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On Teaching: Playing Slowly

Gavin Black
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Playing slowly

I ended last month’s column with an anecdote that I suggested would lead nicely into what I wanted to write about this month:

One day Gene Roan and I were walking along the corridor chatting when he stopped near a practice room door. He told me to listen, and then after a couple of minutes said, “Even his very slow practice has a sense of direction.” I did not know who was practicing. I think that I was shy about actually peering through the little window, or maybe it was papered over. But that was a significant lesson to me. I have tried to make sure that my slow practicing has a sense of direction ever since!

This month I discuss playing slowly—slow practice, students and their relationship to tempo, and various questions related to choice of tempo in performance. Concerning slow practice, which I have written about at some length in the past, I have some new things to say and some new ideas about how best to describe it to students.

First I want to flesh out the anecdote a little bit. After writing last month’s column, I wondered whether Professor Roan might have been engaging in a bit of stealth teaching at that moment. He certainly knew that I was a fervent believer in slow practice and that I had a tendency to prefer somewhat slow tempos for performance. Was he reminding me to take care that my slow playing incorporated as much direction and purpose as possible? Clearly one of the characteristic dangers of slow playing is that of plodding along.

But I have had a few further questions. Is it actually good to imbue your very slow practice with a sense of direction? The point of slow practicing is to learn the notes. Is listening for or trying to project a sense of direction a distraction from that? Does it reduce the efficiency of slow practice and delay the time at which the player will be able to move closer to a performance tempo and eventually all the way there?

Furthermore, what is the relationship between a sense of direction that works at one tempo and one that would work at a very different tempo? Is it possible to hear interpretive or rhetorical gestures in slow motion, so that what you are doing to shape the music four or eight times slower than you end up playing it is genuinely analogous to what you will want to do when you are playing faster? The assumption that there is a strong analogy of this sort with the physical gesture of playing is the foundation of the belief that slow practice is efficient. But that does not tell us anything directly about rhetorical or interpretive matters.

One way of expressing a fairly agreed-upon view of the relationship between systematic slow practice and end results in performance is that the slow practice leads to such solid, reliable, and controllable playing that the ears, mind, judgment, taste, etc., of the player can ask the fingers and feet to do anything and they will respond. This is certainly correct in my experience. And a logical conclusion from this formulation is that expressive content of very slow practice is essentially neither here nor there.

Perhaps the point of playing with a sense of direction or any expressive purpose and effect when practicing very slowly is not about the music that you are practicing. Maybe it is about the next very slow piece that you want to play. It is about learning to hear musical shape and direction in very slow passages in general, not particularly with reference to the piece that you are practicing. Or perhaps it is just about keeping the ears focused. In any case, these are questions to muse about rather than to answer, and it pleases me that an event that took about ninety seconds thirty or so years ago is still causing me to reflect today.

The earlier columns in which I wrote the most systematically about slow practice were those of February and March 2009. Perusing those now I see that I did not talk about one technique that I have used to help students settle in to slow practicing—in particular, not to speed up inadvertently during the process. That is a conscious focus on the sonority of individual notes. If we are lucky, the actual sound of an organ or harpsichord that we are playing is beautiful, interesting, or somehow compelling. Savoring that sound can be an antidote to a tendency to rush or hurry. This is very true on the harpsichord, where the middle to late part of the blooming and decaying sound can be fascinating and the best part. On the organ, decay does not happen. Sounds are still interesting, and the relationship between what the pipes are doing and what the room is doing can be fascinating, and it often develops over the length of even a long, slow note.

This points to a concern that I have tended to gloss over. Since organ sounds can theoretically last forever, very slow organ practice creates the risk that the inexorability of each note’s sound will become annoying. Not everyone feels this. I think that I do so only when there are other people who can hear me practicing, and I am worried that they might find the sounds annoying. This can be largely solved by using soft sounds. In fact, in the great centuries-old debate about whether to do initial practicing on a soft neutral sound or on the sound that you want for the music, this may provide a new wrinkle. Look for a sound that makes the sustained tones of slow practice as interesting as possible!

Concerning choice of tempo for performance, why ask the question, “Is it okay to play slowly?” Surely that question should in principle be a neutral one: “What is the most effective tempo for this piece or passage?” It is possible for a performance tempo to be too slow, and the telltale sign of that is that listeners react to the music as plodding or boring, but it is also possible for music to be too fast, resulting in the music being perceived as hectic or unpleasant or conveying a sense that the performer wants to get it over with. However, if music is slow, there can always be some suspicion that it is that way because the player cannot play any faster. We rarely suspect that someone who plays very fast cannot play any slower. I believe this is often a bigger issue for students than we realize. The pressure to play as fast as you have heard someone else play can be intense.

I recently witnessed a comment on a YouTube performance of a Bach piece that said, more or less, if one cannot play this any faster, one should not play. This was rather unfriendly, and it was accompanied by some other nasty comments. (One of these comments concluded this certainly was not Bach’s tempo, something about which the commenter could not possibly have actually known.) I am perfectly happy that I scrolled away from it before I noted exactly what it was or how to find it again.

I had the great good fortune to hear the pianist Mieczysław Horszowski in concert quite a few times in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was in his nineties. His tempos were usually a bit slower than the average that you would have found by surveying available recordings of the pieces, especially newer ones. His playing was also thoughtful and expressive, natural and unforced. I never suspected that he had to play slowly because of his age or for any other reason. I also noticed that he would often include something very fast among the encores. It struck me that perhaps he was trying to give us listeners the message that, yes, he was playing the way he played because that is how he wanted the music to be heard—that his fingers could indeed move as fast as ever, or as fast as anyone’s.

I tend to like slow tempos. I think that this is in part because my whole orientation to playing music and to listening to music is sonority-based. I am an organist because I fell in love with the sounds of certain organ stops very early in life, and the same with the harpsichord just a bit later. I gravitate toward instruments that sound so interesting and compelling that the experience of listening is powerful almost regardless of what the pieces are like. This is not the only way to listen, and some people would justly criticize it as insufficiently respectful of the importance of composition. But the savoring of the sonority that I recommend as a way of keeping slow practice slow is an everyday part of my listening and playing. This tends to keep my playing slower than it might be, and that can be received either well or badly by any given listener.

In Widor’s recording of his own famous “Toccata” he slows down fairly significantly in measure nine when the pedal enters. I believe this is because he wants to give the long pedal notes a chance to bloom, to savor their sounds. This is a reminder that sometimes slower notes need to be slower, as a matter of underlying tempo, than quicker notes. Sometimes slow notes need to bloom, and quick notes need to be subsumed into larger beats. I measured the Widor tempo change. The opening passage is in the mid-nineties per quarter note, measure nine is in the mid-eighties, but I had not noticed it spontaneously. The rhetoric of the tempo change is convincing.

I have noticed that when I finish listening to a piece of music, if the piece continues to go through my head, it is almost always slower than the performance I just heard. I only focused on this recently, and I do not have a precise explanation for it. It cannot be a reaction to sonority, since I am not actually listening to anything at that moment. And it is not coupled with any conscious sense of having disliked the tempo of what I just heard. It just seems to be something about my own temperament as a musician and listener. For whatever reasons in each person’s history, one has a different temperament as a listener and as a player. I believe that one’s stance as a listener should inform one’s playing perhaps more than we let it sometimes. When in doubt, play it the way you want to hear it. For some people—me, for example, and plenty of students I have known—this means in part being willing to not worry about whether someone else would have played it faster.

Not everyone’s tendency is to want to play slowly or “moderately.” But a desire to play fast is never going to be met with suspicion about the player’s level of competence. The choice to play fast is never going to be invalidated as one that was not in fact a free artistic choice.

Is it a good thing, some of the time, for really fast playing to sound like it is at the cutting edge of difficulty? Or is it necessary that if you are going to play very fast you make it seem easy? I remember a rather ironic story from my life that touches on that. Around 1981 I traveled to Binghamton, New York, at the invitation of Paul Jordan, my former teacher and good friend, to give a concert. One of the pieces that I played was the Sweelinck Chromatic Fantasy. Late in the piece there is a passage of sextuplet sixteenth notes in the top voice against slower notes in the other voices. As part of his feedback after the concert, Paul said that he thought I should play the piece faster. One reason he gave was that he thought those sextuplets should sound like they were at the very edge of what the player could execute. They should sound in that sense difficult, challenging. The irony was I thought that they already were at the limit of what I could do. I would have been terrified to try them any faster, and indeed probably would not have succeeded in pulling that off. But it interested me that they came across to Paul as being serene, too serene!

I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a late bloomer as a player. Even in early adulthood I honestly could not play every piece as fast as I wanted to hear it. It has been a long time now since that was true for me, except perhaps for some extreme cases. But remembering the Binghamton event and my limitations as to velocity back in those days leads me to a couple of thoughts that will close this thread for now. First, is it all right for a teacher to allow or to encourage a student to learn pieces that the student will realistically never be able to get up to tempo? This question should be technically meaningless, since anyone can learn any piece or passage by practicing it the right way. But not everyone is actually going to practice everything enough to learn it. This can be true as a choice or option. A student may be interested in exploring a piece, but only so far. Or it may be a real or realistic limitation. If a piece is so vastly difficult that the most careful, conscientious, systematic practicing would only permit it to be learned over decades, then learning it is probably not a real possibility.

I find it a good idea for a student to work on a piece yet only get it some of the way up to tempo. For one thing, any careful practicing is good practice in the art of practicing. For becoming better at practicing and for becoming a better player, I am tempted to say that it does not matter at all whether you get the pieces that you work on along the way fully learned or not. And the best way of not fully learning a piece is to learn it below tempo. This also allows students to get to know pieces that are for the time being, at least, beyond where they are technically. It is interesting. It also creates a situation in which the piece is primed to be fully learned later on. In fact, learning a piece solidly but well under tempo and then letting it sit for a while, even a long while, is a very effective way of ending up getting it to be a secure, well-thought-out performance when it is eventually learned. Also, being willing to keep a piece under tempo can allow a student to encounter more difficult works by a composer whose less challenging works they may want to learn more fully.

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On Teaching: Gene Roan

Gavin Black
Eugene Roan

Thinking about Gene Roan

This month I share thoughts about my teacher Gene Roan, as the ninetieth anniversary of his birth took place recently. He was born June 8, 1931, and died in 2006 at the age of 75. This recent birthday, significant yet also sad, has led me to think about him quite a lot. On June 8, I posted a lengthy commemoration of Gene on Facebook, recounting some of my interactions with him and reflections on what he meant to me. This was met with a gratifyingly large amount of favorable comment, with many colleagues and friends chipping in with some of their own memories. It was this experience that led me to feel that I should not miss the opportunity to commemorate Gene here. I studied with him formally off and on from the fall of 1974 through 1986. Gene and I remained colleagues in and around Westminster Choir College and close friends until his death on September 21, 2006, after a long illness.

I wrote a column about my other principal organ teacher, Paul Jordan, on the occasion of his death in early 2015. I had been studying with Paul, formally and informally, in New Haven, where I grew up and he worked, for several years when in the summer of 1974 I faced the prospect of going off to college at
Princeton. That was all very well, but working with Paul was so compelling that I was distraught about having to make any sort of change. As I recall, I initially assumed that I would continue to study with him, taking lessons when I was home, and maybe keeping in touch by phone. However, he made plans to leave New Haven that summer, taking a faculty job at the State University of New York at Binghamton, so I asked him to recommend a teacher in Princeton. Paul phoned his friend, the renowned choral conductor and teacher Helen Kemp, who was on the Westminster faculty at the time. He described what I was like as a student and what I might be looking for, and she remarked, “Well, I think Gene Roan is interested in Baroque music.” And thus, very casually, the whole rest of the course of my professional life was set.

I was pretty shy as a seventeen-year-old, so it took me a few weeks to call Professor Roan, even though I was very eager to resume organ lessons. (I also arrived at Princeton with a very nice letter of introduction to William Scheide from a mutual friend. I was too shy to follow up on that, which I have always regretted.) Roan and I arranged to meet at the console of the organ in the Princeton University Chapel. When we had both arrived we talked for a few minutes and then repaired to a small diner a few blocks away to continue chatting over tea. I felt comfortable with him right away. But I also had a concern; he had not asked to hear me play. Did this mean that he had already decided against taking me as a student? I could not imagine that an experienced, august teacher would agree to start working with a student without experiencing their playing. I had assumed that this event was in part going to be an audition. But none of this was true, and we made an appointment for our first actual lesson shortly thereafter. I was left a bit nervous that perhaps when he heard me play some doubt would creep in.

In fact, Gene had taught me his first lesson: how a prospective student already plays is the least important matter about that student. What matters is that they have decided that they want to study. By the time I started teaching regularly around 1985, I had really absorbed that idea. As far as I can remember I have never specifically asked anyone who inquired about lessons to play for me before agreeing to take them on as a student. I am pretty sure I have never declined to take someone on for any reason. If I did it would be because I suspected that they did not really want to be there, but normally it is up to the student to make that judgment.

Sometime soon into our work together, probably at that first real lesson, Gene explained to me that he never expected a student to play a piece the same way that he did. That fit in nicely with my own temperamental approach. I was very stubborn about doing things the way that I wanted to, and my mind was pretty closed to ideas about interpretation that I had not somehow already absorbed by then. (In the aforementioned Facebook post I wrote: “I am at this point the most open-minded person I know of as to artistic matters—maybe to a fault, in some people’s eyes—but when I was seventeen and had only been playing organ for a couple of years I was pretty sure that I knew how things should be done.”)

Everything that I “knew” about “how things should be done” I had gotten from somewhere, largely from Paul Jordan and the approach that he taught, and also from various non-organ musical influences. There is an interesting paradox involved in wanting to do things my way as a kind of declaration of independence when “my” way has been absorbed entirely from others. These kinds of conflicts are probably universal and inevitable, especially early in life. Maybe they are not really conflicts: just the stuff of which our various approaches are made. At first I greeted Gene’s disavowal of any intention of directing me to play a certain way with relief, because I did not want my existing notions to be challenged or changed. What he taught me over many years, starting with that declaration at our first lesson, was open-mindedness itself. And in doing so he opened me up to radical changes in my own playing, all of which came about organically. I was never at a stage where I was doing something just because someone else was requiring me to do it when I found it unconvincing. If you who are reading this today have read this column over the years, you know how much this approach of Gene’s has influenced my own teaching and thinking about teaching.

I have wondered whether one of his reasons for not expecting his students to play the way he did was that he needed for his own way of doing things to be flexible and subject to change. If you lock in an interpretive stance by convincing your students that it is right and necessary, then what happens when you evolve away from that stance? Nothing happens exactly, as a practical matter, but it seems like kind of an awkward state of affairs. I know that Gene was always a bit worried, in “one off” teaching situations like workshops, that the ideas presented might come across to the students as too cut and dried, too clearly “true” when they were really just part of a long thought process. When he taught workshops, as he did a lot over many years, he was careful to present his teaching in a way that avoided this as much as possible.

I know that Gene’s overriding concern in teaching was to give each student what that student specifically needed. As I evolved towards being more open to interpretive approaches other than those I had absorbed from almost the cradle, we had many talks in which I thanked him for his flexibility and non-dogmatic approach. And while he certainly did not remotely disavow that approach, he also took pains to remind me that there are all sorts of different approaches that might be needed for different students. In my case he never directly criticized ideas that I brought to lessons, even ones that I later figured out he thought were flawed, limited, or with which he disagreed. Constantly over many years he pointed me toward all sorts of other manners of hearing things and thinking about music—not so much to get me to adopt any of them as to get me to be open to various interpretations. There are students who perhaps need to be guided a bit more directly. There are also students who think that they need to be guided more directly but who really do not. There are students who learn most from the teacher, and there are students who learn most from other students. There are students who learn by listening, others who learn through analysis, and still others through just trying things. Gene probably thought more consciously and conscientiously about respecting these different needs than anyone else I have known.

Gene Roan was a very fine and accomplished player. During the years that we were both in Princeton he did not give many full-length organ recitals there. I believe that I heard him in such a recital only twice. The first of those was on the Casavant organ at Westminster in the same fall when he and I first met: a recital that included the Bach Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578. I had only ever heard that piece as light, clear, and relaxed—though with building intensity. (This was, to be honest, because I had only listened to the Walcha recording, and maybe tried to play it myself.) Gene played it fast and loud—magnificent, but also shocking to me. I remember that I asked him about it afterwards. I took it for granted that he knew that his way of playing it was kind of “out there” (though as far as I have any reason to believe now, it wasn’t!). He said that this was what he did with the piece when he wanted to shock people. I think that he was partly indulging my limited perspective on the piece by putting it that way, though it was likely also true.

Gene was a great admirer of Mendelssohn’s organ repertoire. We had several fascinating lessons on a couple of the sonatas and maybe a prelude and fugue or two, though I never did much with those pieces in performance myself. In a way that seemed to arise directly out of his love for and affinity with those works, as he was easily the finest Mendelssohn performer that I have ever heard. I heard more suppleness, expressivity, singing quality, and general sense that something consequential was going on with his playing of Mendelssohn than I have heard before or since. He was also especially interested in Reincken, and his analysis of the massive fantasia on An Wasserflüssen Babylon over the course of a couple of lessons was my introduction to the rhetoric of pre-Bach form.

Like many organists, Gene was interested in and focused on sonority. He knew a lot about organ design, both its history and how it works or can work in practice. He had an extraordinary ability to remember specific organ stops. He once told me that if he heard a particular Doppelflöte stop (just an example, but a favorite of his), he would recognize that specific stop forever, should he hear it again. I think that this in part led him to focus more on actual sound than on stop names. He used to delight in telling students that on one old electronic organ, the best-sounding diapason was the stop labeled French Horn. Not that this approach was unique to him or is unique to those who were his students, but it was eye-opening and influential to me and I believe to many others.

He also taught me a lot about the relationship between sonority and interpretation. In a column from 2008 I wrote in these terms about one salient example of that:

In the spring of 1979 I was studying . . . with Prof. Eugene Roan. . . . I played one of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugues for him on my new harpsichord, and he commented that he couldn’t hear a certain motif when it came in in the top voice. I think that I said something about harpsichord voicing, or acoustics, but he suggested that I simply make the theme a bit more detached, and he demonstrated that it could indeed be heard better that way. He floated the idea that the sound of the instrument was telling me something about how to play the piece. At the time I was very committed to the notion that this theme should be articulated a certain way, and that it should be played exactly that way every time that it came in. I didn’t want the instrument to try to force me to depart from my plan. However, that moment was the beginning of my considering the idea that interpretation could be, in effect, a collaboration between analytically derived ideas and acoustic- or instrument-derived sonic realities, and that neither side of that picture should be ignored.

When Professor Roan became head of the organ department at Westminster in 1995 he invited me to join the faculty as an adjunct, initially to teach harpsichord, but soon after also to teach organ and segments of various classes. He retired in 2000, and I left at the same time. These years were extraordinary. He was an extremely supportive “boss”—quotation marks meant to convey, of course, that he did not really feel or behave like a boss, but rather a very supportive colleague with lots of resources to make good things happen. I brought a lot of harpsichords to the campus, and there were a lot of organs there in those days. We had non-stop informal interaction among students and faculty over all sorts of instruments and repertoire. (This interaction was so fruitful and real that I sometimes cannot remember for sure whether a student whom I knew then actually took lessons from me or not.) I was given a lot of freedom to do whatever I thought was right with my students, guided by the notion that this is never the same from one student to another. I had students who didn’t play Bach over a whole year, or nothing but Bach, or who worked on only one piece for a whole semester or even a whole year, or who, for a while at least, just dabbled in many pieces in a row without really learning any; students who played in class every week, and students who did so very rarely: whatever was going to work psychologically and pedagogically to help that student get the most out of the experience. I would tend to run unconventional things by Gene expressly, and he would make sure that I could articulate what I was going for. There was never any top-down decision making.

As I mentioned above, we were good friends for about thirty-two years. He was a presence around Princeton and Westminster for over fifty years, and there are countless people there and spread out through the world who remember him vividly and miss him as I do.

Leonard Eugene Roan, Jr., was born June 8, 1931, in Albany, Georgia, and died September 21, 2006, in Princeton, New Jersey.

On Teaching: Further thoughts about rhythm, part 4

Gavin Black

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

Example 1

Further thoughts about rhythm, part 4

After writing my last column and in the course of searching for further ideas about rhythm, I came across this quote, which was new to me and I quite like. It is from a review of Rhythm and Tempo by Curt Sachs published in 1953 in Journal of Research in Music Education, written by Theodore F. Newmann:

The essence of all musical expression is that of creating a feeling of organic movement. And that factor, above all else, which contributes to a work’s organic unity, its total feeling, is rhythm. Rhythm is not a matter of divisions of time and accent but rather a relation of tensions—the preparation of new expectations by the resolution of former ones. It is rooted deeply in the framework of all living organisms. It permeates the very body of music—its tempo, melody, harmony, and form. Rhythm is, in fact, the most vital element in music.

I might quibble about the absolute terms in which some of this is expressed. Rather than “the essence” I might say “an essence” or “one essential part.” Despite my focus on rhythm right now, I would not say that it is “the most vital” element in music—certainly one of the most vital, and one that, defined broadly enough, must be present.

What I really like is the part about expectations. This is a powerful way of framing the theoretical background for my second mode (as per last month) of determining rhythm in music. The ebb and flow of tension, the creation of expectations—and then the fulfilling or the subverting of those expectations—is the source of the rhythm of my second sort. And this operates at every level, from a whole piece to the motion from one short note to the next. Newmann’s quote is a beautiful expression of the notion that rhythm can be derived from and described as something other than counting beats. For me, this description also establishes that the expectation-based sense of unfolding rhythm is primary. It is not just a system of departing from the rhythm created by the beat structure. If anything it is the deeper, more essential source of rhythm.

How is it possible to reconcile the simultaneous existence of these two radically different ways of defining, projecting, and perceiving rhythm in one piece of music? I do not know if I have a thorough or systematic answer to that. Both forces being discussed here are real, and therefore they do coexist pretty much regardless of whether we know why. Not having an answer to how or why that works may reflect something about how flexible it is in actual practice. It may also relate to the phenomenon of people responding differently as listeners to the choices made by performers. After all, expectation is a listener’s experience. And if a piece or passage of music creates and then fulfills or subverts expectations, then the actual flow of that experience is very likely determined in large part by the listener’s experience, training, philosophical stance, temperament, and so on. Different listeners will hear what is being performed in a way that is literally different.

If a piece of music is ostensibly measured and structured in a regular meter, then any overt conflict between the two approaches to rhythm would take this form. The intuitive, listening-based approach might well lead to something other than playing the rhythm as written, and playing the rhythm as written might lead to ignoring the ebb and flow of tension and expectation. One axis along which a solution to this conflict might exist is that the sense of pulse is remarkably strong and resilient.

My experiment with Helmut Walcha’s recording of Sweelinck, as described in my December 2021 column, page 11, is a manifestation of this resilience. As I wrote then, my reason for testing out the literal metronome steadiness of the recording in the first place was that the performance came across to me as remarkably and inexorably steady. So it was interesting and telling that the metronome reading varied so much across the piece. I have conducted similar tests on other recorded performances. For example, about eighteen different recordings of the beginning of the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony yielded similar results. Some of my odd driving-based experiments about time have this same import.

A Chopin anecdote

There is an anecdote about Chopin that I have come across in writing twice over the years, though I cannot remember where exactly. One version framed the story around his mazurkas, the other around his waltzes. It works equally well for either, as they are in ¾ time. The point is that a friend of Chopin’s said to the composer that when he played one of his own waltzes there were four quarter notes in each measure, not the notated three. Chopin denied this. The friend made him sit down and play and kept strict track of the timing, and Chopin was indeed taking four quarter notes worth of time between bar lines. This story implies three things: that Chopin was playing very freely, holding some supposed quarter notes for as much as twice as long as they “should be” held; that there was nonetheless something that could be identified as “the quarter note;” and that Chopin himself intuitively accepted what he was doing as being a manifestation of three quarter notes per measure.

It seems also possible that if the intuitive, expectation-based approach to rhythm is applied thoughtfully in a way that is really derived from careful, involved listening, then it might enhance the sense of regular pulse while being less regular than a purely beat-based rhythm would be. If the sense of momentum that is associated with the concept of regular accent-based meter is as robust and as difficult to destroy as I suspect, and if an expectation-based shaping of rhythm can make the ebb and flow of intensity the most compelling that it can be, then it could make sense that the latter approach would make the accentuation patterns that define regular meter more rather than less convincing.

The actual results of the two approaches do not always have to be very different from one another. For some performers and listeners experiencing repertoire, the listening-based intuitive approach might well yield results that are quite regular in their actual rhythms.

In musing a bit about how to introduce this idea to students, I start by quoting something that I wrote in my column from April 2015, page 17:

I often suggest to students the following practice tool. Once they have identified a spot where they want to make a rhythmic gesture (usually of the sort that might be described as “rubato”) they practice that gesture, in the privacy of the studio, in as exaggerated a manner as possible: take the risk of executing a gesture that is utterly tasteless, mannered, “schmaltzy.” This is to counter the fact that we usually only visit the gestures that we think we want to make “from below” (so to speak), that is, only compared to and judged in comparison to not making such a gesture, or to a modest version of the gesture. This stems from and then reinforces a philosophy that teaches a kind of reluctance about such gestures. If you hear a rhythmic inflection from both sides, you get a different sense of exactly how it might be effective.

When I wrote the above, I invoked the word “rubato.” Now I would be inclined to avoid that, since it is a term that relates the flow of rhythm to the underlying regular meter. The relationship is real, but I would want to encourage the student to move away from considering that relationship to be primary or of overriding importance. In applying this practice suggestion with many students over many years I have observed that almost everyone finds it easy to identify spots where they intuitively want to create rhythmic gestures that are not identical to what a strict reading of the metric notation would suggest. While these gestures fluctuate in number from piece to piece, it is more common for the student to believe that their interpretation of some of them are wrong.

Experimenting with notable works

As an experiment, try giving a rhythmic inflection different degrees of magnitude—including the highly exaggerated, but not limited to that—and try to experience and analyze what is happening with each different shape. For example, consider the very beginning of J. S. Bach’s Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565. Play the opening mordent and then listen for when you think that the following scale passage “wants” to come in. Try taking longer next time. What has changed? Have you lost the moment when the impact would have been greatest, or does the added suspense increase the impact? Does it sound like you caught a sort of wave of expectation when you initiated the scale passage, or did you miss it? If you missed it, could there be another one coming up, different yet also fulfilling?

Questions like these are easy to highlight with a moment in an intrinsically free passage like this, but they are potentially present all the time. Returning to the pieces that I invoked at the beginning of this series of columns, I would say that the first barline in the opening of the first movement of Widor’s Sixth Symphony is also a place where the dynamic of this sort of rhythm is clear. A student can play it metronomically and then try various timings, listening as closely and open-mindedly as possible. What is gained or lost by various different timing possibilities? What does the timing at that barline imply or suggest or even necessitate about playing the second measure itself? Would the answers be different if this were not the opening of the piece? Is the answer to that question different if we stipulate either that it was a recapitulation or, on the other hand, that it was a new idea introduced in mid-piece? Does the use of this motif later in the movement as written affect choices here at the beginning?

It is interesting to listen for intuition-based timing of quick notes within a texture. In Example 1, in this Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331, how can we determine exactly where to play the sixteenth notes?

My own approach to figuring this out would be to leave those notes out at first, making the rhythm of the first half of each of the first two measures the same as the rhythm of the second half. I would play this a few times, just like that, as if it were the piece. Then I would play it a few times hearing the sixteenth notes in my head, but not playing them and then add those notes back. I often do not know and cannot seem to determine as a matter of counting and calculation where I want to place short notes after dotted notes. To use a piece I have played a lot, I have no idea exactly what ratio I give to the pervasive dotted rhythms in Bach’s Prelude in E-flat Major, BWV 552i. I can only hear whether they do or do not seem to do the right sort of job in creating momentum from one long note to the next.

When one asks a student to listen carefully to every moment in a passage and to discern as much as they can about rhythm through that listening, interesting things happen. Some of these are advantages while others are pitfalls. One great advantage is that this tends to keep the student from rushing. Not everyone has a tendency to rush, but most of us do at least some of the time. One reason for rushing is that we pay the most attention to the things that we must do physically—and for organ and harpsichord that means initiating the notes and releasing them. As soon as one note is safely played, there is some pull toward either the moment of release or the moment of initiating the next note. The sort of listening that I am describing here focuses the attention as much on the middle of a note as on the beginning and end.

Listening this way tends to lead to slower playing. That has been true for me, to a fault some of the time, though it is a perfectly natural outcome of this approach. The way to counter this tendency is through awareness and honesty. This listening approach is both a practice technique and something to bear in mind while actually performing. As with any other sort of practice, it is important and good to utilize it at a slow tempo, but as with any slow practice, it should be ramped up to the desired tempo in a systematic way.

It is natural to prepare for the moment when you believe the next note should occur and then play that note. This makes that moment in the music late by definition and leads to slow playing. It is probably acceptable for this to happen early in practicing a passage, as long as you are aware of it and work on evening it out as you get to know the music better. I have also been guilty of this in performance, not recognizing it clearly enough in practicing, and therefore not working to smooth out the process.

This is analogous to something that can happen when using a metronome, when one listens for the metronome beat and then plays the note. Something like this can also happen with releases. If you hear the instant at which you want to release a note and then release it, the release is late. A release that is executed by pushing off—down, then up—will also be late if the downstroke is timed to the desired moment of release. There is a sort of leap of faith when executing something, whether the timing of the beginning of a note, as we are discussing here, or of the end, without waiting to confirm that the looked-for time has arrived.

A few miscellaneous points

What is the meaning of any given note value? We know the answer: a quarter note is equal to two eighth notes or to half a half note; a whole note is four quarter notes, etc. But here’s another definition: a quarter note (or whatever note value) is whatever a listener will hear or accept as a quarter note. This relates directly to the Chopin story above.

Watching a TV game show recently, I heard the host say to a contestant, “Time is ticking away!” Why? Why is time defined as made up of discrete entities, ticks of a clock? Is it just because old clock technologies produced audible ticking? Or is there really something more fundamental about time that requires us to think that way? This vignette from a fraught moment in a game reminds us that thinking of time as ticking tends to create a sense of impatience or even panic.

The beating of the heart is sometimes evoked as a possible source for the notion of beats in music. This makes sense because the heart does beat fairly regularly in the absence of a medical issue. That beating is audible to the one whose heart it is, though not usually in a way that rises to the level of conscious awareness. If you quiet the outside world, you will easily hear your heart beating. But no heart beats as absolutely steadily as the beat we hear from a metronome. If the heart is a model for musical beats, maybe it should confer some flexibility onto those beats. If the heart is the model for a beat-derived sense of musical rhythm, breathing should be the model for a sense of rhythm based on expectation and fulfillment.

On Teaching

Gavin Black

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

Default

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.

On Teaching: Students' Listening I

Gavin Black

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

Default

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.

On Teaching: Pedals—one more time

Gavin Black
Default

Pedals: one more time

The aim this month is to wrap up a few loose ends about pedal playing, including some interesting points that I gleaned from readers’ feedback following last December’s pedal-oriented column. This will be the twelfth column that I have written over the years that is specifically focused on pedal playing.

Numerous people are concerned and sometimes perplexed about what sort of shoes to wear when playing pedals. In fact, that issue alone generated the majority of comments. One reader sent me the following summary of quotes about the matter, with his comments, that he had collected over the years:

1) “I play in cowboy boots.”

2) “I can feel the pedals better in socks.”

3) “I travel to Europe . . . . Organists there wear street shoes.”

4) “You can injure your foot if you don’t wear shoes.”

5) “I do not sit near the organist on hot days.” (I assumed that said organist is wearing only socks.)

6) “The method books only mention to wear shoes.”

7) [my favorite] “My first organ teacher was a nice old sweet lady. She wore shoes but let me play in socks.”

8) “I have very big feet . . . . Shoes are too big, I use socks.”

I added the numbers above for ease of reference to my comments below.

These comments are intended to be humorous, but each of these is also really apt. I can relate to several of these remarks, either from personal experience or as something that I have encountered with students or colleagues:

1) I have never played in cowboy boots, but I have once or twice played in snow boots. This came about for two very different reasons. Once I had walked to school in the snow in boots and unexpectedly needed to play. I kept my boots on—cleaning them thoroughly. The other time I had snow boots with me but had been walking in regular shoes through the snow. That time I used the boots because they were clean. Playing in boots was awkward: I would not recommend it, and I do not know why the organist quoted above liked to do it. But it moved me to think a lot about foot position and how to maintain relaxation while playing. I come back to that memory frequently while practicing or teaching.

2) I note that people have differing concepts as to whether feeling the pedals with tactile sensitivity while playing is a good thing. I find it interesting that I do not have a clear idea as to what I think about that. There are perhaps dangers to being too caught up feeling the keys by trying to caress the keys or hold on to them. If the latter leads to active use of the toes—curling them, for example—it is probably in most cases a place where problems could arise. On the other hand, any sense that the foot is inert or clunky, or that the shoes are a barrier to suppleness, is at least as great a danger.

3) The question of whether one may wear street shoes to play is a very big one. It encompasses all sorts of other matters, starting with concern about dirtying the pedals. It seems pretty self-evident that it is a good idea not to allow a pedal keyboard to become dirty or gritty, and especially not to scratch it. Can this be achieved by walking into the room already wearing the shoes in which you are going to play but making sure to clean them? That might depend on what is going on outside, particularly when it comes to various types of inclement weather. But it is also important to keep issues separate. If we think that it is not a good idea to track detritus of the outdoors onto the pedalboard, that tells us nothing at all about what sort of shoes to wear or not to wear while playing. For organ playing, one could bring a second pair of the very same shoes in which one walks. I did this for decades, although honesty requires me to admit that I also have sometimes let myself just keep my walking shoes on if it is dry out and I dust them off. (This seems to have been the approach of Marcel Dupré, as I mentioned in my December 2020 column. I am not sure that we know how much dusting off he did.) Since I wrote that I play the organ in New Balance walking shoes, I have stopped walking in those shoes, in favor of something more appropriate in its orthopedic approach, but I still use them at the organ.

4) This is true for some people, and for me at this point in my life. I have never been particularly interested in playing without shoes, but I could do it in a pinch. Sometimes around home I have wanted to play just a little bit but have felt lazy about finding shoes and socks. However, over the last few years I have noticed that if I do this even briefly, I get significant pain in my feet. (This also occurs if I drive without shoes, by the way.) This is a late-middle-age medical/orthopedic development, and it is not surprisingly one that I am not happy with. The point that I take away from this is that things change. This could in principle apply to anything and everything about the question of organ-appropriate shoes, and to everything about pedal playing as such. How does one write a pedal method and take into account changing needs? It is crucial to ponder that.

5) Presumably the “hot days” remark is about aroma, and that is one particular circumstance. What we do in playing the organ is often bound up with interrelationships and appearances that have nothing to do with the music or the instrument as such. Some of the specifics when it comes to organ playing have to do with religious services and the traditions and ethos of those situations. This can be a pervasive issue. I believe that it is critical to use shoes or not use shoes in whatever way really works for playing and is free of any tension or pain. Style and look must be secondary, even when they are important.

6) This is very important, though not because of its own specifics. Rather, it is important to remember that we have a strong tendency to believe what we read. It is utterly incumbent on anyone writing a method or any other authoritative work to ensure that what they write is sound. But equally important is making it clear that flexibility is almost always important, that nothing is engraved in stone. This is most of what I have been musing about in trying to settle on how to give my pedal method its final shape. This brief comment suggests not that the methods in question actively discourage playing in socks or bare feet, but that they simply did not mention it. No one should assume that a method book covers everything. But we have an impulse to assume that. How can a writer be clear, emphatic, and honest about what they think without inadvertently seeming to close out other options?

7) I am a proponent for allowing students to establish their own preferences. This is a good model for students to not necessarily do everything that your teacher does—or for the teacher not to assume that what is right for you is also right for everyone else.

8) This gets back to the cowboy boot thing. The question as it relates to shoes is not what size one’s feet are, but how much the shoes change the size. Agility and flexibility are the important things: any mismatch between the size of one’s feet and the pedalboard can almost certainly be dealt with by angling the feet more or less or in some different way. Not that it is necessarily a mistake for this player to play in socks, if it works. This reminds me that one of my core beliefs about pedal playing is that everything to do with exact foot position—especially but not limited to the extent and exact direction of any turning of the ankles—is a very individual matter. My quest is to give students guidance on how to work that out without trying to prescribe an answer in advance.

I tend to look at the issue of shoes or no shoes as being mainly about comfort and secondarily about style and presentation. But in a recent conversation my colleague Thomas Dressler reminded me that it also ties in with a player’s approach to using heels. Without shoes we are relying on only the shape of our feet to reach the keys. Even a pair of shoes that does not have a built-up heel gives the player a bit of an assist in reaching with the part of the foot that cannot extend far. This is a bigger issue, as Dressler pointed out, the farther toward the edges of the pedal keyboard one goes. If a student wants the assistance afforded by actual built-up heels, then that renders the notion of playing without shoes moot and also guides the choice of shoes.

I realize that my own actual and practical way of encountering this question of playing without shoes is a very specific one. If a student, either new to the instrument or with some experience, indicated that they really want to play in socks, my immediate impulse would be to discourage that. I need to sort out why that is my immediate impulse, what reasons there are for or against that impulse, and what is the best way to address this in writing, absent any possibility for back-and-forth discussion.

(I noticed by chance right now in a brief break from writing a video of someone changing stops with their feet while playing! This absolutely requires playing in neither shoes nor socks. I doubt that this technique will catch on.)

Another reader wrote that she likes to play in organ shoes because the sameness of feel is important. It is disconcerting to have the feel of a foot on pedals be different from one time to another. This makes sense to me. Over the years, when I have occasionally needed to plan on a different pair of shoes for a particular performance, I have made a point of getting used to them over as long a period of time as possible. This process has never quite worked to make me as comfortable as I would be in my regular organ shoes. This principle does not say anything about what exactly the shoes should be. It works just as well with any of the thoughtfully designed “official” organ shoes, my New Balance shoes, or anything else that is intrinsically correct. However, it is worth bearing this in mind as it relates to the passage of years. Will the shoes that you like and are accustomed to be replaceable when they wear out? The ones that I wear have not been made in a while. I purchased my last few pairs on eBay, and there are not any available there now. What will I do when these shoes wear out?

One reader wrote of an early organ teacher who tied their students’ knees together for playing. This is a vivid way of getting to the heart of what I want the core practical center of this pedal method to be about. In several columns I have written about my skepticism of dictating in advance a particular position for the knees or legs for pedal playing. It is not illogical or absurd to think that a stable position could be of assistance in something that presents as being as arcane and difficult as finding notes with the feet. I have plenty of respect for anyone’s efforts to find solutions. And if I want my very different solutions to be convincing, I must make it abundantly clear that they work and make it as transparent as possible how and why they work. That is the absolute core.

Other readers reminded me to make the method as systematic and logical as possible. This is my intention, and one about which I am happy to be reminded. One issue is the number of exercises I should include for each particular technical point or stage. Should I rely on students to create their own exercises with plenty of guidance? I believe that this is a good thing, but I want to be sure that the guidance is sufficient. I will likely end up using more exercises than I have included as part of any pedal-playing columns, though certainly not enough to be exhaustive, if there is such a thing.

Several readers suggested that I include a generous selection of actual pieces or substantial passages drawn from a variety of repertoire. That is also a good idea, possibly as a separate volume of my method. But what I would not expect to do is to provide pedaling for those pieces. Instead I would want to give a concise but thorough discussion for each piece of what some of the possibilities are for thinking about whatever pedaling issues the piece presents either typical of a type of piece or peculiar to that one piece in some way. This would also be a good place to remind a student to notate pedal markings exclusively in pencil!

Another reader suggested that this whole project could be or should be produced as a video rather than as a book. That seems like a great idea to me, though as a supplement, not a replacement. I am daunted by video technology, or at least relatively inexperienced with it. I will tuck that idea away in my mind somewhere and return to it at some point.

I have many notes on this project, in my head, in writing, in emails, indeed in effect as the whole or certain parts of some previous columns. I will now stir it all together and see what comes about.

On Teaching: Further thoughts about rhythm, part 2

Gavin Black

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

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Further thoughts about rhythm, part 2

Continuing from my September column, I offer here a few additional anecdotes and ideas relevant to rhythm and the teaching of rhythm. In my next column I will explore the question of how to teach rhythm or “counting” in a way that enables a student to connect those concepts as directly as possible with rhetoric and the student’s interpretive stance.

I begin by revisiting the anecdote from the last column about my colleague who, in the eyes of a particular third party, “couldn’t count.” Since I wrote that, I have had further relevant thoughts. I remember that as I walked into the rehearsal studio after that exchange, I was very sorry to have been told my colleague’s opinion. I did not want to approach my work with this fellow musician with any preconceptions. And while I certainly did not assume that the older colleague was right, I found it hard not to have a question layered on top of my focus during rehearsal. “Was that rhythm correct? Is this where I learn that she indeed cannot count?” That was distracting.

I wondered why he wanted me to focus my attention on her rhythmic deficiencies. Why did it matter in the overall picture? Why tell me as I headed into the rehearsal that “she can’t count” rather than that “she is an amazingly compelling performer?” This seems like a manifestation of bias in favor of that which can be quantified—that which seems more objective or safer to describe.

Since that day decades ago, I have become very aware that there is a strong pull in all sorts of areas of life to focus on things that can be measured and described in a way that is objective to some extent. It is a truism that in evaluating a competition, for example, or even just in reviewing a concert or a recording, it is relatively easier to note that a performance either does or does not get all the right notes, or that the rhythms are or are not all in strict accordance with the notation, or that the tempo is or is not the same as what the composer requested.

It is much more difficult to describe how expressive or moving a performance is. This is not a bad thing, and competition judges and reviewers certainly do not fail to grapple with the elusive side of things. But this has some bearing on teaching rhythm and counting. On paper, rhythm is one of the most objective matters about music—at least with our familiar rhythmic notation. Quarter notes are twice as long as eighth notes, etc. In a way, some of what is non-objective can even be described objectively. Certain dotted-note patterns, for example, are not meant to be what they apparently look like on the page, and we can often describe the ways that they differ from that presentation.

But how do we teach subtle variations in rhythms that look the same on paper? Is it an acceptable part of our understanding of rhythm for there to be such variations? If we think not, is that for musical reasons, or is it because of this pull toward the objective? If a quarter note is really always exactly twice as long as an eighth note, if all the eighth notes are really exactly the same as one another, what does that mean for a student or for how we teach? And if they are not, what does that mean? Is it possible that rhythmic notation means “these notes should be in any rhythmic relationship that would be expressed more closely this way than any other way?”

Another story from many years ago: I was coaching an amateur chamber music group—a violinist, a flautist, and a pianist who was exploring the harpsichord as part of this project. At that time, in my own work as a player I was exploring Sweelinck and beginning to discover some ideas about freedom of rhythm. At one point I played a segment of a Sweelinck toccata for the members of the group and drew their attention to a particular passage. This was one where I felt that the rhetorical force and expressiveness of the music could be enhanced by playing very freely. I had an approach to that passage that involved drawing out the development of harmonic tension and, when it was resolved, using timing to make it seem difficult to go on. That is a trite and inadequate description, but the point is that it called for freedom, and the musicians in the room found it very effective. I also played through the passage as written, and they found that almost embarrassingly boring and pointless, which was exactly what I intended to convey. So far, so good. But when we had finished this and were ready to get back to rehearsal, one of the musicians said, “Of course, you couldn’t do that with Bach.”

So, the question I had, and still have, is, “Why not?” Anyone may or may not appreciate the rhythmic choices performers exercise. In theory, there could be a plausible analysis of a Bach piece that concludes that free rhythm, or any particular approach to rhythm, might not be effective. And the question of what the composer himself would have thought always looms over our thinking about an issue like this. But none of that is what was meant by that remark that day. We discussed it, and the ensemble member specifically meant that since listeners’ expectations about Bach were pretty well formed already, unlike their expectations of Sweelinck, it would be imprudent to go too far in violating those expectations. To some extent, the way that music had been played and heard in then-recent decades had become part of the actual identity of that music. This seems to be another way in which something objective can gain a kind of privilege or priority that it might not have earned in any substantive way.

Another question that I will delve into more next month is, why rhythm? That is, what is the goal of having music organized into regular or somewhat regular micro units of time? Is it to create a sense of pulse or momentum? Is it something about comparability of experience throughout the duration of a piece or a movement? Is it very specifically about creating the palpable sense of a regular beat in the listener’s ear?

I mention it here to introduce an experiment I once conducted that was predicated on the observation that many people are of the opinion that Helmut Walcha’s recordings are rhythmically conservative. I obtained an interesting result.

I had always reacted to Walcha’s recording of Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica as having both extreme steadiness and inexorable forward momentum. At the time that I did the experiment, I took it for granted that the way to achieve those qualities was to keep the beat very steady. But I must have suspected something that led me to investigate. I put on the LP and measured the beat at the opening. I then picked the needle up and dropped it a bit farther in. I measured again. I did it a third time, maybe a fourth. They were all quite different. This led to the intriguing notion that maybe inexorable forward momentum, and even the very sense of steadiness itself, might sometimes come from something other than regimented sameness of beat.

I have now repeated this exercise using more modern methods: the piece playing on my computer and an online tempo tool. The beat at the beginning hovered around 118, and later on it was over sustained passages as high as about 126 and as low as the mid 90s. That is very much like what I measured thirty years ago. I am intensely interested in the relationship between literal sameness of beat—or departures from that—and a subjective sense of steadiness, momentum, and pulse. Is it possible that sometimes a performance that features a doggedly steady beat comes across as uneven to listeners? If so, how can this be?

There are two games that I have played while riding in a car that both have to do with the use of time in music. First, if you are riding along a fairly busy two-way street or highway, pay attention to the sound of the cars passing on the opposite side. On a busy road cars will space themselves out almost regularly, since all else being equal, people pay at least a little bit of attention to following distance in front and behind. But there’s an emphasis on “almost.” The line of cars is never spaced out exactly evenly. So as the “whoosh” of each successive car goes by, see how far from even those sounds can be and if you can still accept them as conceptually even. How far apart can sounds 2 and 3 be—compared to the time between sounds 1 and 2—and can you still hear that timing as rubato or agogic accent rather than just discontinuity? For me there is a wider range of timings that I can assimilate to evenness than I would have expected.

If you can accept a stream of not quite even cars as conceptually even, is there anything interesting about the shape of the unevenness? Does it have any rhetoric to it, groupings or patterns of weak and strong beats, or impulses? One fascinating feature of this exercise is that each instance of it is ephemeral: you can hear it only once, never again the same way.

Another exercise I enjoy while driving is this: when going under an overpass, I try to experience the time in the shadow of that overpass as lasting forever. Since it will come to an end, usually in seconds or less than a second, I attempt to experience it as simultaneously brief and infinite. This feels even more intense if it is raining. It seems to me this has implications for rhythm in music. The ostensible rhythm, flow, motion of any increment of music is always about the next thing: when will the next beat come? But the state of being of each note, harmony, sonority, or beat, is also a thing that exists for as long as it exists, and that has identity and importance.

(It is probably best to do the above exercises as a passenger rather than as the driver, unless you are very sure that none of it will distract you from driving. I wonder how different any of this will seem if we have nothing but self-driving cars on the road!)

Are there other little slices of everyday life that might illuminate aspects of rhythm and the role of time in music? Rain is an interesting one. There are pieces of music that are inspired by or attempt to depict rain. What is the rhythm of rain like? It is more regular when it is fairly light. What about walking? How regular is that, and how does walking respond to outside conditions? Can one walk while hearing in one’s head a passage of music that moves at a pace different from the footsteps?

It occurred to me a few years ago that I often experience trills as containing some of that simultaneously brief and infinite quality that I get out of my second driving exercise. I sometimes suspect that that is what trills are essentially about, though that is speculative and unknowable. The fast and unmeasured quality of (usually) the middle portion of a trill seems to take it out of time, while, like all music, it is in the end bounded and defined by time.

I will pick this up again next month.

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