Learning the organ for beginners, returners, and autodidacts:

World-renowned organist Ulrike Theresia Wegele talks about her popular Orgelschule mit Hand und Fuß, which covers everything you need to know about the entire organ literature in three volumes. Find out how varied and exciting the textbooks are for beginners, returners and autodidacts, why there is no need for unicorns, knights and fairies to inspire children to learn to play the organ, and the very personal motivations that led to her life's work.

I wrote Organ Method With Hands and Feet because I felt there was no suitable textbook available. My organ lessons were characterised by carrying around a multitude of volumes of music, a piece from this volume, a piece from that volume, I wanted to finish. In Organ Method With Hands and Feet, students start on page 1 and work their way through page by page to the end of volume 3.

The complementary playbooks to each volume, Make the Pipes dance!, Pull Out All The Stops! and Pro organo pleno offer such a comprehensive fund of organ literature that learners will have become familiar with all the major composers. Chamber music for each level is also included in the individual volumes to give the possibility of making music together. The final volume, the pedal book All by Foot, contains a really attractive collection of melodies from well-known piano pieces, oratorios, operas and operettas to new pieces from jazz and swing, which all students will enjoy and which will also ensure a mature pedal technique.

The target group is easy to define: this organ school is for everyone who wants to learn to play the organ. It is suitable for children from about eight years of age, but it does not contain any detectives, unicorns, knights or fairies, as was highly praised in the review by üben & musizieren 1/2020.

The inspiration for writing pieces comes from my students and their abilities and preferences. The exercises and pieces I have written for the Organ School with Hands and Feet have purely pedagogical purposes. For example, the Elegy in A Minor was written to teach the basic cadences, and the Pedal Waltz in G Major was written to improve pedal technique in a fun way. The very popular and often performed piece "Pierrot" from the Organ School Volume 1 was also written in 2011, when I could not find a suitable contemporary piece for a youth competition for a pupil at that time.

It certainly differs from other textbooks on the market because of all the above. Personally, I don't like organ books where you have to read pages and pages of introductory texts before you can even play a note, or where you have to jump back and forth in the book, or even worse, within the volumes. Even as a beginner, I would have liked to have had exactly this organ school. There are also organ books that are overloaded with information, and you are overwhelmed by their flashy presentation. The Organ school with Hands and Feet is deliberately kept simple in layout in order to be able to concentrate on the essentials, learning to play the most beautiful instrument there is. The well-known Viennese organist Peter Planyavsky has written about the organ school: "This organ school is exciting! With this initially platitudinous statement I mean to say: one is always curious about the next page, the next step, the next subject." This makes it attractive and varied for the learners.

You have also developed a handy pedal template for practising!

I designed this organ pedal template together with a master organ builder. I wanted to create a low-threshold possibility so that organists who rarely have the opportunity to practise on an organ can comfortably work out the coordination of hands and feet at home. This thin carpet made of PVC can be comfortably placed under any piano or keyboard, and so even in winter, when it is very cold in the churches, the most necessary can be worked on.

What does your publication as an author mean to you and how did you celebrate?

I see the publication of my Organ Method With Hands and Feet as a logical consequence of my decades of teaching; it is virtually the sum of my work and my pedagogical legacy. The first presentation took place, appropriately enough, at the University of Art in Graz, where I have been teaching for 32 years. It was celebrated in the family circle, because my family has been and still is a great support to me. I dedicated The Organ Method With Hands and Feet to all my students and pupils.