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On Teaching

May 14, 2008
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Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached at .@mail.com>

Registration and teaching—Part IV
In this column—the last on registration for now—I will offer suggestions for ways in which teachers can help students choose sounds for particular pieces. This is, of course, the practical essence of registration. The main point of the systematic approach to understanding organ stops and becoming familiar with organ sounds that was outlined in the last three columns is to enable students to feel confident choosing sounds for pieces and to end up choosing sounds that they will be happy with. The discussion in this column assumes that the student has done some of the analysis, the thinking, and the listening practice described in the last three columns. This student will have a good understanding of what stops are likely to combine well with one another, and will also be open-minded about trying combinations that are unconventional and that might or might not work. He or she will also be in the habit of listening to sounds carefully, and will expect to have a reaction to sounds—an aesthetic and/or emotional reaction—and to give importance and respect to that reaction. A significant part of the process of choosing appropriate sounds for pieces consists of noting one’s aesthetic or emotional reactions to those pieces and allowing those reactions to suggest sounds that evoke similar, compatible, or complementary reactions. This will be the focus of this column. Another part of the process consists of learning about outside factors that might influence registration. The most important of these are any registration instructions that a composer may have given, along with any information about organs or types of organs that a composer knew. I will make a few comments about this below, but it will receive much more attention in future columns devoted to the (often vexing) subject of authenticity.
There are two principles that serve as a foundation for my thinking about the teaching of this phase of the art of registration. The first of these is that no registration is “right” or “wrong.” Rather, any registration has a whole host of things that can be said about it that are descriptive rather than judgmental. Some of these might be simple descriptions of the sounds, such as “loud,” “soft,” “bright,” “mellow,” “pungent,” “hollow,” “beautiful,” etc. Some might be more situational or practical, like: “louder than the previous piece,” or “so muddy that you can’t hear the inner voices,” or “not to our pastor’s taste.” Some might be musicological or historical, like: “not what the composer had in mind,” or “uncannily like the mid-17th-century plenum.” Any of these descriptions might be important to note, and might serve as a basis for choosing or rejecting a registration. However, none of them is the same as “good” or “bad.” Most of us (I emphatically do include myself in this!) have an instinct to call a registration “bad” or “wrong” when what we mean is that it is “not what I am used to” or “not what I would do myself” or, more simply, that “I do not like it.” It is of course absolutely fine and good—and inevitable—for each of us to have developed such tastes and preferences, especially if we recognize them as such. However, if we pass them on to our students as “right” and “wrong,” with the weight of our authority behind them, we are in great danger of limiting and constraining our students rather than liberating and empowering them. We are also in danger of making registration—which has the capacity to be tremendous out-and-out fun—into a source of anxiety: yet another opportunity to get something wrong, in a world that has too many such opportunities.
(Here’s an anecdote about the weight of authority. Many years ago, when I was still a student, I had a friendly but heartfelt argument with a fellow organ aficionado about what was the “right” registration for the long middle section of one of the Bach organ fugues. We both had all sorts of musical, musicological, analytical, even philosophical reasons to give in favor of our preferred sound. We were each convinced that the other’s sound was wrong. Of course it turned out that we were each simply advocating a sound just like the one used in the recording of the piece that each of us happened to have heard first and gotten used to!)
The second principle is this: that the primary purpose of a student’s actions in choosing a registration for a piece is not the attainment of a registration that the teacher likes, or that any other listener would like, or that the composer would have liked, or even that the student likes. The actual registration is not the goal at this stage. Rather the goal is for the process to move the student along towards being more comfortable, confident, and skillful at choosing registrations for pieces. Therefore the teacher, in guiding the student in this process, should be very hesitant about actually giving specific registrations. It is easy for a student to use the stops that a teacher has pulled out, and in so doing to play a piece with a registration that the teacher likes and that some other listeners will also like. It is unlikely that this kind of transaction will teach the student very much. (The same criticism also applies to a student’s using registrations that are found in a printed edition.) If, however, a student goes through a process of listening to stops, listening to combinations, and thinking about the aesthetic of a piece and about possible sounds, the student will always learn a great deal. This is true even if no listener likes the registrations that are found along the way. If he or she creates registrations that listeners do like, the student will also learn a great deal, all the more so if such a registration is significantly different from others that the student may have heard or heard about.
There is one caveat that applies to this second principle. There are times when someone who is still a student, and for whom the work of registration should indeed be mostly about learning and trying things, does indeed—for some practical reason—have to devise a registration that will be acceptable in a particular circumstance. This need will be more compelling the more the circumstance is extra-musical. For example, in a church service, or a funeral or wedding, the student has to use sounds that will enhance rather than disrupt anything that is being accompanied. Also, in these settings, a student might have to respect certain traditions or needs as to the role of music in the service, for example having to do with dynamic levels during communion. A teacher might have to step in and suggest solutions that fit these circumstances, if the student is not yet ready to come up with appropriate registrations directly. A somewhat more cynical practical reason might be this: that the student needs to prepare an audition, and the teacher knows how to help the student match the known tastes of those who will be judging the audition. These practical circumstances should be recognized as limited exceptions to the general principle that it is a better learning experience for students to work on coming up with their own sounds, and then to try those sounds out in performance and see how effective they are.
In an earlier column I mentioned “what I consider to be the soundest and most artistically thorough approach [to choosing stops for a piece]: simply trying the piece out on every possible sound, listening carefully and with attention, and deciding which sound you like best.” This is possible on the harpsichord, but almost never, just as a practical matter, on the organ. If the goal is to allow and encourage students to come as close as possible to this open and un-predetermined approach, the teacher can suggest something like the following procedure:
(This is essentially for pieces that do not have registration suggestions that come directly from the composer, and has to be modified for those that do.)
1) Try, while learning a new piece, either to stay away from recordings and other performances of the piece, or to listen to several, three at least.
2) During the earliest stages of learning a piece, begin to form a sense of what it seems like in mood or feeling, in a very basic way: calm, excited, jaunty, disturbing, anxious, jubilant, peaceful, “in your face,” mellow, etc. (As always with adjectives that describe a piece of music, these are probably best used within the mind of one person to help that person consolidate thoughts about the piece. Different people use adjectives so differently that they can easily be misleading in conveying anything in the aesthetic realm from one person to another.) Do not worry about whether you can prove these feelings or reactions to be correct. (You cannot.) Also, don’t be surprised if you later change them. If you honestly can’t come up with any such feelings about the piece at this stage, choose a concept for the piece at random. (This will probably work out just as well in the end for your performance of the work itself, and certainly will serve just as well as a learning experience.)
3) Remembering the fruits of all of your prior exploration of organ stops and combinations for their own sake, choose a sound that seems to match the mood or feeling that you are discerning in the piece—that is, concoct such a sound: it is not necessary or desirable to remember a specific sound from before—and play the piece with that sound.
4) Find another such sound. That is, a sound that also fits your basic sense about the mood or feeling, but that is easily distinguishable from the first sound. (An easy-to-describe example of this might be, in a quiet and gentle piece, first an 8? Gedeckt alone, then an 8? Dulciana alone; or in a loud, forthright piece, first a principal chorus-based combination, then a combination based on strong reeds; or for a pungent but quiet sound, first the quietest available reed, then a Quintadena.) Play the piece a few times with this second sound.
5) Go back to the first sound and listen to it with ears that have now been influenced by the second sound. Perhaps introduce a third and fourth sound and go back and forth among all of them. Listen for the differences and similarities. Has this exercise enabled you to refine your sense of what the piece is like? Do you prefer one of the sounds to another? If you initially chose your concept of the piece at random, do you now find that concept convincing? If not, how might you want to modify or replace it? If you chose your concept not at random, do you still find it convincing? If not, in what way has your concept changed? If it has changed, then you should follow the same procedure but with stop combinations that reflect your new concept of the piece.
One of the points of asking a student to go through a procedure like this is to make sure that registration does not happen by habituation, that is, that a student does not just come upon a registration more or less at random and then get used to it, the way my friend and I each got used to the registration that we had heard on the Bach fugue recordings, as mentioned above. It is fine to discover some registrations at random, but it is important to be systematic about listening to them, and to be committed to trying others as well.
Although it seems that choosing stops would be easier when the composer has provided a registration, this is often not true. Assuming that we accept the notion that it is right to play a piece the way the composer wanted it to be played, then the composer’s registration probably narrows down the choice of plausible sounds. In effect the composer’s registration does the work of step 2) above. However, it is important to remember that the exact stop names given by a composer do not usually correspond perfectly to the stops available on whatever organ the student is using. This is always true unless the student is playing the organ that the composer had in mind or one very much like it indeed. (Again, I will discuss the ramifications of this at great length in future columns about authenticity.) In trying to recreate the effect asked for by a composer, it is best to do something like the following:
1) Glean from the composer’s suggested registration, and of course from the notes of the piece, as much as you can about what the composer thought the piece was like aesthetically and emotionally. (Again, a student who had already spent a fair amount of time trying many different sounds and listening carefully will have a good notion about how to approach this.)
2) Try out registrations that your own sense of organ sound tells you will express that mood or feeling well. As much as possible you should favor, or at least start with, registrations that resemble what the composer has suggested—for example, for a quiet pungent sound, try a quiet reed first if the composer’s registration is a reed or try a Quintadena or string first if the composer’s registration is a Quintadena or string; or for a bright “tinkly” sound try an 8?+ 11?3? first if that’s what the composer suggested, or an 8?+ 2? first if that is. But all the while, listen to the sounds with the same alert ears that you would apply to any sound that you chose yourself. Do not use a sound unless it works: that is, unless the components of the sound blend properly, the various balances are right (between different sounds if there is more than one, among the different regions of the compass of the keyboard, between inner and outer voices, between melody and accompaniment—whatever is relevant), and the emotional/aesthetic impact of the sound strikes you as right for the piece. A sound is not right just because the stop names are right. Stop names are just a beginning wherever they come from, even the composer.
That is all for now. Since the subject of registration is so multifaceted, I have posted on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website <www.pekc.org&gt; an annotated version of this column, with examples drawn from specific pieces, and further discussion.

 

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