On Teaching

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Velocity III

As a brief addendum to the latter part of last month’s column, I must mention that among famous organ pieces, the Widor Toccata is almost preternaturally well designed for the kind of practicing in altered rhythms that I mentioned in that column. Playing those sixteenth-note mordent-and-arpeggio figures first in fast groups of eight notes starting on the beat, then in fast groups of eight notes starting just after each beat, is remarkably effective for learning the piece itself and is also a good test case for my method. It is also undeniably fun to try to get at least a stretch of that piece as fast as you possibly can—and again a good test case for this approach. As with the Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564, which we examined last month, it is not by any means necessary or even good to play the piece as fast as you possibly can. And with the Widor, there is an interesting history about tempo, since the composer changed the metronome markings through different editions, and he recorded it at a slightly different speed—slower than his slower metronome suggestion. 

This piece—or specifically the passages that are in the shape of the opening in the right hand—is also a good one for practicing stringing together smaller very fast gestures: seeing how long you can keep it going at a tempo defined not by what the music requires, but by simply trying to transfer the “fast, light drumming on a table” feeling to patterns on the keyboard. Once you have practiced two or three adjacent half-notes worth of the sixteenth-note pattern, try going through all of that material, again sometimes playing sixteen or twenty-four notes with the beat, sometimes playing the opening note and holding it for an unmeasured time, and then playing the following two or three groups in one gesture as fast as you can, ending on, and holding, the next downbeat. 

Utter predictability

Of course, this is all based on having achieved the utter predictability that is the foundation of being able to play fast. For one-note-at-a-time lines, that comes from a combination of sensible fingering and enough slow practice to get the elemental learning of the patterns to be way beyond just solid. The reason for considering building a potentially fast passage up out of smaller components (specifically as part of the process of getting it fast, or of testing and figuring out how fast it can be) is that the smaller the bit of music, the more promptly utter predictability can be achieved. In practicing a passage for really learning it—rather than as an exercise in moving around notes as quickly as possible—a player can decide to learn a longer stretch of music and move it up to tempo gradually (this is probably the most common method) or to learn very small bits, and get them up to (or beyond tempo) more quickly, and then work on putting them together. 

Achieving lightness

This feeling that we get from the drumming-fingers exercise of being able to move the fingers even more quickly than playing pieces will actually require is based quite crucially on keeping things light. It is easy to experience what happens if this lightness is compromised. Go back to simple drumming, then selectively tighten up various component parts of the physical mechanism that delivers your fingers to the table or chair-arm: shoulders, biceps, wrist, the fingers themselves. Each of these tightenings will have some effect on the ease, speed, and fluency of the drumming. The tightening of the fingers will be the worst, and will probably bring the drumming down below the velocity that you would like to be able to achieve. It will also most likely hurt. (Don’t do too much of it.) 

Playing lightly is always a good idea, always important. However, in trying to play anything that is fast enough that its speed is an issue, lightness is beyond just a good idea: it is a necessity. (Light, for this purpose, means with not too much more force than you need to make the keys go down, and with no tension whatsoever. It is the absence of tension that is the most important. The actual force of the downstroke of each finger is not as significant, as long as it is reasonably light, and as long as nothing in that downstroke predisposes the finger to have trouble coming back up, which is an impediment to velocity. Holding on to the keys after you have played them is to be avoided altogether. Experimenting with using so little force that you are almost not quite depressing the keys is a good idea, just to get the feel of it.)  

My so-called trill exercise (about which I wrote most recently in the December 2013 issue) is really about incorporating lightness and absolute lack of tension into fast playing. The trill in that case stands in for any fast playing, and, of course, as with the patterns that we have been dealing with here, it is fully predictable. (That exercise can also be found online here: http://gavinblack-baroque.com/trills.pdf). It works well to do a session of this exercise, then do something else for a while (practice something else, or get away from the keyboard altogether) and then play short excerpts from whatever passage you are working on playing at a challenging fast tempo, trying to remember and recapture the feeling of the trill exercise.

Tension and playing fast

Here are a couple of useful points to remember about the interaction between tension and fast playing. Physical tension, which physically inhibits speed, can have mental tension as one of its causes. And in turn, of course, nervousness about the ability to play a passage fast enough or to play it well at the appropriate tempo can be a cause of mental tension. This creates a sort of downward spiral or pernicious feedback loop. Part of the point of using the “drumming on a table” model to convince players that absolute velocity is not often the problem is to break this feedback loop. Also, there is a statement that goes like this: “If we want to accomplish something more, we have to exert ourselves more; playing faster is a form of accomplishing more, therefore to play faster we have to exert ourselves more; and exerting ourselves more means pushing harder.” Of course no one is going to spell this out: when you do it is obvious that it doesn’t add up. But it is a surprisingly pervasive underlying assumption, and we can help our students to let go of it by pointing it out.

(Playing very fast can seem like a tightrope act. The most instinctive way to avoid falling when we are afraid of falling is to hang on tight. This hanging on tight physically is, as I said above, fatal to velocity and to ease of playing in general. But hanging on tight while playing must be mental only: focus, concentration, paying attention to the music or to memory, and so on.) 

Transition points

Transition moments, where the hand has to move in some way, rather than just present fingers to the keyboard in one place, are a big part of the challenge when it comes to velocity. If there were no such moments, we could pretty much just transfer the drumming on a table feeling directly to at least any one-line passages. (But music would be much less interesting!) In real music these transition moments happen sometimes because we effectively just run out of fingers in one position: that is, they happen of necessity. Sometimes they happen because although we could encompass a certain set of successive notes in one position, that is not the most comfortable way to do so. But sometimes also they happen because the change in hand position creates an interpretive effect that we want. This latter situation is found in abundance in “early” fingering, that is, certain fingering patterns that were common and characteristic during and before the early eighteenth century. (Any identification of fingering approaches with any time period is really about tendencies, not absolutes.) These patterns involve using smaller chains of fingers to play small groups of notes, and then turning or moving the hand to present the next small group of fingers to the next set of notes. This was probably done to create articulation or to keep the hands in positions that enabled them to control the sensitive action of the prevailing kinds of instruments as minutely as possible, or some combination of these things. In any case, these fingerings routinely deprive the hand of the ability to sit over a group of notes and just drum those notes out. How does this relate to velocity?

Examples 1 and 2

Considering Examples 1 and 2, do these two fingerings for a basic scale fragment have significantly different ceilings to the tempo at which they can be played? Based on experience with the “drumming on a table” model, I would say that most players could execute the first fingering in not much more than half or two-thirds of a second. (That’s a “tempo” of quarter-note equals 700 or more.) The second fingering? I can’t picture anyone playing it that fast. Someone could surprise me, but certainly for most of us it can’t go at that speed. It is not the “drumming on a table” situation, because the transition points are too many and too frequent: every other note. 

Examples 3 and 4

Now considering Example 3, I feel pretty sure that most people could execute this one, including the transition moment going across the bar line, almost as fast as they could execute example 1: not quite, but almost. So in part it seems to be recovering from the transition, or executing multiple transitions in a row that lowers the ceiling on velocity. 

Practicing this sort of early fingering with a view to getting it fast can involve breaking things up into small units, and applying some of the principles of both my trill exercise and the sort of altered-rhythm practicing that we have been looking at. I have given two fingerings (for the right hand) for this pattern in Example 4. The upper one, with the hand remaining in one position, is for comparison. 

Using the lower fingering, try playing only the first note, then, in an untimed manner, only when you feel relaxed and ready, play the next two notes quickly. Prior to actually playing, map out the feeling of the fingering in your mind. There should be a small articulation between the second note and the third note. (There also can be one between the first note and the second note.) It doesn’t matter exactly how large or small these articulations are as long as the feeling is comfortable. The second finger should be released lightly before moving 3 over it. Don’t hold 2 to the point where the whole hand begins to turn upside down. Try doing the same thing starting on the third note and going to the first note of the second measure. Then try adding notes: start on the first note, wait until you feel relaxed and ready, and play four successive notes. 

Try various small units like this. (You can always try the same groups of notes using the upper fingering, to be reminded of the differences in the feeling.) After you have gone over all sorts of smaller groupings like this, try playing the passage itself as lightly and quickly as you can. (It can repeat indefinitely. Just do it several times, and don’t keep going if it feels stiff.)

Another aspect of the relationship between this sort of fingering and velocity turns things around. If you want an articulation at a certain point, then if you program that articulation into the fingering—using fingers that create a transition moment that makes a space or breath—then that articulation will automatically be there at any tempo. In Example 3 with the given fingering, you will create a small articulation at the bar line. That articulation is not dependent on anything that you do other than executing the fingering. It will be there, proportionate to the tempo, at any tempo. If you change the fingering to 5-4-3-2-1, and still want that articulation (between 2 and 1) then you have to remember to do it on purpose, consciously lifting 2 early by just the right amount. Above a certain speed it becomes very hard; above another, higher tempo, it actually becomes quite impossible. 

In the course of working out these last couple of columns, I have realized that it would be a mistake to try to include a discussion of velocity in more complicated textures here. That would constitute giving it short shrift. Therefore, I will devote a fourth column to that, next month. In addition to talking about two-voice and multiple-voice textures and chords, and a bit about getting comfortable playing fast in both hands together, I will return to some of the questions from the beginning of the first column in this series and talk a bit about the connections between gaining greater ability to play with great velocity and aspects of interpretation and effective performance.

Velocity I

This month and next I am writing about the quest to play fast: fast enough, faster than before, faster than the next person, fast and secure, fast and yet clear. This important thread runs through all aspects of learning to play music. It can also touch upon all sorts of insecurities and sensitive spots. Can I play fast enough? Will my soloist or the conductor insist on a tempo that is too fast for me—either one that feels wrong musically or one that I just plain can’t do? If I don’t play at least something—anything—fast, will listeners assume that I am not really in command of what I am doing?

No one’s self-esteem as a musician is ever undermined by the inability to play slowly enough. (Well, it rarely is. Perhaps this should happen more. Playing slowly effectively isn’t necessarily particularly easy.) But many of us worry whether we can play fast enough, either for what we want to do musically or for what we think listeners will expect of us. We also worry that if we choose a slower tempo for genuine musical/expressive reasons, people will assume we just can’t play it faster. We rarely worry that our listeners will assume that we can’t play more slowly.

Long ago I heard it recounted that Rachmaninoff had said that Alfred Cortot always decided that the really hard bits had to be played “expressively,” that is, slowed down. This was of course meant to be a withering criticism of Cortot: not only claiming that his keyboard facility was faulty when it came to velocity, but also claiming that his much-admired expressive playing was actually musically arbitrary, and just a way of covering up lack of skill. I have reacted to this by saying that often the hard bits are hard because they are musically involved and complicated, and maybe should be slowed down, for the listener’s sake as much as for the players. But not-fast-enough seems to open us to criticisms of this sort, and we often worry about it.

Fortunately this (like most things) can also be a source of humor. I recall a moment a long time ago when I was in the company of a fine young musician who was about to play in a youth orchestra concert. An older friend who was there clapped him on the back with a hearty “Play louder and faster than everyone else!”

As far as I can tell, conductors are not likely to be subjected to this sort of criticism if they are inclined to slow tempos. The physical gestures of conducting relate to the music and its speed in a different way. Also, keyboard continuo playing usually becomes actually easier as tempo goes up—assuming that the continuo part is being improvised by the player, or at least has been written by the player with the ultimate tempo in mind. This is because in general, the faster the tempo, the fewer notes or chords are needed in the continuo realization. (If the bass line itself is too difficult at a fast tempo, that can reverse this effect.)

Tempo and fingering

My decision to write about this subject comes specifically from a reader’s suggestion, in a recent e-mail, that a “discussion of fingerings that will work at faster tempos would probably be interesting.” This indeed seems to me to be a good point of entry into the topic. Is the quest to feel comfortable up-to-tempo—especially at fast tempos—best addressed at the point of choosing fingerings (and pedalings—though I am focusing mostly on manual playing here) or best addressed by process—that is, practicing, and specifically the pacing of work on tempo within practicing? The answer is “both.” But how exactly, and in what sort of proportions? Next month I will look at some specific passages and different fingerings, to try to address this aspect of the question directly.

There are different levels and types of playing “fast.” This is obvious, but worth noting. The act of getting notes right—and its important adjunct, which is having it feel comfortable or even easy—is almost always more likely the more slowly a passage is being played. That’s the fundamental fact of learning pieces: it’s why we start practicing passages slowly and then speed them up. For many pieces, speeding up will not take things past a comfortable level of velocity. For these pieces, that process will always work and is not really within the sphere of this discussion. If, however, the goal is to play a piece at a tempo that seems to tax what the player can do with velocity, then there can be different, perhaps more complicated issues. 

The question is how much continuity there is across these two areas. Is the process that we use to make a “normal” piece comfortable and reliable what we should also use to get something very fast—fast enough that the velocity alone makes it a challenge? How are these two processes related? The point of any normal systematic practice is to create predictability: that is, to make us feel certain, as we play the piece, that we know what is coming up. In “normal” situations, this predictability comes from a blend of things—so-called “muscle memory,” conscious familiarity with what is coming up in the piece (whether we are using notated music or not), and the ability to read ahead and combine memory with newly reviewed information. Fingerings and pedalings that have some logic to them or are simple or that use patterns of some sort can aid in this process.

Tempo and fingering

The key to playing fast is predictability. It is natural to believe that if we have trouble playing fast, it is because we just can’t quite move that fast. However, this is rarely the case. Most organ (and harpsichord) music doesn’t tax the physical ability of any player to move quickly. However, above a certain speed—which of course varies from person to person—the conscious elements of “knowing what’s coming next” simply can’t come into play: there isn’t time. The sources of rock-solid predictability that are below the level of conscious thought become more important.

Let’s take this one step at a time. How fast can you move your fingers? The most direct way to explore this is to drum your fingers on the table, the arm of your chair, or wherever is comfortable. That is, “play” five “notes”—away from any instrument—with the fingering 5-4-3-2-1. No beat, no timing: just drum those fingers as quickly and lightly as you can. Make sure that your arm is comfortable and that your wrist and fingers are not turned too much to either side. It is OK—even a good idea—to have your arm resting on whatever surface you are using. 

How fast do your fingers go in this exercise? You don’t need to come up with a number—just a sense of whether the velocity is greater than you are likely to need in playing music. It almost certainly is. See whether there is an appreciable difference between the two hands, either in how this feels overall or how fast you are able to move. There might be, but if one of them is slower, it is also probably still above the threshold of how fast you will ever need to move when playing.

Now try it the other way around: 1-2-3-4-5. This is no longer intuitive drumming on a table. It can feel a bit awkward, and the ceiling on velocity might be just a touch lower, but still comfortably above any real-life musical speed needs. It feels awkward in part because the thumb is more comfortable as a point of arrival than as a starting point: releasing the thumb almost infinitely quickly to go on to 2 is tricky. How does it feel if you just do four notes: 2-3-4-5? With just non-thumb notes, is the difference in feel between one direction or the other less noticeable? How about the difference between the two hands?

(5-4-3-2-1 drumming is basically the same gesture as closing your fist. However, 1-2-3-4-5 does not correspond to any naturally shaped hand gesture.)

Now try the same thing at a keyboard, (ideally an organ or harpsichord), so that you won’t be distracted by thoughts of dynamics. (If you are at a piano, play near the very top of the keyboard where the touch is lighter.) 

(Or whatever notes you want.)

See if you can let the fact that you are actually playing, not just drumming on a surface, not change the feel of what you are doing. Go through the same sequence of directions and hands. Predictability is at 100% through all of these slightly different ways of performing this exercise, but physical naturalness varies a bit. 

One next step in this exploration is to try up and down, or vice versa. That is, play (on the table at first) 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5. Then do the same, but keep it going for a while, several times back and forth. Then try starting on the thumb: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-3, etc. Is it easier to do this ongoing repeated table-drumming starting on 5 or starting on 1? After the first pass through all of the fingers, they resolve into the same thing, except for perhaps an underlying sense of where the strong beats are—even though in the absence of a musical context there aren’t exactly beats. (For me personally doing this, taking only one pass at the notes, 5-4-3-2-1 is easier, quicker, and more natural than 1-2-3-4-5; the repeated drumming seems easier and faster when I start on 1 rather than on 5. This difference is more pronounced in my right hand than the left. But, again, the fundamental point is that as long as it is utterly predictable, the possible velocity of any of these patterns is greater than the demands of repertoire.)

Another thing to try in exploring predictability and comfort is using the same five fingers, each playing once, but changing the order. You should decide clearly on an order before trying to play and then do so as quickly and lightly as possible. This is meant to be the opposite of improvisation: do not take yourself by surprise. So try, say 1-5-4-2-3, or 2-4-5-1-3—or anything. But again, know before you trigger the five notes exactly what you want them to be. Try this both drumming on a table and poised over five adjacent notes on a keyboard. Try to let those two feel as similar to each other as possible.

As you play around with this, you will probably notice that one time or another through a non-adjacent finger pattern of this sort you will feel a tiny hesitation or notice that the overall speed is less than you thought it would be. If this happens, try to recognize the feeling of whatever it is that is introducing that hesitation. It is probably a split-second of uncertainty about what is supposed to come next. Go back to straight (5-4-3-2-1) drumming for a time or two, then make double-sure of what you want your non-adjacent pattern to be. (Perhaps you will notice a hierarchy of non-adjacent finger patterns as to how easy it is to make them as predictable as scalewise patterns. For me, 5-1-4-2-3 is not appreciably different in feel from 5-4-3-2-1, but I need to think and prepare a bit more to make 2-1-5-3-4, for example, feel that predictable.)  

Another useful variation is to plan and then play non-adjacent note patterns with adjacent fingers, for example:

(or any note pattern that you like).

You can take all of this through the stages described above: each hand, both directions, back and forth once, back and forth repeatedly. Just never do anything that you haven’t mapped out in advance; use predictability to make very high-velocity playing function easily.

So far, predictability has been achieved—and physical ease of movement preserved at the same time—by using patterns in which the hand maintains the same five-finger position throughout. A further step is simple gestures that involve moving the hand. Think of your favorite (for this purpose, easiest) such gesture. For a lot of us that is a scale with the traditional modern fingering: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5 in one direction and 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 in the other. Try playing this—just in one direction for now—with exactly the same feeling that you used for the five-note exercises. Know for certain in advance what you are planning to do and execute it as one very fast unmeasured gesture. 

There are intermediate practice techniques that you can use to prepare for this—for example, drumming on the table with 5-4-3-2-1-3 without changing the position of 3, or drumming 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5, again without changing the position of the fingers on the table. Then 5-4-3-2-1-3, moving 3 over 1 for the last “note.” You can play around with this and invent new permutations, as long as the predictability, quickness, and lightness remain. ν

To be continued . . .

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. Gavin Black’s website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Velocity IV

My approach to helping someone to play fast has been rooted in ways of discovering that the fingers of each hand separately can move very fast when playing one line or voice—one note at a time. There are two parts to this. One is discovering that our fingers can move as fast as the music requires—and thus the limitations on velocity are mental rather than physical. Another is exploring ways of knowing what’s coming up in a passage so that we don’t stumble or hesitate because of uncertainty. This permits us to turn the potential to move our fingers fast enough, or faster, into a reality in performance. 

There are several parallel next steps. One is achieving reliable velocity in one hand when that hand is playing more than one voice. There are two meaningfully different subcategories of this: a hand playing two or more contrapuntal lines, and a hand playing chords. (These can shade over into each other.) Another is achieving appropriate velocity with the two hands together. This can also be subdivided: each hand playing one voice, one hand playing a line and the other hand chords, each hand playing multiple-note texture, and so on. 

Fingering and relaxation

It is easier to achieve the physical and mental relaxation and focus that are necessary for velocity when you are only doing one thing. If a hand is only playing one note at a time, it is trivially easy for the hand to relax—playing one note at a time can’t require the hand to be in an awkward position, it can’t force tension-prone fingerings, and, in principle, it permits any finger that is not actually depressing a note to relax fully. (Psychologically that can be more easily said than done.) Playing more than one note at a time in a hand doesn’t satisfy any of the above, and it gives us more to think about. So fingering planning is both more constrained (the more notes you must play at once, the fewer different ways there are to deploy the fingers over those notes) and trickier in its relation to the comfort necessary to move quickly. And the need for preparation is even greater. 

The Gigue from Bach’s D minor English Suite is almost legendarily difficult. It is meant to be at least fairly fast in performance. It has a number of moments in which one hand keeps up a sustained trill while also playing other notes. Thus it is an interesting test case here. Example 1 shows this sort of writing.

There is a lot more like this in the movement, but this particular bit is best as a velocity exercise, since there is absolutely no way to isolate the trill in one hand. It is possible to play it in either hand (though significantly harder in the right). This can work as an exercise for the right hand, the left, and then for both together.

Let’s start with the trill into the left hand. Most people would play it that way, since the other material in the left hand is less complex than that in the right hand. (It is certainly how I would play it, but we are again using this passage as an exercise, and thus sort of exploiting it. We will also consider how it works with the trill in the right hand. Just as with the passage from the Toccata in C Major, BWV 564, which we looked at earlier in this series, our shameless exploitation of the passage as an example of unbridled velocity does not imply anything about a good tempo for performance of the piece.)

As Example 2 shows, the notes of the trill can be thought of for this purpose as thirty-second notes, and the trill fingering will almost certainly have to be 1/2. The other (bass) notes can be played with a selection of 3, 4, 5 based on the player’s particular hands, habits, and preferences. (Watch out for a fingering that cocks the wrist outward more than necessary. Avoiding this will probably be easier the more you use 4 and 5 rather than 3.) Once you have decided on fingering, this is the practice protocol for the present purpose:

1) Play middle C and the first seven notes of the trill. That is, get to the moment when you would play the G#, but don’t play that note. 

2) Repeat this, getting it ever faster. Try to feel the trill notes the same way that you did the single-voice velocity exercises from earlier—that is, keep them light, with the hand not bearing into the keys, but rather feeling like it is floating upward a bit. Try not to let playing and releasing the middle C affect you. Notice it just enough to make sure that when you release the note (more or less as you release the fourth note or play the fifth note of the trill) you don’t let that release gesture put any tension into the hand. 

3) After you have done this enough that it feels natural and is at a tempo that sounds and feels very fast, add the G#. Again, the point is not to let the addition of this note change the feeling of anything. Play it, but try not to notice that you are playing it. Keeping the release of the C light is the prerequisite for being able to play the G# lightly. 

4) When this is comfortable, add the next few trill notes, without playing the A, regardless of whether you are adding enough trill notes that you have in theory reached the moment for that note. 

The next step is to do the same thing starting elsewhere: on the second beat, where the prevailing notes are G# and F—going through the moment where the A is played, to the moment where the bass note is a B-natural—or beginning at the A and F, and going just over the barline. After you have done this with each segment, the next step is to string it together. First, remind yourself of the feeling of just the initial segment, then starting at the beginning and going through, say, a half-measure, then starting at the beginning and going through the whole measure. The point is to be doing this at a very fast tempo. As you cross each of the spots where you began drilling new segments, make sure to keep the feeling of relaxation going: use your memory of starting at that point to renew that feeling. 

Learning, practicing, 

and lightness

This process is really three things at once: a way of learning this passage; a template for practicing other fast passages with more than one thing going on in a hand; and a way to focus on the feeling of lightness, preparation, and keeping going. In time—that is, after practicing a number of passages this way—the third of these will come to predominate. It will become possible to recapture that feeling without going through a process of this sort or in this amount of detail. 

This is all akin to regular, everyday practicing, in which we break things into small units and add complexity as simpler things become solid. The main difference is that in regular practicing, we start very slowly and increase tempo gradually. It is important never to get ahead of a tempo that feels comfortable. Here, while we don’t want to use a practice tempo that makes things fall apart, we are eager to live in the region of high velocity as promptly and as much as possible. We learn to move our fingers very fast over the notes by—initially and for as long as necessary—keeping the segments that we are playing very short. This is an important difference in emphasis in the structure of practicing.

To use this Bach passage as an exercise for playing two voices together in the right hand at high speed, the procedure would be the same: use the trill notes as an anchor and add notes from the upper voice gradually. The trill will again probably be best played with fingers 1 and 2, and the upper notes probably mostly with 4 and 5: perhaps 5-4-5-5-4-5, etc. It might be a more useful exercise to double the number of trill notes in relation to the sixteenth notes of the upper voice (i.e., make them sixty-fourth notes). The first step is to play the A and the F together and keep the trill notes going without adding any more of the notes from the upper voice. The next step is to start this way, but add the second note of the upper voice—the G#—and so on, following the template that we used above for the left hand. Progress through this passage will be slower than it was for the left-hand version, because there are more notes.

It is equally interesting to use the passage as an exercise in working both hands together up to as fast a speed as you can. Start by going through the process described above for the lower two voices in the left hand. Then go over the upper voice by itself as a right-hand part. Then go back to the beginning and play the passage in extremely short bursts: as short as it takes to enable you to do it fast. This might be a dotted-eighth-note’s worth at a time, or less. The technique of holding a note as if there is a fermata while you remind yourself of the feeling of playing the next note or two, and then playing only that next little bit extremely fast, can work very well in this case.

Example 3 is a contrapuntal passage from Brahms’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. The student can combine various techniques. In the first quoted measure in the right hand, after working out fingering, one could play the second voice (B-A-G#-rest-F#) a few times, progressively faster, then add the upper voice one note at a time. Or play the two voices on the downbeat (E and B) holding those notes indefinitely long. Then, only when ready, play the second and third beats—both voices together—as fast as possible, not going past the third beat. Then start on the second beat, stopping on the D# in the upper voice. In something like the third quoted measure—with its more consistently active voices—the player can practice each voice separately, in the normal manner, but as a short enough sample that it can get quite fast quite efficiently. Practice each voice—with the intended fingering, in the ways that I outlined for individual voices in the last few columns—until it can go very fast. Then put the two voices together in chunks of perhaps three eight-notes-worth at a time. The principles are always the same: use an amount of planning that makes everything utterly predictable, focus on short bits (which makes the predictability easier to achieve in the first place and to maintain), and keep everything light and relaxed.

In a chordal passage, the notion of practicing voices separately doesn’t apply. In keeping with the principle of simplifying, if we aren’t going to practice separately notes that end up being played together, then it is even more important to practice in small increments. Example 4 is an excerpt from near the end of Scherzo, Sortie in D Major by Lefébure-Wely.

The right-hand part provides a good opportunity to practice chords. The fingering will probably fall into place quite naturally: a lot of 5-3-1, 5-2-1, 4-2-1, and so on, depending on one’s hand shape. Once fingering has been worked out, playing and holding a chord, then playing the next two chords as quickly as possible, will probably be the most fruitful technique. The left-hand part is a typical opportunity to practice playing octaves fast, using this same technique. 

What, in the end, is the point of this discussion of velocity? In using a passage from the repertoire as an exercise here, I have said that in doing so I am misrepresenting that passage—that we are exploiting it or latching onto it as parasites. This happens because no one can say whether a given (fast) passage is or isn’t meant to be played at the outer limits of a player’s ability to play fast. In order to practice playing as fast as we possibly can, we subject passages of music to being played (perhaps) faster than we really think they should go. (Even if a passage will be a candidate for actually being played that fast, we don’t know that until we have worked on getting it that fast.) The overriding purpose of doing this—and especially in its application to our teaching, and therefore to the learning process of our students—is to drive home through example the basic message: command of velocity is about preparation. With rare exceptions, limits on velocity are not inherent or physical. I actually think it is better to practice, as exercises for this purpose, pieces or passages that you know are not going to go that fast. That separates the work on velocity from a host of other normal, musical considerations. Then when you want to work on a passage that does indeed visit the outer reaches of how fast you ever want to play, you will know the techniques for getting it to be solid and comfortable at that sort of speed.

The old-fashioned and very sound idea that you must prepare your pieces beyond 100% (I first heard it in connection with Jascha Heifetz, a quintessential virtuoso performer) for them to be 100% in performance applies here. Certainly correct preparation is not just about speed—it is perhaps more importantly about the inner understanding of everything that you hope to bring to the music interpretively, rhetorically, expressively. But since it is harder to execute a piece faster than slower, it is always prudent to know that you could indeed play your pieces faster than you intend to. This should ideally lead to relaxation in performance—a relaxation born out of lack of fear.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. See his blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method XI

I ended last month’s column with the suggestion that experienced keyboard players who are using this book to begin their exploration of organ playing could now feel ready to bring to the organ any reasonably simple two-voice piece that they have already learned on another keyboard instrument. My experience suggests that this is a good idea. It can be tricky to transfer a piece from one instrument to another (very different) instrument, and there are pitfalls to watch out for, having to do with touch, sound, and idiomatic performance. Any student should also begin quite promptly to learn new pieces from scratch. However, already knowing the notes of at least a piece or two can provide added ease. When I am working with such a student, I always suggest a mix: initially a few pieces that are already under the student’s fingers, very soon a new piece or two, and a transition to mostly new pieces. 

In any case, this next excerpt is intended to ground a student with little or no keyboard experience in the practicing of what will of necessity be new pieces at the organ. It provides some general guidelines, and takes the student through the process of beginning to work on a short two-voice piece: one that is not trivially easy (and therefore that adds significantly to what the short exercises from the last few columns have provided) but that is also fairly straightforward: no tricks, nothing too unusual. It is also a piece in which the left-hand part is the more complex of the two voices.

If you have come to the organ without having played a keyboard instrument previously, and have gone over all of the above enough to feel comfortable with it, then you can now also start on simple pieces in two voices—one line of music per hand. These will not, of course, be pieces that you have played before. The repertoire is full of such pieces (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions are probably the best known) and they are appropriate to work on, if you are willing to be careful and systematic about it, and to keep practice tempos slow. A short piece by Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) from his collection Tabulatura Nova Part III of 1624 will serve as an example of how to work on such a piece at this stage in your learning process (Example 1).

Some important guidelines

1) At the beginning, work on each hand separately. In fact, at this stage—and indeed in many circumstances throughout your life as an organist—practice each hand separately until it is fully learned and comfortable before putting the hands together. (You will learn over time when this is, and isn’t, necessary or a good idea for you.)

2) Work in small chunks: maybe a measure or two at a time. It is always a good idea to practice in small enough increments so that when you return to the beginning of what you are practicing, you remember it well: that is, the repetition has a chance to impress itself on your subconscious memory. 

3) Work out fingering carefully. Your approach to fingering will evolve with experience. At this point you are using the piece and the fingering to help you become comfortable with the act of putting the two hands together. Later you will use what you have learned about fingering and practicing to give pieces the musical shape that you want.

4) Always practice slowly enough. This means that what you are playing should both be accurate and feel comfortable. If you hear yourself playing the right notes but feel yourself having to scramble to do so, you are playing too fast. There is no such thing, for purposes of effective practicing, as playing too slowly.

5) Keep your eyes on the music, not on your hands. Even when, in the course of practicing short simple lines, you find that you remember those lines well enough that you don’t need to look at the music, do not fall into the habit of watching your hands. It is OK to take an occasional glance, but that is all. Over-dependence on looking at the hands slows down the progress of becoming comfortable as a keyboard player.

6) And, of course, look the piece over in general before taking it apart and working. Notice rhythms, patterns, exceptions to patterns, wide intervals, repeated notes, compass, and so on.

(I am addressing these suggestions to those who are essentially new to keyboard playing, but any player new to the organ should read and consider them, especially when approaching new pieces.)

Practicing and fingering

In this piece, the left hand part is more active than the right hand. The right hand plays 28 notes, the left hand nearly five times that many. Thus you should probably expect to practice the left hand significantly more than the right hand. This piece also contains many repeated notes—mostly in half notes in the right hand, as in measure 3, for example, and mostly in eighth notes in the left hand, as in measures 3 and 4, and elsewhere. The compass of the right-hand part is one note under an octave; that of the left-hand part is an octave and a fourth. There is a spot in measure five where the two hands coincide on the same note, and a spot in measure nine where the left hand succeeds to the note that the right hand has just been holding. (These spots will feel different depending on whether you are playing the piece on one manual or on two.) 

The right-hand fingering can be worked out using the repeated notes as an anchor—bearing in mind what I have already mentioned about changing fingers on repeated notes. For example, if you play the first of the seven consecutive A’s starting in measure two with the second finger, and then alternate that with the third finger, the rest of the passage falls into place nicely. (This results in the first fourteen notes of the right-hand part fingered as: 2-4-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-4-3-2.) You should try a few different fingering possibilities, guided for the time being mainly by comfort and logistics.

The left hand is more complicated. You will have to spend more time working out fingerings, and you may want to change some of what you first work out as you practice it. This is, of course, normal and fine. If you have been practicing a passage with one fingering but want to change that fingering, it is necessary to back up and practice more slowly, focusing specifically on the notes where you have changed the fingering, and just a few notes before and after. Do not let fingering “change itself” at random as you practice. (To be honest, you will certainly do this later on when you have become more adept at playing and when the process of choosing fingering has become more ingrained and intuitive. But it is best not to let it happen for now.)

Take a look at the first four notes of the left hand. What fingers most naturally would play those notes? 4-3-2-4? 5-4-3-5? 3-2-1-3? Do these feel equally easy and comfortable? Does one fingering seem to create a more comfortable hand position than the others? Does one make it seem easier to go on to the next note than the others do? Or does one make it harder, while the other two seem about the same? What finger can most easily reach the middle D on the third beat of this measure? Is there more than one choice that might make sense? What about coming down from that D? 

Examples 2 and 3 are two fingering possibilities for the first part of this left-hand line. Can you devise another possibility that does not start on 4? Or that does not use 1 to play the fifth note of the line? Or that uses 1 for the first note of the second measure? Spend some time playing around with this. Try a number of fingerings a few times each. Don’t try to practice and learn each one—that comes when you have chosen one.

Later on in this left-hand part is a passage in which repeated notes occur not as groups of notes (as they do in mm. 3 and 4) but as part of moving lines. This creates interesting fingering choices, since every time that you change fingers from the first to the second note of a repeated-note pair you have a chance to reposition the hand. One possible fingering is shown in Example 4—you should try to find others.

Once you have thought about and explored the fingering of these passages and of the rest of the left-hand part, zero in on a small chunk of that line, say the first measure and a half, choose the fingering that you will learn, and begin to practice it. Practicing means repetition of the same thing done the same way, slowly and carefully, and many times in a row. As you break up a line such as this into sections for practicing and learning, bear in mind two important things: first, the increments must be small enough for the repetition to be meaningful; second, the increments should overlap or dovetail into one another, at least a little bit. The second of these is necessary to prevent the first of them from creating fragmentation or moments of insecurity in the passage. 

So, for example, if you start by practicing this left-hand part from the beginning through the middle beat of the second measure (middle D, quarter-note), then it is a good idea to begin your second increment for practicing with that same middle beat, or perhaps either two or four notes before that. The principle is that practice sections should overlap: the details should be worked out in each case in such a way that it feels natural. The exact extent of the overlap doesn’t matter. (This applies, by the way, equally to page turns. When you are working on a piece that requires a page turn, you must make sure that you do not always interrupt your practicing at the same spot. Either through brief bits of memorization or through the use of photocopying or something similar, you must practice across the page turn in a way that dovetails, so as not to create a moment of discontinuity.)

Start your practicing of any left-hand passage very slowly, so that it feels easy. Do not increase the tempo until 1) you have played the passage at least three times at the existing tempo and 2) the passage feels easy and natural at that tempo. Increase tempo a little bit at a time.

Once you have chosen fingering and practiced the same measure (or measure and a half) of each hand—remembering in this case that the left hand will require more attention and more repetition, and to practice each hand enough that it is really learned—then you are ready to put the two hands together. You will probably have to back the tempo up a bit from each hand’s separate tempo in the course of the individual practicing. (It is all right for the two hands to have reached different tempos in separate practicing, as long as you now slow things down to accommodate the extra complexity of putting both hands together.) The purpose of this exercise is to help you to become increasingly comfortable putting the two hands together. There is nothing to be gained by speed; there is a lot to be gained by good focus. 

In starting to put the hands together in a passage, make sure that you have reminded yourself in advance of the note on which each hand will start—especially if the two hands do not come in together. In the beginning of this piece, the right hand comes in well after the left hand, so you should be thinking ahead a little bit to avoid hesitation at that spot. 

(This discussion will be continued in next month’s column.)

Organ Method X

This follows directly from the end of last month’s column.

Take the same approach and follow the same procedures with these additional exercises. These are also four-finger exercises that allow for choices of fingering (2-3-4-5 and 1-2-3-4) and therefore for comparing the feel of different fingerings. They add different, slightly more complicated, note patterns (Examples 1 and 2).

Each of these can also be moved to different positions on the keyboard: moving to a different C as a starting place gives you a chance to practice the feel of the same patterns with different arm angles. When you start on other pitches, change the key signature in such a way as to keep the melodies the same. This will give you a chance to experience different physical shapes with these exercises. Try each of the eight short exercises starting on F, with B-flats, and starting on D, with F-sharps. These flats and sharps may very well change the feel of some of the alternate fingerings, perhaps making some of them distinctly uncomfortable—be on the lookout for this.

You can also start any of the exercises described so far on a raised key. For example, try starting on F#, with the full F# major key signature. Again, be aware of difference in the feel of the fingerings. Keep everything light and relaxed, and remember all of the points listed above.

As you move these exercises to different places on the keyboard, whether by octave or by transposing into another key, make a clear decision as to whether you should write out the new notes, or whether you can effect those changes at sight and by memory. There is nothing wrong with either approach: it is important, however, that you not be distracted from the playing and practicing by worrying about the notes. If the transposing at sight is even a little bit distracting, please go ahead and write things out. (This is absolutely crucial for a student who is new to keyboard playing, and should be done without fail at this stage in the learning process.) The same applies to trying different fingerings: write them in for now. You cannot practice a variety of fingerings effectively if you—even some of the time—don’t quite remember what fingering you are using. Again, if you are beginning your keyboard study with this work on organ, thinking about fingering is something that you can do—for yourself, in large part—even from the very beginning. Remembering your fingerings, especially different ones for the same passage, is tricky at first, though both necessary and completely feasible in the long run.

The following exercises expand the scope of the notes that you are playing: that is, the notes range a little bit farther over the keyboard (Examples 3 and 4). Each of these eight exercises suggests a slightly different approach to fingering. For example, the second and sixth exercises can be played simply by positioning the five fingers above the five different notes, and then playing those notes. (This gives, for the second exercise in the right hand the fingering 1-3-5-4-2-3-2-1; and for the seventh of these exercises—in the left hand—the fingering 5-3-1-2-4-3-4-5.) The first exercise, for the right hand, and the corresponding fifth, for the left hand, are the first pair that we have seen in which the fingerings in the two hands cannot mirror each other. This fingering works very naturally in the right hand: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-1-3-5. In the left hand the closest corresponding fingering—which would start out 5-4-3-2-1—ends up getting us into trouble (try it and see). Other fingerings will work, for example 4-3-2-1-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-2-1.

Playing scales

The last of these exercises for each hand is a scale. (In the physical act of playing, a scale is just a stepwise pattern that spans an octave. It is not intrinsically different from other stepwise patterns.) You should try playing this scale with a number of different fingerings. For example:

R.H.: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 

L.H.: 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5

R.H.: 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1

L.H.: 4-3-2-1-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4

R.H.: 3-4-3-4-3-4-3-4-3-2-3-2-3-2-3

(quite detached: basically eighth notes with eighth-note rests in between; light and relaxed)   

L.H.: 3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-3-4-3 

(likewise)

The first of these in each hand is the standard (piano) scale fingering. The second is a variant of that, which might be appropriate in some situations, but is included here simply to afford more practice with a variety of fingerings. The third is a version of the sort of scale fingering that was prevalent before about 1700. 

You should also try this scale—and any transpositions of it that you want to make—playing every note with the same finger. The three middle fingers are more natural for this than the thumb or the fifth finger. In doing this, you should expect the notes to be detached—but just enough that the motion from one note to the next is smooth, no “lurching”. You should also keep it slow—again so that the motion can be smooth. (It would indeed be quite unusual to play a long stepwise passage all with one finger, however, playing two or more notes in a row with one finger is common, and this is a good systematic way to practice it.) 

The third and seventh of these exercises are the first ones in which you are asked to spread the fingers in such a way that adjacent fingers do not necessarily play adjacent notes, though this happens only briefly. The first three notes of exercise two or six and the first three notes of exercise three or seven are the same: C, E, G. However, the exercises go on to different places, which suggests different fingerings. Exercises two and six can start like this:

Right hand: 1-3-5 [-4]

Left hand: 5-3-1 [-2]

However, exercises three and seven should probably start like this:

Right hand: 1-2-3[-5]

Left hand: 5-4-2 [-1]

The latter two measures of the third exercise—right hand—could be played with the “standard” scale fingering 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1, or, just to practice a different feel, a variant: for example, 5-4-1-4-3-2-1-3. 

Thoughts on fingering

It should be clear by now that I am asking you, the student, to think about the fingering of these fairly simple exercises for yourself, albeit with some guidance. This is, of course, on purpose. Learning to devise your own fingerings is one of the most important aspects of your learning to play organ—or any keyboard instrument. The primary purpose of these exercises is to help you begin to explore the touch and sound of the instrument. However, while you are doing that, you can begin to gain experience thinking about fingering—rather than just implementing fingerings devised by someone else. This may take more time now, but it will save you a lot of time later on.  

For the beginner

If you are a beginner—having more or less never touched a keyboard instrument before—you should nonetheless have been able to do everything that you have encountered so far, if you have taken it slowly and carefully, and paid attention to the suggestions and instructions. It is extremely important that you feel very comfortable with everything that you have encountered so far before you go on. There is no harm in spending extra time with these beginning steps.  

Articulation

There can be a very direct relationship in organ playing in particular between fingering and articulation. Simply put, if a fingering does not allow you to keep holding one note in a passage while you start to play the next note, then going from that first note to that next note will be detached rather than legato. This is simply a fact, not a judgment or even a suggestion about what to do in any situation. There are many places in the organ repertoire where a fingering that actually requires a detached articulation and makes legato impossible—that is, a disjunct fingering—is appropriate or necessary or good. There are also many places where a legato fingering is a good idea or necessary, though there are indeed places where a legato fingering is impossible. The clearest example of disjunct fingering is, of course, playing successive notes with the same finger. Note that if a fingering allows legato, it usually does not require legato: you can release notes early.

If you neither need nor want legato in a particular situation, it is not necessary to create a legato fingering. A legato fingering is often—though certainly not always—more difficult than a disjunct fingering. A disjunct—non-legato—fingering that is comfortable will allow you to create a wide variety of articulations, short of full legato.

Other considerations

Physical comfort and logistic convenience are crucially important first principles of fingering. When you are trying to come up with a fingering for a passage—whether it is fairly simple, like the exercises above, or as complicated as the repertoire gets—the first step is to examine where the hand most naturally lies, what is the most comfortable hand position, what has the fewest steps and can thus be most easily remembered. This does not give all of the answers to all of the fingering questions, but is a good place to start. 

All else being equal, it is useful to plan fingering based on what is going to come next. (For example, that is the point of the different fingerings for the notes C-E-G in exercises three and seven.) Of course, fingering is also about where you have just come from, but the more you can plan fingering based on where you are going, the better.

When either hand is playing only one note at a time, fingering choices are usually very flexible. The more notes or voices a hand is playing, the more constrained the fingering will be. It is often better to change fingers on repeated notes—that is, to play successive notes that are the same as one another with different fingers. This is important enough that I will discuss it at some length later on.

For the experienced player

If you are coming to the organ having already studied and played another keyboard instrument, and if you have previously played pieces that are in two voices—that is, pieces in which there is indeed only one note at a time in each hand—find such a piece that you already know and bring it to the organ now. Work out fingering that is comfortable and in accordance with the discussion above, as much as possible. (This may be largely the same as the fingering that you have used for the piece previously on piano or harpsichord; it may differ from it somewhat.) Then practice the piece hands separately, slowly and carefully. Look at the keyboard as little as possible; an occasional glance is fine, but by and large keep your eyes on the music. As with the exercises above, you should listen carefully for articulation, and you should listen to the sonority. 

Try out different registrations. Do not assume in advance that a certain kind of sound will be right for the piece and other sounds wrong: try things and listen. A strictly two-voice piece is always a candidate to play on two manuals. Try your piece out that way, in all sorts of different configurations. Does it feel more comfortable or natural to have the right hand on a higher manual than the left or the other way around? Or are they both equally comfortable?

(The next section, which will constitute next month’s excerpt, consists of a short two-voice piece by Samuel Scheidt, with a discussion about fingering it and practicing it. It is geared towards those students who have little or no prior keyboard experience but who have gone through the exercises and practicing described so far. That is followed by exercises in which each hand plays more than one note at a time, with further discussion about how to make fingering choices and how to practice.)

Helping Students Choose Fingerings V

I ended last month’s column with a couple of short digressions. I open this column in the same way. Then I will return to the train of thought from last month.

To help myself muse about teaching the art of making purposeful fingering choices, I have done a certain amount of reading: not what I would call “research,” not looking for concrete information, but just part of the process of thinking, gathering, and examining ideas. I happened to come across some extremely interesting comments by the eminent Ukrainian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, who lived from 1848 to 1933.

De Pachmann became convinced during the course of his career that there was something blocking him technically. He eventually decided or figured out that he was allowing his hands to turn out too far, both out and in, from a position that was more or less straight with the forearm. His own discussion of this in an interview is fascinating. (“Should Piano Playing Undergo a Radical Reform?”, Vladimir de Pachmann, Etude, December 1923.) This is a short excerpt:

I discovered that the whole trouble lay in the wrist. The wrists were not free. Easily said—but WHY?

Perhaps a simple experiment will serve to illustrate. Put your elbow upon the table and let your forearm fall with your hand in comfortable playing condition. 

Now, with the hand and forearm in this position, move the hand (without moving the forearm) as far as possible to the left and hold it in that position for a few moments. You will notice at once that there is a strain at the joint of the wrist. Now move the hand in the opposite direction and there is likewise a strain. It is this strain that, to my mind, distorts the muscular and the nervous condition of the hand and the forearm and results in much horrible playing. The tone cannot be musical and beautiful if the wrist is stiff or strained in this manner. Therefore I never move the hand from side to side. 

Having discovered this, I began to find that, whereas I had been unable to practice for long periods in later years without fatigue, I was now able to play for hours and hours and ‘never feel it.’

What was the result? I resolved to rework, re-arrange my entire repertoire upon this new basis. This meant refingering hundreds and hundreds of pages of music.

This interests me because it ratifies what I have long observed about the problems with turning the wrist, though I feel sure that turning out is worse than turning in, whereas Pachmann does not distinguish between those. It is also interesting to me that he presented this as a new discovery. It seems to have been new in relation to his own work and to whatever he had learned from his teachers. Elsewhere, however, he says about Muzio Clementi, who lived from 1752 to 1832, that he “was against the use of the thumb on a black key. I wondered why, and thought it over until I discovered that Clementi’s reason was that there was an undue strain on the wrist, with consequent fatigue.” So, as with a lot about music and life, this was perhaps an instance of “what’s old is new again.”

Fingering principles to
offer to your students

I resume my list of suggestions of principles or ideas that we might offer students in advance of their working out their own fingerings for pieces. 

6) Don’t finger for something that you don’t want or need to do. That is, don’t make a fingering unnecessarily complicated by asking it to create a difficult result when that result is not what you really want. This usually manifests itself as something very specific: constructing an unnecessarily difficult fingering in order to achieve legato, when that legato is not actually wanted. If you do want legato, and the fingering necessary to achieve that is complex or tricky, then this gets turned around the other way: you have to accept the difficult fingering and practice it enough to make it work. But that is usually not the problem. It is definitely a problem for many students that they think that it is lazy or unconscientious ever to use a disjunct fingering. (Often this feeling is entirely subconscious or reflexive.) But that is only true if you honestly don’t like the musical results of that fingering. The most conscientious and efficient thing that you can do in sketching out a fingering for a passage is to give yourself the freedom to use any fingers whatsoever for any two successive notes or chords that are not meant to be legato, and take it from there. 

7) Concerning patterns: on the one hand, it can be very useful to finger something that is reiterated as a pattern in the same way each time it comes along. This is true first of all because perhaps that fingering is the best fingering, considering everything. But also, the patterned fingering is itself easier to remember because it stays the same, and this has the nice benefit that when you practice one instance of it, you are also practicing the others. This is efficient and enhances security. However, it is even more important to recognize that sometimes a musical pattern is not a physical pattern. This happens most of the time and most strikingly because of the presence of sharps and flats. If the keyboard were all white keys, then this concern would largely go away. The other cause, more subtle, is that the feeling and thus the fingering needs of a repeated pattern can also change because of position on the keyboard. The same note-shapes a couple of octaves apart have different implications for hand position in particular, and therefore, sometimes, for fingering.

The two examples above show situations in which the relationship between musical patterning and fingering come out different. In the first case (Example 1), there is probably something to be gained and little or nothing to be lost by playing each four-note grouping in the same way. For any number of reasons, such as relative finger length, some players might prefer 4-2-1-2, some 5-3-2-3. (Those are not the only possibilities, but they probably cover what would feel best for almost everyone.) 

However, in Example 2, with three sharps, the consistent application of a pattern of this sort would conflict with good hand position and create problems with the use of the thumb. I have put in a fingering that fits the native shape of the passage very well for me, and there are other possibilities. A student could make the choice that the pluses of repeated patterning outweigh the negatives of thumbs on black notes or other turnings of the hand. However, that should be thought about as a conscious and careful choice. (For me, the 4-2-1-2 fingering as a thorough-going pattern would be disastrously bad; the 5-3-2-3 would be rather bad, mainly a problem in the second group of four eighth notes.)

Another thought about patterns is that some students have learned default fingering patterns for certain note patterns prior to working on any given piece. These are usually scales and arpeggios, and the fingering patterns have been learned because the note patterns have served as exercises. This can be very useful and quite a time-saver if the learned fingerings actually work well, given all of the circumstances of the piece. They often will, but also often will not. It is important to use them only when they are right, and not to let them interfere otherwise. 

It is worth remembering that even though it can seem like a shame not to take advantage of the comfort of patterned fingering for patterned notes, abandoning that patterning only brings those passages to the level of fingering-complexity of the rest of the music. It is never a particular problem, just sometimes an opportunity that we would rather not pass up.

8) Don’t confuse unfamiliarity with difficulty. That is, don’t judge the easiness or difficulty of a fingering before having gotten somewhat used to it. In choosing between two or more fingerings, the one that seems the least comfortable right off the bat might just seem the best once you have explored them all a bit. On the other hand, if a student is more or less observing all of the precepts above, is trying out a possible fingering, and that fingering simply cannot get comfortable, then it is probably one that should be changed. And that leads to another principle:

9) If you can’t come up with a fingering that you are reasonably happy with, don’t accept an unhappy fingering or try to get used to one that is really awkward. It is better to leave the passage un-fingered and un-practiced until you have had a chance to bring it back to the teacher or, perhaps, just to go on thinking, analyzing, and finally finding something better.

Are these last two principles in actual conflict with each other? Not quite. Taken together they point to the need for a student to develop the ability to tell when a fingering seems wrong because it is wrong, and when it seems wrong because it is unfamiliar or conforms to a new idea, or just hasn’t been practiced enough yet. This is one of the senses that will be strengthened by independent work on fingering. It is fine if it takes a while to develop, and it will kick in earlier and earlier in the process with each piece that the student works on. 

A list can seem so cut-and-dried. Do these nine headings outline all of what I want to tell a student before that student goes off to create fingerings for a piece? Do I always outline all of these things in this exact way? No, of course not. This outline is in part an exercise in thinking about the sorts of things that I think that we can offer to students as pre-established guidelines in lieu of specific “use this fingering here” input. Someone else might have a different specific set of ideas, or ones similar to these but put rather differently. Someone might decide that a few of these are worth outlining and discussing quite specifically in advance and that others of them can be left to be added along the way, in response to particular situations. I have never yet written an outline like this to hand to students. I do it all verbally. But the act of writing it out for the column suggests to me that I might like to try that. The danger in writing something and presenting it as a sort of document, especially as from teacher (or any supposed authority or “expert”) to student, is that it will be interpreted too hard and fast.

I think that it is necessary, whether this is all done in discussion or partly in written outline, to be very careful to remind students about flexibility and balance. This is reflected in my brief comments about “no thumbs on black notes” last month. I am still very aware that I have sometimes seemed too adamant about that, right and important though it usually is, and that a student has wasted time or even risked tendon injuries by using awkward stretches to keep thumbs off black notes that they should indeed have been playing. (I would love to know exactly how Clementi framed that.)

Students working

autonomously

I have alluded a lot to a student’s going off to finger a piece, any piece, autonomously. There’s an interesting question as to whether is it ever useful to choose pieces in the first place not to (just) teach something about execution or rhetoric or even fingering as such, but as exercises specifically in thinking independently about fingering. I think that this can be a good idea, as long as it doesn’t shade over into asking a student to work on pieces that lack musical interest. What constitutes a good piece for working on fingering choice depends on the student. However, there are things to analyze about how a piece relates to the process of working out fingerings. How much will it be necessary to think about choices of hand as they differ from what the distribution on the staves seems to suggest? (As I have written before, I feel very strongly that staff distribution shouldn’t influence hand distribution in mapping out and playing organ music. But it doesn’t hurt to clear the decks, so to speak, for this kind of work by choosing pieces where that isn’t an issue.)

The next step is to see what sort of work each hand has to do. A student can and should learn to think about fingering with any sort of texture. But it is important to be clear about the fact that different textures require a somewhat different approach, or at least feel like they lead to somewhat different processes. For example, if either hand has only one note at a time, as is true of both hands in something like a Bach two-part Invention, then the hand is free of a whole host of constraints. It’s just a question of mapping five fingers onto a succession of notes. If a hand has actual chords, that is one thing. If it has a more-than-one-note texture that arises out of counterpoint, that is something else. (Maybe the principal practical fingering difference there is that chords often change over all notes at once, whereas counterpoint, almost by definition, does not.) Many or most pieces out there have a variety of these sorts of textures. To choose an example out of thousands, many of the pieces in the Vierne 24 Pièces en style libre have long stretches in which one hand is playing a single line while the other is playing chords or some other multi-note texture. 

It is possible that at first (when a student is relatively non-advanced overall or is not yet too comfortable choosing fingerings), pieces that have one sort of texture in each hand for long stretches might be the most comfortable. That situation allows a student to focus on one sort of analysis of what the texture requires of the hand. Within reason—that is, avoiding real blockbusters—I don’t think that overall easiness or difficulty is that much of a concern. A more difficult piece just takes more time and patience, as much during the fingering phase as during the practicing phase. In fact, an extremely challenging piece can be used as an interesting laboratory for thinking about fingering, whether or not the student goes on to practice it and learn it for performance. Using a piece this way can be a challenge to the yearning for completeness and closure that most of us have, but as a learning tool it is perfectly valid. The most compelling reasons to do it are, first, that a student might actually find it intellectually interesting to think about fingering a piece that would be a stretch to play, and that the student might simply like that piece and want to engage with it. If a beginner or intermediate student works carefully on the fingering of a piece, or part of a piece, that is a real (or unrealistic) stretch now, that student will be well positioned to go ahead and really learn that piece later. That is in contrast with the situation that can be set up by more or less just stumbling through a significantly difficult piece without dealing with its challenges seriously and systematically enough.

A brief closing return to de Pachmann. In my reading I encountered this statement, one that we should all always bear in mind: “If . . . a difficulty . . .
does not disappear after one hundred repetitions . . . play it a thousand times!” (Exclamation point mine!)