Pedal playing, part I—overview
Pedal playing is, in a way, the public face of the organ. It is something that sets organ playing apart from other activities—even, for some, defining it. Writing in 1788, an anonymous author who had undertaken to defend J. S. Bach against the charge that he wasn’t as great a composer as Handel had this to say as part of his argument:
Now, if we weigh the organ works of the two men in the same scales, there is a difference as wide as the sky in favor of JSB. The proof of this statement can without any trouble be made convincing even to people who are not experts.
One may assume without fear of contradiction that the pedal is the most important part of an organ, without which it would have little of that majesty, greatness, and power that belong to it alone above all other instruments. Anyone who knows at all what the word “organ” means will grant that.
What shall we say, then, if Handel almost completely neglected and seldom used the very thing that makes an organ an organ, and lifts it so high above all other instruments?
This is not an argument based on anything that we would call compositional content, but just on proper use of—or proper respect for—the pedal division. It is presented as essentially self-evident (“ . . . without fear of contradiction . . . convincing even to people who are not experts”), and as arising from the very definition of the instrument.
Sometimes an organist has the gratifying experience of being approached after a performance by someone who can’t quite believe that anyone can actually do all of that with his or her feet. It seems like magic, or at least something beyond just difficult. The fact that there are more pedal solos in the repertoire than there are extended one-voice passages meant to be played by the hands probably reflects a general tendency for composers to accept the notion that the pedal division is essential to the nature of the instrument, and also that pedal playing is something that is appropriate, and fun, to show off.
So there is a sense, shared in different ways by many organists, organ composers, and listeners to organ music, that pedal playing is important and special, but also very, very hard. There is a down side to this sense, one that is especially important to organ teachers. Many people who would like to play the organ hesitate or refuse even to try because they are (inappropriately) afraid of pedal playing, while also (appropriately) believing that it is a necessary part of being a good organist. Also, many people who are actively playing the organ are chronically scared of playing the pedals. It is so common to hear someone say something like “If I don’t have time to practice I’ll just find something for manuals” or “I’ll play the hymns on manuals only” that we accept that this makes sense. However, ideally, the more resources one can bring to bear on playing a piece—like ten fingers and two feet rather that ten fingers alone—the easier it should be.
So the teacher’s first job in teaching pedal playing to a student who is new to it is to make it not seem intimidating or unnaturally difficult. The key here is that it not be thought of as “unnaturally” difficult. Of course it is hard. It requires lots of practice, and that practice must be along efficient and sensible lines. However, it is a skill that is well tailored to what the human body and mind can do, and in fact anyone who works at it in the right way will learn to do it, and do it well, barring a prohibitive physical disability or injury. In this way it resembles two other activities that were once thought of as highly specialized, arcane, and difficult, namely typing and driving a car. The assumption nowadays is that everyone can learn both of these things to a high level of competence as a matter of routine. The same would prove true of pedal playing if everyone chose to learn it. (Or, to put it another way, if pedal playing were a teenager’s key to autonomy and freedom, everyone would play pedals!) In fact the physical skill of pedal playing is essentially just an extension of the technique involved in using the brake and the gas pedal in a car. Of course it’s more multifaceted than that, but at root it’s the same. This admittedly somewhat goofy comparison often allows a student to take a deep breath and give himself or herself permission not to find the whole enterprise so scary.
It can also be useful and reassuring to remind students that for most of the history of organ playing, organists could not practice very much on church organs, for all of the well-known reasons, namely the need to find a helper to pump the organ in order to play so much as one note, and the difficulty of controlling both temperature and lighting in churches. Of course this doesn’t mean that organists never practiced on their “real” instrument or never practiced pedal playing. Some organists may have had regular access to a pedal harpsichord or clavichord for practice in the Baroque period or even a pedal piano later on, though the extent of this remains very unclear. But certainly the most common situation over many centuries must have been that organists kept their fingers in shape through regular practice at home, and, having once become skilled at pedal playing, tended to add pedal parts more or less at the last minute before a service or other performance. This suggests that pedal facility was something comfortable, natural, and well-learned enough that it was always there ready to be tapped into at a moment’s notice, the way bicycle riding is commonly thought to be.
(Of course no one would suggest that the most demanding and virtuosic pedal passages of Buxtehude or Bach or, especially, many late 19th or 20th century composers can be mastered without dedicated or indeed grueling practice. The above thoughts are intended to address the business of developing good, competent pedal facility and technique in the first instance.)
A second major reason that some students cite for having trouble with pedal playing, or even for giving it up, and therefore in effect giving up trying to learn organ, is that they find it physically uncomfortable. Since playing the pedal keyboard involves almost the entire body—at least more of it than other kinds of music-making do, more like an athletic activity—there is all sorts of room for it to become physically stressful or tense, and to lead to pain in the back, neck, shoulders, legs, feet, etc. Physical tension can always lead to musical problems—a tense sound or a lack of subtle control over timing and articulation—but with pedal playing, since more and larger muscles are involved, it can also lead to a level of discomfort that makes it essentially impossible to go on. I have actually encountered many people over the years who have told me that they are simply not suited to organ playing because they found the physical dimension of pedal playing too awkward and uncomfortable. I am certain that most of them could have found a way of approaching pedal playing that was devoid of any bad physical feeling and that worked fully to give them command of the pedal keyboard and the repertoire. The teacher’s second job, therefore, is to help the student to be comfortable at the pedal keyboard and to develop a technical approach for each student that works for that student’s posture and physique.
The teacher’s third and most fundamental job, of course, is to give the student the basic tools to learn pedal playing. Next month’s column will be organized around specific and detailed suggestions about how to approach this task. I will close this column with some ideas that underlie my way of thinking about the details of teaching pedal playing. This will serve as a background for next month’s column and I hope will provide food for thought.
1) If the goal is to allow everyone who is interested in organ playing to become a competent pedal player, and since everyone’s individual physique requires a somewhat different posture on the organ bench and a somewhat different relationship to the physical side of playing, there should be as few rules or even presuppositions as possible about how anyone should sit at the organ. If it is possible to develop a way of gaining complete security at the pedal keyboard that does not depend on a particular posture or on a particular physical setup, that would be very desirable.
2) The act of playing pedal keys is simply the act of pushing down a lever with a part of the foot that is small enough to do so without pushing down an adjacent lever. Any part of the foot that fits this description is fine to use in playing notes. This might often include the “big toe” area, the “little toe” area, almost anywhere along the outside of the foot, any part of the heel, and, for players with small enough feet, even the very front of the foot. There is no reason to reject any of these in advance, or to prefer any of them as a matter of principle. There might well be musical, practical, or historical reasons to prefer one or another in a given situation. Each player’s posture, and various physical habits, as well as foot size, will often determine what is best in this respect. Students can start to monitor this on their own behalf at the very beginning of the learning process.
3) There are three sound ways of finding the right note while playing pedals:
a) finding notes from scratch, in relation only to the position of one’s body on the bench
b) finding a note with one foot in relation to the position of the other foot and
c) finding a note with one foot in relation to where that foot last was or what that foot just did.
Each of these is useful, and they can all be practiced systematically, but the third is the most useful by far. It forms the basis for the exercises and procedures that I use in introducing students to pedal playing. (There are also various unsound or problematic ways, such as sliding or bumping the foot along the keys or just plain looking. These are unsound in part because they tend to cause hesitation and, by adding steps to the process, set a lower ceiling on tempo. But even worse, a reliance on them, especially by beginning students, delays or defeats the establishment of a solid inner sense of the geography and kinesthetics of the pedal keyboard.)
Next month in part II of this series I will continue this discussion, and move on to exercises and suggestions for practice.
