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On Teaching

December 12, 2007
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Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work on a pedal-playing method that will probably be available in the fall of 2008. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links, along with downloadable PDFs of these and other pedal exercises, can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Pedal playing, part III:
expanding the scope

The scale-based beginning pedal exercise that I discussed at length last month is intended to develop a student’s sense—intuitive and kinesthetic—of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step on the pedal keyboard. The careful procedure that I outlined then for introducing a new student to this exercise is important, since the effectiveness of the exercise is predicated on its feeling easy and natural from the beginning. However, the gist of the exercise can be expressed in music notation as follows (see Example I).
The odd notation of the key signature—that is, that the signature itself is in parenthesis—is a way of expressing concisely that the exercise should be played both without any sharps or flats and with whatever the given key signature suggests. (Remember that it almost always makes sense to practice the “naturals only” version first, since it presents more regularly spaced intervals.) This is nothing but a way of saving space and time, and of course it would be possible to write out any exercise of this sort twice, once with and once without a key signature. However, I have found that students easily get used to this notation.
Every pedal exercise that has as its point the development of a student’s sense of the geography of the pedal keyboard should always be practiced at a slow tempo. This is for two reasons that almost contradict each other but that nonetheless both apply. The first is the normal reason for practicing slowly: it is easier to play an unfamiliar passage slowly than to play it quickly; practicing is more effective if what you are practicing is correct rather than wrong; and it always makes sense to practice any passage as slowly as you need to in order to get it right. Of course as a passage becomes familiar it can—normally—be sped up. With this kind of kinesthetic pedal exercise, however, it is also true that the slower one plays the simple notes of the exercise, the more intense a level of focus is required to feel and internalize the shape of the physical intervals that your feet are negotiating. Such an exercise is actually harder mentally, and more intensely efficient as a drill and as a learning tool, the slower it is played. There can be some point to speeding up exercises such as these—especially as part of the process of learning to play faster without developing tension, and indeed to disentangle velocity from tension or force—but that is not relevant to the stage at which a student is first learning pedal playing.
Once this sense of the distance, shape, and feel of one step has been well established, there are two logical next steps. The first of these is to invite the student to use this sense in more complicated musical contexts. The second is to build on this sense to establish an equally secure feeling for the moving of one foot over two steps, then over three and more.
A simple way to set the moving of each foot by one step in a slightly more complicated context is shown in Example II. In this exercise, each foot does exactly what it does in Exercise I above: that is, it moves slowly by step. (This motion is, in effect, still in half notes, though of course the notation is arbitrary.) Two things are added here. First, the whole process is a bit more challenging conceptually, since the student must think about both feet at the same time. The student can deal with this by keeping it slow, by focusing well in general, and by consciously alternating focus from one foot to the other as appropriate. The need for this latter will melt away with practice.
The second new thing that the student has to deal with is the consequences of having the feet closer to one another. When the two feet are placed in such a way as to be in some danger of pushing each other out of the way or blocking one another’s access to the keys that need to be played, then the student must learn how best to separate the feet and prevent them from causing problems for each other. This causes additional complexity for the student, but it is also a very good opportunity for learning about the logistics of pedal playing and the comfortable use of the feet. In each situation that brings the feet perilously close together, the student can figure out—by common sense, and with help from the teacher—what solutions will work. For example, early on in this exercise, when the left foot first needs to play the note B, the right foot has just played c, and might be in the way. (This will vary a bit from student to student because of the kind of differences in foot size, posture, and habits that I discussed in November’s column.) If there is a problem at this point, the student can think about ways to solve it, such as a more detached articulation, or separating the feet along the length of the keys—either “left foot back/right foot forward” or “right foot back/left foot forward” depending, again, on the particular student’s posture and the angle from which he or she naturally approaches that part of the pedal keyboard—or by holding the foot itself at a different angle (i.e., flexing the ankle more or less), or perhaps by switching from “little toe” to “big toe” or vice versa in one or both feet, if that addresses the problem and is comfortable. The teacher and the student can discuss the pros and cons of any of these, and this kind of discussion will move the student closer to being able to think about such things for himself or herself.
The teacher can make up new exercises along these same lines. They should be simple melodies in which each foot moves mostly by step. The interpolation of the two feet need not be utterly regular, as it is in exercise II above. Some students might want to make up their own such exercises, and can certainly do so, as long as they understand the principle of following carefully what each foot is doing. Example III introduces the moving of one foot over the interval of two steps.
In the first half of this exercise, going up, the left foot is asked to take on the new task of moving over the interval of two steps, while the right foot is still just moving by one step. In the second half, coming down, this is reversed. For completeness one might also try the following variation, in which the roles of the feet are reversed (see Example IV).
Since, when the student approaches these exercises, he or she will already have a very firm foundation in moving one foot over the interval of one step, a simple thought will almost always suffice to guide the feet to the correct distance for covering two steps: namely, that the distance traveled by the foot should feel greater than the accustomed distance of one step, but only just enough greater to notice the difference. If in the course of getting to know these exercises the student ever makes a wrong note (which is certain to happen), the best way to correct that is also with a simple thought: “I just moved my foot a little bit too far [or not far enough], so next time I will move it a little bit less far [or farther].” This simple, almost naïve, way of correcting wrong notes in pedal practicing always works (judging from my experience both with students and with myself). It is also by far the best way of using the experience of making and then correcting wrong notes to imprint a correct feeling for the geography of the pedal keyboard on the brain of the player, and to lead efficiently to reliable, accurate playing. It is always possible to get the next note right—or to correct an actual or anticipated wrong note—by looking. However, that does nothing to improve the student’s command of the pedal keyboard, and the sense that it gives of having gotten something right is illusory.
(I will devote a whole future column to the subjects of looking at the keyboard and not looking at the keyboard. These are both important tools, which are sometimes not thought about systematically enough.)
Example V shows an exercise that asks each foot to move over the interval of two steps. It also provides practice in dealing with repeated notes. (The playing of repeated notes with separate feet, which has musical and technical advantages of its own, is also a way to practice being aware of the position of the feet with respect to each other—not the main focus of this approach to learning pedal playing, but not something worthy of neglect either—and it is good training for learning pedal substitution later on. It is essentially the same gesture as a substitution: the difference can be thought of as one of articulation.)
Again, teachers and students can certainly write other exercises that will work as well as these or that can supplement them. It is only important to bear in mind the patterns of what each foot is doing and to make sure that exercises expand the scope of what each foot is doing in a logical and systematic order.
In fact, after any student has become completely comfortable with the exercises in this column or another similar set of exercises, it should be possible for that student to begin using pedal lines from repertoire as pedal practice material. This can include even very difficult pedal parts if they are approached the right way. This transition will be the main subject of next month’s column, which will also discuss the Bach Pedalexercitium and touch briefly upon the heel.