Special Delivery - Service Playing Preparation Packet

Special Delivery

Service Playing Preparation Packet

A few days ago, I finally received in the mail my order for the Prep Packet for the Service Playing exam which I ordered on the AGO website, where they have many a helpful tool for preparing for their exams.



Included in the packet was:

1) “One Hundred Strategies for Successful AGO Certification” (CD)

2) Service Playing Test Study Guide

3) Sight Reading Examples

4) Mini-course in Basic Organ Registration

5) Mini-course in Hymn Playing

6) Mini-course in Creative Hymn Playing

7) Accompaniment Adaptation Practicum

8) Professional Certification Requirements

9) Bibliography.

The Professional Requirements are available for free in online PDF form. The Bibliography is free but not available on the website, though I think it ought to be.

I've had a few days to give the booklets and recordings a cursory examination and I think it's full of good information.

The 100 Strategies for Successful AGO Certification has a lot of good sense strategies both in general, and for specific questions on the exams. It is a good overview of what is required and some basic ways to prepare. Also, the horror stories of problems that occur during exams as told by Joyce Shupe Kull, DMA, FAGO, ChM from her own experience make for a sober warning. Still, one of the goals of these exams is actually to make a musician who is ready for anything, so it's proper for an organist to be able to roll with the punches when even the testing process has problems.

The Service Playing Test Study Guide provides excellent information on preparing for the test and fleshes out the requirements that are somewhat vague as found in the Professional Requirements document, particularly when speaking of playing of hymns:

He or she will play two stanzas as though leading a large, enthusiastic congregation. Use of pedals for at least one stanza is mandatory. Some contrast in the presentation of the two stanzas is expected, as is sensitivity to the text.

I will try to include a summary of the fundamental techniques necessary for hymn playing in a later post.

I've read through one sight-reading example and it is no problem for me. I'll talk about sight-reading in a later post as well...

The four Mini-courses are also great for forming a good sound foundation on which to build. Most of the material I either knew or figured out, but I found a few things I had missed and further aspects to study.

• The Mini-Course in Basic Organ Registration introduced the families of stops in an orderly way and presented many different names for them that I had learned through context, and some incorrectly. It does strike me as strange that they said that stopped flutes such as the Rohrflute and the Bourdon make better accompaniment sounds than open flutes such as the Hohlflute. This may be true, but my ears have shown the opposite to be true on my organ. I did have one face-palming moment when I realized I could construct an 8', 2' combination by pulling a 4' stop and then the sub-coupler, super-coupler, and unison off. I have been constructing that sound on the Great up to this point using the 16' Rohrflute from the Swell and the 4' Hohlflute from the Great and the super-coupler plus the unison off. The former creates the better sound. I'm still surprised I missed that somewhat obvious solution.
• The Mini-Course in Hymn Playing is valuable for showing the correct way to play hymns to support congregational singing. There is no guess-work here; there is a right way to do it. There is some lee-way that allows individual choice in how to play them, but there are certain fundamentals that are true for anything played to support a congregation. I see after looking at this that I've never really learned to play hymns correctly. I don't think I play them badly by any means, but I think they could be better. I see now that I've been playing them as I do pieces of repertoire and I register them the same way. Overall, I think I'm over-complicating them. So, there's room for improvement there.
• The Mini-Course in Creative Hymn Playing follows up where the previous course left off and introduces several common-sense techniques for doing more than just playing from the page. It's actually a gentle introduction into aspects of improvisation. It opens up reasonable avenues for sprucing up those hymns and making both enhance the liturgical experience, and make them more musical.
• The Accompaniment Adaptation Practicum then rounds the process off by giving many examples of how to effectively translate something that wasn't written for the organ into something that works, whether from a piano accompaniment or from an orchestral score. This is particularly valuable for my position since we have quite the eclectic mix of songs at worship here. So many accompaniments were written for piano, and often not particularly well in my opinion. It just makes for an awkward problem sometimes and this course poses many solutions.

All in all, it's a very friendly set of booklets full of helpful information that does a fair job and promoting higher standards in church music. I think the skills and techniques detailed in these courses show the proper standard of the average church organist and serves as a good foundation of further studies. For myself personally, these documents and recordings show me that I'm on the right track and more importantly, they fill in the gaps I still had in my foundation as an organist and church musician.

I think it was a very worthwhile purchase; now I have no more doubts and see clearly the path of study. Something I particularly like from the Service Playing Test Study Guide is:

The good organist is characterized by meticulous rhythm, note-accuracy, and good manual and pedal technique. Musicianship and professionalism involve not only talent, but also the willingness to work out details with great accuracy.

Meticulous, accurate, precision. That is where it begins.