On Teaching

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part II
In last month’s column, I emphasized the usefulness of starting off the teaching of registration with a clear explanation of the meaning of the foot-designation of organ stops and with a set of demonstrations of that meaning. This is a necessary foundation for understanding everything about combining stops and about choosing organ sounds for music. Once a student clearly understands the meaning of all the numbers on the stop knobs, it is time for that student to begin exploring the art of combining stops. This starts with developing an awareness of what the stop pitch levels imply about the structure of stop combinations, and continues with the development of an ear for the aesthetic nature of different sounds, and then with the acquisition of knowledge about registration practices in different schools of organ composition or in the work of specific composers.
The concept that it is OK to combine stops that are not at the same pitch level as one another, and that the resulting sound will be (or at least can be) a coherent musical sound at a coherent pitch level, is not self-evident. In fact, it is counterintuitive to most people who have not already become well versed in organ registration. It seems, if anything, self-evident that this kind of mixing will result in obvious parallel octaves and fifths, and also in a generalized jumble of pitches, which would at a minimum make clarity impossible (because notes that you play in the tenor register, for example, would produce pitches proper to the treble register, etc.). Since the blending of stops at different pitch levels in fact can work the way it does because of the overtone series, it is useful to explain something about overtones to students. It is certainly not necessary to go into all of the scientific details—the physics of the creation of overtones, the reasons for inharmonicity of overtones in certain situations, or even what the notes of the overtone series are, above the first few. However, it is a good idea to review the basics:
1) Almost all musical sounds produced acoustically have many frequencies blended together. (It usually takes a computer to produce a sound at exactly one frequency.)
2) These frequencies are (usually) a) a given frequency and b) other frequencies that are multiples of that first frequency. (Of course we use the lowest frequency to identify the note, as in “A 440.”)
3) These multiples produce sounds that are related to the lowest frequency by common musical intervals: octave, octave-and-a-fifth, two octaves, two-octaves-and-a-third, etc.
On most organs it is possible to find individual notes on some stops in which some specific overtones can be heard as separate pitches. These can be used to demonstrate the existence of overtones and the pitch levels of some of them. Gedeckts, flutes, and quintadenas are often the most fruitful for this, and notes in the octave and a half or so below middle c are the most promising, because they are the easiest to hear. Usually it is possible to find a pipe or two in which the twelfth is clear (quiet, perhaps, but clear), others in which the seventeenth is, and others in which the octaves are. To someone who has never tried to listen to overtones before, these sounds are usually hard to hear at first, but then suddenly “come in.” The teacher can help with this, first by making sure to zero in on the pipes with the clearest individual overtones, and then by briefly playing, singing, or whistling the actual note corresponding to the overtone that you wish to help the student to hear. This will attune the student’s expectation to that pitch, and it will probably only be necessary for the first few notes.
(A further exercise in listening to overtones is this: play a simple melody on one stop. Try to hear and follow the counter-melody created by the clearest and most noticeable overtones. For example, consider the notes of the fugue subject of Bach’s E-flat major fugue:
b-flat – g – c – b-flat –
e-flat – e-flat – d – e-flat
Depending on what the overtones of each pipe happen to be doing, a counter melody could arise that went like this:
d – d – g – d – g – g – f# – g
or that went like this:
f – b – e – f – b-flat –
b-flat – f# – b-flat
or any number of other possibilities. It will be different for each different stop on which you play the melody. The “extra” melody will be quiet, and usually it will range from one to three octaves above the “official” melody. It is quite possible that these inherent counter-melodies are one source of the human invention of counterpoint. This is all a bit of a detour from learning techniques of registration as such, but it is a useful exercise both for learning to listen carefully to sound and for remembering that sounds themselves are complex and interesting, often doing more than we might at first expect.)
Once a student understands the basic concept of overtones (and believes in them!), it is easy for him or her to understand the blending of stops of different pitches: a 4? stop blends with and reinforces the first upper partial of an 8? stop, a 22?3? stop the second upper partial, a 2? stop the third, etc. One advantage of going through all of this quite systematically is that it answers the question of how in the world it can make sense to combine stops that don’t even produce the same letter-name notes as one another. This is certainly the thing that seems the least intuitive and the most questionable about registration to many of those who are not yet experienced with the organ.
(This can be true especially if someone stops to think about all of the pitches that are present in a thick texture. For example, a G-major 7th chord played on a registration that includes a 22?3? stop includes the pitches g, a, b, c, d, f, f#. If you throw in a tierce you add a d#. That this would be acceptable makes a lot more sense if you know that all of those “extra” pitches are present anyway as overtones.)
So the most basic description of the structure of the art of combining organ stops, and the most useful as a starting point, goes something like this: that, as long as you have one or more 8? stops present in your combination of stops, anything and everything higher than 8? pitch has the potential to blend with the 8? sound. In so doing, it will change the nature of the sound by changing the overall balance of the overtones, and by changing the volume, but it will not upset the pitch identification of the notes that you play.
A simple exercise to demonstrate this would be as follows:
1) choose a keyboard that has more than one 8? stop and several higher-pitched stops.
2) draw the louder (loudest) 8? stop.
3) play a simple passage—a chord progression or a bit of a hymn is good—adding and taking away various 4? and higher stops at random.
4) after a while, remove the 8? stop. The student will hear the music suddenly jump up in pitch.
5) repeat all of this with a softer 8? stop.
Anyone performing or listening to this exercise will certainly notice that not all of the combinations work equally well. Some of the sounds that could blend in theory will not seem to blend very well in practice, perhaps because a 4? or higher stop is too loud or too bright (or for that matter out of tune) or because a given 8? stop is too thin or weak or has something about its intrinsic overtone development that conflicts with rather than supports the addition of higher-pitched stops. These considerations are extremely important. They are also subjective and in the end belong to the realm of artistic judgment or discretion. A student listening to or trying out this exercise should be encouraged to notice aesthetic aspects of each sound. However, the main point for the moment is that the dropping of the 8? pitch makes a sound that is utterly different in kind from the adding or dropping of any higher-pitched stops.
Of course, it might occur to a student, or a teacher might want to mention for completeness if nothing else, that it is perfectly possible to use sounds that omit 8? stops, for some special reason or in some special way. The simplest of these is the use of a 4? or higher sound to play the music at an octave or more higher than the written pitch. Also fairly common is the use of a non-8? registration accompanied by the moving of the hands to a different position on the keyboard to bring the pitch in line with original expectations. These are useful things to bear in mind as a performing organist, but they are special cases that can best be thought about at a slightly later stage in learning, and that should certainly not distract a student from developing the most thorough possible understanding of “normal” stop combination and registration. The same can be said about the use of 16? sound in multi-voiced or chordal manual playing. This, in theory, just transposes the music down an octave, but often doesn’t—for some psychoacoustic or just plain acoustic reasons—quite sound like that.
So far we have developed a rather scientific approach—perhaps too scientific for some people’s taste—to the teaching or learning of registration. We have asked students to think very clearly about the pitch designations of stops, about overtones, about what overtones imply about the use of different pitches of stops, and about how to make sure that a sound is grounded in unison pitch. We have not yet talked about either how to choose registrations that “sound good” (or “beautiful” or “appropriate” or anything else) or about how to respect composers’ wishes or any other way to tailor sounds to pieces. We have also barely mentioned stop names, or even names of important categories of stops, diapasons, flutes, reeds, and so on. Nor have we mentioned any rules or even ideas about how or whether to combine stops of different types, or for that matter of the same type.
Organs have lots and lots of sounds. For example, by my calculations, allowing only for sounds that include 8? pitch and leaving cornets and “céleste” stops out of any ensemble, but taking into account couplers, the Grand Orgue of the Mander organ at St. Ignatius Loyola in New York—a well-known, recent, large but not gargantuan organ—commands 121,889,158,594,564 different sounds. A hypothetical medium-sized organ in which three manuals have 25 to 30 stops would have about 200 million to about a billion 8?-based sounds available in the manual divisions. If the pedal division of such an organ had eight stops, then, assuming normal couplers, the pedals would have a quarter of a trillion different sounds available.
Harpsichords, on the other hand, have rather few sounds. Most large harpsichords have seven to ten different available sonorities all together. Many very fine and versatile harpsichords have only three. In planning registration for a piece on the harpsichord, it is always possible to use what I consider to be the soundest and most artistically thorough approach: simply trying the piece out on every possible sound, listening carefully and with attention, and deciding which sound you like best.
This approach is almost always impossible on the organ. It is always impossible on any organ but the very smallest. However, it seems to me that it is still—albeit only in an underlying theoretical way—the best approach, and the right concept to have in the back of one’s mind when working out registrations. That this is true can, I think, be almost proven logically. If you are using a given registration, whether it comes from an editor, or from your teacher, or from something that you jotted down in your copy years before, or from any other source, but there is in fact a different registration that you would like better if only you heard it, then you should in theory be using that other registration. Therefore, ideally, one would always hear every registration before making a final choice.
(I am not right now dealing with the extra-musical quasi-ethical considerations of authenticity that arise when a specific registration comes from the composer. I will address that at least briefly next month.)
The purpose of taking a student very systematically through what I described above as a scientific approach to the technique of registration—the feet, the overtones, the combinations at different pitch levels—is to allow the student then to feel free to try anything and everything (again, knowing that there won’t really be time for everything!) without fear of doing something that really, in some concrete way, doesn’t and can’t work. This will enable the student to be relatively independent of outside guidelines, and increase the chance that the student will contribute something new and interesting to the world of the organ. It will also almost certainly provide the student with a great measure of out-and-out fun, and keep the job of practicing as interesting as it can be.
Next month I will talk about ways to practice listening to the more subjective, sound-quality-oriented aspects of the blending and combining of stops. I will also talk about helping students to begin to relate sound to other aspects of their concept of a piece of music, and to both structural and historical considerations.?

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part III

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1

In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.

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

Registration and teaching—Part IV
In this column—the last on registration for now—I will offer suggestions for ways in which teachers can help students choose sounds for particular pieces. This is, of course, the practical essence of registration. The main point of the systematic approach to understanding organ stops and becoming familiar with organ sounds that was outlined in the last three columns is to enable students to feel confident choosing sounds for pieces and to end up choosing sounds that they will be happy with. The discussion in this column assumes that the student has done some of the analysis, the thinking, and the listening practice described in the last three columns. This student will have a good understanding of what stops are likely to combine well with one another, and will also be open-minded about trying combinations that are unconventional and that might or might not work. He or she will also be in the habit of listening to sounds carefully, and will expect to have a reaction to sounds—an aesthetic and/or emotional reaction—and to give importance and respect to that reaction. A significant part of the process of choosing appropriate sounds for pieces consists of noting one’s aesthetic or emotional reactions to those pieces and allowing those reactions to suggest sounds that evoke similar, compatible, or complementary reactions. This will be the focus of this column. Another part of the process consists of learning about outside factors that might influence registration. The most important of these are any registration instructions that a composer may have given, along with any information about organs or types of organs that a composer knew. I will make a few comments about this below, but it will receive much more attention in future columns devoted to the (often vexing) subject of authenticity.
There are two principles that serve as a foundation for my thinking about the teaching of this phase of the art of registration. The first of these is that no registration is “right” or “wrong.” Rather, any registration has a whole host of things that can be said about it that are descriptive rather than judgmental. Some of these might be simple descriptions of the sounds, such as “loud,” “soft,” “bright,” “mellow,” “pungent,” “hollow,” “beautiful,” etc. Some might be more situational or practical, like: “louder than the previous piece,” or “so muddy that you can’t hear the inner voices,” or “not to our pastor’s taste.” Some might be musicological or historical, like: “not what the composer had in mind,” or “uncannily like the mid-17th-century plenum.” Any of these descriptions might be important to note, and might serve as a basis for choosing or rejecting a registration. However, none of them is the same as “good” or “bad.” Most of us (I emphatically do include myself in this!) have an instinct to call a registration “bad” or “wrong” when what we mean is that it is “not what I am used to” or “not what I would do myself” or, more simply, that “I do not like it.” It is of course absolutely fine and good—and inevitable—for each of us to have developed such tastes and preferences, especially if we recognize them as such. However, if we pass them on to our students as “right” and “wrong,” with the weight of our authority behind them, we are in great danger of limiting and constraining our students rather than liberating and empowering them. We are also in danger of making registration—which has the capacity to be tremendous out-and-out fun—into a source of anxiety: yet another opportunity to get something wrong, in a world that has too many such opportunities.
(Here’s an anecdote about the weight of authority. Many years ago, when I was still a student, I had a friendly but heartfelt argument with a fellow organ aficionado about what was the “right” registration for the long middle section of one of the Bach organ fugues. We both had all sorts of musical, musicological, analytical, even philosophical reasons to give in favor of our preferred sound. We were each convinced that the other’s sound was wrong. Of course it turned out that we were each simply advocating a sound just like the one used in the recording of the piece that each of us happened to have heard first and gotten used to!)
The second principle is this: that the primary purpose of a student’s actions in choosing a registration for a piece is not the attainment of a registration that the teacher likes, or that any other listener would like, or that the composer would have liked, or even that the student likes. The actual registration is not the goal at this stage. Rather the goal is for the process to move the student along towards being more comfortable, confident, and skillful at choosing registrations for pieces. Therefore the teacher, in guiding the student in this process, should be very hesitant about actually giving specific registrations. It is easy for a student to use the stops that a teacher has pulled out, and in so doing to play a piece with a registration that the teacher likes and that some other listeners will also like. It is unlikely that this kind of transaction will teach the student very much. (The same criticism also applies to a student’s using registrations that are found in a printed edition.) If, however, a student goes through a process of listening to stops, listening to combinations, and thinking about the aesthetic of a piece and about possible sounds, the student will always learn a great deal. This is true even if no listener likes the registrations that are found along the way. If he or she creates registrations that listeners do like, the student will also learn a great deal, all the more so if such a registration is significantly different from others that the student may have heard or heard about.
There is one caveat that applies to this second principle. There are times when someone who is still a student, and for whom the work of registration should indeed be mostly about learning and trying things, does indeed—for some practical reason—have to devise a registration that will be acceptable in a particular circumstance. This need will be more compelling the more the circumstance is extra-musical. For example, in a church service, or a funeral or wedding, the student has to use sounds that will enhance rather than disrupt anything that is being accompanied. Also, in these settings, a student might have to respect certain traditions or needs as to the role of music in the service, for example having to do with dynamic levels during communion. A teacher might have to step in and suggest solutions that fit these circumstances, if the student is not yet ready to come up with appropriate registrations directly. A somewhat more cynical practical reason might be this: that the student needs to prepare an audition, and the teacher knows how to help the student match the known tastes of those who will be judging the audition. These practical circumstances should be recognized as limited exceptions to the general principle that it is a better learning experience for students to work on coming up with their own sounds, and then to try those sounds out in performance and see how effective they are.
In an earlier column I mentioned “what I consider to be the soundest and most artistically thorough approach [to choosing stops for a piece]: simply trying the piece out on every possible sound, listening carefully and with attention, and deciding which sound you like best.” This is possible on the harpsichord, but almost never, just as a practical matter, on the organ. If the goal is to allow and encourage students to come as close as possible to this open and un-predetermined approach, the teacher can suggest something like the following procedure:
(This is essentially for pieces that do not have registration suggestions that come directly from the composer, and has to be modified for those that do.)
1) Try, while learning a new piece, either to stay away from recordings and other performances of the piece, or to listen to several, three at least.
2) During the earliest stages of learning a piece, begin to form a sense of what it seems like in mood or feeling, in a very basic way: calm, excited, jaunty, disturbing, anxious, jubilant, peaceful, “in your face,” mellow, etc. (As always with adjectives that describe a piece of music, these are probably best used within the mind of one person to help that person consolidate thoughts about the piece. Different people use adjectives so differently that they can easily be misleading in conveying anything in the aesthetic realm from one person to another.) Do not worry about whether you can prove these feelings or reactions to be correct. (You cannot.) Also, don’t be surprised if you later change them. If you honestly can’t come up with any such feelings about the piece at this stage, choose a concept for the piece at random. (This will probably work out just as well in the end for your performance of the work itself, and certainly will serve just as well as a learning experience.)
3) Remembering the fruits of all of your prior exploration of organ stops and combinations for their own sake, choose a sound that seems to match the mood or feeling that you are discerning in the piece—that is, concoct such a sound: it is not necessary or desirable to remember a specific sound from before—and play the piece with that sound.
4) Find another such sound. That is, a sound that also fits your basic sense about the mood or feeling, but that is easily distinguishable from the first sound. (An easy-to-describe example of this might be, in a quiet and gentle piece, first an 8? Gedeckt alone, then an 8? Dulciana alone; or in a loud, forthright piece, first a principal chorus-based combination, then a combination based on strong reeds; or for a pungent but quiet sound, first the quietest available reed, then a Quintadena.) Play the piece a few times with this second sound.
5) Go back to the first sound and listen to it with ears that have now been influenced by the second sound. Perhaps introduce a third and fourth sound and go back and forth among all of them. Listen for the differences and similarities. Has this exercise enabled you to refine your sense of what the piece is like? Do you prefer one of the sounds to another? If you initially chose your concept of the piece at random, do you now find that concept convincing? If not, how might you want to modify or replace it? If you chose your concept not at random, do you still find it convincing? If not, in what way has your concept changed? If it has changed, then you should follow the same procedure but with stop combinations that reflect your new concept of the piece.
One of the points of asking a student to go through a procedure like this is to make sure that registration does not happen by habituation, that is, that a student does not just come upon a registration more or less at random and then get used to it, the way my friend and I each got used to the registration that we had heard on the Bach fugue recordings, as mentioned above. It is fine to discover some registrations at random, but it is important to be systematic about listening to them, and to be committed to trying others as well.
Although it seems that choosing stops would be easier when the composer has provided a registration, this is often not true. Assuming that we accept the notion that it is right to play a piece the way the composer wanted it to be played, then the composer’s registration probably narrows down the choice of plausible sounds. In effect the composer’s registration does the work of step 2) above. However, it is important to remember that the exact stop names given by a composer do not usually correspond perfectly to the stops available on whatever organ the student is using. This is always true unless the student is playing the organ that the composer had in mind or one very much like it indeed. (Again, I will discuss the ramifications of this at great length in future columns about authenticity.) In trying to recreate the effect asked for by a composer, it is best to do something like the following:
1) Glean from the composer’s suggested registration, and of course from the notes of the piece, as much as you can about what the composer thought the piece was like aesthetically and emotionally. (Again, a student who had already spent a fair amount of time trying many different sounds and listening carefully will have a good notion about how to approach this.)
2) Try out registrations that your own sense of organ sound tells you will express that mood or feeling well. As much as possible you should favor, or at least start with, registrations that resemble what the composer has suggested—for example, for a quiet pungent sound, try a quiet reed first if the composer’s registration is a reed or try a Quintadena or string first if the composer’s registration is a Quintadena or string; or for a bright “tinkly” sound try an 8?+ 11?3? first if that’s what the composer suggested, or an 8?+ 2? first if that is. But all the while, listen to the sounds with the same alert ears that you would apply to any sound that you chose yourself. Do not use a sound unless it works: that is, unless the components of the sound blend properly, the various balances are right (between different sounds if there is more than one, among the different regions of the compass of the keyboard, between inner and outer voices, between melody and accompaniment—whatever is relevant), and the emotional/aesthetic impact of the sound strikes you as right for the piece. A sound is not right just because the stop names are right. Stop names are just a beginning wherever they come from, even the composer.
That is all for now. Since the subject of registration is so multifaceted, I have posted on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website <www.pekc.org&gt; an annotated version of this column, with examples drawn from specific pieces, and further discussion.

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

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

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

Working
With this month’s column I am beginning a series that will extend for many months—about a year, possibly with interruptions. In this series I will outline in detail and in as practical a way as I can, the process of working on and learning a piece of organ music. I will focus on two very different pieces: the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude, and the Suite Gothique, op. 25, by Léon Boëllmann.
I have settled on these pieces for several reasons or for no reason. The “no reason” side of things is this: that if a series outlining a way of working on learning pieces claims to have general applicability, and that claim is valid, then it must not really matter what the pieces are. And in fact I do believe that this is the case. I could pick a piece or two out of a hat, and the music would serve perfectly well as fodder for this exercise. Some of the actual reasons are these: it seemed to me more interesting to work on two different pieces, from different eras, than just to work on one. I know the Buxtehude extremely well, having both performed it and, years ago, written a detailed theoretical analysis of it; I know the Boëllmann less well, having read through it over the years, and taught it fairly extensively, but never having learned it to the level of performance—I will do so, at least in part, as I write about it. I believe that this will add an interesting perspective to the exercise. Both pieces are somewhat well-known but not, I hope, in any way “worn out” for teachers, students, listeners, or players. Both are available free on the Internet in public domain editions, and of course also through more traditional sources. A correspondent suggested the Boëllmann. Both pieces are challenging, but neither is “unplayable”.

Aims and goals
Each month I will focus on one of the pieces, and I will more or less alternate. I will cover as much as I can of the detailed work of learning a piece, so that, in theory, someone who did exactly what I suggest each month would end up having learned both pieces. Of course, there is more to do in learning any piece than can be written out in half a dozen columns, or even in eight or ten times that much. So part of what I will be trying to do is to outline the highlights explicitly, and to provide guidance for extrapolating from those highlights to all of the rest of the details of the process. In doing this I will often point the reader back to ideas that I have written about in previous columns, and indicate how I think those ideas can be applied in a specific situation.
Since the focus of this column in general is towards helping teachers think about teaching, these upcoming columns will aim to help teachers think in concrete ways about guiding their students through the process of working on pieces. However, by and large the columns will be cast as a direct discussion of the work on the pieces, that is, as if directed at the student rather than the teacher. There will be occasional asides to teachers, but the concept is that teachers wanting to glean some ideas about methodology and teaching practice from this exercise will do so essentially by inference. I believe that this, as the series unfolds, will happen easily and naturally.

Readers’ feedback
Meanwhile, if anyone reading these columns, whether teacher or other organist, wants to go ahead and actually work on the pieces month by month, following the approach and suggestions in the columns, I would be greatly interested to know about that and to get “real time” feedback. Since this series will go on for a while, it will be possible from time to time to discuss some of this feedback in future columns while the feedback is still directly relevant to the ongoing project. I may well have comments to offer from my own personal work on the Boëllmann.

Philosophy/underlying premise
One point about the philosophy and approach of this series of columns must be made clear at the very beginning, since it involves the most difficult challenge both in constructing this project and in fruitfully reading it and getting something out of it. The premise underlying the writing about teaching that I have done here is that no two students are alike, that they should not be expected to work in the same way, or to like and work on the same music, or to play their pieces in the same way technically or artistically. In fact, there is no right way or one way to work on any given piece or to learn pieces in general. There are things that a player can do that are almost always efficient and effective; there are things that often work to get a piece learned solidly but that are generally less efficient; there are things that people sometimes or often do that are inefficient, ineffective, or counterproductive. However, there are also practice strategies, methods of analysis, (self-)psychological or motivational strategies, ways of structuring time, procedures, and so on, that can all be valid but that work better for some students than for others. So the challenge in writing a specific template for working on a piece is to 1) emphasize that which is likely to be almost universally useful; 2) suggest ways of choosing techniques or procedures that might be useful to different extents to different people; and 3) help students to avoid unproductive ways of working.
It is extremely important to make the point that the specific way of working that is suggested for each piece is just one set of possibilities. If in these columns I frame it correctly, that one set of possibilities will also suggest other possibilities. At a more underlying level it will suggest something about a way of organizing work that is systematic enough to be efficient but flexible enough to be widely useful. It will not be useful at all if it is taken to be the only way of doing things.

Interpretive/technical matters
There is a balancing act that will inevitably be part of the discussion that forms this series. The work done to learn a piece is not always objective as to interpretive matters. That is, technical practicing work might be done differently in pursuit of one interpretive goal from the way it would be done in pursuit of a different interpretation. (A clear example of this involves legato versus non-legato articulation. In general, legato involves different—typically more complicated—fingerings. These, in turn, have to be practiced in a different way.) Since the goal of this series is definitely not to dictate a particular interpretation or even, ideally, to suggest one interpretation over another, I will try to make it clear that, when I discuss a practice regimen or idea that leans towards one interpretation or narrows the range of possible interpretations, I intend that as just one example. I will sometimes outline multiple ways of approaching the work on a passage or section of a piece, each of which tends towards a different interpretive result. Limitations of space and time—and at a deeper level, that ways of crafting an interpretation of a piece are infinite in number and scope—make it impossible for me to sketch out ways of practicing towards every possible interpretation.

Editions
One of the first steps in working on any piece of music is choosing an edition. This can be a complicated issue. Some editions are simply better or worse than others. Some editions have inaccuracies in relation to the original source or sources; some have changes that have been made on purpose by an “activist” editor; some are small, cramped, hard to read, or have unnecessarily inconvenient page turns. Also, some editions are based on more reliable sources than others. In cases of pieces that were published under the supervision of their composers, it makes sense to try to work from the original edition if possible. That of course does not always mean a copy of the edition published in the year of original publication. It can just as well mean a newly printed copy of that edition if it is still available. (It should be noted however that this is, at least in part, a non-objective philosophical judgment. Occasionally someone prefers to work from something other than the original edition, though nowadays this is reasonably rare.) Subsequent editions—including free online editions—can be checked, perhaps online or perhaps at a library, against the original edition.
With pieces that were never published under the composer’s supervision, any existing edition is the editor’s attempt to create the best version—according to that editor’s own particular standards—from existing sources. It is usually possible to figure out how different editors have approached the task, when there are different choices, and to make judgments about what edition to use.
Once at a masterclass that I attended, the harpsichordist Colin Tilney was asked what he thought was the best edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier. He replied, first, that he had always liked the old Bach Gesellschaft edition because the pages and the type were large and easy to read. Then, having confounded the expectation of the gathering that his comments about editions would be arcane or impractical—or would revolve around the notion of cutting-edge scholarship—he explained that really everyone ought to make his or her own edition, becoming familiar with the existing editions and taking the best or most convincing readings from each, to the extent that they differ. This has always seemed sensible to me. I usually play Frescobaldi, for example, from the Kalmus edition because it is inexpensive, the pages turn easily, the typeface is highly readable, and it is in fact quite accurate. In the few places where I believe that the notes should be different from what is found in that edition, I correct them in pencil.
For the purposes of this exercise, any good edition, free from significant additions by editors, will work nicely. The free online edition of the Boëllmann that looks the best to me is found at this link: www.free-scores.com/partitions_telecharger.php?partition=13651. It can be opened, downloaded and printed by clicking on the PDF icon. It is also possible to purchase the Durand edition as well as other reputable editions.
There is a good version of the Buxtehude available at: www.free-scores.com/partitions_telecharger.php?partition=1655 or at: http://imslp.org/wiki/Preludes_for_Organ,_BuxWV_136-153_(Buxtehude,_Dietrich). These are both copies of the Spitta/Seifert edition from 1875–76. This edition is more than adequate for our purposes, though the typography is dense enough that I myself would want to print it out a bit large than normal size. The E-major is found at page 21 in this collection.
The Boëllmann download has measure numbers, the Buxtehude does not. I believe it is worth adding them. It makes discussion and analysis much easier.
Next month I will begin with the Buxtehude. I will talk about how to divide the piece into sections and how to break the texture of the piece down into simpler units for practicing. In the meantime, anyone who wishes to start looking the piece over should do the following: notice cadences and changes in texture, and check out recurrences of the very first four notes of the piece, that is, the rising tetrachord. How many can you find?
NOTE: I would like to thank reader Matthew Dickerson for sending in several interesting suggestions for exploring the repertoire, in response to my columns on that topic:
1) The “Organ Recitals” section of The Diapason
2) A Dictionary of Composers for Organ by John Henderson
3) The IAO Millennium Book edited by Paul Robert Hale
4) YouTube. 

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

Some thoughts on ornaments I
The playing of ornaments is one of those areas that many—maybe most—students find intimidating. This is only partly because it can be genuinely difficult. It certainly can be difficult, although, like most physical tasks, it can be made much less so through the right kind of technical preparation and through an adequate amount of well-targeted practice. The intimidation factor with ornamentation comes, I believe, mostly from a fear of getting it wrong. There seems to be so much data about how this kind of trill was played in Italy in 1620 or how that kind of appoggiatura was played in Austria in the early nineteenth century that it can seem impossible to keep up with it all. One well-known book on ornamentation is nearly 600 pages long, and that is just one book of very many. Also, impeccably credentialed experts on the subject can disagree. It is easy, looking at a piece of music, to know what the “regular” notes are, though of course it may not be easy to play them. But it is not necessarily easy, or even possible, to know for sure what the notes of ornaments are or what the exact rhythmic shape of a given ornament should be. It is also a common experience for even very talented and “advanced” students to feel that they have learned to play certain ornaments, but that those ornaments just don’t sound very good. This is always frustrating, and extraordinarily so when it happens more or less all the time.
I believe that part of this frustration comes from, or is made worse by, a confusion among some of these issues. That is, students often assume that their ornaments sound bad because they don’t know what the notes of those ornaments should be, or they have gotten something else wrong in the realm of the historical or the musicological, when in fact they sound bad because the execution is awkward or the preparation before the ornament itself is wrong. It may be important to know whether a given trill should start on the main note or the upper note, or how long or how fast it should be, or whether a certain appoggiatura should be long or short. However, any of the above should be able to sound good—natural, fluid, graceful—whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the composer’s intent. It is important to sort these different aspects of playing ornaments out from one another in order to be able to work effectively on learning to play ornaments well.

So, let us consider several issues.
First of all, what is an ornament? On one level an ornament is a note pattern indicated by a sign, rather than by notes as such. If, for example, the three notes c–b–c are indicated by ordinary notes, they amount to an ordinary bit of music, a phrase or perhaps part of one. If those same notes are indicated—as they could be—by a mordent sign on the note c, then that entity is an ornament. Likewise, the three notes c–d–e could be indicated by three ordinary notes or by the note e with the sign for a slide, or the notes d–c–d–c–d–c by six notes or by a trill sign over the note c. This is basic and well known. So, what is the difference between notes indicated by an ornament sign and the same notes written out? Sometimes there might be little or no difference. In fact, there are plenty of pieces in the repertoire with parallel passages in which the same notes are one time written out and another time marked by ornament signs, with no reason to believe that they should be different one time from the other. (This may make it appear that our distinction between ornaments and other notes is at least sometimes arbitrary. This is true, and actually can be helpful in teaching students to play ornaments well and to be comfortable playing them. A significant part of the fear of ornaments comes specifically from identifying them as ornaments, as something other than just some notes to play.) However, when there is a difference, it is likely to be that notes indicated by ornament signs are meant to be quick and light or to deviate subtly from any rhythm that could be spelled out by notes in our rather simple system of rhythmic notation, or both of these.
In fact, from the point of view of execution or performance, ornaments are simply “quick, light notes” or perhaps the greatest exemplar of that kind of passage. This means that playing ornaments well can be achieved by applying the same kind of light, fluid touch that is in fact best for playing any note patterns on the organ. It also means that working on playing ornaments effectively can be one of the best ways of improving lightness of touch and freedom from tension in all playing.
There is an exercise that I use with students that I refer to as a trill exercise. It is extraordinarily effective at helping a player to develop the right kind of touch for playing trills. However, it is equally useful for teaching a light touch for any kind of fast playing, including both non-trill ornaments and any other kind of rapid passage. (It is in fact the only actual exercise that I normally suggest to students, given that in general I believe that it is best to practice pieces or note patterns drawn from pieces.)

A trill exercise
This exercise is not written in music notation, and, although it involves playing notes at the keyboard, it is really a kind of relaxation/breathing/meditation exercise. It can be carried out at the organ or at the harpsichord. It can also work on the piano, as long as the player remembers not to care about producing a robust or loud sound. It goes like this:
1) Sit at the keyboard, and identify the place on the keyboard where each hand can meet the keys with the arm, wrist, hand, and fingers more or less in a straight line. This is usually at the notes written near the top of the treble clef for the right hand and at the notes near the bottom of the bass clef for the left hand, though it varies a bit from one person to another. It is fine to let the elbows float away from the sides. If you are sitting at an instrument with more than one keyboard, choose the keyboard that it is most natural and comfortable to reach.
2) Pick two adjacent (natural) notes and two fingers. Initially it is a good idea to use adjacent and “good” fingers, perhaps 2–3 or 3–4. Later it is fine to do the exercise with any pair of fingers with which you might ever want to play a trill. The two notes should feel as similar to each other as possible. On many organs this is not an issue, though it is on some. It certainly is an issue on many harpsichords. Choose a quiet registration: a Gedeckt or Dulciana, perhaps, or, on a harpsichord, one 8-foot stop by itself.
3) Play one of the notes lightly and comfortably with the finger assigned to it, and hold the note. While holding this note, let your hand relax as much—as thoroughly—as you possibly can. This can be aided by moving the arm around a bit in the air—still holding the note—or by flexing the wrist a little bit, up and down, or by taking calm deep breaths. When you feel that your hand is fully relaxed:
4) Play the other note and then the first note again, as quickly and as lightly as you can. As you do this, you should have as little as possible of a feeling that your hand is bearing down into the keys. Instead, it should feel as if the hand is almost floating up and away—just failing to do so enough to allow the fingers to play the notes that they are trying to play.
5) After you have played these two rapid notes, you will notice that your hand has lost at least a little bit of its relaxation, that it has picked up a bit of tension or at least a bit more muscle tone than it had just before playing those two notes. So, the next step is, while continuing to hold the note that you are holding, again wait for your hand to become fully relaxed. You should then repeat the process described above, that is, the rapid playing of two notes. It can be repeated several times—four or five, maybe up to a dozen. It should never happen according to a beat or a schedule. Each time, while holding the note chosen as the first note, you must wait until your hand is perfectly relaxed before executing the rapid two-note gesture for the next time.
6) After doing this several times in a row, do the same thing but start with the other note and the other finger.
This exercise should be done with each hand, with various combinations of fingers. It is not a good idea to segue directly from doing this exercise to practicing or playing a trill or any other note pattern. Rather, it should simply be done by itself, perhaps for ten minutes or so at some point—or at two different points—during each practice session. Then, when actually practicing or trying to play a given trill (or other rapid ornament or other rapid passage), the idea is to remember and recapture the feeling in the hand, wrist, arm, shoulders, and body that you experienced during this exercise.
I have never known this exercise to fail to help a student, or any player, beginner or advanced, who spent some time with it. It can be used not just to develop a better feeling for the touch of trills, but also to train recalcitrant fingers to play trills and to play rapidly with control. In particular, it is very fruitful to do this exercise with 4–5, after having first done it with more “normal” trill fingers. Almost everyone I know believes that he or she “can’t” play trills with those fingers. In fact, almost everyone can after having applied this exercise to the task.
(I should mention that the original idea behind this exercise was suggested to me by my friend the late David Margeson in the early 1980s when he was a graduate student in organ at Yale. I have refined the idea and adapted it somewhat to the specifics of organ and harpsichord.)

Fingerings
A real necessity in playing ornaments well is planning good fingerings. This has several elements to it. First, of course, is choosing fingers for the notes of the ornament itself. In spite of the claim I made just above, it is a good idea to use the “best” fingers whenever possible. For most people, these are the middle three fingers, or indeed specifically 2 and 3. It is a good idea to use whatever fingers the player is most comfortable with—why compound difficulty by not doing so?—but it is also important not to be so tied to those fingers that passages before and after an ornament end up suffering from convoluted and unnecessarily difficult fingerings. For example, a player who can only play trills or rapid mordents with 2–3 will frequently get into trouble of this sort. A player who is also comfortable using 3–4 will get into much less trouble. Fingerings such as 4–5, 1–2, 1–3 are also useful, though the actual need for them arises less often. A consideration in choosing fingering for an ornament should always be the effect of that fingering on hand position and, in particular, the ability of the player to keep the fingers from migrating too deeply into the keyboard. So, for example, if one note of an ornament is a raised key and the other a natural, then it is wonderful to end up playing the raised note with 3 and the natural with 2 or 4 as appropriate. Reversing this leads to some kind of awkward hand position, and thus makes it harder to maintain a light, comfortable touch. The logistics of this vary at different points along the compass of the keyboard and also from one player to another depending on the relative lengths of the different fingers. The important thing is to remember to pay attention to the hand position that results from a fingering choice with an ornament.
If the note immediately before an ornament is the same note that actually begins the ornament, it is very important indeed to play the two successive iterations of that note with different fingers. This is an approach that I always prefer with repeated notes (see The Diapason, January 2009), but for preparing ornaments it is especially crucial. This is because, again, a light touch and a relaxed hand are absolutely essential to playing ornaments in a way that feels and sounds good. It is very common for a trill that should begin with the upper note to be preceded by that same note. The best way to work out this fingering is to decide first on the best fingering for the trill, based on the player/student’s preferences and on the logistics of the particular notes, then select a finger to play the preceding (same) note from among the fingers not designated to play the first note of the trill. This choice should be made based on the shape of the passage leading into the trill. If it is impossible to make that passage work without using the same finger for the final note before the trill and for the note that starts the trill itself, then the trill fingering should be changed if at all possible. I have very rarely indeed been unable to devise a good solution in this very common situation—perhaps never. The point for the teacher to make to the student is that it is both fairly easy to work this out and abundantly worth doing so. Awkward starts to trills are usually the result of simply not having thought out the fingering both of the trill itself and (especially) of the notes leading into the trill.
It is also very common for the note before an appoggiatura to be the same as the note of the appoggiatura itself. In this situation, using different fingers for the two iterations of that note will not only make the whole pattern of notes sound more natural and give greater control over timing and articulation, but it will specifically create the right accent relationship amongst the three notes: the note before the appoggiatura, the appoggiatura itself, and the note following it (the “main” note). Trying this example with each of the indicated fingerings (both for the right hand) can make this difference seem clear.
One of my frequent chamber music colleagues recently made the following comment to me about a (non-keyboard) musician with whom we both play a lot: “I’ve figured out why so-and-so’s ornaments always sound so good. He plays them quietly.” The above discussion about fingering and the suggested exercise are essentially aimed at helping students to develop an organ and harpsichord equivalent of playing ornaments quietly. Next month I will deal with the sometimes vexing questions about what the notes and rhythms of ornaments should be—on the beat or before, starting on main or auxiliary notes, and so on. I will also address how to use that information to help students feel freer in their playing of ornaments rather than more constrained, and how to help them approach the subject creatively.