On Teaching

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. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. In the spring of 2011, he will be playing recitals around the Northeast. Details and contact information can be found at gavinblack-baroque.com.

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 5
So far we have looked at the first three—or possibly four—of what might be seven or eight sections of the Buxtehude Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141. (As I discussed in the column of June 2010, there are a number of different ways of counting sections, depending on choices about how to count brief changes of texture at cadences and several other such issues. Are mm. 47–50 their own section? This does not really matter when it comes to understanding or learning the piece.) Several sections remain, and, as with the three already discussed, they display considerable contrast in texture—where that means primarily the extent to which the texture is or isn’t contrapuntal—rhythm, tempo, meter, and mood. Three sections—mm. 60–72, 75–86, and 91 to the end—are truly contrapuntal. The latter two are real fugues or fughettas, constructed quite rigorously from their subjects; the first could probably also be analyzed as a fugue, but really comes across as a sort of contrapuntal mosaic derived from very short motifs.
The other measures—mm. 73–74 and 87–90—are non-contrapuntal. This does not mean that they fail to follow the normal rules of voice-leading when there is more than one note sounding. It means that they are not essentially constructed through the impulses and imperatives of imitative counterpoint, and that the listener’s ears will not respond to them primarily by following an interaction between independent melodies. The first of these sections, mm. 73 and 74, resembles the trillo longo section discussed at length in the November 2010 column. The passage in mm. 87–90 is a texture new to the piece, something like a four-voice chorale, though not with the aesthetic of any chorale meant to be sung.
In this month’s column I will talk about all but the last of the remaining sections. That section, mm. 90 to the end, will be the subject of next month’s column, which will also include some overall thoughts about this Praeludium and the act of learning it.

Measures 60–72
The passage beginning in m. 60 is a contrapuntal section in three voices. It is noteworthy for several things. It is the first section of the piece to have a tempo marking—Presto. Since this section immediately follows one that is essentially unmeasured, it is quite possible that the function of this tempo marking is more to make clear to the player that we are back to measured and regular music than to suggest a specific speed. Of course, it does at least place the music in the realm of “fast” rather than “slow”. This section is in three voices, with the exception of a few beats where a fourth voice briefly appears. (Two of those beats are at mm. 65–66; the other two are part of the cadential measure, m. 72.) The lowest of those voices has a compass that would not have been playable on the pedalboard of Buxtehude’s time. Therefore it is almost certainly not a pedal line, even though it would fall under the feet fairly well. Oddly, the lowest voice does not go very low. Its lowest note is tenor D-sharp, more than an octave above the lowest note of the manual organ compass. Therefore the entire section has a “high” feeling to it.
The section opens as shown in Example 1. This could be read as the opening of a fugue exposition, with a measure-long subject in stretto with itself from the very beginning. However, as the section unfolds, each of the two halves of this theme (Examples 2 and 3) occurs more often by itself than paired with the other half. (The whole theme occurs six times, one or another half occurs separately sixteen times.) Furthermore, two other short themes are introduced, each of which occurs nine times (Examples 4 and 5).
These four short motifs, including the quarter-note that ends each one, account for by far most of the notes of this section. It is this pattern of four short motifs each recurring many times, not really coalescing into “subject” and “countersubject”, which leads me to describe the section as a contrapuntal mosaic. Since for the performer the important point about this kind of analysis is to allow the mind and the ears to know without fail what is coming up next in the piece, the act of going through the score and highlighting each of the motifs is probably worthwhile.

Hand choices
Since the lowest of the three voices is quite high in compass, it is not surprising that the middle voice can fit—almost every note of it—at least reasonably well in either hand. Therefore, this a good passage for a student to use in practicing the art of making hand choices—something that was discussed at some length in last month’s column, though in the context of a very different piece. Here it is possible for the student to play the lower two voices all the way through in just the left hand—omitting just a few notes of the middle voice, in m. 67 for example. Then it is also possible to play the upper two voices in the right hand, again being required to omit only a few notes. Neither of these is at all likely to be the best way to play the passage, of course. The next step is to go through and figure out what choice of hand actually works best for the middle voice as it goes along. This will be different from one student to another, based on existing fingering habits, details of hand size and shape, and musical goals. Any student should be able to work this out essentially for him- or herself, and it is a good exercise to do so.
Once the hand choices have been worked out, since this is a contrapuntal section, the player should practice the middle voice alone with the correct fingering, in order to make the transitions from one hand to another seem as smooth and natural as possible. This can supplement the usual practicing of individual voices and pairs of voices.
(In the few beats where Buxtehude has violated the voice structure by adding anomalous extra notes, it is fine to fudge the voice practicing a bit—omit the extra notes, or expand the voice that you are playing to included, briefly, two notes. As long as the student is aware of doing one of these things, it is fine.)
An important compositional/aesthetic point to notice in this section is that it ends with an incomplete cadence. Everything that develops in mm. 71–72 points strongly to a C-sharp triad on the first beat of m. 73. (It could be major or minor.) However, instead there is nothing there. The timing and pacing of this non-cadence is important, in particular, in setting up the next section.

Measures 73–74
This next “section” is short enough to earn quotation marks—only two measures (Example 6). This section is preceded and followed by contrapuntal sections that are longer than it is, and that are different from it in mood. That is, they are—though also quite different from each other—both marked by strong rhythmic motion and a regular pulse. This section is marked con discrezione, which would strongly suggest free, perhaps even unmeasured, rhythm, even if the overall nature of the writing did not already suggest that. The combination of the shortness of this section with the importance of the contrast that it offers to the sections around it suggests something to me that might seem a little bit simplistic but that I think is valid, namely that within the bounds of what can work, it is a good idea to let this section take as long as it can. That is, the slower and freer it can be, the less perfunctory it will seem as a way station between the contrapuntal mosaic discussed above and the fughetta discussed below. This is just one thought, however; it certainly would not be a good idea to play it more slowly or more freely than seemed appropriate for the passage on its own terms. But all else being equal, perhaps the more time it occupies the more effective it will be.
The elements of this short passage are drawn from other sections of the work. The student should examine the notes of the solo opening measure for motivic connections to the previous section, and the notes of m. 74 for connections to earlier part of the work, in particular the trillo longo section. It becomes apparent that none of this is filler or cadential material. (I should admit that I myself did not notice the relationship between the melodic shapes in m. 73 and the material in mm. 60–72 until I had been studying the piece for quite a few years. There are probably details of the construction of this extremely well thought-out work that I have not noticed yet. Students should be encouraged to undertake as much detective work as they like, picking apart themes and scanning the whole piece for connections.)
Since the pedal note that enters in m. 74 does not change anything about the harmony or anything significant about the counterpoint, it is perhaps there for emphasis. It makes more emphatic the negation or contradiction of two things: first, the B-sharp that has prevailed since m. 71; second, the high tessitura of the section that has just ended.

Measures 75–86
The section that begins after the downbeat of m. 75 is a short fugue in three voices. The subject (Example 7) occurs six times in eight measures, followed by a fairly extended build-up to the final cadence—which this time is completed. This is again a manuals-only section—the lowest voice is too high for the pedal compass. Once again the notes of the middle voice can almost all be reached by either hand. For about five measures’ worth of the section, there are actually only two voices being played, so hand choices as such are limited to the remaining measures. (When there are only two voices being played, there is of course rarely a reason not just to split them between the two hands.) The most interesting spots to think about hand choices and fingering are mm. 78 and 82 and perhaps mm. 84–85. Students should try several possibilities and in particular notice differences in the range of possible articulations with different hand/fingering choices.
A particular feature of this fugue subject is the presence of a repeated-note event at a crucial moment in the unfolding of the theme. The articulation and timing of this repetition each time it occurs is probably more important than any other one thing in shaping the overall effect of the passage. Therefore it is a wonderful opportunity for a student to think about planning repeated notes and to listen carefully to them. As I wrote in the column of January 2009, I believe strongly that whenever possible, it is a very good idea to use different fingers for repeated notes. I would, for example, finger the opening statement of this fugue subject as shown in Example 8 (this is in the left hand, of course).
As always, there are many other specific ways to do it. Changing fingers on repeated notes, in addition to giving the player more control over a wider range of articulation and timing possibilities, is also a free shot at repositioning the hand. In a passage like this, which has an active subject and, just for good measure, four sharps, repositioning the hand can be useful. Here is an example of a repeated-note fingering (in the right hand) that also positions the hand to deal easily with the other notes (Example 9).

Measures 87–90
The last of the four sections that we are looking at here is another fairly short non-contrapuntal passage (Example 10). Since the previous section ended with a convincing and well-heralded cadence in B-major, the opening harmony of this section is another instance of abrupt contradiction. The first note in the pedal sounds like it is inviting a continuation of the same harmonic scheme; when the chord is filled out in the hands it negates that harmony quite clearly. This passage is in the form, more or less, of a four-part chorale harmonization. The Adagio marking suggests a slow tempo for the section. Again it seems to me that, all else being equal, the slower these measures are, the more effective they will be as a counterweight to the rhythmic and contrapuntal material that surrounds them. The same range of possibilities for dividing the alto voice between the hands is found here as in other sections discussed above. In this case, since the lines are slow and not very complex, the choices are perhaps low stakes. However, in a slow bare-bones texture such as this, the addition of ornaments is always a possibility, and that might shape decisions about hand choices as well as fingering. For example, I like to play a trill on the final quarter note of m. 88. In order to accommodate that trill the most easily, I use a fingering like that in Example 11. There is nothing surprising or particularly original about this fingering. The gist of it is taking the first D-sharp in the left hand in order to permit the right hand to approach the trill in an unconstrained way. Students should try out various ornaments: trills, mordents, appoggiaturas, slides. (I sometimes play a slide all the way down from the high D-sharp to the G-sharp in the measure just above, or between the two pedal notes in m. 89.) It is in principle fine to ornament all of the notes, or none of the notes or anything in between. The important thing is for the student to try things out, and react and think.
This month’s discussion ends in the middle of a cadence, since the unresolved final note of m. 90 is resolved by the first note of the fugue subject of the final section. We will resolve this cadence and discuss the rest of the piece next month.

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 4:
Free writing and trillo longo—mm. 51–59
This month’s column is about just a little bit of music—the third overall section of the Praeludium, nine measures long, mm. 51–59. I will provide some analysis of the passage, and offer some thoughts and suggestions about fingering and pedaling.

The Praeludium that we are studying is, as I discussed in the column from June 2010, a one-movement work in several sections. There is both contrast and continuity amongst the sections. Sources of contrast are clear. Some sections are contrapuntal, some are not; some are regular in pulse and rhythm, some are free or essentially unmeasured; some use striking dissonance, some avoid it. Sources of continuity can be more elusive, but can include the use of similar motivic material, or recurring rhythms or harmonies. This is the classic form of the toccata or praeludium as practiced by Frescobaldi and Froberger, among others, and adopted and adapted by Buxtehude as the form of his organ praeludia. It was also used by Bach for organ and harpsichord pieces that we know or believe to come from early in his career: most of the harpsichord toccatas, the famous D-minor organ toccata, BWV 565, and some of the preludes and fugues such as BWV 551.
The section that we are looking at here is essentially non-contrapuntal, in that the writing is not in a set number of voices, although, as we will see, there are recurrent motives. There are fairly quick changes of texture, from one voice in m. 51 and elsewhere to four and five later. Chords are built up out of passagework. There are abrupt changes in the prevailing note values, as in m. 52, which starts with 32nd notes and then somewhat surprisingly sits on the third quarter-note beat with no motion. The lowest notes make up a true pedal part (always a question with Buxtehude, since the sources don’t make it clear, and also since the relationship between the sources and Buxtehude’s original intentions is not always known), since there are stretches that cannot be executed by two hands alone.

Four-note motive
In the following example, some of the notes have been highlighted with either rectangular or oval outlines (see Example 1). The rectangular outlines indicate either an exact form—nine instances, including inversions—or a plausible variant—six instances—of the four-note motive that begins the entire praeludium (see Example 2). This motive is found in crucial spots throughout the praeludium, sometimes as a marker of transitions or important moments, sometimes as part of “officially” motivic material, such as the second half of the fugue subject of the final section of the piece. The section that we are looking at here is clearly chock full of this short motive—it is present almost exactly half the time. This is one of the sources of continuity between this section and the rest of the praeludium.
It could well be argued that this motive is too simple, too ordinary, to count as a real, identifiable motive, or to serve as a source of continuity or unity within a piece. After all, every piece has plenty of short scale passages, and this one in particular is introduced in the most casual possible way. However, it seems to me that if the composer had not intended it to be heard, perhaps subliminally, as a significant motive, then we would not be able to find it quite so consistently through the whole piece. In any case, we do find it, and each teacher and each student—having initially noticed it—can muse about how significant it really is, and decide for him- or herself.

Connections
The second element of this short section that ties it to the rest of the piece is the cluster of notes in the first half of m. 57, highlighted with an oval box. This is a foreshadowing of the fugue subject of the last section of the praeludium (see Example 3), especially as that subject appears when it is in parallel with itself. This happens in several places, such as m. 104, for example (see Example 4).
This section is also clearly related to the rest of the piece by its similarities to the transitional passage that constitutes the end of the second overall section of the piece and that therefore comes just before this section. This transition occupies mm. 47–50. It arises out of the fugue that precedes it without break or interruption. The fugal texture just gives way to non-contrapuntal writing with passagework and built-up quasi-arpeggio chords. This texture resembles that of mm. 51–59, although it has the feeling of both a cadence and coda to the long fugue that has preceded it. The flourish that ends the transitional passage and the pedal solo that begins the third section are more or less versions of each other (see Examples 5 and 6).
(A similar way of linking the end of one section to the beginning of the next was employed by Bach in, for example, the Toccata in C Major, at the transition between the opening manual solo and the ensuing pedal solo, where the first four pedal notes seem to answer the last four manual notes [see Example 7], and in the F-major Toccata and Fugue, where the very last notes of the toccata are echoed in the mordent that begins the fugue subject.)

Trillo longo
One interesting feature of this passage is the use of the term trillo longo, placed over two spots in the pedal part, as seen in Example 1. Of course it seems obvious, on one level, what this term means: long trill. And in both instances it is written above notes that are in the shape of a trill, one that begins on the lower of its two notes. One surprising discovery about this term—trillo longo—is that there is no evidence that it was ever in common use as a technical musical term or as a piece of accepted musical jargon. A bit of research reveals that it is not listed as a musical term in any music dictionary or encyclopedia, and there are no papers or articles that discuss it as a term or that mention any piece in the entire history of music that uses it as a term, other than this piece. (A Google search on the term “trillo longo” returns seven results, one of them about a piece that does not in fact use the term, and all of the other six about this passage. Included in these search results is one prior column in this series.)
So if this term was not in particularly common use—even if its basic meaning is clear—why did Buxtehude (or his copyist: we can’t be sure) use it here? Was he simply observing that the printed notes constitute a “long trill”? Or was he instructing the player to execute a long trill beyond what the notes indicate? If so, is this to be accomplished by adding notes and time, or by adding notes and making them faster? Does the designation of a group of 32nd notes as a “long trill” suggest that they can or should be played freely, or given some particular grouping or shape? (For example, the 16th-note B that falls on “the ‘and’ of three” in m. 51 could be thought of as the beginning of a trill, and the 16th-note/32nd-note rhythm rendered freely, as the gradual beginning of the trill.) Or was he just reminding the player to resist the temptation to shorten or omit or simplify the trill due to its being in the pedal, and therefore tricky to execute? Here’s another possibility: perhaps Buxtehude wanted to employ some Italian language at this point to signify that the trills in question were Italian-style trills, that is, trills beginning on the main note.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, or whether any of these thoughts really apply. I throw them out there for the student—or teacher—to muse about. Meanwhile, the “long trill” continues to be important as the section goes along, especially as manifested by the (very long) trill in one of the inner voices in m. 56. In this spot, unlike in mm. 51, 53, 55, and 57, the trill is accompanied throughout by motion in other voices. This is also the measure in this passage that is in five voices—and five notes are actually sounding throughout the measure—therefore it is literally the loudest measure within this section. It has the largest number of total notes played of any measure at 32. (The following measure is second at 29.) All of this suggests that this measure might be the rhetorical climax or high point of the section. The major interpretive or performance issue in this measure concerns the trill. Should the notes that follow the pattern of a trill on E and D-sharp be played “as written,” that is, as more or less measured 32nd notes, or should they be untethered from that timing and played as a fairly free trill? The latter is, to put it plainly, harder. It requires that the trill pattern be learned and practiced so well that the fingers can execute it while the mind of the player is, in a sense, ignoring it. The player must let those notes go their own way rhythmically and concentrate on playing the other—right hand—notes in the desired rhythm, regardless of how those notes do or don’t line up with the notes of the trill. In any case, the student or player should initially practice the notes of this trill in the “as written” rhythm, learning them more and more securely while thinking about whether to try to set them free from the printed rhythm.

Pedaling
Pedalings in this passage are mostly straightforward. That is, there are easy pedaling solutions involving toes—mostly alternate toes—as would have been the norm in Buxtehude’s time. A possible pedaling—along with some fingering—is suggested in Example 8. The pedal notes marked with asterisks are (some of?) those that could very easily be played with heel if a player is so inclined, either because that happens to be more comfortable for the particular player or to avoid a disjunct articulation at those spots. (Just for the record, I believe that I have usually used the left heel on the asterisked note in m. 51, where my particular posture makes it extremely comfortable and natural to do so, but not on the one in m. 53.) The transaction that takes place between the second and third pedal notes of m. 51 (G# and F#) is interesting. The articulation created by simply using the right toe for both notes, as I have indicated it, is natural and “musical” in that it precedes a note that is on a beat, and confers a slight accent on that note.
However, if in a particular player’s conception of the passage that articulation seems jarring, then it is difficult (but probably not impossible) to figure out a way to avoid it that works. Players with very wide feet can play the G# with the extreme outside of the right toe and rotate the foot in order to play the F# with the inside of the foot—the big toe. Some players might be comfortable initially catching the F# with the left toe and quickly substituting the right toe, in order to free the left toe up to aim for the following note. It is hard to picture getting the heel involved since we are dealing with black notes. It is very possible to turn the logic of this around and say that since it is so much more natural to use a pedaling here that creates an articulation, perhaps that is how the passage was meant to be played.

Fingering
As always, the first step in creating a fingering is to figure out, where there is any possible doubt, which notes belong in which hand. I have indicated some “handing” choices in the example above, using curved lines. There are several other options. For example, it would be possible to take the 16th notes on the second beat of m. 52 in the left hand, or the B# and C# in the second beat of m. 54 in the right hand. In the third beat of m. 57, I have suggested taking the G# in the left hand. This is because I would find it extremely awkward to play the remaining upper-voice notes of that measure while holding the G#, all in the right hand. However, reaching the E/G# dyad with the left hand is indeed also tricky. It certainly involves a break immediately before those notes, and must be practiced carefully to avoid making that break sound jarring or abrupt.
I have included only a few fingerings as examples. Any of them can also be done a number of other ways. For example, changing the numerals printed above the upper staff in m. 52 from 2-3-4-5-4 to 2-3-1-4-5 would result in an also very good fingering (leaving the other fingers the same). In the right hand in m. 53 the fingering could be (instead of 4-3-1-2-1-4-3) 5-4-3-2-3-4-3 or 4-3-1-3-4-5-2 or a number of other possibilities. For that matter either or both D#’s could be taken in the left hand. Comfortable hand position is the main guiding principle, and this is something that varies from player to player, based on posture and the size and shape of the hands.
Notice, however, that in all of these (m. 53) examples I am carefully preserving the use of a different finger to repeat the D# from the one that is already holding it. The suggested fingering for the right hand in m. 56 is also designed to use different fingers on repeated notes. By and large, it is a good idea to keep the thumb off of black keys. In fact, the most physiologically comfortable use of the thumb at the keyboard is for playing white notes just before or just after another finger has played a black note. Much of my approach to fingering a passage like this—in a heavily “black note” key—is derived from this concept of the use of the thumb. This can be seen in essentially all of the fingerings that I have written in here.
The student and teacher can try some of my fingerings, but should primarily work fingerings out from scratch, bearing in mind the ideas discussed above. Then, of course, the next step is what it always is: careful and patient practice, starting with separate hands and feet—doing as much of that as turns out to be needed, better too much then too little—then putting things together at a comfortably slow tempo, speeding up gradually, keeping the hands and feet relaxed.
Next month we will return to Boëllmann, looking at the charismatic and popular Menuet Gothique.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work this fall on a recording of Bach’s Art of the Fugue in a version for two harpsichords. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.

Counterpoint III
This month I want to outline, as systematically as I can, a method for taking any contrapuntal keyboard piece apart into separate voices, practicing those voices separately, and putting the piece back together. This builds on some of the ideas discussed in the last two columns. I will also begin to discuss motivic analysis, which I will expand upon next month in wrapping up this series on counterpoint.
To begin with, I will mention some of the reasons for approaching this kind of music in this way, since it involves, up front at least, more work than it would take just to finger and practice the piece. Any student who is being asked to put in this extra work deserves to know why it is being suggested, and thus to have a chance to become convinced of it and motivated, inwardly and enthusiastically, to do it. The first reason is in a sense philosophical. If a piece is convincingly contrapuntal—written in voices that are completely or very largely consistent, that is, each is a coherent melody from the beginning of the piece to the end—then the composer certainly wrote it that way on purpose. Therefore it makes sense to assume that the performer ought to understand it that way as well, at least as a point of departure for making decisions as to how best to play the piece. This is somewhat analogous to an actor’s knowing the grammar and syntax of the language in which a play is written before performing in that play. It is possible to learn a part phonetically, in a language that you do not understand, but this is unlikely to lead to convincing rendering of the phrases and sentences, or possibly even of the words.
A second reason arises out of the first one. An actor playing a part in a language that he or she doesn’t understand might be able to give a convincing performance of that part through coaching. That is, someone who does understand the language could demonstrate ways of speaking the words and phrases that are appropriate, and the actor could mimic that native speaker. This could perhaps provide one—but certainly only one—convincing performance. However, it would deny the actor any scope to vary and develop that performance or to opt for a different interpretation. Likewise, a student working on a contrapuntal piece can certainly be coached by someone—possibly the teacher—towards a performance of that piece, through that coach’s suggesting phrasings and articulations and other interpretive details. A conscientious student could realize those suggestions and thereby give a performance that might be well worth listening to. However, the student would not have much basis on which to vary or change that interpretation, and would not really have learned anything much about interpretation or performance. The notion that a teacher ought not to tell a student how to interpret a piece but rather let the student work out and discover interpretive ideas him- or herself is of course something that applies equally well (or equally poorly: it is in fact a controversial idea, though one that I believe in strongly) to any music, contrapuntal or not. If, however, we accept for the moment that a student should have maximum autonomy in shaping interpretation and performance, then certainly for counterpoint the more intimately familiar the student is with the voices the more he or she will be able to focus on shaping those voices and bringing them to life.
A third reason is that the ears and the mind can follow what they recognize. If you enter a room in which half a dozen people are talking out loud in six different languages that you do not know, you will hear a blur of sound, a cacophony. If, however, you do know one of the languages, you will be able to follow what the person speaking that language is saying. Those sounds will form themselves in your mind into words and phrases, and separate themselves out from the rest of the decibels. Likewise, if the ears and mind of a player know and can recognize each of the melodies that are going on at once in a contrapuntal passage, that player will have a good chance of being able to follow each of those voices as a discrete melody. The best way to predispose one’s ears to recognize each melody amongst all of the others is to have listened to it independently, enough times to have almost memorized it, not necessarily to be able to play it without music, but to be able to anticipate in the mind where it is going next. If a student, or any player, has only heard each voice while also hearing other voices then it will be unnecessarily difficult to hear the voices independently, and difficult to come up with—or indeed to implement—any interpretive ideas.
The fourth reason is of a different sort. I said above that working out a piece one voice at a time involves more work up front. The fortunate fact, however, is that this approach actually saves time and makes things easier in the long run. If a player’s ears and mind know—in the manner discussed in the previous paragraph—what the voices are doing and where they are going, then at the stage of fingering, pedaling, and learning the whole texture of the piece, the fingers and feet will have much less tendency to stumble or hesitate than they would if this first stage of learning has been omitted or shortchanged. This is emphatically true even though the fingerings will almost always be different for separate voices than for those same voices as part of the complete texture.
Working out a given piece this way saves time in learning that piece. It is also true that working out several pieces in this way saves a substantial amount of time in learning the next piece and the one after that, and so on. This is especially true within a particular style or compositional type. So, for example, if a student takes the time to learn three Bach fugues by studying the voices as rigorously as possible, then the next Bach fugue that he or she works on will go very quickly, and might even seem “easy,” or almost so! (certainly “easier”). Working on these Bach fugues will not help as much with a piece by Cavazzoni, Louis Couperin, Reger or Moondog. It will help some, but each new style or type of music has its own quirks and tendencies that can best be learned by working on that type of music. Also, any piece worked out in the manner described below will be very solidly learned, and not easily forgotten.
So here are the steps to follow in taking the voices of a contrapuntal piece apart and then putting them back together again:
1) First, it is important that the act of reading the voices not be an impediment to fluent practicing. The student should already have spent some time going over the art of reading individual voices in a keyboard score, as discussed last month. However, if the teasing out of the voices still seems difficult, then prior to practicing the voices, this reading should be made easier. This can be done by highlighting voices in the score, by acquiring several copies of the score and highlighting each voice in a different copy, or by writing out the piece in open score. (The latter can nowadays sometimes be done most easily by computer.) Some pieces are indeed available in open score, either through a bookstore or online. In any case, the literal reading of the voices should be made as little a problem as it can be. It is also a good idea, for the first few instances of a student’s working out a piece this way, to choose music that is easier rather than harder to read, say a three-part invention or a chorale prelude in which only the middle two voices are written together on a staff, rather than a five voice fugue on two lines.
2) It is a good idea, as with most kinds of practicing, to work with small and manageable sections of music. These can be as short as a few measures at a time. It is fine to let the working sections coincide with musical sections of a piece—a fugue exposition, or a phrase of a chorale—but this is also not necessary. It is also not necessary to start at the beginning of a piece.
3) Once a section of music has been chosen to work on, the student should go through and play each voice of that section as many times as necessary to make each voice seem familiar—really familiar. That is, the student should stick to separate individual voices until he or she could sing those voices in the shower without having to stop and think about it. Each voice should seem as familiar as “Happy Birthday” or “Jingle Bells.” The physical practicing of the separate voices, at this stage, need not correspond particularly to the way they will be practiced later as part of the whole texture. For example, an inner voice that will end up passing back and forth between the hands should be practiced—at this point—by one hand or the other. (In fact, both hands should take turns playing it, in preparation for 4) below.) It is also acceptable to play a pedal line in the left hand, if that would facilitate this process, while also spending time practicing it in the pedals. None of this, as I mentioned above, will end up creating problems. When the time comes to put the whole texture back together, the advantages gained by the ears’ extraordinary familiarity with the voices will outweigh any memory that the fingers might have of having played the notes with a wrong fingering. It is also OK to keep the voices slower than they will end up being later on.
4) Next, the student should put all of the possible pairs of voices together. This is the most important step in this process, and the prior steps really exist to make this step work as easily and thus as fruitfully as possible. In a three-voice piece there are three pairs of voices [SA, SB, AB]. In a four-voice piece there are six [SA, ST, SB, AT, AB, TB], and in a five-voice piece there are ten [SA, ST1, ST2, SB, AT1, and many more!]. (This count is a good reason to start with a three-voice piece in learning and implementing this technique.) In principle, all of the pairs of voices are equally important, and each pair has the potential to reveal interesting things about the ways in which the voices interact. It is important to practice all of the pairs an ample amount, but in particular not to short-change the pairs that are, just because of acoustics, harder to follow in the full texture. These are, usually, pairs involving inner voices or non-adjacent voices. Although the mere playing of these pairs of voices—with the ears becoming more and more attuned to them at a subliminal level—is the main point of this exercise, this is also a good stage at which to begin to notice specific things about the ways in which voices interact. In playing a particular pair of voices, do you hear echoes or repetition of motivic material, or anything that sounds like question and answer? Are there interesting rhythmic relationships between voices? Are there passages in which the phenomenon of quicker notes in one voice against slower notes in another voice is significant? This is a good time to notice anything and everything that happens more than once (something that I will discuss at much greater length next month). Is there a leap of a fourth in one voice, followed by a leap of a fourth in the other voice a little bit later? Are they both up, or down, or are they opposite? Is there a rhythm in one voice that is taken up later in the other voice? In augmentation or diminution? Does the soprano voice reach its highest note at the same time that the bass voice reaches its lowest? Or its highest? Everything like this is worth noticing, even though certainly not all of it has a definable or important theoretical role (and even though it is utterly impossible to notice everything: that cannot be the goal).
5) Once the pairs have all been played a lot and feel comfortable, the student should step back, work out fingerings and pedalings for the whole texture of the piece or passage, and begin to practice it in his or her normal way. This can, and usually should, include separate hands and feet (as opposed to separate voices), and slow practicing. I believe that it is not necessary to practice all of the groups of three voices in a four-voice piece, or all of the groups or three and four voices in a five-voice piece. If the player’s ears hear the individual voices and the pairs of voices clearly, then the whole texture will fall into place nicely.
Next month I will discuss approaches to motivic analysis and other kinds of analysis in learning contrapuntal music, and will wrap up a few odds and ends.

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.