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 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 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 I
I was first drawn to organ and harpsichord back in the late ’60s—not too long after I turned ten—by the sonorities of those instruments. I remember being particularly entranced by the reed sound that E. Power Biggs used for the fugue subject in his recording of the shorter Bach Prelude and Fugue in c minor on the Schnitger organ at Zwolle. Later I discovered the sounds of the small organ at St. Jakobi Church in Lübeck as recorded in 1947 by Helmut Walcha, and the sound of the so-called Ahaus Ruckers harpsichord, recorded, in music of Froberger among others, by Gustav Leonhardt. Later still I was captivated by the sounds of Messiaen’s Cavaillé-Coll organ at La Trinité through the composer’s own recordings there. In all of these cases and many others, it was the sounds themselves that most interested me, not the repertoire or the performances. A desire to be involved more and more closely with these sounds was the first and most essential reason that I decided to study organ and harpsichord and later to make a career out of those instruments. Of course an interest in much of the repertoire, in the act of performance itself, and, especially, in teaching, followed fairly quickly. But it was the sounds that got me hooked.
I think that this is a fairly common experience among people who end up studying organ or harpsichord. All of the many rather different instruments that have been accepted as “organs” over several centuries, and all harpsichords and harpsichord-like instruments, have in common that the actual sonorities are determined in advance of any playing of the instrument. These sounds are created by the combined work of builders, metalworkers, voicers, tuners, acousticians, and so on. The player can make only very subtle changes in the sound itself, if any, while playing. Therefore, it has always been important that builders create sounds that are in some way compelling, beautiful, interesting, even perhaps disturbing, but in any case worth hearing—important in and of themselves to someone who hears them. So it is natural that these sounds would form a large part of the reason that some people become interested in these instruments.
This has implications for the teaching of registration, or, more accurately and more interestingly, for the interaction between registration and teaching. For most students, the sonorities of the instrument are a source of fun and interest. Therefore the whole business of trying out sounds and getting to know sounds can be fun, can be highly interesting, and can both relieve and enliven the painstaking, difficult work of becoming more adept at the technical side of playing. The practicing of any simple—and therefore potentially tedious—exercise can be made more interesting or even very interesting by also using it as an opportunity to pay attention to the sound and to try out different sounds. The difficult and intense practicing of difficult and intense passages can be leavened by occasional breaks during which the student uses any easier or more accessible musical material—simple or already-learned passages, scales and chords, folk songs, improvisation, whatever—to try out different sounds, and to listen to those sounds carefully. And even a beginning student can learn right away to make registration choices that are interesting and appropriate for the music and the situation, and that, often, are different from the choices that the teacher or any other player would have made. This can be a source of encouragement and can help to create a feeling of connectedness to the real art of music making.
This column and next month’s will consist mostly of suggestions for ways of introducing students to the art of registration: that is, explaining to them what it is, demystifying it as much as possible, offering them ways of exploring and practicing it, and helping them to relate sounds to particular kinds of music and particular pieces. It is very important that students be given a way to learn registration from within, that is, by understanding how it works, and not just through formulas or (even very sound) principles. Only in this way will students learn to be able to create registrations on their own. Also, only this way will they be able to understand registration formulas or suggested registrations that they might encounter, and to be able to figure out when to apply such things and when to modify or ignore them. These suggestions are aimed in the first instance at students who are beginners or who are at least fairly new to the organ. However, some of the ideas should also be helpful to more experienced students who happen, for any reason, to feel uncomfortable with their approach to registration or who want to rethink it or perhaps simplify it a bit.
Registration is simply the act of choosing stops—choosing sounds—for pieces or passages of music. If there are no stops drawn, the music will not be of much use to the listeners: it will be silent. This is something that can be said more or less as a joke, but indeed some students come to the organ not quite realizing it. (After all, we are not born knowing something that seems so basic to practicing organists!) In choosing what particular stops to use in a given situation, we normally take into account at least some of the following:
1) What the sound is like subjectively—loud, soft, dark, bright, smooth, clear, reedy, warm, piercing, hollow, thick, thin, haunting, and so on—and how this relates to our sense, again subjective, of what the piece is like or should be like. (Everyone uses adjectives differently, however. They are useful for listing the kinds of qualities that a sound might have. They are also useful for helping one person, in his or her own mind, to characterize and remember what a sound is like. They are normally not particularly useful in conveying a sense of what a sound is like from one person to another.)
2) How loud or soft the sound is in relation to other things that are going on. In particular, how two sounds balance when they are being used together (i.e., in a two-manual or manual and pedal piece) or when they follow one another, as in sections of a piece or verses of a hymn; also, if it’s relevant, how the volume of sound relates to things beyond the organ, such as singers or other instruments. All of these considerations are more objective than those in 1), but not entirely so except at the extremes when one sound actually threatens to drown out another.
3) What is known, if anything, about composers’ intentions. This can range from a general sense of what kind of instrument a composer knew—or even just what was prevalent in a given composer’s era and approximate geographic area—to precise, meaningful, and specific registration instructions from a composer about registration. Some of the data in this area is essentially objective or even beyond dispute. However, its application to a given situation often requires flexibility and judgment, as when a particular organ doesn’t have the stops specifically suggested by the composer, or when the acoustics of the room, or the specific sound qualities of stops with a particular name are different from what a composer knew. (This is the case more often than not.) Also non-objective and subject to different philosophies and judgments is the basic question of whether and how much it matters what a composer wanted or expected.
Registration is the art of choosing sounds, and, on the organ and the harpsichord, most available sounds are combinations of other sounds. (This, again, is something so basic that an experienced player might not notice that it is not self-evident to a beginner.) The first step in learning how to combine sounds is developing a sense of what the sounds are like on their own. I tend to define a “stop” to a new student as “a set of pipes, one per key, all of which make more or less the same sound as one another, and each of which plays the right note for its key.” (This is just a starting point. Mixtures can be explained separately, perhaps simply as several stops that are operated by one control for convenience and that function as one sound. The technicalities of breaks and changing numbers of ranks can certainly be discussed with a student who is eager to understand such things, but that can wait, since it is not necessary to know this in order to learn how to begin to use them in stop combinations.)
Each stop typically has two parts to the label that describes it: a number and a word. The number—8', 4', etc.—is one of the very few things in the world of the arts that has a clear meaning that never changes and is not subject to interpretation. However, as with some of the other basic points that I have mentioned above, students often don’t know what that meaning is. In fact, if you ask a beginning student what those numbers mean, he or she will more often than not say “Isn’t it something about how long the pipes are?” (I certainly mean no criticism of those students! No one knows something that they haven’t yet learned. My point is just that it is easy for us to take it for granted that everyone would know something that seems so basic to an experienced organist.) So it is important to start by explaining very simply what the numbers mean: 8' means “at unison pitch,” 4' means “an octave above unison pitch,” and so on. It is a good idea to demonstrate that every 4' stop is at the same pitch as every other—though the sounds may be very different—and the same for 2 2/3', 16', and all the other numbers/pitch-levels. I would suggest doing this with something like the following routine:
Draw two stops, on two different keyboards. One should be an 8' stop, the other a 4', and they should be as similar as possible in tone. Play two keys, one on each keyboard and thus one on each of the two stops, which are ostensibly the same note. (They should be near the middle of the keyboard, middle c or close.) Invite the student to hear that these notes are clearly an octave apart. Make sure that the student really gets this: the concept of an octave, especially when listening to a new kind of sound, can be elusive. (The first time that I ever tried to tune a harpsichord, I broke several 4' strings because I was trying to tune them an octave high! I just couldn’t hear the octave placement of the notes amongst all the strong harmonics of the bright sound.) This should be repeated with several different “8', 4', similar sound” pairs, and also 4', 2' pairs. Then, with the same various pairs of stops, demonstrate that (for example) the f below middle c on the 4' stop and the f above middle c on the 8' stop are clearly the same pitch, and so on with other appropriate pairs of stops, or that the scale from tenor c to middle c on the 4' stop is clearly at the same pitch as the scale going up from middle c on the 8' stop.
Next, draw pairs of 8' stops that are noticeably different in tone: a gedeckt on one keyboard, an oboe on another, for example, or anything like that. Then compare notes from one to the other, making sure that the student hears that in this instance keys that ostensibly represent the same note actually produce the same pitch. This can be done with single notes—again starting around the middle of the keyboard since that region is the easiest to hear—then with short scale passages and perhaps chord progressions. Then the same sort of comparison can be done with 4'stops and so on, even including mutations, if there are multiple examples of the same ones on the particular instrument.
This procedure is very simple and may even seem simplistic. Again, however, I want to emphasize that these things are not known to beginners. They are also not always absolutely clear even to people who have sat at a console and done some organ playing, but have not yet had any systematic study. It is not uncommon, for example, for someone to know by experience that a 2' stop is kind of bright, but not to know anything about the stop’s pitch level, or about how the brightness is achieved. An unshakably clear grasp of the meaning of the pitch designations is the first step in understanding how organ stops can be fruitfully combined with one another: that is, really understanding it in a way that permits one to do it without formulas and without assistance, on a familiar or an unfamiliar instrument. We will move on to this in next month’s column.

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

Thoughts on teaching
interpretation
Interpretation is fascinating from many points of view. These include the relationship between interpretation and technique, how different approaches to the problems of authenticity affect interpretive choices, the history of different interpretive schools, the many elements of interpretive choices—tempo, registration, phrasing, articulation, rhythm, rubato and agogic accentuation or the relative lack thereof, and more—and in general, the strange phenomenon of how different performances of exactly the same notes can be.
With organ music in particular, interpretation begins with the choice of instrument and the venue—in effect, this is the beginning of the registration process. Sometimes—most of the time for most of us, in fact—the choice of venue and organ comes first. This part of the interpretive process is turned upside down: we choose music that suits the instrument and/or the room, or we make decisions about how much we feel that the music needs to be an exact fit for the situation or how much we can bend and stretch and compromise. This is all part of the interpretive process, and it shares with the rest of that process the fact that different players approach it quite differently from one another.

Conveying interpretation
to students
For teachers, primary questions about interpretation or interpretive stance are joined by questions about how to introduce students to matters of interpretation. These questions start with the over-riding one: whether or not a teacher should hope or expect or even insist that his or her students take a similar interpretive approach to that of the teacher. It often seems almost routine to do so. In listening either to established or to up-and-coming players, we often expect to be able to tell who studied with whom based on what the student’s interpretations are like. However, it is by no means clear that this is necessary or good. I will suggest below that teachers can be very happy with a wide variety of interpretive approaches on the part of their students. Another question might be put like this: if a teacher will not tell a student how to interpret and perform a piece—or a type of repertoire or repertoire in general—then how can that teacher help the student work out an interpretation of that repertoire, or how can the teacher help the student become a vivid and convincing interpreter of music in general? Yet another question is what sort of approach to interpretation to expect from students of different ages or levels of skill or experience. An intriguing question, to me, is this: does it matter whether or not a performance that a student gives is effective interpretively—or appeals to any particular listener’s taste—at the moment the performance is given, or is it more important that the performance be part of the long-term learning process? These two things are not always incompatible with each other, of course, but they are different, and they might suggest different kinds of input from the teacher. That is, if it is important that a given performance by a student be effective interpretively in a certain way, then it might be necessary for the teacher to coach the student in that way of playing the piece. If the goal of learning to perform a particular piece is geared only to the student’s longer-term development, then it might be better to allow the student to experiment, try things, listen, and learn, even if along the way this results in a performance that the teacher, other listeners, or perhaps even the student looking back on it later won’t like.
The question of whether a teacher should want his or her students to end up—as mature performers—playing the way the teacher does, that is, with respect to interpretive choices and overall interpretive stance, is philosophical. (I assume that every teacher wants his or her students to be as competent technically and as masterful in performance as that student can possibly be, whether that is more than the teacher, the same, or less.) Why is the teacher teaching? What does he or she consider important about music, about organ playing for church or for concert? What kind of contribution does the teacher want to make to the history of the organ over the next few decades or beyond, and does that contribution depend on nurturing a particular style of performance or approach to interpretation? Does the teacher feel that students represent the teacher: that colleagues, audiences, and possible future students will judge the teacher based on how existing students play—not, again, with respect to competence or mastery, but with respect to interpretation? If so, is this appropriate, or is it placing a responsibility on the students that is burdensome?
These are questions that every teacher must answer for himself or herself—or, perhaps more importantly, must ask and think about. The answers may change over time, and the questions may be supplemented by others—other ways of looking at it. I myself long ago came to feel that I don’t care at all what my students end up doing interpretively, as long as they feel that the act of playing music and making choices is satisfying to them. This is largely a matter of philosophy, and I don’t feel that it is necessarily the right way for every teacher to look at it. I also honestly don’t know what it says about other dimensions of my underlying attitude. Do I feel this way out of modesty—“my way is no better than other ways”—or something quite the opposite—“my way is so special that you need not even attempt it”—or selfishness—“it would be better if my students played like me, but I will withhold the information that they would need to achieve that”—or fear—“if I teach my students how to play like me they will do it better than I do, and render me superfluous”—or all of the above or none of the above? I am, in general, inordinately in favor of people thinking for themselves: my students, other players, other teachers, everyone—not just about music, but most definitely including music.
The more a teacher believes that his or her approach to interpretive matter is based on objective truth, the more likely it is that the teacher will want to try to pass that approach on to students. And, as a subset of that, we all have an obligation to pass on to our students anything that we honestly believe to be true—objectively true or likely to be so. A substantial amount of what falls into this category is information related to composers’ intentions or performance practices. I wrote at length about “authenticity” in my column of April 2010. In a sense, the principal thing is this: the most thorough knowledge about composers’ intentions and the circumstances of the composition and initial performances of a piece places surprisingly few limits on interpretive choice. That is, such knowledge may change the direction or nature of interpretive choices, but it does not effectively narrow the range of choice or tend to make different performances more similar to one another. This is like a comparison of infinities: the set of all possible performances of a piece is infinite; the set of all performances that respect whatever is known about the composer’s fingering and pedaling practices, tempo preferences, registration techniques, etc., is also infinite.
Analysis—contrapuntal, harmonic, or other theoretical analysis—can be another source of a feeling on the part of teachers that we have something objective to share with our students that might affect performance. Again, I think that it is very important to share such things with students, and I believe that this can be done in such a way as not to limit choices. For example, it is one thing to notice fugue subjects or other recurrent themes. (As I have written more than once, I believe that noticing anything that happens more than once is an extremely important and efficient tool for learning pieces.) However, it is something else entirely to move from noticing such things to reaching any hard and fast conclusions about what our analysis tells us to do in performance. (Again, comparative infinities: the set of possible performances by a player who has analyzed a piece for counterpoint and harmony is infinite, as is the set of possible performances by a performer who has not paid any explicit attention to those things.) As soon as we cross over into saying to a student something like: “of course you must phrase the subject the same way every time it comes in,” we have left the realm of the objective. This is one way of looking at it; however, it would also be possible to argue that the “sameness” of a theme from one instance of it to another lies in the notes themselves, and that phrasing and articulation of that theme can reasonably vary with the context. My point here is not to resolve a question like that, but just to suggest that we should all be as clear as possible as to what is neutral and objective and what reflects our own habits or biases. It is wonderful to share all of this with our students, but only if we are clear ourselves and candid with them about what we are sharing.

A sample interpretation
Many teachers who share my feeling that they do not aspire to have their students end up playing in their (the teacher’s) style still feel that the best way to teach interpretation is to ask the student to copy—more or less—the teacher’s performance for the time being and then to evolve later on from that to their own style and approach. This makes sense based on the notion that an inexperienced player—a student, especially a beginning student—does not yet have a basis of knowledge for shaping interpretations. This approach is also based on the idea that the best way to learn to think about performance and interpretation is to have the experience of doing something effective, and then either to react against it or to embrace it—or some mixture—later on, on the basis of other experiences and increasing knowledge.
In fact this is probably the most common approach and attitude, and most of those who expect their students to copy the teacher’s interpretive ideas also fully expect those students to move on from those ideas later on. I imagine that any approach to teaching interpretation has to include at least a dose of direct suggestion from the teacher to the students. Even when those suggestions are less than direct, they are not entirely absent. I myself have never said to a student “you should phrase this subject this way” or “play this eighth-note line detached.” However, when I invite students to play contrapuntal voices separately and in pairs, or to play a line omitting the unaccented notes, or to listen for the bloom in harpsichord sound when shaping a melody or a bass line, or to change fingers on repeated notes, or indeed just to play with a light touch, I am moving the student away from some interpretive possibilities and towards others.
My own reluctance to suggest—let alone require—specific interpretive choices stems from a feeling that such suggestions from a teacher have a tendency to have too great a weight of authority. We may honestly want our students to move beyond those suggestions, but the weight can be harder to shake off than we expect it to be. The whole dynamic of accepting, rejecting, debating, and evaluating the specifics of what we were told to do by (especially) an admired teacher can be a distraction for years or decades. Of course, every teacher has to become comfortable with his or her own approach to these things. My specific advice is just this: be open to the possibility of suggesting less and letting the students explore more, and make suggestions, when you make them, as lightly and informally as you can, consistent with getting the point across.
Here are a few suggestions for helping students to think about interpretation and learn about the effects of different interpretive choices.
1) Especially for beginning students, but also for any student who is not yet very familiar with a particular kind of repertoire, play something for the student two different ways, and ask simply which he or she likes better. With a line—recurring motive or not—the two ways will probably be two different phrasings or articulation patterns. In a full-textured passage, the differences might be of tempo or registration or again articulation or perhaps arpeggiation or something about rubato or timing. The differences should be noticeable but not a caricature, and the student should listen carefully, and then feel absolutely free to choose whichever he or she prefers.
2) Invite students to listen not just to what different interpretive decisions are like, but also to what they do. For example, does a line in an inner voice become easier to hear if it is articulated one way rather than another? Does it become easier to keep a sixteenth-note line steady if the accompanying chords are articulated one way rather than another or registered one way rather than another? Does a bit of rubato make a passage sound softer, or more suspenseful, or just static?
3) Ask students to listen—carefully—to at least six different performances of whatever they are working on. (Important note: listening to one performance is risky. It tends to lead to subconscious mimicking of that performance, which can then have the same difficult-to-shake weight of authority—perhaps for life—that performance suggestions from a teacher can have.) This listening can focus on a passage rather than a whole piece. Sometimes ask the student to write down anything they can think of to say about each performance, but sometimes don’t, so that the balance between pleasure and work remains healthy.
4) Ask the student to listen to a large number of performances of a short passage, paying very careful attention to something specific. For example, how do a dozen different players treat the rests between the several phrases on the first page of the Bach d-minor Toccata? How do several different performers treat the timing of the manual notes in the first sixteen measures of the Franck b-minor Choral? (I once, many years ago, sat with the great Canadian teacher and performer Mireille Lagacé, listening to the way that several different harpsichordists handled the transition from the first half to the second half of Variation 16 of the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting and rewarding.)
With items 3) and 4) it can be valuable to suggest that several students do these things together and discuss what they hear. Of course, nowadays it is easy to find many performances to listen to of just about anything. As I am writing this, YouTube has over 7,000 performances of the Bach d-minor Toccata, but also several performances of each of a few less famous pieces for which I searched. This changes all the time. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organ Method XXI

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com.