of this by increasingly remembering to pay attention.

What are some of the salient features of the sound of a harpsichord? What if anything is universal, what are common threads to look out for, what varies, and how can one best understand the sound of a given harpsichord with a view to using it most effectively?

For me the starting place is something that seems more technical than aesthetic, though in the end it is crucially about aesthetics and performance. The sound of each note on every harpsichord has an intrinsic behavior. From the instant the sound starts, from the moment when the plectrum lets go of the string, the sound does what it is going to do without any input from the player until it ends. This may be more purely true of harpsichord than of any other instrument. With violins, voices, flutes, etc., the performer can change a lot about the sound while performing; with plucked string instruments, there are measures of control, more or less subtle in nature, over ongoing notes that can be exercised by the player. Even with organ and piano there are some small such things: damper pedal actions that affect the overall sonority in a way that changes an existing sound picture; swell pedals; on some organs, manipulations of the wind during sustained notes by the playing of shorter notes. Nothing like any of this exists with the harpsichord. On almost all instruments, to some degree the player can at least partially create the sound; with harpsichord, the player works with a given sound. This sounds a bit inflexible, cold, and limited. And it could be if the sounds themselves were not extraordinary both in what they seem spontaneously to sound like and in what possibilities they create.

But if every harpsichord note has some sort of intrinsic behavior, that behavior is very different from one harpsichord to another. These differences pertain sometimes to the simple quality of sustaining. Interestingly, there is a tradition of believing that the harpsichord does not sustain as well or long as the piano. This is not necessarily true. It is true of some harpsichords, yet definitely not true of others. What is the shape of the first tiny fraction of a second of sound, the “attack?” Does the sound then die away in more or less a straight line or according to some other shape? Is the attack the loudest instant of the sound? Does the timbre of the sound remain constant as it dies away? Do all the partial tones die away at the same rate, or does the timbre change as the note grows quieter and eventually ceases to be heard?

Answers to these questions can be found on some harpsichords out there. The only way to answer the questions is to listen, and I will discuss some listening techniques here, as well as ways to think about relating this analysis of the sound to playing music. There are some generalizations that are interesting and helpful if we remember that they might not always apply. Surviving, well-restored harpsichords from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries tend to share certain acoustic traits, offering similar answers to the questions above and to other questions about acoustics. They tend to have a crisp attack—not all according to exactly the same pattern, and not necessarily loud, but all with immediacy and clarity, often seeming either bell-like or “plucky.” They tend to sustain longer than we sometimes expect with a harpsichord, long enough that in most music, all but the longest notes are vividly present for as long as they are notated. The issue of harpsichord notes dying away so promptly that they do not fill the space allotted is a false problem, at least on instruments of this sort. On many older instruments, the sound dies away not in straight line, but in gentle but perceptible waves, which create a subtle pulse to the sound. At the same time, the sound also changes in timbre over the length of the note.

There are two concrete and compelling effects that the above combination of traits has on the ways in which sonority relates to playing music. The first has to do with tempo and timing. If the sound has an intrinsic pulse to it, that exists in relation to time as such and is not created, shaped, or determined by the rhythmic picture of a piece being played. That means that since choices about tempo are also choices about how much of the lifespan of each note to use, those choices affect what the actual shape of the notes will be. A shorter note is not just shorter. Since it also uses a smaller part of the lifespan of each note, it has a different shape from what a longer note would have had. For example, if there is going to be a peak of a (gentle) wave 0.6 seconds after the beginning of a note, then if your tempo for that note is 120, you will never get to that peak; if your tempo is 90, you will.

On an instrument with a sound such as this, one can record a passage at two different tempos and then use computer magic to adjust them to being at the same tempo as each other, and they will not actually sound the same. The sonority-scape will be very clearly different.

The second effect concerns the relationships among notes that are occurring at the same time. If there are longer and shorter notes happening in juxtaposition to one another, then the longer notes will be heard more prominently while the quicker notes are going by. This is like the situation in a choral piece where one section has longer notes—and the conductor reminds the singers to do something through the duration of those notes: something as active, if subtle, with volume, timbre, vibrato, or whatever else. This can keep the effect of those longer notes from being static or from dragging down the momentum of the music. The intrinsic sound of a harpsichord can serve this same purpose to similar effect. This is one reason that the presence of lots of long notes in a keyboard piece does not necessarily mean that it should be performed on an organ rather than a harpsichord. The organ can sustain long notes indefinitely, but those sounds can also defeat momentum in a way that the sound of a harpsichord never does.

Everything from the last few paragraphs is just one set of possible examples of what one might hear in the sound of a harpsichord. The overall points are: one can tell by careful listening what the sound of a given harpsichord is like, especially in that it is largely set and does not change in performance; and what one hears in the sound may well have implications for performance choices and for how the instrument is likely to come across in performance.

There are some points that are more straightforward and that are common to just about all harpsichords. One of these is that when there are two 8′ stops, they differ from each other in timbre. Inevitably, one stop is flutier and one reedier: one gedeckt-like, one with at least a bit of the quintadena about it. (I will discuss this further in my next column, as it arises out of the mechanism and physical setup of a harpsichord.) Each individual stop tends to change in timbre from bottom to top: reedier at the bottom, flutier at the top. This also arises out of the physical setup.

Getting to know a harpsichord

I recommend the following as a set of starting points for getting to know a new harpsichord. First, move the music desk out of the way, as it blocks much of the sound from the player’s ears. (This is especially true in a wing-shaped harpsichord, less true with virginals, spinets, and upright harpsichords.) Make sure there is only one stop on, and know which one it is. Then play some individual notes, starting in the middle of the compass, moving up and down. One might do some of this standing up and leaning out over the soundboard. Hold notes for a long time, and listen to the whole span of the length of each note. Then play some bits of scales, chords, and perhaps passages from pieces. If possible, have someone else play while listening. One should start near the curve in the side of the instrument and then move out a bit farther along that same line. Slower pieces are better for this sort of close listening than faster pieces. Faster pieces certainly demonstrate some of what the instrument can do, but give you less of a direct line to what the sonority is like. When listening to someone else play, one should be slightly less analytical than what I am describing. Are you reacting to the sound as beautiful, compelling, loud enough that you do not have to strain, so loud that it is annoying, such a pleasure that you are reluctant to ask your colleague to stop and go back to playing yourself? All of these could well happen along with an infinite number of other reactions.

Next, go back and play some individual notes on each stop. Do you hear them at all differently now from when you did the same thing a few minutes before? What is the last thing that you hear before a note has fully died away: it might be an overtone; the answer might be different for different notes. The next step is to play a passage, trying to focus on listening to different parts of the texture: lowest notes, highest notes, and most importantly, notes in the inner part of the texture.

Try to do this with as few preconceptions as possible. Do some of the above with your eyes closed. This can help focus on listening, but it can also help banish preconceptions. Since there are interconnections between mechanical aspects of the harpsichord and sonority, I will continue to build on these ideas next time.

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.

Gavin Black, director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, Princeton, New Jersey, is preparing performances on Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on both harpsichord and organ for the next two concert seasons.

The Art of the Fugue, part 8

In the last few columns, I have started writing and thought of a suitable and effective name for each column somewhere along the way, even at the end of the process. However, today I was able to start with the title, because it is time to get back to writing about Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue!

This is still an uncertain time, no less so than a month ago. And it is still true that there are things that are unknown as I write this that will be known when you read it: will there be a Major League Baseball season? Who will be the Democratic nominee for vice president? Will there be a post-Memorial Day spike in COVID-19 cases? Will Broadway theaters really reopen on September 6? And there are things that are unknown now that will probably remain unknown, at least with any certainty by then: will there be a second wave of the virus? What will Advent and Christmas be like—for church musicians, for retailers, for families? Will the practice of going to the movies survive?

When I wrote my first Art of the Fugue column a year ago, I could not have imagined that over the succeeding year I would be unable to practice or perform the work, so this column really was my only study of the piece. I also could not have predicted what the content of the columns would actually be. I thought that I could, but it turned out to be very different from what I initially planned. But that is all eerily appropriate. When Bach first set out to compose the work he certainly did not know that he would be forced to leave it incomplete or that he would not see it published. Uncertainty has to be an underlying theme of The Art of the Fugue.

I strive to organize some of my thoughts about how the uncertainties surrounding the order of the movements interact with my thinking about the work in general. In my column from May 2020 I wrote of “the basic definition of counterpoint, namely two or more things that are different from one another happening at the same time.” The second consistent characteristic of counterpoint as we usually know it—for me, just below the level of “definition”—is that things that are the same happen at different times. Paradoxically this is perhaps even more important in shaping our range of reactions to counterpoint: esthetic, emotional, intellectual, etc. It is the source of our need, when we analyze pieces of this sort, to know about and recognize themes, subjects, countersubjects, motifs: anything that happens more than once. And this phenomenon is entirely dependent on memory. We know that a theme has recurred because we remember it from before. This is true immediately when a fugue subject appears for the second time. That part is relatively easy. (And it is assisted by expectation, if we have been told that what we are hearing is a “fugue” and we have just heard a theme in one voice unaccompanied.)

When a theme comes from elsewhere, as in a chorale prelude, for example, the process of recognizing that theme takes on another layer or two. I find it interesting that chorale-based pieces have a kind of double life. They come across differently to listeners who already know the tune and those who do not. Presumably most chorale-based pieces have been written in the first instance for listeners who knew the tunes extremely well—almost instinctively. In a multi-movement chorale-based work like Bach’s Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her the recognizability of the chorale creates unity that perhaps makes the exact order of the movements function differently than it might in another situation. That is not to say that it is not important: it is manifestly a somewhat different piece with the movements in one order from another. It is interesting that Bach did indeed present the work in two different orders: first, in a published version, with the most complex and imposing of the five variations as the closing movement; later, in an autograph manuscript, with that variation in the exact middle. (This could be a rationale for considering it possible that the triple/quadruple fugue from The Art of the Fugue could function not as a culmination but as an interior building block, way station, or destination.)

When a theme has been altered, perhaps through augmentation, diminution, inversion, or something else well defined, perhaps by just a small change or two, recognizing it becomes more abstract and mediated by the subconscious. For many contrapuntal works this creates a kind of layered structure in which as elements recur in different ways, they evoke different kinds of memory. The development of the sense of “this is answering that” or “this edifice has that kind of shape or structure” is a multi-faceted, interlocking, overlapping experience.

In my December 2019 column, I wrote that “the subject or fundamental building block of The Art of the Fugue is not ‘the AOTF fugue subject’ but is ‘the very concept of the melodic interval.’” That column develops some of the reasons I believe that this is so, which I will not repeat here. If this is true, it sets up a condition in which the layers and facets of what we recognize as we listen, what we rely on to create structure in our minds, is infinitely complex and varied. The more the status of recognized themes or ideas is different (some more obvious, some more subliminal), the more complex that structure will be. 

I believe this relates to the question of the order of the movements. Since these connections are so numerous—effectively infinitely numerous, since there is very nearly nothing within the universe of the piece that does not connect to other things—and since the nature of those connections is so varied and fluid, convincing, engaging patterns will form themselves in the listener’s mind regardless of the order in which the components are encountered. The structure is then not “x follows y, which follows z” but “a, b, and c are all connected.”

So the nature of the opening theme and the ways in which it is developed in the first contrapunctus set up this focus on any and all melodic intervals, which in turn creates an infinitely fluid set of ways of hearing connections and perceiving or synthesizing shape. This explains why the piece can be effective almost regardless of the order in which the movements are heard. And it is not just that it is effective: it takes on a convincing overall shape, a strong sense of arc, direction, and structure. This does not mean that Bach did not have an order in mind. It just explains perhaps why the piece works so well even though we do not and very likely cannot know what that intended order was.

I say “almost” regardless. I believe, based on this analysis and intuition, that it is important for Contrapunctus I to be first, since it sets the stage for all that follows. I also think that not placing the triple/quadruple fugue at the end makes the biggest difference among all possible ordering choices. I am reluctant to say that it is “wrong” or would not work, but I know that it would be a big statement to place it elsewhere.

Conventional ordering of musical content

With certain sorts of pieces convention gives us an expectation as to how the ordering of types of musical content will create shape. This is true of suites, sonatas, symphonies, and other similar types of works. These conventions are not ever absolutely fixed, and they vary with time and place. But there is no convention as to the ordering of twenty or so contrapuncti. The content must create the possibility of shape and arc if there is going to be such a possibility.

This thought leads to an idea that I have held for a long time, have never been able to implement, and will likely never be able to implement. It would be a logistic tour de force and extraordinarily expensive as well. The analysis above helps to explain why I think that it could in theory work. Consider a performance of The Art of the Fugue by twenty different performers or performing ensembles, each playing one contrapunctus in a different room. Each movement in its room would be played over and over, and the listeners would be free to wander from one room to another. Each audience member would create their own path and could come and go from rooms at any time. Timing considerations would make it close to impossible to hear all of the movements in any order without also hearing fragments, since each movement in each room would be a different length from the others. The experience for any listener would not be that of “hearing the piece” exactly, but of getting absorbed in it. This is not a type of deconstruction that I would suggest for, for example, the Goldberg Variations or most other multi-movement works. But I think that it would work beautifully here.

Some of the observations that I have been trying to pull together in the last several months’ columns have led this thought to occur to me. The Art of the Fugue is a fully, rigorously contrapuntal work, and that is a large part of the lens through which we think about it. There is a body of music out there that is clearly imbued with counterpoint, but that is not fully contrapuntal. For me one quintessence of this sort of music is the keyboard music of William Byrd. There are passages that are fugal, there are passages that are chordal, and there are fugal bits in which the number of voices seems to fluctuate, or in which it is not always clear which notes belong to which voice. There is music by Mozart, Beethoven, and many subsequent composers that fits this profile. I have always had a nagging tendency to be uncomfortable with this: is it counterpoint or not? Fundamentally there is no reason to consider this anomalous or problematic, though some of us do. Looking at counterpoint as an analogy to the structure of the world or of the universe in the manner that I described in my previous column, and noticing that under some circumstances entities other than complete, defined subjects can be fodder for contrapuntal development, both tend to mediate between and reconcile contrapuntal and non-contrapuntal textures and make sense of the sorts of pieces that flow from one to the other.

Another less esoteric part of my recent Art of the Fugue experience has been that circumstances have led me to practice quite a bit on the piano. Using the piano in our home as a practice machine has been interesting. Vestigial memories of studying piano in my youth have come to the fore and have caused me to drift into doing things with volume that I am not very good at and that are not really relevant to this music.

But that raises a good question: does the “volume temptation” reveal things to me about the piece that are valid and that I can make use of, or is it just a distraction? Or is it actually misleading? These are not questions that I have never heard people ask. But they feel more vivid to me now as I have sat at the piano more in the last couple of months than I had in the previous many years. Many students do a fair amount of practicing on instruments other than the one on which a lesson or performance will take place: piano for harpsichord, piano for organ, electronic keyboard for either, or of course harpsichords and organs that are just very different from others. I have had too much tendency to see this as a necessary evil, to believe that ideally practicing on the exact right instrument is always better. I still believe that practicing on the performance instrument is better, more efficient, and that it should make up as significant a portion of practicing as possible. But since I am finding sitting at the piano to be enriching and interesting, I find myself rethinking all of this a bit. 

This is my twelfth consecutive column that is either about The Art of the Fugue or framed by my inability to write about The Art of the Fugue. It is my plan to put writing about the piece on the back burner, while getting back to actually working on the piece.

Just as I used the titling of this column as a boost of morale, I will reuse my mini-bio from 2019 below to express a bit of optimism about getting back to performance. It turned out not to be true then. Perhaps it will be now.

Towards a pedal method

I recently decided that over the next few months, I will work on writing a stand-alone pedal-playing method, and much of it will draw on what I have written in The Diapason. My columns from November 2007 through February 2008 constituted a discussion of teaching pedal playing intended to be read by teachers. The June 2009 column presented thoughts about use of heels. The columns from January through May 2013 revisited pedal playing, this time in a way that was directed at students. These latter columns come close to adding up to the pedal method that I am now contemplating. This version, however, will differ from the sum of those columns in several ways: it will be longer and will include more exercises and excerpts from pieces.

In this month’s column I again discuss pedal playing and pedal teaching. I will not canvass all of my specific thoughts about teaching in any detail, as I have done that previously. I will go through a summary of some of those thoughts, with particular references to ways I have somewhat reshaped my approach over the last several years. That reshaping is probably more “meta” than “nitty-gritty.”

My set of techniques for helping students to become comfortable negotiating the pedal keyboard has not changed much. When I was developing these techniques years ago I felt after a certain period of thought and discovery that it worked well; I still feel that. But there are details that I have rethought, and there are aspects of somewhat more advanced pedal playing to which I want to give more attention and more space in the forthcoming method than I did in those columns. I also think that I know more now than I did when I first began to formulate my approach (thirty years ago or so) or when I wrote my columns on the subject (seven to thirteen years ago) about how to present some of the ideas in ways that will engage and help the greatest number and variety of students.

My earliest memories of my own attempts to learn to play with my feet as well as my early attempts to teach pedal technique revolve around the notion that pedal playing is difficult. It is difficult. But I also suspected early on, and still believe, that it often presents itself to people as even more difficult than it is, perhaps in the wrong ways. It seems awkward or unnatural rather than just something that properly requires a lot of practice and dedication. I have mentioned here more than once before that I was a late bloomer as a playing and performing musician. Thinking back now, I realize that for many years my pedal playing lagged behind the rest of what I was trying to do as an organist and harpsichordist. At least all through high school, I found pedal playing awkward and uncomfortable. And beginning at least that early, long before I was any sort of teacher, I encountered people who told me that they had given up trying to play organ because they found pedal playing too awkward: they could not believe they would ever get to a place where they could be comfortable with it. In my zeal for playing the organ I reacted to this as a tragedy. For some of the people involved it probably was a tragedy, in that they were led into passing up something that could have become a valuable part of their lives. This stayed with me and was part of my impetus for becoming an organ teacher.

Over the last few years I have noticed that my pedal playing has been the most robust part of my playing. In juggling harpsichord and organ performance I sometimes go for as much as several months without practicing organ very much or playing pedals at all. The first time that I then sit down at an organ after an extended time away there is never any rust in my pedal technique, in fact it feels well-rested rather than creaky. This certainly does not prove that my technical approach to playing is better than any other approach, but it does suggest that it is not worse. 

This reminds me of the situation that prevailed for so many centuries, when getting to the organ to practice was a difficult enough proposition that most organists did most of their practicing on manuals-only instruments at home. They then needed to have a pedal technique that could be called upon as needed on short notice. Some organists had access to pedal clavichords, pedal harpsichords, and pedal pianos, but that was very far from universal. Here is a speculative thought: is there a correlation between the development of winding systems that allowed organists to practice without having to enlist an assistant and a boost in the type and level of virtuosity that could be expected of pedal playing?

My approach to teaching pedal playing arose more or less in sync with my efforts to improve my own pedal facility during and shortly before and after my graduate school years. The foundation of the approach is that everything about playing should be physically comfortable. This highlights the crucial difference between two ways of approaching something difficult. Pedal playing is, along with most music making, difficult in that it requires a lot of well-targeted work. No one should expect to become adept at playing pedals without putting in many practice hours; one should expect to find the process sometimes arduous or daunting. However, there is no reason to expect it to feel unnatural or awkward or to accept it if it does. 

None of the people I have met who have told me they gave up organ playing because they could not get comfortable with pedals ever say that they simply did not want to put in any work. They say that they cannot get their bodies to do the things that are required to grapple with the pedals or some of the things they had been told were required. Some of this may have to do with being asked to keep one’s knees and heels together much of the time. I sympathize with this concern, since I cannot sit on an organ bench with my knees together for even a few seconds without experiencing back pain and overall physical tension. However, I sympathize with what I take to be the impetus for directing students to sit in a particular position. It is part of a system for learning to find notes reliably and to be able to play with confidence. The question is whether this is the best system or is necessary for all or any students. An approach that starts with a specific physical requirement like this tends to act as a gatekeeper, weeding out people for whom it does not work. I believe that is the strongest reason for only embracing it if it is absolutely necessary. It is not the worst tragedy that we encounter when someone who might have entered the world of organ playing is turned aside from doing so, but it is a tragedy.

What about the practical side of learning to negotiate a pedal keyboard? There are three ways to find the next note in a pedal passage: 1) by discerning where that note is in relation to the note that you most recently played in the same foot regardless of whether there have been intervening notes in the other foot; 2) by discerning where the note is in relation to the note you most recently played in the other foot; and 3) by discerning where the note is in relation to where you are sitting on the bench. The impetus for asking students to keep themselves in a specific set posture while playing is an emphasis on the second of these. It seems to me that, although sometimes useful, the awareness of where each foot in itself has been and is going is the most efficient and reliable of these techniques. I developed a set of exercises and practice techniques for training this.

I will not go through all details here, but I do mention some questions that I have and some ways in which I want to rethink things a little bit, or to supplement the ways in which I have thought about this in the past. Have I placed too little emphasis on #2 while believing that some others have placed too much emphasis on it? In my own playing I rely on #1, but am I right to do so? I think so: it seems to work for me. But does my personal emphasis on that technique bias me towards emphasizing it too much in teaching? What about #3? This is sort of an analogue to “perfect pitch”—just hit the note from scratch. I have always been a bit distrustful of this, and I have tended to de-emphasize it. I wonder if I should think a bit more than I have in the past about ways of training this sense, at least so that it can be an always-available backup. (Playing a note with the heel when you have just played a different note with the toe or vice versa is a special and important case of #2.)

How much does all of this vary from student to student? How much does it vary from one sort of repertoire to another or from one instrument to another? 

Notice that I am not even mentioning: 4) looking at the feet and 5) feeling around for easy-to-find keys and then using them as guideposts for the notes that one wants to play. I am generally skeptical about looking. It can sometimes work in the moment, but it is dangerous to use it as a technique for making finding notes seem easy during anything remotely like the beginning learning stage. Every time a student finds a note by looking, they pass up a chance to become a more skillful and secure pedal player. Looking can become a habit. And when it is a strong habit it can get disconnected from the business of finding the next note. It is not uncommon to see someone look down at their feet quickly and still play the wrong note. Looking at the feet also creates a perpetual risk of getting lost in the score. It is not impossible that a given player can incorporate some looking as a successful part of pedal playing. I need to consider how to characterize this situation. 

Concerning #5, I feel strongly that this is a bad idea, except perhaps as an occasional emergency measure. Any use of this technique during the beginning learning stage can actually make it close to impossible to get away from needing it. And since it requires extra gestures and time it can force slower tempos than would otherwise be necessary. It can also tamper with a player’s sense of rhythm and timing. However, I once had a student who came to me after decades of playing who found every note this way, who therefore made exactly twice as many gestures with her feet as she would have had to, but who was so adept at it that it did not create any trouble at all. That is, it did not create hesitation, insecurity, or inaccuracy. It did place an upper limit on her tempos. I need to continue to consider how to address this when writing for students.  

Concerning proper organ shoes, they should be comfortable; they should be light enough that keeping them up in the air is not a burden; and they should not be inclined to slip off or around in such a way that the player has to clutch at them with the toes to keep them on. When I was first trying to learn to play pedals I tended to use old-fashioned men’s dress shoes. These were uncomfortable and much too heavy. Each of my organ teachers gave me an indescribably vast amount of help, input, and encouragement, as I have written about over the years. But none of them ever said anything about shoes. Eventually I noticed that my ankles and leg muscles were perpetually tired and sore. I tried a number of lighter, more supple shoes. I have wide feet, and, in those days, it was difficult to find anything just right. But the heaviness was worse than any other sort of compromise would have been. 

For many years now I have played organ in New Balance walking shoes. For me, they are amazingly comfortable, light, wide enough, etc. Thinking of those shoes puts me in mind of another big issue. What about built-up heels? They can assist in heel playing, but they can impede certain sorts of foot crossing. I think that the extent to which built-up heels are necessary is influenced by certain things about foot position and foot flexibility that vary from person to person and also vary depending on technical choices. In preparing to write this method, should I revisit various different sorts of shoes, maybe purpose-designed organ shoes? These are now available to fit my wide feet, which was certainly not the case in the early 1970s! If I do this, I will be coming at those shoes through a filter of unfamiliarity that would not be there for a student who started out with them.

Marcel Dupré wrote in his memoirs that he answered the question, “Avec quels souliers jouez-vous de la pédale?” (“With what shoes do you play pedals?”), with “with my own.” Various eyewitnesses have testified that he indeed played in his everyday shoes, not normally changing shoes between walking in and playing. What about this latter practice? I certainly know people who consider it to be unacceptable to track outside dust and dirt onto a pedal keyboard. But here is a venerable precedent for doing so! Is it enough to sort of dust off the shoes? Is this something that I should write about in the method?

As much as I always enjoy getting feedback from readers, in this case such feedback could be especially useful and interesting. What do you think should be included in a pedal method? Did you happen to read my earlier pedal columns? Did you find them helpful? Do you have anything from your own experience either learning or teaching pedal playing that you think might inform such a book? I would love to hear from you.