Finger, heel and toe management
I have to admit that I am very poor at working out and then writing in fingering and pedaling. When engaged in my favourite pastime of sight-reading music not only does my brain seem to quickly work out the notes from the symbols but my fingers seem always to cope with a last second dash for the notes themselves. Working on my LTCL recital programme has brought a new discipline to my playing, and not before time.
Many academic papers and treatises have been written over the years from 1511 onwards on the value of ‘correct’ fingering for pre-Baroque organ music and then the transition to using all five fingers as the practice of legato playing emerged post-JSB. There are two excellent chapters by Kimberly Marshall in the Cambridge Companion to the Organ (Link) on the historical development of fingering and on current good practice. To quote the author “The ear is always the most important arbiter in determining the way to finger or pedal any given passage of organ music.”
Marcel Dupré took fingering and pedaling very seriously indeed. All his published music has very detailed instructions for both the fingers and pedals. The image above comes from one of his 79 Chorales; the density of the fingering almost obscures the notes themselves. Dupré extends this practice to his transcriptions of the Handel Organ Concertos. His pupil Jeane Demessieux adopted the same approach in the score of her Six Études (which were dedicated to Dupré) but not in her Te Deum.
Louis Vierne also had a very clear view of the importance of finger and pedal notation, which he planned to set out in his Méthode d’Orgue. Sadly he only completed the sections on the mechanism of the organ and on fingering. The sections on pedaling and registration were never written. There are two excellent theses that examine the Méthode d’Orgue in some detail; Louis Vierne and his Unfinished Méthode d’Orgue by Jian Guang Shi (Rice University 1999) and An Interpretation of the Organ Symphonies of Louis Vierne (1870–1937) with Specific Reference to his Méthode d’Orgue by Lourens Coetzee (Stellenbosch University 2020.)
One of the earliest analyses of the development of fingering conventions in English was authored by W.T.Cummings in the February 1890 issue of The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular. Cummings was a distinguished musician in Victorian England and was the Principal of the Guildhall School of Music from 1896 to his death in 1915. Cummings also discusses the use of x rather than 1 for the thumb. If the name Cummings seems slightly familiar, it was he who blended the music of Felix Mendelssohn and the words of Charles Wesley to create ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, a fact largely ignored by most current hymnbooks!
Another fingering challenge is coping with the wide hand stretches in the music of Franck and Vierne in particular. Dupré published an edition of Franck’s music edited for “the allotment to the pedal of other passages which were written for the hands, but with such wide intervals that the proper legato cannot be secured with the hands of average size”. Rachmaninov poses the same issues for pianists! There is an excellent thesis from Janet Salassi Jouett entitled Approaching Late 19th Century and Early Twentieth Century French Organ Works with Small Hands (Rice University 2001) which is full of good advice on this topic.
Moving on to the feet, I can recall my first organ teacher insisting that Bach should only be played with the toes even though there is a reference to the use of the heels as early as 1511, reinforced by Rinck’s Practical Organ School in 1818. The development of a good pedal technique comes up against the significant inconvenience of organ benches that cannot be adjusted to the height of the player. Thinking back to 2023 I played on 13 different organs, only one of which (Tickell 2014) had a bench that could be adjusted for height. The Society of Women Organists, through its Adjustable Bench Campaign, has substantially raised the issue of a lack of adjustable benches, pointing out that the average height of a woman in the UK is 5’3” and for men is 5’9”, which makes a huge difference in the ease of managing pedal passages.
See also this post on Bach’s feet