My First Student Recital

    Fathers' Day evening, June 21st, 1998, marked my first student organ recital. I was one of ten of Maestro York's students, including three other organ students and six piano students, who performed for our friends and family. I remember very little of the actual performance; it seems I "zoned," and performed on "autopilot." I do know that I made a few mistakes, but recovered from them, and nobody watching seemed to mind.

    Like most of the students performing at the recital, I performed two pieces. My first was the Bach Minuet in G, Anh 114, from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, which I'd had to learn for my Piano 2 final exam. The second was Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which I'd arranged specifically for the recital: the Bach is not specifically for organ, and therefore it has no pedal part; I would have felt rather silly getting up in front of people, sitting down at an organ, and NOT playing at least ONE piece with a pedal part. So I wrote an arrangement of the Beethoven that included not only a pedal part, but a pedal solo. And discovering that the bulk of the pedal solo fell naturally under my right foot, I decided to play all but the one note that was already under my left foot with the right foot alone, using a heel-and-toe technique that was beyond anything I "officially" knew how to do. It seems that I couldn't resist the chance to have a small, private laugh at all the "Left-foot Lennys and Left-foot Lindas" I'd had to endure, who could find nothing better to do with the right foot than park it on a swell pedal, and who used only the left foot on the pedalboard.

I have placed the score for my arrangement, in facsimile form, on this site.

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