Pedal keyboard
The first use of pedals on a pipe organ grew out of the need to hold bass drone notes, to support the polyphonic musical styles that predominated in the Renaissance.
The pedals on French organs were composed of short stubs of wood projecting out of the floor, which were mounted in pedalboards that could be either flat or tilted.
By the 14th century, organ designers were building separate windchests for the pedal division, to supply the pipes with the large amount of wind that bass notes need to speak.
Beginning in the 15th century, some organ designers began giving pedal keyboards their own set of pipes and stops.
In Bach's organ music the cantus firmus melody, which is usually a hymn tune, is often performed in the pedal, using a reed stop to make it stand out.
Several sources, including an encyclopedia on the organ, claim that the pedalboard design improvements of the 17th century allowed the organist to actuate the pedals either with the toe of the foot or with the heel.
[3] However, organist Ton Koopman argues that "Bach's complete oeuvre [can be played] with the pedal technique of his time, in other words without the use of the heel."
If an organist was performing a piece with a pedal part, "an assistant was needed to play the bottom line of the finger keyboard, offset on the bass side of the console.
Nilson lamented that it "...is a melancholy fact that only very few eminent organists since Bach's time have made it their business to lift pedal-playing out of its primitive confusion..." (page 1 of Preface).
He argued that the great organ pedagogues such as Kittel and Abbe Vogler did not make any efforts to improve the "...system of playing on the pedals".
Nilson makes one exception from this critique: the organ method of J. Lemmens, who he praises as having reformed pedal playing by introducing "...sound principles of execution" (page 2 of Preface).
dislike the way that the use of MIDI pedal divisions blends electronically amplified lower voices with the natural, wind-driven upper ranks.
Willi Apel and Peter Williams argue that by definition, an organ must make its sound by air flowing through pipes.
argue that the bass tone from a MIDI pedal division, which comes from an amplified 12-inch subwoofer, is not as "natural" and "open-sounding" as the vibrations from a massive, wind-driven 32-foot pipe.
In some organs, a wooden panel called a "kickboard" or "kneeboard" is installed above the pedalboard, between the pedals and the lowest manual keyboard.
The mechanism prevents accidental foot contact with the pedalboard from sounding notes in a section written only for the upper manuals.
The works of Dutch composer, organist, and pedagogue Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) contain the earliest example of an independent part for the pedal, rather than a sustained bass drone.
His work straddled the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the Baroque eras, and he helped establish the north German organ tradition.
The young Johann Sebastian Bach was influenced by Buxtehude, who used the pedal board "as a full-fledged keyboard and devot[ed] virtuoso passages to it.
Bach also wrote compositions that use the pedal for dramatic virtuoso displays of scales and figurated passage-work in preludes, toccatas, fantasias and fugues.
English organist and composer George Thalben-Ball (1896–1987) wrote a piece entitled “Variations on a Theme by Paganini” for pedal keyboard.
24”, a virtuoso work for solo violin, it includes pedal glissandi, leaps from one end of the pedalboard to the other, and four-note chords.
[citation needed] The symphony was performed 29 times during the week of its premiere, to "...literally screaming audiences...who had never seen such a sight as an organist up on a lift [platform] in the spotlight playing with his feet alone".
In his serene Le Banquet Céleste Olivier Messiaen places the tune, registered for 4′ flute (and higher mutation ranks), in the pedals.
Performers display their virtuosity in such works as Wilhelm Middelschulte's Perpetuum mobile, Leo Sowerby's Pageant (1931), and Jeanne Demessieux's Six études, Op.
Other users included metal and hard rock bands such as Yngwie Malmsteen, Styx, and Francis Buchholz of the Scorpions, and Justin Harris of Menomena.
The keyboardist for the rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer took this idea to its logical conclusion by performing all of the first movement, and part of the second of The Three Fates on the organ of Royal Festival Hall in London.
In jazz organ trios, a keyboardist using this type of pedalboard usually connects it to a MIDI-compatible electronic Hammond organ-style keyboard.
On modern electronic synthesizers such as the Yamaha Electone, the pedals are not limited to traditional bass notes but may instead produce many different sounds, including high-register tones.
McMillen's pedalboard can be programmed so that pressing an individual pedal triggers chords (up to five simultaneous notes), which a one person band could use to provide accompaniment for live shows.
