Here you can find the short piece of improvisation by Helmut Walcha that I mentioned in my February column. The Thomaskantorei under Karl Straube recorded several short Bach selections in the late summer of 1927. Straube invited Walcha, who was a student at the time, to improvise an introduction to one of the selections - Dir, Dir, Jehovah will ich singen. You can hear the introduction and the motet movement in one of two formats:
This page is - and will perpetually be - under construction. The initial phase of that construction has taken longer than I anticipated, for which I apologize. Downloadable PDF versions of the pedal exercises from the January column are now available here
I will soon add an expanded version of the story of how I got into teaching, the short version of which is found in the September '07 column, and more pedal exercises, along with expanded discussion of those exercises. -Gavin Black