Piping Up! Backstage: Organ Pedals and Pedaling w/ Richard Elliott

For the full First Anniversary concert of Piping Up!: • Piping Up! * FIRST Ann...
FIVE Organists Perform Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Final Mvt. on Casavant Frères organ in the chapel of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building: • FIVE Organists Perform...
Piping Up! host Luke Howard, discusses organ pedals and pedaling with Principal Tabernacle Organist, Richard Elliott.
Elliott discusses how the pedals on an organ work as well as acquiring organ pedal technique. The pedal board is essentially just a set of giant keys that the organist plays with their feet. They are connected to the biggest pipes in the organ, which also play the very lowest sounds. Because of that, the feet are usually playing the bass lines, so they're kind of like the string basses, the bassoons, the trombones, or the tubas in the orchestra. In fact, if you look at the pedal stops, you'll see a lot of tubas, trombones, bassoons, and contra-basses there.
As far as acquiring pedal technique, it takes a lot of time. For a lot of people, they find that in the beginning if they just focus on playing the feet by themselves and getting that where it's automatic, and then adding the hands to the piece later on, that's a good approach. One secret of the trade is that having good organ shoes really makes a difference. The difference between organ shoes and regular street shoes is that they're all leather on the bottom with a leather sole and a leather heel. That allows you to slide around, pivot around, and not get stuck on the keys. Richard Elliott's secret to learning the pedals is to turn off all the sounds on the manual keyboards and play the piece so he's only hearing what his feet are doing, even though his fingers are moving at the same time. That forces his ears to focus in on what the feet are doing.
Some interesting trivia about organ pedals is that back in the time of the great Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest organists of all time, the organists only played with their toes, the very tips of their feet. Nowadays organists use both the toes and the heels, which allows them to play more complicated music. In Bach's time, it was said of him that he could play better with his feet than most organists could play with their hands.
Piping Up! Organ Concerts at Temple Square, First Anniversary Concert, 2021.

[@RechtsstaatBRD]

i would be happy to see more such interviews and backstages :-)

[@helenjohnson7583]

Thank you for a nice bit of information! And Richard Elliott is such a cool guy!!

[@SamtheMan0508]

I always find it fascinating watching an organist's feet move along the pedals without looking at what they're playing.

[@tom7601]

Beautiful series!

[@benjaminjacob20000]

Thank you❤️

[@henriquevaifrebaptistini8960]

Very very good.