On Teaching

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VII 

I start this month’s column by following up on my closing comment from last month, that I would write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. I have written at length about hand distribution (as the principal subject of three columns, July, August, and September 2014, and in passing elsewhere). Since fingering choices can’t be made prior to hand distribution choices, it is a necessary part of the student’s autonomous thinking about fingering that they think about hand distribution. I enumerated this among the guidelines with which I would send a student off to work out fingerings. At this current stage, when you as the teacher are watching and evaluating a student’s fingering choices, you need to evaluate whether there is any awkwardness created by playing some notes in the hand that is less easily suited to reach them. 

It occurs to me that this is usually closely bound up with the use of the inner part of the hand. When notes are positioned such that either hand might reasonably play them, then it is (usually? always?) the thumbs and second fingers of the two hands that are in competition for those notes. It is also true that awkward hand position often (though not always) results from choices about the use of the thumb. Also, the decision to use the thumb or second finger to play a particular note will often change what the rest of the hand has to do with the other notes—the notes that “officially” are in that hand, and have to remain so. Therefore, as you watch, listen, and check for matters of concern in a student’s fingering choices, your alertness for hand position problems and your checking for hand distribution issues can largely converge. 

Hand distribution

A hand distribution decision that is an actual issue or question can only arise when there are more than two simultaneous or overlapping notes. Otherwise either one note per hand makes sense, or it is trivially easy to play both notes together in one of the hands, when the outer notes are close enough that either hand can reach the inner notes. If those conditions are met, and there is anything awkward-looking occurring, as I sketched out last month (twisting of the hands, hunched shoulders, grimacing or other uncomfortable expressions, tight-looking tendons or muscles), then asking the student to review hand distribution choices is a good idea. This will not always be the answer and will not always solve the problem to switch notes into the other hand. But perhaps it will, and it is logically the first easy thing to check. 

There are only two hand possibilities for any note, as well as limited fingering choices for notes that are within the reach of either hand. A significant proportion of what look like tricky fingering spots can be solved by correction. Again, it is a good idea to prepare students in advance to think about this, but equally important to keep an eye on it along the way.

Speaking of the thumbs, I am aware of the pitfalls of using thumbs on black notes, as you also know if you have read this column often. I mentioned that as something to send students off thinking about as they work on fingering. And clearly if you see a student using a thumb on a black note and it looks awkward, that is a spot that you and the student should scrutinize. However, the opposite problem can also occur. From time to time I see a student conscientiously avoiding playing a sharp or flat with the thumb when doing so would be best, maybe actually fine, maybe a bit awkward but the best available choice. Beyond just adjusting the fingering, this can be an opportunity to remind the student that guidelines are just guidelines, and that it is the maximum hand-comfort itself that counts. Guidelines are really guesses about what is likely comfortable most of the time.

Fingering forward and backward

One of the concepts with which I suggested sending a student off to work on fingering was that fingering should be accomplished forward and backward: that we shouldn’t always start somewhere and finger ahead in the music from that point. Rather, we should sometimes consider where we want the hand or a finger to be at a certain point and reason backwards from there. This is especially important when there are crucial spots that are difficult to finger. We must give those spots what they need, and work outward in both directions to incorporate them into the overall flow of the fingering. One way to notice when a student has given in to the common tendency to start at the beginning and go forward with fingering is to notice when a fingering crashes (or even crashes and burns!). That is, when everything looks smooth, makes sense, sounds continuous and accurate as to rhythm, and then suddenly falls apart: the hand looks bent out of shape, hesitations or wrong notes occur, and so on. A subset of this is the appearance of sudden, not musically sensible substitutions. An instance of this is demonstrated in Example 1.

I would not expect a student to attempt literally this fingering, though someone, perhaps a real beginner, might. It would probably be an executed but not written-in fingering, since the very act of writing this shows that it is too elaborate. But it encapsulates the principle of starting somewhere, running out of fingers, and not having a good way to recover. If the passage went like that exhibited in Example 2, then the impetus to use the fingering in Example 1 would be more understandable. If the passage went like that in Example 3, then the fingering in Example 1 would be in the conversation as a possible solution. This assumes a desired legato. As always, with non-legato technique, fingering possibilities are expanded.

There is an interesting fork in the road with substitutions in general. They can be either a sensible solution to a tricky fingering moment, preserving the desired articulation and using the hand efficiently, or a desperate attempt to rescue a fingering disaster. We must know how to tell these apart, and in evaluating a fingering that a student has brought back to us we can use a discussion of this distinction to help the student become aware of the best ways to use substitution. If we see substitution, especially if it is executed but not written in, then we should invite the student to talk about the reasons behind it.

Example 4 demonstrates another sample of a fingering’s crashing because of lack of planning. This is one that I have indeed seen frequently in real life. In this case, if a significant overall non-legato is what is desired, then there might be nothing particularly bad about this fingering. It might or not be comfortable or be best overall. But it is the kind of pattern that often or habitually arises not out of a purposeful decision about articulation, but rather from starting somewhere and not planning. If you observe a fingering like this and hear awkward irregularities in articulation, then it is something that should be questioned. 

Substitutions are one way under some conditions of achieving legato. In general, as you watch your student’s new fingering, bear in mind that there are many ways of making successive notes legato, and when they are intentional for the purpose they are important and good. But they are also at risk for not being the simplest way to execute the successive notes. If you see a student using a legato fingering, it looks awkward, and they are not actually executing the legato (that is, having planned out a somewhat complicated fingering for which the only rationale would be to connect notes, and they are in fact optionally releasing fingers and not connecting the notes), then this is a time to query. Sometimes an impulse to use a legato fingering at all costs comes about because that fingering feels like holding on to the notes for dear life and creates a sense of note security. That sense is a false one if the fingering is awkward or if it causes the hand to be rooted in one place when it should be free to move to another. 

One point to notice in watching student’s fingerings is whether there are spots where a finger seems to be falling naturally over a note, but the student plays the note with a different finger. There can be many reasons for this to happen. One of those is that the student is in fact planning just as I have been writing above. In that case, the benefit of starting a discussion about that spot is that it can allow the teacher to ratify the student’s sense that what is being done makes sense. However, it is also possible that the finger that seems to be falling naturally over the next note would have been the right one to use, and that the student hasn’t seen this. This is often because it is just a less-favored finger than the one that the student is using—finger 4 being often less favored than 3, or 5 being usually less favored than anything else, for example. But it can be for essentially no reason. Sometimes if I say, “Finger 4 is almost touching that note. Why not play it with 4?” the answer may just be, “Oh, yeah. That looks good,” or even, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.” Not thinking of options is universal, and is part of the reason that we study and teach. Sometimes there is an impulse to look for the more complicated when the simpler would have been just as good and actually better because it is simpler. Moments when a finger that seems to be easily aiming at the next note is not used are sometimes instances of this. This kind of thing happens with everyone, not just students and certainly not just beginners.

Fingering patterns

I wrote earlier about note patterns and how and when they can or cannot be a scaffolding on which to build fingering patterns. This is a key thing to look for when a student brings a fingering back to you. There is the two-headed basic manifestation: is the student missing any opportunity to achieve simplicity by applying good, repeated patterned fingering where it would work, and is the student imposing a patterned fingering where it is actually made awkward by something specific in the notes? There are also a couple of special cases. Is the student using the same fingering when there is an exact repeat of a passage? This can be literally a repeat sign applying to some sort of section or, for that matter, successive verses of a hymn, assuming that they are played the same way as to such things as “soloing out,” etc., or it can be a more limited return of the exact same notes. It can be in one hand or through the whole texture. It can be a full-fledged da capo as in the big E-minor Fugue of Bach among innumerable examples. 

Is there ever a legitimate reason to use a different fingering for two instances of exactly the same notes within the same piece? I am not sure that I have ever decided to do so. Maybe so with hymn verses, even apart from the obvious reasons derived from desired changes in texture, since the player might want to project a significantly different feeling with various verses, and that might make fingering and interpretive decisions result differently. In principle, a desire to project a different feeling when the same notes come back within a repertoire piece is a real possibility. In fact, it should always be considered. After all, a passage is different when it is being heard as a repetition or a hearkening back to something heard earlier. I do not recall that I have ever wanted to manifest this through different fingering: perhaps I have thought of these differences as being more modest or subtle. If a student plays the same thing with different fingering when it occurs at different places in a piece, that is likely to be because of insufficient planning or mistaken execution. But pointing it out could still spark an interesting discussion of the matter! 

Wrong notes and rhythms

What about wrong notes, wrong rhythms, out-and-out unsuccessful playing? The relationship between these sorts of problems and fingering planning is a complicated one. One point of good fingering is to make it as easy as possible to execute the notes. In fact that is what we have essentially been looking at as “good” fingering in these columns, since this discussion has by and large not been about fingering as an interpretive tool or as a tool of historical accuracy. However, it is always true that enough really well carried-out practicing can make almost any fingering work. So in a sense “good” fingering has as its purpose reducing the amount of practicing that will be necessary. And you could say that practicing has the purpose or effect of making it unnecessary to have planned good fingerings, although there is probably never a good reason to use it for that purpose. I have occasionally, just as an exercise, tried practicing a purposely awkward fingering, one that stops well short of being “dangerous” in the sense in which I have discussed that earlier, and trying to get it to work well. This has had mixed results. It has been successful enough to convince me that if I had had any reason to stick to it I could probably make it work, but not successful enough to make me think that that would ever be a good idea.

If a passage that a student reports having fingered carefully and practiced well doesn’t seem solid, it is reasonably likely that the fault lies with the practicing more than with the fingering planning, or that the passage is simply not ready to go at the tempo that the student is trying. Ragged, hesitant, or otherwise unsuccessful playing is not one of the most reliable indicators of non-optimal fingering. But note that this is really about the percentages: sometimes bad fingering is what is going on in these situations. It is quite common for a student to say, “I can’t get this bit right. There must be a better fingering I could use,” when in fact it really is all about the practicing.

I am going to leave it there for the time being. In so doing I am aware that, as I suggested at the beginning of last month’s column, I have by no means exhausted this subject. I have not, for example, talked very directly about how to make a more interventionist approach work. For me, the gist of that is to wear that approach lightly: to let students know that even though you are making the initial fingering choices, you want them to think those fingerings out and ask you questions about them. I may return to this specifically another time. I also could at this point write a whole column just about how my own approach to all of this has evolved during the time when I have been writing these columns! I may indeed return to that at some point, partly for the content of it, partly because it is a bit of a case study in self-teaching. 

Next month, I will be on to other things.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VI

At the beginning of this series of columns I mentioned (warned?) that I was planning to let myself muse about the subject in a leisurely fashion, spread out over quite a few months. The importance of the subject justified this, and so did its open-endedness. There are many ways of looking at this aspect of our work that are worth talking about and taking seriously; there are several angles from which to approach it. I am beginning to feel, however, that six columns spread out over seven months is getting close to being enough for now. So this column and the next one—which constitute a long “to be continued” on the same specific aspect of our subject—will be the last ones on this matter for a while. 

The specific agenda for these two columns is to talk about what to do when a student comes back with a worked-out fingering. I will also address a couple of loose ends and include a random thought or two. I certainly have not exhausted the overall subject, and I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that exhausting the subject is never possible and is never the point. I will probably come back to it someday, perhaps in part to address some interesting and useful comments from readers that I have already gotten, and others that I may get. Meanwhile, in January’s column, I will move on to other things.

Feedback for student fingerings

If you have sent a student off to work out a fingering for a passage or a piece, perhaps with some guidelines similar to mine from the last two columns, then presumably that student will come back with the worked-out fingering. The next step, in which you give feedback, is crucial: that’s where a lot of the learning comes in.

The actual dynamic of this part of the process is subject to a host of variables: how much of the passage has the student felt comfortable actually fingering, and how much has been reserved for discussion? How much has already been practiced, and how close is it to being learned? (Included in the latter are questions as to whether the student has put the hands together yet, or added pedals, if that’s relevant, and at what sort of tempo is the piece in relation to a possible final tempo.) Questions about how the student relates to the particular piece or the sort of repertoire might be relevant. Is the piece an exemplar of a kind of music with which the student is already very familiar (their sixth Orgelbüchlein chorale, say, or eighth movement from a Widor symphony), or is it relatively uncharted territory, a first step into the twentieth century for a student who has been at home in the eighteenth, or vice versa? Does it happen to be a two-manual passage? 

Then there are the psychological/temperamental matters. Is the student one who is self-confident in general and likely to feel good about fingering choices, perhaps regardless of whether the choices seem good to the teacher? Can the student be relied on to push back against teacher suggestions that he or she really doesn’t like, or at least to be forthright about the rationale for choices? Or is it someone who is almost waiting to be told that they have gotten it wrong—someone whose first impulse will be to shut down in the face of any inquiry and be embarrassed to share the thought process that led to the fingering choices? Or is the situation somewhere in between? Do you know the student well, and are the two of you comfortable together? Or is it someone whom you are really still getting to know?

All of these are surprisingly practical concerns given our delicately balanced goal: to coax students into greater autonomy, confidence, and independence without letting them persevere with fingerings that are going to be really problematic. If we think that a fingering is just plain really bad (to put it bluntly), how do we tell that to the student? It is important not to seem to go back on the promise of autonomy and independence. But it is also important for the student to end up with good fingerings. (Well, maybe. I’ll talk about that more below.)

Of course this is a version, appropriate to this stage of the process, of the whole set of questions about how much autonomy to give students in choosing fingerings in the first place. The premise for now is that we are opting for a great deal of autonomy. But that takes on a different dynamic as the moment of solidifying fingerings in actual use draws closer.

At an earlier point in planning out these columns, I had thought that I would try to concoct a “case study,” that is, that I would choose a passage, create a fingering for it that a student might have come up with, and then go through the passage, reacting to that fingering as I might do with a “live” student. But as I thought about all the variables of the situation, I decided that that would be artificial and limiting. It is a process that perhaps could form the basis of a video or live class demonstration. To be useful it would need to be made up of multiple examples. I think that here it is more fruitful to keep discussing the process, again not expecting to be exhaustive, but to cover enough points to be useful.

To start with, let’s assume that the student comes back with a fingering with which they feel pretty comfortable and that they are ready to play, perhaps (or probably) below the eventual performance tempo. How should we watch and listen, and what should we be looking out for?

The answer to how we should watch and listen is “very carefully, very closely.” And although listening to what our students do is always critical­—this is music after all—in this situation watching is if anything more important. We need to see and keep track of a host of things: what the written fingerings are, what the actual fingerings are, where on the keys the fingers are landing, and, always, everything about the student’s physical being: hand position, tension or relaxation of the hand, and signs of tension or awkward or unnatural positioning of the rest of the body. For this specific kind of work with a student, the most practical use for listening is as an aid in noticing tension. A persistent wrong note, which we might either see or hear, can be a sign of a fingering problem that should be dealt with, but it is more often about practicing. (More about all of this below.) 

Concerns about student fingerings

The bedrock, non-negotiable concern about a student’s worked-out fingering is that it not be dangerous. Everything else is part of a discussion. Fingerings that are non-historical, or different from what the teacher would do, or that create certain articulations, or rule out certain articulations, and so on, might be good, bad, both: everyone will think about them a bit differently. Fingerings that are awkward and inefficient can still be made to work with enough practicing, though that practicing might be less enjoyable than it could or should be. That’s not to say that a fingering that is bad in that sense should go unnoticed or unchallenged: part of the point of this process is to get students to recognize such fingerings and get better and better at avoiding them. Fingerings that might hurt the hand, usually by an uncomfortable stretch or by twisting out, are fairly rare. But they deserve first mention here because it is absolutely out of the question to let them pass.

This does indeed shade over into the next item to pay attention to: anything that looks tense or awkward. Are there spots where the student looks uncomfortable or tense as a matter of overall attitude? Are there moments where you can see the hands, arms, neck, or (especially) shoulders appear to tighten? These signs can mean either that the fingering in those spots is actually a problem or that the student is uncertain about those fingerings. In any case, these are places that should be flagged for discussion. Even if the tension or awkwardness is not so severe that our judgment suggests that it could be harmful, it is still not best for musical performance and should be corrected if possible.

With awkward-looking fingerings, it is a matter of your judgment and the student’s whether they cross a line into being potentially physically harmful. You must bring this up and discuss it if you are concerned. That is one situation in which your sense of the student’s temperament and attitude comes into play. If the student says that something is not painful, is it OK to leave it at that? If a student needs to wring out a hand after playing a passage and says, “no, it’s all right,” is it acceptable to leave it at that? If a student is wearing a pained facial expression, is that more likely to be about general anxiety than an immediate extreme discomfort?

If a fingering is somewhat awkward and we can’t come up with a better one, then we are likely to stick with it and try to relax out of whatever tension it creates as promptly as possible. If the only possible fingering for a passage is one that honestly seems so wrong physically that it could be damaging, then that is actually a reason to consider not playing the piece or slightly rewriting it. This latter is rare—presumably because most keyboard composers write their music to be playable. When it does happen it is often because of a mismatch between the hand size of the player and the expectations of the composer. We are all lucky that composers with extra-wide hand spans mostly bore in mind the needs of the rest of us!

Hand position

Watching hand position is important and is really the foundation of all of what I have mentioned above. If you see an awkward hand position, then it is worth querying the fingering, pointing out what looks awkward, and asking the student about the rationale for the fingering. Sometimes bad hand position is the result not of actually bad fingering, but of holding notes longer than necessary or leaving fingers over notes that they have released when they should be free to float away and wait over other notes. This is actually a surprisingly important aspect of the relationship between fingering and hand position. No fingering in itself implies anything about where the relevant finger should be or what position that hand should be in once that finger has released its note. That can be clearly determined by the next note, but if it isn’t, then the situation is turned around, and the proper place for a finger to be is defined by the act of returning the hand to a relaxed comfortable position. It is possible to be misled as to how good or bad a fingering is by letting that fingering influence hand position more than it actually has to, and in an uncomfortable direction.

When bad hand position does stem directly from a questionable fingering, sometimes that in turn comes from the next thing to watch for: the student’s neglecting part of the hand for no particular reason. As I mentioned in one of my sample guidelines two months back, there is a tendency to avoid fingers 4 and 5, especially 5. If you see a student indulging that tendency, you should question it. And you will see this, whether or not you remind students in advance to think about it. If you see a busy passage being played with just fingers 1-2-3, and if it looks awkward, then ask the student about it. Often there will be a plausible musical logistic reason. Often that reason, though plausible, is in fact a false one: an excuse, not a reason. (And this is usually subconscious, so it is fruitful to alert the student to it.) The avoidance of “weak” fingers is instinctual and can be stubborn. It also reflects different realities for different students: that is, for some people, the fifth finger really is a problem, for some it is just a fear. This is a difference that should be sorted out. My Diapason column from September 2016 was all about the fifth finger and includes my ideas about how to work on it when it really is a problem in and of itself.

Avoiding use of certain fingers

A couple of side notes: I have only fairly recently become really comfortable playing trills, especially long trills, with fingers 4 and 5. I didn’t notice the moment when this happened, but it was probably in about my 25th or 30th year of performing and teaching. I have noticed that the availability of that fingering for trills sometimes can make the rest of the fingering for a passage remarkably more straightforward. This reminds me, in turn, that it is important in all circumstances not to avoid the use of any fingers arbitrarily. Sometimes the avoidance of certain fingers is indeed not arbitrary, but has a musical (often historical) purpose. If a student, in collaboration with you as the teacher, is applying some of the principles of “early” fingering to a piece, and therefore perhaps using at the least the thumb and maybe the fifth finger less than one might otherwise, it is important to do this in a way that is comfortable. That is, almost certainly, a significant part of the actual original purpose of that approach to fingering. The main enemy of comfort and natural hand position with fingerings of this sort is an attempt to hang on to legato when the fingering is specifically geared towards non-legato: for example in a 3-4-3-4 fingering in the right hand in a rising scale passage, turning the hand nearly upside-down between the second and third notes.

Another thing to look for is any place where your student is actually using a fingering different from the one that they have worked out and written in. This is one place where your watching closely comes into play! When this happens, it can be just a random one-off that doesn’t mean anything. It should be queried though, in case it is more than that. It can turn out that the written fingering is really best, and that the task for the student is to be more assiduous about following it. That often means slower, more targeted practice. (Though it can also be a sign that the student needs new glasses. That sounds flippant, but is actually a frequent serious issue. If you can’t read the notes easily, that is always a problem. If you can’t read the written-in fingerings easily and spontaneously, that is a problem as well: a source of inefficiency and potential insecurity.)

It can be useful to go over the reasoning behind the fingering again. This can help fix it in the semi-memory so that the need to read it in real time will recede and eventually go away entirely. It is also very possible that the actual fingering that you saw is better than the written-in fingering. This should be explored in discussion. If it turns out to be true, that creates an excellent opportunity for the student to learn through analyzing and comparing the two fingerings and analyzing why the written-in choices were made and why they don’t seem to be best in practice. 

Next month, in continuing this discussion, I will, among other things, write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. As an appetizer to that part of the discussion I include a couple of examples of spots where I happened upon ways of solving tricky fingering issues by what I like to think of as clever hand distribution. (See Examples 1 and 2.) These both arose in my practicing of pieces that I will be performing this fall, and indeed they both arose during the same days during which I have been writing this column. They are both Bach harpsichord pieces. The first is from the fugue of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the second from the fugue of the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro. No very specific pedagogic point to either of them: I just like them.

To be continued.

To look or not to look, part II

To recap from last month, it has been my observation that making a practice of looking at the hands or feet while learning to play the organ will hinder a student’s becoming comfortable at the instrument and of developing skill at playing. In some cases this practice actually prevents a prospective player from ever developing reliable facility and technique. At the same time, though, it is  natural and essentially universal for students to want to look at their hands or feet, and to do so quite a lot, often more than they know. 

This affects different students in different ways. Some people have been so systematic and efficient in their ways of practicing from when they first sat at a keyboard that they have, even very early on, no insecurity, very little tendency to make wrong notes, no tendency for the few wrong notes to throw off the rhythm or overall flow of the music, or to snowball out of control. These are likely to be students who did very little or no looking at the keyboard from the very beginning. On a basic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle, any student who presents a teacher with this situation doesn’t need help with the task that we are talking about here. 

Most students who come to an organ teacher, however, present a more mixed picture, in which wrong notes, insecurity about notes, and a habit of looking at the keyboards all play a part. This is true of students with plenty of talent and potential, as well as some whose potential has been well hidden by badly conceived habits and approaches. One crucial point is this: that some students who think that they are just plain not very good—and whose playing indeed presents as not very good—also think that they have to look at the keyboards a lot specifically to try to fight against being not very good. However, if they can be taught to stop looking at the keyboards, they will discover that their talent and potential are a lot better than they thought. The existence of this psychological trap or paradox is one of the main reasons that I think that this is so important.

Why look at a keyboard?

There are, I think, three specific reasons for looking at the keyboards that are different enough from one another for us to distinguish them. One of these is pure habit, probably driven by fear or insecurity, and sustained perhaps by never having thought about the issue. The next is the one that most people would cite as the main reason: namely, to find a note or notes when you know from the music or your memory what the note(s) should be. The third is to check that whatever you just played was right or was what you thought it was. Each of these might sometimes require a different approach.

What a teacher can do

Anyone who has read this column knows that I am not very big on prohibitions or rules. Although I often have no choice but to ask students to take my word at first about the benefits of not looking—because they have to try it in a pretty committed way before they will know from their own experience that it works—I do prefer to cajole them or persuade them as much as possible. For this purpose there are two things that I have tried that are always available to the teacher and that seem to be effective as starters. One is simply to notice how much a student is looking at the hands or feet, and let the student know. With a student who has not yet been consciously thinking about this subject, it is often sort of mind-boggling how much looking is going on: every note, every second or third note, twice a measure: things like this are quite common, and the student usually has no idea. Just pointing that out—which often is sort of intrinsically humorous and can always be done quite good-naturedly—can help inspire a student to want to reduce the reliance on looking. When a student is pretty much bobbing his or her head down to the keys and back up to the music with great frequency and doesn’t quite know that this is happening, it is probably something that is being done just as a habit. And because it is being done just as a habit, it is very likely not actually giving the student much information. If you stop the student on the way back up and ask what note he or she just found (by looking) and played, the student often won’t be able to answer. You are also likely to be able to find plenty of instances of the student’s looking down at the keys and making a wrong note anyway. It is a good idea to point this out to the student when you see it: it is pretty telling.

The second simple preliminary thing that the teacher can do is to choose a passage that the student has been a) playing with a lot of looking, and b) playing with a fair number of wrong notes, and ask the student to try it once without looking at all. The passage should be short, and should if possible be one that does not have any of the more plausible reasons for looking, like big leaps or chord shapes with awkward hand positions. When the student plays through this passage with a 100% not-looking approach, he or she will probably notice a few interesting things right away. First of all, it is hard to make oneself do this. A student who is really trying not to look at all may reduce looking from, say, two or three times a measure to once every two or three measures, but not likely to zero. This might reflect just old habit, and is worth pointing out. It might sometimes be a way of pinpointing the bits that are indeed harder to play without looking, or that seem that way. Only the student can really figure out which of these it is (since it is never clear to one person, even a teacher, what another person will find hard) and focusing on that is a useful exercise. 

Second, the student will observe that the wrong-note count goes down. Often it goes down dramatically; it almost always goes down some. (And that is without the student’s having had a chance yet to get used to this approach.) This is what people don’t expect, assuming, as we all tend to, that looking will reduce wrong notes. Therefore, it can be a powerful tool for convincing students that looking less or not at all is worth pursuing. Doing this with several passages, doing it from time to time—making a sort of deal: “just this once don’t even glance down at all, and we’ll see what happens”—is a good idea. Sometimes the result will be that most of the passage becomes more accurate, but that a spot or two will stubbornly remain inaccurate or get worse. This provides a reason to examine those passages—what is hard about them, are the planned fingerings and hand positions well thought out, are those plans really being carried out, and so on?

Speaking of doing this, or anything, “from time to time,” it is a good idea to remember that this isn’t something that must be changed or solved right away. It is unrealistic to expect that it can be. Any reduction in the amount of looking by a student who is over-relying on it is good; more should come as time goes by. I do sometimes say to a student something like “take a good look at those keyboards, ‘cause that’s the last time you will see them.” But that is just an attempt to keep the atmosphere light and relaxed. It is always a balancing act: focusing too intensely on something like not looking at the keyboards can distract from other things and can lead to tension (mental, perhaps leading to physical); however, thinking about it and working on it is important. The balance will have to be different for each student.

Additional suggestions

One approach that I have used to start working on this, either with a student who is really convinced or one who still needs persuading, is to suggest a quota for looking at the hands or feet. This seems silly, in a way; at the moment when I suggest it to a student, it actually often comes across as rather silly or funny. That’s one of its advantages—again, a relaxed atmosphere. The student may think that it is a joke, but it is a good, practical idea. 

With the passage in question, first ask the student to play through it once not looking at all, regardless of what seems to be happening. (If that goes really well, then that passage may not be the right one for this exercise.) If there are some rough spots or the student feels really uncomfortable with certain spots, ask the student to do one of the following: 1) Choose in advance a few places to look (maybe a number that averages once every five or six measures: not much more frequent than that). Try to base the choice on an estimate of where looking can be most helpful. Then play the passage moving in and out of the looking according to the plan. Or 2) Set a quota for looking—maybe six times in a short piece, or whatever seems fair—but then look at the hands or feet as it seems necessary along the way, trying not to use up the quota too quickly.

The more planned—not just habitual—the looking is, the more likely it is that the student will actually get something out of it. Both forms of the quota exercise will help the student make looking count: that is, really know what notes should be played, and then really find them with the eyes. (Note that these quota approaches tend to get the student looking to find notes, not looking to check on the notes just played.) The first approach makes this happen most efficiently, since it analyzes which notes the student thinks that he or she will have to look for. The second approach is more of a motivator. Since the looking quota shouldn’t be squandered, the student will want to use it well. 

The drawback to looking

Looking to find notes is usually unnecessary and introduces tiny delays that undermine the overall sense of rhythm. Looking to check on the notes just played should be rarely necessary, if ever. It introduces really serious delays, since the process of checking visually on what notes were just played and comparing that to a sense of what the notes should have been takes a long time. 

This looking to check is something that reflects a student’s low assessment of his or her abilities. That is, the student doesn’t realize that he or she knows by ear what the right notes should be. In general, if we know a passage of music, we also know what isn’t in that passage: if something is wrong we will probably hear it. This doesn’t happen all of the time, even with experienced and accomplished players, but it happens more of the time for inexperienced players than they may realize. Most people would know immediately if they heard a wrong note in, say, The Star Spangled Banner, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, or Jingle Bells—or any number of other tunes and pieces of music. You do not need to be a beginner at playing music, let alone experienced or “advanced,” to recognize rightness or wrongness of notes in a piece that you have heard a few times. This assumes paying attention—both when first hearing the piece a few times, and when playing through it and being on the lookout for wrong notes. This is all part of the process of getting to know pieces and plays out a bit differently from one student to another and from one piece to another. Most students, especially beginners, underestimate their own ability to know whether they are playing what they want to have played and do unnecessary looking to compensate for that. Even if a student must stop and think about whether what was just played was correct, it is worth challenging that student to make that judgment by ear not by eye, if at all possible.

Looking versus not looking

Here’s a good exercise for getting a vivid sense of the difference between looking and not looking—the difference in how it feels to the player. This is not just for beginners or students. As with many efficient exercises, it is mostly just a way of clearing the mind and looking at something as simply as possible. Take a very short passage, perhaps just a measure or two, plus the next downbeat—or any short unit that makes sense. It should be one that you know well. This particular exercise is more focused (or at least easier) with a passage that is either manuals-only or a pedal solo. It should not be difficult or present any virtuosic challenges. Play the passage a few times in a row, keeping your eyes on the music in a way that is almost exaggeratedly focused. Actually say some of the letter names as you go. (I get something out of opening my eyes extra wide for this purpose, as if I were doing a comic turn as someone looking astonished.) Then, look the passage over and start playing it, keeping your eyes only on the keyboard. This will only work completely if you have the passage memorized. If you need to glance up at the music, go ahead. Make sure to remind yourself exactly where on the page the passage is, so that you can get right to it if you need to glance up. Do this several times in a row. Now play the passage several times in a row alternating—one time to the next—between looking only at the music, and looking only at your hands. By now you will probably have the passage memorized if you didn’t already, so you shouldn’t have to glance at the music much, if at all. The memorization is the main reason for keeping the passage short. If the passage is well memorized, you can add this in: play it with your eyes closed! This can feel a bit tightrope-like, and can really intensify the focus on the mental side of not looking. In what ways do these modes of playing feel different to you? Are there differences in security? In how well you can listen while playing? In what you think the effectiveness of the playing to a listener would be?

After you have subjected a passage to this treatment, you will know it very well and can use the same passage for this trickier exercise in looking. Play the passage, and go back and forth from looking at the music to looking at your hands or feet at random times. This is the very thing that I am suggesting that we should mostly not do (but especially not do while learning). The reason for doing it here is to practice getting back to the same place in the music that you have just left, smoothly and without delay. For me the trick to this is in knowing an instant before I am going to look down that I am about to do so, and sort of memorizing my place on the page. Then the gesture of looking down should be light and quick, and the return to the music should be governed in part by the physical feeling of return rather than by reading the music to find the spot. At least that’s how it seems to me. Play around with it and see what you think.

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 . . .

Performance

Something that has been on my mind for a while now is the relationship between being a player and being a performer. This has been on my mind in one way or another for most of my adult life, but it has recently come to the fore and presented itself as an interesting subject for this column.

There are a few reasons for this. I have been playing more concerts over the last five years or so than at any other period of my life. As a result, I have been focusing directly and intensely on my own experience of being a performer and my feelings about that experience. I have had a larger than usual influx of new students over the last several months, and whenever that happens I have to focus as consciously as possible on my own thinking about the goals and needs of those students. Over the last five or six years, I have also been a more frequent audience member both at concerts and at other sorts of artistic endeavors­—theater, dance, and so on—than I had been over the preceding couple of decades. In this I have looked for (not totally) offbeat, non-traditional, semi-improvisatory, some-
times mixed-media, or otherwise somewhat avant-garde sorts of performance. This has been partly for practical reasons (a lot of such things take place near where I live, tickets are usually easy to get, and much of this sort of work is not costly to attend) and partly because this is an area—or a set of overlapping areas—that I had previously neglected. This has given me an interesting look at new aspects on performance as a phenomenon. 

By and large this column has dealt with two sorts of things over the years: the really practical, such as a protocol for learning pedal playing, suggestions for solving hand distribution difficulties, general practice strategies, or exercises for trills; and the tangential but relevant, such as tuning and temperament, an introduction to the clavichord, or my thoughts on the ways in which trying to learn golf has informed my playing and teaching of music. What I have not dealt with very much is the whole set of questions that bridge the gap between playing and performance. Some of these perhaps boil down to what might be called the fundamental question of musical performance: how do I know that what I am doing is valuable to those who are hearing it? 

But this in turn expands to a host of specific questions and things to think about. This includes everything that we call interpretation. Interpretation as a part of actual performance includes not just interpretive choices that we know we are making (tempo, registration, articulation, approaches to rhythm, etc.), but also all sorts of intangibles that make the worked-out and describable interpretation seem compelling and convincing. This “compelling and convincing” phenomenon is probably one reason that a given listener can like so many different interpretations of the same piece. The describable interpretive choices are by no means all of what makes a performance effective: you can make a case that they are often only a small part, or that they essentially just set the stage for effectiveness rather than create it. 

The relevant questions might well include things about presentation. Is the way I look while playing important? Is it important that a written program be presented a certain way? Shall I talk to the audience? Looking at it from another point of view, is it better to pay as little attention as possible to those trappings and think only about how the music sounds? 

The strongest reason that I have not dealt very much with the question of “Is what I am doing valuable to the audience?” in these columns is that I feel I don’t want to dictate anything to my students about interpretive choices. I do not want to say, “This is right, and that is wrong,” or even “These could be right, but all of those are wrong.” Nor do I want to say, “This is how I do it. Why don’t you try that out?”

Helping a student to become a competent, eventually exceptionally accomplished, player or to become a well-educated, well-rounded musician, artist, and person, can all be addressed without prejudice as to interpretive stance. Can that also be said of helping students to deal directly with the question, “Will what I do be valuable to the listeners?” I think that it can. But I also feel that this is one of the most elusive aspects of teaching and among the most difficult to describe. I think that I have deliberately (or let’s say subconsciously deliberately) shied away from trying to address it over the years. Indeed I am not going to answer it in this or any future column. However, in raising and considering all sorts of questions about what performance is and what it is to be a performer, I will perhaps approach some ways of answering it over time. 

The other big matter about performing is nervousness. There are all sorts of ways to help students deal with that. To start with, helping a student to be highly competent at all of the practical dimensions of playing, and to know and to trust that, is a major part of that picture. Perhaps other aspects of understanding performance as such can also be helpful.

Thoughts about performance and being a performer

So here are various questions and thoughts about performance and being a performer. I will address more of them in future columns. And we will see how many of them wind their way to answers.

Should students be expected or required to perform? When I was very young and taking piano lessons, I used all of my wiles to avoid playing in any of my teachers’ studio classes or recitals. I am pretty sure that from the moment of my first piano lesson in the fall of 1965 when I was eight years old, no member of any public ever heard me perform so much as a note at a keyboard instrument until mid February 1974. I was then 16.

My debut that month involved my playing one organ piece at a Valentine’s Day-themed service at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut. Do I think that my avoiding performing for all those years was good? Did it do any harm to my development as a musician? How do I square that history with the fact that I am now a more-than-average comfortable performer? (That is, regardless of whether a given listener likes my approach or doesn’t, I greet concert performance with very little nervousness these days, 40 years and more after the events described above.) 

Why did I not want to play for people in those days? It wasn’t for lack of interest in music or for lack of identifying myself as a musician. Both of those things were present in abundance. I spent a lot of time at the piano, not necessarily practicing what I was “supposed” to practice, but playing. I listened a lot to LP’s and to concerts. I even composed a bit. I think that I was influenced by a feeling that if I played for someone, it had to be perfect. The only thing I would have meant by that at the time was note perfect. This is an attitude that is very easy to pick up from our society and culture. 

There is a billboard that I often pass on the highway near where I live that says, “You don’t get medals for trying, you only get medals for results.” This may be literally true as to “medals,” but it strikes me as a harmful attitude to try to instill in people in general and certainly in aspiring musicians. To put it more neutrally, it is at least an attitude that has consequences. One way to frame how I felt when I was young and trying to play piano is that, in effect, if I would only get a medal for (perfect) results, then I might as well not try. That’s only about performing, not about engaging with music, which I did with great energy in private. 

I don’t believe that my early piano teachers (or other teachers or any adults in my circle) directly conveyed this fear of making mistakes in public to me. I imagine that many of them felt about the whole subject more or less the way I do now. But this is a reminder that being afraid of doing something wrong is a powerful force and one that we have to think about how to counter. One tremendous benefit to me from my memories of my own early refusal to perform is that I can tell the story to my students. Those who are more or less beginners and who are nervous about performing—and about whether they can ever learn to be comfortable performing—take a good deal of comfort from my history.

When I was a student at Westminster Choir College, the organ department was very systematic in introducing us to performance. With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals, shorter or longer, with or without memorization, depending on the student and his or her program. I credit this systematic and humane approach with a significant proportion of my evolution into a comfortable performer.

I have had students who start out thinking that they don’t want to perform.  Their interests in music or in playing organ or harpsichord are inner ones, and expecting to play for other people would only add a layer of tension to an experience that they want to be serene. I have a lot of respect for that sort of feeling. However, I can report that almost everyone who starts out saying something of this sort and whose inner-directed interest is strong enough to cause them to stick with their studies for a while ends up actually wanting to play for others, if only in an informal studio class, and getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing so. 

I am fairly certain that there is a different or competing reason that some people feel reluctant to perform or to be identified or to self-identify as performers rather than just as people who play music. In a way it’s the opposite of the fear of making mistakes or playing badly, but it also stems from a set of societal biases about performing. It is a fear of seeming arrogant, vain, or self-indulgent by putting oneself forward as a performer. This stems at least in part from the awareness that we tend to elevate performers to the rank of “celebrities.” It gives rise to such inhibiting questions as “Who am I to play this great piece?” or “Who would want to listen to me when they could be listening to X or Y?” Such thoughts probably exist and function mostly at a subconscious level. But I believe that for a lot of people they are present. The great, famous touring and recording virtuosi are doing things that many of our students are not going to do, and indeed that you and I might not do either.

The truth is that most of those things that are inevitably different are about circumstances. My experience is that almost any student can play at least as many pieces as effectively, with as much benefit to the listener, as any experienced or famous performer might play them. The chief difference is that the famous performer probably has a larger repertoire and performs more. There may be individual pieces that are too difficult for us to learn comfortably, at least given realistic limits on our practice time. But this knocks out only some of the repertoire and has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the performance of any other piece. The most beautiful and moving performance I have ever heard of Variation 25 from the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach was given recently by a student of mine at a studio class. That reaction of mine as a listener did not come about because the performance reflected my specific interpretive ideas. It aligned with them in part, but not in full. And I mention this example only because it is the most recent. It is one of many from over the years, on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. 

At any given moment in history, there are many listeners for whom the performances of certain pieces by well-known touring and recording artists are indeed the finest performances out there. Those performers are not excluded from the community of those who might give great or even transcendent readings of great music. But no one who gains some level of competence at an instrument is excluded from that community either. It can be liberating to students to be reminded of this. The answer to the question “Why is that performer so famous and successful?” is not always or exclusively because he or she does things on a piece by piece basis that the rest of us can only dream of—not at all. 

Performance as improvisation

I feel that a version of this dynamic has been at play in my own life in the area of improvisation. If it comes up in conversation, I always say that I am not someone who can improvise. This is true of me as I stand now. But why is it? Some time very early in my engagement with music I decided that I couldn’t become someone who could improvise. This was in spite of my being a developing organist, and the organ’s being one of the corners of the “classical” music world where improvisation is most likely to be found. Looking back, I am pretty sure that I never chose to study improvisation and thereby find out what I could and couldn’t do in that field (which would have been the logical approach) because of two inhibiting assumptions: I couldn’t learn to improvise music of the quality of the greatest pieces in the repertoire, and I couldn’t learn to improvise as well as the great and famous improvisers. Were these assumptions correct? I have no idea. But I know that they cut me off from trying.

I close with a stray idea about performance, though as you will see, a logical segue from the above, which came into my head at some point over the last year or so. It stems in part from my experience watching certain theater and dance performances that included an element of improvisation. It is in a way an effort to counter the notion that as performers we must always be humble and self-effacing with respect to the composer. Such an idea is not without merit: it makes a lot of sense, especially, for me, as a kind of specific practical point. The composer probably knew a lot about the essence of the piece, and it might very well turn out that that knowledge can be of use to us in figuring out how we want to play it. (How we tap into that knowledge is a complex subject.) But I also think that too much reverence for the composer, especially when it is specifically expressed as humility, can be inhibiting.

This is not utterly unlike the ways in which too much reverence for other, more famous performers can be. So here’s my thought: one of the ways to conceptualize a partial goal of live performance of repertoire is that the pieces should seem improvised. They should have a kind of spontaneity and ability to surprise performer as well as listener—that we would ideally associate with something that was being brand new. This notion, though paradoxical when applied to a piece that we have leaned through hours of practicing, can be a strong antidote to staleness. But if I play a piece that was actually written by Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Messiaen and I feel like I am improvising it, then I am embracing at that moment the idea that I am someone who could be improvising that extraordinary musical content.

I am in fact not such a person. Even a fine improviser would, here and now, be improvising that piece. In a way, I am playing the role of that person, in a way that is perhaps not the same as but also not completely alien to the way that an actor plays a role. This is just a concept. But it feels to me like one that can bridge the gap between respect for the composer and the fortitude necessary to perform.

More to come . . .

Reflections from a trip

I recently returned from an unusually long vacation, and it has been around six weeks since I have taught or even played a note on the organ or harpsichord. For part of this time I was traveling in England—mostly London—with family members. I am in the process of discovering, as I get back to my regular routine, that there are aspects both of being off from work for that long and, especially, of visiting London that have lead me to reflections about teaching, playing music, the art of practicing, the business of helping to motivate students or to understand and work with their motivation, and various other tiles from the mosaic of the work that I do and that I write about. I want to set some of those reflections down here, before they have a chance to fade away. Admittedly, this column is a bit miscellaneous.

I grew up in an academic family, and we had various sorts of long breaks from our normal life at home. Some of those were the three-and-a-half month summer vacations that seemed to me growing up to be the norm. (More about that later.) But there was also an occasional sabbatical, when we would be away from home for eight or nine months, and really settle somewhere. During one of these periods, when I was thirteen years old, we lived in London. I also spent other, shorter, chunks of time in London in my teens, but, until a few weeks ago, I had not been there in forty-two years. (The reasons for this were varied and random: budget, logistics, other things going on, and my own aversion to air travel.)

The first, and biggest, phenomenon that I noticed being back there after all that time was just how powerful it felt to me—it was as if the years had melted away. It felt like a new and compelling combination of a dream and reality. Walking, and in some cases, re-walking the streets of London felt like one of the most important things that I had ever done. I knew that living in London had been important to me, but I was completely unprepared for how powerfully being there again after such a long time would hit me.

Early life experiences and later influences

What does that have to do with music, or with teaching? Well, it reminds me of, and sort of ratifies for me, the importance of early experience in shaping what we care about, how we think and feel, and what is more important and less important to us. Only some of that, of course, is about music—maybe little or none for some people, a lot for others. And it is not a point that is obscure or controversial, let alone specific to me. However, it came flooding back to me during this particular time, and that in turn reminds me to renew my commitment to helping students discover what it is that they most care about, what draws them to what they are proposing to do in music—why they are doing it—and to helping them to explore where that all come from.

In fact the first student whom I saw after I got back was a new student. And I felt like I could sharpen the focus of all of the questions that I like to ask, such as “Why are you here?” “What interests you about the instrument(s) and their repertoire?” “What is your first memory of being aware of organ/harpsichord/keyboard instruments?” and so on. I felt even more comfortable than I have in the past making such questions the center of the process of our beginning to work together.

Nevertheless, there were also things surrounding this trip that were much more specific to music and to my musical life. Not surprisingly, since I was thirteen, and the stay in London was, at seven months, quite a long one for someone at that formative age, I had a lot of experiences during that long-ago time that were directly part of my own early musical development. By and large, those resided in the fairly deep recesses of my mind, but they came flooding back. 

It was in London, during the fall of 1970, I really discovered the Beethoven piano sonatas. This was not so much as a player, but as a listener. I had the radio on much of the time that I was hanging around our apartment that year, and BBC Radio 3 happened to be playing, over part of that season, a large sample of Alfred Brendel’s early recording of the Beethoven sonatas. These performances were a revelation to me. I had certainly heard Beethoven’s piano music—and some of his other works—prior to that. Yet, until then, I found the pieces unsatisfying: sort of fragmented or arbitrary. Looking back it is almost certain that I was too young to appreciate them. My whole orientation to music started with Bach and Handel, and I think that Beethoven was frighteningly anarchistic to me as an eleven- or twelve-year-old. Occasional listening to a sonata played by Rubinstein, Schnabel, or Fischer had not enabled me to break through that. However, for whatever reason, these Brendel recordings made perfect sense out of the music for me, and in so doing opened up the whole world of post-Baroque music to me.

I noticed, a week or so after returning home from London, that the only music that had been going through my head since then were Beethoven piano sonatas! The experience of being in London has apparently re-awakened something amounting to a preoccupation with those pieces. I think that, if I had any piano (as different from organ, harpsichord, or clavichord) technique, or perhaps if I had a Beethoven-era piano to work with (and the requisite technique) I would quite possibly be interested in approaching those pieces as a player. Indeed perhaps I will sit down and read through some of them, though without expecting anything much in the way of rhetoric or interpretation, since I do believe that mastery of the instrument is as crucial as being able to learn the notes, and I definitely do not have that with piano.

So, in addition to the importance that early experience plays in shaping what we care about or are interested in, I am reminded of the notion that coming to something naturally, when the time is right, is a valuable process. I did indeed (try to) play a fair amount of Beethoven on the piano as a teenager. But, even though by then I loved listening to that music, I never felt any affinity for it as a player. Any work that I did on it felt forced, any practicing that I did of it (and I did much too little) was impatient and vulnerable to distraction. Of course perhaps I “should have” made myself work harder and better way back then, as a matter of discipline or dedication. Nevertheless, I could not or did not, and that process feels to me (even more so after the recent experiences that I am describing here) like a completely different one from working on something out of genuine interest and desire.

Early life experiences and later regrets

On the other hand, as I reflect on how the trip relates to my teaching, I wonder: What are the downsides to my strong focus on following one’s own deepest artistic interests? Would I, for example, have been better off if I had somehow found a way to get myself to practice Beethoven more effectively (and just plain more) when I was young? Suppose that specifically a teacher had managed to force or coerce me into doing so. Would that have been good or bad? Even if the process feels unnatural, is the long-term loss too great to indulge the preference for what feels to me natural, organic, inner-directed? Is it a shame that a fairly accomplished, middle-aged player feels regret about missing the chance to learn a particular part of the repertoire? There is always an infinite amount to regret and no one can do everything. Also it is impossible (isn’t it?) to know with respect to any given child, teenager, student of any age, what he or she will or will not wish that you had made them do along the way.

On another matter altogether: we walked past a house where Mozart lived for several weeks during 1764, when he was eight years old, and where he is said to have written his Symphony #1, K16. The house is located at 180 Ebury Street, just south of Sloane Square, which was a rural area at the time Mozart lived there. (As far as I can tell, it is indeed the same building that is there, on a quiet street very much in the middle of the city, now.) Mozart’s father, Leopold, was recovering from an illness at the time, and apparently this necessitated quiet, and thus his children were not allowed to play music. Thus, it was a good opportunity for Wolfgang Amadeus to focus on composition. 

There is a statue of Mozart in the square near the house and a plaque on the house itself. In fact, that block of Ebury Street has been renamed, or given the additional name of, Mozart Terrace. All of this happened a long time after the Mozart family’s residence there. Although Leopold Mozart was an esteemed musician, and both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his older sister Nannerl were known as child prodigy performers, none of them were earth-shaking celebrities back then.

This leads me to the principle thing that I was trying to achieve by visiting and contemplating the Mozartiana around Ebury Street: the elusive awareness that Mozart was a person—a real, regular (though phenomenally talented) person. When he lived in Ebury Street, Mozart walked with his own ordinary feet over the same ground that my family and I were walking on last month. Did he like to walk down to the river? Was he more worried about his father or consumed by his music? What was there to eat in the neighborhood? Did Mozart find the old buildings around London cool?

Standing in awe of geniuses like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, makes plenty sense. Their intellect is awe-inspiring, and there is something about perceiving their work as out of the ordinary that can be extraordinarily powerful. But this perspective is usually by default. It is important to remember that they were also ordinary humans with everyday lives.

By the way, on a perhaps somewhat macabre note, another spur towards trying to take in the sense of the great figures of the past as real people is to be found at Westminster Abbey and other places that house tombs of famous people. It is sobering and moving to walk past (or on!) the spaces that contain the actual mortal remains of, say, Elizabeth I,
or Dickens, or Handel. The very bones that held the pen that composed Messiah are right there . . . .

No one knows everything.

Thinking back to Beethoven and Mozart reminded me of something else, not from London directly, but about even earlier in my life. I recall that when I was something like six or seven years old, I came across both of those names—Mozart in a children’s book about composers, and Beethoven in the title of the song Roll Over Beethoven, which I probably heard sung by the Beatles. I remember being disturbed about the pronunciations of both of those names. I thought that “Mozart” should be pronounced with a “z” in the middle, and that “Beethoven” should be pronounced such that the first syllable rhymed with “beneath,” and the rest sounded like the appliance in which you might bake something. I was sure that the grown-ups had it all wrong. I had never thought of the notion of different languages using letters differently, or having different sounds.

My point is that this is an example of a simple fact that it is easy to forget: that you only know something if you know it. No one knows that which they have not yet learned. This is one bedrock reason, though certainly not the only one, for teaching at all. It is also, I believe, closely allied to this: that no one knows or can know everything. So knowing what we do know and what we do not is critically important. And knowing how to find things out is as important as, or maybe more important than, knowing things. 

Twice on the England trip I happened to walk through a space where someone was practicing the organ. One of these spaces was King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with its famous Harrison & Harrison, and the other was Bath Abbey, where there is a Klais organ from 1997. I knew a lot about the King’s organ already, but nothing about the instrument in Bath. As an organ groupie, I was excited to hear both. So in each case I stood there listening for a while, probably staying a bit longer than I would have otherwise.

The experience reminded me of something I wrote in this column back in March: Performance is playing when 1) you know that you are playing, and 2) you know or think that someone is listening. So what about overheard practicing? For me as a random casual listener, this was performance, even though for the person seated at each of those organs it was not! It certainly had some of the significance for me that we usually associate with having heard a performance. Here I am remembering it a month or so later. Each of those brief listening experiences added a little something to the edifice of what it means to me to have spent my life hearing music, and to my awareness of what the organ is.

The last thing that I will mention for now is that, back in London, I poked my head briefly into Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. In 1970 we lived a few blocks from this church, and I used to go to short organ recitals there. I don’t remember whether it was a daytime or evening series—and if the former, exactly how I squared that with going to school. But I do remember that the sound of that organ and the ambience of the place helped seal the deal regarding my interest in the organ. I also remember that there was a strong sense of history there, that I found mesmerizing. I would not have recognized all of the names then, I assume, but I have now read that Edwin Lemare, Walter Alcock, and John Ireland were organists of the church at one time or another. I do remember there being a picture of Jean Langlais on the wall, taken on a visit of his to the place. I did not know much about him at that point, but I was nonetheless impressed!