Crazy about Organs: Gustav Leonhardt at 72

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

Brenda Portman

Dutch composer Ad Wammes (b. 1953) achieved international notoriety in the organist community through the publication of Miroir in 1989. Miroir has been performed and recorded by many American and European concert organists, including Thomas Trotter and the late John Scott. The piece has justifiably yet erroneously been labeled minimalist: many of the techniques used in Miroir are similar to the techniques in post-minimalist music, but we cannot trace any direct influence from minimalism. Just as American composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass were attracted to the rhythmic and harmonic elements in popular music and integrated them into their style, Wammes’ primary influence was the 1970s symphonic rock group Gentle Giant. This influence can be heard by comparing a recording of Miroir to a recording of Gentle Giant’s song Proclamation.

It is entirely possible that Wammes’ more recent organ work, Ride in a High-Speed Train (2011), could be similarly mislabeled, since it too has many repetitive figures. The title suggests that it could be conceptually modeled after John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine, a post-minimalist piece for orchestra. Originally given the title TGV and composed for a mechanical dance organ in 1993, Ride in a High-Speed Train has an intriguing and multi-faceted history, but it was never intended to be a minimalist piece. 

For those who might attach the label of minimalist onto Ride in a High-Speed Train, I would emphasize that the presence of repetition alone is not sufficient. According to Keith Potter, minimalism is “a style of composition characterized by an intentionally simplified rhythmic, melodic and harmonic vocabulary.”¹ In other words, reduction is the primary characteristic, not repetition. But, unlike visual art, music unfolds over time, so in order for a composition to be produced with a minimum of materials, it needs to have either long sustained tones or repetition of brief melodic patterns. Reduction typically manifests itself through the absence of melody (only short melodic fragments exist in the repetitive figures); a strong, steady pulse (except in the case of long tones); a strong tonal center (e.g., In C by Terry Riley, one of the very first minimalist compositions); slow harmonic change; and sometimes a limited number of pitches. The second most important characteristic of minimalism is gradual process: the idea that the listener should be able to hear and understand the compositional process as it unfolds. This creates a feeling that the music is going 

nowhere and is endless, unlike most Western music, which is goal-oriented and directional.  

Of course, the appeal of minimalism could not last forever, so it evolved. As a result, the repetitive figures became accompanimental to simple melodies, the audible process became less important, change began to happen at a quicker pace, and various means of expression and directionality were added. Both Miroir and Ride in a High-Speed Train seem to match this description of post-minimalism. For instance, the one-measure repetitive cell in Miroir remains the same throughout the piece but with simple melodies weaving in and out (see Example 1).

Despite the appearance of post-minimalism, we need to take the composer at his word when he himself denies having been influenced by minimalism. In Ride in a High-Speed Train, Wammes instead acknowledges a debt to symphonic rock music, Balkan music, and the process of composing for The Busy Drone (the name of the mechanical organ). The repetitive devices alone do not convincingly indicate minimalism, but they do give the piece a compelling energy that makes it a refreshing contrast in any concert program.  

While I was preparing to present this and several other pieces in a lecture-recital, the composer revealed to me many details about the unique genesis of Ride in a High-Speed Train through e-mail conversations in December 2014 and January 2015.

 

Brenda Portman: What was your inspiration for choosing the title? Is the piece meant to be programmatic?

Ad Wammes: In 1981 my wife and I cycled for seven weeks through Europe. When we were in former Yugoslavia I had a breakdown with my bike (broken spokes caused by the terrible condition of the roads). I rang the doorbell of the nearest house and we were warmly welcomed by the man and woman living there. It was difficult to communicate as they spoke only Serbian. Anyway, in the evening the man placed a map of Yugoslavia on the kitchen table, took his accordion, pointed at a certain district, and then played music from that district. This way he went through the whole map. And this story came to my mind while composing, as it had Balkan influences in it and, in my mind, I kept seeing a train (probably caused by the ongoing 5/4 beat) going through an ever-changing landscape. 

In 1993, the year in which I composed this piece, a train named TGV (“train à grande vitesse,” French for “high-speed train”) was introduced in Europe. In 2011, I made a transcription for (normal) organ and renamed it Ride in a High-Speed Train (as English-speaking people probably don’t know what TGV stands for).

[The TGV, with its hub in Paris, is a network of high-speed trains that can reach a speed of over 300 miles per hour. It was introduced in Europe beginning in 1981, with its first line between Paris and Lyon. In 1993, the year Wammes composed the piece, the northern Europe line opened from Paris to Lille, which was a connection for destinations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Germany.²]

 

Can you point out specific places in Ride in a High-Speed Train that show Balkan influences? 

Ornamentation, scales (especially the Lydian mode), unequal deviation over 5/4. [At this point Mr. Wammes referred me to an e-mail attachment that contained the first four pages of the original score to the piece.] I withdrew this version after one day because Boosey & Hawkes immediately took interest in publishing it. The original version differs from the score published by Boosey & Hawkes concerning the notation of the rhythms. In the Boosey & Hawkes version all the rhythms are notated in the deviation of 2-2-2-2-2 eighth notes. (See Example 2.) But in fact the deviation constantly changes and is often diverse for both hands and feet at the same time [See the table on page 23 showing the piece’s structure.] When changing the scale, root key and rhythmic deviation, it feels like slipping into another landscape.

Was Gentle Giant also an influence on Ride in a High-Speed Train, as it was for Miroir?

I don’t know, but I am not the kind of composer that tries to escape from his influences, so probably yes.

 

Could you tell me more about the mechanical dance organ for which Ride in a High-Speed Train was written? 

[From the author: Ad Wammes sent me the manual for The Busy Drone, which he wrote himself, explaining the instrument and how to appropriately write music for it. The following information is derived from that manual.]

The Busy Drone has three manuals (Zang, Tegenzang, and Accompagnement), pedal (Bassen), and limited percussion capabilities (big drum, woodblock, cymbal, and snare drum). It is a transposing instrument and sounds a minor third higher than notated. Each manual/pedal division has a compass of only one to two octaves, but, with stops ranging from 32′ to 4′, it actually spans six octaves. The disposition can be found on the website for Het Orgelpark Amsterdam [www.orgelpark.nl/nl].

The speed of the engine is 360 centimeters per minute, so the lengths of notes have to be calculated in millimeters for the organ book, based on the desired tempo.³ The speed of the engine is the key to understanding optimal tempos and note values that could be written for the organ. If the note is too short, it does not have enough time to sound, and if it is too long (longer than approximately six beats at a tempo of quarter note = 120), then the organ book will weaken. [An “organ book” is comparable in function to a player piano roll.] The most effective compositions have a perpetual-motion type of energy and are dance-like, in order to capitalize on the instrument’s history as a dance organ. If performed at the indicated tempo, Ride in a High-Speed Train has a continuous energy that propels the piece forward, making it sound like the motion of a train. The piece consists primarily of eighth notes, although the organ is able to accommodate durations as short as thirty-second notes. The longest note value in the piece, which occurs only a few times, is nine beats long at a tempo of 152.

 

Did you intend for Ride in a High-Speed Train to be played on this organ only, or did you write it with performing organists in mind as well?

Intentionally it was only written for the mechanical organ; I had no real organists in mind. It was only in 2011 that I made a transcription for “normal” organ at the request of the Dutch organist Age-Freerk Bokma. He heard TGV on The Busy Drone and asked me if it was possible to make a transcription for organ. I answered him: “Well, I’ll have a look at it.” After a week the transcription was ready, and although difficult, it is playable!

 

What else can you tell me about the process of composing TGV for The Busy Drone? 

In 1993 I was asked to make a composition for The Busy Drone. While I was in the possession of the computer sequencer program PRO 24 (ancestor of Cubase), a sound sampler (ASR10 by Sequential Circuits), and a portable DAT recorder, I decided to do it differently. First I recorded all the different stops (there is an organ book called GAMMA, which runs through the different stops note by note) and put the sound samples in my sound sampler. Then I made my composition and put the information in the sequencer program on my Atari computer by playing it live. Finally I notated the score on large files of paper by indicating with pencil what had to be chopped out. This gave me the benefit of getting a musical interpretation of my piece instead of a stiff interpretation of a normal score.

 

How did other composers create their scores?

They made normal scores and from that the book-choppers (I don’t know if this is the correct word for their profession) made the organ books.

The first person that delivered his piece as a MIDI file was Eric de Clercq. He made his piece Een meter sneeuw in 2001. The book was chopped by Johan Weima, who has a chopping machine connected to a computer. However, Een meter sneeuw was only premiered on October 7, 2009, in Het Orgelpark Amsterdam, because the concerts at the City Museum stopped and shortly after that the renovation of the Museum started (2004–12). The second person that delivered his piece as a MIDI file was me! In 2010 I went to Het Orgelpark to listen to TGV. (The organ was restored, so now it would sound much better!) The organ book, however, was nowhere to be found. Then Johan Luijmes (the director) told me about this MIDI file chopping machine. I still had the old MIDI files and from that a new version of TGV was chopped, now with the correct tempo at 152 per quarter note. (The first version was chopped at 150 while the translation of the MIDI data was too difficult at 152.)

From that time, 2010 till mid-2014, I was the intermediary between composer and chopping machine (handled by Johan Weima) by translating normal scores to MIDI files. Many times the composers (especially the young ones) came with MIDI files. I checked those and corrected them (notes being out of range, notes being too short, adding bridges (short interruptions) to the notes that were too long).

 

Can The Busy Drone read MIDI files directly?

Since mid-2014 a MIDI device has been installed in The Busy Drone by the Belgian manufacturer DECAP (Herentals). Now it is no longer necessary to make organ books. The Busy Drone directly reads the MIDI information.

 

When you composed TGV in 1993, was The Busy Drone still in the museum in Amsterdam or had it been moved to the museum in Utrecht?

Yes, it was still in Het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (The City Museum). It stayed for one year (2008) in the museum “Van Speeldoos tot Pierement” (“From Music Box to Street Organ”) in Utrecht. It was taken over by Het Orgelpark Amsterdam in 2009.

[We have little knowledge of mechanical organs in the United States, but they were used frequently in various settings in Belgium and the Netherlands for many decades. A mechanical organ is like a player piano, which plays itself, but someone has to work the controls. This particular organ was built in 1924 by the Belgian firm Mortier. It has 92 keys and 17 registers. Originally a dance organ in a café, it had fallen into disuse and been abandoned. In 1965 it was purchased by the Amsterdam publisher De Bezige Bij (The Busy Bee), with the intent to provide background music for an annual book fair. The organ was given a new look and a new name, “The Busy Drone.” In 1973 the organ was moved to the auditorium of the City Museum and remained there for nearly 35 years, playing a role in a concert series entitled “Music Now.” Contemporary composers were encouraged to write music specifically for the instrument during its long stay at the City Museum. These included Louis Andriessen (a key figure in the European minimalist movement), Misha Mengelberg, Willem Breuker, Bo van der Graaf, and others.⁴ When the City Museum underwent renovations, it was moved to the museum “Van Speeldoos tot Pierement” (“From Music Box to Street Organ”) in Utrecht in 2008, restored by the Perlee firm, and then moved in 2009 to Het Orgelpark Amsterdam, where it stands today.⁵]

 

What exactly does it mean for a person to “work the controls” of the  organ? 

They change the organ books and see to it that the transport of the organ book runs smoothly. By the way, the organ books can also be run by hand. Yes, the registrations can be handled on the spot, but usually the stop changes are already programmed (chopped out) in the book.

 

Do they still have to do this now, even with the organ reading MIDI files?

No, because there are no organ books to be transported anymore. The stop changes still can be done by hand, but usually they are programmed in the MIDI file.

 

Thank you for taking the time to tell me more about Ride in a High-Speed Train. It is much easier to understand the musical language and performance challenges after learning about all of the factors involved in its composition.

 

Postscript: Performing Ride in a High-Speed Train

As alluded to by the composer, there are some performance challenges in Ride in a High-Speed Train, due to its original function as a mechanical-organ piece. For a live organist, the execution of multiple complex rhythmic patterns at a tempo of 152 is daunting at the very least, if not close to impossible. Performers may need to dial the metronome down a few notches to communicate the piece effectively. It is also impossible for an organist to carry out the intended registration changes and still maintain the tempo without either omitting notes to hit a piston or enlisting the help of an assistant. For a mechanical organ, though, these details are programmed into the organ book (or now the MIDI file) and present no problems at all. Additionally, the size of an organist’s hand or the distance from one note to the next were not an issue for The Busy Drone; therefore, there are several instances of quick leaps greater than an octave, sometimes at the same time as a manual change (see Example 3). It is also worth mentioning that the rhythmic precision in this piece renders a mechanical-action organ more suitable than electro-pneumatic, and a three-manual instrument is necessary in order to implement all of the desired colors.

YouTube features recordings of young American organists playing Ride in a High-Speed Train: Karen Christianson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmygJ5lobhs), Chinar Merjanian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOXjt3_sGmE), and Brenda Portman (https://youtu.be/tujdOGm-9JE), and the Hauptwerk version by the composer himself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct7oNhSX-1w). The first professional recording of the piece was recently released on the Acis label, by Jonathan Ryan (acisproductions.com). Information on Ad Wammes’ organ compositions is at http://adwammes.nl/. ν

 

Acknowledgements

Miroir by Ad Wammes, © 1992, 2006 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

Ride in a High-Speed Train by Ad Wammes, © 2011 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. Reprinted
by permission.

 

Notes

1. Keith Potter, “Minimalism,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2007–13), accessed July 3, 2014.

2. Russ Collins, “TGV History and Speed Records,” TGV—High-Speed Train, last modified 2014, accessed January 16, 2015, http://www.beyond.fr/travel/tgvhistory.html.

3. The Busy Drone manual, sent in an e-mail attachment from Ad Wammes on December 15, 2014.

4. Thom Jurek, “The Busy Drone,” AllMusic, accessed December 27, 2014, http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-busy-drone-mw0000566283.

5. Orgelpark, “The Busy Drone,” accessed January 16, 2015, http://orgelpark.nl/over-het-orgelpark/de-instrumenten/the-busy-drone/.

 

David Rumsey

David Rumsey⁴⁴ was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied with Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain in Europe 1963–66, then returned to a position at the University of Adelaide. Moving back to Sydney in 1969 he established a Department of Organ and Church Music, which survives the recent Australian educational and research funding cuts. For over 25 years, until 1998, he was the regular organist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and as such frequently presided over the Grand Organs of Sydney Opera House and Sydney Town Hall. Associations with multimedia events have included performances of the Saint-Saëns “Organ Symphony” to 100,000 people with the orchestra in the Sydney Domain, the organ via microwave link from Sydney Town Hall. In 1998, he wrote, produced, acted, and performed in a highly successful 14-hour musical and dramatic spectacle on the life of J.S. Bach, with actors in period costume from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (AUS), and musicians playing period instruments. He resigned his post in Sydney in 1998 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he continues working as an organist and consultant, and as a Senior Researcher at the University of Bern. Since 2007 he has been responsible for the editing and CD-production of historic organ recordings released under the OehmsClassics label using the historic Welte organ and its player-rolls at Seewen (SO-CH) and is regarded as an authority on aspects of medieval organ culture. He is organist at Herz Jesu Kirche in Laufen (BL-CH) and in-house consultant and organist to the Museum der Musikautomaten, Seewen (SO-CH).

On Friday and Saturday, June 9 and 10, 2012, a concert and workshop focusing on the medieval organ were held at the Basel (Switzerland) Peterskirche. They dealt with concepts, designs, repertoire and the medieval organ used in ensemble.¹ Another symposium and series of concerts was later organized in and around East Friesland (Rhede), commencing Monday, September 3, 2012, running until Sunday, September 9, dealing with much the same topics.² Some instruments and participants were common to both events. Elsewhere Kimberly Marshall played and held courses in Sion (Switzerland) during October 2012. Other events in Europe during the summer of 2012 dedicated to the medieval organ included one arranged by Jos van der Giessen in the Netherlands.

Kimberly Marshall’s 1989 book, Iconographical Evidence for the Late-Medieval Organ in French, Flemish and English Manuscripts,³ was of seminal influence to much of this blossoming culture. It was the most oft-quoted work at the Basel and Rhede conferences. A colloquium in 1995 at Royaumont (France), two years after an 11th-century Theophilus organ had been reconstructed there by Antoine Massoni, was a most important sequel.⁴ Marcel Pérès, responsible for the Royaumont Theophilus organ, also played in Basel during August 2011. The 2012 events were significant vantage points in an ongoing search for the Holy Grail of understanding medieval organs and performance practices. They continued to push back through the 15th, 14th, 13th centuries, even to the 3rd in Rhede.

 

The Phenomenon

The observant phenomenologist might well note something in the air: research into and performance of early music has now spread both forwards and backwards in time—from a “Bach-fulcrum” that began with Mendelssohn,
S.S. Wesley, et al. in the early 19th century. By the late 20th century it had reached fortepiano, early Steinway, the “real” Wagner orchestra, and even Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, where authenticity of instruments used was a measure of performance excellence. Concurrently, moving back to ever earlier eras, the music of Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Couperin, Correa de Arauxo, and Sweelinck—among many others—has been vigorously regenerated through performance on historic organs, careful emulation of their temperaments, key proportions, wind quality, specifications, tonal and mechanical attributes, all of which illuminate performance practices.

Other 19th- and 20th-century contributions to this historical consciousness included the continuum of English choral music, the rediscovery of Palestrina, and parallel developments in Gregorian chant. In the educational arena it seeped into musical institutions such as Eugène Gigout’s 19th-century Organ School in Paris or the early 20th-century Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, not to forget the work of Solesmes and similar centers. High-profile specialist performers such as Gustav Leonhardt then came on the scene, increasingly promoting serious research, publications, recordings, and concerts. Discrete organ cultures began to be brought back to life by dedicated builders, researchers, performers, and luminaries. A veritable explosion of knowledge and activity erupted around the turn of the 21st century.

The phenomenon is now neither confined to the organ nor the 16th–19th centuries, but takes in viola da gamba, cornetto, medieval fiddle, lute, harpsichord, hurdy-gurdy, harp, bells, whole families of antique instruments, and virtually all music of any period. The ongoing challenge in the medieval arena for instrumentalists is that of surviving originals. Certainly extant and truly original 16th-century organs are scarce. Precious little material dating from before the 15th century is known—and then essentially only fragments. Iconography, contemporary descriptions, the few comprehensible early organbuilding tracts, and much circumstantial evidence taken from extant contemporary repertoire are about all that there is to go on. At the Rhede conference, Winold van der Putten, who was responsible for building many of the instruments present, added another significant factor: the experience of specialist organbuilders who have now regularly interpreted these old sources and learned how to put theories or confusing historic descriptions into practice. This is a cutting edge where artistic fringe-dwellers live dangerously by constantly expanding boundaries. It is a little like “walking the plank,” just that the board gets narrower as it seemingly extends back forever, engaging the enquirer in an ever more precarious balancing act. But the rewards are tangible, and in the past few years fully successful medieval constant-scaled ranks have been constructed and voiced. They were commonplace enough for much of medieval instrument-building history and essential to its performance.

Walter Chinaglia, from Como (Italy)⁵ was another of those present in both Basel and Rhede with several of his own positives and portatives built from extending what is “seen through a glass darkly” into convincing practical realities, another fruit from the experiences of these increasingly skilled specialist builders. There are others—Marcus Stahl of Dresden⁶ and Stefan Keppler of Kötz,⁷ to name but two from Germany.

 

2012—European Medieval 

Organ Summer

On Saturday afternoon, September 8, 2012, the Rhede symposium was nearing its conclusion and running rather late, since so many people had had so much to offer. The interest was exceptionally keen; most sessions had extended well beyond their scheduled times. About 15 different organs had been assembled in a kind of “grand general meeting of gothic organs.” They emulated everything from a hydraulis to 13th, 14th, and 15th-century portatives and positives. There were also some renaissance instruments, including an original 16th-century Italian organ, the most modern of the assembly, a permanent fixture in the Old Church at Rhede, nodal point of this symposium. Other venues around this East-Friesland region included Weener and Rysum. Attendees came from Germany, Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland, Australia, Czech Republic, USA, and Scandinavia. 

At the outset Harald Vogel made the poignant observation that this unusual gathering of medieval organs was an exceptionally important event in the history of the instrument, a hitherto virtually unthinkable assembly. It was organized by the Weener Organeum, Winfried Dahlke in charge, supported by a squadron of organists, organbuilders, and others whose burning curiosity clearly motivated them strongly. 

Dr. Vogel inaugurated the “Rims” instrument, made for a German organist by Orgelmakerij van der Putten after mid-14th-century practices: constant-scaling, two 8′s in parallel (effectively 8′ II-ranks, always playing, no stop control) and a 6′ (on a separate register, slider above the windchest). The resemblance to an organ described in the 10–12th-century Sélestat Manuscript gives its 8′+8′+6′ specification full credibility.⁸

The prototypical culture that inspired the Rims instrument used lead as pipe material, constant scaling after the 11th-century Berne Anonymous MS,⁹ and keys as described by Praetorius for Halberstadt.¹⁰ Its Gamba-Quintadena-like bass tones with Principally-Flutey trebles were an experience all of their own. They came into good use during the symposium in Gregorian alternatims, borduns supporting chanters, and works such as medieval Redeuntes with long-held bass notes under more agile trebles. This instrument presented a left-hand cantus firmus of an early Felix namque¹¹ with remarkable ease and complete conviction; its scaling allowing the “slow-note cantus firmus” to stand out against right-hand elaborations as if two manuals were being used. Yet no normal two-manual organ could ever achieve the effect so convincingly. An understanding of the 13th-century Notre Dame school of Léonin and Pérotin—also tried out at the conference—was clarified through performance on this instrument. All present knew instinctively that they were in the presence of a special musical integrity and masterly instrument building.¹²

Another organ, of an altogether different, rather later style, was the largest of several provided by Walter Chinaglia. This remarkable organo di legno brought to mind a passage in Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography: 

 

My father began teaching me to play upon the flute and sing by note; but notwithstanding I was of that tender age when little children like to take pastime in whistles and such toys, I had an inexpressible dislike for it, and played and sang only to obey him. At this time my father fashioned wonderful organs with pipes made of wood, spinets the fairest and most excellent which could then be seen, viols and lutes and harps of the most beautiful and perfect construction.¹³

What could be called Chinaglia’s Cellini Principals are exceptionally fine ranks, made from a beautiful red-yellow cypress, which even contributes scent to the total experience of this organ. They run through the entire range of its keyboard at both 8′ and 4′ pitches. The third register, an exquisite Krummhorn-Regal with a beautifully full and rich quality in spite of its pencil-thin resonators, adds a strong and spicy finish to the tonal resources.¹⁴ He also brought along several positives and portatives, one very fine positive emulating that in the van der Goes painting in Scotland.¹⁵

Of particular interest to everybody at the symposium was a new interpretation of the ancient Roman organ finds from Aquincum (Hungary). It was built by
A. Schuke Potsdam-Orgelbau GmbH (Germany) for the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz (Germany); research, design, and concept were by Susanne Rühling M.A. and Michael Zierenberg.¹⁶ Extra time had to be allocated, taken from later sessions, allowing a second round of discussion about this amazing but potent little replica. It stood there, like a proud Roman sentinel, on its brown hexagonal pedestal, a living and working monument, mostly in copper or bronze, to the organ belonging to Aquincum’s 3rd-century fire brigade. Its prototype ironically survived a fire by falling into the cellar. Were they all out that night? Perhaps the seemingly unanswerable question—“Was it a hydraulis or a bellows organ?”—might be given a nudge towards hydraulis, since its survival could have been the result of having water poured over it as it fell? It is doubtful that burning floors falling into cellars with highly flammable organ bellows would do anything more than increase the conflagration. Such speculations aside, this instrument looked more like something from the age of steam and polished brass. Indeed, its amazing sounds were quite reminiscent of steam whistles. Justus Willberg also tours Europe with a hydraulis,¹⁷ complete with air-pumps, water cistern, pnigeus, and Greek repertoire, but following the older, Walcker-Mayer interpretation. He was in Basel not so long before the June event, another manifestation of this fascinating phenomenon. The sounds of these Roman organs seem not unrelated to the new Rims organ when first heard from a modern perspective, although they are in reality tonally, musically, and mechanically universes apart.

Another star of both events was the two-stop, one-manual and pedal positive made for the author in 2010 by van der Putten. This instrument was also partly influenced by the van der Goes painting. The organ and I had been invited to make the trip from Basel specifically to talk, play, and be played at this conference. Much of the woodwork is Lebanese cedar, again contributing scent to the total experience. It was used in every concert and demonstration and featured twice on the cover of the flyer. (Rysum was the third.) The two Rhede flyer photos were taken at the Basel event by Jos van der Giessen where the Peterskirche appropriately provided a neatly framed, truly “Gothic” background.¹⁸ The positive was moved from Laufen (Switzerland, near Basel) to Rhede (Germany), then Huizinge (Netherlands), Rysum (Germany), Rhede (Germany), Groningen (Netherlands), Finsterwolde (Netherlands), and back to Laufen (Switzerland) during this northern sojourn—about 12 days.

The rest of the Rhede Symposium consisted of demonstrations, concerts, lectures, a church service, socializing, and networking. The invitees included Harald Vogel, Winold van der Putten, Koos van de Linde, Cor Edskes (paper read in absentia), Susanne Rühling, Winfried Dahlke, Jankees Braaksma, Tomas Flegr, and myself. Themes ranged around gothic pipe-making, wind pressures, voicing, repertoire, performance practice, the problems and advantages in the anachronous use of tuning slides in modern copies of early organs, the towering figure of Arnaut de Zwolle, medieval organ design (cases, windchests, specifications, keys), the Blockwerk, surviving literature, touch sensitivity on portatives, the use of bells with medieval organs, Pythagorean tempering, and much more.

Time simply ran out. The richness of thematic material, available expertise, the many discussion by-products, and the ravenous cultural, intellectual, and musical hunger of all gathered together for this event turned out to be quite overwhelming for the organizers. Some speakers and players had to seriously curtail their offerings. Frustrating though this was, it should be no enduring problem as long as the need for more is acknowledged.

Thus it was that, on Saturday afternoon, September 8, 2012, momentarily lacking a program, I turned to Jos van der Giessen and asked, “When does this finish?” Even the fascinating unscheduled double session by Koos van de Linde (Netherlands/Germany) ranging from Arnaut de Zwolle to the much-discussed Utrecht Nicolaïkerk organ restoration¹⁹ was not fully done. Three more speakers were impossibly scheduled in the 30 minutes before the close at 4:30 pm. My question was intended to be “When does this (session) finish”—but the response fittingly, amusingly, and intentionally misinterpreted it, summing up the spirit which had been engendered by all the 2012 events: “Never, I hope!”

For the phenomenologists, at least four medieval organ events in around four months—Basel, Netherlands, Rhede, Sion—must be something of a landmark for 2012.

•

Immediately following the Rhede Symposium, on Sunday, September 9, after the closing church service in Rysum, a further concert was held in Groningen’s De Oosterpoort Concert Hall. Arrangements had been made that my instrument would remain in the Netherlands for a few days before being returned to Switzerland. Jankees Braaksma (Netherlands) and Tomas Flegr (Czech Republic) played it with the group Vox Resonans, the ensemble adding that sparkle and transformed sound that has been frequently noted with this organ: those who had attended both events were still commenting on Tobie Miller’s hurdy-gurdy playing in Basel and the amazing soundscapes created when organistrum and organum are played in ensemble. The dance group, RenaiDanse,²⁰ led by Veronique Daniels (Switzerland), and instrumentalists also featured in two of the Rhede Symposium concerts as well as this Groningen event. They all earned a double standing ovation in Groningen—one after the concert, another after the encore. The calcant (the organ’s builder), physically exhausted and suffering from a serious workshop injury incurred just before the symposium, was fittingly included with the performers in these accolades.

 

Quo vadis?

The many themes raised by these conferences can only be dealt with through an enduring continuum of instrument building, research, discussion, publication, and many more such events. This arena is a collection of musical swords that still need much more rattling in their scabbards. Basel and Rhede together were able to pose important questions, and even answer some, at least in the short term. But long-term answers are needed, since both the practice and the research is relatively recent, tends to be revelatory, and is ongoing—very much an essential part of the phenomenon.

There were questions posed about the nicknaming of the Rutland Psalter copy as a “Theophilus” organ. Of course, with hindsight we can now view this as two ends of a historical progression and clearly distinguish between them as organ types. Simple, well-intended glossing can grow into habits that become less correct as time progresses. Such expressions tend to stick, even when more recent knowledge overtakes them. Another habit of this kind began to be formed at these conferences when—rightly enough as a new venture in recreating pipe-making history—the so-called “pigeon’s egg” registers (three on the Rims organ, one on the Rumsey organ) were referred to just so: “pigeon’s egg ranks.” The term comes from the 11th-century Codex Bern (see endnote 9), where the measure of pipe diameters is explained as “the width of a pigeon’s egg.” Yet the eggs chosen were different and correctly discriminated between the eras the two instruments represented. Thus the ranks were not scaled to the same widths. The terminology really should have been “constant-scaled.” After that we might talk ancient treatises and ornithology.²¹ Likewise, in discussing the “wolf” in Pythagorean tempering, the interval really should have been referred to as “b to g♭” rather than “b to f♯”. And what were referred to as “pure thirds” are in fact just ever so slightly impure acoustically, since they are really Pythagorean diminished fourths, e.g., d–g♭, which are 384.36 cents, whereas a truly pure major third is 386.31 cents. True, normal human perception cannot distinguish between them.²² Again, strictly speaking, the hydraulis presented was closer to a bellows organ. 

These matters need little further comment here; the intention is clear in every case once the context is clarified and human nature to gloss, nickname, and abbreviate is acknowledged. Exact terminology usually sorts itself out eventually as needs arise and awareness increases—although a general tendency to slow progress is lamentable.

What needs probing now includes the following:

Medieval Tuning and Tempering: A frequent modern assumption that earlier Pythagorean temperaments mostly had the “wolf” at G♯–E♭²³ seems only rarely to be hinted at in ancient sources. It has sometimes been recommended or assumed by exponents of this culture, including Mark Lindley, although often with serious reservations or caveats.²⁴ Others, such as Adam B. Rahbee, are known to be investigating this.²⁵ Further results are eagerly awaited from him and others. However, the most likely outcome, endemic to this medieval discipline it would seem, is that there was no single standard. One particularly fascinating development of this was how, in the half-century or so before Schlick (the work of Arnaut de Zwolle, Pietro Aaron, et al), the pure thirds/diminished fourths were shifted and came into line with four of what became mean-tone temperament’s normal eight.²⁶

Fingering: The use only of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers when playing medieval keyboard music was strongly promoted in the Rhede masterclasses. There was a claim that it was impossible to use thumb and 5th finger anyway, especially when playing portatives. Yet this was proven wrong by at least one participant, who repeatedly and comfortably used all fingers. When an octave span is required in, e.g., a 3-part Buxheim²⁷ piece, and it can only be played by one hand because the other is too far removed to help out, then how can the thumb not be used, especially if the keys are substantially wider than modern keys and there is no pedal? (Horror of horrors: was the rule of exclusively 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers partly formulated by people playing relatively narrow modern keyboards?) Aside from Tobie Miller’s hurdy-gurdy playing in Basel, the finely fingered performances by Brett Leighton—who takes Buchner’s Fundamentum organisandi of c. 1520 and his Quem terra pontus as a point of departure—also linger very well in collective memory.²⁸

Music and its structures: Much of the medieval repertoire could have been intended for constant-scaled ranks. The music of Robertsbridge²⁹ and Faenza³⁰ seem often to rely on the development of tension through tessitura variation and the relation of this to changing tonal qualities induced by scaling practices. Redeuntes, for example, sound wonderful on constant-scaled ranks as the figuration rises and falls. This music thrives on “intensity climaxes” that higher-pitched, fuller and flutier constant-scaled ranks produce. No modern scaling can possibly achieve this. The first Estampie from Robertsbridge has one “punctus” after another, each getting successively higher than the preceding, until the final one just blooms with the highest and most intensely flutey notes of all. It is not just constant-scaled ranks but also other scaling practices from this era—e.g., Arnaut’s “halving on the octave with addition constant”—that can produce this effect. Essentially all early scaling practices do to varying degrees, but the more scaling practice approaches modern schemes, such as Töpfer’s norms,³¹ the less marked this effect becomes, and the music ends up sounding relatively flat and lifeless.

Metallurgy—copper, lead, tin, and alloys—plays a most critical role. The use of wood for pipes is another question, particularly the issue of its first clearly recorded use—Italy, late 15th century?³² The Sion (Switzerland) Valeria organ has a “Copel” made from wood, now dendrochronologically dated from around early 15th century.³³ Of course, wood was introduced at some stage between the hydraulis and Arnaut de Zwolle as a material replacing the earlier copper/bronze variants used in making windchests.³⁴ Similarly, early conical metal pipe-forms and the potential confusion they cause in the iconography with wood needs investigation.³⁵ The relics at Hamar, Norway, may eventually provide a key.

The apparently sudden change from copper/bronze to lead at the turn of the 13th century is an interesting phenomenon: that lead was far more malleable than copper may have been a driving motivation clinching change. But the tonal effect was so strikingly softer and sweeter that this was expressly noted in many contemporary tracts.³⁶ It must have come as a profoundly exciting development, part of the Ars Nova/Ars Antiqua watershed. Notated organ music first consistently appeared just after the change—some of it might suit the sound of tin or copper but most of it plays remarkably well on lead pipework. Did the notion of accompanied voices rather than alternatim also receive some kind of stimulus here? And the desire to separate a single 8′ out from a Blockwerk: was this also part of the switch to lead? Later register names, such as Doof, hint at this, for the softer tones of lead must have seemed “deaf” compared either to copper pipes or the presence of upperwork of any kind. It was mainly in the centuries after this change that the typical, relatively small, medieval organ began to share the stage with some increasingly multi-ranked Blockwerks. The facility of the larger Blockwerks to be reduced to a single, sweet foundation rank must have been very alluring, whether for accompaniment or contrast.

Blockwerk registrations were sometimes recommended for pieces played by participants in Rhede—but how many organs pre-15th century had more than about one, two, or three ranks? Two of these ranks were often enough simply a doubled unison. The most spectacular Blockwerks were reported by Wulstan at Winchester in the 10th century or Praetorius at Halberstadt in the 14th or 15th century. Were some of these chroniclers, like us, more impressed with size—or hooked on hyperbole—than with making sober inventories of what was really there? Certainly, the three-rank Rims organ was closer to many Blockwerks of that era than the concept of a “Lokaz of at least 50 ranks,” to cite Schlick at the end of the era around 1511. And the Winchester organ: did this have copper pipes? Presumably. Was that—apart from its apparently anachronistically large mixture—another reason why it was reported as being so loud? Prima facie, sources and iconography prior to the 15th century indicate the existence of relatively few large Blockwerks compared to the many Positives and Portatives.

As with scaling, pitch, keyboard design, metallurgy, and everything else about medieval organs, there were no DIN specifications. Any investigative path is flawed if standards like this are sought. A variety of options needs to be tried within known tolerances, then optimums and limits found. Assessments can then follow, which might be region-, collection- or even specific work-oriented. It would be wonderful if some day money could be found to build an entire series of constant-scaled ranks from very thin to quite wide scaling, note the true ranges available, and try out repertoire on them, for instance that spanning the era between the Robertsbridge Codex and Buxheimer Orgelbuch. If further funding were available, then some copper pipes might also be tried, not for keyboard repertoire before this, since it virtually does not exist, but for ensembles (especially those commonly iconographically represented) and alternatim.

Did some or all the music in Faenza assume copper pipes, lead pipes, tin pipes, alloys? Constant or variable scaling? Pitches equivalent to A440, A466, A520 or something else? And where to place the “wolf”? A520, lead pipes, early Pythagorean tempering, and constant scaling certainly seem to work very well. But are our criteria correct? The experience of beautifully pure major thirds from Renaissance mean-tone tempering, or major thirds ranging from pure to mistuned in the circular temperings of the Baroque era, is very enticing to impressionable musicians travelling back from an accustomed equal tempering. Yet the sober reality is that pure thirds were sometimes expressly avoided, e.g., by Bach using remote keys with dissonant thirds to represent crucifixion, or even just sheer doggedness as with Thomas Roseingrave’s self-proclaimed love of F–G♯ rather than F–A♭ in his deliberate choice of a “nasty” F-minor tonality. Was the Pythagorean “wolf” sought out in like manner, or studiously avoided by these earlier musicians? Probably it was avoided if the evidence of modal transpositions is taken at face value—but even here there are questions that need working through.³⁷ In any case, there is no significant evidence in medieval music for an Affektenlehre and Figurenlehre: that was the culture of Bach, Handel, and Roseingrave.

To a degree, medieval voicing seems somewhat weather-prone: what barely works one day, might work well or not at all in the next cold snap or heat wave. And the organs of those days were only marginally protected from weather change compared to ours in air-conditioned buildings today. Thus: were their tolerances of pitch and tuning, including in ensemble, and with bells, more flexible than ours are today? Within limits, slight differences actually make these organs more interesting, as do historical voicing techniques—particularly the lack of total control with wide-open footholes. The lowest generally workable pitch from 27mm constant-scaled lead pipes is about modern (A440) tenor E♭. With 33mm it extends down to B♭, a fourth lower. Thus, pitches of organs produce differing manual compasses, or a few low pipes with ears needed to make them speak. As Winold van der Putten pointed out in Basel, “Medieval organ builders were no fools: it only takes cupping a hand around a pipe mouth to make it speak.” Iconography showing ears is, however, extremely elusive—jury out, experimentation and investigation still in. If, as seems likely, constant scaling was perpetuated well after the 11th century, whence these “pigeon’s egg” figures derive, then diameters could well have increased in time, allowing lower bass ranges and even more blooming trebles. The iconography, inter alia, suggests that this tendency could have persisted until early 15th century as diameters apparently became wider.³⁸ A targeted study of this is overdue.

If we retain all the parameters noted above, then reduce the size of the pigeon’s egg taken to 27mm, as with the Rims organ, little of Robertsbridge and Faenza at its notated pitch can be played satisfactorily unless the instrument is higher than A440. The very low notes cannot be voiced reliably using known medieval tools and techniques. Yet Léonin, Pérotin, or the Felix Namque of the Oxford MS sound totally convincing here with their more agile trebles—everything just bringing this music to a radiant vitality. The same applies for other parameters with Buxheimer, Ileborgh,³⁹ or various regional- or even specifically single-work instances.

Even so, did Léonin and Pérotin ever know lead pipes?

Research and experimentation not possible hitherto has now shown that constant scaling with pigeons’ egg dimensions around 33mm, and a pitch of at least A465 makes the first Estampie from Robertsbridge sound simply magnificent when transposed up a tone. That equates to A520—which should make some players of medieval instruments happy, since many project that pitch for some of their repertoire. All this, or an even higher pitch, brings “43” from Faenza truly to life in 33mm constant scaling. Lower that pitch and the bass notes of the Estampie are poor or missing, while the overall effect of “43” is relatively dull from trebles that simply do not bloom so well.

Of necessity, these assessments will always have a component of subjectivity in them. But not entirely: low pitches and constant scaling yield bass notes that do not repeat promptly, and others that will not speak properly, if at all—indicators that either pitch is too low, scaling too narrow, or later scaling practices could be appropriate. The physical limits of medieval organ compasses and pitch now need probing and defining. Any temptation to a general conformity of anything—pitch, scaling, metal alloy, tempering, fingering—must be addressed as a range or tolerance, given a specific set of parameters. This expressly includes repertoire and ensemble playing.

Standardization was a new concept that had to wait for Arnolt Schlick and later centuries. Interestingly, Schlick, relatively modern by comparison to the main thrust of these conferences, barely made it into the discussions.

 

A sequel? 

Thus, there was a consensus that intellectual and musical exchange should not simply vanish after this flush of medieval organ symposia during the European summer of 2012. Several events are already known to be foreshadowed. Of considerable interest will be a major symposium planned for the Amsterdam Orgelpark, June 6–8, 2013.⁴⁰ Wherever future events are held, it would be most welcome if they were not primarily talk-fests, but also included strong performance components. One small criticism of the Rhede Symposium was its predominance of talk over music. A four-way balance will always be needed with medieval organ cultures: talk, solo organ, alternatim, and in ensemble. In a way, these instruments were born to work in alternation with speech, chanting, silence, and possibly bells. It is particularly in ensemble that the iconography, literature, and extant music seems to be signposting the way ahead. Both Basel and Rhede showed that all four are needed for a completely balanced presentation of this highly fascinating culture. Basel strongly promoted alternatim and ensemble, and so did Rhede, the latter chiefly in concerts where dance was also represented. Would the miracle or mystery plays of the era be a good suggestion for some future events?

The Mainzer Hoftag of 1184 is usually reckoned as the greatest medieval festival in history. It was here that Friedrich Barbarossa knighted his sons, Heinrich VI and Friedrich V. A contemporary description of it included these lines:⁴¹

 

Dâ was spil end gesanc

End behurt ende dranc,

Pîpen ende singen

Vedelen ende springen,

Orgeln ende seitspelen,

Meneger slachten frouden vele.

 

There was playing and song,

And pushing and shoving,

Piping and singing,

Fiddles and dancing,

Organs and strings playing,

Many joyful things mingling.

 

Epilogue

The standing ovations in Groningen mentioned above had something of a cathartic feel to them, reflecting the exegesis in medieval organbuilding and musical performance that has taken place over the past several decades, especially in the events described above. Winold van der Putten’s organs were not at all alone in this, but he and his work were at the center of two of these conferences.⁴² His 1999 realization of the copy of the Rutland Psalter organ was an important trailblazer. This instrument was featured at the Rhede conference, along with some portatives for Jankees Braaksma and his group, Super Librum.⁴³ These were prototypes for most of what has followed as van der Putten and others investigated, experimented, and cracked the codes of medieval organbuilding and voicing. His recent constant-scaled ranks for myself and the Rims instrument were essayed only after much investigation and experimentation. In their own way, they alone deserved their rightful share of those standing ovations. Medieval organ scaling of this kind now seems set to be one of the next “revelations” in the performance of this music—not least in portatives where, oddly enough, it remains relatively untried.

 

David Rumsey⁴⁴ was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied with Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain in Europe 1963–66, then returned to a position at the University of Adelaide. Moving back to Sydney in 1969 he established a Department of Organ and Church Music, which survives the recent Australian educational and research funding cuts. For over 25 years, until 1998, he was the regular organist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and as such frequently presided over the Grand Organs of Sydney Opera House and Sydney Town Hall. Associations with multimedia events have included performances of the Saint-Saëns “Organ Symphony” to 100,000 people with the orchestra in the Sydney Domain, the organ via microwave link from Sydney Town Hall. In 1998, he wrote, produced, acted, and performed in a highly successful 14-hour musical and dramatic spectacle on the life of J.S. Bach, with actors in period costume from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (AUS), and musicians playing period instruments. He resigned his post in Sydney in 1998 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he continues working as an organist and consultant, and as a Senior Researcher at the University of Bern. Since 2007 he has been responsible for the editing and CD-production of historic organ recordings released under the OehmsClassics label using the historic Welte organ and its player-rolls at Seewen (SO-CH) and is regarded as an authority on aspects of medieval organ culture. He is organist at Herz Jesu Kirche in Laufen (BL-CH) and in-house consultant and organist to the Museum der Musikautomaten, Seewen (SO-CH).⁴⁵

 

Acknowledgements

(*) Seemingly the only images currently available, taken here from Stein Johannes Kolnes, Norsk orgelkultur—Instrument og miljø frå mellomalderen til I dag, Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo, 1987.

Thanks to John Liddy, Jos van der Giessen, Marc Lewon, and Elizabeth Rumsey for their help with this article, and to all who contributed photos and good advice. My apologies to Walter Chinaglia for not writing more about his organo di legno—space allocation just became too acute and this instrument really belongs to a slightly later epoch than the one mainly under discussion here. A fuller report on it can be seen at http://www.davidrumsey.ch/Chinaglia.htm.

 

Notes

1. Some details are available at www.david rumsey.ch/Medieval.php.

2. www.ostfriesischelandschaft.de/1097.html

3. Kimberly Marshall, Iconographical Evidence for the Late-Medieval Organ in French, Flemish, and English Manuscripts (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), ISBN 0-8240-2047-2.

4. A description of the background to this, including mention of an earlier instrument by Yves Cabourdin, is available in Marcel Pérès, editor, Les orgues gothiques: Actes du Colloque de Royaument, 1995 (Paris, Editions Créaphis, 2000).

5. www.organa.it

6. www.marcus-stahl-orgelbauer.com

7. Wolkenstayn Orgelbau—also represented at the Basel event—www.wolkenstayn.de. He is arranging a course March 8–10, 2013, the “13. Etappe zur Frühen Musik,” dealing with Organetto/Portative playing, to be held at Burg Fuersteneck. Details on his website.

8. www.davidrumsey.ch/Bibliography.htm (see under 11th century)

9. Anonymous of Bern(e) or Codex Bern, Anonymus Bernensis etc., excerpt De fistulis organis/De organis.

10. In Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum, Volume II, Wolfenbüttel 1618 (1619/20), section V, and Volume III 1619, section 7: “Das I. und II. Diskant-klavier.”

11. Oxford Douce MS 381

12. An alternatim (Veni creator spiritus) from an ad hoc Rhede performance can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtszdCw91o&feature=youtu.be.

13. John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), trans., The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Chapter V. It is now available online as part of the “Gutenberg” project (see www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4028).

14. Further details at: www.organa.it/page1/page14/page41/page41.html.

15. Hugo van der Goes, Ange jouant de l’orgue (Angel playing the organ), Flemish ca. 1480, Sir Edward Bonkil, Holyrood Castle, Edinburgh collection. For a sample (second from left) see https://d30dcznuokq8w8.cloudfront.net/works/r/bal/6/8/0/399086_full_102….

16. www.schuke.com/pages/de/projects#reconstructions

17. www.hydraulis.de

18. Remains of a hydraulis were excavated in Dion, Greece, in August 1992. A reconstruction has since been toured. See Peter Williams and Jean-Paul Montagnier, eds., The Organ Yearbook #33 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2004), p. 163; Michael Markovits, Die Orgel in Altertum (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and websites: www.culture.gr/2/23/232/epked/en/00_standard_menu/00a_ydraulis/00a.htm and www.mlahanas.de/Greece/Cities/Dion.html.

19. See Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #41 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2012), pp. 7–35. Program at www.david rumsey.ch/index.pdf, images at www.david rumsey.ch/2012/album/index.html.

20. www.renaidanse.org/page/de/act.html

21. The sizes of pigeons’ eggs are discussed in a footnote to Part II, Section 1, of Christhard Mahrenholz, Die Berechnung der Orgelpfeifenmensuren vom Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bärenreiter, 1968); also in English translation (Oxford: Positif Press, 1975). 

22. See also www.davidrumsey.ch/
tempering.pdf.

23. Really not a quint at all, but a diminished sixth, which has to function as a quint on the vast majority of keyboards where no split keys provide any better-tuned alternatives. This also applies to diminished fourths, which, in the Pythagorean temperings under discussion here, more accommodatingly or even fortuitously provide a near-pure major third.

24. An important essay on this subject by Mark Lindley can be found online at http://independent.academia.edu/MarkLindley/Papers/242254/Pythagorean_i…. See particularly Table 2, page 27, and the general discussion involving Odington, Spechtshart, et al. Certainly he presents much evidence for the B–G♭ wolf having more than a century’s demonstrable currency from 1413 to 1513 and correctly reminds us that the organ’s tuning cultures were often at variance with those of other instruments. The only significant assertion he makes for a G♯–E♭ wolf is for Robertsbridge (p. 33). Another essay, by Margo Schulter, can be viewed at www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth4.html#1. See especially around “4.5 Pythagorean tuning modified: a transition around 1400,” where she assumes a G♯–E♭ wolf. In the final analysis, these do not argue very convincingly for a wolf at G♯–E♭ on purely statistical grounds. Of course, this only became a pressing issue when keyboards came to be divided into 12 or more discrete notes.

25. E.g., in a series of e-mail exchanges between Rahbee and the author dating June 28 to July 22, 2012. He is particularly interested in 15th- and 16th-century tempering practices and takes such relatively new material as the Cambrai MS into account (see Patrizio Barbieri, “An Unknown 15th-century French Manuscript on Organ Building and Tuning,” in Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #20 [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1989]). Rahbee is also exploring a hypothesis that meantone tempering may have come into widespread use somewhat later than is commonly believed. The apparently dual-tempered instruments of late 15th century, e.g., the Lorenzo da Pavia style of organ, may yet have much to offer on this topic. See http://www.david rumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf, pp. 7 and 8, and Marco Tiella, “The Positive Organ of Lorenzo da Pavia (1494),” in Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #7 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag 1976), pp. 4–15.

26. With a B–G♭ wolf giving near-pure major thirds (really diminished fourths) on A, D, E and B as opposed to the four (from a G♯–E♭ wolf tuning) quasi-pure major thirds on B, G♯, F♯, C♯ (see also endnote 22). This awakens interest in the potential adaptation of Pythagorean/B–G♭ tempering—seen as part of a transition to meantone—bearing, e.g., on the E-major/e-minor tuning dilemma in some Bruhns and early Bach organ works.

27. Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, MS 3725, Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, München.

28. Leighton’s point of departure is that Buch-ner was a Hofhaimer pupil, barely outlived his master, and most likely merely codified what he had been taught. The “good” fingers are 2 and 4, with scales played on lower keys executed, r.h. ascending and l.h. descending, as 2-3-2-3 (starting on strong beats), r.h. descending and l.h. ascending as 4-3-2-3-2-3, turn figures r.h. high-middle-low-middle and l.h. low-middle-high-middle as 4-3-2-3. The hand can be turned in the direction of travel when using paired fingerings (turning the hand in the direction of movement and keeping the fingers parallel to the keys were techniques used in the outgoing 16th century, their relative employment before that is a matter of speculation; Santa Maria and Diruta were in disagreement about this). Thumbs and fifth fingers are used in both hands (especially the left) when larger intervals require them. The iconography indicates use of left thumb when that hand played longer note values in three parts. Impractical passages sometimes need rule-breaking exceptions. Prohibition of using the same finger twice in succession is not endorsed in Quem terra pontus (which seems to have been fingered by a scribe rather than Buchner) and in polyphony, finger repetition is often the best musical and technical solution. (E-mail correspondence of 12.11.2012-3.12.2012).

29. Robertsbridge Codex/Robertsbridge fragment, London, British Library Add.
MS 28850. 

30. Faenza Codex, Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, ms. 117.

31. See J.G. Töpfer, Lehrbuch der Orgelbaukunst, in 4 volumes (Weimar, 1855, and Mainz: Rheingold-Verlag, 1955–60).

32. See www.davidrumsey.ch/Technology.htm.

33. See Friedrich Jakob et al. in Die Valeria-Orgel. Ein gotisches Werk in der Burgkirche zu Sitten/Sion (Zurich, Verlag der Fachvereine, 1991), ISBN 3-7281-1666-1 and the updates in La Tribune de L’orgue, ed. Guy Bovet (Geneva), in numbers 56/3 and 61/2. A subsidiary issue here is that many of the older metal pipes at Sion appear not to have been hammered, but retain a thick, rough—even slightly porous?—post-casting appearance.

34. As noted, e.g., by Markovits in Die Orgel in Altertum. See, e.g., pp. 342, 418, and especially p. 444, where metal scarcities in the middle ages are said to have driven the change to wood, etc. (cf. pp. 198). Note also the tin- or copper/bronze-veneered wooden plates of windchests. This book is also available for viewing online at http://books.google.ca/books?id=p7amFlH7Bg0C&pg=PA401&source=gbs_toc_r&….

35. A need to be cautious here is underscored by an illusion in some representations, such as that of the Dame à la Licorne tapestry (http://www.davidrumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf, p. 5), where the pipe tops appear cylindrical, but lower down, under the bar, seem square.

36. E.g., see www.davidrumsey.ch/index.pdf—the Jerome de Moravia quote. In that connection a question (cf. Markovits endnote 33 above) that needs raising may well be: If metal was scarce, then what drove the change to lead so strongly (and e.g., not to wood)?

37. Lindley (op. cit., p .5) for example claims that most of Buxheim seems “. . . in certain cases at least, to require some form of meantone temperament for its proper effect” but gives no clear criteria. My own experience is contrary to this, having tried both, and I am mostly very comfortable with a Pythagorean/B–G♭ wolf for Buxheim. Criteria of this kind are difficult to formulate, save to note that resting points in the music, apart from open fifths and octaves, seem often enough to occur with the near-pure thirds of e.g., an A-major or D-major triad (a feature also noted by Lindley, pp. 42–43). We have to face the fact that medieval musicians themselves applied no consistent criteria here—a proposition that Lindley gives credence to with his quotation (p. 4) of the Spataro/Gaffurio and many other bitter contemporary conflicts around such issues. By virtue of its three additional pipes per octave, the medieval organ built by Winold van der Putten for me in 2010 is capable of playing in a variety of early Pythagorean temperings. With options of pipes to play either D♭ or C♯, G♭ or F♯, and A♭ or G♯, this currently allows any of the following tempering configurations:

Wolf G♯–E♭: E♭ B♭ F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯

Wolf C♯–A♭: A♭ E♭ B♭ F  C G D A E B F♯ C♯

Wolf F♯–D♭: D♭ A♭ E♭ B♭ F C G D A E B F♯

Wolf B–G♭: G♭ D♭ A♭ E♭B♭ F C G D A E B

E♭/D♯ and B♭/A♯ choices (not yet built 2012) would further increase these options with:

Wolf D♯–B♭: B♭ F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯

Wolf A♯–F: F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯ A♯

So far a lack of available time has allowed only limited exploration of these variants.

38. www.davidrumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf

39. Incipiunt praeludia diversarium notarum secundum modernum modum subitliter et diligentor collecta cum mensuris diversis hic infra annexis by Adam Ileborgh of Stendal, 1448 (Ileborgh: Paris, private collection [‘Ileborgh Tablature’]).

40. www.orgelpark.nl/pages/home

41. Quoted in Jean Perrot, The Organ, from Its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1971, ISBN 0 19 318418 4), trans. Norma Dean, p. 268. Perrot is sourcing this from Th. Gérold, La Musique au Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1932), p. 419.

42. www.orgelmakerij.nl

43. www.superlibrum.nl

44. www.davidrumsey.ch/index.php

45. www.bundesmuseen.ch/musikautomat en/index.html?lang=en

John Bishop

Color my world

Twenty years ago I was serving a New England Congregational church as music director, bringing the glories of the English cathedrals to the land of the Puritans. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. The moderator of the parish council was a curmudgeonly attorney who lived in an attractive house sited prominently on a corner lot along my route to the church. The Sunday after contractors finished painting his house, I teased that he had his house painted pink. He responded in his usual gruff way, “It’s Chippendale Rose.” Ha! My point. It was pink.

When placing organs in church buildings, we often leaf through the “swatch fans” provided by paint companies, and I always wonder who invents the names of paint colors. The website of the paint company Pratt & Lambert shows a cozy-looking room featuring the colors Pearl Tint, Toasted Wheat, Dusk Sky, and Gloaming. The P&L color experts deem this to be a winning combination. The first three names give clues as what the colors might be, but “gloaming?” What’s gloaming? Its root, glo-m, is an Old English word of Germanic origin that means “twilight,” and is related to “glow.” So gloaming refers to the glow of twilight. I would describe the color in the photo as a sort of dark ecru—“twilight” and “glow” mean something else to me than dark ecru.

The printer on my desk spoke to me the other day. A cute little chime rang and the screen informed me that I needed to replace the cyan cartridge. Cyan? It’s a sort of light blue. My printer has three color cartridges: cyan, magenta, and yellow. I think of primary colors as red, yellow, and blue, so I googled to learn that there are now at least three basic systems of blending colors, each based on three “primary” colors.  

The standard for photography, television, and video screens is an “additive” system that uses red, green, and blue. The standard for printing is a “subtractive” system that uses cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Combine those three colors and you get black.) The website I visited says artists still prefer the additive system that uses red, yellow, and blue.¹ That’s a relief! Seems to me that the world of art would be a different place if Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso had cyan, magenta, and yellow on their palettes as primary colors.

 

Colors in music

I’m a devoted fan of Captain John Aubrey, the principal character in Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In the first scene of the first novel, Jack meets Stephen Maturin (a physician, drug addict, and elite member of Naval Intelligence) at a concert by a string quartet. They are as different as two men can be, but after their introductory dispute they become firm and fast friends, and they share a love for music. Jack plays the violin (his “on land” violin is a Guarneri), Stephen plays the cello, and through the twenty-year span of the war, they spend thousands of evenings playing together in the captain’s cabin while enjoying their customary toasted cheese and Marsala.

In the second novel, Jack is promoted from the rank of Master and Commander (remember the Russell Crowe movie?) to Post Captain. That night, in his happiness, he dreamed about a painting owned by his old nanny, now wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man who had promoted him: 

 

Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!²

 

When I first read that passage I immediately compared it to playing the organ. We accept the traditional system of notes, harmonies, and tuning as common with all other instruments, but the organ is unique because of its range of color. A pianist or flautist can conjure up contrasting tone colors by varying the physical forces involved in playing their instruments, but if you sit at an organ console and compare a Cromorne to a Diapason, a Trombone to a Rohrflute, or an Open Wood to a Tierce, you realize that the organ is a collection of instruments that contrast and complement each other, and like the painter’s palette of colors, the organ’s drawknobs allow the musician to blend a finite number of basic timbres into a seemingly infinite number of color combinations.  

 

Express yourself in color

I’ve heard that some symphony conductors consider the organ to be the least expressive musical instrument because the basic unit of musical tone—one organ pipe playing one note—cannot be altered in volume or timbre. That fact is true enough, but it’s like saying yellow is a boring color because all it can do is be yellow. Pratt & Lambert shows me Old Linen, Buttery, Golden Glimmer, Bay Rum, and Colorado Sand as complementary shades of yellow, and I haven’t touched the blues, reds, or greens. It’s ridiculous and ignorant to say that a pipe organ is not expressive.

Let’s consider an eight-foot flute stop, a simple enough subset of organ tone. But is it a Flauto Dolce, Gedeckt, Melodia, Harmonic Flute, Rohrflute, Spitzflute, Koppelflute, Hohlflute, or Flûte Triangulaire? Nine different flute stops, each with a unique tone color, and each comprising pipes of different shape and construction. Could you discern between them in a hearing test? Could you name each one if shown photographs of the various pipes? Or do you just draw an eight-foot flute because you always use an eight-foot flute in this piece as if you were painting a wall yellow instead of Golden Glimmer?

Pratt & Lambert says:

 

The color of the sun, yellow is associated with laughter, happiness and good times. It can cause the brain to release more serotonin, which makes people feel optimistic. It even has the power to speedup [sic} metabolism and drive creativity. However, yellow can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to a cool palette of blues or grays. It can also work well with orange, red, olive green or brown.³

It would be easy to paraphrase this when discussing organ stops:

 

A Cornet can be overpowering if it’s not used sparingly in just the right places. Use it to add zest to an Oboe, Cromorne, or Trompette. It can also work well with Principals at eight and four-foot.

 

Is your imagination strong enough to find ways to use that Cornet that will make people feel optimistic?

 

Clashing or harmony?

You and your partner are getting dressed for a party. She comes out of the bathroom, takes one look, and says, “You’re not wearing that, are you?” We all think we know when colors clash, but while there are some basic rules, you have to judge each comparison separately. Otherwise, it would be impossible for two shades of red to clash. I have a pairing of red shirt and red tie that I think looks great, but there are also a couple doozies of possible combinations of red hanging in my closet that Wendy would question, rightly.

When we register a piece of music on a particular organ, we have to judge each combination separately. It’s not safe to assume that because it sounded good on one organ, that it will also sound good on another.

In his wonderfully researched book, The Language of the Classical French Organ (Yale University Press, 1969), Fenner Douglass presents detailed information about the various “standard” registrations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French organ music. He opens Chapter 5 (Registration in the Classical Period) by citing the prefaces to various famous “books” of organ music, the Livres d’orgue of Corrette, Nivers, Lebègue, Boyvin, and many others. He boils all that data down into charts that compare the registrations for Le Grand Jeu, Fugue, Le Duo, etc. by all these composers. It’s terrific material for informing our playing today, but does it have any real meaning if we don’t hear those registrations on the specific organs? One chart shows that in 1676, Nicolas Lebègue uses Grand Jeu de Tierce for the left hand of Le Duo, while Dom Bedos suggests sixteen-foot foundations. Who is right? And what organs were they using?

Assuming the Möller organ in your church has all the correct names and pitches on the knobs as cited by Fenner Douglass, does the historically correctly drawn Grand Plein Jeu sound anything like what Lebègue was hearing? Simply and definitively, no. Douglass has given us a great gift by collecting this information, but you still need to use your ears.

 

Shutter bugs

Besides choices of colors, many modern organs have an additional dimension of expression. Enclosing a group of stops, usually all the stops of one keyboard, in a tightly and heavily constructed “box” with movable shutters on one or more of the faces, allows the organist to simulate control over the volume of a single organ pipe. This does not literally answer the conductor’s ignorant criticism because the pipe is still only speaking one pitch at one timbre at one volume level.
But it increases the organist’s palette of
colors exponentially.

When I was a teenager, a mentor listening to my preparations for a recital commented that if everyone used the Swell Pedal like I was, they’d have called it a crush. I was closing the box at the end of a phrase, and popping it open before starting the next phrase, using only half of the device’s possibilities—but I was still too green to realize that the expression is about more than volume. It’s also an important tool for the creation and manipulation of tone color.  

When two or more manuals are coupled together, moving the expression pedals changes the emphasis from one tone color to another, taking the organ’s color spectrum from the finite number of possible combinations of stops to the infinite. Here’s a simple example. You might play the opening verse of a hymn on Great Principals with a Swell Trumpet coupled in, saving the more powerful Great Trumpet for later. Add to that registration the dimension of starting the verse with the Swell Box closed, and open it gradually as the choir comes down the aisle. The sound of the Trumpet is subtle at first, and blooms into being the principal ingredient of the aggregate color.  

Think of an “Old Master” painting. When Meindert Hobbema takes your eyes from the green of a tree canopy to the blue of the sky, he takes you through an infinite spectrum of colors. Compare that to the results of a color-by-number kit in which the boundary between one color and another is defined by a stark black line. And think of the artist making a drawing with charcoal or pastel, using her fingers to smudge the lines to create shading. Smudge is no better a description for the use of the expression pedals than crush, but the creative colorist at the organ can use the expression pedals to enhance the transitions from one color to another. That’s painting with sound, like Captain Aubrey’s colorful violin strings.

 

Stop, look, and listen

In these pages, I’ve often mentioned formulaic organ registration. You play the opening of a baroque Prelude and Fugue on Organo Pleno—Principals eight, four, and two, plus Mixture. You’ve always done it that way. Fair enough. That implies that the opening of Bach’s B-Minor Prelude (a high and screechy B) should be registered the same as his Dorian Toccata (middle of the keyboard canonic counterpoint). We are free to choose registrations that reflect the response of the specific instrument playing the specific notes in the specific acoustic. 

I think of my own performances of Bach’s B-Minor, how in the boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop-da-da-da-da-da, boop-boop episode of the fugue I always reduced the registration to flutes at eight and two. Always.

As I think about the opening of that great piece, I wince at the high B. What about starting on a smaller registration (that hymn registration I described earlier?) so the opening high B is less jarring. And here’s a radical thought. I know organs that simply don’t have stops that can be combined to give an impressive and dignified sound on that high B, so maybe I won’t play that piece on one of those organs—the ultimate registration discretion. There are other pieces.

Have you ever heard an organist play the opening pedal solo of Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne on anything other than pretty-much full organ, including reeds and mixtures, and manuals coupled to the pedals? Me neither. Why doesn’t someone play it on a four-foot flute? One of my favorite organ tones is a good clear Koppelflute, especially in a spacious acoustic. Would the Buxtehude cops storm into the church if I played that opening pedal solo on a four-foot Koppelflute? Would the first-time listener be disappointed?

If you, as an educated and experienced organist, went to an organ recital and the performer had the nerve to do that, would you be offended or disappointed? Are you just as happy to hear the same piece played with the same registration by every organist on every organ? Or are you excited when someone offers a fresh approach to an old warhorse? If we’re not listening as we register pieces, why should we expect the audience to listen?

Once when a colleague was demonstrating the organ in his church to me, he drew a huge combination of stops and told me that was his typical registration for postludes. Yikes. Easter I? Advent I? Pentecost XVIII? Bach? Widor? Stanley?

You go to a restaurant and order a chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. Delicious. Next week you go a different restaurant and order chicken breast with lemon, butter, capers, and parsley. And the next week, and the next. Different chef, different cooking temperature, different weather, but same ingredients. Can we think of a different way to cook a chicken breast?

How many different colors can you paint a front door and still be correct?

If we say Swell instead of crush, why do we call them stops? That seems limiting. Why don’t we start calling them Go’s? No matter how many of you agree with me, we’re probably stuck with stops. It would sound ridiculous for a politician to say, “We’re pulling out all the go’s.” But in your mind’s eye—and ear—think of them as opportunities, possibilities, or ingredients. If you’re listening when you draw stops, there aren’t many wrong answers. You’ll know if the tie clashes with the shirt. Have a blast. Put it on my tab. But hold the capers. They’re not my favorite.

 

Notes

1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/pricol2.html

2. Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain. William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, London, 1972, page 421.

3. http://www.prattandlambert.com/color-and-inspiration/learn-about-color/…

John Bishop

What a winter.

Our son Andy writes for a daily news service at the State House in Boston and gets to see his prose online and in print the next day. Writing for a monthly journal is a little different. You’re reading in May, and I can only hope that the giant gears that drive the universe continued to function properly and the weather is warm. 

I’m writing in March on the first day of spring. I’m in my office at our place in Newcastle, Maine, looking across the Damariscotta River, a dramatic and beautiful tidal river. We’re eight miles up from the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean, and the tide chart says that we’ll have an eleven-foot high tide just before 11:00 this morning, a couple hours from now, so the ice floes are drifting north toward town with the tide. I can barely see the sea ice on the river, because my usual view is all but obscured by the piles of snow outside.

A couple weeks ago, the weatherman predicted a heavy snowfall, to be followed by rain. There were already several feet of snow on the roof, so we hired some local guys to shovel the roof, fearing that the added weight would be too much. Those piles added to the drifts already in place to leave six feet on the ground outside my windows.

We’ve spent a lot of time outside this week in eight-degree weather because we have a new puppy, and in spite of the cold, we’ve heard the calls of eastern phoebes and cardinals right on schedule. The wicked weather must be unsettling for these denizens of springtime in coastal Maine. Think of the poor ovenbirds, who get their name from the oven-shaped nests they build on the forest floor.

We’ve had about 90 inches of snow here this winter, which is plenty, but it’s a foot-and-a-half short of the all-time record of 108 inches set in Boston this year. Last weekend, friends and family there were rooting for the predicted snowfall to exceed the two inches needed to break the record—“if we’ve been through all this . . . .” I trust they’re happy with their bitter reward. 

Subways stopped running, roofs collapsed, and houses burned down because fire hydrants were buried deep beneath the snow. Local school officials are debating whether to bypass legislated minimum numbers of school days, because it’s simply not possible to make up all the days lost to cancellations through the winter. And the New York Times quoted the city’s guide to street defects, which defines a pothole as “a hole in the street with a circular or oval-like shape and a definable bottom.” An actionable pothole is one that’s at least a foot in diameter and three inches deep. I wonder what they call a hole that doesn’t have a definable bottom.

 

But baby, it’s cold outside.

It’s been a terrible season for pipe organs. Long stretches of unusually cold weather have caused furnaces to run overtime, wringing the last traces of moisture out of the air inside church buildings. Concerts have been postponed, and blizzards have sent furious drafts of cold air through old stained-glass windows, causing carefully regulated and maintained pitches to go haywire. One Saturday night, a colleague posted on Facebook that the pastor of his church called saying there would be “no church” tomorrow. The sewers had frozen and the town closed public buildings.

One organ we care for outside of Boston developed a sharp screech lasting a few seconds when the organ was turned on or off. After spending a half hour tracking it down, it was easy to correct by tightening a couple screws and eliminating a wind leak, but it had been a startling disruption on a Sunday morning. 

A church in New York City that is vacant because it merged with a neighboring congregation suffered terrible damage when an electric motor overheated, tripping a circuit breaker for the entire (poorly designed) hot-water heating system. Pipes froze and ruptured, the nave floor flooded ankle deep, and the building filled with opaque steam. A week later, when heat was restored, steam vented, and water drained and mopped up, the white-oak floorboards started expanding, buckling into eight-inch-high mounds, throwing pews on their backs, and threatening to topple the marble baptismal font.

My phone line and e-mail inbox have been crackling with calls about ciphers and dead notes, swell boxes sticking and squeaking, and sticking keys—all things that routinely happen to pipe organs during periods of unusual dryness. And I can predict the reverse later in the season—maybe just when you’re finally reading this—as weather moderates, humidity increases, heating systems are turned off, and organs swell up to their normal selves.

 

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

So sings the hapless Jud Fry in a dark moment in the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma!. He’s lamenting his lot, pining after the girl, and asserting to himself that the smart-aleck cowhand who has her attention is not any better than he. The lyrics pop into my head as I notice the winter’s effects on the woodwork that surrounds me. We have a rock maple cutting board inserted in the tile countertop next to the kitchen sink. The grout lines around it are all broken because the wood has shrunk. The hardwood boards of the landings in our stairwells are laid so they’re free to expand and contract. Right now, there are 5/16′′ gaps between them—by the time you read this, the gaps will be closed tight. I need to time it right to vacuum the dust out of the cracks before they close. And the seasonal gaps between the ash floorboards of the living and dining rooms are wider than ever.

The teenager trying to sneak up the front stairs after curfew is stymied in winter, because the stair treads and risers have shrunk due to dryness, and the stairs squeak as the feet of the culprit cause the separate boards to move against each other.

The other day, working in my home office in New York, I heard a startling snap from my piano, as if someone had struck it with a hammer. I ran up the keyboard and found the note that had lost string tension. Plate tectonics. Good thing the tuner is coming next week. 

As I move around in quiet church buildings, I hear the constant cracking and popping of woodwork changing size. Ceiling beams, floorboards, and pews are all susceptible. But it’s inside the organ where things are most critical. The primary rail of a Pitman chest shrinks a little, opening a gap in the gasketed joint, and three adjacent notes go dead in the bass octave of the C-sharp side because the exhaust channels can no longer hold pressure. And there’s a chronic weather thing in Aeolian-Skinner organs: The ground connections to the chest magnets are only about a quarter-inch long, and near the screws that hold the magnet rails to the chest frames, where the wood moves with weather changes, the ground wires yank themselves free of their solder and cause dead notes.

 

Let’s talk about pitch.

Fact: Temperature affects the pitch of organ pipes. You might think this is because the metal of the pipes expands and contracts as temperature changes, and while that is technically true, the amount of motion is so slight as to have minimal effect. The real cause is changes in the density of the air surrounding and contained by the organ’s pipes. Warmer air is less dense. If a pipe is tuned at 70°, it will only be in tune at that temperature. If that pipe is played at 60°, the pitch will be lower; if it’s played at 80°, the pitch will be higher.

While it’s true that all the pipes involved in a temperature change will change pitch together (except the reeds), it’s almost never true that a temperature change will affect an entire organ in the same way. In a classic organ of Werkprinzip design, with divisions stacked one above another, a cold winter day might mean that the pipes at the top of the organ are super-heated (because warm air rises), while the pipes near floor level are cold. 

There are all kinds of problems inherent in the classic layout of a chancel organ with chambers on each side. If the walls of one chamber are outside walls of the building, while the walls of the other back up against classrooms and offices, a storm with cold winds will split the tuning of the organ. I know several organs like this where access is by trap doors in the chamber floor. Leaving the trap doors open allows cold air to “dump” into the stairwells, drawing warmer air in through the façade from the chancel. This helps balance temperature between two organ chambers.

One organ I care for has Swell and Great in the rear gallery on either side of a large leaky window. The pipes of the Swell are comfortably nestled inside a heavy expression enclosure, while the Great is out in the open, bared to the tempest. A windy storm was all it took to wreck the tuning of the organ as cold air tore through the window to freeze the Great. It only stayed that way for a few days, until the storm was over, the heating system got caught up, and the temperatures around the building returned to usual. Trouble was, the organ scholar played his graduate recital on one of those days, and there was precious little to do about it.

One of the most difficult times I’ve had as an organ tuner was more than twenty years ago, caring for a huge complicated organ in a big city. The church’s choir and organists were doing a series of recording sessions in July, preparing what turned out to be a blockbuster bestselling CD of Christmas music, on a schedule for release in time for the holiday shopping season. It was hot as the furnaces of hell outside, hotter still in the lofty reaches of the organ chambers, and the organ’s flue pipes went so high in pitch that the reeds could not be tuned to match. It was tempting to try, and goodness knows the organists were pressing for it, but I knew I was liable to cause permanent damage to the pipes if I did. It was a surreal experience, lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweating to the strains of those famous arrangements by David Willcocks and John Rutter rendered on summertime tuning.

 

Mise en place

I started doing service calls maintaining pipe organs in 1975, when I was apprenticing with Jan Leek in Oberlin, Ohio. Jan was the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and had an active maintenance business on the side. I worked with him three days a week when I was a student, and loved driving around the countryside and rolling from church to church. (Many of my peers were trapped on that rural campus by a college that didn’t allow students to own cars.) I suppose in those days we did fifty or sixty service calls each year, and as my career expanded, there were some periods during which I was caring for well over a hundred organs, visiting each at least twice a year. I suppose the annual average has been around sixty a year, or 2,400 since those naïve days in Ohio. 

Each organ has peculiarities, and each has its own environment of climate and acoustics. The tuner-technician has to learn about each organ and how it relates to the building, as well as learning the ropes of the building itself. Over the years you learn where to find a stepladder, how to get the keys to the blower room, and most important, where to find the best lunch in town.¹

And speaking of peculiarities, organists crown ’em all. A professional chef has his mise en place—his personal layout of ingredients, seasonings, and implements that he needs to suit his particular style of work and the dishes he’s preparing. It includes his set of knives (don’t even think of asking to borrow them!), quick-read meat thermometer, whisk, along with an array of seasonings, freshly chopped or minced garlic, parsley, basil, ground black and white peppercorns, sea salt, and several different cooking oils. 

Likewise, the organist, both professional and amateur, sets up his own mise en place—cluttering the organ console with hairbrushes, nail clippers, sticky-notes, paper clips, cough drops, bottled water, even boxes of cookies. Sometimes the scenes are surprisingly messy, and these are not limited to those consoles that only the organist can see. Next time you’re at the church, take a look at your mise en place. Does it look like the workplace of a professional? If you were a chef, would anyone seeing your workspace want to eat your food? 

Care for the space around the organ console. Ask your organ technician to use some furniture polish, and to vacuum under the pedalboard.² Keep your piles of music neat and orderly, or better yet, store them somewhere else. Remember that what you might consider to be your desk or workbench—the equivalent of the chef’s eight-burner Vulcan—is part of everyone’s worship space.

 

Everywhere you go, there you are.

There’s another aspect of visiting many different churches that troubles me more and more. As a profession, we worry about the decline of the church, and the parallel reduction in the number or percentage of active churches that include the pipe organ and what we might generally call “traditional” music. But as I travel from one organ loft to another, peruse Sunday bulletins and parish hall bulletin boards, I’m struck by how much sameness there is. What if suddenly you were forbidden to play these pieces:

• Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (you know the composer)

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

• Nun danket alle Gott . . . (which of the two?)

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

 

Each of these is a beautiful piece. There are good reasons why we all play all of them, and congregations love them. The same applies to choral music. We could get the sense that if we took away “ten greatest hits,” no organist could play for another wedding. Take away a different “ten greatest hits,” and no organist could play another ordinary Sunday worship service.

I know very well that when you’re planning wedding music, it’s difficult to get the bride (or especially, the bride’s mother) to consider interesting alternatives. And I know very well that when you play that famous Toccata, the faithful line up after the service to share the excitement. It would be a mistake to delete those pieces from your repertoire.

But if we seem content to play the same stuff over and over, why should we expect our thousands of churches to spend millions of dollars acquiring and maintaining the tools of our trade? Many people think that the organ is yesterday’s news, and I think it’s important for us to advocate that it’s the good news of today and tomorrow.

The grill cooks in any corner diner can sustain a business using the same menu year after year, but if the menu in the “chef restaurant” with white tablecloths and stemware never comes up with anything new, their days are numbered.

This summer, when many church activities go on vacation, learn a few new pieces to play on the organ. Find a couple new anthems to share with the choir in the fall. You might read the reviews of new music found each month in the journals, or make a point of attending reading sessions for new music hosted by a chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Here’s a real challenge for you—work out a program of preludes and postludes for the coming year without repeating any pieces. Can you rustle up a hundred different titles? You never know—you might find a new classic. Remember—every chestnut you play was once new music! ν

 

Notes

1. In the days when I was doing hundreds of tunings a year, I made a point to schedule tunings so as to ensure a proper variety of lunches. As much as you may like it, one doesn’t want sushi four days in a row! It was tempting to schedule extra tunings for some of the churches—there was this Mexican place next to First Lutheran . . . Wendy would say I have a lot to show for it. 

2. It’s traditional for the organ technician to keep all the pencils found under the pedalboard.

John Bishop

It’s about time, it’s about space . . . 

Music is one of the most elegant ways we have to measure and control time. Time is about the generous breath an organist gives the congregation at the end of a line of a hymn and the beautifully paced pause between verses. Time is about never giving the listener or singer the sense that you’re in a hurry, even in a piece that is fast and furious.

Inspiration is a magical word that refers to innovation and new ideas and also to the intake of breath. One of the special moments in musical time is the sound of inspiration as a choir breathes in unison at the start of a piece. The music starts a full beat before the first note. All these examples are also about space, the breath between lines or verses, and the control and spacing of tempo. Thoughtful consideration of time and space are among the most important elements in a moving musical performance.

When I was a pup, just out of school in the late 1970s, I was working for Jan Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. One of our projects was the renovation of a Wicks organ in the cavernous and ornate St. James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio.¹ I don’t recall the exact date, but remember that the organ was built in the 1930s, comprising a big three-manual instrument in the rear gallery, and a modest two-manual organ behind the altar, all played from two identical consoles. The 1970s was the early dawn of solid-state controls for pipe organs, so our project was replacing the original stop-action switches with new analogue switches.

The job involved weeks of repetitive wiring, much of which I did alone, sitting inside the organ during daily Masses and the recitation of devotional rites. I heard “Hail, Mary” repeated hundreds, even thousands of times, led by the same faithful woman, so I not only memorized the text, but can still hear the quirky inflections of her voice, which I associate with the memory of the beeswax-and-incense smell of the church’s interior: “. . . and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, JEE-zus.”

The building is huge, and the acoustics endless, and there was a majesty about that repetitive chanting. It was even musical because the different tones of inflection lingered in the reverberation, turning the spoken word into song. Listening to that for countless hours allowed me insight into the origin of music. The later intonation of text as chant made the words easier to understand, and the natural succession of fauxbourdon embellishing the single line was the first step toward the rich complexity of today’s music.

A few weeks ago, Wendy and I attended a concert by Blue Heron, a polished vocal ensemble that specializes in Renaissance choral music. You can read about them, and hear clips from their recordings at www.blueheron.org. They are in the midst of a project titled “Ockeghem@600,” in which they are performing the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (1420–1497) over a span of about five years. The project includes performances of music by Ockeghem’s predecessors and contemporaries, providing a significant overview to the development of this ancient music.

That music roughly fills the gap between the origin of chant and the advent of tonal harmony, more than a hundred years before the birth of Sweelinck (1562–1621). Ockeghem and his peers were striving to take music in new directions, wondering what sounded good as chordal progressions, as counterpoint, and simply, as harmony. There is a sense of experimentation about it that reflects the genius of innovation. The performance we heard was at First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square, where the brilliant Peter Sykes is director of music. The building is a grand Victorian pile, and while it doesn’t have the endless acoustics of that stone interior in Lakewood, Ohio, it’s big enough to have spacious sound.

As we listened to the timeless sounds, my mind wandered to the devoted Hail, Mary women of Lakewood, drawing connections between the “spoken singing” I heard there and the explosion of innovation at the hands of the Renaissance composers. There were many homophonic passages, but also exploration into imitation (the forerunner of fugues) and melismatic polyphony. And along with the tonal innovations, those composers were learning to manage time.

Harvard University professor of music Thomas Forrest Kelly is an advisor to Blue Heron, and the ensemble recorded a CD of plainchant and early polyphony to accompany Kelly’s insightful book, Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,² in which he traces the invention and development of musical notation. In Chapter 3, “Guido the Monk and the Recording of Pitch,” Kelly examines how Guido of Arezzo, Italy, developed notation to indicate musical pitch around the year 1030, and in Chapter 4, we meet Leoninus, an official of the as yet unfinished twelfth-century Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, who is credited with developing notation for the recording of rhythm in music.

I recommend this book to anyone whose life revolves around reading music. Professor Kelly unveils countless mysteries about musical notation, including the origin of the names of the solfège scale. It is a compelling read.

§

There were some wonderful organs in the wood-frame-and-plaster New England buildings of my teenage life, but they certainly didn’t have much reverberation. I was around 25 years old when we did that work at St. James in Lakewood, Ohio, and it was one of the first places where I had freedom to play in such a huge acoustic. I was mesmerized by the sense of space. There was the obvious magic of releasing a chord and listening to the continuation of sound, but even more, I loved the way the building’s space gave the music grandeur. I had an epiphany as I played Widor’s ubiquitous Toccata. Suddenly, it wasn’t about 32 sixteenth notes in a measure, but four grand half-note beats. The harmonic motion was like clouds rolling across the sky, and the spaciousness of the room turned the sixteenth notes into chords. The music went from frantic to majestic. So that’s what Widor had in mind.

Take a minute with me on YouTube. Type “Widor plays his toccata” in the search field. Voilà! There’s the 88-year-old master playing his famous piece on the organ at St. Sulpice in Paris. It takes him seven full minutes to play the piece. Scrolling down the right-hand side of the screen, there was a list of other recordings of the same piece. I saw one by Diane Bish with 5:47 as the timing. I gave it a try and found that Ms. Bish was speaking about the performance and the organ for nearly a full minute, and she played the piece in less than 5/7 of Widor’s time. There sure were a lot of performances to choose from. Most of them were around five-and-a-half minutes long, and only a few were over six minutes. No one but Widor himself made it last for seven. Have we learned anything today?

More than 800 years after Leoninus started writing down rhythms at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, on November 15, 2015, a special Mass was celebrated there in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris two days earlier. Olivier Latry was on the bench, and as the priest consecrated the bread and wine, Latry set sail with La Marseillaise like only a genius cathedral organist can. The vast church was full, and emotions must have been running high. Latry established a powerful rhythm and gave the music a harmonic structure worthy of the towering room. His improvisation was about time and space in the extreme. It’s just over four minutes long, but it seems eternal, perfectly paced, and exquisitely scaled for the occasion. If I had been in that church, I would have needed to be carried out. Sitting at my desk in Maine, I’m weeping as I write. Watch it with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbwJACUxXdo.

The other day I had a meal with David Briggs, the virtuoso organist who is dining out these days on his capacious transcriptions of symphonies by Mahler and Elgar. How appropriate that he has been appointed artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Church buildings don’t get bigger, and pipe organs don’t get grander. That iconic church is a perfect stage for solo music-making on such a grand scale.

Like Notre Dame, but for only about an eighth as long in time, St. John the Divine has been the site of immense pageantry and ceremony. Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have preached there. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic there. Philippe Petit walked across the nave on a tightrope there. John Lindsay, Alvin Ailey, and Duke Ellington were buried from there. Elephants have paraded down the center aisle for the blessing of the animals. To walk and breathe in any building of that scale is to experience the ages.

It is no wonder that David could be master of such a space. He was bred for it. As a boy chorister at Birmingham Cathedral, he watched the organist out of the corner of his eye, waiting for him to draw the Pedal Trombone. He was organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where the renowned choir sings in one of the world’s largest college chapels, with one of the trickiest organ console placements in Christendom. From that hidden console, twenty-something David had the bench for some of the most visible services in history, as the Festival of Lessons and Carols is broadcast to hundreds of millions of listeners around the world. He has held positions at the cathedrals in Hereford, Truro, and Gloucester. He was born and bred to make music in huge spaces, a far cry from the frame buildings of my musical childhood.

David’s performances and improvisations are informed by his innate understanding of space. While many musicians are baffled by long reverberation, he harvests it, molds it, and makes it serve the music. No building is too large for his concepts of interpretation. A great building joins the organ as vehicle for the flow of the music.

 

Bigger than the great outdoors

Bagpipes, yodeling, and hog-calling are all forms of outdoor communication with a couple things in common. Bagpipes were commonly used on battlefields for military communication. Yodeling traces back to the sixteenth century, when it was a means of communication between Alpine villages and by animal herders for calling their flocks. Hog-calling is for, well, calling hogs. The other thing they have in common is that they are all air-driven. Wind-blown acoustic tone is as powerful as musical tone gets. No one ever put a Plexiglas screen in front of a violin section.

Around 1900, Robert Hope-Jones, the father of the Wurlitzer organ, invented the Diaphone, a powerful organ voice with unusually powerful fundamental tone. The sound of the Diaphone carried so efficiently that the United States Coast Guard adopted the technology for foghorns, used to warn ships of coastal dangers. The pipe organ combines bagpipes, yodeling, hog-calling, and foghorns as the one instrument capable of filling a vast space with sound at the hands of a single musician.

Igor Stravinsky famously said of the organ, “The monster never breathes.” He was right. It doesn’t have to. It’s the responsibility of the organist to breathe. Playing that wonderful organ at Notre Dame, Latry has infinite air to use. That does not give him the mandate to play continuously, and he doesn’t. The recording I described shows him at the console in an inset screen. The space he leaves between chords is visually obvious—his hands are off the keys as much as they’re on. He uses every cubic foot of the huge space for his breathing. As Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.” A Zen proverb enhances that: “Music is the silence between the notes, and the spaces between the bars cage the tiger.”

Nowhere in music is the space between the notes more important than for the organist leading a hymn. You have an unfair advantage. According to Stravinsky, you can hold a huge chord until Monday afternoon without a break. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know), the lung capacity of an adult human male averages about six liters. There’s a six-pack of liter bottles of seltzer in our pantry waiting to be introduced to whiskey, and it surprises me to think that my lungs would hold that much. It doesn’t feel that way when I’m walking uphill. But it’s a hiccup compared to the lungs of a pipe organ. With the privilege of leading a hymn comes the responsibility to allow singers to breathe.  

As you read, I imagine that you’re nodding sagely, thinking, “Oh yes, I always allow time to breathe.” Because of the amount of travel my work requires, I no longer lead hymns. I’m a follower. Frequently, as I gasp for breath, I wonder if my admittedly energetic hymn playing allowed those congregations time to breathe. I hope so.

I often write about my love for sailing. Friends seem surprised when I draw a parallel between a sailboat and a pipe organ, but for me, it’s simple. Both machines involve controlling the wind. You can describe the art of organ building as making air go where you want it, and keeping it from going where you don’t want it. When I’m at the helm, I harvest air, the same way David Briggs harvests space. I set the sail so it reaps maximum energy from the air. And to inform my organ playing, when I’m sailing, I use only a fraction of the air available. The huge volume of air above the surface of the ocean moves as a mass. Sometimes it’s moving slowly, and sometimes it’s flowing at great speed. I raise 400 square feet of canvas to capture thousands of cubic miles of moving air.³

Two weeks ago, we experienced a violent storm on mid-coast Maine. It blew over 60 miles per hour for 18 hours, and it rained hard. We were fortunate to avoid damage to our house, but friends and neighbors were not so lucky. Thousands of trees fell, there was no power, phone, or internet service for nine days, and it took emergency workers four days to open the road to town. I love wind. It’s my favorite part of weather. I love sitting on the deck with wind coming up the river. I love it when I’m sailing. But there’s such a thing as too much. That storm was too much. People in Houston and Puerto Rico know what too much wind can be.

When you’re playing a processional hymn, you’re Aeolus, god and ruler of the winds. You’re Zephyrus, god of the west wind. You have the wind at your fingertips. What a privilege, and what a responsibility. Use it wisely. Use it to create time and space. Use it to move a sailboat, not to knock down trees. Think of the spaces between the notes. Think of the clouds flowing across the sky. You’re the weather maker. You’re lucky.

 

Note: ‘It’s about time, it’s about space . . . .’ are the opening words of the theme song of a 1966 television sitcom by the creators of ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ ‘Gilligan’ lasted three seasons while ‘It’s About Time’ lasted only one, a clear indication of the degree of artistic content. It has been an annoying earworm today as I try to conjure images far more grand.

 

Notes

1. There’s a slide show of photos of this church on the homepage of https://www.stjameslakewood.com/.

2. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

3. Ours is a 22-foot catboat with a single gaff-rigged sail.