A question for someone who composes or engraves for organ:
How do I set a piece for two-manual organ, especially with regard to passages that are to be played in places with both hands on the upper manual? Do I notate these passages completely in the upper manual, or do I separate them into upper (right hand) and lower (left hand) and create playing instructions such as “on the upper manual”?
I am grateful for any help!
You can safely write 2 voices in the upper staff and organists will use 2 hands without needing an indication. Or if it’s easier to read on 2 treble staves, that’s fine too.
I think organists generally play the notes by whatever means, whereas piano composers are a bit more careful to separate RH on top and LH on the bottom.
Thank you Mark, perfect. I’m starting to like this forum. I have all the relevant music notation programs on my computer, heck I could even use MuseScore if nothing else was available (not that I would want to do that). But this forum here really makes a difference.
Thank you very much!
As an organist (and pianist) I agree. Sometimes the music requires rather interesting finger gymnastics to play the notes. We also tend to ignore very specific organ registration, particularly if our organ doesn’t have one of the specified stops.
Interesting, thank you!
It is helpful to consider that pipe organs are generally uniques. Almost every pipe organ is specifically tailored to the room it is to be installed in, taking acoustics, musical preferences and visual appearance into consideration. As such, they are not just huge pieces of furniture any more like for example grand pianos are, but rather installations on the border of becoming real estate. While there were organ builders in the past who had a very distinct style and built very similar instruments throughout their careers (G. Silbermann, Ladegast, Cavaillé-Coll, just to name a few), organists generally need to adjust themselves to every instrument they recite on anew.
So this is why we organists always compare the stop recommendations of the score to what we have in front of us and think about how to convey the essence of the piece, rather than trying to stick to the script. For example, if I want to play a late 19th century German romantic piece on a village church’s organ which is more tailored towards baroque repertoire and singing accompaniment, I may choose to add a soft 4’ stop even if the text says only 8’ stops marked mezzoforte. The same applies to the distribution of the manuals: From lowest to highest, the most common setups on a three manual organ are: Great-Choir-Swell, Great-Swell-Choir and Choir-Great-Swell. This requires to adjust fingering to a large extent if there are passages in which one hand needs to work two manuals at once. And I don’t even want to start talking about the setups of foot switches and swell pedals above the pedalboard.
I think this is one major reason why there are very few fingerings provided in printed organ music - the other being that the organ is not touch sensitive in terms of dynamics. (It may be a tiny little bit touch sensitive in terms of attack/decay and release if it has a mechanical tracker action.)
Thank you! The piece I’m working on is meant to be played on a 2 manual small church organ with few stops and no pedal (which I’m familiar with), so I can be sure that composer and organist are on the same side of the story. It’s also a more or less simple piece with regard to fingering, and supposedly so. It’s not about hammering away with as many notes as possible, but instead has a nice melody with a decent accompaniment in the lower notes. So I have decided to go for a strictly 2 stave notation, with markings for UM where needed.