On Teaching

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

This & that
As I mentioned in last month’s column, this month I will provide a sort of miscellany or potpourri of brief thoughts, ideas, and anecdotes that will amount to “light summer fare,” but which I hope will be interesting. Some of this column will introduce subjects that I will take up more fully later on.

Organ pedagogy
When I was a graduate student in organ performance at Westminster Choir College in the mid-80s, I took—as was required—the course in organ pedagogy. This course was, in those days, set up in an extraordinary way, and it ended up having a strong influence on the way that I think about teaching. The course was not a step by step traversal through a particular method of teaching. It did not purport to teach us how to teach in any technical sense. Rather, it was a kind of colloquium loosely organized around the notion of teaching but really concerned with what it means to be a musician, an organist, a performer, a colleague, and, indeed, a teacher. The course—and this was the crucial part as far as I was concerned—was taught by all six members of the organ department in turn, each one taking two or three weeks, and sharing whatever he or she thought was interesting, useful, or important for us to know.
Structured this way, the course taught us two lessons before we even stepped into the classroom. The first of these was that learning to be a teacher did not consist of learning some other (presumably older) teacher’s method, or, more broadly, did not necessarily consist of learning a method at all. The second was that diverse or divergent points of view were worthy of respect, and that anyone who had experience and something to say was worth listening to, even if he or she was not your own teacher, and—especially—even if he or she was rumored to have an approach or a philosophy that was different from your own, from your teacher’s, or from what you were used to.
(The Westminster organ faculty at that time was such an extraordinary group and represented such a great amount and diversity of experience that I would like to record here, even though it is already of course a matter of public record elsewhere, the names of the teachers who made up that group, in order of their seniority at the time. They were Donald McDonald, Eugene Roan, Joan Lippincott, Robert Carwithen, William Hays, and Mark Brombaugh.)

Two kinds of teaching
The whole phenomenon of declaring that “there are two kinds of” something—usually “people”—is somewhere between a joke and an oversimplification. My notion that there are two kinds of teaching is the latter: an admitted oversimplification that, if it is recognized as such, might be interesting. The first kind of teaching is the normal kind: a student comes for a lesson more or less every week, and practices regularly. The work of these lessons is organized in a fairly systematic way, and the teacher’s job in large part is to help the student make systematic progress, with each lesson building upon what came before. This will always be the largest and most important part of what goes on in the teaching/learning process, especially when that process addresses an area that involves technical skill.
The second kind of teaching is that in which a teacher says or does one simple thing that—very quickly, almost suddenly, with little or no need for follow-up or amplification—makes a significant or even crucial difference to the student. This is a kind of teaching by “revelation” or “enlightenment.” Of course—as I have experienced myself!—this concept can lead towards arrogance (“I will bestow Pearls of Wisdom upon my students as if I were a great Guru”) and laziness (“I need not undertake the grinding work of helping my students develop a systematic lesson and practice plan”).
(I should mention that I think that laziness can be quite useful sometimes—more about that below—but that arrogance probably cannot.) The antidote to this arrogance and laziness is the realization that, if sometimes something that you say or do as a teacher can have a revelatory effect upon a student and can create as much progress for that student as you might expect to achieve in a semester of work, it is always impossible to know or even guess in advance what might have that effect or serve that role for a particular student. It is not really something that you can do on purpose!
Here are four almost offhand remarks made to me over the early years of my own organ and harpsichord study, by four different people, some of whom were official teachers of mine and some of whom were not, each of whom turned out to be about as important to my learning as any given few months of studying and practicing:
1) After listening to me play a bit of a Bach fugue on the organ in my first year of organ study, an astute listener commented that I should listen to my playing of the subject in the pedals, and then try to recreate that effect in the voices that were on the manuals. This taught me that sometimes the visceral, kinesthetic, dance-like feeling of pedal playing can be a good intuitive source of rhythm, shape, and liveliness.
2) Early on in the time when I was studying organ with Paul Jordan—probably in about 1973—I was trying to play a short piece for him. Whenever I made a wrong note, I hesitated, or stopped, or tried to go back. Paul said to me that I should always know before I started a passage whether I was, on the one hand, playing it, or, on the other hand, drilling it. If the former, then I should be utterly committed to keeping it going, never breaking rhythm, always thinking about the next thing, not worrying about what just happened. If the latter, then I should know in advance what bit of the music I was drilling, and indeed go back and repeat it as many times as I needed to, but on purpose, not as a result of letting myself be derailed. This brief comment was, I believe, the source of at least half of my own ability to practice effectively and to perform, and to help others learn how to do the same.
3) A young but experienced virtuoso harpsichordist with whom I was chatting one day in the late ’70s, commented that any gesture that a person could perform at any given (slow) speed, could also—absolutely certainly—be performed at any (faster) speed, given appropriate practicing. I had no way of actually evaluating the truth of this claim at the time, but I kept it in mind. In the end it provided more or less the other half of my own ability to practice effectively and to teach effective practicing.
4) In the spring of 1979 I was studying privately with Prof. Eugene Roan, a few years before I studied with him as a graduate student. I played one of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugues for him on my new harpsichord, and he commented that he couldn’t hear a certain motif when it entered in the top voice. I think that I said something about harpsichord voicing, or acoustics, but he suggested that I simply make the theme a bit more detached, and he demonstrated that it could indeed be heard better that way. He floated the idea that the sound of the instrument was telling me something about how to play the piece. At the time I was very committed to the notion that this theme should be articulated a certain way, and that it should be played exactly that way every time that it came in. I didn’t want the instrument to try to force me to depart from my plan. However, that moment was the beginning of my considering the idea that interpretation could be, in effect, a collaboration between analytically derived ideas and acoustic- or instrument-derived sonic realities, and that neither side of that picture should be ignored.

Laziness
We clearly live in an era when everyone is expected to work all of the time. In fact, on the day when I am writing this, there are news stories floating around about attempts to get people to “turn off their BlackBerries” at least while they are at the beach or at a ball game. The need for such an attempt says a lot. In some fields the essential source of pressure to work all the time is external: the corporation, the boss, the client. For an enrolled student there is the pressure of grades, prizes, recommendations, etc. For any student there is the pressure of pleasing the teacher. In a field that specifically requires technical prowess, like playing a musical instrument or a sport, there is also the inner pressure of wanting to get better and better—to become more accomplished than it is actually possible to be, in order to hold at bay the fear of not being accomplished enough.
I myself have had exactly one period in my life when I actually practiced about ten hours a day, on average, for quite a few weeks in a row. This was when I was first learning to play the Art of the Fugue on the organ. It was, and is, that hard: I practiced for eight hours on the very day when I first performed it. Obviously this is not normally recommended. I believe that I or just about anyone would burn out before too long on this kind of schedule. It was certainly exhilarating to do it for a while, though.
I am, however, fundamentally quite lazy. I love sitting on the couch watching TV or reading or chatting with friends, and I believe that doing a reasonable amount of that kind of thing is clearly good. Resting and recharging is good (crucial!) for work, and doing things that are not work is good for life. However, I want to point in particular to one way of harnessing laziness that I think is really useful. The impulse towards laziness can be used to help us (and our students) to become aware of what is really important to us and what is not. Certainly it was important to me to learn the Art of the Fugue. I behaved like a working fiend then, long before the invention of the BlackBerry. Many other things that I think about doing also turn out to be important enough to me that they overcome whatever inertia I may have. And of course some things one just has to do. However, in the areas of life and of musical work that are optional—choices about what pieces we want to work on, or whether to get a harpsichord and learn how to keep it tuned and working, or whether to learn clavichord technique, or whether to try to become a good golfer or to read all of Joyce or Dante or Wodehouse—we should always be attuned to the voice that keeps us informed as to whether we would actually rather be napping. Sometimes, to be sure, this voice is misleading, and represents only a fleeting bit of tiredness or inertia. Sometimes, however, it can help us not bother with things that are really not valuable enough to bother with, and to focus on the things that are (and to take an occasional nap).
This ties in with the last subject for this month:

Motivation
I am convinced that working on learning a piece of music is a totally different experience depending on whether you do or do not really want to be working on it. And, as an extension of that, I am convinced that the whole project of working on becoming a musician (organist, harpsichordist, or anything else) is a completely different project depending on whether you are by and large working on music that you really, truly want to be working on or you are not.
I also believe that the artistic results that a performer can achieve—and the level of likelihood that it will be a worthwhile experience for a listener to hear that performer’s performance—are proportional in large part to how much the performer likes the music and really wants to be playing it.
I have seen evidence for this with myself and with every student that I’ve ever worked with. But one story illustrates it very clearly and strikingly.
I came to know an organ student, not my own, who had an interesting life history. He had been a member of the clergy, and cared about both the church and church music. He had always been a musician, but had lately decided to shift his work into music as such, rather than the ministry. He was still a young man, though old for a student. He had made this decision thoughtfully and was certainly highly motivated. However, for the first year or so of formal study, during which time his teacher asked him—quite reasonably, by usual standards—to work on a cross-section of standard repertoire, he found it all to be a chore, and grew less interested. He tried to be conscientious about his work, but no one found his performances all that exciting, and he became uncertain about his choice to enter into this kind of work.
Later on, after a year or so of study, his teacher decided that it was OK to let him focus, exclusively for the time being, on a certain, admittedly very narrow, slice of the repertoire that he had always particularly loved. At this point his demeanor and manner changed—much for the better—he abandoned his thoughts of abandoning his musical calling, and, most interestingly, he began for the first time to give performances that were exciting and interesting, that really contributed something artistically and enhanced the lives of those who heard them.
This was a long time ago: before I started teaching. It left me with a suspicion that whenever I did start teaching, I would have a strong bias in favor of letting students choose essentially all of the music that they wanted to work on. I have indeed followed that practice—100% as far as I can remember—and I think that it works extraordinarily well. Of course it raises issues about how students can inform themselves of what music is out there, and it confronts such ultimate questions as “what if someone never plays any Bach in their whole life? Can they be considered a real organist??” These are valid concerns, and I will, at some point in the future, write a column or two on exploring and choosing repertoire. My point here is just that the motivation provided by genuine inner excitement about the music being worked on is a powerful force that we should never ignore.
Next month I will start the new school year with a series on the teaching of contrapuntal keyboard music.

Gavin Black can be reached at gavin [email protected].

Repertoire, part 3: Mailbag
This month’s column is devoted to answering a few questions from readers, arising out of the two recent columns about repertoire. The questions all have to do with one basic point—namely, how it can be possible for students to work effectively on pieces that are “too hard.” These questions have led me to believe that I should discuss this further, especially since I also consider it a very important point. I will revisit certain things that I have already said, looking at them from somewhat different angles, and add a few new ideas.

What is too hard?
I begin by quoting at length from a set of questions sent to me by Don Stoner, a reader from Pennsylvania who studied organ in college and has taught high school and middle school music for many years. From his perspective as an experienced teacher, he has provided interesting feedback on different matters over the past couple of years, and in this instance his questions bring up essentially everything that I want to address here. He wrote as follows:

Thanks once again for your articles in The Diapason. I would like to ask you several questions that I was thinking about, especially in the paragraphs about the issue: What is too hard? . . . Here goes!

Should a teacher first access what the technical and theory abilities a student has at the keyboard? For example: You get a student that wants to play the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But he doesn’t have the “finger power” (for lack of a better way to describe it) to negotiate the manual runs, the pedal work, and so on. It would, I think, be like throwing someone in 10 feet of water and tell him to swim!! While I think that we need to let people play music they enjoy, they need to have certain amount of technical ability to be able to “make it through” to the end of the piece. Would you in this case say to a student “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think that we need to start with a smaller prelude and fugue (little 8) and then build up to this larger selection”? Do you think that all organ students are ready to “make the decision” that “I can play this piece no matter what anyone thinks”?

The essence of the matter is this: if it is true—as I believe—that it is important to encourage students to work on music that they really like and want to work on, then it must be OK to let those students (some of the time at least) work on music that is harder than what we as teachers might consider prudent. It also must mean, again some of the time, being willing to throw out any sense that it is necessary to work on pieces in some particular order. In general, it seems to call for taking a somewhat improvisatory approach to the business of using repertoire as material for making technical progress. In order for any of this to work, it is necessary to discover a way to use any piece—regardless of its degree of difficulty—as the material for teaching and learning at any stage. The essence of this, in turn, is the ability to break each piece down into simple components and to figure out how to use those components as appropriate teaching materials. It can, as a matter of teaching technique, learning technique, and practicing strategy, be done successfully with any piece.
However, as Don Stoner suggests in the last line quoted above, part of the issue is psychological. This is true most fundamentally with respect to the root of this whole discussion: the reason for letting students work on whatever music they most want to work on is that the mind of the student will then become more focused and better able to work efficiently. I believe this because I have observed it over and over again in myself, in colleagues, and in students. I think that this effect can often be at work even in people who believe that it doesn’t apply to them—that is, who believe that they have the pure willpower to make themselves work regardless of their feelings about what they are working on.

Temperamental and psychological issues
However, there certainly are some psychological or temperamental points that run counter to this. The main one is that if a student is working, even very efficiently and effectively, on a piece that is very challenging—“too hard”—for that student, then the student has to have patience. It will clearly take many times as long to learn a piece that is lengthy and difficult than to learn a piece that is short and (relatively) easy. A student who asks to work on such a (long, difficult) piece must think carefully about whether he or she has the patience to defer the gratification of having completed the whole piece, perhaps not even to be able to predict how long it will take. If this student gets pleasure out of playing pieces for people along the way, then he or she will have to think about whether it is all right to do less of that for the time being—that is, to be learning fewer pieces in a given space of time and thus have fewer, or no, new pieces to perform during that time. (I am talking now about this as a source of pleasure, satisfaction, or motivation, not as a practical requirement. Of course some students are in a position where they need pieces for practical purposes, say for church or to meet the requirements of a structured academic program. If so, then of course those needs may intervene temporarily and deflect the student from simply studying what he or she wants to study.)
If a student comes to a teacher wanting to work on a very difficult piece, one that is exciting and interesting to that student, then the teacher should discuss the temperamental and psychological issues involved. That is, the teacher should remind the student that this will be a long project, will require patient and well-organized work, and will involve postponing the satisfaction of having completed and learned a piece. It is by no means necessary to end up working on that piece. However, it is necessary (where “necessary” means “much better for the learning process”) that the student be genuinely happy with whatever piece(s) he or she end up working on. And while there need not be an assumption that the longer or more difficult piece will be chosen, there should also not be an assumption, even as a starting point, that it will not be chosen.
In fact, if a student has a strong desire to work on a piece that is a stretch for that student, then the teacher can use that as a sort of bargaining chip: you may certainly work on this piece, but only as long as you practice it well, in the ways that I suggest, patiently, systematically, etc.
The other psychological dimension that I want to discuss is fear. Fear is a natural response to the prospect of doing something very difficult. At a minimum, fear of failure, in and of itself, comes into play. On top of that, there is fear of disappointing the teacher, fear of disapproval from others—the teacher, fellow students, others in the field, a kind of imaginary, externalized “superego,” one’s parents, and of course one’s self. There is also the fear, specifically, of being thought hubristic, arrogant, self-important, or just plain cluelessly unrealistic in your claims about what you can or can’t accomplish. These fears are all natural and more or less universal. However, acting on them, in particular by limiting the scope or ambition of what pieces one works on, seems to me to be a terrible loss. In discussing with a student the pros and cons of tackling a big difficult piece, a teacher should, I believe, encourage the student to think clearly about his or her motivation, temperament, style of working, and so on. The student should know as clearly as possible what it would feel like to dig in and work on a very challenging piece, and make a free decision about whether that is or is not something that he or she wants to do. But the teacher should also try very hard to help the student ignore any voice of fear, any voice suggesting that working on a harder rather than an easier piece is scary or risky.
In fact, helping our students to free themselves from fear is probably the most important thing that we can do as teachers. I have one anecdote to relate on that subject. At my first organ lesson in the spring semester of 1985—which was my second year as a graduate student—I placed on the music desk of the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College the Helmut Walcha organ edition of The Art of the Fugue. When Professor Eugene Roan arrived for the lesson, he just sat down in a nearby chair, nodded and smiled. He was telling me that, yes, it was OK for me to work on that (very) long, (excruciatingly) difficult piece for my upcoming degree recital. There was essentially nothing in the record of what I had done prior to that day to suggest that I could handle this project. His immediate, concise, friendly agreement that I could and should do it not only led to my lifelong involvement with that piece, it also signaled to me that I really was an organist, and that I could really aspire to do what I wanted to do.

The role of the teacher
This brings us to the next question. It is always important, essential in fact, that a teacher know as much as possible about the “technical and theory abilities a student has” as Don Stoner aptly puts it. The notion of letting students choose their own repertoire cannot be based on the teacher’s abdicating the responsibility to know both exactly where that student is in the learning process and as much as is humanly possible about the student’s abilities and aptitudes. This knowledge can be used either to help the student choose pieces to work on that will seem appropriate in a traditional way—neither too easy nor too hard, adding something to the student’s technical and musical learning without being overwhelming—or to help the student navigate the treacherous but fruitful waters of a very challenging piece. If Professor Roan had not known me very well—I had studied with him off and on for several years at that point—he would not have been able to agree without discussion that it was a good thing for me to work on The Art of the Fugue, and he certainly would not have been able to help me with the process as much as he did.
If anything, it is more important that the teacher be prepared—equipped with knowledge of the student and of the music, and in a frame of mind to pay very close attention—when a student is working on a “too hard” piece. Although such a piece approached properly can be at least as effective a teaching tool as several easier or shorter pieces, it is also true that it carries with it more danger. If the student approaches it the wrong way, it can turn into a waste of time or a source of discouragement, or, worse, a framework for developing bad technical habits. There is nothing intrinsic to a longer or harder piece that will make these pitfalls actually manifest themselves, but they can do so if the piece is not approached the right way. The teacher’s job is to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The more that a teacher knows about the strengths, weaknesses, and habits of the student, the better he or she can accomplish this.
As a matter of hour-by-hour practicing, week-by-week learning, or the overall pedagogic usefulness of any number of months or years of study, the act of working on short easy pieces is identical to the act of working on a longer or more difficult piece. A long, difficult piece is several shorter, easier pieces. It is up to the student to be willing to treat it that way and up to the teacher to use all of his or her teaching expertise to show the student how to do so.
The technique for doing this is conceptually simple. The long piece must be broken into shorter bits, and those bits then must be made easier by practicing them slowly, by separating hands and feet as much as necessary, and by doing enough analysis to render the piece well known to the student. For example—an extreme example—if a student who might naturally be working on a few Orgelbüchlein pieces or short preludes and fugues wants to learn the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that piece can be broken up into many pieces, none of which is (initially) any harder than, say, Ich ruf zu dir. The first of these might be the right hand part of the opening canon. The next might be the left hand part from the same section, noticing very explicitly the relationship between this line and the right hand part. The third “piece” might be any dozen measures of the pedal part from the middle of the toccata section. (I say that to make the point that a long piece that is being learned patiently does not have to be worked on in order from beginning to end.) The next might be, say, the alto voice of the fugue for the first two pages, and so on.
In this way, a long difficult piece can be built up, and it is the key to avoiding the “throwing someone in 10 feet of water” problem. Of course, this is really just everyday good practicing, but applied very seriously. In fact, the discipline of working on an extremely challenging piece can help to teach overall good practice habits. The easier the piece, the more tempting it is just to play it over any number of times in a row until it gets more or less learned. If it is obvious that this casual approach will not work with a given piece, then the student—who in this scenario is highly motivated to play the piece: after all, it was chosen specifically and only because the student really wanted to work on it—will be highly motivated to practice in a way that does work.
I will leave the subject of repertoire for a while after this month, though happy to answer further questions individually by e-mail. Sometime in the future I will write a fairly long series of columns going step by step, in considerable detail, through the process of learning a specific piece. As part of that series I will address particular individual practice strategies for students with different levels of experience. I welcome suggestions for what piece I should use for that project, though of course I will not be able to use them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authenticity
This month’s column is about authenticity in the study and performance of music. Or, more accurately, it suggests ways that teachers can help students grapple with questions of authenticity. As with the teaching of other technical or specific aspects of playing, I think that teaching about authenticity should be done in a way that respects students’ individuality and autonomy, that increases rather than limits choice, and that helps students to feel ever more comfortable making choices of their own. This might seem to be a paradox, since the concept of “authenticity” might seem to carry with it an air of “authority,” of “right or wrong,” of “we know how it was done and (therefore) how it should be done.” In fact, however, ideas, information, concepts, and modes of analysis that one way or another reside in the realm of authenticity—historical authenticity or concern for the composers’ intentions—are neither more nor less authoritarian in nature than any other ideas that might arise in the work of a musician. They can be thought about, accepted, rejected, used in different ways by different performers, and used in different ways by the same performer at different times or under different circumstances.
What follows is not an outline for a curriculum about historical authenticity. Rather, it is a somewhat personal miscellany of questions, ideas, and interesting quotes. I have always liked and admired the approach of Peter Williams as described in the Preface to the Second Edition of his extraordinary book The Organ Music of J. S. Bach: “[this book’s] style and method still work towards framing questions rather than defining answers.” Answers are important, but questions are even more so. Answers quite properly change, as new information comes in or as circumstances change. Questions normally shouldn’t go away, though new ones should always be expected to arise.

Why does authenticity matter?
The first question, logically, is this: why do we or should we care about authenticity? Ways of thinking about this question seem to me to hold the key to freeing the concept of authenticity from the burden of authoritarianism. In fact, as far as I am concerned there is no reason that we should care about authenticity—emphasis on the word “should”. There are many ways in which caring about authenticity can be rewarding. There are also ways in which we automatically and inevitably care about authenticity whenever we study or play music that we are not ourselves improvising at that moment. In fact, questions about whether or not—and how—to care about authenticity are really questions about how far to take our concern for authenticity and how to shape it. However, if anyone who plays music wishes to say, in effect “thank you, composer, for having provided me with a set of notes; I will now do the rest,” I believe that this is perfectly OK: not immoral, dishonest, or inartistic, though also not my own choice. Between this attitude and what might be considered its polar opposite—“I will never play anything unless I can be convinced that my performance is literally indistinguishable from that of the composer”—there lie all of the real-life possibilities for approaches to authenticity.
Not surprisingly, I have never actually known anyone to articulate either of these extreme positions as their own, though Wanda Landowska came close to the former position late in her life. (This was not exactly out of lack of respect for composers or their intentions, but out of the interesting but perhaps questionable idea that she had by then come to know the music so well that she was as much of an authority on it as the composers could have been.) The latter attitude—hyper-authenticity—I have only heard as a parody of historical-mindedness by people who were themselves essentially against it. It seems to me that any underlying philosophical attitude towards historical authenticity can be artistically rewarding if it is honestly and joyously held by the musician—student or experienced player. The attempt, on the part of a teacher or of any “expert” or (worst of all) of the student’s own superego, to impose a particular attitude about authenticity creates the danger that authenticity will be felt as a burden or a constraint.

What is authenticity?
What is this “authenticity” then, about which we each have a somewhat different attitude? After all, the nature of what is being sought must have some influence on our attitudes about seeking it. One way to look at historical authenticity is, as I alluded to above, as a simple amplification of the basic question: “what is this piece?” If we tell our audience that we are playing such-and-such a piece, then we expect ourselves—and they have the right to expect us—to play that piece. If I (just to put it absurdly) announce that I am going to play the Bach F-major Toccata and then sit down at the organ and play the note middle C hundreds of times in a row, I have not done what I said I was going to do. If I make the same claim and then play most of the notes of the actual BWV 540, but omit the pedal solos, then I have probably also not done what I said I was going to do. If I attempt to play the piece but make a truly astonishing number of wrong notes, then I have perhaps also not done so. If I play all of the notes, accurately and completely, but really slowly—sixteenth-note equals 32, say—then have I performed the piece? Suppose I play a slow piece mind-bendingly fast, so that cantabile lines become lightening-fast passage work and the listener can’t recognize pitches. How off-tempo must a piece be to cease being that piece?
Now, less absurdly, suppose that I make legato that which the composer clearly intended to be detached, or the other way around? Suppose that I make lines so detached that the overlapping of the notes of suspensions is lost? Suppose that I make very strict and metronomic a piece or passage that the composer has clearly marked as free or molto rubato? Suppose that the piece isn’t marked that way, but that we know that the composer expected it to be played that way? Suppose that I change the sonority, perhaps playing the Widor Toccata on an 8-foot Gedeckt throughout? Suppose that the changes in sonority, rhythm, or articulation are quite subtle? At what point does a piece become not that piece?
There are no definitive answers to questions like this. And the point of asking them is not to suggest that they can or must be answered before we can just relax and play music. The point is to suggest that the information that we might seek in the name of authenticity is not the stuff of some arcane intellectual pursuit, but rather a common-sense extension of what we do anyway when we open up a score and start to learn it. For some pieces, we do not even know for sure what the basic note picture is, in every detail. This can be true because of misprints or other problems in transmission, or because a composer left alternate versions. With aspects of “what the piece really is” that go beyond the notes themselves, of course the proportion of i) what we can know for sure, ii) what we know fairly well, and iii) what we honestly don’t know shifts toward the latter two. This can be a source of frustration or a source of freedom—probably both for most of us.

Finding authenticity
However, for me, knowing as much as I can about anything that might legitimately be part of “what the piece really is” is liberating. If I know all that can be known about a piece or a segment of the repertoire—no more and no less—then I can make my own decisions about how I want to play that piece or that repertoire. To the extent that I don’t know all that there is to be known, I am letting my performance of that piece be shaped by forces that are not my own, the nature of which I might not even understand. These forces include arbitrary or incorrect traditions that have grown up around a piece or a part of the repertoire, judgments by an editor that might be correct or incorrect but that shouldn’t pre-empt my own judgments, and unconscious habits of my own that I might want to change or to apply differently if I thought them through.
(If I pick up a novel that I want to read, I expect to be able to read the text of that novel as is. If, in the copy I have, a previous reader has written notes—“this character is odd,” “the best part is coming up!,” “I’m not sure I believe this,” etc.—then, in effect, I cannot do my own reading of the book. I can’t help filtering my reading through those comments. This is so unsatisfying that I will either look for another copy or not read the book at all. Even if I would have ended up agreeing with the comments—in fact even if I wrote them myself years before—they destroy my autonomy in reading the book. For me anything other than knowing what there is to know about a piece of music—again, no more and no less—creates a similar situation.)
As one interesting example, consider wanting to learn and play some Reger on an organ in a church in the U.S.—any organ, but let us assume it is not an accurate re-creation of an organ that Reger would have known. How would one’s approach differ in each of the following circumstances:
1) never heard of swell pedal, crescendo pedal or Rollschweller
2) heard of swell pedal and crescendo pedal but not Rollschweller
3) heard of swell pedal only
4) heard of all three, and have a good sense of what each one does
5) believe that Reger wrote in the eighteenth century, and that dynamic markings must have been added by an editor
6) have never seen dynamic markings before and don’t know what they mean.
Perhaps the last two seem silly, but each of us starts with that lack of knowledge with respect to at least some repertoire; I have certainly done so over the years. In any case, the task would be the same under each condition, that of adapting Reger’s intentions and the rhetoric of the music to an instrument different from the ones for which it was conceived. But the approach and the results would probably be quite different.
So the search for accurate historical information is, at one level, just a tool for creating the conditions for thinking honestly and with autonomy about how to interpret and play a piece. As such, this search implies literally nothing about how the information should be used. It is perfectly possible to say “yes, this piece probably was meant (by its composer) to go this way, but I want it to go that way,” as long as one is honest about this thought process. (I mean honest with one’s self. It is not particularly anyone else’s business unless you want it to be.) The next level of the search for authenticity is this: that, for some people, the very phenomenon of being in sync with the artistic intentions of another person—say of a great composer—is desirable and satisfying in itself. Most of us have had this feeling to some extent, and some of us have to a very great extent indeed. For some, it is a large part of the joy of being involved with music—for others, it is more or less a spice or a bonus: satisfying, but of fairly little importance.
The presence or absence of this feeling will certainly inform anyone’s decisions about how to use any valid historical information. It is through this connection, perhaps, that certain kinds of second-level or “meta” historical information become important. For example, we may know that Bach played his pieces on a certain kind of organ or harpsichord, but what do we know of his attitude towards the playing of his music on other instruments? We know that he did a fair amount of transcribing: violin pieces for harpsichord, and so on. Or do we? Many or perhaps all of those transcriptions may have been done by others in his circle, though perhaps with his knowledge. He certainly traveled and played organs other than the ones in his immediate home area. On one trip he played on a “piano”, though one that sounded more like a harpsichord than like a modern piano. What did he think of this experience? We don’t know.
What was Bach’s own attitude towards the question of how essential different aspects of music creation were? That is, did he believe that the note-picture of a piece and the theoretical structure that it creates are the entire essence of a piece, or did he believe that the sonority, for example, is equally essential. Here’s a paradox: if Bach believed the former, but I as a modern performer believe the latter, then am I coming closer to being “in sync” with Bach if I pursue all the knowledge that I can find about instruments, playing techniques, etc., or if I don’t? (This is hypothetical, since we really don’t know Bach’s attitude on this point.) Certainly most composers over the centuries have not been predominantly interested in discovering and (authentically) performing old music. Does this mean that if we use historical research to try to answer the question of “what the piece really is,” but the composer of that piece would never have used or advocated those techniques, we are being unfaithful to the composer while being faithful to the piece? Is this another paradox?

Historical re-creation
At this point I want to say something about historical re-creation. One criticism of the whole enterprise of seeking authenticity in playing music is that “we don’t live in their times, therefore we just can’t make their music.” This implies that the search for an accurate historical understanding of the pieces that make up our repertoire is somehow intended as an attempt to turn back the clock and re-create the times in which the pieces were written, or that it ought to be intended that way, but that at the same time this is impossible and absurd. So, if we want to try to find fingerings and hand positions that facilitate the execution of notes inégales in the music of Couperin, we must also eat what Couperin ate, and forswear cars, etc. (I understand that this is a rare criticism, but it is sort of “in the air” and I have indeed known students to shy away from seeking historical information for fear of being subject to it in their own minds or others.) Certainly some people find it fascinating to try, in a circumscribed way, to re-create things about living in the past or to re-enact aspects of life in distant times. There is certainly nothing wrong with that. However, that is not the point of gathering accurate historical information about musical repertoire and performance. The point is, once again, to know what the piece is, and then to use that knowledge and that piece in your own life and times in whatever ways are fruitful and useful. It is in every way analogous to cleaning an old painting that has become grimy. It is not necessary to live like Rembrandt in order to prefer to see his paintings without a layer of grease and dirt.
Many years ago, my teacher and friend Paul Jordan said something to me along the following lines: that the act of doing something in performance because you yourself honestly believe in it artistically is categorically different from the act of doing something because you have been told that it is “right”. This has always seemed to me to be true, certainly at an artistic level, but also at a practical level: performing is hard, and performing while trying to remember a way of doing things that you have only learned externally is astonishingly hard. I myself have become convinced of the artistic value of honestly seeking accurate historical information through a circumstance that more or less bypasses analysis: my own true experience has been that when I discover something about the playing of a piece that seems to be a more authentic expression of what the composer intended, I believe that it made the piece better: more expressive, more intense, more moving. This is not, on reflection, surprising. Composers by and large know what they are doing, and most of them, being practical musicians, develop consummate skill at working with the materials at hand.
If however I try something—fingering, registration, an approach to rhythm, phrasing, or articulation—that I believe to be an accurate reflection of what the composer intended, and, in good faith, I don’t or can’t like it, then my own choice (mindful of what Paul said, and of my own experience) is to refrain from implementing it for now, but rather to play the piece or passage in the way that I find convincing. As I said, I have not actually had this conflict very often. And when I do have it, I still feel respectful of whatever it is that I have decided not to do, and I am always open to revisiting it later. I am quite comfortable with this approach—more so than either with shying away from seeking historical knowledge for fear that having it would force me to be overly academic, or with making myself play in ways that are not deeply, personally convincing for fear of being considered “wrong”. 

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, and Projection I

With this month’s column, I begin to muse about some aspects of our jobs as teachers that involve helping students to work in ways that are best for their own enjoyment and motivation: how to help students integrate their playing into their own lives, and how to integrate the students’ lives into our teaching. This is partly about the big picture: how much time can a student find to play? How much of that should be real practicing, and how much can be other sorts of playing? How can a student’s own interests and motivations interact with the requirements, needs, or demands of others? But it can also be about the immediately musical. I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking “What do you most deeply want out of life?” That is perhaps sort of a joke, but not entirely, as I will discuss later on.

While I wish that any column of mine could be a discussion rather than just a one-way written piece (I ask for feedback from time to time, and often get some, for which I am grateful) this time around I wish that more than ever. The things about which I am musing this month are not concrete or demonstrably true (or false). They arise out of my own experience, and—much more than things like what practice protocol will produce the most efficient progress in learning a pedal line—they change or evolve over the months and years. That evolution is partly the result of new experiences with students, as well as an ongoing conversation between myself and others. I hope that a future column will consist of e-mails from readers about this column, with further thoughts of mine. Furthermore, I am trying to challenge or question some of my own thoughts or habits of thinking, and that process is made more fruitful by interaction with the ideas of others. You will notice that there are plenty of sentences here that end in question marks: more questions than answers.

Inspiring motivation 

I haven’t written much about how to keep students interested or motivated. That is in part because I—and to an extent all of us as organ teachers—have the luxury of working mostly with students who are well self-motivated. That doesn’t necessarily mean self-disciplined. Someone can be very well motivated and still not be very good at self-discipline and the kinds of efficiency and organization that we associate with that concept. I myself am a prime example. I am an organ, harpsichord, and keyboard repertoire “groupie.” But that often manifests itself in my perpetually distracting myself from focused work on practicing or writing with other things that are also about the kinds of music that I love listening to or reading. 

However, very few people are pushed into studying organ or harpsichord by circumstances beyond their control. Very few people go into any sort of music (especially “classical” music) because it seems like the best or easiest way to make a living. There always must be a large element of just plain loving it—being deeply interested. However, music teachers of piano, violin, some wind instruments, sometimes voice, perhaps other instruments, are often called upon to teach students—especially children—who are taking lessons because someone has twisted their arms to do so. This arm-twisting certainly isn’t necessarily or always bad. It is undeniable that young children don’t always know what they will end up wishing they had done or had learned, and very possibly one of the jobs of a parent is to introduce children to things that they can’t or probably won’t just find for themselves. That this creates a risk for over-coerciveness, for inappropriate pressure based on projection, and for all sorts of conflict and struggle to arise doesn’t mean that it isn’t also sometimes right and good. 

I have admiration and awe for music teachers who can make good things happen for students whose reasons for being there are not just their own genuine and deep interest. It is hard to find the balance between keeping interest, morale, and a sense of fun high and getting practical learning done. If there were not plenty of teachers able to navigate all of this extremely effectively then we wouldn’t have very many musicians around. But at the same time, I have always doubted how effective I could be in that situation. I think that it is not an accident that I teach a subspecialty that draws people who know that they want to be there (though I teach organ and harpsichord mainly because that is what interests me).

I don’t want to get too complacent about that. If our students are largely self-motivated, and if we can expect to take advantage of that in our teaching, how specific can we or should we get in understanding that self-motivation? Can we help students more the more we understand that motivation? Here I want to examine and challenge some of my own assumptions. One of them is that studying music is all about preparing for concert performance. This manifests itself in my own work: the only way I can make a bargain with myself to practice slowly enough (even though I know how important slow practice is, and have written about it here over many years), is to pretend while I am playing a passage slowly that I actually want to perform it at that speed. If I let myself admit what I actually know to be true, that I am playing slowly at that moment as a stage in practicing, I will begin to speed up, as much as I know that I shouldn’t. I strongly believe that every student should be working towards playing all of his or her pieces in concert. I wouldn’t explicitly say that this is what I think, but it operates in the background as an assumption. 

Concert vs. non-concert 

preparation

Of course, there are many reasons for working on pieces other than to play them in concert. One is simply interest—just to get to know the piece, or, to put it another way, to be able to play it for oneself. Another is to play it informally in a non-concert situation or in church. Yet another is to use a piece as material for becoming a better player overall, as an exercise. Another is to learn about a kind of repertoire or composer, or to learn something about the organ on which you are playing. Does an awareness of exactly why the student wants to work on a particular piece inform anything specific about how we teach that piece? Here’s an aspect of this that I think is delicate and interesting: if a piece is being prepared for performance, then we know that it should be prepared really well. That means several things—the notes are extremely reliable, the tempo is where the player really wants it to be (no fudging or pretending that a too-slow tempo is what is really desired, as in my own practice habits!), the interpretive elements are thought out and internalized enough to be reliable, and so on. 

Suppose that a piece is being played for a purpose other than performance? On the one hand, it might be questionable to insist on the same level of preparation. It is hard, often grueling work to get a piece into that sort of shape. Is it really necessary? On the other hand, is it patronizing (to the piece or to the student) to set a lower bar because there isn’t a concert in the offing? Would doing so encourage bad learning habits that might spill over? Does this imply lack of respect for whatever purpose the piece is actually being used for? Again, the answers might be different depending on whether the piece was being prepared for non-concert performance—informal playing for the student’s friends, parents, fellow students, church—or being worked on just to get some familiarity with that piece or a segment of the repertoire, or to get to know a particular organ, for example. 

I suspect that the answers to these questions may depend on the student’s state of mind. Is incomplete (or what might seem neglectful) playing the result of an attitude of neglectfulness, or is it the result of a decision about where effort should best be spent? If a piece of music is being used as fodder for studying something other than that piece, if it is being used as exercise material, for developing greater skill as a player, then arguably it doesn’t matter how well the student learns that piece. In other words, any given number of hours spent practicing can have the same result for the player’s development, regardless of whether those hours are spent practicing one piece enough to learn it, or practicing three pieces each for an amount of time that leaves them far from complete. 

Over the years I have had a few students say, right off the bat, that they don’t really care about fully learning their pieces. I remember one such student in particular. He was very talented and dedicated, yet preferred to work on a piece only up to a certain point—getting to know it pretty well, but not do all of the drilling necessary to get a piece performance-ready. It was of more interest to him, once he reached that stage with a piece, to go on to another piece. This was most decidedly not part of an attitude of neglectfulness. For one thing, he fingered every note very carefully and put as much time into that process as it needed. He was also analytical in his approach to the music, studying and becoming aware of all sorts of compositional features and thinking deeply about performance ideas. But at a certain point he preferred to do all of those things with the next piece, not to “finish” the existing piece. He had never given a public performance.

It was a challenge for me to accept this. For one thing, he was “so close”—he amply had the ability and had already done much of the work that it would have taken to get the pieces in shape for performance. What would be the harm in doing so? But this was my agenda, not his. Furthermore, it could have been influenced by our desire that we all must have at some level to have people out there hear our students play well—since that will reflect well on us as teachers. Again, this was my agenda, not his needs. Perhaps I was also influenced by the “if something is worth doing it is worth doing well” ideology, though at a conscious level I have long ago decided that that is at best an oversimplification. But even accepting the notion of doing something well, there’s still the question of what you are doing. 

Part of this student’s motivation was intellectual curiosity about the next piece, and the next, and then the next composer, and so on. Part of it was the desire to have fun playing. The fingering process he found to be fun because it was a set of interesting puzzles. The process of playing through a piece—with the well worked-out fingerings, slowly, tolerating some hesitations and wrong notes—he found to be fun because it sounded a lot like the piece: it felt like playing music. The process of drilling all of the difficult bits until they were really solid was not fun. He was doing—extremely well—what he wanted to be doing.

Of the students whom I remember who fit this description, most or perhaps all had not done any actual performing as of the time that they came to me for lessons and professed this attitude. This gives rise to a set of questions: how can they know that they don’t want to perform or wouldn’t get something out of working pieces up beyond a certain point if they have never tried it? What should the teacher do to offer at least a chance of exploring the logical next step in learning pieces without being coercive about it or acting according to the teacher’s own agenda rather than the students? Questions of this sort also apply to other areas in which I would most naturally want to suggest that we teachers should try to not push our students in pre-determined directions, most especially in choice of repertoire.

All this leads to the following question, which makes me uncomfortable enough to have to do some real thinking: what is the line between not imposing approaches or activities on our students that are driven by our needs rather than our students’ needs and making patronizing or even (subconsciously) dismissive assumptions about what a given student can or cannot do? In other words, if I decide not to coerce a student into framing his or her musical activities with reference to concert performance, am I respecting that student’s own wishes and giving him or her credit for being mature enough to know what is right, or am I somewhat type-casting the student as one who can’t perform or can’t be challenged beyond a certain point?

More questions, and perhaps more answers, next month.

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

Memorization
I ended last month’s column with a list of some ideas about memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the keyboards. This month and next I will focus on the pros and cons of memorization as a learning tool. That is, I want to consider ways in which working on memorization—or not working on memorization—can help the teaching and learning process, and what can be learned from thinking about the phenomenon of memorization, whether a student memorizes music for performance or not. I will also consider the role of sight-reading, or reading in general, in performance, and how reading relates to knowing a piece thoroughly and well. I want to start with a brief account of my own history with memorization. This, of course, affects my thinking about memorization in general, as does the whole range of experiences of my students—and other students whom I have observed—over the years.

Personal experience
I have, to put the punch line first, done very little public performance from memory over the years. I have actually never played a piece in concert or in a recording session from memory. When I was applying to graduate school at Westminster—it was 1983—I had to play my audition partly from memory. This was a requirement for the organ performance program, though not for organists applying to the church music program. I was unaccustomed to memorizing, and I worked very hard at it. In the end, at the audition, I had a brief memory slip or two, from which I recovered fairly well. During my years in that graduate program, I also had to play a jury or two from memory. The experience was similar: that is, I worked very hard on the memorization, had a few brief memory slips, and more or less got through it.
Meanwhile, the rules of the organ performance program at Westminster, at the time I was a student, stated that I would have to play my master’s recital entirely from memory. Entering that program as someone who had done little or no work on memorization prior to my audition, I had no idea how I would manage to cope with that requirement. Either I would work very hard at it and hope that it went well—better, I would have hoped, than the audition or the juries, since noticeable memory slips in concert would have felt quite bad—or I would hope for some sort of miracle. That miracle came when the department decided to change the requirement. We were now allowed to choose either to give one recital from memory, or two playing from the scores. I chose the latter, which, among other things, permitted me to take on the challenge of learning The Art of the Fugue and playing it as one of those recitals. I could not even have considered trying, at that point in my life, to memorize something that long and complex.
Since the last of those juries that I played as a graduate student, I have not played a piece from memory with anyone listening. Clearly this means that I do not believe that memorization is a necessity for good performance: if I did believe that, then either I would have memorized repertoire for all these years or I would have been taking, and would still be taking, an ongoing blow to my self-esteem.
Furthermore, it would be hypocritical of me to believe that we teachers ought to expect—let alone force—our students to memorize. Indeed, after many years of teaching and playing, I cannot see any good reason to expect students or any players to perform repertoire from memory. This is, of course, a fairly extreme statement about a more or less “hot button” topic, and I hold onto it lightly: that is, while I feel quite convinced about this view, I am also open to being persuaded otherwise at some point. I have not been persuaded yet, though, in spite of both generally paying attention to writing and teaching on the subject and having conducted a review of the literature in preparation for writing this column.

The case against memorization
It makes sense to me that, in spite of the very strong tradition of memorization in piano playing and the weaker but persistent tradition of memorization in organ playing, the burden of proof must fall on the side of maintaining that performing from memory is necessary. This is in part because it is usually extremely time consuming. If I am going to ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time on anything—time which could be spent, among many other things, on learning and performing more pieces—then there must be a very good reason for it.
However, I have seen the imposition of a need to memorize do actual harm. Literally all of the auditions, juries, and student recitals that I have ever heard that were performed from memory have included memory slips—sometimes small, sometimes large—or passages that were clearly executed in a tight, hesitant way because of fears about memory. This is perhaps a small sample size, but it has been so consistent that it strongly reinforces my belief that if students are required to play from memory, the benefits of doing so must be unambiguous and compelling. I have also seen students do what I would have had to do with The Art of the Fugue if I had been required to play my degree recital from memory: that is, avoid certain pieces that they would really like to play because those pieces seem daunting to memorize. Many students go around in a constant state of tension and anxiety because of concern about memorization. And, worst of all, some people decide that they cannot aspire to be performers at the highest level because they do not—rightly or wrongly—believe that they could confidently perform from memory.

Is there a case for memorization?
Of course, playing music and being a performer is difficult and can be nerve-racking. But is the extra difficulty and tension caused by memorization justified? How good are the reasons for asking students to play from memory?
Some of these reasons are, it seems to me, either essentially stylistic or just practical and arguably rather superficial: that it looks more professional, that it saves the inconvenience of having to use a page turner, that if you use music you will feel like or look like a “student”, that memorization will save you if the music blows off the music desk, that it will enable you to give a recital at a moment’s notice when you are away from your library of printed music, that it will permit you to play at a social occasion at which you were not planning to play. (These specific reasons actually constitute the majority of what I have seen mentioned about the subject in my recent review of Internet-based discussions.) Some people mention that if a piece is fully memorized, it becomes easier to look steadily at the hands and feet and to look to find pistons, stop levers, etc. This is interesting and has more musical/technical substance to it than some, and I will discuss it more later.
However, the main claim for memorization is that only by memorizing a piece can you learn it really thoroughly. This claim takes several forms. The most direct is that it is only through the techniques of memorization that a piece can really be learned—that is, that experience shows that only after doing the kinds of things that lead to a piece’s being memorized will you really know the piece inside and out. Another claim, turning things the other way around, is that if a player engages in the act of learning a piece really thoroughly then he or she will indeed, almost automatically, have memorized it: therefore playing from the score is seen as a sign that the player can’t have learned the music very well. Both of these ideas have been incorporated into the ways that some people talk about learning and playing music. I have seen phrases like “learn the piece inside and out, backward and forward” used as a synonym for “memorize the piece.” I have encountered as a sort of aphorism: “get the music into your head and your head out of the music.” Indeed, in some circles, and in particular at certain times in music history, “learn a piece” has been used as a synonym for “memorize a piece.”
Furthermore, of course, we normally use the language in which we talk about performances or performers to imply, without necessarily having made a considered judgment about it, that playing from memory is playing of a higher order. “She was the first to play the works of so-and-so from memory,” “he had memorized such-and-such repertoire by the time he was 14.” Feats like this are impressive because they are difficult, and there is no reason not to acknowledge the work of people who accomplish them. (By the way, however, they also get more notice than they might otherwise, simply because they can be described objectively. If we try to say that “she was the first to play the works of so-and-so in an absolutely riveting manner” there is no way to establish objectively that this is actually true.) We are still just slipping around the question of whether playing from memory is in any way better—or, for our purposes here, whether asking students to play from memory really helps them to become better players.
Some observers report seeing performers—both students and others—playing pieces with their eyes intently, almost frantically, following the music, clearly needing that music to teach them the notes as they play. In fact, most of us know that this is common, that it always creates bad and insecure performances, and that it is a sign of poor preparation. However, in itself this doesn’t prove or even really suggest that performing from memory is the solution to this problem, although it points to the fact that some people misuse the circumstance of playing from music.

The bottom line of learning
So this all comes back to the same thing: that anyone who wants to play a piece should take on the responsibility of learning that piece extremely thoroughly, and that anyone who wishes to become an accomplished player must get into the habit of studying all pieces thoroughly and well. Much of what I have written about over the last several years—in particular the methods of analyzing and learning counterpoint and the technique of paying attention to elements, small or large, that recur in any piece—has been geared towards helping people to know their pieces very well musically by the time that they have learned the notes. Much of the rest of what I have written—about pedal learning, slow practicing, paying attention to hand choices and more—has been geared towards making sure that the physical side of playing will be secure enough that a player can take advantage of what he or she has learned by getting to know the piece really well, that is, not be distracted from it by physical problems or insecurity.
It seems to me that anyone with good practice habits and good physical technique who has put in the time to study a piece thoroughly will end up being able to play that piece from the score as well as anyone could play it from memory. Therefore my own approach—the bargain I would make with my students, so to speak, is this: that there should be no compromise on studying the music in depth, including taking things apart contrapuntally and motivically, noticing harmonic patterns, recurring rhythms, changes in texture, in what order voices enter, playing hands separately when that seems like a good idea for technical or musical reasons, and so on; but that this intense study should be for its own sake and for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of leading to full memorization.
Those who advocate memorization are right that the greatest source of wrong notes, insecurity, and hesitant, unconvincing playing is not knowing what is coming up next. Too strong a reliance on reading—only half-learning a piece and expecting to fill in the rest by quasi-sight reading in performance—is a trap into which many of us fall, experienced players as well as students. It does not often result in good performances. I would suggest avoiding that trap in the most direct way—by insisting to one’s self and to one’s students that pieces be studied thoroughly and carefully. It is, looking at it one way, overkill and perhaps a distraction to relate that process of thorough study to the act of playing from memory. The opposite of reading a piece that is ill prepared is, I would say, reading a piece that is extremely well prepared.
For some people, the act of studying a piece well will indeed lead naturally and apparently automatically to the musical text of the piece actually being memorized and the printed music’s becoming unnecessary. There is, most obviously, nothing wrong with this. However, there is also nothing wrong with the more common scenario in which even very thorough study of the music does not lead to real, note-perfect memorization. I would encourage teachers and students to be comfortable with that.
Next month I will continue this discussion, talking about some of what I consider to be beneficial ideas that have arisen from the tradition of memorization, such as studying music away from the keyboard, and also discussing the role of sight reading, some of the pitfalls that reading presents, and ways to avoid them.

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On a completely different matter: I have recently had a fascinating conversation with several friends on the following question: who was the musician that you have heard live in performance who was born the earliest? This led to quite an interesting and far-ranging discussion about time and history, and the reach of living memory. I would like to open that discussion up to a wider group. I encourage anyone reading this to think about your own answer to that question, and to e-mail it to me at Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at . My own answer is as follows: that the earliest-born performer whom I heard in performance at all was Leopold Stokowski, born 1882, and that the earliest-born player that I heard was Arthur Rubinstein, by a margin of ten days over Eubie Blake, both born in 1887. I will include all of the answers that I get in a later column.