So last night I had the chance to do some practice on the pipe organ at Central Park Presbyterian Church in preparation for the talent show coming up a week from Sunday. I showed up at 6:45 and the kind man had already turned on the lights and turned up the heat so I could practice. I pulled out my copy of Tocatta and Fugue in D-Minor and got right to it.

Two hours later was reminded of a time soon after I started taking piano lessons when I swore I never wanted to play the piano again. The song in question was the Suzuki classic Lightly Row, and the challenge was to make the left hand play something different than the right hand was playing. Fortunately, I got through it, and my hands have been happily individually dexterous for years now. Enter the pipe organ, which includes two manuals of keys, plus two octaves of pedals.

For twenty-some years now, I have trained my brain that the left hand follows the notes on the bottom staff. But not on the organ! Early on in the Bach piece, there is a little pattern where the hands play some separated chords, just stepping down: B-flat, A-minor, G-minor, A. The pedal moves in parallel, playing D C B-flat, A. It must’ve taken me 30 minutes of practice to try to play those two lines. My left hand just kept getting lost.  I think I pulled something, somewhere in my brain.

I found I can play the pedals pretty well by themselves; the intervals are pretty easy to figure out, and with a little practice I’ll know where the notes are without having to look. I can play the pedals and the right hand together without too much effort. But the left hand just doesn’t want to cooperate. I’ll try to get over to the church again next week for some more practice and we’ll see how much I can get worked out. Worst case, I’ll creatively omit some of the harder pedal parts for the talent show… I’ll feel bad about doing it, but it’ll be better than not playing it at all.

One other thing took getting used to with that organ: the timing. Since it’s a real pipe organ, driven by real air, there is a perceptible time lag between when you press the key and when you hear the note. When you’re playing long held notes, it’s not that big a deal. But when you’re playing Bach with all the sixteenth-notes, you have to mentally force yourself to make your fingers do the right thing and ignore the timing. It took me a while to get that figured out, but I think it makes sense now.