10,000 Hours

Surprising as it may seem, simply owning a fine AGO organ console does not a good organist make, all claims by the manufacturers aside. No matter how many beautiful stop keys, switches, and pistons, little musical sound will spontaneously erupt without some human intervention (MIDI recordings aside). To be fair, this is not a fact that organ manufacturers usually hide, but neither do they go out of their way to advertise it.

I do admit that I feel like a better organist seated at a better organ. And I enjoy practicing longer when there are inspiring stop sounds to select. Different registrations can make the same piece of music sound ghastly or sublime. My recent favorite is the Burea Church extended AGO sample set which I use with the free Grand Orgue software. But just having this organ setup sitting in my living room does nothing to improve my playing, especially if I am traveling and away from said living room as I was recently. My last organ lesson clearly demonstrated that.

Tempting as it is to spend my free time tweaking virtual organ configurations or converting analog organs to MIDI, the only thing I would have to show for that time would be a mechanical tool, an instrument capable of producing music, but only by someone who knew how to play it. Time spent practicing gives me something that cannot be taken away, something less susceptible to obsolescence and decay. The gift of music.

Malcom Gladwell in his best selling book "Outliers" describes some of the ingredients which produce truly exceptionally competent people. Be they musicians, airline pilots, or physicians, he asserts that an investment of at least 10,000 hours is necessary to truly excel at anything. And thinking about it, this number seems about right. That's about 3 hours a day for 9 years. A doctor does not graduate from university and start practicing immediately. A tennis star does not pick up a racket and win at Wimbledon the first year. The Beatles didn't start a band and instantly rise to stardom by performing to stadiums full of adoring fans. No, they spent years playing in small clubs in Berlin honing their skills before they were 'discovered'. I'm not sure they would have called their club playing 'practicing'. If you had asked, they probably would have told you 'trying to survive'.

But I thought it would be interesting to estimate how many hours I've spent practicing the organ, omitting past musical interests like piano, band, and choir participation. I started playing the organ about as soon as my feet could reach the pedals. I didn't care so much for the piano. Maybe it was just the loud piano we had a home, but I did not like sound of hammers banging on strings. It was a Baldwin Acrosonic. It probably should have been called a 'forte' rather than piano. Assuming that organ lessons started around age 13 and stopped when I graduated from high school at age 18, that's about 6 years. Assuming I practiced about 45 minutes every school day each of those years, by a very rough estimate I have put in about 832 hours of organ practice. That does not seem like very much, but it might even be a slightly high estimate. Of course it omits any time spent playing in church on the weekend, but that could probably be considered a negligible rounding error due to the fact that the majority of time in church services was spent with other people talking or simple hymn playing, not performing serious organ music. I was a bit surprised at how little cumulative time I had invested.

But the good news here is that there is hope! Maybe all that is needed is more practice time, as Bach said something to the effect that organ playing is easy if you work as hard at it as he did! If I can play as well as I can now with that little practice, just think what could happen if I spent 3 hours a day for 9 years? In fact, using Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 number, I only have an estimated 9168 hours to go, less whatever practice time I already put in over the last year and a half since purchasing this organ. That's just a bit over 8 years more to go!

I am reminded of something Nadia Boulanger once wistfully wrote regarding her failure to learn Russian: "Would it have really killed me to learn one word a day?"

Time for me to get serious about practicing! Maybe you too!

Transcription Prescription

I was listening www.organlive.com today and heard Thomas Murray's performance of Dvorak's Carnival Overture on the Yale Woolsey Hall Organ (Newberry Memorial Organ) which was just terrific enough for me to go to Amazon.com and buy the single MP3 for 99 cents. While you may or may not be a Dvorak fan, this hauntingly beautiful piece has a special place in my memories from high school days when I listened to an orchestral version over and over. Thomas Murray's registration on the Yale Skinner organ is really quite amazing. It has rather positively changed my opinion of the role of the organ in a convincing orchestral symphonic transcription for organ and has helped me understand the enthusiasm for such instruments which existed near the turn of the last century (1900's). Spec sheet for this organ here.

Speaking of transcriptions for organ, having recently watched the duly troubling DVD Troubled Water, complete with a prominent role for a pipe organist, I am convinced that there is a wide-open opportunity for contemporary pipe organ music that is neither stodgy nor dissonant. Music that, dare it be said, is serious yet modern without being stuffy. Perhaps even based on popular music.

Even if you aren't a friend of Dorothy or the Wizard of Oz, you'll probably like this version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow The subtle buildup towards the end is magical. Just goes to prove that one does not need a theater organ to play accessible music or a lot of pipes to make wonderful sounds (organ has just 8 ranks, 550 pipes only).

A recent pipe organ list mentioned Paul Ayre's Toccata on All You Need is Love (aka Toccata on Amor Satis Est) for organ. I couldn't find any YouTube performances of Ayre's Toccata online but I did find several interesting organ renditions of All You Need is Love. Here are a couple:
All You Need is Love (skip ahead to 01:00 on the time line where the music starts).
or an interesting home version:
All You Need is Love (probably a closer transcription to the original).

My interest picqued, I had to have Ayer's Toccata on All You Need Is Love and have now sight read it through twice. Or should I say stumblingly attempted to sight read it! Great fun and someday I will no doubt make it sound good enough to play in public! Not a transcription really, it can be said to be more or less loosely based on the original Beatles tune. Paul Ayer's Toccata feels a bit more difficult to play than In Dir Ist Freud (my previous major challenge, which by the way, I am relearning nearly from scratch now that I have a teacher to inform me that it is not cool to mix Bach and legato!) Registration looks like it will be key and it definitely needs a good pedal support. Get your own copy http://paulayres.co.uk/catalogue/243:

If you happen to be in Tennessee for the American Guild of Organists' National Convention Friday July 6, 2012, check out Jane Parker-Smith's two performances of Paul's Toccata (the Fab Four meet the symphonic French organ tradition). I heard her play at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco last year and she is terrific, although I got the distinct impression either she or the Ruffati (probably the latter) were having a bad day. Her performance of Paul's Toccata will be at the Brentwood United Methodist Church, Tennessee (presumably in Brentwood).

Past is Prologue

I've been reading the fascinating Memoirs of a San Francisco Organ Builder by Louis Schoenstein. The book provides a very personal, albeit often non-chronological, look into the life of a very long lived bay area organ builder whose father, brother, and sons were also organ builders in a company which continues to bear their name (although not their ownership to the best of my knowledge). Although not a work of high literature, the book is still interesting from more than just an organ point of view. It is not often one is able to read a book published in 1977 which relates first hand recollections of the 1899 Naval celebrations on their return from the Philippines following the Spanish American war. Or recollections of the 1906 fires which ravaged San Francisco following the great earthquake (another due again sometime one must assume). Or of the author's boyhood memories of the tomb of a Unitarian preacher who helped convince civil war era 1860's San Francisco to side with the north. But just as importantly, it gives a no nonsense view of the pipe organ builder's trade.

Schoenstein's memoirs are divided into sections. The first part describes scores of organs which succumbed to the flames in 1906 and is something of a downer. The next deals with the mechanical workings of an orchestrion (a special interest of his father), and the section I am reading now is fascinating mainly in that it describes the many organs of the period that survived at least into the 1960's and possibly into the current day. My next project will be to actually see those organs that survived. More on this later hopefully.

Returning to the Beginning

Thanks to a tip from a fellow pipe organ list member, I learned just in time about a concert yesterday given by a very special organist. I must admit, I was not prepared for the pleasure of listening to Dorothy Young Riess, MD.

Her theme: Music of Joy. In a brief speaking part she mentioned that this was partly joy in just being able to stand up at her age! But you could tell it was more than that, probably joy at being able to return to the pleasure of music she experienced years before. If you have been reading here long, you know what I think about harsh, painful, bombastic, alienating organ music. There was none of that here. This program by Dr. Reiss was almost a complete opposite, although there were a few chords here and there from Langlais (Fete) and Messiaen (Transport de Joie) that might disturb an extremely sensitive church lady.

While composing this blog post, I initially thought to make comparisons: A young organist who gave up music to study medicine then returned much later to pick up where she left off. But the similarities ended there. She obviously came to earth brimming with far more gifts than most. Genes perhaps (both parents were musicians) but also perseverance. Maybe some of it is the swimming.

She went on to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and organ with Marcel Dupre. However, following "a series of life changing events" including the death of her father when she was 20, she changed course and eventually practiced internal medicine until her retirement in 2000, at which time she began playing the organ again at age 72.

At this concert it sounded as though she had played all her life. Now proudly 80 years old, there was nothing to give away her age in either her bearing or her vibrant performance. Pieces chosen included her own arrangement of the Shostakovich "Suite for Variety Orchestra" (complete with an ending 32' low C pedal note, which worked by the way) and Waltz 2, a delightful almost theater-organ-like piece famous from the film "Eyes Wide Shut". She ended her concert with the same Olivier Messiaen piece with which in 1952, 59 years ago to the day, she had won the AGO National Competition in San Francisco in this very same Berkeley building, although presumably a different organ given that this one was built in 2006.

As if to summarize her life, in her touching short comments she quoted the poem "...and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." [T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"]

Pipes

I've been enjoying my jOrgan virtual pipe organ setup. The jOrgan Puppy Linux computer hasn't been turned off since I last wrote about it, and it still works fine. I find myself using the Baroque and American Classic organ dispositions quite a lot. Because of the limited CPU power on that computer however, it can't handle software reverb internally, so I run the computer's soundcard audio out through an external stereo reverb unit, and from there to the Allen's internal amplifier which feeds the 9 speakers. The subwoofer actually sounds stronger with the jOrgan than with the Allen's internal 32 foot stops. Practice has been a bit sketchy the last couple weeks due to travel, business, and family celebrations. In fact, I wrote the first draft of this blog on the road. Unfortunately, my organ does not travel as well as my internet tablet. Hopefully a solution for that small problem will be found some day. Inflatable midi console and pedalboard anyone? Oh, and maybe I have been just a bit intimidated by the realization that I will never play as well as EPB, VF, MCE, OL, CC, or PJ. But I remind myself, it is not the destination, it is the journey.

Meanwhile, for more inspiration, I attended another concert at symphony hall by a very well known organist and pedagogue with the initials PJ. He was very relaxed and expertly performed what seemed like a too brief concert. His casual anecdotes, shared philosophy, and introductions to performance pieces compensated for what felt like an almost too technically perfect performance of a somewhat challenging program. And as for attire, he dared not deviate from the mandatory black suit except when he tossed his jacket off in order to play Reger's "wickedly difficult" Inferno wearing his shirt sleeves. Although the organ console was initially turned at a slight angle, he thoughtfully arranged to have it turned to an equal and opposite angle for the second half of the concert. This decision received applause when he mentioned deviating from the usual straight on back view. He commented that Liszt was one of the first to do this with the piano.

The most interesting pieces of the evening, aside from the toe-tapping The Gigue Fugue attributed questionably to Bach (BWV 577 - who says Bach couldn't write rock and roll?) were works composed by composers with whom the organist had personal connections. The opening piece, Fantasia for Organ by Weaver, one of his teachers, was breathtaking. Equal parts electronica, theater organ, and classic organ articulately and played with supreme confidence. A real crowd pleaser.

Another noteworthy piece was a West Coast premiere of Reverie by Wayne Oquin, a pianist colleague of his. In introducing this piece, the organist lamented the fact that many composers fear the organ. There is a tendency to find the piano a safe alternative. To compensate, PJ gave the composer free access to an organ. Apparently this was the composers first work for organ, but there was nothing to indicate this in the resulting piece, and one can only hope that this is an indication of more to come from Oquin. As the organist put it, "beauty is not icing on the cake, it is part of the cake" and "popular culture fills our stomachs with facts, but starves us of wonder". This piece was a welcome antidote. As the name implies, it was a dreamy expression of taking the time to contemplate beauty and the arts. Filled with a calliopic intro, birdlike flute solos over left hand chords, there were shades Messiaen. As the organist later commented, you could have heard a pin drop.

Readers of this blog may already have guessed my impression of Durufle. The dirge like, agonizing and child-scaring Durufle Suite for Organ, Opus 5 proved that PJ can play difficult pieces. But even Durufle apparently had little good to say about the Toccata. Enough said.

After extended applause, PJ returned to the console, indicating with an index finger that he would play one encore, and commenting "We haven't had enough Bach" and played Bach's Fugue in A-minor, if my distinctly non-Mozartian musical memory and subsequent comparisons with YouTube organ fugue recordings is reliable. I am not yet enough of a Bach connoisseur to play "name that tune" with Bach, so it is entirely possible that this was the G-minor fugue or some other equally unknown to me fugue, but the A-minor theme seems the closest to my ears. Whatever it was, bottom line, I liked it. If you were there and remember which it was, feel free to comment and enlighten me.