Registration and teaching, part I
I was first drawn to organ and harpsichord back in the late ’60s—not too long after I turned ten—by the sonorities of those instruments. I remember being particularly entranced by the reed sound that E. Power Biggs used for the fugue subject in his recording of the shorter Bach Prelude and Fugue in c minor on the Schnitger organ at Zwolle. Later I discovered the sounds of the small organ at St. Jakobi Church in Lübeck as recorded in 1947 by Helmut Walcha, and the sound of the so-called Ahaus Ruckers harpsichord, recorded, in music of Froberger among others, by Gustav Leonhardt. Later still I was captivated by the sounds of Messiaen’s Cavaillé-Coll organ at La Trinité through the composer’s own recordings there. In all of these cases and many others, it was the sounds themselves that most interested me, not the repertoire or the performances. A desire to be involved more and more closely with these sounds was the first and most essential reason that I decided to study organ and harpsichord and later to make a career out of those instruments. Of course an interest in much of the repertoire, in the act of performance itself, and, especially, in teaching, followed fairly quickly. But it was the sounds that got me hooked.
I think that this is a fairly common experience among people who end up studying organ or harpsichord. All of the many rather different instruments that have been accepted as “organs” over several centuries, and all harpsichords and harpsichord-like instruments, have in common that the actual sonorities are determined in advance of any playing of the instrument. These sounds are created by the combined work of builders, metalworkers, voicers, tuners, acousticians, and so on. The player can make only very subtle changes in the sound itself, if any, while playing. Therefore, it has always been important that builders create sounds that are in some way compelling, beautiful, interesting, even perhaps disturbing, but in any case worth hearing—important in and of themselves to someone who hears them. So it is natural that these sounds would form a large part of the reason that some people become interested in these instruments.
This has implications for the teaching of registration, or, more accurately and more interestingly, for the interaction between registration and teaching. For most students, the sonorities of the instrument are a source of fun and interest. Therefore the whole business of trying out sounds and getting to know sounds can be fun, can be highly interesting, and can both relieve and enliven the painstaking, difficult work of becoming more adept at the technical side of playing. The practicing of any simple—and therefore potentially tedious—exercise can be made more interesting or even very interesting by also using it as an opportunity to pay attention to the sound and to try out different sounds. The difficult and intense practicing of difficult and intense passages can be leavened by occasional breaks during which the student uses any easier or more accessible musical material—simple or already-learned passages, scales and chords, folk songs, improvisation, whatever—to try out different sounds, and to listen to those sounds carefully. And even a beginning student can learn right away to make registration choices that are interesting and appropriate for the music and the situation, and that, often, are different from the choices that the teacher or any other player would have made. This can be a source of encouragement and can help to create a feeling of connectedness to the real art of music making.
This column and next month’s will consist mostly of suggestions for ways of introducing students to the art of registration: that is, explaining to them what it is, demystifying it as much as possible, offering them ways of exploring and practicing it, and helping them to relate sounds to particular kinds of music and particular pieces. It is very important that students be given a way to learn registration from within, that is, by understanding how it works, and not just through formulas or (even very sound) principles. Only in this way will students learn to be able to create registrations on their own. Also, only this way will they be able to understand registration formulas or suggested registrations that they might encounter, and to be able to figure out when to apply such things and when to modify or ignore them. These suggestions are aimed in the first instance at students who are beginners or who are at least fairly new to the organ. However, some of the ideas should also be helpful to more experienced students who happen, for any reason, to feel uncomfortable with their approach to registration or who want to rethink it or perhaps simplify it a bit.
Registration is simply the act of choosing stops—choosing sounds—for pieces or passages of music. If there are no stops drawn, the music will not be of much use to the listeners: it will be silent. This is something that can be said more or less as a joke, but indeed some students come to the organ not quite realizing it. (After all, we are not born knowing something that seems so basic to practicing organists!) In choosing what particular stops to use in a given situation, we normally take into account at least some of the following:
1) What the sound is like subjectively—loud, soft, dark, bright, smooth, clear, reedy, warm, piercing, hollow, thick, thin, haunting, and so on—and how this relates to our sense, again subjective, of what the piece is like or should be like. (Everyone uses adjectives differently, however. They are useful for listing the kinds of qualities that a sound might have. They are also useful for helping one person, in his or her own mind, to characterize and remember what a sound is like. They are normally not particularly useful in conveying a sense of what a sound is like from one person to another.)
2) How loud or soft the sound is in relation to other things that are going on. In particular, how two sounds balance when they are being used together (i.e., in a two-manual or manual and pedal piece) or when they follow one another, as in sections of a piece or verses of a hymn; also, if it’s relevant, how the volume of sound relates to things beyond the organ, such as singers or other instruments. All of these considerations are more objective than those in 1), but not entirely so except at the extremes when one sound actually threatens to drown out another.
3) What is known, if anything, about composers’ intentions. This can range from a general sense of what kind of instrument a composer knew—or even just what was prevalent in a given composer’s era and approximate geographic area—to precise, meaningful, and specific registration instructions from a composer about registration. Some of the data in this area is essentially objective or even beyond dispute. However, its application to a given situation often requires flexibility and judgment, as when a particular organ doesn’t have the stops specifically suggested by the composer, or when the acoustics of the room, or the specific sound qualities of stops with a particular name are different from what a composer knew. (This is the case more often than not.) Also non-objective and subject to different philosophies and judgments is the basic question of whether and how much it matters what a composer wanted or expected.
Registration is the art of choosing sounds, and, on the organ and the harpsichord, most available sounds are combinations of other sounds. (This, again, is something so basic that an experienced player might not notice that it is not self-evident to a beginner.) The first step in learning how to combine sounds is developing a sense of what the sounds are like on their own. I tend to define a “stop” to a new student as “a set of pipes, one per key, all of which make more or less the same sound as one another, and each of which plays the right note for its key.” (This is just a starting point. Mixtures can be explained separately, perhaps simply as several stops that are operated by one control for convenience and that function as one sound. The technicalities of breaks and changing numbers of ranks can certainly be discussed with a student who is eager to understand such things, but that can wait, since it is not necessary to know this in order to learn how to begin to use them in stop combinations.)
Each stop typically has two parts to the label that describes it: a number and a word. The number—8', 4', etc.—is one of the very few things in the world of the arts that has a clear meaning that never changes and is not subject to interpretation. However, as with some of the other basic points that I have mentioned above, students often don’t know what that meaning is. In fact, if you ask a beginning student what those numbers mean, he or she will more often than not say “Isn’t it something about how long the pipes are?” (I certainly mean no criticism of those students! No one knows something that they haven’t yet learned. My point is just that it is easy for us to take it for granted that everyone would know something that seems so basic to an experienced organist.) So it is important to start by explaining very simply what the numbers mean: 8' means “at unison pitch,” 4' means “an octave above unison pitch,” and so on. It is a good idea to demonstrate that every 4' stop is at the same pitch as every other—though the sounds may be very different—and the same for 2 2/3', 16', and all the other numbers/pitch-levels. I would suggest doing this with something like the following routine:
Draw two stops, on two different keyboards. One should be an 8' stop, the other a 4', and they should be as similar as possible in tone. Play two keys, one on each keyboard and thus one on each of the two stops, which are ostensibly the same note. (They should be near the middle of the keyboard, middle c or close.) Invite the student to hear that these notes are clearly an octave apart. Make sure that the student really gets this: the concept of an octave, especially when listening to a new kind of sound, can be elusive. (The first time that I ever tried to tune a harpsichord, I broke several 4' strings because I was trying to tune them an octave high! I just couldn’t hear the octave placement of the notes amongst all the strong harmonics of the bright sound.) This should be repeated with several different “8', 4', similar sound” pairs, and also 4', 2' pairs. Then, with the same various pairs of stops, demonstrate that (for example) the f below middle c on the 4' stop and the f above middle c on the 8' stop are clearly the same pitch, and so on with other appropriate pairs of stops, or that the scale from tenor c to middle c on the 4' stop is clearly at the same pitch as the scale going up from middle c on the 8' stop.
Next, draw pairs of 8' stops that are noticeably different in tone: a gedeckt on one keyboard, an oboe on another, for example, or anything like that. Then compare notes from one to the other, making sure that the student hears that in this instance keys that ostensibly represent the same note actually produce the same pitch. This can be done with single notes—again starting around the middle of the keyboard since that region is the easiest to hear—then with short scale passages and perhaps chord progressions. Then the same sort of comparison can be done with 4'stops and so on, even including mutations, if there are multiple examples of the same ones on the particular instrument.
This procedure is very simple and may even seem simplistic. Again, however, I want to emphasize that these things are not known to beginners. They are also not always absolutely clear even to people who have sat at a console and done some organ playing, but have not yet had any systematic study. It is not uncommon, for example, for someone to know by experience that a 2' stop is kind of bright, but not to know anything about the stop’s pitch level, or about how the brightness is achieved. An unshakably clear grasp of the meaning of the pitch designations is the first step in understanding how organ stops can be fruitfully combined with one another: that is, really understanding it in a way that permits one to do it without formulas and without assistance, on a familiar or an unfamiliar instrument. We will move on to this in next month’s column.
