Repertoire, part 3: Mailbag
This month’s column is devoted to answering a few questions from readers, arising out of the two recent columns about repertoire. The questions all have to do with one basic point—namely, how it can be possible for students to work effectively on pieces that are “too hard.” These questions have led me to believe that I should discuss this further, especially since I also consider it a very important point. I will revisit certain things that I have already said, looking at them from somewhat different angles, and add a few new ideas.
What is too hard?
I begin by quoting at length from a set of questions sent to me by Don Stoner, a reader from Pennsylvania who studied organ in college and has taught high school and middle school music for many years. From his perspective as an experienced teacher, he has provided interesting feedback on different matters over the past couple of years, and in this instance his questions bring up essentially everything that I want to address here. He wrote as follows:
Thanks once again for your articles in The Diapason. I would like to ask you several questions that I was thinking about, especially in the paragraphs about the issue: What is too hard? . . . Here goes!
Should a teacher first access what the technical and theory abilities a student has at the keyboard? For example: You get a student that wants to play the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But he doesn’t have the “finger power” (for lack of a better way to describe it) to negotiate the manual runs, the pedal work, and so on. It would, I think, be like throwing someone in 10 feet of water and tell him to swim!! While I think that we need to let people play music they enjoy, they need to have certain amount of technical ability to be able to “make it through” to the end of the piece. Would you in this case say to a student “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think that we need to start with a smaller prelude and fugue (little 8) and then build up to this larger selection”? Do you think that all organ students are ready to “make the decision” that “I can play this piece no matter what anyone thinks”?
The essence of the matter is this: if it is true—as I believe—that it is important to encourage students to work on music that they really like and want to work on, then it must be OK to let those students (some of the time at least) work on music that is harder than what we as teachers might consider prudent. It also must mean, again some of the time, being willing to throw out any sense that it is necessary to work on pieces in some particular order. In general, it seems to call for taking a somewhat improvisatory approach to the business of using repertoire as material for making technical progress. In order for any of this to work, it is necessary to discover a way to use any piece—regardless of its degree of difficulty—as the material for teaching and learning at any stage. The essence of this, in turn, is the ability to break each piece down into simple components and to figure out how to use those components as appropriate teaching materials. It can, as a matter of teaching technique, learning technique, and practicing strategy, be done successfully with any piece.
However, as Don Stoner suggests in the last line quoted above, part of the issue is psychological. This is true most fundamentally with respect to the root of this whole discussion: the reason for letting students work on whatever music they most want to work on is that the mind of the student will then become more focused and better able to work efficiently. I believe this because I have observed it over and over again in myself, in colleagues, and in students. I think that this effect can often be at work even in people who believe that it doesn’t apply to them—that is, who believe that they have the pure willpower to make themselves work regardless of their feelings about what they are working on.
Temperamental and psychological issues
However, there certainly are some psychological or temperamental points that run counter to this. The main one is that if a student is working, even very efficiently and effectively, on a piece that is very challenging—“too hard”—for that student, then the student has to have patience. It will clearly take many times as long to learn a piece that is lengthy and difficult than to learn a piece that is short and (relatively) easy. A student who asks to work on such a (long, difficult) piece must think carefully about whether he or she has the patience to defer the gratification of having completed the whole piece, perhaps not even to be able to predict how long it will take. If this student gets pleasure out of playing pieces for people along the way, then he or she will have to think about whether it is all right to do less of that for the time being—that is, to be learning fewer pieces in a given space of time and thus have fewer, or no, new pieces to perform during that time. (I am talking now about this as a source of pleasure, satisfaction, or motivation, not as a practical requirement. Of course some students are in a position where they need pieces for practical purposes, say for church or to meet the requirements of a structured academic program. If so, then of course those needs may intervene temporarily and deflect the student from simply studying what he or she wants to study.)
If a student comes to a teacher wanting to work on a very difficult piece, one that is exciting and interesting to that student, then the teacher should discuss the temperamental and psychological issues involved. That is, the teacher should remind the student that this will be a long project, will require patient and well-organized work, and will involve postponing the satisfaction of having completed and learned a piece. It is by no means necessary to end up working on that piece. However, it is necessary (where “necessary” means “much better for the learning process”) that the student be genuinely happy with whatever piece(s) he or she end up working on. And while there need not be an assumption that the longer or more difficult piece will be chosen, there should also not be an assumption, even as a starting point, that it will not be chosen.
In fact, if a student has a strong desire to work on a piece that is a stretch for that student, then the teacher can use that as a sort of bargaining chip: you may certainly work on this piece, but only as long as you practice it well, in the ways that I suggest, patiently, systematically, etc.
The other psychological dimension that I want to discuss is fear. Fear is a natural response to the prospect of doing something very difficult. At a minimum, fear of failure, in and of itself, comes into play. On top of that, there is fear of disappointing the teacher, fear of disapproval from others—the teacher, fellow students, others in the field, a kind of imaginary, externalized “superego,” one’s parents, and of course one’s self. There is also the fear, specifically, of being thought hubristic, arrogant, self-important, or just plain cluelessly unrealistic in your claims about what you can or can’t accomplish. These fears are all natural and more or less universal. However, acting on them, in particular by limiting the scope or ambition of what pieces one works on, seems to me to be a terrible loss. In discussing with a student the pros and cons of tackling a big difficult piece, a teacher should, I believe, encourage the student to think clearly about his or her motivation, temperament, style of working, and so on. The student should know as clearly as possible what it would feel like to dig in and work on a very challenging piece, and make a free decision about whether that is or is not something that he or she wants to do. But the teacher should also try very hard to help the student ignore any voice of fear, any voice suggesting that working on a harder rather than an easier piece is scary or risky.
In fact, helping our students to free themselves from fear is probably the most important thing that we can do as teachers. I have one anecdote to relate on that subject. At my first organ lesson in the spring semester of 1985—which was my second year as a graduate student—I placed on the music desk of the Fisk organ at Westminster Choir College the Helmut Walcha organ edition of The Art of the Fugue. When Professor Eugene Roan arrived for the lesson, he just sat down in a nearby chair, nodded and smiled. He was telling me that, yes, it was OK for me to work on that (very) long, (excruciatingly) difficult piece for my upcoming degree recital. There was essentially nothing in the record of what I had done prior to that day to suggest that I could handle this project. His immediate, concise, friendly agreement that I could and should do it not only led to my lifelong involvement with that piece, it also signaled to me that I really was an organist, and that I could really aspire to do what I wanted to do.
The role of the teacher
This brings us to the next question. It is always important, essential in fact, that a teacher know as much as possible about the “technical and theory abilities a student has” as Don Stoner aptly puts it. The notion of letting students choose their own repertoire cannot be based on the teacher’s abdicating the responsibility to know both exactly where that student is in the learning process and as much as is humanly possible about the student’s abilities and aptitudes. This knowledge can be used either to help the student choose pieces to work on that will seem appropriate in a traditional way—neither too easy nor too hard, adding something to the student’s technical and musical learning without being overwhelming—or to help the student navigate the treacherous but fruitful waters of a very challenging piece. If Professor Roan had not known me very well—I had studied with him off and on for several years at that point—he would not have been able to agree without discussion that it was a good thing for me to work on The Art of the Fugue, and he certainly would not have been able to help me with the process as much as he did.
If anything, it is more important that the teacher be prepared—equipped with knowledge of the student and of the music, and in a frame of mind to pay very close attention—when a student is working on a “too hard” piece. Although such a piece approached properly can be at least as effective a teaching tool as several easier or shorter pieces, it is also true that it carries with it more danger. If the student approaches it the wrong way, it can turn into a waste of time or a source of discouragement, or, worse, a framework for developing bad technical habits. There is nothing intrinsic to a longer or harder piece that will make these pitfalls actually manifest themselves, but they can do so if the piece is not approached the right way. The teacher’s job is to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The more that a teacher knows about the strengths, weaknesses, and habits of the student, the better he or she can accomplish this.
As a matter of hour-by-hour practicing, week-by-week learning, or the overall pedagogic usefulness of any number of months or years of study, the act of working on short easy pieces is identical to the act of working on a longer or more difficult piece. A long, difficult piece is several shorter, easier pieces. It is up to the student to be willing to treat it that way and up to the teacher to use all of his or her teaching expertise to show the student how to do so.
The technique for doing this is conceptually simple. The long piece must be broken into shorter bits, and those bits then must be made easier by practicing them slowly, by separating hands and feet as much as necessary, and by doing enough analysis to render the piece well known to the student. For example—an extreme example—if a student who might naturally be working on a few Orgelbüchlein pieces or short preludes and fugues wants to learn the Bach F-major Toccata and Fugue, that piece can be broken up into many pieces, none of which is (initially) any harder than, say, Ich ruf zu dir. The first of these might be the right hand part of the opening canon. The next might be the left hand part from the same section, noticing very explicitly the relationship between this line and the right hand part. The third “piece” might be any dozen measures of the pedal part from the middle of the toccata section. (I say that to make the point that a long piece that is being learned patiently does not have to be worked on in order from beginning to end.) The next might be, say, the alto voice of the fugue for the first two pages, and so on.
In this way, a long difficult piece can be built up, and it is the key to avoiding the “throwing someone in 10 feet of water” problem. Of course, this is really just everyday good practicing, but applied very seriously. In fact, the discipline of working on an extremely challenging piece can help to teach overall good practice habits. The easier the piece, the more tempting it is just to play it over any number of times in a row until it gets more or less learned. If it is obvious that this casual approach will not work with a given piece, then the student—who in this scenario is highly motivated to play the piece: after all, it was chosen specifically and only because the student really wanted to work on it—will be highly motivated to practice in a way that does work.
I will leave the subject of repertoire for a while after this month, though happy to answer further questions individually by e-mail. Sometime in the future I will write a fairly long series of columns going step by step, in considerable detail, through the process of learning a specific piece. As part of that series I will address particular individual practice strategies for students with different levels of experience. I welcome suggestions for what piece I should use for that project, though of course I will not be able to use them all.
