Music and Worship: Organs and Organ-playing: Part 2

A church organist’s principal role is to engage the worshipping community in the shared experience of hymns and songs – however important, enjoyable and even uplifting voluntaries and anthems may be. As well as playing at many Sunday services, organists are often privileged to take part in baptism, wedding and funeral services.

A hymn or song begins with a partial play-over to announce the tune, and establish speed and character. A hymn of praise like ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation’ must be more vigorous than a reflective piece like ‘Such love, pure as the whitest snow’. The introduction can be short if a sense of urgency is appropriate, or quite long; the congregation and choir won’t always know in advance. So it’s good if people stand when the introduction starts!

Ideally, every verse should be played with a different sound quality. Even most small organs have two keyboards for the hands (manuals), each with several stops of different characters, plus a third mammoth-sized keyboard for the feet (the pedals). On the piano, if you press down one key you get one sound. On the organ, by drawing several stops you get several sounds from a single key. Some of these don’t even sound at the expected pitch: if you play middle C you can, with the appropriate stops, produce higher and lower Cs as well. Changes of volume are achieved by adding or subtracting stops – pressing the keys harder, as on a piano, won’t produce a louder sound. Special swell pedals can also increase or decrease volume.

Some organ stops sound like woodwind instruments, especially flutes; others, known as reeds, resemble brass. The most important ones are the diapasons, the organist’s equivalent of violins and other orchestral strings. Often the diapasons predominate, as strings sometimes do in an orchestra, but a final verse may have, for example, additional reeds. Not all final verses need be loud, of course: it works quite well to make verse 4 of ‘Lord of all hopefulness’ the quietest. Look at the words and see why.

There are opportunities in many hymns for illustrating the words, for example the ‘loud organs’ in verse 3 of ‘O praise ye the Lord’. The penultimate verse of ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’, with its references to suffering and death, is effective when sung quietly – or the organ can rest altogether if congregation and choir are on good form.

Solo organ pieces (voluntaries) may help prepare the congregation for worship, provide a sense of completion and release at the end, or underline a seasonal theme. Many organists are especially fond of voluntaries by Johann Sebastian Bach…