Reluctant Organists - 2

(this article appeared in the August 2010 edition of the parish magazine)

I might have mentioned last month the rocks and sharp stones that bestrew the path of the Reluctant Organist, but I didn’t know the half of it then.

It was when I raised with the Treasurer, I thought quite politely, the matter of the customary Fee for services above and beyond the call of duty, that I was transfixed by a gimlet eye and informed in acid tones that the Fee for a Reluctant Organist was exactly the same, to the penny, as the fine for failing to sing in the choir.  In vain did I protest that I had hummed as well as strummed.  It cut no absolutely no ice.

I was particularly peeved because on Whit Sunday I had become the latest innocent victim of a cunning plan hatched by French organ composers to restore national pride after Agincourt.

French composers of organ music, you see, have a mischievous  streak, and they are never happier than when they are teasing the reluctant organist by starting a piece off innocuously enough on Page One in some easy key like F, with a nice tune and only the flute stop out, then introducing more and more sneaky sharps and flats after the first page turn, until suddenly, just as you’ve arrived at a really fast passage in six sharps and 11/16, you are expected to have enough free hands to pull out 19 more stops on the swell and 12 on the great while holding a nine-note chord with your feet, and the new ‘registration’ (as we organists call a particular combination of knobs and buttons) occupies half a page of extremely small print.  In French.

It is not surprising that ladies make good organists, because reading an organ score must be very much like reading a knitting pattern.  If you can translate K2, yfwd., sl.1, K2tog, psso, yfwd., K5, yfwd., sl1, K2tog. psso., yfwd., K1 into dexterous digital activity while simultaneously concentrating on daytime television then reading an organ score, even one by a French composer, must be an absolute doddle.  And it is worth noting that in a random sample of French organists, such as Olivier Messiaen (anag: “vile ear emission”) and Marie-Claire Alain (“a miracle alien air”), fully half are women.

The reason that there is so much French organ music is, of course, that French orchestras, like French farmers and French ferry operators, are always on strike, and churches and cathedrals there have learned the hard way to play safe.  Indeed, the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (“calm is an essential”) got so exasperated that he wrote a symphony for Organ and Orchestra that still packs the concert halls because he cunningly fixed things so that nobody notices if the orchestra do not actually turn up.

But on one thing all Reluctant Organists agree – that the last word should come from their patron saint, perhaps the finest of all English-speaking women organists, the New Zealand-born Gillian Weir – 


“I are willing.”

Reluctant Organists - 1

 (this article appeared in the July issue of the parish magazine.)

I don’t trust Church Organs.  Unlike the Church Piano, which has long been domesticated, the organ is a feral creature, apt to assert itself in unpredictable and possibly life-threatening ways.  The Church Piano comes equipped with a single keyboard, and makes only three sounds – plonk on the left, plink on the right, and a sort of muffled plunk in the middle (where it gets the most wear.)  The Church Organ comes with a bewildering array of keyboards, five in some instances such as Cathedrals, where the poor organist must need either a couple of assistants or at least a stepladder to use the one at the top.

The piano has two pedals – the left one and the right one, and is easy to remember which pedal does which job. The left one is the clutch, the right one the accelerator, I think, or it might be the other way round (pianos do not need a brake pedal, because they do not move about much or they go out of tune.)

The organ, in contrast, has dozens of pedals, whose function is not quite the same as the function of the pedals on the Church Piano, as every Reluctant Organist knows to his (or her) cost after stepping on one by mistake in a quiet bit of the service.

But it isn’t the pedals on the Church Organ that cause most trouble for the Reluctant Organist, who can always tie his or her ankles to the legs of the organ stool so there is no risk of an accident – and it isn’t even the keyboards in their manifold multiplicity.  It is all those knobs and buttons and things.  I’ve managed to work out that the one that says START turns the organ on, and the one that says STOP turns it off so you can hear what the Vicar is saying, and I’ve found the light switches, because they look like light switches, but as for the rest I confess that I am completely baffled.  The knobs, which you can pull out or push in, are supposed to change the sound that the organ emits, and to help you, they have labels on them, like Flute, or Trumpet, or Oboe, or Salicet, whatever that is (it sounds to me suspiciously like something you buy discreetly at the chemist’s.)  The problem is that if you pull one out either nothing happens or the organ just carries on sounding like an organ.   The trick is to pull them out in different combinations, I am told, and to help the Reluctant Organist at St Oswald’s there are five presets.  Well, I have tried the five presets, and in ascending order they sound like this: 1) very very quiet indeed; 2) very quiet indeed; 3) jolly quiet; 4) pretty quiet; and 5) absolutely deafening.

So I thought I’d look up ‘organ stops’ on the Internet, and apart from two returns which said ‘and thank heaven for that’ all I got was an advertisement for a DIY quadruple-bypass kit.

Anxiously, with a looming service to play for, I phoned a friend.  “Ah!”, he said.  “Presets start you off, but then you have to twiddle a bit.”

So I started twiddling a bit.  And bingo!  He was absolutely right.  I was thrilled.  When I found a combination that worked I wrote it down in a little notebook so that I could reproduce it.  I did it for all seven hymns and both voluntaries, and sat back, satisfied, then took the rest of Saturday off, confident that Sunday would be fine.

Well, evidently somebody changes the combinations daily for security reasons, which is why you were blasted out of your seats by Veni Creator Spiritus, and why Shine Jesus Shine sounded as though it was being played somewhere across the river by a kazoo band with mutes on, so it’s back to the drawing board.

I’ve got two more services to play for in August.  But I’m not sure I’ll have got the hang of the thing even by then, so it could well be back to the piano.  Must remember, though, to work out which pedal does what.  Oh, and book an oil change.