Little Organ Book: For Beginners in Organ Playing: Includes Graded Exercises on Well-known Hymn Tunes

Description

The renowned [Catholic composer] Flor Peeters is known as an organist and composer from his native Belgium to all of Europe and both Americas. Little Organ Book , consisting of hymn tunes and original compositions, has won special favor among teachers and students because of the clear presentation of elementary rules for organ playing.

Little Organ Book is a sort of abridged version of his Ars Organi (vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3).

Recommended by CharlesW on this MusicSacra.com forum thread: "Organ self-study for those with a strong musical background?":

the Little Organ Book by Flor Peeters is an easily understood and economical place to start. He was Catholic and taught using well known Catholic hymns of his day. I also have the Stainer and think it is good.

responses:

@CharlesW: Judging this PDF of Little Organ Book, it seems very good! It uses sacred hymns, too. I'm going to print it out. Thanks!

@CharlesW: Zoran Minderovic's entry on Peeters in Contemporary Musicians :

"Particularly captivating are his fluid, natural, finely wrought melodies. A well-known example of Peeters's art is his Toccata, fuga en hymn op 'Ave Maris Stella,' op. 28, a powerful, moving, technically brilliant composition that reflected the artist's deep knowledge of Catholic church music and traditional compositional techniques. Scholars have singled out the fugue in this work as an example of flawless contrapuntal organization."

I'm impressed by how well-thought-out his book's exercises are, building (in typical Aristotelian pedogogical fashion*) from what is more known to what is lesser known.

*Physics bk. 1 ch. 1: "The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature".

Anki deck of Little Organ Book 's exercises, so you can keep track of your progress and review more difficult exercises more frequently.
Anki is a flashcards program that uses spaced repetition; there are many other music learning decks available, too.

printed with this command:

lpr -o page-ranges=5-123 -o sides=two-sided-short-edge *.pdf

"rank": "A row of organ pipes graduated in size and controlled by a particular stop, each pipe in the row corresponding to a key on the keyboard."
"stop": "a graduated set of pipes producing tones of the same quality. Originally applied to the slider which controls such a set."