Organ lessons over the internet – yes it works
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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