Practicing I
When I was a graduate student at Westminster Choir College in the early eighties, there was a piece of graffiti written over the door leading to the basement corridors where the organ practice rooms were found. It said: Take Responsibility: Really Practice! I was always impressed by that. For one thing, it was the only graffiti that I had ever seen, or have ever seen, that had practicing music as its subject. But also it seemed to point to a real truth about practicing and about the act of being a musician. Unless you do what it takes both to develop your overall skills to the fullest and to learn—really learn— the pieces that you are working on, you haven’t really taken responsibility for your contribution to the world of music, or for your contribution as a musician to the world.
Failure to practice enough or in the right way can have a number of consequences. The most basic one is that a given piece will be learned only partially or with inadequate security, and will fall apart in performance. The lesser case of this is that a piece will be insecure enough that it can only be kept from really falling apart by a kind of tense focus on getting the right notes. This will in turn make the performance sound tense and will rule out, or at least limit, any freedom or spontaneity. Inadequate practice can both force the performer to fall back entirely on consciously chosen interpretive gestures—rather than allowing those gestures to be modified on the spur of the moment to reflect the conditions of the particular performance or a new feeling or idea—and make the execution of those interpretive gestures tentative and unconvincing.
Learning a piece extraordinarily well—by practicing it well and practicing it enough—greatly increases (perhaps paradoxically) the chance that the performance of that piece can have the feeling of an improvisation to it. One hallmark of good improvisation, in music, public speaking, conversation, or anything, is that the next thing that happens comes without hesitation. This is what practicing makes possible in playing an already-composed piece. Furthermore, practicing, even if it is primarily aimed at making the practical side of the mastery of a piece as secure as it can be, also involves repeated exposure to the whole picture of what is going on musically in the piece. The performer who has the ability to play a given piece accurately without having really practiced it (that is, someone who is a really good sight-reader) always runs the risk of giving an offhand and superficial performance of that piece. (I hasten to add that this certainly does not always happen, but it can happen and sometimes does.)
Analysis and study of the musical content of a piece can happen before, during, and after the process of rigorously practicing the notes. The particular kind of contrapuntal analysis that I wrote about in several recent columns is intended to take place for the most part before the practicing of the complete note-picture of the piece with appropriate fingerings and pedalings. However, since it is carried out largely through playing, it is also a form of practicing, and part of its purpose is to make the subsequent practicing both easier and more effective.
Analysis along other lines—melodic analysis of non-contrapuntal (melody-and-accompaniment) passages, harmonic analysis, etc.—can be done prior to the start of nitty-gritty note practicing, and also ought to make that practicing easier and more effective. This happens, of course, because if the mind already knows to some extent what is coming next—and if that is also, according to some musical logic, what ought to come next—then the fingers will tend to find it more directly, with less hesitation or fumbling. Then, during practicing, the sound and feel of the notes will reinforce whatever was learned by analysis, if that analysis was sound, or perhaps suggest ways in which to modify it.
Real practicing also ought to be (most of the time) fun and (always) absorbing. It should also be the case, as much of the time as possible, that a player finds efficient, effective practicing to be deeply satisfying because it so clearly leads to real accomplishment. A teacher can greatly help a student to feel this way by making the relationship between practicing and real learning very clear, and by teaching practice techniques that work.
Indeed, practicing that does not seem to be working—where there is a goal but that goal is not getting any closer, or where there isn’t a clear goal and over time nothing much seems to be happening—is so discouraging and demoralizing that experiencing too much of it will often lead to a student’s giving up, discovering that he or she isn’t really that interested in the instrument after all. This is a shame, because without the experience of practicing well, a student actually doesn’t know what the instrument is, what the repertoire is, what the experience of playing music can be.
So, what is good practicing? What works under what circumstances? Part of the answer, as it applies to organ and harpsichord, comes from J. S. Bach. He said about organ playing that:
“All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”
When I first read this comment, I assumed that Bach was being flippant, either in a way that was meant to be dismissive to whomever he was speaking with, or in a way that was meant to be funny and modest. However, I have since realized that he probably meant something specific. In most musical situations, the performer has to create aspects of the content of the musical sound directly. This is obviously the case with singing, since the performer creates and controls everything about the sound, both sonority and intonation. With non-fretted string instruments, the performer has complete responsibility for intonation, and with bowed string instruments, responsibility for shaping the sound of the note over its entire duration. With blown instruments, the player likewise has the job of creating and sustaining the sonority, and has some responsibility for intonation.
Organ and harpsichord come much closer to fitting the following description: if anyone or anything pushes the key down, the note will sound. (This is also true of the piano except in the very important area of volume, and it is surprisingly untrue of the clavichord, but that’s a subject for another day.) Of course on some organs and most harpsichords, the player can influence subtleties of the beginnings and ends of notes—attacks and releases—by subtle variations in technique. This can be very important artistically, but it does not define as big a proportion of what the player has to do or to think about technically as similar subtleties do with some of the types of instruments mentioned above. I believe that Bach was pointing to this distinction: other musicians have to create their sound and tuning, we keyboard players just have to push the keys down and the instrument does the rest!
This means, first of all, that the physical act of playing—the thing that we are practicing when we practice—can be thought of in simple mechanical terms, more so with keyboard instruments than with most others. This leads to another fruitful paradox. The more we approach the act of practicing as if it were a simple mechanical task, the more artistic control we will end up having over the end results of that task.
Also, and most fruitfully of all, the physical act of playing organ or harpsichord can be slowed down to any extent whatsoever without changing its essential physical nature. This, again, is not true of most means of producing music. A singer or wind player can only slow down a little bit without changing the relationship between the musical note-picture and the act of breathing. This is a crucial change. A player of a bowed string instrument cannot slow down too much without changing the relationship between the note-picture and the bowing. This is almost as crucial. An organist or harpsichordist can slow down any passage any amount and still be executing a genuine slow-motion version of the final desired result, however fast that result might be intended to be.
In general, any physical gesture that someone can execute at a given speed, can be learned to be played faster: much faster, if the process of learning is approached the right way. This is quite reliable, and not something that varies much from one person to another. It is also not specific to music or to artistic endeavor, but it happens to apply very well to the particular physical demands of organ and harpsichord playing. There is certainly some limit beyond which one simply can’t move any faster. There is only a small amount of keyboard music that goes beyond that limit for most people. The limits that we experience on how fast we can play in general, or on whether or not we can play a given piece up to tempo have to do with our lack of immediate, transparent awareness of what is coming next in the piece, not with physical inability to play fast enough.
Furthermore, there is in fact some speed, some tempo, at which anyone can play any given keyboard piece. That is, anyone who can basically read music and who knows the order of the keys on the keyboard can sit down at the keyboard and sight-read any piece perfectly the first time with no previous keyboard-playing experience if he or she adopts a slow enough tempo. This includes everything from the first exercise at the beginning of a keyboard primer to the most complicated works by Liszt, Reger, or Duruflé. Of course, in these latter cases, the tempo might have to be really monstrously slow: one thirty-second note per minute, or maybe even slower. This is an extreme case, almost a reductio ad absurdum, but it is quite true, and the principle, applied more moderately, is very important.
All of the principles discussed in the last few paragraphs come together to suggest the most efficient and reliable protocol for practicing organ and harpsichord pieces. I will sketch out this approach in a basic way here, and elaborate upon it next month.
Prior to practicing a piece or a passage, it is necessary to have worked out the fingering and pedaling. For the moment we will take this for granted. Fingering and pedaling choices can legitimately be made for all sorts of reasons, from the historical to the aesthetic to the personal, and I will devote more than one future column to the subject. Even a “bad” fingering or pedaling can become pretty reliable by being practiced well. This is not always a good thing, but it is in a sense a necessary thing, because we do not always come up with the best fingering or pedaling the first time or, for that matter, ever. Any fingering or pedaling, no matter how well thought out, may need to be changed as a piece becomes more familiar. This can, if it is extensive or tricky, require backing up and re-practicing.
In any case, once you—the student—have worked out a fingering and pedaling for a passage, the next step is to select an appropriately manageable amount of music to practice. It is usually a good idea to work on fairly small units: a page, a few lines, a section, or, looking at it a different way, the left-hand part, the right-hand part, the feet, or even one foot at a time.
The next step is to play that unit of music slowly enough. The concept of “slowly enough” is the key to the whole matter of practicing organ and harpsichord. Ideally, every time that you play anything—but certainly during a session of real practicing—that playing should be done at a tempo at which a) you get all of the right notes, and b) getting all of the right notes feels easy: no hesitation, no panic, no scrambling. Achieving point b) is a matter only of honesty with one’s self: if, on a given time playing through a passage, you hear yourself make all of the right notes, then it is very easy not to notice whether you were getting those right notes serenely or by the skin of your teeth! It is important to notice this and to be honest about it.
Once the unit that you are practicing feels serene and easy and is reliably accurate at this first tempo, then it is time to try it a little bit faster. The concept of “a little bit faster” is the second most important thing about practicing. The new practice tempo should be just enough faster that you can tell that it is faster, but not enough faster that the passage falls apart. It is OK for it to require a bit more concentration to get it right at first—in fact this is a good sign, since it means that you have increased the tempo enough to make a difference—but not for it to fall apart. If it does, then it was premature to speed up, or you sped up too much. In this case it is necessary to slow back down just a bit.
Once you have played the passage at the new (very slightly faster) tempo enough times in a row for it to have become once again utterly comfortable and reliable, then it is time to speed it up, again by a very small amount. By patiently following this procedure enough times in a row, it is possible to move a passage from any tempo to any other tempo. This is true whether the music is simple or complicated. It is true even if the initial practice tempo is so slow that it would be difficult for a listener to follow it as music at all.
If the unit of music that you are practicing is not the whole texture—that is, if you are practicing separate hands or feet—then at some point it becomes appropriate to put the hands or feet back together, or to put the whole thing together. The rule of thumb is this: the sooner in the process you put things together, the slower you have to keep your practice tempo. Different ways of practicing a piece or passage—for example, keeping all of the parts together and starting with a very slow practice tempo or, on the other hand, practicing hands separately and being able to start each hand at a somewhat faster practice tempo—usually end up being equally effective. One might be better than another only because the player happens to find it more interesting. The crucial thing is to remember and abide by the definition of a correct practice tempo: slow enough.
I will continue this discussion next month.
