Repeats and strict adherence to fingering etc.

[bats_about_belfreys]

I am a self-taught pianist who, at 41, has started to take lessons (which I need because I WILL play Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue before I die) and I am sure that the following will prove controversial.

From day 1, my teacher has set on a course of absolute strictness. I developed an intuitive fingering technique that allows me to cross over the 3rd and 4th fingers (now I do this almost automatically and with great ease) in order to maintain perfect legato without recourse to the pedal. In Mozart and Bach particularly this has proved helpful (as well as the Berceuse by Chopin). She regards it as a circus trick, disrespectful of the composer's wishes, out-of-step with the fingerging on the score and recommends judicious application of the pedal. Well, not recommends, but insists on. To me, of the three choices available - 1. maintain an honest fracture in the legato because the human hand has natural limitations; 2. do whatever you physically can to adhere to the composer's instructions (which exist IN THE MUSIC, not in the digitation put there perhaps a century later by some musicologist); 3. blur the entire register of the piano by using the sustain pedal - the pedal is the ugliest and the most cheaty. Even given the lightest touch its indiscriminate smoke affects every corner. I'd even put it on a par with selecting the "strings" sound effect when you are playing Schumann on an electric keyboard. It is rude.

Who knows? Perhaps this double-jointedness that I taught myself, over years, might be authentic to the composers. They were undoubtedly extraordinary human beings and no two human hands are really alike. I can't see how the Bach Gm toccata can be played without double-jointedness in the left hand.

And my teacher is as unbending on repeats. Even when they go against any kind of structure I can identify. Does anybody know of a recording of the sublime Goldbergs in which EVERY single half of EVERY single variation is repeated as "instructed"? Kempf? No. Gould? Ditto. Yet my teacher insists that skipping these violates the author's rights. I don't see the sense in it. These are not being played during 18th century social parties, in which context the repeat gives people the chance to comment on and hear again pieces as they are being played. In today's performance setting we can assume that people heard it the first time round! (PS I do appreciate the concept of repeating the Aria and the canons because these do have a nobler and denser musical content, and merit special treatment which blanket repetition wipes out.)

BTW, it is often said that repeats are requested to be skipped during exams. If they are integral to the music, then the ennui or the rushed timetable of a panel of examiners seems a far more vacuous reason to skip them than the pianist's innate desire to express something of meaning.

Over to you.

[iroveashe]

In Bach's time the thumb was far less used than it is today, and the overlapping of fingers wasn't unusual. You may want to read Rosalyn Tureck's An Introduction to the Performance of Bach where she talks about how romanticism has affected the way most pianists play, and she includes a simple Bach piece with his own original fingering. To give you an idea, the first bar of the right hand is (without ornaments):

C D E F G A B G  with fingers:
3 4 3 4 3 4  3 1

However in her performance of the Goldberg Variations she includes all the repeats if I'm not mistaken, and in the book I mentioned she elaborates about the possibilities of repeats (different dynamics for example). Also, as wonderful as Gould is I wouldn't take him as an example for interpretation.

[bats_about_belfreys]

Thanks irov. I had no idea whatsoever about the Bachian fingering you outlined and have given it a trial run. Peculiar but not impossible and certainly learnable.

I think though that what I was getting at was more my teacher's attitude that questioning ANYTHING is inherently arrogant, an offense against the composer and bad manners. I, in classes I give (I have had a few students for about three years now) positively encourage my students to investigate and interrogate the score, to assess for themselves fingering that fits their hands etc. In every situation I adhere to the cardinal rules of legato, maintaining tied notes, expression of melody and melodic line and rhythm, as all these things are consequent to appropriate playing. I would never dream of being doctrinaire about fingering and saying "The score says 3 so you MUST NOT use 2", closing my ears to any contribution they may have to add. I have met too many people who received that sort of treatment during lessons and they simply never went back.

In a way it is the same with the repeats, although there is the extra case against me that these were at least written in by the composer, which rarely happened for fingering. I would neither advocate skipping them all nor obeying them all. It all depends on the piece and also on the context in, even the piano on, which you are playing it. I would not choose to repeat an exposition, for example, because the resolution is already there, the audience already knows how everything comes back home. Nothing to do with how long a piece takes to play nor whether I can be bothered to repeat, this is about something more personal and intuitive to do with the overall structure, the "message" that I feel goes with the music. Put simply, the automatic insistence on repeating "because of that thick vertical line and those dots" lays a very dead and unthinking hand over the joy of music.

Point taken about Gould, viz: wonderful, but not the best guide to interpretation. His Goldbergs (both recordings) were instrumental (ouch!) in attracting me to music, as was Sparky and his Magic Piano and, well, you never forget your first love.

[iroveashe]

I do agree with you regarding a teacher's attitude, and I think that's a difference between teacher who teaches piano, and teachers who teaches how to learn. The last teacher I had, when I told her about the alternate fingerings I used for scales and I tried to explain why, she just rejected them and said I should use the orthodox fingerings because it's the way it is.

It's true that repeats depend on context, but for example take a piece like Beethoven's 15th Sonata, 2nd Movement, it wouldn't make sense without repeats, the whole structure would fall apart. Or sometimes they might be there to establish the exposition more, and in that way make the variations or elaboration of the development stand out more.

[scottmcc]

a good teacher (of anything, not just music) knows that they can learn something from their students, and that it's not a purely one-way street.  bad teachers are threatened when a student knows something that they didn't, but good ones see the opportunity to improve.

regarding fingerings, the "standard practices," whatever those are, are generally designed to allow the most comfortable execution of a passage, but they may not feel that way at first.  over time however we often learn that they are indeed the most effective.  as you mentioned, many of the fingerings listed on scores are those of an editor, and none of them should be seen as rigid.  I'm sure rachmaninoff used fingerings that those of us with normal-sized hands can't even contemplate, but that shouldn't stop us from playing his music.  beethoven often wrote fingerings that are terribly awkward, and much as I want to respect his music, I don't see that as an affront as long as the right note is played.  but, in contrast, with many etudes, the fingering is the element being studied.  for a simple example, the hanon thumb-passing exercises: no sense doing them if you're not passing the thumb.

in general, if I see a fingering listed on a score, I try it, because it saves me the time of trying to figure it out myself.  but I don't hesitate to substitute something that works better if I am struggling.

regarding repeats, some repeats are more integral to the score than others.  the repeated exposition of a sonata, as mentioned by iroveashe, is often unneeded, but sometimes it is required to give balance, especially if there is a lengthy development to follow or if the theme wasn't stated very strongly initially.  repeats within a section are generally necessary, such as those within the second movement of beethoven's appasionata (op 57).  to paraphrase animal farm, "all repeats are equal, some are just more equal than others."

[bats_about_belfreys]

Irovashe and scott, nice to receive feedback.

1. Repeats. Sure, if repeats (like the beethoven 15th as cited will have to go back home and check which one that is), certainly like his repeats in the scherzo for the "Pastorale" sonata, are indispensible to the structure then they matter, and I have no problem with that. But, to take a "lighter" example, is every page of Scott Joplin worth the required second hearing (accepting that it is worth a first listening, of course)?

2. Fingering. I do, btw, try out all the fingering provided in a score but also allow my own bones and brain to make their input. My grandad was a concert pianist in London and his dusty tomes swarm with carefully inked-in (in beautiful copperplate numbering) 1s to 5s, more often than not in disagreement with the printed material. In the current case that gets my goat, the teacher wrote her own (repeat: her own) fingering on a Mozart Sonata we are looking at, with a thumb-thumb moment in left-hand chords (nothing was printed on the score and my 1-2 was clearly "not the done thing"). She told me that if I disagreed with it, then I should go to a music library and look through other editions. If I could find one that went my way, then she would accept my suggestions.

Now, whether or not that gives me a fingering that will be more comfortable in the long-run (I am 41 - how much long run do I have left?), it was insulting and seemingly baseless enough to make me consider joining the exodus of bright, ambitious human beings away from the world of taught music. I don't care if Radu Lupu is a friend of hers.... (I am going into rant mode, so I'll stop, go back home and do some more practicing)

[slobone]

You have to use the fingering that works for you. Charles Rosen, a superb scholar and very underrated pianist, says he was never able to turn the thumb under when doing scales because of the way his hand is shaped. Instead, he quickly moves the whole hand to the right or left so he can play legato.

And using the pedal to cover up non-legato playing, especially in Bach or Mozart, is a real no-no. Later on, composers like Liszt and Debussy would expect you to use the pedal to create a legato effect where it's impossible to do it with the fingers alone. But certainly not in the 18th century!

Repeats -- I tend to agree with you. There's considerable evidence that in Bach's time, if a performer took a repeat, he was expected to improvise additional ornamentation the second time around. Igor Kipnis did a recording of the Goldbergs (on harpsichord) where he carries this idea to an extreme.

Plus you need to keep in mind the occasion and the audience. There's a recording on youtube by a young pianist who apparently did the entire Goldbergs in performance in Tokyo, taking all the repeats with no changes. Unfortunately -- he's not very good (I won't say who it is). It must have been a very long evening for the audience. And this is a guy who just signed with a major record label...

[iroveashe]

And using the pedal to cover up non-legato playing, especially in Bach or Mozart, is a real no-no. Later on, composers like Liszt and Debussy would expect you to use the pedal to create a legato effect where it's impossible to do it with the fingers alone. But certainly not in the 18th century!

I don't think it's fair to reject that possibility the piano gives you just because the instruments at that time didn't have that capability. I don't mean to say be lazy, don't work carefully on fingerings and don't master for example, changing fingers on a key without repeating the sound; I think one should play as legato as possible without the aid of the pedal, but once you can do that, some subtle pedal when necessary won't harm anyone, after all there are some parts where it's literally impossible to play legato, especially with multiple voices, and managing to use the pedal without making it obvious is far from the "I'll use the pedal because I'm lazy to do it with my fingers" approach.
Instead of thinking "Bach couldn't use it, so I shouldn't", I like to think "More likely than not, if Bach was a live today he'd use it".

[bats_about_belfreys]

Hello again,

I am totally in agreement with the idea that if Bach had lived in an era in which the sustain pedal - heck, even the saxophone, ondes martinet, microwave oven or mobile phone - existed, he would have used it. I also imagine he'd be tickled by Jaques Loussier's jazz-savvy recordings of the Goldbergs (etc.) and the use of Air on a G-string to advertise Hamlet cigars (memory trip there for Brits over "a certain age", perhaps youtube has the ads. They were very funny). I can't imagine JS, should he be living among us in 2009, being so tranfixed with his own antiquity that he only takes a horse-drawn brougham to work, eschews cheese wrapped in plastic and takes his pantaloons to the haberdashery to be mended instead of getting a new pair of chinos from the arcade.

Nevertheless, in all the music of his and Mozart's that I have played, I cannot bring to mind a single "impossible" legato (whereas romantics and later often like to have notes several octaves apart being sustained, and here only the pedal works, or asking someone from the audience to hold down that B-flat while you tinker about in another zone). There is art in solving those nasty little micro-seconds where the fingers have to do their trapeze work, and this is a lovely challenge. The use of the pedal to duck the challenge is objectionable more from the internal point-of-view of the player than that of the audience. The best analogy I can think of is that I'd use a lift (or an elevator, oh my American cousins) to go up 5 storeys but take the stairs to go up only two.

I've strayed a bit from talking of teaching techniques, but this is fun.

[slobone]

Nevertheless, in all the music of his and Mozart's that I have played, I cannot bring to mind a single "impossible" legato

With the possible exception of pieces that were explicitly written for the 2-manual harpsichord, like some of the Goldberg variations. The fingering there may not be impossible, but it's damn tricky...

[dezfair]

Hey Bats!

I was floored by your referencing the Hamlet cigar advert! It was my first hearing of the Air and for that matter any Bach at all (being a kid yay high...)

However the sequel to that comercial which I found even more magical, featured the D Major prelude, No.5 of the WTC, played legatissimo with pedal. This is the way I prefer to play it now but I can't decide if I am doing Bach a dis-service as such. I find the original staccatto interpretation frigid and uninteresting and yet I keep reminding myself that that is the way he wanted it!

It always seems to me I prefer the first version of anything I hear!

[bats_about_belfreys]

Hoy dez!

Between stacatto and pedal is an entire universe of interpretation, much as the colours are found between white and black. Yet it is very warming to have someone admit that they tend to go for the the first recording/version they hear. After all, that's often when you decide you want to hear more of a piece.

Which Hamlet ad did you chance upon? My favourite was always of a man completing a model of Salisbury Cathedral made out of matches when somebody slams the door... or the follically-short-changed man in the photo booth trying to comb the three strands that remain of his hair from one ear to the next, making it look that he had an admirable crown of flowing locks. Without success.

"Bats"

[iroveashe]

However the sequel to that comercial which I found even more magical, featured the D Major prelude, No.5 of the WTC, played legatissimo with pedal. This is the way I prefer to play it now but I can't decide if I am doing Bach a dis-service as such. I find the original staccatto interpretation frigid and uninteresting and yet I keep reminding myself that that is the way he wanted it!

I'm not in favor of either the overly romantic approach of legatissimo and pedal (even if my mom likes the C Prelude from the WTC I that way) nor of the strictness in playing every single crochet detached from the rest. A lot of people say it should or shouldn't be played a certain way because Bach didn't play it like that; but what about how Chopin played Bach? Or any other great composer playing someone else's work? Are their interpretations "less right" if for example they decide to use pedal or even add octaves to dramatize the music more? Chopin said of Liszt that he played the Etudes the way Chopin himself would like to play them, who can say what would happen if Bach heard people from centuries after he died playing his music this or that way?

[thierry13]

1. maintain an honest fracture in the legato because the human hand has natural limitations; 2. do whatever you physically can to adhere to the composer's instructions (which exist IN THE MUSIC, not in the digitation put there perhaps a century later by some musicologist); 3. blur the entire register of the piano by using the sustain pedal - the pedal is the ugliest and the most cheaty. Even given the lightest touch its indiscriminate smoke affects every corner. I'd even put it on a par with selecting the "strings" sound effect when you are playing Schumann on an electric keyboard. It is rude.

1- You must use your arm and technique to control the legato, not only the fingers, on the modern piano (which is different from the ones past composers used, including Chopin).
2- Fingerings in editions are more often wrong than right(by that I mean that I have better ones most of the time). But then again, they all *work*, and are "good".
3- If there's something you SHOULD do with pedal indications by composers, it's not absolutely respect them, it's absolutely DO NOT RESPECT THEM. They played on different pianos and it simply did not work the same way back then. Composer's pedal markings should be respected on the instrument they used, then you can add this kind of sound to your imagination and do something similar on a modern piano using different pedaling techniques.

By the way, I know what I'm talking about and am not bullshitting. I have very serious information about these very particular problems.

[mcdiddy1]

If I were you, I would look in to getting a new teacher. The teachers role is to merely guide you in the right direction towards "musical " direction. As long as the intent and spirit of the music is preserved then you are doing it justice. A violin teacher one said to me " i don't care if you play with your toes, as long as you can comfortably execute it then do it".
        You sound educated enough about music to make your own mind about what the music calls for and if she insist on being a keyboarding teacher instead of a music teacher you should simply part ways. While it is noble to want to preserve the musical practices of the past, you have to accept the reality that todays instruments are made differently. Besides we don't know if Bach or Beethoven was alive and they saw the fingering you use and might say the would prefer the fingering you did over the ones they did.
        We tend to treat composers like perfect human beings with no flaws and who are incapable of changing their minds. The fact that they were able to separate themselves from their thousands of contemporaries is one of the reasons that make them great. We should continue to foster these ideas of having new ideas and trying new things because that is what they did.

[bats_about_belfreys]

Good day, thierry and mcdiddy. Thanks for the highly thought-provoking and supportive comments.

Any chance of nudging me towards that "very serious information" mentioned? My impression is that, as fingering tends to differ among publishing companies, it might even be used as a means of "autographing" the score, of identifying it as the Peters or the Dover edition etc, and perhaps each publishing house has a paidup fingerer. Is this in any way true/likely? (Incidentally, I have never even looked at pedal markings, except una corda, in 3 decades of playing, nor ever marked one in when I was trying to be the next great composer.) On with the story.

At the last class, we veered away from fingering (it was clear enough that I had cracked it, and went along with her, a-hem, "suggestions" because, heck, practice is practice) and on to dynamics. Again, to the last ink dot. My Chopin Bbm Nocturne was blowing loud and quiet like a radio with water in the battery compartment, but she semed to like it that way....

I think I may have to open another thread on this.

[mcdiddy1]

Yea , one of my old teachers who played at Carnegie Hall many times would take my music and say  bring a white out marker so he could get rid of all the editors pedal markings in my Dover Chopin etudes book. He would say that they are just stupid....and then he would play it and show me why. My current teacher does not follow the pedal markings strictly either.

[slobone]

Even if you're using the Chopin urtext edition, I wouldn't treat the pedal markings as gospel. Pianos today are different than they were in his time. And pedalling is dependent on the piano, where it's being played, and the audience. Not to mention the taste of the performer. And also the tempo, etc.

[lostinidlewonder]

I don't think Bach would have used the pedal with his music as liberal as we see in musical periods after Baroque. If it is used it is used to connect two sounds, rarely to allow sounds to sustain while other notes play over it. This seems to me to be a key point of playing counterpoint correctly, that the combination of melodies are not misconstrued by sustaining phrases with the pedal but by our fingering.

When we study Shostakovich prelude and fugues we would do a lot of disservice over using the pedal as he is very particular as to how long each note holds for (however we may use the pedal for parts which are impossible to produce a legato sound without, but the pedal is merely used for this minor touch up, not for its powerful sustaining effect). If we add the pedal we merely give a blur of sustained notes paying no regard to the composers wish for the exact length of the notes thus we miss out on the appreciation of the pure sound of the counterpoint.

Fingering in Bach is a real art form. There are often many options of fingering for a given passage but what is key is that there really is only one masterful fingering to use. In Bach people can do all sorts of things that may seem correct but really is not the most efficient fingering to play. I know this personally from studying the WTC as a young child. I have retained the memorized the muscular memory of the wrong fingerings in particular sections, I can feel how the muscular memory is acquired through those wrong fingers, I also notice how it feels more tense than a more efficient fingering option.

The problem is that sometimes in Bach we are asked to have very keen sense of our fingering and position of our hand, after all Bach revolutionized fingering at the keyboard, but this point highlights that often people who study Bach "do not know" that they "do not know" what is the best fingering.

[slobone]

lostinidlewonder, you make good points but I disagree that there is only one best fingering for Bach. Fingering is affected by a lot of different things, the size of your hand, the tempo, the articulation, even which voice you want to bring out. All are variable in Bach.

As for muscle memory, I sometimes revise my fingerings even on a piece I've already learned. IF the new fingering is better, I actually find it feels more natural to my hand and the old fingering is soon forgotten.

[lostinidlewonder]

lostinidlewonder, you make good points but I disagree that there is only one best fingering for Bach. Fingering is affected by a lot of different things, the size of your hand, the tempo, the articulation, even which voice you want to bring out. All are variable in Bach.

The traditional approach to Bach is not to bring out one voice over the other because of adherence to strict counterpoint playing. On an organ one would not feel the need to bring out one voice over the other, on the piano also we do not need to do this, I believe this pianistic habit can misconstrue the traditional Bach sound. We do however have to support the voice that is in most danger of failure in tone (as we always are challenged when playing piano) but we do not bring one voice louder than the other as we would find in later periods of keyboard music. Bach's must should be considered as a mass of voices not individual voices working separately.

With regards to fingering I have seen too many self taught and professional Bach players alike, who use inferior fingering. The thing is, with Bach you can actually get away with "bad" fingering and still produce a good sound. It might feel in control but it is not the best, most flowing. People who study Bach will notice many occasions where a natural fingering that you might come up with is actually not as good as a more intricate fingering which has more thought for the position the hand and efficiency/sharing of fingers.

From my experience of teaching hundreds of hands Bach, I find that we must stick to the best fingerings the great majority of the time. There are occasions where one might use an alternate fingering and it is certainly better for their mind and body to accept. If we research into Bach you will notice that he did revolutionize fingering at the keyboard, and we do harm in learning about this if we substitute fingering that makes sense to us but ignores the innovative fingering of Bach (even though the sound we produce is of high quality).

From my own experience as a child I would like to use the same fingers for the same pattern, so many times I would use inefficient fingerings for playing Bach even though the sound produced was fine. As an adult revising the works I gained more appreciation for the more intricate fingering option. As a child I tried it but my mind didn't like it, I liked to apply similar fingering for similar patterns, but this Bach option for the fingering was alien to me making the patterns seem harder! As my experience of fingering options at the keyboard increased over the years, coming back to Bach and exploring the more BACH style fingering, made me appreciate the efficiency of this technique. You can also see reflections of these fingering options in later music too and the Bach style fingering has a far reaching effect on all periods of music.

[ritzmar]

Quote:

3- If there's something you SHOULD do with pedal indications by composers, it's not absolutely respect them, it's absolutely DO NOT RESPECT THEM.[/i]

How I agree!!! Even in modern editions editorial pedalling instructions tend to swamp the music unmercifully.  As a student at the RCM in the 60s, I found that the best pedalling solutions was to listen to recordings of the finest performers very carefully, many times, and apply THEIR pedalling techniques.  In virtually every instance, the pedalling used by great players is a) nothing that even resembles the rubbish written in scores, and b) those pianists tend to use the pedal about 5% of the time that scores recommend.

Finally, my professor in those days told me that, if you are going to perform at the  Wigmore Hall, for instance, you may wish to arrange to play through your concert in the afternoon, accustoming yourself to the acoustics.  However, when that same hall is filled with 400-500 soggy bodies clad in non sound-reflecting clothes, the auditory result is nothing like what you heard when the Hall was empty, and the pedalling must accordingly be seriously modified.  As a piano teacher myself, I always carefully examine the pedalling contained within the most reliable edition I can find, then almost always end up totally ignoring it, because it is odious.