Registration and teaching—Part III
To all this was added the peculiar manner in which he combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which could never be produced by their mode of registration. This peculiar manner of using the stops was a consequence of his minute knowledge of the construction of the organ and of all the single stops.1
In the last two columns we have gone over, as carefully as possible, all of the aspects of the art of organ registration that are objective and systematic—that is, the meaning of the pitch designations given to stops, and the science of combining stops as it relates to the different pitch levels and to overtones. By devoting two whole columns to these matters and in the way I laid out all of their details, I have tried to make the case that students wanting to study registration should be encouraged to understand these things extraordinarily thoroughly at the very beginning of that study. This seems to me to be the necessary first step in achieving the “minute knowledge” attributed to Bach by Forkel (and his sources) in the famous account quoted above.
The next step in achieving the level of knowledge and understanding that permits freedom and confidence in registration—or, I should say, the next set of steps—involves beginning to explore the actual sounds of the stops: the thing that makes organ registration exciting and challenging, and that gives meaning and variety to the essentially infinite number of different combinations of stops that a mid-sized or large organ possesses. Let us begin with a few principles. These partly reflect my practical experience—they seem to me to provide a good foundation for an approach that clearly and simply works to help students to feel comfortable with registration and to achieve results with which they are happy. Partly, however, they reflect my belief—which I admit probably rises to the level of an ideology—that every musician ought to think for him- or herself and be willing or eager to achieve results that are different from anyone else’s. These principles are as follows:
1) The art of registration is fundamentally the art of really listening to every sound that you hear—also really hearing every sound that you listen to—and noting carefully and honestly your reaction to it.
2) The ideal approach to choosing a sound for a given piece or passage is to try it out with every available sound. This is almost always actually impossible (see last month’s column), but it is still an interesting and invigorating concept to keep in the back of one’s mind.
3) The names of the stops are only a general guide to what they sound like or how they should be used. These names can be very helpful for targeting which stops or combinations to try, given that it is impossible to try everything. However, they should never even tentatively override the evidence of your ears. (My teacher, the late Eugene Roan, used to say that the best Diapason on a certain older model of electronic organ was the stop marked “French Horn.” This may be an extreme case, but the principle always applies: it is the sound that matters, not the name.)
4) Relating the sound of any registration to a piece—that is, choosing stops for that piece—is part of the same interpretive process that includes choosing a tempo, making decisions about phrasing and articulation, making choices about rhythm, agogic accent, rubato, etc., etc.
5) Using stops that someone else—anyone else—has told you to use is not part of the art of registration. Rather, it is a choice not to practice that art in that particular case. There can be very good reasons for doing this, most of which have to do with respecting the wishes of composers, or of conductors or other performing colleagues, or occasionally of participants in an event such as a wedding or a funeral.
6) Learning how to respect the wishes of a composer when playing on an organ other than the one(s) that the composer knew, taking into account but not necessarily following literally any specific registrations that the composer may have given, is an art in itself. It requires both a real mastery of the art of registration as understood here, and thorough knowledge of the composer’s expectations and wishes.
The first three of these principles essentially lead to the conclusion that a student wanting to become adept at using organ sound should spend a lot of time listening to organs. This is, in a sense, a process that takes place away from, or even without the need for, a teacher. However, there are ways that a teacher can help with the process, and the rest of this column will be devoted to suggesting some of these.
The last three principles concern ways of relating registration to music, either in and of itself or in connection with various historical, musicological, or practical concerns. Next month’s column will offer suggestions for helping students think about these issues.
The first logical step in beginning to listen carefully and learn about organ sound is to listen to 8' stops. A student should find a short piece of music for manuals only that feels easy enough that it can be played without too much worry or too much need to concentrate. This can be a well-learned piece or passage, or a simple chord progression, or a hymn, or even just some scales. The student should play this music on any 8' stop a time or two, and then on another 8' stop, and then back to the first, listening for differences and similarities: louder, softer, darker, lighter, brighter, joyful, somber, open and clear, pungent and reedy, compelling, boring, with or without emotional content. Then he or she should continue the process, adding in another 8' stop, and then perhaps another, comparing them in pairs. (Any and all adjectives that the student uses to describe individual sounds or to clarify the comparison between sounds should probably remain in the student’s head. All such words are used completely differently by different people, and can’t usually convey anything meaningful from one person to another. In any case, the point here is for the student to listen, react, and think, not to convey anything to anyone else.)
After doing this for a while—reacting to the sounds on a spontaneous aesthetic level—the student should begin listening for structural characteristics of the sound. The most obvious of these is (usually) balance. If you play, say, a chord progression on a principal, then on a gedeckt, then on a salicional, there will be all sorts of aesthetic differences. Are there also differences in how well you can hear the bass? the treble? the inner voices? Is there a difference in how well your ears can follow lines, as opposed to just chords as such? If you arpeggiate the chords in various ways (faster, slower, up, down, random) does the effect of that arpeggiation seem different on one sound from another? If you play the same passage very legato and then lightly detached, is the texture different on one sound from another? (This latter might be easier to execute and to hear with a single line melody.) Do the several different sounds suggest varied tempos for the passage that you are playing?
(It is important that the teacher remind the student not to expect all such questions to have clear-cut or unchanging answers. The point is to listen and think, not to solve or decide.)
After playing around with a few 8' stops this way, start combining them. This should be done without reference to any assumptions about which combinations will “work” or which are sanctioned by common or historical practice. Again, the point is to listen, even to things that you might not like or ever use. For each combination of two 8' stops, the student can go through an exercise like that described above, asking the same questions. However, there are also other things to listen for. If you combine two 8' stops, does the resulting sound resemble one of them more than the other? Does it resemble neither? Does it seem louder than the separate stops? (Acoustically it always will be, psycho-acoustically it will not always seem to be.) Do the two stops in fact seem to blend into one sound, or does it seem that there are two sounds riding along together? If someone randomly removes one of the stops while you are playing, can you tell which one is left? Is the nature of the beginnings of notes (pipe speech or diction) different with the combined stops from either one by itself? Does it resemble one more than the other?
Another wrinkle on this exercise is this: choose one loud 8' stop, say a principal, and then make a separate combination of 8' stops to create a similar volume level, say a gedeckt plus a quintadena plus a rohrflute. How do those two different sounds compare to one another with respect to all of the questions asked above, or any others that you can think of? Here’s another: what is the very quietest 8' stop that can be heard alongside a (presumably fairly loud) 8' principal in playing a two-voiced passage on two manuals? Does this change depending on which hand is on which keyboard? Or this: if you play a two-voice passage on one keyboard (i.e., the same registration in each part), do the left hand and the right hand sound like they are using the same sonority, or do they sound different? Does this differ from one registration to another? (Every student and every teacher can make up many further questions, exercises, and tests such as these.)
The next step, of course, is to begin combining 8' sound with higher-pitched stops, and to listen in the same way and to ask the same kinds of questions. The student should choose one of the 8' stops, and add to it first one 4' stop, then another, then two or more together, then a 2-2/3' if there is one, then a 2', then a different 2', then a 4' and a 2' together, etc. In all of these cases, the first thing to listen for is whether the sounds really blend into one—like a section of a fine chamber choir—or just sort of straggle along together—like the voices at a party singing “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, these differences are really likely to be along a continuum, not “either/or.”) Next come any and all of the other questions, not forgetting the structural ones. The addition of a 4' or higher stop can change the structure of a sound significantly, often bringing out or suppressing inner voices or a particular part of the keyboard compass. A special case of this is the 2-2/3', which, as experienced organists know, often blends well with an 8' stop in the upper part of the compass of the keyboard, but separates out somewhere below middle c. It can be interesting to try the following experiment with an 8' + 2-2/3' combination: first play a bit of a melody remaining above middle c; then play a scale starting an octave or so above middle c and going down. Notice when the sound “splits” into what sound like parallel fifths (perhaps suddenly sounding vaguely medieval!). Then, play a few notes in that lower part of the compass—notes chosen as good roots for a chord progression, say c-f-g-G-c. (They will sound unsuccessfully blended.) Then play those very same notes, but with appropriate chords added above them. This will sound absolutely fine. Of course, it is even more interesting to try this with several different 8' + 2-2/3' combinations and see how similar or different the results are, and then to compare all of these results to those obtained with 8' + 4'+ 2-2/3' or 8' + 2-2/3' + 2'.
All of the above is a kind of systematic “goofing off,” first of all in that it should be fun—it should be one of the things that connects a student to the joy in the sensations of sound that is part of playing the organ—and also in that it shouldn’t be too well ordered. After all, it is impossible to hear/try/test all of the sounds, so the sample that one tries should be random enough to achieve good variety. Second, it is systematic in that it is important to do these exercises in an order that permits meaningful comparisons—more or less as described above—and also in that it is important, alongside a generous amount of pure aesthetic listening, to remember to ask questions about the more measurable or “structural” aspects of the various sounds.
Next month I will take up some aspects of the business of combining one’s awareness and understanding of organ sound with various external matters. These include the aesthetics of particular pieces, historical instruments and styles, and the wishes or intentions of composers.
