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On Teaching

October 1, 2015
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Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

To look or not to look

During my months off from writing this column, I heard from several readers, partly with various stories or questions or comments about organ study, but also with some suggestions for topics for future columns. These suggestions included aspects of service playing, advice about how to get pieces up to a fast tempo, and on fingering, including how to plan fingering with ultimate tempo in mind, dealing with acoustics, and details about pedal playing (always at the forefront of concern about organ playing!). I will in due course cover these topics. This month, however, I begin with something I consider to be more important the more I observe students—and indeed the more I observe my own process of learning and performing music. This is the question of whether, when, and how to look at one’s hands and feet while playing.

In an early column, I noted that some day I would devote a whole column to this, and while I have mentioned aspects of it from time to time, I have not yet written that column. Furthermore, I have developed some new ideas about it over the last few years—ideas that supplement rather than contradict or change my thoughts from several years ago. So it seems like a good idea to take it on, in this column and the next, pulling together some of my long-standing ideas and supplementing them with some new thoughts.

I have always been—and still am—very skeptical of the practice of looking at the hands or (perhaps especially) the feet. However, I have become more open to the idea that looking can sometimes be all right—certainly neutral, if it is done correctly, perhaps even helpful in some cases. This has led to the other new turn in my thinking: how to be sure that when you occasionally look down at the keyboard(s), you don’t create any problems by doing so. I have also developed some exercises and practice techniques that address looking or not looking at the hands and feet, or deal with looking away from the music. 

Beyond the practical aspects of looking or not looking, one can learn about focus and concentration, and about the whole learning process, by thinking about the different approaches to the looking/not looking question. I will include a few thoughts about that here.

The fundamental, most important fact about looking at the hands and feet while playing is that a reliance on looking is extremely damaging to the learning process for someone who is still learning to play. This is probably one of the things that I have observed the most clearly in my years of teaching and that I am most sure about. It is also one of the few things that I am willing, if necessary, to ask students to believe on trust even if they don’t see it for themselves right away. Not every student will do that, especially since I always urge students not to take things on trust, but it is why I have tried to make the advantages of not looking seem clear and obvious.

There is a distinction between someone who is still learning and someone who is an accomplished player. The pitfalls of too much looking are the most hazardous for anyone who is still engaged in the early to middle stages of becoming comfortable with the instrument. This is why thinking about this issue is specifically an important part of the work of a teacher. For more experienced, comfortable, “advanced” players (whatever imprecise term seems best), looking or not looking becomes more of a personal choice, a matter of comfort—at least much of the time.

Most of us find it natural to look—that is, literally, with our eyes—for things that we want to find. Picking up our glasses off the table, reaching for the light switch, getting a stick of butter out of the fridge, anything normal and everyday, is usually achieved partly through looking. The keys of keyboard instruments—more than the technical components of string or wind instruments, I believe—seem to be things that are there and that we want to find. So it is natural to think something like: “OK, I need to play that ‘A-flat,’ so I should look for it” or even “so I’d better look for it.” This is a way of seeming to map normal experience onto the act of playing a keyboard instrument: it seems intuitive, at least as a starting point.

However, there are equally fundamental reasons not to accept that intuitive feeling, not to look at the hands and feet while playing—especially while first learning to play. First of all, it is impossible to find every note of every piece by looking in time to play that note on time. If all music were extremely slow, this whole discussion might well be different. Looking at the hands and feet might be a valid option as a way of feeling comfortable at the instrument. But with real-life repertoire and performance conditions this just won’t work: there just isn’t time. Only a strong and reliable kinesthetic sense of the keyboard can enable the fingers and feet to go where they need to go, when they need to go there. So learning to play has to be, in part, a matter of developing that kinesthetic sense. And (this is the most important point here) every time that a student finds a note by looking, he or she misses an opportunity to strengthen this all-important sense

It is a very clear distinction: if you move your hands and fingers, or your feet, directly from whatever position they have just been in to the position they need to be in to play the next notes or chords, then you establish in your mind a connection between those two positions. If you intervene between those two points with a glance at the new position, and then find that new position through that visual clue, you do not establish that connection, or you establish it weakly. Only by reinforcing these connections over and over and over again can we achieve the ability to execute them reliably in the infinitely varied circumstances created by an infinitely varied repertoire. Using our eyes to find notes makes this process of learning physical connections inefficient. Using the eyes a lot makes it extraordinarily inefficient, and possibly totally ineffective.  

Other reasons to be concerned about looking at the hands and feet are more practical, and apply beyond the learning stage. It is always a possibility that upon looking away from the music, the player will get lost and be unable to come back to the right place in the music. I will discuss ways of dealing with this later on. This is tied up with questions about memorization and about solid learning in general. Also, there is a strong tendency for looking away from the music to cause delay: very tiny delay that doesn’t add an amount of time to the playing that can really be counted, but that tends to undermine the sense of rhythmic momentum and continuity. This is something that an accomplished player can find ways to deal with, if it is addressed purposefully. I will also come back to this later.

The good news, especially for beginning students, is that a very basic level of awareness of the kinesthetics of the keyboard gets established surprisingly promptly. I tell students that anyone who has been playing any keyboard instrument for a few weeks essentially knows where the keys are, though he or she might not realize it. Of course, this sense of where the keys are needs to grow stronger, so that it can function reliably with ever more complicated (and faster) music. Also, crucially, the player needs to learn to believe in it. However, a basic version of this awareness is established much sooner than most people—most students—realize. How early may depend somewhat on the exact nature of the very beginning lessons and/or practicing that this student encountered. But it will be there as something to build on, even from random doodling around. The layout of keyboards seems to be intuitive and humane enough to make this happen.

Let me mention the analogy to the typing keyboard. I don’t know from personal experience how intuitive that layout is, since I have never learned “touch typing.” I type with, perhaps, two or three fingers, always looking at the computer keyboard. Sometimes I must spend appreciable time searching for a given letter or symbol: my sense of where they all are is that poorly developed. It has slowly improved over many years of typing that way; I now often find my fingers heading towards the correct letter before I have consciously thought about where it might be. But I never can pin a letter down exactly without looking. This means that I am an extremely slow typist, and that I effectively cannot type a copy of something that I would have to read while typing. I can only type while composing. It is interesting to me that the most common form of “real” typing involves always pressing (I originally wrote “playing”) any given key with the same finger. 

This is completely different from playing a keyboard instrument, where there is no linkage between specific fingers and specific keys. It is more analogous to fingering on a wind instrument. My own slow typing suits me: it matches the speed at which I think out what I want to type. This is analogous to the slow musical tempos that would be required if players were all to try to find all of their notes by looking, but in this case it is suitable—or at least it works for me. I am, however, very aware that my need to look imposes limitations. This informs my sense of how important it is not to be limited by looking while playing music. My awareness that (almost) everyone but me does indeed type without looking reinforces my belief that everyone can do the same with a musical keyboard.

The fundamental difference between the keys of a keyboard instrument (and the typing keyboard) and the other objects that I mentioned above—the stick of butter, and so on—is that the keys don’t move. We don’t come to the moment when we need to find them without knowing where they are to be found. This is a necessary condition for us to be able to find them without looking. Other things in everyday experience also have this quality, such as the gas pedal and brake arrangement in a car. Of course, no one has ever thought that they had to look to get a foot from one of those to the other. It would be courting death to do so, so we are motivated to learn and believe that we don’t have to! Various household situations work this way: reaching for the bedside alarm clock, or a light switch on the wall of a room that you always enter the same way. Anything that is always in the same place relative to your person is something that you might well be able to reach for and find without looking. In normal life we don’t always do so, since there is often (gas and brakes aside) very little reason not to supplement the spatial awareness with visual confirmation. But such things can help to persuade students that the keys of their instrument can also be routinely found without looking.

Another way of looking at it is this: when we talk about reliably finding notes, we are also talking about avoiding wrong notes. These are complementary ways of looking at the same thing. When a student feels a strong urge to look at the hands or feet, that student is trying not to play wrong notes. However, by far most actual wrong notes made by students—and by most of us—come specifically because we don’t really know what the correct note was supposed to be. I first learned this by observing myself. When I was still a beginning (or at most “intermediate”) player, it one day occurred to me that whenever I made a wrong note or a cluster of wrong notes, if someone had stopped me and asked me what the right notes were supposed to be, I would never have been able to answer that question. I have since observed this with students, fairly consistently. The proportion of wrong notes that happen when the student clearly knows what note or notes or chord is indicated—and could promptly tell you if you asked—but makes a wrong judgment about where to find the note(s) on the keyboard is very small. The proportion that happens when the student doesn’t quite really know what was supposed to be played is very high. It is exactly the information that is on the page that is most urgently needed at the moment when a passage might be about to go wrong, not the information found on the keyboard itself. 

When a student has played a number of wrong notes—especially if it happens to be a high number—and has been looking down at the hands or feet quite frequently, I ask the student to try playing the same thing without looking at all. If the student is reluctant to do that, I remind him or her that the worst that can happen is that the passage will fall apart dramatically—so badly that it will be funny. And if that happens, so what? We will have learned something. Of course, the most common result is that the accuracy improves immediately and dramatically, even if the student didn’t expect anything good, and even before he or she had any sort of chance to get comfortable doing this, or to believe that it was a good idea. This experience, repeated as often as necessary, will help to persuade the student that not looking is fruitful.

I will continue this discussion next month and include further ideas about how to convince or cajole students into taking advantage of not looking at the hands and feet. I will also talk about when and how it is OK to look, and I will give the exercises and practice techniques that I mentioned above.

 

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