On Teaching

This is the next part of the Introduction, addressed to someone who has never sat down at an organ before.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached  at [email protected].

Organ Method III

This is the next part of the Introduction, following directly from last month. Next month’s column will include the final section of the Introduction—which will finish up the preliminary discussion of registration, and touch on one or two smaller points—and the beginning of the first chapter, which will be about pedal playing. This Introduction includes, as I mentioned last month, quite a bit that is very basic, that is really addressed to someone who has never sat down at an organ before. I want to include this for several reasons: first of all, that some such people may want to use the book; that some of them may not have access to an experienced teacher (though of course working with a teacher is a very good idea whenever possible); and that a beginner’s perspective can be interesting as a refresher even for non-beginners. I would especially appreciate feedback about this aspect of what I have written here. I would also like to begin to solicit the following from readers: terms that should be included in a Glossary. If you have a term that you think is important but not obvious—I don’t need to
be reminded to include “Great” or “Swell” or “Crescendo Pedal,” etc.—then please send it along, with—if you wish—your definition.  

What do you the student need to know as you sit down at the keyboards of an organ for the first time?

First, you should know in general terms what to expect to find in front of you once you are seated at the organ bench. There will be keyboards: probably at least two manual keyboards (routinely abbreviated as “manuals”) and one pedal keyboard (“pedals”). There are a very few organs out there with only one manual, and of course some without pedals. A manual keyboard usually has the same general setup and configuration as a piano or an electronic keyboard: the same arrangement of seven “white” keys and five “black” (really “raised”) keys to the octave, the same letter names for the notes:

Remember, though, very little about the organ is “always”: you may someday encounter an organ on the keyboards of which some of the notes are actually in a different order from this. (This is rare: more about it later in this volume.) You will probably indeed encounter organs on which the “white” keys are of some dark or natural wood color, and the “black” keys are of a different wood color or perhaps are white. These colors and materials make no difference to the functioning of the instrument. (But if as a beginner, you find yourself at an organ that seems to have the notes of its keyboard(s) in a non-standard order, then consult the last chapter of this book, or the proprietor of that organ!)

The manual keyboards of most organs have a compass of four-and-a-half or five octaves. It is almost always the case that the lowest note of the manuals is a C, and that it is specifically C two octaves below middle C—the note two ledger lines below the bass clef: this is also, for example, the lowest note of the cello. The highest note is usually one of three notes: the C five octaves above that lowest note, or either the G or the F below where that five-octave C would have been. Middle C is, therefore, a bit to the left of the actual middle of the keyboard. It is normal—not universal, though close to it—for the multiple manual keyboards of any given organ to have the same compass as one another. 

The most common numbers of manual keyboards on organs around the world are two and three: any survey would probably show that 90% of the organs out there are either 2-manual or 3-manual. However, 4-manual organs are far from unheard of, and even more than that can be found. The purpose of multiple manuals is to provide different sounds, and more flexible ways of using different sounds than could be achieved with just one keyboard: much more about this below.

The pedal keyboard is—appropriately enough—down at your feet, or essentially on the floor. Like the manuals, the pedalboard uses the regular keyboard configuration: it is important to be aware that this is so, even though it looks so very different. The keys of a pedal keyboard are of course bigger than the keys of a manual keyboard, or of a piano, say, or a harpsichord. Each key will be played, when it is played, by a foot. Manual keys are played not by the hand as such, of course, but by individual fingers. (Manual keys meant to be played by the whole hand are found in carillons, where they are about as big as organ pedal keys, and look similar.) The pattern of “white” and “black” keys is the normal one, though fairly often the keys are all of a natural wood color. (Raised keys may be black; no pedal keys are normally white.) The lowest note of a pedal keyboard is again usually a C: the same C as the lowest note of a manual keyboard—two octaves below middle C. The highest note is usually either the F or the G above middle C. This give a compass of about two and a half octaves, corresponding to the lower two and a half octaves of the manual compass. 

Thus if you saw these notes 

you would play, on a manual keyboard:

1) the lowest key

2) the next C up, which is the eighth white key and the thirteenth key overall

3) the next C up after that, the fifteenth white key, the 25th key overall: roughly the middle of the keyboard

4) the F above that (18th, 30th), still near the middle of the keyboard

5) the C above that (22nd, 37th)

and on a pedal keyboard:

1) also the lowest key

2) also the next C up (8th, 13th), but near the middle of the keyboard

3) also the next C up (15th, 25th), but rather near the top of the keyboard

4) also the F above that (18th, 30th), but very near the top of the keyboard—perhaps the top note (on a few pedal keyboards this note is not there: it is above the compass of the pedals)

5) this note is well above the compass of any pedal keyboard.

Note that “middle C” is more or less in the middle of a manual keyboard, but near the top of a pedal keyboard. The C that is found in the middle of a pedal keyboard is “C below middle C,” often called tenor C. Also note that E or F above middle C on the manuals is probably directly above E or F below middle C on the pedals.

All of this quickly becomes intuitive or second nature, but it is important to be clear about it from the beginning.

Beyond the keyboards, what else will you see when you first approach
the organ?

Surrounding the keyboards are various switches, knobs, tabs, buttons, lights, perhaps LCD-type displays, toe studs, pedals other than the pedal keys, and more. Organs vary from one another quite a lot in the configuration of all of these accessories. Some organs have many more of them than others. Most of the pedals, knobs, and so on have to do, one way or another, with changing sounds, and, therefore, they can be of critical importance in allowing the organ to reach its full expressive potential. For the beginner at the organ, some of them are more important to understand and to use right off the bat than others.

Somewhere on or near the keyboards is a switch to turn the organ on. Almost every organ needs electricity, either to pump wind, in the case of pipe organs, or to generate the sound directly, in the case of the various types of electronic organ. Prior to the late nineteenth century, all organs needed wind, and all pumping of wind was done by people: to play the organ—even just to practice, however briefly—required the help of someone plying the bellows. The switch that enables us now to play the organ alone can take any one of several forms—a button, something that looks like a light switch, a toggle switch of a different shape, a timer knob, a key in a lock. It can be located anywhere: right by the keyboards, on a nearby wall, in another room. The first time that you arrive at a new organ, the proprietor of that organ will probably show you the switch. If not, look around: if you’re lucky it will be labeled. If not, there might be some trial and error involved.

Other than the on/off switch, the most important set of “extras”—accessories—that you need to understand before embarking on the journey of learning to play the organ is the stop controls—that is, the knobs, switches, or whatever it might be that turn the stops of the organ on and off, and that allow you to choose from among the many different sounds of the instrument. 

Thus we come to the subject of organ registration or the art of choosing sounds for organ pieces—or for any playing that you do at the instrument: repertoire, hymns, accompaniment, improvisation, and so on. I discuss registration at some length from historical and aesthetic perspectives in the later chapter on registration. Here I will go over the beginnings of what is a very big subject: enough to allow the beginner to start feeling comfortable using organ sound, and therefore to be able to start practicing and learning.

An organ has stops. A stop is a sound. Traditionally—that is, in pipe organs—a stop is a set of pipes, usually one per key of a given keyboard, that make a certain kind of sound. (Electronic organs make the sounds in different ways, and the sounds can be rather different, but the concept is the same.) The pipes of a given stop differ from one another in pitch, as they go up the compass of their keyboard, and resemble one another in sonority. Different stops cover the same notes as one another but differ, a little bit or a lot, in sonority. No note will sound on an organ keyboard—no key will produce a sound—unless there is at least one stop turned on when the key is pressed. 

Stops are normally assigned to particular keyboards. So, if there are two manuals and one pedal keyboard on a given organ, each of those three keyboards will have its own set of stops, from as few as one to as many as, rarely, dozens. For a keyboard to have between about eight and sixteen stops is common. (A keyboard and its associated stops are normally referred to as a “division.”) There are often, but not always, limited ways of sharing stops between keyboards. Most of the accessories mentioned above, found around the actual keyboards of an organ, are the switches that turn stops on and off. These can be knobs, which are pulled out to turn stops on, giving rise to the expression “pulling out all the stops.” They can also be tabs, rectangles or rounded rectangles, which are flipped up or down, or tablets meant to be rocked back and forth. The stop controls for each keyboard are usually grouped together. If the organ at which you find yourself is well labeled, then it will probably be clear which group of stop knobs or tabs controls the stops for which keyboard. If it is not clear, then it can be found out very readily by trial and error. 

Organ stops can be used singly or in combination. In general, just as each stop has its own distinct sound, so any possible combination of two or more stops has its own sound. If a given keyboard has just two stops, then that keyboard has three possible sounds: stop A, stop B, and those two stops together. If a keyboard has eight stops—still a fairly small division—then it has a total of 255 different possible sounds. A large division with, say, eighteen stops has over a quarter of a million possible combinations of stops, and thus that many different sounds. Of course many of these sounds are similar to one another. Also, these numbers—which get even bigger when we talk about combinations of sound across the whole organ—are for technically possible combinations. Only a fraction of those possibilities are normally judged to be musically attractive and useful. This, of course, is subjective, and open to disagreement and change.

Each organ stop is defined by two attributes: its pitch level and its sonority. The pitch level is easy to define or describe: a stop is either at unison pitch or at some other clearly defined non-unison pitch, say, an octave above unison, or two octaves above unison, or an octave below unison, or an octave and a fifth above unison. The purpose of stops that are not at unison pitch is not to transpose music, nor to alter the apparent pitch level of the music that is being heard. All of the non-unison stops are used in combination with unison stops. They blend in and change not the pitch level, but rather the sonority. It can be a bit of a leap of faith at first to believe that this works or makes sense, but it does. Stop knobs (or tabs, etc.) are labeled with numbers that tell us clearly what the pitch level of each stop is. These numbers are expressed as feet; however, it is important to know that they are not about length: they are simply a convention for describing pitch level. The meanings of the numbers are as follows:

8′ - at unison pitch (that is, each note has the same pitch that you would expect a piano to have, except for minor tuning differences)

4′ - one octave higher than unison

2′ - two octaves higher than unison

1′ - three octaves higher than unison

16′ - one octave lower than unison

32′ - two octaves lower than unison

51⁄3′ - a fifth higher than unison (a C key, for example, plays the G above it)

22⁄3′ - an octave and a fifth higher than unison (a C key plays the G a twelfth above it)

13⁄5′ - two octaves and a third above unison (a C key plays E a seventeenth above it).

It is very important for the student to know these numbers (there are a few others that are used rarely, but can be figured out). If a stop knob has a Roman numeral—say V or III or IV—then that stop is a conglomeration of many very high-pitched pipes. 

Stop controls also have words on them—the likes of “diapason” or “gedeckt” or “salicional” or “trumpet”. These are terms that attempt to describe the sonority of the stop. There is a lot to say about what these terms mean and where they come from (again, see the chapter on registration), but the best way to look at it at the very beginning is this: the term attempts to describe the sound, but if I pull out the stop and play some notes I can hear the sound itself.

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

Organ Method IX

This excerpt begins the section on manual playing, in which I offer guidance to the student who has already played piano or harpsichord, on how to adapt that playing to the organ. This is, as I wrote in the Preface to the method—which appeared as the October 2012 column—mostly about how to practice. One model for an approach to learning organ (manual) playing for a student who is already a keyboard player is this: sit down at the organ, play around, and see what you notice. Of course, this is potentially inefficient. There is no reason that a student should lack the advantage of some guidance from someone more experienced, in person or through writing. However, this hands-off, unguided approach is in fact the essence of what a musician/student should do. The way to learn what sounds and touch on the organ are like is to play the organ, notice everything that you hear and feel, and respond to what you notice. Although I think that at least on grounds of efficiency it is a good idea for a student to accept guidance from teachers (or for that matter from method-writers), I also think that such guidance should remove as little autonomy and initiative from the student as possible. The opening of the section on manual playing—the part included this month—is a general guide to starting the process. 

I should mention that, whereas in the column from last October I wrote that the work on playing manuals and pedals together would form part of the section on pedal-playing (the section that was printed in several columns ending last month), I have since decided to shift it to after the section on manual playing. This seems to me to make more sense, although of course in the end students can uses chapters of this book in any order that they want.

Position

Take a seat on the organ bench. If you have already begun to work on pedal playing, then remember to position yourself on the bench—and to position the bench itself—in the way that you have found best for pedal work. It is not a good idea to get accustomed to a different bench position for manuals-only music, pedals-only music, and the large segment of the organ repertoire that uses hands and feet together. (Though once in a while, later on, it might be a good idea to change position for a particular piece that presents some sort of unusual challenge.) If you are coming to this section of the book without yet having begun to work on pedal playing, then position the bench at a height that allows you to relax your legs completely either without depressing any pedal keys, or only depressing them lightly with your toes. Of course, while practicing manuals without pedal, you should rest your feet in whatever way that the organ you are playing provides. Usually there is a bar low down on the bench that is meant to accommodate the feet when they are not being used to play. 

Since the vast majority of organs have at least two—often three—manuals, there is no way to sit that gives you one position in relation to the manual keys. The higher manuals are both higher and farther away. In trying to work out the right distance from the manuals at which to sit, it is important to make sure that you do not feel cramped. If you are too close to a keyboard, it is extremely difficult to play without tension. You should never feel that your shoulders need to be drawn upwards or back in order to give your hands and arms room to address the keyboards. Your shoulders should also, however, not be hunched forward. Your posture on the bench should be as relaxed and comfortable as possible. As you get accustomed to playing, you may make changes in the exact distance from the keyboards that you choose to sit. There is no “correct” posture for your arms while playing the organ. That is, your elbows, for example, do not have to be in one particular place or one particular alignment with your torso; your wrists need not be consistently above, below, or even with your forearms or hands. These things will vary with your own physique and habits.   

Once you are seated on the bench, notice where on each keyboard each of your hands most naturally falls—the place on the keyboard at which your forearms, the middle three fingers of each hand, and the keys themselves line up straight, while your shoulders and elbows are in a comfortable place. This will probably be roughly an octave below middle C for the left hand and an octave above middle C for the right hand: a bit farther out from the center for players who are particularly broad-shouldered or who prefer to keep their elbows out from their sides. This is the place on the keyboard where it is easiest to play without tension. Therefore, it is the best place to use as a sort of laboratory for learning or trying out various aspects of organ touch and various fingering skills. 

Begin to play

Now draw a stop or two (you can revisit the Introduction for a reminder about drawing and combining stops) and play some individual notes in the region of the keyboard described above. What do you notice? What is the touch like? How does it compare to the instruments with which you are most familiar—piano, harpsichord, or others? Is it heavy or light or in-between? Try playing a few notes with your fingers as far out on the keys as possible—almost slipping off to the front—and then with your fingers in the middle of the keys. Do these different positions feel different? Try playing notes in this same region of each of the different keyboards of the organ at which you are seated. Do the keyboards feel different from one another? Try engaging a coupler. Does this change the feel of either of the keyboards involved? If you depress a key very slowly, with as little force as possible, does that seem to sound or feel different from what you experience if you strike a key with more force? The answers to these questions will vary—sometimes a lot—from one organ to another. Whatever you notice or learn at the first organ keyboard at which you sit and play is, of course, only a beginning. 

Next play some simple note patterns, one hand at a time, along the lines of these, the first for the right hand, the second for the left (Examples 1 and 2). I have located these short exercises in the region of the keyboard that I have identified as the most natural for your arms and hands to reach. However, if for you that region is a little bit higher or lower, then start out playing the same four-note pattern using whatever specific notes seem most comfortable. (Stick to natural notes for the moment.) Try the following different fingerings—right hand: 2-3-4-5-4-3-2 or 1-2-3-4-3-2-1; left hand: 5-4-3-2-3-4-5 or 4-3-2-1-2-3-4.

What do you notice about the different fingerings? Do they seem to result in differences in hand position or in where on the key you play each note? Does one feel more comfortable or more natural than the other? 

Next, try the same exercise about a fifth closer to the center of the keyboard. If you started on the notes that I pictured, move to this (Examples 3 and 4). Try the same different fingerings, and look out for the same things. Then play the same pattern near the middle of the keyboard, perhaps with each hand crossing or including the note middle C. Try this on all of the keyboards of the organ that you are playing. 

In playing this short exercise bear the following in mind:

1) Keep everything relaxed: hands, arms, shoulders, and your entire body.

2) As long as you are physically relaxed, do not worry for now about the shape or position of the hand: the relationship between the fingers and the rest of the hand; the height of the wrist; the height of the wrist or hand in relation to the arm. All of these things are individual and flexible. There might turn out to be right and wrong ways for you to approach these things, but they will be right or wrong for you specifically: they will emerge in the course of your learning—they can’t be dictated in advance. There are aspects of sideways hand position—that is, how the hand is turned or cocked side-to-side—that are important, and that tend to work out the same way for most players. You will begin to work on this a bit later on.

3) The fingers need not always be parallel to the keys. It is fine for the finger playing a note to be at any angle to that key, as long as the part of the finger actually playing the note touches the key solidly. 

4) Keep the tempo slow, and listen to the sound of each note: savor each note. There is nothing to be gained by speed.

5) Try different articulations. Some of the time, make the exercise legato: release each note as you play the next note. Other times, try an exaggerated legato: let notes overlap to such an extent that you hear adjacent notes sounding together, perhaps for nearly the full length of the latter note, even though this will sound odd. Then try it detached: release each note long enough before playing the next note that you hear a gap. Then also try it very detached: release each note as soon as possible after you play it, only making sure that you do really hear the sound of each note. (Even these very short notes should be played without extra force or tension.) 

6) In trying out all of these articulations, do not worry about precision or making everything come out the same. Just keep relaxed and listen. This will lead to the most control—and precision when it is desired—later on.

Next, add some raised keys—sharps and flats—to the exercise. Start with one of the following, and take it through all of the steps described above (Examples 5 and 6). 

Two hands together

These simple exercises are meant to be played one hand at a time. The next step is to put the two hands together, keeping the note picture simple. As always, you the student can construct such exercises yourself. Here are a few possibilities derived from the exercises above (Examples 7, 8, 9, and 10).

Concerning the fingering for these exercises, bear the following in mind:

1) Use the same sorts of fingerings for each hand of these exercises that you used for the separate-hand exercises above; that is, sometimes 1-2-3-4, etc., sometimes 2-3-4-5, etc. 

2) Mix and match these fingerings between the two hands. Sometimes use the thumb-based fingering in both hands, sometimes use the second-finger-based fingering in both hands, and sometimes use one of those in each hand. 

3) Note that when the notes are parallel, the fingerings are mirrored, or nearly mirrored; when the notes are mirrored, the fingerings are parallel or nearly parallel.

4) Before you play through an exercise, be absolutely sure that you know what fingering you are about to use. If it would help, write the fingering in—but lightly, in pencil. When you want to try a different fingering, erase what you have written and write in the new fingering. 

Keep these exercises slow: it is not useful to practice this sort of material if, in doing so, you feel that you have to scramble to find the next note, or if you actually make wrong notes, or if you have to hesitate in order to get it right. There is no disadvantage to keeping the notes very slow indeed. Listen to the sounds, and to the intervals. Savor the sounds of the registrations that you use. 

Continue to try different articulations, as described above. If you feel comfortable doing so, you may try different articulations in each hand. In doing this, again don’t expect for the results to be measured or precise: just keep the feel of the hands relaxed and natural, and listen carefully.

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.

Organ Method II

This is the first part—roughly the first half—of an Introduction designed to orient the beginning student to the instrument itself: what an organ is, what it feels like to sit at the console and begin to play, what you have to know in order not to find the initial experience of the organ overwhelming. One of my own earliest attempts to practice organ has always served as a caution to me. I was about thirteen years old, and I had arranged with a nearby church to practice on their organ. I had barely played at all prior to my first visit there. Of course, they were being quite nice and supportive to let me use the instrument. When I got there, I turned the key and got the instrument going. I started trying to play. No matter how few stops I put on—and I was trying to be quiet—the sound stayed the same: rather loud. I concluded that the organ was broken, and I was scared to death that I might have broken it. I turned everything off, left, and later called to tell my contact at the church that the instrument was broken, trying to tell the story in a way that made it look like I hadn’t done it. Of course, in fact, someone had simply left the crescendo pedal a little bit on. I had never heard of a crescendo pedal, so I panicked. I always hope to spare other beginners experiences like that. The Introduction is just a brief run-through of some concepts that I think the student should bear in mind before beginning to play. The last section of the book will be a more thorough discussion of organ history, types of organs, developments in organ repertoire, and so on. An important part of that section will be suggestions for further study, since of course what we know about the organ and its history keeps expanding and changing. As always, I strongly welcome any feedback. 

Introduction: the instrument

What is the organ? The answer to this question is surprisingly elusive. No student should expect to come up with a definitive answer, when no experienced professional can; every student, especially one new to the instrument, should  think about it, and can confidently expect to find thinking about it fascinating and absorbing. 

The word “organ” and its equivalent in other languages—orgue, orgel, órgano, and so on—has been used for many centuries and in many parts of the world to denote a musical instrument. That musical instrument has changed—evolved—over the centuries, and has also differed, to some extent, in different parts of the world. This evolution and these differences have been substantial: probably as substantial as the process that led from the harpsichord to the piano, or from the shawm to the oboe. In the case of the organ, however, its name has not changed. (Here’s why the name has not changed: because the biggest and most striking organs are solid, immovable objects that cost a lot and that in part define the spaces that they inhabit. Changes in organs have usually been sold as improvements, upgrades, updatings, or even restorations, no matter how new or innovative the content of those changes was, not as new instruments. New developments in smaller, portable instruments—a new action type in a stringed keyboard instrument, or a new kind of bore in a double-reed instrument—have usually been sold as new instruments.) A definition seems impossible: it is a challenge to find any one thing to say that is categorically true of all organs. Description, however, is possible, if it is flexible enough to encompass all of this magnificent variety. So, the organ is:

1) A musical instrument. This is obvious: it’s what we are talking about. Maybe it is not even worth mentioning, except that it is one of only two things that we can mention that are really true of all organs. The second one is that it is:

2) A keyboard instrument. In fact, even this is not quite universal. There have been barrel organs and other mechanically operated organs—organs that play themselves. However, for someone coming to study organ, someone who wants to learn to play, we can assume that it is a keyboard instrument that we are talking about.

3) An instrument with a pedal keyboard. The pedal keyboard has been a characteristic of the organ for a very long time indeed, but it has never been universal. It would be unusual nowadays (but not necessarily actually wrong) for someone who could not play the pedals at all to describe himself or herself as an “organist”. However, over the centuries many organs have been built without pedal keyboards, and something like (very roughly) half of the organ repertoire consists of pieces that do not need pedals.

4) A wind instrument. For many centuries all of the instruments that were considered “organs” were ones in which the sound came about through the application of wind. Some sorts of pipes—wooden or metal, with or without moving parts, similar in their ways of producing sound to wind instruments such as flutes or to reed instruments such as clarinets or oboes—were set up ready to receive a breath of wind—not from human lungs, but from some type of bellows system. This was then delivered to the correct pipes, through one sort of mechanism or another, when a player pushed a key. However, beginning in the early twentieth century, inventors began to create ways of making sound through electricity without the use of wind, which were then gathered under the umbrella of the organ. In the early twenty-first century, a large proportion of the organs in use have no pipes and use no wind: they are one sort or another of electronic organ, most creating sound through the use of computer technology. Many but not all of these electronic organs are explicitly intended by their makers to imitate the sounds of pipe organs. 

(Of course, the electronic organ has always been a source of controversy. If it is in theory trying to sound like a pipe organ, how well does it succeed? Is the sound as beautiful and stirring as the sound of a pipe organ? Is it artistically appropriate to play organ repertoire from before the era of the electronic organ on such an instrument? Does it offer any advantages—portability, more stable tuning, an even greater variety of sounds? And so on. One interesting point about these controversies is that they are new to recent decades only in their details. All changes in organ design over hundreds of years—and change has been the only constant—have met with both condemnation and adulation, and everything in between.)

5) An instrument with “stops”. That is, an instrument with discrete different sounds that can be used separately or in various combinations. This is highly characteristic of the organ, and essentially every organ beyond the very smallest is set up this way. Of everything that we have so far listed here, it might be the closest to a definition, or at least to a thread binding together all of the instruments that have been accepted as “organs” over the years. It is not quite universal: there are organs small enough that they make only one sound—that is, they have only one stop, so the business of combining stops does not apply. It is also not found only in the organ. Harpsichords also have stops, for example. However, the concept of stops and the combining of stops is essential to the artistic task of playing the organ. With most musical instruments, the player has one basic sound available, but has the ability to shape the nature of that sound somewhat, through dynamics or other means. With the organ, the player has several or, usually, many different sounds available. However, the ability to shape the nature of any given sound is limited. 

6) A place. More than any other musical instrument, a pipe organ is part of the architecture, part of the substance of the structure where it lives. Very few organs move around. Those that do are very small and not designed to play very much of the organ repertoire: they are valid organs, but they are not the most characteristic. Organists can feel enveloped by the instrument. The organ, rather than the room or the building, is where they are when they are playing. And if the instrument is an essential part of the architecture, then the architecture is also part of the instrument. The acoustics of the room in which it is found are always part of the sound of an organ, and the layout of the instrument in the room can dictate things about how it can best be used. 

7) A technological marvel. In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance large church organs—fully mechanical with several keyboards and many stops—were at least candidates for the most advanced and intricate technology that had yet been developed. The history of the development of technology for the organ—key and stop action, and pipe design—moves in sync with the overall history of technology, including the application of electricity and of computer-driven functions. 

8) Whatever you the student think it is or want it to be. Why are you studying organ? Did you fall in love with the sounds? If so, were they of one particular organ, or a type, or a wide variety? (It could be even one particular stop.) Is it repertoire that draws you to the instrument? If so, what repertoire? A piece? A composer? An era? A variety of things? Is it the sense of power? That is a bit facetious, but also real: an organist at even a fairly small organ commands more sounds and a greater range of dynamics than any other performer: it is not even close. That can be intoxicating, and, since it is not harmful, there is no reason that we should not enjoy that intoxication. Is it a place—a place where you have heard organ music, whether a church or a concert hall or a practice studio? Is it an inspiring performer or teacher or friend? Is it a connection to one of the religious practices that make use of organ music? Try not to forget what drew you to the instrument and what makes you love it—especially if the hours of practicing ever threaten to seem long. At the same time, try to be open to discovering all of the sides of the organ. 

With all of this variety, how do we get started? 

I will end the excerpt here, because it is a fairly logical stopping place. Next month’s excerpt will begin with keyboard and stop control layout, and go on from there. It will discuss the beginnings of registration, and practice habits.

To look or not to look, part II

To recap from last month, it has been my observation that making a practice of looking at the hands or feet while learning to play the organ will hinder a student’s becoming comfortable at the instrument and of developing skill at playing. In some cases this practice actually prevents a prospective player from ever developing reliable facility and technique. At the same time, though, it is  natural and essentially universal for students to want to look at their hands or feet, and to do so quite a lot, often more than they know. 

This affects different students in different ways. Some people have been so systematic and efficient in their ways of practicing from when they first sat at a keyboard that they have, even very early on, no insecurity, very little tendency to make wrong notes, no tendency for the few wrong notes to throw off the rhythm or overall flow of the music, or to snowball out of control. These are likely to be students who did very little or no looking at the keyboard from the very beginning. On a basic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle, any student who presents a teacher with this situation doesn’t need help with the task that we are talking about here. 

Most students who come to an organ teacher, however, present a more mixed picture, in which wrong notes, insecurity about notes, and a habit of looking at the keyboards all play a part. This is true of students with plenty of talent and potential, as well as some whose potential has been well hidden by badly conceived habits and approaches. One crucial point is this: that some students who think that they are just plain not very good—and whose playing indeed presents as not very good—also think that they have to look at the keyboards a lot specifically to try to fight against being not very good. However, if they can be taught to stop looking at the keyboards, they will discover that their talent and potential are a lot better than they thought. The existence of this psychological trap or paradox is one of the main reasons that I think that this is so important.

Why look at a keyboard?

There are, I think, three specific reasons for looking at the keyboards that are different enough from one another for us to distinguish them. One of these is pure habit, probably driven by fear or insecurity, and sustained perhaps by never having thought about the issue. The next is the one that most people would cite as the main reason: namely, to find a note or notes when you know from the music or your memory what the note(s) should be. The third is to check that whatever you just played was right or was what you thought it was. Each of these might sometimes require a different approach.

What a teacher can do

Anyone who has read this column knows that I am not very big on prohibitions or rules. Although I often have no choice but to ask students to take my word at first about the benefits of not looking—because they have to try it in a pretty committed way before they will know from their own experience that it works—I do prefer to cajole them or persuade them as much as possible. For this purpose there are two things that I have tried that are always available to the teacher and that seem to be effective as starters. One is simply to notice how much a student is looking at the hands or feet, and let the student know. With a student who has not yet been consciously thinking about this subject, it is often sort of mind-boggling how much looking is going on: every note, every second or third note, twice a measure: things like this are quite common, and the student usually has no idea. Just pointing that out—which often is sort of intrinsically humorous and can always be done quite good-naturedly—can help inspire a student to want to reduce the reliance on looking. When a student is pretty much bobbing his or her head down to the keys and back up to the music with great frequency and doesn’t quite know that this is happening, it is probably something that is being done just as a habit. And because it is being done just as a habit, it is very likely not actually giving the student much information. If you stop the student on the way back up and ask what note he or she just found (by looking) and played, the student often won’t be able to answer. You are also likely to be able to find plenty of instances of the student’s looking down at the keys and making a wrong note anyway. It is a good idea to point this out to the student when you see it: it is pretty telling.

The second simple preliminary thing that the teacher can do is to choose a passage that the student has been a) playing with a lot of looking, and b) playing with a fair number of wrong notes, and ask the student to try it once without looking at all. The passage should be short, and should if possible be one that does not have any of the more plausible reasons for looking, like big leaps or chord shapes with awkward hand positions. When the student plays through this passage with a 100% not-looking approach, he or she will probably notice a few interesting things right away. First of all, it is hard to make oneself do this. A student who is really trying not to look at all may reduce looking from, say, two or three times a measure to once every two or three measures, but not likely to zero. This might reflect just old habit, and is worth pointing out. It might sometimes be a way of pinpointing the bits that are indeed harder to play without looking, or that seem that way. Only the student can really figure out which of these it is (since it is never clear to one person, even a teacher, what another person will find hard) and focusing on that is a useful exercise. 

Second, the student will observe that the wrong-note count goes down. Often it goes down dramatically; it almost always goes down some. (And that is without the student’s having had a chance yet to get used to this approach.) This is what people don’t expect, assuming, as we all tend to, that looking will reduce wrong notes. Therefore, it can be a powerful tool for convincing students that looking less or not at all is worth pursuing. Doing this with several passages, doing it from time to time—making a sort of deal: “just this once don’t even glance down at all, and we’ll see what happens”—is a good idea. Sometimes the result will be that most of the passage becomes more accurate, but that a spot or two will stubbornly remain inaccurate or get worse. This provides a reason to examine those passages—what is hard about them, are the planned fingerings and hand positions well thought out, are those plans really being carried out, and so on?

Speaking of doing this, or anything, “from time to time,” it is a good idea to remember that this isn’t something that must be changed or solved right away. It is unrealistic to expect that it can be. Any reduction in the amount of looking by a student who is over-relying on it is good; more should come as time goes by. I do sometimes say to a student something like “take a good look at those keyboards, ‘cause that’s the last time you will see them.” But that is just an attempt to keep the atmosphere light and relaxed. It is always a balancing act: focusing too intensely on something like not looking at the keyboards can distract from other things and can lead to tension (mental, perhaps leading to physical); however, thinking about it and working on it is important. The balance will have to be different for each student.

Additional suggestions

One approach that I have used to start working on this, either with a student who is really convinced or one who still needs persuading, is to suggest a quota for looking at the hands or feet. This seems silly, in a way; at the moment when I suggest it to a student, it actually often comes across as rather silly or funny. That’s one of its advantages—again, a relaxed atmosphere. The student may think that it is a joke, but it is a good, practical idea. 

With the passage in question, first ask the student to play through it once not looking at all, regardless of what seems to be happening. (If that goes really well, then that passage may not be the right one for this exercise.) If there are some rough spots or the student feels really uncomfortable with certain spots, ask the student to do one of the following: 1) Choose in advance a few places to look (maybe a number that averages once every five or six measures: not much more frequent than that). Try to base the choice on an estimate of where looking can be most helpful. Then play the passage moving in and out of the looking according to the plan. Or 2) Set a quota for looking—maybe six times in a short piece, or whatever seems fair—but then look at the hands or feet as it seems necessary along the way, trying not to use up the quota too quickly.

The more planned—not just habitual—the looking is, the more likely it is that the student will actually get something out of it. Both forms of the quota exercise will help the student make looking count: that is, really know what notes should be played, and then really find them with the eyes. (Note that these quota approaches tend to get the student looking to find notes, not looking to check on the notes just played.) The first approach makes this happen most efficiently, since it analyzes which notes the student thinks that he or she will have to look for. The second approach is more of a motivator. Since the looking quota shouldn’t be squandered, the student will want to use it well. 

The drawback to looking

Looking to find notes is usually unnecessary and introduces tiny delays that undermine the overall sense of rhythm. Looking to check on the notes just played should be rarely necessary, if ever. It introduces really serious delays, since the process of checking visually on what notes were just played and comparing that to a sense of what the notes should have been takes a long time. 

This looking to check is something that reflects a student’s low assessment of his or her abilities. That is, the student doesn’t realize that he or she knows by ear what the right notes should be. In general, if we know a passage of music, we also know what isn’t in that passage: if something is wrong we will probably hear it. This doesn’t happen all of the time, even with experienced and accomplished players, but it happens more of the time for inexperienced players than they may realize. Most people would know immediately if they heard a wrong note in, say, The Star Spangled Banner, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, or Jingle Bells—or any number of other tunes and pieces of music. You do not need to be a beginner at playing music, let alone experienced or “advanced,” to recognize rightness or wrongness of notes in a piece that you have heard a few times. This assumes paying attention—both when first hearing the piece a few times, and when playing through it and being on the lookout for wrong notes. This is all part of the process of getting to know pieces and plays out a bit differently from one student to another and from one piece to another. Most students, especially beginners, underestimate their own ability to know whether they are playing what they want to have played and do unnecessary looking to compensate for that. Even if a student must stop and think about whether what was just played was correct, it is worth challenging that student to make that judgment by ear not by eye, if at all possible.

Looking versus not looking

Here’s a good exercise for getting a vivid sense of the difference between looking and not looking—the difference in how it feels to the player. This is not just for beginners or students. As with many efficient exercises, it is mostly just a way of clearing the mind and looking at something as simply as possible. Take a very short passage, perhaps just a measure or two, plus the next downbeat—or any short unit that makes sense. It should be one that you know well. This particular exercise is more focused (or at least easier) with a passage that is either manuals-only or a pedal solo. It should not be difficult or present any virtuosic challenges. Play the passage a few times in a row, keeping your eyes on the music in a way that is almost exaggeratedly focused. Actually say some of the letter names as you go. (I get something out of opening my eyes extra wide for this purpose, as if I were doing a comic turn as someone looking astonished.) Then, look the passage over and start playing it, keeping your eyes only on the keyboard. This will only work completely if you have the passage memorized. If you need to glance up at the music, go ahead. Make sure to remind yourself exactly where on the page the passage is, so that you can get right to it if you need to glance up. Do this several times in a row. Now play the passage several times in a row alternating—one time to the next—between looking only at the music, and looking only at your hands. By now you will probably have the passage memorized if you didn’t already, so you shouldn’t have to glance at the music much, if at all. The memorization is the main reason for keeping the passage short. If the passage is well memorized, you can add this in: play it with your eyes closed! This can feel a bit tightrope-like, and can really intensify the focus on the mental side of not looking. In what ways do these modes of playing feel different to you? Are there differences in security? In how well you can listen while playing? In what you think the effectiveness of the playing to a listener would be?

After you have subjected a passage to this treatment, you will know it very well and can use the same passage for this trickier exercise in looking. Play the passage, and go back and forth from looking at the music to looking at your hands or feet at random times. This is the very thing that I am suggesting that we should mostly not do (but especially not do while learning). The reason for doing it here is to practice getting back to the same place in the music that you have just left, smoothly and without delay. For me the trick to this is in knowing an instant before I am going to look down that I am about to do so, and sort of memorizing my place on the page. Then the gesture of looking down should be light and quick, and the return to the music should be governed in part by the physical feeling of return rather than by reading the music to find the spot. At least that’s how it seems to me. Play around with it and see what you think.

Mazel tov to muscle tone

We have a close friend in Maine who has always taken pride in his self-sufficiency. He built his own house, and in the twenty-five years he and his wife have lived there, he has done all the maintenance and improvements himself. As it is a rural house, there is extra work involved, like plowing a half-mile driveway, clearing brush and trees, and mowing a large lawn. They are just across the river from us, so like us, they have waterfront chores like taking docks and moorings in and out of the water. He is a tough and stubborn guy in his early seventies, and last winter he had a stroke.

I visited him in the rehab center where he spent several very difficult months learning to walk with new limitations, straightening out his speech, and adjusting to his new circumstance in general. His right arm and hand are now pretty much useless, and he was lamenting the loss of his “chain saw arm.” He could not imagine how he was going to be able to get the snowplow off his pickup truck, and the dormers on their roof needed shingle repairs. During that visit, it was simply not crossing his mind that he would likely not be able to do those things again.

Wendy and I had dinner at their house last week and were brought up to date on all those issues. He hired someone to repair the shingles, a friend took the plow off his truck, and he decided they would not put the docks in the water this year. In fact, he put his boat on the market. And though his wife is energetic and sprightly, they are considering selling their house and moving into a condominium, or even, dare they admit, an assisted living facility. With all those changes imposed on their lives, my pal is grateful that his speech is fine, and that with some difficulty he is able to walk, but he is astonished at the uselessness of his arm. “It hangs off my shoulder; I know it’s there. It hurts and itches sometimes, but I can’t make it move.”

Since that dinner, I have been reflecting on the miracle that is the human body, and the incredible things people can learn to do. All of us who are born with bodies that are normal and complete start with roughly the same equipment. Some people have little dexterity. The private nickname we have for one friend is “Oops.” But then there is the fellow who can throw a ball ninety feet and reliably hit a target about one-foot square, and there is the woman who can jump, twirl, and somersault on a beam that is ten centimeters (3.9 inches) wide.

The world of music is full of incredible examples. The human hand is the same apparatus that handles the “neck end” of a violin or guitar, the keys of an oboe or piano, or the strings of the harp. Have you ever shaken hands with a harpist? What may seem to be the simplest instrument is perhaps the most miraculous—the human voice. Stop and think what an incredible feat it is to simply match a pitch with your voice. How do we know exactly the tension of the countless muscles involved that will create that A-flat out of thin air? A choir starting a piece, a cappella, with each member confident of the pitch, volume, and timbre, is a dramatic example of human muscle control.

No musician can play two identical performances of the same piece. We study, train, and practice, trying to make accurate plans for where our fingers will go, where we want to emphasize something, where we want to bring something forward. We write fingerings into our scores, intending to use the same sequence of fingers on each sequence of notes in the hope that we can eliminate confusion. But something always comes up in performance that was not part of the plan. Maybe we got distracted. Or maybe something wonderful happened that never did before. It’s a thrill when you surprise yourself in performance with a special lilt, a delicious ritardando, or a thrilling and dramatic crescendo.

It’s a control issue.

Let’s take that muscle thing a little further. My friend’s stroke did not spoil the muscles in his right arm; it interrupted the electrical gear that operates them. The human nervous system is the amazing wiring harness that transmits our thoughts into muscular impulses. Our bodies include several hundred “visceral” muscles, those that perform involuntarily, running such equipment as our hearts, eyelids, and diaphragms. There are something like 320 symmetrical pairs of skeletal muscles, those that we exercise control over. When I googled that, I was surprised to learn that there seems to be disagreement over the actual number, apparently because some muscles can be considered as part of more complex structures and not counted separately.

I am something of a mechanical geek, which has allowed me to notice that controls of a backhoe, the most common piece of excavation equipment, are roughly equivalent to the nerves that operate our arms and hands. Each lever has opposite motions—left and right, up and down, flex and open—and the operator uses levers in combinations to make fluid compound motions. The boom extends, the bucket opens, the machine swivels all at once.

Watch a virtuoso musician playing a brilliant passage and think of all nerves firing to make those hundreds of muscles do exactly the right thing, at the right time, with the right amount of force. That’s some data stream.

Many musical instruments, including winds and strings, require the musician to participate in the production of tone, and the volume of every musical instrument is controlled by the muscular impulses of the musician. That is, every instrument but one. An organ pipe is perhaps the simplest of musical instruments, and certainly the least versatile. Any organ pipe can produce just one pitch at one volume level and one timbre. Period. Big deal. It is for that reason that many orchestral conductors consider the pipe organ to be expressionless. Conversely, I claim that a pipe organ, especially a large organ with electric stop action, is the most expressive of musical instruments. The catch is that the musician operates it remotely. The mechanics of the instrument serve as an artificial nervous system, allowing the musician to control the instrument. While I know I am opening a path for cruel jokes (he plays that organ like a Mack Truck!), there is a real analogy with that excavator operator causing a twenty-ton machine to move with fluid, human-like motion.

The musician’s workstation

I am thinking about organ consoles these days because I am working on one in my personal shop at our house in Maine. It is a three-manual job of modest size, about fifty years old, and I am refitting it with a new nervous system, that fantastic array of solid-state controls concealed in a series of small black boxes that have brought such sophisticated levels of control to the modern organist. Those black boxes were provided by a supplier who incorporated the original specifications of the organ, plus a slew of features that I wanted to add. There is a small LED screen at the heart of the control panel, the controls that control the controls.

The keyboards have been recovered and polished to provide a lovely visible sheen, but more importantly, a smooth surface to meet the musician’s fingers. There are no sharp edges or snags that could divert attention, or worse, cause injury. (I once covered a keyboard with blood from a deep slit in my finger caused by the jagged edge of a broken ivory, admittedly buried in my score enough that I did not look down until the piece was over.) The best keyboards are works of art whose beauty helps to inspire the musician.

All the stopknobs and pistons need to feel alike. A squeaky knob or a piston that clicks will distract the player and interrupt the flow. While it is impossible for everything to be perfect, the goal of the organbuilder is to make the machine disappear, or at least to minimize the machine’s ability to intrude on the sacred space between the musician’s heart and the sound of the pipes. I am requiring the musicians to take care of the arms, hands, and fingers part of the system.

Besides the switches and buttons that actually control the functions of the organ, the surrounding cabinet needs to be an inspiring workstation. The wood should be beautiful, the finishes smooth, the geometry perfect. All of these factors add to the console’s status as an extension of the musician’s body.

Cleanliness is . . .

There is a terrific hardware store in Damariscotta, Maine, the town that adjoins our village of Newcastle, and I go there at least every few days. It has a large parking lot with head-in spaces in front of the store, and a row of spaces you can enter from behind, leaving your car facing across an open lane at the store. There is typically a row of tradesman’s pickup trucks and vans lined up there, and I always notice which trucks are kept neat inside, and which have their dashboards piled high with soda cans, coffee cups, receipts, sandwich wrappers, tools, and hardware samples. I have used those observations to inform who I hire to help with our house. If a painter’s truck is covered with slobbers of paint and filled with empty coffee cups, I don’t want him in my house.

Traveling around maintaining organs provides the same experience. Some organ consoles are always clean and free of clutter, and some are nasty depositories that could have come straight from the dashboard of a plumber’s pickup truck with the same coffee cups, candy and food wrappers, nail clippers (ick), and hairbrushes. One organist I worked for had long thick gray hair and the console looked like the couch in a house with ten cats. Her hair tangled up in the pedal contacts causing dead notes. We called it the “Hairball Church.”

Often, those dirty consoles are out in the open in the front of the church for everyone to see. It’s hard to imagine why a musician would choose to present such a front for the worshippers. And it’s hard to imagine how a sloven could produce beautiful music from such a sty. I understand the value of having pencils, note pads, “stick-ems,” and even paper clips handy (though paper clips falling into keyboards have necessitated many an emergency call!), but you should take your trash with you when you leave. The one that really gets me is the half-sucked lozenge sitting on the open wrapper. You didn’t finish that lozenge? Really? A few paragraphs ago, I referred to an organ console as an extension of the musician’s body, perhaps a little idealistic if the console is a mess.

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A modern solid-state organ console is loaded with creative functions that allow the musician ever higher levels of control over the instrument. Multiple levels of memory and piston sequencers are two concepts that were really not possible before the introduction of solid-state equipment. Like the old codger who starts a conversation with a grandchild with the words, “When I was your
age . . . ,” I like to share that it was a big deal when my high school purchased four four-function calculators (add, subtract, multiply, divide). But it was only a few years later, when as an apprentice, I participated in installing one of the earliest solid-state combination machines. A lot of smoke came out.

As incredible as these machines can seem, organ consoles built a century ago featured sophisticated functions requested by the pioneers of symphonic organ playing. Lynnwood Farnam was organist at Emmanuel Church in Boston when Casavant’s Opus 700 was installed there in 1917. That console featured such controls as:

• Piston “throwing off” all manual 16′ stops, also Quint 51⁄3′ and Tierce 31⁄5′

• Piston “throwing off” all subcouplers

• Swell octave couplers to cut off Swell 2′ stops

• Other manual 16′ and 2′ stops not to be cut off by octave or sub couplers.

What was he thinking? That was barely the time when you could expect a new organ to include an electric blower. (After sitting in storage for more than ten years, that organ has recently been renovated by Rieger and installed in a concert hall on an island in China.)

Mr. Farnam was involved in the design of another console that I have written about before, that of the new Skinner Opus 707 built in 1928 for Grace Church, New York City. Farnam’s dear friend George Mitchell was organist there, and together they dreamed up a behemoth console that could seemingly do anything. The console controlled a double organ, Chancel and Gallery, with a total of 167 stops and 133 ranks. There was a separate crescendo for each organ. Above the Gallery Crescendo pedal there were two toe studs, marked “Regular” and “Orchestral.” The Chancel Crescendo pedal could be programmed from the console, using a wire-and-plug system located in a drawer under the bottom keyboard. A programmable crescendo in 1928! Besides the two crescendo pedals, there were five expression pedals, with a sliding control switch that allowed the organist to assign any expressive division to any pedal.

It is amazing to think of that level of electrical control in a contraption built in 1928. It was the product of some of the world’s most creative musical minds expanding the expressive possibilities of the most complex and least personal of all musical instruments. It is as if a puppeteer added 320 symmetrical pairs of strings to the marionette, mimicking the repertory of human skeletal muscles.

Because of that heritage of creativity, combined with the added dimensions made possible with solid-state controls, the supposed least expressive of musical instruments eclipses the expressive capabilities of the symphony orchestra. It can be softer than the softest, louder than the loudest, and with a few flicks of fingers, create dramatic crescendos between extremes.

When Wendy and I lived in Boston, we had series tickets for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with seats near the curve just above the stage. During the first performance using the newly renovated organ, with Simon Preston playing the obligatory Organ Symphony by Saint-Saëns, we marveled at the facial expressions and communication between orchestra members as the super low notes came from the organ during the slow movement. No orchestral instrument can go as low as the organ, and it is partly because of the limitless supply of air that the organ can blow whistles that big.

Are you surprised when I suggest that the organ is the least personal of musical instruments? I don’t feel that way when I play, rather I feel at one with the instrument, excited by the range of things I can make it do, excited by the way its sound rings in a huge room, excited by the way my musical impulses can make a whole room ring. It feels very personal to me, but as an organbuilder, I cannot separate all that from the fact that the organ is a machine operated by remote control. Like a pantograph that magnifies the size of a drawing using proportional levers, so the machine that is the organ magnifies the vision of the musician. But please, take your trash with you.