Sure-Fire Practice Techniques

David Herman, DMA, MusD, is Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music and University Organist at the University of Delaware. The author of numerous reviews for The Diapason, David has enjoyed playing hymns in churches of various denominations for more than fifty years. His recent CD includes music by his teacher Jan Bender and by Bender’s teacher, Hugo Distler.

Through the diverse work of nearly every organist runs a common thread: We are called upon to play the organ for religious services. This is the first in a series of articles that will offer ideas for enriching service playing; these articles were originally written for Crescendo, the newsletter of the Philadelphia AGO chapter and are used with their permission. Mention is occasionally made of the “young organist”—this is not a reference to age, but of skills and experience. Many “young” organists of all ages have keyboard skills and have been pressed to move from the piano bench to the organ bench. In this first installment, we will turn our attention to hymn playing.

Hymns must dance, even when they

“slow dance.”—Bruce Neswick

Hymn playing is a large topic—and the most important of them all, as it is the heart of what we do as church organists. A comprehensive treatment of hymn playing would include topics such as touch, breathing/phrasing, repeated notes, pedaling, registration, tempo, and, especially, attention to the text. You have probably recognized these as the same skills necessary in playing organ literature convincingly.

The service player, moreover, must consider many additional aspects. These include the different “personalities” of hymn texts and tunes; musical leadership; variety—in registration, texture, and harmonization; and, most importantly, bringing the words of the hymn to life. “Present the ancient truth as a present truth,” as Erik Routley once wrote, referring to hymns from previous centuries.¹

In short, hymn playing deserves a book and course of its own. What follows here are merely a few thoughts, with the hope they may be of some use and interest.

The organist as leader

First, some technical aspects. It is worth mentioning just what we’re about as organists during congregational singing. We are not the peoples’ accompanist; to accompany is to support, and, ultimately, to follow. That’s what we do, for example, when accompanying a vocal or instrumental soloist. When the people are singing they depend upon the organist for leadership—a significant, if subtle, difference.

The organist has a number of important decisions to make on behalf of the people. These include interpreting the “character” of the hymn, perhaps even determining the key; and setting the tempo. Having established these essential musical ingredients, the organist then invites the people to sing by way of an intonation: an introduction that is both music and signal. As the hymn unfolds, the organist maintains the tempo and sees to other musical ingredients—including phrasing and appropriate changes in texture and registration—with polite, but firm, insistence. Through all this, the organist encourages the faithful (nearly all of whom are musical amateurs) to sing and helps to interpret the texts of the hymns.

How is all this accomplished? What to do, for example, when the tempo (or spirit) sags? The answer: Of most importance in effective musical communication is the organist’s strong sense of rhythm, accomplished through touch. In other words, the same technical skills needed for a compelling performance of a Bach fugue or a French organ symphony are those we draw upon in leading congregational song. The late Robert Glasgow, one of my teachers and a man who didn’t waste words, was once asked at a masterclass to “say a few words about rhythm in organ playing.” “Well,” he replied, a bit bewildered by the question, “I’m very much for it.”

Playing the text

All this reinforces the fact that hymn playing is technically demanding. It requires a strong sense of rhythm, confidence in touch, and at least the beginnings of a dependable pedal technique. Hymn playing is especially challenging for the less-experienced organist, who is understandably concerned about playing notes; but ultimately, this really is about playing words!

Hymns are poetry, as we know; it is the hymn’s tune that we play. It is the wedding of hymn and tune that we sing. Out of respect for the hymn text, many British hymnbooks display it, separated from the music, at the bottom of the page so that the poetry can be seen and appreciated. Young organists (of all ages) often find it necessary to fix their attention on the music of the hymn, and become anxious when told they must also follow the text. If the words of each stanza are not considered, the result is playing the first stanza again four or five times. Indeed, there can be significant changes in mood and even in rhythm from one stanza to the next. (Think of the rhythmic variables among the stanzas of “For All the Saints.”)

Some of us have played hymns for a very long while and, as a result, we need not spend quite so much time working out the notes each week. My pre-Sunday preparation focuses on reviewing the hymns’ words: the phrases and stanzas. Realizing that the congregation will breathe when they need to, I nevertheless mark places in my hymnbook where the choir and I will not breathe, to help make clear the poet’s thoughts.

In earlier times I recommended that the organist sing aloud with the people. I changed my mind, however, when in a workshop some thirty years ago, John Ferguson made a convincing case for the organist’s forming the words mentally but not actually producing a sound. He was right: This allows the organist to be both involved with the text and to monitor the peoples’ singing. I want to be certain that the congregation is “with me,” not only in tempo but in spirit. I also believe that, if I can hear the people singing, the organ is not too loud.

Pedaling

Playing the pedal (bass) part of a hymn can be as difficult as trio playing. Until an organist has developed the requisite pedal technique, it is better to not use pedals on hymns, even though this will likely increase the challenge for the hands. Example 1 shows an in-between solution: to pedal only occasionally—on long notes (pedal points) and at cadences, where the feet can prepare the primary scale degrees (tonic and dominant notes).

Q: How long may you hold on to a pedal point?

A: For as long as it sounds good!

Working out the pedal part is a challenge for all of us who like to write in pedaling marks, as hymnbooks typically have the settings notated in “choral” style, with insufficient room above the bass line for writing in pedaling.

Tempo

Tempo is a tricky and somewhat subjective matter, especially since the same hymn might call for different tempos depending upon such factors as hour of the day, age of the congregation, acoustics of the worship space, and the number of people singing. The organist sets the tempo, of course, which then must be maintained from beginning to end, through clear touch and rhythm.

Hymn introductions

Hymn introductions function as musical signals. They alert the congregation that it is time to sing, and provide essential information about the key, tempo and, perhaps, the nature of the hymn. What an introduction need not have to provide literally is the hymn tune, played all the way through (although this is typically what the British do).

In a hymn introduction, the organist can exercise some creativity in crafting a hymn “intonation,” by improvising or composing one, or using one of the many thousands in print by various composers. (See Example 2.)

Links

No, not golf or computer links. These refer to the precise amount of time inserted by the organist between the intonation and stanza 1, and between subsequent pairs of stanzas. This rhythmic silence is crucial in both giving the people time to breathe as well as signaling when they sing.

The link between stanzas is created by either adding a certain number of beats (if the last note of the tune is short, as in Example 3a), or subtracting beats (when the final note is long, say, a whole note, as in Example 3b). The great majority of people in our congregations are musical amateurs and we want to use all possible means to encourage them to sing energetically and with confidence.

Registration

“Flue” pipes on an organ are the strings, flutes, and principals. The first two are indispensible for accompaniment and in playing many organ pieces. Principals, on the other hand, excel at leading. A solid registration of principals 8′, 4′ and 2′ (crowned, perhaps, with a mixture) provides clear and encouraging leadership to the congregation. Normally, it is preferable to not overload the registration with 8′ stops; better to have stops of higher pitches, which sing out above the register of the congregation. Use manual 16′ stops carefully and sparingly and avoid celestes and the tremulant.

Above all: Listen to the congregation. If you can’t hear them, you may be playing too loudly!

Voice leading and texture

People often ask: “In passages with repeated notes, which do I tie and which should be repeated?” It’s not possible, I think, to declare an “always” rule for this (although some books do). Repeated notes in the melody of any hymn are always repeated—perhaps even overenunciated. Think of the opening notes of Rhosymedre. The best treatment of repeated notes is the use of “half-values” (that is, changing repeated quarter notes to eighth notes and eighth rests), shown in Example 4. As for the other voices, I suggest listening, to both the organ and the response of the congregation, making modifications in touch as needed.

Variety

A hymn may have four or five or— thank you, Martin Luther!—ten to fifteen stanzas. Why should all of them be played the same way? After all, the words change from one stanza to the next. Variety does not mean drastic or melodramatic musical gestures, unnecessary interludes, constant modulations, etc., but variety in response to the hymn text—musical interpretations that inspire the congregation to “sing ancient truths as present truths.” (See Routley’s comments below.) In the meantime, here are some easy ways to introduce variety in your hymn playing:

• Change registration (between stanzas, not within a stanza), reflecting upon aspects of the words.

• Solo the melody by using a trumpet or similar stop. Or better: Do you have young people in your congregation who play instruments? Most of us do. Recruit one or more to play the trumpet or other instrument on the melody of selected stanzas of a hymn. He/she can be thought of as a supplementary organ stop; and the young person will be thrilled to be a part of such an important activity.

• Drop out the pedals for a significant change (lightening) in overall sound.

• Occasionally, drop out the organ completely for a stanza. This requires preparation and the presence of a confident choir, who have been clued in as to what will happen. This can be very effective, even dramatic, on the right stanza and allows the people to find, and “center on,” their voices.

• Use alternation. Lutherans in 16th-century Germany continued the venerable process known as Alternatim Praxis—alternation. Carl Schalk described it this way: “The congregation, singing the unison chorales unaccompanied, alternated with (1) a unison . . . choir (the schola), (2) a choir singing polyphonic settings of the chorale (the choir), or (3) the organ, playing chorale settings.”²

Yes, that’s right: The organ can “play” a stanza of the hymn by itself. Other possibilities for alternation: men and trebles; right and left sides of the naves; choir and congregation. An example: Have the choir sing stanzas 5 and 6 of “For All the Saints” in parts. Perhaps from the aisle, before going on into the choir stalls. Alternation is meant to enhance, of course, not distract or annoy. So, the details of such a plan should be clearly laid out in the Sunday bulletin, especially when doing this for the first time.

• Sing in parts. None of these suggestions require the organist to depart from the harmony in the hymnbook. In many churches, the people wish to sing hymns in parts. This precludes, of course, the possibility of the organist’s occasional playing of alternate harmonizations (something many of us enjoy doing). Blessed is the church, then, that has the tradition of “unison on first and last stanzas, parts on the middle stanzas.” When the choir uses this plan, the people usually follow. This allows for the introduction (carefully) of varied harmonizations to enrich the hymn singing. These can be improvised (if thought out in advance), composed by the organist, or played from any number of fine publications written for this purpose.

Ultimately, hymn playing is about inspiration. For me, few musical experiences can top that of leading and encouraging a large congregation in singing a great hymn. The rewards and satisfaction can be tremendous. We’ve all been inspired by great service players, some of whom have been our own teachers.

Let’s allow Routley to have the last word:

It is your duty, your contribution to the service, to interpret as well as to play.

You are taking those words and notes out of the printed book and presenting them to the congregation as a new, fresh, contemporary thing.

Do nothing mechanically, by habit, or lightly, or casually.

Do all by decision. Do all after thought and prayer.

And may the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,

and may He prosper our handiwork.³

Additional resources

• The Association of Lutheran Church Musicians offers several hymn-based recordings, including a hymn festival by Paul Manz and Martin Marty. See www.alcm.org/marketplace/.

• David Cherwien provides many useful suggestions in his book on leading congregational song, Let the People Sing! A Keyboardist’s Creative and Practical Guide to Engaging God’s People in Meaningful Song (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1997).

• John Ferguson and others have created “Mini-Courses on Hymn Playing,” available from the publications section of the AGO website: http://ago.networkats.com/members_online/members/createorder.asp?action….

• Stuart Forster, Hymn Playing: A Modern Colloquium, offers contributions from eleven prominent organists (MorningStar Music Publishers, 2013).

• Gerre Hancock’s book on improvisation, Improvising: How to Master the Art (Oxford University Press, 1994) remains one of the standards in the field. 

• David Heller’s Manual on Hymn Playing: A Handbook for Organists offers techniques at all levels (GIA Publications, Inc., G3642, 2001).

• Noel Jones, A Catholic Organist’s Guide to Playing Hymns. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015 (available from Amazon).

Notes

1. Erik Routley, The Organist’s Guide to Congregational Praise (London: Independent Press, 1947), 12, quoted in Austin Lovelace, The Organist and Hymn Playing (rev.) (Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1981), 26.

2. Carl Schalk, ed., Key Words in Church Music, rev. and enlarged (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2004), 26–27.

3. Routley, The Organist’s Guide, 12–13, quoted in Lovelace, The Organist and Hymn Playing, 26.

David Herman, DMA, MusD, is Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music and University Organist at the University of Delaware. The author of numerous reviews for The Diapason, he has enjoyed playing hymns in churches of various denominations for more than fifty years. His recent CD includes music by his teacher Jan Bender and by Bender’s teacher, Hugo Distler.

This is the third installment in a series of articles that will offer ideas for enriching service playing. (The first installment, on hymn playing, appeared in the September 2016 issue of The Diapason; the second installment, on transposition, appeared in the January 2017 issue.) These essays had their genesis in a series of articles written for Crescendo, the newsletter of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and are used with permission. This installment tackles the challenge of encountering and learning new music.

I. Sight-reading

The old joke: A visitor to Manhattan asks a policeman, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The cop: “Practice, practice, practice!”

Sight-reading is a skill highly to be prized, but alas—there seems to be no shortcut in acquiring it. Nor is there much devoted to sight-reading skills in the standard organ methods or other books. The solution seems to be the same as that offered by the New York cop! Here are some suggestions and words of encouragement. 

Being a good sight-reader offers many advantages. It is an attribute that helps one secure and retain professional positions. Word gets around—“She can sight-read anything!” It is also helpful in playing through and learning new music. (There can be a downside: good sight-readers sometimes have a challenge in the business of working out details, especially fingering.) Sometimes we develop sight-reading skills in a non-voluntary way. I learned to sight-read some 55 years ago. At the church where I played during my high school years there was a Sunday evening service, the highlight of which (for them, not me) was a lengthy segment when members of the congregation called out hymn numbers to sing. I was expected to play each hymn at sight. Many of us have had such experiences, and we look back on them with belated appreciation, realizing that in such situations our skills at sight-reading were being developed and honed. Here are some suggestions for practicing.

• An opening thought: Practicing sight-reading, at least of music for manuals, does not necessarily require a trip to the church; a piano does just fine. Or, how about on the kitchen table, for developing concentration? (See below.)

• Select music that is not overly difficult to play; let the challenge be in the reading, not in the complexity of the music. Choose music to sight-read that is less difficult than what you would normally select to learn. 

• If sight-reading hymns is too difficult, practice sight-reading just the melody, then the melody with bass. Indeed, because traditional harmony is clearly defined by these outer voices, it is often possible to use only them in congregational singing; the organ registration helps fill in the middle.

• Bach chorale settings are like multivitamins; they provide many benefits. 

• Other possibilities include Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach and manual pieces such as those found in eighteenth-century English voluntaries, Franck’s L’Organiste, and many others.

• More vitamins: Warm up each day with scales on the piano. This benefits playing technique in general and, as a preparation for sight-reading, helps you think and play “in the key.” (Vitamins such as scales also help increase the blood flow in the hands for us older organists.)

• Keep a strict tempo—do not permit hesitations as you move your fingers from note to note. Instead, play slower, using a metronome, if necessary, to ensure steadiness.

• Keep going. Don’t stop to correct wrong notes—that’s not sight-reading, it’s practicing the piece!

• The experienced sight-reader looks slightly ahead, anticipating what is coming while also playing the notes of
the moment.

• Keep the fingers in touch with the keyboard, anticipating the next notes and moving each smoothly but quickly. 

• As with transposition and improvisation, “think in the key”—have the accidentals of the key in mind and anticipate upcoming modulations.

• Finally, as with practice of all kinds, play musically when sight-reading. Don’t settle for just playing notes—think about lines, shape, phrasing, and touch. 

Sight-reading resources 

Anne Marsden Thomas’s The Organist’s Hymnbook (Boosey & Hawkes, £21.95, www.boosey.com) provides a wealth of hymns for sight-reading, arranged in graded difficulty, beginning with two-part manual settings. (Because these settings maintain traditional hymnbook harmony, they can also be used in congregational accompaniment.) Early sections of most organ method books also contain pieces suitable for sight-reading.

Hymnbooks, of course, provide many appropriate examples. Select hymn tunes with simple harmonies and textures, however—not ones that are rhythmically or chromatically complex or have busy, contrapuntal textures.

Other resources include:

Hall, Jonathan B. “Ten Tips on Sight Reading.” The American Organist,  March 2009, 84–85.

Harris, Paul. Improve your sight-reading (in six volumes). Alfred Music, 1998.

Stewart, Stephie. Ten Tips for Improving Sight Reading. Blog from Sheet Music Plus: https://blog.sheetmusicplus.com/2013/01/16/10-tips-for-improving-sight-….

Nance,  Daryel. How to Practice Sight-Reading at the Keyboard. http://
danwebs.com/chorg/sightread.html.

I offer a suggestion, useful in all aspects of music learning, including sight-reading, improvisation, and new music: use a metronome in your practicing. The primary reason is that music unfolds through time; a metronome helps maintain a steady tempo and prevents you from playing faster than you’re able.

There is an old story about André Previn arranging an audition with the great conductor George Szell. Previn, hoping to be invited to play a piano concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra, went to Szell’s hotel room as instructed. He looked around. “Where is the piano, maestro?” “Ah, we don’t need a piano. You can play it on that,” he said, pointing to a table. Somewhat unnerved, Previn sat down and began to play the piano part of the concerto. And Szell immediately began to criticize Previn’s playing. “Too loud; too soft; not legato enough; the chords are not well voiced.” Finally, Szell stopped him, saying “It’s no use; it is unfortunately clear that you can’t play this piece.” And Previn said, “I don’t understand, maestro; it went fine on my kitchen table this morning.”

II. Learning new music

To play the organ properly, one should have a vision of Eternity.

—Charles-Marie Widor

Music, being identical with heaven, isn’t a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It’s a condition of eternity.

—Gustav Holst

Our profession offers a marvelous variety of activities. Most of us hold positions in churches and synagogues; some of us teach or play recitals. Through all these, I hope we continue to be students—studying new music, expanding our techniques, even learning from our students. Some of us study new music with the assistance of a teacher, while others learn on our own. A third possibility might be informal playing for a colleague: receiving encouragement and constructive feedback from a friend. 

This might sound strange, but when I do this I prefer playing for musicians who are not organists. Other instrumentalists will provide useful comments about lines, the need to breathe (Hurford: “Music must breathe if it is to live.”) and, especially, rhythm. They usually don’t sugarcoat their reactions. I remember, many years ago, trying out my first attempt at early French rhythms on a colleague, who was a clarinetist. “(Expletive deleted!),” he hollered; “Can’t you count?” I must have been going a little too far with my “inequalities.” Instrumentalists, unencumbered by what we organists know about styles, performance practice, and the idiosyncrasies of our instrument, will let you know some essential truths about your playing—especially rhythm and tempo!

Here are some suggestions for learning music. First, whether working alone or with a teacher, those starting out should have access to one or more organ method books (organ “tutors,” as our British colleagues say). Even advanced players return to these for their musical “vitamins”—pedal exercises, manual studies, scales, and more.

There are many excellent method books currently available, and I will mention but a few here (see details in the list of references, below). The Gleason book (Harold Gleason, Method of Organ Playing, eighth edition, 1996) continues to be a standard. I return to it when my feet are not behaving. I appreciate The Organist’s Manual by Roger Davis (1985) and very much admire the book by George Ritchie and George Stauffer, Organ Technique Modern and Early (2000), with its reference to techniques both old and new. A Practical Guide to Playing the Organ by Anne Marsden Thomas (1997), an experienced British pedagogue, is thorough and innovative. Her book even includes useful tips for practicing in a cold church: “Strap one or two hot water bottles to your body with a long scarf.” 

As you work on new music, some of the following may be helpful or thought provoking, as they have been for me. Anne Marsden Thomas writes:

• Concerning exercises: Play them as beautifully as you can. 

• Do not confuse touch with phrasing. (Touch is for clarity; phrasing is
for breaths.)

• Accent is an illusion on the organ. (An accent cannot be accomplished by merely pressing harder on the key.)

• Fingering is the means to an end. (Pedaling, too.)

Touch is perhaps the most critical of all the organist’s tools, for it is with touch that we communicate the essentials of music: rhythm, pulse, accents, breath. Touch should not be artificial or draw attention to itself. Rather, it is for the organist what diction is for the singer: in communicating to our listeners, we rely on touch to make the music clear. Peter Hurford offered an imaginative suggestion (recalled from a masterclass many years ago): Communication is accomplished by consonants—touch, articulation, and the space between notes. Emotion is expressed through aspects of legato touch—the vowels. I heartily commend Hurford’s slim but profound volume, Making Music on the Organ—a wonderful title!—published by Oxford University Press (revised edition, 1990, $51.00; https://global.oup.com). 

Additional suggestions

In choosing pieces to learn, first, it is important to like the music you are playing, so select works that you have heard and enjoy, or those written by a composer whose music you like. Second, choose music appropriate to your technical skills. It is more important to play well, of course, than to play an overly difficult piece. For example, many settings in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein are more challenging to play than the eight (“little”) preludes and fugues. (I once knew a teacher of a beginning student who said: “You’re just starting off, so let’s do something in the key of C—it’s the easiest.” So the student was assigned Bach’s Prelude in C Major, but not from the “eight little;” no, he was told to began with BWV 547—the “9/8!”)

Regarding ornaments, do not get bogged down in reading about how to play them. Seldom is there only one “correct” way of playing an embellishment. Ornaments should occur naturally. Work out your interpretation of the ornamented passages, massaging them into place. (Hurford: “Ornaments should marry with the music which they embellish.”) Then try them out on your teacher or a colleague who has a good understanding of the style. An oft-quoted line of Ralph Vaughan Williams, about studying: “I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.”

With aspects of interpretation and performance practice, it is here that a teacher can be especially valuable. And, in a variation of this, what about two or more colleagues playing for one another? A group of learners, perhaps facilitated by an American Guild of Organists chapter, could meet together regularly: sharing ideas, techniques, and solutions while cheering each other on. Or, try it on the dog. In any case, play for as many people as possible. Each time we do this, we become more confident and less apprehensive about performance. 

The metronome can be very helpful in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of a practice session. When working out a new piece of music (after writing in solutions to any fingering or pedaling challenges), set the metronome to a comfortably slow tempo, one distinctly slower than the tempo at which you are able to play the notes with accurate pitches and rhythm. You may wish to begin with right hand and pedal, left hand and pedal combinations. While repeating one page or section, gradually increase the tempo one click at a time. This ensures an overall increase in tempo, but accomplished gradually so that comfort and accuracy do not suffer. As time goes by we seem to have less and less time for practicing; fortunately, at the same time we get smarter! This method can go a long way in helping you achieve the best results in the shortest time. 

Finally, quoting Anne Marsden Thomas once more: “Always play the right note.” Now, that might seem too obvious to mention. But the fact is, in playing a note incorrectly more than one time, we are in fact practicing that mistake. In a short time, we’re able to play the wrong note perfectly! It can be very difficult to erase that mistake from our motor memories.

Happy practicing! And play the right notes.

References

Davis, Roger E. The Organist’s Manual. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.

Gleason, Harold, ed., and Catharine Crozier Gleason. Method of Organ Playing, eighth edition; Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Hurford, Peter. Making Music on the Organ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; revised edition, 1990.

Ritchie, George H. and George B. Stauffer. Organ Technique Modern and Early. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Thomas, Anne Mardsen. A Practical Guide to Playing the Organ. London: Cramer Music, Ltd., 1997. Accompanying volumes contain graded literature.

David Herman, DMA, MusD, is Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music and University Organist at the University of Delaware. The author of numerous reviews for The Diapason, David has enjoyed playing hymns in churches of various denominations for more than 50 years. His recent CD, Ein neues Lied+A New Song, includes choral and organ music by his teacher Jan Bender and by Bender’s teacher, Hugo Distler. The disc is available from the author ([email protected]).

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of articles that offer ideas for enriching service playing. (The first installment, on hymn playing, appeared in the September 2016 issue of The Diapason; the second installment, on transposition, appeared in the January 2017 issue; the third installment, on sight-reading and learning new music, appeared in the February 2017 issue.) These essays had their genesis in a series of articles written for Crescendo, the newsletter of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and are used with permission. This installment concerns accompaniment.

Accompanying choral music and solos

The good accompanist always plays the text.

—Austin Lovelace¹

In hymn playing, the emphasis is on leading; with accompaniment, the organist’s role is different. When accompanying, we are followers, sometimes supporters; and at other times merely in the background; occasionally, equal partners. In any case, as accompanists we make a very important contribution to the music. Just listen to recordings of choral music and note the deft playing that “makes” an anthem, a Howells canticle, or an Anglican psalm. As with hymn playing, on some occasions the accompanist joins with the singers in making magic happen! 

Accompanying is an art, of course, and, as with any aspect of our work, the more we practice it, the better we become. It is a worthy calling and good accompanists are highly to be prized—“More to be desired are they than gold,” to borrow from the Psalmist. Engaging in such collaborative work enhances our overall musicianship and usefulness and makes us better listeners. I regret that some advanced piano students, particularly at universities, ignore or turn away from opportunities to accompany, preferring instead to focus only on learning repertoire. That seems pretty short-sighted to me. Do they really think they are going to have careers only as soloists? Accompanying is not necessarily easier than solo performance; it merely calls upon some different skills. Following are a few thoughts on technical and musical aspects of effective accompanying, particularly as applied to working with choirs. 

Technical matters

Rhythmic playing is especially important in choral accompaniment. With all due respect to conductors, the stability of the choir is often in the hands (literally) of the accompanist, who helps keep the singers on track rhythmically, gives them confidence for their entrances, and generally contributes to the solidity of the ensemble.

We accompanists have an extra challenge. In addition to reading the map (music) and piloting the organ, we also have to keep an eye on the conductor. (Unless the conductor is you!) For those of us in middle age or beyond, the ocular challenges can be significant. We’ll leave that matter to you and your optical professional, but do remember that appropriate eyeglasses are among organists’ essential tools. Reading what’s on the music rack through bifocals is likely to give you a pain in the neck! If you require reading glasses, consider “half glasses,” so that you can look over them at the conductor. In addition to the visual aspects, careful listening to the combined sounds of organ and choir is musically very important. Constant monitoring is needed to ensure good balance between choir and organ. Relying on the Swell division can be useful in allowing immediate modifications in volume. (But see also the final paragraph below.)

Transcription-type 

accompaniment

Some accompaniments are written specifically for the organ, using two or three staves. These should be learned in the same way as organ literature and played as written. Other accompaniments are composed more generically, for “keyboard.” Those are sometimes a challenge to play on the organ. A growing number have tricky pianistic textures with lots of arpeggios and/or “oom-pah” left-hand parts—not natural to the organ. Arpeggios, really “unfolded” harmony, can often be played vertically, as chords. Although such accompaniments often have no pedal parts, using the organ pedals occasionally can make them a bit easier to play, helping out the hands and compensating somewhat for the lack of a damper pedal.

Many accompaniments are transcriptions, having begun their lives as orchestral music. Some are even twice removed from the original: think of Handel’s Messiah, for which we must take music written for orchestra, subsequently arranged for piano, and now play it on the organ—all at no extra pay! In these cases it is important to keep in mind that our job is making organ music, and thus we must often make some adjustments in the music’s texture in order not only to make it playable on our instrument but also to make it sound effective and convincing as organ music. This is an important concept, running as a common thread through both hymn and anthem playing: organists often are called upon to play something that did not originate as organ music. The late Erik Routley wrote convincingly of this in his book, Church Music and the Christian Faith: 

Service playing demands a great deal of imagination on the player’s part, and has very little to do with the fundamentalist obedience to a score that recital playing . . . requires. An organist must constantly edit a score. When accompanying anthems and service settings the organist gets no instructions about registration, and sometimes indeed has to play from a piano reduction of what was originally an orchestral score. The point here is that the organist must translate the . . . score into organ language [my emphasis] as he or she plays. This will be not a distraction but a reassurance for the congregation, especially if the organist’s chief attention is to rhythm and touch [again, those two magic words].²

Here are some specific suggestions for playing transcriptions:

• I often find it easier to first work out a transcription at the piano and then move to the organ. This helps in developing an initial understanding of the musical texture and expression, which then transfers to the organ.

• As with hymns, here the novice organist faces the question of “to pedal or not to pedal.” Try taking busy eighth-note bass lines with your left hand (instead of the pedals), or leave them out entirely. Consider the possibility of “pedal points”—the concept originates in organ music. Replacing a busy bass line with a long-held note often results in more convincing organ music. 

• Pedal long notes, not fast ones, and add pedal at major cadences (musical punctuations—see example above).

• Simplify the texture when possible. Thinner is usually better than thicker. Remember that, especially in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century music, the outer voices of the texture usually tell all. Playing only these is very often enough; the organ’s registration fills in with other pitches and doublings.

• Consider using only a manual-to-pedal coupler instead of heavy pedal stops. This helps to keep rhythm and tempo from bogging down, and taking the occasional left-hand note with a foot helps with page turning.

These suggestions also apply when playing solo organ works that are transcriptions.

Registration

• Avoid string and flute celestes in most instances unless specifically called for in the music. Although they can make an ethereal “wash” of sound, their pitch is vague by design, and their articulation is too imprecise for detail work. Keep in mind that the articulation in organ playing is equivalent to consonants in speech—enunciation. The goal is the same: clarity, so as to make the music understandable.

• Light and clear registrations (8′ and 2′ flutes, for example) enhance early (pre-nineteenth-century) music, when accompaniments are often instrumental in origin. Rhythmic energy and pulse are essential ingredients in early music; a light registration makes this easier to provide. Save colorful registrations for nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, where they’re often called for.

• Use the swell box judiciously. In anthem accompanying, especially of early music, try setting the swell box and leaving it alone. This will simplify things and be more faithful to the music’s intentions. Although it is sometimes appropriate to close the box partially in order to achieve a good balance between organ and singers, it is generally better to leave the box open to allow easy egress of the sound. In pre-nineteenth-century music, one or two clear stops on the Great or Positiv are better than three or more on the Swell with the box shut.

Accompanying Psalmody

All Christian churches are impoverished if the psalms are withdrawn from their worship.

—Erik Routley³

The Book of Psalms is a sweet and delightful song because it sings of and proclaims the Messiah.

—Martin Luther⁴

The skills necessary in accompanying psalms effectively are essentially those needed for leading hymn singing (see September 2016 issue) or accompanying in general. Nonetheless, it may be helpful to offer suggestions specific to psalmody.

There are various methods of singing the psalms, of course: psalm tones; harmonized (Anglican) chant; metrical paraphrases (which would be played as a hymn); and “newer” methods, such as formulary tones and Gelineau psalmody. A keyword in hymn playing is “leading.” Its correspondent in playing psalms is “support,” and, for the most part, is in the background. A partial exception: there are responsorial psalm settings in which the choir or soloists sing the verses while the congregation responds with a refrain or antiphon. In this instance the organist is alternately leader and accompanist. It is helpful in such cases if the organist can give a clear signal to the people each time they sing, with an increased registration; by playing the antiphon’s melody as a solo voice; or by providing a firm “downbeat” in the pedal to serve as a springboard to the congregation’s response.

However, in most psalm settings of the “formula” type—various types of psalm tones, for example—the goal is to be quietly supportive but not “in the way” of the voice part, whose text-inspired rhythm must float in a free and flexible way. Harmonized (Anglican) chant, normally played as written, must be similarly supple in rhythm. In addition, organists who are experienced and comfortable with this medium have opportunities for discrete “colorings” by way of appropriate registration changes and/or melodic descants (but without changes in harmony).

In all chant-based accompanying, the organist must play the music from memory in order to follow and play the words of each psalm verse. In playing the psalmody of Joseph Gelineau, which employs a temporal system quite different from that in psalm tones, the organist again provides quiet support to the sung text, but within the framework of its regularly recurring rhythm. 

Following are some specific suggestions for accompanying psalm tones, Gregorian psalmody, or other “monodic” chant:

• Keep in mind that, in fact, no accompaniment may be needed at all. Historically these chants would have been sung without accompaniment. Or, instead of the organ try a few handbells, used to punctuate the phrases.

• Use a discrete, quiet registration, preferably in a swell box to allow for subtle and immediate gradations in dynamics.

• Don’t pedal, or use a light pedal registration.

• It is not necessary to double the melody; providing slow-moving and somewhat thin accompaniment (alternately, a “wash” of sound, hardly moving at all) helps to encourage the requisite flexibility in singing.

• In generating your accompaniment, think modally, not harmonically. No V7 chords or other traditional harmonic motion.

A final thought

The initial learning process of accompanying different types of psalm tones is not unlike mastering a spoken language; playing fluidly and supportively requires having the authentic “accent” in the ears. As with mastering a language, accomplishing the appropriate “sound” of, say, Anglican chant is enhanced by listening to examples. There are fine recordings available (on such labels as EMI, Hyperion, and Priory, among others), especially from English college chapels and cathedrals. Some British recording companies have committed to issuing the entire Psalter in Anglican chant, such as the recordings by the choir of St. Paul’s London, when it was under the direction of the late John Scott. ν

Notes

1. Austin Lovelace, The Organist and Hymn Playing (rev.) (Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1981), 26.

2. Erik Routley, Church Music and the Christian Faith (Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1978), 102 and 105–6.

3. Routley, p. 117.

4. Luther’s Works, Vol. 15; ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan (Concordia Pub. House, 1971), p. 273.

Dutch composer Ad Wammes (b. 1953) achieved international notoriety in the organist community through the publication of Miroir in 1989. Miroir has been performed and recorded by many American and European concert organists, including Thomas Trotter and the late John Scott. The piece has justifiably yet erroneously been labeled minimalist: many of the techniques used in Miroir are similar to the techniques in post-minimalist music, but we cannot trace any direct influence from minimalism. Just as American composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass were attracted to the rhythmic and harmonic elements in popular music and integrated them into their style, Wammes’ primary influence was the 1970s symphonic rock group Gentle Giant. This influence can be heard by comparing a recording of Miroir to a recording of Gentle Giant’s song Proclamation.

It is entirely possible that Wammes’ more recent organ work, Ride in a High-Speed Train (2011), could be similarly mislabeled, since it too has many repetitive figures. The title suggests that it could be conceptually modeled after John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine, a post-minimalist piece for orchestra. Originally given the title TGV and composed for a mechanical dance organ in 1993, Ride in a High-Speed Train has an intriguing and multi-faceted history, but it was never intended to be a minimalist piece. 

For those who might attach the label of minimalist onto Ride in a High-Speed Train, I would emphasize that the presence of repetition alone is not sufficient. According to Keith Potter, minimalism is “a style of composition characterized by an intentionally simplified rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vocabulary.”¹ In other words, reduction is the primary characteristic, not repetition. But, unlike visual art, music unfolds over time, so in order for a composition to be produced with a minimum of materials, it needs to have either long sustained tones or repetition of brief melodic patterns. Reduction typically manifests itself through the absence of melody (only short melodic fragments exist in the repetitive figures); a strong, steady pulse (except in the case of long tones); a strong tonal center (e.g., In C by Terry Riley, one of the very first minimalist compositions); slow harmonic change; and sometimes a limited number of pitches. The second most important characteristic of minimalism is gradual process: the idea that the listener should be able to hear and understand the compositional process as it unfolds. This creates a feeling that the music is going 

nowhere and is endless, unlike most Western music, which is goal-oriented and directional.  

Of course, the appeal of minimalism could not last forever, so it evolved. As a result, the repetitive figures became accompanimental to simple melodies, the audible process became less important, change began to happen at a quicker pace, and various means of expression and directionality were added. Both Miroir and Ride in a High-Speed Train seem to match this description of post-minimalism. For instance, the one-measure repetitive cell in Miroir remains the same throughout the piece but with simple melodies weaving in and out (see Example 1).

Despite the appearance of post-minimalism, we need to take the composer at his word when he himself denies having been influenced by minimalism. In Ride in a High-Speed Train, Wammes instead acknowledges a debt to symphonic rock music, Balkan music, and the process of composing for The Busy Drone (the name of the mechanical organ). The repetitive devices alone do not convincingly indicate minimalism, but they do give the piece a compelling energy that makes it a refreshing contrast in any concert program.  

While I was preparing to present this and several other pieces in a lecture-recital, the composer revealed to me many details about the unique genesis of Ride in a High-Speed Train through e-mail conversations in December 2014 and January 2015.

Brenda Portman: What was your inspiration for choosing the title? Is the piece meant to be programmatic?

Ad Wammes: In 1981 my wife and I cycled for seven weeks through Europe. When we were in former Yugoslavia I had a breakdown with my bike (broken spokes caused by the terrible condition of the roads). I rang the doorbell of the nearest house and we were warmly welcomed by the man and woman living there. It was difficult to communicate as they spoke only Serbian. Anyway, in the evening the man placed a map of Yugoslavia on the kitchen table, took his accordion, pointed at a certain district, and then played music from that district. This way he went through the whole map. And this story came to my mind while composing, as it had Balkan influences in it and, in my mind, I kept seeing a train (probably caused by the ongoing 5/4 beat) going through an ever-changing landscape. 

In 1993, the year in which I composed this piece, a train named TGV (“train à grande vitesse,” French for “high-speed train”) was introduced in Europe. In 2011, I made a transcription for (normal) organ and renamed it Ride in a High-Speed Train (as English-speaking people probably don’t know what TGV stands for).

[The TGV, with its hub in Paris, is a network of high-speed trains that can reach a speed of over 300 miles per hour. It was introduced in Europe beginning in 1981, with its first line between Paris and Lyon. In 1993, the year Wammes composed the piece, the northern Europe line opened from Paris to Lille, which was a connection for destinations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Germany.²]

Can you point out specific places in Ride in a High-Speed Train that show Balkan influences? 

Ornamentation, scales (especially the Lydian mode), unequal deviation over 5/4. [At this point Mr. Wammes referred me to an e-mail attachment that contained the first four pages of the original score to the piece.] I withdrew this version after one day because Boosey & Hawkes immediately took interest in publishing it. The original version differs from the score published by Boosey & Hawkes concerning the notation of the rhythms. In the Boosey & Hawkes version all the rhythms are notated in the deviation of 2-2-2-2-2 eighth notes. (See Example 2.) But in fact the deviation constantly changes and is often diverse for both hands and feet at the same time [See the table on page 23 showing the piece’s structure.] When changing the scale, root key and rhythmic deviation, it feels like slipping into another landscape.

Was Gentle Giant also an influence on Ride in a High-Speed Train, as it was for Miroir?

I don’t know, but I am not the kind of composer that tries to escape from his influences, so probably yes.

Could you tell me more about the mechanical dance organ for which Ride in a High-Speed Train was written? 

[From the author: Ad Wammes sent me the manual for The Busy Drone, which he wrote himself, explaining the instrument and how to appropriately write music for it. The following information is derived from that manual.]

The Busy Drone has three manuals (Zang, Tegenzang, and Accompagnement), pedal (Bassen), and limited percussion capabilities (big drum, woodblock, cymbal, and snare drum). It is a transposing instrument and sounds a minor third higher than notated. Each manual/pedal division has a compass of only one to two octaves, but, with stops ranging from 32′ to 4′, it actually spans six octaves. The disposition can be found on the website for Het Orgelpark Amsterdam [www.orgelpark.nl/nl].

The speed of the engine is 360 centimeters per minute, so the lengths of notes have to be calculated in millimeters for the organ book, based on the desired tempo.³ The speed of the engine is the key to understanding optimal tempos and note values that could be written for the organ. If the note is too short, it does not have enough time to sound, and if it is too long (longer than approximately six beats at a tempo of quarter note = 120), then the organ book will weaken. [An “organ book” is comparable in function to a player piano roll.] The most effective compositions have a perpetual-motion type of energy and are dance-like, in order to capitalize on the instrument’s history as a dance organ. If performed at the indicated tempo, Ride in a High-Speed Train has a continuous energy that propels the piece forward, making it sound like the motion of a train. The piece consists primarily of eighth notes, although the organ is able to accommodate durations as short as thirty-second notes. The longest note value in the piece, which occurs only a few times, is nine beats long at a tempo of 152.

Did you intend for Ride in a High-Speed Train to be played on this organ only, or did you write it with performing organists in mind as well?

Intentionally it was only written for the mechanical organ; I had no real organists in mind. It was only in 2011 that I made a transcription for “normal” organ at the request of the Dutch organist Age-Freerk Bokma. He heard TGV on The Busy Drone and asked me if it was possible to make a transcription for organ. I answered him: “Well, I’ll have a look at it.” After a week the transcription was ready, and although difficult, it is playable!

What else can you tell me about the process of composing TGV for The Busy Drone? 

In 1993 I was asked to make a composition for The Busy Drone. While I was in the possession of the computer sequencer program PRO 24 (ancestor of Cubase), a sound sampler (ASR10 by Sequential Circuits), and a portable DAT recorder, I decided to do it differently. First I recorded all the different stops (there is an organ book called GAMMA, which runs through the different stops note by note) and put the sound samples in my sound sampler. Then I made my composition and put the information in the sequencer program on my Atari computer by playing it live. Finally I notated the score on large files of paper by indicating with pencil what had to be chopped out. This gave me the benefit of getting a musical interpretation of my piece instead of a stiff interpretation of a normal score.

How did other composers create their scores?

They made normal scores and from that the book-choppers (I don’t know if this is the correct word for their profession) made the organ books.

The first person that delivered his piece as a MIDI file was Eric de Clercq. He made his piece Een meter sneeuw in 2001. The book was chopped by Johan Weima, who has a chopping machine connected to a computer. However, Een meter sneeuw was only premiered on October 7, 2009, in Het Orgelpark Amsterdam, because the concerts at the City Museum stopped and shortly after that the renovation of the Museum started (2004–12). The second person that delivered his piece as a MIDI file was me! In 2010 I went to Het Orgelpark to listen to TGV. (The organ was restored, so now it would sound much better!) The organ book, however, was nowhere to be found. Then Johan Luijmes (the director) told me about this MIDI file chopping machine. I still had the old MIDI files and from that a new version of TGV was chopped, now with the correct tempo at 152 per quarter note. (The first version was chopped at 150 while the translation of the MIDI data was too difficult at 152.)

From that time, 2010 till mid-2014, I was the intermediary between composer and chopping machine (handled by Johan Weima) by translating normal scores to MIDI files. Many times the composers (especially the young ones) came with MIDI files. I checked those and corrected them (notes being out of range, notes being too short, adding bridges (short interruptions) to the notes that were too long).

Can The Busy Drone read MIDI files directly?

Since mid-2014 a MIDI device has been installed in The Busy Drone by the Belgian manufacturer DECAP (Herentals). Now it is no longer necessary to make organ books. The Busy Drone directly reads the MIDI information.

When you composed TGV in 1993, was The Busy Drone still in the museum in Amsterdam or had it been moved to the museum in Utrecht?

Yes, it was still in Het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (The City Museum). It stayed for one year (2008) in the museum “Van Speeldoos tot Pierement” (“From Music Box to Street Organ”) in Utrecht. It was taken over by Het Orgelpark Amsterdam in 2009.

[We have little knowledge of mechanical organs in the United States, but they were used frequently in various settings in Belgium and the Netherlands for many decades. A mechanical organ is like a player piano, which plays itself, but someone has to work the controls. This particular organ was built in 1924 by the Belgian firm Mortier. It has 92 keys and 17 registers. Originally a dance organ in a café, it had fallen into disuse and been abandoned. In 1965 it was purchased by the Amsterdam publisher De Bezige Bij (The Busy Bee), with the intent to provide background music for an annual book fair. The organ was given a new look and a new name, “The Busy Drone.” In 1973 the organ was moved to the auditorium of the City Museum and remained there for nearly 35 years, playing a role in a concert series entitled “Music Now.” Contemporary composers were encouraged to write music specifically for the instrument during its long stay at the City Museum. These included Louis Andriessen (a key figure in the European minimalist movement), Misha Mengelberg, Willem Breuker, Bo van der Graaf, and others.⁴ When the City Museum underwent renovations, it was moved to the museum “Van Speeldoos tot Pierement” (“From Music Box to Street Organ”) in Utrecht in 2008, restored by the Perlee firm, and then moved in 2009 to Het Orgelpark Amsterdam, where it stands today.⁵]

What exactly does it mean for a person to “work the controls” of the  organ? 

They change the organ books and see to it that the transport of the organ book runs smoothly. By the way, the organ books can also be run by hand. Yes, the registrations can be handled on the spot, but usually the stop changes are already programmed (chopped out) in the book.

Do they still have to do this now, even with the organ reading MIDI files?

No, because there are no organ books to be transported anymore. The stop changes still can be done by hand, but usually they are programmed in the MIDI file.

Thank you for taking the time to tell me more about Ride in a High-Speed Train. It is much easier to understand the musical language and performance challenges after learning about all of the factors involved in its composition.

Postscript: Performing Ride in a High-Speed Train

As alluded to by the composer, there are some performance challenges in Ride in a High-Speed Train, due to its original function as a mechanical-organ piece. For a live organist, the execution of multiple complex rhythmic patterns at a tempo of 152 is daunting at the very least, if not close to impossible. Performers may need to dial the metronome down a few notches to communicate the piece effectively. It is also impossible for an organist to carry out the intended registration changes and still maintain the tempo without either omitting notes to hit a piston or enlisting the help of an assistant. For a mechanical organ, though, these details are programmed into the organ book (or now the MIDI file) and present no problems at all. Additionally, the size of an organist’s hand or the distance from one note to the next were not an issue for The Busy Drone; therefore, there are several instances of quick leaps greater than an octave, sometimes at the same time as a manual change (see Example 3). It is also worth mentioning that the rhythmic precision in this piece renders a mechanical-action organ more suitable than electro-pneumatic, and a three-manual instrument is necessary in order to implement all of the desired colors.

YouTube features recordings of young American organists playing Ride in a High-Speed Train: Karen Christianson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmygJ5lobhs), Chinar Merjanian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOXjt3_sGmE), and Brenda Portman (https://youtu.be/tujdOGm-9JE), and the Hauptwerk version by the composer himself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct7oNhSX-1w). The first professional recording of the piece was recently released on the Acis label, by Jonathan Ryan (acisproductions.com). Information on Ad Wammes’ organ compositions is at http://adwammes.nl/. ν

Acknowledgements

Miroir by Ad Wammes, © 1992, 2006 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

Ride in a High-Speed Train by Ad Wammes, © 2011 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. Reprinted
by permission.

Notes

1. Keith Potter, “Minimalism,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2007–13), accessed July 3, 2014.

2. Russ Collins, “TGV History and Speed Records,” TGV—High-Speed Train, last modified 2014, accessed January 16, 2015, http://www.beyond.fr/travel/tgvhistory.html.

3. The Busy Drone manual, sent in an e-mail attachment from Ad Wammes on December 15, 2014.

4. Thom Jurek, “The Busy Drone,” AllMusic, accessed December 27, 2014, http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-busy-drone-mw0000566283.

5. Orgelpark, “The Busy Drone,” accessed January 16, 2015, http://orgelpark.nl/over-het-orgelpark/de-instrumenten/the-busy-drone/.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. See his blog at www.amorningfordreams.com.

Organ Method XI

I ended last month’s column with the suggestion that experienced keyboard players who are using this book to begin their exploration of organ playing could now feel ready to bring to the organ any reasonably simple two-voice piece that they have already learned on another keyboard instrument. My experience suggests that this is a good idea. It can be tricky to transfer a piece from one instrument to another (very different) instrument, and there are pitfalls to watch out for, having to do with touch, sound, and idiomatic performance. Any student should also begin quite promptly to learn new pieces from scratch. However, already knowing the notes of at least a piece or two can provide added ease. When I am working with such a student, I always suggest a mix: initially a few pieces that are already under the student’s fingers, very soon a new piece or two, and a transition to mostly new pieces. 

In any case, this next excerpt is intended to ground a student with little or no keyboard experience in the practicing of what will of necessity be new pieces at the organ. It provides some general guidelines, and takes the student through the process of beginning to work on a short two-voice piece: one that is not trivially easy (and therefore that adds significantly to what the short exercises from the last few columns have provided) but that is also fairly straightforward: no tricks, nothing too unusual. It is also a piece in which the left-hand part is the more complex of the two voices.

If you have come to the organ without having played a keyboard instrument previously, and have gone over all of the above enough to feel comfortable with it, then you can now also start on simple pieces in two voices—one line of music per hand. These will not, of course, be pieces that you have played before. The repertoire is full of such pieces (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions are probably the best known) and they are appropriate to work on, if you are willing to be careful and systematic about it, and to keep practice tempos slow. A short piece by Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) from his collection Tabulatura Nova Part III of 1624 will serve as an example of how to work on such a piece at this stage in your learning process (Example 1).

Some important guidelines

1) At the beginning, work on each hand separately. In fact, at this stage—and indeed in many circumstances throughout your life as an organist—practice each hand separately until it is fully learned and comfortable before putting the hands together. (You will learn over time when this is, and isn’t, necessary or a good idea for you.)

2) Work in small chunks: maybe a measure or two at a time. It is always a good idea to practice in small enough increments so that when you return to the beginning of what you are practicing, you remember it well: that is, the repetition has a chance to impress itself on your subconscious memory. 

3) Work out fingering carefully. Your approach to fingering will evolve with experience. At this point you are using the piece and the fingering to help you become comfortable with the act of putting the two hands together. Later you will use what you have learned about fingering and practicing to give pieces the musical shape that you want.

4) Always practice slowly enough. This means that what you are playing should both be accurate and feel comfortable. If you hear yourself playing the right notes but feel yourself having to scramble to do so, you are playing too fast. There is no such thing, for purposes of effective practicing, as playing too slowly.

5) Keep your eyes on the music, not on your hands. Even when, in the course of practicing short simple lines, you find that you remember those lines well enough that you don’t need to look at the music, do not fall into the habit of watching your hands. It is OK to take an occasional glance, but that is all. Over-dependence on looking at the hands slows down the progress of becoming comfortable as a keyboard player.

6) And, of course, look the piece over in general before taking it apart and working. Notice rhythms, patterns, exceptions to patterns, wide intervals, repeated notes, compass, and so on.

(I am addressing these suggestions to those who are essentially new to keyboard playing, but any player new to the organ should read and consider them, especially when approaching new pieces.)

Practicing and fingering

In this piece, the left hand part is more active than the right hand. The right hand plays 28 notes, the left hand nearly five times that many. Thus you should probably expect to practice the left hand significantly more than the right hand. This piece also contains many repeated notes—mostly in half notes in the right hand, as in measure 3, for example, and mostly in eighth notes in the left hand, as in measures 3 and 4, and elsewhere. The compass of the right-hand part is one note under an octave; that of the left-hand part is an octave and a fourth. There is a spot in measure five where the two hands coincide on the same note, and a spot in measure nine where the left hand succeeds to the note that the right hand has just been holding. (These spots will feel different depending on whether you are playing the piece on one manual or on two.) 

The right-hand fingering can be worked out using the repeated notes as an anchor—bearing in mind what I have already mentioned about changing fingers on repeated notes. For example, if you play the first of the seven consecutive A’s starting in measure two with the second finger, and then alternate that with the third finger, the rest of the passage falls into place nicely. (This results in the first fourteen notes of the right-hand part fingered as: 2-4-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-3-2-4-3-2.) You should try a few different fingering possibilities, guided for the time being mainly by comfort and logistics.

The left hand is more complicated. You will have to spend more time working out fingerings, and you may want to change some of what you first work out as you practice it. This is, of course, normal and fine. If you have been practicing a passage with one fingering but want to change that fingering, it is necessary to back up and practice more slowly, focusing specifically on the notes where you have changed the fingering, and just a few notes before and after. Do not let fingering “change itself” at random as you practice. (To be honest, you will certainly do this later on when you have become more adept at playing and when the process of choosing fingering has become more ingrained and intuitive. But it is best not to let it happen for now.)

Take a look at the first four notes of the left hand. What fingers most naturally would play those notes? 4-3-2-4? 5-4-3-5? 3-2-1-3? Do these feel equally easy and comfortable? Does one fingering seem to create a more comfortable hand position than the others? Does one make it seem easier to go on to the next note than the others do? Or does one make it harder, while the other two seem about the same? What finger can most easily reach the middle D on the third beat of this measure? Is there more than one choice that might make sense? What about coming down from that D? 

Examples 2 and 3 are two fingering possibilities for the first part of this left-hand line. Can you devise another possibility that does not start on 4? Or that does not use 1 to play the fifth note of the line? Or that uses 1 for the first note of the second measure? Spend some time playing around with this. Try a number of fingerings a few times each. Don’t try to practice and learn each one—that comes when you have chosen one.

Later on in this left-hand part is a passage in which repeated notes occur not as groups of notes (as they do in mm. 3 and 4) but as part of moving lines. This creates interesting fingering choices, since every time that you change fingers from the first to the second note of a repeated-note pair you have a chance to reposition the hand. One possible fingering is shown in Example 4—you should try to find others.

Once you have thought about and explored the fingering of these passages and of the rest of the left-hand part, zero in on a small chunk of that line, say the first measure and a half, choose the fingering that you will learn, and begin to practice it. Practicing means repetition of the same thing done the same way, slowly and carefully, and many times in a row. As you break up a line such as this into sections for practicing and learning, bear in mind two important things: first, the increments must be small enough for the repetition to be meaningful; second, the increments should overlap or dovetail into one another, at least a little bit. The second of these is necessary to prevent the first of them from creating fragmentation or moments of insecurity in the passage. 

So, for example, if you start by practicing this left-hand part from the beginning through the middle beat of the second measure (middle D, quarter-note), then it is a good idea to begin your second increment for practicing with that same middle beat, or perhaps either two or four notes before that. The principle is that practice sections should overlap: the details should be worked out in each case in such a way that it feels natural. The exact extent of the overlap doesn’t matter. (This applies, by the way, equally to page turns. When you are working on a piece that requires a page turn, you must make sure that you do not always interrupt your practicing at the same spot. Either through brief bits of memorization or through the use of photocopying or something similar, you must practice across the page turn in a way that dovetails, so as not to create a moment of discontinuity.)

Start your practicing of any left-hand passage very slowly, so that it feels easy. Do not increase the tempo until 1) you have played the passage at least three times at the existing tempo and 2) the passage feels easy and natural at that tempo. Increase tempo a little bit at a time.

Once you have chosen fingering and practiced the same measure (or measure and a half) of each hand—remembering in this case that the left hand will require more attention and more repetition, and to practice each hand enough that it is really learned—then you are ready to put the two hands together. You will probably have to back the tempo up a bit from each hand’s separate tempo in the course of the individual practicing. (It is all right for the two hands to have reached different tempos in separate practicing, as long as you now slow things down to accommodate the extra complexity of putting both hands together.) The purpose of this exercise is to help you to become increasingly comfortable putting the two hands together. There is nothing to be gained by speed; there is a lot to be gained by good focus. 

In starting to put the hands together in a passage, make sure that you have reminded yourself in advance of the note on which each hand will start—especially if the two hands do not come in together. In the beginning of this piece, the right hand comes in well after the left hand, so you should be thinking ahead a little bit to avoid hesitation at that spot. 

(This discussion will be continued in next month’s column.)

Music in terrible times

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

—Leonard Bernstein

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany invaded Russia under the code name Operation Barbarossa, a plan that led to the Siege of Leningrad, the horrific isolation of a city of three million people. After systematically closing access routes to the city during the summer, the German army closed the last road into Leningrad on September 8, and during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in Leningrad (then known as St. Petersburg) in 1906 and established himself as an outspoken, provocative artist. In 1936, Joseph Stalin stormed out of the Bolshoi Theater after the third act of Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The next morning, the state newspaper, Pravda, wrote that Shostakovich was “playing a game” that “may end very badly.”¹

Shostakovich wrote the first two movements of his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad as the siege began. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia in October 1941, after all roads were closed, during a period when 650,000 civilians were evacuated, mostly by boat across Lake Ladoga or by ice road across the lake as winter set in. There, he completed the symphony on December 27, 1941, dedicating it to the city of Leningrad. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater in Kuibyshev performed the premiere on March 5, 1942. Arturo Toscanini led the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere in a radio broadcast on July 19.

The people of Leningrad first heard “their” symphony on August 9, 1942. The score and parts were flown into the city by a pilot, skimming above the surface of Lake Ladoga to avoid detection. The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, and there were only 15 players remaining in the orchestra of the city’s radio station, so the ensemble was filled out by musicians who were serving as active soldiers in the Russian army, released by their commanders for the occasion. 

I hadn’t thought much about Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony until last week when Wendy and I heard it performed in Carnegie Hall by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Six minutes into the opening Allegretto, when the muffled snare drum started a relentless ostinato and pizzicato violins introduced the seductive melody, I was on the edge of my seat. The oboe repeated the melody, echoed phrase by phrase by the clarinet, and the haunting tune repeated with ever increasing orchestration, ever more complex harmonizations, and ever expanding, even maniacal intensity until the orchestra reached a towering climax with all the thundering guns of the percussion section, and an astonishing closing statement of the theme by the bass brass, as powerful in that mighty orchestra as all the diaphonic fog horns the Coast Guard could muster from Maine to North Carolina.

We were dressed for a night at the symphony and seated on red velvet chairs in a box in the first balcony. The heat was on, the hall was comfortable, the lighting was perfect, and the legendary acoustics of Carnegie Hall brought every nuance of the complex score to every ear in the house. Each musician on the stage was playing a first-class instrument in perfect condition, and each was supported by a comfortable salary and pension plan. You could just tell that they had all practiced earlier in the day. And by the way, that was the first time I heard the BSO’s new conductor, Andris Nelsons. Wow! They should keep him.

It takes about 75 minutes to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The program book listed a huge orchestra, with a phalanx of percussion, and almost as a footnote, “additional brass group (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones).” Those bad boys and girls were seated in a long row, stage right, with the traditional brass section (3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba) seated stage left.

That first performance in Leningrad must have been a very different experience. If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

The performance was broadcast by radio, and over loudspeakers in public places. I bet that not one member of that audience was sitting on red velvet. I wonder if there’s a Syrian refugee at work on the score of the Aleppo Symphony.

A cathedral in ruins

On November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) dropped more than 36,000 bombs on the city of Coventry in Great Britain, killing more than 1,400 people. Hundreds of structures were destroyed, including St. Michael’s Cathedral. Besides the human loss and suffering, think of the cultural and historical loss. How many works of art, how many rare books, how many pipe organs were destroyed during that attack?

I was seven days old when Queen Elizabeth II laid the cornerstone for the new Coventry Cathedral on March 23, 1956, and the controversial contemporary structure was consecrated on May 25, 1962. Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a choral work for that occasion, with freedom to choose topic and content. Britten’s War Requiem comprises a combination of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems of the British poet, Wilfred Owen, who at the age of 25 was killed in action in the British army during World War I, seven days before the Armistice of 1918.

War Requiem is dedicated to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerly, David Gill, and Michael Halliday, all close friends of Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who were killed during World War II. Like Shostakovich’s Seventh, War Requiem is scored for a huge force of musicians, including full orchestra, chamber orchestra, four-part chorus, soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, a boy choir (at a distance) accompanied by a chamber organ or harmonium, and grand organ. It’s about five minutes longer than Shostakovich’s Seventh, and it rings with the deepest emotions.

Wilfred Owen became well known as a war poet posthumously. He was commander of a rifle brigade, and the poems that Britten chose to include in War Requiem were written in the field. Imagine the young man on a bedroll in a military camp, writing Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action:

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,

Great Gun towering toward heaven, about to curse;

Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse

Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!

Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,

And beat it down before its sins grow worse.

Spend our resentment, cannon, yea disperse

Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison

Must wither innocent of enmity,

Be not withdrawn, dark arm, the spoilure done,

Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.

But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,

May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul.

I had to look up some of the words. In English, there are many words for curse.

He plays like a German.

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937) is one of the towering figures of the pipe organ. He was born into a family of organbuilders in Lyon, France, and his earliest studies were with his father François-Charles, a church organist. The great French organbuilder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, a friend of the Widor family, encouraged young Charles-Marie to go to Belgium to study with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens at the Royal Brussels Conservatoire.

Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–1869) was a prominent French organist, known for his many compositions in “popular” style. I have enjoyed playing his music, especially programming the famous Sorties as rollicking larks, foils to more serious, meaty music. Cavaillé-Coll advocated Lefébure-Wély, arranging for him to play the dedication recitals of many of his prominent organs. It’s no accident that he was installed as organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in 1863, home to Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental magnum opus completed in 1860. But by that time, the young Widor was in Cavaillé-Coll’s sights as a young genius who represented the future of serious organ playing and composition, and Cavaillé-Coll apparently grew tired of Lefébure-Wély’s shallower antics, feeling that his huge and sophisticated organ was deserving of a more serious musician. Legend has it that Cavaillé-Coll made life miserable for Lefébure-Wély, even hinting that contributed to his death.

In the late 1860s, Paris was in a state of political tension as Prussia was on a tear toward German unification, and the French Empire of Napoleon III anticipated and feared that if the Prussians succeeded, the balance of power in Europe would be upset. Sure enough, on July 16, 1870, France declared war on Prussia, and three days later, the Germans invaded France.

With that political climate as background, Cavaillé-Coll championed the 26-year-old Widor to the rector at Saint-Sulpice, but Parisian organists, many of whom must have wanted a crack at the plum position, protested that Widor “plays like a German.”² That explains why the rector offered Widor a temporary position, feeling the weight of Cavaillé-Coll’s recommendation, but not making a full commitment. Widor started his legendary tenure in a France occupied by Germany. Marcel Dupré, in his memoir Recollections, shares Widor’s telling of presenting himself at the rectory when the year was up, hoping for an upgrade in his status. The rector simply wished him “Happy New Year,” so Widor assumed he should just keep playing—64 years as temporary organist!

Marcel Dupré succeeded Widor as organist at Saint-Sulpice in 1934. German troops marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, starting the occupation that lasted until 1944. In his memoir, Dupré wrote that as the occupation began, while many Parisians were fleeing the city, he and his wife Jeanne stayed at their home in Meudon, about 6½ miles from Paris. The city was deserted and transportation was stopped. For the first two Sundays, Marcel and Jeanne Dupré walked together back and forth to Saint-Sulpice: “Our fatigue was nothing compared to the joy we felt when we reached the organ, and I know that the parishioners still remaining in Paris found comfort when they heard it.”

A few days into the occupation, German officers visited Dupré’s home in Meudon, where there was a clear view of the entire city. The Germans intended to install anti-aircraft guns on the roof of Dupré’s salle d’orgue. When they saw the hall’s interior, they thought it was a chapel, but Jeanne Dupré told them that a musician worked in that room. The Germans reconsidered, and occupied the roof of the house next door, evicting the woman who lived there.³

A cold night at Stalag VIIIA

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was a soldier in the French army during the German invasion of 1940 when he was captured and taken to a German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, near the modern border between Germany and Poland. Fellow prisoners included the clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier, which explains the unusual instrumentation of Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), which Messiaen wrote after his arrival at Stalag VIIIA. Karl-Albert Brüll, a sympathetic guard, provided Messiaen with paper and pencil.

The premiere of the quartet was presented on January 15, 1941, in an unheated space in Barracks 27, using instruments that Brüll helped procure. The performance was announced with a flyer bearing an official stamp, “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft” (approved). There was an audience of about 400 prisoners, with German officers sitting in the front row.⁴

Messiaen’s deep Catholic faith was at the heart of the composition. In the preface to the score, he quoted from the Book of Revelations, Chapter 10:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire . . . and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth. . . . And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swore by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. . . .

The opening movement is titled Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). In the preface, Messiaen described the movement:

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane, and you have the harmonious silence of heaven.

Imagine the mix of emotions of prisoners of war, playing that new music on beat-up instruments in a frigid prison room, with their captors in the audience shivering among the other prisoners, the throng listening to music expressing the sadness, the rage, the pathos of war.

Just another gig

Have you ever felt that a gig was a nuisance? “Do I really have to play that wedding on Saturday or grind out another Sunday in the heart of Pentecost?” Is your phone sitting on the console on “silent” while you’re playing a service? Have you ever sent a text from the bench during a sermon? When I receive a text from an organist at 10:42 on a Sunday morning, letting me know that the swell shutters are squeaking, I know that his eyes are not on the road, and that his heart is not in church. 

I keep two artifacts in the top drawer of my bureau in our bedroom in Maine. One is a note I received 25 years ago from a soon-to-be bride. I had met with her and her fiancé a few evenings earlier to help them choose the music for their wedding. It’s a simple drugstore thank-you card, and the handwriting is childish (the transcription is verbatim):

Mr. Bishop, we wanted to thank you for such a nice night, we had picking out our music. You were so very nice, the way you helped us, pick out what we wanted. I’am sure our wedding day will sound beautiful, thank you again for you kindness. Steve and Ruth.

Maybe Steve and Ruth’s wedding was another go-round of Wagner, Mendelssohn, and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Did I think it was just another gig I had to finish? Doesn’t matter. It was important to them.

Music matters. Music is important. A bride and groom and a war-torn city have something in common. They can express themselves through music. If you think you’re a vendor providing music, standing in line for a check with limo drivers, florists, and caterers, you’re missing something. Anyone can wrap bacon around a scallop. You know how to play the organ. You’re providing a sacred art. It matters to people. You’re their voice.

So pretty

The second artifact in that bureau drawer is my draft card, dated April 15, 1974. The draft had ended in 1973, but the Selective Service issued numbers to all American men born in 1954, 1955, and 1956, in case the draft was extended. I had to report to Local Board No. 108 in the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (There’s a McDonald’s in that storefront now.)

In 1968, while war was raging in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, Leonard Bernstein wrote the song, So Pretty, with lyrics by Comden and Green for a fundraiser for Broadway for Peace, where it was premiered by Barbra Streisand, with Bernstein at the piano. A child is learning in school about a far-away place, wondering why the pretty people are dying. The teacher replies, “. . . they must die for peace. . . .”⁵ ν

Notes

1. Book review: “Leningrad: Siege and Symphony,” The Washington Post, Peter Finn, October 3, 2014, quoting from the book by Brian Moynahan.

2. That story was told to me by Daniel Roth, current organist at St. Sulpice, as we walked together up Park Avenue in New York after he played a recital at the Church of the Resurrection. 

3. Marcel Dupré, Recollections, page 107, Belwin-Mills, 1972.

4. Alex Ross, “Revelations: The Story behind Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time,’” The New Yorker, March 22, 2004.

5. You can read the lyrics of So Pretty here: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=7245&lang=en, and hear Deborah Voight singing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYlwwRmv8c.