(Experienced organists, this is yet another boring blog post which you may wish to skip)

Once priestly persuasion has been successful, and you have agreed with many misgivings to have a go at playing the organ, next comes the fateful moment when pianist and organ meet face to face for the first time. This should always happen in an empty church. If an organist is there to advise, well and good. Otherwise, priests, relatives and church hangers-on should be banished while you very carefully examine the tabs, stops, couplers, pistons, pedals and other bits and pieces. The main question is of course ‘How do I know which of these things to push, pull or press, and when?’  Have a notebook ready to write down the answers.

Here is a quick start guide:

First, check out which items are STOPS and which are COUPLERS, and PARK THE PEDALS.

Stops will have a pitch number – 8’, 4’ etc (some electronics have each tab consecutively numbered as well; try to ignore this.). Stops will be grouped according to their location (Swell, Great, Pedal – on some electronics, unhelpfully, I and II).

Coupler tabs or knobs will name the bits of the organ which they join up (e.g. ‘Swell to Great’, ‘Swell Octave’, ‘Great to Pedal’, or the less easy to spot ‘II/I’). They won’t have pitch numbers, and their lettering is sometimes a different colour from the real or ‘sounding’ stops.

Best to leave the pedal keyboard alone for now. You can stop it sounding by pushing in or switching off all stops in the Pedal group, and any couplers with ‘Pedal’ written on them. That way, if you kick one accidentally it won’t make a noise. Later, when you’re confident, you’ll enjoy getting to know the pedals. Volume pedals are a different matter (see below).

Then, explore the STOPS.

Look for diapasons. Diapason is the basic organ hymn-playing sound. They come as 8’, 4’ and possibly 2’ (remember 8’ is in the middle of the pitch range, 4’ an octave up, and so on). Apart from Stopped Diapason, which is a flute sound, everything else called ‘diapason’ is a diapason. Other names for diapasons are Octave, Principal and Fifteenth (a 2’ stop). Sometimes their spellings are foreign, like Prinzipal, Oktave. Try playing a hymn on an 8’ diapason, then add a 4’ for the next verse. If there’s a 2’, add it to the next again verse. Try out the couplers. Listen carefully to the results.

Now check out the flutes. Again, there will be an 8’ and a 4’, and possibly a 2’. You can get a 16’ flute (usually called Bourdon), which can be a bit growly. Their names vary more than the diapasons. Look for anything with ‘flute’ or ‘flöte’ in the name, like Rohrflöte or Wald Flute. Other flute sounds are Stopped Diapason, Bourdon, Clarabella or similar, and anything that looks like or includes Gedackt. Try playing voluntaries on the different flute sounds. Some flutes are strong enough to include in hymn playing. Again, listen carefully. Your ear will tell you what sounds good and what doesn’t.

With flutes and diapasons a pianist can get going on hymns and voluntaries right away. The other kinds of stops – string, mutations, mixtures and reeds – can be explored in a more leisurely way once confidence is established and the organ touch is comfortable. A great help in identifying peculiar-looking or sounding stops is a website called Encyclopaedia of Organ Stops. Here you can find just about every stop in the world, and you can listen to some of them, too.

Finally, examine PRESETS and VOLUME PEDALS

Presets will reveal what stop combinations the previous organist decided to keep handy. You may find some useful, but don’t rely on them, as other people may have been messing around in the interim. Eventually you’ll create your own.

Volume or Swell pedal(s) If there is only one, you are lucky. It should apply to the upper or Swell manual. If there is more than one, find out which does what, and practise locating them without looking down. The dreadful ‘Crescendo’ pedal is usually on the extreme right. This will take the organ to its loudest whatever stops you are using, with a resulting shock both to you and to the congregation. Identify it, then see if there isn’t a switch to disable it.

By this time, you should have a notebook full of useful information, to be used when you practise. On the Sunday itself, when the church is full of people, you will almost certainly find that you’ll need more stops or volume, so it’s worth planning for that, too.

Good luck!

(Experienced organists please find another blog, because you’ll be very bored by this one. Or stay and criticise, if you prefer…)

Most pianists who play the organ have been dragged there unwillingly by the clergy. The priestly approach is either sad and pathetic (‘Please, please help me out’) or domineering, like the priest who 40 years ago dismissed all my protests that I knew nothing about the organ with ‘Nonsense! Black keys, white keys, they’re all the same. You don’t need to worry about the pedals – we’ve taken them off. See you Sunday!’

I have to say that once I got to appreciate the organ I never looked back, but I still remember the horror of those nerve-racking early days. There was no one who could tell me how organs worked. I would automatically thump the thing to make it louder, and didn’t dare pull any stop that might sound above mf. And everything was so public. Every mistake of any kind would blare out, and all I wanted to do was go home. Many pianists have gone through this, and some have not felt able to take the strain, and have given up. This is a great pity, because playing at Mass can become really rewarding once confidence is established.

So here are a few notes taken from a beginners’ training day. I hope they might be of some use and encouragement to pianists who are either beginning to play the organ in church, or still thinking about taking the plunge.

SOME VERY BASIC THINGS ABOUT THE ORGAN

All church organs work the same way. They have MANUALS (keyboards), PEDALBOARD (most of the time but not always), STOPS, COUPLERS, some kind of ‘PRESET’ arrangement and some kind of VOLUME PEDAL. The organ specification is simply a list of these for a particular organ.

MANUALS If there are two manuals, they are called Great and Swell. The Swell is the upper one, it’s less strong than the Great, and the volume can be controlled by a foot pedal. There can be more than two manuals, of course.

PEDALBOARD A full pedalboard is two-and-a-half octaves or more and goes right across the bottom of the organ. A single octave on the left – usually found on ‘home’ organs – requires a quite different technique and cannot be used for serious organ pedalling.

STOPS They can be drawstops or tabs. The figure (16′, 8′, 4′, 2′) denotes pitch – the smaller the number, the higher the note. 8′ is the middle range. Middle C on an 8′ stop sounds as Middle C. On a 4′ it sounds an octave higher, and on a 16′ an octave lower. The name tells us the tone quality, and what tonal family (diapasons, flutes, reeds, etc.) the stop is in. For more about stop families see the stop chart in the blog post of 8 January 2010

COUPLERS join up different sets of sounds. They can combine the sounds on two manuals, add a manual sound to the pedals, or add an octave above or below the stops being used. On electronics, there can be an ‘automatic bass’ feature which brings the pedal sound into the bottom of the lower manual.

PRESETS I’ve used this term to cover all ways of setting combinations of sounds so that the organist can find them again easily. They can be buttons, thumb-pistons, toe-pistons or combination pedals.

VOLUME PEDAL This is known as the ‘Swell Pedal’ on a pipe organ because it controls the Swell manual. There can be more than one pedal, especially on electronics. Be wary of the ‘crescendo’ pedal, which takes the entire organ to its loudest!

REGISTRATION is the way the organist sets up the instrument for a particular piece of music. In hymn-playing, careful registration can really inspire the singing.

And always remember that unlike the piano:

• the organ is not touch-sensitive
• there is no perpetual diminuendo
• there is no sustaining pedal

And also remember, it’s worth it in the end. Honest!

About 15 minutes before the funeral was due to start, I was told someone in the porch wanted to speak to me. When I got down, there was a young girl standing at the gallery door, in tears and clutching an oboe.  This was her gran’s funeral, and she wanted to play the oboe as her contribution to her gran’s music.  I asked gently if she had any particular piece in mind.  Well, no.  She just wanted to join in with the hymns.  She had no music with her.  She said she would look over my shoulder, read the music and play along.

How could I refuse? The only problem for me would be having an oboe in my ear the whole time, and I could put up with that.  It wouldn’t matter if she played wrong notes or broke down – all the family knew who she was, and how much she loved her gran. So we did it, and it went well.

But – and this is a big BUT, quite enormous in fact – had she been clutching a clarinet, everything would have been different.  For those who don’t know, the clarinet is one of a number of transposing instruments, which sound at a different pitch from that of their written music.  Any accompaniment must be transposed to accommodate this.  Electronic organs have transposing knobs, but pipe organs generally don’t.  Transposing at sight is not my favourite occupation, and all the hymns at a funeral, with no time for preparation … the very thought makes me shudder.

Usually, though, there is advance warning:

Cornet player:  I want to play the Burns song ‘Of a’ the airts’ at the tribute time.

Me:  What’s the key?

Cornet player:  G

Me:  Your G or my G?

Cornet player:  My G

(It always takes me ages to work this out – it’s like the mental arithmetic which I was so hopeless at in school.  It’s a B flat cornet, so if he reads C, it comes out as B flat.  So if he reads G, it will come out as F.  So I have to play the accompaniment in F – I can busk that, not a problem. He’ll play the tune in G and it should sound OK.  But will it?  I don’t trust my own calculations.)

Cornet player: Are you still there?

Me:  Oh, yes.  Sorry.  Look, I know time is short, but please (oh, please) can we have a practice?

And we did. And it was fine.

But there was one proposition – for a wedding this time – that I did have to reject, even though asked in advance.  The chief bridesmaid wanted to play a euphonium solo from the front of the church, with me accompanying from the gallery at the back.  With my mind full of the strange spectacle this would present, I voiced some doubts. Even though the instrument wasn’t a transposing one, I wasn’t at all sure that it would blend with the organ. And I was especially concerned about the time lag.  In the end I suggested she perform unaccompanied, which she did.  And it was really rather nice.

It started when one of my churches decided to forbid the playing of CDs at funerals.  This caused some upset to families who wanted the coffin to go out to the deceased’s favourite piece of music.  The inevitable happened:

Undertaker: The family want to know if you can play ‘Amapola’ on retiral. It’s a Benny Goodman jazz band number.

Me:  (Jazz band number! Help!) Can’t say I know it.  I might if I heard it.  Can anyone provide the music?

Undertaker: I’ll check and get back to you.

What came back from the family were three pages of the full band score.  This was similar to an orchestral score, and if you’ve ever dealt with orchestral scores, you’ll know that three pages of a piece going at any speed is equivalent to about ten seconds of music.  No use at all.

One doesn’t want to pester the bereaved, but I was on the point of asking if they could lend me a CD when I thought: how about trying Youtube?  I’d first discovered Youtube after watching a cable TV programme of some pretty dreadful figure-skating, where they all kept falling down. To counteract this I went to the computer and googled ‘John Curry’ and immediately got a Youtube video of that wonderful gold-medal performance in a Winter Olympics years and years ago.  I have since found you can get just about anything on Youtube. So on this occasion I googled it with ‘Amapola’ and lo and behold! up came a clip of the whole thing.  Excellent.

Transcribing pieces like this for organ is OK so long as you don’t even try to produce the same effect as the original, in this case a jazz band (well, maybe some of these gaudy electronic organs with rhythm sections could do it, but it’s risky).  The treatment I use is a bit similar to the old music dictation which we all hated at school or college: get the melody written down first, then the main bass beats, then a rough harmonic structure (chord symbols will do), then any noticeable twiddly bits (sorry, motifs) in the accompaniment.  You finish up with a melody you can solo if you wish, plus an underlying chordal accompaniment and possibly even a pedal line.

When it comes to playing the piece, it can be quite poignant to start softly and then build up by adding stops.  A bit like those old films where the heroine is thinking back to happier days and the love theme very gently begins in the background before crescendo-ing like mad and taking over.  If you become aware that the family are in tears, it doesn’t necessarily mean they feel you are totally mangling their precious tune.   In fact, usually it’s quite the opposite; it has gone to their hearts and they are really grateful for the trouble you’ve taken.

I’ve quite a collection now of these organ arrangements via Youtube, including ‘My Way’, ‘Moon River’, ‘When I grow too old to dream’ and a few I hope I never have to play again.  But it’s worth keeping them safe, as you never know when they’ll be needed.

The only time Youtube appeared to fail me concerned a wedding. The groom, who was French, asked for a French hymn which he called ‘Holly Mary’.  This returned nothing from Youtube.  I suspected it might be ‘Holy Mary’, but still no go.  Finally he sent me the link to a French Youtube version, and it turned out to be ‘Je vous salue, Marie’, which is of course ‘Hail, Mary’.  Oh well.