Blue Moon's trip around the UK

I’m prepared to bet that Blue Moon is the only Parker 325 with a two-manual organ on board. Sadly there simply wasn’t room for the pedals, but I reckoned that five months without touching a keyboard would render my organ playing even worse than it already is (and it is really poor – no false modesty here). But, what with all the rushing around the South Coast and the spirit-sapping greyness that was the Bristol Channel, I haven’t had the chance to try the instrument out yet. But a lazy evening in FIshguard presented the ideal opportunity.

In the absence of pedals, Simon my teacher had recommended a range of pedal-less (manuals only, in organ parlance) music I could learn while away, including Louis Vierne’s Quatre-vingt pieces en style libre. I had baulked at this, having considered Vierne one of those fin de siecle stodgy French types, but as always, Simon is right and I’d say a dozen of the 24 are worth a go (the others are either dirges or way beyond my limited capacity).

Simon had recommended the Berceuse as an accessible starting point, and it is indeed the crowd-pleaser of the set, and not too challenging to the fingers. Have a listen on Spotify, it’s no 19. So in I jumped.

Now as I’m sure you know, a Berceuse is a French cradle song, and Vierne’s has a lovely rocking lullaby swing to it. The problem was, as soon as I started playing, I realised the boat was rocking; just a little, but enough to make playing a keyboard instrument really quite challenging as the keys kept seeming to move away from me and back again. I tried timing the rhythm of the piece to the waves, but they hadn’t read the metronome marking and it was way too slow. But I persisted, and after about an hour I’d got accustomed to a constantly moving keyboard, by moving myself with the waves.

What I am worried about now is how much more terrible will my playing be come the Autumn when I’m back on dry land? Will I be the organist equivalent of the salty sailor swaying up Fore Street from the harbour, unable to walk straight for days because the ground is moving under him? And how on earth do I fix that? I have Googled ‘adapting organ manual technique from sea to land’ and it came up with a range of unhelpful and rather distasteful results.