Grande Pièce Symphonique: a journey

January 13

Today, I ventured across town to the Congregational Church. They have invited me to play a half-hour recital in their Lenten noontime series. [For readers of these pages who are local, it is scheduled for Noon on Wednesday, March 16.] It is the newest instrument in town, a two-manual Casavant, and (as I found) very nice. But despite repeated invitations, I had never played it; I cannot afford the time away from my duties.

The role of “concert artist” is one that I play infrequently, especially “guest artist,” playing somewhere other than my own congregation. It is intoxicating; no wonder that many people aspire to such a life. While playing this role, one is fully immersed in great music. What could be better?

Some might be interested in the details of what an organist does to prepare for a concert on an unfamiliar instrument, so I will try to keep a diary for this event. It will also provide opportunity to describe my practice methods.

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The secretary led me upstairs to the chancel. “There it is. I don't know a thing about it,” she said. The console was under a bed sheet like a piece of furniture in an old house. I unveiled it, and set about the first task: figuring out how to turn it on.

Methods vary. With luck, there is a switch in an obvious location on the console. Sometimes not; it might be controlled by a circuit breaker back in the Sacristy, or out in the hall, or (in one church I know) next door in the adjoining Rectory. This is a new instrument; surely it would not be hard to find.

It only took me ten minutes, poking around and thinking of whom I might call to ask as I grew slightly desperate. As it turned out, there is a keyed switch under the keybed. I found the switch readily enough, but the key took some hunting. It was on the stop jamb, but under some papers, and not labeled for its purpose.

An adjustable bench! What luxury! Ours at home is “one size fits all” (or not). And an AGO standard pedalboard! Our instrument was built some twenty years before the AGO decided that pedalboards ought to be standardized, and its pedalboard is flat rather than the concave layout in the AGO standard. This is not unusual, and not only with old instruments; many modern builders of mechanical action instruments routinely thumb their nose at the AGO console standards, in the name of “historical accuracy.” I view it as an effort to make their instruments as hard to play as possible.

And a combination action. It has been quite a while since I have dealt with one of these. I have become suspicious of them, old relic that I am – especially of combination actions with dozens of levels of electronic memory. But its presence is one of the reasons for my choice of repertoire. I hope to play the Grand Pièce Symphonique of César Franck, and it would be almost impossible to do it on the mechanical stop-action organ at home. Here, it can be done.

For an instrument of reasonable size, I like to take a few minutes and copy down the stoplist, in the order that it is laid out on the console. That way, if I get home and think “now where was that Great to Pedal coupler?” I will know. Often (and possibly on this instrument, since I may well play it again someday), I will transfer the list to my computer, making a full-page chart, then making multiple copies of it. For any given combination setting, I can circle the stops I am using, with a fresh sheet for each piston. With these in hand, I can set the combinations on the day of the concert quickly and accurately. When I regularly played an instrument with a combination action, I had a thousand copies run off by a print shop and used them for hymn registrations as well as for the repertoire.

At last, I am ready to sit down and start playing: Elapsed time for the above: about a half-hour.

But I can't start in on the Franck, not until I know the instrument better. The best method I have found for doing so is to improvise, starting on individual stops, then building ensembles, right on up to full organ and then back down. I spend about a half-hour doing so, discovering a number of delights such as a fine Grand Cornet on the Great and an Oboe on the Swell that is suitable for “that sound” - 8' foundations and reeds – without which Franck is virtually unplayable.

Now, I can open the score book and see what I can do.

I play through the piece. At this point, I do not care about accuracy; I simply want to get a sense of how the piece will sound on this instrument. If it does not work, I can try some of the other pieces that I brought along – music by Bach, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Alain. But the Franck is my first choice, and from what I have already heard in my improvising, it ought to work fine.

I get to the final pages, making complete hash of the F-sharp Major passagework in the pedals. Yes, this is the piece; it will sound terrific.

So, back to the beginning: now it is time for serious work. I make my way through the piece again, working out the registrations in detail and writing them all down – not yet in the score, but on a pad of paper, with references by measure number. This takes the next three hours, and is all that I need to do at the instrument for now.

January 25-26

One of the frustrations of any artistic endeavor is that the work is invariably interrupted by Real Life. I returned to my parish church full of excitement about working on the Franck – and I was unable to touch it for a fortnight. My other duties took precedence. But I managed to find a half-hour on the 25th and almost an hour on the 26th to work on it, transferring the registrations to post-it tape flags in the score (so that they can be removed after I play the piece) and beginning to work on the fingerings.

I have played this piece several times before, most recently in 1998. But in those days, I was casual about fingerings. Now, I am not; I write them all down. I am faced with thirty-two pages of score, some twenty-five or thirty minutes of music, all of it needing to be fingered before I can do anything else.

When I was in my twenties, I read Arthur Rubenstein's autobiography, “My Many Years,” an excellent book. He was a larger-than-life personality, a Concert Artist of the highest order, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. But he led me astray; he wrote that he paid little attention to fingerings, often changing them on the fly in performance. I was all too ready to follow suit; in those days I valued spontaneity above what seemed the mechanical drudgery of writing fingerings into the score. He said: “At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew.” (quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Arthur Rubenstein”)

I can see where Rubenstein's approach could work at the piano, especially in the Romantic repertoire of which he was a master. But it took me thirty years to fully understand that it does not work at the organ. The added complication of the pedals and the absence of the piano's sustaining pedal demand greater accuracy from the organist than is needed at the piano. The organ demands what Dr. Delbert Disselhorst calls the “firm foundation” of a thoroughly defined and ingrained fingering. Thus, I now write down a finger-number for every note. I practice the music with these fingerings, carefully. And I play more accurately as a result.

I could say more about fingerings, but for now I will simply commend the Essay on the True Art of Playing the Clavier by C.P.E. Bach. It is the definitive guide to this subject.

February 2: Candlemas

A snow day! It is Wednesday, and we can ill afford to miss choir rehearsals with Evensong coming up this Sunday, but last night's wild ride home on the bus was convincing evidence that the blizzard was sufficient reason for everyone to stay at home today. I had only a short walk from the bus stop to our apartment, and I was wondering if I would make it. I can well understand how some of the old-time farmers could be lost in such weather between their house and the barn, unless they had tied a rope from door to door to guide them.

This day is my opportunity to get the fingering done. I have a paper tracing of the organ keyboard that permits such work away from the instrument. I spent several weeks in 2009 doing much work with it when the church construction project and jazz department left me holding forth from a desk in the downstairs hallway.

I am not entirely starting from scratch; I have a few written fingerings in place from the past, and these are the spots where I have had the most difficulty. What remains is the more routine work. As I have learned, these must be written down, too.

And so, to work: five hours of it. It it sufficient to finish the first movement. I find that I have better ways now to play some of the difficult passages that are already in the score, so I have changed more than half of the old fingerings.

I did not reach my goal. In part, I ran aground on the difficulties of working at home, where domestic responsibilities call. My wife also was home, so we had three square meals together, two of which I cooked and for all of which I washed dishes. And I shoveled snow from around our Honda; that took over an hour. But I faced the choice: continue work after Evensong? Work on Thursday, which I try to take as a Sabbath? I did neither, with hopes of tackling the later movements on my next day off from the church, this coming Monday.