Pedal Etudes for Organ
I hope these etudes will provide students, recitalists, and liturgical musicians a useful compendium of short works featuring (primarily) the pedal board of a standard, classical organ. Some are written for pedal solo; others for pedal with modest melodic and/or harmonic counterpoint, the pedal part remaining the focus of each composition. Mastery of toe-heel technique is the expressed goal, legato playing and foot substitution the pathway to mechanically seamless connections across the pedal board. I’ve never found pedal “exercise” books to be much fun, so I thought I’d try my hand at this area of organ mastery by writing “compositions” rather than “exercises” as my starting point-of-view. If you find any of this esoteric topic interesting enough to tackle, I’d be pleased if you’d drop me a note and let me know what you think.
Since pedaling is somewhat of an individual endeavor, I will present some of these etudes in two versions: without pedaling suggestions; with pedaling suggestions. I am hopeful that the two versions will prove helpful in playing these short compositions. A demo recording of each etude can be found HERE.
