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On Teaching

June 1, 2016
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Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. The first recording in which he participated was an LP made around 1968 by the Hamden Hall Country Day School French Singers (“participated” almost certainly means “stood there mouthing some words silently”). He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Recording Notes I

At the end of last month’s column, I noted that I was scheduled to make a recording of Frescobaldi harpsichord music during the week when my usual plan would have been to write this June column. I had decided to let those two projects interact with and enhance each other: during the last week or so of preparation for the recording sessions, and then during the week of the sessions themselves, I would take notes—keep a journal of my thoughts, experiences, and reactions arising out of the recording project. Those notes would be the basis for a column describing the process and relating it to a wider web of thoughts about playing and teaching music. 

The sessions occurred as planned, and I did keep notes. This column is the beginning of what has arisen from that process; it is randomly organized, or in a stream-of-consciousness style. One thing that I hadn’t realized when I conceived this idea was that each day’s taping was quite tiring. Thus those notes taken on recording days were jotted down, more often than not, in a state of exhaustion. Looking them over afterwards, I realized while organizing and fleshing them out, I needed to give them a jolt of energy! (Or to tease out what I had meant by something rather cryptic.) I have decided that these notes should form not just a single column, but a short series. 

This column is a set of questions and musings organized around a particular period of my musical life—the weeks of preparation leading up to these recording sessions. My notes from the week of the sessions will come along later.

 

Why make recordings? 

If I had expressly asked myself that question when I was quite little and first getting into music, I would probably just have thought it was definitional: making recordings was what it meant to be a musician. That was because, with few exceptions, recordings were my way of encountering music. Of course there was some live music in the air—at school, for example—but it was the music that I encountered on records that really captivated me. I heard Beethoven symphonies, Messiah, Bach organ music, and so on, through the stereo system before I ever heard anything of that sort live. So my own feeling of being drawn to recording is informed largely by nostalgia for what my earliest interactions with music felt like. 

And that nostalgia is also for the physical form of the recordings. I remember that the box that constituted Volume II of Helmut Walcha’s complete recording of the organ music of Bach was, just as an object, something that I craved before I got a copy of it and loved and doted on thereafter. That nostalgia leads me to crave making recordings that have a physical manifestation. I seem to have successfully transferred that feeling from LPs to CDs. But what about beyond CDs? What does it mean nowadays to release a recording? Once I have taped (a technically inappropriate word, but one that I still use) this set of harpsichord pieces, what next? A traditional CD? (Funny that CDs should be traditional.) Downloads? If the latter, through an established company or just on a website that my producers and I set up? If I tape pieces and toss them up onto the internet and allow people to download them and listen to them have I “made a recording” in the sense that Heifetz and Brendel and Walcha “made recordings?” Does that matter? If it does matter, is that only in relation to the nostalgia that I referenced above?

Is there a way to make money from recording? Has there ever been? (Not sure.) Is it true that modern expectations about how music will be disseminated have rendered the notion of making money from recording almost delusional? I have heard people use that very word. Does this matter? Is it less “real”—Heifetz/Brendel/Walcha-like—if it is not a process that involves anything financial? Must a recording have the imprimatur of a company to be “legit?”

 

Form and content

How does the form of a released recording affect the content? Over the years recording formats have defined certain aspects of what music was or was perceived to be. A long time ago, the three-minute 78-rpm record shaped society’s sense of how long a song should be. When I was growing up the natural unit of a body of music—whether a long piece or a compilation—was the duration of the LP: rather less than an hour, with a break about halfway through—a break that you sometimes had to pretend wasn’t there. I believe that it is really the image of the LP that shapes my sense of what “a concert” is: a full-length concert has two halves, the first of which is regular LP length, the second of which is like a somewhat short LP. A non-intermission concert is the length of a rather long LP. 

As I was preparing this program, I realized that I didn’t know how to use any image of a finished product to govern my choice of what pieces to record or even how much to record. I didn’t know—and still don’t know—whether this project will be (in part or in full) a CD. If it is, that would suggest about 70 minutes of music, with suitable pieces to serve as beginning and ending and a satisfying shape and progression in between. 

What if we want to release the music as downloads? If so, there is no particular reason to tape any particular amount. Also, there is no way to govern the order in which people listen to the pieces. (Of course there never was, but it used to be routine to suggest an order through the construction of the LP or CD track list.) Is there any point in thinking about the program as an overall shape? I find myself doing two things at once: first, just putting together a list of the Frescobaldi pieces that I currently find most interesting and that I know (assuming that I will just tape them and then see what happens), and second, constructing various orders and track lists in my head—just in case.

If anything, this latter activity has informed my recent concert playing more than it will necessarily end up affecting anything about a record release. I have played several concerts recently drawn from the list of pieces that I have been planning to tape. My musings about possible CD track order have taught me various things about how I might want to order these pieces in concert. Nonetheless, it seems pretty likely that we are entering an era in which there will be a growing lack of connection between making and disseminating recordings and planning concerts. 

 

Prior to a recording session

What should I listen to in the run-up to a recording session? The first answer: not Frescobaldi keyboard music. There are two rather contradictory things that I know to be true of me. First, I really care about playing this music the way that I want to play it and hear it. If I play on this recording like someone else, then my doing this project at all is pretty much a waste of time. The other person’s way of doing it is already out there, and they probably do it better that I will, since they’re the original and I am a copy. However, I am also very impressionable. If I hear something about the specific music that I am playing close to the time when I will play it, then I am likely either to copy that unconsciously or to play while preoccupied with whether I am copying unconsciously. I must avoid that whole set of traps by not doing such listening at all.

How about ensemble music or vocal music from the same era—the kinds of music that Frescobaldi would have heard in the air around him when he was writing and playing? That would make sense, and I can’t see any pitfalls. It’s not close enough to what I will be actually playing to create a problem. What about other keyboard music? Later harpsichord, organ, or piano repertoire? That’s all clearly related to what I am doing, but different enough that it shouldn’t interfere. That would also make sense. Come to think of it, earlier keyboard repertoire would make particularly good sense, since some of it is what Frescobaldi grew up with. It helped to shape him. Is it similar enough to the music that I will be playing to trigger my copying fears? Not sure.

What did I in fact listen to during the couple of weeks prior to the recording sessions? Almost exclusively the sound track to the Broadway musical Hamilton. Why? Because I discovered it and got really excited about it. So rather than learning or trying to absorb anything that makes sense musicologically as an aide to understanding Frescobaldi and keyboard playing, I did something different because I couldn’t resist it. I listened to something that reminded me that music can be extraordinarily gripping, emotionally powerful, and can sometimes feel like the most important thing in the world. Did this have an effect on the sessions, good or bad? Not sure.

 

Practicing

I did much of my practicing for this project on the clavichord because of logistics. The harpsichord that I used for the recording lives at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio—and, for various reasons, has to. I have a small clavichord at home. The harpsichord in question has a C/E short octave; so does this clavichord. I think that it would be a mistake to practice on a chromatic keyboard anything that I’m planning to play—especially record—on a short-octave keyboard. I want instincts for the fingering of the low notes to be utterly well established. So practicing on this particular clavichord made sense.

The sound and touch of the clavichord are both very different from those of the harpsichord. I had to resist using the dynamics of the clavichord while practicing. That could mislead me into thinking that I had successfully internalized something that had rhetorical or expressive effect when for harpsichord purposes, I hadn’t. I probably have less trouble with this than some people would, because my own normal conception of how I want to use the clavichord relies less on dynamic inflection as an interpretive tool than is the case with some players. The crispness of the attack of the clavichord echoes that of this particular harpsichord rather well. The gentleness and beauty of the clavichord sound reminds me of qualities that I hope to put into my playing of these pieces on the harpsichord. Those qualities are almost hard to avoid on the clavichord, and though they are abundantly available on the harpsichord, they have to be worked for a bit more.

 

Preparation

Is it necessary to know a piece well in order to record it? That question is absurd: who could defend not knowing our pieces well? However, there is a reason that it arises as a question—editing! The defining characteristic of recording is that you can edit as endlessly as you have patience. I’ve known record producers to joke that they only need to ask the musicians to play each note once, and they can create the performance from that in the editing studio. Maybe that’s not quite true. But it is true that you can sit there playing with the microphones on and have most of what you do come out badly—wrong notes, unsuccessfully executed ornaments, bits that fall flat interpretively, tuning or technical problems, and so on—and as long as there is a good version of each bit and as long as the tempos and tunings match, you can piece it together afterwards in a way that really sounds fine.

So, how does an awareness of that possibility affect preparation? I want the answer to be this: that it doesn’t affect it at all. I feel quite certain that knowing a piece really well is the best way to open up possibilities for expressiveness, interpretive/rhetorical interest, and subtlety that are beyond what you can consciously plan for. I would be astonished if I could make a great recording of a piece below my sight-reading threshold by sight-reading it. (There are people whose sight-reading thresholds are a lot higher than mine, and once in a while someone does make a recording by sight-reading.) So I want to pretend to myself that editing doesn’t exist. However, I don’t want an inappropriate fear that small technical glitches will ruin the recording process to make me anxious. 

It is wonderful to learn and prepare all of our pieces in such a way that we can play them really well. That always means with real command of what we want to do interpretively. For concert performance, it also means with only occasional, rather fleeting wrong notes. In a live performance—which goes by once and is over—an occasional wrong note is usually not a big deal. For most of us, the anxiety created by an obsessive insistence on never playing a wrong note would be an overall loss. It would tighten and constrain interpretation. In a recording, since our performance can be listened to over and over, even a small fleeting wrong note can become an annoyance. (Or worse. On the LP of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that I listened to growing up, there was a place that stuck. I would hear the same half-second of music until I went and pushed the needle along. Random though that was, it still leaves me hearing that passage as awkward in any performance all these decades later.) So to me the possibility of editing serves to reduce anxiety about wrong notes or other glitches to something like the level that it occupies for live performance: worth trying to plan against and keep to a minimum, but not worth allowing to interfere with a focus on vivid, communicative, expressive playing.

 

Concentration

Speaking of wrong notes, two things came into focus during the preparation for these sessions. First, I noticed that when I concentrate really well on a passage—when I don’t play on any sort of autopilot and when I specifically don’t let stray thoughts come close to the center of my focus—I make fewer wrong notes. This applies whether the stray thoughts are obviously irrelevant (“I wonder what I should put on my pizza later?”) or deceptively legitimate-seeming (“So how did that passage that I just played go?”)

Concentrating well is certainly important. But I am reminded that accurate, competent playing is a result of preparation (which I have done amply with this project) and concentration, much more than it is the result of some sort of pure talent. (That is perhaps an oversimplification, but I think that we have a tendency to shortchange the role of concentration). I am also reminded that that is especially true of me. My history as a player is that I have a strong tendency to let my attention wander, and when that happens, my playing comes the farthest from being what I want it to be. I have to remember this about myself in these recording sessions and elsewhere, and think about what it says about my students and how I can help them. Of course, it is also possible to concentrate too hard on remembering to concentrate . . . 

I also have discovered that if I play a passage evenly with no rhythmic inflection and with no attempt to think about or feel or project what I want to do with the piece interpretively, then I make essentially no wrong notes. The point of noticing this is to remind myself that that is not how I want to play. I have to look elsewhere for security and accuracy. 

One practice technique that I am using more for this preparation than I would usually use it is that of opening a piece to a random spot, or even opening a volume of music to a random piece from among the ones that I am preparing, and starting to play at that point. When I do this, I don’t take any time to orient myself to where I am or what’s coming up: I just play. This is a check on how well I know things and also a bit of concentration practice. Practice on letting real focus kick in quickly, without context. I now suspect this is a useful thing to do in practicing in general. But it is particularly relevant for recording, because a fair number of takes will indeed start at musically random places, as determined by things like page turns and what is interrupted by noise, or a note slipping out of tune, and so on.

To be continued . . . 

 

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