Repertoire, part 1
The issue about which I have gotten by far the most inquiries since I started writing this column is repertoire: that is (primarily) the question of what repertoire students should work on, or, to put it slightly differently, what repertoire teachers should ask or expect their students to work on. In this month’s column I will offer some general musings about that question, including some reminiscences and anecdotes that I think are relevant. Next month I will continue to muse, but also give more specific suggestions, including some guidance—as up to date as possible in a rapidly changing technological world—about the practical side of finding printed music, especially for students who do not have access to well-stocked music libraries.
Organ repertoire: size and scope
The first thing that stands out about the organ repertoire is its size and scope. The number of composers, the number of pieces, the number of centuries, the number of different types of instrument for which what we call “organ music” was written: it is all almost overwhelming. If you throw in hymns and various other sorts of accompaniment, and then remember that a substantial proportion of at least the pre-1750 keyboard repertoire not expressly written for the organ can be played perfectly well on the organ, the amount and diversity of music that an organist might be expected to master seems to spiral out of control.
There are several possible reactions to contemplating this overwhelming amount of music. One is panic over the seeming impossibility of learning all of it. This panic can set in when a student, perhaps because of something about the teacher’s real or perceived attitude or perhaps just from within the student, feels an obligation to know everything: a sense that one can’t be a real artist or a real “professional” without mastering everything. A lesser form of this—which I still sometimes feel myself—is sadness over the fact that it is impossible to learn all of the repertoire. This, of course, is just a part of life: it is also impossible to visit every town in the world, or to read every book, or to attend every baseball game. (Or at a deeper level, to spend enough time with all of one’s friends or loved ones, or to meet everyone who might have become a good friend.)
Another possibility, however, is to find the size and scope of the repertoire liberating. If the amount of music that exists is too great to make it possible to learn all of it, then we are all relieved of the obligation to learn all of it. In that case, each of us is perfectly free to work on the music that we really like or that we are really interested in, or that our experience shows us we can learn and play in a way that somehow makes a difference. This is what I have always done myself, and have always invited my students to do. There are other dimensions to this liberation. For example, within any style or type of music that happens to interest any one of us there is almost certain to be enough music to sustain that interest for a long time. Also, if anyone’s interests change or if a particular part of the repertoire loses its allure for a particular player (student or otherwise) there is an essentially infinite amount of other music to investigate. If I, as a performer who is mostly focused on Baroque music, feel a hankering to delve into the nineteenth century—as I have felt from time to time over the years—then I need not lament the fact that I am not a pianist or a player of an orchestral instrument. There is a whole panoply of organ music from that particular esthetic world for me to explore. If an organist who has mostly played nineteenth-century music develops an interest in late medieval music, then he or she can investigate the earliest known keyboard repertoire as an introduction to that musical world.
Personal responses
The relationship between all of this repertoire and people—people who might be organ students or organ teachers or organists or listeners to organ music—is complicated, multilayered, and interesting. Each person’s detailed experience, probably from before conscious memory on, colors his or her reaction to pieces of music and of course to all other experiences. I was remembering recently that whenever I hear the word “culpable” I get in my mind a flash of a strong image of a certain place: the gravel road at the back of the park in the shadow of East Rock in New Haven, where I grew up. (I know the source of this image, though I don’t know why I remember it so strongly: I was taking a walk there with my father when I was nine or ten, and he told me—joking, I assume—that the only sentence he knew or needed to know in French was “Ce n’est pas de ma faute.”) I mention this because it is essentially certain that I am, and will forever remain, the only person in the history of the universe who makes that particular connection. I believe that a vast number of connections like this color everyone’s reaction to all of music that they hear, as well as other experiences, and shape the course of one’s life with music, as an appreciator or as a player, professional or otherwise. Since everyone’s experiences, and the linkages that they form, are different from everyone else’s, it is quite impossible that any two people react to any music the same way, or, even at the most direct level, have the same experience as each other when hearing any given music. (After all, that scene in the park is part of my immediate, direct experience upon hearing the word “culpable,” and part of no one else’s.)
(Some more examples from my own experience, this time about music: I am a big fan of the rock group Jethro Tull. Although I honestly consider their music to be in every way as wonderful artistically as any other that I know of, including the organ repertoire and the rest of the “classical” repertoire, I also believe that I know why I became a fan of that music. During my freshman year of college, one of my roommates had a Jethro Tull record, and I, who at the time did not like any rock and roll, heard in a few passages in a few of the pieces, something that evoked very powerfully for me some of the feelings of the time I had recently [then] spent in England, and that music became part of my nostalgia for England, although I didn’t really get to know the whole Jethro Tull repertoire until about twenty years later. Also, when I hear or play older English music—Tallis or Gibbons, say—the feelings that come up in my mind are those of my experience at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, where I first heard music of that sort when I was in the choir there in the late 1960s: the smell and appearance of that church, the vastness [as it seemed to me then] of the New Haven Green outside, the sounds of cars and buses muffled by the thick stone walls. When I hear mid-twentieth-century chamber music I get an image in my mind of the cover of a particular LP. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think that it included a Poulenc trio. Along with this comes a memory of a certain kind of spring weather.)
I mention all of this in connection with the organ repertoire because it is important to remember that no two people experience, or can possibly experience, that repertoire in the same way: not even one piece, and certainly not any subset of or pathway through the whole repertoire. This is, to me, probably the most important thing to bear in mind when thinking about the vastness of the organ repertoire and when contemplating how to help students find their way through all of that music.
Practicing music is more fun when you really like the music. It is also, in my experience, better practicing: more efficient, more effective, much more likely to result in learning. It is also likely to lead to more practicing, to a real desire to work on more music, and even to a greater willingness to try new things. This observation is based on my own direct experience—practicing, learning music, trying to become a progressively better player—and also on my observation of many students (mostly my own) over many years.
Another anecdote to illustrate this point: my daughter took piano lessons for several years. She, coming from a home in which lots of unusual things went on musically, had unusual ideas about what music she wanted to play. For example, she brought to her lessons movements of Buxtehude harpsichord suites that I was in the middle of recording at the time, or, later, folk song melodies that she wanted to learn how to harmonize and then play. None of this was anything that any piano teacher would have expected to give to a beginning student. (This was in the second year or so of her studies, and she was nine or ten years old.) However, her teacher went along with this and let her work on whatever she was interested in at a given time. The result was that my daughter practiced a fair amount and looked forward to her lessons. She also cared about doing well and about pleasing her teacher. There was good give and take: an atmosphere was created in which it was also possible for the teacher to coax her into trying out various new things. Later on, when that teacher moved away, her new teacher, a very gifted and serious player and an experienced teacher, had a more traditional attitude about what was and what wasn’t OK for a student to work on. My daughter quit enjoying her lessons, quit practicing, and indeed quit the piano. Nowadays she can still play those Buxtehude movements: the way that she worked on them caused them to stay with her forever.
So, for me, the first thing to think about in choosing repertoire for students is to try to find music that the student will really like and want to practice. This is certainly not the only consideration, and it does not directly answer the question of how to find those pieces. After all, not every student comes with a list of pieces that he or she wants to work on. However, I think it is important to give this consideration first place, not to consider it a frill or a luxury or an afterthought.
Is there a standard repertoire?
Another consideration that normally comes up in talking about repertoire for teaching is what the “standard” repertoire is, what music students should know. To me, this is a complicated question, or a question with several different answers. In principle, I believe that there should be no assumption that every student will, even to a small extent, involve him- or herself with the same repertoire as other students or with a “standard” repertoire. This is for several reasons: because there is so much wonderful music out there, because everyone’s experience of that music is different, and because no one can work extremely effectively on music that they don’t like. Also because, for the benefit of the musical world at large, it is a more interesting situation if many performers perform as diverse a repertoire as possible. If there is music that somehow deserves to be more widely played than other music, that will take care of itself: more people will want to play it if it is indeed in some meaningful sense better or more interesting. It may seem to me, or to anyone in the field, that an organ student would be crazy not to want to play at least some Bach (to use the most obvious example). However if a student doesn’t want to, then, perhaps, there is no point in any way forcing them to. There will, presumably, be plenty of others who do want to play Bach.
On the other hand, there is a tremendous disadvantage to anyone in not even knowing what is out there (in any field or endeavor). If a student is not interested in playing something utterly standard, like Bach or Franck, only because he or she has essentially never encountered it in an engaging and interesting way, then that student is being impoverished unnecessarily. This is also true, however, if a student fails to become interested in non-standard repertoire (Cavazzoni, Ernst Koehler, Moondog, Lefébure-Wely, anyone) for the same reason. It is certainly important for a teacher to encourage a student to know about a lot of music, and to make choices based on that knowledge. That does not mean that those choices must settle to any very large extent on standard repertoire.
(Next month I will include some thoughts about ways of exposing students to lots of music and giving them the best chance of figuring out what might most interest them.)
Of course, there are real practical considerations to think about when considering “standard” repertoire. The first is really part practical and part psychological. If an organ student or organist bravely carves out a whole career without ever working on the music that is considered to define the organ repertoire, then that person will be called upon over and over again to explain, and will in fact not be thought well of by at least some people. “You can’t be a real organist if you’ve never worked on any Bach” would be a common refrain. Withstanding this in a happy frame of mind would require a lot of fortitude.
The other problem is more purely practical. It is the problem of auditions and other organized occasions for jumping through hoops. Obviously an organ student who might want to go on for advanced study or who might want to apply for a scholarship or fellowship, or who might want to enter a competition or, for that matter, apply for a job, might well have to produce some pieces that conform to certain rules. Many of these situations have an audition requirement that is more or less “something before Bach, something by Bach, something after Bach” or “something by Bach, something nineteenth century, something twentieth century.” Of course there is often flexibility, but almost always in the context of some such specificity. (I myself, if I were in charge of shaping an audition, would use the following prompt: “Play us about 25 minutes of whatever music you believe would best show us your recent work as an organist, and be prepared to talk to us about that music and the other music that you have studied over the last few years.”) It seems to me that the best approach in dealing with this is to consider it a practical problem with practical solutions. If the right pieces for such needs can be found among the repertoire that a student and his or her teacher are working on in any case, that is wonderful. If not, then the student might have to venture into the territory of playing pieces that he or she is not really interested in. However, this should be recognized as a simple practical task, and not given any more ethical, moral, artistic, or pedagogic weight than that.
Next month I will write more about how to incorporate this and other outside constraints into the teaching process as fruitfully as possible. I will also discuss the “two-way street” relationship between learning to play and repertoire as such (that is, that we learn to play in order to play repertoire and at the same time we work on repertoire in order to learn to play). And I will also consider how to help students explore the repertoire and make choices that are honestly their own, but also impeccably well informed.
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