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Organ Music Compositions
Organ Music Composition
My former organ professor has this innate ability to improvise music as a backdrop to stories or poems. He can shadow the mood of a story, foreshadow events, reinforce meaning, and retain your attention from beginning to end. Organists know how much work and skills must go into being able to create such improvisations; listeners do not. Those who are both organist and listener have the distinct advantage of better appreciating improvisations. Such “live” compositions, however, must tell a story.
That compositions must tell a story is not a new idea. Short of doing so, a composition may fail to catch or retain the attention of the listener. Most of us were read to when we were little, and such an experience has taught us to recognize that each story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. How many of us would stay tuned if the story we were listening to never went past the beginning? And yet, there are organ improvisations that do just that. The composer might get away with it if he varies his choice of instruments to voice his feelings and emotions. No matter how “pretty” it sounds, hearing the same theme repeatedly will make your head spin. So, an improvisation must tell a story. And this is where most organists have difficulties. Not that they do not have the skills or the imagination to do so, but it is a “think out loud” type of creative work that must take place “live.” Such live performances require practice, particularly of the imagination. Allow me to digress for a short moment and tell you when, where, and how I practiced using my imagination compose a story “live.”
Every morning of the week, I would drive my child to pre-school, and I always made sure one of her favorite animal characters was sitting next to her in the car. I had not planned on being tasked by my child to exercise my imagination, but it happened. That morning the protagonist was her puffin, and the question my daughter asked was “Make the puffin tell me a story, Papa!” Knowing that being so challenged would only last as long as the commute to her school would take, I gave all I had to make it interesting to my young listener, whose ability to absorb and retain information was no doubt already greater than mine. I was hoping she would forget it by the time I went back in the afternoon to pick her up, but no. “Tell me more about the puffin, Papa!” “Well, that was it,” I said. “No, she said, what happened after he woke up from his fall and found himself in a zoo?” Wow! That young already, the human mind seems to have an appetite for stories and a sense of what a complete story sounds like. So, I learned two things from that experience. One is that composing a story live pushes the imagination to accomplish things never thought feasible at first, but doable in the end. Two is that a story, be it oral or in writing, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end as a minimum. The composer, like the storyteller or the writer, must adorn his work of art with what it takes to retain the listener’s attention from beginning to end, thus building in the listener’s mind this metamorphic vision of the awesome and the beautiful.
So could it be that the best way to improvise (I would call it “compose on the go”) is to first commit it to paper in the form of a narrative, and then compose the music to accompany that narrative? There is so much more that we, organists, can do with our armies of ranks, pipes, and voices, tones and semi tones, tempo variations, volume fluctuations, key changes, in order to have an instant effect on the listener than the writer can using words to impact the reader. So why is it that we have nearly lost the ability to compose like our ancestors did back in previous centuries? Yes, there is a handful of those who today can, but they are rare and far between.
I invite all of you, skilled and talented organists out there, to challenge your imagination and push yourselves to places you haven’t been yet to offer the world of listeners the beauty that lies within the human mind. It is not just the poet or the philosopher that sustains a culture, it is also the music composer. Today, more than ever before, we need more of you, music composers.
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by Domino May 11, 2020 01:36 PM
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RE: Organ Music Compositions
I've often wondered why more people don't improvise. (Thankfully, I do.) In my case, I trained myself almost exclusively by ear until I was nearly a senior in high school. The lack of formal education necessitated my own personal development since reading music was not an option to me. I was vexed by it at the time, but I now smile at God for working things to my benefit in His own way. If He hadn't left me to my own devices, I never would have worked out how to hear things in my head and translate that to my hands. As it was, I HAD to otherwise I couldn't play, and I had a compulsion to play every day as strong as my instinct to breathe.
I think part of the problem is most children aren't encouraged to improvise; in fact, it is (metaphorically speaking) beat out of them. And the few teachers who have students who DO dabble in the art are ill-equipped to help them. I did take a few months of early music lessons when I was very young; I eventually had one teacher refuse to continue lessons with me. He told my parents, "I can't teach him. He's adding notes that aren't on the page!"
How funny it is to me now to think back on that time! I was so disappointed that lessons ended; it just wasn't clicking at the time. I also languished for a good long while because I had no one to lead me towards good models of improvisation and form. My exposure to the classics was limited although I did like classical music. I often wonder now how different my capabilities could have been if, at 12, someone had explained the concept of a fugue to me and challenged me to work one out. I would have tried (and probably loved it). As it is, I didn't learn about fugues until I was in college, at which point many of my neural paths were firmly cemented; I can do so now but only in a limited capacity. In truth I probably can't improvise 'true fugues' but rather highly imitative pseudo-fugal things.
Part of the problem, as I mentioned above, is the fact that our educational system really pushes children to just play what's on the page. No more, no less. That's always the goal. Can you imagine if we only ever forced children to color by numbers within the lines? Never allowed them to just doodle freely with crayons? If we did this, how many artists would be forever stifled? A good many I suspect. Mercifully, we allow small children to just doodle off the page right onto the carpet, and they are the better for it.
Another reason is fear; children are bold if for no other reason than they don't know any better; they are blissfully unaware. So many adults who never grew up improvising are petrified to even try. I only knew one other friend in college who was willing to improvise. I'd play piano and he'd do cello and we'd work off of some basic harmonic progressions and improvised some lovely things. My wife, and a former GF (french horn and clarinet, respectively) absolutely refused to even try. The GF even cried when I tried to strongly encourage her to do so. There was absolutely no way in her mind. She was an extremely talented musician, but she refused to even try because the concept was just so foreign to her.
Finally, I do think there is a bit of a natural tendency towards or against it. In my case, I hear music in my head non-stop (sometimes to my annoyance). I can sit and hear full symphonic music in my head if I try, although I'd be utterly incapable of writing it down. I'm constantly humming to myself and hearing melodies in my head. It is not the same for my wife. She never just whistles to manifest a tune in her head. I on the other hand have a very difficult time keeping it in. Almost all of my compositions begin as an improvisation. Often those improvisations are me working out what I'm already hearing in my head. Sadly I cannot accomplish what I so often hear.
I recently read an article about how some people "hear" their voice in their head even when they aren't physically speaking out loud, while others simply do not have an inner voice. Unless they are physically speaking, they do not "hear" words in their heads. They think in concepts/images/shapes etc. This blew my mind when I first read it... I very much fall into the former category and can hear my voice as clearly as if I was listening to an audio book. In fact, I can even simulate conversations with other people hearing their voice reply to me as well. Clearly I have a very active audio cortex. I would imagine that many of the people who improvise have the same capacity (ie- to render audio in their head at will) whereas many people who cannot fathom "hearing" music in their heads might fall into the latter category. Just a theory anyway.
Either way, as you can tell from my rather verbose response, this is a terribly interesting question to me.
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by Romanos401 May 13, 2020 09:17 AM
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RE: Organ Music Compositions
Romanos, this is indeed a fascinating phenomenon that you described in your last paragraph, and perhaps it's only me but I can echo it! If you take a look at my uploads list, you'll probably notice that there's a (huge) bunch of improvisations and by-ear replays, if not almost entirely, but merely a few pieces that would mean something to the "classic" organist's reportoire. I can hear and induce the sound of exact voice replica, pre-thought conversations, single instruments and entire orchestras in my head just as you do --- and it's exactly that ability which helps/enables me catch up and improvise melodies with full harmonics on the spot and out of the void.
Decades back, when I had (electronic) keyboard lessons, I got my creativity punched out of my head with a sledgehammer -- or at least, my teacher heavily tried to. After around one year and a half of feeling to be pushed to obey what's printed in the sheets, I quit music school by myself without my parents knowing for a while. You may correctly guess that they were pretty much upset about this and in turn confiscated my keyboard at home to punish me...but, thankfully, this was not for long when I finally convinced them that I'm still interested in making music (but not in a way my teacher forced me to do it).
However, there's both a boon and a bane with that experience: I *can* read (i.e. spell) notes one by one, which enables me to pick up complex pieces if I *really* want to. But the negative aspect is that I'm still unable to sight-read, since I never felt motivated to do so. Improvisation is easy for me since it's the only thing that I've "learned" or, let's say, "developed" in the past, but picking up the "conventional" reportoire in its original form is pure hell for me. Thankfully -- and thanks to Hauptwerk/GrandOrgue/etc. -- I'm still free to play what I want without having to bow my knee by force to get access to an organ nearby or elsewhere, which is extremely helpful in further expanding my "self-taught reportoire" and my experience with many different types of real-world organs.
Getting back to where we started: Yes, I can confirm this "highly active audio cortex" thing might be some sort of support or even requirement. Perhaps there might be others who could confirm or disprove that, since us two people is not an empirically significant number to give an estimate about the overall probability of this phenomenon... :-)
My question is, whether you or the others who excel at improvisation had the same problem with "sticking to the rules" and the ability to master sight-reading as I did.
Last but not least, THANKS for starting this highly interesting thread and your contributions, Domino and Romanos401!
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by woody-mc May 16, 2020 10:57 AM
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