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On Teaching

October 3, 2012
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Gavin Black is the Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached at [email protected].

Organ Method I

Note: This is the first excerpt from my Organ Method, as discussed in last month’s column. It is the Preface to that book, and, as such, is written with the audience of prospective readers and users of the book in mind. I strongly welcome any and all feedback from readers of this column.

 

Preface

This book is written and presented with one concrete purpose at its core. It is intended to offer to anyone who is interested a clear and reliable path towards becoming a highly competent player of the organ. I would like to examine a few of the specific implications of that concept.

1) First of all—and, in a way, most important of all—is the notion of “anyone who is interested.” One of the greatest joys of my years as a teacher of organ and harpsichord has been the discovery that no two people who develop an interest in something do so for the same reasons, with the same background, or with the same expectations. Any approach to teaching that suggests, even unwittingly, that some of those reasons, backgrounds, and expectations are more suitable than others will have the effect of excluding or discouraging a portion of those who are—or were, initially—interested. In the world of organ playing, some of the notions that can end up excluding or discouraging potential students are those derived from the world of music and music teaching in general: that after a rather young age it is essentially too late to become a truly competent and skillful musician, or that anyone who cannot develop perfect pitch, or become a good singer, or learn to take dictation cannot be or should not be a musician, or in general that only those “touched by the gods” can master the mysteries of understanding and playing great music. 

I am well aware that, fortunately, very few music teachers or working musicians hold this last attitude. Unfortunately, however, I also know very well that many prospective students do—people are scared off by it. No one should be. Some other of these notions are specific to the world of the organ, and many of them are indeed inadvertent or unwitting. (Certainly very few, if any, music teachers want to exclude or discourage anyone.) The assumption that anyone who wants to become an organist should specifically first become a pianist is one such notion. (It is one to which I am personally sensitive, as it almost derailed me from pursuing organ in my teenage years.) Certain approaches to the learning of pedal playing are so prohibitively uncomfortable to some people that they convince those people—wrongly—that they are just not cut out to be organists. I am also sensitive to this one. 

At an early point in my teaching career, I happened to encounter a couple of people who told me that they had really wanted to play the organ, but found it too uncomfortable to sit in some particular posture while learning to play the pedals. They had come to believe, perhaps because of something that they had read or that they had been told, that this posture was necessary, and they actually gave up. This felt to me at the time like a tragedy (both for their sakes and because I wanted there to be more organ students out there as I began my teaching career!) and it led to my developing my particular approach to pedal learning, the latest refinement of which is found in this book. Others are discouraged by being told that it is absolutely necessary that they work on some particular part of the repertoire that really—for the time being at least—doesn’t interest them. I don’t believe that there is any good reason for this—even for something as basic as requiring a student to play some Bach, for example—as I discuss later on in this book.

2) In order for it to be true that any interested party can work successfully on organ playing, it must also be true that this does not involve any “dumbing down.” If I am claiming that a particular approach to working on organ can be successful not just for selected students but for anyone who is interested, then I must mean that anyone can reach a high level of competence and understanding—not just dabble a little bit. I firmly believe this to be true. And I am reminded of the saying attributed to J. S. Bach, concerning organ playing that “All one has to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.” I have always believed that he meant something quite specific by this: that it was not, as it perhaps sounds at first, a joke or some sort of dismissive remark. I believe that he meant that the organist does not have to create tone and intonation in the various ways that singers and many string and wind players do. The basic act of making a note happen on the organ, with its pitch and tone color intact, is simple. That is why it is appropriate for the world to provide us with such amazingly complicated music. It is also why learning to play organ very well—at least what we might call an “intermediate” level—is available to anyone who chooses to work at it.

3) The process of learning to play the organ is, I believe, natural, simple, very human, and available to all. I hope that this volume helps to make that convincing. It is not, however, easy. That is an important distinction, and its main implication for the student is that learning to play (well) requires both the time and the personal commitment to do a substantial amount of work—of practicing. To a large extent, an organ method should be a statement, fleshed out in considerable detail, that amounts to: this is how to practice. That statement should be clear—enough so that a student can follow it without already knowing everything that the writer of the method knows. If this is not the case, then the book has in fact failed to convey its message. It should be reliable: that is, the approach to practicing must really lead to results if it is followed. This latter point is indeed my main claim for this method. I certainly don’t make, and wouldn’t want to make, the ignorant and arrogant claim that other approaches and other methods don’t work—or even that they don’t work at least as well as this one. I will, however, make this claim, also arrogant unless it is true: that anyone who actually does all of the things described and suggested in this volume will—inevitably, everyone, every time—become a competent, skilled organist. This is another lesson that I have learned through thirty years or so of teaching, and it is one that gives me great joy. I hope, always, that anyone contemplating or starting the study of organ approaches it with optimism and joy. It has always been my goal as a teacher, and is my goal as the writer of an organ method, to help students feel that way about the process. But it is a process: it takes work, it takes time, and it takes patience.

Is there an ideal or core student to whom this book is addressed? The answer to that is yes and no. The “yes” side of the answer looks like this: a student who is old enough to think about matters of learning on his or her own, who can already read music, who has already done at least a bit of keyboard playing, on any instrument—that is, who starts with a basic sense of what it is to use fingers at a keyboard—and, of course, who is really interested in learning organ. I have tried to write in such a way that this student can use the book either with or without the guidance of a teacher, and that this student can, so to speak, plunge right in to work on organ. The section on pedal playing is completely “from scratch,” that is, designed in such a way that it can be used by someone who has never played a note on a pedalboard before.

Any student who does not fit that particular description can use this method just as fruitfully by bearing in mind a few things.

A student who does not read music must learn to do so, both to use this method and in general to function as an organist. That is not something that is dealt with directly in this volume. There are, as I write this, many online music-reading resources: there probably always will be, though of course they change all the time. Most or all community music schools—or colleges that offer music instruction to the public—have classes that include an introduction to reading music. These classes usually include other aspects of basic musicianship or elementary music theory that can be interesting and that are useful for beginners. Although I do not attempt to teach music reading here, I do, in side-notes, make suggestions for the benefit of those whose music reading is still new and not fully internalized. Such students should be able to feel all right about working on the early stages of learning to play while getting more and more comfortable reading.

In my opinion, a student who has never played any sort of keyboard instrument at all and who is interested in organ need not start with any instrument other than organ. There is certainly nothing actually wrong with starting on piano or harpsichord—except that for a student who is not particularly interested in those instruments or their repertoire it can be frustrating. But there is also no reason to do so. Everything practical that you need to know about organ playing can be learned by playing the organ. (There are certainly things to be learned artistically from an involvement with piano and its repertoire or harpsichord and its repertoire: also by any involvement with any other sort of music. I discuss this from time to time in the course of the later chapters of the book.) The relationship of this student to the pedal-playing work in this method will be exactly the same as that of the “core” student. However, the sections here about manual playing do not start absolutely from scratch—there are no basic exercises for just a few fingers, or similar things. A student who has never played before might very well want either to work with a teacher who can begin at the very beginning, or to consult a beginning keyboard method on his or her own—in print or online. I have tried to write in such a way that there is very little of this sort of preliminary work needed, the less so the more a student is able and willing to follow my suggestions about slow and systematic practice.

Students who have in fact already played organ—either a little bit or more than a little bit—can, I hope, also get something out of this method and this approach. This is true especially for anyone who finds pedal playing awkward. (As I have suggested above, my approach to pedal playing involves a kind of physical simplicity that some players find helpful.) It might also be especially true for a player who feels less than fully comfortable with the difficulties of grappling with complex counterpoint. Of course, an experienced or accomplished organist who is comfortable with all the main aspects of his or her playing is not likely in any case to need to consult an organ method. However, I have tried to include enough here in the way of generally interesting ideas, observations, and thoughts about the organ and the never-ending task of learning, that such a player might find it worth browsing through, as I myself have found it interesting to browse through a wide variety of organ methods, from at least Sir John Stainer on.

The method is organized as follows: 

1) A very brief introduction to the organ in general, geared mainly to what a student needs to know in order to start working. 

2) The section on pedal playing. This is the most categorical thing that a student who is already a pianist or harpsichordist needs to grapple with in order to begin the alchemical transformation into an organist. This section outlines, quite systematically, a comprehensive approach to playing pedals. It can certainly be used on a stand-alone basis by anyone whose main concern is either to learn pedal playing or to review and revise his or her approach to the pedals. This section includes—logically enough, though somewhat out of order—a set of protocols for practicing hands and feet together.

3) The section on manual playing. This section is largely about practicing, the most important aspect of work on organ playing. It includes, however, discussion of ways to approach work on counterpoint and other specific organ textures, thoughts about articulation and other interpretive matters, and discussion of registration. (My goal in addressing interpretive matters is always to help students create possibilities for themselves, never to tell them where they should end up.) For a student specifically hoping to make the transformation from non-organ keyboard player to organist, the second element of that transformation, less categorical than learning to play pedals, but just as important, is learning to manipulate the touch and sound of the organ in a way that is idiomatic and that opens up as wide a range of possibilities for expressive and communicative playing as possible. This is open-ended and subjective, but I try to provide a framework for thinking about it.

4) A longer discussion about the organ and its history and repertoire—not seen through the lens of “what a new student needs to know to sit at the console and get started” but rather as a slice of what an evolving organist might want to absorb about the instrument and its music. This includes a substantial number of suggestions for further research. It is characteristic of our times that information—say the detailed history of the evolution of a major historic organ—is easy to find, and that what is available changes (expands) rapidly. An organ method nowadays does not need to include, as a basic resource, a representative set of historic stoplists. It needs, instead, to inform the student about how best to find such information and how to understand it, and how to use it to create and expand possibilities.

 

 

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