In her new two-CD set Johann Helmich Roman’s flute sonatas (Caprice 2007; CAP 22060), flutist Maria Bania provides a well-written short biography of this “father of Swedish music”. Stockholm-born Roman (1694-1758), a talented violinist, was in London between 1716 and 1721 and played in Handel’s orchestras (the King’s Theatre and later the Royal Academy). Thus he participated at at least seven of Handel’s operas; “operas at the highest European level and with the most eminent singers of his time.” Unsurprisingly, “it was a reluctant Roman who returned to a Stockholm that had neither opera house nor public concerts.”

I have sympathy for the man. Single-handedly, it seems, he set about cranking up Swedish music life, which had been sleeping during the previous years of war, he composed, organized and played and made himself a name in history.

The flute sonatas are original pieces in a predominantly Italianate Handelian idiom with a rather moderate share of Roman-isms such as some unexpected breaches in structure and harmony. Under the layer of solid High-Baroque compositional craftsmanship, we sense an ease of inventing passages and modulations (as opposed to characteristic melodies or workable counterpoint) and a certain reluctance to select and discard. Still, these pieces are pleasant to listen to, especially in this excellent version (Maria Bania, traverso, with Lars-Ulrik Mortensen, harpsichord, Jane Gower, bassoon and Thomas Pitt, cello).

In his Swedish Mass (1752), however, Roman pushes some of the less convincing characteristics of his style to the limit. This is, at least, the impression one gets during rehearsals. The problem with getting a good idea of a work as a whole during rehearsals is, of course, that the movements are usually grouped together to suit the performers: the tenor has missed his plane, the soprano has to catch the 5:20 train; coffee at 4:15; the choir comes at six; the oboe players are free after seven - that kind of thing. The continuo player sits through the whole rehearsal day performing snippets and getting grumpy with poor Roman, who has, in fact, no responsibility for his piece being butchered in this fashion.

Nevertheless, Friday last week I went home with a substantial musical hangover. How is it possible, I asked myself, that someone produces sequences of such utter clumsiness and banality alongside with the most securely applied, most modern - almost Mozartean - harmonies? How can a composer who is capable of single bars of absolutely breathtaking beauty destroy that bliss with the following two inexpert chords without ever noticing? What makes him so impatient that he seems incapable of building up and maintaining a specific mood longer than three bars at most? Why does he persist in silly syncopations and unprepared hemiolas that make the work difficult to get together while they add about as much quality to the music as do the pineapple chunks to Pizza Hawaii?

The reason is, as everyone always says, that Roman here pioneered in matching the Swedish text with musical phrasing. But this can’t be the true reason for his clumsiness. Why would adhering to a specific language result in such maddening quality shifts?

In any case, after a day of rehearsals, this work seemed to me a gigantic waste of my patience. I only learned about its true quality at the performance itself: it is clearly fun to sing; most of the time it engages the choir and the soloists in quick succession or simultaneously, which results in a sensation of togetherness that is absent from the big oratorios; it is fun to play through (as opposed to rehearsing in bits); it is not too long for the performers or the audience; and for the continuo player it is a great challenge to properly support the text. I admit that I returned from the Saturday performance in a much mellower mood - and also slightly embarrassed: do all those large, heavy oratories slowly turn us into snobs?

After years away from the studio, Murray Perahia has issued a new CD with three of Bach’s partitas. The official Perahia website, maintained by Sony, provides audio samples of the new recording. As reviews are being written, we will in all likelihood once again have to endure the silly arguments for and against playing Bach on this, that or the other instrument.

To be sure, Perahia himself has an open-mindedness about the issue that many other pianists (and sadly enough many harpsichord lovers) seem to lack. In this interview, for example, he is quoted as saying “I think the pursuit of authenticity is fine. There’s nothing against it, but it’s not the only way.”

Okay - we harpsichordists know (or ought to know) that the word authenticity has nothing to do with our choice of instrument, tempo, trills or articulation, while it hopefully depicts our artistic pursuit correctly. But one can understand what Mr. Perahia is trying to say here: “I think playing Bach on the harpsichord in a harpsichordy manner is fine, but there must be room for playing Bach on a piano as well.”

Interestingly, the interviewer attempts to turn this perfectly reasonable position into a tougher one by introducing it with the words: “But Perahia is adamant that the music can be transmitted on an instrument of our day.” Why ‘adamant’? Because there are positions involved in the tug-of-war about Bach on this or that instrument. To be graceful about the choice of instrument and approach is a breach of etiquette, it takes away confrontation, and it is difficult to present in a journalistic style. For the interviewer, it would probably have been more satisfying to quote things like ‘I never quite got the point of playing Bach on a harpsichord’ or, conversely, ‘the only way to hear Bach is the way he heard it, too.’

None of these positions makes any sense. It is certainly enlightening in all sort of ways to experience Bach’s keyboard music - either as a player or as a listener - as he might have experienced it himself. But the notion that this would be the only correct manner is more likely to destroy that enlightenment than to lead to the kind of open minds and open ears that Bach so dearly deserves. Exactly the same applies to the opposite position. There is nothing that makes Bach played on a piano better per se, even considering modern ears and audiences - it is a matter of choice (or, at least, of personal tradition), of feeling comfortable with that choice and of doing the thing that feels right to oneself (at that moment, or at all).

András Schiff writes in the booklet of his recording of the Goldberg variations, “…to many others the tone of the piano is preferable to that of the harpsichord and let’s not forget we are talking about an hour and a quarter of music - hands on heart, can you listen to the harpsichord that long?” Beyond the layer of witty and slightly mischievous charm, Schiff seems to me much more adamant than Perahia about not preferring the harpsichord. A bit sneaky, really, to involve the hands and hearts of that vast a number of anonymous listeners. And, hand on heart, I listen to the harpsichord that long or longer every day: I play it. It can be done.

Mr. Perahia’s new CD should be welcomed by everyone who cares about Bach, because it is a new, sincere attempt to approach these fabulous pieces of music: an authentic manifestation of Perahia’s musicianship. Who cares about the instrument.

28 March, 09:03 p.m. Amusing coincidence: Since I began this blog last November, I’ve had exactly 6000 visitors, and 600 spam messages were caught by the friendly WordPress robot. Thanks for reading, folks!

Final post about handedness and keyboard technique

Continuo practicing

Depending on one’s handedness, the preparation of continuo bass lines and continuo chords calls for different approaches. Obviously, continuo is about harmonies and bass line phrasing, but in terms of performance, it is first and foremost about being together. One could describe the ideal state of mind of a continuo player as ‘being part of the music’ to the extreme. Continuo playing is not about waiting and reacting, it is about anticipating, participating and breathing. No matter what her or his handedness, if the continuo player worries about the poor performance of her or his non-dominant hand, this will likely prevent the directness (I keep wanting to write “flow,” but to be honest, I do not know very much about flow) and spontaneity necessary for a good performance.

For the right-handed player, the unanimous continuo teachers’ chorus “listen to the bass” is, hence, not very edifying. Well, of course one needs to consider the bass. For a musical person, the proper phrasing of most bass lines can be worked out sitting in a chair. Preparing (or sight-reading) thoroughbass is - again - a matter of getting secure in the dominant hand in the first place. Granted, if we, for example, consider the jumpier sections of Bach’s cello or gamba arias from the Passions, there are certainly good reasons for practicing the left hand too. These pieces are extremely exposed, and the gamba players will be grateful if they can concentrate on their performance without having to eclipse the bloopers from the organist. But it will be difficult to achieve true togetherness in this music - as opposed to merely wanting to be together - without special consideration for the timing of the chords in the dominant hand.

Left-handed continuo beginners usually have quite some difficulties in getting their chords together, and they tend to concentrate too much on their right hand for that reason - especially when they engage in competition with the right-handed fellow students, who soon learn to produce sonorous melody lines in their successions of ninth chords or to dissolve their Handelian continuo figures into merry twiddles and harpings. The left-handed continuo player has the task of getting secure in her or his left hand, which grants the opportunity of getting extra good at breathing together with the music, but which is, at the beginning, a bit disappointing. From my own experience, I guarantee that the twiddling, trilling and harping will become fully accessible even to the left-handed player if one first tries to be patient and constructive. Unfortunately I have also had the experience that conservatory committees tend to be impatient in this respect. There is so much one would like to say about conservatory committees.

Coordination

George Bland, the tragic hero in W. Somerset Maugham’s short story The Alien Corn, studies piano for two years in Munich and, after returning to London, plays for Lea Markart, “the greatest women pianist in Europe.” The narrator gives his impression of George’s playing, “I felt that he missed what to me is the peculiar charm of Chopin…and again I had the vague sensation, so slight that it almost escaped me, that the two hands did not quite synchronize.” Asked whether she thought that George could become a concert pianist, Lea Markart answers, “not in a thousand years.” George shoots himself.

I always found this story fascinating but lacking in crucial detail. Has Somerset Maugham heard someone play the piano who had coordination problems, or did he invent these details in order to add verisimilitude to his plot? Naturally, if you have coordination issues, you may indeed arrive at interpretations that are lacking in “peculiar charm” as well - but is it truly not possible ‘in a thousand years’ to improve these things? Is it really likely that the great pianist would not offer any advice to help young George to overcome these problems? Of course there is a story behind my interest in this mini drama: after a few lessons, one of my earlier teachers commented - in a beautiful lack of logical consistency - on the imperfect coordination of my hands: in his long teaching practice he had never encountered a problem like this, he said, and according to his long experience, this particular technical imperfection could never be solved.

It is certainly possible to improve the coordination between the hands. The first skill to develop is, naturally, to be able to hear what’s wrong (since we tend to get accustomed to our shortcomings, this is no easy task, but not my main topic here). Then we can begin to analyze those moments where the coordination is imperfect. These are most likely spots where one hand has to join the other; where one hand plays a dotted rhythm against fast notes in the other hand; where one hand has embellishments and the other a regular figuration; where both hands have a movement in the same note values but very different figurations, such as a melody against an Alberti bass; polyrhythmic passages.

The problem of polyrhythmics is special, and I will not discuss it here (one trick is to listen to the compound rhythm instead of listening horizontally). I am interested in those figurations where one hand must react to what the other hand just did, or join the other hand, or where one hand makes movements that distract the other hand.

Consider, for example, the gigue of the first partita by J.S. Bach. The triplet figurations throughout the piece are divided into a downbeat quarter played by one hand, and two pick-up eights played by the other. To judge from the stem up - stem down notation it is clear that Bach intended the right hand to play the strong beats and the left hand to play the pick-up eighths. Curiously, the fingering in the well-known edition that I am using inverts this distribution - a good opportunity to test which of the two feels better. You will notice that it feels more natural to let your dominant hand, whichever it is, play the strong beats and to let the non dominant hand play the pickup notes. You will have an easier time achieving a regular exchange and the piece will feel technically less awkward. In other words, the coordination between the hands (in this example: their exchange) is easier to achieve when the dominant hand leads.

The true problem arises when there is no such choice, or when the non dominant hand for some reason tries to take over the responsibility. In my experience this happens typically when the dominant hand has pickup notes or second offbeat entries or is otherwise, for musical reasons, soft or subdued. Turned around, these can be passages where the non dominant hand has to perform strong rhythmic impulses, a technically challenging part or a very exposed melody.

My solution for such instances is to think of the dominant hand with its fragmented, subdued or offbeat part as second violin or viola player in an orchestra. It is a matter of professional pride and dedication for these players to give accompanying voices the very character they require, even if this character should be soft and, in the hierarchy of the score, secondary. The dominant hand must learn to perform such secondary tasks with true authority - not loud and belligerently, but precisely according to specifications. In this fashion we (”we” being, of course, our dominant hand) can learn to jump in onto an ongoing line in the non-dominant hand with utter precision, yet without making the slightest accent. In this fashion, we can leisurely but precisely accompany the virtuosic stunts of our non-dominant hand, rather than as brain dead and clunky followers. Most coordination issues are nothing else than a failure to acknowledge the importance of the dominant hand even in moments where it, as we tend to think, “has nothing to do.”

Part IV of V about handedness and keyboard technique

3) Learning complex passages in two hands

How do we practice a complex passage that involves both hands? I am thinking of technical writing such as in bars 60-64 in the Gigue of Bach’s fifth partita. Trying to approach such passages while comfortably relying on our dominant hand will lead us nowhere. I prepare this kind of music by first establishing in detail how both hands have to interact and trying to practice away any jerky or panicky arm or finger movement at about half tempo. Now I make extra sure that my dominant hand knows exactly where it has to go and what it has to do - increasing the security here can be compared with establishing anchor points, with memorizing the moments when the balance within the hand is perfect or, in short, with giving that hand extra authority. Now I can begin to work with the non-dominant hand, focussing on two things: agility and coordination. By first ‘grounding’ the dominant hand, I give freedom to the non-dominant hand, and eventually the passage emerges as secure and repeatable.

This concept of creating a technical center is especially helpful if one has concentration issues in performance, because it helps to focus the mind on concrete matters. We don’t stumble into a passage with the music and the choreography only vaguely in our head; we have formulated and practiced a precise manner of focusing on our movement.

4 ) Learning passages where the non-dominant hand has most of the work

The idea that the dominant hand needs to serve as a technical center does not necessarily mean that it needs to have a high level of activity. A typical moment where, for a right-handed person, the dominant hand can act as a technical anchor to enable the non-dominant left hand to do its virtuoso stuff is the beginning of the finale of Bach’s fifth Brandenburg concerto. Of course, the left hand has to be coaxed into being able to play those runs a tempo, and this is likely to take some time and energy. Nevertheless, the whole set of passages gains considerably in stability if one works out the right, dominant, hand in overly meticulous detail, so that it can serve as a source of security throughout. Given the nature of much of the repertoire, left-handed players encounter such instances - where they have to make the left hand the center while the right hand does ‘all the work’ - much more frequently than right-handed players. It is worth every minute to devise a useful personal strategy for these cases.

5) Learning passages where the dominant hand rests while the non-dominant hand has all the work.

One of the stupidest blunders - for left-handed pianists - in the history of music editing was when the continuo lines were taken out of the solo parts of classical piano concertos. All of a sudden, Mozart’s concertos became a predominantly right-handed enterprise; whole lines have to be played right-hand-only, with the left hand suspended in mid air, making geeky and hapless conducting movements. Fortunately, modern critical editions have corrected this madness. There nevertheless exist many moments in the literature where one hand gets to do all the work while the other one is resting.

If the non-dominant hand has such a solo, what should one do? Evidently, the only sensible basic solution is to practice until the problem is mastered; but in doing this we have to observe our approach especially closely. If we try to convince our non-dominant hand to do something demanding, it is, for example, not a good idea at all to become impatient. I am left-handed, and I have performed Mozart concertos - I know very well what I am talking about. As soon as you try to force yourself with the non-dominant hand through a fiddly problem passage, you prepare yourself for an inevitable crash in concert. There are three main strategies to prevent this to happen. The first is, obviously, utter patience. The second is to try to divide a non-dominant-hand-passage as much as possible between the hands. Many of Bach’s concertos, for example, contain runs that can be divided in this fashion. The third method is to let the dominant hand be the teacher.

The key word here is mirroring. The keyboard’s layout is, as everyone knows, symmetrical at two points, d and a-flat. By observing these two points, the dominant hand can technically mirror a complex passage of the non-dominant hand, and teach the latter how to move most effectively, where to rest, pivot and balance, and how to speed the passage up. To be sure, such exercises are no pleasure to listen to, but they are highly effective and have solved many problems for me.

All these examples are intended as no more than a sketch of why handedness needs to be taken into account by the player, and how handedness can be exploited in a constructive way in keyboard practicing. In Western pedagogy we are trained to try to run at barriers head-first. When we notice that using our non-dominant hand at the keyboard creates an uneasy feeling, we automatically try harder to conquer the very thing that causes the insecurity. Keyboard playing doesn’t work that way; it should instead be based on the realization that it is unnatural to make the non-dominant hand a leader and that it is nonsense to believe that it can make a good leader. To believe otherwise would be against nature and it would obstruct our very goal: a flexible and secure playing technique.

Why? Because hand dominance is nature’s solution to the problem that two equally dominant brain halves would, in an emergency where quick and precise reactions are required, risk giving conflicting commands, thus effectively slowing down the execution of either of these commands. One clear command is followed up quicker than two conflicting ones. If we aim at equalizing and balancing the performance of our hands, we should not give up this given command structure in out head, or our access to smart technical solutions will slow down.

Performing a concert is often some kind of ‘emergency’. We produce an extra dose of adrenaline, to a certain extent we are afraid and we try to solve our problems while we, so to speak, are running. This is the one typical situation where the quickness and precision of our reactions is most appreciated. It would be utterly stupid to cast away the brain’s natural manner of dealing with such a situation.

…continued

Part III of V about handedness and keyboard technique

I came to acknowledge the potential of my dominant hand in keyboard playing through an accident. I am posting all this partly so that others won’t need to repeat the trick I played on myself. One day, early on in my studies, in a period where I fought to overcome some invisible technical barriers through a fierce practicing routine, I got up at six in the morning and fetched breakfast. The idea was to start with my exercises at seven sharp, together with the wakeup chorus of Czerny and Clementi produced by the pianists elsewhere in the dormitory. At a quarter past six, I tried to cut the crust off a bit of elderly Gouda cheese, using a cheese plane. At 6:15:30 I was running for my medicine box: the plane had slipped and I had chipped off two of my finger tops - moderately enough not to need a doctor; thoroughly enough - as it turned out - not to be able to play with that hand - my non-dominant hand - for a month (I will stick to the terms dominant hand and non-dominant hand in order to make it easy for both right-handed and left-handed readers to wade through my text). I stopped the blood flow and kept myself from fainting, cleaned up the mess, had a quiet hour of self-contemplation, canceled my harpsichord lesson and returned to eating cheese. There is nothing so upsetting as an interrupted routine.

Suddenly I was faced with a period of not being able to practice as I thought I should. Quite a frustrating prospect really. I threw myself at all my pieces and doggedly practiced only one hand: my dominant hand.

Couperin (L’Art de toucher Le Clavecin p. 13) observes that the hand that does most of the daily work is less supple (as well as the hands of people who do a lot of work with their hands). However, as I soon learned, the dominant hand is great at finding its way about the keyboard; at musical expression; at rhythm. It serves as a secure base for sight-reading and it is faster at learning. Its, let’s call it ‘intelligence’ outweighs its possible stiffness by far. My single-handed practice period soon became a phase of joy. I was able to sit down at the keyboard any time without that dull feeling of having to drag a drowsy giant along a beach of knuckle-deep soft sand that a normal morning of technical study otherwise induced. No trace of my usual urge for a coffee break after five, and a hot shower after ten minutes. None of the fiddly unrest of the mind when I failed to solve a tricky passage, or when I started messing up my five-finger-exercises after the seventh chromatic shift.

I came out of this experience with a few technical issues solidly solved and a greatly improved overall technical security. However, it took me many more years to realize what I had done during these weeks, and why it had been so successful - this brought me belatedly to a re-organization of my daily practice routine and, hence, to writing some posts about all this.

So what was new - what had I done wrong earlier?
- One of the common characteristics of any of the exercises that any of my teachers had given me to that date is that they are to be performed with both hands simultaneously. Some were built up so that the hands moved mirrored, most of them would send the hands across the keyboard in parallel movement.
- Many of the pieces of music that my teachers deemed to be best suited for my technical development were, small wonder, taken out of the educational bucket of Bach’s output. One of the common characteristics of these pieces is that they ask for an equal level of activity in all the voices.

I was using this material according to specifications: as a massive program for exercising the hands together. In other words, I tried to work my way towards the goal of technical achievement by taking the balance of the hands as a point of departure. This is wrong: it denies the actual nature of handedness. The balance has first to be achieved; it stands at the end of a development.

I am taking care in this description to avoid blaming my teachers. Why? Because our mis-interpretation of what handedness can do happens not at the assignment level, but when we try to realize the assignments: in the practice studio. It is our own responsibility, or chance, to make use of our handedness in an appropriate fashion. Let’s give some examples.

1) The beginning of a practice day.

To be sure, if you are truly comfortable beginning your daily study with both hands, there is no call for special attention here. It is, however, likely that you are not. The typical feeling  of plodding along until the first break is a clear sign that something is amiss. Physically, to sit behind a keyboard instrument and move one’s fingers isn’t all that demanding, so what plods here is actually our brains.

I want to begin my practice day with an open and friction-free mind. I begin by playing a few exercises only with my dominant hand. Sometimes I warm up in this fashion for only a few minutes, sometimes I would play half an hour or more with this one hand only - this greatly depends on my mood. You can test the difference yourself. Begin one practice day in the fashion I just described and write down how you experience your mood, your concentration and your playing on that occasion. Begin the next practice day with your non-dominant hand, and take care to do the same kind of exercises for the same length of time. You will very probably have a higher level of restlessness and unease, be more irritable and at the end you will not have the feeling of truly being warmed up for the rest of your practicing day.

After this introduction of playing around with my ‘good’ hand, I proceed to two-hand exercises, such as five-finger exercises, scales or broken chords. Usually, the dominant hand guides the non-dominant hand along well enough. Sometimes, if something feels awkward at first, I might relapse into the previous single-hand mode. Sometimes, too, I risk sorting out a specific awkwardness or problem with the non-dominant hand alone. What is paramount in all this is that, while I try to guide my non-dominant hand so it performs everything just as well as the dominant one, I do not try to change its basic character. In all two-hand exercises, I try to realize two main things: regularity and freedom of movement in both hands, and the clear manifestation (great term here) that my dominant hand is the mentor - the stronger character, so to speak - of the two.

2) Preparing new pieces.

I begin new pieces by working out a complete fingering of the complex moments. I don’t want to waste time later on with major revisions, and it makes my learning a lot easier all the way along. I admit that I have a quick intuition for harmony and structure, so I usually spend little time analyzing a piece.

There are many pieces where I now can break down the action by attacking more difficult passages in bits and putting the whole together again later. One maddening exception that tends to frustrate this approach is the two-part- or three-part-invention-type of piece or passage. Absurdly easy to listen to in most cases (in comparison to the difficulty of playing it), this sort of structure forces the player to listen horizontally most of the time, and it typically employs the same kind of material in both hands. In such pieces I practice one hand at a time during the first day or two. This may seem silly, but it gives a lot of extra security later on. I have heard some of the absolutely foremost pianists of our time get muddled in the two-part pieces of Bach’s c-minor and a minor partitas. No practicing approach that effectively helps to reduce such a risk can be called too basic.

I begin by working out the whole piece with my dominant hand, then I practice the other hand. When putting the parts together I constantly make sure that my attention does not totally get absorbed by the problems my non-dominant hand might have. Most of the time, the technical problems of one line alone are anyway not too hair-raising anyway. It is the coordination of the parts that takes sorting out.

…continued

Part II of V about handedness and keyboard technique

The ideal of balance between the hands of a keyboard player was clearly not at all the most likely historical cause of why the standard keyboard developed as it did, with the treble at the right-hand side. To be sure, speaking as a historian, that cause can never be definitely stated. The development of keyboard instruments took a long period and most of the remainders of its early stages are lost. And even if they were not - surviving artifacts rarely disclose their most important secret: why their inventors made them as they did.

The only valid statement about the mechanics behind the development of the modern keyboard layout is, hence, one about correlations: the majority of people is right-handed; keyboard instruments have the treble at the right-hand side. This layout enables musicians of a statistically dominant group to create music especially well that features one specific important musical element: melody lines in a well-carrying register.

In spite of this likely reason for the treble being at the right-hand side of the keyboard, keyboard composers from very early on (such as Byrd, Bull, Sweelinck or Frescobaldi, to name but a few) were apparently especially interested in exploiting the virtuosic potential of both hands. In the polyphonic tradition, an equal share of responsibility of the voices is a prerequisite in any case. In real music, the keyboard’s lopsided layout turned out not to be its most important feature at all. On the contrary, it was the potential of allowing for a wide range of playing approaches that became characteristic of the keyboard. One can use the keyboard in an ambidextrous manner if one chooses to; one can emphasize a virtuosic left hand passage; one can lose oneself in expressive right-hand melodies. So this is how we arrive at the requirement of balance.

The fact that human handedness, unlike the many possible uses of the potential of the keyboard, is not a matter of choice informs our techniques of learning to gain a balance between the hands. As said before, balance is a learned skill; it might overlay the natural handedness but it does not replace it; some people learn it better than others.

Learning is greatly helped by a stress-free environment and by positive motivation. This implies that bullying the non-dominant piano hand into the limelight is not an appropriate strategy. In this light, it is doubtful whether the existence of special studies for the left hand, like the ones by Brahms and Godowsky, are very helpful tools for the average (that is: right-handed) pianist at all. My idea is that one has to fully accept and to understand one’s handedness as much as possible in order to arrive at practicing strategies that help the non-dominant hand to do a good job. Paradoxically, balance between the hands requires that we accept one hand as the boss and the other as the follower.

…continued

Part I of V about handedness and keyboard technique

In one of the interviews presented in Bruno Monsaingeon’s monumental video documentary Richter, the Enigma, Sviatoslav Richter mentions his belief that the right and left hands of a pianist need to be in balance. The video clips of Richter on this DVD (and any one of those available on YouTube) show impressively what he means by balance: the independence between the hands and, as it would seem to an observer, a lack of subordination of either of them. But the call for balance on an instrument played by both hands using the same set of basic techniques is, by itself, not very earth-shattering. Much more interesting is how the effect of balance is achieved, and at what costs. The following posts are about this topic.

To pave the way for explaining my view on keyboard technique and balance between the hands, I will, however, have to supply an introduction containing disclaimers, myth-destroyers, definitions and denials. Why? Because this is about handedness. I have heard very smart people say searingly stupid things about handedness.

For example, I once got drawn into an anti-Lefty e-mail quibble. I had sent a short message to the contact page of a private but voluminous and well-informed Beethoven website which contained a passage about how Beethoven was not a left-hander (this refutes one typical unsupported claim found on many Lefty websites). I admit that I was in a precise mood that day: I pointed out that, whereas Beethoven very clearly wrote with his right hand as all his autographs show, one can, in a culture where children were forbidden to write with their left hand, never be sure about his actual handedness. That was all.

This was perhaps an unnecessary and nitpicky comment, but to my excuse it should be said that I made it in a friendly spirit, and that I was using rather few, well-chosen words. I even wrote in the native language of the author of the site. I was clearly prepared for the possibility of some manner of disagreement, but the avalanche of incoherent e-babble that came streaming into my inbox in response took me by surprise. After a day-long lopsided exchange consisting of several incoming multiple-screen-length messages and my sporadic replies of a few lines at a time, I was presented with a direct question: could it perhaps be, my opponent wrote, that I myself was a Lefty? Determined to let things fully unfold while we were about it I took the bait: yes, as a matter of fact, I am left handed. Wow. So there, I learned, was the true root for my obsession - I had my own ax to grind! That explained it all, and she had somehow sensed it all the time. In the eyes of this person, the fact of one’s own handedness obviously excludes the possibility that one can make rational statements about anything that has to do with handedness in general. The only group excluded from this rule is, naturally, the right-handers. It was at this point that I pitched the whole exchange into the trash can, which I then emptied.

In fact, both the irrational and the obsessive about this issue have nothing to do with my faint voice in the modern e-jungle. Rather the opposite is true. I was being naive, thinking that I would actually be able to reason about such matters. Instead, the irrational treatment of handedness is too deeply ingrained in most human cultures to allow for such a light-hearted approach. We are dealing here with religious issues and ideology, matters of psychological denial and of other personal agendas. In taking up this topic, I have to face a century-old cabbage stew of prejudice, which no Prussian sharp-edged intellectuality helps to avoid. So let’s get over the central question. Do I have any skeletons in my assorted closets that have to do with my handedness? Answer: no. I fetched them all out of there years ago, and now they are neatly lined up in my study and grin at me every time I try to tickle them.

Before I proceed to explaining my strategies for bringing handedness and keyboard balance into agreement, I will have to make a few statements. I am not a neurologist, and what I have read about the nature of handedness is hence, of necessity, limited. A few concepts, based on the findings of relatively new research about the topic are, however, helpful for understanding my arguments:

- Handedness, no matter which variety, is a matter of life. As such, it is not a condition that has to be dealt with in any special manner at all. It is innate; it cannot be changed; we live with it (it can, however, be denied, but that is another matter). It only gets attention here because the piano keyboard is not, in the same fashion, automatically and inevitably divided into a more preferred and a less preferred side.

- Ambidexterity is today, in contrast, understood as a learned skill. It overlays one’s natural handedness (again: whichever that may be). Some learn certain skills better or quicker than others. So some individuals have a special talent for developing ambidextrous behavior, others don’t. In this context, I am especially baffled by the art of the Canadian pianist Marc André Hamelin (also present on YouTube).
Some people have so much talent that they fool themselves and others into believing that they are right-handed while they are, in fact, left-handed. In this corner most issues of self-denial lurk. My topic here is, however, keyboard technique and not turned-around left handers, so be assured: I will not take this matter any further.

- There is no complete consensus about how problematic it is to teach one’s non-dominant keyboard hand to become more accomplished. In view of my idea of varying talents, pointed out above, this consensus is not likely to come in the future. It is, however, an established fact that an intricate action such as writing by hand, which stimulates a lot of diverse brain activity, should be carried out with the dominant hand: to use the wrong hand when writing can generate severe difficulties for the individual that substantially transcend issues such as the readability of one’s handwriting or other niceties.

If we put these bits of information together we get some idea of what can, in rough terms, be done on a keyboard instrument and what can’t:

It is absolutely possible to develop a balanced or even ambidextrous behavior at the keyboard. This would, however, require one to know and accept one’s natural handedness, in order to avoid over-exercising the non-dominant hand: just as it is problematic to write with the wrong hand, it would be problematic to bully the non-dominant piano hand into a leading role.

…continued

If you, after reading this, have an overpowering urge to click into the “leave a reply” window and to post a quick witty remark about my sinister approach or anything else that contains more than one pair of scare quotes, think again. This post wasn’t written quickly either.

To participate in the St Matthew Passion means that you meet another continuo player, which is something that doesn’t happen very often otherwise. While two oboists at the left and two oboists at the right huddle together and compare reeds between arias, while two plus two flutists practice their passionate bits of duo during the coffee breaks and while the assorted singers fine-tune their smiles and the pronunciation of words like “zerknirscht,” the keyboard section exchanges stories of life and talks about bold new projects. Andreas Edlund (organ, Choir I) whom I (organ, Choir II, plus some stray chords from the harpsichord) hadn’t seen for two years (a shame because his artistic and culinary tastes are impeccable) brought me his new CD with harpsichord and nyckelharpa (keyed fiddle).

The keyed fiddle, possibly best described as a hurdy gurdy-violin cross-breed (organologists forgive me), has - according to the booklet - been around since the middle ages. In the 1950s and -60s, there was a revival of the instrument which also brought about some technical changes, or improvements. Today, the Swedish Nyckelharpa is firmly established as a folk instrument and there are several people who master it extremely well.

But nyckelharpa and harpsichord? Difficult to avoid a spontaneous association with crossover. Why would I want to avoid the word? Well, when the duo Homburger Guy (”New compositions, improvisations and baroque masterpieces”) was here a few years ago to join forces with our ensemble, they made - in their TV interview - a special point of calling their mix of genres something else, but not “crossover.” The point made is almost too subtle for my taste. No matter what the event is supposed to be from the artist’s view, style combinations of this kind are evidently addressing audiences with several contrasting musical tastes. (Whether this is an advantage is, in fact, uncertain: combination programs appeal to the curious but they repel the purists). But perhaps one should honor the effort of presenting programs that help audiences merge by not contrasting the styles. If we call these “flow-over” instead, we might give a faithful impression.

The CD From Castle & Cottage with Torbjörn Näsbom, keyed fiddle and Andreas Edlund, harpsichord (Musica Rediviva MRCD-014) is flow-over of the best sort: excellently played, slightly naughty and very entertaining. The only non-flow-over piece is Francois Couperin’s beautiful fifth Prélude in A major. Otherwise the CD is a colorful mix of Swedish Folk Music (Church March, Spring Drops…), a C.P.E Bach gamba sonata, a Bach Cello suite and Marais. Look at their video to get an idea:

http://www.nyckelharpacembalo.info.se/

…and demonstrating historical keyboard actions

Public outreach is a term that does very well in academia these days. It guarantees that one’s research, one’s department, or even one’s university will be there tomorrow. If we want to make people appreciate our work and open their purses in our favor, we have to go to places where these people are and we have to learn to talk their language.

Musicians have known this for quite some time. Even for someone with good references, it is pretty much more difficult to get funding for a cute concert idea than it is for an established researcher to get a stipend for a snazzy research project. We have learned to talk about our work. We have also learned to deal with the old problem that one may not use too many words to tell an audience that what they never knew before one started talking is in fact very interesting.

This took me some getting used to. A few months after my arrival in Sweden, I was asked to participate in the annual three introduction days where concert arrangers could hear and see what productions the musical umbrella organization of our ensemble had to offer. Our ensemble’s producer asked me to do an intro about the different types of harpsichords and to play a piece.

The spectrum of musical styles presented on such a day is very wide. I was new to the game, I was new to the country, and I was still speaking English. Unfortunately, nobody had the wits to give me any further directives, although I distinctly remember that I asked for them. Such as: a reminder that, if presenting in English, I might talk slowly and not too much; or an explanation that these people expected a presentation of a nice program for their little church or concert hall, and nothing else - that they, in fact, weren’t even expecting a harpsichordist to be there and were likely completely disinterested in my work, unless I managed to interest them then and there.

I had no clue about all this. I thought that everybody would love the harpsichord. I gave, as I thought I had been asked, an impromptu lecture about the main traditions in harpsichord making, complete with squeaky felt tip pen drawings, and I concluded by playing Francois Couperin’s lengthy and pompous b-minor Passacaille. Afterwards, someone came to me and said kindly but unmistakably that on the next day, I should just play my piece and someone else would do the presentation. My throbbing embarrassment was somewhat alleviated by the fact that that second presentation did not go too well either: after all, I had learned how to interpret the meaning of the collective sigh at the end.

The most important thing to observe before one addresses one’s audience is what that audience can absorb in terms of length and density of information. For a verbal presentation of composers and the music during the program this usually (or should I say: hopefully) causes no real problems. For explaining exotic, large instruments like the harpsichord or the fortepiano, on the other hand, a parting session of Show And Tell is by far a better option than a mid-recital lecture. Audiences always do want to know everything about these instruments. However, they did come to listen to music in the first place, and one does well to honor this desire. I usually encourage people to come and look at my instrument after the concert. Here in this country, people are unfortunately sometimes too shy to do even that. Elsewhere, one might instead need the help of a second watch person to prevent curious people from creeping into the instrument.

To demonstrate how a harpsichord works is not difficult. The jackrail can easily be opened and the working of the jacks can be shown to a fairly large group of people. Fortepiano actions are trickier. One needs to concentrate pretty fiercely when extricating and putting back such an action without causing an accident. If one touches a key while doing either, the next thing heard is a faint Crick! - and that was your hammer. We like to avoid this risk - re-gluing hammer heads is fiddly and the result is almost never as mechanically stable as the original thing. My friend Matt Bengtson has solved this problem in a great way: he presents a short video on his website where he explains what various fortepianos do, how they can sound and how the Viennese action in his own instrument works. Here is the link:

http://www.mattbengtson.com/fortepiano.html