The Organist’s Toolkit: All fingers and thumbs
Tim Rishton
Have you ever worried because someone has said that “to play Bach on the organ you should be using toes only and no thumbs”? A lot of guilt surrounds this question. It’s a bit like New Years’ resolutions: you’re determined to start doing the ‘right’ thing but today isn’t really a convenient day to start, so we’ll do it tomorrow. Or next year. But is this statement actually true?
There is an old saying: “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish”. In other words, people are not very good at describing things that seem completely natural in their own time because they don’t have anything to compare them with. So a good place to start looking at early performance practice is a few decades after Bach’s death, when organists and theorists were discussing ‘the new way’ of doing things, as opposed to ‘the old way’ (meaning back in Bach’s era).
This is an over-simplification, of course, but we can roughly divide organists during the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century into two camps: the ‘modern’ ones who espoused the innovative techniques of Czerny and others, and the ‘old fashioned’ fuddy-duddies who stuck to the traditional ideas.
