On Teaching: Remembrances of Westminster Choir College

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.

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

Utterly miscellaneous

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

Pedal playing

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

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

Background music

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

Is the performer deeply engaged?

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

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

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

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

A love of the sound

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

Surface level appeal

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

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

What’s in a name?

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

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

Competition-based model

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

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

And that is all for this month.

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

Students’ Listening I

Through the first years of this column’s existence, much of what I wrote about was practical, specific material regarding teaching—what I often refer to as nitty-gritty: an approach to teaching pedal playing, hand distribution, practice techniques, registration, etc. I would often go through pieces in great detail, suggesting how to put these ideas into practice.

However, over the last year or so, I have found myself interested in writing in a more general vein, tossing out ideas and questions about music, and admittedly, the relationship this has to the day-to-day teaching process is perhaps more distant or indirect. I would argue that even if more distant, that connection is crucial. One of the reasons that I have moved in this direction is that I feel more strongly that everything is about learning and, therefore, also about teaching. I increasingly notice that some of the most important things that I learned from my formal music teachers came from things that they said or did that had nothing to do with fingering, phrasing, or practice techniques, even though all of those things were crucially important as well. And much of what I have learned about my own work as a musician and teacher has come from outside formal or informal lessons.

I am also aware that there is some limit to how much there is to say about the purely practical. There might be a limitless number of approaches to pedal pedagogy, but there is a limit to how much one person should go on saying it! There are good reasons that method books are not as long as encyclopedias. At a certain point a teacher says what needs to be said, and it is time for the student to get on with it. Having started in September 2007, my column as a whole is approaching 400,000 words.

That is not to say that I do not expect to write about the “nitty-gritty” again. There are things in that area that I have not gotten to yet. (And if anyone reading this has suggestions for something that you would like me to address, I would be overjoyed to read them.) There are also things that I have written about that I want to revisit someday. The distinction between the practical and the fruitfully speculative is not absolutely clear-cut.

When I started the column, and for a while thereafter, I was typically writing about things that I knew about before the column ever started. My technical approach to pedal learning, my way of conceptualizing the importance of relaxation, my concerns about memorization, or any number of other subjects for writing and discussion were all there in some fairly thoroughly worked-out form prior to 2007. I may have rethought them in the course of writing them up, and I needed to subject them to organization. But more recently, a lot of what I have wanted to write about has been more in the category of things that are pending in my mind—new ideas that I am in part working out by the very process of writing about them. For me this is an interesting, exciting process. It exposes the very process of trying to evolve as a teacher and thinker about music and teaching.

In the next several months, I will write about issues that are either directly about specifics of teaching or related to that; and the following part of this column falls into that latter category. In subsequent articles, I will systematically explore my own current project as a player, namely relearning and performing J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Rather than being a detailed and systematic set of suggestions about how to approach a particular piece, it will be an actual account of my own grappling with the work of learning a piece. Be sure to watch for it in the May issue of The Diapason.

Music listeners

I was originally planning to call this column “What should students listen to?,” but I put that aside because of my aversion to the concept of “should,” and that title did not represent the scope of what I want to think about. The question is, what is the role of listening to music in the life of someone who is studying music, studying an instrument, or, specifically, studying organ? What has some of my own experience with this been, and what can we as teachers do to guide students in their lives as music listeners, if we should do anything?

When I was a student in a second-year music theory class in college, near the beginning of the school year, the teacher administered a listening test to all students. He played twenty recorded excerpts of classical pieces, and we had to try as best we could to identify each piece. I remember the number of examples well, because my results made it an intense and disturbing experience for me. Even as a classical music junkie and aspiring musician, I was able to recognize and identify only one out of the twenty. I was mortified by how badly I had done. But when the teacher went over the results with me in private, he said something in a very kind, concerned way about how I really should start listening more to music. I shifted from being mortified to being indignant. Prompted by that comment, I belatedly became aware of how narrow and biased the examples were. All but one or two were from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was probably one Bach selection, and that was probably the one that I got right, and maybe one from either Mozart or Beethoven that probably sounded familiar to me, but which I could not pin down.

I would have been able to make up on the spot a similar test with Buxtehude, Schütz, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Pachelbel, Scheidt, de Grigny, Westhoff, Mainerio—and, of course, Bach. I told him, rather annoyingly, that I listened a lot, even maybe too much, and exclusively to classical music, but just not to the repertoire he thought one should know. I remember being impressed by the fact that he immediately conceded the point. He not only expressed agreement, even though that perspective had not occurred to him, but he acknowledged that he learned something from the exchange. I also learned something, although I was entirely within my rights to consider that test unfair and to maintain that I was an avid music listener, it was also true that I would benefit from expanding my own listening habits. There is great merit in the ability to differentiate Brahms, Chopin, or Stravinsky. One should always be open to listening to new music, but that there is also no reason to assume that any set of assumptions about what “should” be listened to are any better than any other set.

It makes perfect sense for a college music professor to believe that a student, otherwise unknown to him, might not be an avid music listener and might need some prodding to become one. After all, college students take classes for all sorts of reasons. As far as he knew, maybe it just fit my schedule, or maybe I thought that it would be easy. However, if someone has come for organ lessons and seems involved and committed to that process, it is likely that they have fairly strong ownership of their music listening habits. If we become aware that someone has focused somewhat narrowly—listening only to the music of one era, or perhaps listening only to organ music, or only to vocal music, while ignoring oratorios, or any electronic music—then we should certainly consider nudging them in the direction of whatever has been lacking. Or, I should say, some of what has been lacking, since there is always an infinite amount out there, and we can never fill in all of it. It is possible to push too hard, and this is about a student’s (or anyone’s) psychology. I became aware in that teacher’s office that it would behoove me to broaden my listening habits. I embraced that and internalized it as a concept. But nonetheless, I did not and could not jump right into listening to music that I did not like or that bored or annoyed me. I had to wait for the time to be right, for my mind to be ready.

The listening that I did back then was limited though extensive. I was listening to music that was associated pretty directly with the music that I most wanted to play. I listened to the composers listed above along with many others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I listened to their organ and harpsichord music, to their chamber and orchestral music, and to their (mostly sacred) vocal music. These were the years when I was officially a student. But I do not think that the reason this pattern developed was related to the study of the music. The reason was that I chose to play music I liked best, and I chose to listen to music I liked best. Not surprisingly, the two were related. It was not a conscious choice; I did not say, “If I want to play Baroque keyboard music, I should listen mostly to Baroque music.” I was just drawn to that repertoire whether I was functioning as a listener or as a player.

Nowadays, it is not just chance, a change in my tastes, or an attempt to practice broadmindedness that has me listening mostly to music from outside the realm of what I mostly play. I have come to a different kind of relationship with various sorts of music. When I encounter new music by hearing about it, or reading through it, happening to notice the cover of a volume, or indeed actually hearing it, any music that is squarely at the center of what I most care about playing, my immediate relationship to that experience is framed by questions of performance. What would I want to do with that theme? How would I try to make those voices dance around each other? How much would I want to draw out that moment? Should that bit be viscerally exciting or more calm and considered?

When I was a student, my relationship to that repertoire as a listener was pure, intense, and primary; now that relationship has been somewhat eclipsed. It is replaced by my own attempts to play the repertoire. I am not quite sure how to describe this fully and accurately. It is not that I do not think that I would like or admire performances or performers, nor is it a diminution of the intensity of my involvement with that music or of my liking of it: quite the opposite. But one could argue that I am not objectively listening to the repertoire I am most interested in playing. I suspect that if I listen to a recording of Baroque organ music, I am doing that recording a disservice. I am not being faithful to it as a listener. I am over-writing the performance with my own imagined performance. This is paradoxically true with performances that I think are really good by players whom I admire and respect.

Whether to listen to other performances, that is the question.

To tie this in to our work with students: the question often arises of whether someone who is working on a particular piece should listen to other performances of that piece. My own answer is almost always the same: either listen to no other performances or listen to at least half a dozen. These are the two ways to avoid being, consciously or subconsciously, over-influenced by what you hear. If the listening process only reinforces a link between these notes on the page and that one particular sound, it is very difficult to break that link. Not necessarily impossible, though sometimes nearly so, but always a source of indirectness or inefficiency in working out interpretation. Half a dozen performances will, in this respect, cancel one another out.

There is a lot of pressure on students (and on the rest of us) to look for objective reasons for doing what we are doing. That is abundantly useful and good. It is always a part of the process of performing a piece that we have learned. The notes and rhythms are (usually uncontroversially) part of the objective. So is at least some of what we know about a composer’s particular intentions, often as to choice of instruments or registration, sometimes as to tempo, articulation, etc. But there is also always the less objective, fundamentally personal part of interpretation and performance. Fully manifesting performance decisions that are not objective can be difficult psychologically and emotionally: this is really me, this is what I really want to say to you, this is me trying my hardest to make you feel something. So I wonder whether a student’s identification of himself or herself as still in large part a listener might connect in various ways with the difficulties that leap into exposure. This connection could be helpful or it could be limiting. The limiting aspect of it is very likely to arise with the practice of listening to or identifying with only one performance. (“I am not really doing this, I am just serving as a conduit for something that someone else concocted.” I feel fairly certain that I had a great deal of that feeling when, in my high school and early college years, I was a devotee of the playing of only a small number of favorite performers. If in those days I tried to play a Bach piece, I was really trying to recreate Helmut Walcha’s performance of that piece. I would not have owned up to that, but it is what was happening.) The helpfulness might be that of hiding the personal nature of performance from oneself in a way that avoids a too frightening feeling of exposure.

My thoughts about this are most certainly evolving, but I suspect that helping students detach themselves, in some ways and in part, from a primary identification as listeners could be a useful if non-obvious project for a teacher. This could apply even when imitating recordings is not a problem.

Soon I will start with a discussion of authority in recorded performances, YouTube (a surprisingly important issue all by itself), listening to live performance, listening for instruments and acoustics, and circles of connectedness in music.

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

Students’ Listening I

Through the first years of this column’s existence, much of what I wrote about was practical, specific material regarding teaching—what I often refer to as nitty-gritty: an approach to teaching pedal playing, hand distribution, practice techniques, registration, etc. I would often go through pieces in great detail, suggesting how to put these ideas into practice.

However, over the last year or so, I have found myself interested in writing in a more general vein, tossing out ideas and questions about music, and admittedly, the relationship this has to the day-to-day teaching process is perhaps more distant or indirect. I would argue that even if more distant, that connection is crucial. One of the reasons that I have moved in this direction is that I feel more strongly that everything is about learning and, therefore, also about teaching. I increasingly notice that some of the most important things that I learned from my formal music teachers came from things that they said or did that had nothing to do with fingering, phrasing, or practice techniques, even though all of those things were crucially important as well. And much of what I have learned about my own work as a musician and teacher has come from outside formal or informal lessons.

I am also aware that there is some limit to how much there is to say about the purely practical. There might be a limitless number of approaches to pedal pedagogy, but there is a limit to how much one person should go on saying it! There are good reasons that method books are not as long as encyclopedias. At a certain point a teacher says what needs to be said, and it is time for the student to get on with it. Having started in September 2007, my column as a whole is approaching 400,000 words.

That is not to say that I do not expect to write about the “nitty-gritty” again. There are things in that area that I have not gotten to yet. (And if anyone reading this has suggestions for something that you would like me to address, I would be overjoyed to read them.) There are also things that I have written about that I want to revisit someday. The distinction between the practical and the fruitfully speculative is not absolutely clear-cut.

When I started the column, and for a while thereafter, I was typically writing about things that I knew about before the column ever started. My technical approach to pedal learning, my way of conceptualizing the importance of relaxation, my concerns about memorization, or any number of other subjects for writing and discussion were all there in some fairly thoroughly worked-out form prior to 2007. I may have rethought them in the course of writing them up, and I needed to subject them to organization. But more recently, a lot of what I have wanted to write about has been more in the category of things that are pending in my mind—new ideas that I am in part working out by the very process of writing about them. For me this is an interesting, exciting process. It exposes the very process of trying to evolve as a teacher and thinker about music and teaching.

In the next several months, I will write about issues that are either directly about specifics of teaching or related to that; and the following part of this column falls into that latter category. In subsequent articles, I will systematically explore my own current project as a player, namely relearning and performing J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Rather than being a detailed and systematic set of suggestions about how to approach a particular piece, it will be an actual account of my own grappling with the work of learning a piece. Be sure to watch for it in the May issue of The Diapason.

Music listeners

I was originally planning to call this column “What should students listen to?,” but I put that aside because of my aversion to the concept of “should,” and that title did not represent the scope of what I want to think about. The question is, what is the role of listening to music in the life of someone who is studying music, studying an instrument, or, specifically, studying organ? What has some of my own experience with this been, and what can we as teachers do to guide students in their lives as music listeners, if we should do anything?

When I was a student in a second-year music theory class in college, near the beginning of the school year, the teacher administered a listening test to all students. He played twenty recorded excerpts of classical pieces, and we had to try as best we could to identify each piece. I remember the number of examples well, because my results made it an intense and disturbing experience for me. Even as a classical music junkie and aspiring musician, I was able to recognize and identify only one out of the twenty. I was mortified by how badly I had done. But when the teacher went over the results with me in private, he said something in a very kind, concerned way about how I really should start listening more to music. I shifted from being mortified to being indignant. Prompted by that comment, I belatedly became aware of how narrow and biased the examples were. All but one or two were from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. There was probably one Bach selection, and that was probably the one that I got right, and maybe one from either Mozart or Beethoven that probably sounded familiar to me, but which I could not pin down.

I would have been able to make up on the spot a similar test with Buxtehude, Schütz, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Pachelbel, Scheidt, de Grigny, Westhoff, Mainerio—and, of course, Bach. I told him, rather annoyingly, that I listened a lot, even maybe too much, and exclusively to classical music, but just not to the repertoire he thought one should know. I remember being impressed by the fact that he immediately conceded the point. He not only expressed agreement, even though that perspective had not occurred to him, but he acknowledged that he learned something from the exchange. I also learned something, although I was entirely within my rights to consider that test unfair and to maintain that I was an avid music listener, it was also true that I would benefit from expanding my own listening habits. There is great merit in the ability to differentiate Brahms, Chopin, or Stravinsky. One should always be open to listening to new music, but that there is also no reason to assume that any set of assumptions about what “should” be listened to are any better than any other set.

It makes perfect sense for a college music professor to believe that a student, otherwise unknown to him, might not be an avid music listener and might need some prodding to become one. After all, college students take classes for all sorts of reasons. As far as he knew, maybe it just fit my schedule, or maybe I thought that it would be easy. However, if someone has come for organ lessons and seems involved and committed to that process, it is likely that they have fairly strong ownership of their music listening habits. If we become aware that someone has focused somewhat narrowly—listening only to the music of one era, or perhaps listening only to organ music, or only to vocal music, while ignoring oratorios, or any electronic music—then we should certainly consider nudging them in the direction of whatever has been lacking. Or, I should say, some of what has been lacking, since there is always an infinite amount out there, and we can never fill in all of it. It is possible to push too hard, and this is about a student’s (or anyone’s) psychology. I became aware in that teacher’s office that it would behoove me to broaden my listening habits. I embraced that and internalized it as a concept. But nonetheless, I did not and could not jump right into listening to music that I did not like or that bored or annoyed me. I had to wait for the time to be right, for my mind to be ready.

The listening that I did back then was limited though extensive. I was listening to music that was associated pretty directly with the music that I most wanted to play. I listened to the composers listed above along with many others from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I listened to their organ and harpsichord music, to their chamber and orchestral music, and to their (mostly sacred) vocal music. These were the years when I was officially a student. But I do not think that the reason this pattern developed was related to the study of the music. The reason was that I chose to play music I liked best, and I chose to listen to music I liked best. Not surprisingly, the two were related. It was not a conscious choice; I did not say, “If I want to play Baroque keyboard music, I should listen mostly to Baroque music.” I was just drawn to that repertoire whether I was functioning as a listener or as a player.

Nowadays, it is not just chance, a change in my tastes, or an attempt to practice broadmindedness that has me listening mostly to music from outside the realm of what I mostly play. I have come to a different kind of relationship with various sorts of music. When I encounter new music by hearing about it, or reading through it, happening to notice the cover of a volume, or indeed actually hearing it, any music that is squarely at the center of what I most care about playing, my immediate relationship to that experience is framed by questions of performance. What would I want to do with that theme? How would I try to make those voices dance around each other? How much would I want to draw out that moment? Should that bit be viscerally exciting or more calm and considered?

When I was a student, my relationship to that repertoire as a listener was pure, intense, and primary; now that relationship has been somewhat eclipsed. It is replaced by my own attempts to play the repertoire. I am not quite sure how to describe this fully and accurately. It is not that I do not think that I would like or admire performances or performers, nor is it a diminution of the intensity of my involvement with that music or of my liking of it: quite the opposite. But one could argue that I am not objectively listening to the repertoire I am most interested in playing. I suspect that if I listen to a recording of Baroque organ music, I am doing that recording a disservice. I am not being faithful to it as a listener. I am over-writing the performance with my own imagined performance. This is paradoxically true with performances that I think are really good by players whom I admire and respect.

Whether to listen to other performances, that is the question.

To tie this in to our work with students: the question often arises of whether someone who is working on a particular piece should listen to other performances of that piece. My own answer is almost always the same: either listen to no other performances or listen to at least half a dozen. These are the two ways to avoid being, consciously or subconsciously, over-influenced by what you hear. If the listening process only reinforces a link between these notes on the page and that one particular sound, it is very difficult to break that link. Not necessarily impossible, though sometimes nearly so, but always a source of indirectness or inefficiency in working out interpretation. Half a dozen performances will, in this respect, cancel one another out.

There is a lot of pressure on students (and on the rest of us) to look for objective reasons for doing what we are doing. That is abundantly useful and good. It is always a part of the process of performing a piece that we have learned. The notes and rhythms are (usually uncontroversially) part of the objective. So is at least some of what we know about a composer’s particular intentions, often as to choice of instruments or registration, sometimes as to tempo, articulation, etc. But there is also always the less objective, fundamentally personal part of interpretation and performance. Fully manifesting performance decisions that are not objective can be difficult psychologically and emotionally: this is really me, this is what I really want to say to you, this is me trying my hardest to make you feel something. So I wonder whether a student’s identification of himself or herself as still in large part a listener might connect in various ways with the difficulties that leap into exposure. This connection could be helpful or it could be limiting. The limiting aspect of it is very likely to arise with the practice of listening to or identifying with only one performance. (“I am not really doing this, I am just serving as a conduit for something that someone else concocted.” I feel fairly certain that I had a great deal of that feeling when, in my high school and early college years, I was a devotee of the playing of only a small number of favorite performers. If in those days I tried to play a Bach piece, I was really trying to recreate Helmut Walcha’s performance of that piece. I would not have owned up to that, but it is what was happening.) The helpfulness might be that of hiding the personal nature of performance from oneself in a way that avoids a too frightening feeling of exposure.

My thoughts about this are most certainly evolving, but I suspect that helping students detach themselves, in some ways and in part, from a primary identification as listeners could be a useful if non-obvious project for a teacher. This could apply even when imitating recordings is not a problem.

Soon I will start with a discussion of authority in recorded performances, YouTube (a surprisingly important issue all by itself), listening to live performance, listening for instruments and acoustics, and circles of connectedness in music.

Random

Last month, as I was finishing up the column recounting my youthful discovery of the playing of Alfred Brendel and discussing some of the effects of that discovery on my life and work, it occurred to me that my affinity for Brendel was something that came about utterly at random. I alluded to this briefly at the end of the column, but I have continued to muse about it.

Randomness is a flexible concept as well as one that is subject to various interpretations or restraints. I would not expect to be able to sort all of that out here. Instead, I will posit some of the ways this randomness affected my own story—some aspects of music making that seem to engage the idea of randomness in a fruitful way, and how this might benefit teaching.

I invested a lot of time in 1970 listening to BBC 3 and thus hearing its broadcasts of Brendel Beethoven records was itself random. It was also a matter of chance that I was then at a particularly receptive moment to encounter that music and those performances. In other words, that receptivity did not arise out of, or have any connection to, my having injured my back, my wanting to skip school as much as I could get away with, my family being in London at the time, or the BBC’s choice to program that music. I wrote last month, “As a ‘classical music person’ in the latter third of the twentieth century and thereafter, I would certainly have been familiar with Alfred Brendel.” But at a later time, I may have gotten little or even nothing out of my encounter with that playing. Or I might have gotten more. In any case it would have been something different. By that point, perhaps I would have more-or-less given up on piano listening and not paid any attention; or at another time, maybe I would have been so inspired that I would have decided to rededicate myself to actually learning piano, and would thus not have ended up as an organist or harpsichordist.

Another development in my education as a musician came about at random and yet was of tremendous importance. I took bassoon lessons during the 1968–1969 school year. Late in that year my teacher, JoAnn Wich, downsized her record collection and gave me a pile of LPs. Among those was the recording of Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, conducted by Paul Paray with Marcel Dupré at the organ. At some point I listened to this at random: I had essentially never heard of Saint-Saëns and thought of myself as someone who did not like post-Classical-era music. I could easily have never listened to this record. In fact, I fell head-over-heels in love with it: the music, the performance, the sonorities, even the discussion on the record jacket of the recording technology that was used. I became an instant Saint-Saëns fanatic—I still am—and Paray became one of my favorite conductors, which he still is. In discovering Saint-Saëns I allowed the first crack to form in this resistance that I had to music from after the Classical era.

It would be impossible to overstate how strong that resistance had been up to that time. I can still remember the feeling that music after Beethoven engendered in me (come to think of it, maybe music after early Beethoven). It was a kind of fear of chaos or anarchy—probably, really, death. I thought that it would be wrong as well as dangerous to engage with that sort of music.

I do not know where those feelings came from. I suspect that I got from Baroque and early Classical music more of a sense of order and reassurance than I would want to get out of that music now, and that later music challenged or upset that sense in a way that I was not ready for. It took a while for that crumbling of my resistance to bear fruit. As I wrote last month it was in 1974 that I first became receptive to Schumann, and later to Liszt, for example, or for that matter Brahms.

Most germane to my work at the organ was that I discovered Dupré, and this is where it gets particularly interesting, since the story is not that I became a great devotee of him or his playing, as much as I do indeed admire both. The first thing my exposure to his playing of the magnificent Saint-Saëns organ part did was to help push me away from the bassoon and back toward keyboard playing. I was forcefully reminded that I was excited about the organ, even though the return to keyboard playing meant, for the time being, going back to piano lessons.

Second, it got me interested in Dupré and the kinds of organs that he was generally associated with. As I grew up and became generally a bit more diligent, that led to a significant amount of time reading about and listening to Romantic organs, especially in France, but also Germany and England. I already knew that in my own playing I wanted to focus on Baroque music and the instruments that pertained most directly to that repertoire. This is something that has never wavered. But the chance encounter with that Saint-Saëns recording is the specific source of my awareness of organs and organ music beyond my own performing specialties. If I never had that encounter but had returned to and stuck with study of the organ I would someday have had to learn about all manner of details about the organ and its music. Perhaps my interest in doing so would have been sparked by another chance encounter; after all, I grew up less than a mile from the Woolsey Hall organ at Yale University. But maybe I would have simply had to grapple with that music as a part of my education, understood to be necessary. It occurs to me now that discovering something by chance or at random can give an extra jolt of excitement and can help it to feel more personal.

Randomness in music

So what about randomness in music itself, be it performance, improvisation, perhaps composition, and maybe even instrument design? I will not write about composition or improvisation here, since randomness in those settings is complicated, and I do not have direct experience with these concepts myself. Besides, other scholars have canvassed these topics at great length. But I have some thoughts about instruments and performance.

One of these concerns harpsichord voicing. In the case of harpsichords, voicing means causing the plectra to be the way that you want them to be. It is about size, shape, and relative rigidity or flexibility. It affects volume of sound, character of sound, and touch. The plectra are relatively ephemeral, and voicing has to be reworked or touched up on harpsichords rather regularly. Many harpsichordists do most or all of their own voicing, and I have done so for several decades. In thinking about voicing, the voicer probably has a template in mind for all the notes of a stop on a harpsichord. That could be that all the notes should be the same strength as one another; or that the middle two octaves should be even and the volume and touch should gradually ascend in the high and low outer octaves; or that the middle should be even, the top notes gradually louder, and the bass notes slightly quieter; and so on. I feel convinced from my own experience that whatever the template may be, the result is more effective musically if there is a small amount of random variation from that template. When I do a total voicing of a harpsichord stop, I do the initial, rough voicing as carefully as I can, according to whatever plan I have in mind. Then I wait until the following day to do the final refining of that voicing, which rarely needs to be done.

I believe that these very slight deviations from the theoretical ideal help to enliven the sound and compensate for any aesthetic stiffness that might come from the lack of player control over dynamics. But there is something about the way that this works that I had not sorted out until now. It is actually critical that it be genuinely random, not a planned-out slight deviation from the plan. That would just be a second, more detailed version of the template. The randomness is what makes it feel alive. Random variation will relate in various ways to different pieces in different keys, without any danger that the voicer will favor one over another. 

I suspect that there are similar things to say about organ voicing. This logically should relate differently to a wide variety of harpsichords or organs. It is a subjective reaction, but still an example of the way that randomness can come into play in music.

This puts me in mind of an aspect of the sound old natural horns make. Some notes have a sonority that is completely different from the adjoining notes—vastly different, on the scale of placing a few Vox Humana pipes throughout a stop that is otherwise a Gedeckt, for example. These notes are distributed at random with respect to any given piece and add a surprisingly vivid color dimension to the effect of a performance.

I have observed similar concepts about interpretation and performance. As players we often have templates for how we want pieces to go: tempo and registration, but also details like articulation, phrasing, rubato, dynamics or dynamic inflections, voicing of chords on piano (a different use of that word, of course), arpeggiation, and so on. We map these things out; doing so is an important part of the process of creating our interpretation. Drilling the results of this planning into our fingers and feet is an important part of making an interpretation into a performance. However, my own experience tells me that a bit of random deviation from what we have planned and drilled so diligently is usually a good thing. It is as a listener rather than as a player that I have noticed this. In particular, I realized that performances in which a fugue-subject phrasing or the shaping of a recurring motif is exactly repeated without change tends to sound sterile, boring, and, eventually, annoying. There can be planned deviation from one instance of a theme to another. However, I feel that a little bit of random variation, including from the planned variation, brings the results closer to feeling alive and human.

Random choice of repertoire

Another aspect where randomness seems to be a fruitful lens through which to ponder is that of finding repertoire for students. There are various ways of approaching that task. At one extreme is the concept of having a list of pieces that you expect all students to work on, perhaps in a set order. (This is, I believe, rare as a practice, but is a concept that can inform the process.) At the other is simply letting students bring in and work on any pieces that they happen to like. (I am temperamentally inclined to this, though I do recognize the glaring problem with it, namely, that it fails to introduce students to pieces that they do not already know about or happen to hear or otherwise discover.) Most approaches are a hybrid, and many approaches can work. But it is fun to ponder how to randomize this process: line up all of the pieces ever written on the desk, swirl around until dizzy, then lunge over and pick one! Or put them all on a dartboard and throw! These are joking ways of describing the idea. But I wonder whether choosing the occasional piece utterly at random might be a way to enliven study and might not teach both the student and the teacher something about the learning process.

If the actual experience of working on the randomly chosen piece was boring or fruitless it might be humane to let the student drop it after a while. But in order for this to be a good experience or experiment, the student would have to want to give any such piece an honest try.

I plan on choosing my own next piece this way. I need to concoct an actual method for doing the random choosing. But I am very curious to see how it feels to work on a piece for none of the sorts of reasons that I usually have. That should mean starting the work itself with fewer preconceptions or expectations. That is part of what is intriguing about it, and I will report back at some point.

Next month I will write about some of the feedback that I have received about my pedal method column from several months ago. I have not done that yet because other things have come up and because that feedback is still coming in. Interestingly, most of it by far, though not all, has been about shoes.

So, I shall kick off the discussion in May by talking about shoes.

The Art of the Fugue, part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

My early history with The Art of the Fugue

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

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

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

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

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

Instrumentation in The Art of the Fugue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.