Playing hymns, part 1
This month and next I want to share a few thoughts about hymns and the teaching of hymn playing. There are a few special factors that influence my thinking about hymns and how to learn and teach them. First, I have been a church organist for a smaller proportion of my career than many colleagues—for about six years all together, less than many of my students and many or most readers of this column. I have engaged in the act of accompanying a congregation in singing a hymn probably about eleven- or twelve-hundred times. Many organists have done ten times that much. Although I believe that I have learned a lot about hymn playing from my own experience with it, I have probably learned more from the experiences of my students and from my own experience in helping them with their church work.
Second, I especially love hymns as pieces of music. They resonate, as I think anyone’s favorite music often does, with strong early memories: of time spent as a schoolboy in England, when we sang hymns in assembly every morning; of a couple of years spent as a boy soprano in the choir of Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven in the late 1960s; of travels through Europe, especially Germany, where I looked in on many church services for the purpose of hearing the music. This early exposure was fairly eclectic, and so is my own taste in hymns.
The playing of hymns in church—that is, when you as organist are accompanying people who are singing the hymns but who are there for the whole experience of the church service—is one of the (for me) rather few performance situations in which someone other than the performer has a legitimate interest in questions of what the playing is like, even, in fact, a right to help determine what the performance is like. A listener at a concert might prefer that a piece be louder, softer, faster, slower, registered differently, phrased differently, etc. That is fine: that listener’s perspective might constitute interesting feedback for the performer. If the performer genuinely finds that feedback useful, then he or she should take it into account next time. On the other hand, the performer has every right indeed to ignore that listener’s perspective, and the listener has every right not to come to the next concert! However, in church the pastor, members of the choir, members of the congregation, members of the music committee, perhaps even visitors, all have the right to care about how the hymns are played and to try to influence that playing.
(Bach was involved in a famous conflict about his hymn-playing style, in which he was criticized by the authorities for harmonizations that were too dissonant and too rhythmically complex for members of the congregation to follow. Although we all quite rightly venerate Bach, I myself would not like to try to sing to the few surviving hymn accompaniments from his pen. They are indeed dissonant, in a way that undermines the strong harmonic drive of the chorales, and there are virtuoso flourishes interrupting the rhythmic momentum not just between verses, but between phrases! Bach also got into conflict with church authorities because he wanted to choose the hymns himself, and the clergy wanted to do so.)
It is difficult to predict in any general way what stylistic or performance qualities a particular church will favor, request or require. It is also by no means true that a church organist must always agree to do things in the way that the pastor or music committee or a particular member of the congregation wants. In fact those might well differ from one another within any church situation: an organist can easily get caught in the middle. An organist must, however, be prepared to treat any opinions or suggestions with respect and consider how best to accommodate tastes, habits, and traditions that are found in a given church. It seems to me to make sense for an organist or aspiring organist to do the following: learn to play hymns so well that any stylistic or interpretive approach that that organist favors and wants to suggest will be presented as convincingly as possible, and thus have the best chance of being accepted by the others involved. And, at the same time, learn to play the hymns so securely that the act of changing some aspects of the playing—tempo, articulation, timing between verses, etc.—in such a way as to fit in comfortably with what the church wants will not be onerous.
Fortunately these two things are in fact the same. So how should a student work on learning to play hymns?
As pieces of music to learn on the organ, hymns have certain characteristics. They are essentially written to be sung. Therefore the writing is not necessarily idiomatic or comfortable keyboard writing. Hymns should be “easy” compared to all but the easiest repertoire, in that they have limited range, limited velocity, very limited rhythmic variation, little or no need to try for independence of line of the sort needed for playing counterpoint. However, they often seem, especially for relative beginners, harder than “hard” pieces. Pieces written as organ repertoire are usually written with at least half an eye on the question of what is physically, technically idiomatic to the instrument, so that even hard pieces are often natural and comfortable. This cannot usually be a concern in writing or setting a hymn when the setting is meant to be sung in four parts. (While in many or most situations hymns are not in fact sung in parts, traditional hymn settings are designed as four-voice harmony.) Of course hymns are fully learnable. The point of recognizing that they are sometimes surprisingly difficult is to avoid getting discouraged if they indeed seem that way, and, also, to make a note that it is worth working on them carefully.
Hymns typically have a top voice that is a charismatic or attractive melody—the hymn tune itself—and a bass line that is shaped by the need to provide unambiguous harmonic foundation. Since in turn these voices have to be singable by non-trained singers, they can be neither too high nor too low. This is what causes the inner voices to be (usually) confined within a strikingly small range. This confinement results in inner voices of hymns being characteristically boring (to put it bluntly) as melodies. This can lead to frustration on the part of choir or congregation members who feel that they are supposed to sing those parts, thus missing out on the attractive melody. It also leads those lines, often, to have a remarkably high proportion of repeated notes. This is a well-known issue in playing hymns, one that I will discuss a little bit below and more next month.
There are many ways to arrange the four voices of a typical hymn on the organ. The most common and, I think, indeed most useful is to play the bass voice in the pedals and the other three voices together on one manual. (This is also clearly the best starting place for students working on hymn playing.) It is also possible to play all four voices on one manual (no pedals), or to play the bass in the pedal, the alto and tenor on one, presumably somewhat quiet, manual, and the soprano on a louder manual. Another way of thus “soloing out” the hymn tune itself is to play it (the soprano voice) on the pedals with an appropriately high-pitched stop, and to play the three remaining voices in the hands. Although all of these ways of arranging a hymn on the organ are useful, and although it is never a good idea to rule out anything that might provide greater variety of effect in any kind of music-making, I think that the traditional way of playing hymns offers these advantages: the use of pedal and 16′ sound in the bass emphasizes the harmony in a way that helps keep singers together rhythmically and on pitch (it also makes the sound less directional and helps it to fill the room well); the hymn melody itself will, by virtue of being on the top of the texture, be heard clearly in any case, while the inner voices will—if not relegated to a softer sound—help to enrich the texture, again helping to project harmony and rhythm forcefully.
A student learning his or her first hymns should approach them as if they were pieces of organ repertoire, and challenging ones at that. This means several things:
1) First, the student should learn the pedal part (the bass voice, let us assume for now). This involves, of course, working out a pedaling and then practicing it carefully, by itself, perhaps one foot at a time (see The Diapason, December 2007), slowly and without looking. Pedaling choices at this early stage should be based on what the student is used to and finds comfortable, with a slight bias in favor of pedalings that do not rule out legato, but with a willingness to locate non-legato pedalings (such as the same toes playing two successive notes) in places where the rhythm and meter suggest that subtle breaks will be unobtrusive. Since we are talking about the early stages of learning something new, it should be considered OK if the results are not musically perfect in this respect. Technical, physical comfort at this stage will lead to more secure and flexible hymn-playing in the long run.
2) Second, the student should learn the tenor voice in the left hand. This is often a task that seems trivially easy: the line is essentially sight-readable for even not very advanced players. However, the point is to learn it extremely well, to get it so nearly memorized that it is impossible to imagine not playing it correctly. Also, by working on this one line carefully, it is possible to learn to play it (musically) really well. This involves, among other things, treating the repeated notes in the way that I discussed in this column in January 2009, that is, changing fingers and executing the repetitions smoothly with natural-sounding articulation.
3) When the pedal line and the left hand are really well learned, the next step is to practice the two together. This is the most important step in learning a hymn, and doing this systematically in learning many hymns is the most important technical step in learning to play hymns securely. This is because (even for experienced organists who happen not to have yet delved into hymn playing, but especially for anyone new to the organ) there is a strong tendency for the bass/pedal line and the tenor/left hand line to interfere with each other. This can take the form of the tenor line getting lost in the shuffle and becoming inaccurate or unclear. It also can take the form of the left hand reaching for and playing some notes of the bass line instead of or in addition to the notes of the tenor line. This latter is extremely damaging to the development of an aspiring organist, not just as to hymn playing. Even though it may not hurt the sound of a given hymn (if the manual sound is coupled to the pedal it may be literally inaudible), it can damage or destroy a player’s ability to execute an independent pedal line in any kind of music. Practicing hymns as described here, however, will enhance a player’s overall independence of hands and feet in any kind of music.
4) Meanwhile, the right hand part, consisting of the two upper voices, should be practiced. It is trickier in this case to finger all of the repeated notes in the best possible way, because the hand is responsible for two voices at all times. It is a good idea to come as close as possible to this, again without insisting on perfection.
5) Once steps 3) and 4) are complete—step 3) having been done really thoroughly, no compromise—then it is time to put all four voices together. The experience of most students is that if the pedal and left hand have been prepared really well, and the right hand basically learned, then putting it all together is not only easy but more-or-less automatic. If this stage does not feel easy, then the student should revisit the previous two steps and/or slow the tempo down.
Once a student has worked on a number of hymns this way—six, eight, ten maybe—he or she will be able to learn the next hymn noticeably more quickly. First, this procedure itself will start to take less and less time. Then it will no longer be necessary: the student will be able to learn new hymns simply by reading through them slowly enough, with all the parts, and working them up to tempo gradually. Trying to do that prematurely—that is, without having taken enough hymns apart and worked on them in the way described here—will derail the learning process, but the process should in due course make itself obsolete.
Next month I will discuss various other aspects of hymn playing: rhythm, articulation, repeated notes, registration, accompanying part-singing, accompanying unison singing, “soloing out” lines, and more.
