After about 9 months of playing one 4 page organ piece I can finally play all the notes. Yes, I said NOTES, it is still far from performance material. Seems like I will never get anywhere with it! Sometimes I remind myself how nice it is to NOT have lessons and just do what you want. But then I remember that you really don't perfect things that way and I realize how much I have learned this year and how far I've come. Today my lesson taught me that I needed to connect things more and work on feeling the direction of the phrasing, not just mechanically playing the notes. Funny how you know that's what you are doing but you don't know how to fix it. I know how I would fix it on a piano, but an organ is entirely different. So basically I've overshot my goal: when I first started playing organ I was playing everything too mushy; now its too detached and mechanical. You can't win. Perhaps I'll be able to play this organ piece by 2010.
Last week we had an organist here from Germany. He was a jolly curly-haired sort of fellow who made me think a little of Beethoven. He thought everything was so neat here in America "where you have everything!" from my driver's license down to our custom organ shoes. He took a picture with his digital camera every 10.2 seconds, literally. Last year when we had these master classes with European organists, I'd sit still and try not to be noticed but since I have been here longer than most of these freshman who now play our organ, I am a bit more confident about trying things. There is something to be said for being in a room with people who all share a desire to learn about something you find important from a person who is really good at that something.
No matter how much I am tired of this piece, I think this is something I will really miss when I leave Southern. There isn't another organ like this in the whole country. Anybody want to buy me a tracker organ for my living room?
