Hello Golos! Introducing myself

My name is Vidas Pinkevicius and I'm an organist who draws from Vilnius, Lithuania. In this post, I would like to introduce myself to the Golos community.

FIRST MUSICAL EXPERIENCES

​I was a weird kid growing up. When I went to a choir trip to St. Petersburg, our director took us to the record store. A famous place. Everybody bought pop or rock music and I bought “Ruslan and Ludmila” by Glinka. I don’t know what I was thinking. I probably wanted to impress girls. Never worked.

The earliest experience with music was probably me directing Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusic” with my mom’s brushes in her workshop to the music of LP record.

On another occasion I remember going with my mom and aunt to visit our neighbors and I would teach them how to sing “Kyrie” by Stanislaw Moniuszko we’ve been singing in the choir at school.

DISCOVERING THE ORGAN

Not far from our summer cottage where I spent my summers growing up as a kid was a small wooden church with an anonymous one manual organ in it. It had to be pumped by hand. My mom took me there and asked the priest if I could play this instrument since I was studying at the music school.

The priest agreed and I enjoyed playing this instrument for a couple of hours while my mom pumped the bellows by hand. She was sweating and I was happy.

The priest liked how I played it and asked, if I could play for the wedding anniversary mass next Sunday. I foolishly said “yes”.

But I spend the upcoming days practicing the hymns on this organ which was fun. Oh and by the way, I missed the Sanctus on the live event. I was embarrassed but the priest was thankful.

One evening I received a phone call from Elena Paradies who was one of the piano teachers in our school. She is also an organist and incidentally lives in the US now. She asked me, if I would like to learn how to play the organ and take lessons with her on a newly built studio organ in our school. “You could study with Prof. Leopoldas Digrys”, she said. Digrys for Lithuanian organ culture is like Flor Peeters for the Netherlands. Big deal. Because I was a lousy choir conductor and didn’t see my future in choir, I said “yes”.

STUDIES IN LITHUANIA AND THE USA

In Lithuania I learned the basics and became a young professional. Because of organ I met my future wife, Ausra which of course would’ve never happened without it. One day I found a flier about the 2000 International Organ Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden. Ausra and I decided to apply.

Since Lithuania became regained its independence in 1990, the Nordic countries were strongly supporting us in many ways. So they gave us stipends and waived the registration fee. The same happened in 2002.
But, here’s the catch: we had to let people in during the night to practice on a large North German Baroque organ they had in the New Orgryte church.
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So we had a chance to play it too but we didn’t sleep much during the Academy. I guess you have to choose between learning to play an old style organ with split semitones or sleep well at night.

This Academy opened many doors for us. We met wonderful professors, including our future Professor from Eastern Michigan University, Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra. A year after that we went to do our second Master’s degree with her.

We are also very grateful to Dr. George Ritchie and Dr. Quentin Faulkner from University of Nebraska-Lincoln who taught us at UNL for 3 years during our DMA studies.

Playing the famous Bedient organ at Cornerstone chapel in Lincoln was a lot of fun. I felt transported some 400 years back to the Netherlands where Sweelinck “the Deutscher Organistenmacher” was active.

Our studies in the US was an amazing time. That’s were we really understood what it means to study and met a lot of wonderful people who were very helpful to us. We are great friends with all of them until now.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

At Vilnius university we have this unique possibility to teach community members of the university to play the organ. They are amateur organists, people of various professions – mathematics, physicists, chemists, philologists, medics etc. who all share a common passion – pipe organ. Some are students, some are professors and some are staff members of the university. In fact, we even have a physics professor in our studio who came to us with his student. We gather once a week at the largest pipe organ in Lithuania and make music together.

At the end of the school year we play a joint recital on this organ and celebrate the end of the season.

I founded “Unda Maris” 8 years ago but this year Ausra is also joining me in leading the rehearsals. It’s fun and useful because two heads are wiser than one.

“Unda Maris” activities give me a lot of ideas for my little blogging enterprise.

SECRETS OF ORGAN PLAYING

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At the beginning of December 2011 I first started writing educational articles and publishing them online. On December 23 I then began writing a blog at http://www.organduo.lt which I continue to this day. My first ten email subscribers came on December 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 15, 17, 18, and 19.

At first one a day, then 2, then 3 and so on.

​I made my first 100 dollars while helping them on March 27, 2012.

It's been more than 5 years since I've been helping organists from all over the world reach their dreams in organ playing. If it wasn't for my loyal readers, I've never would have been able to provide tips, advice, and specialized training for organists. Right now we have a vibrant community of 3200+ subscribers to this blog, plus people who follow me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. About a year ago Ausra has also joined me in these educational efforts and we alternate our postings and trainings regularly.

It all started with humble beginnings (Stage 1) – as I mentioned above, around Christmas of 2011, I started posting articles with various advice on how to play the organ. Interaction with my subscribers led me to create various training programs later on. To help those people who are the most committed, in April 2013 I started my membership program - Total Organist. This was the beginning of Stage 2.

Since August 2015 we entered Stage 3 of Secrets of Organ Playing – weekly SOP Podcast interviews with internationally renown experts from the organ world - concert and church organists, improvisers, educators, composers, organ builders, musicologists and other people who help shape the future of our profession. These audio conversations and stories are definitely inspiring to a lot of people from our community. The number of these shows are slowly getting close to 100.

ORGAN DUETS

Imagine for a second two organists sitting on one organ bench. In order for their hands not to be confused, a performer on the left side plays the lower part of the piece and the person on the right – the upper part.

Very often it is convenient for the organists to divide their music so that the left page is played by the organist performing the 2nd part and the right page - for the 1st part.

Personally for me, such division of the music makes it really difficult to follow the music of the partner. There are more chances that one organist would lose the beat and consequently the duet will fall apart. For this very reason it is quite necessary sometimes to look at another organist's page and try to find the right place in the music.

Because of this simple reason I find that the easiest division of the music on the page is when both parts are visible for both performers and placed one under another. This way the entire musical view can be seen.

To make music together for 4 hands (and feet) is very fun thing to do. It is possible to play not only the original compositions for organ duet, but also arrange choral or orchestral music because when you have 2 performers, technically there are twice as many possibilities. It is also possible to improvise.

Because 2 performers sit on the same organ bench, both can very often turn pages and change organ stops on each other's side of the instrument. Of course, you need to feel your partner well because otherwise both people could try to turn the pages or pull the same stops at the same time which would make a lot of chaos for the entire performance.

​We also enjoy playing Bach’s Brandenburg concertos together and polychoral motets by Hans Leo Hassler. Of course finding suitable repertoire for 4 organ duet isn’t easy so we have to make special organ duet transcriptions ourselves.
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STORYTELLING IMPROVISATIONS

​I started improvising long recitals maybe 6 years ago. It was scary at first and it’s still is to this day. You have to constantly be aware compositional elements that go into a good piece – rhythm, melody, harmony, form, registration, texture etc. and constantly make it engaging and interesting.

The goal is to have a spontaneous but a complete musical experience and the one that could be transcribed into musical notation, if needed. In fact, I have transcribed several shorter of my improvisations for other organists to play and enjoy.

I'm specializing in storytelling based on biblical and liturgical themes, literary works, poetry, visual art, fairy tales, legends and myths of various nations of the world.

Here's a sample of my improvisations:

It's based on the fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen.

Usually the listeners of such events where I play have a program with a detailed synopsis of the story being played. Therefore, they can follow the action very closely which helps them to connect with organ improvisations on a much deeper level. These stories enable to find new friends of the organ who wouldn’t perhaps otherwise be exposed to regular classical organ repertoire.

Improvising an hour-long musical stories is difficult but it’s also fun because I can tell musical stories that will connect with my audience. I believe those improvisations have an amazing potential in finding new audiences for the organ.

Every year as part of Children University initiative of Vilnius University 8-11 year-old kids at our church have a chance to experience the organ.

After last years event before climbing to the organ balcony I told the kids the story of Damned brothers (some of your readers might enjoy listening to my improvisation on this legend). I saw how fascinated children are by the stories, especially the scary ones.

So this year I chose to do the event not as a regular organ demonstration but as a storytelling improvisation based on the famous fairy tale of Brothers Grimm "The Musicians of Bremen".

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Not only the listeners listened to the musician being improvised on the spot but also my dramatization of the story.

Also I asked them to draw the story and the organ. I made a sound recording and took pictures of drawings and made them into a 29 minute movie.

PINKY AND SPIKY

Back in 2015 I started drawing various illustrations for my blog posts about organ music. For example, I would draw a pipe organ facade and write a sentence or two about an idea from the organ world that they liked, or a summary or a phrase or a keyword about some topic that I was writing in that day in that particular article. So basically drawing and writing down ideas became kind of natural to me, like a diary, right? With your hand, you write and I started doing this with my organ related activities too because otherwise, I would forget other ideas, right? If I don’t write everything down. And if I just drew an illustration about that, that felt like a simple enough method for me to draw into a mini-notebook which would fit into my pocket.

My medium is very simple. I don’t have a command of digital art at least yet, so what I do is I take a notebook or a piece of paper and I use either pen for drawing lines and either crayon or pastel, oil pastel, for making colours and backgrounds. So that’s my medium for making cartoons. The reason I chose this medium is because it seemed very simple and easy for me to carry all day long, right? A box of oil pastels. I can put it into my bag or pocket. I can carry it with me and can make my art anywhere I want and anytime I want. That flexibility is quite inspiring for me.

The origin of Pinky and Spiky is very obscure. A long time ago we had a practice with Ausra of asking one another in the morning of what kind of animal you want to be today. What kind of animal you feel like being today. If you are feeling great maybe you may be feeling like some happy animal or maybe if you are not feeling great if you are sad maybe some other animal, right?

Animals carry emotions so we started developing various ideas about those animals and then drawing those two that we were that particular day on the wall calendar on a specific day. And we were doing you know this for a number of months and years and it seemed very natural. It was like a game for us. So every morning we would draw two different animals. Sometimes a worm, sometimes a bird, sometimes two birds and they would be silent, not talking. It’s not a comic strip but we would put a heart in the middle of them, like one animal loves the other so it was like a secret way of telling each other that we loved each other. So little by little our favourite animals like hedgehog for me and piglet for Ausra became very natural and this format stuck actually and somehow we fell in love with those two characters. We didn’t know if we should name them, right? Like imaginary friends we always wanted but then since I started drawing cartoons of hedgehog and piglet, I thought maybe we should give them a name so Ausra came up with those names. Pinky because the colour of her skin is pink so it seemed natural good fitting name and of course Spiky as a hedgehog, it has spikes and needles, sharp needles so we thought this name would be fitting as well. So those two names have this curious and funny history you see. And it all started from us drawing various animals on the wall calendar. It’s a very nice practice by the way if you have a spouse or a partner or a friend you can do this every day and this will make you and the other person very happy.

It’s so natural to grow every day for me now because after sixty-seven or sixty-six days it becomes a habit so I don’t have to think about it. I actually feel bad without drawing now, it’s kind of second nature now. It’s kind of organ practice for me too. I feel bad if I don’t play the organ every day and I feel bad if I at least don’t draw a few lines of my favorite characters every day you see. The motto that my dad had was “no day without a line.” He was very hard working and he didn’t wait for an inspiration to come.

His name was also Vidas, like myself and he would paint every single day for as long as I can remember. Actually up until two months before he died. He did it every single day. So this motto seemed quite inspirational to me in many aspects. You can practice organ playing like for musicians for an organist, you can practice writing like for writers or bloggers, you can practice drawing as well every day and once you do that something magical will happen after sixty-six days because your new habit will be formed and you don’t have to even think about it. You will actually feel bad if you have to miss a day and Golos seems to be very motivating place to share those drawings because if I just kept drawing for myself and never showed to anybody it would seem quite selfish, right? So I have this idea of sharing my art.

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Of course, it involves certain ego, certain idea that you are worthy of sharing your art but you see I am not a trained professional, I am an amateur who just happens to love drawing. But you see since nobody stopped me from drawing I felt quite motivated to do this every day. And little by little actually Ausra also started drawing too those two our beloved characters, Pinky and Spiky.

So I’m happy to create and share my Pinky and Spiky cartoons everyday with you. I do it wherever and whenever I see the opening in my day. In fact, today I made a drawing about how Pinky and Spiky are crashing teddy bear's picnic while waiting at the mechanic’s shop to change the tires of my car. Who knows maybe a new comic about Pinky and Spiky changing car tires will be born...
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I hope that silliness of Pinky and Spiky will put a smile on your faces!