On Teaching

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work on a pedal-playing method that will probably be available in the fall of 2008. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at . Expanded versions of these columns with references and links, along with a collection of pedal exercises, can be found at .

Pedal playing, part II: opening exercises
Last month I closed by stating that there are three reliable ways of finding notes at the pedal keyboard with accuracy, namely: 1) finding notes absolutely, in relation only to your position on the bench; 2) finding the next note that a given foot has to play in relation to where the other foot just was; and 3) finding the next note that a given foot has to play in relation to where that foot last was or what that last foot just did. I also said that while all three of these are useful and necessary, it is the last one that is actually the most useful and the best source of really secure, comfortable pedaling. This month I want to elaborate on that idea, and then to describe a beginning exercise based on this third approach.
For the moment, we are concerned only with the use of the toes in pedaling. This is emphatically not because I believe in eliminating the use of the heel or in restricting it in principle—as noted last month, I consider every part of the foot to be fair game for playing pedal keys. Rather it is because the gesture of pointing with the toe is more natural and basic as a way of using the foot, and therefore should be the beginning and the basis of pedal technique. In fact, although “toes-only” pedaling is quite rightly linked to older repertoire and performance practice (17th and 18th century, approximately), even in the 19th and 20th centuries, without any specifically “historical” intent, it was often recognized that the toes were the logical place to start in teaching pedal playing. For example, the influential and often reprinted organ method of Sir John Stainer begins its pedal playing work with the toes alone. Once any student is fully proficient at finding note patterns at the pedal keyboard with his or her toes—given that the technique is fluid and comfortable—it will be easy and natural to use the heel for some or even many notes. Playing with the heel is, in a way, a special case of finding a note with a foot in relation to what that foot just did, and it can be very reliable. Of course, there are musical and historical considerations that might argue for or against the use of heel in any given situation, and I will discuss these at some length in a later column.
It is more natural and intuitive for a person to judge or know how far he or she has just moved one foot than to know spontaneously how far one foot is from the other or how far one foot will be from the other after it has been moved. It is this intuitive judgment that makes it possible for us to drive cars knowing that we will hit the brake when we need to. In order to tell how far one foot is from the other foot it is necessary to link the two feet together by creating some sort of juxtaposition of the legs, for example by keeping the knees more or less together or by keeping the upper legs more or less parallel and roughly a constant distance apart. All such constraints on the position that a player assumes on the organ bench are perhaps acceptable or even comfortable and good for some students or players. But they are also the main source of the discomfort—initially physical but then increasingly mental as well—that many organists and prospective organists feel with the instrument. In fact they are the reason that a steady stream of interested students end up giving up the organ, as I mentioned in last month’s column. Of course some of the physical constraints that are suggested as ways of orienting the two feet to each other are intended only for the beginning of study and are meant to be modified or dropped later on. However, they are still often damaging to the process of a student’s becoming comfortable with the instrument initially, and the success that students have moving past this discomfort varies considerably. Organizing the learning of pedal facility and technique around an awareness of what each foot is doing with respect to its own position allows the student to avoid this sort of problem altogether, and also leads to a remarkably secure mastery of the pedal keyboard.
Musically, of course, any pedal part is the sum of what the right foot plays and what the left foot plays. A listener does not know, and probably does not care, which foot is playing what. However, from a technical point of view, a pedal part consists of two separate lines, one for the right foot and one for the left foot, just as any keyboard piece consists of a left hand part and a right hand part. It often makes sense to analyze the technical work required to learn a keyboard piece as consisting of the two separate tasks required of the two hands. It also often makes sense to analyze a pedal part as the two separate tasks required of the two feet. Pedal lines approached this way usually reveal themselves to be conceptually very simple. Something like 80% of all notes in the pedal repertoire are generated by one foot or the other doing one of the following three simple actions: repeating a note, moving one step, or moving two steps. This is a much simpler technical picture than that presented by the note-surface of pedal lines, in which of course there are all sorts of intervals and all sorts of patterns as to which foot is playing what. (For a couple of classic cases of this, see the two long pedal solos from the Bach F-major Toccata and the pedal part from the Widor Toccata). It makes sense for an organist to pick any pedal line apart, to see which foot is playing what and to look for simple, memorable, or useful patterns. I will return later to this idea as it applies to experienced organists hoping to improve their happiness with their level of pedal mastery. However, this approach makes even more sense for a beginning organ student. A simple set of exercises will enable a new student to take the intuitive sense of where a foot is in relation to where it has just been, train it to be increasingly precise, and tie it in solidly to the particular logistics of the pedal keyboard. One important benefit of learning pedal playing this way is that after only a very few exercises that feel like exercises, any student is able to use essentially any pedal line as practice material. This makes it easy to keep things interesting for the student and for the teacher, and allows the student to have a satisfying sense of being connected from the very beginning to the world of real music and to the tradition of great organists through the ages.
In keeping with all of the above, the first thing that I ask a new student to do in preparing to work on pedal playing is to sit in the middle of the organ bench in a way that is comfortable, relaxed, and informal. Most people have been trained—subliminally if in no other way—to arrange themselves more or less “at attention” in situations that seem even vaguely formal, including the situation of a music lesson or a musical performance. However, any posture that needs to be maintained consciously and that involves any discernible use of muscles is probably at risk for creating tension and should be avoided. Of course it is possible to imagine an exaggeratedly “informal” posture—slumped over to one side, for example—that would indeed have to be corrected. I have, however, never once actually encountered a situation in which a student’s natural, comfortable posture presented any sort of problem for organ playing. It is important to start off with the bench at a good height. The height is probably right if the act of utterly relaxing the legs and back—completely letting go, as if flopping down on a couch—does not quite make the feet inadvertently play pedal keys. This will prevent the student from having to use muscle tension to keep the legs and feet up away from the pedal keyboard while playing.
Once a student is seated comfortably on the bench I suggest the following:
1) Find the lowest “A” on the pedal keyboard. It is fine to do this by looking, for now.
2) Play that note with the left foot, using whatever part of the foot can most comfortably push the key down fairly close to the nearest raised keys but without touching them. This will (essentially) always be part of the toe region of the foot, and will be the outside of the foot for some players and the inside for some. (For a very few students with quite small feet it will be the very tip of the foot.) The question of which particular part of the foot can most comfortably address the key will depend on the angle at which the foot is approaching the key, which will in turn depend on the student’s posture on the bench. The more the student tends to keep his or her knees together, the more likely it is that the inside of the foot will be the most comfortable for playing this A; the more the student lets his or her knees drift apart the more likely it is that the outside of the foot will be more comfortable. Neither one is right or wrong; there is no reason to favor one over the other. It is very important to let the student figure out, starting from an individually comfortable posture, what details are right for that student as to foot position for playing particular notes.
(Note: by the time the student has played and released the A once or twice, he or she should quit looking at the pedal keyboard, and rarely look again).
3) Ask the student to play A then B. This should be done slowly and lightly, without either slithering the foot along the keyboard or snapping the foot high into the air between the two notes. The foot should trace a small arc that moves directly from the center of one key to the center of the next. If the student misses the B, then on the next attempt he or she should compensate in the opposite direction from the miss. If he or she played A–C, then on the second attempt he or she should think “I should move my foot a tiny bit less far.” If the mistake was the other way then the thought should also be the other way. This simple way of thinking about the logistics of missed notes is remarkably effective for correcting them, in this context and in others.
4) Once the student has successfully played back and forth between A and B several times, ask the student to play the notes of an A natural-minor scale, up and down, very slowly and lightly. The lower four notes (A–B–c–d) should be in the left foot, the upper four (e–f–g–a) should be in the right foot. For each note, the student should make an appropriate decision as to foot position and what part of the foot actually plays the note based on the approach described in 2) above. It is important that the student keep everything very slow so as to have plenty of time between each two notes to think about all the details, without any need to panic.
5) Once this scale seems comfortable—slow, light, even, accurate, and feeling easy to the student—the next step is to play an A major scale in exactly the same way. This, of course, introduces less regularly spaced one-step intervals. and so is more challenging. It is normal, in fact nearly universal, for a student to land in between e and f coming down from f-sharp, for example. The way to correct this is again simply to say, on the next time through that moment, “I must move my foot a tiny bit farther.” This works remarkably well.

This simple, basic scale-based exercise is extraordinarily effective in training the sense of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step. This is the foundation of secure pedal facility. Next month I will introduce exercises that train that same sense in more complicated musical contexts, and expand the scope of what we are asking each foot to do.■

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at . Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at .

Relax
At the end of last month’s column, I said that next time I would talk about relaxation, hand position, and posture, and would begin to address the business of teaching experienced pianists to play organ or harpsichord. Let’s start by discussing the latter of these, then the extraordinary or even transcendent importance of relaxation, a little bit about its relation to posture and hand position, and the role that the concept of relaxation can play in teaching.
Among the students who come to us, those who are already experienced pianists but not organists or harpsichordists present special opportunities. This is made clear by the question that a new student of this sort will almost always ask at the first lesson: “Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I already play piano?” The answer is “both.” The good part, of course, is the skill and experience in choosing fingerings, in practicing, and in just plain playing note patterns at the keyboard. This is a tremendous leg up, and can save a vast amount of time and work. The bad part is made up of any technical habits that are proper to the piano but unsuitable for the organ or the harpsichord. These usually have to do with weight or force, or with playing too far into the keys, but may also include over-reliance on the damper pedal or an approach to articulation that does not translate well from piano to other keyboard instruments, or various listening habits that, if unaltered, can limit a player’s ability to use organ or harpsichord sound expressively. These problems can, in theory, form a tremendous set of obstacles that would indeed negate the advantages from the student’s pre-existing keyboard facility.
Often, out of an understandable desire to not neglect the artistic in favor of the crassly practical, pianists who come for organ or harpsichord lessons will exaggerate in their own minds the obstacles or problems created by their piano-oriented technique and feel reluctant to embrace the advantages that their keyboard training gives them. Many students start out with an almost morbid fear of sounding like “a pianist trying to play the organ” rather than “an organist.” The good news is that it is actually quite easy to overcome all of these disadvantages and to reap the full benefit of any basically sound keyboard training. The key to doing this efficiently and indeed easily is relaxation.
This relaxation is essentially physical: that is, the complete absence of tension in all of the muscles, tendons, etc. that are directly involved in playing, the substantial absence of tension in the rest of the body, and the assumption of a posture or body position that can be maintained without conscious thought and without muscular effort. The ideal is that the player be as relaxed—physically—while playing as he or she would want to be while “relaxing” in his or her favorite and least demanding way: sitting back in an arm chair, lounging on the beach, taking a nice long bath, or whatever.
One exercise for getting to know the feeling of physical relaxation as it applies to the hands is this. Stand up in a posture that seems comfortable (not formal or “at attention”). Allow your arms to hang loosely at your sides. Now raise one arm up to about waist height, without raising or otherwise tightening the shoulders, letting the elbow move out to the side and letting the forearm point more or less toward where you are looking (probably tilted inward a bit: it should feel natural and comfortable). Do this as gently as possible. Let your hand hang loosely at the end of your arm. Now move your forearm up and down several inches, not too quickly, letting your hand flap up and down loosely without attempting to control it in any way. The feeling that you get in your hand by doing this fairly briefly is a lot like the way the hand should feel at the keyboard when it is quite relaxed. (If you do this exercise for too long, say more than twenty seconds at a time, it can get wearing on your arm and begin to create the kind of tension it is trying to expunge.)
(A longer discussion of this exercise can be found, along with several further exercises, at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <www.pekc.org&gt;.)
There are several ways in which extreme physical relaxation helps with organ and harpsichord playing. First, on instruments that have a touch that is in any way sensitive—that is, tracker organs with a good responsive action and at least somewhat flexible winding, and some but not all harpsichords—there is pretty good agreement that the sonority produced by a fluid touch without tension and as light as the action allows will be the most beautiful and the most useful musically. (Of course this is subjective and therefore subject to disagreement. I am reporting what has seemed to me to be a near unanimous reaction that I’ve observed over the years.) On organs and harpsichords whose sonority cannot be influenced directly by touch (non-tracker organs, tracker organs with a heavy or unresponsive action and some harpsichords) a light tension-free touch is neither good nor bad for the sound as such.
A light fluid touch also makes it possible to play faster, and for fast playing to sound less labored and thus more musically charismatic. One way to test this away from the keyboard is through the normal act of drumming one’s fingers on a table. (That is, in keyboard terms, playing 5-4-3-2 or 5-4-3-2-1 on the surface of the table over and over again quickly.) If you keep your hand very light while doing this you can do it very fast, almost infinitely fast, certainly faster than you would almost ever play notes at a keyboard. As you begin to tighten your hand up the drumming becomes slower and the “notes” become more distinct from one another, sort of clunkier.
However, the most important role of physical relaxation in organ and harpsichord playing—and the reason I said last month that I sometimes consider it to be the only technical imperative in playing these instruments—is that a very relaxed hand can make much more subtle distinctions of timing and articulation than can a hand with any tension in it. Whether these distinctions are being used to create accent through varied articulation or to shape a line through slight rubato or to create just the right amount of overlapping to adjust to a particular acoustic or to stagger the releases of the notes in a chord to create a gentle diminuendo or anything else, tension in the hand will force the player to choose between starkly different alternatives, whereas a truly relaxed hand will allow the player to make infinitely slight distinctions, while of course also easily permitting larger distinctions to be made.
There is a lot more to be said about this. In fact it will be the background to much of what is discussed in this column, and there will be more columns about it specifically. Right now, however, let us return to the former piano player who wishes to learn organ. I have found over the years that introducing such a student to the idea of relaxation—extreme relaxation—as early as the very first lesson is a remarkably effective way to do two important things: first, to allay the student’s anxiety about the process of adapting to the new kind of touch; second, to develop a very plausible—or occasionally even really good—organ or harpsichord touch right off the bat.
This does not mean, of course, that the student will instantly have nothing more to learn or will immediately become a knowledgeable or virtuosic performer of all sorts of different repertoire. It will, however, create, very promptly and with little or no anguish, a platform upon which the student can build. This will allow the student to take advantage of the years of piano training without falling prey to the actual problems that piano technique can create for aspiring organists or harpsichordists or to the anxiety created by fear of those problems.
Here are some practical steps when beginning to help a pianist study organ or harpsichord:
1) At the first lesson invite the student to sit at the keyboard and play something—anything—that he or she already knows. This might well not be a piece that is really appropriate to the instrument. This does not matter in the least. In fact, since part of the purpose of this beginning is to allay anxiety, it can be better if the issue of the piece’s sounding good or right on the instrument doesn’t even exist. (Of course most pianists have some Bach pieces under their fingers. These will almost always adapt well to any keyboard.) In any case, do remind the student that this is in no way a performance or audition, and that it doesn’t matter for now how the piece actually sounds. The piece should not be too fast, so if it is intrinsically fast, ask the student to play it under tempo for now.
2) Ask the student to sit in as relaxed and comfortable a way as possible. At the organ this might involve hooking the feet back under the bench or even letting them rest on and mutely play some pedal keys. At the harpsichord this might involve leaning back in the chair or slumping forward a bit or sitting with one foot up on the other knee. Some of these things might have to change later on—though I have a strong bias in favor of any player’s sitting in whatever way is most natural and comfortable for that person’s physique and habits—but for the moment the only role of the whole body other than the hands is to be subjectively comfortable and to provide the student with no distraction or worry.
3) As the student begins to play, remind him or her to think about nothing other than playing lightly. In particular, this means explicitly not caring about wrong notes and, especially, not caring if some notes actually fail to sound because the student has not pushed them down hard enough. I always tell students that if, when first working on organ or harpsichord, they play so lightly that some notes don’t sound, they will discover that after a short time this is simply no longer happening. They will have discovered, subconsciously, the right actual amount of force to play the keys, without having lost the feeling of lightness and fluidity. (I have actually never known this not to happen.) Any preoccupation at the very beginning with making sure that every note sounds will almost certainly lead to the “safe” adoption of a too strong and insufficiently relaxed touch.
4) Concerning hand position, the most important thing to mention to the student at this stage is that it is a good idea to keep the hand more or less in a line with the arm along the side-to-side axis, that is, not to cock the wrist in or out to any appreciable degree. This can be made difficult by certain fingerings, so as a practical matter the student should simply skip any (already learned) passages that seem to make it necessary to turn the hand in or out more than a little bit. In the next phase—that of learning new pieces—this idea can be taken into account from scratch in making fingering choices. I don’t believe that it matters, at this stage, where the hand is at on the up-and-down axis, as long as the shoulders and arms are comfortable. Issues such as high or low wrists or the position of the elbow will fall into place naturally or can be easily dealt with later on. It can be useful to remind the student that the fingers need not be parallel to the keys. Rather, the tips of the fingers must present themselves to the keys with the rest of the hand in a physiologically comfortable position.
For many students, one session along these lines is a revelation. They immediately hear themselves making beautiful sounds, and they hear any articulations that they make as being subtle and musical, not abrupt or jarring. Of course this is just a beginning, but it is a very good one. Needless to say, pianists coming to the organ also must begin to explore the joys of pedal playing. We will turn to that subject beginning with next month’s column.

Organ Method V

This follows directly from last month’s column. The approach to learning pedal playing that I am outlining here is not materially different from that in my columns on pedal playing between November 2007 and February 2008. Here it is recast as something addressed directly to the student, which the student can use with or without a teacher. This month’s column simply introduces the notion of learning the feeling of moving a foot from one note to the adjacent note. This feeling is, as far as I can tell, the best foundation upon which to build solid pedal facility.

Looking at the pedals while playing

Everyone is tempted to look at the feet, either from time to time or quite regularly. However, each time that you look at your feet while you are working on a pedal exercise or trying to learn a pedal part you deprive yourself of a chance to become more secure in your pedal playing. You might or might not increase your chance of accurately finding the note that you are looking for. Security at the pedal keyboard comes from a firm inner sense of the physical shapes and distances involved—the kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard. Any time that you do not rely on that sense, you fail to develop it further. Of course, the reason that players, especially beginners, are temped to look at the feet is the fear that this physical sense of where the pedal keys are will fail. In fact, this sense can become extraordinarily reliable: it must, since the practice of looking at the pedal keyboard can be quite problematic if it is used at all regularly. (Looking at the feet makes it easy to lose your place in the music, and it tends to introduce small hesitations into playing.) The pedal exercises and learning strategy used here will enable you to rely on the kinesthetic sense from the very beginning—the sequence of exercises has been designed with that particularly in mind. In turn, relying on that sense from the very beginning will make it reliable. You will be comfortable looking at your feet very little indeed—or not at all. This approach asks you from the very beginning to understand what is going on physically in your pedal playing, and to participate quite consciously and actively in the creation of your own particular pedal technique. This has the added advantage of making the process more interesting.

Heel and toe

Playing pedals means pushing down pedal keys with the feet. In theory any part of the foot can be used to depress a pedal key, but the front and back of the foot—the toe area and the heel—are the most useful. Further, the toe area, at least, can be thought of as divided into parts: the inside of the foot, or big toe side, the outside of the foot, or little toe side, and the front or center of the foot, under the middle toes—the tip of the shoe. (The heel area could be thought of as divided into similar regions, however the shape and size of the heel makes it more natural to think of it as a continuum.) All of these areas are completely suitable for playing pedal keys. The choice of which particular part of the foot to use in playing which notes is referred to as pedaling—the pedal version of fingering. As with fingering, pedaling choices are influenced by many factors. Some of these are directly about the music: the shape of a musical line, considerations of tempo, articulation, and phrasing. However, pedaling choices are also affected by logistic factors that are independent of the music itself: the height of the bench, the exact shape and size of the pedal keyboard—including details such as the size of the sharps/flats in relation to the naturals—and the physique and habitual posture of the player. Pedaling choices for the same passage of music, and overall tendencies in pedaling choices, will vary from one player to the next depending on all of the factors mentioned above; plus different types of repertoire require different approaches to pedaling.

Flexing the foot

The physical gesture involved in playing a pedal key with the toes is a gesture that can take advantage of the full flexing ability of the foot. Playing with the heel can take much less advantage of that flexing, since the heel is located much closer to the ankle, and does not move up and down very much with the flexing of the foot. Playing with the heel is, therefore, a gesture that is controlled somewhat more with the leg. It is easier, in the earlier stages of learning to play pedals, to execute toe pedaling with a relaxed and fluid motion than it is heel playing. (In the long run it is just as possible to play in a relaxed and fluid manner with the heels: that is just something that comes about more naturally after a player is familiar with the pedal keyboard and comfortable on the organ bench.) It is also the case that the gesture of flexing the foot and, in a sense, reaching with the toes is a gesture that feels like pointing: it is easy and natural for even someone who is not yet a trained organist to know by feel where the toes are and where they are pointing. Again, it is not a problem—it is not difficult—to develop an equally secure sense of this for the heels: it just naturally comes later. Therefore, the first several pedal exercises that I provide are all meant to be played with the toes alone. Heel playing will be introduced shortly.

If we leave aside any artificial assistance, such as looking, or bumping the feet along the keys until you find the one you want, there are three ways to get a pedal note right: 

1) finding a note in relation to where the foot that will play that note last was; 

2) finding a note with one foot in relation to where the other foot is; and 

3) finding a note “from scratch,” in relation to where your body is on
the bench. 

The first of these—which includes both moving the toe area of the foot from one note to another, and playing a note with the heel when you have just played another note with the toe—is the most reliable, and the most powerful tool for developing secure pedal facility. The other two come into play once in a while. The exercises and practice techniques that we start with here rely on—and strengthen—the first way of finding notes. Later on we will address the other two. 

You have already noted which pedal key each of your feet rests on (or over) as you sit in a relaxed posture on the organ bench. Draw a pedal stop or two: make sure that you include at least one 8′ stop. Now, without looking, flex one of your feet in such a way that the toe area of that foot moves downward and plays something. What do you hear? You might hear a note; you might hear two adjacent notes. Notice what part of your foot actually touched and depressed the key. In general, most of us cannot play pedal notes “straight,” that is, with the tip of the shoe. Most feet are too wide for that. If you hear yourself playing two notes at once, then you need to turn your foot slightly so that one side or the other is touching the key. In general, people with wider feet need to turn more than people with narrower feet. There are some players whose feet are in fact narrow enough that they can play with the very end of the foot. If you find yourself to be one of those people, then you can ignore most of what I have to say about turning the foot to one side or another.

But assuming that you do need to turn your foot, which way should you turn? The fundamental answer to this is “whichever way is more comfortable.” Usually, in any given situation, one way will be definitely more comfortable than the other. If this is not the case—if they both feel much the same—then either will probably be fine. In general, however, if the note that you want to play is outside wherever your knee is then it will feel comfortable to turn the foot out and play from the big toe side; if the note that you want to play is inside wherever your knee is then it will probably work best to turn the foot in and play from the little toe side. (Outside means higher for a right-foot note and lower for a left-foot note; inside mean the opposite.) In first playing the note that lies under each foot, try turning each way. Is one easier or more comfortable? Which one? Does it conform to what I have suggested (outside/inside) or does it feel different from what that would predict? (Once you have turned each foot enough to play its note cleanly, make sure that you know what note it is. If you have perfect pitch, you will know. If not, play around on a manual keyboard until you match the pitch, then see what note it is. This is practice in not looking at your feet!) Fortunately, there are only two directions in which to turn your foot in order to play a pedal note, so it is always possible to try both and see which one works better. (Of course, by the time you perform a piece you should have worked this out long before.) There is enough variation among different people in the comfortable positioning of the knees—that is, in how close together or far apart the knees naturally fall while sitting on the organ bench—that it is not a good idea to try to come up with a general rule for which way a player should turn the feet for which notes. You the student must discover this for yourself. Furthermore, it is not something that is fixed. That is, you will not always turn each foot the same way for a given note, every time you play that note. Some particular musical or technical context may cause you to position a knee differently, which will change the angle of the foot, or something about the direction of a musical line—where the foot is going next—may affect things, perhaps in ways that can’t be predicted in advance.

From one note to another

Once you have played your one note with each foot, play the next natural note up and the next natural note down. You should achieve this in the following way: gently release the first note; then move the foot—in the air just above the pedal keyboard—through a very small arc that you guess might take it to the space over the next (natural) note. When you have arrived at that place, again flex your toes downward and play the note over which you have arrived. Let your ears tell you whether you have indeed come to the next note up or down. It is fairly likely that you will have gone too far. This is common, in fact almost universal at this stage. The gesture of moving one foot from one note to the next note is one of the smallest things that we humans ever do with our feet; it takes some getting used to. If you have gone too far—if the new note that you have just played is a third away from your starting note, or even more—then go back to your starting note and try again. Move less far. Don’t think that you have to know exactly how much less far you need to move before you try it: just move less far. This thought and gesture will probably bring you to the correct note. It might lead you to drop down into the space between your starting note and the note that you were hoping to play next. If so, then go back to the opening note and this time move your foot a little bit farther. 

This thought process is crucial to the work of learning to play pedals. In learning and in practicing you are trying things out. Everything will not be right the first time. The good news is that if you play a wrong note in working on a pedal exercise or a pedal part, only one of two things can have gone wrong: either you moved your foot too far or you didn’t move it far enough. Furthermore, you can tell by listening which of these things happened. The way to arrive at correct practicing is simply to go back to the starting point, and move the foot again, correcting that motion in whichever direction is indicated. If you went too far before, go less far now; if you didn’t go far enough before, go farther now. It is not necessary to try to calculate how much farther or less far to go: in fact, it is counterproductive to get too specific about it. It is always a small amount. 

This way of thinking about it always gives good results. 

After you have become comfortable moving each foot from the starting note (the note over which the foot naturally falls) to the adjacent notes up and down, try the same thing elsewhere on the keyboard. Move each foot around, to random places, in both directions. Then, after playing a note, move up, back, down, always moving by one step at a time, always moving the foot just up off the key that you have been playing and through the air to the next note. Always pay attention to the comfortable tilting of the foot to one side or the other. Note that this may change from one note to the adjacent note. Never accept an uncomfortable foot.

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

Organ Method I

Note: This is the first excerpt from my Organ Method, as discussed in last month’s column. It is the Preface to that book, and, as such, is written with the audience of prospective readers and users of the book in mind. I strongly welcome any and all feedback from readers of this column.

Preface

This book is written and presented with one concrete purpose at its core. It is intended to offer to anyone who is interested a clear and reliable path towards becoming a highly competent player of the organ. I would like to examine a few of the specific implications of that concept.

1) First of all—and, in a way, most important of all—is the notion of “anyone who is interested.” One of the greatest joys of my years as a teacher of organ and harpsichord has been the discovery that no two people who develop an interest in something do so for the same reasons, with the same background, or with the same expectations. Any approach to teaching that suggests, even unwittingly, that some of those reasons, backgrounds, and expectations are more suitable than others will have the effect of excluding or discouraging a portion of those who are—or were, initially—interested. In the world of organ playing, some of the notions that can end up excluding or discouraging potential students are those derived from the world of music and music teaching in general: that after a rather young age it is essentially too late to become a truly competent and skillful musician, or that anyone who cannot develop perfect pitch, or become a good singer, or learn to take dictation cannot be or should not be a musician, or in general that only those “touched by the gods” can master the mysteries of understanding and playing great music. 

I am well aware that, fortunately, very few music teachers or working musicians hold this last attitude. Unfortunately, however, I also know very well that many prospective students do—people are scared off by it. No one should be. Some other of these notions are specific to the world of the organ, and many of them are indeed inadvertent or unwitting. (Certainly very few, if any, music teachers want to exclude or discourage anyone.) The assumption that anyone who wants to become an organist should specifically first become a pianist is one such notion. (It is one to which I am personally sensitive, as it almost derailed me from pursuing organ in my teenage years.) Certain approaches to the learning of pedal playing are so prohibitively uncomfortable to some people that they convince those people—wrongly—that they are just not cut out to be organists. I am also sensitive to this one. 

At an early point in my teaching career, I happened to encounter a couple of people who told me that they had really wanted to play the organ, but found it too uncomfortable to sit in some particular posture while learning to play the pedals. They had come to believe, perhaps because of something that they had read or that they had been told, that this posture was necessary, and they actually gave up. This felt to me at the time like a tragedy (both for their sakes and because I wanted there to be more organ students out there as I began my teaching career!) and it led to my developing my particular approach to pedal learning, the latest refinement of which is found in this book. Others are discouraged by being told that it is absolutely necessary that they work on some particular part of the repertoire that really—for the time being at least—doesn’t interest them. I don’t believe that there is any good reason for this—even for something as basic as requiring a student to play some Bach, for example—as I discuss later on in this book.

2) In order for it to be true that any interested party can work successfully on organ playing, it must also be true that this does not involve any “dumbing down.” If I am claiming that a particular approach to working on organ can be successful not just for selected students but for anyone who is interested, then I must mean that anyone can reach a high level of competence and understanding—not just dabble a little bit. I firmly believe this to be true. And I am reminded of the saying attributed to J. S. Bach, concerning organ playing that “All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.” I have always believed that he meant something quite specific by this: that it was not, as it perhaps sounds at first, a joke or some sort of dismissive remark. I believe that he meant that the organist does not have to create tone and intonation in the various ways that singers and many string and wind players do. The basic act of making a note happen on the organ, with its pitch and tone color intact, is simple. That is why it is appropriate for the world to provide us with such amazingly complicated music. It is also why learning to play organ very well—at least what we might call an “intermediate” level—is available to anyone who chooses to work at it.

3) The process of learning to play the organ is, I believe, natural, simple, very human, and available to all. I hope that this volume helps to make that convincing. It is not, however, easy. That is an important distinction, and its main implication for the student is that learning to play (well) requires both the time and the personal commitment to do a substantial amount of work—of practicing. To a large extent, an organ method should be a statement, fleshed out in considerable detail, that amounts to: this is how to practice. That statement should be clear—enough so that a student can follow it without already knowing everything that the writer of the method knows. If this is not the case, then the book has in fact failed to convey its message. It should be reliable: that is, the approach to practicing must really lead to results if it is followed. This latter point is indeed my main claim for this method. I certainly don’t make, and wouldn’t want to make, the ignorant and arrogant claim that other approaches and other methods don’t work—or even that they don’t work at least as well as this one. I will, however, make this claim, also arrogant unless it is true: that anyone who actually does all of the things described and suggested in this volume will—inevitably, everyone, every time—become a competent, skilled organist. This is another lesson that I have learned through thirty years or so of teaching, and it is one that gives me great joy. I hope, always, that anyone contemplating or starting the study of organ approaches it with optimism and joy. It has always been my goal as a teacher, and is my goal as the writer of an organ method, to help students feel that way about the process. But it is a process: it takes work, it takes time, and it takes patience.

Is there an ideal or core student to whom this book is addressed? The answer to that is yes and no. The “yes” side of the answer looks like this: a student who is old enough to think about matters of learning on his or her own, who can already read music, who has already done at least a bit of keyboard playing, on any instrument—that is, who starts with a basic sense of what it is to use fingers at a keyboard—and, of course, who is really interested in learning organ. I have tried to write in such a way that this student can use the book either with or without the guidance of a teacher, and that this student can, so to speak, plunge right in to work on organ. The section on pedal playing is completely “from scratch,” that is, designed in such a way that it can be used by someone who has never played a note on a pedalboard before.

Any student who does not fit that particular description can use this method just as fruitfully by bearing in mind a few things.

A student who does not read music must learn to do so, both to use this method and in general to function as an organist. That is not something that is dealt with directly in this volume. There are, as I write this, many online music-reading resources: there probably always will be, though of course they change all the time. Most or all community music schools—or colleges that offer music instruction to the public—have classes that include an introduction to reading music. These classes usually include other aspects of basic musicianship or elementary music theory that can be interesting and that are useful for beginners. Although I do not attempt to teach music reading here, I do, in side-notes, make suggestions for the benefit of those whose music reading is still new and not fully internalized. Such students should be able to feel all right about working on the early stages of learning to play while getting more and more comfortable reading.

In my opinion, a student who has never played any sort of keyboard instrument at all and who is interested in organ need not start with any instrument other than organ. There is certainly nothing actually wrong with starting on piano or harpsichord—except that for a student who is not particularly interested in those instruments or their repertoire it can be frustrating. But there is also no reason to do so. Everything practical that you need to know about organ playing can be learned by playing the organ. (There are certainly things to be learned artistically from an involvement with piano and its repertoire or harpsichord and its repertoire: also by any involvement with any other sort of music. I discuss this from time to time in the course of the later chapters of the book.) The relationship of this student to the pedal-playing work in this method will be exactly the same as that of the “core” student. However, the sections here about manual playing do not start absolutely from scratch—there are no basic exercises for just a few fingers, or similar things. A student who has never played before might very well want either to work with a teacher who can begin at the very beginning, or to consult a beginning keyboard method on his or her own—in print or online. I have tried to write in such a way that there is very little of this sort of preliminary work needed, the less so the more a student is able and willing to follow my suggestions about slow and systematic practice.

Students who have in fact already played organ—either a little bit or more than a little bit—can, I hope, also get something out of this method and this approach. This is true especially for anyone who finds pedal playing awkward. (As I have suggested above, my approach to pedal playing involves a kind of physical simplicity that some players find helpful.) It might also be especially true for a player who feels less than fully comfortable with the difficulties of grappling with complex counterpoint. Of course, an experienced or accomplished organist who is comfortable with all the main aspects of his or her playing is not likely in any case to need to consult an organ method. However, I have tried to include enough here in the way of generally interesting ideas, observations, and thoughts about the organ and the never-ending task of learning, that such a player might find it worth browsing through, as I myself have found it interesting to browse through a wide variety of organ methods, from at least Sir John Stainer on.

The method is organized as follows: 

1) A very brief introduction to the organ in general, geared mainly to what a student needs to know in order to start working. 

2) The section on pedal playing. This is the most categorical thing that a student who is already a pianist or harpsichordist needs to grapple with in order to begin the alchemical transformation into an organist. This section outlines, quite systematically, a comprehensive approach to playing pedals. It can certainly be used on a stand-alone basis by anyone whose main concern is either to learn pedal playing or to review and revise his or her approach to the pedals. This section includes—logically enough, though somewhat out of order—a set of protocols for practicing hands and feet together.

3) The section on manual playing. This section is largely about practicing, the most important aspect of work on organ playing. It includes, however, discussion of ways to approach work on counterpoint and other specific organ textures, thoughts about articulation and other interpretive matters, and discussion of registration. (My goal in addressing interpretive matters is always to help students create possibilities for themselves, never to tell them where they should end up.) For a student specifically hoping to make the transformation from non-organ keyboard player to organist, the second element of that transformation, less categorical than learning to play pedals, but just as important, is learning to manipulate the touch and sound of the organ in a way that is idiomatic and that opens up as wide a range of possibilities for expressive and communicative playing as possible. This is open-ended and subjective, but I try to provide a framework for thinking about it.

4) A longer discussion about the organ and its history and repertoire—not seen through the lens of “what a new student needs to know to sit at the console and get started” but rather as a slice of what an evolving organist might want to absorb about the instrument and its music. This includes a substantial number of suggestions for further research. It is characteristic of our times that information—say the detailed history of the evolution of a major historic organ—is easy to find, and that what is available changes (expands) rapidly. An organ method nowadays does not need to include, as a basic resource, a representative set of historic stoplists. It needs, instead, to inform the student about how best to find such information and how to understand it, and how to use it to create and expand possibilities.

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

Practicing II
Last month I wrote that the “concept of ‘slowly enough’ is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord.” This month I want to explore that concept further. I will also discuss a couple of other aspects of the art of practicing.
In urging that students practice their pieces slowly, I want to avoid giving particular, specific practice-tempo suggestions, and I also want to advocate that teachers not expect, by and large, to give their students such specific suggestions. One of the keys to really efficient practicing is to develop a feeling for what the right practice tempo is. That is, literally, a feeling, since the right tempo at which to practice a given passage at a given moment is the tempo at which that passage feels a certain way. The way to guide a student towards being able to practice well—and to know how to go on practicing well for the rest of his or her playing career—is to help the student learn to recognize that feeling.
When a student (or anyone) plays through a passage, whether it is a few notes or an entire long piece, and whether it is the whole texture or separate hands or feet, one of a number of things can happen. If the playing is clearly wrong—wrong notes, missing notes, wrong rhythm—then that is easy to notice and easy to describe. A student who is very inexperienced indeed, or, more commonly, a student who is scared or self-conscious, or who has been trained to leave all matters of judgment to the teacher, might not notice such things at first. But he or she will not have any trouble noticing them if they are pointed out, and can be taught and reminded to notice them directly. They are there for the taking. If a passage being practiced shows such problems, beyond just a few, then it should be practiced more slowly. That is clear.
However, it is extremely common for a student—especially a student with good powers of analysis and of concentration—to be able to play a passage correctly, perhaps even many times in a row, but to have that correctness be a sort of high-wire act: that is, for there to be some or many “near misses” in which the student comes very close to getting a wrong note, but manages to remember and play the right note at the very last second. Playing a passage this way is emphatically not good practicing. (I will discuss this more below.) As I wrote last month, it takes honesty with one’s self to admit that a passage that sounded at least “OK” to the listening world was in fact not OK. We are all motivated not to admit this, first of all because it is always more friendly to our self-esteem to believe that something we just did was done well, not badly, and second because this admission seems to let us in for more work!
In addition to honesty or self-awareness, however, it is necessary for a student to know how to recognize, while playing, specific signs that a passage is in this “high-wire” state. This can be tricky both for beginning students and for anyone else who has never been in the habit of looking out for this problem. Some of the phenomena to watch out for include:
1) Very slight hesitations, especially—but not exclusively—before strong beats. This is an outward, audible sign, but a subtle one that a listener can easily miss. It can be confused with interpretive inflections that might even be musically effective. Only the player can know for sure.
2) Significant departures from worked-out fingering, especially lots of substitution that wasn’t part of the plan.
3) Tension: in the hands for manual parts, probably in the legs and back for pedal parts, but possibly also in the feet.
4) Playing certain notes with more physical force than others: banging. When a particular note takes the player by surprise and is only achieved by dint of great last-minute concentration, then that note will often be banged down hard.
5) Breathing problems or frequent catching of the breath.
(Some of the items on this list are hard for the student to notice unless he or she is otherwise playing in a relaxed manner, both physically and psychologically. This is one of the most compelling practical reasons both for cultivating a relaxed, friendly atmosphere in the teaching studio and for encouraging a light, tension-free physical approach to playing.)
To put the same thing the other way around—accentuating the positive—the playing should seem calm and serene, the hands and feet should be able to move from one spot in the music to the next at a fairly even pace, the player should be able to remain relaxed and keep a light touch. In fact, the whole thing should feel easy. Performing is not easy; having the patience to practice well is not easy; the act of practicing should be easy.
(It is also important to note that an occasional or rare wrong note that happens while practicing a passage is not necessarily a problem or a reason to slow down. A recurring wrong note usually is. Clusters of wrong notes are. But the scrambling, uncomfortable feeling described here is the most compelling reason to try a slower tempo.)
If a teacher guides a student towards recognizing that a passage or piece is being practiced at too fast a tempo—without specifically suggesting a practice tempo, but instead inviting the student to try it more slowly and to be on the lookout for all of the signs described above, negative and positive—then the teacher will be helping that student to develop a lifelong ability to guide his or her own practicing effectively.
It is important for students to know that when you play though a passage in a way that has an element of scrambling to it—the “high-wire” or emergency feeling—you are actually not practicing the passage at all. Practicing a physical gesture, or set of physical gestures, of the sort we are talking about here is a matter of repeating that gesture until it becomes second nature. (I believe—from conversations I’ve had with people who have studied the subject—that this is at least in part a matter of imprinting something on the cerebellum as opposed to the cerebrum. In any case, it is something quite real and specific neurologically.) When you play a passage wrongly you are actually making the wrong gestures second nature: you are imprinting (on your cerebellum?) the acts of scrambling, getting the wrong notes, hesitating, hitting keys too hard, using unnecessarily complicated fingerings, having trouble breathing, etc. In the end you will have learned to do those things.
On the other hand, if you start off at an appropriate tempo, then you can practice, as I put it last month, “a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result.” Then, following the procedure that I outlined last month, you can work it up to any desired tempo.
There are two other issues about practicing that are important to discuss alongside the basic procedure proposed in these two columns: 1) keeping it going, and 2) (not) looking.
It is always a good idea to keep whatever bit of music you are playing going steadily, in tempo (plus or minus any purposeful interpretive rubato), without letting anything distract you or derail your playing. In the context of practicing a passage, however short or long, it is important to know where you plan to stop—in order to go back and play it again—and both to keep it going until that point and in fact to stop there and go back and repeat the passage as many times as you have planned. If you allow yourself to be distracted by anything—a noise outside, your teacher’s cell phone, a light flickering—then you are in part practicing letting yourself be distracted. This is the last thing that you want to prepare yourself to do in performance. However, if you allow yourself specifically to be distracted by hearing a wrong note, that is even worse. If you are planning to stop, or allow yourself the possibility of stopping, when you hear yourself make a wrong note, then as you play you will inevitably divert some of your concentration onto monitoring each note for “wrongness” and to deciding whether or not something that you have just heard justifies stopping. All of your focus, however—all of it—should be on what comes next. As soon as your fingers or feet are committed to playing a given note, your mind should be on to the next note.
I have known students to stop abruptly upon hearing themselves play a particular right note. Either they had already programmed themselves to stop, assuming that the note would be wrong, or, again expecting a wrong note, they were astonished into stopping by the unexpected sound of the correct note! In any case, it is just a distraction. Also, often a student will hear a wrong note, stop, and play the correct note and go on. This does not even constitute actually practicing that note effectively, since practicing a particular moment in a piece actually consists of practicing getting to that moment from whatever came before it.
If a student has trouble bringing him- or herself to keep playing through wrong notes in lessons, this often comes from a desire to signal to the teacher that he or she knew that the note was wrong. It can feel humiliating to make a wrong note without, in a sense, atoning for it right away. It is worth reminding students that there is plenty of time to discuss what was good or bad about a particular time through a passage when that passage has ended, and that the teacher will think more rather than less of a student for waiting!
It is, I believe, quite important not to look at the hands or feet while practicing, and it is worth trying to learn not to, or trying to get into the habit of not doing so. But it is also important not to become so preoccupied with not looking that that becomes a distraction in itself. It is, in the end, OK to glance down a little bit, while bearing in mind the reasons to try not to do so very much.
The problems with looking at the hands or feet during practicing are several:
1) If you find a note, or several notes, or a chord—or whatever—by looking for that note (those notes) and then putting the fingers or feet in the right place and pushing, you have essentially not practiced the act of finding and playing those notes at all. The physical gesture that you are trying to imprint has not happened, or, at least, your mind has not focused on it and followed it. The brain has used an alternate, visual, route to the ostensibly correct note. Practicing that involves a significant amount of looking is inefficient: it will probably get you there eventually, but it will take longer.
2) Whenever you take your eyes away from the page, you run the risk of not finding your place again.
3) If you are playing a passage and you are (even subconsciously) expecting to find a fair number of the notes by looking, then there will almost certainly be a large amount of hesitation in the playing. Even when your hands or feet have in fact traveled correctly, and on time, to the next note, you may well hesitate to play it until you have checked it out visually. There is often an overall jerkiness and lack of convincing pulse to playing that involves a lot of looking. This will usually go away immediately if the player quits looking so much.
4) The vast majority of wrong notes happen not because the player does not know where the notes are on the keyboard (and thus needs to look for them), but because the player does not honestly know what the next note is supposed to be.
This last point is one of the most important about the act of practicing and about learning to play. The keyboard is basically very simple, and it stays in place. Anyone who has played a little bit has, even if unknowingly, developed a strong instinct for where the keys are. Many players, including most students and almost all beginners, do not believe this. They assume that wrong notes and insecurity come about because they don’t know where the next note is. The wrong note count in a passage, if it is at all high, will almost always go down immediately upon the player’s starting to keep his or her eyes (by and large) on the music. In working on helping a student to practice effectively, this should be taken into account before choices are made about what practice tempos are appropriate.
Specifically, if there is a fairly persistent wrong note in a passage being practiced, but that passage feels generally secure enough that the tempo does not need be slowed down, a student will want to start correcting that wrong note by looking, or will assume that looking is the only technique for getting the note right. Instead of looking, however, the student should try this: first notice in which direction the note is wrong. A wrong note can only come about because of moving a finger, hand, or foot either too far or not far enough. Once it is clear which of these has happened, the student should, on the next time through the passage, simply think “all right, I’ve been moving too far, so I’ll move a little bit less,” or the opposite, as needed. This simple thought—mechanical rather than musical in nature—will almost always work. Coupled with this, the student should keep his or her eyes on the music and not lose the information that is found there.
One final thought. These two columns have been intended to outline a rigorous and efficient approach to practicing. It is certainly a good idea for students to follow this approach, or one that incorporates some of its ideas, a good deal of the time. Practicing every piece this way—in small increments, always starting slowly enough, speeding up only gradually, keeping the eyes on the music—will lead to the most efficient learning of pieces and the quickest and most secure development of a player’s ability. This kind of practicing is satisfying since it gives such prompt and evident results. It should also be just plain fun for people who love the repertoire and the instruments. However, it is important to remember that not every minute at the keyboard has to be spent doing the most disciplined work. It is a very good idea for any player, student or not, to have some out-and-out frivolous fun at the keyboard as well: play pieces you already know too fast and see how well you can keep them going; sight read pieces that are too hard, just slow enough that it’s plausible, and don’t worry too much about wrong notes; play easy pieces on all sorts of different registrations, including outlandish ones.
Every player—and every student, perhaps with input from a teacher—can decide how great a proportion of time spent at the keyboard should be spent on well-designed rigorous practicing and how much on other kinds of playing. An awareness that you are doing enough of the former should permit you to relax and enjoy the latter!

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work on a pedal-playing method that will probably be available in the fall of 2008. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links, along with downloadable PDFs of these and other pedal exercises, can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Pedal playing, part III:
expanding the scope
The scale-based beginning pedal exercise that I discussed at length last month is intended to develop a student’s sense—intuitive and kinesthetic—of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step on the pedal keyboard. The careful procedure that I outlined then for introducing a new student to this exercise is important, since the effectiveness of the exercise is predicated on its feeling easy and natural from the beginning. However, the gist of the exercise can be expressed in music notation as follows (see Example I).
The odd notation of the key signature—that is, that the signature itself is in parenthesis—is a way of expressing concisely that the exercise should be played both without any sharps or flats and with whatever the given key signature suggests. (Remember that it almost always makes sense to practice the “naturals only” version first, since it presents more regularly spaced intervals.) This is nothing but a way of saving space and time, and of course it would be possible to write out any exercise of this sort twice, once with and once without a key signature. However, I have found that students easily get used to this notation.
Every pedal exercise that has as its point the development of a student’s sense of the geography of the pedal keyboard should always be practiced at a slow tempo. This is for two reasons that almost contradict each other but that nonetheless both apply. The first is the normal reason for practicing slowly: it is easier to play an unfamiliar passage slowly than to play it quickly; practicing is more effective if what you are practicing is correct rather than wrong; and it always makes sense to practice any passage as slowly as you need to in order to get it right. Of course as a passage becomes familiar it can—normally—be sped up. With this kind of kinesthetic pedal exercise, however, it is also true that the slower one plays the simple notes of the exercise, the more intense a level of focus is required to feel and internalize the shape of the physical intervals that your feet are negotiating. Such an exercise is actually harder mentally, and more intensely efficient as a drill and as a learning tool, the slower it is played. There can be some point to speeding up exercises such as these—especially as part of the process of learning to play faster without developing tension, and indeed to disentangle velocity from tension or force—but that is not relevant to the stage at which a student is first learning pedal playing.
Once this sense of the distance, shape, and feel of one step has been well established, there are two logical next steps. The first of these is to invite the student to use this sense in more complicated musical contexts. The second is to build on this sense to establish an equally secure feeling for the moving of one foot over two steps, then over three and more.
A simple way to set the moving of each foot by one step in a slightly more complicated context is shown in Example II. In this exercise, each foot does exactly what it does in Exercise I above: that is, it moves slowly by step. (This motion is, in effect, still in half notes, though of course the notation is arbitrary.) Two things are added here. First, the whole process is a bit more challenging conceptually, since the student must think about both feet at the same time. The student can deal with this by keeping it slow, by focusing well in general, and by consciously alternating focus from one foot to the other as appropriate. The need for this latter will melt away with practice.
The second new thing that the student has to deal with is the consequences of having the feet closer to one another. When the two feet are placed in such a way as to be in some danger of pushing each other out of the way or blocking one another’s access to the keys that need to be played, then the student must learn how best to separate the feet and prevent them from causing problems for each other. This causes additional complexity for the student, but it is also a very good opportunity for learning about the logistics of pedal playing and the comfortable use of the feet. In each situation that brings the feet perilously close together, the student can figure out—by common sense, and with help from the teacher—what solutions will work. For example, early on in this exercise, when the left foot first needs to play the note B, the right foot has just played c, and might be in the way. (This will vary a bit from student to student because of the kind of differences in foot size, posture, and habits that I discussed in November’s column.) If there is a problem at this point, the student can think about ways to solve it, such as a more detached articulation, or separating the feet along the length of the keys—either “left foot back/right foot forward” or “right foot back/left foot forward” depending, again, on the particular student’s posture and the angle from which he or she naturally approaches that part of the pedal keyboard—or by holding the foot itself at a different angle (i.e., flexing the ankle more or less), or perhaps by switching from “little toe” to “big toe” or vice versa in one or both feet, if that addresses the problem and is comfortable. The teacher and the student can discuss the pros and cons of any of these, and this kind of discussion will move the student closer to being able to think about such things for himself or herself.
The teacher can make up new exercises along these same lines. They should be simple melodies in which each foot moves mostly by step. The interpolation of the two feet need not be utterly regular, as it is in exercise II above. Some students might want to make up their own such exercises, and can certainly do so, as long as they understand the principle of following carefully what each foot is doing. Example III introduces the moving of one foot over the interval of two steps.
In the first half of this exercise, going up, the left foot is asked to take on the new task of moving over the interval of two steps, while the right foot is still just moving by one step. In the second half, coming down, this is reversed. For completeness one might also try the following variation, in which the roles of the feet are reversed (see Example IV).
Since, when the student approaches these exercises, he or she will already have a very firm foundation in moving one foot over the interval of one step, a simple thought will almost always suffice to guide the feet to the correct distance for covering two steps: namely, that the distance traveled by the foot should feel greater than the accustomed distance of one step, but only just enough greater to notice the difference. If in the course of getting to know these exercises the student ever makes a wrong note (which is certain to happen), the best way to correct that is also with a simple thought: “I just moved my foot a little bit too far [or not far enough], so next time I will move it a little bit less far [or farther].” This simple, almost naïve, way of correcting wrong notes in pedal practicing always works (judging from my experience both with students and with myself). It is also by far the best way of using the experience of making and then correcting wrong notes to imprint a correct feeling for the geography of the pedal keyboard on the brain of the player, and to lead efficiently to reliable, accurate playing. It is always possible to get the next note right—or to correct an actual or anticipated wrong note—by looking. However, that does nothing to improve the student’s command of the pedal keyboard, and the sense that it gives of having gotten something right is illusory.
(I will devote a whole future column to the subjects of looking at the keyboard and not looking at the keyboard. These are both important tools, which are sometimes not thought about systematically enough.)
Example V shows an exercise that asks each foot to move over the interval of two steps. It also provides practice in dealing with repeated notes. (The playing of repeated notes with separate feet, which has musical and technical advantages of its own, is also a way to practice being aware of the position of the feet with respect to each other—not the main focus of this approach to learning pedal playing, but not something worthy of neglect either—and it is good training for learning pedal substitution later on. It is essentially the same gesture as a substitution: the difference can be thought of as one of articulation.)
Again, teachers and students can certainly write other exercises that will work as well as these or that can supplement them. It is only important to bear in mind the patterns of what each foot is doing and to make sure that exercises expand the scope of what each foot is doing in a logical and systematic order.
In fact, after any student has become completely comfortable with the exercises in this column or another similar set of exercises, it should be possible for that student to begin using pedal lines from repertoire as pedal practice material. This can include even very difficult pedal parts if they are approached the right way. This transition will be the main subject of next month’s column, which will also discuss the Bach Pedalexercitium and touch briefly upon the heel.