One could say that Clarity would be one of the most important aspects to a great musical performance. In a sense, without clarity, many of the other aspects of musical performance are not really of any use.

Let's take for example, a Bach Fugue, the C Major WTC1. A relatively complex four-voiced fugue with extensive use of stretto. Some pianists play it as though it's like just academic nonsense, and just one big wall of complicated noise. But other pianists, such as Glenn Gould and so on, are able to achieve a clarity in which you can hear every voice as it's own single voice, and yet if you sit back and listen to the whole sound, it is not unbalanced.

As I myself work on pieces like Bach and Mozart, I'm beginning to become more concerned with things like this. Beyond extensive the studying of every detail on the score and months of working on a piece, how should one go about achieving a nearly perfect clarity?

Before one can address things such as clarity one needs to develop a technique that will allow him to speak to such things. One must have a strong grounding in the basics before reaching for the top shelf.

Some things that might help:
1) Use a metronome and set at twice the speed of play. So on one tick you will play and the next tick will be a rest. This will give you spacing between notes. So if you are playing a run of 8th notes, set your metronome for sixteenths. I hope this makes sense.
2)Practice everything stacatto at first, the increase note durations from there.
3)Go easy on the pedal

My teacher was just talking about this in regards to my Bach Fugue last night at my lesson.

When she teaches fugues, she makes her students memorize each voice separately. It's a huge P.I.T.A. but now that I'm teaching, I understand why she does it. Once the fugue gets put back together, you really hear the voices as each new theme starts.

Also, she told me she wasn't interested in hearing my fugue at tempo if it was just a jumble of notes (like the
"big wall of complicated noise" you described, Jolteon). So we've slowed it right down so I can concentrate on making each voice "sing" rather than just trying to get all those notes in! I'll be working at this slower tempo for awhile before we start to bring it back up to speed.

And now I'll go listen to Glenn Gould and Angela Hewitt play WTC and make myself depressed lol

We have to deconstruct fugues (especially fugues! but it works for everything else) because we need to have a clear aural image of what's happening. If it is a mess in your head, you can be sure it'll be a mess when it comes out of the piano. Singing a line while playing another works (I always use solfege). Sure, you can learn a fugue without meticulous care and attention, but it'll sound more like a wash of noise.

So, the long and short of it is that you need to have every line in your head, and be able to hear each line separately. If you can sing it, even better, because then you'll have real proof that your aural image is sound (no pun intended).

For the thread to have any meaning the OP has to say what his definition of clarity is. If he only means clarity of voices in a contrapuntal passage, fine, but "clarity" has many different meanings IMO.

For example, I recently started a thread about Chiu's Classical Smackdown and spoke about his great clarity, but it had nothing to do with clarity as so far discussed by the OP.

I took his meaning to be:

clarity is clarity.

i think that many relatively advanced (yet inexperienced) pianists do not realize tht they rely on pedalling to achieve a legato sound..that does not allow them to hear (for instance) the the 2nd note sounds for 2 beats, and not one, that doesn't push them to perfect a finger legato, that does not rely on an aural symbiotic ear to finger relationship.

maybe i better quit while I am still above water. Back to comment later.

I would define Clarity as being able to hear every single note, things being well balanced, the tone being such that it's a beautiful sound to listen to, and notes not blurring or blending together. All of this kind of thing.
I used the fugue as an example of clarity because it's easy to see how it should sound, but it's also hard enough that not a lot of people can do it right.



When she asks you to memorize each voice, is that with the same fingering as you would use when playing it all together, or just another perhaps more comfortable fingering so you can get used how the voice sounds? Both?

On a similar thought, I wonder if playing different combinations of voices together would be able to give even more perspectives of how the music all fits and works together in terms of voicing and balances. I recently was at a Piano Summer School, and a String Quartet came to play for us (partly because the summer school was also for string players). One of the practice techniques they mentioned was having different combinations of instruments play various sections and the others critique it before everyone plays it together. I'm wondering if a similar idea could be applied to Contrapuntal piano music?

We just memorize each voice for the melodic line -- it's not a technical exercise at all, so yes, with a more comfortable fingering.

Another exercise that we've done, similar to your thought above and what another poster suggested, is play one voice and sing another. This can be quite difficult unless you're used to playing and singing different lines at the same time .

Someone mentioned on another thread, to study Bach's choral works as a kind of door into understanding Bach. When I was learning to play by ear, I would listen to a chorale and listen to one voice only and shut out the others, then focus on another voice, and then gradually construct the correct harmonies on the keyboard. There was an old boombox in the kitchen and I would stand with my ear mashed right up against the speaker to hear the cassette, rewinding and replaying... it was tedious but maybe it helped me understand Bach a little better? But I still haven't played anything from WTC. Right now just working on bringing out the melody line in a certain etude and making the rest of the arpeggios sound light and fluffy, and teacher will not let me escape till it sounds right. So it boggles the mind to think of what Glenn Gould must have done with his fingers to articulate all those voices in Bach!! I think you have to have the ability to hear, then the ability in your fingers too.

One of the most helpful exercises I do when studying a fugue is to play through it several times, each time choosing a different voice to bring out. I'll go through it playing the alto voice forte and all other voices pianissimo. Then I'll go through it playing the soprano forte and all others pianissimo, and so on.

Each time, it's important to play the forte voice with the exact phrasing and articulation you want. That way when you go back and put everything together, you've infused each voice with its own independent character.

A number of people have mentioned eschewing the pedal, something I am doing more and more. If you use it, use it correctly. That means pedaling after playing the note, not before. I would go further and say you should learn to play with the sostenuto pedal, where that is the only way it works.

Exercises in playing legato and staccato simultaneously, like the Chopin Etude (from the three without opus number) or Brahms' B-minor Capriccio are good. Of course, you should play the Brahms as written instead of too fast and over-pedaled as so many people play it. (Actually, I substitute the sostenuto pedal in the Brahms, something he would have done if it was on his piano, I am sure.)

Another thought: While it sometimes seems that the masters achieve clarity by bringing *everything* out, in fact they often achieve it by the opposite: clear-cut decisions about which voices to favor and which to relegate to a distant background. A democratic approach, where all voices are heard, even one where both hands are heard equally, can lead to real muddiness.

-J

Learning how to shape and play lines without relying on legato helps.

Do you think that clarity is one of the more advanced issues of technique, the type of issue that you would fine-tune after there is a solid technical foundation present? Even when students are learning basic scales, Hanon, and Czerny, many teachers will insist that all of the notes be played with evenness and clarity.

Perhaps it is an issue of degree. Beginners and intermediate students may be able to develop a basic level of clarity, but to play runs with the type of clarity that Horowitz or Hofmann exhibited obviously requires virtuosity of a very high order. It seems that to play with that kind of clarity, you need incredible control over the sound- in addition to great speed and dexterity.

An interesting exercise that my teacher recommended to me recently is play subject entries (not "false" entries) with a good healthy forte and keep the episodes and sections of free counterpoint and all the other intertwining or "accompanying" voices (any one without a complete statement of the subject) mezzo piano or piano. That's not to say "bash out the subject and whisper everything else," but to bring it to the fore with hearty tone and appropriate phrasing wherever it appears and keep the other lines singing and connected (or disconnected as the case may be) with a kind of graceful, light, and clear mezzo voce sound.

I find it really extremely useful both for getting a clear and rather lively texture (what with the voices all passing by one another - makes it easy to come up with some musically appropriate interpretational choices in the realms of staccato/legato, easing up here or there, etc) and for getting a strong sense of the structure or geography of a fugue, so to speak: it's much easier to memorize and learn more quickly when you know what key each subject entry is in, and often the episodic passages are less contrapuntally dense and are easily absorbed into muscle memory!

Strettos are one place that this method falls short at times, I find... it's so dense, yet it must sound like clear water, practically!

now that will be interesting to think about today. of course legato is not always appropriate or desirable..

care to elaborate?.. specific examples?

not always. ( I really enjoy the varying sounds of different pedalling techniques.. perhaps a bit too much).

I am very fortunate to study organ and have an organ to practice on..one can simply play a voice or melody on another keyboard with a different sound. it is very easy then to focus on the separate voices. I don't think it is that difficult of a skill. one of my jobs as a choir accompanist was to support the section that was struggling or lost.. the tenors for instance... on the piano. i am not that great of a pianist by any means, but have focused on individual melody lines for quite some time.

Just a side question while we are kind of on this subject:

When we have use of stretto like in this C Major fugue at bar 14, is the accepted convention to bring out just one voice (for example the alto voice in the tonic key) and have it above the rest? Or would it be better to bring out each subsequent voice in increasing dynamic, kind of similar to what you would do any other time the subject is stated? Should each other voice soften with the introduction of a new voice in stretto? Or would an increasing dynamic be considered all part of the tension it should create and come naturally?

This is probably a better question to discuss with my teacher, but my lessons don't start again for at least another week!

I wasn't ignoring you...I just didn't really know what I wanted to say. The following muddled thoughts are very much IMO, based just on my own experience and sensibility...

I guess I was thinking was that many, maybe most, of us pianists get into this habit of trying to make a "singing" line, which usually includes a lot of legato to connect the notes. It seems like there is a certain mindset regarding that approach which is constantly reinforced, and it holds that "singing" is the ideal way of playing. And the upshot of that is that using legato as the default mode in shaping a line becomes habitual.

But that kind of idealization of a singing legato line seems to me to belong mostly to the Classic and Romantic era. Music from other times, both before and after, seems to need a different approach. (Side issue: am I remembering correctly that Beethoven thought that Mozart's playing was too choppy and lacking in long lines?)

Back to the subject of this thread - it can clarify music a great deal, especially in material like Bach fugues, if there is as much "air" around notes as possible. So, for example, learning how to give the subject of a fugue a distinct shape, without using legato to achieve it, can help in clarifying the texture.

Another point is that, in practice, it was not always expected that performers hold notes for their full value. I wish I knew more about this particular issue, and the evidence about it, but all I can really say is that one shouldn't assume that composers of the Baroque and Classical era really meant you should hold the note as long as the notation says. There's an interesting allusion to this in the preface of Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum, where he goes to the trouble to explain that he actually does want the pianist to hold notes for full value, as if that is something that could not be assumed.

For myself, my sense of all this stuff is still evolving. Years ago, I decided to try to learn to play Bach and Scarlatti without any pedal. And that was a big shock (mind you, I'm an amateur). Initially, it forced me to get much better at finger legato. It also made me become much more aware of how the pedal is the opium of the amateur. Eventually, it made me to realize that neither legato nor a romantic idea of "singing" is really required to give expressive shape and meaning to Baroque music. Which is not to say that juicy excess when playing Baroque music can't be fun, too. But it's good to have more ways of getting at the music than that.

"Honest method, by which...above all, however, to achieve a cantabile style in playing...

Not my words.

Which does not reference a kind of piano playing that didn't even exist at the time.

Nor does it imply that a "cantabile style", as understood within the context of Baroque keyboard playing and the era's music in general, was the only valid possibility. It was really aimed at a particular group of amateur players, who Bach felt needed to learn something about that style. It's hardly some one-size-fits-all directive.

I didn't say it was the only possibility. They are Bach's words and not my own. It is true that his description is aimed at the amateur, but if the goal is for the amateur to arrive at a cantabile manner then those beyond amateur levels will possess a similar manner of playing already which they will have had to attain similarly. Thus, the ideal for all is to learn to sing via one's playing and Bach, certainly, knew a thing or two about singing.

I ain't buying. The jump from an amateur needing to acquire something they typically may not have, to generalizing it into some overall style of the professional is unwarranted. Of course, the professional will have the ability, but how and when they use it is a whole different thing.

At any rate, the transference of the notion of "cantibile" from how it would work on Bach's available keyboards, to doing something similar on a modern piano is not straightforward.

And too, it may be a mistake to take assume that Bach used the word in exactly the same way we do. Usage does change over the centuries, after all, and specialized usages like this are particularly prone to changes in meaning and nuance.

I didn't expect you to "buy it", because obviously, you had your mind made up to begin with. You don't get it and that's okay...not everyone does.

I'm having a hard time trying to understand what this quote is trying to say... is it something like "Good technique is the most important skill in trying to achieve a cantabile style in playing?"

They are Bach's words, Jolteon. It comes from the introduction to his inventions/sinfonias. He is simply saying that one of our preeminent goal should be to achieve a cantabile manner of playing.

The entire introduction reads:

Straightforward Instruction,
in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only (1) of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, (2) of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three obbligato parts; at the same time not only getting good inventiones, but developing the same satisfactorily, and above all arriving at a cantabile manner in playing, all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition.
Provided

Anno Christi 1723. by
Joh. Seb. Bach:
Capellmeister to
his Serene Highness the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen.