I love liturgical church music. But, how do normal people play the organ? This is such a huge instrument. They have normal music which features the organ. I’ve seen some DVDs and the organist has to play several keyboards… Is this really a dificult instrument?
Oh my god, look at all the keys, buttons and pedals. Do you need a copilot when you play this thing?
You think they’re big now? In Bach’s days you had to have a local schoolboy or two to work the bellows!
My grandfather played and taught the organ, and as I recall he more often played 40s-50s stuff than anything liturgical. My father, forced to take organ lessons (and all he ever wanted was a guitar!) complained heavily about the instrument when I asked him about it years back. A local music professor/conductor of the local symphony also went on about how it was such a difficult instrument – and he is quite the pianist.
So yeah, I’d say it’s hard, compared to other keyboard-type instruments.
I have a brother-in-law that’s a professional organist. As I understand it, it’s not that much harder than piano, except you use your feet, too. But each hand can only play one keyboard at a time, so it’s not all that different. As for all the settings (the buttons or knobs or whatnot) those are typically set up ahead of time. Most organs will have memory settings, so you can set up more than one combination beforehand and switch between them easily.
The knobs on the left and right of the manuals (keyboards) are called stops. When you pull them out, they allow different combinations of pipes to sound, causing different effects. When you really want to impress the hell out of someone, you pull out all the stops.
This has been your organ-related etymology lesson of the day.
I’m amazed they don’t. I imagine it’s not especially hard to learn to switch between keyboards (they each do different things, as I recall), I think a lot of keyboard players can do that. But doing that while pulling out the bars, staying in rhythm, and playing all those foot pedals? That’s confusing.
About 10 years ago I was singing in a concert in the Sydney Town Hall, where there’s one of those large 19th century organs. I was in the back row of the choir, which meant that I was practically next to the organist. He got several of us to help him in pulling out the stops for the finale of a piece.
Dammit, I hit submit too soon, omitting a clever joke about “organs”. OK, it wasn’t that clever.
Please check out the organ links above for really huge (heh) organs.
:smack:
I’m going to have to ask whether this is a true etymology, or just one which has been commandeered by organists? (E.g. the whole 9 yards -> wedding veils, men’s suits, ship’s sails, coal, concrete, etc. ad infinitum.)
I used to play the organ in our church when I was in high school. I had about 8 years of piano lessons under my belt by then and my piano teacher got me started on the organ as well. It took me about a month to figure out how to work my feet at the same time as the rest of the organ, other than that it wasn’t difficult at all.
The knobs are called “stops” because they used to literally stop the flow of air through the pipes that they controlled. These days most organs have electronic stops, but they are still called stops. A typical organ has two keyboards and one set of foot pedals. The pedals are layed out exactly like a keyboard, same sharps, flats, etc so it’s not difficult to learn aside from getting the coordination down. You set the various stops to tell the organ what kind of sound you want from each keyboard. You may want a more “violin-ish” type sound for the main keyboard and a more “woodwind-ish” sound from the upper keyboard, or whatever the song you are playing at the time demands. Typically, your feet are playing the bass notes, and your left hand is on the lower keyboard and your right hand is either on the same keyboard or is playing a different sound on the upper keyboard instead, like maybe a big brassy sound with the left hand and the sound of a flute on the right hand. Some organs even have a third keyboard, which just gives you one more sound to choose from during the same song. Usually the upper keyboards are smaller. It’s very rare to have more than two keyboards and also to have them all be the same size, as in the one link from squeegee.
I’m no expert on word origins, but if you google “pulling out all the stops” you get a lot of pages that claim the organ as the origin of the phrase.
Can I start out by saying that the phrase “foot pedals” makes me want to bitch-slap someone, and will continue to do so until I’m shown either a foot handle or a hand pedal? Tks. /pet peeve
Organs have anything from three to six keyboards (sometimes less, hardly ever more), one of which is played with the feet and the rest (manuals) with the hands. The music is typically slightly less complex than piano music, but you need an exact touch with an organ as the note cuts off when the key is released, whereas a piano “rings” for a moment or so.
The manuals are as follows, the most-significant and frequently-used ones listed first:
Great: Has a number of loud to medium stops and is intended to produce a big fat ensemble sound. On a smallish organ it may also have some softer stops so it can cover for the absent Choir manual (see below).
Swell: Has its pipes mounted inside a wooden box with movable shutters, providing a form of volume control. Not as beefy as the Great but often has “couplers” allowing itself to play the octave above and/or below the key pressed. Usually can be coupled to the Great so both sets of pipes can be hooked up to the one manual. The keyboard is positioned above the Great.
Choir: Has softer stops to accompany singing, or to play quiet passages in solo work. May or may not have a volume pedal like the Swell. The keyboard is positioned below the Great.
Solo: Has assorted stops not for use in ensembles, designed to be loud and distinctive enough to make themselves heard against another manual and often imitative of orchestral instruments (oboe, viol, trumpet, etc). The keyboard is positioned above the Swell.
Echo: Has its pipes mounted remotely from the rest of the instrument so it can produce an antiphonal effect across a concert hall or cathedral. The keyboard is positioned above the Solo.
Each manual has a smaller range than the piano keyboard, and the Pedals only about half the range of a manual, but organ stops may sound one or more octaves above or below the key depressed. This is by reference to a standard whereby a nominal 8’ pipe sounds two octaves below middle C (and is operated by the lowest note on the keyboard). Doubling the pipe length lowers the pitch by an octave, and halving it raises it by the same amount. So a stop labelled "Open Diapason 8’ " sounds “as written”, a "Principal 4’ " sounds an octave higher, a "Fifteenth 2’ " two octaves higher and a "Twenty-second 1’ " three octaves higher. Similarly "Bourdon 16’ " sounds an octave lower and "Gravissima 32’ " two octaves lower. The instrument as a whole therefore has a much larger range than the piano. (When Terry Pratchett described the Unseen University organ as having a 128’ stop called “Earthquake”, he was staying faithful to this powers-of-2 principle.) Usage of the stop was banned, because on the one occasion it was employed, the 16 students operating the bellows were sucked into the machinery, a quarter of the city suffered painful bowel movements, and the whole building moved a quarter of an inch sideways. But you should note that the “nominal” length does not necessarily correspond to the physical length of the beastie.
It’s also important to be aware that the left hand and the pedals don’t always get away with merely accompanying the right hand. Organ virtuosi need feet like Fred Astaire as they have to change feet on one note, cross feet, and heel-and-toe as well, to keep up with the composer on works like Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. But whether the organ’s harder than any other instrument to play really well is open to question. Composers write with one eye on the inherent difficulty of the instrument. Bach’s op. cit. might be difficult on the organ; it would be flat-out impossible on anything else 
Now come on people, so far we’ve had but one attempt at double entendre in a thread title containing the words “organ” and “play”? We’re slipping.
Precisely. Things do get slippery when you are always running your hands up and down your organ. How could you expect otherwise?
You know, like erosion…makes the keys get all polished… Nevermind.
I think it is true. At least, I can’t think of anywhere else the phrase could have come from; playing the organ is the only context in which the phrase could be taken literally.
This story may be apocryphal, but I have heard it repeated before:
prospector-utah.com - This domain is for sale! (Warning: cheesy MIDI background music!!)
Not entirely true. I was walking through the center of Stuttgart about five years ago and I saw a pair of musicians setting up. I figured it woule take them a while so I kept going, but then I heard them start behind me and I had to stay and listen. They did the entire Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on two accordions, and they absolutely kicked ass! Followed it with Winter from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Thank you for the wonderful post.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned tulips yet.
For completeness’ sake, one will note that there are also fractional stops (sometimes called mutation stops) like the Larigot (1 1/3), the Tierce (1 3/5), the Nazard or Quint (2 2/3), etc…
Per Malacandra, the preferred term, at least here in the US, is “pedal board,” especially on models where the pedal board is detachable. Yes, it’s bloody complicated, and that’s precisely the fun of it: all the knobs and buttons and presents and pedals and oy!