I never wanted to play the organ. From the dawn of my musical life, I knew my keyboard instrument of choice was the piano. I loved the seemingly endless spectrum of tone and color one can draw from a fine piano, simply by virtue of one's physical and psychological makeup—combined with the speed, the amount of pressure, and how much of one's fingertips one uses to depress the keys. When I listened to great pianists, I was awed and fascinated at their ability to turn the piano into an aural kaleidoscope, to evoke the sound of rain, thunder, birds, the human voice, and everything in between. When as a child I looked at an organ, with all its stops and pistons, bells and whistles, I thought, "Well, you just push different buttons to get different sounds. That doesn't seem very fun or challenging." Aside from hymns, I didn't even like to listen to the organ. Organ recitals left me completely unmoved and unimpressed.
Even now, I remain unmoved. I can sometimes be impressed by a fine organist's skill, but I am never moved, nor would I willingly choose to attend an organ recital. The piano, on the other hand—rather, in the hands of a master—can, and very often does, move me to tears. It can also make me laugh—when I am so overwhelmed by the music and the pianist's gift, so much joy wells up in my soul, I can't help laughing. Glee. Sheer glee.
When I entered the monastery, I knew I would have to curtail severely my piano playing, noise of any kind, musical or otherwise, not being conducive to the silence that is so crucial to monastic life. I also knew that I would eventually be asked to learn to play the organ. It surprises me that so many people think pianists can automatically play the organ and vice-versa. The only thing the two instruments have in common is the keyboard; otherwise, they are radically different and require different techniques. By the same token, an oboe and a clarinet are both wind instruments, but they are radically different and require different techniques—not to mention the fact that one has a double reed and the other has a single. The only thing they have in common, really, is that they are both blown into.
Sisters in that monastery who learned the organ before I entered, took lessons from a local teacher. But when it came time for me to learn, that teacher's health had declined and she no longer taught. Since there was no other organ teacher in Lufkin, I perforce taught myself. At that time, a sister from an active congregation was visiting us for a week, to help hone our liturgy and improve our singing. She kindly got me started on the organ, giving me the Gleason manual as a guide. I remembered my high school choir director, who was also a church organist, had always told me that hymns are some of the most difficult things to play on the organ; so almost immediately on learning basic pedal technique and finger legato, I sightread and worked on as many hymns as I could.
For some time, I found it especially difficult to stop my left pinkie finger from wanting to play bass notes! And of course, there was the problem most common among pianists learning the organ: training the left hand to be completely independent from the feet. At first, the left hand wants not only to play bass notes, it wants to move parallel with the bass line instead of sticking to wherever the tenor line goes. The remedy is to practice, ad nauseum, the feet and left hand by themselves.
I won't go into the challenges of finger legato or the finer points of pedal technique; it all gets too complicated. I will say, though, that I had to practice using at all times the quietest registration possible. The monastery owns two organs, almost identical to each other; one is in the chapel, the other in the chapter hall. The latter is used for practice. However, the chapter hall is in the same building as the professed sisters' cells. Given that when they're not working or in chapel, nuns are encouraged to spend as much time as they can praying and reading in their cells, those practicing on the organ can never practice with "real" registrations, for fear of disturbing their sisters. So the organists never really know what a piece sounds like until they play it on the chapel organ, in the actual situation for which they practiced! When I was asked to play the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria (and later, the Schubert) for a special Mass, I had no idea what my chosen registration actually sounded like beforehand. Scary—and very frustrating.
Now I am the volunteer organist (and, at the moment, the volunteer cantor) at a small chapel in a retirement village. The congregation consists of retired sisters belonging to a certain active order, and lay residents. I'm happy to put the skills learned during my novitiate to such a worthy use, and grateful to be given the opportunity to serve the Church in even a small way. But I consider myself a pianist by nature and an ersatz organist who still doesn't like the sound of an organ, except in the liturgy.
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