(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!