On Teaching

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

Buxtehude and Boëllmann—final thoughts (for now)
For the last year I have looked, in as much depth as space seemed to permit, at the process of studying and learning two contrasting and, I hope, complementary pieces—the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141 by Dietrich Buxtehude, and the Suite Gothique, op. 25 by Leon Boëllmann. This month I will share a few thoughts about this project as a whole; then next month I will turn to something new.
The goals of this long series of columns were really two: first, to provide a template for working on the two pieces, which, if followed, would help a student learn those pieces securely and comfortably; and second, to suggest ways of thinking about and working on organ repertoire that could be applied broadly to other pieces.

The learning process
The process of learning a piece of music on the organ can be thought of in three parts—parts that are not rigorously separate, but interact with and blend into one another. The first is the very practical: learning the notes by working out fingerings and pedalings, and by practicing the notes systematically and patiently—and practicing enough. The second is getting to know the piece as well as possible. This includes anything that permits the player to know, consciously or subconsciously, what is coming up next in the piece. This has a working relationship with the act of memorizing a piece, but doesn’t depend on memorization. (And indeed memorization does not guarantee really knowing the content of a piece musically.) This knowledge reinforces the learning that comes from practicing—makes it more secure. The third part comprises purely interpretive decisions that are made about how to play the piece: tempo, articulation, phrasing, and so on—and of course also registration.
In the columns of the last year I emphasized the first two of these, writing rather little about interpretation, for reasons that I will discuss below. Also, I only occasionally, when there seemed to be a particular reason for it, outlined a specific protocol for practicing a passage. That protocol is largely the same from one case to the next. Systematically organized and patiently carried out practicing is monumentally important. I will outline the most important points about it once more here.
1) Any student or other player can successfully play any passage right off the bat—sight read it—if he or she keeps it slow enough. The harder or more intricate a passage is, the slower it has to be at first. The simpler a passage is or the more it is broken down into simple parts, the less slow it needs to be.
2) The correct starting practice tempo for any passage is a tempo at which that passage is reliably accurate and feels easy. Again, the simpler a passage is, the less slow that tempo has to be. Practicing hands and feet separately allows the initial practice tempo to be less slow than it would have to be to cope with playing the whole texture from the very beginning. The most important thing to note is that an appropriate practice tempo is never defined in relation to the ultimate tempo of the piece or to anything about what sounds “musical.” Students can get into trouble because of a reluctance to practice too much more slowly than the tempo that they hear in their head for a piece. This should never be a consideration at this stage. The faster a piece is supposed to be in the end, the more important it is to practice it slowly enough in the beginning.
3) Once any passage, in any combination of hands and feet, has been played enough times at a given (appropriate) tempo, and feels really easy—essentially automatic—at that tempo, then it can always be played just a little bit faster. This is simply a fact about the human mind, brain, reflexes, muscles, and so on, which continues to be true as the passage increases in tempo towards (or beyond) where the player wants the piece to end up. Therefore:
4) Any passage or piece can always be learned—by anyone—by starting it at a slow-enough practice tempo and speeding it up in sufficiently small increments. Always—anyone. This only ever appears to have failed when the person claiming to have done it has not really done it. (I should know: I have from time to time been that person, led by busy-ness or laziness or distraction to cut corners. Most of us have done the same.) The teacher’s role in this process is to motivate the student to stick to practicing this way.
5) Choices about how much to simplify the increments in which a piece is practiced—that is, whether to practice a measure at a time, or a few measures, or half a piece or a whole piece, how much to practice separate hands, when to start putting things together, and so on—are really matters of the psychology and motivation of the student. Different choices will affect the trajectory of the learning of the piece, but not the final results, as long as the above principles are followed. Some students like working with larger or more complex chunks of music and are willing to keep them slow enough; other students would rather work with simpler or smaller bits and be able to have the “up-to-tempo” experience sooner with those bits.
(I want to mention, just by way of example, a recent experience that has come my way just by coincidence that touches on this. I have a student who has been working on the first Contrapunctus of The Art of Fugue—on harpsichord, and thus with all four voices in the hands—over the month or so prior to my writing this. She decided—after spending some time working out fingerings—that she would altogether skip the step of practicing hands separately. This was contrary to my assumption that she would work out each hand until it felt really ready before putting the two together. She did this because she found the whole texture fascinating and wanted to experience that texture from the beginning. And—this is crucial—she has made it work because she has been willing to keep the whole thing slow enough, and to crank it up to tempo very gradually indeed. I believe that it will take her longer to learn the piece this way, but she is finding it more interesting, and she will in the end learn it well. I should mention that she is playing through individual voices in the manner that I have often discussed, to learn them both aurally and structurally.)

Hand choices
I wrote quite a bit in recent columns about hand choices. These are a disproportionate and needless source of trouble for many students. Of course, if a passage involves the use of two keyboards, with one hand on each, then the player does not choose which hand plays which notes, and it was the composer’s job to make sure that the note patterns within each hand are plausible to finger and play. If both hands, and thus the whole manual part of the texture, are on the same keyboard, then it is extremely important that the student consider the two hands, ten fingers, to be one unit—a unit with the job of playing all of the notes in the most comfortable way, regardless of what note is printed in what staff. I have seen students classify whole pieces as un-learnable because of disadvantageous hand choices in a few salient difficult spots.

Getting to know the piece
In writing about getting to know the piece, I have tended to emphasize what might be called motivic analysis, but of an informal kind: simply noticing any melody, motif, theme, fragment, etc., that happens more than once. It has always been my experience that noticing things like this, even if this is not followed by the drawing of any particular analytic conclusions, leads both to more solid playing—by improving the ongoing remembering of what is coming up next in the piece as it goes along—and to more rhetorically convincing playing. However, getting to know the piece through noticing things about harmony or chord progressions, while not something that I tend to emphasize, can certainly also be useful.
A piece like the Toccata from the Suite Gothique is strongly chord-based. A trip through the piece, identifying chords by letter-name and type and also by relation to a local tonic or to the tonic of the piece, could aid in finding those chord shapes securely, and therefore in playing the piece well. A passage like the section of Buxtehude BuxWV 141 that begins at m. 60, though certainly conceived contrapuntally, can also be seen as organized around chord shapes, and taking note of what those chords are can also be useful in fixing the piece in the student’s mind.
Practice techniques
Practice techniques that I described in the last year’s columns might of course also suit other pieces. For example, in the final column on the Buxtehude, I discussed the technique of leaving out certain notes in a passage as a stage in practicing. This directs the attention of the ear to the stronger notes, and guides the player towards playing lighter notes lightly. I discussed this in connection with the fugue subject of the final section of the Praeludium. This approach could also be applied to the Boëllmann Toccata, leaving out the latter three sixteenth notes of each quarter-note beat in the right hand over the first nineteen measures of the movement, and similar passages, and playing the on-the-beat notes as (very) detached quarter notes. This would, among other things, elucidate the relationship between those notes and the left hand chords, which are in effect detached quarter notes.

Interpretation
I am very much a non-authoritarian when it comes to interpretation. I have no desire whatsoever for my students to play pieces the same way that I do, or in a way that I consider “right”. If a student of mine, or any other musician, plays a piece in a way that I really don’t like, or that I consider “wrong”, either based on analysis of the piece or historical considerations, then that is their business and not mine.
I am happy to share my reasons for liking or not liking anything, but only if the person with whom I am sharing those ideas is not going to feel obliged then to do things the way that I seem to want them done. I fear that the hand of a teacher’s artistic, aesthetic, and interpretive judgments can be a very heavy one for a student, even long after the teacher has modified or abandoned the particular opinion.
I try to consider any aesthetic judgment that I formed more than about five years earlier to be officially out-of-date and subject to being changed—or at least needing to be consciously re-thought before it is ratified. However, if I conveyed that judgment to a student with a kind of teacherly authority, then the student might have a hard time letting go of it, even if unknown to that student I have already done so. This is why I have tried to avoid statements of the sort—“this theme (or passage, or piece) should be played legato (or staccato, or with this or that phrasing)”—in these columns. Another reason for avoiding this is that my own interpretive thoughts about these pieces have changed at least somewhat as I have gotten to know them better by writing about them.
For example, I would now play the Prière à Notre-Dame a bit less slowly and significantly more freely than I would have expected to play it a year ago. It is also true that, outside of a certain level of generality, interpretive decisions in organ music depend on the instrument being used and on the acoustics of the performing space. The more solidly a piece has been learned, the more readily a performer can adapt his or her performance to the needs of a new instrument or a new acoustic situation.
I have enjoyed living with these two works for a year. They are both, beyond the nitty-gritty of working on them, expressive, exciting pieces that are viscerally fun to play as well as wonderful to hear and interesting to think about. Next month I plan to write about memorization. This is a subject that arises fairly naturally out of the attempt to learn a piece or two really well. The question of the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning of a piece is a complex and controversial one. I will try to explore a number of different ways of thinking about it, and give an account of my own views and my own experience. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 2: First movement
This month’s column looks at the first movement—Introduction-Choral—of the Suite Gothique. In the main, we will outline an approach to practicing the movement, starting of course with working out fingerings and pedalings. We will also consider some interpretive questions, mainly as they interact with or affect choices that must be made about fingering and pedaling.
Several technical features of this movement immediately stand out:
• Many thick chords in the hands—both hands;
• Double pedal for several measures;
• Except for the double pedal passages, the pedal part is strikingly low in compass, with the E-flat in the middle of the pedal keyboard as the highest note;
• Very little indication for swell pedal use;
• The hands sometimes more or less double each other in octaves;
• Conceptually each hand seems to be more of its own part than is usually true in a contrapuntal piece, where voices often wander from hand to hand—however, that does not mean that the hands cannot help each other out a bit;
• Very few chords do not include raised notes;
• There are no explicit instructions from the composer about articulation or phrasing, except for commas in three places, and one important slur, with its repeat.

Articulation
The thick chords raise one important technical issue right away, namely the matter of fingering in relation to articulation. It is essentially always easier—more natural as to hand position—to play successive chords of three or more notes non-legato. Sometimes it is actually impossible to do otherwise, more so the more notes there are in the chords, of course, but also depending on other matters, such as the placement within chords of raised notes. However, in a typical passage made up of successive chords, there are almost always some that can be played legato fairly easily, others that can be played legato with some sort of extra effort, and some that really cannot be played legato at all. This is of course different, around the margins at least, for different players, with hands of different sizes.
In music that we believe to be basically non-legato in overall style, none of this presents particular problems. Chord fingerings can be chosen based largely on the comfort of each chord—in turn based mostly on hand position—and the non-legato transition from one chord to the next can be practiced until it is, while non-legato, still smooth and cantabile, if that is what is desired. In a piece or a passage that we want to play legato, we must grapple with finding the best way to make connections between chords when it is not easy to do so. (By contrast, it is, from a technical point of view, almost trivially easy to play at least most of the upper voice melody in the third movement—Prière—legato, as per the marked phrases. The fingers of the right hand are simply available to do so.)
The question of whether this movement is meant to be legato, or the question of whether a given player wants or prefers to play it legato is unclear, or, more accurately, it is one that different students, teachers, and players will answer differently from one another (and from me). I am not interested in prejudging questions like this—that is, I want to try as best I can to leave all sorts of interpretive possibilities open as we consider how to work on the pieces under discussion. Also, there is a close relationship in a piece like this between articulation and room acoustics. In a very resonant room, a thick texture will come across as essentially legato even if the fingers and feet put small spaces between the notes and chords. If the player literally connects notes and chords, then there is a chance that the result will be enough beyond legato to sound unintelligible. This is an important consideration, especially since most organ repertoire, certainly including the pieces of Boëllmann, was written to be played in very resonant rooms. Of course, we must play in the rooms that are available to us.

Fingering
A fingering for the chords of the opening, in the right hand, that is designed to be comfortable, accepting that most of the chords will be non-legato, might look like Example 1. This happens to suit my hands. For another player, the best fingering might be a little bit different. In m. 5, for example, some players would rather do this (Example 2):

To achieve more full legato, substitution might be used, especially, for example, in the second and sixth measures (Example 3). (I find this fingering awkward, but possible with practice.)
A player with large hands might be able to do this (Example 4),

releasing the lower two notes of the opening chord early, but joining the upper two notes to the notes of the second chord. (I cannot quite do this one. Don’t try it unless it is really comfortable. The stretch could cause injury.)
In the passage at m. 13 (Example 5), the left hand can take some of the notes printed on the upper staff. I have put boxes around a few that I think make sense treated this way, although there are others that are possible. The decision to do this would make it easier to play the upper notes of the right-hand part legato, at the expense of some legato in the inner voices. This is an artistic judgment call, but notice the slurs in m. 18 and later its echo in m. 25. These are the only slurs in the entire movement, and are probably an important part of the rhetoric of this phrase.
Any student must make decisions and choices about fingering matters such as these, perhaps in consultation with a teacher. There are two important technical practicing points to make about some of these fingerings. First, non-legato fingerings will end up sounding smoother and most natural the more they are practiced, at first, with large rather than small breaks between the notes. That is, a gesture such as this (where the asterisks are) (Example 6),

should be practiced with the A-flat/
E-flat/C chord released almost as soon as it is played (but released gently), so that the motion to the next (B-flat/F/D) chord is as easy as possible. Then it will also be easy, later in the practicing process, to close that gap and make the articulation very small and unobtrusive. If you try to make the articulation too small from the beginning—waiting until the last instant and then quickly moving to, almost lunging at, the next chord—then it is likely to end up sounding awkward and stiff, no matter how much you practice it.
Second, it is important to remember to use the correct order in any fingering that includes multiple substitutions. For example, in this triple substitution (Example 7),

it is necessary to execute the substitutions from the lowest to the highest: 2-1, then 3-2, then 5-4. In every case, it is important to carry out substitutions in such a way that the hand moves inward—becomes smaller—rather than moving outward and stretching out. This can always be worked out by trial and error, and getting it right can make the difference between a substitution’s being impossible and its being easy.

Pedaling
One advantage of double pedal is that it resolves any doubt as to which foot should play which note. In effect there are two pedal lines—in the case of the first four measures of this piece, identical to one another except for being an octave apart—and each line has to be executed by one foot. An approach to pedal playing that involves paying attention to the position of each foot with respect to itself (as outlined in my earlier columns on pedal playing) not just, or mainly, in relation to the other foot, tends to make double pedal passages not seem as different from “regular” pedal as they might otherwise. In the case of this passage, as with the manual part, there is a relationship between pedaling and articulation. If this were a line from a Buxtehude piece (which it, unlike the manual part, could just as well be) then any comfortable pedaling would be fine: perhaps all toe, perhaps some heels when the angle was such as to make that comfortable. If, in keeping with an overall interpretive approach, we want to play this line legato, then a pedaling like this for the right foot part might work (Example 8).
The two quarter notes could be played by rolling the toe area of the foot, that is, playing the B-flat with the outside of the foot and the A-flat with the inside. The first note (G) of the second measure could be played with the toe, creating what should be a small articulation before that note. I might also play the first note of the passage with the toe initially, to make a clean, crisp beginning easier to achieve, before substituting the heel to prepare for the next note. There are other possible variations. The left foot could well use exactly the same pedaling as the right.
For the non-double segments of the pedal line, different players will choose different pedalings based largely on personal preference. Here are two different pedalings for mm. 5–8 (Examples 9 and 10); and of course there are other possibilities.

Practicing
The most efficient procedure for practicing this movement is the same as for almost any piece: work out fingerings and pedalings; divide the piece into manageable sections (in this piece, it makes sense to work with the phrases suggested by commas and by fermatas, although it is certainly fine to subdivide those units into smaller ones); practice these sections with separate hands and feet, very slowly; put hands together, or hands and feet together, only when the separate components are very well learned; increase tempo only when a given tempo has become almost trivially easy. This procedure can never be mentioned too often, and it can never be stressed enough that, if it is followed thoroughly and patiently, it always works.
In the case of this movement, I would strongly suggest that at every stage of working on the piece, until it is really ready to go at approximately the composer’s suggested tempo of half note equals 50, the beat in the student’s head, or coming from the student’s metronome, be equal to an eighth note. The quarter note will be too slow to be followed easily until close to a performance tempo.

Special procedures
In the case of this movement, there are a few special procedures that can enhance the learning of the piece—that is, getting to know it musically—while the notes are being learned securely. These are analogous to the practicing of separate voices in a contrapuntal piece, but modified to reflect the texture and structure of this piece: one in which the melody—the top voice—is indeed musically the most important thing, and in which the interaction between that melody and the bass line is the main source of motion.
So the first special practice technique is simply to play the melody and the bass line together, omitting all of the other voices or chordal notes. This can be done with the bass line in the pedal—as soon as the pedal is well enough learned—or with the bass line in the left hand, read from the pedal line or extracted from the left hand part of the manuals-only phrases. It can also be done with the melody in the left hand—since the left hand often doubles the melody—and the bass in the pedal. This can be done before the fingering of the chords has been practiced and made comfortable, since the extracted individual lines are fairly easy to play. But I would also suggest continuing to do it at later stages of work on the piece as a listening exercise and a way of keeping focused on the architecture of the piece, rather than just the complexities of learning it.
In the passages in which the left hand doubles the right hand an octave lower (this is a slightly oversimplified description of the texture), it is difficult for the ears of the performer to follow the left-hand part. The higher sounds of the right-hand part predominate. And, although the left hand in these passages is in a meaningful sense somewhat subordinate to the right hand, the overall texture will benefit from the left hand’s being played in as interesting and nuanced a way as the right hand, and from the two hands really being in sync. One way to work on this is to play the two hands together—once they have been practiced and are secure!—on different keyboards, with the left hand significantly louder. The right hand should be almost but not quite actually drowned out. Of course this only applies to some passages (mm. 1–8, 16–23, and 33–37, more or less). Then, when next practicing on a “normal” sound, try to focus on listening to the left-hand part, and let the right hand take care of itself.
Next month I will return to the Buxtehude Praeludium, looking at the first contrapuntal section beginning at m. 13. We will return later to the Boëllmann, looking at the Menuet.

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="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Boëllmann Suite Gothique, Part 1: Getting to know the piece
This month’s column is the first in the current series to take a look at the Boëllmann Suite Gothique, op. 25. We will go through the first steps of getting to know the piece in a manner analogous to what we did with the Buxtehude Praeludium in June’s column. In large part, this will be presented as a list of features or aspects of the piece, the noticing of which will help with learning the piece, either by suggesting approaches to technical problems or by helping with the task of knowing securely what is coming up next. Next month we will discuss fingering, pedaling, and practicing issues in the opening movement.

Editions
As with the Buxtehude, there are several perfectly good editions. There is (as of this writing) a Durand edition in print that is the direct successor to the original edition of 1895. There are also several free online editions available. The best of these seems to me to be the one at the Werner Icking Music Archive, edited by Pierre Gouin: <http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Boellmann.php&gt;. This is essentially an accurate new type-setting of the original, with registrations and other performance suggestion transcribed in an undistorted manner. There are, I believe, other good editions to be found online. (This is, like the Buxtehude, a piece that is in the public domain.) However, there are also some editions out there that are misleading. For example, again as of this writing, both editions available through the Petrucci Music Library—in general a wonderful resource—omit original registrations and other performance suggestions. One of them also adds fingerings and pedalings, which, by the nature of printed technical suggestions, may or may not suit any particular player. They do not come from the composer and thus have no authority.
Whatever edition one is using, it is important to start by writing in measure numbers if, as in the case of the Durand edition, they are absent.

Overall structure
The first thing to notice about this piece is that it is in four movements. The Buxtehude, we noticed, is in one movement but several sections. What is the difference? Would this piece be different—would we want to play it differently—if the movements were printed in such a way that the end of one was followed immediately on the same staff by the beginning of the next, and the various instructions—name, tempo, registration—were printed discreetly above the appropriate notes? What is the effect on our concept of the piece of all the thick double bars and new pages? There is a chance (danger?) that whereas it is obvious that sections should follow one another in a way that is dictated by musical sense, shape, and drama, it does not always seem obvious that movements should do so. Breaks between movements can seem like opportunities to cough, take a drink, reposition on the bench, and so on. Perhaps this is often just fine, but it is worth thinking about. In the case of this piece, the first movement ends with the word enchaînez, which is French for what we often call attacca—that is: let what follows arise directly out of what is ending. The other movements do not have this notation.
Each movement has a title and a tempo marking. The titles are in a sense “fanciful”—they are probably meant to suggest images and moods, and to link the music of each movement to the idea of the “gothic,” which is found in the title of the work as a whole. How will these images affect choices made in playing the work? Three of the movements have ordinary Italian tempo markings: two Allegros and a Maestoso. The remaining movement has a tempo marking in French, that is, in the vernacular: Très lent. This means “very slow” and this movement—the third, titled Prière à Notre Dame—has no metronome marking, whereas all the other three do.
All of these various markings help to differentiate the movements; so does the fact that each is in a different meter, and so do the registrations offered by the composer. Interestingly, all of these things tend to separate out the Prière more than any of the other movements. It alone lacks a metronome marking, it has the vernacular—and extreme—tempo suggestion, and its registration is significantly more different from any of the others—they differ from one another slightly—and its name is fully extra-musical. It is also in a (very) different key, namely A-flat major. Meanwhile, each movement is remarkably consistent within itself in texture and mood, almost as if each movement had an “affect” in the sense in which people often apply that word to Baroque pieces. What does all of this mean? Not necessarily anything in particular. We will explore some of it along the way, but it is all useful to notice as part of getting to know the piece.
Now to go through the movements one by one.

First movement
The first movement is Introduction-Choral (not, by the way, “Introduction & Choral” as some editions have it). It is the shortest movement in the work, certainly in amount of musical material and probably in duration, even at its slow tempo. Perhaps this is in part what justifies calling it an “introduction”. It is a “choral”, essentially, because of the texture. In keyboard music, “choral(e)” texture means that by and large the voices all move in the same rhythm as one another. This is the case here. (Note: “by and large”, not 100%.) So chorale texture is somewhat of a chordal texture, but not necessarily entirely so. The phrase structure here is also reminiscent of a chorale or hymn. The opening phrase is eight measures, and it is repeated. The next phrase is seven measures and it is also repeated. The final phrase is eleven measures, with an internal quasi-repetition after the first four measures, and with only the tail end of the phrase repeated at the end. The repetitions—mm. 9–16, 24–30, and 42–end—are quiet, whereas the initial statements—mm. 1–8, and so on—are loud: therefore the repetitions are echoes. These echoes are manuals-only, while the initial statements all use pedal. Thus the pedal/no pedal shift serves to intensify the fff/p contrast. There is pervasive octave doubling in the fff passages, and essentially none in the echoes. (In fact there is one instance of it in all of the echo passages, in m. 11. This has the look of an inadvertent “parallel octave” rather than a way of building a texture.) This also intensifies the fff/p contrast. It also serves to shift the feeling of the texture a little bit: the echoes seem closer to the contrapuntal than the initial statements do.
From the purely technical point of view, the two most noticeable issues presented by this movement are the fingering and execution of some very thick chords, and the double pedal that opens the work.

Second movement
This first movement ends quietly, and on a dominant chord. This, plus the enchaînez instruction, leads us directly into the second movement. Entitled Menuet gothique, it is appropriately in the minuet meter of 3/4. The lilting minuet rhythm is very clear from the beginning. It is accentuated by the articulation in the bass line in the left hand (Example 1). The opening motive provides about half of the musical material of this movement. It is, somewhat like the first movement, organized in phrases that are repeated. In this case, the initial statements are manuals-only and quiet. The repetitions are with pedal and loud. The louder statements have octave doublings, the quiet statements by and large do not. The second motive begins with the upbeat to m. 49. It is quite different from the opening, but with a version of the same lilting articulation (Example 2). The movement consists of a back and forth between these two ideas. In one stretch they interrupt each other in short bursts. The movement ends with a complete statement of the opening idea, loud and with pedal.
This minuet movement is marked “non legato” throughout. One of the chief performance issues is how to interpret that instruction, and how to interpret the detailed articulation marks—dots and slurs—in light of the overall non legato. As a matter of note learning, the main issue is—as with the first movement, but in a very different esthetic context—the fingering and executing of long passages in block chords.

Third movement
The third movement—Prière à Notre Dame—starts with a cantabile melody in the top voice, accompanied by chords and slow accompanying notes in the middle part of the manual compass and in the pedal. This melody begins with the interval C–G, which is of course the defining interval of the overall C (major and minor) tonality of the work. However, in this context the interval consists of the third and seventh scale degrees of the key of A-flat major. The movement retains the feeling of cantabile throughout, even as occasionally the inner voices become more melodically active. The treble melody is marked with long slurs throughout, most of which last a (slow) measure or longer.
This movement has more phrasing marks and more shadings of dynamics than the other movements. The absence of a metronome marking may suggest an assumption on the composer’s part that the tempo and rhythm will be freer than might otherwise be normal, even that it will be free enough to render the initial setting of one very precise tempo inappropriate. All of this is in keeping with the purely musical notion of cantabile, and perhaps also with something about the composer’s sense of what is implied by the concept of prayer.
From a playing point of view, this movement divides into two parts: those measures, such as the first four, or mm. 33–50, in which the principal melody is alone in the right hand, and those, such as mm. 5–12, in which the right hand also takes some of the slower accompanying notes. (Oddly enough, there is an almost identical amount of each.) When the melody is alone in the right hand, it is physically quite easy to create legato and to shape and time the line in whatever way the ears and mind suggest. This is harder when the hand also has other notes to play. This will suggest specific approaches to practicing and learning the movement.

Fourth movement
The last movement is Toccata. It is, until the grand ending, a pure perpetuum mobile—that is, a piece in which there is one note value that is always present and is the shortest note value in the piece. (In this case it is the sixteenth note.) These sixteenth notes almost always outline chords, and the notes of those chords are usually also present elsewhere in the texture in slower notes. The opening is a typical example of this (Example 3).
With the kind of organ sound that the composer would have expected—nineteenth-century French foundation stops and reeds in a well-closed swell box—in the kind of very resonant room that would have been normal at the time, at the indicated tempo (quarter-note = 132) this writing is mostly pure texture, with a dose of rhythmic impetus. The notes are not heard as individual, let alone particularly crisp, notes. Slower-moving themes, such as the pedal line that enters in m. 3 or the various forms of syncopated quarter notes that first enter in m. 20, will seem to cut through this texture rather than interact with it contrapuntally.
The sixteenth-note patterns are, in themselves, fairly easy. That is, they fall under the fingers naturally. The challenge for many students will be to prepare these patterns well enough that the movement can go fast enough for the texture and rhythm effects to work well. In performance it is important that the perpetuum mobile sixteenth notes neither seem to interfere with or to be interfered with by the other lines.

About Boëllmann
This is a very well-known piece by a not very well-known composer. Boëllmann worked in the shadow of the other great French composers of his day, and of the organ composers in particular. Or at least he seems to us to have done so. Perhaps this is mainly because he had, unfortunately, a very short life and left less music than he might have. Many of us who know the Suite Gothique do not have a lot of context for it. As part of the preparation for working on the piece, I would suggest that a student explore that context a little bit. There are recordings of Boëllmann’s chamber music and other non-organ music, and this music is worth getting to know. Boëllmann lived in the household of Eugène Gigout from the mid-1880s until his death in 1897. (He had married Gigout’s niece.) Gigout published his famous Toccata in 1890. It is obvious on its face that Boëllmann was influenced by this piece in the composition of the Toccata that forms part of this suite. A student who doesn’t know the Gigout work should listen to it. Also, organ music and, perhaps especially, other music by such composers as Franck, Widor, Saint-Saëns can form an important part of this context.
Next month we will zero in on specific technical aspects of working on and learning the first movement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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