On Teaching

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He is at work on a pedal-playing method that will probably be available in the fall of 2008. He welcomes feedback by e-mail at <[email protected]>. Expanded versions of these columns with references and links, along with downloadable PDFs of these and other pedal exercises, can be found at <http://www.pekc.org&gt;.

Pedal playing, part III:
expanding the scope
The scale-based beginning pedal exercise that I discussed at length last month is intended to develop a student’s sense—intuitive and kinesthetic—of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step on the pedal keyboard. The careful procedure that I outlined then for introducing a new student to this exercise is important, since the effectiveness of the exercise is predicated on its feeling easy and natural from the beginning. However, the gist of the exercise can be expressed in music notation as follows (see Example I).
The odd notation of the key signature—that is, that the signature itself is in parenthesis—is a way of expressing concisely that the exercise should be played both without any sharps or flats and with whatever the given key signature suggests. (Remember that it almost always makes sense to practice the “naturals only” version first, since it presents more regularly spaced intervals.) This is nothing but a way of saving space and time, and of course it would be possible to write out any exercise of this sort twice, once with and once without a key signature. However, I have found that students easily get used to this notation.
Every pedal exercise that has as its point the development of a student’s sense of the geography of the pedal keyboard should always be practiced at a slow tempo. This is for two reasons that almost contradict each other but that nonetheless both apply. The first is the normal reason for practicing slowly: it is easier to play an unfamiliar passage slowly than to play it quickly; practicing is more effective if what you are practicing is correct rather than wrong; and it always makes sense to practice any passage as slowly as you need to in order to get it right. Of course as a passage becomes familiar it can—normally—be sped up. With this kind of kinesthetic pedal exercise, however, it is also true that the slower one plays the simple notes of the exercise, the more intense a level of focus is required to feel and internalize the shape of the physical intervals that your feet are negotiating. Such an exercise is actually harder mentally, and more intensely efficient as a drill and as a learning tool, the slower it is played. There can be some point to speeding up exercises such as these—especially as part of the process of learning to play faster without developing tension, and indeed to disentangle velocity from tension or force—but that is not relevant to the stage at which a student is first learning pedal playing.
Once this sense of the distance, shape, and feel of one step has been well established, there are two logical next steps. The first of these is to invite the student to use this sense in more complicated musical contexts. The second is to build on this sense to establish an equally secure feeling for the moving of one foot over two steps, then over three and more.
A simple way to set the moving of each foot by one step in a slightly more complicated context is shown in Example II. In this exercise, each foot does exactly what it does in Exercise I above: that is, it moves slowly by step. (This motion is, in effect, still in half notes, though of course the notation is arbitrary.) Two things are added here. First, the whole process is a bit more challenging conceptually, since the student must think about both feet at the same time. The student can deal with this by keeping it slow, by focusing well in general, and by consciously alternating focus from one foot to the other as appropriate. The need for this latter will melt away with practice.
The second new thing that the student has to deal with is the consequences of having the feet closer to one another. When the two feet are placed in such a way as to be in some danger of pushing each other out of the way or blocking one another’s access to the keys that need to be played, then the student must learn how best to separate the feet and prevent them from causing problems for each other. This causes additional complexity for the student, but it is also a very good opportunity for learning about the logistics of pedal playing and the comfortable use of the feet. In each situation that brings the feet perilously close together, the student can figure out—by common sense, and with help from the teacher—what solutions will work. For example, early on in this exercise, when the left foot first needs to play the note B, the right foot has just played c, and might be in the way. (This will vary a bit from student to student because of the kind of differences in foot size, posture, and habits that I discussed in November’s column.) If there is a problem at this point, the student can think about ways to solve it, such as a more detached articulation, or separating the feet along the length of the keys—either “left foot back/right foot forward” or “right foot back/left foot forward” depending, again, on the particular student’s posture and the angle from which he or she naturally approaches that part of the pedal keyboard—or by holding the foot itself at a different angle (i.e., flexing the ankle more or less), or perhaps by switching from “little toe” to “big toe” or vice versa in one or both feet, if that addresses the problem and is comfortable. The teacher and the student can discuss the pros and cons of any of these, and this kind of discussion will move the student closer to being able to think about such things for himself or herself.
The teacher can make up new exercises along these same lines. They should be simple melodies in which each foot moves mostly by step. The interpolation of the two feet need not be utterly regular, as it is in exercise II above. Some students might want to make up their own such exercises, and can certainly do so, as long as they understand the principle of following carefully what each foot is doing. Example III introduces the moving of one foot over the interval of two steps.
In the first half of this exercise, going up, the left foot is asked to take on the new task of moving over the interval of two steps, while the right foot is still just moving by one step. In the second half, coming down, this is reversed. For completeness one might also try the following variation, in which the roles of the feet are reversed (see Example IV).
Since, when the student approaches these exercises, he or she will already have a very firm foundation in moving one foot over the interval of one step, a simple thought will almost always suffice to guide the feet to the correct distance for covering two steps: namely, that the distance traveled by the foot should feel greater than the accustomed distance of one step, but only just enough greater to notice the difference. If in the course of getting to know these exercises the student ever makes a wrong note (which is certain to happen), the best way to correct that is also with a simple thought: “I just moved my foot a little bit too far [or not far enough], so next time I will move it a little bit less far [or farther].” This simple, almost naïve, way of correcting wrong notes in pedal practicing always works (judging from my experience both with students and with myself). It is also by far the best way of using the experience of making and then correcting wrong notes to imprint a correct feeling for the geography of the pedal keyboard on the brain of the player, and to lead efficiently to reliable, accurate playing. It is always possible to get the next note right—or to correct an actual or anticipated wrong note—by looking. However, that does nothing to improve the student’s command of the pedal keyboard, and the sense that it gives of having gotten something right is illusory.
(I will devote a whole future column to the subjects of looking at the keyboard and not looking at the keyboard. These are both important tools, which are sometimes not thought about systematically enough.)
Example V shows an exercise that asks each foot to move over the interval of two steps. It also provides practice in dealing with repeated notes. (The playing of repeated notes with separate feet, which has musical and technical advantages of its own, is also a way to practice being aware of the position of the feet with respect to each other—not the main focus of this approach to learning pedal playing, but not something worthy of neglect either—and it is good training for learning pedal substitution later on. It is essentially the same gesture as a substitution: the difference can be thought of as one of articulation.)
Again, teachers and students can certainly write other exercises that will work as well as these or that can supplement them. It is only important to bear in mind the patterns of what each foot is doing and to make sure that exercises expand the scope of what each foot is doing in a logical and systematic order.
In fact, after any student has become completely comfortable with the exercises in this column or another similar set of exercises, it should be possible for that student to begin using pedal lines from repertoire as pedal practice material. This can include even very difficult pedal parts if they are approached the right way. This transition will be the main subject of next month’s column, which will also discuss the Bach Pedalexercitium and touch briefly upon the heel.

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

More about pedals:
looking at heels
This month I am returning to the subject of pedal playing, this time to discuss heel playing. I have some general thoughts to share with students, and a few practical suggestions and exercises.
It is interesting that the use of the heel in pedal playing is an artistic issue that has a history of lending itself to controversy, becoming a political and, almost, an ethical matter. I have had students come to me who believed—or who had heard—that it was out of the question to use heels in music written before a certain date: that is, essentially in Baroque music. On the other hand, I have heard students and others say that failure to use the heels in Baroque music could only be motivated by a pedantic insistence on academic correctness at the expense of artistic considerations. I once heard two musicians passionately agreeing with each other that “heel and toe” was the only way to play the organ, even though neither of them was an organist! I thought that this was—quite apart from the merits of the notion—a fascinating example of how ideas or ideologies can spread beyond their original home turf. It was also revealing how heated this discussion was and how angry (good-naturedly angry, as I remember it, but still angry) the two of them seemed at people who might disagree.
I have also had students come to me convinced that “heel and toe” pedaling is intrinsically legato, whereas “alternate toe” pedaling is intrinsically detached. (I’m not sure about the concept of “alternate heel”!) In fact, alternate toe pedaling is usually capable of creating a full (even overlapping) legato. It has trouble doing so only in some patterns involving sharps and flats. It is same-toe pedaling (using the same toe on successive notes) that is inherently detached. Also, while heel and toe pedaling can often create legato—and sometimes in places where all-toe pedaling cannot—it is also true that the use of the heel is often most natural in detached situations, where the heel can be used without resorting to an uncomfortable foot position.

Stylistic authenticity
Questions about heel pedaling are bound up, as are many other technical matters, with questions of historical authenticity. These apply in several ways, of which the most prevalent is the above-mentioned concern about using the heel in older music. Questions of authenticity do arise in connection with later music as well, for example, whether a legato achieved using alternate toes is or isn’t acceptable in music written by a composer who is known to have used, or explicitly called for, heels. Is it enough for the player’s judgment—or that of a teacher or any listener—to conclude that the effect is suitable or perhaps actually identical to what the composer intended, or is it in some sense necessary (ethically, artistically) for the composer’s technical suggestions to be followed literally?
It is certainly generally true that earlier organ playing probably made less use of the heels (short pedal keys, giving little room for the heels; relatively restricted use of sharps and flats, and of pedal scale passages; non-legato style attested through surviving fingerings, among other things) and later organ playing more (big and, eventually, “AGO”-type pedal boards; more sharps and flats and scale passages; legato style; the need, some of the time, to assign one foot to the swell pedal), though, as with so many issues, we do not know everything about the historical situation, and what we do know contains intriguing anomalies. These include, for example, the Schlick work Ascendo ad Patrem from about 1512, which has a four-voice pedal part clearly requiring the use of heels, and the (mid-to-late-nineteenth century) organ playing of Saint-Saëns, who apparently never used heels.
(If the one surviving pedaling by Saint-Saëns,1 along with contemporaries’ comments on his playing, were all that we knew about nineteenth-century organ playing, we would assume that Franck, Widor, Reger, and the rest all used only toes! If the Schlick Ascendo were the only surviving organ piece from before, say, 1610, we would assume that in the late Renaissance, multi-voiced pedal parts and heel-based pedal playing were the norm!)
When I was first getting interested in the organ in the early 1970s, I did not, for a long time—a year or two at least—become aware that there were these sorts of historical or musicological polemics—or such strong feelings—surrounding heel playing. I did absorb, however, the idea that it was more difficult to create clarity and precision with the heels than with the toes, and that, any concern for authenticity aside, a player has to be sure that heel pedalings in any given situation really work to create the desired effect. This is an issue with heel pedaling in a way that it is not with toes.
I recall hearing that Helmut Walcha insisted, with his students, that the famous pedal solo in Buxtehude’s G-minor Praeludium, BuxWV 149, be played with all toes, the left toe moving up to play the off-beat F-sharps. (See Example 1.) The purpose of this was to achieve the greatest possible crispness and accuracy of timing, not necessarily to be historically accurate, although it probably was that too, or at least might well be. (Other players might use the right foot to play all of the upper notes—heel and toe—while the left foot remains in the lower half of the pedal keyboard rather serenely catching what might be called the melody of the passage. It is an interesting exercise to work the passage up both ways and listen to the difference(s) in articulation, timing, and pacing between the two.)

Anatomical issues
The fact that playing with the heel is, in general, harder to control with great precision than playing with the toe stems from the basic anatomical fact that the foot is hinged in a way that gives the toes more leverage, a better mechanical advantage. In other words, the heel is closer to the ankle than the toes are: simple, but very important for organ playing. To some extent, whereas the toes play a pedal key through the flexing of the ankle, there is a tendency for the heel to play a key by dropping the leg onto the key.
The approach to teaching pedal playing that I outlined in four columns in The Diapason (November 2007–February 2008) relies on using the instinctive pointing gesture of the toes as a starting place for developing a strong kinesthetic sense of the pedal keyboard. It is mainly for this reason that the various strategies deployed there and the various exercises suggested do not include any work with heel. In spite of this, however, the approach laid out in those columns actually sets a student up to learn heel playing efficiently and with great security. This can happen best after the student has become truly comfortable with the techniques developed through that approach.
Each student—each player, in fact—has a somewhat different physique, which suggests a somewhat different physical orientation towards the pedal keyboard. Some people can more comfortably play off the inside of the foot, some the outside; some people can most comfortably keep the knees fairly close together, some people are more comfortable with the knees farther apart, and so on. The key to incorporating heel playing into this overall approach is to remind the student always to monitor and make decisions about the exact physical approach of the heels to the keys: which side of the heel for which notes, where on the keys the heels should land (perhaps different for each key or different depending on previous or subsequent notes), where the knees should be in relation to the feet in a given passage, etc. These are things that only the student can judge, since that judgment depends on how things feel.

Some practice exercises
The first step in practicing heel playing is to choose a simple passage—taken from a piece or written as an exercise—and to play some of the (appropriate) notes with heel, trying out different positions and placements along the lines mentioned above. It is by far the easiest to use the heels on a natural key that is being played just before or just after a sharp or flat, so it is best to start with such a passage. The Buxtehude quoted above is a good example. It is clear that, if the right heel is going to be used in this passage, it will be used on the G that is the second overall note and its reiterations. A student can try—slowly and keeping everything physically relaxed, as always—to play G–F#–G with heel-toe-heel, using first the inside of the foot, then the outside, letting the knee move to where it is most comfortable. (To play on the outside of the right foot the right knee will probably need to be farther out—to the right—than to play on the inside of the foot.) A player with slender feet might find that the center of the foot works. For most players, one of these configurations will be the most comfortable and should be practiced until it feels reliable. If more than one feels equally comfortable, then both, or all, should be practiced.
A short exercise like Example 2 can be used in the same way, again trying out different angles and positions for the feet and keeping track of what is comfortable. (Note that this, on its own, can well be played like Example 3. It is interesting to compare the differences in sound and feeling, if any, between the different pedalings. In the context of a longer passage, one or the other might be better or actually necessary.)
Here are two matching exercises for heel at the extremes of the keyboard. (See Examples 4 and 5.) Again, they should be tried with every different alignment of inside/outside and knees. The teacher can help the student remember what all the possibilities are, but only the student can tell for certain what is and what isn’t comfortable. They should be tried both fully legato and lightly detached.
The well-known Vierne theme, from the Carillon from Op. 31, is an interesting one on which to try various different heel-based pedalings.2 (See Example 6.) It is possible, while keeping this completely legato, to use alternate toes (left first) except for left heel/left toe going across the bar line. It is also possible, however, to make more extensive use of the heel, for example, using left heel on all of the C’s and fitting the other notes around that. The student can try it a number of ways. For using this as a learning tool, it is crucial to remember to keep it slow and light.
Example 7 is a somewhat arbitrary heel-based pedaling for a scale. I’m not sure that I would use it in “real life,” but it works as an exercise. The challenges here are 1) to orient the left foot in such a way that the toe is aimed easily at the F-sharp after playing the D; 2) to reorient the left foot to execute the more difficult G–A with heel-toe; and 3) to move the right foot securely to the B after leaving the E.
In beginning to practice playing with the heels, as with any pedal practicing, it can be useful to practice separate feet, in the manner that I have discussed in earlier columns. In the above scale, for example, the right foot can practice moving from the E to the B. Really what this means is practicing moving the right heel from the position in which it rests while the right toe is playing the E to the position in which it (itself) plays the B, while turning the foot so that the toes are poised to play the C-sharp. This is a bit more abstract than moving the toe of one foot from one note to another, but equally subject to being analyzed and practiced systematically.
Students themselves, and their teachers, can create little exercises like this, and can extract bits of pieces with which to try out the use of the heel. I want to reiterate that the key to integrating heel playing comfortably into pedal playing is to pay attention to—and make choices about—the position and angle of the feet as they address the keys. This should be done, in the manner discussed at length in my earlier columns, without any particular preconceptions. It is in the end up to the student to determine what is comfortable and what works. The teacher can certainly make suggestions, and can help evaluate the results, but only the student can actually tell how it feels.

Organ Method V

This follows directly from last month’s column. The approach to learning pedal playing that I am outlining here is not materially different from that in my columns on pedal playing between November 2007 and February 2008. Here it is recast as something addressed directly to the student, which the student can use with or without a teacher. This month’s column simply introduces the notion of learning the feeling of moving a foot from one note to the adjacent note. This feeling is, as far as I can tell, the best foundation upon which to build solid pedal facility.

Looking at the pedals while playing

Everyone is tempted to look at the feet, either from time to time or quite regularly. However, each time that you look at your feet while you are working on a pedal exercise or trying to learn a pedal part you deprive yourself of a chance to become more secure in your pedal playing. You might or might not increase your chance of accurately finding the note that you are looking for. Security at the pedal keyboard comes from a firm inner sense of the physical shapes and distances involved—the kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard. Any time that you do not rely on that sense, you fail to develop it further. Of course, the reason that players, especially beginners, are temped to look at the feet is the fear that this physical sense of where the pedal keys are will fail. In fact, this sense can become extraordinarily reliable: it must, since the practice of looking at the pedal keyboard can be quite problematic if it is used at all regularly. (Looking at the feet makes it easy to lose your place in the music, and it tends to introduce small hesitations into playing.) The pedal exercises and learning strategy used here will enable you to rely on the kinesthetic sense from the very beginning—the sequence of exercises has been designed with that particularly in mind. In turn, relying on that sense from the very beginning will make it reliable. You will be comfortable looking at your feet very little indeed—or not at all. This approach asks you from the very beginning to understand what is going on physically in your pedal playing, and to participate quite consciously and actively in the creation of your own particular pedal technique. This has the added advantage of making the process more interesting.

Heel and toe

Playing pedals means pushing down pedal keys with the feet. In theory any part of the foot can be used to depress a pedal key, but the front and back of the foot—the toe area and the heel—are the most useful. Further, the toe area, at least, can be thought of as divided into parts: the inside of the foot, or big toe side, the outside of the foot, or little toe side, and the front or center of the foot, under the middle toes—the tip of the shoe. (The heel area could be thought of as divided into similar regions, however the shape and size of the heel makes it more natural to think of it as a continuum.) All of these areas are completely suitable for playing pedal keys. The choice of which particular part of the foot to use in playing which notes is referred to as pedaling—the pedal version of fingering. As with fingering, pedaling choices are influenced by many factors. Some of these are directly about the music: the shape of a musical line, considerations of tempo, articulation, and phrasing. However, pedaling choices are also affected by logistic factors that are independent of the music itself: the height of the bench, the exact shape and size of the pedal keyboard—including details such as the size of the sharps/flats in relation to the naturals—and the physique and habitual posture of the player. Pedaling choices for the same passage of music, and overall tendencies in pedaling choices, will vary from one player to the next depending on all of the factors mentioned above; plus different types of repertoire require different approaches to pedaling.

Flexing the foot

The physical gesture involved in playing a pedal key with the toes is a gesture that can take advantage of the full flexing ability of the foot. Playing with the heel can take much less advantage of that flexing, since the heel is located much closer to the ankle, and does not move up and down very much with the flexing of the foot. Playing with the heel is, therefore, a gesture that is controlled somewhat more with the leg. It is easier, in the earlier stages of learning to play pedals, to execute toe pedaling with a relaxed and fluid motion than it is heel playing. (In the long run it is just as possible to play in a relaxed and fluid manner with the heels: that is just something that comes about more naturally after a player is familiar with the pedal keyboard and comfortable on the organ bench.) It is also the case that the gesture of flexing the foot and, in a sense, reaching with the toes is a gesture that feels like pointing: it is easy and natural for even someone who is not yet a trained organist to know by feel where the toes are and where they are pointing. Again, it is not a problem—it is not difficult—to develop an equally secure sense of this for the heels: it just naturally comes later. Therefore, the first several pedal exercises that I provide are all meant to be played with the toes alone. Heel playing will be introduced shortly.

If we leave aside any artificial assistance, such as looking, or bumping the feet along the keys until you find the one you want, there are three ways to get a pedal note right: 

1) finding a note in relation to where the foot that will play that note last was; 

2) finding a note with one foot in relation to where the other foot is; and 

3) finding a note “from scratch,” in relation to where your body is on
the bench. 

The first of these—which includes both moving the toe area of the foot from one note to another, and playing a note with the heel when you have just played another note with the toe—is the most reliable, and the most powerful tool for developing secure pedal facility. The other two come into play once in a while. The exercises and practice techniques that we start with here rely on—and strengthen—the first way of finding notes. Later on we will address the other two. 

You have already noted which pedal key each of your feet rests on (or over) as you sit in a relaxed posture on the organ bench. Draw a pedal stop or two: make sure that you include at least one 8′ stop. Now, without looking, flex one of your feet in such a way that the toe area of that foot moves downward and plays something. What do you hear? You might hear a note; you might hear two adjacent notes. Notice what part of your foot actually touched and depressed the key. In general, most of us cannot play pedal notes “straight,” that is, with the tip of the shoe. Most feet are too wide for that. If you hear yourself playing two notes at once, then you need to turn your foot slightly so that one side or the other is touching the key. In general, people with wider feet need to turn more than people with narrower feet. There are some players whose feet are in fact narrow enough that they can play with the very end of the foot. If you find yourself to be one of those people, then you can ignore most of what I have to say about turning the foot to one side or another.

But assuming that you do need to turn your foot, which way should you turn? The fundamental answer to this is “whichever way is more comfortable.” Usually, in any given situation, one way will be definitely more comfortable than the other. If this is not the case—if they both feel much the same—then either will probably be fine. In general, however, if the note that you want to play is outside wherever your knee is then it will feel comfortable to turn the foot out and play from the big toe side; if the note that you want to play is inside wherever your knee is then it will probably work best to turn the foot in and play from the little toe side. (Outside means higher for a right-foot note and lower for a left-foot note; inside mean the opposite.) In first playing the note that lies under each foot, try turning each way. Is one easier or more comfortable? Which one? Does it conform to what I have suggested (outside/inside) or does it feel different from what that would predict? (Once you have turned each foot enough to play its note cleanly, make sure that you know what note it is. If you have perfect pitch, you will know. If not, play around on a manual keyboard until you match the pitch, then see what note it is. This is practice in not looking at your feet!) Fortunately, there are only two directions in which to turn your foot in order to play a pedal note, so it is always possible to try both and see which one works better. (Of course, by the time you perform a piece you should have worked this out long before.) There is enough variation among different people in the comfortable positioning of the knees—that is, in how close together or far apart the knees naturally fall while sitting on the organ bench—that it is not a good idea to try to come up with a general rule for which way a player should turn the feet for which notes. You the student must discover this for yourself. Furthermore, it is not something that is fixed. That is, you will not always turn each foot the same way for a given note, every time you play that note. Some particular musical or technical context may cause you to position a knee differently, which will change the angle of the foot, or something about the direction of a musical line—where the foot is going next—may affect things, perhaps in ways that can’t be predicted in advance.

From one note to another

Once you have played your one note with each foot, play the next natural note up and the next natural note down. You should achieve this in the following way: gently release the first note; then move the foot—in the air just above the pedal keyboard—through a very small arc that you guess might take it to the space over the next (natural) note. When you have arrived at that place, again flex your toes downward and play the note over which you have arrived. Let your ears tell you whether you have indeed come to the next note up or down. It is fairly likely that you will have gone too far. This is common, in fact almost universal at this stage. The gesture of moving one foot from one note to the next note is one of the smallest things that we humans ever do with our feet; it takes some getting used to. If you have gone too far—if the new note that you have just played is a third away from your starting note, or even more—then go back to your starting note and try again. Move less far. Don’t think that you have to know exactly how much less far you need to move before you try it: just move less far. This thought and gesture will probably bring you to the correct note. It might lead you to drop down into the space between your starting note and the note that you were hoping to play next. If so, then go back to the opening note and this time move your foot a little bit farther. 

This thought process is crucial to the work of learning to play pedals. In learning and in practicing you are trying things out. Everything will not be right the first time. The good news is that if you play a wrong note in working on a pedal exercise or a pedal part, only one of two things can have gone wrong: either you moved your foot too far or you didn’t move it far enough. Furthermore, you can tell by listening which of these things happened. The way to arrive at correct practicing is simply to go back to the starting point, and move the foot again, correcting that motion in whichever direction is indicated. If you went too far before, go less far now; if you didn’t go far enough before, go farther now. It is not necessary to try to calculate how much farther or less far to go: in fact, it is counterproductive to get too specific about it. It is always a small amount. 

This way of thinking about it always gives good results. 

After you have become comfortable moving each foot from the starting note (the note over which the foot naturally falls) to the adjacent notes up and down, try the same thing elsewhere on the keyboard. Move each foot around, to random places, in both directions. Then, after playing a note, move up, back, down, always moving by one step at a time, always moving the foot just up off the key that you have been playing and through the air to the next note. Always pay attention to the comfortable tilting of the foot to one side or the other. Note that this may change from one note to the adjacent note. Never accept an uncomfortable foot.

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

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

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

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

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

Buxtehude BuxWV 141 – Part 2:
Fingering, pedaling, and
practicing, part 1
In this month’s column, we will look at the opening section of the Buxtehude E major Praeludium in great detail as to fingering and pedaling, and outline ways of practicing that section. When we return to this piece, after beginning our look at the Boëllmann Suite Gothique, we will analyze the section that begins in m. 13 with regard to practicing and learning that section. These two sections offer several different textures and types of writing; each suggests a different approach to the very practical act of learning the notes. These textures include the one-voice opening, the multi-voiced but not strictly contrapuntal measures that immediately follow, and the rigorously contrapuntal—fugal—section that begins in the soprano voice in m. 13. Each of these textures recurs in this piece, and of course throughout the repertoire as well.
This and the next few Buxtehude columns will focus on the steps necessary to learn the right notes securely and efficiently. I will try my best to do this in a way that leaves open as many different interpretive possibilities as possible. In particular, I do not mean to take sides in any debate about how much to incorporate “authentic” fingerings and pedalings, or about what those are or might be in any particular case. That does not mean that I will not mention them or include them among the possibilities. As I hinted but did not quite state last month, I will not discuss any work on memorization. (I have, like many performers and teachers, somewhat mixed and complicated feelings about memorization, but I do not consider it to be a necessary or integral part of learning a piece well and performing it in a way that is both solid and artistically worthwhile. I will discuss memorization as an issue unto itself in a later column.)

Fingering
Since the opening of our Praeludium (see Example 1) is a monophonic statement of three rather long measures—49 notes—the first question that arises is which hand or hands should play it. (This foreshadows the most important practical question about any passage of keyboard music; namely, which notes should go in which hand. This question must precede detailed questions about fingering, and it is often overlooked or shortchanged by students. More about this later.) Since the passage is basically high—in the right hand region of the keyboard—and is probably not going to be played in a way that is prohibitively fast for one hand, it makes sense to start out by assuming that it is a right-hand passage.
However, it also makes sense to look for places where taking some of the notes in the left hand would make things easier. Each student can look the passage over and make this judgment for him- or herself. It might, for example, make sense to take the four sixteenth notes of the third beat of m. 3 in the left hand. These notes are lower than the rest and using the left hand to play them would put that hand in a good position to participate in playing the chord on the first beat of m. 4.
It is also possible to share the notes more or less equally between the hands, though I myself have not been in the habit of doing so in this passage. An advantage of sharing the notes between the two hands is that it is just easier to execute. This becomes more important the faster a player wants the passage to go. A disadvantage to dividing the passage up between the hands is that it gives more to think about in the learning process and to remember in playing, and probably takes longer to learn.
On a more positive note, an advantage to keeping the passage in one hand is that it is probably easier or more natural to project the overall rhetorical shape of the line when the shape and spacing of the notes is felt in the most direct physical way by the player. None of these considerations is absolute, and a teacher and student can think about them and work them out.
Just for the record, the fingering that I myself would use to play this passage is shown in Example 2. This is largely a common-sense and hand-position-based fingering. For example, the choice of 1-3 to begin the passage is entirely based on the way that my own fingers happen to fall over those notes, given my posture and my arm angle. (The arm angle stems from my preference for letting my elbows float out from my sides, which in turn is—for me—part of a relaxed posture.) The first four notes could just as well be played 1-2-3-4 or 2-3-4-5. The choice of 3 rather than 4 for the D-natural 32nd note late in m. 1 is designed to make it easier to reach the coming G# with 4 (rather than 5). The point of playing that G# with 4, in turn, is twofold: first, to place the (long) third finger on the F# and the (shorter) second finger on the E; second, to make it easier then to reach the high B on the final half-beat of the measure with finger 5. (It would also be fine to play those notes—G#-F#-E—with 3-2-1.) For me, keeping the thumb off of raised keys is a guiding principle.
A reason for not playing the third beat of m. 1 with 2-1-2-5, etc. (but rather with 4-3-2-5, etc.) is that the gesture of turning the second finger over the thumb to play the G# moves the hand away from the upcoming (high) E, and therefore makes the playing of that note awkward—at least, that is how it works with my hand. In m. 3, the non-adjacent fingerings of each of the beat groupings are all designed to move the hand in the correct direction for whatever is coming up next.
This fingering is not intended to be a recommendation or even a suggestion: it is just how I would probably do it. There are many other ways. (Some of these might be more historically minded—with more disjunct or pair-wise fingerings—or less so—with substitution or more use of the thumb, even occasionally on a black note.) The important thing is that teacher and student work out a fingering that is appropriate for that student. Sometimes that process involves a lot of specific input from the teacher, sometimes little or none. A teacher should always look for ways to let the student assume increasingly more responsibility for working out fingerings. I tend to give very few specific fingering suggestions, but keep an eye out for spots where a student may not have succeeded in finding something that works well. In those cases, I will invite the student to analyze the spot again, perhaps with more input from me.
So in this case, once a fingering has been worked out, the most effective approach to practicing the passage is clear. That is, since it is only one line and one hand—at least, certainly one hand at a time—there is no concern about how to combine parts, and in what order. The plan is just to practice it. First, choose a very slow tempo: slow enough that playing the right notes with the planned fingering is actually easy. This might, for one player, be sixteenth note equals 60, for another 80, for another 45. For an advanced player or a good reader it might be faster, and it might be all right to think about a pulse for the eighth note even from the beginning. Anything is all right, as long as the student does not start with too fast a tempo. Then, having played the passage several times at this starting tempo, the student should play it several times a little bit faster, then a little bit faster still. At some point, the beat in the student’s head will naturally shift from the sixteenth note to the eighth note, then to the quarter note. The crucial thing is not to get ahead of a tempo that honestly feels easy. This, if practiced rigorously, will lead to unshakeable security.
Meanwhile, the rest of the opening section is multi-voiced, a mix of not very strict counterpoint and homophonic writing. In this passage, the main practical question is which hand should play some of the inner-voice notes. As I mentioned above, this is extraordinarily important. I have seen students waste a lot of time or even make an easy passage almost unplayable by assigning notes to hands in an awkward way. This is usually caused by assuming too readily that the notes printed in the upper staff should be played by the right hand and those printed in the lower staff should be played by the left hand. In fact, there should never be such an assumption unless the two hands are meant to be on different keyboards, providing different sounds for different parts of the texture. In general, the two manual staves between them present a note picture, and we have ten fingers with which to play that note picture in the most reliable way possible.
In each of the measures in Example 3, there are notes in what is more or less the alto voice that are printed in the upper staff; some of these might be best played in the left hand. The notes that I have highlighted are those that I would choose to play in the left hand. Again, this is not by any means the only way to do it. The first criterion that I use in working this out is that “extra” notes should be placed in the hand that otherwise has less to do. That is at work very strikingly in mm. 7-8, and the beginning of m. 9, but also elsewhere. Sometimes hand choices are made based on the need to prepare what comes next. That applies here in m. 11, where I am not taking several notes in the left hand that could, or in a sense should, be in the left hand, so as to make it possible for the left hand to play the (tenor) E in the chord in m. 12. (There would be other ways to deal with this, involving substitution.)
Sometimes the notes of a passage in a middle voice can be divided between the hands just to make that passage easier—less inclined to get tangled. This is the case here in m. 5 and to some extent in m. 10. An overriding consideration is hand position: how can notes be divided between the hands in a way that best allows each hand to remain in a natural, comfortable position?
After the hand assignments have been worked out, the next step is to work out fingering. (In the process, some hand choices may be changed.) As always, fingering will depend in part on factors that differ from one player to another, including the size and shape of the hands, existing habits or “comfort zones,” and artistic goals concerning articulation, tempo, and other matters. Example 4 shows a possible sample fingering for one of the more convoluted of these measures. As always, there is a lot here that could be done differently. For example, it could make sense to play the E that is the first note in the top voice of the first full measure with 5, or the D#/B right-hand chord later in that measure with 2/1. It would also be possible to take the A#-B in the first full measure with the left hand, probably with 2-1. The above is just one way of doing it.

Practicing
Once the fingering has been worked out, the next step is practicing. The principles of practicing are always the same, and they are both so important and so difficult psychologically (for most of us, certainly including me) that they can’t be repeated too often: break the music down into manageable units—short passages, separate hands and feet; practice slowly enough; speed up gradually and only when the unit being practiced is really ready for it. In the case of the passage under discussion, one sensible way to divide things up might be as follows:
1) the right hand from the last few notes of m. 3 through the downbeat of m. 9
2) the left hand from the downbeat of m. 4 through the second beat of m. 9
3) the right hand from the first high B in m. 8 through m. 12
4) the left hand from the half note D# in m. 8 through m. 12, and
5) the pedal part, which I will discuss in its own right just below.
(Notice that the sections are designed to dovetail, not to bump into one another. This guarantees that practicing in sections will not cause fissures or awkward transitions to develop. This is quite important. It also applies to practicing across page turns.)
Each of these units should be played many times at, initially, a very slow tempo: as always, slow enough that it feels easy. For most students it would probably make sense, given the somewhat complex texture of this passage, to start with a beat—in the student’s head or from a metronome—that will represent the 32nd note, so that each of the sixteenth notes will receive two of those beats. This 32nd-note beat might initially be at 100, or 80, or 120: whatever feels comfortable. Then each unit should be sped up gradually.
(Some musicians express concern that starting the practicing procedure with beats that represent very short notes—many levels down from the “beat” suggested by the time signature—will result in playing that lacks a sense of underlying pulse, that is too divided into small fragments. However, it is insecurity as to the notes, fingerings, and pedalings that is by far the greatest cause of rhythmically unconvincing playing. At the early to middle stages of learning a passage, the best thing that we can do to predispose that passage towards convincing rhythm is whatever will get the notes learned the most securely. The use of very small note values early in practicing is so removed from later performance, in time and in feel, that I have never known it to come back and haunt or influence the quality of a that performance.)
Some variation is possible in the mode of reconnecting the separate hands. In general, the slower you are willing to keep things, the more promptly you can let yourself put components of the whole texture together. There is some speed at which any given student could indeed skip the step of separating hands. For most of us, in moderately or very difficult passages, this tempo is very slow indeed, and in general it is not a good idea to aim to do this. (Not a good idea partly because it taxes our boredom threshold and partly because separate-hand practicing also allows us to hear things clearly.) In general, if each hand feels really solid at a certain tempo—ready in theory to be performed by itself at that tempo—then it is possible to put those hands together at a somewhat slower tempo. How much slower varies from one situation to another. The overriding principle is a familiar one: when you put the hands together, the tempo should be such that the results are accurate and the experience feels easy—no scrambling, no emergencies, no near misses.

Pedaling
The pedal part in mm. 4–12 of this piece is simple though non-trivial. I would play the fifteen pedal notes with the following feet, all toes:
l-r-r-r-l-r-l-r-l-r-l-l-r-r-l
Other possibilities involve, for example, playing the first note of m. 5 with left toe (crossing over) or playing the second note of that measure with right heel; or playing some of the two-note groupings that span bar lines (between mm. 6–7, 7–8, 8–9) with one foot, either all toes or toe and heel. Once a student has decided on a pedaling, he or she should play through the pedal part slowly, not looking at the feet, until it is second nature. Since the note values are all long, getting the pedal part up to tempo will not take as long or go through as many stages as it would with some other passages. However, it is extremely important not to shortchange the practicing of even this fairly simple pedal line. This is all the more true because in general lower notes and slower notes play the greatest part in shaping the underlying pulse and rhythm in organ music. This pedal line is both.
When the pedal part seems very solid, then it is time to begin practicing it with the left hand. It is often true—for most players—that “left hand and pedal” is the combination of parts that requires the most work. Therefore it should be started as soon as each of those parts is ready. It is also often true that once left hand and pedal is very secure, and the right hand part is well learned, and the two hands together are secure, then the whole texture will fit together without too much trouble. However, it certainly never hurts to practice right hand and pedal as well. In the case of this section, there are a couple of places where the strongest rhetorical and rhythmic interaction is between the something that is being played by the right hand and the bass line in the pedal. This is the case, for example, with the transition from m. 3 to m. 4, and also the middle of m. 10. Practicing the right hand and pedal together will draw the attention of the ears to these spots.
Next month we will start looking at the Boëllmann, concentrating on understanding the overall shape of the piece and looking for connections and contrasts.

About heel playing (with many exercises), and dealing briefly with double pedal and with pedal substitution

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

Organ Method VIII

This month’s excerpt continues the discussion of heel playing, with many exercises. It then deals briefly with double pedal and with pedal substitution. This wraps up the chapter on pedal playing as such. The next part of the method is about manual playing—aspects of keyboard technique specific to organ, and ways of getting comfortable at the organ keyboard for players who come from a piano or harpsichord background. Later on I will deal with putting hands and feet together, and with overall organ practice techniques and habits.

Here are several other exercises along similar lines. Each one gives you the chance to try out the heels with a different note pattern. For the moment, the principle that the toes take the raised keys and the heels take the natural keys remains (Examples 1 and 2).

In the six short exercises above, I have provided pedalings that allow each foot to play notes that are in the region of the pedal keyboard where that foot automatically falls as you sit on the bench. However, these very same note patterns can also be played by the opposite feet, as follows (Examples 3 and 4).

Each of the gestures in these exercises—playing a natural note with the heel after having played a sharp or a flat with the toe, then again playing a sharp or flat (the same one or a different one) with the toe, turning the foot—feels different and of course requires different planning, depending on which foot is involved. It is not necessarily true that a gesture is easier or more natural if it is carried out by the foot that is “proper” to the side of the keyboard where the notes are found. As you play these exercises notice whether you find the note patterns easier with one foot or with the other. Also notice which exercises, with which pedaling, can most easily be played legato. In some cases it may seem nearly impossible to keep a full legato through the turns of the foot. However, after you have practiced the exercise enough with detached articulation, and your feet have become adept at following the shape of the notes, the execution of the same exercise with full legato may begin to seem possible. This will vary from one player to another. (Note: do not try to connect notes with a strong legato in these exercises if doing so is awkward or creates tension in the feet, legs, or ankles.)

Posture

Everything about your posture will affect how you carry out these exercises: that is, which parts of the toe and heel region of each foot you actually bring in contact with the keys. You must pay attention to this and work it out consciously for yourself. It is different for each player. In general, as with the “toes only” exercises, the more that you prefer to hold your knees close to each other, the more you will find it comfortable to play from the inside of the foot; the more that you prefer to let your knees move away from the center and follow the feet towards the notes, the more you will find it comfortable to play with the outside of the foot. However, this varies greatly with individual posture and physique. Only you, the player, can figure out what works best for you.

The following exercises ask the foot to span slightly longer distances between the toe and the heel—still with the toes playing the sharps and flats, and the heels playing the naturals (Examples 5 and 6). Again you can try these note patterns with the feet reversed, as in the following (Examples 7 and 8), and so on.

This might seem like a bit of a stretch. It will certainly be necessary to turn the body a lot to reach the opposite sides of the keyboard with the heels. Each of these exercises should be done slowly, paying maximum attention to foot position, especially during any turns.

The next step is to use the heel on natural notes following the use of the toe on other nearby natural notes. This feels different from playing a natural with the heel when the toe has just been on a sharp or flat. The angles at which the feet need to be held are different. The following exercises begin to address this sort of playing (Examples 9 and 10).

These should be played slowly and, at first, non-legato. As you become comfortable with the shapes of the gestures you can try connecting the notes. You may find some of the pedalings in these exercises uncomfortable. Again, this is something that varies with the posture and physique of the player. If you do, then move away from that exercise for now. It may (or may not) feel more comfortable later. You should make up short exercises of your own in which you play simple chains of notes with alternating toe and heel, or with irregular patterns of toe and heel.

Toe and heel together 

Here is an example of a short phrase in which toes and heels can used in an irregular pattern geared to the shape of the particular melody (Examples 11, 12, 13, and 14). I give it, however, with four different pedalings. Which one do you like best? Can you devise another that you like better?

After you have become comfortable with the basic gesture of playing successive notes with the toe and heel, you can begin to look at pedal passages from the repertoire in which a combination of toe and heel pedaling can be used. (Note that it is rare for a passage to be played with heels only. Any passage that is best played without the application of alternating toe and heel is normally played with toes alone, not heels alone. Also, the heels rarely play raised keys, so any passage that is not all-naturals will be played either by toes alone or by a combination of toe and heel.) 

Here are two examples of such passages, with possible pedalings. The first is from Franck’s Choral No. 3 in E, beginning at m. 138 (Example 15). The second is from the chorale setting Alles ist an Gottes Segen, op. 67, no. 2, by Max Reger, beginning at m. 2 (Example 16). The pedalings that I have provided for each of the complete passages are just suggestions: each is one way that an organist might configure the pedaling, but not the only plausible way, and also not necessarily the best way for any given player. Try each of these passages slowly and carefully with the pedalings that I have given. Then try to find other pedalings for at least part of each passage that would also work—perhaps that feel better to you. For the purpose of this exercise, assume that you want to use pedalings that would in theory allow you to play legato: that is, do not use the same part of the same foot for two successive notes in such a way as to require a break between those notes. 

Can you find other pedalings that you like as well as or better than those that I have given? In the Franck, I have had each foot remain on its “proper” side of the pedal keyboard—the left foot plays tenor C and lower notes, the right foot plays tenor C and lower notes. In the Reger, I have written in more crossing of the middle of the keyboard, especially involving the right foot’s reaching for some of the lower notes. Could you pedal either passage differently by crossing the middle line of the keyboard either more or less than I have done? Are there pairs of successive natural notes that I have assigned to the heel and the toe of the same foot for which you would find it more comfortable to reverse that heel and toe (for example, the A and the C in the seventh measure of the Franck)?

Here are a few more pedal passages that can or should be played by a mix of heel and toe. They are from Mendelssohn Sonata #3, first movement (Example 17); Vierne Symphony #3, first movement (Example 18); and Elgar Organ Sonata, op. 28, first movement (Example 19). In each case, work out a few different possible pedalings, and practice them slowly and carefully. 

In general, organ music written after about 1800 is likely to make more use of the heel than that written before then. (Some of the reasons for this are discussed in the last section of this book.) The music of the composers excerpted here and their contemporaries will provide you with a treasure trove of passages with which to practice the use of the heels.

Double pedal and substitution

There are two special pedal playing techniques that should be mentioned here: double pedal and pedal substitution.

A small number of pieces in the organ repertoire have pedal parts in which for some of the time or all of the time two notes are to be played at once by the feet—or two ongoing independent contrapuntal lines in the pedals. Here is an example from a Bach chorale setting—Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 686 (Example 20).

Once the second—higher—pedal line comes in here in the fourth measure of this excerpt, each of the two pedal lines has to be played in its entirety by one foot. This is the norm for a double-pedal part. For anyone who has learned to look at pedal parts on a one-foot-at-a-time basis, as we have done here, this actually presents no conceptual challenge, and no more physical challenge than a similarly intricate single pedal part would.

In order to practice a double-pedal part, first work out a pedaling for each separate pedal line: the upper line in the right foot, of course, and the lower line in the left foot. The pedaling will of necessity be a mix of same-toe pedaling—which is intrinsically non-legato—and heel/toe pedaling. Once the pedaling has been worked out separately for each foot, each foot should be practiced separately. This is exactly the same process as practicing each foot separately when the two feet will end up being combined into one pedal line. 

Next, you should practice putting the two feet together, but with the notes staggered, so that you are not yet trying to play two notes at the same time, but are tracing the outline of the two-voice pedal part as it will be. This step in the process is unmeasured: you are following the physical shape of the pedal parts, but not their rhythm or the way that they will actually fit together. For the sixth measure of this Bach example, the practice line would look like Example 21.

This should be practiced slowly and reasonably steadily, without worrying about any particular rhythm. I have not indicated a specific pedaling here because that will be up to the particular player, and makes no difference in principle for the working out of this approach. After the patterns of the two feet have become comfortable interspersed with each other in this way, they can be brought into the proper rhythmic alignment and the passage can be practiced as written. 

Substitution in pedal playing is either 1) changing feet on one key silently: that is, bringing the right foot onto a note that is being held by the left foot and then removing the left foot from that note, without releasing the note, or the same with the roles of the feet reversed; or 2) moving the heel of one foot onto a note being held by the toe of that foot, or vice versa, again while holding the note—not releasing and repeating it. 

Substitution is a natural outgrowth, technically, of the act of repeating a note using the other foot, as practiced in Exercise V of the March 2013 column. The change is, in a sense, just one of articulation: instead of putting a space between the “two” notes, you make them, in effect, legato—playing the second one before the first one has been released. Planning is required whenever you play two notes that are close together: which foot should be closer to the instrument and which closer to the bench? Should the new foot take over the key behind the old foot, or in front of it? Above or below? Try Exercise V this way, not repeating any of the notes that are the same as one another, slipping the foot that would have played the second note onto the key and then—but only then—silently removing the first foot and sending it on its way to its next note. This should feel like a natural outgrowth of the work that you have already done.