Getting ready for an organ lesson – over the internet

Organ lessons can sometimes be like doctor’s appointments – you have your allotted time, and leave with half a dozen questions still hanging in your head.  When Neil Cockburn, Head of Organ Studies at Mount Royal University Conservatory in Calgary, Canada, offered an experiment with distance learning to students at the RCO Summer Course in August, I thought it was fun in principle, and wanted to try it.  What I didn’t expect to find was that as a learning method, it had advantages over an ordinary organ lesson.  I had time to shape my questions, and think through exactly what I wanted to know.  There was less pressure.   And at the end I had a permanent record of Neil’s advice to refer to, like a personal YouTube Channel, rather than trying to remember exactly what my teacher said from a few scrawled notes.

Neil is looking to offer teaching from Calgary to more students – as he says “You may have a specific question about registration or another feature of your own instrument, and your teacher can’t make the journey to advise in person – or teachers may be unavailable where you live.  We have all these wonderful resources here in Calgary – but are a long way from everyone.  Learning via the internet is the obvious answer.   At the moment we are trouble-shooting the technology and testing the ideas – eventually we would like to offer two-way distance learning, at the organ.”

The process is in theory simple – you record yourself playing.  You send the recording to your teacher, along perhaps with scans of the relevant bars of music.  Then you have a video conference at a mutually suitable time to discuss it.  Your teacher then can email instructions and videos back.

 We are on the brink of technology that will let you get a link from anywhere. So if you are 4000 miles apart, it no longer matters.

Of course, persuading the technology to do what you have in mind can be a bit of a digital wrestling match, first time round, and you have have to stay cheerful about this*.   I made a test recording first off**, and sent it to Neil, to make sure the iPad was going to work as a recording device.   He was happy with both sound and vision, and here’s my lesson video for real – a few bars of Matthew Locke’s Voluntary in A from Melothesia, one of the ARCO set pieces.  I wanted Neil’s advice on the ornaments, and the outbursts of  of demi-semi quavers from bar 34 onwards (like how do you make them secure for an exam?)

When we had our conference call it was 10.30pm in the UK, and 3pm in Calgary, but it was as if the miles didn’t exist.   Neil had recorded some videos to help me with the scale passages – here’s one:

video © Neil Cockburn/Mount Royal University Conservatory

Possibly the best bit for me was solving the vexing issue of the final cadence in the Locke – which in the Faber edition is bizarre and ambiguous.  A few clicks at either end of our conversation and we both had a facsimile of the original manuscript on our screens, courtesy of a link Neil sent me from Petrucci Music Library.  With his help I translated the 17th century original…as a straightforward 4-3 suspension, of course!   A neat bit of scholarship, accomplished in seconds, even though teacher and pupil were 4000 miles apart.

If you would like to know more about this project, you can contact Neil at ncockburn@mtroyal.ca.

Ultimately he is suggesting that distance learning on these lines would cost about the same as a lesson in person – say 90 minutes (taking into account the background work) at the usual hourly teaching rate.

*What I used:  The filming was the most straightforward part.  Smart phones and tablets are good at making the most of interior lighting, even in organ lofts.  I recorded myself on my iPad, propped on hymn books on the edge of the organ balcony.  With more time you could probably devise something better: stands and tripod mounts for tablets are available – though this is another expense for a student, and something else to cart around along with shoes, music, and other organist clobber.  A digital camera would be just fine of course, and Neil suggests a laptop lid with built-in camera would also be good option. 

Neil and I set up a shared Dropbox folder to exchange the videos.  I wanted to see if I could do the whole process just using a mobile device,  but trying to upload the videos to Dropbox at the church over 3G was an expensive use of data and very slow (a wireless connection in a church is kind of rare in the UK)  so I had to wait until I got home to a decent broadband connection. 

We had our conference using Facetime as we both had Mac devices, but Skype would have worked just as well.  Email, of course, kept the ball rolling, especially as a secondary communication channel during our video conference.

** NB Girls, check your camera angles.  If you wear a skirt, and are in the habit of nonchalantly kicking your heels up over the organ bench to dismount, don’t do it towards the lens.   Not a good look.

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You can find it here.

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There’s another page of pedals-only in production, just as soon as I’ve sorted out all the links.

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Excerpt from Macdougall Dramatic Pedal Studies    /Michael Johnston

I’ve been following Michael Johnston of @michaelsmusic on Twitter for a while, and I had to share a recent tweet about his reprint of Dramatic Pedal Studies by Hamilton Crawford Macdougall  (1858-1945) in which the parts given to the feet are either well-defined melodies or at least have some melodic interest.  They will therefore stimulate the players’ interest in pedal playing, and through the assignment to the feet of those climacteric and dramatic passages usually (and quite naturally) given to the hands, give the player a grip of the pedals not otherwise obtainable  says Macdougall.  Quite right – see sample above.

This is a reprint of the 1922 Schirmer edition, and is something they specialise in at Michael’s Music Service – cleaning up and re-issuing organ music to make it available again, often for the first time in decades.

Browse their catalogue of restored organ music here.

More here if you are interested in their take on music restoration, and the proliferation of pdf downloads on the internet.

Michael’s Music Service is based in North Carolina in the US, but they ship by air to other countries.

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Sight-Read the Pedals!
Richard Ellis
Published by atticbooks January 2013
Price £9.95 (to be confirmed) including postage.  Discounts to teachers for multiple copies
Will be in stock by major mail-order music shops in due course – in the meantime contact publisher Mark Ellis direct: atticbooks@ntlworld.com

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Edward Elgar – the perfect country gent

Elgar’s image-consciousness could put many modern celebs to shame.   As photography got into its stride at the turn of the 19th century, he posed for the camera as the dapper country gent (above) or the distinguished composer about to dash off another masterpiece.   Ironically, it’s in his portrait paintings, rather than photographs, where you can see a more human, less self-assured personality.

I’m taking baby steps towards learning how to register and play Elgar, with the Vesper Voluntaries Op14.  No4 was my contribution on a recent RCO workshop on the big 3 manual Mander organ at the West End of St Giles Cripplegate, London.  Elgar expert Dr Christopher Kent was our tutor.

To start with, I’ve struggled with understanding how to play the cadences in this piece – bar 8 for example.   It’s one of Elgar’s little classical allusions, explained Christopher, play it like Haydn or Mozart.  Problem solved.  We know Elgar studied the Best and Stainer organ tutors, said Christopher, so he knew his way around the organ – but not as an organist and choirmaster like Stainer or Parry.  He recycled music from other genres for his organ works – the Cantique was a slow movement for a wind quartet, the Vesper Voluntary No3 originally written for string quartet.    So ‘orchestrating’ rather than ‘registering’ an Elgar organ piece is a useful way to think.

8′ Oboe is a crucial timbre for the music of Elgar and his contemporaries, backed with a diapason or string sound. On this organ there isn’t a particularly appropriate 8′ reed on the Swell, though there is a 16’ Contra Hautboy.  Use it, and just play that phrase an octave up, suggested Christopher breezily.

Elgar like his music to be ‘elastic’ with ebb and flow.  ‘Don’t starve the quaver’ he insisted, particularly in triplet rhythms.  Another of his sayings was ‘Cut that and it would bleed’ – referring to his phrasing marks.

My fellow students were further on than me, offering the Cantique and the Organ Sonata in G Op28 – I can see a lifetime of study, particularly in the latter, where the whimsical changes of mood, from skittish to serious within the space of a barline, require an equally nifty response from the player.  Christopher has given us Elgar’s own metronome settings here, and markings from the score of Sir Ivor Atkins, whose playing Elgar approved of.

Our chat at the tea break moved on to harmoniums.  Much organ music of this time was published with an eye to the harmonium or American organ market. (The difference? – a harmonium blows wind, an American organ sucks (and fills the reeds with dirt!))  So some of the little double hairpins in Elgar’s simpler music (eg bar 20 of the Vesper Voluntary No4) can be disregarded – they are an indication of the harmonium ‘Expression’ pedal, rather than a sudden bulge on the full organ Swell.

Christopher Kent is an organist, harpsichordist and organ advisor, with many publications on Elgar and his music.  More about Christopher here.

The new bicycle!  Elgar in 1900/ The Elgar Museum

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From the look on her face, even St Cecilia could get a bit annoyed at times.  Window in St Mary the Virgin, Little Wymondley/Wiki Commons

There’s something about an organ being played – like a traffic accident or a crime scene – that draws a crowd. Some excellent organists simply do not play in public, and I understand where they are coming from.  If your instrument is even slightly in the public domain, it can be impossible to escape onlookers, at times when really you would rather they weren’t there. It’s wonderful to be able to lock yourself in an empty church and practice to your heart’s content, but this luxury is rare.  Your playing often goes on with the  twitchy awareness of assorted listeners at your back.   This used to worry me terribly, but I’ve decided to harden up and get used to it.  It goes with the territory.

The easiest to cope with is gawpers from the congregation.  Whether you adopt a playing style of extreme nonchalance, or add a little showmanship in the form of extravagant stop-pulling and a few grimaces at key points in the music, they will usually be in awe whatever you do.

Slightly more difficult are members of the vestry and clergy who hover behind you eager for a discussion of next month’s rota or just to exchange some church chitter-chatter.   They have a strong sense that they can interrupt, and often do.  Organists are trained multi-taskers, and I have watched an organist of my acquaintance simultaneously booking the departing sopranos for a wedding the next week while smashing through the final voluntary (respect!) but I’m not in that league.  A smile and a grunt is usually enough to postpone the discussion here – though this may have to be repeated before the message gets through.

The hardest situation to deal with is when you sense a little semi-circle has gathered behind you of teachers, fellow professionals, dare I say it, rivals – usually just before a difficult pedal entry.  This taxes the sang-froid of even the best.  (Gillian Weir suggests imagining you’re in a safe bubble which lets the music out but bounces back any ill wishes – so she’s been there herself.)  If this class of onlooker does manage to throw you, the only answer I can suggest is a little gamesmanship at the end of their next recital.  Adopting an air of faint commiseration with  ‘I say, the last movement of that Reger is awfully difficult isn’t it?’ should restore your sense of fair play.

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Who wouldn’t like to play the pedals like Joyce Jones?  I’ve just ordered her book, Pedal Mastery For Organ from Amazon and I can’t wait.   The page previews show exercises ranging from elementary to quite terrifying.

Joyce Jones is renowned for her twinkling, virtuosic feet. Here she is on YouTube playing Flight of the Bumble Bee – on the pedals of course.  The relaxed economy of movement, and effortless pedal trills are just wonderful to watch.

Dr Jones is winding down her performance schedule as of last year, when she retired from her position as Professor of Music and Organist in residence at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.   “It’s my 79th birthday and I don’t mind saying at my age, it’s amazing that anyone that old can still be playing,” she announced.

She describes herself as an accidental organist – when she was a piano undergraduate in Texas she sprained her hand – badly.   Six weeks of no playing were ordered for recovery.  She occupied herself with pedal exercises on the organ, and found a natural talent and affinity for the instrument.  The rest is history.

Here’s a longer (1 hour) clip on YouTube from the Pedals and Pumps festival of organ divas at Trinity Wall Street, New York,  in 2008.  Joyce plays Dupre, Liszt, Bach, with plenty of showing off on the pedals.   The dancing over the manuals between different registrations that she uses in the Bach comes from her studies with Karl Richter – before that her playing had become uber correct “as if the music was sprayed with Lysol”, and it needed liberating, she says.  Bach purists beware.

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