Overland Park organist earns high professional benchmark
Playing the organ takes a lot more than knowing how to play spooky chords for Halloween or accompany a hymn. Becoming a fellow of the American Guild of Organists is even more intense.
Overland Park organist Elisa Bickers earned that honor recently, and she’s one of only six people to do it this year.
It’s the highest level of certification the guild offers, and the selection process for fellows is intense. In addition to a performance component that covers a variety of musical styles, there are tests in sight reading, transposition, composition and orchestration, as well as essays.
“They tested everything from improvisation to writing 16th-century fugue and 18th-century fugue and writing choral compositions, and I had to write an essay on a composer,” she said. “They give you a two or three-measure subject, and from that, I had to write a string quartet.”
She said that the skills the fellows exam tested are ones she uses all the time in her work.
To attain the fellow designation is “a very high professional benchmark of skill. It’s a real feather in the cap of the community where that person works and lives to have someone of that standing among them,” said Jonathan Hall, director of the committee on professional certification for the American Guild of Organists. “It’s a test of comprehensive musicianship.”
Bickers is associate director of music and principal organist for Village Presbyterian Church, in Prairie Village, but she also teaches organ lessons and performs in concerts around the country and the world.
“You tend to cobble together a living, because it’s hard to find just one job where you only play the organ,” she said.
She’s leading a committee to commission 13 new works for the organ in advance of the guild’s 2018 convention in Kansas City.
“We gotta get new things written as well as have a great love for the old stuff, so I try to reflect that in my concerts,” said Bickers, who has a doctorate in music from the University of Kansas.
Village Presbyterian is in the process of replacing its pipe organ, but the church is expecting to have one ready to play in the next few months. That’s okay, though, because Bickers doesn’t just play the organ. As well as leading regular and hand bell choirs at the church, she also plays harpsichord, piano, clarinet, oboe and English horn.
While the organ at the church is out of commission, Bickers’ been going to other local churches to practice and “keep my chops up,” she said.
She got started with the organ at age 12, when she won a year’s worth of private lessons from a piano competition in Washington, D.C., where she grew up. Around the same time, she started playing for church services.
“I was learning church music at the same time as I was learning how to play the organ,” she said.
She had musical experience to draw upon, but learning to play the organ was a completely new experience.
“It’s not as much like the piano as you might think,” she said. “Really, the only thing they have in common is that the keyboards look the same and that the music kind of looks the same, but the technique involved to play it is very different.”
Still, knowing the piano helps, but you have to put in a lot of hard work to learn the organ.
“When you try to combine the feet with the hands, that’ll trip you up. … It took a while, but eventually, you reach that moment of nirvana, that moment of, ‘Ah, that’s how it works together,’” she said. “And it’s fun to observe that in my students too.”
Some of her own favorite performance moments are when she gets to improvise.
“It’s the best instrument to improvise with, because you can start with the sound,” Bickers said. “An organ has got all these different sounds on it: ones that imitate flutes; ones that sound like trumpets. That just opens up the imagination,” she said. “The instrument can be an entire orchestra if you know what you’re doing.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2016 at 11:27 AM with the headline "Overland Park organist earns high professional benchmark."