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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Something more dramatic for the feet

Joyce Jones – queen of the pedals

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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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Sight-reading resources

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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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