Hamilton Crawford Macdougall First Lessons in Extemporizing on the Organ

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Experience teaches every church organist that the ability to extemporize even in modest fashion is not only a very convenient thing, but also', very often indeed, a positive necessity. Natural aptitude and intelligent practice are the foundations of good ex temporizing, as indeed they are of good organ playing. Natural aptitude alone will not enable one either to play the organ well or to extemporize on it acceptably; one must practice extemporizing regularly, day by day, over and over again, just as one practices the pieces in one's organ repertoire. A seventeenth-century writer (francis Quarles) puts it somewhat inelegantly, but squarely, when he writes: I see no virtues where I smell no sweat. To invent and play, on the spur of the moment and without specific preparation, an unwritten piece of music, long or short as the case may demand, conforming reasonably to the principles of musical com position, is to extemporize.