Vidas: Hello and welcome to Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast!
Ausra: This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better organist. V: We’re your hosts Vidas Pinkevicius... A: ...and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene. V: We have over 25 years of experience of playing the organ A: ...and we’ve been teaching thousands of organists online from 89 countries since 2011. V: So now let’s jump in and get started with the podcast for today. A: We hope you’ll enjoy it! V: Hi guys! This is Vidas. A: And Ausra. Vidas: Let’s start episode 622 of Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast. This question was sent by Brigitte, and she writes: “Thanks Vidas for the complete pedaling and instructions. It has created a great opportunity for me to focus on the pedal technique for early music beyond toes only.” Vidas: Ausra, do you have an idea what Brigitte is talking about? Ausra: Well yes, I guess she’s talking about your “Pedal Virtuoso Course.” The focus is on early technique, but then you have supplement material which includes the Romantic and Modern technique as well. Vidas: Well, could be. Interesting. Let me check. She’s in our Total Organist community. Yeah, I guess she needs to practice her “Pedal Virtuoso Master Course.” Yeah, and of course all pedaling really helps to have… do you think early music could be played with heels also? Ausra: Well, I think I have talked about this issue many times before, but, I don’t think you need heels in order to play Baroque music. That’s my own opinion. Vidas: When I play Baroque music, I also almost never use heels. Somehow, toes are quite enough, unless you play one particular piece by Arnoldt Schlick, “Ascendo ad Patrem meum” which has two voices in each foot! Ausra: Well, but I think this kind of piece is more like an experiment, not like a conventional thing. Vidal: Yeah, especially since it’s from the 1500s, so it’s a really early piece, and the pedalboard was very narrow, and keys were short, so it would be very difficult to play with heels. Ausra: But let’s say if you are playing like double pedal, for example like some of the J. S. Bach’s chorale works requires, for example “Aus Tiefer Not.” Do you remember that chorale from the collection for the third part of Clavier-Übung. Would you use any heels? Vidas: No. If this is a piece composed before the 19th century, even double pedal can be played with toes only in each food, I think. You don’t have to play completely legato, obviously, and that’s why you have toes-only technique. Right? Ausra: Excellent. That’s what I am doing, too. Vidas: Actually, Brigitte is not in “Pedal Virtuoso Master Course,” but in “Organ Sight-reading Master Course,” and she is studying Contrapuncti from “The Art of Fugue.” So it’s a different course, but similar technique for early music. Right? Ausra: Yes. They have some similarities, of course. Vidas: Right. It was her answer to my question in week 12 of Sight-reading Master Course. So, this week, she had to play only pedal solo lines, and I prepared pedaling for each of the exercises, too. So it was suitable for her, too. Let me check what kind of music she plays there. Yes, of course! Contrapunctus #1, only the bass part. Only the bass. And later on Contrapunctus #2, #3, only the bass up to Contrapunctus #6 or #7 even. Yeah, only the bass in week 12. And she has complete pedaling figured out for her, which is really really helpful. So those are advanced exercises but sound very beautiful if you play at the concert tempo on the pedal. Right Ausra? Ausra: Yes! Sort of like “Pedal Exercitium” by J. S. Bach, too! Vidas: I recently recorded this video which has become quite popular in my channel. I don’t know why, actually! More popular than serious organ music, sometimes. Do you have an answer, Ausra? Ausra: I guess some people are still mystified playing pedals, and love to watch how other people play pedals. Vidas: I positioned the camera next to the pedalboard so that my feet would be clearly visible, and therefore, obviously, my pedal technique was right in front of their faces. Ausra: I don’t like this video of yours, and I don’t watch it because it annoys me! Do you know why? Vidas: Because I’m playing not with organist shoes? Ausra: That’s right, and you are playing with your almost new shoes that will be thrown away very soon because of you're using it inappropriately. Vidas: Yeah, I didn’t plan to record this…. anything to record with my feet that day. It was on a Tuesday last week, when I went to Unda Maris studio rehearsal, but you see, I discovered that one student wants to play something with pedals, so I assigned him this “Pedal Exercitium,” and when he started playing, I saw that he doesn’t know how to play it, and I remember that I never recorded a video. So at the end of rehearsal, I practiced a little bit and recorded a complete video. It wasn’t easy, actually! It was very difficult to play the entire exercise from the start until finish in a concert tempo without any hesitations and mistakes. Yeah. Ausra: Yes, but it’s a nice piece, actually. If you listen closely and you’ve played with passion, you can hear even two voices, because it’s actually written like two individual voices, although it’s just the one line. Have you noticed that? Vidas: Yes, yes. Left foot is one voice, right foot is another voice. And this piece comes as a bonus material for my pedal virtuoso master course—one of the bonus pieces. I haven’t done a video of another piece, which is an Etude #1 by Alkan. Have you heard of Alkan before? It’s a French 19th century composer. Ausra: Actually no, I haven’t. Vidas: He wrote a series of twelve etudes for solo pedals, and I pedaled the first one. Maybe I should create a video of playing that, too. Ausra: Maybe I should learn it, too! Vidas: It’s considerable more difficult than the Pedal Exercitium, but worth playing, actually, too. So, hopefully, guys, you found our conversation useful. Please send us more of your questions; we love helping you grow. And remember, when you practice, Ausra: Miracles happen. V: This podcast is supported by Total Organist - the most comprehensive organ training program online. A: It has hundreds of courses, coaching and practice materials for every area of organ playing, thousands of instructional videos and PDF's. You will NOT find more value anywhere else online... V: Total Organist helps you to master any piece, perfect your technique, develop your sight-reading skills, and improvise or compose your own music and much much more… A: Sign up and begin your training today at organduo.lt and click on Total Organist. And of course, you will get the 1st month free too. You can cancel anytime. V: If you like our organ music, you can also support us on Patreon and get free CD’s. A: Find out more at patreon.com/secretsoforganplaying
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It's wonderful to practice the Gigout Toccata and today I'm going to show you how to master it in 12 steps. I'm using Sint Laurenskerk Marcussen the main organ sample set from Rotterdam by Sonus Paradisi and Hauptwerk VPO software.
Score with fingering and pedaling: https://secrets-of-organ-playing.mysh... I'm preparing Crown Imperial by William Walton for my online recital this Saturday. So I thought today would be a great time to share with you 11 steps in mastering this piece. I'm using Sint Laurenskerk Marcussen the main organ sample set from Rotterdam by Sonus Paradisi and Hauptwerk VPO software.
Score: https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/... This is a rather short prelude and fugue by Bach and organists usually play it at the beginning of their organist career. However, since I'm playing all the free works of Bach in particular order, this piece comes next. I decided to record a practice video for you today where I will share with you 10 steps in mastering BWV 549. Look forward to my live recital this Saturday on this channel. This piece will be included in the program for sure. I'm using Sint Laurenskerk Marcussen the main organ sample set from Rotterdam by Sonus Paradisi and Hauptwerk VPO software.
Score with fingering and pedaling: https://secrets-of-organ-playing.mysh... Thank you everyone for participating! You all made us very happy with your entries. We have all selected the following winners. You can listen to their pieces and congratulate them here. If you want to participate next week, here are the rules.
I hope you will enjoy listening to Secrets of Organ Playing Playlist 4 on Spotify this week!
As a professional organist I always wanted to earn a living from what I do. This is probably very common thread among most musicians. I suspect if you are a professional, you would rather be living off your art than working side jobs. The truth is that for most organists traditionally they need to do at least 3 things at the same time to survive - play church services, teach and play recitals. There are of course people who specialise in just one area but chances to make it are greater when you combine the 3 activities. Add to this mix selling your CD's and often you can make a living. Of course not many people choose to buy CD's anymore but that's another question. The age of the Internet has opened new possibilities too. You can get paid for teaching organ playing online, sell your scores, or stream your music. Traditionally music streaming is done on platforms like streaming giants as Spotify, Apple Music and many smaller ones. These services are a real paradise for listeners. While paying a low monthly subscription fee you get to choose from their enormous catalogue of tenths of millions of tracks. Literally anything you can think of, you will find on Spotify or Apple Music. However, for musicians this arrangement is not very appealing because you would get paid for each stream only a fraction of a penny. If your music is distributed through a label, it also takes a cut, if you are performing with a group of people, then each of you would get even a smaller percentage of revenue. Of course, for big names and big labels this arrangement works very well because they get the majority of streams. For independent or up-and-coming musicians this means most of them will never make it.
Based on the stats below from my Artist page on Spotify, I have 677 streams in the last 28 days. According to Streaming Royalty Calculator website, my revenue should be $2.71 USD. Probably less than that because Spotify earnings vary from country to country. YouTube also pays content creators, such as musicians a portion of their ad revenue. However, today the requirement to be admitted into their Partner Program has a rather high bar - the most prominent being 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours in the last 12 months. Of course, every YouTuber can make some additional money from affiliate revenue or selling courses and merchandise but for this to happen, you have to have a rather large and engaged audience. My Secrets of Organ Playing channel luckily is monetised but the amount of money I receive from the ads is not something I can rely on. It varies between 30 and 35 USD a month at the moment. It comes into my bank account ones it reaches 70 EUR threshold, in this case, every 2 months or so. So I hope you can see that in this system clearly something is broken for average musician. Yes, you will make some money from your music but are you being compensated fairly? The good news is that recent technological developments in the blockchain area tries to fix this disconnect. In the last 3 years quite a few platforms have been springing up which offer direct, faster and bigger returns for musicians. Some of them are less successful than others when it comes to user adoption. Some of them are already absolete. But some have been doing great progress. One of them is Emanate. It's too early to tell if Emanate will be a success story but the start is really promising. I first heard about it at the end of 2019 but it was in the early development stage and music upload was limited to invited artists only. The promise of Emanate which is based in Australia, is that they offer instant, direct and fair compensation for musicians for every second their music is listened. When they opened the gates to the public, in the middle of September I created my profile and started uploading the audios of some of my videos from YouTube. At first I wouldn't pay much attention to it because my tracks would get very few streams. Right now there are almost no classical musicians on Emanate yet (most of them create electronic music) so I have been sharing my tracks with some friends to see if they like it. When yesterday one such friend was listening to my Sarabande by Louis Couperin (a 2 minute piece) I kept refreshing my earning stats on the dashboard in my profile. Here's what I saw as he kept listening over those 2 minutes: That's right. One stream of a 2 minute piece earned me 3 ct. That's not a lot as a whole but on Spotify I would get 0.004 USD (probably less) for such stream (provided the listener kept on playing the track for at least 30 seconds). 0.004 USD on Spotify versus 0.03 USD on Emanate. That's 7.5 times more! Probably closer to 10 times in reality. Oh and by the way, I would have to wait for those 0.004 USD from Spotify for about 2 months to be transferred to my account and on Emanate I could instantly convert the native MNX tokens to EMT in my wallet, from there to EOS (because Emanate runs on EOSIO blockchain) and use that EOS any way I want, like convert it to other currencies such as Bitcoin, USD or EUR. Run the math. If there are 10 people listening to your 2 minute track, you would earn 0.30 USD. 100 listens give 3 USD and so on. What if the piece is 4 minutes long? That's right, if people listen twice as long, you would get twice as revenue. Of course, this is what Emanate pays currently and in the future the payout rates might fluctuate. Emanate is also really good for collaborations because you can specify the exact percentage for each member of your team. If you play in a trio, you can split your revenue 3 ways in whatever proportion you want. In fact, you can split your revenue with up to 50 people. This opens up many ideas for choirs, ensembles, orchestras and even fans. By the way, your fans who create playlists would also get rewarded in the future.
As I said, right now there are very few classical musicians on Emanate so this is a good time to sign up. If you do, check out the FAQ section of Emanate which has a growing collection of answers to various questions. You can also visit my profile there (emanate.live/vidaspinkevicius), say hello, upload a few tracks and send me the link to listen to.
Vidas: Hello and welcome to Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast!
Ausra: This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better organist. V: We’re your hosts Vidas Pinkevicius... A: ...and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene. V: We have over 25 years of experience of playing the organ A: ...and we’ve been teaching thousands of organists online from 89 countries since 2011. V: So now let’s jump in and get started with the podcast for today. A: We hope you’ll enjoy it! V: Hi guys! This is Vidas. A: And Ausra. V: Let’s start episode 625 of Secrets of Organ Playing Podcast. This question was sent by Luis Garcia, and he writes, Dear friends: I live in Spain and here there are few organ teachers. Pedal Technique is a mystery here. I need to learn how to play pedals without looking at the pedalboard and with a mind strategy. Some teachers recommend to slide the foot counting the intervals. I think that it may well be in some times but not all the time. Others recommend memorizing the gaps in the pedalboard. And the worst teachers don't recommend anything. Even it is very difficult to see organists with organ shoes. Spain is a bad country to learn how to play the pipe organ. Remember that I am interested in a romantic technique. I know that you like Baroque music. Please, try to help me. Thank you. Luis García A: Well I think Spain is a wonderful country for organ, because it has these beautiful chamades that you will not encounter very often in another country; it has a rich and old history of organ music. I think even about Francisco Correa de Arauxo, a famous Cabezón. Well, but what, if we are talking about pedaling technique then I would have to probably agree, but it’s natural because the Spanish organ history developed in that way. Because it’s known as a Catholic, mostly Catholic country. So Catholics didn’t use so much of solo organ music in their liturgy, and in general didn’t use so much organ music. It just served as a servant to the liturgy, and the same case was actually in Italy. Very few organs, historical organs, had pedal, and because what you needed during liturgy was probably to sustain the tonic or dominant chord. V: Here I want to a little bit explain something. When a person writes such generalization without giving any details, how many and what kind of teachers has he or she encountered, at what level, how long have they studied, it doesn’t say anything about the country or its pedal technique or anything. It just says about his or her experience, personal experience, right? Let’s say if he tried all the teachers in Spain, and everyone was bad at this, then he could say, “Yes, Spain is bad for organ playing - to learn organ playing.” But I highly doubt it, because he would have written some more details about that. So if you go to the conservatory level, university level, professional level, I’m sure you will learn many details about organ playing, including pedal technique, even in Spain, just like anywhere else in a highly culturally sophisticated country like Spain is. So it doesn’t mean that Spain is bad for organ playing - to teaching organ playing. It just means Luis Garcia hasn’t found a suitable teacher for him. A: You know, when I started to study organ in Lithuanian Academy of Music, nobody taught me specifically how to play the pedal, although I was at the conservatory level already in my general musicianship. But I don’t know, if they didn’t know any specific techniques or whatever. But, and why I’m telling this, because I want to give a little bit support to that worse teacher in this letter. Luis Garcia said that the worst are who says “whatever,” play however you want, and do whatever you want. But there is some truth in it. Because usually, if you know you cannot play the pedals without looking at them or hit the wrong notes, the problem might be that you don't spend enough time, and you don’t spend enough time practicing organ. Because if you will spend enough time on that, you will see that playing the pedals becomes so natural and it doesn’t give you any trouble at all. Because I was told about all these different pedaling techniques for Baroque music and for modern music much later on in life. By that time I had already built my own pedal technique which was quite fine. So what do you think, Vidas, about that? V: And several well-known organists have complimented your pedal technique in the States. A: Yes, true. V: So. Yes, it reminds me of a problem I had early on in improvisation. When I wanted to learn improvisation, but didn’t have either clear path in front of me or good materials, so I was always on the hunt of the best textbook out there about improvisation. I was buying up all the method books and searching online and things like that. But that didn’t give me a clear path, clearer path, or vision where to go from there in my experience. What changed me was just to start improvising and keep improvising. Whenever you feel stuck, you would just keep doing it until you get unstuck on your own. Without any help of method books or teachers or whatever. So if Luis Garcia still looks at the pedalboard, as you say, probably it means that he needs to practice more pedals. A: Yes, though like lately I read and listened to some podcasts and some books about creativity and inspiration, and one of the general rules that people who create (8:21 not sure) and this is true to musicians, to writers, to painters, you know, if you will wait for inspiration let’s say, to come, it might never come. Because inspiration usually comes to people who work, and work daily, diligently, and are not waiting for inspiration to come. And I think this could be easily applied to developing good organ technique, both manual and pedal. You just need to really to find time, and to practice regularly, daily, and without a lot of philosophy and will not wait for right teacher to come, because you are the best teacher for yourself. V: Yes. Be the best, all help is self-help, except for surgery. A: (laughs) Sure. V: That’s not my word, not my words, but I picked it up from the famous author and blogger and marketer Seth Godin. And he, it’s a joke, basically, for people who always have tried to find some external help. Instead, they should take actionable steps every day to improve themselves, at least one percent every day. A: True. And you know, in general, I think that everybody is a little bit different. Like the length of legs are different, the length of feet are different. And some things that work for one person might not work as well for another person. But in general if you want to become better in pedal playing, you could try and check Vidas’ course of pedaling. V: Yeah, it’s called Organ Pedal Virtuoso Master Course. And we have extensive material, training material about pedaling scales, arpeggios, over one octave, over two octaves. Even in double octaves too, with both feet at the same time. So, and this is romantic technique with legato touch. Yes, we do like early music, right? But we do play and of course have a lot of knowledge about any kind of music including romantic and modern music. So it’s just part of our extensive training. A: Yes. If we would play all of Baroque music, that way we wouldn’t get our doctoral degrees. V: Yes. We would be masters of early music, not masters of music. Or doctors of musical arts - doctors of early musical arts would be appropriate. But we have everything they teach. A: And also, if you want to learn more about pedaling technique, then I would also suggest you to buy a book of George Ritchie and George Stauffer which is called Organ Technique Modern and Early, and a good half of that book is devoted to the modern techniques including pedal exercises also, and it gives detailed descriptions of how it should be done. V: Yes. When we were doing our doctoral degree programs at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, George Ritchie taught us the basics, even though we were already doctoral students after completing second master’s degree a year before that, he still felt that we needed to refresh our basic training and to learn a little bit, not even a little bit, a lot from his own book, which really helped. A: So it’s really handy, you should really try it. V: Yes. It’s, you will not use it just once, it’s like extensive review material there about all kinds of organ playing aspects - about even hymn playing and organ building, about all kinds of performance practice issues. It’s really really extensive, like a small encyclopedia of organ playing. V: Thank you guys. This was Vidas. A: And Ausra. V: Please send us more of your questions. We love helping you grow. And remember, when you practice, A: Miracles happen. V: This podcast is supported by Total Organist - the most comprehensive organ training program online. A: It has hundreds of courses, coaching and practice materials for every area of organ playing, thousands of instructional videos and PDF's. You will NOT find more value anywhere else online... V: Total Organist helps you to master any piece, perfect your technique, develop your sight-reading skills, and improvise or compose your own music and much much more… A: Sign up and begin your training today at organduo.lt and click on Total Organist. And of course, you will get the 1st month free too. You can cancel anytime. V: If you like our organ music, you can also support us on Patreon and get free CD’s. A: Find out more at patreon.com/secretsoforganplaying In this video I'm playing Auf meinen lieben Gott, BuxWV 179 by Dieterich Buxtehude. Hope you will enjoy this performance from Vilnius University St John's church.
Score: https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/... |
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Drs. Vidas Pinkevicius and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene Organists of Vilnius University , creators of Secrets of Organ Playing. Our Hauptwerk Setup:
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