Are crazy octaves (like Franz Liszt piano music) common in organ music?

[Sarah Weizhen]

We know that composers start from the 19th century seems to like adding a lot of fast octaves in their piano music, most famous
like Franz Liszt and Chopin. This is a huge challenge for pianist with small hands, if their hands can only barely play octaves, and can't run very fast with too many chords.
Like me for instance, it's almost impossible to play Chopin and Liszt just because my hands are too tiny.



But I wonder if this happens on the organs too. I don't know if there are many organ music that was composed this way (crazy fast octaves played by one or both hands).
Because what I assume is the sound of fast running octaves could be acchiach by just pulling out an 8' stop and a 4' stop together, or even 16', 32', and 2', whatever necessary.

But I am not sure if I was correct.

And I heard people say that small hands organist might have problems arranging fingerings in some soft legatos.

[jgowen]

Wed 3/20/2019 10:58 am. I don't know about crazy octaves, but I just happen to have been playing (badly) some 1700s Nicolas Gigault organ music ("Kyrie (des) Doubles 4 5 parties") where he has the left hand in one measure span an octave + minor third (G2 Bb3) which I certainly can't play. Doing the Bb with the right hand wouldn't help -- that'd be Bb3 D2.

I was thinking it might be the music's old-enough that the keyboard might've been shorter. Or maybe he had a little boy stand-by to press the Bb?

[Sarah Weizhen]

hahaha that's funny. Or play with your nose like Mozart did.

[Sarah Weizhen]

I wonder if it's possible to play that note with the foot paddle instead?

[myorgan]

In the decades I've been playing organ, I've never run into parallel octaves in both hands on the organ for any serious literature. As you so intuitively observed, one can just add a stop the octave above or below to achieve the same effect.

However, I have run into parallel octaves in organ arrangements. For me, it's usually a good indication I can ignore an organ arrangement, if it has parallel octaves in both hands. I've found pianists are often the arrangers, and don't understand what they're doing. My hands are short and fat, so I can't reach much more than an octave or a 9^th. I actually had to stretch my hands to play a piece with 10^ths and/or 11^ths written. It was a Dupré piece.

Enjoy your octaves!O:-)

Michael

[Sarah Weizhen]

That's good to know haha. Thanks for sharing

[Jay999]

Electric action organs have octave couplers....would that do?

[Nutball]

I have found with my particular organ (Allen 530) that I don't seem to get the expected result from simulating spanning extra octaves by just using more stops. I can't explain it now, but I know I have run into the problem a lot in the past. I was looking for a certain sound, and wanted to free up some fingers, so I used more stops in place of octave couplers, and it didn't sound right. Maybe it's from too much mixing into 2 channels.

[andijah]

There's a wonderful piece by Rheinberger where I need to stretch to a tenth, and that's really hard (octaves are no problem at all), and there is of course organ literature that requires you to do tenths (or find a good way around them), but regarding parallel octaves, I agree with what myorgan said.

[Tertia]

Despite being known as an astounding virtuoso pianist, Franz Liszt (1811-1886) did also compose some astounding organ music. One of his pieces, the Fantasia and Fugue on the chorale: Ad nos, ad salutarum undam is considered to be the greatest single organ work of the nineteenth century. For the first time, Liszt introduces many virtuoso pianistic elements to the score, including doubled octaves in the left hand and extremely difficult cadences for the right hand, already amply demonstrated in his piano music. However, Liszt also knew the organ very well including all of its capabilities and limitations. This is very true of the pedal section; because of Liszt's intimate relation with the instrument, there is hardly anywhere in the score where the pedal can be substituted for the left hand figuration. There again, this level of difficulty would never be expected from an amateur player. In fact it took me, by then, with over fourteen years experience of giving concert performances on the organ, nearly five years before I considered I knew the work well enough to give a first performance of it in public without the music score in front of me, although of course I was working on several other pieces at the same time. By what I know of Liszt's piano music, is that many of the doubled octaves he requires to be played not monophonically, but with the bass note first, followed immediately afterwards by the upper note but in very rapid succession.

Organ music from earlier in the past can also have absurdly difficult stretches in the left hand; the works of Francois Couperin deserve a mention in this respect. Often he requires the player to stretch an interval of an octave and a tenth. If you cannot manage such a stretch and indeed, it is extremely fortunate in this respect to subtly use the pedal (with no independent stops drawn), to play the lowest note, since no one could ever notice.

[Sarah Weizhen]

Wow, let me admire your great talent and wonderful experience first haha. Yeah I think the composer really start to experience with the possibility of what an instrument can do from that time, it's great, but also really really difficult. I think me, as a person who definitely can't stretch a 10th, I will just have to give up those pieces and be satisfied with what I am capable of doing haha

[Vincent]

If you play the harpsichord, you will find that some copies of 18th century masterpieces have much narrower keys than the piano, making it easier for persons with small hands. The typical piano keyboard octave is 16.5 cm wide, and I have found the same on my Viscount organ. The famous 17th century harpsichord builders from Antwerp, the Ruckers, used a similar scale and four and a half octaves. However when Ruckers harpsichord were transformed by Taskin and others to acommodate wider compasses (usually the same 61 keys we find today), without major work on the soundboards and cases, they simply shrunk the width of the keys, and the trend caught on. My present harpsichord has an octave span of only 15.8 cm.

New harpsichords are handmade to order by devoted craftsmen, and you can easily order a study instrument with narrow keys to fit your style, at reasonable cost. In my case it will be the reverse. I intend to commission next year the building of a 61 key instrument with the same key width as the piano, for easier fingering...