Organ Performance Posture

Edie Johnson is the assistant organist/choir director at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Indianapolis as well as seminary organist and instructor of piano and organ at Christian Theological Seminary. She holds the B.Mus. in organ, magna cum laude, from Furman University studying with Dr. Charles Tompkins. She completed both the M.M. and D.M. degrees at Indiana University, where she studied with Dr. Larry Smith. Ms. Johnson is an active recitalist throughout the United States and she also leads workshops on mental rehearsal and imagery for universities and AGO chapters.

The use of mental imagery in the creation of music goes back many generations. Composers such as Mozart, Schumann, Wagner and Brahms utilized mental processes in their compositions, often hearing works in the mind before putting them on paper. Olivier Messiaen claimed that harmonies evoked specific colors in his mind?s eye and the myriad of colors that he experienced influenced his innovative compositions for organ, piano, orchestra and other media. All musicians have experienced mental rehearsal and imagery of music, perhaps unknowingly, in some fashion. You may have had a teacher who incorporated analogies, evoking creative images, or remember a passage of music that persistently remained in your inner ear.

Over the past thirty years, there has been a surge of interest in mental imagery and rehearsal in a variety of fields. In various studies, the majority of research has shown that in learning and retaining a motor skill, mental rehearsal combined with physical practice is much more effective than physical practice alone. An organist may benefit from mental practice both in the initial and later stages of learning. In addition, beginning organ students may incorporate this process; however, it may be difficult for a new organist to imagine actions with which he/she is unfamiliar.

Mental rehearsal and imagery can have great benefits for performers. When incorporated consistently, mental rehearsal may heighten the efficiency of practice time while it also allows muscles to relax and decreases excess tension in the body. This in turn may reduce instances of pain and performance-related injuries. Mental rehearsal creates minute innervations in muscles; it programs and prepares the body by forming a mental blueprint. Mental imagery assists performers in coping with performance anxiety, thus providing a mechanism for increasing quality and consistency of performance.

Mental rehearsal requires consciously practicing sounds, motions and senses in the mind while simultaneously releasing unwanted tension in the muscles. This process heightens the awareness of sensory feedback, and it allows the mind to be in conscious control, thus directing physical actions rather than simply responding to them.

Mental imagery is the ability to develop an image without analyzing its contents. This involves seeing an image in the mind?s eye as if watching a movie. It is important to be able to imagine events from both an internal and external perspective. Mental rehearsal and imagery may be employed both at and away from the keyboard. Learners and performers may employ these techniques within practice sessions or during rest periods, walks, and other monotonous activities.

The most successful and vivid imagery employs all of the senses. Aural imagery can be strengthened by playing a passage, mentally hearing the music and then repeating this until the aural representation is as clear as the actual performance. Visual imagery involves the ability to see objects or events in the mind?s eye. This may entail experiences such as seeing the details of a score as a clear mental image to enhance memory, imagining watching one?s self perform as if sitting in the audience, or mentally visualizing the instrument and movement of the hands and feet from an internal perspective. Kinesthetic imagery indicates imagining the sensations involved in muscular movements. For example, you can employ kinesthetic imagery by thinking about what it feels like to play an exercise or passage of music, focusing on the muscle movements in the fingers, legs, arms and shoulders. If kinesthetic imagery does not come easily, alternate miming the movements of playing with mental rehearsal until the sensation of the muscle movements is vividly imagined. Involving the senses of taste and smell also heightens the imagery experience.

Relaxation

The first step to vivid imagery is learning to relax the body completely. Total relaxation allows you to eliminate external stimuli and become more aware of your inner state.1 Muscle tension is a common concern among organists at all levels. The demands of the instrument produce tension in the neck, back, hands, arms and legs. Utilizing relaxation procedures eases the organist's bodily tension that can hinder the quality of practice and performance. You may use progressive relaxation, tightening and releasing specific muscle groups throughout the body. Another common relaxation technique is auto suggestion in which you mentally speak words, such as "Relax your jaw, release the muscles in your back." A text that provides further insight into benefits and processes of relaxation is Herbert Benson's The Relaxation Response.2

Relaxation is an important initial step when employing mental rehearsal and imagery at or away from the organ. It is also a useful tool when preparing for a performance, to calm pre-concert nerves or to visualize successful performances. Most importantly, relaxation must be practiced under non-stressful conditions before you can effectively employ it in a pressured situation. Benson and other experts recommend incorporating a relaxation session for ten to twenty minutes daily, in order to gain maximum benefit.

Centering

Centering is a means of calming the body and channeling an individual's focus and energy to the task at hand. Sports psychologist Robert Nideffer created this technique for athletes. Don Greene, a sports psychologist who has coached the U.S. Olympic diving team as well as musicians at the Juilliard School and members of major orchestras throughout the United States, has adapted the idea of centering to suit musicians. Centering allows you to shift from critical, verbal thinking to creative, musical thinking. Greene states, " . . . you can picture what you want to do, get a feeling for how you are going to do it, and hear the sound that you'd like to create."3

Greene provides the following guidelines for "Centering Down" in his text, Performance Success.

1. Form your clear intention. Precisely state a goal, for example: "I am going to learn how to center down" or "I am going to carefully practice this pedal solo."

2. Pick your focus point. Greene suggests choosing a focus point that is below eye level, because having the eyes closed or lowered is more conducive to right brain activation. This can be difficult for organists, especially if playing on a four-manual instrument with a high music rack. This could be a good reason for playing from memory or at least only referring to the music occasionally.

3. Close your eyes, focus on your breathing. When first learning to center, it is important to first close the eyes; later you will be able to do this by just lowering the eyes and focusing gently. You should concentrate on breathing from the diaphragm rather than the upper chest. Breathe in through the nose and out from the mouth for three to seven breaths, until entirely focused on breathing.

4. Scan for excess tension and release it. With each inhalation, scan the body for tension from the head to the feet. When exhaling, release the tension. 

5. Find your center. The center of gravity in one's body is about two inches below the navel and two inches into the body. You must maintain the center of gravity in relation to the chair or bench as you center. During times of stress, the sensation of the center tends to rise and the goal in centering is to keep the center of gravity at the proper location.

6. Repeat your process cues. Process cues are concise, "supportive directions" that help you focus on goals once successfully centered. This phrase should be a specific cause phrase, not an effect. For example, when beginning a Bach sonata you might think, "Clear articulation," or before beginning Vierne's Berceuse, you would think, '"rolling legato." These phrases might be instructions that you have heard from a teacher when working on a particular piece in a lesson.

7. Direct your energy. Energy must be gathered at your center and then directed through the body to a specific focus point. If these steps are taken thoroughly you will direct energy and concentration to successful completion of the performance goal.

Focused Concentration

Performers who consistently achieve optimal and peak performances have a high degree of mental quiet. This is a state in which concentration remains steady, avoiding any external interruptions. Within this focused status, the performer lets the physical movements and the music flow freely; however, this mindset can be interrupted by internal criticisms and external distractions. 

When performing, if something irrelevant or distracting enters your mind, Greene suggests asking yourself if this is relevant or irrelevant. Try not to force the mind onto the task at hand, simply think "irrelevant" and pay the distracting thought no mind.4

If you experience problems with distracting thoughts during performance or practice, it might help to play through a piece and afterwards write down all of the thoughts that came into your mind. For example, thoughts concerning job pressures, personal issues or everyday tasks may intervene and decrease the quality of the performance or productivity of the practice session. When you take note of the distracting thoughts and analyze the list, it becomes evident how mundane and irrelevant these thoughts are, and it may help you disregard these items as they arise in the future.5

One of the most distracting elements of a musician?s concentration is the presence of negative thoughts. Many athletes use the technique of "thought stopping" to eliminate both distracting and negative thoughts. When you experience an irrelevant or unproductive thought, briefly attend to the thought, say "stop" out loud and clear your mind. Select a particular thought pattern that you really wish to extinguish. Then close your eyes and try to imagine the situation in which the negative thought generally appears. Finally, practice interrupting the anxiety-producing thought until it is eliminated entirely. This process may take much time, focus and practice; however, the reward will be a decrease in negative thought patterns and distractions to concentration. Discover phrases, such as a positive mantra ("I feel strong and I radiant confidence."6 "I play with clarity and strength.") or emotions that can be conjured to combat negative thoughts during performance. It is important to become aware of self-defeating phrases that interrupt constructive thoughts and replace them with positive ideas and feelings.7

Positive self-talk can greatly increase confidence and thus decrease arousal and anxiety immediately prior to a performance. If you experience nervous symptoms such as a dry mouth, cold hands, nervous stomach or other such physiological annoyances before performances, your first thought is probably something like, "I hate this feeling and I'm not going to do well." This thought pattern can be reframed with the statement, ?"These feelings help give me the energy I need for an exciting performance." It is important to take bothersome or negative thoughts or self-talk and put a positive spin on them.8 For every negative thought that crosses the mind, strive to come up with two positive thoughts.

Performances are rarely perfect, and musicians should strive for optimum performances rather than perfect performances. Every human is fallible, and it is imperative to keep experiences within a realistic realm of accomplishable goals.9 The most beneficial type of self talk is referred to as "realistic self appraisal" with comments such as "I will probably make a few mistakes, but the important thing is relaying the music."10

Mental Rehearsal Techniques

When practicing the organ, postural alignment, proper breathing and relaxed muscles are imperative. When incorporating mental rehearsal, the mind retains your overall physical state along with the music, so it is important to remain relaxed during these portions of a practice session.11

When first developing imagery ability, attain a state of relaxation, decide upon an external or internal perspective, and then practice imaging from one point of view. After proficiency is gained in one perspective, switch to the other. Initially practice visualizing yourself performing from the audience's viewpoint, noticing deportment, energy and emotions from this external perspective. Next, imagine what it feels like to be at the organ playing, noticing all details of the experience: body position, muscular contractions, emotions, etc. You must practice the two perspectives independently at first; later, they can be combined. As you become more experienced in imagery, you can quickly shift from an internal to an external perspective.

Decide in advance on one element upon which to focus. This can be incorporated with centering and setting up a "process cue," a simple phrase or word that summarizes the immediate performance goal. For instance, you should decide if you are going to focus on a single element such as muscle tension, precise notes, expressive timing or piston changes.12

When initially learning a skill, external imagery may be the most efficient technique. For example, a beginning organ student may benefit most from external imagery because he/she is not familiar enough with the muscle movements involved in playing the instrument to imagine them from an internal perspective. When a skill is very comfortable and automatic, kinesthetic imagery may work more effectively. For an advanced player or a beginner, imagery and mental rehearsal work most effectively with consistent practice.

Three Step Practice Loop

Mentally imagine the ideal sound, play the passage, and then analyze the result. Did the physical performance match the inner ear's model?13 This is a wonderful idea for musicians of all levels to put into daily practice. You may incorporate this technique as a teaching tool within lessons by asking the student's reaction to a performance, determining what element(s) require alteration and reminding him/her to repeat this process during practice sessions. By focusing the learner's mind and ear, this time-efficient idea is a great way to sample different interpretations or experiment with various ways to shape a phrase.

Mental Leadership

Mental leadership entails thinking ahead rhythmically while playing a passage or taking silent breaks to mentally rehearse a motif or phrase. When initially incorporating this technique, practice playing a simple example, such as a scale, hymn or exercise from a method book, for either manuals or pedals. At first, it is perhaps best to play with only the hands, or only the feet. While playing, focus on staying mentally ahead by thinking the sound and fingering, or pedaling, of the next note immediately before it occurs. Depending upon the meter and tempo of the passage, you could think ahead with the value of an eighth note, but if playing slow note values, it is possible to think ahead by a quarter or half note. The main goal is to think ahead rhythmically in order to maintain strength in the meter. Initially the organist should think ahead by individual notes, then by measure and finally by phrase. This method encourages you to anticipate both musical and technical issues within a piece and can also enhance sight-reading skills. After you gain proficiency with simple scales or hymns, you may transfer the process of mental leadership to specific pieces. This technique is an excellent way to make the mind guide the muscles and the music, rather than letting motor memory take the lead. 

Example 1:  Mental Leadership

Practice a simple scale, such as the following, using the small notes to quickly think ahead the pedaling for and sound of the next note, moving the foot to its next position as soon as possible.  This promotes anticipating movement and sound while playing so that you are always preparing the body and mind ahead of the music. (Example 1) Employing mental leadership can be especially useful in pattern-based pieces, such as the famous Final from Louis Vierne's Symphonie No. 1. It is beneficial to imagine a brief grouping of notes, perhaps starting with two to four sets of notes and increasing to measures and phrases. During this process, begin by analyzing harmonies, accidentals, and hand position of a short grouping prior to physically playing. Continue by alternating the physical playing and mental analysis, feeling and hearing the next grouping during each rest period.

Example 2:  Mental Leadership

Vividly imagine playing each consecutive grouping during the rests then physically play the grouping. As proficiency increases, you can later imagine groups of eight, twelve, etc. (Example 2) This process allows you to analyze accidentals and to think of harmonies, patterns and sounds allowing the mind to guide the muscles rather than vice versa. Whenever you stop to think through an upcoming passage, it is imperative to relax the muscles, be aware of any tension and release, breathing deeply. Although this process sounds time consuming, when practiced regularly and properly, it may decrease the amount of learning time as well as increase memory and retention of the passage. 

Miming

Mime motions of playing while hearing the sound in the inner ear and paying careful attention to muscular movements. This technique is especially helpful in pieces with large leaps, difficult manual changes, extended reaches or rapid piston changes. It takes much less muscular tension to mime through a passage than it does to physically play.

Example 3: Miming

From Cantabile by César Franck

In Example 3a, mime moving the hands from the Positif and Récit to the Grand Orgue to achieve a smooth, solid transition. In Example 3b, mime the octave movement between the two circled notes, making sure that the first note is released gently and the horizontal arm movement is accurate, settling the fingers over the notes before playing.

Verbal Cueing

Based on your own interpretation or an instructor's suggestions, write cues in the score and speak them aloud as you get to that passage; later, the cues can be imagined rather than spoken. You may employ phrases such as "play legato, articulate before the downbeat, stretch the hand," etc.

Example 4:  Verbal Cueing

From Berceuse by Louis Vierne

When playing this example, you could think phrases such as "rolling legato," "reach up to the F#," "open swell pedal," "close swell pedal," etc.

Modeling

Listen to a recording and imagine the motions involved in playing; do the same when a coach is modeling for you. Imagine that you are a performer that you admire and play through a piece with his/her energy and flair.

Creative Images

Think of the images or characters that the music evokes; play a movie in your mind that corresponds to the piece. The movie can be created while listening to a recording, during physical practice, or while hearing the music in the inner ear. Instead of a movie, one might simply recall evocative images in the mind?s eye such as a regal event during a majestic work, or a playful scene during a lighthearted passage.

Altering Tempos of Mental Rehearsals

It is best to employ mental rehearsal at the same tempo as physical performance; however, there are exceptions when altering the tempo may be desirable. When working slowly on a new piece it is possible to mentally rehearse the piece at the desired final tempo. This can be helpful when working out fingerings and initial technique for the piece. You may also skim through simple sections and mentally rehearse the successful performance of difficult sections or memory posts.

Mental Practice with a Metronome

Increasing the tempo of a new piece may be done by incrementally raising the speed of a metronome. You will have stronger rhythm and improved success with this technique by setting the metronome to the appropriate tempo, hearing the desired passage in your head with precise rhythm, then playing the passage at that tempo. Most likely, by following this technique, you will play with steady rhythm rather than speeding up or slowing down to match the metronome.

Memory

Mental rehearsal can be incorporated in the early and advanced stages of memorizing a composition. You can employ this technique both at and away from the organ. When initially learning a new work, mental rehearsal and imagery with the score (away from the instrument) allow you to analyze the formal structure, harmonic and melodic patterns of the piece. Thorough understanding of a work's structure from an analytical standpoint increases the speed of memorization.

When memorizing a phrase or short passage, play through the phrase looking at the score, then play through it mentally, with eyes closed, noting sounds and movements, and then physically play the passage from memory, continue this process for several repetitions. This technique may seem time consuming, but it can make memory more solid and can allow you to memorize more quickly. The muscles benefit from rest during the mental rehearsal period while the music is reinforced in the mind. It is imperative that you combine vivid aural, visual and kinesthetic images during the mental rehearsal.

When a composition is securely memorized, it is beneficial to mentally play the piece away from the instrument. This can be done sitting or lying down in a state of relaxation, or while on a walk or other monotonous activity. When practicing memory in this fashion, it is important to incorporate all of the senses, visualizing the score and location of performance or practice, imagining all piston changes and dynamic changes, and most importantly hearing the correct notes, phrasings and interpretations in one's inner ear. If there is a passage that cannot be heard internally away from the keyboard, then this is a passage that needs extra physical and mental rehearsal in order to be securely memorized.

Conclusion

Organists and other musicians should continually aim for optimal performances, striving to do their best, yet realizing that live performances are rarely ever perfect. Employing relaxation techniques as well as mental rehearsal and imagery can improve your chances for achieving an optimal level in all performances. Incorporating mental methods assures that the mind stays ahead of the body, thinking beforehand about both technical and musical issues. Initially, you must spend a great deal of time to develop mental imagery and  rehearsal techniques, but the time yields improved quality of concentration and focus, thus saving practice time in the long run.

Mental rehearsal should never be considered a permanent alternative to physical practice. There is certainly no substitute for physically engaging the muscles in practice, but mental rehearsal enhances the cognitive and spatial elements of a task and also allows time for theoretical analysis of the music. Taking time out for mental rehearsal during the physical practice session has the added advantage of giving the muscles time to rest before reaching a fatigued state.

Mental rehearsal and imagery are most effective when they are extremely vivid, involving all of the senses. You must be aware of muscular sensations, sights, sounds, smells and tastes in great detail in order to benefit from mental imagery. One of the most important elements of mental rehearsal is that you relax the muscles before practicing mentally. The brain memorizes muscular tension or release along with the mental representation of the music.

Whether dealing with performance anxiety or individual practice sessions, always be open to new images or forms of mental rehearsal. By employing basic mental rehearsal and imagery techniques, you may find additional methods that work better, or some that are entirely ineffective. It is important to share these ideas with colleagues and students; all can learn from one another. Also, consider writing down newly discovered mental practice techniques or effective images in a notebook or journal.  These ideas can then be applied to other pieces or used for teaching; they may even be employed within other venues such as choir rehearsals or public speaking.

It is always important for musicians to remember successful performances and frequently recall the feelings associated with these experiences, as well as vividly imagining successful future performances. The preparation, emotions and sensations associated with past successes are the foundation upon which future successes are built.   n

Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at . Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at .

Relax
At the end of last month’s column, I said that next time I would talk about relaxation, hand position, and posture, and would begin to address the business of teaching experienced pianists to play organ or harpsichord. Let’s start by discussing the latter of these, then the extraordinary or even transcendent importance of relaxation, a little bit about its relation to posture and hand position, and the role that the concept of relaxation can play in teaching.
Among the students who come to us, those who are already experienced pianists but not organists or harpsichordists present special opportunities. This is made clear by the question that a new student of this sort will almost always ask at the first lesson: “Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I already play piano?” The answer is “both.” The good part, of course, is the skill and experience in choosing fingerings, in practicing, and in just plain playing note patterns at the keyboard. This is a tremendous leg up, and can save a vast amount of time and work. The bad part is made up of any technical habits that are proper to the piano but unsuitable for the organ or the harpsichord. These usually have to do with weight or force, or with playing too far into the keys, but may also include over-reliance on the damper pedal or an approach to articulation that does not translate well from piano to other keyboard instruments, or various listening habits that, if unaltered, can limit a player’s ability to use organ or harpsichord sound expressively. These problems can, in theory, form a tremendous set of obstacles that would indeed negate the advantages from the student’s pre-existing keyboard facility.
Often, out of an understandable desire to not neglect the artistic in favor of the crassly practical, pianists who come for organ or harpsichord lessons will exaggerate in their own minds the obstacles or problems created by their piano-oriented technique and feel reluctant to embrace the advantages that their keyboard training gives them. Many students start out with an almost morbid fear of sounding like “a pianist trying to play the organ” rather than “an organist.” The good news is that it is actually quite easy to overcome all of these disadvantages and to reap the full benefit of any basically sound keyboard training. The key to doing this efficiently and indeed easily is relaxation.
This relaxation is essentially physical: that is, the complete absence of tension in all of the muscles, tendons, etc. that are directly involved in playing, the substantial absence of tension in the rest of the body, and the assumption of a posture or body position that can be maintained without conscious thought and without muscular effort. The ideal is that the player be as relaxed—physically—while playing as he or she would want to be while “relaxing” in his or her favorite and least demanding way: sitting back in an arm chair, lounging on the beach, taking a nice long bath, or whatever.
One exercise for getting to know the feeling of physical relaxation as it applies to the hands is this. Stand up in a posture that seems comfortable (not formal or “at attention”). Allow your arms to hang loosely at your sides. Now raise one arm up to about waist height, without raising or otherwise tightening the shoulders, letting the elbow move out to the side and letting the forearm point more or less toward where you are looking (probably tilted inward a bit: it should feel natural and comfortable). Do this as gently as possible. Let your hand hang loosely at the end of your arm. Now move your forearm up and down several inches, not too quickly, letting your hand flap up and down loosely without attempting to control it in any way. The feeling that you get in your hand by doing this fairly briefly is a lot like the way the hand should feel at the keyboard when it is quite relaxed. (If you do this exercise for too long, say more than twenty seconds at a time, it can get wearing on your arm and begin to create the kind of tension it is trying to expunge.)
(A longer discussion of this exercise can be found, along with several further exercises, at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <www.pekc.org&gt;.)
There are several ways in which extreme physical relaxation helps with organ and harpsichord playing. First, on instruments that have a touch that is in any way sensitive—that is, tracker organs with a good responsive action and at least somewhat flexible winding, and some but not all harpsichords—there is pretty good agreement that the sonority produced by a fluid touch without tension and as light as the action allows will be the most beautiful and the most useful musically. (Of course this is subjective and therefore subject to disagreement. I am reporting what has seemed to me to be a near unanimous reaction that I’ve observed over the years.) On organs and harpsichords whose sonority cannot be influenced directly by touch (non-tracker organs, tracker organs with a heavy or unresponsive action and some harpsichords) a light tension-free touch is neither good nor bad for the sound as such.
A light fluid touch also makes it possible to play faster, and for fast playing to sound less labored and thus more musically charismatic. One way to test this away from the keyboard is through the normal act of drumming one’s fingers on a table. (That is, in keyboard terms, playing 5-4-3-2 or 5-4-3-2-1 on the surface of the table over and over again quickly.) If you keep your hand very light while doing this you can do it very fast, almost infinitely fast, certainly faster than you would almost ever play notes at a keyboard. As you begin to tighten your hand up the drumming becomes slower and the “notes” become more distinct from one another, sort of clunkier.
However, the most important role of physical relaxation in organ and harpsichord playing—and the reason I said last month that I sometimes consider it to be the only technical imperative in playing these instruments—is that a very relaxed hand can make much more subtle distinctions of timing and articulation than can a hand with any tension in it. Whether these distinctions are being used to create accent through varied articulation or to shape a line through slight rubato or to create just the right amount of overlapping to adjust to a particular acoustic or to stagger the releases of the notes in a chord to create a gentle diminuendo or anything else, tension in the hand will force the player to choose between starkly different alternatives, whereas a truly relaxed hand will allow the player to make infinitely slight distinctions, while of course also easily permitting larger distinctions to be made.
There is a lot more to be said about this. In fact it will be the background to much of what is discussed in this column, and there will be more columns about it specifically. Right now, however, let us return to the former piano player who wishes to learn organ. I have found over the years that introducing such a student to the idea of relaxation—extreme relaxation—as early as the very first lesson is a remarkably effective way to do two important things: first, to allay the student’s anxiety about the process of adapting to the new kind of touch; second, to develop a very plausible—or occasionally even really good—organ or harpsichord touch right off the bat.
This does not mean, of course, that the student will instantly have nothing more to learn or will immediately become a knowledgeable or virtuosic performer of all sorts of different repertoire. It will, however, create, very promptly and with little or no anguish, a platform upon which the student can build. This will allow the student to take advantage of the years of piano training without falling prey to the actual problems that piano technique can create for aspiring organists or harpsichordists or to the anxiety created by fear of those problems.
Here are some practical steps when beginning to help a pianist study organ or harpsichord:
1) At the first lesson invite the student to sit at the keyboard and play something—anything—that he or she already knows. This might well not be a piece that is really appropriate to the instrument. This does not matter in the least. In fact, since part of the purpose of this beginning is to allay anxiety, it can be better if the issue of the piece’s sounding good or right on the instrument doesn’t even exist. (Of course most pianists have some Bach pieces under their fingers. These will almost always adapt well to any keyboard.) In any case, do remind the student that this is in no way a performance or audition, and that it doesn’t matter for now how the piece actually sounds. The piece should not be too fast, so if it is intrinsically fast, ask the student to play it under tempo for now.
2) Ask the student to sit in as relaxed and comfortable a way as possible. At the organ this might involve hooking the feet back under the bench or even letting them rest on and mutely play some pedal keys. At the harpsichord this might involve leaning back in the chair or slumping forward a bit or sitting with one foot up on the other knee. Some of these things might have to change later on—though I have a strong bias in favor of any player’s sitting in whatever way is most natural and comfortable for that person’s physique and habits—but for the moment the only role of the whole body other than the hands is to be subjectively comfortable and to provide the student with no distraction or worry.
3) As the student begins to play, remind him or her to think about nothing other than playing lightly. In particular, this means explicitly not caring about wrong notes and, especially, not caring if some notes actually fail to sound because the student has not pushed them down hard enough. I always tell students that if, when first working on organ or harpsichord, they play so lightly that some notes don’t sound, they will discover that after a short time this is simply no longer happening. They will have discovered, subconsciously, the right actual amount of force to play the keys, without having lost the feeling of lightness and fluidity. (I have actually never known this not to happen.) Any preoccupation at the very beginning with making sure that every note sounds will almost certainly lead to the “safe” adoption of a too strong and insufficiently relaxed touch.
4) Concerning hand position, the most important thing to mention to the student at this stage is that it is a good idea to keep the hand more or less in a line with the arm along the side-to-side axis, that is, not to cock the wrist in or out to any appreciable degree. This can be made difficult by certain fingerings, so as a practical matter the student should simply skip any (already learned) passages that seem to make it necessary to turn the hand in or out more than a little bit. In the next phase—that of learning new pieces—this idea can be taken into account from scratch in making fingering choices. I don’t believe that it matters, at this stage, where the hand is at on the up-and-down axis, as long as the shoulders and arms are comfortable. Issues such as high or low wrists or the position of the elbow will fall into place naturally or can be easily dealt with later on. It can be useful to remind the student that the fingers need not be parallel to the keys. Rather, the tips of the fingers must present themselves to the keys with the rest of the hand in a physiologically comfortable position.
For many students, one session along these lines is a revelation. They immediately hear themselves making beautiful sounds, and they hear any articulations that they make as being subtle and musical, not abrupt or jarring. Of course this is just a beginning, but it is a very good one. Needless to say, pianists coming to the organ also must begin to explore the joys of pedal playing. We will turn to that subject beginning with next month’s column.

When meeting Kimberly Marshall, one’s first impression is that of great energy. That impression lingers as one encounters her presence in written publications and recordings—she seems to turn up everywhere and indeed, she has performed and presented at American and European conventions and conferences, has written entries for Grove and other music dictionaries, recorded organ music from the 15th to the 21st centuries, and even made videos to illustrate exercises for organists (Marshall kindly produced one for The Diapason).

A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Kimberly Marshall began organ studies in 1974 with John Mueller at North Carolina School of the Arts. After studies in France with Louis Robilliard (1978–79) and Xavier Darasse (1980–81), she returned to North Carolina and completed her undergraduate studies with Fenner Douglass in 1982.

With a full scholarship from the British government, she pursued graduate studies at the University of Oxford (1982–86), earning a D.Phil. in Music for her thesis, Iconographical Evidence for the Late-Medieval Organ. During her time in England, she won first prize at the St. Albans Organ Interpretation Competition in 1985, leading to a contract with the BBC and a recital on the Royal Festival Hall series.

In 1986, Marshall was appointed assistant professor of music and university organist at Stanford, where she presided over organs by Fisk (dual-temperament, 1984) and Murray Harris (1901). Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1991, she continued her research and teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium in Australia. From 1993–96 she served as dean of postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music, developing a new master’s degree in advanced performance studies, awarded in conjunction with King’s College London. 

From 1996–2000, Marshall was a project leader for the Organ Research Center in Göteborg, Sweden, where she taught and performed. Under the aegis of GOArt, she organized the first conference ever devoted to organ recordings, “The Organ in Recorded Sound,” and has edited its proceedings.¹ Appointed to Arizona State University in 1998, Marshall (now Goldman Professor of Organ) oversees the graduate organ studio and presides over the instrument by Paul Fritts (1992). 

Kimberly Marshall has performed and done research worldwide, from a sabbatical in Pistoia, Italy, researching early Italian organ music, to performing on many historic organs, including those in Roskilde Cathedral (Denmark), St. Laurenskerk, Alkmaar (Netherlands), the Jacobikirche in Hamburg, and the Hildebrandt instrument in Naumburg, Germany, which Bach examined in 1746. She has also presented concerts and workshops on early music in Sweden, in Israel, at the 2007 Early English Organ Project in Oxford, and at the Festival for Historical Organs in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Marshall’s publications reflect her eclectic interests. Examples include Rediscovering the Muses (Northeastern University Press, 1993), her edition of articles on female traditions of music making; entries for the Cambridge Companion to the Organ (1998), the Grove Dictionary of Music 2000, and the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (2012); and her anthologies of late-medieval and Renaissance organ music (Wayne Leupold Editions, 2000 and 2004). 

Marshall’s recordings (over a dozen, at this writing) cover a wide spectrum, including music of the Italian and Spanish Renaissance, French Classical and Romantic periods, and works by J. S. Bach. Her most recent CD, The First Printed Organ Music: Arnolt Schlick, celebrates the music of Arnolt Schlick on the 500th anniversary of its publication (2012). A CD/DVD set, A Fantasy through Time (Loft, 2009), featured the organ fantasy genre across five centuries, from Ferrabosco and Sweelinck through Jehan Alain. Marshall has collaborated as organist for a recording of Chen Yi’s organ concerto with the Singapore Symphony (BIS, 2003). Her recording of works for organ by female composers, Divine Euterpe, includes music by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Elfrida Andrée, and Ethyl Smyth.

While at Stanford and the Royal Academy of Music, Marshall gave performances of organ works by Ligeti in the presence of the composer, and she has been an advocate for music by Margaret Sandresky, Dan Locklair, and Ofer Ben-Amots. In a recent article, she described the new Gerald Woehl organ in Piteå, Sweden (“The ‘Organ of the Future’ in Sweden’s Studio Acusticum,” The American Organist, February 2013, pp. 62–65). Her publications and recordings can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberly_Marshall.&nbsp;

Marshall also maintains a vibrant website (www.kimberlymarshall.com) and a Facebook page, and she can be found on YouTube performing everything from Christmas favorites to Widor. Marshall also has created exercise videos tailored to the organist, in which she demonstrates moves and stretches that work on muscles most used by organists. In person and even via the telephone Marshall communicates a passion both personal and professional, and we wished to explore the life and work that has ensued from such energy and enthusiasm.

Joyce Johnson Robinson: Do you come from a musical family? 

Kimberly Marshall: My mother is very musical and had a beautiful singing voice, but she had very little formal training. Her mother had played the piano, so when I was seven, she asked if I’d like to study the piano. We didn’t have an instrument in my home until my parents bought an upright piano for my practice.

What ignited your love of organ music? 

I had the great luck to be born in the town where John and Margaret Mueller were teaching. Margaret is a legendary organist, and she became my piano instructor when I was thirteen. She is a master teacher for young musicians, and she opened my ears to the expressive possibilities of the piano. John attended one of my piano recitals and invited me to study organ with him. What an honor! I began my studies with him on the beautiful Flentrop organ at Salem College, and the next year continued my work as a high school student at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Dr. Mueller’s enthusiasm and the range of timbres available on the Flentrop organ sparked my passion for the organ.

What works were some of your first favorites?

I was very enamored of French music from the start, Alain’s Litanies and Franck’s Choral III being two of my early favorites.

You received a full scholarship from the British government for your graduate work at Oxford. Is that unusual for an American?

Each year, the British government awards up to 40 “Marshall” Scholarships to Americans to pursue graduate degrees at British universities. The Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission was set up in 1953 as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for the Marshall Plan. Scholars in many fields have studied on Marshall Scholarships—Thomas Friedman, William Burns, and Nannerl Keohane, to name three—but there have been very few musicians in the 60-year history of the awards. Perhaps the common family name helped me, although I’m not aware of any direct link to George C. Marshall.

You had a contract with the BBC. What did that entail?

This was part of my St. Albans prize, and it started with a recording of my prizewinner’s recital that was later broadcast on BBC. The first contract meant that I was on the books, so to speak, and I was later asked to do other projects, such as recordings at Birmingham Town Hall and London’s St. John’s Smith Square.

You’ve done a great deal of work in the areas of medieval and Renaissance organ music. What are the elements of early music that appeal to you?

My interest in early music was sparked by my experience with historical organs while an undergraduate in French conservatories. As a high school student working with John Mueller at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I had focused mainly on Bach and French romantic music, which led me to continue studies with Louis Robilliard at the Lyon Conservatoire. Every day, I practiced Franck, Liszt, and Messiaen on the beautiful Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. François-de-Sales—it was a marvelous time in my life! After gaining the Médaille d’Or in Lyon, I decided that I should spend some time in Paris working on early music. I was planning to study privately with André Isoir, whom I had met during one of the Salem College summer organ academies, and whom several of my fellow French students had recommended warmly. 

I remember arriving early for the Sunday morning Mass at St. Germain-des-Prés, hoping to go up to the tribune with him, when who should appear but Isoir’s colleague, Odile Bailleux, who hurriedly invited me up the stairs so that she could start the prelude. During the course of the Mass, she played a number of French and English baroque pieces. I loved her playing and her personality and impulsively asked if I might study with her. She agreed, and so I began having lessons in early music with Bailleux at St. Germain. I also went to hear Chapuis play at St. Sévérin in the Latin Quarter whenever possible, and I attended Saturday workshops with him and Jean Saint-Arroman at Pierrefonds, near Compiègne, on an organ built in historical style by Jean-Georges Koenig in 1979. This was a terrific initiation into the performance practice of French Classical organ music, which, with Buxtehude and Pachelbel, was the first pre-Bach repertoire I learned.

So you began with French Romantic repertoire and then started playing the tape backwards, so to speak, moving back into French Classical. What specifically appealed to you about medieval and Renaissance works? 

Again, I was inspired to learn about Renaissance music because of my experiences with historic organs. I remember visiting the gorgeous Piffaro organ (1519) in Siena’s Santa Maria della Scala with Umberto Pineschi and Joan Lippincott in the late 1980s. We were enchanted by the gravitas of the 12′ Principale, by the shimmering beauty of the ripieno, and by the delicacy of the Flauto. But Joan and I didn’t know what type of music would have been composed for this instrument—the four-octave compass began at F (without low F# or G#) and was not conducive to baroque music. So we improvised and relished the sounds. Then I started doing some research, uncovering a treasure trove of 16th-century Italian music, including the first “St. Anne” Fugue, composed before 1570! (I published this in my Renaissance anthology for Wayne Leupold Editions, 2004.) 

The desire to demonstrate a historical organ with corresponding repertoire also motivated my research into Arnold Schlick. Years ago, I had the opportunity to perform on the 16th-century Genarp organ in the Malmö Museum, for which Schlick’s music is well suited. I’ll never forget that pedalboard because the sharps were so high that it made playing Schlick’s Ascendo ad patrem meum (with four parts in the pedal) easier than usual, although I had to take my shoes off to do it!

My interest in medieval music obviously did not come from playing historic organs, but rather from my study with John Caldwell at Oxford. As part of my course, I researched the early history of the organ, and I was naturally curious about the sort of instrument that would have accommodated the first surviving keyboard music—the Robertsbridge Codex, circa 1360. Caldwell is an expert on medieval music and English keyboard music, and he encouraged my efforts, giving me insightful suggestions about possible sources and the meaning of obscure Latin references. Another formative influence was my thesis advisor, Christopher Page, who founded Gothic Voices just a year before I began my studies at Oxford. Listening to Margaret Philpot and Rogers Covey-Crump recreating the music of Machaut and Dufay in New College Chapel transported me to new musical horizons. I was taken by the strange beauty of the music, and I wanted to reclaim the organ repertoire from this time. Page was the perfect mentor for me, a scholar/performer of the first order who was able to sell out major concert halls with a program of medieval motets and Renaissance chansons. I was inspired to include 14th- and 15th-century keyboard pieces on my own concert programs. 

Although I have had the chance to perform concerts at Sion and Rysum, I usually play late-medieval music on modern organs, trying to evoke something of its original creation through my articulation and registration. As I tell my audiences, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to medieval replica organs to bring this music to life in the 21st century. What if we hadn’t played Bach’s organ music until we had the perfect Bach organ?

You put a great emphasis on recital program design. Tell us how you approach programming.

I am fascinated by the many different types of organs that have been created and try to share this fascination with my audiences through interesting programming. My concerts often have a theme, such as A Fantasy through Time, a CD/DVD of organ fantasies from the 16th to the 20th century, or Bach Encounters Buxtehude, exploring through organ music the ways in which the Lübeck master might have influenced the young Bach.

I very much enjoy finding ways to link disparate types of music or to help the audience understand the development of a genre or organ type. Organ music preserved from the early 16th century shows the emergence of national styles, as German, Italian, French, and English musicians began exploring the organs they knew. So it’s a great way to demonstrate the distinguishing characteristics of organs in different European countries, many of which also correspond to some national stereotypes of the people in those countries!

Of course, the organ that I am playing must always be the starting point for any program to be successful. I try to show as much of each instrument as I can, sometimes finding unusual combinations that highlight the geographic or chronological variety of the music. If there’s a beautiful Quintadena or Regal, I need to determine how best to feature it. Because the compass required for 14th–17th century music is usually much less than that of contemporary instruments, it is often possible to play pieces up or down an octave, thereby employing different registers of the stop(s) than are normally heard. Building fine programs is like managing a restaurant, determining from day to day the best menus to take advantage of fresh, seasonal foods while also creating a special atmosphere for the establishment. Registering organ music is like being the chef, knowing the intrinsic tastes of each ingredient and finding inspired (and delicious!) ways to combine them.

Has your methodology of programming changed over the years?

Yes, definitely. My changing approaches to programming relate to changing expectations of audiences during the past 30 years. When I started concertizing, I would try to include standards of the organ repertoire, always a major Bach work, another German work (perhaps Buxtehude or Pachelbel), something French (some Couperin, Grigny, Franck, Dupré, Alain, or Messiaen) and at least one “outlier,” some Spanish or Italian music, or a contemporary piece (Albright, Heiller, Sandresky, Ligeti). Organ music was more mainstream then, and audiences knew many of the major works. I would try to give them a sampling of music they would recognize and then add some rarer gems to spice up the program. 

As audiences for organ concerts became less familiar with the instrument and its repertoire, I decided that I needed to introduce verbally the music I was playing. This was difficult for me at first, but I forced myself to do it because I felt that it was important to make a connection with the audience and to tell them what excited me about a particular work. I got a lot of good feedback after concerts, when listeners would say, “I especially appreciated your comments,” or “You really helped me to hear things in the music that I otherwise would have missed.” So I persevered, always planning my comments meticulously and memorizing them. (I later discovered that Winston Churchill had similarly written out his speeches, even including indications concerning their delivery, and memorized them, so that it appeared to audiences that he had a natural gift for public speaking.) 

I found that it helped the flow of my comments to have an overriding theme for the concert, so I began to craft programs that related to a type of music (say, dances or organ fantasias) or that showed influence from one composer or national school to another (such as Bach and the Italian influence or organ music by female composers). With time, the speaking between pieces became easier and more natural, so that now, instead of dreading my time off the bench, I can enjoy looking out at the audience and communicating my ideas to them with words as well as through music. And my themes have become more imaginative, such as “War and Peace” (from early battle pieces through Messiaen’s Combat de la Mort et de la Vie), “Number Symbolism in Organ Music,” and “Bottoms Up!” (a program with my fabulous tuba colleague, Sam Pilafian). Sometimes I am asked to prepare a specific type of program for an event. This happened when I was invited to perform an organ recital for the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music in London two weeks before the 2012 Olympics. The festival organizers were using the theme of competition, so they asked me to recreate the competition between J. S. Bach and Louis Marchand that was planned but never took place. I believe that such a programmatic approach can help bring in new listeners for the organ as well as add new dimensions to the experience of organ enthusiasts.

Let’s discuss your teaching. How do you present historical contexts to your students? 

I have a three-pronged approach to this. We study surviving treatises and instruments to learn from them about playing styles. We then develop interpretations of pieces from different national schools and time periods at a specific organ, determining ways to adapt the historical material to real-life performance situations. Finally, I draw links between what is happening in a specific organ school and what was happening in the broader musical, political, and social contexts in which the music was composed. It is vital for my students to listen to great performances of vocal and instrumental music from each of the traditions we study, so that they have a sound ideal in their minds before they try to achieve it at the organ.

How do you integrate web-based information with traditional bibliographic research methods?

The most important web-based information in my teaching is the availability of fine recordings through the Internet. Our university subscribes to the Naxos Music Library, and my students are constantly finding new sources of recorded music (and not only organ recordings!) to inform their interpretations. I also investigate historical recordings as part of my research (as seen in my article in The Organ in Recorded Sound), so I use the International Historic Organ Recording Collection (www.ihorc.com) and the Centre for History and Analysis of Recorded Music at King’s College London (www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/research/proj/charm/) whenever relevant to a student’s interests. 

I think my students teach me more about what’s out on the Internet than I teach them, although I certainly add a critical element that can be lacking for the generation that grew up on Google. Just because there’s a video on YouTube doesn’t mean that it’s an authoritative performance! Of course, my students and I benefit daily from music editions available through the Internet, especially public domain scores through IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project: imslp.org). Again, one must exercise critical judgment about the context of the original edition, since many reflect the scholarship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is why they are in the public domain. In some cases the scholarship was very sound, but new sources and approaches during the second half of the 20th century may make old editions obsolete, so one must be cautious and not just latch onto the first edition that pops up in the browser.

Given the ubiquity of electronic devices and technologies, do you find that students have more trouble maintaining focus and patience? 

Since my teaching is specialized, I haven’t encountered this problem directly, but colleagues who teach more general courses often complain of the need to present material in “sound bytes.” Organists have great powers of concentration, so I’m not sure that my students are a barometer of what may be happening more generally with regard to attention spans in our culture. 

Do your students embrace early music as much as you do? 

Some of them do; others don’t. And that’s just fine, because each student is unique and has individual passions that I try to develop through my teaching.

You not only work to stay in shape yourself, but you have created short videos to educate others on ways of preventing pain and injury. What led you to promote exercises for organists? 

I am very committed to helping organists stay fit and able to play the organ without pain. To this end, I have been developing some simple exercises to combat the typical problems encountered by organists spending prolonged periods of time in bad positions.² By working to open the chest and strengthen the rhomboids—upper back muscles— it is possible to correct for the kyphosis (humped upper back) that often plagues organists. It is also necessary to make the hips more flexible and to strengthen the abdominal wall in order to have a stable core that grounds the body. [Kimberly Marshall has created a video for The Diapason demonstrating warmup exercises. Visit TheDiapason.com and look for Diapason TV.] With a strong core and good position at the organ, the arms and legs can move freely, enabling one to play for hours without repetitive strain.

How did you decide on the muscle groups to work on, and which exercises to do? Did you work with an exercise physiologist?

I have practiced yoga for about 15 years, and this has helped my flexibility and mindfulness. Breathing deeply is the key to so many aspects of our mental and physical performance, so opening wind passages and the diaphragm is top priority! I tend to gravitate towards restorative, yin poses in my yoga practice, so I try to balance that with strength training, especially for the core, shoulders, and arms. For the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of working with a fabulous trainer, Larry Arnold. Larry has his own gym in Phoenix and a unique approach to fitness that is rooted in his understanding of the body (his website is www.labodycraft.com). He trains athletes at a very high level, but he’s amenable to improving body function in other activities. I am definitely the first organist he’s worked with, and I’ve taken students to see him as well. We all have the same issues!

Since you have a heightened awareness of physical issues, do you assess any weaknesses with your students?

Yes, my students are often kyphotic (hunched upper back), and they usually have tight lower backs from the strength required to support themselves on the bench during hours of practice. These are problems affecting almost all organists, which is why I developed simple exercises to help offset them. Usually, organists need to strengthen the upper back (so that it holds the shoulders down and back, creating a long, free neck) and to strengthen the abdominal muscles (so that the opposing muscles in the lower back can loosen). Individual students sometimes have other physical issues, so I try to create ways to help them with alignment, strength, and/or flexibility. 

How do you maintain your own fitness when you’re traveling and concertizing?

This can be a challenge, but mainly because of time constraints. Preparing concerts takes a lot of time and energy, so I focus on flexibility rather than strength training when I am touring. I maintain good flexibility through stretches and poses that don’t require lots of space or special equipment, and I’ve even become rather adept at exercising on the plane. You can do small abdominal crunches in your seat to help stretch out the lower back. Neck, shoulder, wrist and ankle rolls help to keep the circulation going and to prevent muscle strains, especially on long flights.

You heartily embrace new technology.

Although I’m of an older generation that actually did research in libraries looking at manuscripts and books, I have learned to embrace several aspects made possible by technological advances in the last 30 years. Scanning projects have made immediately accessible many of the musical sources that used to require air travel and long library stays. Manuscripts, music prints, and recordings are now accessible at the click of a mouse, and this facilitates aspects of my work. Nevertheless, one must be careful to verify information retrieved on the web and to develop a critical sense about the integrity of certain sites. 

I am currently collaborating with David Rumsey on a 4,000-article Encyclopedia of the Organ that provides articles on the history of the instrument in specific countries, with cross-referenced articles giving composers’ biographies, technical information, and organ specifications. We are investigating different online platforms for this in order to make it more user-friendly and to keep it updated. With the speed made possible by new technology, today’s readers are too impatient to look up articles in a book, so we hope to provide links that will pop up almost as quickly as the brain initiates the curiosity to investigate.

Of course, I am delighted to be able to share my own work through online articles, recordings, and videos. The facility of communication makes it easy to get feedback and to carry on stimulating discussions with colleagues. Very importantly, I can now give lessons via Skype with organists who want some tips on playing specific pieces or types of repertoire. This is a great boon to disseminating ideas and to giving instant feedback to those who are experimenting with new techniques.

How have the Skype lessons worked out? 

Remarkably well! I was a bit skeptical at first about whether I would be able to have a good idea of someone’s playing through Skype, and then to convey my ideas back to them. But I have found that Skyped lessons can provide an effective way for me to hear someone playing a specific repertoire and to give them input on aspects of performance practice, such as articulation, ornamentation, and rhythmic alterations. I would not recommend Skype sessions for feedback on registration when preparing a recital or as a substitute for an ongoing relationship with a teacher. There is nothing better than being in the same acoustical environment when working together. But Skype enables me to introduce someone to a new style of playing or to help him/her prepare a specific piece without having to make the trip to Arizona. (In some cases, it inspires them to make the trip later!) 

You have worked all over the world. Are you multi-lingual? If so, do you find it helps your work (or if not, does that hinder you in any way)? 

I am a firm believer that organists should know several languages, and as my students will attest, I make linguistic study a priority. Reading is of course the most important aspect for research, and I help prepare my students for reading exams at ASU. When we travel together to see organs in Mexico and Europe, they see how important it is to be able to speak the local language when I am setting up meetings with colleagues, working out travel details, teaching and introducing my concert programs in Spanish, French, Italian, or German. I haven’t yet mastered Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, but know enough to read about organs in them. I think Mandarin is going to become an important language for the future, as we work to foster an organ culture in China. I’ve been there twice, and I am optimistic about the potential for developing Chinese organists and an enthusiastic following for them.

Is there any other area or type of music that you would like to tackle next? 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been relishing the opportunity to play a wide repertoire on many different types of organs. I’ve become known for my work in early music, which is very gratifying, but I don’t want to be confined to that, unless, of course, the organ I am playing dictates a specific style of music. I’ve always played romantic and contemporary music, so I’m coming back to some of the 19th- and 20th-century works that dominated my student days as an organist. Hopefully I’m playing them now with greater insight resulting from the intervening musical experience! What excites me about playing the organ is the amazing variety of sound possibilities available. What other instrumentalist can play 14th- and 15th-century music in Sion, Switzerland, and a month later (and 3,000 kilometers north) perform music from a seven-century spectrum on a futuristic organ with over 100 stops?³ 

Perhaps the most extreme example of this “stylistic schizophrenia” occurred this past summer. At the end of June 2014, I performed during the Boston AGO Convention on the Fisk organ at Wellesley College, in ¼-comma meantone tuning with short octave and split keys. Six weeks later, after a wonderful stay in southern France, I appeared on the Spreckels Organ in San Diego’s Balboa Park, complete with tibias and percussion, playing a program of music by Parisian composers. And that, in a nutshell, is why I love the organ. Vive la différence! ν

Notes

1. The Organ in Recorded Sound: An Exploration of Timbre and Tempo. Göteborg: Göteborg Organ Art Center, 2012. Available from the author or from www.ohscatalog.org.

2. Some of these may be found at https://www.facebook.com/KimberlyMarshall.
organist. 

3. “The ‘Organ of the Future’ in Sweden’s Studio Acusticum,” The American Organist (February 2013): 62–65. 

Kimberly Marshall’s forthcoming recording, A Recital in Handel’s Parish Church, features concerti and passacaglias performed on the new Richard-Fowkes organ in St. George’s, Hanover Square, London. All tracks will be available online in September.

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Mississippi. His interviews with William Teague, Thomas Richner, Nora Williams, and Albert Russell have also appeared in The Diapason.

Robert Town has recently retired after more than forty years of overseeing the organ department at Wichita State University, where he established a legacy of the highest standards in organ performance with his many award-winning students, oversaw the plans and completion of a world-class concert hall and organ, and brought the great organists of the world to the Wichita community through the Bloomfield concert series. In this colorful interview he reminisces about his student life at Eastman, his encounters with eminent musicians such as the Gleasons, Arthur Poister, Marilyn Mason, Marcel Dupré, the Duruflés, Mildred Andrews, and Claire Coci, and his notable career as a teacher and recitalist.

—Brett Valliant

Director of Music, Worship and the Arts

Senior Organist, First United Methodist Church, Wichita, Kansas

Lorenz Maycher: Tell us about your early years.
Robert Town: I am from Meridian, New York, a little village just west of Syracuse. My parents took me to church for the first time in 1940, where I heard the one-manual, six-rank 1876 Hook & Hastings organ. And that was it. I started piano lessons when I was five and took all through my school years.
I became fascinated at the age of ten with something new on the market—the Hammond organ. My mother and I had stopped into Clark Music in Syracuse, and Mr. Clark showed us a church-model Hammond, which I thought was just wonderful. The Hook & Hastings organ in our church was thought to be old and beyond repair. At my instigation, when I was ten, I raised money with other kids in town by putting on circuses, magic shows, and the like to start an organ fund. At the end of two years we had raised $50. The Ladies’ CIC from church added $50, my father $100, and the man who owned the hardware store $100. Before long, we had enough to buy the Hammond organ for the church. I played the prelude and postlude sometimes, and took Hammond organ lessons at the music store in Syracuse. I became the organist at that church at fifteen, and then at First Baptist Church in Weedsport, New York when I was fifteen, where I played a two-manual, ten-rank Steere & Turner for $5 a Sunday.
In my sophomore year of high school, Warren Scharf, who had just finished his master’s degree with Catharine Crozier at Eastman, came to Auburn, New York, to be organist at Second Presbyterian Church, which had, and still has, an E. M. Skinner organ in the gallery. I began lessons with him, and he started me right from the beginning of the Gleason book, with exercises and pieces for manuals alone. At the age of fifteen, having to start from the very beginning was demoralizing, but was the correct thing to do. I studied with him for about six months, until he was drafted into the Army, ending my organ lessons. However, I had become intent on studying with Catharine Crozier at the Eastman School. When her first records came out from Kilbourn Hall, I bought them right away, even before I had anything to play them on. When her Longview, Texas, records of American music came out in 1953, I bought those. They are still marvelous to this day.
I met and heard Miss Crozier for the first time when I was fifteen, at an AGO regional convention in Utica, and made an appointment with her the next year to see how I could best prepare to become her student. I took off two days from school and took the bus over to Rochester to meet with her. Not wanting me to develop any bad habits, she urged that I not take organ lessons until I came to study with her. She did say piano was of the utmost importance, however, and that I could not have enough of that, emphasizing scales and arpeggios.
When I went to audition for her on December 18, 1954, they neglected to tell her. So, after my ear training test and piano audition, Edward Easley, who directed the auditions, looked around for her and found that she had gone out shopping. He found Mr. Gleason in Sibley Library and had me play for him instead. Halfway through my audition, Miss Crozier walked in. I was playing the Messiaen Celestial Banquet, and got so distracted that I left out the pedal part! Afterwards, to my great surprise, she said in a very cold and unsympathetic tone of voice, “Would you do a modulation for us?” I was so shocked that I turned around and said, “You mean from key to key?”
I was devastated when, in 1955, just as I was about to graduate from high school, I learned Catharine Crozier and Harold Gleason were resigning from the Eastman School. I had already been accepted.
As a teacher, Catharine Crozier had been difficult and unsympathetic. She had too many students to suit her, wanted an assistant to take beginning students, and only wanted to teach upperclassmen. Miss Crozier was unhappy.
I think it would be safe to say they knew they were leaving Eastman by January of 1955. Robert Hufstader from Rollins College wrote Eastman asking for a recommendation for a replacement for Arden Whitacre, who had resigned, and that is how the Gleasons found out about the opening at Rollins. Over Christmas holiday, they went down, unbeknownst to anybody, and looked the job over.
I went to Eastman in the fall of 1955. David Craighead, who was 32 years old at the time, had been appointed the new organ instructor. He came to have a very successful tenure at Eastman, and was a prince of a fellow, but his teaching style was very different from Catharine Crozier’s. When Catharine was in a lesson, it isn’t an exaggeration to say the student might receive a tap on the shoulder every two measures. When Mr. Gleason gave her students lessons while she was away on tour, her students did not think he was a very good teacher because he did not stop them every two measures!
In one of my first lessons with David Craighead, I had some things from the Gleason book, and he admitted he did not agree with all the precepts of that method, saying it was too fussy, with too much to be concerned about. He did not even think it was necessary to wear organ shoes and played in his street shoes. I sat in the practice room with the Gleason book, working on pieces for manuals alone, which, after time, Mr. Craighead thought were too easy for me; so he assigned about ten chorales from the Orgelbüchlein and two of Karg-Elert’s chorale improvisations, an impossible leap from what I had been playing. The former Gleason students would sometimes come in and say, “It would be helpful if you would do it this way.”

LM: What were the practice organs and studio organs like at Eastman?
RT: The organ in Catharine Crozier’s studio, where David Craighead first taught, was a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner of about 26 ranks. The whole instrument was installed in a chamber in the ceiling. In Norman Peterson’s studio, next door, the Great and Pedal were on the floor level (the early records of Catharine Crozier at Kilbourn Hall have a drawing of that Great and Pedal on the cover), and the Swell, Choir, and basses were located in the ceiling chamber. There were three Aeolian-Skinner practice organs that were in great demand all the time. One was called “the Trumpet Skinner”; one was “the Mixture Skinner”; and the third was a small three-manual. The other practice organs were two-manual Möllers of five ranks each, most of which were original to the school when it was built in 1921, and two three-manual Möllers in such poor working order that no one could use them.

LM: You told me an amusing story about hearing Claire Coci when you were a student at Eastman.
RT: The year before I went to Eastman, Claire Coci played a recital at Kilbourn Hall, and some of the Eastman students sat behind the console. As things went wrong, she would curse, often loud enough for the first few rows to hear. When we found out she was to play a recital on the Holtkamp organ in Crouse Auditorium at Syracuse, two carloads of us organ students from Eastman drove over to hear her, and the Syracuse students reserved the front two rows for us.
While she was practicing for that recital, a couple of organ students were listening to her from the balcony. She noticed and called up, “Do you kids know where there is a Coke machine around here?” One of them ran downstairs and brought her up a Coke, and, in one of her enormous gestures in playing, she knocked it off the bench and the bottle shattered on the floor. When she finished practicing that piece, she got up and kicked the broken glass under the pedalboard.
For the recital, the dress she was wearing had many different layers which had to be parted to get out of the way and put over the back of the bench. She fussed and fussed, trying to find the part. She couldn’t, and finally muttered, “My God, it would take a road map to find your way in here.”

LM: From Eastman, did you go right to Syracuse to work on your master’s degree with Arthur Poister?
RT: Yes. Arthur Poister was a great man—very sensitive, intuitive, and wise. Classes began in the fall of 1960, and lessons with Poister were a revelation, as was playing the Holtkamp organ at Crouse Auditorium. He waited about three weeks into school to comment on my playing. I had been working on the F-Major Toccata, which was one of his favorite pieces, and played it for my lesson, which certainly was not a finished performance. Beverly Blunt came in to wait for her lesson. He looked at her, and said, “Did you hear that? Wasn’t that wonderful?” He did that to encourage me, and it did. To have ANYONE say I was wonderful! I walked out of there on a cloud!
Arthur Poister taught at Crouse all morning, and had full reign of the auditorium, with his students practicing there afternoons into the evening. We each had Crouse one hour a week. I loved exploring, hearing, and getting to know that organ. I visited there this past summer for the first time since our Marcussen organ was installed here in Wichita. Curious to see how the Holtkamp in Crouse would seem to me these days, I sat down in the stifling heat and played individual stops and choruses, then finally got to full organ. When the old Roosevelt Trombone came on in the pedal, I concluded it was still magnificent.

LM: What would Arthur Poister say about a piece like the Toccata in F? Did he tap you on the shoulder every two measures?
RT: No, no—never. He did not like articulation in Bach, and had learned and memorized all the Bach works with Marcel Dupré over the course of two years in Paris. He thought Bach should be played legato, regardless of Walcha and others on the scene at the time. He taught and used the ornaments as explained in the Dupré edition of the Bach works. If someone detached something, he would say, “You kids! You just want to break up things, when it would be so much more beautiful if you would just stop that!”
It was amazing how his students came to play the way they did, because he never said much about pedaling or fingering. In fact, I was studying the Partita on “O Gott, du frommer Gott,” and, in the last variation, I did not know what to do in one passage. He said, “You have had enough organ to be able to figure it out yourself.” Then, he threw in a little hint by saying, “It may be all thumbs.” When I look back at my Syracuse years—Calvin Hampton was there, Paul Andersen, Lawrence Jamison, who was the star of the undergraduates—when I look back on the preparation of the undergraduates, and the caliber of master’s recitals with that man, it was phenomenal. It is the mystery of Arthur Poister how it happened—how he did NOT correct fingering or pedaling, and only talked about the way it must sound. His only concern was how to communicate musically.

LM: Did you ever play for Marcel Dupré?
RT: No, but I met and heard him July 6, 1969, on my first trip to Europe. I was with two other Americans, and we started out unsure that any of the big organists would be playing that day, it being time for their holiday, and our having made no prior arrangements to visit organ lofts. We started out at 9:00 at St. Clothilde, and Marie-Louise Jacquet came down the aisle after Mass. I inquired if Langlais was at the console, and she said, “Yes, and you may go up.” I was the first to enter. He was sitting at the console, waiting for the next Mass, and turned and said, “Yes?” I introduced myself and the two others, and said, “I bring greetings from Catharine Crozier.” He was delighted, and said, “Tell me, is she still playing that perfectly horrible Reubke piece?” He very kindly and generously went over the stops on the entire instrument. Then, he opened his Braille watch and said, “I have just enough time to play the Franck B-Minor Choral for you before the next Mass.” He seemed so delighted that someone had come up to visit him in his organ loft. We signed his guest book, and he showed us to the door before he had to pile back on for the next Mass.
We then walked to St. Sulpice, where Mass was already in progress. We walked far enough down the aisle to look back and see who was in the loft. We couldn’t see anyone, except one man standing at the rail. After a time, he noticed us looking up with great interest, and motioned for us to come up. There were 15 or 20 other people in the loft visiting that day, including Guilmant’s granddaughter. The man who had motioned to us took me by the shoulders, led me over and planted me on the left side of the console, and I listened and watched HIM—Dupré—improvise and play. We were told he had just played the Bach Passacaglia. After our arrival, it was all improvisation.

LM: Did he welcome you?
RT: Oh, no. He was absolutely oblivious to anyone being there at all—no eye contact, no smile. His hands were deformed with arthritis, and it was most distracting for me to watch him play. The little finger on his left hand had a joint that actually pointed up, instead of down, so he had to play on a different part of that finger. It did not seem to bother him. During communion and at other times, when he wanted to see how they were making progress downstairs, he would insert a pedal point into his improvisation, stand up on the pedals, and look down the length of the nave. His improvisations were fantastic, and we were in seventh heaven. His postlude was very reminiscent of the first piece in his Fifteen Pieces—big, block chords on full organ, with the theme in the pedal. The other improvisations were very contrapuntal.
When Mass ended, apparently he had an appointment with someone, because a young man came up to him. When Dupré saw him, they went off together to a room behind the console, and were there for some time. On his way to the room, he did not take notice of anyone. When they emerged, he made his way back to the console, again without acknowledging our presence, and began the prelude for the next Mass, which was the “Grand Orgue” Mass. When the postlude of the “Grand Orgue” Mass ended, all of a sudden, he looked around and noticed there were people there. I extended my hand and introduced myself as a former pupil of Arthur Poister. If ever in my life I saw a face light up, it was at the mention of Poister’s name. His gnarled hand shot up in the air—“AH! ARTHUR!” I wish I had a picture of it. He asked me to please give Poister his best. After that Mass, we stood outside St. Sulpice and watched as Dupré came out and got into a Mercedes.

LM: Let’s get back to your student days and Syracuse.
RT: After my master’s recital, I decided to stay on at Syracuse and work on a Ph.D. in humanities, which was the nearest thing they offered that had to do with arts and music. But I did not like it. There was no actual music, no practicing, no lessons. So, when Kirk Ridge, who was chairman of the school of music, contacted me to teach piano full-time for the spring semester 1963, as a temporary replacement, I jumped at the chance.
That semester, when I wasn’t teaching one of my 36 piano students, I was practicing and playing recitals. I had seen an ad in The Diapason announcing the Boston Symphony and AGO organ competition, so decided to enter. Even after two years with Arthur Poister, I still had thoughts that I did not measure up to others, and I did not think I stood a snowball’s chance in a hot place of placing in the Boston competition. However, I made a tape and sent it in. In the meantime, I had also decided to apply to the University of Michigan to work on a doctorate with Marilyn Mason, so I flew to Ann Arbor to audition for her.

LM: What was your first impression of Marilyn Mason?
RT: I liked her! When I arrived at Hill Auditorium, she was practicing the Schoenberg. We went to one of the side rooms off the stage, and I auditioned for her on a 3-rank Möller. She was very nice, personable, and encouraging.
After my audition, I went back to Syracuse and received a letter from the Boston AGO saying I was a semi-finalist. I thought there was some mistake and even called the man who had written the letter and asked him if it were a mistake. He assured me it was not. The semi-finals were held in April at the Arlington Street Church on a Whiteford Aeolian-Skinner. They kept us all in the basement apart from each other, and I have no idea who the other contestants were. Two others and I were selected as the finalists.
For the finals, which were open to the public and held at Symphony Hall in May, we each had to play thirty minutes. I had gotten there four days early to practice. The combination action on the Symphony Hall organ was very unreliable, and there was an enormous setterboard in the back of the console. Even after setting pistons, some of the generals were undependable. During my practice time, I learned which ones were reliable and which ones to avoid. I never saw any evidence of either of the other two finalists practicing. We did not have scheduled practice times, and every time I walked in, I was able to get to the organ.
There was a big crowd there for the finals, and the hall was set up with round tables for the Boston Pops. We were allowed five minutes to walk onstage informally and set our pistons before playing, then had to leave the stage and reenter formally to applause. I played from memory, and all I could think was, “If I can just make it through this without making a complete fool of myself . . . ”
Afterwards, we three finalists went down into the audience and mingled. I kept myself in close proximity to the other two so I could go up and congratulate the winner. A woman came out on stage and said, “Here’s the news you’ve all been waiting for: the winner is Robert Lloyd Town.” The other two finalists looked at each other in disappointment, turned around, and left. Lawrence and Ruth Barrett Phelps both came up to me, and that was the beginning of my very long and valuable friendship with him. Larry later gave us much help on our new hall and Marcussen organ here.
As the winner, I was given a full-length recital at Symphony Hall that next February. The previous day, a blizzard paralyzed the entire city. Harry Kraut, who managed the Boston Symphony, called my hotel room and said, “Can you come back and play for us in April?” Rubenstein was to have performed with the Symphony that evening, and instead, they held it as an open rehearsal for anyone who could get there. They paid for me to come back in April to play my winner’s recital on the Symphony Hall recital series. I had heard Catharine Crozier play on that series the previous year, and stepped in on her practice, and went to lunch with them—the Gleasons.

LM: How did Catharine Crozier and Harold Gleason interact with each other in a social setting?
RT: They were not very affectionate. Just before she went in to play a recital once here in Wichita, I saw him take her hand and give it a squeeze. That is the only sign of affection I ever saw between the two of them. Mr. Gleason had a great sense of humor. He liked stories—tawdry stories; the more so, the more he liked them. She would turn and look the other way. They were both here in 1973 for a day of masterclasses and a recital. It had just been announced that Mildred Andrews was to be married. We were driving along in my car, and I told them the news. After a moment of silence, Harold said, from the back seat, “Well, I guess she didn’t want to die wondering.”
If I could characterize their relationship, it was very much one of teacher and performer. He was an invaluable coach—another set of ears to tell her how it really sounded. As time went on, she relied on recording herself over and over, and kept a tape recorder on the bench at all times, even recording small passages to play back to herself.

LM: You were around the Duruflés a lot, too. Did they have a similar relationship?
RT: No. Although they were 19 years apart, they interacted warmly as man and wife. She was a very loving and devoted wife to her great organist-composer husband, with little to no thought of herself. That tells you right there of the difference between the Gleasons and the Duruflés. After the accident in 1975, until his death in 1986, she went across the street to play for church, but abandoned all teaching and concertizing just to take care of him. I had a letter from her in 1984 saying he could do nothing for himself, and she had to bathe him, get him in and out of bed, and everything else. She was as devoted to him as anyone could ever be to another.
When they were here in 1969, I was dean of the Wichita AGO and responsible for showing them around, and we became good friends. She was cute and unpretentious. Over lunch, I told her I had heard about the tremendous standing ovation she had received at St. Thomas Church, October 1968, for her performance of the Liszt “Ad nos,” to which she replied, “Ah, but that was not for me, but was for my husband, who was more busy than me, pushing and pulling the stops—and for Liszt.”
The Duruflés’ manager, Lilian Murtagh, only charged us $700, and they did not come over here to make money, but for sightseeing, enjoying the people and the organs. When the place went wild after their recital, she came back out and played the D’Aquin “Cuckoo,” followed by their cute routine of taking bows: they would go into the sacristy, then he would push her back out and close the door. She would shrug, then bow so nicely. Then she would go in and they would both seem to come back out together, but she would run back in and close the door. He’d look at the door, then turn and bow. She then played the Vierne Impromptu and Dupré’s Second Sketch, during which, with the octave trills and the octaves in the pedals, I thought the organ was just going to collapse. The audience would not let her go, so she came back and played the theme and four or five variations from Variations on a Noël.
For their masterclass the next day, we arranged for them to play and discuss music. Mildred Andrews sent her entire organ class. He played the Franck A-major Fantasy and then his own Veni Creator, in which he had some registration problems, so Madame Duruflé moved him over and played it herself. She had played Tournemire’s Victimae the previous night, so she played the Ave Maris Stella, followed by the Duruflé Scherzo. He discussed each piece very nicely through a translator. I was sitting about five feet from the console when he approached me and whispered, “Would you like to terminate the class with the Liszt?” Of course, I said “Yes.” He turned to her and said, “The Liszt.” “Ah, but I am not prepared!” She set up a few pistons, and, I’m here to tell you that I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t witnessed it with my own ears and eyes. Her performance was amazing. Afterwards I asked her where else she would be playing the Liszt on the tour. She said, “Nowhere. Perhaps next spring.”
After the class, I took them out to the university to see the mighty 18-rank Casavant in the chapel. They wanted me to play, since it was my post, then they came up to the console. I asked if she would like to play. “Oh yes, with pleasure.” She sat right down, pulled some stops, and tore right into the Sinfonia from Cantata 146, transcribed by Marcel Dupré, from memory, of course. It was played with the refinement and finesse as if she had been practicing it on that organ every day of her life.
We had been talking about the French system of assigning letter names to notes, and she tried to explain it to me, although I did not understand. She figured out the notes for “T-O-W-N” and improvised a fugue on it. When she finished, she said, “It was too academic.” So she improvised another one!

LM: A few minutes ago, you mentioned Mildred Andrews. Were you close?
RT: I loved Mildred Andrews as an “adopted” student, and we became close after she came to Wichita in 1976 to give a day of masterclasses for the AGO. Afterwards, I received a note from her saying she had conducted masterclasses from north to south, east to west, in thirty-five states, and that my students were the best she had ever heard. That sealed our friendship. Although I did not realize at the time how much proper attire meant to her, my students had shown up dressed for the occasion.
At the University of Oklahoma, Mildred Andrews had a strict dress code: the girls showed up in a dress, or they would not have a lesson; the boys showed up in shirt, tie, and jacket—no moustache or beard. I know of one occasion where a student showed up in the wrong attire, and Miss Andrews drove her back to the dormitory to change, then back to Holmberg Hall for what remained of her lesson time. There was never a “Well, it’s all right this time.” When she attended organ conventions, she would show up wearing one outfit in the morning, another in the afternoon, and in the evening, a third, usually full-length.
I was up for a promotion in 1976, and again in 1978, and she wrote wonderful letters of recommendation, saying things like, “I wouldn’t just promote him; I would do everything in my power to keep him.”
She was a character. One year an organist we were planning on having play for us in Wichita played a recital in Norman, so one of my students and I drove down to hear her. Mildred Andrews and Mary Ruth McCulley sat behind us for the recital. When the organist came out, Miss Andrews tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Tell her when she comes to Wichita not to wear that dress. It looks like something you’d wear for Halloween.” The recital opened with the Chorale and Variations from the Mendelssohn Sixth, and it did not go well at all. Mildred Andrews did not like Mendelssohn in the first place, and tapped me on the shoulder again, and said, “And for heaven’s sake, when she comes to Wichita, tell her to play something she knows!”

LM: Did Mildred Andrews study with Marcel Dupré?
RT: Yes, at Fontainebleau. She used his organ method and used the Dupré editions. She had studied at Oklahoma University for her bachelor’s, went to Michigan for her master’s, then back to OU to teach.

LM: What was the secret to her success?
RT: If there is a key word to Mildred Andrews’s success in teaching, it was determination—devoted determination. She would not rest, she would not stop, until she had solved a student’s technical problem, and was always looking for more effective fingering and pedaling, many times arriving at unorthodox solutions. She was devoted to her students, although there were some who did not get along with her, and did not like her.
She was very organized and demanding, outspoken and even brutal—even towards her peers. In 1971, the Duruflés gave a recital and masterclass at Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, and I drove down to hear them. For the masterclass, that huge choir loft was full of listeners. Madame Duruflé played the Prelude and Fugue on the Name of ALAIN, and Maurice Duruflé asked “Are there questions?” Mildred Andrews shot back with “Yes! I’ve been timing this performance on my metronome, and have just found her playing a tempo other than is indicated in the score.” Madame Duruflé replied, “I played it as I felt it.” Maurice Duruflé backed up his wife and said he agreed with her performance. Mildred Andrews would not stop there and said to Madame Duruflé, “Well, I would like to know the correct metronome marking so that my students can play it the way YOU ‘feel it.’” I heard her do that numerous times. She would stand up to her peers as well as her students. That was a side of Mildred Andrews that I prefer not to think of. But, as a teacher, she was devoted and determined in every way.

LM: We keep getting sidetracked by all these hair-raising stories! Can we go back and talk about your days as a student at University of Michigan and your time with Marilyn Mason?
RT: I loved being with Marilyn Mason—dearly loved her. I had and still hold the greatest admiration for her. She was very good to me at all times and in all ways. Jim Bain was close to her, too. The three of us used to have our own little parties together. He and I called her “The Madame.” One morning, at an unthinkably early hour, we knew she was going to be leaving from the Detroit airport to play a recital, so we got ourselves up and to the airport and waited for her arrival so we could surprise her, which we did, and had a little party right there at the gate, then saw her off.
One year Marilyn arranged for Leo Sowerby to visit for an organ conference. He had been teaching at a summer camp in Put-in-Bay, across from Port Clinton. We had two days of recitals scheduled at Hill Auditorium, one of which included Marilyn playing his Pageant. We drove down to Port Clinton and took a little commuter plane over to the island to pick him up. The plane looked as if it could fall apart at any moment. Marilyn got in, looked around, and made the sign of the cross. We drove Sowerby up to Ann Arbor and had a dinner with martinis at my apartment in Huron Towers. Marilyn made lasagna at her house and brought it over. After we had had sufficient martinis, Sowerby told us about a nun who had been taking composition lessons with him. She brought in the exposition of her composition to him, and it had a series of parallel fifths in it. He explained to her that, in the style she was writing, parallel fifths were not appropriate any more than in music of the 18th century, and they should be rewritten and corrected. When she came back the next week for her lesson, she had added more to it but had done nothing to correct the parallel fifths. He pointed them out again and tried to explain to her more clearly why they needed to be changed, asking her to please correct them. She came back the third week, and the composition had been extended further, but nothing had been done about the parallel fifths. Sowerby became impatient and spoke to her about it, whereupon she burst out, “Dr. Sowerby, I don’t care anything about your [language unbefitting a nun deleted] parallel fifths,” and walked out!

LM: Was he laughing when he told that?
RT: No. He said it matter-of-factly.

LM: When did you come to Wichita?
RT: In the spring of ’65, the dean of Wichita State University asked the dean of Michigan’s school of music, James Wallace, for a recommendation for an organist. I was ready for a break from school, so applied for the job, and was asked to come to Chicago, to the Sherman House Hotel, for an interview with the dean. We spoke for about an hour, and it was a very pleasant conversation. He built the school of music here—Walter J. Duerksen. As we wound down, we shook hands, and he very nicely said, “I can’t say for sure, but I feel nearly sure you are going to be the choice. You will hear from us within a couple of days.” Sure enough, his secretary sent me a contract. I was twenty-seven, and ready to get out on my own and make a living, although I did plan to finish my degree at Michigan in summer sessions.
My first fall here, I had seventeen students: six were master’s students, and I inherited a graduate teaching assistant and five beginners, and had a graduate organ class, plus two undergraduate classes. That next summer, I had so many students wanting to continue lessons that I felt duty-bound to stay here and teach. I ended up teaching every summer session, with the exception of 1969, until the 1990s, and never went back to Michigan to complete my degree.
When I came here, there were two organs on campus—a seven-rank Möller, and the Casavant in the chapel. An eight-rank Reuter was added in 1970.

LM: Was there any talk of a concert instrument at that time?
RT: No. However, it soon became apparent that we needed one. During a period of ten to twelve years beginning in the 1970s, we had numerous finalists and winners of prestigious national competitions. Two students won Fulbrights. University administrators realized there should be some place for these people to play on campus other than the chapel. The Dean of Students, Jim Rhadigan, said to me one day, “We’ve got to have a new organ and a new hall for these kids!” and an organ recital hall was soon added to a list of university capital needs.
At this point, I should introduce Gladys Wiedemann, one of Wichita’s leading philanthropists. She belonged to a club called “Mink or Sink,” obviously for wealthy ladies, and belonged to another club called “The Organaires.” The Organaires had about twenty members who were wealthy dowagers with electronic organs in their homes. They met monthly at a different member’s home, and everyone in attendance had to sit down at that particular organ and render a selection following a very extravagant lunch. Mrs. Wiedemann had a concert-model Hammond in her home.
In 1973, the organ students and I decided to sponsor the Gleasons in a summer workshop and recital. We took out an ad in the AGO magazine, which was called “MUSIC” at that time, and I started calling people for contributions for Catharine’s recital fee. Some friends in town suggested I call Gladys Wiedemann. So, I got up the nerve and called her. Right away, she said, “Well, would $100 help you out?” The following year we sponsored Marilyn Mason, and she gave another $100. Two months later, I received a letter from Mrs. Wiedemann saying she was going to have a Christmas party for the Organaires at the Wichita Country Club, and wanted to know if I would play a program for her party on an appropriate electronic. In gratitude for what she had already done for us, I wrote back to her immediately that I would be happy to play the program gratis. We went to dinner to discuss the details of this party for the Organaires, and that was the beginning of our friendship.
I played for her party, and she invited officials from the university. She also hired a dance band, Doris Bus and Her Dance Band, and Mrs. Wiedemann danced up a storm. The next day, she called the head of the endowment association at the university, and told him she would like to make a contribution to the university. He suggested she establish an organ scholarship, and that was exactly what she wanted to hear.
In 1979, an organ recital hall was added to the long list of capital needs for the university. By 1981, it was on a priority list of five years. I thought I should acquaint myself with all the organ builders in order to be prepared to make a serious recommendation, so in the summer of 1981 I went on a European organ study tour led by Earl Miller. We visited organs in the Netherlands, and I saw and heard a Marcussen organ at St. Laurance Church in Rotterdam, where there are three Marcussens. Larry Phelps had been telling me all along, “Marcussen is the only way to go.” The following summer, I returned to hear other instruments and went to Freiburg Cathedral for a recital. The Marcussen there, in the “swallow’s nest,” is only two manuals, but we all agreed that night if we could get an organ even half as good, we wanted it. That recital was the defining moment.
Gladys Wiedemann was a woman of unimpeachable integrity. She discussed money and business matters with me as long as they did not concern me. Very rarely, however, did she mention the purchase of an organ. But, when she encountered the president of the university at social functions, she would tell him she was going to do her part when there was a building to put it in. And she considered her “part” to be one-fifth of the cost of the organ, $100,000, with four other donors giving a like amount.
The central administration asked me for a report on my students for a proposal to be submitted to Mrs. Wiedemann. As March neared in 1983, I learned the president was going to meet with Mrs. Wiedemann in her Florida home to propose that she donate $500,000 for the organ. They got along well in business matters, and I felt very comfortable letting him meet her. She had already made sizable contributions to the university through him. Unfortunately, the meeting did not go well, and he came back without an agreement for more than the $100,000 she had initially offered. So he asked me to meet with her over spring break, which put me in a very uncomfortable position.
Mrs. Wiedemann received me warmly, as if she were glad to see me. I had been fretting on the plane down and all day Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday about how I was going to bring up the subject of the organ. After dinner, she rounded the corner from the dining room to the living room and, with a decidedly unpleasant look on her face and the proposal in her hand, said, “Well, I suppose while you’re here you’ll want to talk something about this organ.” I was not prepared for her to bring it up, so had not prepared a response. All I could think of was, “Well, I would like to tell you something about the builder we have in mind.” She said, “Oh?” in an immediately relaxed and interested way. I did not say a thing about money, or her part in it. She sat down visibly relaxed and said, “Tell me something about these people.”
She did seem interested in what I had to say about Marcussen, and at one point she said, “Maybe I could give an organ sometime, to my church or even to WSU,” then, “Maybe I should make a trip over and see where these organs are built sometime,” and, finally, “You know, in two weeks I’ll be back in Wichita. Would you be willing to come to my house and meet with my financial advisor and tell him everything you have just told me?”
The next month, Mrs. Wiedemann called to schedule a meeting. The last student I had that day was a devout Catholic, and she brought me a scapular and told me to put it in my pocket, saying it would help. I still have it. I was received nicely and I made my pitch for the Marcussen organ. Her financial advisor seemed interested, as did she. We were in session for two hours. As the advisor got up to leave, she said to him, very upbeat, “Well, are we going to be able to do it?” Not wanting to say anything in front of me, he replied, “I will be back on Friday, and we can discuss this and other matters at that time.” She said, “Gee, I hope so!” As soon as he was out the door, she said, “You know, you make a good presentation. You ought to be the dean.”
When she finally called me the next Tuesday, she was very foxy. Supposedly she had called to talk about humorous little things that had happened at one of her clubs. After a few minutes, she said, “Well, you have to be on your way to teach, so I’ll get off the phone. We’ll talk another time.” And, just as I was about to put down the phone, she said, “OH! Yes, by the way, I suppose I should tell you I have just called up Clark Ahlberg (WSU president) and asked him to write up a pledge for $500,000 for the organ.”
At the end of the school year, I went to Denmark to visit Marcussen, and we talked about the stoplist, which had already been in the works for two years. My most notable advisor through its design was Lawrence Phelps.
After several hair-raising setbacks, we signed the contract for the organ in December of ’83, when everything seemed like it was on solid ground, until October of ’84, when the contractors’ bids on the building came in, and every one of them, even the lowest bid, exceeded the amount of money we had to spend on the building by over $100,000. I attended the meeting, and there wasn’t one of them that was even in sight of the money we had.
From 1934 to ’54, a wonderful man by the name of Sam Bloomfield and his wife lived in Wichita. He was the first airplane builder in Wichita, which is now known as the air capital of the world, and had countless patents on aeronautical devices he invented, as well as other inventions. The Bloomfields moved to California in 1954. They had been very active in the arts in Wichita, and our dean, Gordon Terwilliger, had known them both personally. So, he called up Rie Bloomfield (her name was Henrietta) and explained that the hall was in jeopardy. The good Mrs. Bloomfield came through with $150,000, which put us over the top. Construction on the hall was begun in December of ’84, and the organ was declared finished on July 9, 1986. A 5-rank Phelps practice organ was installed in my new studio.
For the inaugural series, we had Gillian Weir, Dennis Bergin, François-Henri Houbart, and Catharine Crozier, and I gave the last one in April, 1987. President Ahlberg named the hall for Gladys Wiedemann, and at the dedication ceremony for the hall and organ, she was so overcome with emotion that she just sat there and wept before the ceremony ever began. The following season I was allowed $3,000 for the University Organ Series, as it was called. It did not go very far, but we had Madame Duruflé in 1992, and Olivier Latry in 1993.
In 1994 the aforementioned Rie Bloomfield endowed the organ series in her name, which has allowed me to have four to five major recitals per season. Catharine Crozier recorded the Rorem works in 1988, and inquired about playing a vespers series here. She played again in 1989, and weekly vespers recitals in 1993, ’97, and ’99. She recorded works by Franck for Delos in 1997. The Marcussen organ here became her favorite, and she said there was not one organ in Europe or in the United States that she liked better. In twenty years, most of the world’s major organists have performed here, and many have remarked about this marvelous instrument. After forty-one years of teaching, I played a final series of vespers recitals in March, 2006, and a Robert Town Finale recital in May. The organ professorship became an endowed faculty of distinction chair in my honor in 2005.

Hannah Koby is an organ/church music major and German minor at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, where she is also a member of Christ College (Interdisciplinary Honors College), the University Chorale, and the student chapter of the American Guild of Organists. At the university’s Chapel of the Resurrection, she serves on the Morning Prayer planning staff, is organist for the weekly Matins service, and serves as pianist and on the planning team for the weekly Candlelight service. Koby is also organist and choir director at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Chesterton, Indiana. After her studies at Valparaiso, she plans to pursue graduate work in sacred music and to maintain German connections.

We have probably all heard that studying in a foreign culture is life changing, that one will learn a lot and grow as a person. After spending spring and summer of my sophomore year of college in Germany in 2016, I can say that those are all true. Yet as musicians, we seek musical as well as personal growth. My time abroad left me with stronger musicianship, broader understanding of German organs and their history, greater appreciation for and knowledge of liturgical worship, and a network of colleagues, friends, and mentors on the other side of the world. I believe that studying in Europe and experiencing the instruments, churches, history, and culture for oneself is an unparalleled opportunity for organists. As I played Schnitger, Silbermann, and Sauer organs last spring (to name a few), I knew I was learning for myself the aural ideals of each builder, place, and era.

A unique partnership between Valparaiso University, where I study, and the Hochschule für Kirchenmusik (Church Music Conservatory) in Rottenburg am Neckar, Germany, provides church music students with an opportunity to study abroad while continuing music studies and gaining a new perspective on sacred music and the church. This program was part of what led me to study at Valparaiso University. I believe studying abroad is an opportunity that student organists should seek out, because the benefits of seeing, hearing, and playing historic and modern European organs in their context cannot be overestimated.

Rottenburg am Neckar

Most of my time in Germany was spent in Rottenburg am Neckar, in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. There is not much to set Rottenburg apart from any other small Swabian town, except that it is the seat of the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart. Because of this, Rottenburg is home to a Catholic church music conservatory and to St. Martin’s Cathedral—the smallest cathedral in Germany. The conservatory, or Hochschule für Kirchenmusik, is on the edge of town, providing an idyllic setting for study. It is housed in one building, with residential floors above the classrooms/practice rooms, which means no excuse for not practicing in bad weather! The size of the school—about 35 students, including bachelor’s, master’s, and one-year certificate students—lent a very personal dimension to my experience. I got to know all the students and could learn from nearly all the professors, even those I didn’t officially study under. Since all the classes and lessons are taught in German, I appreciated that small class sizes also allowed for language-related clarification when necessary!

One aspect I value most from my semester in Rottenburg was the different perspectives I got from each teacher. I studied organ literature with Herr Heinrich Walther, a concert organist and professor. While it was difficult for me to get used to a teacher very different from others I previously had, he imparted much musical and life wisdom to me in the short semester we worked together. One focus of my work was playing with more nuanced articulation. Herr Walther helped me bring out much more detail than I previously had, which was possible since we were working only with tracker-action organs, as is the norm in Germany. The lessons from that semester still impact how I think about articulation and the shape of individual notes and phrases, even though I don’t often perform on tracker instruments now that I am back in the United States.

In addition to the seven small pipe organs housed at the Hochschule, students have occasional access to organs in local churches. I had the privilege of performing in one of the weekly “Music for the Market” concerts on the four-manual 1979 Hubert Sandtner organ in Rottenburg’s St. Martin Cathedral. I also heard this instrument often, with the masterful improvisation of cathedral organist Ruben Sturm during Sunday Mass. The other Catholic church in town, St. Moriz, has a three-manual instrument built in 1976 by Winfried Albiez, which provided many registration options for an improvisation lesson there! Both of these churches regularly hosted the conservatory’s guest artist and faculty recitals, giving me a chance to hear the breadth of color and texture on each instrument.

Difference in curriculum

One surprise for me in Rottenburg was that organ improvisation is a main subject in the German church music curriculum, taken every semester. I encountered many surprised looks when I shared that it is not required in many American programs. I think that for the first couple of weeks, even my teacher was not quite sure what to do with me! While I struggled to understand my lessons, my teacher, Herr Peter Schleicher, was a patient instructor. He worked with me on the basics of improvisation, a skill that has already proven very helpful for service playing upon my return.

The most striking difference in church music studies at Rottenburg is the choral and conducting curriculum. In the United States, church music studies largely focus on organ, and choral conducting training is often minimal. In Rottenburg, organ is a primary component of studies, but the church musician’s role as choral director is taken very seriously. Each student at Rottenburg has private or small-group lessons in choral conducting every semester, and the whole school takes part in a weekly praxis seminar. In addition, there are classes in choral/vocal pedagogy, and orchestral, chant, and children’s choir conducting. I think I had as much education in choral leadership in one semester in Rottenburg as many American church music students receive in four years!

Prior to my time in Germany, I had only taken one semester of basic conducting, in a class of about a dozen people. What a difference it was to work one-on-one with a professor! I worked with Herr Peter Lorenz, cantor of St. Martin’s Cathedral. I learned so much from him about physical preparation for conductors, score study, and rehearsal preparation, as well as the conducting itself. Because we had half an hour every week just to focus on my conducting, rather than dividing the time between students in a class, Herr Lorenz was able to correct much more than I had previously experienced. My conducting has become significantly more fluent because of these lessons.

Every Tuesday morning at the Rottenburg conservatory is devoted to the choral conducting practicum. Students work with their professors in lessons to prepare a choral work, and on their assigned Tuesday, lead a rehearsal of the piece. The professors will assist the student when something is not going well, and always provide feedback at the end. In addition to rehearsal leadership experience, the practicum also serves as weekly sight-singing practice for all the students.

Usually in the first year, students must also take a set of choral pedagogy classes. This set consists of studies of body and breath, choral warm-up practicum, and choral voice building. Studies of body and breath focuses on physical exercises both for the students as musicians and performers and for choirs. We learned everything from relaxation exercises for musicians to activities to physically prepare choral singers. Each new technique or exercise was practiced as well as discussed.

This class led directly into the warm-up practicum, a half hour in which a student leads a 20-minute choral warm-up, both physical and vocal, followed by 10 minutes of debriefing. This gives each student a chance to try out new vocalises and learn about their particular issues in leadership. In Germany, it is considered unprofessional to lead warm-ups from the piano, so each student has a tuning fork and vocally gives pitches. Working in that system was one of my challenges. For example, I tended to have my singers vocalize higher than necessary or comfortable because my own vocal range is high.

Following the practical courses, we had choral voice-building class, which is essentially the theory behind what we were practicing in the other courses. We focused on individual sounds—for example, learning which vowels best reinforce different vocal qualities or what sorts of exercises can be used to bring out certain consonant sounds in singing. We also learned about vocal register and experienced an introduction to the physiology of the voice. The theory was always demonstrated through vocalises (and sometimes tricky German tongue twisters!), and was reinforced through paired themes for the warm-up practicum. All these classes operated as a set, providing a holistic education for future choral leaders.

Organ to organ: 

Traveling Europe

Supplementing all my studies in Rottenburg, I took advantage of the vast organ riches within traveling distance. A highlight for me was traveling to Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Lübeck over Pentecost break. Particularly impressive was the number of organ concerts and other events in Hamburg in the half week I was there (prompting my Hamburg grandmother to suggest I continue my studies there; but that is another story). One of the many opportunities was a demonstration of the famous Arp Schnitger organ in Hamburg’s St. Jacobi Church. Upon learning that I was an organist, the intern leading it invited me to play while he demonstrated some registrations. Afterward, he asked if I would like to come back the next day, leading to a glorious hour and a half with the church to myself, exploring the grand sounds of this historic instrument. Now, I try to remember these sounds as a standard for North German Baroque registration for my work here in the United States.

Another memorable instance was in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the St. Petri Church, home to a German-speaking congregation. I was studying what I could see in the façade when the organist arrived. I asked to see the console, and he offered that I could play for a few minutes. When he saw me pull out my organ shoes and music from the bag I always carried, he realized I was a serious student and invited me to come back once he was finished with his rehearsal. I was allowed to explore this late Sauer organ from the 1930s until the church closed for the day. While it is not as old or distinguished as many I saw, playing this instrument gave me a taste of the aural ideas from that era in northern Europe.

Professional connections

Along with the experience of playing historical organs, the examples above illustrate a few of the invaluable connections I made with church musicians in Europe. I am considering graduate studies in Germany, and the connections I already have may lead to mentorships or other opportunities then. Some of my best friends are students from Rottenburg who are involved with the Valparaiso exchange. Knowing a few people made the transition to Rottenburg so much easier than it could have been. In the future, these friends will also be my colleagues. There is no telling how the friendships might lead to international opportunities for our research or future choirs or students.

Personal connections with German church musicians have already led to an amazing opportunity for me. While I was abroad, I learned through a Valparaiso connection about a potential internship at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther is said to have posted his 95 theses. Having been identified as a bilingual church music student, I was put in contact with the cantors there, Thomas and Sarah Herzer. Since I was in Germany at the time, it was possible for me to travel to Wittenberg to interview for the position. In the summer of 2017, I served as church music intern at the Castle Church, playing for and helping host some of the many worship services and concerts taking place as part of the 500th anniversary celebration of the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation. I don’t know if this would have happened without the personal contact I was able to make while in Germany for a semester.

Learning from difference

As a Lutheran student from a Lutheran university, I was well aware of the fact that I was going to study at a Catholic conservatory. However, I learned that I did not need to be so concerned about it, because Catholics and Lutherans truly have much in common. The pattern of the liturgy meant that I was rarely lost in worship, even when I could not figure out all the responses. For me, this underscores the value of a universal liturgy practiced by Christians all over the world. While the language may be different, we know we are singing the Kyrie or professing our faith through the creed. Interestingly, in Rottenburg I actually felt more at home at High Mass in the cathedral than in Protestant worship. Because the Protestant state church in Baden-Württemberg is “Unified,” which was explained to me as a cross between Lutheran and Reformed traditions, the local Protestant church did not follow a strictly liturgical pattern of worship. This made it more difficult for me to follow and drove home how much I rely on the liturgy to shape my experience of worship.

Another difference for me in Rottenburg was the strong focus on the chant repertory. I participated in the conservatory’s Schola in which all second-year to graduate students sing—but for which I was completely unprepared. Prior to that semester, I had sung some chant, but always in modern notation. At Rottenburg, we sang from medieval square notation with neumes—neither of which I knew how to read. Realizing my deficiency in this area, I chose to take their intro-level chant course.

This class, Gregorian Chant and German Liturgical Music, was an incredible mix of subjects. We learned the basics of understanding, singing, and leading chant, and got a crash course in Latin and German musical resources for the seasons and festivals of the church. I am glad to say I now have a basic understanding of neumes and can read historical chant notation. Beyond that, the course also drove home the deep connection that German Catholics have to their musical tradition. They regularly sing Medieval chant without a second thought, which I have not encountered in American Lutheran circles. While acknowledging the importance of vernacular hymnody, they nonetheless keep strong the Latin song tradition as well. It was impressed upon the students in this class that as church musicians, it is our responsibility to respect these traditions.

Closing thoughts

Perhaps for organists more than other musicians, the benefit of experience cannot be overestimated. Actually being in European churches and playing historical instruments gives an incomparable context for the work that we do as organists. Many times since my semester in Germany, I have worked on registration or encountered a new organ and noted that it sounds like a certain instrument I played in Europe. From that relationship, I know I have found an authentic sound for works of that time and place. When working on registration, there is no substitute for knowing firsthand the sounds that composers had at their disposal.

The traditions I studied and participated in while in Rottenburg showed me the importance of both the historical and universal planes in which we as musicians work. I hope that my experiences encourage others to seek opportunities to be challenged as musicians by other cultures and traditions.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links can be found at <www.pekc.org&gt;.

Pedal playing, part I—overview
Pedal playing is, in a way, the public face of the organ. It is something that sets organ playing apart from other activities—even, for some, defining it. Writing in 1788, an anonymous author who had undertaken to defend J. S. Bach against the charge that he wasn’t as great a composer as Handel had this to say as part of his argument:

Now, if we weigh the organ works of the two men in the same scales, there is a difference as wide as the sky in favor of JSB. The proof of this statement can without any trouble be made convincing even to people who are not experts.
One may assume without fear of contradiction that the pedal is the most important part of an organ, without which it would have little of that majesty, greatness, and power that belong to it alone above all other instruments. Anyone who knows at all what the word “organ” means will grant that.
What shall we say, then, if Handel almost completely neglected and seldom used the very thing that makes an organ an organ, and lifts it so high above all other instruments?

This is not an argument based on anything that we would call compositional content, but just on proper use of—or proper respect for—the pedal division. It is presented as essentially self-evident (“ . . . without fear of contradiction . . . convincing even to people who are not experts”), and as arising from the very definition of the instrument.
Sometimes an organist has the gratifying experience of being approached after a performance by someone who can’t quite believe that anyone can actually do all of that with his or her feet. It seems like magic, or at least something beyond just difficult. The fact that there are more pedal solos in the repertoire than there are extended one-voice passages meant to be played by the hands probably reflects a general tendency for composers to accept the notion that the pedal division is essential to the nature of the instrument, and also that pedal playing is something that is appropriate, and fun, to show off.
So there is a sense, shared in different ways by many organists, organ composers, and listeners to organ music, that pedal playing is important and special, but also very, very hard. There is a down side to this sense, one that is especially important to organ teachers. Many people who would like to play the organ hesitate or refuse even to try because they are (inappropriately) afraid of pedal playing, while also (appropriately) believing that it is a necessary part of being a good organist. Also, many people who are actively playing the organ are chronically scared of playing the pedals. It is so common to hear someone say something like “If I don’t have time to practice I’ll just find something for manuals” or “I’ll play the hymns on manuals only” that we accept that this makes sense. However, ideally, the more resources one can bring to bear on playing a piece—like ten fingers and two feet rather that ten fingers alone—the easier it should be.
So the teacher’s first job in teaching pedal playing to a student who is new to it is to make it not seem intimidating or unnaturally difficult. The key here is that it not be thought of as “unnaturally” difficult. Of course it is hard. It requires lots of practice, and that practice must be along efficient and sensible lines. However, it is a skill that is well tailored to what the human body and mind can do, and in fact anyone who works at it in the right way will learn to do it, and do it well, barring a prohibitive physical disability or injury. In this way it resembles two other activities that were once thought of as highly specialized, arcane, and difficult, namely typing and driving a car. The assumption nowadays is that everyone can learn both of these things to a high level of competence as a matter of routine. The same would prove true of pedal playing if everyone chose to learn it. (Or, to put it another way, if pedal playing were a teenager’s key to autonomy and freedom, everyone would play pedals!) In fact the physical skill of pedal playing is essentially just an extension of the technique involved in using the brake and the gas pedal in a car. Of course it’s more multifaceted than that, but at root it’s the same. This admittedly somewhat goofy comparison often allows a student to take a deep breath and give himself or herself permission not to find the whole enterprise so scary.
It can also be useful and reassuring to remind students that for most of the history of organ playing, organists could not practice very much on church organs, for all of the well-known reasons, namely the need to find a helper to pump the organ in order to play so much as one note, and the difficulty of controlling both temperature and lighting in churches. Of course this doesn’t mean that organists never practiced on their “real” instrument or never practiced pedal playing. Some organists may have had regular access to a pedal harpsichord or clavichord for practice in the Baroque period or even a pedal piano later on, though the extent of this remains very unclear. But certainly the most common situation over many centuries must have been that organists kept their fingers in shape through regular practice at home, and, having once become skilled at pedal playing, tended to add pedal parts more or less at the last minute before a service or other performance. This suggests that pedal facility was something comfortable, natural, and well-learned enough that it was always there ready to be tapped into at a moment’s notice, the way bicycle riding is commonly thought to be.
(Of course no one would suggest that the most demanding and virtuosic pedal passages of Buxtehude or Bach or, especially, many late 19th or 20th century composers can be mastered without dedicated or indeed grueling practice. The above thoughts are intended to address the business of developing good, competent pedal facility and technique in the first instance.)
A second major reason that some students cite for having trouble with pedal playing, or even for giving it up, and therefore in effect giving up trying to learn organ, is that they find it physically uncomfortable. Since playing the pedal keyboard involves almost the entire body—at least more of it than other kinds of music-making do, more like an athletic activity—there is all sorts of room for it to become physically stressful or tense, and to lead to pain in the back, neck, shoulders, legs, feet, etc. Physical tension can always lead to musical problems—a tense sound or a lack of subtle control over timing and articulation—but with pedal playing, since more and larger muscles are involved, it can also lead to a level of discomfort that makes it essentially impossible to go on. I have actually encountered many people over the years who have told me that they are simply not suited to organ playing because they found the physical dimension of pedal playing too awkward and uncomfortable. I am certain that most of them could have found a way of approaching pedal playing that was devoid of any bad physical feeling and that worked fully to give them command of the pedal keyboard and the repertoire. The teacher’s second job, therefore, is to help the student to be comfortable at the pedal keyboard and to develop a technical approach for each student that works for that student’s posture and physique.
The teacher’s third and most fundamental job, of course, is to give the student the basic tools to learn pedal playing. Next month’s column will be organized around specific and detailed suggestions about how to approach this task. I will close this column with some ideas that underlie my way of thinking about the details of teaching pedal playing. This will serve as a background for next month’s column and I hope will provide food for thought.
1) If the goal is to allow everyone who is interested in organ playing to become a competent pedal player, and since everyone’s individual physique requires a somewhat different posture on the organ bench and a somewhat different relationship to the physical side of playing, there should be as few rules or even presuppositions as possible about how anyone should sit at the organ. If it is possible to develop a way of gaining complete security at the pedal keyboard that does not depend on a particular posture or on a particular physical setup, that would be very desirable.
2) The act of playing pedal keys is simply the act of pushing down a lever with a part of the foot that is small enough to do so without pushing down an adjacent lever. Any part of the foot that fits this description is fine to use in playing notes. This might often include the “big toe” area, the “little toe” area, almost anywhere along the outside of the foot, any part of the heel, and, for players with small enough feet, even the very front of the foot. There is no reason to reject any of these in advance, or to prefer any of them as a matter of principle. There might well be musical, practical, or historical reasons to prefer one or another in a given situation. Each player’s posture, and various physical habits, as well as foot size, will often determine what is best in this respect. Students can start to monitor this on their own behalf at the very beginning of the learning process.
3) There are three sound ways of finding the right note while playing pedals:
a) finding notes from scratch, in relation only to the position of one’s body on the bench
b) finding a note with one foot in relation to the position of the other foot and
c) finding a note with one foot in relation to where that foot last was or what that foot just did.
Each of these is useful, and they can all be practiced systematically, but the third is the most useful by far. It forms the basis for the exercises and procedures that I use in introducing students to pedal playing. (There are also various unsound or problematic ways, such as sliding or bumping the foot along the keys or just plain looking. These are unsound in part because they tend to cause hesitation and, by adding steps to the process, set a lower ceiling on tempo. But even worse, a reliance on them, especially by beginning students, delays or defeats the establishment of a solid inner sense of the geography and kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard.)
Next month in part II of this series I will continue this discussion, and move on to exercises and suggestions for practice.