I was watching the video below of a woman playing a church organ. It seems to take two people (mostly her) but also another person lurking and pushing/pulling buttons.
How does anyone learn to play such a thing? There are not a whole lot to practice on and (I don’t think) something that can be practiced at home. Mastering most instruments takes a great deal of practice. So, how does someone manage something like a church organ? Or a carillon? (I worked with a guy who played a carillon…I wish I had asked him since, in Chicago, I can’t think of more than a few that are here.)
I’m sure other unusual instruments can be conjured…these are just what came to mind.
Both of the church organists I know learned it from the previous organists at their churches. They did go to the church to play every day; it seems like one of the churches also accommodated a music student who was learning organ elsewhere.
It’s a keyboard instrument, so a lot of practice is going to occur on other keyboard instruments–pianos, other organs, etc. But, yes, they do also practice on the actual instrument, too. And often they can do dry runs, where they play but they don’t make sound.
It seems each of those really big church organs are unique. No two are really alike. I imagine learning piano is a good start but you see the multi-level keyboards and endless buttons and plungers and knobs and foot pedals and it is hard to imagine learning how to manage all that other stuff.
A friend of mine was a church organist. Long story short, he started on piano, mastered that, and wanted to branch out. So he found someone to teach him pipe organ, and all about the different manuals, stops, and pedals. He played a number of exams for a panel, and achieved membership in the Canadian College of Organists. To this day, he still plays at church every week, and loves it. And he practices a lot, both at church on weekdays, and at home on his piano.
I’ve seen a carillon keyboard, though never attempted to play it. The “keys” are wooden sticks, shaped and finished, so they’re not rough. It’s like a piano keyboard. I’d guess the white keys are oak, while the black ones are ebony—both hardwoods, that can take a pounding. Because they will. As the carilloneur explained to me on my tour, you play it with your fists, pounding the keys. At any rate, if you can read music to play piano, you can play a carillon. It’s actually easier to play a carillon than to play a piano, the carilloneur explained, because while a carillon can play chords like a piano, players don’t have enough hands to make that happen. So you just carry the melody line on the right, and hit the chord tonics on your left.
My question here is carillons are very big things that many can hear when you play. Do the locals have to suffer through a student’s mistakes as they learn to play?
I’d imagine that carillon students practice a lot on piano. Like I said, generally, on a carillon, you only play one note at a time. So if you can do, say, “Ode to Joy” one-fingered on piano, you can probably do “Ode to Joy” one-fisted on carillon. But you’d better nail that tune with piano practice!
Be friends with a priest who’s in charge of a church with an organ. If you ask nicely and seem like a reasonable person, they’ll let you use their organs for practice. This is what a friend of mine did.
In this post I talk abut a carillonist who has his own portable one. With vids even:
So that’s one way. Just practice in your garage like all the other teenage grunge band wannabes.
As to church organs I’ll suggest that although each instrument is unique, they’re only unique-ish. The ideas are consistent. A common electronic organ for home use has 2 keyboards. Each of which can be set by various switches to make different types of sounds. And which switches are generally set once before beginning the piece and leaving them that way. Sometimes a quick change is made along the way, but not often.
A church organ with 4 or 5 keyboards is just more preset sound sets to work with. It’s still only played 2 keyboards at a time, jumping from one to the other now and again over teh course of some, not all pieces.
The foot pedals are simply another set of keys delivering yet another sound. And of course have their own set of knobs and switches to set up.
So overall I’d separate “configuring” the instrument from “playing” the instrument. A lot of what’s hard about playing music is the real-time nature of it. The keyboards themselves are the same, or very nearly so on every keyboard instrument. The configuration process differs largely, but that doesn’t have to be done in real time.
Bottom line:
Kinda like driving a rental car, the specifics of starting the engine, adjusting the seats & mirrors, and setting the HVAC & audio is unique, but once you’re actually in motion, they all drive about the same for the things that matter moment to moment.
The pipe organ is one of the oldest instruments around. There has been a lot of development over the centuries, and many very old organs are more the organ of Theseus than original.
The basic traditional pipe organ, of which there are a great many, are mechanical in operation. Tracker rods operate the valves on the wind-chests delivering wind to each pipe, allowing it to speak. There is a huge mechanical logic gate array that selects whether a pipe rank is enabled. Some enabled by simple sliding valves atop the wind-chests, but also interlinking the tracker rod systems. In early organs long levers operated the logic, as more technology arrived, pneumatic operation was added, enabling small pistons to control the stops. Mechanical memories allowed presets to be created. So, even before the advent of electrical operation, an organ could be quite sophisticated in operation. The need for a second person to pre-set the stops as the organist plays could be obviated by pre-sets.
The advent of electricity enabled probably the biggest change in organs. First up, you no longer needed a row of peasants to pump the bellows. Large churches used to have an entire room dedicated to the organ pumpers. Availability of human power probably limited practice time more than anything else.
Electrical operation of valves from switches on the keyboard was the other huge change. This one is however not necessarily a win. Mechanical systems provided the keyboardist with a tactile feel for taking up the slack in the linkages and the feel for exactly when the valve was on the edge of opening. This was lost with electrical operation of valves. The precise nuance of timing was to some extent lost. This is important as pipe organs only play at one volume level. There are swell boxes that provide an ability to control the volume in a broad manner, but there is no easy way of modulating note to note. Precise shifts of length of note provide the needed expressiveness, and this came from that mechanical feel.
Lots of organists prefer mechanical mechanisms, and mechanical operated organs are still manufactured. Once they get past a certain size it gets much harder however. It is quite brilliant what can be achieved with pneumatics. Pneumatic force amplifiers are a common device when it comes to controlling the valves on really large pipes.
Nearly every pipe organ is different. They share a common base, but every one has its own character. The building it is installed in has a significant part to play. As will such niceties as the location of the console in the space. One skill organists need is that of being able in time with what the congregation hear, and not what they hear.
The skills an organists brings are more in the unseen aspects of musical performance than the obvious mechanical ones.
Only tangentially related, but when I was taking piano lessons, my teacher once went away to work on an opera production for a couple of weeks and asked one of his friends, an organist, to sub for him.
When he came back, he asked me to play the brand new piece I’d been working, then almost immediately asked me to stop.
‘How did you come up with this weird fingering? It’s not very practical’, he said.
‘Well, the other teacher suggested it to me’, I replied.
He rolled his eyes and muttered ‘Ah yes, an organist… It figures.’
I’ve been up in a carillon. The bars you strike to play the bells were set up exactly like piano keys (even though they didn’t look like piano keys), so if you had been trained o a p[iano the locations of the “keys” were the same – you just had to learn to play them differently.
As for listening to the mistakes that those learning the carillon inevitably make – yup, you do. But since they’re generally music students with capability in board instruments already, the mistakes aren’t so common or awful. People also get to hear prankl – like having the carillon strike 13 o’clock. (The guy playing the carillon did that while I was up there.)
I took organ lessons for a few years as a teenager. I was a piano student and interested. I had classes in two different churches, one was mechanical and one electric. I have to admit I was not very good, but pipe organs are very cool. Recorded pipe organ music is universally terrible. You have to be there and feel the floor shake.
I had an electric organ to practice on at home, similar to the one here: Hammond organ
My sister is a trained organist. She graduated from Oberlin College which has the largest assortment of organs on one campus and the immediate area. 32 of them! I helped her move an unwanted church organ to her house many years ago. Dozens of tubes and big Leslie speakers. It was amazing to hear it in a home. We went around the house nailing and gluing various trim pieces to prevent them from buzzing. We never did quiet down a few windows. She wears ballet slippers to play.
She also has the harpsichord our Mom built, a Zuckermann kit.
Large schools with music programs will have a large pipe organs and possibly a carillon or other large instruments. I think most people learn to play these at churches where most of the worlds pipe organs are carillons are located. I saw a big pipe organ in the 70s at UVW. They had several other organs of varying sizes. Pipe organs can have a number of sets of pipes in different ‘voices’. I don’t know much about the details but there are controls to change which pipes are played directly from the keyboard and a large array of foot pedals, and multiple sets of pipes can be active at the same time. Really good organists work a manual air pump at the same time they’re playing. Drummers think they have the best 4 limb coordination but organists but they don’t have multiple notes per drum to play.
I’ve been following the journey of Look Mum No Computer who bought a church organ (Joan’s Organ) which had been installed in a house, and is installing it in his museum “This Museum is Not Obsolete”.
