SOPP282: My dream is to be able to play some of my favorite music on a good pipe organ
b'This question was sent by Anders and he wrote:\\n\\nHi Vidas and Ausra!\\nI\\xb4m following the information you give with great interest. I have been playing the piano for a while but I\\xb4m not very good at it, though I really love it and listening to great music, Classic as well as Jazz and Ragtime. In the last period I have started to think much about playing the organ and I\'ve asked the local organist to give me lessons (lessons are free in the Swedish Church) and I hope lessons will start this autumn. I bought an old Electronic organ but am extremely disappointed since the sound is outright awful. It\\xb4s not what is called a Church organ, they\\xb4re much more expensive. I will throw my Electronic organ and buy some good instrument with a really good sound.\\n\\nThe short answer to the questions are:\\n\\n1.) My Dream is to be able to play "well enough" on the organ some of my favorite music on a good pipe organ. This I wish to do in a Church where I can enjoy the fantastic and mysterious sound of the different voices of the pipes.\\n\\n2.) What is stopping me is really nothing except:\\nA.) The feeling that I have no time (I do have long working days and other commitments)\\nB.) The feeling that my wife really doesn\'t enjoy listening to me repeating the difficult parts over and over again. Though she doesn\'t complain.\\nC.) The lack of a good instrument.\\n\\nAnd these three things shouldn\'t stop me. I know and I\\xb4m working on it...\\n\\nNow I\\xb4ll explain what I mean by playing "well enough":\\n\\nIt\\xb4s not at all necessary for me to dream of reaching a level of high professionalism, though I fully understand and wish to play with correctness and musicality. For me it\\xb4s better to listen to an amateur playing a simple piece very well instead of some half-professional doing a sloppy job on too complicated pieces. I think that for me it will be much more realistic to find, or even better, to be able to arrange the music so it will be simple but still beautiful and retaining the real spirit and essence of the pieces. For that I obviously will have to learn about music theory and learn to play chords and their inversions etc. Maybe not so impossible. \\n\\nFor instance i have maybe 5-6 different versions of some piece of music ranging from the very simple to the very difficult. And it\\xb4s far from always the fastest version with most notes and difficult fingering that catches the essentials! Thank god for that. I have some rather simple pieces that are really beautiful if you perform them correct and with real spirit.\\n\\nMy taste includes classical pieces such as "Poem" by Fibich, pieces by Grieg and Delius and some very nice pieces by Eric Satie. Some jazz pieces I wish to play are maybe not very well known but some are jazz standards. I especially point out some outstanding jazz recordings made by Fats Waller in 1927 on a Church pipe organ (Estey). There has not been any recordings of jazz organ to compare with before or after these few musical pearls, so rich in harmony and feeling. Of course I will never be able to play like Waller did, far from. But maybe be able to play some simplified and still beautiful version in a not too fast tempo. In my opinion speed is not often very important, many pieces win on being played slower but correctly giving time to listen to the music.\\n\\nAs a rounding off I wish to say that I fully appreciate and try to apply the principles of slow playing in practice, repeating until I play without faults and learning a piece step by step. Actually I was smiling with remembrance when I read through your "Organ practice is a privilege". The reason is that I already knew about the principles since my last wife was a really good piano teacher (from St Petersburg). And she applied these rules. Before she died 6 years ago I was lucky to learn the importance of these rules, though I was never a very good pupil. And it was maybe not so easy to have the wife as a teacher (she was really serious).\\n\\nBest of Wishes,\\nAnders from Sweden'