Paul Cienniwa book

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Memorization II
Last month I staked out a position about memorization that went something like this: that asking students to perform from memory is not in any way a necessary part of asking those students to perform well, or to become fully competent or indeed great players; that in many or most cases, a focus on memorization is damaging to the student’s work because it is disproportionately time-consuming and it leads to increased anxiety—anxiety that is often justified, since the attempt to play from memory does indeed often lead to reduced security and thus less command of the music; and that any meaningful advantages that are sometimes ascribed to memorization—which can be summed up as “knowing the music really well, inside and out”—can actually be achieved better by studying the music extremely thoroughly in a way that is governed by the idea of studying the music thoroughly, not by the goal of then being able to play it from memory. A substantial amount of what I have written in this column in the last few years has been geared towards helping students and their teachers develop ways of studying music very thoroughly, in a focused and efficient way. Further aspects of this study will of course occupy future columns as well.
In this month’s column I will write about a few more aspects of the memorization issue, including a (very) little bit about the history of memorization, the relationship between memorization and sight-reading, and some of what I think that we and our students can learn from thinking about the concept of memorization, even without taking the step of deciding to perform pieces from memory. I will also focus more on the other two aspects of playing—or learning to play—that I have mentioned as being related to memorization, that is, sight-reading and looking or not looking at the hands and feet.
It is commonly said that Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were the first keyboard players to play in public from memory. As far as I know, this is indeed true, although it is often the case that before the first famous person did any particular thing, there were less famous—or more-or-less unknown—people doing that same thing. In any case, when Schumann and, soon after her, Liszt began to play public piano recitals from memory, it was greeted as something new. It was also not greeted universally favorably. Both of these great performers were criticized for showing off, for putting their own displays of virtuosity ahead of the musical integrity of what the composers had written. (Apparently Clara Schumann came in for more of this criticism than Liszt, perhaps because she was the first, but, unfortunately, also because she was a woman.) It was probably largely the extraordinary popular success that Liszt enjoyed as a virtuoso performer—success that put him easily in the “rock star” category—that led to the spread of the practice of playing piano music from memory.
It is interesting to speculate for a moment about the relationship of memorization to the notion of authenticity to the composer. Of course, the most basic way to apply that type of “authenticity” to the memorization question would be to suggest that music should be memorized if the composer expected or wanted it to be memorized, and not memorized if the composer did not. It seems extremely unlikely that very many performers approach it this way. I have never myself noticed a pianist playing Liszt or other late nineteenth- or twentieth-century composers from memory, but not Beethoven, Brahms, or Schubert. Memorization seems as a normal matter to be associated with the identity of the performer rather than the identity of the composer. However, it is quite common for players who do regularly memorize their repertoire to report, as a matter of their experience, that older music is harder or in some way less natural to memorize than later music. On the whole, composers are probably more interested in having performers play their music promptly than in having them memorize it. It would make sense for composers to want good performers to be available routinely to learn new music rather than to spend their time on memorization. This, rather than any particular difficulty in memorizing the type of music, may explain why in the twentieth century there was an informal tradition against memorizing modern or avant-garde music.

Memorized works vs.
improvisations
After the growth of Lisztian memorized performance in the world of concert piano playing, the historical situation in the organ world was mixed. It is well known that Marcel Dupré played from memory and expected his students to do so; Maurice Duruflé did not. Surviving photographs of Alexandre Guilmant playing all show him with scores on the music desk. Pictures of Joseph Bonnet playing are always devoid of music, as are those of Günther Ramin. Of course Helmut Walcha, Jean Langlais, André Marchal, and other blind organists played from memory. Judging from photographs, Charles Tournemire played from music.
That is, Walcha, Langlais, and many others played from memory, or Tournemire played from music, when they were not improvising. The place of memorization in the history of organ playing must be seen, in part, in relation to the importance of improvisation in the work of organists over the centuries. If much of what is being done at the organ is improvisation, then the relative importance of playing music that other people have already written is reduced. Perhaps the sense of whether or not it is worth the time to memorize that music is affected by this.
At the same time, in a different way, I believe that the phenomenon of improvisation has shaped our perception of the meaning or importance of memorization in the opposite direction. Improvisation is a directly creative art, more directly creative than playing music that others have written, though not necessarily more important to the listening public or to the world of music as a whole. Improvisation is done without music on the music desk. I think that there is a chance that when some people react to performance from memory—without music on the music desk—as being on a higher artistic level than performance from printed music, they are being influenced in that judgment by the image of improvisation. At least, I think that this may be true—probably subconsciously—for some people, and it may shape the nature of the discussion about the supposed advantages or merits of playing from memory.

Related musical skills
There are also other ways in which playing from memory shares outward forms with other musical skills that themselves are often admired. For example, playing from memory is clearly easier for those who have perfect pitch, and when an audience sees a performance from memory, some of that audience probably react to that performer as being more professional, more of a musician even, because the memorized performance seems to imply perfect pitch. Or, to put it another way, it looks a lot like “playing by ear”, a skill that is often admired. (In fact, playing by ear is another one of those skills that are sometimes used almost to define great musicianship: “When he was only five years old he could hear something once and sit right down and play it,” etc.) Of course, playing by ear is an impressive skill, and it has uses in music-making. Perfect pitch can also be impressive, though its relationship to making music is complicated and not always positive. It is important, however, not to confuse these various issues. The impressiveness of the feat of playing by ear does not address anything about whether playing from memory leads to better performances.

Sight reading
Sight reading is, in a way, the opposite of playing from memory. It by definition requires the printed music, and the better a player is at it, the less he or she has to have studied the music before playing it. Good sight reading is a useful practical skill, especially for the most practical situations: the moment in church when the minister changes the hymn (to an unfamiliar one!) at the last minute, or the sudden request to participate in a vocal or chamber music recital. Ideally we can all choose our own repertoire in plenty of time to learn it the right way. In real life that does not always happen, and good sight-reading skills can come to the rescue. Good sight reading can also play an important part in the process of learning a piece carefully and well. Of course, learning any piece starts with reading something, whether that is a series of separate contrapuntal voices, or separate hands and feet, or a whole texture in small increments. The more accurate and comfortable that reading is, the more smoothly and, probably, the more quickly the process will go. That process can work perfectly well as long as the player can read music at all, but the earlier the reading is the faster the process will normally be.
However, really great sight reading—the kind that permits a player to sit down and perform a piece without having looked at it previously—can be a trap that leads to artistically unconvincing performances. This is because it allows players to short-circuit the process of really studying the music, discovering what is going on in the music, what the patterns are, what the overall shape is, what the rhetoric of each section or passage is about. Of course, this trap in its full form only lies in wait for a few of us, the most elite sight readers. (It is not a problem for me, for example.) However, it is a reminder of the major caution that I or any of us who do not practice or advocate memorization must give to ourselves. Since we allow ourselves to rely on the printed music in performance, we have a solemn responsibility not to use that music as a crutch propping up an inadequately prepared performance. This is what leads to the claim that un-memorized performance exists at a lower artistic level than memorized performance. I have been arguing that any suggested advantages to memorization in the realm of artistic quality of performance can actually be attributed to thorough study of the music, not to memorization itself. Obviously, in order for a non-memorized performance to express the fruits of thorough study, that study must have taken place. Over-reliance on reading ability is a threat to this, and we who do not memorize must be conscientious and honest with ourselves about this, and teach our students—and then expect them—to do the same.

Pros and cons
Although I have outlined reasons for not expecting our students to memorize or, certainly, requiring them to, I do not believe that memorization and performance from memory should be expunged from the life of the student and teacher. To start with, if a student wants to memorize pieces, I have no particular interest in discouraging that, let alone trying to forbid it. Some students, of course, come to their first organ teacher having already learned to memorize repertoire from the experience of studying piano. Some students do indeed find that they memorize fairly easily and naturally. However, just as we who perform from scores have a responsibility to be honest about the pitfalls of that approach, any student who wants to play from memory must realize the pitfalls of that approach. The first of these that can affect even very willing and successful memorizers is the time that it consumes. Is that worth it? The same time could be spent learning more music. Would, for example, learning all three Franck Chorals rather than memorizing one of them add to a student’s musical understanding of the Choral that the student might otherwise have memorized? Would the time spent memorizing the Bach “Dorian” Toccata be better spent learning a couple of Buxtehude Praeludia so as to understand better the background to Bach’s work? This particular question is less relevant the faster and easier a memorizer a student is, but it is of some relevance to anyone who expresses a preference for memorization.
Here’s another pitfall: Is a student memorizing only because he or she feels the need to look steadily at the keyboard? If so, then the time spent memorizing is clearly being misdirected. That student should, as a matter of overall security and reliability, learn to play with much less looking: the occasional glance rather than the eyes glued. After this has been accomplished—or indeed while it is being worked on—the commitment to memorization can be re-evaluated. Perhaps there will be other, better reasons for that student to continue to work on memorization, perhaps not. (Incidentally, learning to play with very little looking at the keyboard will greatly improve a student’s relationship to sight reading and to the early stages, at least, of working on a piece.)
Also, a student who chooses to memorize must be honest about whether that memorization work is really—really—correlated with thorough study of the music. It is certainly true that the process of memorization involves going over the music a lot in a way that can be short-circuited by those of us who play from score. However, to the extent that that repetition is training the muscle memory to react correctly and carry out the gesture that is supposed to come next, it isn’t necessarily about musical understanding at all. Also, if memorization is mostly physical—if the student would not be able to write the piece out from memory, or even to know and be able to describe away from the keyboard most of what comes next as the piece unfolds—then it is notoriously unreliable. In particular, it is subject to falling apart in the face of any distraction and then being very hard indeed to put back together.
Even a student who is not committed to memorization might be intrigued by trying it out as a special project or challenge on an occasional piece. I have no problem with this, as long as it is kept separate from an expectation that memorization will become the norm. It might make sense to start with a short piece—an Orgelbüchlein chorale, perhaps, or one of the short Vierne pieces. And this would be a particularly intense and interesting challenge if it were approached—at first—away from the keyboard. If, for example, a student memorizes each separate voice of a short chorale prelude away from the instrument—so that he or she could write it down—then brings each voice over to the console separately at first, and then puts those voices together from memory, that constitutes an intense and challenging mental workout. It is also a version of the kind of separate-voice study that I would recommend in any case.
Looked at this way, memorization has something in common with, for example, learning to read from seventeenth-century tablature, or making one’s own organ transcription of a song or a string quartet. It is a mental and musical exercise that might well be interesting and challenging, and that might yield some insights or unexpected results.
This topic of memorization is one about which I would particularly welcome feedback—ideas, anecdotes, reactions to anything that I have said. I will include some of that feedback in a future column. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

This and that
This month’s column is a grab bag or miscellany of sorts. I will add to what I have already written about each of my last two subjects—memorization and interpretation—based partly on feedback and discussions that I have had about those subjects over the last few months and partly on my own further thoughts. By coincidence, a couple of things have arisen in my own performing life and in my teaching recently that shed some specific light on the issues that I discussed in July, August, and September, and I will recount those anecdotes. I will also provide a brief introduction to what will be the subject of next month’s column: figured bass realization and continuo playing.

Memorization vs. thorough learning
The first anecdote that I want to mention comes from my own recent performing life. It bolsters my existing views about memorization, or, more particularly, about the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning. (That is, it is a bit self-serving of me to recount it!) I recently needed to choose one of the larger Bach pieces to be part of a recital program. There were three in particular that I was interested in playing: the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548; the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542; and the Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540.
The first two are pieces that I memorized for auditions or juries at Westminster in the early 1980s. The Toccata and Fugue is a piece that I first learned at about that same time but that I have never tried to memorize. I did, however, study the F-major more intensely and in more detail than I had ever studied anything up to that point. I did all sorts of motivic and other analysis, including an analysis of proportion in both the Toccata and the Fugue, which suggested to me that the two pieces are more closely related than they are sometimes thought to be. I also practiced it to within an inch of its life, using every strategy that I knew at the time, but relying mainly on good old-fashioned repetition. I feared at the time that it was “too hard” for me, but it was an absolute favorite of mine and I was determined to learn it.
I performed all three pieces from time to time in the 1990s, and had not looked at any of them within the last ten years. When I began exploring them in order to choose one to play, I discovered very quickly that the F-major was much more solid—retained much more of what I had once put into it—than either of the other two. In fact, right off the bat I could play through it at about 80% tempo and have it come out quite accurate and steady. The process of working it up to a performance tempo and getting it to feel solid and ready to play was as smooth and easy as I can remember that process ever being with any piece. Furthermore, I noticed that when I tried to play chunks of each of these three pieces from memory—at page turns, for example, in order not always to stop at the same place—I could do more of that with the F-major than with pieces that I had explicitly memorized all those years ago. This probably in part reflects my having done a less than stellar job of memorizing them, but it is also, I believe, a reminder of the power of really studying and working on a piece.

Reading or sight-reading
One of the ideas that I have encountered persistently in discussions about memorization after I finished writing my recent columns on the subject (before as well, but more after, for some reason) is that if you haven’t memorized, you are sight-reading. I discussed sight-reading in July and in August. However, at the moment I feel even more impressed that we must make clear to our students that the alternative to memorized performance is not or should not be anything that earns the description of sight-reading. “Reading,” yes; “sight reading,” no. The role of reading in a well-prepared performance is hard to describe. I would try some of the following:
1) Reading confirms what you already know or remember at a (slightly) subconscious level about what is coming up next, and therefore enables you to bring that knowledge to the conscious level in an untroubled manner.
2) Reading gives you something to latch on to if you feel that the performance is slipping away. In fact, the security—or perhaps the rescue—that players are sometimes tempted to achieve by looking at their hands when a passage seems about to unravel can usually be achieved better by zeroing in on the music and explicitly reading what the next notes are supposed to be. This sometimes takes a leap of faith—it can feel like tightrope-walking—but it works.
3) The experience of playing a piece from the score resembles the experience of listening to a long, complicated song (or oratorio or opera) that you know well. You would not be able to write out all of the words or the whole libretto, but as it unfolds you know with certainty at each moment what is coming up next.
4) There are many things in everyday life that we experience this way: for example, the road signs along a familiar route. I could never list from memory the content of all of the signs along, say, the Connecticut Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway. But as I drive along, I know what is coming up next, and I know right away if I see that one of them has been changed.

Semi-memorization
I describe this particular state of knowing something—a piece of music or a pattern of exit signs or anything—as semi-memorization. It results naturally from really thorough study of a piece of music. Reading with attention and focus a piece of music that you have semi-memorized is neither sight-reading nor playing from memory. It is its own thing, as different from each of them as they are from each other. It is the most common and natural mode of performance for most of us most of the time.

Page turns
I have become increasingly impressed by the extent to which full-fledged memorization is mentioned as a necessity specifically to avoid dealing with page turns. Page turns can be annoying indeed, but, as I mentioned in July, wholesale adoption of memorization seems to me to be a disproportionate response to this annoyance. It is especially disproportionate as something to ask of our students as a major part of what they work on.
(At this moment in history, it seems possible that the practical side of page turning will change dramatically, perhaps quite soon. There are already electronic music reading systems that work very well on orchestral-type music stands, and that can work also on piano or harpsichord music desks. They eliminate the need to turn pages by hand. I have started using such a system in my harpsichord playing. It is useful in concert, and also sort of a conversation piece, given that it is still fairly rare. However, the most important difference that it makes is in practicing. After all, no one ever employs a regular page-turner for practice sessions. I have often in the past had the experience of playing through a piece without page-turning breaks for the first time when I played it in concert. These new music-reading/page-turning systems make that unnecessary. It is trickier to devise a system like this for organ, mainly because the organist cannot spare the feet for operating page-turning pedals. However, it seems certain that any practical obstacles to this will be figured out and that systems like this will some day be commonplace.)
However, page turns do create a real musical problem, and one approach to solving that problem involves a modest selective use of memorization. If a player—student or otherwise—always stops at a specific point, turns the page, and picks up the piece immediately after that specific point, then that moment in the music will often be permanently technically insecure or musically hesitant or unconvincing, or both. I have seen students struggle with short passages that seem puzzlingly difficult, for which no fingering, no way of practicing, no way of thinking about it seems to help. Then we have realized that the page-turning break has been actually training the student to become anxious and distracted at that spot. He or she has literally never played or heard that moment in the music without a break. (This is easy to miss in lessons where the teacher is routinely doing the page turns.)
The solution to this is straightforward. The student must vary the placement of the page turn break while practicing. This can be done by selective copying—taping a copy of the final line of the earlier page to the top of the later page and a copy of the first line of the later page to the earlier page, and then pausing to turn that page at all sorts of different places. It can also be done by memorizing the last few measures of the earlier page and the first few measures of the later page and again pausing to turn at various different spots, randomly distributed. This little bit of memorization should be anxiety-free, since is it never intended to be brought out in performance.

Teaching interpretation
Here is another recent story, this one relevant to teaching interpretation. It is also, I am afraid, intended to confirm or bolster what I have recently written, so it too is a bit self-serving. A young student of mine—middle-school age, a somewhat experienced and very talented pianist with so far just a little bit of harpsichord and organ experience—was working on a piece that was manuals only, two voices, with a left-hand bass line in steady eighth notes and a more florid right-hand part in sixteenths and thirty-seconds. After she had worked on the notes a certain amount, when it was almost time to put the hands together, I did the following. I played the first several measures of the left-hand part for her three different ways: legato, staccato, and in-between, that is, mildly but distinctly detached. I asked her to think about which she liked better: nothing about which I preferred, or about historical authenticity, or about anything else (supposedly) authoritative. I did say to her that in the end there was no reason that these approaches couldn’t be combined and the results varied. She took this home to think about.
Over the next week or two of practicing and the next couple of lessons, she not only, in a sense, chose one of my options (the middle one) but more importantly worked out—on her own—a completely varied and nuanced articulation with some notes held longer than others and certain phrases or passages played overall more or less legato than others. This exercise pointed her in the direction of listening carefully to what her playing was doing and to thinking about what she wanted out of the piece and each of its constituent passages. It also led—without my saying anything else—to her beginning to make similar choices about other pieces that she was playing and to her listening more closely to what she was doing in those pieces.
I believe that none of this would have happened if I had said to her something like “why don’t you try this phrasing and these articulations,” and had written various markings into her music. Of course this happens a lot—otherwise this approach would not be the essence of what I recommend, as discussed last month. I mention this case because the student was young enough—and sufficiently inexperienced at the particular instrument—that any teacher might easily have misgivings about leaving so much to the student’s choice, because it happened to arise while I was thinking and writing about these things, and because it worked out especially well.

Figured bass realization
Next month’s column will be about figured bass realization and continuo-playing at the keyboard. This skill is not necessarily directly relevant to the day-to-day work of most organists or to what our students come to us to learn. It is normally thought of as part of the constellation of skills that might be taught to those studying harpsichord, though of course in the days when continuo was a universal practice, much continuo playing took place at the organ. Certainly any organist who feels comfortable realizing continuo parts himself or herself (rather than relying on printed realizations found in modern editions) will have both greater flexibility and greater musical possibilities open to him or her in playing any non-solo Baroque music. This includes many anthems and other music that church choirs might sing. It is even relevant to the playing of many hymns. Understanding continuo playing is also a window to understanding a lot of what is going on in (at least) Renaissance and Baroque music in general. It is also a step towards undertaking the art of improvisation, since it is itself a form of improvisation, though one conducted within defined limits.
Figured bass realization is often taught as part of the teaching of harmony, counterpoint, or theory in general. In that context it is considered a good idea to think of continuo realizations as being in effect pieces of music that should follow the rules or customs of composition especially as to voice leading. This is an approach that is nearly the exact opposite of what works best in actual performance. The reasons for this lie in the nature of what a keyboard continuo part contributes to a performance. An understanding of this is the key to learning to play continuo comfortably, not least because it actually has the effect of making the process easier than it can seem to be in theory class. I will discuss this in detail next month. That discussion will also include a very practical protocol for working on continuo playing and of course for introducing it to students of various levels and backgrounds. 

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

To look or not to look

During my months off from writing this column, I heard from several readers, partly with various stories or questions or comments about organ study, but also with some suggestions for topics for future columns. These suggestions included aspects of service playing, advice about how to get pieces up to a fast tempo, and on fingering, including how to plan fingering with ultimate tempo in mind, dealing with acoustics, and details about pedal playing (always at the forefront of concern about organ playing!). I will in due course cover these topics. This month, however, I begin with something I consider to be more important the more I observe students—and indeed the more I observe my own process of learning and performing music. This is the question of whether, when, and how to look at one’s hands and feet while playing.

In an early column, I noted that some day I would devote a whole column to this, and while I have mentioned aspects of it from time to time, I have not yet written that column. Furthermore, I have developed some new ideas about it over the last few years—ideas that supplement rather than contradict or change my thoughts from several years ago. So it seems like a good idea to take it on, in this column and the next, pulling together some of my long-standing ideas and supplementing them with some new thoughts.

I have always been—and still am—very skeptical of the practice of looking at the hands or (perhaps especially) the feet. However, I have become more open to the idea that looking can sometimes be all right—certainly neutral, if it is done correctly, perhaps even helpful in some cases. This has led to the other new turn in my thinking: how to be sure that when you occasionally look down at the keyboard(s), you don’t create any problems by doing so. I have also developed some exercises and practice techniques that address looking or not looking at the hands and feet, or deal with looking away from the music. 

Beyond the practical aspects of looking or not looking, one can learn about focus and concentration, and about the whole learning process, by thinking about the different approaches to the looking/not looking question. I will include a few thoughts about that here.

The fundamental, most important fact about looking at the hands and feet while playing is that a reliance on looking is extremely damaging to the learning process for someone who is still learning to play. This is probably one of the things that I have observed the most clearly in my years of teaching and that I am most sure about. It is also one of the few things that I am willing, if necessary, to ask students to believe on trust even if they don’t see it for themselves right away. Not every student will do that, especially since I always urge students not to take things on trust, but it is why I have tried to make the advantages of not looking seem clear and obvious.

There is a distinction between someone who is still learning and someone who is an accomplished player. The pitfalls of too much looking are the most hazardous for anyone who is still engaged in the early to middle stages of becoming comfortable with the instrument. This is why thinking about this issue is specifically an important part of the work of a teacher. For more experienced, comfortable, “advanced” players (whatever imprecise term seems best), looking or not looking becomes more of a personal choice, a matter of comfort—at least much of the time.

Most of us find it natural to look—that is, literally, with our eyes—for things that we want to find. Picking up our glasses off the table, reaching for the light switch, getting a stick of butter out of the fridge, anything normal and everyday, is usually achieved partly through looking. The keys of keyboard instruments—more than the technical components of string or wind instruments, I believe—seem to be things that are there and that we want to find. So it is natural to think something like: “OK, I need to play that ‘A-flat,’ so I should look for it” or even “so I’d better look for it.” This is a way of seeming to map normal experience onto the act of playing a keyboard instrument: it seems intuitive, at least as a starting point.

However, there are equally fundamental reasons not to accept that intuitive feeling, not to look at the hands and feet while playing—especially while first learning to play. First of all, it is impossible to find every note of every piece by looking in time to play that note on time. If all music were extremely slow, this whole discussion might well be different. Looking at the hands and feet might be a valid option as a way of feeling comfortable at the instrument. But with real-life repertoire and performance conditions this just won’t work: there just isn’t time. Only a strong and reliable kinesthetic sense of the keyboard can enable the fingers and feet to go where they need to go, when they need to go there. So learning to play has to be, in part, a matter of developing that kinesthetic sense. And (this is the most important point here) every time that a student finds a note by looking, he or she misses an opportunity to strengthen this all-important sense. 

It is a very clear distinction: if you move your hands and fingers, or your feet, directly from whatever position they have just been in to the position they need to be in to play the next notes or chords, then you establish in your mind a connection between those two positions. If you intervene between those two points with a glance at the new position, and then find that new position through that visual clue, you do not establish that connection, or you establish it weakly. Only by reinforcing these connections over and over and over again can we achieve the ability to execute them reliably in the infinitely varied circumstances created by an infinitely varied repertoire. Using our eyes to find notes makes this process of learning physical connections inefficient. Using the eyes a lot makes it extraordinarily inefficient, and possibly totally ineffective.  

Other reasons to be concerned about looking at the hands and feet are more practical, and apply beyond the learning stage. It is always a possibility that upon looking away from the music, the player will get lost and be unable to come back to the right place in the music. I will discuss ways of dealing with this later on. This is tied up with questions about memorization and about solid learning in general. Also, there is a strong tendency for looking away from the music to cause delay: very tiny delay that doesn’t add an amount of time to the playing that can really be counted, but that tends to undermine the sense of rhythmic momentum and continuity. This is something that an accomplished player can find ways to deal with, if it is addressed purposefully. I will also come back to this later.

The good news, especially for beginning students, is that a very basic level of awareness of the kinesthetics of the keyboard gets established surprisingly promptly. I tell students that anyone who has been playing any keyboard instrument for a few weeks essentially knows where the keys are, though he or she might not realize it. Of course, this sense of where the keys are needs to grow stronger, so that it can function reliably with ever more complicated (and faster) music. Also, crucially, the player needs to learn to believe in it. However, a basic version of this awareness is established much sooner than most people—most students—realize. How early may depend somewhat on the exact nature of the very beginning lessons and/or practicing that this student encountered. But it will be there as something to build on, even from random doodling around. The layout of keyboards seems to be intuitive and humane enough to make this happen.

Let me mention the analogy to the typing keyboard. I don’t know from personal experience how intuitive that layout is, since I have never learned “touch typing.” I type with, perhaps, two or three fingers, always looking at the computer keyboard. Sometimes I must spend appreciable time searching for a given letter or symbol: my sense of where they all are is that poorly developed. It has slowly improved over many years of typing that way; I now often find my fingers heading towards the correct letter before I have consciously thought about where it might be. But I never can pin a letter down exactly without looking. This means that I am an extremely slow typist, and that I effectively cannot type a copy of something that I would have to read while typing. I can only type while composing. It is interesting to me that the most common form of “real” typing involves always pressing (I originally wrote “playing”) any given key with the same finger. 

This is completely different from playing a keyboard instrument, where there is no linkage between specific fingers and specific keys. It is more analogous to fingering on a wind instrument. My own slow typing suits me: it matches the speed at which I think out what I want to type. This is analogous to the slow musical tempos that would be required if players were all to try to find all of their notes by looking, but in this case it is suitable—or at least it works for me. I am, however, very aware that my need to look imposes limitations. This informs my sense of how important it is not to be limited by looking while playing music. My awareness that (almost) everyone but me does indeed type without looking reinforces my belief that everyone can do the same with a musical keyboard.

The fundamental difference between the keys of a keyboard instrument (and the typing keyboard) and the other objects that I mentioned above—the stick of butter, and so on—is that the keys don’t move. We don’t come to the moment when we need to find them without knowing where they are to be found. This is a necessary condition for us to be able to find them without looking. Other things in everyday experience also have this quality, such as the gas pedal and brake arrangement in a car. Of course, no one has ever thought that they had to look to get a foot from one of those to the other. It would be courting death to do so, so we are motivated to learn and believe that we don’t have to! Various household situations work this way: reaching for the bedside alarm clock, or a light switch on the wall of a room that you always enter the same way. Anything that is always in the same place relative to your person is something that you might well be able to reach for and find without looking. In normal life we don’t always do so, since there is often (gas and brakes aside) very little reason not to supplement the spatial awareness with visual confirmation. But such things can help to persuade students that the keys of their instrument can also be routinely found without looking.

Another way of looking at it is this: when we talk about reliably finding notes, we are also talking about avoiding wrong notes. These are complementary ways of looking at the same thing. When a student feels a strong urge to look at the hands or feet, that student is trying not to play wrong notes. However, by far most actual wrong notes made by students—and by most of us—come specifically because we don’t really know what the correct note was supposed to be. I first learned this by observing myself. When I was still a beginning (or at most “intermediate”) player, it one day occurred to me that whenever I made a wrong note or a cluster of wrong notes, if someone had stopped me and asked me what the right notes were supposed to be, I would never have been able to answer that question. I have since observed this with students, fairly consistently. The proportion of wrong notes that happen when the student clearly knows what note or notes or chord is indicated—and could promptly tell you if you asked—but makes a wrong judgment about where to find the note(s) on the keyboard is very small. The proportion that happens when the student doesn’t quite really know what was supposed to be played is very high. It is exactly the information that is on the page that is most urgently needed at the moment when a passage might be about to go wrong, not the information found on the keyboard itself. 

When a student has played a number of wrong notes—especially if it happens to be a high number—and has been looking down at the hands or feet quite frequently, I ask the student to try playing the same thing without looking at all. If the student is reluctant to do that, I remind him or her that the worst that can happen is that the passage will fall apart dramatically—so badly that it will be funny. And if that happens, so what? We will have learned something. Of course, the most common result is that the accuracy improves immediately and dramatically, even if the student didn’t expect anything good, and even before he or she had any sort of chance to get comfortable doing this, or to believe that it was a good idea. This experience, repeated as often as necessary, will help to persuade the student that not looking is fruitful.

I will continue this discussion next month and include further ideas about how to convince or cajole students into taking advantage of not looking at the hands and feet. I will also talk about when and how it is OK to look, and I will give the exercises and practice techniques that I mentioned above.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at

Repertoire, part 2
Last month’s column was in large part an argument in favor of letting students work on whatever music they want to work on: that is, not believing that it is necessary for a student’s development that he or she work on any particular piece or pieces, or on any particular subset of the repertoire. I base this belief on several things: the large size and great diversity of the repertoire; the fact that any student works better—and any performer, no matter how accomplished, plays better—when he or she really likes and cares about the music involved; and that it is better—more interesting—for the world as a whole if organists learn and play as wide a variety of pieces as possible, rather than all focusing on a narrow “standard” repertoire.
This month I want to address some ways of implementing this philosophy. Letting students work on the music that they really want to work on does not, of course, mean just coming to lessons with no ideas about repertoire: just shrugging the shoulders and saying “work on whatever you want.” That would be abdicating our responsibility to help students find out what it is that they might like or want to work on. The point is to figure out how much help each student needs in exploring the repertoire, and then to offer that help in a way that is maximally helpful and minimally coercive. That way we will never lose the advantages created by the student’s own intense involvement with the music.

Determining what to study
It can be very productive to start the first session with a new student by asking a question more or less like this: “why are you interested in studying organ right now?” Many students will talk about the instrument as such, perhaps their love for organ sound. Some will also talk about something in their life experience, maybe some involvement with the church or with church music. But most will also talk about repertoire. They will say that they have always loved Bach, or Baroque music, or that they are fascinated by French Romantic or twentieth-century music. I have had students, at this early stage, mention something very specific and unusual: Messiaen, for example, or Rorem, or the Couperin organ Masses.
If this question does not evoke any response about repertoire, then it is a good idea to ask more specific, targeted questions: What music have you worked on in the last couple of years (for existing organists)? What organ music have you heard that you like (for new organists)? What non-organ music have you played by organ composers? What music do you like to listen to? Have you worked on any pieces that you found frustrating? Why were they frustrating (if you know)? One of the most fruitful questions of all is “What piece is it your dream to work on?” Or, to put it another way, “What piece would you love to work on right now, but you assume that it is too hard?”
These are all questions that can, of course, be asked and explored at any time, not just at the first lesson. Such a discussion will tell the teacher a lot about the student’s relationship to the repertoire and will give the teacher specific answers to specific questions: what music the student likes, already knows about, is interested in. It can be even more important, though, for the teacher to read between the lines. Does the student have strong opinions about music? Does he or she already know and talk about a wide range of repertoire? Has the student listened to or studied any non-keyboard music by organ composers? These are all things that can help a teacher make good judgments about how much guidance a particular student will need in looking for music, how much prodding and suggesting might be necessary, or, on the other hand, how much the student can be expected to use his or her own initiative. There are clues to look for beneath the surface. For example, if the student talks about a composer and you mention a related composer (Vierne to the student’s Widor, or Buxtehude to the student’s Bach—or vice versa) does the student respond with recognition or not? Does that conversation develop naturally or does it—without a lot of teacher input—just fizzle out? Does the student know about the relationships between different kinds of organs and different kinds of repertoire? Perhaps the most important thing to look for is this: that which makes the student look animated, happy, excited, involved.
It is not possible to say specifically and in advance exactly what a teacher can learn or will conclude from these conversations. In some cases, nothing will come of all of this except that the student and teacher will get to know one another better—always a good thing. Sometimes the teacher will both learn what music the student likes and begin to form a sense of how to get the student interested in other music. The point is to start the conversation, pay close attention, and see where it leads.
The two practical issues that are of most concern regarding letting students themselves decide what to work on are, first of all, the problem of pieces that are too hard, and, second, the teacher’s responsibility to help (or perhaps even force!) the student to become well-rounded.

Issue: What is too hard?
A friend of mine went, sometime around 1980, for her first meeting with an eminent harpsichord teacher with whom she was planning to study. Near the beginning of the lesson he asked her “What would you really like to work on?” Her response was “Well, of course the Goldberg Variations, but I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be, it’s so hard, imposing, virtuosic, etc., etc.” And his reply to this was “Put it up on the music desk—of course you should work on it now!” Her morale and her level of interest and commitment shot up through the roof right away. She reported on this glowingly, to me and to others. This was what first convinced me that it was important for a student to love the music that he or she was working on. It also impressed me a lot that an experienced teacher was not afraid to encourage a new student to reach for something very challenging indeed.
However, the question still is: what is and what isn’t too hard? Of course it makes sense that any student should, in some sense, work on pieces that are of an appropriate level of difficulty. That is, pieces that are somewhat challenging—that stretch the student’s abilities out, that teach something new—but that don’t create discouragement by being so hard that the feedback they give is only negative. If a student has no very particular ideas about what music he or she wants to work on, then the teacher is free to take level of difficulty into account in helping the student choose pieces. For a new student, the judgment about this matter can arise in part out of the kind of discussion described above. For an existing student, the teacher will already have knowledge and context to go on.
Sometimes, however, a student suggests some music that the teacher suspects might be so difficult or so complex that working on it would be at best unproductive and at worst actually damaging. There are several ways to deal with this. One way, of course, is to tell the student that the particular piece is inappropriate and should be postponed. In spite of my emphasis on letting students work on the music that they want to work on, I don’t believe that this is necessarily always wrong. To begin with, there is certainly no reason not to tell the student what you are thinking and to discuss it. If it honestly appears to you, after this discussion, that your student would be just as happy working on something else—perhaps something easier but musically similar to the original piece—then there is nothing wrong with proceeding that way. (However, it is important to remember that many students are reluctant to disagree [openly] with what the teacher suggests, and that most students will hide it if they are disappointed or discouraged. You as a teacher should require a fair amount of convincing that it is really all right with your student not to work on whatever it is that the student has brought in. You should not assume or accept this too readily.) If you are convinced that a piece is categorically too hard—regardless of how the student feels about it and taking into account some of the suggestions below—then it is important to explain to the student why the piece is not right, what you and he or she can work on to get ready for that piece, and, if possible, how long that is likely to take.
If you and your student decide to go ahead with a piece that seems, on paper, too hard, then there are several ways to structure the work on that piece to make it indeed fruitful and appropriate. The first thing to do is to make sure that the student understands that a too-hard piece has to be allowed to take time. That is, in exchange for working on a difficult piece, the student must be willing to be patient, to work hard, and to plan on not getting discouraged or bored if this one piece stretches out for months or longer. (My experience is that any number of months spent working well on one difficult piece will advance the student’s overall abilities at least as much as the same time spent working on several easier pieces. I don’t have any trouble reassuring students about this.)
Second, it is important that the student be willing to break the piece down in ways that make it easier: in effect turning it into several, or many, easier pieces. This means doing an especially good and thorough job of some of the things that we should all do anyway with all of our pieces: working on separate hands and feet; working on small sections; teasing out individual voices; practicing slowly; practicing even more slowly! Again, this can be part of a deal with the student: you may work on this (too hard) piece that you love, but only if you will work on it the right way. It is possible to consider a small section of a long difficult piece to be a piece in itself. The student can work on that section, and then student and teacher together can decide whether going on to the next part of the piece is the best way to use the student’s time, or whether it would be better to turn to something else.
Here it is worth mentioning the “two-way street” aspect of the act of working on repertoire. We work on pieces, in part, as a way of helping us get better as players—more skillful, more versatile, more confident. The pieces that we work on are the fodder for this process. At the same time, we strive to get more skillful, versatile, and confident so that we can better play the pieces that we want to play. A situation in which a student is working on a piece that he or she loves, that provides some challenges, and that he or she can learn well and perform is an ideal one. However, working on a section of a piece, even without ever going on to the rest of it, or working on aspects of a piece—just the pedal part, or just the separate voices, for example, or certain passages that present particular fingering issues—can be completely valid as a way of using repertoire to advance one’s playing ability. It is wonderful to learn complete pieces—obviously utterly necessary for anyone who wants to perform. However, it is not necessary to insist on finishing every piece that you start. It is all right sometimes only to work one side of this street. It can actually free a student up to try more things—both things that are more difficult and things that are unfamiliar or even unappealing at first—if the student knows that it is OK to re-evaluate the decision to work on something if that something turns out not to be rewarding.
Sometimes a student will bring in pieces that seem to be too easy. These are pieces that the student is interested in, but that the teacher fears would not really help the student to learn anything: that is, that they would not advance the student’s facility or technique, or teach any new skills. This is working the other side of the street. Pieces in this category can be used for relaxation, just to let the student have the pleasure of playing something that is fun to play. This can be important for morale and for pacing one’s efforts. However, it is also true that there is nothing—literally nothing—that is so easy that it can’t teach something to any student or even to any advanced player. A piece consisting of a single middle c held for a few beats (to reduce it to the absurd) could still afford an opportunity to work on touch, posture, relaxation, breathing, listening to sonority and to room acoustics, and probably a lot more. Any piece can be used to work on those things and also on technical and psychological performance values: accuracy, security, articulation, timing, rhythm, and so on. If a piece seems very easy, then the student can take on the challenge of playing it even better.

Issue: Becoming well rounded
It is certainly important for a teacher to offer students help in the matter of becoming well rounded—generally knowledgeable about the repertoire and the instrument. There are two reasons that I do not believe that the matter of what pieces a student works on and plays while studying is the crucial part of this process. (Of course, it is always part of the process.) One reason is that there is so much music in the repertoire that any attempt to get to know all of it in a fairly short time will inevitably be just a token. The other is that a student who is taught how to listen carefully and open-mindedly and how to practice well will have a lifetime to explore the repertoire. There is no hurry, and it is better for anyone to work on any given part of the repertoire at a time when he or she has become genuinely interested in it.
If the repertoire that a student really wants to work on (with whatever amount of prodding or guidance from the teacher seems helpful, but with no coercion) happens to cover quite a few different composers, from different time periods and geographic areas, that is fine. However, even in that case it is not actually true that the student has covered the whole repertoire. In fact, the difference between this student and one who has chosen to work on only German Baroque music (as I did in graduate school) or only Franck and Widor is small. It is not a difference worth pursuing at the expense of any of the student’s sense of joy and commitment.
However, it is a very good idea for a teacher to help students to know what repertoire is out there, and to offer them a chance to figure out what might be interesting to them. One of the best ways of doing this has always been to get students to listen to a lot of music. Listening is easy and non-time-consuming compared to practicing and learning pieces. In the past, the best way to talk about listening to a lot of organ music would have involved mentioning record libraries or used record stores—also perhaps friends with record collections, or organ concert series. These possibilities all still exist. However, recent technology has of course added to them. I will mention a few Internet-based approaches to exploring the organ literature. Of course, it is the nature of such things that these specific resources may vanish. But if so they may be replaced with others.
At the website orgelconcerten.ncrv.nl, under the heading Archief, are recordings of hundreds of performances by organists of the last several decades. Many of these are concert performances. This is an extraordinary resource for getting to know the playing of a wide variety of organists, but it is also a very good way to hear repertoire. The list of composers represented is over 250 in number and covers more than five hundred years. The assignment of listening to all of it (or, say, listening to a piece or two from each composer whose name is unfamiliar) would be highly informative and educational for any organist.
There are several ways to find (free) printed music on the Internet. Two of these are http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer.php and http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. These sites both have a fair amount of organ music. Of course, they can be used to acquire printed music for use: that is, for pieces that a student wishes to work on. They can also be used, however, to explore the repertoire. For example, a student equipped with a list of organ composers (which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_composers for example, or through traditional sources such as The New Grove or various books about organ history) can visit the Icking Archive, look for names of organ composers, and look at and begin to analyze representative pieces, or follow the scores while listening to a recording, or print out and (slowly) sight-read opening pages of many pieces just to get a sense of what they’re like.
Another way for students to get to know about, and perhaps become interested in, composers with whom they are not already familiar—especially with more recent composers—is to read the composers’ writings. There are writings in print by Saint-Saëns, Reger, Messiaen, Rorem, Dupré, and many others. Reading the thoughts of a composer—especially if those are provocative and interesting—is a wonderful way to spark interest in that composer’s music.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Paul Jacobs is no stranger to anyone who knows the organ world, and of late he is gaining exposure to a broader audience through the mass media. The subject of numerous newspaper, professional journal, and public radio interviews (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Choir and Organ, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, to name just a few), Jacobs is a musician of passionate and devoted intensity. One of the first mentions of him in these pages was as the college division prize winner of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see The Diapason, November 1998); his Messiaen Marathon performance in Chicago was chronicled by Frank Ferko in The Diapason in May 2002, and his numerous achievements and honors have often been reported here. Jacobs’ current high media profile is due in part to his position as head of the organ department at Juilliard—at age 26 he became the school’s youngest department chair ever. He has also garnered attention for his Bach and Messiaen marathons, though these certainly are serious and concentrated encounters with the music of these composers and not to be considered stunts.
A native of Washington, Pennsylvania, Paul Jacobs studied organ with George Rau, John Weaver, and Thomas Murray. His teachers attest to his intelligence, great capacity for learning, and hardy work ethic; these were noticeable even as he began his organ studies. George Rau, Jacobs’ first organ teacher, remembers that even at his first lesson, his talent was obvious; he learned very quickly, and worked very hard.
I knew that his was an extraordinary talent, and also not only that, he works harder than any musician that I know; and having the two—not only this great talent, but also this great work ethic—really, you just knew that he was going to go far.1
By age 15—when he took his first church position—he had learned much of the standard repertoire and was working on larger Bach works. Jacobs studied with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music; Weaver’s first impression noted the “security of his playing and the musicianship.” Weaver also commented that

Certainly one of his strengths was a great seriousness, which is still a hallmark of his playing, and of his personality. He really is deeply devoted to excellence in performance. What did he need to work on? Well, he was not at the top of his form in the social graces. Not that he was inappropriate, but I think he was a little nervous about conversing with people; and interacting with people was a skill that he had not developed terribly well at that point, but that he now has more than compensated for.2
At Rau’s suggestion, Jacobs began mastering early on the skill of memorization.

I would always tell him that it’s a skill that if developed now, you’ll have it for the rest of your life, and it’s a skill that you want to develop young, so that it becomes a natural part of your playing.3

Rau’s nudging to memorize was taken to heart; John Weaver elaborates:

The tradition at the Curtis Institute that goes back to the days of Lynwood Farnam and was maintained for many years by Alexander McCurdy, and I inherited and maintained, [was] that each student shall play a new piece from memory in organ class each week. And nothing like this exists any place else in the world, as far as I know. Paul wasn’t fazed by this at all. But after he’d been at Curtis, oh, perhaps six weeks or so into his first year, he came to me and said, “well, would it be all right”—he was very timid about this—“do you think it would matter, would people be upset, would it be all right if I were to play TWO pieces each week?” (laughter) And so I thought that would be just fine, and told him so, and so he did. From that time on, for the rest of his four years at Curtis, he played at least one new piece each week, plus another piece and sometimes repeating a piece from another time. Well the interesting thing is, it wasn’t very many weeks after that, one of his fellow students who’d become equally notorious in the organ world, Ken Cowan, wasn’t about to be upstaged. He started memorizing two pieces each week too! (laughter) It was quite a class—to have Paul Jacobs and Ken Cowan both studying at the same time.4

Following Curtis, Jacobs went on to study at Yale. His teacher at Yale, Thomas Murray, found Jacobs to be “a genuinely modest and seriously committed artist.” 5

Perhaps the greatest strength a musician can have is to be truly individual, and that surely describes Paul and the way he approaches everything. He identifies the music of specific composers as being the most enduring and ennobling, and then devotes himself to that music without reservation. In Paul’s case, that has meant Bach and Messiaen especially. By the time he left Yale with his Artist Diploma and Master of Music degree in 2003, he was adding Brahms and Reger to his agenda. With this as his core repertoire, he is fastidious about what he adds for “lighter music.” He knows how to popularize the organ in other ways. In fact, he was a very effective “pied piper” while at Yale, intentionally drawing large numbers of undergraduates and non-concert-going people to his programs. Much of that he does with a personal, one-to-one, friendly rapport. When he played his E. Power Biggs Memorial Recital at Harvard, for example, he calmly greeted members of the audience as they arrived! So in large measure, his approach has not been on the well-trod path of competitions or with showy music.6

Phillip Truckenbrod, whose agency manages Jacobs’ engagements, first heard of Paul Jacobs via his playing at an AGO convention and subsequently when Jacobs won the college division award of the Albert Schweitzer competition. Truckenbrod has mentioned how Jacobs has been noticed by the broader musical community, remarking that

A lot of the kudos which have come his way are not from organ sources, they’re from critics who don’t usually do much with organ, and people who have simply recognized a real talent—a talent comparable to some of the best talents in other fields of classical music. Resonating is one of the favorite words today—but he’s sort of resonating on that level.7

We wished to discover for ourselves a bit of what makes this fervent musician tick, and also to explore some of his views on the role of the organ and its music in the face of the popular culture juggernaut that challenges us all.

JR: In your very full life you have teaching at Juilliard, and recitals to play, which involve a good deal of travel. How do you balance these many demands?
PJ: I look to the life of George Frederick Handel for inspiration. Handel was not a man of leisure—he was very much married to his art. There are not enough hours in the day, and I feel obligated to my work, which is so fulfilling. Actually this ties in with my not owning a television, too. Who has the time? While I’m home visiting my mother and family in Pennsylvania, of course I do occasionally watch television. And you know, the more stations there are, the less that’s worthwhile. I actually have encouraged people to get rid of their television and get out there and live. Live deliberately!

JR: I’ve read that you first heard organ music when you were young, at church—a nun was playing and it inspired you. Prior to that, were you already listening to serious music? What sort of family culture do you come from?
PJ: Surprisingly, I do not come from a musical family, nor from a musical community, for that matter. As you know, I’m from Washington, Pennsylvania. My father is deceased; my mother is a nurse, and, while not musical herself, she did all that she could to support my fascination with music. She recognized early on that I possessed a very strong attraction to music. Even when I was three, she noticed that I would listen to classical music, or if there was a conductor on television, an orchestra concert, I was entranced. And I expressed interest at age five to study the piano. All of that led way to more serious study of music.

JR: And you began piano study when you were about six?
PJ: Yes, at six, and continued that through my first year at Curtis. Thirteen was when I began playing the organ. And I was fortunate in a relatively small town to have both a first-rate piano teacher and an organ teacher who nurtured my zeal for music and my musical education.

JR: Is that how your practice habits got a good start?
PJ: Yes, I would say so. For a young person to have strong feelings for classical music in the United States is generally not held in high regard by the young person’s peers.

JR: Indeed! I take it that you were not on three or four sports teams?
PJ: Not only that—I’m as unathletic as one could be. But you know, I didn’t really have any friends, growing up. I had difficulty, even through most of my time at Curtis, because I was an intense introvert. I’ve lightened my personality a bit over the last several years. And I don’t regret any of this, by the way—but I had no time for taking part in the banalities of life; and partying, or drinking, or just idle talk—it was of no interest to me. I would much prefer to be playing and studying beautiful music. Friday nights, even through Curtis, were spent practicing, late into the night, not out with friends. One has to become the music. You have to want it to become part of you, you have to go through an incredibly intense, rigorous lifestyle to get to this point, to earn the right to confidently express yourself.

JR: That’s a very interesting idea—that as an introvert you would bypass social opportunities, so that you could dig in deeper and express yourself publicly through music.
PJ: Oh, I think that’s absolutely the case. I think keyboardists tend to lead the most insular existences—pianists, organists, because our instruments are so complete. But the nature of being a serious musician demands a lifestyle that is centered around not only musical analysis but also self-analysis, and self-reflection—all of these things are intertwined. If one is to have a love affair, shall we say, with music, one must become as intimate with it as possible, and that demands many hours of the day—hours that could be spent doing other things with other people. I suppose it’s an abstract point, but it’s a very important point—musicians need that solitude. My solitude has always been very important to me, because it has allowed me to become very close with the art. It’s not necessarily loneliness—it can be, at times, but solitude doesn’t necessarily equal loneliness.

JR: Yes—alone is not equal to lonely. But I think of you as quite gracious. At the 2004 AGO convention you were at the door greeting people as they entered the church for your recital. That seemed very open and confident, not what I would associate with someone who was an introvert.
PJ: Yes, I feel genuinely obliged to thank people and to be gracious to them because they’re giving of themselves. Good musicians want to become vulnerable to an audience. You get out there and pour your heart and soul out, and you hope an audience will do the same: that they will allow the barriers to come down—emotional barriers, spiritual barriers, intellectual barriers, and just be there in the moment. It has to be this mutual vulnerability; everyone must be very giving and human and sensitive to what’s going on. So it’s important that the performer be approachable and not aloof. Again, I don’t think I’m contradicting myself. One can still have the solitude and not be aloof—you can still relate to people.

JR: Yes! Do you routinely greet people before a performance?
PJ: It varies, depending on how I feel. I like to, but not always. Quite frankly, oftentimes I like to take a walk—depending on where the venue is. One time, last season, the church was located in a wonderful neighborhood—it was very scenic. And I wanted to take a walk about an hour before. And—I got lost! I didn’t get back into the church until about two minutes before the concert. People were concerned!

JR: During your training years, what would be a typical amount of practice in a given day? I know you emphasize not merely the quantity but also the quality of it, but quantity needs to be there too.
PJ: Sure, absolutely, it does, and that’s an important point—you do have to have the quantity as well. I would like to get in between six to eight hours a day if I could.

JR: And I would imagine now that’s not as possible as it used to be?
PJ: It sometimes is not, that’s right, especially during the school year. However, this relates to organists, because we as organists often have to wear many hats—I should say those of us who are church musicians. One sometimes has to work with choirs, prepare music, and be an administrator, all of these sorts of things—and practice is neglected. And practice needs to be a crucial part. I might even say that practice needs to be THE crucial part of an artist’s life—a significant priority—every day, just as eating, sleeping, breathing.

JR: Prior to Curtis, were you musically active in your church or at that point were you focused on being an organist? Were you in your church choir?
PJ: Well, I actually became the organist of my home church when I was 15, and that was a very large church. The position was quite demanding; I had to play for six Masses a weekend, over 60 weddings a year—this was a parish of over 3500 families. And I had to accompany the choir; I was not the choir director, but I was there for all choir rehearsals, interacting with people much older than I was. But I loved it! I was in my element.

JR: Did you also have a church job in New York?
PJ: I did. And I still do. I was organist and choirmaster at Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church for two years; however, I became artist in residence beginning in the fall, mainly because I’m seldom there due to my performance schedule. I’m very fond of the people there, though, and I very much enjoy playing for services; it just is something I’m unable to do regularly. Being artist in residence and playing a few times a year seems to work well.

JR: You have done Bach and Messiaen marathons. What made you want to play their entire works for organ?
PJ: I see Bach and Messiaen as perhaps two incomparable composers for the organ. They also happen to be perhaps two of the most overtly religious composers in Western history, if you think about it. That has always been an enormous source of stimulation, and that element alone has attracted me to their music. Then on a purely compositional level they are two of the greatest composers to have lived—every note of Bach and Messiaen is in its proper place. They never waste a note; it’s music that is perfectly crafted. It is music that is as close to God as we could possibly experience in this life, and I wanted to become intimate with as much of it as I could—and that meant the entire canons of these composers.

JR: You have said that you like to just enjoy nature. That makes me think of Messiaen—what an amazing mind there, so far-reaching: Greek music, Indian modes, birdsong, other sounds in nature, that play into his concept of music. Do you incorporate any of this into your approach to Messiaen’s music?

PJ: Very much! Messiaen had the soul of a poet, there’s no question about that. And we as musicians need to have this insatiable desire, to be drawn to beauty. It’s not enough to sit down and play the organ well—and then go about life. Playing music should be an end in itself, not a means to an end. When I sit at the organ and play the Book of the Blessed Sacrament of Messiaen, the Livre du Saint Sacrement, it’s the end of the world, in the most glorious sense. One forgets about time, one forgets about all of these things—and there’s a purity of nature, a reality. As much as I adore the culture of the city, it’s artificial, on one level, because it’s all man-made. But nature is made directly by God.
You know, I did recently take one day off to go to Valley Forge Park, which I adore, and just walk and hike up the mountains and through the fields and into the woods. And it was balmy and humid and hot and quite cloudy as well. About halfway along my walk, the heavens opened up, and it started to pour. I didn’t have an umbrella, and I got soaked; but it wasn’t long before I realized that this is something to relish! It wasn’t a thunderstorm, I wasn’t in any danger of being struck by lightning; but just being showered upon, it was actually very wonderful; it was a beautiful experience. I always have a deep yearning to spend time in nature; that never ends.
Recently I was in Australia. I encountered some glorious birds and birdsong—in particular, on one SPECTACULAR occasion, I confronted a lyre-bird. My first introduction to the lyre-bird was through Messiaen’s symphonic work, Illuminations of the Beyond, the Éclairs sur l’au-delà. It’s the third movement that’s called “The Superb Lyre-Bird.” I was taking a walk with two of my hosts in a wooded area outside of Sydney; to encounter this lyre-bird, that inspired Messiaen, was an immensely moving experience.

JR: What are you working on now in terms of adding to your repertoire? What would you like to focus on in the future?
PJ: Even though I haven’t programmed much German Romantic repertoire—Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann—in the last few months, it’s music of the highest quality. I have become quite attracted to Reger’s music. I think that it is sorely underestimated, because it is difficult, not only for the player, but sometimes for the audience, and even music historians. It’s difficult to comprehend technically and musically, and it’s often played in a heavy-handed way that can make it unattractive, and this need not be the case.
I have broad interests in music—I play contemporary art music. I do have an interest in 20th-century music, not just with Messiaen, but also Hindemith, Langlais, Duruflé, Alain, and others. It is also important to support the creative spirit of contemporary times and I intend to commission works from several modern composers. I also delight in music earlier than Bach—Buxtehude, Couperin, De Grigny—exquisite music! I rejoice in playing the whole canon of the organ repertory. I would never want to be labeled a specialist; my interests are too extensive for that. I savor the ability to play a vast array of music.

JR: Do you read about the composers whose music you play? What do you do besides study scores?
PJ: Absolutely. Attempting to understand the personality behind the music is fascinating and illuminating. You want to understand everything you can about what you’re pursuing, not just sit down and crank out notes.

JR: Yes, and if you can understand the person and their time, it really helps shed light on the music, or the music shed light on the time.
PJ: That’s right! And not necessarily in a stylistic sense, although it can sometimes. I’m revisiting some older repertoire now, and I think I’m going to program some Franck this season or next. One of the first pieces I learned was the Prelude, Fugue and Variation—it’s a gorgeous work. And I might do some different things; I’m conceiving of the piece in a different way, perhaps with some different articulations, colors and sounds. If one were playing a Cavaillé-Coll, one could follow exactly what Franck indicated, and it’s wonderful. But there’s nothing wrong, too, with developing a different, even unorthodox concept of a piece, as long as the playing is expressive and compelling. That’s really the ultimate goal—it’s not about right and wrong, or what one should or shouldn’t do. Rule No. 1 is to MOVE the listener, and if the subsequent rules need to be broken to serve this first rule, so be it.

JR: How do you prepare a piece? Do you have any specific practice techniques? Transferring your knowledge of how to play on one instrument to another, in a very short span of time—is there anything specific you do?
PJ: Well, one needs to sleep with the score. That is to say, you need to study it away from the keyboard. Know it inside and out—live with the music. Understand what the music means on spiritual levels, philosophical levels, aesthetic levels—one needs to be able to look at music in so many ways. I do a lot of work at the piano, particularly much of the preliminary work—phrasing, or learning notes, things such as that. And sometimes one can discover new ideas about how to interpret a piece on a different instrument, then transfer those concepts to the other instrument. And one isn’t distracted, too, by all of the gadgets on the organ. When sitting at a piano or harpsichord, any instrument is sparse compared to the pipe organ. I think it is easier to focus with the piano or the harpsichord than it is with the organ, because there’s so much to consider: not only notes, but also registration, and all the other technical and mechanical aspects.

JR: But at some point, the organ’s gadgets will require your attention. How do you memorize registrational changes on an unfamiliar instrument, when you have very little time? How do you remember that on this instrument “I need to hit the Great to Pedal toe stud” and on the next instrument there is none? How do you remember all the mechanics, since you don’t use a registrant?
PJ: Well, that’s a bit of an enigma to me. Obviously, I become familiar with the instrument before the concert—then I associate the sound with my muscles—I don’t really know!
It MIGHT BE a little bit psychological, particularly if you can memorize notes. I find that students can usually do far more than they think they can. There are teachers who unintentionally beat students down, even intimidate, and have them frightened to take risks or challenges, or be creative, but I try to pull out the potential of students. Nothing is more rewarding than when they’re surprised about what they CAN do—for instance, memorization. I have some students who say, “Oh, I just can’t memorize,” and some students that it comes easy to. Well, there are ways to work at this—there aren’t short cuts, it’s difficult—but there are ways that one can improve.

JR: I remember being told that you have to practice the button-pushing as much as the key-pressing.
PJ: I focus with students on playing the organ beautifully. Not only the music, but the instrument, the console. You watch pianists or violinists—the grace with which they play! And many organists sit up there looking rather rigid and stiff. Particularly with consoles that are more visible these days, we have to physically be confident when we play. We don’t want to be overwhelmed by the organ, we want to be in perfect alignment with it. And you’re right—the idea of practicing pushing pistons, and pushing them at the right time—these technical things have to be practiced. But when you actually play them, you want the timing to be musical. You want to push them gracefully. All of these things have to serve the music; they can’t just be technical exercises.

JR: You spoke of people who are stiff sitting at the organ. Have you ever had a problem with muscle tension?
PJ: Well, I haven’t, other than maybe practicing. When one does a lot of practicing, fatigue can set in, muscles can become a little sore. There are organists who think that you have to sit completely still, that you have to be able to balance a glass of milk on your hand, you don’t want any unnecessary movements. Well, some people are naturally quieter at the console, and some people are a little freer, they move more. And that’s ok! You have to do what is comfortable.
Certainly with beginners you have to be very careful about extraneous motion and movement. At a more advanced stage, you develop your own musical personality, and your physical personality when you’re playing, and it’s ok to move. Just move the body! Just as long as you’re relaxed. And if being relaxed means being still, so be it. If it means moving, that’s fine too. But there are many organists that sit almost as if they’re frightened to move, they’re intimidated by pushing buttons, making sure everything’s right on. If you don’t revel in what you’re doing, if the technical demands of playing the organ are overwhelming you, you won’t enjoy it. And you need to enjoy! It seems so obvious and logical—you need to not only musically and mentally enjoy the music, but you need to physically enjoy the music while you’re playing. There’s nothing wrong with that.

JR: Our culture trivializes music—for the most part, it’s considered background noise, playing while one does something else. People prefer music that is short, simply constructed, and any melody must be very simple and accessible. Given this, how can we as organists reach people? Schools are eliminating music instruction; serious organ music is scarcer in churches—there are a lot of organists who can’t play it, or won’t; and fewer people are going to church. So the opportunities for exposure to things like Bach and Messiaen are fewer and fewer. How do we react to that? What can we do?
PJ: Anyone who says that he or she cares about music or values it has an obligation to take action. And what I have found is that many people do acknowledge these problems—at least those of us who play music and listen to music. So what is the next step? I see most of popular culture as extremely corrosive to what we try to accomplish as musicians. And I think we organists first need to put ourselves in a larger context, and start thinking in broader terms. I do find that our profession is far too isolated. We organists need to get out of the loft and listen to operas, listen to chamber music, go to hear the symphony—we need music, in all of its manifestations. It is, however, possible to really like music and to be intrigued by it at a high level, without being passionate about it. Those of us who are passionate about music need to challenge those who are merely intrigued by it, to make them even more sensitive. This is what we have to do: build an army of individuals who possess an unwavering commitment to the creation of a musically literate society.
Popular culture is extremely destructive to beauty because it serves the opposite purpose of what true music and art serve—and that is, it numbs us. Because music is in the background and not the foreground, one is not expected to listen to it with this full spirit, being, mind—whatever term you wish to use. And that essentially desensitizes. Art music is supposed to make one more sensitive to beauty and life. That is to say, we learn how to listen carefully and deliberately—for there are so many alluring details in the music that desire our full undivided attention.

JR: If we say we care, then we have an obligation to take action.
PJ: And that is to say, to challenge the culture. I see my obligation as an artist—I should say, one facet—is to challenge aggressively this corrosive popular culture. What does that mean? Write letters to newspapers and other organizations, make noise about what you do. If you care, do you care enough to share what you profess to care about? Do you want to share it with someone else? If we value something, and we see the good in something, isn’t it logical to want to share it? I’ve become dismayed because I see quite clearly the enormous potential of a society which truly values music—the potential is there, and we see it on an individual level; we see what happens when a young person discovers the power of music in a very real and profound way. It’s something to celebrate. I have NO faith in the popular culture, but I have boundless faith at the individual level. I think that keeps me going, keeps me inspired, and wanting to continue living.

JR: Well, all right. If an audience member heard a serious program, and wasn’t used to that, how would you respond if they said they wanted to hear something that was easier to listen to?
PJ: Well, I would have a conversation with that person, first of all. I would be very patient initially. If the person said “I don’t understand that,” or “I don’t appreciate that,” that’s a fair statement, and it’s not making a judgment. It’s even fair to say “I don’t care for that.” But judging something that you don’t understand isn’t fair, and I guess I would attempt to help the person see this.
I remember having an interview for NPR’s Morning Edition, last year before my Messiaen program. And it was very clear to me that the person who interviewed me did very little preparation for the interview. I think she knew practically nothing about the organ, knew even less about the composer. And she said to me, “There are those who don’t like the organ. I’m wondering what you might say to that.” And my feeling was, you know, we live in a culture that sits back and says, “Prove to me that this is worthwhile”—that X is worthwhile, or that this has value, or that I should do this. Prove to me, show me—and they don’t take any initiative. And my feeling is, pick up a book yourself and read. Or take an organ or piano lesson. YOU have to take some initiative. You’re right, we’re so used to diluting everything these days. I find it troubling that many organists don’t seem to possess this zeal, this call to action. They possess it at some level, there’s some awareness of it, but it doesn’t determine their behavior, or their actions, or their everyday conversations with people, I don’t know how else to say it. There’s no fire in the belly—there has to be.

JR: You mentioned that we organists need to get out and listen to other musical forms, such as the symphony. What other music do you listen to?
PJ: We could be here all night! I will say quite clearly, I do not listen to popular entertainment. I have no interest in that sort of thing. I see that as corrosive, and as an artist and a musician, I feel obligated to challenge what our culture accepts as music. What do I listen to? I listen to six centuries of music—from plainchant and Ockeghem through Dallapiccola and Debussy. Recently, I’ve been listening a great deal to Mozart, perhaps more than I ever have in my life—specifically to the piano concerti and the sonatas. This summer I’ve rediscovered this music—specifically Ashkenazy playing the piano concerti, DeLarrocha the sonatas. And I’m very fond of the great Romantic repertoire—Mahler’s symphonies, Verdi’s operas, and Brahms’s chamber music. In the twentieth century, I find Alban Berg’s music quite voluptuous. But yes, I have very broad tastes, with the exception that I’m not fond of most popular music. I maintain that Western art music is the pinnacle. But of course, that would be challenged by more and more people today.

JR: During your time at Yale and at Curtis, what were you able to learn? I have the feeling that you were already technically skilled by the time you got to Curtis, so you didn’t need to work on technique. Is that correct?
PJ: No, not really. Certainly I would consider registration part of technique. That was something that I learned a great deal from both John Weaver and Thomas Murray—with regards to console control, and how to bring out the best from an instrument. Both John Weaver and Thomas Murray allowed me to be my own musical voice; they didn’t try to impose their own style upon me. And that is something that I have taken from them, and applied to my own style of teaching. I’m very grateful to both of them.

JR: How are you enjoying teaching at Juilliard?
PJ: Very much. And I should add that with the current situations of schools—such as Northwestern and of course the New England Conservatory—the situation at Juilliard could not be any better. The president of Juilliard, Joseph Polisi, has been extremely supportive of my vision for the department. And the talent that exists in the department is formidable. During a visit last year to organ class, Michael Barone referred to the department as a “hot shop!”

JR: You have indicated that the department would not really be growing in numbers, that it would be limited to a certain size. Is that correct?
PJ: It fits in with the school, because the school itself is small. Juilliard prides itself on being a small school, and our department is the size of some of the wind departments—flute, oboe—relatively similar in size. Ten organ majors is generally a good number for the Juilliard community. It could be bumped up a little, I suppose, and it might be, but not much.

JR: Do you find any difference either in outlook or ability or approaches between your students and those that you work with in master classes?
PJ: With master classes, one can be all over the map; there’s such variety. One thing that I insist on with each of my students is that they develop their own musical signature, right from the start. We don’t want any clones in the department—and there are none. I think if one visits the school and hears the department play, one will encounter rich variety and imagination in playing and in styles. And I encourage this—I insist upon it. I believe that a teacher at Juilliard needs to be quite demanding with the students, but the students are highly motivated and always rise to the occasion. I’m very proud of them.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned? Any more marathons, any more things of that nature?
PJ: I performed the Messiaen cycle again in Los Angeles, at the end of October, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels. But with regards to something different, I look forward to pursuing new repertoire. Actually I am considering offering a Reger marathon, a Reger cycle—but not in the immediate future!

JR: Will you be making any more recordings?
PJ: Oh, yes, yes! I’ve neglected recording, simply because of other projects and such. But I am very keen on recording Messiaen and Reger in the near future.
I want to concentrate on other things right now, these being performing and certainly learning other repertoire. The snowball keeps growing larger, but I love it. This work provides such joy and fulfillment in my life, and meaning.

JR: Well, Paul, I will let you go get a cup of tea! Thank you so much for your time.
PJ: It’s been a pleasure talking with you.