Pedal playing, part II: opening exercises
Last month I closed by stating that there are three reliable ways of finding notes at the pedal keyboard with accuracy, namely: 1) finding notes absolutely, in relation only to your position on the bench; 2) finding the next note that a given foot has to play in relation to where the other foot just was; and 3) finding the next note that a given foot has to play in relation to where that foot last was or what that last foot just did. I also said that while all three of these are useful and necessary, it is the last one that is actually the most useful and the best source of really secure, comfortable pedaling. This month I want to elaborate on that idea, and then to describe a beginning exercise based on this third approach.
For the moment, we are concerned only with the use of the toes in pedaling. This is emphatically not because I believe in eliminating the use of the heel or in restricting it in principle—as noted last month, I consider every part of the foot to be fair game for playing pedal keys. Rather it is because the gesture of pointing with the toe is more natural and basic as a way of using the foot, and therefore should be the beginning and the basis of pedal technique. In fact, although “toes-only” pedaling is quite rightly linked to older repertoire and performance practice (17th and 18th century, approximately), even in the 19th and 20th centuries, without any specifically “historical” intent, it was often recognized that the toes were the logical place to start in teaching pedal playing. For example, the influential and often reprinted organ method of Sir John Stainer begins its pedal playing work with the toes alone. Once any student is fully proficient at finding note patterns at the pedal keyboard with his or her toes—given that the technique is fluid and comfortable—it will be easy and natural to use the heel for some or even many notes. Playing with the heel is, in a way, a special case of finding a note with a foot in relation to what that foot just did, and it can be very reliable. Of course, there are musical and historical considerations that might argue for or against the use of heel in any given situation, and I will discuss these at some length in a later column.
It is more natural and intuitive for a person to judge or know how far he or she has just moved one foot than to know spontaneously how far one foot is from the other or how far one foot will be from the other after it has been moved. It is this intuitive judgment that makes it possible for us to drive cars knowing that we will hit the brake when we need to. In order to tell how far one foot is from the other foot it is necessary to link the two feet together by creating some sort of juxtaposition of the legs, for example by keeping the knees more or less together or by keeping the upper legs more or less parallel and roughly a constant distance apart. All such constraints on the position that a player assumes on the organ bench are perhaps acceptable or even comfortable and good for some students or players. But they are also the main source of the discomfort—initially physical but then increasingly mental as well—that many organists and prospective organists feel with the instrument. In fact they are the reason that a steady stream of interested students end up giving up the organ, as I mentioned in last month’s column. Of course some of the physical constraints that are suggested as ways of orienting the two feet to each other are intended only for the beginning of study and are meant to be modified or dropped later on. However, they are still often damaging to the process of a student’s becoming comfortable with the instrument initially, and the success that students have moving past this discomfort varies considerably. Organizing the learning of pedal facility and technique around an awareness of what each foot is doing with respect to its own position allows the student to avoid this sort of problem altogether, and also leads to a remarkably secure mastery of the pedal keyboard.
Musically, of course, any pedal part is the sum of what the right foot plays and what the left foot plays. A listener does not know, and probably does not care, which foot is playing what. However, from a technical point of view, a pedal part consists of two separate lines, one for the right foot and one for the left foot, just as any keyboard piece consists of a left hand part and a right hand part. It often makes sense to analyze the technical work required to learn a keyboard piece as consisting of the two separate tasks required of the two hands. It also often makes sense to analyze a pedal part as the two separate tasks required of the two feet. Pedal lines approached this way usually reveal themselves to be conceptually very simple. Something like 80% of all notes in the pedal repertoire are generated by one foot or the other doing one of the following three simple actions: repeating a note, moving one step, or moving two steps. This is a much simpler technical picture than that presented by the note-surface of pedal lines, in which of course there are all sorts of intervals and all sorts of patterns as to which foot is playing what. (For a couple of classic cases of this, see the two long pedal solos from the Bach F-major Toccata and the pedal part from the Widor Toccata). It makes sense for an organist to pick any pedal line apart, to see which foot is playing what and to look for simple, memorable, or useful patterns. I will return later to this idea as it applies to experienced organists hoping to improve their happiness with their level of pedal mastery. However, this approach makes even more sense for a beginning organ student. A simple set of exercises will enable a new student to take the intuitive sense of where a foot is in relation to where it has just been, train it to be increasingly precise, and tie it in solidly to the particular logistics of the pedal keyboard. One important benefit of learning pedal playing this way is that after only a very few exercises that feel like exercises, any student is able to use essentially any pedal line as practice material. This makes it easy to keep things interesting for the student and for the teacher, and allows the student to have a satisfying sense of being connected from the very beginning to the world of real music and to the tradition of great organists through the ages.
In keeping with all of the above, the first thing that I ask a new student to do in preparing to work on pedal playing is to sit in the middle of the organ bench in a way that is comfortable, relaxed, and informal. Most people have been trained—subliminally if in no other way—to arrange themselves more or less “at attention” in situations that seem even vaguely formal, including the situation of a music lesson or a musical performance. However, any posture that needs to be maintained consciously and that involves any discernible use of muscles is probably at risk for creating tension and should be avoided. Of course it is possible to imagine an exaggeratedly “informal” posture—slumped over to one side, for example—that would indeed have to be corrected. I have, however, never once actually encountered a situation in which a student’s natural, comfortable posture presented any sort of problem for organ playing. It is important to start off with the bench at a good height. The height is probably right if the act of utterly relaxing the legs and back—completely letting go, as if flopping down on a couch—does not quite make the feet inadvertently play pedal keys. This will prevent the student from having to use muscle tension to keep the legs and feet up away from the pedal keyboard while playing.
Once a student is seated comfortably on the bench I suggest the following:
1) Find the lowest “A” on the pedal keyboard. It is fine to do this by looking, for now.
2) Play that note with the left foot, using whatever part of the foot can most comfortably push the key down fairly close to the nearest raised keys but without touching them. This will (essentially) always be part of the toe region of the foot, and will be the outside of the foot for some players and the inside for some. (For a very few students with quite small feet it will be the very tip of the foot.) The question of which particular part of the foot can most comfortably address the key will depend on the angle at which the foot is approaching the key, which will in turn depend on the student’s posture on the bench. The more the student tends to keep his or her knees together, the more likely it is that the inside of the foot will be the most comfortable for playing this A; the more the student lets his or her knees drift apart the more likely it is that the outside of the foot will be more comfortable. Neither one is right or wrong; there is no reason to favor one over the other. It is very important to let the student figure out, starting from an individually comfortable posture, what details are right for that student as to foot position for playing particular notes.
(Note: by the time the student has played and released the A once or twice, he or she should quit looking at the pedal keyboard, and rarely look again).
3) Ask the student to play A then B. This should be done slowly and lightly, without either slithering the foot along the keyboard or snapping the foot high into the air between the two notes. The foot should trace a small arc that moves directly from the center of one key to the center of the next. If the student misses the B, then on the next attempt he or she should compensate in the opposite direction from the miss. If he or she played A–C, then on the second attempt he or she should think “I should move my foot a tiny bit less far.” If the mistake was the other way then the thought should also be the other way. This simple way of thinking about the logistics of missed notes is remarkably effective for correcting them, in this context and in others.
4) Once the student has successfully played back and forth between A and B several times, ask the student to play the notes of an A natural-minor scale, up and down, very slowly and lightly. The lower four notes (A–B–c–d) should be in the left foot, the upper four (e–f–g–a) should be in the right foot. For each note, the student should make an appropriate decision as to foot position and what part of the foot actually plays the note based on the approach described in 2) above. It is important that the student keep everything very slow so as to have plenty of time between each two notes to think about all the details, without any need to panic.
5) Once this scale seems comfortable—slow, light, even, accurate, and feeling easy to the student—the next step is to play an A major scale in exactly the same way. This, of course, introduces less regularly spaced one-step intervals. and so is more challenging. It is normal, in fact nearly universal, for a student to land in between e and f coming down from f-sharp, for example. The way to correct this is again simply to say, on the next time through that moment, “I must move my foot a tiny bit farther.” This works remarkably well.
This simple, basic scale-based exercise is extraordinarily effective in training the sense of what it feels like to move one foot the distance of one step. This is the foundation of secure pedal facility. Next month I will introduce exercises that train that same sense in more complicated musical contexts, and expand the scope of what we are asking each foot to do.■
