On Teaching: willing suspension of disbelief

A word

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

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

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

Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

So performance is presumably directed outward. Usually? Always?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance vs. performance art

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

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

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

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

An upcoming workshop

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

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

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

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

Stories and conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of the Fugue, part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing a work as if improvising

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

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

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

It’s all in the name.

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

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

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

Talking about study

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

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

To be continued.

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

Utterly miscellaneous

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

Pedal playing

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

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

Background music

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

Is the performer deeply engaged?

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

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

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

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

A love of the sound

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

Surface level appeal

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

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

What’s in a name?

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

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

Competition-based model

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

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

And that is all for this month.

Repetition II

During the week after I finished writing my previous column, I had several experiences, each of which had some bearing on what I wrote about, so I will describe these before continuing and expanding the discussion from last month. One of them was a delightfully well-timed refutation of something that I wrote last month, the others more in sync with my thoughts.

First, a student asked me to review some of the music of Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer with him. We started with the Musicalischer Parnassus, a collection of nine suites published in 1738. I was reminded by reading through the collection that the prelude to the first of those suites follows almost exactly the same harmonic progression as the first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is in triple time. Thus it sounds a lot like my tripled version of that passage from last month: probably more so than the Bruhns excerpt that came to my mind when I contemplated my altered version of the Bach. The relevant measures of the Fischer are found in Example 1.

It is widely accepted that Bach knew Fischer’s music and was influenced by him. Fischer, about whose life not much is known, was probably nearly thirty years Bach’s senior. However, the collection that contains this passage was not published until twenty years or so after Bach wrote the WTC prelude that seems to echo it. Did Bach know this piece in manuscript? Did Fischer know the WTC, which of course was not actually published until decades later? Probably not. This is probably coincidence, and this passage is possibly just another interesting example of the use of repetition to create an aesthetic effect.

Next, I was coaching some musicians on a chamber music project, and I was surprised to be told that they had decided to make cuts to one of the pieces they were to play at an upcoming concert. Specifically, they were going to leave a movement or two out of the very long piece. However, in the longest movement, they were snipping out bits: a few measures here, a few measures there, based on a sense that the movement was too long and repetitive. This caught my attention since I had just written in my February column that, “. . . we essentially never find ourselves wanting to omit any part of a piece that isn’t a repeat. I have never had a student ask me about a through-composed piece ‘should I or should I not play mm. 9–16?’ or anything like that.” And indeed I cannot remember any previous instance of this.

A hypothetical discussion of the ramifications of this choice by these musicians would probably start by invoking respect for the composer and go on to talk about the shape and arc of the piece. It might emphasize “right” and “wrong,” or just attempt to characterize the nature of the changes brought about by this sort of editing. Some people would say that if they didn’t like this piece as is, they should play something else. I did not engage in very much of that discussion with these performers, at least not then. The choices had been made, practiced, and rehearsed. And I am not sure what I would say, beyond just that I was surprised and that I tip my hat to the Fates for delivering this to me at that exact moment.

I have heard debate from time to time about whether or not a performer should take the repeat in the long first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major. Performers and musicologists talk about the length and raise questions about balance. But since there is a fairly long first ending as part of the section that we either do or do not decide to repeat, part of the discussion is about the material in that first ending. I have heard people use it as a reason to take the repeat—so that one does not entirely omit material that the composer wrote. But I have also heard it given as a reason not to take the repeat—on the grounds that the first ending material is boring, not up to the standard of the rest of the piece. This again touches on the question of when we do and when we do not give ourselves permission to second-guess a composer.

Then a student of mine, a former player of a melody instrument, just now getting into keyboard playing, spontaneously asked why so much keyboard music has repeats: is it just because they want to make the pieces longer? I touched on that a bit in the February column as well. It is an idea that we tend to resist, since in a way it could be taken to be disparaging or belittling of the work of composers. That does not mean that it is not true. And whatever the intent, the effect of repeats on length is real. I found it interesting that the question came up naturally for someone whose take on this repertoire was fresh and unspoiled.

The last of these chance occurrences was about the Widor “Toccata” from Symphony V. I wonder how different this piece would seem if the first measure were repeated exactly as is before the (actual) second measure. That second measure starts out as a repeat of the first, but crucially changes on the final beat.

Further questions regarding repetition

One question that I find fascinating in repeat situations is whether the two instances of the same material, one after another, are a statement of something and then a restatement of it, or are a question and an answer. This question itself will not always or often have an answer. However, in some cases for us as players, and for our students, observing our own feelings about this, one case at a time, might be revealing.

It might seem counterintuitive that the exact same notes could be both the question and the answer. However, this is not impossible even with words:

“Really?”

“Really!”

or even more extended:

“Really?”

“Really.”

“For certain?”

“For certain.”

Each of these question and answer groups works. Furthermore, each word or phrase has its own particular feeling. The “really” answer in the second grouping feels different to me from that in the first, because it is not being asked to express finality.

In the realm of music without words, the question and answer attribute is more abstract, more elusive. Attributing this to a passage almost certainly cannot ever be right or wrong or subject to proof, or even perhaps to analysis. But because it cannot ever be wrong, it can always be potentially useful. If thinking of a repetition situation as a question and answer, or as a statement and restatement, perhaps in a different mood or by a different “person,” seems useful or seems to enliven the experience of playing the passage, then it is a fruitful and correct way of looking at it.

With words, the vast majority of attempts to use the same word or phrase as a question and its answer will fail:

“Would you like some toast?”

“Would you like some toast.”

and so on.

The possibility that a repeat will seem like a question and answer can never be subject to failure as such; it can just seem like an interesting idea or not. This brings us to one of the fascinating things about repetition, both signed repeats and the repetition or recurrence of any material, whatever the structure. The fact that we can accept the amount of repetition in music that we do accept invites us to think about the ways in which music resembles or does not resemble those forms of expression that use words or concrete visually based images.

In a work of theater—play, movie, television episode—if a structure in which something happened and then was literally repeated, then something else happened and was also literally repeated, and so on, were to be used, it would be at best some sort of special effect. It is not necessarily the case that this has never been done. But it is not routine or remotely common. It would be possible to go to dozens of plays and movies per year for a lifetime—and watch an almost infinite amount of television—without ever once encountering this form.

But in music it is routine. Why is this so? It should not be that the repetition is inoffensive—acceptable—because it is meaningless. If it were meaningless, then we would not have a vast repertoire in which a substantial amount of repetition has been perceived as valuable by a vast audience over many centuries. (At least that is a fair assumption or a reasonable hope.) But the meaningfulness is abstract, and that seems to be the big difference. The extent to which repetition in music engages our “why are they doing that again?” reflex is limited.

Perhaps because the repetition is abstract, it can also evoke a response to the very idea of repetition itself. That idea is powerful. As much as we like newness, we also like familiarity, and repetition gives a sense of connection to the past and future. It is possible that sometimes, at least when we hear the repeat of a passage, we react as we do when we see an old friend or go back to our favorite restaurant. Repetition may suggest something like resurrection or reincarnation, or hint at some of the things that we wonder about and crave having to do with eternity and infinity. This is especially true of recurrence in composition, as in rondo technique or recapitulation. Certainly these images are overblown and should not be taken too literally or even too seriously. But I am pretty sure that some of these sorts of feelings are there much of the time. It is part of the picture of what repetition can feel like or mean.

In music that has words and is in verses, we expect the music to repeat, but not the words. We can sing any number of verses in a row of a hymn and happily accept that the musical notes will be the same for every verse. However, if the words were exactly the same for each verse it would seem bizarre. A phrase in words might recur. But any sameness of that sort has to be dealt out very differently with words than with music.

The term “repetitive” is, in everyday usage, almost a synonym for “boring.” You never hear someone say “that was a wonderful book: really repetitive” or “that movie was the most repetitive I have seen in a long time. I loved it!” So that suggests that we need to feel a bit of caution about whether repetition, whatever its power, can lead to boredom. This is to some extent the domain of the composer. If we think that a composer’s use of repetition in a particular piece creates boredom, we might just not want to play that piece. But nonetheless as players, we need both to make sure that we do what is necessary to make repeated material interesting and to refrain from overreacting.

I believe that a lot of students tend to overreact to the fear that repeated or recurrent material will be boring. This can manifest itself in wanting to add ornamentation or change stops. There is a kind of fruitful paradox, that if you always change ornaments or change stops on repeats, that in itself becomes repetitive and potentially boring. So everyone should be motivated to limit those sorts of gestures or to think carefully and in an individually tailored manner about when they are the most valuable.

If a repeat—or material that comes back or resembles other material—seems intrinsically boring to you, is there a way of framing it aesthetically, philosophically, or through imagery, that brings it to life? Is there a way of playing it with more energy, or less energy, like a response, like an echo, like a reaffirmation, like something thoughtfully reconsidered? A serious engagement with ideas such as these should probably precede choices about out-and-out changes. Any changes in the notes (ornamentation) or the sound (registration) or performance values (articulation, phrasing, use of timing devices, rubato, and so on) will be based on taking the passage as seriously as it warrants, not on halfway giving up on it in advance.

A very practical though mysterious aspect of playing repeated passages or identical material is that the same exact notes can seem easier or more difficult to play depending on whether you are playing them for the first or second time. Sometimes, in a long piece in which something comes back after a long interval, this can be explained by stamina and concentration issues. This is something that I have to remember to think about consciously when I am playing the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, for example. In each movement there is an extended true da capo. And when the opening material comes back it manifestly does not feel the same. I need to remember consciously to give it an extra dose of concentration to compensate for the effects of playing non-stop for a long time. Also the return of familiar material in a case like that creates the danger of a letdown: “oh, it’s just that old passage again; I did that fine ten minutes ago.”

One way to avoid that letdown is to focus on the possible rhetorical differences alluded to above. Try to remember, whether it is an instant repeat or a return after a good deal of other musical wandering, that by virtue of its not being the initial statement it is a different thing that is going on and needs attention and interest. On a very practical note, if the fingering and pedaling of two passages that are identical in notes can also be identical, that should save time and work and lead to greater security. This is something that seems like it could go without saying, but that is also worth remembering consciously.As I said last month, a lot of this is speculation or ideas that I find interesting to try on for size. I would encourage students to think for themselves as much as possible about what it means to take an interesting and important musical idea and just plain do it again. The ways in which I have framed some of my thoughts about it might be useful to some people, but all the more so if they invite people to come up with their own.

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

The way of the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few random thoughts from the last month or so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.