On Teaching: Interruption

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

The way of the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few random thoughts from the last month or so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.

Therapy

I begin this month’s essay with an anecdote that will lead to some further reflections and questions arising out of my recovery from shoulder surgery. I am writing in mid-February, and yesterday I needed to go to the bank. Because of a student cancellation I had about an hour free for a ten-minute errand, without anything else on my schedule. As I turned into the bank parking lot I got a jolt of pleasure from noticing that the lot was empty. Maybe I would be the only person there! Maybe I could do what I needed to do quickly and get it over with! But, as I fished around in a compartment in my car for the papers that I needed, I realized that I was getting into a mild but real panic that someone else might drive up before I had a chance to go in. Why? I had a lot of time, it was too cold to take a walk or to do other errands. Yet, I was not aware of any other errands that I needed to do.

My arm still will not permit me to practice—no reason to rush back to the studio. If anything, it would make sense for me to want the bank errand to take a bit longer. I was experiencing impatience for its own sake: just manifesting a habit of being impatient or maybe behaving as if being impatient were something that I actually needed to practice. The latter is, unfortunately, not remotely true. I am habitually impatient, and I have trouble putting that aside. Increasingly I notice that most of the time when I am upset or having trouble with something, the underlying source of that trouble is impatience.

My long-term goal is to rid myself of impatience, which will in turn improve my character and temperament. It takes time, and that is difficult.

I have no idea where I stand on the human impatience scale—maybe no worse than average. Impatience is something that is woven into the fabric of our world. The desire or need to get a lot done can lead to impatience—although that connection is, I believe, illusory. Fervor, efficiency, commitment, concentration: those all can lead to getting more done; impatience cannot. Impatience may be a natural, or at least common, human feeling. But there are things about modern life in particular that seem to nurture it—commercials, for example, or the approbation given to multitasking.

Thankfully, this impatience does not manifest itself when working with students. Encouraging students to work fervently, efficiently, with commitment and concentration is important and good. Becoming concerned about a student’s productivity is appropriate. But impatience just clouds thought. Directed at others it can give rise to unhelpful and unnecessary interpersonal problems.

My own tendency towards impatience is directed at myself. For example, once in a while over the years I have thought it prudent to try to get my weight down. If I am lucky, I experience a day on which I eat lightly and healthy and maybe take a walk or play a round of golf. So far, so good. But if the next morning I have not demonstrably lost four or five pounds (and I have not) then I immediately decide that this is not working, and that I might as well give up. Or I should say that I experience the impulse to decide that. Once or twice over the years I have been able to fight against that impulse successfully. (I know that I am not the only one who has had this experience!)

So all of the above ties in to my current round of physical therapy, which in turn ties in to practicing and other aspects of musical life. When I wrote my March column about a month ago I had not yet started therapy. I wrote that the kind of patient, one-step-at-a-time work that I imagined it to be seemed like something that went against the grain of my temperament. This was in spite of whatever success I have had in making myself carry out similar tasks that add up to learning pieces of music or learning to be a performing musician. But I also thought that in this circumstance I would have a fairly easy time of overcoming any problems with impatience, distraction, or boredom due to the obvious high stakes. Here are a few observations from three weeks into the process:

1) There is an element in my physical therapy that resembles good systematic practicing—exercises that should be done on a consistent, regular schedule and that allow progress to happen. This progress has, in both situations, the quality of sometimes being difficult to see day to day. Some days are different that way from others. Sometimes you think that you can feel the small increments, and sometimes you can experience the progress sort of “catch up.” I have done what I would say is a “B+” job of complying with the home exercise schedule, maybe “A–.” It is not quite as easy to make myself do it as I had expected, even with an awareness of the consequences of not doing it. I believe that I am doing enough that my progress is what the therapist expected.

2) And speaking of that, there is an important element here of the need to put faith in the skill and (perhaps even more importantly) in the judgment of the physical therapists. There are levels to this. The first is faith in the knowledge, judgment, and experience of the establishment and of everyone involved in creating the program. The second is faith in the overall skill and judgment of my particular therapist. Third is faith in my therapist specifically to know whether what she sees happening is right.

When we do various exercises, there is often pain involved. (There is a big difference between this and practicing organ or harpsichord, by the way!) I have discovered that when I am doing exercises at the facility or having my shoulder worked on by my therapist, I can relax about the meaning of that pain. I trust her to know for certain whether any given pain is what has to be expected or if there is a problem. (So far there has been none of the latter, I am glad to say.) When doing exercises at home I do not feel that I can trust myself to make that same judgment. So it is nerve-racking. I do these exercises more cautiously than I need to. As the repair to my shoulder heals and I know that the risk of re-injury is fading, I am less worried. But early in the process the fear that I would do something to set the whole process back had a tendency to constrain my work quite a lot.

Trusting in the judgment of the professionals is one of the parallels between physical therapy and music lessons. I muse about whether this experience has changed my thinking about teaching. I believe that it has clarified something for me. Physical therapy is analogous to the part of music teaching in which we try to guide our students toward learning the notes reliably, as to one piece or as to gain general skill. But it does not include anything about interpretation, rhetoric, or style. I have realized that I do want my students to trust me implicitly and thoroughly about note-learning techniques but that I specifically do not want them to trust me about interpretation, and so on. This is a slightly different lens through which to view what I have always said about not wanting my students to play like me or to copy me or anyone else.

If a student does not believe me when I say that a practice protocol will work, or that it is acceptable to work on this “difficult” piece if (and only if) we approach it in this specific way, or that if you do this exercise you can learn to play 5/4 trills comfortably, then the whole process becomes inefficient or ineffective. Just as I have no idea what works and what does not work in physical therapy, the student may not know what does or does not work in note-learning.

Why do I trust my physical therapist, and why should a student trust me? It is partly about institutions and partly about individual experience. I assume that if I go to a reputable physical therapy establishment, I will find that the therapists there are good at what they do. This kind of reasoning is often valid, but sometimes trips us up. We also trust training and education. My physical therapist has certain degrees and certificates. I do not know anything about the schools and programs that she attended; again, we are largely trusting institutions. This often works, yet sometimes does not.

(It occurs to me that if anyone assumed that they could trust me as a teacher specifically because I am the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center, then they would be falling into a circular trap. I founded PEKC, and it is a small operation. If PEKC vouches for me as a trustworthy teacher, then I am just vouching for myself!)

The next step is the experience itself. If we discover that we were wrong to trust someone’s judgment and expertise, it is likely that we will find out too late. In the physical therapy situation as well as other medical situations this could have terrible consequences. It is difficult not to see any choice other than to do the best we can in making that judgment. I should say that as far as I can tell, my therapist is extraordinarily good and everything is proceeding exactly as it is supposed to.

(It occurs to me that if I could trust my students not to trust me about interpretive matters—that is, not take anything I say as authoritative—I would probably talk to them more about such things than I do. That seems to be a fruitful idea about which to muse further.)

3) The interpersonal side of the physical therapy process has something in common with that of music lessons. It is a partnership and a kind of artificial friendship. I am not at all sure that I am putting this particularly well, as it is something that I am in the midst of experiencing and just beginning to think about. By artificial I do not necessarily mean false, but rather forged by circumstances that are not themselves about friendship. It is of necessity hierarchical. It is time-limited—it is likely that after another month, I will never see my therapist again, nor any of the other people at the office whom I have gotten to know. This happens all the time with business or practical connections. But it seems like more of a “thing” in this case perhaps because the business at hand is important and personal, perhaps because it is time-intensive while it is going on. I have had a previous bout of physical therapy in my life. I remember being quite sad, even briefly kind of forlorn, when it ended.

This makes me ponder the time element of music teaching. I have rarely had a student who came for lessons as often per week or for as long each time as I am going to physical therapy now. But on the other hand I have had students stay with me for a very long time indeed. As best I can figure it, I have had students whose study has been as short as one lesson and as long as twenty-five years. The former has occasionally (rarely) been a failed connection—always determined by the student, not by me—but more often been a planned one-time consultation. Decades-long study needs to be thought about very carefully and conscientiously by the teacher. Is the lesson process still useful for the student? Is the balance between the interpersonal and the pedagogic successful?

To be continued.

The Art of the Fugue, part 4

Over the next two months, I will continue my analysis of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080, with a focus on my own experience of learning the piece. Following that, I will expound on the piece itself: namely analysis, form, history, and more. The later stages of the discussion will refer back to the long program notes I originally wrote in 1985 that formed the content of the July and August columns. This will include looking at some of what I wrote there in greater detail and from various points of view.

The ideas constituting this month’s column are set down in no particular order—not quite as a stream-of-consciousness narrative, but with some of that miscellaneous quality, somewhat reflective of how I learn a piece as monumental as The Art of Fugue. Of course, there is a big part of that process that is highly structured, especially the act of practicing.

The Art of the Fugue is monumentally important to me. I care about it more than any other piece of music, which is not a statement I make lightly. I have experienced the work, both as a listener and as a performer, While performing, it has a level of emotional power that is both deeply satisfying and difficult to live with. It is a known phenomenon that once in a while a person simply cannot listen to some particular piece because the emotional effect is too strong, too disturbing. I have a similar experience with The Art of the Fugue.

I can remember once hearing from a musician that he could not listen to the Bach Saint Matthew Passion because it was overwhelmingly emotional—but that he could and did participate in performing it. Being involved that way did not weaken his emotional force. Rather, it gave it somewhere to go that made it manageable. That is different from my experience with The Art of the Fugue. I find the piece more intense and powerful—and that intensity and power more difficult to assimilate—when playing it than when listening to it.

I do not think it is that I “like” my own performance better than the ones I might listen to. That is, in itself, a complicated concept. I make the interpretive/rhetorical choices that I want to make, whereas other performers make the choices that they want to make. So my own playing is at least striving to be that which I would find most powerful. It does not always succeed. Consequently, ideas that are not the ones that I have thought of myself can end up striking me as powerful.

I suspect this is not about liking interpretive choices or a particular performance. It may be connected with another aspect of my relationship to The Art of the Fugue. I wrote in the column from June 2018 that I experience a kind of impersonalized, societal superego looking over my shoulder while I perform with harpsichord performance than I do with organ performance. This is not that I necessarily think that my organ playing is more successful than, or better than, my harpsichord playing. But for some complex set of psychological reasons I have a more settled sense of ownership in my organ playing. In a similar way I seem to be discovering that I have an extremely solid, even unshakeable feeling of ownership in this piece. That sense feels exactly the same, in nature and in strength, whether I am playing it on harpsichord or organ. I intend to use that sameness to overcome some of the weakness in the feeling of ownership that I sometimes have at the harpsichord. In other words, some of the strengths of the way that I feel about The Art of the Fugue will, after I experience performing it on the harpsichord, be transferable to other harpsichord performance situations.

My early history with The Art of the Fugue

The first time I performed The Art of the Fugue was May 8, 1985, on the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey. This was the first of my two graduate recitals for the Master of Music degree in organ performance. I presented two recitals; the school’s policy stated that one could play either one recital from memory or two with music. It was easy for me to choose the latter. On the day of my first lesson in January 1985, I put The Art of the Fugue score up on the music desk before my teacher Eugene Roan came into the room, and then with some fanfare announced to him that I wanted to play it as a recital. He agreed immediately, even though it was clearly a stretch for me to learn it within the projected time! (I was 27 years old then, a late-bloomer as a player.)

This was an important step in the evolution of my belief that everyone should be allowed and encouraged to work on that which they find the most deeply important, engaging, and exciting. An interesting difference exists, however, between the project that we began that January and the normal approach that I take with my students as to their repertoire choices. Normally, if a student wants to work on something that is a “stretch,” I make it clear that I am very happy to oblige. But I also note that one key to making that process work is that there be as little time pressure as possible to allow the process to unfold naturally.

In the case of my first pass at The Art of the Fugue, we knew very well that we did not have any time flexibility, and the piece is long and difficult. There are passages that are still, at a minimum, tied for being the most challenging music that I have ever tried to learn for performance. So it was a bit of a gamble and a high-wire act. One consequence of this was that I spent that late winter and early spring doing something that I had never done before and have not done since: actual ten-hour practice days. I was taught up until then that it was counterproductive to practice for more than four hours a day. For those three months I averaged something like eight hours, five or six days a week, with some of those ten-hour days thrown in.

This was grueling and tiring, physically and mentally. I have never wanted to do anything like that again. But simultaneously, it was fun, exhilarating, and clearly something that could become addictive, even though it seems not to have done so for me. It also was effective. I learned the piece: not perfectly, but well enough to give a performance that made the people glad they were present. (That concert was not recorded. I am almost certain that many of the tempos were slower than what I would now want, and that was in part out of necessity. I also remember there being plenty of wrong notes.)

I believe that the full-immersion approach to the initial learning of the piece left me in a position to revisit it later with a kind of serenity and comfort that feels like quite a luxury when dealing with something so imposing. That practicing experience was, among other things, kind of mind-bending. I felt sort of spaced out, vertiginous, in another world much of the time. I now wonder whether my sense of bonding with the piece comes in part from my having encountered the nitty-gritty of learning it for the first time. Though a lot of effort was involved, it was also sort of as if I had learned it in a dream; therefore, it felt in a way like something that had been magically bestowed on me rather than something I had done.

Instrumentation in The Art of the Fugue

The Art of the Fugue was not designated by its composer as written for any particular instrument or combination of instruments. For my purposes in planning out a performance, this is liberating. We are all very aware of transcription as a kind of thing in itself. If I take the notes of a Beethoven string quartet and try to execute them on the organ, that is a transcription. Transcription has been an important aspect of organ literature for ages. In some way—which is not rigorously defined—transcription is seen as different from other performance. (As a personal confession: part of my own frustration with the common practice of performing harpsichord music on the piano is not that it is done, but that it is never categorized as “transcription.”) I have a lot of faith in composers’ abilities to know what they are doing with sonority, and I have a preoccupation with shaping music and performance to sonority, so I have never been that interested in playing transcriptions myself.

But what is or is not transcription with The Art of the Fugue? Neither a harpsichord performance nor an organ performance can fall into that category. How about a clavichord performance? Bach never specified clavichord in so many words for any piece of his, whereas he did for organ and harpsichord. How about a performance by an ensemble of any instruments that the composer could have known? There is a fair amount of reason to assume that he had keyboard performance in mind, but it is not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. What about instruments that the composer could not have known?

Even though we care about what is or is not a transcription, it is not really important to know how to answer these questions. I enjoy knowing that the various ways that intrigue me to perform the piece all have similar claims to being “valid,” while each one has its own light to shed on the work. The ways of distributing the piece on instruments that interest me the most are the following:

1) on organ, played “like organ music.” That is a deliberately silly way of putting it, but what I mean is with ample pedal, by and large putting bass lines in the pedal, typical of Bach’s other organ music. One feature of this approach is that it allows the three-voice mirror fugues to be played in trio-sonata texture. In some other movements, the distribution of the four voices over two hands and feet enables the independent motion of the voices to be especially clear.

2) on organ, mostly or entirely manuals. This approach opens up the interesting idea of playing on a chamber organ or trying out lighter textures.

3) on harpsichord. Part of the interest for me right now of this very normal, obvious, and mainstream approach is that I have never done it.

4) on two harpsichords. For several years about ten years ago, my occasional student and current colleague George Hazelrigg and I performed and recorded The Art of the Fugue in a thoroughgoing arrangement for two harpsichords. That is, every movement was played by two instruments, usually with each of the four voices on a different manual. This provided an extraordinary variety of colors, but all within the landscape of colors that the composer knew. It made the note playing simpler for each performer, but introduced the challenge of chamber-music-like coordination.

It is fascinating to me that in the entire Art of the Fugue there is exactly one note that is unplayable on the organ (because of compass) and one spot that is unplayable by one performer on the harpsichord (because of hand span). Since there are plenty of arguments in favor of playing the work on either of those instruments, it almost seems like he is teasing us!

Since I have played this work on the organ frequently in the past, learning it and playing it on the harpsichord is the first priority for the current project. That is true both in that, in a pinch, it is more important as a project for me and in the sense that I plan to do it chronologically first. However the real point is to see how it feels to have both performances in my fingers and feet simultaneously and to try to get comfortable playing it one way one day and the other way the next day or soon thereafter. There are two main components to this: getting comfortable with the differences in sonority and touch between the two instruments and the interpretive/rhetorical differences that these make necessary, and getting used to playing some notes now in the pedal and later in the hands.

In one of my first columns in The Diapason, addressing the question of why playing manuals-only is often considered easier, I wrote “ideally, the more resources one can bring to bear on playing a piece—like ten fingers and two feet rather that ten fingers alone—the easier it should be.” Working on The Art of the Fugue simultaneously with pedals and without is a good test of this. Often the fingerings required to play all four voices of a four-voice movement are extremely complex. The gain in out-and-out easiness created by only having to finger the three upper voices is considerable. It is also usually meaningfully easier to make the voices seem clear with this lighter load. On the other hand, the bass lines themselves, while most are amply playable by the feet, are also often extremely challenging. Both sides of the equation are heightened in intensity, and there is the matter of keeping both approaches fresh and reliable at the same time. Will there be moments at the organ when the outer part of my left hand inadvertently starts to play the pedal line? Will there be moments at the harpsichord when the same outer part of my left hand drops out, relying on a pedal keyboard that is simply not there?

I close this month with a couple of stray thoughts. I notice reading through the piece these last months that I feel significantly less connected with Contrapunctus II than with any of the others. That certainly does not mean that I do not like it. I like it a lot, as I do the whole piece. Maybe just a tiny bit less. And, as a practical matter, I have a much less well-developed sense of what I want to do with it than I do with any other movement. It is the one that begins with the version of the theme seen in Example 1.

And I have also noticed that when a fragment of The Art of the Fugue starts going through my head, more often than not it is the opening of the long and imposing final movement. I do not know why this is the case, but I just want to notice and muse about all such things.

To be continued.

Stories and conversation

In mid-March, when I last sat down to write a column, the current health crisis was at a relatively early and very uncertain stage. I wrote that I hoped that by the time that column appeared in The Diapason things would be much better. I sit here writing now a week or two after that last column appeared, and this one will not be read for nearly another six weeks. It seems accurate to say that the situation remains dire and that the sense of uncertainty remains as high as it was then. While society is slowly starting to reopen, we will not know the effects of this action for quite some time. This very morning there are hopeful headlines about a vaccine, but we have no idea whether that hope will pan out or, if so, what sort of timeframe this will take.

I still cannot consider it prudent to schedule concerts. I wrote in my March column (written in mid-January) that I did not have any concerts scheduled at all, a first in nearly thirty-five years. I stated that that was “odd: simultaneously peaceful and eerie.” Today it feels more eerie than peaceful: the latter has been partially replaced by impatience and the fear that it will never seem right to schedule events. Looking back, as of a couple of weeks ago I have not played in public for over a year. That arises out of a chain of mostly unrelated circumstances: first I kept my schedule clear for several months so that I could practice for planned performances of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue; then I had to deal with my shoulder surgery and recovery; then the current phase in the history of the world set in. The last time that I went more than a year without playing in public was prior to 1980. 

Over the last several weeks there has been a lot of discussion, much of it deeply anguished, about choirs and choral singing. This does not affect me directly at this point in my life except as a listener, though I know it is deeply affecting many of my friends and colleagues. In fact, it may be two years before widespread choral singing will be possible again. I hope very much that by the time you are reading this that hypothesis will have turned out to be overly pessimistic.

There is a lot of variation in how people react to this uncertainty when it comes to the parts of their lives and daily activities that are subject to discretion. Some colleagues are using their extra free time to learn new music or new skills—the technique required to work on new and unfamiliar repertoire or even a new instrument. Some are taking up new activities or hobbies—perhaps ones that they have always meant to pursue. So far, I have done none of the above. My reaction to the situation has been to put much of my motivation to tackling preexisting projects. I mentioned in my previous column that I needed “to take a deep breath.” At that point, early in this whole scenario, I felt that my students needed that as well, and that it was a good thing for all of us. Shortly after writing that, I did start to offer various forms of remote lessons or consultations to my students. However, I have not felt my own motivation returning, either to plunge back into practicing or to explore anything new. Most of what I have been doing has been “comfort food,” as we have been baking a fair amount of bread and cooking a bit more elaborately.

I am not certain why this is. It may be partly a direct reaction to the sadness and difficulty of what is happening. If so, it is not necessarily entirely a depressive reaction or a reaction of feeling indifferent. I suspect that in the face of so much tragedy right around me I am afraid that I will find the music that I might normally be playing too intense. That has been my reaction to the little bits of playing that I have done and also to much of the music that I have heard. Also, I have always had better practice habits when I have performances coming up. That impetus is gone for now. I do feel certain that the motivation will come back. But the main point is this: that any such reaction is okay. I am overjoyed that so many of my colleagues are, for example, posting videos of performances from their homes. That is generous and helpful. I have been an avid viewer and listener, and that is helping me get through certain days. However, I believe it is important that no one feels pressure to cope in ways that are unnatural. In general getting a lot done is more admired in society than not getting anything done. And I am confessing to embracing the latter, though just for now, and claiming that I am within my rights to do so. 

But if it is self-serving, it is not selfish since I hope very much to help persuade everyone to give themselves the same leeway, as much as they need. Doing the things that we have to do is enough as far as fulfilling obligations is concerned. 

At the same time, I have been thinking about counterpoint and The Art of the Fugue. It feels like the odd times in which we live are encouraging me to engage in ever more speculative thinking. Rather than indulging in the technical aspects of counterpoint, I have been pondering more about images and ideas around the concept of counterpoint. Ideally the images and ideas will inform the way that I think about the technicalities. 

One very powerful idea about counterpoint is that it is related to conversation. If two musical entities are engaged with one another, doing different things at the same time, it is natural for us to hear what is happening as analogous to human verbal conversation. This is not an idea of mine, but has been the subject of articles and books as well as informal discussion. It is intuitively convincing. When counterpoint is being produced by separate instruments the conversational aspect is enhanced by the visual and the conceptual: we see and are aware of a different source for each musical line, just as we see and are aware of each different speaker in a conversation. In vocal counterpoint, we see and hear something that is remarkably similar to conversation, down to the humanity of the sources of the sound and the expressions and gestures. At a keyboard instrument the conversational aspect is something that presumably arises solely from the sound. Visually, and often spatially, everything comes from pretty much the same place. The extent to which it is up to the performer and to performance choices to make the conversational aspect of the music convincing is not necessarily very different from the parallel concerns with ensemble counterpoint.

For the performer, one of the great strengths of conceptualizing counterpoint as conversation is that it brings home the need to make each line in and of itself an effective piece of communication—something that has “meaning” though not dictionary or visual-image based meaning. At a minimum this is psychologically helpful, even inspiring, for many performers. For me it serves as a reminder to behave as if every note matters. In conversation every word matters, in that it can be heard by someone and may affect that person. That does not mean that every word is serious, solemn, or weighty. Some are funny, light-hearted, rhetorical rather than meaning-laden. But they are all there and all have an effect.

I have a few caveats about counterpoint as conversation. For one thing, it seems important to me to remember that, as I just mentioned, music in itself does not have dictionary meaning, semantic, idea-based meaning, and that it does not mean anything that can be encapsulated in a visual image. It is liberating and powerful to accept that Example 1 means exactly what it says and nothing else. This freedom from word-like meaning gives a line of music the ability to do things that words cannot do and the flexibility to be used in ways that words are not used. 

Related to that is the first major difference between verbal conversation and musical contrapuntal conversation. In the latter, we not only allow but expect material to be used multiple times. Although the essence of counterpoint is found in two different things happening at the same time, it is habitual for identical or similar things to happen at different times. This can be recurrence, repetition, echoing, answering, returning, and so on. But all of these techniques play a minor role in anything like normal conversation and a limited though sometimes important role in poetry, drama, and literary narrative. They are pervasive and important in music.

In verbal conversation, we do not expect many voices to be sounding at the same time. We expect them to take turns and occasionally overlap, which is fascinating in verbal conversation. Sometimes, it functions to create continuity and an overall arc. At times it is an interruption, which can be a sign of enthusiasm and can constitute rudeness. It is common and normal for interruption to take the form of one person’s finishing another’s thought—not necessarily in the way that the first speaker would have finished it. It is not normal for two or more people simply to talk steadily at the same time as one another for a substantial amount of time. This would cease to be conversation. But it is the norm for musical contrapuntal conversation. 

With words, we do not expect to be able to follow even two let alone three or more lines of thought at the same time. With counterpoint, that is exactly what we expect to do: it is a major concept of the exercise. It is not necessarily easy, and it is not necessarily something at which we always fully succeed. It is almost certainly both common and unproblematic for some of that following to be subconscious or subliminal. People differ in the extent to which they are consciously, specifically aware of following and really parsing the separate lines of counterpoint as it goes by. And, of course, different performances of the same piece or passage can seem to make it easier or harder to follow in that way. (And interestingly different performances can seem different in that respect to different listeners.) I think that it is a pitfall of the counterpoint-as-conversation idea that it can tempt us to try to make the analogy fit even more closely than it naturally does. This might involve downplaying the significance of the simultaneity of lines or even denying that following multiple lines at once is possible. I have heard people suggest that the way we listen to counterpoint should fundamentally involve switching focus from one line to another, as we would presumably have to do if we were trying to listen to two or more people talk at the very same time. 

Questions of how many lines we can listen to simultaneously are complex. Does it vary from one person to another? If so, is that somehow intrinsic—or of life-long standing—or does it arise specifically from music-based training? Can almost everyone follow two voices? Can anyone really follow six? eight? forty? Do people mainly listen to or notice the beginnings of notes, or are the sustained portions of notes important as well? In counterpoint is one line ever more “important” than another, and, if so, what does that mean and what should a performer do about it? Whatever these questions are, I believe it is important not to let the speech analogy influence our answers to them, or how we frame them, more than it should.

Another concern about the conversation analogy is that musical conversational counterpoint is mostly experienced by listeners, whereas verbal conversation is fundamentally experienced by those who participate in it. We who love counterpoint love playing it. It is interesting to contemplate how much we function as listeners while we play and how much of our experience is the pure experience of playing. But the vast majority of music listening is done by listeners. Listening to a spoken conversation in which you have no part happens and is perfectly normal, but not the most usual or common.

The completely different model of counterpoint that has come to interest or even preoccupy me over the last few years is one that is harder to encapsulate in words: counterpoint in music is a model for the whole phenomenon of the existence of the universe. This model was suggested to me by some of my experience as a theater attendee.

Over the last several years I have attended quite a few theater events that are organized in what amounts to contrapuntal layers: different parts of the story going on in different or overlapping spaces, perhaps threads sometimes coming together in one space or passing near one another, sometimes remaining separate. Together they all add up to the complete story. Some such pieces that I have experienced are Sleep No More, Then She Fell, The Grand Paradise, Ghost Light, Here, Seeing You, and versions of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

I was initially puzzled by why I found this sort of story-telling so powerful. Events of this sort seem very much like closed worlds: nothing from the outside gets in or interferes. This helps the audience to concentrate and stay committed. It also means that the world built up inside the walls of the event has the chance to feel complete—it is temporarily defined as being all that there is, and it is structured according to its own content.

I realized after a while that the structure always felt, through a number of different styles and each time with a different story, like an analogy to the “real” world: layered and complex enough for that analogy to seem valid and emotionally convincing. 

At some point I realized that the experience of being at this sort of show reminded me strongly of closing my eyes and becoming totally absorbed in a piece of contrapuntal music. In such a piece of music there might be only three or four component lines; in a show such as the ones that I am talking about there might be any number of component storylines weaving their ways around one another. In the universe as a whole there are infinite numbers. But the analogy still seems to hold.

This image neither contradicts nor directly complements the conversation analogy. It is simply another angle and one that I along with some of my students have found particularly interesting and powerful.

It is my intention—uncertainties aside, for the moment—to return next month to some nitty-gritty motivic analysis of The Art of the Fugue, not without some speculation about the role of memory in creating structure.

The Art of the Fugue, part 5

This month I continue my discussion about the process of performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. The connection of all of this to teaching is tangential, perhaps, but very real. As part of the act of working on a project that is especially important and challenging to me, I find myself trying to delve more deeply, accurately, and honestly into understanding what is most important and meaningful to each student.

Yet it can be hard to figure out what is important to oneself and why. In my recent attempts to look closely at that, I have noticed that a majority of the artwork that I care about the most is either big in scale or possesses a convincing overall arc that gives it a spacious feeling regardless of the literal size or length. That arc is a significant part of what is artistically important about the work.

I recently made a list of the five specific artistic entities that mean the most to me or have meant the most to me over my life. This was not in connection with The Art of the Fugue project, though coincidentally, they all have this quality. Just for the record, the five entities are, in no particular order, as follows: The Art of the Fugue; Handel’s Messiah; Hamilton (the current Broadway musical); the Jethro Tull album-length song Thick as a Brick; and the off-Broadway immersive theater piece Sleep No More. All are in the category I have described. Each of you reading this could probably make such a list; it would surely be very different from mine. The same is true for each of our students. But I could also make a list of moments, bits of music or theater or other narrative, say no more than ten or fifteen seconds long, that are in themselves deeply important to me.

Presumably a work of art that moves through time, like music or a play, cannot have a convincing and important overall arc unless each constituent part of that arc is convincing in itself. Some of those constituent parts may be the ones that strike a given person as especially intense, important, or moving. Others may be just part of the moment-by-moment flow. Something about the relationships of those details to one another, ones that are adjacent in time and ones that have to rely on memory to be connected, has to be convincing in order for the overall arc to be convincing. Is it important to think, in shaping each detail, about how it relates to the overall arc? Or is it possible to trust that if each detail comes out the way that you want it to (on its own terms) the overall shape will take care of itself? Does this differ from one piece to another? Are there many possible ways of dealing with this effectively, and do these arise out of and then shape the interpretive stance of different performers? It seems that, among other things, it would have to vary from player to player, based on different fundamental feelings about the relative importance of overall arc and moment-by-moment experience.

Why is the overall arc so important? I do not have one specific answer, though I think there is value in asking the question. I believe that one answer that is highly personal and significant, but that also risks sounding cliché, is that it relates in part to the quest to understand what it means to experience the arc of a life, and thereby to come to terms with death. Of course, The Art of the Fugue has a special role in this regard due to its unfinished nature.

The longer a work of art is, and the more compelling its shape, the more it feels to me like a place—perhaps a place into which one can escape for a while. (That is significant even without anything from which to escape. The sense of being elsewhere for a while is enticing and refreshing in and of itself.) I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and spent a lot of time as a small child roaming around some of the buildings of Yale University. Many of these structures are maze-like and are imbued with a strong feeling of being places unto themselves, hidden and self-contained. This was perhaps especially so to a child for whom they are frighteningly big. This shaped some of my taste in architecture, but I believe it spilled over even more powerfully into my taste in music and in theater. It is relevant to all of the works of art I mentioned above, but most especially to Sleep No More. It is also a source of my love for golf, since a golf course is also this sort of place. (If you count the movements of The Art of the Fugue one particular way, the number comes out the same as the number of holes on a golf course.)

I am finding (or re-confirming for myself) that because of my propensity or craving for long structures, it actually is not a challenge for me to play from one end of The Art of the Fugue to the other. Encompassing the whole of it in my focus seems to be the aspect of working on it that comes the most naturally to me. The challenge—the part where I have to be honest with myself and not let myself indulge any laziness—is making sure that that overall shape is as convincing to audience members as it is to me. This is a place where the questions I posed above about details become critical.

To have an intermission or not: that is the question . . .

Here is a consideration that arises from the length of this work taken in conjunction with the desire to make the overall shape convincing and powerful: intermission. I do not yet know exactly how long my performance of The Art of the Fugue will be. I am sure that in my graduate school performance the music itself took about an hour and forty-five minutes, in addition to an intermission. Subsequent performances have varied in length. My recording on two harpsichords with George Hazelrigg used faster tempi still. It lasts about 78 minutes and just fits on one CD. I think that my planned solo harpsichord performances will be somewhere in between. It is rare for a classical concert lasting over an hour and a half to lack an intermission. On the other hand, an intermission interrupts the flow of the piece significantly. But so will listeners’ impatience and need for a physical and mental break. We go to movies that are longer then that, without needing to take a break. Plays lasting ninety minutes with no intermission have become more and more common. But as I ask people about this—concert patrons among my friends, students, etc.—I get a pretty strong consensus that an intermission is a necessity. I am very reluctant to go along with that, so I am conflicted. Perhaps some performances will include an intermission while some will not.

Playing a work as if improvising

I have written in previous columns that it can be useful to pretend that you are improvising the piece that you are performing. This is not a literal idea, since I am not a particularly adept improviser, yet it is an image or a way of mentally organizing the quest for spontaneity. How does that relate to The Art of the Fugue? After all, the piece is so complex contrapuntally, and we know that Bach worked on it over a long period, so we can safely assume it was not improvisatory in origin. Yet, it might be all the more necessary to try to have that improvisatory feeling as a corrective to the tendency to be over-awed by that structure, formality, and complexity.

It is a myth that improvisatory means unstructured, free, or rhapsodic. Improvisation can be of that sort, but it can also be highly structured, contrapuntal, well planned motivically or harmonically. A few times over the years I have heard an improvisation that was begun by a player who did not know how long the improvisation needed to be, but who ended up producing an experience that seemed to have a convincing overall shape. It seemed to me listening as if the expectations shaped by the beginning determined the rest, including the timing of the end. How is that even possible? Of course, I am only reporting my reaction, not anything scientific or measurable, and I do not have recordings of these moments to study objectively. But those experiences have always been in the back of my mind as a paradox that probably has something to say about musical shape. I will return to this next month in discussing the state of my thinking about the structure of The Art of the Fugue.

After practicing on different harpsichords recently I have noticed that in the four-voice mirror fugue there are passages in parallel tenths, a rarity in Bach and other Baroque keyboard music. However, these passages disappear when one voice is in the pedals, so their existence as an unavoidable technical matter is harpsichord-specific; and I can reach those notes on a harpsichord with a 61⁄4′′ octave, but not on one with a 61⁄2′′ octave! So as a very practical matter, this defines or limits what instruments I can successfully use for an Art of the Fugue performance on harpsichord. This is another example, specific to me, of the ways in which this work is playable, but just barely.

It’s all in the name.

There is no evidence that the name The Art of the Fugue or its original in German, Die Kunst der Fuge, came from J. S. Bach himself, or that he even encountered it. It is found on the title page of the first edition, published under the supervision of members of Bach’s innermost circle. It is entirely possible that the choice of that title reflected something that they knew about what J. S. Bach intended or wanted. But it is also possible that it did not: that he had not said anything about a title by the time he died, and that therefore they just had to come up with something.

I believe that the name has tended to move us toward thinking of the work as being more academic—more of a treatise or exposition about something—than the music itself gives us any reason to think that it is. In fact the younger generation circa 1750 might well have seen it as old-fashioned in a way that seemed to make it into something academic. C. P. E. Bach certainly seems to have revered his father. But he also lived surrounded by musical aesthetics that would have been foreign to his father. If J. S. Bach himself had meant to call this work something very different, say The Mysteries of Harmony or Grand Passacaglia in D Minor or The Strife of the Gods, would we see the piece differently? Would the tradition (quite weak now, but prevalent for many years) of thinking that this work was only suitable for study, not for performance, ever have formed?

We do not really know how much any child understands about the work or indeed the character of a parent. It is convenient to assume that what C. P. E. Bach says about J. S. Bach, or what he implied by engraving a certain title on a piece, is valid. No one would suggest that it be arbitrarily dismissed. But it is just not accurate or intellectually rigorous to assume that it is correct or that it could not be misleading. I know that when I myself try to understand the work or the intentions of anyone of an older generation whom I knew well, I am under very strong internally derived pressure to make the kind of narrative out of that story that I would like it to be or that I can in some way admire or relate to. I resist that, but I do not think that I can escape from it. A composer’s children and students belonged to a different generation from that composer and grew up with different artistic assumptions.

Talking about study

I have found myself slightly more inclined to look over The Art of the Fugue away from an instrument than I normally do with music that I am working on. All of the analytical work that I do with pieces is usually done at a keyboard, teasing out voices and actually playing them, looking at aspects of harmony, rhythm, melody, and so on, either while playing them or in a position to play on the spur of the moment any or all of what I am trying to analyze. Why am I spending time with my Art of the Fugue score in front of me at a table or seated in a comfy chair? I am not sure. Should I suspect myself of being subconsciously influenced by the age-old classification of the piece as one suitable for study? I do not quite think so. I believe it is two things: that I want or need to spend more time thinking about the piece than I can or should spend playing, and that I am just plain interested in it. I think that some of the time that I am spending reading The Art of the Fugue sitting in a chair is taking the place not of practicing it more, but of reading a novel or the newspaper! Needless to say, I am rethinking the ways I encourage my students to study away from the instrument!

Next month I will write more about the structure of The Art of the Fugue, in particular, the ways in which the overall shape makes sense even though the piece is incomplete and even though we are not certain about the order of the movements.

To be continued.

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

Utterly miscellaneous

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

Pedal playing

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

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

Background music

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

Is the performer deeply engaged?

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

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

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

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

A love of the sound

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

Surface level appeal

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

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

What’s in a name?

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

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

Competition-based model

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

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

And that is all for this month.