Musings of an Organ Teacher

(This article was originally published in the February 2017 edition of the church newsletter.)

As some of you know, I've been the organ instructor at Allegheny College for the past few semesters, following in the footsteps of a dear woman named Rebecca Borthwick-Aiken.  My students aren't music majors who are already proficient organists: those kids opt for conservatories like Juilliard or big-city colleges like Duquesne.  Instead, I end up with science and humanities students who have some piano lessons under their belt and want to try the organ mainly out of curiosity.  Guiding them through their first introduction to the organ has proven surprisingly rewarding.  At the same time, though, it highlights how many people (even some fairly sophisticated musicians) underestimate the difference between the organ and the piano.
 
But wait — they both have keys, so aren't they basically the same?  In short, no!  I won’t bore you with technical details here, but physically and musically speaking, the two instruments must be approached entirely differently. Seating an excellent pianist at an organ console unprepared is going to result in a lot of clunky, awkward playing, since the organ lacks the 'sustain' pedal which smoothes out the piano's sound.  (To connect notes and chords together, organists dip into a bag of techniques that pianists seldom bother with.)  In fairness, I should note that the reverse is also true: trained organists pounding on the piano can make some very un-musical music.  I'm occasionally guilty of this myself!
 
There’s also the matter of registration: the art of knowing which sounds to choose for a particular piece of music.  Before my students can even start to make those decisions for themselves, they must learn the names of all the fancy knobs and tabs on the organ console and what each of them does.  This alone can take months to get a feel for.  By contrast, the piano undeniably makes up for in simplicity what it lacks in variety.

And we haven’t even mentioned the pedals, the aspect of organ playing my beginning students find the most unnatural.  I tell them it’s not unlike learning to ride a bicycle.  It may be confusing, awkward, and frustrating at first…but if you keep trying, something eventually just ‘clicks’ and you’re off to the races!  After a few lessons they can play some notes without looking, and by semester's end their pedal scales are reasonably smooth.  The final step is adding pedal notes while the hands are busy doing something else; that level of coordination is the work of at least one lifetime!
 
Until next time,
Kevin