On Teaching

Gavin Black is 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 <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part III

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1

In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.

Gavin Black is 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 <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching—Part II
In last month’s column, I emphasized the usefulness of starting off the teaching of registration with a clear explanation of the meaning of the foot-designation of organ stops and with a set of demonstrations of that meaning. This is a necessary foundation for understanding everything about combining stops and about choosing organ sounds for music. Once a student clearly understands the meaning of all the numbers on the stop knobs, it is time for that student to begin exploring the art of combining stops. This starts with developing an awareness of what the stop pitch levels imply about the structure of stop combinations, and continues with the development of an ear for the aesthetic nature of different sounds, and then with the acquisition of knowledge about registration practices in different schools of organ composition or in the work of specific composers.
The concept that it is OK to combine stops that are not at the same pitch level as one another, and that the resulting sound will be (or at least can be) a coherent musical sound at a coherent pitch level, is not self-evident. In fact, it is counterintuitive to most people who have not already become well versed in organ registration. It seems, if anything, self-evident that this kind of mixing will result in obvious parallel octaves and fifths, and also in a generalized jumble of pitches, which would at a minimum make clarity impossible (because notes that you play in the tenor register, for example, would produce pitches proper to the treble register, etc.). Since the blending of stops at different pitch levels in fact can work the way it does because of the overtone series, it is useful to explain something about overtones to students. It is certainly not necessary to go into all of the scientific details—the physics of the creation of overtones, the reasons for inharmonicity of overtones in certain situations, or even what the notes of the overtone series are, above the first few. However, it is a good idea to review the basics:
1) Almost all musical sounds produced acoustically have many frequencies blended together. (It usually takes a computer to produce a sound at exactly one frequency.)
2) These frequencies are (usually) a) a given frequency and b) other frequencies that are multiples of that first frequency. (Of course we use the lowest frequency to identify the note, as in “A 440.”)
3) These multiples produce sounds that are related to the lowest frequency by common musical intervals: octave, octave-and-a-fifth, two octaves, two-octaves-and-a-third, etc.
On most organs it is possible to find individual notes on some stops in which some specific overtones can be heard as separate pitches. These can be used to demonstrate the existence of overtones and the pitch levels of some of them. Gedeckts, flutes, and quintadenas are often the most fruitful for this, and notes in the octave and a half or so below middle c are the most promising, because they are the easiest to hear. Usually it is possible to find a pipe or two in which the twelfth is clear (quiet, perhaps, but clear), others in which the seventeenth is, and others in which the octaves are. To someone who has never tried to listen to overtones before, these sounds are usually hard to hear at first, but then suddenly “come in.” The teacher can help with this, first by making sure to zero in on the pipes with the clearest individual overtones, and then by briefly playing, singing, or whistling the actual note corresponding to the overtone that you wish to help the student to hear. This will attune the student’s expectation to that pitch, and it will probably only be necessary for the first few notes.
(A further exercise in listening to overtones is this: play a simple melody on one stop. Try to hear and follow the counter-melody created by the clearest and most noticeable overtones. For example, consider the notes of the fugue subject of Bach’s E-flat major fugue:
b-flat – g – c – b-flat –
e-flat – e-flat – d – e-flat
Depending on what the overtones of each pipe happen to be doing, a counter melody could arise that went like this:
d – d – g – d – g – g – f# – g
or that went like this:
f – b – e – f – b-flat –
b-flat – f# – b-flat
or any number of other possibilities. It will be different for each different stop on which you play the melody. The “extra” melody will be quiet, and usually it will range from one to three octaves above the “official” melody. It is quite possible that these inherent counter-melodies are one source of the human invention of counterpoint. This is all a bit of a detour from learning techniques of registration as such, but it is a useful exercise both for learning to listen carefully to sound and for remembering that sounds themselves are complex and interesting, often doing more than we might at first expect.)
Once a student understands the basic concept of overtones (and believes in them!), it is easy for him or her to understand the blending of stops of different pitches: a 4? stop blends with and reinforces the first upper partial of an 8? stop, a 22?3? stop the second upper partial, a 2? stop the third, etc. One advantage of going through all of this quite systematically is that it answers the question of how in the world it can make sense to combine stops that don’t even produce the same letter-name notes as one another. This is certainly the thing that seems the least intuitive and the most questionable about registration to many of those who are not yet experienced with the organ.
(This can be true especially if someone stops to think about all of the pitches that are present in a thick texture. For example, a G-major 7th chord played on a registration that includes a 22?3? stop includes the pitches g, a, b, c, d, f, f#. If you throw in a tierce you add a d#. That this would be acceptable makes a lot more sense if you know that all of those “extra” pitches are present anyway as overtones.)
So the most basic description of the structure of the art of combining organ stops, and the most useful as a starting point, goes something like this: that, as long as you have one or more 8? stops present in your combination of stops, anything and everything higher than 8? pitch has the potential to blend with the 8? sound. In so doing, it will change the nature of the sound by changing the overall balance of the overtones, and by changing the volume, but it will not upset the pitch identification of the notes that you play.
A simple exercise to demonstrate this would be as follows:
1) choose a keyboard that has more than one 8? stop and several higher-pitched stops.
2) draw the louder (loudest) 8? stop.
3) play a simple passage—a chord progression or a bit of a hymn is good—adding and taking away various 4? and higher stops at random.
4) after a while, remove the 8? stop. The student will hear the music suddenly jump up in pitch.
5) repeat all of this with a softer 8? stop.
Anyone performing or listening to this exercise will certainly notice that not all of the combinations work equally well. Some of the sounds that could blend in theory will not seem to blend very well in practice, perhaps because a 4? or higher stop is too loud or too bright (or for that matter out of tune) or because a given 8? stop is too thin or weak or has something about its intrinsic overtone development that conflicts with rather than supports the addition of higher-pitched stops. These considerations are extremely important. They are also subjective and in the end belong to the realm of artistic judgment or discretion. A student listening to or trying out this exercise should be encouraged to notice aesthetic aspects of each sound. However, the main point for the moment is that the dropping of the 8? pitch makes a sound that is utterly different in kind from the adding or dropping of any higher-pitched stops.
Of course, it might occur to a student, or a teacher might want to mention for completeness if nothing else, that it is perfectly possible to use sounds that omit 8? stops, for some special reason or in some special way. The simplest of these is the use of a 4? or higher sound to play the music at an octave or more higher than the written pitch. Also fairly common is the use of a non-8? registration accompanied by the moving of the hands to a different position on the keyboard to bring the pitch in line with original expectations. These are useful things to bear in mind as a performing organist, but they are special cases that can best be thought about at a slightly later stage in learning, and that should certainly not distract a student from developing the most thorough possible understanding of “normal” stop combination and registration. The same can be said about the use of 16? sound in multi-voiced or chordal manual playing. This, in theory, just transposes the music down an octave, but often doesn’t—for some psychoacoustic or just plain acoustic reasons—quite sound like that.
So far we have developed a rather scientific approach—perhaps too scientific for some people’s taste—to the teaching or learning of registration. We have asked students to think very clearly about the pitch designations of stops, about overtones, about what overtones imply about the use of different pitches of stops, and about how to make sure that a sound is grounded in unison pitch. We have not yet talked about either how to choose registrations that “sound good” (or “beautiful” or “appropriate” or anything else) or about how to respect composers’ wishes or any other way to tailor sounds to pieces. We have also barely mentioned stop names, or even names of important categories of stops, diapasons, flutes, reeds, and so on. Nor have we mentioned any rules or even ideas about how or whether to combine stops of different types, or for that matter of the same type.
Organs have lots and lots of sounds. For example, by my calculations, allowing only for sounds that include 8? pitch and leaving cornets and “céleste” stops out of any ensemble, but taking into account couplers, the Grand Orgue of the Mander organ at St. Ignatius Loyola in New York—a well-known, recent, large but not gargantuan organ—commands 121,889,158,594,564 different sounds. A hypothetical medium-sized organ in which three manuals have 25 to 30 stops would have about 200 million to about a billion 8?-based sounds available in the manual divisions. If the pedal division of such an organ had eight stops, then, assuming normal couplers, the pedals would have a quarter of a trillion different sounds available.
Harpsichords, on the other hand, have rather few sounds. Most large harpsichords have seven to ten different available sonorities all together. Many very fine and versatile harpsichords have only three. In planning registration for a piece on the harpsichord, it is always possible to use what I consider to be the soundest and most artistically thorough approach: simply trying the piece out on every possible sound, listening carefully and with attention, and deciding which sound you like best.
This approach is almost always impossible on the organ. It is always impossible on any organ but the very smallest. However, it seems to me that it is still—albeit only in an underlying theoretical way—the best approach, and the right concept to have in the back of one’s mind when working out registrations. That this is true can, I think, be almost proven logically. If you are using a given registration, whether it comes from an editor, or from your teacher, or from something that you jotted down in your copy years before, or from any other source, but there is in fact a different registration that you would like better if only you heard it, then you should in theory be using that other registration. Therefore, ideally, one would always hear every registration before making a final choice.
(I am not right now dealing with the extra-musical quasi-ethical considerations of authenticity that arise when a specific registration comes from the composer. I will address that at least briefly next month.)
The purpose of taking a student very systematically through what I described above as a scientific approach to the technique of registration—the feet, the overtones, the combinations at different pitch levels—is to allow the student then to feel free to try anything and everything (again, knowing that there won’t really be time for everything!) without fear of doing something that really, in some concrete way, doesn’t and can’t work. This will enable the student to be relatively independent of outside guidelines, and increase the chance that the student will contribute something new and interesting to the world of the organ. It will also almost certainly provide the student with a great measure of out-and-out fun, and keep the job of practicing as interesting as it can be.
Next month I will talk about ways to practice listening to the more subjective, sound-quality-oriented aspects of the blending and combining of stops. I will also talk about helping students to begin to relate sound to other aspects of their concept of a piece of music, and to both structural and historical considerations.?

Gavin Black is 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 <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Registration and teaching, part I
I was first drawn to organ and harpsichord back in the late ’60s—not too long after I turned ten—by the sonorities of those instruments. I remember being particularly entranced by the reed sound that E. Power Biggs used for the fugue subject in his recording of the shorter Bach Prelude and Fugue in c minor on the Schnitger organ at Zwolle. Later I discovered the sounds of the small organ at St. Jakobi Church in Lübeck as recorded in 1947 by Helmut Walcha, and the sound of the so-called Ahaus Ruckers harpsichord, recorded, in music of Froberger among others, by Gustav Leonhardt. Later still I was captivated by the sounds of Messiaen’s Cavaillé-Coll organ at La Trinité through the composer’s own recordings there. In all of these cases and many others, it was the sounds themselves that most interested me, not the repertoire or the performances. A desire to be involved more and more closely with these sounds was the first and most essential reason that I decided to study organ and harpsichord and later to make a career out of those instruments. Of course an interest in much of the repertoire, in the act of performance itself, and, especially, in teaching, followed fairly quickly. But it was the sounds that got me hooked.
I think that this is a fairly common experience among people who end up studying organ or harpsichord. All of the many rather different instruments that have been accepted as “organs” over several centuries, and all harpsichords and harpsichord-like instruments, have in common that the actual sonorities are determined in advance of any playing of the instrument. These sounds are created by the combined work of builders, metalworkers, voicers, tuners, acousticians, and so on. The player can make only very subtle changes in the sound itself, if any, while playing. Therefore, it has always been important that builders create sounds that are in some way compelling, beautiful, interesting, even perhaps disturbing, but in any case worth hearing—important in and of themselves to someone who hears them. So it is natural that these sounds would form a large part of the reason that some people become interested in these instruments.
This has implications for the teaching of registration, or, more accurately and more interestingly, for the interaction between registration and teaching. For most students, the sonorities of the instrument are a source of fun and interest. Therefore the whole business of trying out sounds and getting to know sounds can be fun, can be highly interesting, and can both relieve and enliven the painstaking, difficult work of becoming more adept at the technical side of playing. The practicing of any simple—and therefore potentially tedious—exercise can be made more interesting or even very interesting by also using it as an opportunity to pay attention to the sound and to try out different sounds. The difficult and intense practicing of difficult and intense passages can be leavened by occasional breaks during which the student uses any easier or more accessible musical material—simple or already-learned passages, scales and chords, folk songs, improvisation, whatever—to try out different sounds, and to listen to those sounds carefully. And even a beginning student can learn right away to make registration choices that are interesting and appropriate for the music and the situation, and that, often, are different from the choices that the teacher or any other player would have made. This can be a source of encouragement and can help to create a feeling of connectedness to the real art of music making.
This column and next month’s will consist mostly of suggestions for ways of introducing students to the art of registration: that is, explaining to them what it is, demystifying it as much as possible, offering them ways of exploring and practicing it, and helping them to relate sounds to particular kinds of music and particular pieces. It is very important that students be given a way to learn registration from within, that is, by understanding how it works, and not just through formulas or (even very sound) principles. Only in this way will students learn to be able to create registrations on their own. Also, only this way will they be able to understand registration formulas or suggested registrations that they might encounter, and to be able to figure out when to apply such things and when to modify or ignore them. These suggestions are aimed in the first instance at students who are beginners or who are at least fairly new to the organ. However, some of the ideas should also be helpful to more experienced students who happen, for any reason, to feel uncomfortable with their approach to registration or who want to rethink it or perhaps simplify it a bit.
Registration is simply the act of choosing stops—choosing sounds—for pieces or passages of music. If there are no stops drawn, the music will not be of much use to the listeners: it will be silent. This is something that can be said more or less as a joke, but indeed some students come to the organ not quite realizing it. (After all, we are not born knowing something that seems so basic to practicing organists!) In choosing what particular stops to use in a given situation, we normally take into account at least some of the following:
1) What the sound is like subjectively—loud, soft, dark, bright, smooth, clear, reedy, warm, piercing, hollow, thick, thin, haunting, and so on—and how this relates to our sense, again subjective, of what the piece is like or should be like. (Everyone uses adjectives differently, however. They are useful for listing the kinds of qualities that a sound might have. They are also useful for helping one person, in his or her own mind, to characterize and remember what a sound is like. They are normally not particularly useful in conveying a sense of what a sound is like from one person to another.)
2) How loud or soft the sound is in relation to other things that are going on. In particular, how two sounds balance when they are being used together (i.e., in a two-manual or manual and pedal piece) or when they follow one another, as in sections of a piece or verses of a hymn; also, if it’s relevant, how the volume of sound relates to things beyond the organ, such as singers or other instruments. All of these considerations are more objective than those in 1), but not entirely so except at the extremes when one sound actually threatens to drown out another.
3) What is known, if anything, about composers’ intentions. This can range from a general sense of what kind of instrument a composer knew—or even just what was prevalent in a given composer’s era and approximate geographic area—to precise, meaningful, and specific registration instructions from a composer about registration. Some of the data in this area is essentially objective or even beyond dispute. However, its application to a given situation often requires flexibility and judgment, as when a particular organ doesn’t have the stops specifically suggested by the composer, or when the acoustics of the room, or the specific sound qualities of stops with a particular name are different from what a composer knew. (This is the case more often than not.) Also non-objective and subject to different philosophies and judgments is the basic question of whether and how much it matters what a composer wanted or expected.
Registration is the art of choosing sounds, and, on the organ and the harpsichord, most available sounds are combinations of other sounds. (This, again, is something so basic that an experienced player might not notice that it is not self-evident to a beginner.) The first step in learning how to combine sounds is developing a sense of what the sounds are like on their own. I tend to define a “stop” to a new student as “a set of pipes, one per key, all of which make more or less the same sound as one another, and each of which plays the right note for its key.” (This is just a starting point. Mixtures can be explained separately, perhaps simply as several stops that are operated by one control for convenience and that function as one sound. The technicalities of breaks and changing numbers of ranks can certainly be discussed with a student who is eager to understand such things, but that can wait, since it is not necessary to know this in order to learn how to begin to use them in stop combinations.)
Each stop typically has two parts to the label that describes it: a number and a word. The number—8', 4', etc.—is one of the very few things in the world of the arts that has a clear meaning that never changes and is not subject to interpretation. However, as with some of the other basic points that I have mentioned above, students often don’t know what that meaning is. In fact, if you ask a beginning student what those numbers mean, he or she will more often than not say “Isn’t it something about how long the pipes are?” (I certainly mean no criticism of those students! No one knows something that they haven’t yet learned. My point is just that it is easy for us to take it for granted that everyone would know something that seems so basic to an experienced organist.) So it is important to start by explaining very simply what the numbers mean: 8' means “at unison pitch,” 4' means “an octave above unison pitch,” and so on. It is a good idea to demonstrate that every 4' stop is at the same pitch as every other—though the sounds may be very different—and the same for 2 2/3', 16', and all the other numbers/pitch-levels. I would suggest doing this with something like the following routine:
Draw two stops, on two different keyboards. One should be an 8' stop, the other a 4', and they should be as similar as possible in tone. Play two keys, one on each keyboard and thus one on each of the two stops, which are ostensibly the same note. (They should be near the middle of the keyboard, middle c or close.) Invite the student to hear that these notes are clearly an octave apart. Make sure that the student really gets this: the concept of an octave, especially when listening to a new kind of sound, can be elusive. (The first time that I ever tried to tune a harpsichord, I broke several 4' strings because I was trying to tune them an octave high! I just couldn’t hear the octave placement of the notes amongst all the strong harmonics of the bright sound.) This should be repeated with several different “8', 4', similar sound” pairs, and also 4', 2' pairs. Then, with the same various pairs of stops, demonstrate that (for example) the f below middle c on the 4' stop and the f above middle c on the 8' stop are clearly the same pitch, and so on with other appropriate pairs of stops, or that the scale from tenor c to middle c on the 4' stop is clearly at the same pitch as the scale going up from middle c on the 8' stop.
Next, draw pairs of 8' stops that are noticeably different in tone: a gedeckt on one keyboard, an oboe on another, for example, or anything like that. Then compare notes from one to the other, making sure that the student hears that in this instance keys that ostensibly represent the same note actually produce the same pitch. This can be done with single notes—again starting around the middle of the keyboard since that region is the easiest to hear—then with short scale passages and perhaps chord progressions. Then the same sort of comparison can be done with 4'stops and so on, even including mutations, if there are multiple examples of the same ones on the particular instrument.
This procedure is very simple and may even seem simplistic. Again, however, I want to emphasize that these things are not known to beginners. They are also not always absolutely clear even to people who have sat at a console and done some organ playing, but have not yet had any systematic study. It is not uncommon, for example, for someone to know by experience that a 2' stop is kind of bright, but not to know anything about the stop’s pitch level, or about how the brightness is achieved. An unshakably clear grasp of the meaning of the pitch designations is the first step in understanding how organ stops can be fruitfully combined with one another: that is, really understanding it in a way that permits one to do it without formulas and without assistance, on a familiar or an unfamiliar instrument. We will move on to this in next month’s column.

Organ Method XXI

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com.

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Thoughts on teaching
interpretation
Interpretation is fascinating from many points of view. These include the relationship between interpretation and technique, how different approaches to the problems of authenticity affect interpretive choices, the history of different interpretive schools, the many elements of interpretive choices—tempo, registration, phrasing, articulation, rhythm, rubato and agogic accentuation or the relative lack thereof, and more—and in general, the strange phenomenon of how different performances of exactly the same notes can be.
With organ music in particular, interpretation begins with the choice of instrument and the venue—in effect, this is the beginning of the registration process. Sometimes—most of the time for most of us, in fact—the choice of venue and organ comes first. This part of the interpretive process is turned upside down: we choose music that suits the instrument and/or the room, or we make decisions about how much we feel that the music needs to be an exact fit for the situation or how much we can bend and stretch and compromise. This is all part of the interpretive process, and it shares with the rest of that process the fact that different players approach it quite differently from one another.

Conveying interpretation
to students
For teachers, primary questions about interpretation or interpretive stance are joined by questions about how to introduce students to matters of interpretation. These questions start with the over-riding one: whether or not a teacher should hope or expect or even insist that his or her students take a similar interpretive approach to that of the teacher. It often seems almost routine to do so. In listening either to established or to up-and-coming players, we often expect to be able to tell who studied with whom based on what the student’s interpretations are like. However, it is by no means clear that this is necessary or good. I will suggest below that teachers can be very happy with a wide variety of interpretive approaches on the part of their students. Another question might be put like this: if a teacher will not tell a student how to interpret and perform a piece—or a type of repertoire or repertoire in general—then how can that teacher help the student work out an interpretation of that repertoire, or how can the teacher help the student become a vivid and convincing interpreter of music in general? Yet another question is what sort of approach to interpretation to expect from students of different ages or levels of skill or experience. An intriguing question, to me, is this: does it matter whether or not a performance that a student gives is effective interpretively—or appeals to any particular listener’s taste—at the moment the performance is given, or is it more important that the performance be part of the long-term learning process? These two things are not always incompatible with each other, of course, but they are different, and they might suggest different kinds of input from the teacher. That is, if it is important that a given performance by a student be effective interpretively in a certain way, then it might be necessary for the teacher to coach the student in that way of playing the piece. If the goal of learning to perform a particular piece is geared only to the student’s longer-term development, then it might be better to allow the student to experiment, try things, listen, and learn, even if along the way this results in a performance that the teacher, other listeners, or perhaps even the student looking back on it later won’t like.
The question of whether a teacher should want his or her students to end up—as mature performers—playing the way the teacher does, that is, with respect to interpretive choices and overall interpretive stance, is philosophical. (I assume that every teacher wants his or her students to be as competent technically and as masterful in performance as that student can possibly be, whether that is more than the teacher, the same, or less.) Why is the teacher teaching? What does he or she consider important about music, about organ playing for church or for concert? What kind of contribution does the teacher want to make to the history of the organ over the next few decades or beyond, and does that contribution depend on nurturing a particular style of performance or approach to interpretation? Does the teacher feel that students represent the teacher: that colleagues, audiences, and possible future students will judge the teacher based on how existing students play—not, again, with respect to competence or mastery, but with respect to interpretation? If so, is this appropriate, or is it placing a responsibility on the students that is burdensome?
These are questions that every teacher must answer for himself or herself—or, perhaps more importantly, must ask and think about. The answers may change over time, and the questions may be supplemented by others—other ways of looking at it. I myself long ago came to feel that I don’t care at all what my students end up doing interpretively, as long as they feel that the act of playing music and making choices is satisfying to them. This is largely a matter of philosophy, and I don’t feel that it is necessarily the right way for every teacher to look at it. I also honestly don’t know what it says about other dimensions of my underlying attitude. Do I feel this way out of modesty—“my way is no better than other ways”—or something quite the opposite—“my way is so special that you need not even attempt it”—or selfishness—“it would be better if my students played like me, but I will withhold the information that they would need to achieve that”—or fear—“if I teach my students how to play like me they will do it better than I do, and render me superfluous”—or all of the above or none of the above? I am, in general, inordinately in favor of people thinking for themselves: my students, other players, other teachers, everyone—not just about music, but most definitely including music.
The more a teacher believes that his or her approach to interpretive matter is based on objective truth, the more likely it is that the teacher will want to try to pass that approach on to students. And, as a subset of that, we all have an obligation to pass on to our students anything that we honestly believe to be true—objectively true or likely to be so. A substantial amount of what falls into this category is information related to composers’ intentions or performance practices. I wrote at length about “authenticity” in my column of April 2010. In a sense, the principal thing is this: the most thorough knowledge about composers’ intentions and the circumstances of the composition and initial performances of a piece places surprisingly few limits on interpretive choice. That is, such knowledge may change the direction or nature of interpretive choices, but it does not effectively narrow the range of choice or tend to make different performances more similar to one another. This is like a comparison of infinities: the set of all possible performances of a piece is infinite; the set of all performances that respect whatever is known about the composer’s fingering and pedaling practices, tempo preferences, registration techniques, etc., is also infinite.
Analysis—contrapuntal, harmonic, or other theoretical analysis—can be another source of a feeling on the part of teachers that we have something objective to share with our students that might affect performance. Again, I think that it is very important to share such things with students, and I believe that this can be done in such a way as not to limit choices. For example, it is one thing to notice fugue subjects or other recurrent themes. (As I have written more than once, I believe that noticing anything that happens more than once is an extremely important and efficient tool for learning pieces.) However, it is something else entirely to move from noticing such things to reaching any hard and fast conclusions about what our analysis tells us to do in performance. (Again, comparative infinities: the set of possible performances by a player who has analyzed a piece for counterpoint and harmony is infinite, as is the set of possible performances by a performer who has not paid any explicit attention to those things.) As soon as we cross over into saying to a student something like: “of course you must phrase the subject the same way every time it comes in,” we have left the realm of the objective. This is one way of looking at it; however, it would also be possible to argue that the “sameness” of a theme from one instance of it to another lies in the notes themselves, and that phrasing and articulation of that theme can reasonably vary with the context. My point here is not to resolve a question like that, but just to suggest that we should all be as clear as possible as to what is neutral and objective and what reflects our own habits or biases. It is wonderful to share all of this with our students, but only if we are clear ourselves and candid with them about what we are sharing.

A sample interpretation
Many teachers who share my feeling that they do not aspire to have their students end up playing in their (the teacher’s) style still feel that the best way to teach interpretation is to ask the student to copy—more or less—the teacher’s performance for the time being and then to evolve later on from that to their own style and approach. This makes sense based on the notion that an inexperienced player—a student, especially a beginning student—does not yet have a basis of knowledge for shaping interpretations. This approach is also based on the idea that the best way to learn to think about performance and interpretation is to have the experience of doing something effective, and then either to react against it or to embrace it—or some mixture—later on, on the basis of other experiences and increasing knowledge.
In fact this is probably the most common approach and attitude, and most of those who expect their students to copy the teacher’s interpretive ideas also fully expect those students to move on from those ideas later on. I imagine that any approach to teaching interpretation has to include at least a dose of direct suggestion from the teacher to the students. Even when those suggestions are less than direct, they are not entirely absent. I myself have never said to a student “you should phrase this subject this way” or “play this eighth-note line detached.” However, when I invite students to play contrapuntal voices separately and in pairs, or to play a line omitting the unaccented notes, or to listen for the bloom in harpsichord sound when shaping a melody or a bass line, or to change fingers on repeated notes, or indeed just to play with a light touch, I am moving the student away from some interpretive possibilities and towards others.
My own reluctance to suggest—let alone require—specific interpretive choices stems from a feeling that such suggestions from a teacher have a tendency to have too great a weight of authority. We may honestly want our students to move beyond those suggestions, but the weight can be harder to shake off than we expect it to be. The whole dynamic of accepting, rejecting, debating, and evaluating the specifics of what we were told to do by (especially) an admired teacher can be a distraction for years or decades. Of course, every teacher has to become comfortable with his or her own approach to these things. My specific advice is just this: be open to the possibility of suggesting less and letting the students explore more, and make suggestions, when you make them, as lightly and informally as you can, consistent with getting the point across.
Here are a few suggestions for helping students to think about interpretation and learn about the effects of different interpretive choices.
1) Especially for beginning students, but also for any student who is not yet very familiar with a particular kind of repertoire, play something for the student two different ways, and ask simply which he or she likes better. With a line—recurring motive or not—the two ways will probably be two different phrasings or articulation patterns. In a full-textured passage, the differences might be of tempo or registration or again articulation or perhaps arpeggiation or something about rubato or timing. The differences should be noticeable but not a caricature, and the student should listen carefully, and then feel absolutely free to choose whichever he or she prefers.
2) Invite students to listen not just to what different interpretive decisions are like, but also to what they do. For example, does a line in an inner voice become easier to hear if it is articulated one way rather than another? Does it become easier to keep a sixteenth-note line steady if the accompanying chords are articulated one way rather than another or registered one way rather than another? Does a bit of rubato make a passage sound softer, or more suspenseful, or just static?
3) Ask students to listen—carefully—to at least six different performances of whatever they are working on. (Important note: listening to one performance is risky. It tends to lead to subconscious mimicking of that performance, which can then have the same difficult-to-shake weight of authority—perhaps for life—that performance suggestions from a teacher can have.) This listening can focus on a passage rather than a whole piece. Sometimes ask the student to write down anything they can think of to say about each performance, but sometimes don’t, so that the balance between pleasure and work remains healthy.
4) Ask the student to listen to a large number of performances of a short passage, paying very careful attention to something specific. For example, how do a dozen different players treat the rests between the several phrases on the first page of the Bach d-minor Toccata? How do several different performers treat the timing of the manual notes in the first sixteen measures of the Franck b-minor Choral? (I once, many years ago, sat with the great Canadian teacher and performer Mireille Lagacé, listening to the way that several different harpsichordists handled the transition from the first half to the second half of Variation 16 of the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting and rewarding.)
With items 3) and 4) it can be valuable to suggest that several students do these things together and discuss what they hear. Of course, nowadays it is easy to find many performances to listen to of just about anything. As I am writing this, YouTube has over 7,000 performances of the Bach d-minor Toccata, but also several performances of each of a few less famous pieces for which I searched. This changes all the time. 

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at

Repertoire, part 2
Last month’s column was in large part an argument in favor of letting students work on whatever music they want to work on: that is, not believing that it is necessary for a student’s development that he or she work on any particular piece or pieces, or on any particular subset of the repertoire. I base this belief on several things: the large size and great diversity of the repertoire; the fact that any student works better—and any performer, no matter how accomplished, plays better—when he or she really likes and cares about the music involved; and that it is better—more interesting—for the world as a whole if organists learn and play as wide a variety of pieces as possible, rather than all focusing on a narrow “standard” repertoire.
This month I want to address some ways of implementing this philosophy. Letting students work on the music that they really want to work on does not, of course, mean just coming to lessons with no ideas about repertoire: just shrugging the shoulders and saying “work on whatever you want.” That would be abdicating our responsibility to help students find out what it is that they might like or want to work on. The point is to figure out how much help each student needs in exploring the repertoire, and then to offer that help in a way that is maximally helpful and minimally coercive. That way we will never lose the advantages created by the student’s own intense involvement with the music.

Determining what to study
It can be very productive to start the first session with a new student by asking a question more or less like this: “why are you interested in studying organ right now?” Many students will talk about the instrument as such, perhaps their love for organ sound. Some will also talk about something in their life experience, maybe some involvement with the church or with church music. But most will also talk about repertoire. They will say that they have always loved Bach, or Baroque music, or that they are fascinated by French Romantic or twentieth-century music. I have had students, at this early stage, mention something very specific and unusual: Messiaen, for example, or Rorem, or the Couperin organ Masses.
If this question does not evoke any response about repertoire, then it is a good idea to ask more specific, targeted questions: What music have you worked on in the last couple of years (for existing organists)? What organ music have you heard that you like (for new organists)? What non-organ music have you played by organ composers? What music do you like to listen to? Have you worked on any pieces that you found frustrating? Why were they frustrating (if you know)? One of the most fruitful questions of all is “What piece is it your dream to work on?” Or, to put it another way, “What piece would you love to work on right now, but you assume that it is too hard?”
These are all questions that can, of course, be asked and explored at any time, not just at the first lesson. Such a discussion will tell the teacher a lot about the student’s relationship to the repertoire and will give the teacher specific answers to specific questions: what music the student likes, already knows about, is interested in. It can be even more important, though, for the teacher to read between the lines. Does the student have strong opinions about music? Does he or she already know and talk about a wide range of repertoire? Has the student listened to or studied any non-keyboard music by organ composers? These are all things that can help a teacher make good judgments about how much guidance a particular student will need in looking for music, how much prodding and suggesting might be necessary, or, on the other hand, how much the student can be expected to use his or her own initiative. There are clues to look for beneath the surface. For example, if the student talks about a composer and you mention a related composer (Vierne to the student’s Widor, or Buxtehude to the student’s Bach—or vice versa) does the student respond with recognition or not? Does that conversation develop naturally or does it—without a lot of teacher input—just fizzle out? Does the student know about the relationships between different kinds of organs and different kinds of repertoire? Perhaps the most important thing to look for is this: that which makes the student look animated, happy, excited, involved.
It is not possible to say specifically and in advance exactly what a teacher can learn or will conclude from these conversations. In some cases, nothing will come of all of this except that the student and teacher will get to know one another better—always a good thing. Sometimes the teacher will both learn what music the student likes and begin to form a sense of how to get the student interested in other music. The point is to start the conversation, pay close attention, and see where it leads.
The two practical issues that are of most concern regarding letting students themselves decide what to work on are, first of all, the problem of pieces that are too hard, and, second, the teacher’s responsibility to help (or perhaps even force!) the student to become well-rounded.

Issue: What is too hard?
A friend of mine went, sometime around 1980, for her first meeting with an eminent harpsichord teacher with whom she was planning to study. Near the beginning of the lesson he asked her “What would you really like to work on?” Her response was “Well, of course the Goldberg Variations, but I’m not ready for that, maybe never will be, it’s so hard, imposing, virtuosic, etc., etc.” And his reply to this was “Put it up on the music desk—of course you should work on it now!” Her morale and her level of interest and commitment shot up through the roof right away. She reported on this glowingly, to me and to others. This was what first convinced me that it was important for a student to love the music that he or she was working on. It also impressed me a lot that an experienced teacher was not afraid to encourage a new student to reach for something very challenging indeed.
However, the question still is: what is and what isn’t too hard? Of course it makes sense that any student should, in some sense, work on pieces that are of an appropriate level of difficulty. That is, pieces that are somewhat challenging—that stretch the student’s abilities out, that teach something new—but that don’t create discouragement by being so hard that the feedback they give is only negative. If a student has no very particular ideas about what music he or she wants to work on, then the teacher is free to take level of difficulty into account in helping the student choose pieces. For a new student, the judgment about this matter can arise in part out of the kind of discussion described above. For an existing student, the teacher will already have knowledge and context to go on.
Sometimes, however, a student suggests some music that the teacher suspects might be so difficult or so complex that working on it would be at best unproductive and at worst actually damaging. There are several ways to deal with this. One way, of course, is to tell the student that the particular piece is inappropriate and should be postponed. In spite of my emphasis on letting students work on the music that they want to work on, I don’t believe that this is necessarily always wrong. To begin with, there is certainly no reason not to tell the student what you are thinking and to discuss it. If it honestly appears to you, after this discussion, that your student would be just as happy working on something else—perhaps something easier but musically similar to the original piece—then there is nothing wrong with proceeding that way. (However, it is important to remember that many students are reluctant to disagree [openly] with what the teacher suggests, and that most students will hide it if they are disappointed or discouraged. You as a teacher should require a fair amount of convincing that it is really all right with your student not to work on whatever it is that the student has brought in. You should not assume or accept this too readily.) If you are convinced that a piece is categorically too hard—regardless of how the student feels about it and taking into account some of the suggestions below—then it is important to explain to the student why the piece is not right, what you and he or she can work on to get ready for that piece, and, if possible, how long that is likely to take.
If you and your student decide to go ahead with a piece that seems, on paper, too hard, then there are several ways to structure the work on that piece to make it indeed fruitful and appropriate. The first thing to do is to make sure that the student understands that a too-hard piece has to be allowed to take time. That is, in exchange for working on a difficult piece, the student must be willing to be patient, to work hard, and to plan on not getting discouraged or bored if this one piece stretches out for months or longer. (My experience is that any number of months spent working well on one difficult piece will advance the student’s overall abilities at least as much as the same time spent working on several easier pieces. I don’t have any trouble reassuring students about this.)
Second, it is important that the student be willing to break the piece down in ways that make it easier: in effect turning it into several, or many, easier pieces. This means doing an especially good and thorough job of some of the things that we should all do anyway with all of our pieces: working on separate hands and feet; working on small sections; teasing out individual voices; practicing slowly; practicing even more slowly! Again, this can be part of a deal with the student: you may work on this (too hard) piece that you love, but only if you will work on it the right way. It is possible to consider a small section of a long difficult piece to be a piece in itself. The student can work on that section, and then student and teacher together can decide whether going on to the next part of the piece is the best way to use the student’s time, or whether it would be better to turn to something else.
Here it is worth mentioning the “two-way street” aspect of the act of working on repertoire. We work on pieces, in part, as a way of helping us get better as players—more skillful, more versatile, more confident. The pieces that we work on are the fodder for this process. At the same time, we strive to get more skillful, versatile, and confident so that we can better play the pieces that we want to play. A situation in which a student is working on a piece that he or she loves, that provides some challenges, and that he or she can learn well and perform is an ideal one. However, working on a section of a piece, even without ever going on to the rest of it, or working on aspects of a piece—just the pedal part, or just the separate voices, for example, or certain passages that present particular fingering issues—can be completely valid as a way of using repertoire to advance one’s playing ability. It is wonderful to learn complete pieces—obviously utterly necessary for anyone who wants to perform. However, it is not necessary to insist on finishing every piece that you start. It is all right sometimes only to work one side of this street. It can actually free a student up to try more things—both things that are more difficult and things that are unfamiliar or even unappealing at first—if the student knows that it is OK to re-evaluate the decision to work on something if that something turns out not to be rewarding.
Sometimes a student will bring in pieces that seem to be too easy. These are pieces that the student is interested in, but that the teacher fears would not really help the student to learn anything: that is, that they would not advance the student’s facility or technique, or teach any new skills. This is working the other side of the street. Pieces in this category can be used for relaxation, just to let the student have the pleasure of playing something that is fun to play. This can be important for morale and for pacing one’s efforts. However, it is also true that there is nothing—literally nothing—that is so easy that it can’t teach something to any student or even to any advanced player. A piece consisting of a single middle c held for a few beats (to reduce it to the absurd) could still afford an opportunity to work on touch, posture, relaxation, breathing, listening to sonority and to room acoustics, and probably a lot more. Any piece can be used to work on those things and also on technical and psychological performance values: accuracy, security, articulation, timing, rhythm, and so on. If a piece seems very easy, then the student can take on the challenge of playing it even better.

Issue: Becoming well rounded
It is certainly important for a teacher to offer students help in the matter of becoming well rounded—generally knowledgeable about the repertoire and the instrument. There are two reasons that I do not believe that the matter of what pieces a student works on and plays while studying is the crucial part of this process. (Of course, it is always part of the process.) One reason is that there is so much music in the repertoire that any attempt to get to know all of it in a fairly short time will inevitably be just a token. The other is that a student who is taught how to listen carefully and open-mindedly and how to practice well will have a lifetime to explore the repertoire. There is no hurry, and it is better for anyone to work on any given part of the repertoire at a time when he or she has become genuinely interested in it.
If the repertoire that a student really wants to work on (with whatever amount of prodding or guidance from the teacher seems helpful, but with no coercion) happens to cover quite a few different composers, from different time periods and geographic areas, that is fine. However, even in that case it is not actually true that the student has covered the whole repertoire. In fact, the difference between this student and one who has chosen to work on only German Baroque music (as I did in graduate school) or only Franck and Widor is small. It is not a difference worth pursuing at the expense of any of the student’s sense of joy and commitment.
However, it is a very good idea for a teacher to help students to know what repertoire is out there, and to offer them a chance to figure out what might be interesting to them. One of the best ways of doing this has always been to get students to listen to a lot of music. Listening is easy and non-time-consuming compared to practicing and learning pieces. In the past, the best way to talk about listening to a lot of organ music would have involved mentioning record libraries or used record stores—also perhaps friends with record collections, or organ concert series. These possibilities all still exist. However, recent technology has of course added to them. I will mention a few Internet-based approaches to exploring the organ literature. Of course, it is the nature of such things that these specific resources may vanish. But if so they may be replaced with others.
At the website orgelconcerten.ncrv.nl, under the heading Archief, are recordings of hundreds of performances by organists of the last several decades. Many of these are concert performances. This is an extraordinary resource for getting to know the playing of a wide variety of organists, but it is also a very good way to hear repertoire. The list of composers represented is over 250 in number and covers more than five hundred years. The assignment of listening to all of it (or, say, listening to a piece or two from each composer whose name is unfamiliar) would be highly informative and educational for any organist.
There are several ways to find (free) printed music on the Internet. Two of these are http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer.php and http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page. These sites both have a fair amount of organ music. Of course, they can be used to acquire printed music for use: that is, for pieces that a student wishes to work on. They can also be used, however, to explore the repertoire. For example, a student equipped with a list of organ composers (which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_composers for example, or through traditional sources such as The New Grove or various books about organ history) can visit the Icking Archive, look for names of organ composers, and look at and begin to analyze representative pieces, or follow the scores while listening to a recording, or print out and (slowly) sight-read opening pages of many pieces just to get a sense of what they’re like.
Another way for students to get to know about, and perhaps become interested in, composers with whom they are not already familiar—especially with more recent composers—is to read the composers’ writings. There are writings in print by Saint-Saëns, Reger, Messiaen, Rorem, Dupré, and many others. Reading the thoughts of a composer—especially if those are provocative and interesting—is a wonderful way to spark interest in that composer’s music.