On Teaching: an update

An update

Several months ago, I fell and tore my right rotator cuff, again! Though I continue to heal, there have been a few setbacks. Holding my arms in the position necessary to play any of my instruments has continued to engender really severe shoulder pain—and so has any effort to type.

Hence, my column has been absent for the last few months. I have been doing a disproportionate amount of practicing with my left hand, which is probably a good thing, and I will perhaps write about it someday. In particular I have been going through the Bach trio sonatas with left hand and pedal. This is the most important step in practicing those pieces anyways: but one that we are all inclined to shortchange! It is refreshing, in a way, to be forced to concentrate on it.

Because of the delays and uncertainties inherent in this problem, we have decided to shake things up a bit with respect to the column. In the coming weeks and months I will be creating videos addressing the sorts of topics that have concerned the column over the last sixteen years. This is actually something that we considered seriously several years ago, though at that point it never quite got off the ground.

I will eventually resume writing columns for the magazine. However, for now they will be more “once in a while” than “almost every month.”

Meanwhile, one great advantage of the video project is that it creates a format for revisiting topics I wrote about a long time ago without being redundant. There are many things that I would consider differently now, or which I can explain better now. That is as it should be: we all hope to learn and evolve, and print notoriously sets things in stone forever. For example, I am inordinately fond of thinking about hand distribution, the importance of which I think sometimes goes a bit under appreciated.

I wrote a three-column series on that subject in 2014, and I still endorse what I wrote then. But I would put some of it differently now. That is a discussion that could benefit from demonstration. This is also true of many areas within the very open-ended realm of organ pedagogy. To some extent my choices about what to focus on in video form will be governed by what I think can benefit more from demonstration. (I will certainly revisit the always-pressing subject of teaching and learning pedal playing. This is an area where actual demonstration should be very 
useful indeed.)

This is a work in progress for now. The videos will be released periodically, and it’s possible that by the time you are reading this a video or two will be available. The first one will be an introductory discussion, and then I will plunge into specific topics.

I will be overjoyed to receive suggestions for video topics, or thoughts about this project. Of course I will also be very happy to hear from anyone with any sorts of reactions to the videos as they start to come out. And I will stay in touch with you in these pages from time to time!