On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Counterpoint IV
A student who has worked on a piece of contrapuntal keyboard music in the ways outlined in my last few columns will be able to play the piece with great security, accuracy, and confidence. The student’s performance of that piece will project a strong sense of the contrapuntal lines as individual, autonomous melodies with shape and direction. This result is as close to being certain as anything in the realm of human endeavor ever is: this systematic working out of separate voices is an extremely powerful tool.
However, nothing in that method deals directly either with interpretive questions as such or with aspects of performance that might arise out of motivic or harmonic analysis. The method can work with many different interpretive stances as regards tempo, articulation, phrasing, registration, rubato (or lack thereof), agogic accentuation, etc., and many philosophies regarding memorization, concert programming, authenticity (or, again, lack thereof), fingering, pedaling, posture, etc. In this column I will discuss questions involving form and structure, and suggest an approach to motivic analysis—I prefer to call it motivic awareness—that I believe is useful and flexible, and that arises naturally out of the learning and practicing approach outlined in the last few columns.
Almost every piece of music deals in some way with issues of sameness and change. In some types of pieces, the way in which those opposite poles are presented is very clear. For example, in a chaconne or passacaglia, the repeated harmonic pattern provides sameness or continuity, while the various melodies, rhythms, and textures that unfold over that harmonic pattern provide change. In a rondo, the ritornello represents continuity and everything else represents change or development. In sonata-allegro form, on one level continuity is represented by a recapitulation, and change by the development section. However, the balance (or tension) between sameness and difference may also be manifested in other, more subtle ways, such as having two principal themes that are very different from one another. In general, in tonal music change is represented by departures from the tonic and continuity by the return to it.
In pieces that are largely or entirely contrapuntal—built up of melodies happening in different voices—questions of overall structure, including the handling of continuity and change, are dealt with in large part through recurring melodic themes or motives, and through the patterns of recurrence of those motives. A motive is a recognizable bit of melody, and when it recurs, it is recognizably the same, or close enough to being the same that a listener’s ears and mind will accept it as being the same. In some types of pieces, some recurrences of themes will be at least somewhat predictable. In a fugue, the beginning of the piece will be shaped by each voice entering in turn with the same theme—the fugue subject—and the end section of the piece will involve the return of that theme in some or all of the voices. In between there will almost always be passages—sometimes long, sometimes short—during which the fugue subject is more or less absent. A chorale-based contrapuntal piece will often have one or more recurring motives derived directly from the chorale melody. In a piece that is canonic, the different voices will present the same melodic material at different times.
(Notice that at least some of the reasoning in the above paragraph is circular. I wrote that “in a fugue” such-and-such will happen. I could just as well have written that if such-and-such happens, we will call it a fugue.)
In principle, a piece could be fully or partly contrapuntal without having very much—or indeed any—recurrence of themes. A piece could be written in three or four or more voices, and the voices could share no thematic material at all, and each voice itself could fail to repeat any recognizable themes. However, this essentially never happens. There are pieces—for example, several of the Orgelbüchlein chorales—in which motives are shared by only two out of the four voices (Puer natus, Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn) or in which the voices share little or no thematic material from one to another, but do each repeat and develop motives as they go along (Ich ruf’ zu dir). But a piece that is worked out rigorously in voices and in which melodic motives play no role is a rarity, to say the least. There seems to be, and to have been over the centuries, a strong consensus that a voice-based texture and a motive-based rhetorical structure go together.
This makes it natural to assume that the first goal in interpreting such pieces is to bring out the theme(s), (subject(s), motive(s). I have often had students who were pianists new to organ and harpsichord ask me how it could be plausible to play a fugue, for example, on those instruments, since they do not permit the player to use dynamics to make the fugue subject stand out from the rest of the texture. Of course it’s possible to do this occasionally, when the logistics of the notes and the fingering happen to line up just right, but it can not be done in a thoroughgoing way. However, sometimes students assume that there must indeed be a way to do this, and that it must be in fact the hidden art—the secret!—of playing counterpoint on harpsichord and organ. At first glance this seems to make sense: if themes and motives are important, even crucial, to contrapuntal keyboard music, then surely it is important or crucial that listeners be able to hear those themes.
However, this idea bumps up against an interesting historical reality. It was precisely during the time when the only keyboard instruments available for performance were those instruments on which the player cannot bring themes out explicitly that the writing of contrapuntal music for the keyboard most flourished. The decline in the predominance of rigorously contrapuntal music in the (newly written) repertoire after the Baroque period corresponded exactly to the rise of the piano and the replacement of the harpsichord with the piano in everyday use. So apparently composers have seen the piano’s ability to use dynamics to highlight particular parts of the texture to be inconsistent with, or at least not conducive to, the writing of counterpoint. Instruments on which the changing timbre up and down the keyboard helps to make individual voices clear and autonomous, but on which individual motives cannot be brought out have been seen by composers as most conducive to writing counterpoint for the keyboard.
This, in turn, seems to me to point to perhaps the most important concept for a student, or any performer, to bear in mind when thinking about shaping performances of contrapuntal pieces on a keyboard instrument. On the one hand, the music is at its very essence made up of motives or themes, not just notes. These motives are the philosophical and rhetorical building blocks of contrapuntal music. They are the words and phrases, while the individual notes are the phonemes. But, on the other hand, there is no reason to consider any one theme or motive or subject within a given piece to be more important than any of the others.
In the course of working on the separate voices of a contrapuntal keyboard piece, any student—even one who is not yet very experienced with this kind of music—will become, perhaps unwittingly, a real expert on the motivic content of that piece. Simply as a result of having listened a lot to each voice and, by definition, to all of that voice’s melodies, themes, motives, or subjects, that student will have become perhaps the world’s leading expert on what is going on melodically in that line. This expertise may well be largely subconscious. I believe that the best way to point a student towards making that awareness of the motivic content of contrapuntal voices explicit, and thus heighten its ability to help enliven the music, is to ask the student simply to try to notice anything and everything that happens more than once.
This is a deliberately simple, colloquial, almost naïve way of looking at themes in contrapuntal voices. One purpose of starting out by looking at voices this way is to avoid a prejudice in favor of motivic ideas that have what might be called a professionally sanctioned importance, such as fugue subjects, countersubjects, or motives derived from a chorale. If these things are present, then a neutral search for anything that happens more than once will certainly find them. If, in a particular piece, such themes really are the most important thing about the motivic structure of the piece, then that will become apparent, because those themes will occur more, and/or in more important contexts, than other recurring events that the student may find. But again, even themes that recur more frequently are not more important in performance than themes that recur less often. That is, there is no reason to treat them differently in performance than other motives. It is a good working assumption that anything that a composer took the trouble to do more than once should be treated as rhetorically important.
The question arises of how we know—how a student can tell—what actually constitutes something that happens more than once. In principle, what we are looking for is simple: intervals, melodic shapes, and rhythms that are the same one place in a voice as they are somewhere else (in that voice or in another voice). Some points to remember in looking for such things—or in helping a student to do so—are as follows:
1) It can be useful to make copies of a piece and use different copies to highlight different themes or other recurring events.
2) It makes sense to notice and highlight first of all anything that jumps out as being obvious. This will often include—but not be limited to—“official” motives such as fugue subjects or chorale phrases. Longer motives are the easiest to notice right off the bat.
3) It then makes sense to scan any as-yet unhighlighted sections of each voice looking first for rhythmic patterns that recur, since those are often easiest to spot, and then for intervals or melodic patterns that recur.
4) There is no harm in identifying something as a recurring theme when, according to someone else’s analysis, it might not be. It is more interesting to notice more similarities than to notice fewer. If something seems far-fetched (“there is a major sixth here in m. 4, and another one there in m. 7” or “the note A occurs in each of these three measures”) then it might be far-fetched—in which case it will probably melt away upon further consideration—or it might turn out to be real. If on reflection it seems real, then it might lead to some insight about the piece or to a more rhetorically convincing playing of the piece or of that part of it. It would be a shame to miss out on this.
5) At the same time, it is not necessary to expect to find everything the first time through. The act of looking through voices hoping to find recurring motives will almost certainly lead to playing all of the notes more meaningfully—more like words and phrases and not just phonemes—regardless of whether you do or don’t find all of the plausible recurring motives.

I have recently done (actually re-done) a quick analysis of two very basic Bach contrapuntal works, the first Two-Part Invention and the first fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In the former I have found that one half-measure in both voices together (m. 6, second half), one measure in the upper voice (m. 13, third beat through m. 14 second beat), and a further half measure in the upper voice (m. 21, second half) consist of material that is not part of any motive that recurs. That’s all: ten beats out of a total of 176 in the piece. Of those ten beats, six occur in cadences. In a cadence the relative importance of harmony goes up and the relative importance of counterpoint goes down. (Cadences express sameness or togetherness rather than diversity or change.)
In the fugue, there are 432 beats of voice-writing (27 measures, four beats per measure, four voices). Of these, no more than about 40 beats are constructed out of thematic material that does not recur, and there is no moment in the piece when there is not at least one voice presenting recurring material. The fugue subject occurs officially 23 times. However, part of the recurring material consists of fragments of the fugue subject. The analytic approach being described here makes it unnecessary to consider those notes anomalous or fragmentary, but still permits an understanding of how they relate to the rest of what is going on.
In both of these pieces I have now found more notes that seem to me to belong to recurring melodic ideas—i.e., more things that happen more than once—than I did the last time I looked them over some years ago. Our ability to notice should grow with experience.
Sometimes looking for anything that happens more than once can be revealing in unexpected ways. Years ago when I first studied the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude, I happened to notice that the opening four notes—the rising tetrachord b-c#-d#-e—recurred at least a time or two. I decided to look for this motive wherever I could find it in the piece. The recurrence of that simple, almost throwaway bit of melody turned out to provide a structural roadmap of the whole work. It occurs in one form or another at all of the important transition points in the piece, and actually serves as a guideline to the affect of the different sections. It would never, however, be identified as any kind of subject that is developed contrapuntally in the work.
(Since there is not space here to delve into the details of these three examples, I have posted them on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <A HREF="http:www.pekc.org">www.pekc.org</A&gt;, with highlighting in several colors, and thorough commentary. I have also posted some expanded discussion of the relationship between this kind of contrapuntal learning and various aspects of interpretation, including a perspective or two other than, and different from, my own.)
In essence, this approach is very simple, as simple as it sounds: notice everything that happens more than once; notice as much as you can, but don’t worry about noticing everything; let your awareness of musical words and phrases enliven your playing of the music.
Next month I will turn to the interesting and sometimes vexing—but comparatively circumscribed!—subject of the playing of repeated notes.

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

Counterpoint II
In last month’s column, I discussed teaching the playing of contrapuntal music on keyboard instruments, focusing on ways of conceptualizing counterpoint that might be interesting and useful to students without being intimidatingly technical or complicated. This month I want to continue that effort. I will also discuss ways of unraveling contrapuntal textures, to help students understand those textures and feel comfortable playing them.
A contrapuntal piece is, fundamentally, a piece that is in voices, and, as I wrote last month, the concept of voices in keyboard music is both elusive and powerful. The concept of voices in, for example, a vocal quartet or a wind trio is not the least elusive. Each singer or instrument is capable of producing one note at a time and thus playing or singing a melody. When a voice is temporarily silent (i.e., has rests), then the musician carrying that voice is still present, not singing or playing, but representing those rests. The concept of voices at a keyboard instrument is elusive because, conceptually, each voice clearly does not emanate from its own source—a consciousness, a person, an instrument—and, practically, because voices can cross and become confused with each other, or blend together in a way that sounds like chords.
Of course, there are certain cases in which a keyboard instrument can clarify or solve at least the practical side of this problem: two-voice counterpoint in which either the voices don’t cross or, better, are played on different sounds, that is, different keyboards; or three-voice counterpoint in which each line is clearly on a different sound, that is, two manuals and pedal. It is possible that one reason for the greater prevalence of clearly contrapuntal music during the harpsichord era, as opposed to the piano era, was the availability of two-manual domestic keyboard instruments. However, this was probably only a minor reason, since those larger instruments were the exception in most times and places, and the vast majority of contrapuntal keyboard music was indeed written to be played on one sound.
The abstract nature of contrapuntal voices in keyboard music is probably one of the sources of its particular emotional and philosophical power. When a musical voice is heard that is clearly a person—a singer or an instrumentalist—then there is a sense of personal communication that helps to define the character of the listening experience. This personal communication may be, in a way, illusory. (I recall a famous discussion by a prominent opera singer some years ago of how during an intense scene in a opera she was most likely—while singing—thinking about what kind of pizza to order later on!) However, it still shapes our reaction to the music. In keyboard counterpoint, while the overall piece may seem to come from one place—the performer and at one remove the composer—each voice on its own comes from somewhere that is abstract and anonymous. Thus a listener can fill in a sense of where the voices are coming from, and what meaning or emotional content this sense of where they come from conveys. This will be, for different listeners, emotional or philosophical or religious in nature, or something that can’t be pigeonholed. In any case it is not something that needs to be—or, most likely, even can be—defined or described in words.
The relevance of the above discussion to the work of a student wishing to begin studying keyboard counterpoint—and to his or her teacher—is probably twofold. First, it is a reminder that indeed keyboard counterpoint has its conceptual and historical origin in vocal and instrumental counterpoint. This can help develop a basic sense of what a “voice” is. Second, and perhaps even more important, it is a reminder that keyboard counterpoint, whatever its origins, is its own thing with its own power and meaning. It is not (musically, even if it is historically) derivative, and it should not be considered inferior. Attempts to determine anything—technical or interpretive—about how to play keyboard counterpoint by direct analogy with singing or with playing instruments should be taken with a grain or two of salt. Of course, such analogies are useful and should be considered, along with all other possible sources of ideas and inspiration, such as dance, bird songs, any and all genres of music, the rhythmic feeling of walking through the woods, or bicycling, or swinging a golf club, or one’s heartbeat. But it should not be assumed that playing contrapuntal music on keyboard instruments is a never-quite-as-good substitute for something else.
(Of course I mention this because we are often told, or at least somehow absorb the idea, that the human voice is the best instrument, or the “only perfect” instrument. Again, it is wonderful to draw both inspiration and, sometimes, concrete interpretive ideas from singing. But it is crucial not to practice, play, and perform always looking over one’s shoulder in case there is a singer back there who could be doing the same thing better!)
So, as I mentioned briefly last month, I believe that the best way to introduce a student to the idea of voices in contrapuntal keyboard music—with the above caveats—is to make the analogy to individual sung or played musical lines. A contrapuntal voice is a musical line, or melody, that could in theory be produced by a singer or by someone playing a melody instrument. A voice in a keyboard piece can exceed the range of a vocal part or of any given instrument: it should be made clear to the student that neither very wide range nor extravagant leaps are rare or problematic in keyboard counterpoint. (Again, I mention this because it does arise as a concern. If a student comes to understand the concept of a contrapuntal voice by analogy with a sung voice or line, then a keyboard line that exceed the bounds of what a singer can do might seem to be illegitimate. This can lead students to worry inaccurately and unnecessarily that they are making mistakes in their analysis of the voice structure of certain pieces. This is another of those things that seem obvious to those who have worked with it for a long time but that is not necessarily clear to anyone who has not studied it yet.)
The first practical step in introducing students to playing music written in voices is to ask the student to play individual voices—melodies—starting with ones that are easy to find, that is, that do not have to be teased out of a complex texture. These can in principle be anything: voices taken from simple contrapuntal pieces, coherent melodies from pieces that are not otherwise contrapuntal, songs (classical or popular), lines from instrumental pieces that are not officially for keyboard instruments, hymn tunes, etc. The purpose of doing this is to reinforce what a contrapuntal voice is, and to give students (in particular their ears more than their fingers) a chance to become more deeply accustomed to following melodic lines. Learning, playing, and listening to pedal lines is also a good idea at this stage. These can be extracted from pieces, and it is of course perfectly OK to learn a pedal line without going on to learn the whole piece. It will just be a leg up if the student ever happens to want to come back to that piece.
The appropriate next step is for the student to play one melody while listening to another. An ideal way to do this is for the student to have learned one voice of a two-voice piece, say a Bach Two-part Invention, or a bicinium by Scheidt or Sweelinck, and to play that line while the teacher plays the other line. On organ, this can be done with various registrations creating various kinds of balance, all the way from the student’s line predominating enough that the teacher’s line is no distraction at all, through a nice even balance, to the point where the student’s line is almost drowned out, and following it is a challenge.
(This exercise is of course aimed primarily at students who are beginners at playing contrapuntal music. However, it is not a bad refresher exercise for anyone, at any level of experience. This is probably true of most of what is being discussed here.)
There are two parallel next steps, which can be done in any order, or essentially at the same time.
The first of these is to ask the student to work on some two-voice counterpoint: a Bach Two-part Invention, or anything else that has that structure to it. Technically, all else being equal, this is the easiest kind of counterpoint to play, simply because there are fewer notes than in a three- or four-voice piece. Conceptually, it is easiest—and the best starting place—because with each hand playing one voice, the physical, dance-like connection between the musical line as a concept and the act of playing that line is the most direct. (This connection is also very direct and compelling when playing a contrapuntal voice on the pedals.) It is extremely important that the student practice each separate hand/voice until it is, by itself, second nature. The act of putting the two voices together should be well prepared enough to feel natural and easy. Ample practicing of separate hands is usually (probably always) a good idea, with any music. In this case, it is important in particular because the student’s main task when putting the two hands together—that is, playing the whole two-voice texture—is to listen well. It is important that the physical side of playing not demand so much concentration as to distract from the listening.
The next step is to work on extracting contrapuntal voices from textures of three or more voices: that is, at first, not playing them, but just following them. The basics of knowing which voice is which are not always obvious to someone who has not yet done much of this kind of work. It is fine to start this process with something as basic as a traditional four-part hymn setting. In that type of writing, it should be quite clear from a combination of placement of notes on the two staves, stem direction, and musical sense which notes belong to which voice. These are the same things that ideally should (and usually do) make the voices clear in the score of a more complicated contrapuntal piece. Next could come slightly more elaborate and challenging hymn-like pieces, such as the Brahms Es ist ein Ros’ or the Vierne Épitaphe, and after that three- and four-voice fugues. The point is to find pieces in which there is not a one-to-one correspondence between voices and staves. The exercise can be done by having the student go through and point to all the notes of a given voice, or highlight voices in different colors, or actually write out the separate voices on separate staves. The point is simply to practice discerning which notes in a complicated texture belong to which voice.
(I should mention that there are certainly students who are beginners in actually playing contrapuntal keyboard music, or who feel that they need systematic work in that area, but who, perhaps because of theoretical study or something in their background, really don’t need to go through the process described in the last paragraph. That is, they know perfectly well how to discern what the voices are in any texture. This is wonderful, and no one should be made to do anything that they don’t need to do. The point is to make absolutely sure that everyone knows, without its seeming to be any sort of bother or obstacle, how to follow the voices in any contrapuntally constructed score. If a student says that he or she can already do that, then the teacher’s job is just to make sure that this is true, in a friendly and discreet way, and go on!)
The final step, and in a sense the most important, is for the student to work on a three- or four-voice contrapuntal piece by first learning each voice separately, then practicing all possible pairs of voices, then putting the whole texture together. In the course of doing this, the student can also begin a motivic analysis of the piece. For this purpose, I advocate avoiding technical terms, even basic ones such as “subject,” “countersubject,” and “answer.” Instead of using those terms, I ask students simply to look for and notice anything and everything that happens more than once. This often leads to a more thorough and nuanced analysis than would arise by applying technical terms to various motifs. It is also usually quite interesting to do. Next month I will take all of this up in detail.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 3: Practicing the first fugal section
This month we return to the Buxtehude Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, looking at the second section of the piece, which begins at m. 13 and goes through about m. 50. This—except for its last three measures or so, which are a transitional passage, cadential in nature, and which we will in the main discuss next month—is a contrapuntal, essentially fugal, section, a fact which has implications for studying, practicing, and learning the music. Much of what I will suggest here will involve revisiting the ideas that I discussed in the series of columns about counterpoint that began in September 2008, applying those ideas to this specific passage.
The fugal section that begins in m. 13 is in four voices. The musical text could by and large be written out on four staves, accounting for all of the notes, with each staff presenting a coherently “melodic” melody. (It departs from this briefly in mm. 32–33 with the addition of a few “extra” notes, and again in the transitional passage.) The voices behave like the voices of a contrapuntal piece: each of the four voices has a different compass, each of the voices is present most of the time but not all of the time, and, melodically, the voices do the same things at different times and different things at the same time. The section is “fugal” in that the voices enter one at a time, each with a version of the same theme, and that theme recurs a lot during the section.

Theme
This theme is as follows, in its first iteration:

It enters first in the top voice, and then in the other voices in descending order. It is present in 24 of the measures of the section, and a motive identical to the second half of this fugue subject is present in another 3½ or 4 measures. The longest stretch without any of this theme present—prior to the transitional/cadential section at the end—is about one measure.
(There is an interesting side note about this theme, one that in a sense is irrelevant to the piece on its own terms because of the chronology, but which should be intriguing to organists nonetheless. The first half of the theme is the same as the fugue subject of Bach’s Fugue in E-flat Major, BWV 552, and the second half of the Buxtehude theme is essentially the same as a recurrent pedal motive in the Prelude, BWV 552. This Buxtehude work seems like a more likely source of Bach’s inspiration for the so-called “St. Anne” Prelude and Fugue than is William Croft’s hymn tune, which Bach most likely never heard.)

Bass voice in pedal?
The first practical question about working on this section is whether or not the bass voice belongs in the pedal. This is often a question with Buxtehude, since the sources for his music do not often indicate pedal explicitly, and in any case are rather far removed in origin from the composer. In this section, there are several reasons to believe that the bass voice was indeed intended as a pedal part. First, it works on the pedal keyboard, and, in order to make it work, the composer has shaped it a little bit differently from any of the three other voices. That is, there is no scale-wise writing in the bass voice that is any faster than the eighth-note, whereas there is such writing in each of the other voices. Second, there are many places in this passage where it is awkward to play all four of the voices in the hands and where the fingering is much more natural without the lowest voice. (This is true, for example, in m. 33 or mm. 42–43.)
There is, as far as I can see, only one spot prior to the transitional/cadential section where it is actually impossible to play all four voices in the hands, namely the second eighth note of m. 44. Someone else might be able to find a clever way to make it work, and it is certainly possible to do so by fudging the duration of some of the longer notes. (Someone with larger hands than mine would have no trouble with it, but the stretch of a tenth is beyond what is normally found in music of this time.) Furthermore, the transitional section ending in m. 50 certainly requires pedal—really physically requires it—and there is no particularly good place to shift the bass line to the pedal if that line has been played in the hands from m. 20 on. So on balance this seems to me to be a section to be played with pedal.
(The closing fugue of the Praeludium in E Minor, BuxWV 142, presents an interestingly different picture. There the fingering is made dramatically easier, more natural, and more idiomatic to the organ playing of the time by not including the bass voice in what the hands are expected to play. However, at the same time the bass line itself is, if not unplayable in the pedal, still extraordinarily difficult and well outside what would have been the norm at the time.)

Learning protocol
The protocol for learning this fugal section starts with the approach that I outlined in the columns on counterpoint mentioned above; that is, playing through each voice separately and then playing pairs of voices. Here are some specific points about applying that approach to this passage:
1) The section that we are looking at is about 34 measures long—long enough that it should be broken up into smaller sections for this kind of practicing. It doesn’t really matter how it is broken up. It is fine to practice separate voices and pairs of voices in chunks of just a few measures, or in significantly larger chunks. One average way to do it would be to have breaks at around m. 23 and at around m. 36. Each voice will naturally break at a slightly different place. So, for example, it would make sense to play the soprano voice from m. 13 to m. 20, the alto from m. 15 to the middle of m. 23, the tenor from m. 17 through the first beat of m. 25, and the bass from m. 20 through m. 24. Then these sections of these voices can be combined in pairs.
2) When playing individual voices, it is fine to finger those voices in ways that will not be used when later putting the voices together. This is especially necessary and important with inner voices—typically the alto voice in a piece or passage that has three voices in the hands. Such an inner voice will almost certainly end up migrating from one hand to the other. However, at this stage it is important to play each voice in a way that is comfortable and natural, and that makes it as easy as possible to hear that voice as a coherent melody. It is also necessary to be flexible about playing inner voices in either hand. So, of course, when putting soprano and alto together it will be necessary to play the alto in the left hand, but when putting alto together with tenor it will be necessary to play the alto in the right hand.
3) At this stage, it is also not necessary to play the pedal part in the pedals. Practicing the pedal line as a pedal line (see below) can come later or can start in parallel with this process of getting to know the voices. However, for carrying out this approach to learning the voices, just as it doesn’t matter what fingering is used, it also doesn’t matter whether the feet play the bass voice or the left hand does. The important thing is that the student be able to listen carefully and hear the voices well while playing them.
4) In putting voices together in pairs it is a good idea some of the time to play the two voices on two manuals, in order to hear them with extra clarity. This is especially useful when voices cross or, as for example with the soprano and alto voices at mm. 38–39, come very close. The two sounds should be similar in volume and different in character.

Pedaling
While studying individual voices and pairs of voices, it is emphatically not a good idea also to finger and practice the manual part of the texture. That will come a little bit later. It is perfectly fine to practice the pedal part, however. It is interesting that in this piece the pedaling choices are more straightforward, and in fact the pedal part is probably easier overall, in the more active fugue subject and subject fragments, than in the measures in which the pedal is playing long-held notes.
The fugue subject can easily be played with alternate toes, starting with the right foot; the subject fragment that occurs in m. 33 and elsewhere can also be played with alternate toes, starting with the left foot. These pedalings are natural enough that I would expect essentially every student or player to use them. (There are other possibilities: for example, using the same foot to play some of the successive quarter notes, or occasionally using heel to play some of the sixteenth notes that are on white keys when the immediately prior note was on an adjacent black key. On the whole, I doubt that many players would find these variants easier or better, but perhaps some would. They could certainly be OK.) This consistent alternate toe pedaling implies nothing in particular about articulation, phrasing, timing, or other interpretive/performance matters.
However, when the pedal part moves more slowly, particularly from m. 43 on, pedaling choices both affect and depend on choices about articulation. To the extent that the player prefers or can accept spaces between these long notes, he or she can apply the principal of playing each note with whatever foot happens to lie most comfortably above that note. As an example that would lead me to the following succession of toes for the eleven pedal notes beginning with the first note of m. 44 and going to the end of m. 50:
l-r-r-l-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
For someone else it might be a little bit different. Creating more legato in this passage would involve different pedaling choices—for example, crossing the left foot under to play the E in m. 44, and then playing the C# in m. 45 with the right foot.
Of course, practicing the pedal line once pedaling choices have been made involves the usual things: keep it slow and accurate; look at the feet as little as possible—ideally not at all; repeat small-enough passages that the memory of the feeling of the passage does not fade before you get back to it. When the pedal part has become secure, join it first to the tenor voice, then to the left hand part as such—once that has also been practiced as outlined below—then to the hands together. (Of course, it is fine also to practice pedal with right hand alone. However, as always, left hand and pedal is most important. Usually if left hand and pedal has been practiced enough, then adding the right hand is something that feels natural and almost easy.)
And do not forget what might be the cardinal rule of practicing: if you hear yourself make a wrong note while practicing, do not stop or hesitate or go back and correct it. By the time that your ears have heard the wrong note, your mind should already have moved on to playing the next note. Next time through the passage you can make sure to adjust what needs to be adjusted to correct what was wrong.

Fingering choices
Once you have played through all of the voices and all of the pairs of voices, it is time to work out a fingering for the three voices that will be in the hands. And, as I discussed in the column from last July, the first task is to decide which notes belong in which hand. This must come before making specific fingering choices, and it must be done in such a way as to make those fingering choices as easy and natural as possible. As I wrote before: I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make a passage that could be fairly easy almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in a way that was awkward. However, there is not always only one good answer, and the answer is not the same, necessarily, for any two players.
In any situation in which three voices are present and the notes of the alto voice can be reached by either hand—that is, generally, in which neither the soprano notes nor the tenor notes are more than an octave away from the alto notes—the player can, in a pinch, try it both ways. Generally it is nice to put “extra” notes with whichever other voice is less active. So, in m. 19, for example, I would play the first three notes of the alto voice in the right hand since the tenor voice has sixteenth notes, but then play the half note E in the left hand, since the soprano voice then has sixteenth notes. In m. 24 I would play the one alto voice (whole) note in the right hand, even though the soprano voice notes are a bit farther away, since the tenor voice is more active; in m. 25, however, I would shift the alto voice to the left hand since the soprano voice become much more active. Again, these choices are not right and other choices wrong. It is simply very important that each player—each student perhaps with the help of a teacher—work this out carefully and patiently, in a way that feels right.
After the “handing” and fingering have been worked out, it is possible to try an interesting challenge, namely to play the alto voice alone with the correct fingering. This involves letting that voice move from one hand to the other according to the plan that has been worked out. The goal is to play it in such a way that it sounds as natural and cantabile as it would sound played in one hand. It is simultaneously harder to do this outside the cushion of the other voices and good practice for playing that voice well when it is partly obscured by the other voices.

Practice procedures
Practicing the three-voice manual texture of course follows the usual pattern for any practicing. Each hand should be practiced separately, slowly, until it seems easy. The tempo should be allowed to rise only according to a pace that is comfortable: once a passage is learned well at one tempo, it can be played a little bit faster; playing it much faster will often lead to its falling apart. Once each hand is solid at a given tempo, the two hands can be put together at a slower tempo. This can then also be allowed to speed up gradually. The rule about not stopping or hesitating when you hear yourself make a wrong note is always utterly important.
After a player or student has carried out all of the above—individual voices, pairs of voices, pedal part, individual hands, left hand with pedal, and all the rest—there is an interesting exercise to try. Play the section—well learned, all parts together—and consciously listen only to one voice at a time. This is easiest with the soprano voice, next easiest with whichever voice is the lowest at a given time, quite hard with a real inner voice. The ability to do this and also keep the whole thing going accurately and with a feeling of ease will help to reveal the fruits of studying the voices thoroughly and also test the solidity of the overall practicing of the notes.
Next month I will discuss both the transition measures 47–50 and the free section that follows, beginning in m. 51. ■

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. This spring he will be playing recitals around the Northeast. Details and contact information can be found at gavinblack-baroque.com.

Buxtehude BuxWV 141, Part 6: the final section
This month’s column wraps up our detailed look at Buxtehude’s Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by examining the final section, a 20-bar fugue lasting from m. 91 to the end. Next month we will look at the final movement of the Boëllmann Suite Gothique—the Toccata—and then in the column for May, I will provide an overview of the process of studying these two pieces that has occupied this column for about a year.

Analysis
The fugue subject (Example 1) is introduced in m. 91 of BuxWV 141, in what turns out to be the alto voice of a completely regular four-voice fugal texture. There are several interesting things for the student to notice about this subject and about the way the fugue based on this subject develops in Buxtehude’s hands. Before going through a few of them, however, I want to review what I think is the principal purpose of engaging in this kind of analysis for the student actually learning a piece. Analysis can serve many purposes. For one thing, it is—or should be—intellectually interesting and satisfying in and of itself. It also satisfies, specifically, the puzzle-solving or detective instincts that many of us have. It can help us understand—or move closer to understanding—why the composer wrote the piece the way that he or she did. This might, again, be interesting in itself. It might also lead to discoveries about interpretation, perhaps in conjunction with knowledge about performance practices that prevailed around that composer. Analysis of a piece can also help us learn about connections and influences among composers, and in particular to understand what it was that a subsequent composer learned—perhaps, if we are lucky, in specific detail—from the composer whose work we are analyzing.
However, for a student learning a piece or a passage, analysis of that piece or passage also serves simply to increase the student’s awareness, both conscious and unconscious, of what is in the piece and, in particular, of what is coming up next at any given moment. This awareness—which comes into play, in somewhat different ways, both with memorized and with non-memorized performance—is the most important prerequisite for playing a piece securely and comfortably, and thus for being able to project an interpretation in a convincing manner. This is why I tend to emphasize simple motivic analysis, which I describe as “noticing anything and everything that happens more than once.” There is nothing about a passage the noticing of which won’t contribute to security of performance.

Fugue subject
The first thing that stands out about the fugue subject of this final section is that it is intimately related to the opening four notes of the Praeludium, the short motif that I pointed out in my first column about this work (Example 2). In fact, it is probably fair to say that this subject is derived from that opening motif. This is explicit in the end of the fugue subject (Example 3), and implicit in the opening (Example 4), where it is inverted and decorated, but still meaningfully related to the opening motif.
Of course, it is possible to give a name to the four notes that we hear at the opening of the piece: they are a rising tetrachord, and the later instances of this motif that pervade the piece are tetrachords, perhaps rising, perhaps falling, perhaps augmented or diminished or decorated in some way. I am always a bit concerned that this kind of terminology can tend to trivialize the thing being observed. After all, every piece has tetrachords in it, usually many. It is so simple that it scarcely rises to the level of a theme, motif, or subject. However, the point isn’t that it is a tetrachord or any other particular theme, simple or complicated, common or (close to) unique. And the point isn’t to tie this theme to any other piece. The point is specifically that it happens to be the opening gesture of this piece, and that it is then found recurrently throughout the piece. The fugue subject under discussion here is the culmination of the development of that theme.
This fugue, twenty measures long and in four voices, has eight full and unambiguous subject entries. There are also, at mm. 100 and 101–2, three entries that are full-length but in which the second half of the theme is somewhat altered. (Are these “fugue subject entries”? Does it matter?) Beyond that, the first half of the theme occurs by itself, without the second half, approximately ten times; again there are a few spots that are hard to categorize precisely, such as the alto voice in the first half of m. 104 and again in m. 107. The second half of the theme also occurs several times by itself, for example in m. 98.

Tetrachord motif
Stepping back from the fugue subject or its halves to the tetrachord motif derived from the opening of the Praeludium, we see that this motif is found in almost every spot in this section where the fugue subject itself is not present. These spots are the second half of m. 98 into m. 99 in the tenor voice, m. 103 into
m. 104 in the alto voice, and elsewhere. If a student goes through these twenty measures highlighting the tetrachord motif every time it occurs in any genuinely plausible form—simple, inverted, ornamented—the moments in the piece that do not have at least one voice highlighted will be—at most—as follows: part of m. 103, the final whole-note chord, and (maybe) the two 32nd-note flourishes in mm. 106 and 109.
This section is, as noted above, a fully worked-out fugue in which the four voices all maintain integrity throughout and the rules of counterpoint are followed. However, looked at through the lens of the tetrachord motif, it also appears to be a piece of the sort that is built around the inexorable repetition of a single motif that is always present: that is, the kind of piece that might be described as a chaconne or passacaglia. Even though fugue is a quintessentially contrapuntal form and chaconne/passacaglia is fundamentally a harmonic form, the two can actually coexist, and many of Buxtehude’s fugues do indeed shade over into being chaconnes. This gives them, or tends to give them, a driving or hypnotic feeling.
(A wonderfully unambiguous example of this is the short fugal section that begins at m. 55 of the Praeludium in C Major, BuxWV 136. The subject is exactly one measure long, the section is seven measures long, and the subject is heard once in each measure, in one voice or another. This short passage can be analyzed as a fugue without compromise, but it is also—without compromise—a chaconne. The chaconne theme migrates from one voice to another, but that is only somewhat rare in chaconnes, not against the “rules”.)
The two flourishes that are constructed of 32nd-note rising scales, found in mm. 106 and 109, could be seen as the apotheosis of the tetrachord motif, constructed as they are out of two of them in a row, sped up. Is this a convincing connection? I am not sure; a scale is pretty basic and common, and clearly the main point of these flourishes is to heighten visceral excitement leading to the final cadence. The main point against considering these scales to be a direct outgrowth of the opening four notes of the Praeludium is that the scales begin on the beat, whereas the tetrachord motif most emphatically begins just after the beat. Nonetheless, in playing this piece myself, I have always found it meaningful to hear those two half-measures as being an outgrowth of the four-note half scale that has been so important in the construction of the work. I would again say that it doesn’t matter what conclusion a student comes to about this, or indeed whether he or she comes to any conclusion at all. The act of noticing and thinking about the question will help fix the piece in the student’s mind and make the performance more secure and convincing.

Practicing this section
So, how should a student approach the actual practicing of this section? I believe that there are several practice possibilities that work especially well for these measures. To start with, since this passage is both fairly short and extremely well worked out as a fugue, it is a good section to choose for a rigorous application of the technique of practicing separate voices and pairs of voices. I would organize this practicing as follows:
1) Divide the section into either two or three shorter bits. These will each be somewhere between six and ten measures. They do not have to correspond to natural musical divisions, though of course they can.
2) Choose one of these shorter passages and play each voice through several times, slowly and accurately. It is fine to keep the bass voice in the hands for the time being, even though it is certainly a pedal line. Each of the two inner voices should be played, at this stage, an equal number of times in each hand.
3) Combine the voices into pairs. With four voices there are always six pairs: SA, ST, SB, AT, AB, and TB. They are all equally important and should all be practiced a roughly equal amount. Note that for these combinations the alto voice and the tenor voice each have to be sometimes in the right hand and sometimes in the left. It is extremely important to keep the tempo slow enough that this process feels easy.
4) Repeat this with each of the other short sections.
As I have written elsewhere, I do not consider it particularly necessary or useful to try to put together the groups of three out of four voices. (There are four such groups of three.) Of course, the three upper voices may well be practiced as a group under the heading of “practicing the hands.” That is a practical/technical step rather than a musical/listening step, as the above exercise is.
Another specialized technique that can be incorporated into the learning of this passage is that of actually leaving out notes that are rhythmically lighter and that, on a piano or violin, for example, the player might well play quietly. This is an extremely useful technique on instruments that do not offer dynamic inflection of individual notes, that is, for keyboard players, on the harpsichord and organ—so much so that I will at some point devote a column to it. In this piece it has a special relevance to the motivic analysis that we did above. If the student plays the theme leaving out the off-the-beat sixteenth-notes, then the structure of the theme becomes abundantly clear. Then, when those unaccented notes are added back, they stand a good chance of coming across to a listener as light, without the player’s having had to do anything very calculated to make them light. The theme without the off-the-beat sixteenth-notes looks like this (Example 5, with the newly-created eighth-notes played detached).
Of course I have used some judgment about which notes to omit. You could actually make a case for leaving out—again, obviously just for purposes of this exercise—the first note of the theme. The student can play the theme this way one voice at a time and also with pairs of voices.

Fingering and pedaling
The next set of steps is the usual: working out fingering and pedaling, practicing hands and feet separately, putting hands together, putting each hand with the feet, and, finally, putting the whole texture together. The bass voice is clearly a pedal line here. (Remember that with Buxtehude, the sources do not always make this clear.) There are a few spots—I have found them in mm. 96 and 97—where the two hands alone cannot reach all of the notes, and the bass line is well suited to the pedal. The pedaling has a couple of interesting issues to work out. The first of these is the transaction in the middle of the theme in which the feet have to move down by two successive thirds (Example 6).
It seems inconceivable that the F-sharp would not be played by the right toe (though someone could prove me wrong about this). How should the D-sharp and the B then be played? There are a number of possibilities that the student can explore, and they have somewhat different implications for articulation. (I myself would play the D-sharp also with the right toe, trying to make the articulation that this pedaling automatically creates as subtle and light as possible. It is also possible to play the D-sharp with the left toe, and then the B either also with the left foot—creating a significant articulation—or, reaching under, with the right toe. This latter might be awkward or might not, depending on both the build and the habits of the player.)
There is also the question of how to pedal the last four notes of the theme, the rising tetrachord. In many passages in the repertoire, legato can be achieved equally well with toe/heel or alternate toes. Here alternate toe is made difficult, at least, by the pattern of sharps—at least if the left foot takes the low B. Since there were physical constraints against heel pedaling in the late seventeenth century—high benches, small pedal keys—a passage like this forms part of the evidence that in general in those days organists did not expect always to play legato. That is a big subject, beyond the scope of this series of columns, but it is something for a student and teacher to think about. Successive toe pedaling is easy here, and leads to a non-legato approach to, at least, the eighth notes. When the pedal plays the opening half of the fugue subject without the latter half, as it does repeatedly in the last third or so of the section, the pedaling is straightforward, as it also is with the quarter-note passages, since those notes are fairly slow. These pedalings are straightforward, but still have to be thought out carefully and practiced well.

Hand choices
Since all three upper voices belong in the hands, the same issue arises that we have discussed in the last few columns: the dividing of the middle of three voices between two hands. There are many places in this section where multiple solutions are possible, for example, mm. 93–94, 97, 102–3, and more. As always, the student should not forget to take a comfortable hand position into account in sketching out the hand choices for those spots. Another important consideration is that of allowing faster or more intricate notes to be played with as little interference as possible from other notes in the same hand. So, for example, in m. 101, I would have no temptation whatsoever to take any alto voice notes in the left hand, whereas in m. 105 and the identical m. 108, I would take both alto voice notes in the left hand. In mm. 106 and 109, I would take all of the tenor and alto notes in the left hand to facilitate the trills.
A special hand-choice issue in this piece is the fingering of the 32nd-note scales in mm. 106 and 109. They can be played in the right hand, split between the two hands, or even, somewhat counter intuitively, played by the left hand, with the right hand taking the high e′′ in m. 106 and the middle e′ in m. 109. This latter would only make sense for a player who finds it easier to play upward scales rapidly and fluently in the left hand than in the right hand. (This makes sense physiologically. Each hand can play more naturally going towards the thumb than going away from it. This is the “drumming on a table” effect.) These flourishes can work any number of ways, but it is, again, something that the student should make a point of thinking about and planning out well.
Everyone that I have known who has worked on this piece has found the passage in the second half of m. 102 (Example 7) to be the most difficult to finger and play securely. This is because of several things: it is impossible for both of the two voices playing sixteenth-notes to be unconstrained by other notes; the tenor voice and the alto voice keep bumping into each other; and the placement of the sharps makes some fingerings that would otherwise be possible impossibly awkward. This is a passage for the student to pick apart very thoroughly, with no preconceptions about which hand or which fingers should do what. It is important, probably, to change fingers on all of the hidden, that is voice-to-voice, repeated notes. It is almost certain that it is a good idea to divide the alto voice fugue subject fragment between the hands. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to that motif as it passes from one hand to another to make sure that it flows the same way in two hands that you would want it to flow in one.
This ends our detailed look at the Praeludium in E Major. Next month, back to Boëllmann.

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

Counterpoint I
This month I will begin a series about the teaching of the playing of counterpoint on keyboard instruments. There are several reasons why this is an important subject, one that can and should be considered as something meaningfully separate from other aspects of keyboard playing—though of course related to them. I will discuss playing counterpoint on organ and harpsichord, but I hope that some of this will also be useful for the playing and teaching of counterpoint on piano, or for that matter on celesta, electronic keyboards, carillon, etc.
This month’s column will consist of some general thoughts, and ways for students and teachers to think about contrapuntal music. This is very much a beginning: it is a vast subject! Next month I will add specific practice suggestions and ways to develop both analytical strategies and playing exercises appropriate to particular pieces.
The first reason that the specific study of playing counterpoint on the keyboard is important is, rather obviously, that a lot of keyboard music is counterpoint. This is, broadly speaking, truer the farther back in time you go, and, also broadly speaking, truer of organ and harpsichord music than of piano music. The organ and the harpsichord repertoires are full of fugues, older fugue-like forms with names like “canzona” or “ricercar,” chorale preludes that are in a fixed number of voices and that involve motivic imitation and development, and other such things. Pieces written in these purely contrapuntal forms are still common in later music, but less so.
The second reason is that a lot of keyboard music that we would not consider contrapuntal in a formal way has elements of counterpoint embedded in it. This is clearly true, for example, of many Bach preludes (whereas Bach fugues are by and large “formal” counterpoint). It is true of many of the keyboard dance pieces that make up the Baroque keyboard suites, and of many toccatas, scherzos, pieces with fanciful “character” names, etc. These elements sometimes consist of lines of counterpoint that are surrounded or accompanied by other notes that are not part of the counterpoint, sometimes of implied contrapuntal lines in thicker textures, sometimes of short sections that are contrapuntal where the surrounding sections are not.
A further reason for studying counterpoint as a player is that listening to—or listening for—contrapuntal lines is extraordinarily good training for listening carefully to anything. Developing the ability to hear, especially, three or more simultaneous contrapuntal voices with some degree of independence is perhaps the best training for the ability to hear all parts of any musical texture, including inner or background harmonies in primarily melodic or homophonic music.
The final reason to mention here—I’m sure that there are more—is that practicing and playing counterpoint is the best training for dexterity and independence of fingers. The physical skills developed by playing counterpoint will improve the playing of any kind of music, usually both by making it seem easier and by making it sound better in the end (or, more meaningfully, by expanding the range of ways in which the player can play the music, by increasing control and security).
In teaching the playing of counterpoint to students who are not already steeped in the (theoretical) study of counterpoint or who do not have the experience of playing a lot of rigorously contrapuntal pieces, the first task is to make the concept of counterpoint as unintimidating as possible. There is no doubt that the formal theoretical study of counterpoint—or, more usually, an indirect impression of what that study is like—can make contrapuntal music seem so complicated, so intellectually rigorous, so arcane, and so steeped in analytical detail as to be prohibitively frightening to play. This fright, which usually comes in the first instance from a sense of what the music is like compositionally, is sometimes enhanced by hearing experienced virtuoso performers say that counterpoint is more challenging than other music: that even a relatively simple Bach fugue, or invention for that matter, is “harder” than Liszt or Brahms or Beethoven. This may well be true for that performer (usually a performer who was first trained on piano music from the Classical period and later); however, it can still be an unfortunate place for a student to start.
If the first source of a potentially crippling fear about playing contrapuntal pieces is a sense that those pieces are by definition intellectually (too) complex, then perhaps the first way to work on alleviating that fear is by trying to define contrapuntal music, and specific contrapuntal forms such as fugue, in as simple and commonsense a way as is possible consistent with accuracy. This would involve avoiding, at least at first, the laundry list of terms that are used to try to describe contrapuntally constructed pieces, or the building blocks of those pieces—terms such as subject, answer, inversion, augmentation, diminution, stretto, episode, perhaps many more. (Fortunately, it seems to me, a simple colloquial way of describing what is going on in a piece can often be in fact the most accurate for that particular piece: more about this later on.) Also, it would be nice if any such definitions could also be interesting and intriguing, and serve to connect contrapuntal music to the rest of our musical (and perhaps non-musical) experience.
So, what is counterpoint and what is contrapuntal music? Here are a few attempts at addressing that question, none of which is intended to be complete or definitive, or to exclude any others. They are all just ideas to be thought about.
Counterpoint is two or more different things happening at the same time. This way of looking at it is not necessarily specific to music. It can apply, for example, to a freight train chugging past a road on which cars are cruising, or to clouds at two different atmospheric levels moving in different directions, or to birds chirping outside the window of a room where the radio is on.
In music, if two “things” that are not the same are to happen at the same time, it is necessary to know what a “thing” is. For the kind of keyboard counterpoint that we are discussing here, the “thing” is a contrapuntal voice or, putting it a bit differently, a melody. It could in theory, however, be something different, like a rhythm (think, for example, of the opening of the John Fogerty song Centerfield, in which a repeated rhythm generated by clapping—rather than by any musical instrument—is joined after a while by the lead guitar and then the bass line) or even a sonority (as in, for example, the Jethro Tull song Mountain Men, in which the vocal line is accompanied by guitar, ostensibly in unison, but with an effect that is—–because of the sonority—not that of blending into one sound, but rather of counterpoint at the unison).
Counterpoint is also the same thing happening at different times, assuming that it is also coming from different places. That is, if in a piece of music we hear the same tune or melody or motif at different times, but we perceive that it is coming from the same instrument or singer, or from the same voice in a multi-voice texture, then that does not feel like counterpoint. If it seems to be coming from a different voice or a different instrument, then that is counterpoint. (For example, in the Vierne Arabesque, when the opening theme [m. 2] recurs, still in the upper voice, in m. 6, this is just a repetition, not counterpoint. When it enters in the lowest voice in m. 21 and thereafter, this is a contrapuntal event.)
A contrapuntal piece of music is one that has voices (regardless of whether they do the same thing as one another or different things). The concept of a voice in a contrapuntal texture can seem so intuitive or obvious to anyone who has gotten used to working with contrapuntal music that it can be hard to remember that it is new to many students—or at least that earlier explanations may have been incomplete or left them confused. It is not uncommon for a (beginning) keyboard student to assume that “voice” means “hand,” or to have trouble sorting out which notes belong to which voice. And, in fact, the contrapuntal voice is a concept that can be elusive. After all, if some music is being played, and, most of the time there happens to be more than one note sounding, then what is it exactly that allows us to say that certain notes follow one another in the same voice? Is it just that the composer’s notation suggests what the voices are? Isn’t that potentially pretty arbitrary? If I took a nicely contrapuntal piece or passage and rewrote various stem directions, or changed the placement of some notes on the different staves, so that the flow of the voices was ostensibly changed—but all the notes, rests, etc. remained exactly the same—would a listener hear it as a different piece? Would a performer need to do something different? If not, then what in the world is the meaning of this concept of a voice, anyway?
This elusiveness may well be one of the keys to understanding the job of the performer in playing contrapuntal music. If for whatever reason we grant that the phenomenon of voices is significant (artistically, philosophically, intellectually, emotionally) and if the concept is elusive or abstract, then presumably it is up to the performer to try to make the significance of the voice structure manifest and project it in a way that is (emotionally, artistically, etc.) meaningful and powerful.
The easiest way to introduce a student to the concept of a voice as it applies to keyboard music is probably by the traditional, straightforward analogy to singing, which is probably the original source of both the concept of a contrapuntal voice and the nomenclature. That is, a contrapuntal voice is a line of music—a melody—that could be sung by an individual singer or played by an individual melody instrument. Making the concept of a voice vivid and clear to a student can best be achieved through analysis and practicing of actual pieces, as I will discuss next month.
To sum up, a contrapuntal keyboard piece is one that is clearly in voices, which are usually doing different things at the same time and similar things at different times. The patterns according to which voices do similar and different things are probably meaningful or interesting. Usually, most of the notes form part of musical gestures that recur, and the voices sounding together make sense in the harmonic language that prevails in the musical culture in which the piece was written.
I will close this month with a story from my own earliest year studying music, which, I think, nicely frames some of the issues in practicing and learning contrapuntal music that I will begin to discuss in detail next month.
When I was about ten years old, I was known around my school as someone who was interested in music and was beginning to play piano. One of the older students (ninth grade, maybe) was kind enough to bring in some pieces that she thought I would like, and to help me work on them occasionally after school. Once she brought in a volume of what I seem to remember were simpler Bach fugues, arranged for four hands, and she and I sat at the piano trying them out. She told me that they were hard, and I found them hard. She also explained to me what fugues were, and that it was very challenging to play different voices at once, even though we were each playing only half the notes of the original pieces. All of a sudden sitting there I had a revelation: why not forget about this idea of “voices” and just make sure to position my hand above the notes as they came along, and play them! This idea made me think that I could even cope, at home, with trying to play all the notes of some of these pieces, which I did then try. I found it easier than I had been led to expect, especially if I kept it slow. After doing this for a while, however, something (I don’t remember what: probably something another student said) made me suddenly realize—or I should say, suddenly believe—that ignoring the voices this way was musically the worst thing I could do: actually really barbaric, creating a strong danger that I would be shown to be a charlatan! I was horrified with myself, and tried to flee as quickly as I could from that way of looking at it, even though it had made the learning of the pieces seem easier.
Many years later, I now think that some sort of synthesis of these two approaches is probably wise: that a student should simultaneously study, listen to, and understand the voices as thoroughly and vividly as possible, and eagerly embrace the easiest, most practical approach to fingering and to the practical side of learning the notes. I will take this up in detail next month.

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 1: Getting to know the piece
This month we begin the process of working on the Praeludium in E major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude. As I mentioned last month, there is a good edition available online for free at http://imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/1/1e/IMSLP29682-PMLP06429-BuxWV136-154.pdf, pages 21–26. This is a reprint of the edition first published in the 1870s by Breitkopf & Härtel, edited by Phillip Spitta, and frequently reprinted, later on with revisions by Max Seiffert. It is also available in a 1988 Dover reprint and in Kalmus editions. There are several subsequent editions available through music dealers and at libraries. Small differences in these editions will not in any way interfere with the discussion of the process of working on the piece. Any one of them will serve this purpose very well.
The first step in working on a piece is to make sure that there are measure numbers, and if there are not—as in the edition referred to above—to put them in. This is worth doing! It will save time later and help in getting to know the piece. Even though the measure is somewhat of an arbitrary construct (and I feel pretty sure that as a matter of performance and listening nothing would change in the least if all of the bar lines in the notated music were erased), the act of going through and writing in measure numbers is a good first step in exploring what a piece seems to be about on the broadest level. The Buxtehude Praeludium has 110 measures. Going through the piece counting measures, I notice the following, among other things:
• three measures are whole notes;
• three tempo markings appear along the way, each of which apparently occurring at a place where there is also a noticeable change in texture;
• quite a few measures or passages are in only one voice;
• pedal is present almost exactly half the time (though this can be an artifact of the edition rather than the piece);
• several changes in time signature.
None of this is exactly earth shaking, and of course most of what there is to notice about a piece is not noticed casually while counting measures. However, I want to introduce the idea that noticing anything and everything about a piece is the first and an important step towards learning how to play it. I am not talking specifically—or only—about the things that constitute a formal analysis—harmonic or motivic/contrapuntal—such as might be done in a theory class. This might overlap with what I am talking about, and that kind of rigorous academic analysis has several important purposes, only some of which bear upon the act of learning a piece or actually performing it. However, noticing things about a piece—simple or complex, superficial (even, for example, things about font and layout in the page) or “deep” (contrapuntal structure, harmonic intricacies)—can increase ultimate performing security by increasing the extent to which a player simply knows what is coming up next. This is analogous to the fact that it is easier to drive around a town whose streets you know well, or to walk around a building where you know all of the corridors and staircases. It is also part of the process of making a non-memorized piece as well-learned and secure as a memorized piece is supposed to be. (A piece that is memorized mostly by feel is often not particularly secure.) Of course, working out fingerings and pedalings and then practicing them is by far the most important component of learning a piece and becoming comfortable playing it. However, the more consciously familiar you are with the landscape of a piece, the more your mind will be able to help you, as you practice and perform the work, with the task of remembering what is coming up next in time to execute it serenely and securely. Such things as “the next subject entry is in the tenor” or “there’s a surprising chord coming up” or “the first thing on the next page is a D-major chord” or “the font on page 4 is larger, because there are fewer lines” all serve this function. Some of these things might also contribute to an analysis of the piece and perhaps to a greater artistic understanding of the piece as well. However, the point right now is that they make the basic learning of the piece more solid and secure.
The first thing to explore about a piece is what sections the piece falls into. Sometimes sections are delineated by double bars or (of course) movement breaks, or flagged by words—tempo indications, usually. Sometimes they are not. It is also possible to be unsure whether two adjacent areas within a piece should be considered different sections or simply somewhat different parts of the same section. This almost always does not matter at all. Exploring the issue and describing for yourself what is going on is all that is necessary.
In this Praeludium, there are quite a few spots where something changes, that is, where one kind of writing gives way to another. These spots seem to be as follows: after m. 12; the beginning of m. 51; after m. 59; after m. 72; after the first beat of m. 75; after m. 86; and after m. 90. This suggests that there are eight different sections. The nature of the writing in the second, and longest, of these sections changes in the last three and a half measures, that is, from the middle of m. 47 through m. 50. There is no clear break leading into this change, so perhaps it isn’t quite a new section, but simply a different kind of passage. As I pointed out above, it does not matter what we call it as long as we notice what is happening.
So, if these passages or sections are different from one another, then how are they different and what can this tell us about how to work on the piece? Keyboard writing has a tendency to mix contrapuntal and non-contrapuntal textures. Therefore it is always useful in looking over a piece to notice which passages, if any, are written in a thoroughgoing contrapuntal texture and which are not. There may also be passages that seem to be somewhere in between. Of course one can assume that, in general, Renaissance and Baroque keyboard music will have a large proportion of formally worked out counterpoint, later music rather less.
In the case of this piece, the following sections seem to be fully contrapuntal, in the sense that they have a set number of voices and they treat recognizable motives imitatively: the section beginning at m. 13, excluding the last few measures; the section beginning at m. 60; the section beginning in m. 75; and the final section, which begins at m. 91. Each of these sections is more or less fugal—that is, in addition to their being contrapuntal in the sense described above, they have at least one theme or motive that is heard one or more times in each voice. These themes are first heard as follows: 1) mm. 13–15 in the soprano voice; 2) m. 60 in the alto voice; 3) m. 75 in the tenor voice; and 4) m. 91 in the alto voice. It is important to go through and find each and every occurrence of each of these themes. This is certainly part of understanding the rhetoric of the work, and of analyzing the work for achieving an intellectual understanding of the piece and of the mind of the composer. But it is also a very practical step in learning how to get the notes right and how to make the piece secure in performance. As noted above, the more you simply know what’s coming up, the more familiar you are with what is in the piece, the more likely you are to recall it in time to play it easily and securely. The most natural thing to remember is any kind of pattern, and a recurrent theme is a pattern.
Motives or themes, including themes functioning as fugue subjects, are of course not the only recurring patterns that can (and should) be noticed; we will get to some others just below. However, fugue subjects and similar recurring motives are easy to notice and to identify, and are therefore a good starting point. So it is a good idea to highlight them on a copy of the work. I find twelve instances of the theme introduced in m. 13—four in the soprano voice, three in the alto, two in the tenor, and three in the bass. There are also many instances of the second half of this theme occurring without the first half, as in, for example, measures 33 and 34. The theme introduced in m. 60, if we take it to be the full measure in the alto voice, occurs six times: three in the soprano voice, two in the alto, one in the tenor. (This section is in three voices.) However, each half of the theme occurs separately quite a few more times. Does it make sense to call this a measure-long theme, or is it really two separate four-note motives, which may or may not follow one another in the same voice? It doesn’t matter! As long as you notice what the notes and patterns are, either of those concepts will do very nicely to describe the situation. The theme introduced in m. 75 occurs six times, two in each of the three voices. Again, fragments of this theme also occur. The theme introduced in m. 91 seems to occur eleven times, though it would be possible to argue that a couple of them are not quite exactly that theme, but rather a close variant. Each half of the theme also occurs separately many times.
Turning for a moment to the four remaining sections of the piece, what is there to notice about them? First of all, they are short, occupying 27 of the piece’s 110 measures. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that they take up a proportionately small amount of time: that depends on tempo. One of these sections—mm. 87–90—is in a set number of voices (four), with a homophonic, somewhat hymn-like, texture: fully worked-out counterpoint, but with no imitation or motivic development. The other three (at mm. 1, 51, and 73) are not in any fixed number of voices or, really, in voices at all. They include passage work, trills and trill-like writing, fairly long one-voice passages, occasional abrupt changes in texture—the most noticeable of which is near the beginning, where a long solo passage ends in a four-note chord—and some unprepared dissonance. Two of these sections have written comments associated with them: trillo longo in mm. 51 and 53, and con discrezione in m. 73. Both of these might suggest rhythmic freedom at a fairly broad level. This is obvious with con discrezione. It also makes sense that trillo longo, written over a very brief trill-like passage, would suggest that the trill can be made to occupy more time than is notated for it.
Getting to know a piece in order to perform it securely involves simply noticing things, even things whose significance isn’t clear—indeed, even things that are not really significant except in that they form part of the process of getting to know the piece. It is most important to notice anything that happens more than once. There is a good chance that anything that happens more than once is important compositionally, that the composer did it on purpose. However, even if this is not the case, the act of noticing helps with learning. By “anything” in this context I mean, probably, anything except individual pitches. It is probably not fruitful to notice that, for example, the note “a above middle c” occurs in this measure, and then occurs again in that measure. Once in a while this might matter, but usually not. Anything more involved than an individual note, however, is worth paying attention to.
Here are some things—other than the well-defined motives discussed above—that I notice in looking over this piece. The upward leap of a step in the pedal part occurs five times in a row near the beginning; it is possible that the rising quarter-note line in the lowest voice (not shared with the other voices) in the section beginning at m. 60 could be heard as related to this, an extension of it. The countersubject fragment in m. 16 and again m. 18—four notes in the soprano voice beginning just after the downbeat—comes in again somewhat prominently in the final section beginning at m. 103, and ends up being the final gesture of the piece. It also occurs in m. 72, but in a way that is interrupted: it does not resolve, and it leads into the con discrezione section. The phenomenon of two voices playing together—that is, in a way that is in sync rhythmically and more or less parallel—is characteristic of the beginning (mm. 4–6) and the end (mm. 99 on) of the piece, but not, except fleetingly, the middle. The one instance of this that I notice in the middle of the piece is at m. 57 and seems to foreshadow the fugue subject that governs the final section of the piece beginning at m. 91.
The most interesting recurrence of a compositional element in this piece is the first four notes—that is, the rising scale fragment B–C#–D#–E—which keep coming back at crucial moments. To start with, it is the germ from which the rest of the opening section is, at least partly, built up. This is most explicit in mm. 3, 4, and 9. Then this opening gesture is quoted directly as the last notes of the fugue subject that is introduced in m. 13. Also, the second half of that subject is essentially an ornamented inversion of this motive. When the long fugal section that begins in m. 13 is coming to an end and gives way to non-fugal passage work, the four-note motive or a close variant of it is present throughout, as it also is in the following section. The final fugue subject, which enters in m. 91, is made up of the ornamented inversion of this motive, followed by the motive itself. From m. 94 on, the motive occurs in parallel or contrary motion in two or three voices at once repeatedly, and the flourish that gives energy to the ending of the work in mm. 106 and 109 is made up of two iterations in a row of this four-note motive in diminution.
I have posted a copy of the score of BuxWV 141 with various motives and other aspects of the text of the piece highlighted at http://www.gavinblack-baroque.com. Next month we will continue with this piece, and I will discuss how to break the work up into units for practicing. Then, in the August column, we will turn to the Boëllmann Suite Gothique.