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Bob's Music Notes
My July/August overseas musical adventure in 1953 was drawing to a close. The final event was a concert to display what we might have learned. Dupre assigned me Bach Trio Sonata 6, a charming work. In these pieces, Bach treats the pedals just like the hands, notes all over the place, and I got to thinking about the various pedalboards of different builders.
When Laurens Hammond was formulating the pattern for his electric organ he noted that the conventional AGO pedalboard was concave and radiating and contained 32 notes. In talking with his musical friends he observed that the top seven notes were seldom used so, he figured, why include them? So Hammonds were made with 25-note pedals. Later on, Hammond made a Concert Model with 32 pedals and advanced electronics - an example of which was at Washington High School in Massillon where, for several years, I accompanied Messiah on a Concert Model (with great assistance on piano from Joyce Corbett).
The historic organ at Zoar, an 1857 affair with one manual, has a most un-standard pedalboard, and when I've played it, I had more wrong notes than right ones (unlike Mark Thewes who never missed a note!)
The great organ at St. Sulpice where I sat on the bench with Dupre, has 30 pedals. And I've marveled at players who can go from one pedalboard to another and never miss a note: Hector Olivera, for example, plays an electronic with 25 pedals as well as the late Ethel Smith (First Lady of the Hammond Organ) who never played a false note with her spikey high heels.
In my day, thank goodness, I was able to get by using Organmaster shoes which had high heels and smooth soles, enabling one to play two notes with one foot, a requirement, for example, in Dupre's G Minor Prelude and Fugue which I had to play from memory for my Peabody scholarship recital. And there's a YouTube of me playing a pedal solo at the Re-Dedication of the Trinity UMC Youngstown organ in June 1988.
But when I played at a lesson with Fox (at 4 a.m. in his New Jersey home) the first thing he said was, "Bobby: your pedaling lacks authority" whereupon the next half hour was spent doing pedal scales.
After weeks of encountering the flat French pedals, I was able to get through the Bach Trio Sonata without falling on my face. The organ was a modest Cavaille-Coll installed in the Salle de Jeu de Paume which started life as the royal tennis court. Its hard-surfaced walls made for a good acoustical environment.
With that final concert behind me, I began to wonder how I'd get back home. Several attempts at booking passage on a ship (like the Queen Mary on which I had made my way to France) proved unproductive. It looked like I'd have to fly, but I couldn't get a reservation until September 10th. What to do in the meantime?
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