Working
With this month’s column I am beginning a series that will extend for many months—about a year, possibly with interruptions. In this series I will outline in detail and in as practical a way as I can, the process of working on and learning a piece of organ music. I will focus on two very different pieces: the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude, and the Suite Gothique, op. 25, by Léon Boëllmann.
I have settled on these pieces for several reasons or for no reason. The “no reason” side of things is this: that if a series outlining a way of working on learning pieces claims to have general applicability, and that claim is valid, then it must not really matter what the pieces are. And in fact I do believe that this is the case. I could pick a piece or two out of a hat, and the music would serve perfectly well as fodder for this exercise. Some of the actual reasons are these: it seemed to me more interesting to work on two different pieces, from different eras, than just to work on one. I know the Buxtehude extremely well, having both performed it and, years ago, written a detailed theoretical analysis of it; I know the Boëllmann less well, having read through it over the years, and taught it fairly extensively, but never having learned it to the level of performance—I will do so, at least in part, as I write about it. I believe that this will add an interesting perspective to the exercise. Both pieces are somewhat well-known but not, I hope, in any way “worn out” for teachers, students, listeners, or players. Both are available free on the Internet in public domain editions, and of course also through more traditional sources. A correspondent suggested the Boëllmann. Both pieces are challenging, but neither is “unplayable”.
Aims and goals
Each month I will focus on one of the pieces, and I will more or less alternate. I will cover as much as I can of the detailed work of learning a piece, so that, in theory, someone who did exactly what I suggest each month would end up having learned both pieces. Of course, there is more to do in learning any piece than can be written out in half a dozen columns, or even in eight or ten times that much. So part of what I will be trying to do is to outline the highlights explicitly, and to provide guidance for extrapolating from those highlights to all of the rest of the details of the process. In doing this I will often point the reader back to ideas that I have written about in previous columns, and indicate how I think those ideas can be applied in a specific situation.
Since the focus of this column in general is towards helping teachers think about teaching, these upcoming columns will aim to help teachers think in concrete ways about guiding their students through the process of working on pieces. However, by and large the columns will be cast as a direct discussion of the work on the pieces, that is, as if directed at the student rather than the teacher. There will be occasional asides to teachers, but the concept is that teachers wanting to glean some ideas about methodology and teaching practice from this exercise will do so essentially by inference. I believe that this, as the series unfolds, will happen easily and naturally.
Readers’ feedback
Meanwhile, if anyone reading these columns, whether teacher or other organist, wants to go ahead and actually work on the pieces month by month, following the approach and suggestions in the columns, I would be greatly interested to know about that and to get “real time” feedback. Since this series will go on for a while, it will be possible from time to time to discuss some of this feedback in future columns while the feedback is still directly relevant to the ongoing project. I may well have comments to offer from my own personal work on the Boëllmann.
Philosophy/underlying premise
One point about the philosophy and approach of this series of columns must be made clear at the very beginning, since it involves the most difficult challenge both in constructing this project and in fruitfully reading it and getting something out of it. The premise underlying the writing about teaching that I have done here is that no two students are alike, that they should not be expected to work in the same way, or to like and work on the same music, or to play their pieces in the same way technically or artistically. In fact, there is no right way or one way to work on any given piece or to learn pieces in general. There are things that a player can do that are almost always efficient and effective; there are things that often work to get a piece learned solidly but that are generally less efficient; there are things that people sometimes or often do that are inefficient, ineffective, or counterproductive. However, there are also practice strategies, methods of analysis, (self-)psychological or motivational strategies, ways of structuring time, procedures, and so on, that can all be valid but that work better for some students than for others. So the challenge in writing a specific template for working on a piece is to 1) emphasize that which is likely to be almost universally useful; 2) suggest ways of choosing techniques or procedures that might be useful to different extents to different people; and 3) help students to avoid unproductive ways of working.
It is extremely important to make the point that the specific way of working that is suggested for each piece is just one set of possibilities. If in these columns I frame it correctly, that one set of possibilities will also suggest other possibilities. At a more underlying level it will suggest something about a way of organizing work that is systematic enough to be efficient but flexible enough to be widely useful. It will not be useful at all if it is taken to be the only way of doing things.
Interpretive/technical matters
There is a balancing act that will inevitably be part of the discussion that forms this series. The work done to learn a piece is not always objective as to interpretive matters. That is, technical practicing work might be done differently in pursuit of one interpretive goal from the way it would be done in pursuit of a different interpretation. (A clear example of this involves legato versus non-legato articulation. In general, legato involves different—typically more complicated—fingerings. These, in turn, have to be practiced in a different way.) Since the goal of this series is definitely not to dictate a particular interpretation or even, ideally, to suggest one interpretation over another, I will try to make it clear that, when I discuss a practice regimen or idea that leans towards one interpretation or narrows the range of possible interpretations, I intend that as just one example. I will sometimes outline multiple ways of approaching the work on a passage or section of a piece, each of which tends towards a different interpretive result. Limitations of space and time—and at a deeper level, that ways of crafting an interpretation of a piece are infinite in number and scope—make it impossible for me to sketch out ways of practicing towards every possible interpretation.
Editions
One of the first steps in working on any piece of music is choosing an edition. This can be a complicated issue. Some editions are simply better or worse than others. Some editions have inaccuracies in relation to the original source or sources; some have changes that have been made on purpose by an “activist” editor; some are small, cramped, hard to read, or have unnecessarily inconvenient page turns. Also, some editions are based on more reliable sources than others. In cases of pieces that were published under the supervision of their composers, it makes sense to try to work from the original edition if possible. That of course does not always mean a copy of the edition published in the year of original publication. It can just as well mean a newly printed copy of that edition if it is still available. (It should be noted however that this is, at least in part, a non-objective philosophical judgment. Occasionally someone prefers to work from something other than the original edition, though nowadays this is reasonably rare.) Subsequent editions—including free online editions—can be checked, perhaps online or perhaps at a library, against the original edition.
With pieces that were never published under the composer’s supervision, any existing edition is the editor’s attempt to create the best version—according to that editor’s own particular standards—from existing sources. It is usually possible to figure out how different editors have approached the task, when there are different choices, and to make judgments about what edition to use.
Once at a masterclass that I attended, the harpsichordist Colin Tilney was asked what he thought was the best edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier. He replied, first, that he had always liked the old Bach Gesellschaft edition because the pages and the type were large and easy to read. Then, having confounded the expectation of the gathering that his comments about editions would be arcane or impractical—or would revolve around the notion of cutting-edge scholarship—he explained that really everyone ought to make his or her own edition, becoming familiar with the existing editions and taking the best or most convincing readings from each, to the extent that they differ. This has always seemed sensible to me. I usually play Frescobaldi, for example, from the Kalmus edition because it is inexpensive, the pages turn easily, the typeface is highly readable, and it is in fact quite accurate. In the few places where I believe that the notes should be different from what is found in that edition, I correct them in pencil.
For the purposes of this exercise, any good edition, free from significant additions by editors, will work nicely. The free online edition of the Boëllmann that looks the best to me is found at this link: www.free-scores.com/partitions_telecharger.php?partition=13651. It can be opened, downloaded and printed by clicking on the PDF icon. It is also possible to purchase the Durand edition as well as other reputable editions.
There is a good version of the Buxtehude available at: www.free-scores.com/partitions_telecharger.php?partition=1655 or at: http://imslp.org/wiki/Preludes_for_Organ,_BuxWV_136-153_(Buxtehude,_Dietrich). These are both copies of the Spitta/Seifert edition from 1875–76. This edition is more than adequate for our purposes, though the typography is dense enough that I myself would want to print it out a bit large than normal size. The E-major is found at page 21 in this collection.
The Boëllmann download has measure numbers, the Buxtehude does not. I believe it is worth adding them. It makes discussion and analysis much easier.
Next month I will begin with the Buxtehude. I will talk about how to divide the piece into sections and how to break the texture of the piece down into simpler units for practicing. In the meantime, anyone who wishes to start looking the piece over should do the following: notice cadences and changes in texture, and check out recurrences of the very first four notes of the piece, that is, the rising tetrachord. How many can you find?
NOTE: I would like to thank reader Matthew Dickerson for sending in several interesting suggestions for exploring the repertoire, in response to my columns on that topic:
1) The “Organ Recitals” section of The Diapason
2) A Dictionary of Composers for Organ by John Henderson
3) The IAO Millennium Book edited by Paul Robert Hale
4) YouTube.
