On Teaching: lessons from figure skating

A word

Over the last year or so I have attended more cultural and artistic events than I have in several years. I have had periods of doing more of this sort of thing than I had on average before the pandemic: catching up on theater, dance, music, art galleries, one figure skating exhibition, poetry readings, lectures, movies, etc. This has been extraordinarily satisfying, life-affirming, and a good antidote to a certain claustrophobia that had rather naturally set in before. I have noticed that as it seemed to become safe to go out and experience public life in these ways, I pursued doing so almost frantically. I get maybe 100 emails per day informing me about some sort of concert or play, and for quite a while I reacted to each such email by thinking “Yes, I have to do this!!” Recently I have noticed that this exaggerated fervor has simmered down to something more normal.

Upon attending theater, concerts, and such, I noticed that I was beginning to think about performance—not so much the phenomenon as the word itself. It felt like I was saying to myself things such as: “How nice to be attending a performance again;” “I haven’t been to a performance in a long time;” “I had never gone this long without experiencing a performance.” The word began to sound weird to me, the way a word does once in a while if you hear it enough. Yet, it also sounded interesting. I began to seek out instances of the words “performance,” “performer,” and “perform.” And though it was not the point initially, I became interested in the connections between that word and our relationship to it as musicians. In particular, I wonder what holding that word up to the light a bit might say about the perennial problem that we all face: that performance is hard, nerve wracking, and productive of anxiety. Certainly most of what is so difficult about performing music is intrinsic to the activity, not something that is created by the word itself. However, the word may shape expectations of feeling to some extent.

By chance these musings about the word “performance” tie in with something that I had planned to write about anyways, and that will form the subject of the next column.

Performance

So what about that word “performance?” Below is a potpourri of some of the ideas, observations, and questions that have been going through my head.

Performance is used in the arts (or the “performing arts”) to refer to a situation in which someone provides a public exhibition of their art. What are the performing arts? Is it interesting to suggest that they are arts that involve movement through time? That is, movement through time when they are being taken in by a patron, customer, or audience member. Everything exists in time, so a painting or sculpture exists in time. When someone looks at it and focuses on or appreciates it, that takes time. But the art is not using time.

There are some moving sculptures. If that is not “performance,” why not? Presumably because the sculpture has no consciousness or volition, and the person who made the sculpture is not the one doing the moving. So if something is a “performance,” someone has to be doing the performance in real time, though not necessarily at the same time that the audience is experiencing it. Acting in a movie or television show is just as much “performance” as acting in the theater.

We certainly would say that an orchestra gives “a performance.” But would we say that of an individual orchestra member? “I love (or hated) his performance of the oboe solo in such-and-such a symphony.” “She gave a great (or terrible) performance of the opening horn solo in Schubert’s Ninth.” Probably not. We would say, “I liked (hated) the way she or he played that passage.”

What about conductors? We might say, “That conductor gave a great performance of that symphony last night.”

What about in church? Would we say that someone gave a performance of a certain piece as prelude or offertory? Maybe, though I think that in reality we would be more likely to use a phraseology involving “playing” rather than “performing.” “That prelude that you played today was a favorite of mine.” How about with hymns? I would be astonished if anyone said, “I loved her performance of Hymn #284,” rather than “I loved how she played. . . .” If I am right about that, what does that tell us? When you accompany a hymn in church you are, first of all (like a member of an orchestra), not creating the whole of the musical, artistic entity. You are also doing something that is only partially directed at the listeners/audience, or in this case the congregation, whom we have stipulated as part of the “performance” situation—that is, only partly directed at them as listeners. You are helping them to sing, and in turn their singing is probably not what we would call a “performance;” the singing is essentially for the benefit of the people engaged in doing it.

So performance is presumably directed outward. Usually? Always?

Occasionally at one of these performances I have been so avidly attending, I find myself chatting afterwards with an actor or dancer. This is usually in a small group in the lobby or out on the street in front of the venue. Occasionally, I will say, “I am also a performer,” or something to that effect. What I find fascinating is that I always feel that in saying this I am being a bit presumptuous or even a bit of a fraud. Yet, I am a performer. So what’s up? I think that part of it is that we tend to put “performers” on pedestals; we do not think of them as being “regular” people, and I happen to know first-hand that I am a “regular” person! So at some visceral level I feel as though I am misrepresenting myself or perhaps impolitely trying to cut down the real performer to whom I am talking. There is also more neutrally just the feeling that using the concept of “performer” to equate two very different things is somewhat inaccurate and reductionistic.

The difference between the two things may come down to an actor plays a part pretending to be someone else, whereas performance of music does not. Is that really true? Is it a hard and fast difference? This is the thread that I will pick up next month.

The word performance is also used with respect to athletics. “That was a great pitching performance.” “He underperformed his career average.” In athletics the word almost always means what you achieve in relation to defined standards. If I say that a golfer’s performance in the final round of a tournament was amazing, I do not mean anything other than that they shot a great score and perhaps executed some shots along the way that were really difficult. That may not be a comprehensive way of putting it, but it is all about the concrete, measurable carrying out of defined tasks. I might very well appreciate the elegance of a golfer’s swing or something about their demeanor—maybe a particular look of concentration, but in this context that is not part of their “performance” on the golf course. 

This is one of the reasons that we think that we can compare how “great” different athletes are. It is not just that statistical descriptions exist of what each athlete did in their sport. (Sometimes that information is lacking, which makes the evaluation impossible as a practical matter, but does not change the concept.) It is that “performance” is defined as being those objective results. 

Picture this: you have been sitting around the living room visiting with some friends. All of a sudden one person stands up, starts to express displeasure with everyone else in the room, increasingly loudly and insistently, and walks out shouting, “I’m finished with the lot of you!” Let us say that this was unprovoked. Someone in the room might then look at the others and say, “Well, that was quite a performance!” If the person who left the room had instead just visited peacefully and eventually said a pleasant “Good night,” no one would have characterized that as a “performance.”  

When someone acts as the officiant at a wedding, their words, gestures, and signature make the marriage official. We might say that they have “performed” a wedding ceremony. However, we would probably not refer to that phenomenon as “a performance.” When shaking the hand of a member of the clergy or judge or ship’s captain, we might say, “I loved the way you spoke at the wedding” or “I loved the way you conducted the wedding.” Maybe, “I loved the way you performed the ceremony just now.” But certainly not “I loved your performance earlier this afternoon.” What does this tell us, and what does this mean? 

Performance vs. performance art

What about “performance art?” It resists definition, as the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the subject illustrates. That interesting article opens with statements such as, “Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants,” and “Its goal is to generate a reaction,” which do not really distinguish it from other art. That leads back to the question: why use the word “performance” as the defining title of an art form or art movement that is not any more about “performance” than any theater piece or piano recital? It seems an abstraction of the concept of performance, perhaps an assertion that the act of performance as such has a life and a meaning independent of the forms through which it has traditionally been channeled. Can that concept of performance as an independent entity then be turned back on our awareness of what performance is in any form?

There is a whole other set of uses to which the word “performance” is put. One that is found disproportionately in ads and commercials is a use like “performance motor oil,” “get the best performance from your stove,” or “high performance grass seed.” This is another abstraction or maybe just a more fundamental use of the word. It means something like, “How you do something (anything).” It is interesting that in this context the word “performance” implies “really good performance.” I suspect that this is fairly new, as is a similar way of using the word “quality.” This usage is related to the “performance” of a stock or mutual fund. Two characteristics of this sort of usage are that it has an unambiguous good-to-bad axis—no one would disagree about what’s good and what’s bad—and that it refers to inanimate entities. The things doing the performing have no consciousness or awareness.  

The second of these is clearly a departure from the way “performance” is used in the arts. The first is more intriguing. I wonder whether this is connected with our heightened feelings of expectation and nervousness when what we are doing at a given moment is a “performance” rather than just playing through a piece or reciting a poem out loud because we like the sound of it. There are many reasons to find performance difficult, reasons that are grounded in the content of what we are doing. But I wonder about the linguistic: “performance” is supposed to be good, can always be better, can be measured, and can be used to create rankings.

As an anecdote about my own recent experience, I have done very little performing since the pandemic began—just two short harpsichord recitals, a year or so ago. I feel confident that I will progressively get back to performing, but it still all feels rather abstract. On the other hand, I have been doing a lot of playing at home and in my studio, playing through things, sort of practicing, but usually not in a goal-directed way. My own ears are telling me that, for my own taste and in relation to what I want to try to make happen when I play, I am playing categorically more effectively than I ever have before. I suspect that what I am hearing in my playing is related to the sense of being free from the demands of performance. And if true, this is in large part due to the substantive anxieties and pressures of performance. But I suspect that the language plays a part. If we are contemplating a “performance,” we are at risk for thinking that we have to behave like “performance motor oil”; if we are just playing, we can just play.

An upcoming workshop

I will be offering a one-day workshop on J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on Saturday, April 1. The event, presented by Princeton Early Keyboard Center, will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. The workshop is free, and no advance registration is required. However, if you let me know in advance that you are coming, I will be able to keep you informed of any changes of plan, and I will also invite you to tell me about any specifics of what you would like to get out of the day. It has always been important for me to keep the exact content of workshops flexible so that we can end the experience having addressed the needs of each person who has attended. This event is open to anyone: keyboard players, other musicians, other artists, any person with any interest in The Art of the Fugue, from any background. I hope to be able to offer a valuable experience to people who already know the work very well as well as to those who know nothing about it but are interested. 

I will have at least one harpsichord at the event, and we will also be able to use the Paul Fritts organ in the chapel. I will not be giving a performance of The Art of the Fugue, but I will be playing substantial amounts of the piece. There should be opportunities for workshop attendees who wish to play a bit on various instruments.

There is information about the workshop on the PEKC website (pekc.org) and on my own website (gavinblack-baroque.com), and both of these will be kept up to date with any changes. There will likely still be some sort of Covid protocols in effect for visitors to the seminary at that time. This information will be found at both websites.

Please feel free to come, and also to let anyone know who you think might be interested. I hope to see you there!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.