8 short preludes and fugues for organ not by J S Bach no. 1, BWV 553 

I'm very glad that it's useful. Good luck with the lessons! Tim

Glad it was helpful! Tim

Glad you liked it! Tim

Yes, it's by one of my favourite builders in Norway. The registration was just 8, 4 and 2 but as you say it works so well in the room. Tim

Thank you Joh.Seb.Bach - great to have confirmation that you don't know who wrote the piece, either. Tim

Really great that you've found such a good and helpful way of working: thank you very much for sharing that. Tim

When I asked what music to look at next in this series, these 8 short preludes & fugues were by far the most popular answer, so they’re evidently popular in many places, perhaps because so many people - like you and I - used them in their earliest organ lessons. Like you, I see copies lying around in Norway as well as in Germany and Denmark. I’ve not played them since I was 15, when I heard someone refer to them as “those silly pieces that people shouldn’t learn”, so looking at them now is quite redemptive. They’re jolly pieces and surprisingly well written; when we stop looking at them for what they are not, they really seem quite attractive. Maybe we both ought to play them more! Tim

Thank you so much for that! Tim

Thank you: that's a really interesting question. I can certainly understand why what you describe was suggested, and it was a widespread way of thinking for a time. But eighteenth-century articulation ("phrasing" as such was not a concept until well through the 19th century - later than Mendelssohn's time, at least) is rooted in the idea of highlighting the beat. Everything serves to emphasise the beat - which is why hemiolas and other disruptions of the beat were so commonly used to signal cadences and so on: simply because the beat was so central to everyone's awareness that the slightest disruption served like a big flag. In that sense, slurring across the beat is not something Bach or an 18th-century performer would ever have done in this kind of passage. I talk a little bit about articulation here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hPN6AEm2hno.html but that is mostly in connection with fingering, and it occurs to me that I don't really talk enough about the basics of articulation. But I did discuss it at more length on ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7SLraW3ucdg.html (after the first minute or so), including a bit about why we don't slur across the beat. Of course, we can always end up with the old conundrum: we are not 18th-century people - we have been partly shaped by 19th-century thinking - so do we necessarily have to do things like they did in the 18th century? And that one I can't answer, so I'll leave it with you. It sounds like you have a very thoughtful approach and I'm sure your congregation is very fortunate to have you there! Tim

@@timrishton5871 Many thanks Tim - lots of food for thought! I look forward to your analyses of the next few pieces in this set!

Mm, that one's tricky. Given that 0077 is the dialling code for Kazakhstan, this is evidently Schweitzer's telephone number during his North-Asian period ... no, I'm sorry, probably not. But I've just found a picture of the book on the internet, and from the front cover, I see that it includes Hammond registrations. Now, "Hammond players refer to the drawbars as sets of 9 numbers. Because of the nature of the harmonic series and the color of the drawbars, they are spaced like so: 12 3456 789 Each position is a drawbar “pulled” to a number between 0 and 8, representing the position of the drawbar." (quoted from www.davidkempton.com/hmd3/). Shame, really: I was just warming to the Kazakhstan idea. Tim

@@timrishton5871 :) Thank you

You're thinking in terms of today's pedalboards, not the pedalboards the 17th and 18th centuries. Sure, builders were beginning to use pedalboard resembling the more modern German pedalboard, which would allow you to use heels, but that would have been a novel technique at the time and would not be possible in many of the organs of the time.

You make some really good points. Firstly, the toe and heel question. I discuss this question here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hPN6AEm2hno.html . You're quite right that left and right are ambiguous, but the preponderance of evidence seems to support toes being a generally-accepted practice, though, as I point out, that doesn't necessarily mean we have to do the same. But in this kind of pattern that we're discussing here, using only toes actually helps us to attain a correct articulation, so it is in any case useful. You're also right that resolving a suspended dissonance is an exception to the custom of taking a breath after a long note tied to a shorter one, although that's not the case in this fugue. Thanks for your points! Tim