In the wind . . .

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/…

Thar she blows!

I know I share with many organbuilders the sense that the organ is alive. Stand inside an organ chamber when the blower is off and all is silent—unliving. Turn on the blower. The reservoirs fill, the swell shutters give a little twitch, and the instrument seems to quiver expectantly, ready to sound. We normally don’t notice air. We don’t bump into it when we walk. We don’t feel its resistance when we gesture with our hands. But we do notice it when it’s in motion—we call that wind. Reflecting on the nature of wind, we typically refer to blowing wind, as in “it’s blowing a gale out there.” But a sailor knows that the effect is often just the opposite. If there’s a low pressure cell up north, all the high pressure air south of us rushes by to fill the gap. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. Another interesting case is the classic sea breeze that occurs when coastal land is heated by the midday sun causing updrafts. You can’t have a vacuum without an enclosure, so when all that air rushes skyward, the cooler air over the water rushes ashore to take its place. Again, the wind is caused by air being drawn.
Wind n. 1a. Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air, parallel to or along the ground. b. A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan . . .1 The organ is all about wind—air in motion. Because the organ and the piano have similar keyboards, many people assume that they are a lot alike. In fact, they could hardly be more different. The tone of the piano is created by a hammer striking a metal string. The vibration of the string creates the sound, the length and tension of the string determine the pitch, and the impact of the hammer causes the attack. The fact that a great pianist can produce cascades of notes without the sensation of hammering is at the heart of the art—the art of both the instrument and the player. I’ve often marveled during piano performances when a scale or arpeggio gives the impression of falling water rather than hundreds of hammers hitting strings. Here the art surpasses the mechanical—or the mechanical enables the art.
In nature, wind is caused by air being drawn. Of course, the wind in a pipe organ emanates from a blowing device, usually a rotary blower. But when I play, I think it’s fun to imagine the air as being drawn out from the top of the organ’s pipes, originating in my body, leaving my fingertips to make the sound. That imagined sensation is the heart of the player’s phrasing. Remember your teacher encouraging you to breathe with the music? Once again the art surpasses the mechanical. The huge mechanical entity that is the pipe organ in effect vanishes, leaving only the player and the sound of the music.
The sound of the organ is produced by columns of air vibrating in the organ’s pipes—or in the case of a reed stop, by the vibration of a brass reed or tongue. The physical production of those sounds is analogous to the flute whose sound is produced by the player blowing across an open hole (like the top of a bottle), or a clarinet whose sound is produced by the vibrating reed. Whether you are vibrating a column of air by splitting a sheet of air against the edge of a hole or with a vibrating tongue, you need air in motion to do it.
We measure organ air pressure in inches using a manometer. In its simplest form, a manometer is a U-shaped tube filled with water so the level of the water is even on both sides of the tube (gravity does a good job of leveling). When you apply air pressure to one end of the tube, the water in that end is blown down forcing the other side up and you use a ruler to measure the difference. If an organbuilder forgets to bring a manometer to a job, he can make one using flexible plastic tubing as found in a fish tank, a rough piece of wood, and a few staples.
The other measurement we take of organ air is volume—considered as a factor of an amount of air in a specified period of time. In the case of a pipe organ it’s meaningless to say, for example, 1,000 cubic feet of air, because when described that way our thousand cubic feet is sitting still and won’t make a peep. Instead we say 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM), which describes a volume of air in motion. And, 1,000 CFM doesn’t mean much unless you also assign a pressure value. So you might purchase an organ blower that can produce 2,000 CFM at 4? WP. That would be adequate for an organ of about 25 stops with low wind pressure. If you needed 2,000 CFM at 10? WP, you would need a more powerful blower. Some organbuilders use the term windsick to describe an instrument in which the wind supply is not adequate for the job. Now you’re an expert.
I’m inspired to write about organ air by the engraving that hangs over my desk. It’s reproduced from L’Art du Facteur d’Orgues, the 18th-century French treatise on organbuilding written and illustrated by the good monk Dom Bedos de Celles—it depicts a large organ in cross-section. On the left side of the image, which is the back of the organ, there is a young gentleman working a set of three large manually operated multi-fold bellows. He walks down the row, pushing down each lever, in turn raising each bellows. The bellows are connected together with a tripping mechanism—when one nears empty, the next one starts to fall, and the young gentleman circles back around to fill the first again. He’s wearing a jacket with some 20 buttons, breeches that buckle at the knee, and stockings that cover his calves from the top of his buckled shoes.
Back then you couldn’t play a note on an organ without someone to pump. I imagine that there were plenty of very bored organ-pumpers. But remembering that mechanical or electric organ blowers are essentially a 20th-century invention—how many of us would have volunteered hours to pump while Buxtehude, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, or Widor was practicing? Maybe rival organists tried to infiltrate “enemy” organ lofts by embedding their choir boys in the other’s pumping squad: “What’s that Bach up to this week?”
The great Cavaillé-Coll organ in the church of St. Sulpice in Paris was built in 1862. It has about 100 stops—a very large organ by modern standards and downright huge for the days of hand-pumped organs. Charles-Marie Widor’s tenure as organist there started in 1870 and ended with his retirement in 1934 (he was hired as a temporary fill-in and never given a permanent appointment!), so we can assume that there was a magical Sunday when Widor played the organ for the first time supported by an electric blower. That must have been liberating for the organist.
When organs were pumped by hand, organists were acutely aware of how much wind they were using. The more stops you drew, the more air you used and the faster the pumper had to work. Surely more than one young gentleman quit in protest. Think of Bach’s pumpers dealing with those huge arpeggiated diminished chords midway through the Toccata in D Minor that start with bottom D of the pedalboard, the third biggest wind-consuming note of the organ. Imagine the master playing those soon-to-be famous chords with arms outstretched and head thrown back, reveling in the sonic experience, while the pumpers raced from bellows to bellows, trying to keep up with the demand: “Nice work,” he said, “here’s an extra ducat for your trouble.”
I have had personal experience with this phenomenon. At the time I graduated from Oberlin College I was working with an organbuilder in Ohio named Jan Leek, a wonderful man who was trained in the Netherlands and who shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with me. We restored a 19th-century organ in a church in Bethlehem, Ohio—a project that included the restoration of the original hand-pumping equipment. Garth Peacock, a member of Oberlin’s organ faculty, played the dedication recital, which included some pieces and a hymn to be played with the organ pumped by hand—and I was the pumper. The pump handle stuck out of the right-hand side of the organ case where pumper and player could see each other. As we got into the hymn, Peacock caught my eye and winked. He drew stop after stop, filled in manual chords, then added doubling in the pedals, using all the wind he could, chuckling as I flailed the pump handle up and down. I know he did it on purpose.
My other favorite organ-pumping story happened after I completed the restoration of the 1868 E. & G. G. Hook organ (Opus 466) for the Follen Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. That project also included the restoration of the hand-pumping gear, and more than one parishioner felt clever commenting that the organ could be played even during a power failure. And sure enough, one of the first times the restored organ was played in concert there was a power failure and someone from the audience volunteered to go forth and pump.
Those who know me well—and probably some casual acquaintances—know that I love the epic series of novels about the brilliant captains of the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, especially captains Horatio Hornblower (written by C. S. Forester) and Jack Aubrey (written by Patrick O’Brian). Many a turnpike toll-taker has chuckled as my lowering car window emits a hearty “belay there” (audio books have accompanied me for tens of thousands of miles of pipe organ adventuring). Both epics are full of musical allusions, such as when Captain Hornblower rounds Cape Horn in a gale after lengthy adventures in the Pacific, and the groaning of the timbers of his ship Lydia “swelled into a volume of sound comparable to that of an organ in a church.”2
Captain Jack Aubrey, an accomplished amateur violinist as well as a brilliant fighting sea captain, shared hundreds of evenings making music with his closest friend, the equally able cellist and ship’s surgeon (and prolific intelligence agent) Stephen Maturin while traveling through 360º of longitude and twenty novels. Their evening concerts (typically enhanced with toasted cheese and marsala) pepper the active story with allegory while giving the reader a chance to understand the musical tastes of the day. It’s a delight to read how these determined warriors reveled in playing chamber music or improvising on favorite melodies as they sail around the world. On several occasions they discuss the effect of all that damp salt air on their instruments, and Jack Aubrey is smart enough to leave his precious Amati violin at home, distinguishing it from his seagoing fiddle.
In Post Captain, the second book of the series, Captain Aubrey returns to shore at a dramatic and complicated moment in his life. Heavily in debt, badly wounded after a violent sea battle, and thrilled with his new promotion to post-captain as a result of his victory, he is confined to the Duchy of the Savoy in London, a sanctuary where debtors were protected from arrest. After learning the boundaries of the Savoy from his innkeeper, he goes out walking:

Wandering out, he came to the back of the chapel: an organ was playing inside, a sweet, light-footed organ hunting a fugue through its charming complexities. He circled the railings to come to the door, but he had scarcely found it, opened it and settled himself in a pew before the whole elaborate structure collapsed in a dying wheeze and a thick boy crept from a hole under the loft and clashed down the aisle, whistling. It was a strong disappointment, the sudden breaking of a delightful tension, like being dismasted under full sail.
“What a disappointment, sir,” he said to the organist, who had emerged into the dim light. “I had so hoped you would bring it to a close.”
“Alas, I have no wind,” said the organist, an elderly parson. “That chuff lad has blown his hour, and no power on earth will keep him in. But I am glad you liked the organ—it is a Father Smith.3 A musician, sir?”
“Oh, the merest dilettante, sir; but I should be happy to blow for you, if you choose to go on. It would be a sad shame to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind.”
“Should you, indeed? You are very good sir. Let me show you the handle—you understand these things, I am sure . . . ”
So Jack pumped and the music wound away and away, the separate strands following one another in baroque flights and twirls until at last they came together and ran to the final magnificence . . . ”4

The next day while writing a letter to Stephen to share the news of his promotion, Captain Aubrey recognized the depth of his humor:
. . . in the Savoy chapel I said the finest thing in my life. The parson was playing a Handel fugue, the organ-boy deserted his post, and I said “it would be a pity to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind,” and blew for him. It was the wittiest thing! I did not smoke it entirely all at once, however, only after I had been pumping for some time; and then I could hardly keep from laughing aloud. It may be that post-captains are a very witty set of men, and that I am coming to it.5
That reminds me of E. Power Biggs’s quip after recording Handel’s organ concerti in the 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the instrument that Handel played in St. James’ Church, Great Packington, Warwickshire, when he recalled “handling the handle Handel handled.” I’m long-winded today. I’ve got lots more to say about organ wind, and I’m running out of space. So join me here next month for Thar she blows—some more.

The Ugly Duckling”

I am a hopelessly besotted fan of Patrick O’Brien’s magnificent series of novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Through twenty-one novels, O’Brien carries his cast of characters from exuberant youth to deep old age, hardened by the experiences of more than twenty years at war. The main characters are “Lucky Jack” Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. We first meet Aubrey as an unruly lieutenant, who matures into one of the most illustrious post captains in the Navy. Captain Aubrey is impossibly unlucky and foolish when ashore, exposing himself to scams, cuckolding his superior officers, and occasionally winding up in prison for debt. When at sea, he is universally admired for his seamanship, leadership, intuition, courage, and cheerful demeanor.  

His close friend is Stephen Maturin, a complicated and curmudgeonly character, who is a physician and “natural philosopher” (biological researcher). When we meet him he is flat broke because his wealthy patient died, and a servant made off with all the money. But as the story progresses, we learn that he is not only widely recognized as a brilliant scientist, but is one of the most important members of the British Naval Intelligence Service. Stephen is responsible for much of Jack’s seagoing success as he cooks up secret missions, insisting that Jack sail as captain with him.

In the opening paragraphs of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, Jack and Stephen meet at a concert, and the first days of their friendship are based on music, the one thing they have in common. Jack convinces Stephen to sail with him in his first command to serve as ship’s surgeon, allowing him to take advantage of world travel to fuel his scientific studies. 

Stephen plays the cello and spends a lot of time during long voyages, between battles, arranging various masterpieces for them to play together. Jack plays the violin, well enough that having received a “fortune in prize money” for capturing an enemy vessel, he indulges himself in the purchase of an Amati violin. (Stephen goes to the shop with him to offer his opinion about the instrument.)

They both play quite well for amateurs, often sharing a game of improvisation and finding relief in blasting through their favorite pieces, such as the “often played, yet ever fresh Corelli in C Major.” Night after night in the captain’s cabin, Aubrey’s steward, Preserved Killick, prepares toasted parmesan cheese in a silver chafing dish, complaining to his mate about the horrible noise of the tuning, “There they go again, screech, screech, scrape, scrape . . . and never a tune you could sing to, not if you were drunk as Davie’s sow . . . “

The musical subplot is always bubbling through this massive tale. It’s accurate and learned, and often very funny. One afternoon while in London, Jack takes refuge in a church where he is delighted to find that the organ is being played, but halfway through the piece, it whimpers to a stop mid-phrase and a surly teenager lurches out of the loft and onto the street. The priest who was playing comes down, apologizes for the sudden stop (the teenager was pumping the organ and the hour was up), and Jack compliments the beautiful playing, “Händel, wasn’t it?” The priest mentions that the organ was built by Father Willis. Jack offers to pump the organ himself so he can hear the end of the piece. As the music continues, Jack starts chuckling as he thinks, “it would be a pity to leave Händel (handle) up in the air for lack of wind.”

The many passages that describe the handling of those great nineteenth-century ships are equally colorful and accurate, making two passions of mine that are nurtured as I re-read these books.

Early on, Jack gets by on his innate seamanship alone, relying on others for the advanced mathematics necessary for navigation. But when Stephen is away on a mission and there’s no music, Jack listens in to the on-board schoolroom of his midshipmen (who are young teenagers), one of whom is so gifted that Jack is shamed into joining in. He is enchanted by spherical trigonometry (whatever that is!), and quickly adds deep scientific skills to his toolbox. That student, whose first name is Richard, is “horribly disfigured” by acne and is given the nickname of Spotted Dick, which is a dessert dish of custard and currants, popular among the officers.

Several novels later we meet up with Spotted Dick again, acne long past, who has matured into a “seagoing Apollo, perfectly unaware of his beauty.” He is serving as flag lieutenant under Admiral William Pellew, also a musician who “never sailed with anything less than a clavichord,” and “required his steward to take tuning lessons” in a long series of unlikely foreign ports, and who was known for “his appreciation of beautiful young men.”

The transformation from “Spotted Dick” to “A Seagoing Apollo” reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, The Ugly Duckling, in which all the farmyard creatures make fun of the clumsy, unsightly little black bird and receive their comeuppance when he matures into a beautiful swan.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Over the years working in the organ business, I’ve enjoyed it when our projects have attracted the attention of the local press. When a little weekly country newspaper gets wind of an organ project in a church, they show up flannel-shirted with camera hanging from a strap and ask ridiculous, ubiquitous questions. As we answer, we can tell that they don’t understand what we’re talking about, and invariably, when the story is published it’s full of inaccuracies. I remember a front-page photo of my teenaged self proudly holding up a stenciled façade pipe, bearing the caption, “Organbuilder John Bishop voices an organ pipe.” That made two promotions for me—to organbuilder and voicer—and my co-workers bowed and scraped appropriately, tongue in cheek, dope-slaps included.

As I grew into my newly acquired “in name only” skills (I’m still not much of a voicer—I rely on my smarter colleagues for that), I learned to understand that the pipe organ is an arcane subject. I received an important lesson from a member of a church where the Organ Clearing House was delivering a rebuilt organ. We had organized an “Open House” in the nave of the church the evening after unloading the truck. Some fifty people showed up, and I walked about through the heaps of bewildering parts, picking things up and explaining their purpose, trying to give the group a general idea of the assortment of components it takes to make up a working pipe organ. One gentleman spoke up, saying that now he understood why it all cost so much.

When an organbuilder is selling or planning a project with a committee of a client church, he may be the only person in the room who understands the subject. Through those experiences, I realize what a responsibility it is to carry the trust of the client, who nods his head, signs the contract, and hopes for the best.

I often hear comments from parishioners indicating that it had never occurred to them that the organ was separate from the building, that it required maintenance, and was in any way sensitive to what goes on around it. How often have we finished a project, only to learn that the floors of the church would be sanded and refinished the next month? How could that have failed to come up as we neared the end of the project, BEFORE we put the reeds in?

A shuttered view

It’s easy enough to understand innocent ignorance regarding the organ as a musical instrument, but it troubles me to realize that more than a few prominent symphony conductors consider the pipe organ to be expressionless. I think this notion comes from the concept that a violinist, clarinetist, or trumpeter can alter the volume and timbre within the duration of a note, while a single organ pipe can only play a single note at a single volume level. Also, the classical idea of terraced dynamics, which has played such an important role in our study of historically informed performance, enforces the idea of the uninitiated that the pipe organ is unexpressive. 

These are simplistic views. Organists know that expression comes from the manipulation of stops and shutters. It’s a physical and mechanical fact that any accent, crescendo or decrescendo, “soloed out” melody, change of timbre—in short, any alteration of dynamics at all—is accomplished by the organist manipulating “the machine” by pushing buttons, operating pedals, drawing stops, each motion in addition to the simple playing of notes. The uninitiated may focus on the machine, but the effect is all art.

The apparent ugly duckling blossoms into the dramatic and beautiful expressive instrument.

I believe that the modern pipe organ, with its sophisticated combination actions and efficient and effective expression enclosures, is the most expressive of musical instruments. The skillful organist can take the listener smoothly from a distant whisper to a heroic roar in a few seconds—and today’s large instruments have a greater dynamic range than a full symphony orchestra.

There’s an apocryphal story that I believe is true about the first rehearsal of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with the brand-new Fisk organ in the Meyerson Center. The orchestra was preparing (of course) Camille Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. When the last movement started with the monumental C-major chord from the organ, a trombone player raised a white flag with his slide.

The Meyerson Fisk is a landmark in my opinion, as it was the first of a new wave of brilliant concert instruments with tracker key action. 

And let’s not forget that early in the twentieth century, a tribe of brilliant concert organists, many of whom as municipal organists were city employees, played with just as a great a dynamic and expressive range, as they explored the extraordinary, newly conceived electro-pneumatic instruments being produced by such innovators as Ernest Skinner.

Perhaps twenty years ago, I was having a conversation with organ historian and consultant Barbara Owen, during which she asserted, “We need to get the organ out of the church.” At first I thought that was ridiculous. After all, without the long illustrious history of the organ in church, we wouldn’t have the pipe organ today. But reflecting on the (let’s face it) diminishing role of organized religion in American society, it’s true that if we would only find organs in churches, most people would never hear an organ.

How ordinawy

So says Madeline Kahn as Lily von Shtupp as she receives a gift of flowers in Mel Brooks’s zany 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles.

When we think of the pipe organ, we might be thinking of the grand and glorious instruments that knock our socks off in church and in the concert hall. But we have to admit that for every inspiring and beautiful organ, there are at least two dowdy old tubs lurking in dusty balconies. Through decades of working in and around organs, I’ve been aware that thousands of people think of the organ as a wheezy, murky thing that utters incomprehensible sounds at unexpected moments. (I suppose that some of this may be operator error.)

I’ve written many times that it was the corporate assessment of these dull cousins that inspired the revival of classic styles of organbuilding that ultimately led to the further revival of interest in the spectacular electro-pneumatic instruments that dominated the early twentieth-century. Many people defined this movement as “organ wars,” known as the battle between electric and mechanical actions. But it was deeper than that—I think it was the battle between good and bad organs. Something had to be done in response to the content-lacking factory-produced organs of post-World War II America. 

There’s that ugly duckling again.

The best of both worlds

Last Thursday night, one of Wendy’s clients treated us to fancy “down front” seats at Paul Winter’s “Winter Solstice Celebration.” The venue was New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, affectionately known as St. John the Unfinished. It’s a grand Gothic structure on Amsterdam Avenue, unfinished as the West End façade and towers are not complete, transepts haven’t been built, and interior stonework is incomplete. We understand that it will remain in this state of perpetual incompletion. The six-hundred-foot-long interior is breathtaking, and it has all the functions, chapels, and memorial spaces needed for majestic worship and pageant. As an unfinished edifice, it’s a metaphor for Work in Progress, symbolizing the state of religious celebration and thought.

I am well aware that many colleagues disagree with the frequent secular use of that most grand of sacred spaces. Since the twelfth century, worshippers have been building Gothic spaces out of stone—spaces that are so lofty and massive as to be inspirations to us before the introduction of any content, whether religious or secular. The Episcopal Diocese of New York has condoned and promoted the liberal use of its landmark space for decades.

On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit surreptitiously strung a high-wire between the two towers of New York’s World Trade Center and famously spent forty-five minutes walking back and forth, saluting, kneeling, even lying on the wire. New Yorkers were transfixed and the police were baffled by the spectacle. That incredible feat and the years of planning that preceded it are documented in the award-winning documentary film, Man on Wire. To commemorate that singular public expression of self-confidence, theater, and the human spirit, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine includes Petit on a long list of Artists in Residence and has installed permanent fittings in the fabric of the building that allow him to hang a high-wire across the nave.

For thirty-five consecutive years, the cathedral has hosted the Paul Winter Consort’s celebration of the winter solstice. The heavily amplified instruments of the Consort (saxophones, oboe, cello, bass, keyboards, percussion) and the Latino night-club style of Puerto Rican headliner Danny Rivera are not the usual fare of Episcopal cathedrals, but the production standards, the choreography, and the iconography combined to provide a deeply moving spiritual experience.

We were especially moved by the depiction of the sunrise that ended the first half of the three-hour production. A procession down the length of the seemingly endless nave, up the steps to the chancel, and all the way to the great granite columns that define the apse was accompanied by brilliant music dominated by the sounds of more than a dozen great bronze gongs. Dramatic lighting and smoky effects focused on the distant front of the church as the sun, depicted as the mother of all gongs in polished, spotlighted brass, rose out the depths and ascended to a dizzying height. The thing must have been ten feet in diameter, big enough to look dramatic in that vast place. It was accompanied toward the heavens by a safety-harnessed “Gonger,” wielding a mallet of suitable heroic size in a slow rhythm that produced a crescendo of earth-shaking tones that echoed throughout the cathedral.

Wendy and I have visited the site of the quarry where those fifty-foot high columns were made on a specially built lathe. It’s in Maine on the island of Vinalhaven in Penobscot Bay. As the spectacle of the sunrise unfolded, I remembered that visit and marveled at the role those columns were playing in that glorious theater.

In 2008, Quimby Pipe Organs completed a comprehensive rebuilding and renovation of the cathedral’s great Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ. The Organ Clearing House was privileged to play a role in that herculean job, providing scaffolding and rigging and assisting the staff of QPO with the installation of the completed organ. It was a thrill for us to experience that building “up close and personal,” learning the legends of the place and experiencing the singular acoustics when the space was empty.

The organ was used heavily during the Paul Winter extravaganza, and I wept as we were enveloped by its gorgeous tones. The emotions generated by the scope of the sound were enhanced by memories of the spooky heights of the hoisting scaffolding, the difficulties of getting four semi-trailers full of organ parts into the hundred-feet-up organ chambers, and the incongruity of logistics meetings held while sitting in folding chairs surrounding the bronze medallion in the chancel floor.

Through the miracle of concert technology, the instrumentalists on the stage in the Great Crossing were effortlessly accompanied by the organ, more than a hundred feet away. I pointed out to our hosts that the organ was the only instrument that was not amplified, and while Paul Winter’s soprano saxophone was much nearer to us, and the speakers through which he played were almost directly in front of us, the organ was by far the more present—a triumph for acoustic music.

The majesty of the room, the creativity of the music and the production, the energy of the instrumentalists, singers, and dancers, and the enthusiasm of the vast audience (must have been over three thousand people) combined to create a beautiful artistic and spiritual experience. What’s wrong with that? 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Cracking the code
In April 2008 the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered John Harbison’s Symphony Number 5 for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists with symphony orchestra. The texts are from three poems on Orpheus, the tragic figure who tried to rescue his lover Euridice from the underworld. The score calls for a huge orchestra. Here’s the way it was listed in the BSO program book:

baritone and mezzo-soprano soloists, three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (second doubling e-flat clarinet, third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, contra bassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion (three players—I: glockenspiel, vibraphone, cymbals, metal blocks, guiro, slapstick; II: concert marimba, high bell, triangle, tenor drum, maracas, high and highest claves, sandpaper blocks; III: large bell [E], tuned gongs [E, G], cowbells, snare drum, bass drum, sandpaper blocks), timpani, piano, harp, electric guitar, and strings.

Let me tell you, it was a surprise to hear the sound of an electric guitar from a guy in a tux on that venerable stage!
You ask, what’s a guiro? It’s a Latin American instrument made from a gourd with notches cut in it. You scrape a stick across the notches to make the sound. And by the way, if the large bell and the gongs are tuned to specific notes, why isn’t the high bell?
We are used to hearing thrilling performances of huge orchestral pieces. It’s not uncommon to see a hundred-member orchestra, even with an array of solo singers and a huge chorus. We marvel at how hundreds of musicians can be kept together in any kind of coherent ensemble, but when a great conductor raises a finger the response is instant. I remember witnessing a rehearsal at Tanglewood in which Seiji Ozawa was leading an orchestra and choir of student musicians in a Bach cantata. There was a scrabbly moment that could only have been caused by singers’ inattention, and I was fascinated watching Ozawa pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then at the tenors. That was the end of that lack of focus. It was as if his fingers were ray guns.
When we perform a familiar piece of music we have something of a head start. We know how the piece should sound, we have an idea of how to achieve that sound, and we have past mistakes informing us. Hearing the premiere of Harbison’s symphony, I was struck by the majesty of the achievement of the ensemble in a brand-new piece of music. It was new for all of the musicians. But much more, I was struck by the composer’s ability to conceive such complex sounds on paper, to lay the score out across the orchestra in such a way as to achieve antiphonal effects, create curious inner ensembles of two or three instruments seated forty feet apart, and affect a balance of the wide range of timbres. How did Mr. Harbison know how to balance eighteen first violins and thirteen second violins with the guiro?
When a composer is sitting at a desk with blank manuscript paper (or the electronic equivalent) that can accommodate 35 or 36 independent parts, what does he hear in his head? Can he hear the balances and contrasts emerge as he starts to put notes on the page? Can he tell that the horns will be too loud in this passage? Does he know that the guiro will balance with the strings? Does he toss and turn all night because in his mind’s ear the large bell (E) is too loud?
Reflect on the magic of musical notation—how it stands as a code for a palette of pitches and tones arranged in the passage of time. Is the printed score actually the piece of music, or is it code for the realization of a piece of music? Perhaps it doesn’t become music until someone cracks the code and the ink blots on the score become audible sound. The score implies not only melody, rhythm, and harmony, but the intricate balance of tone colors coming from so many different instruments.

Persichetti ate spaghetti he himself had made.
He spilled some sauce upon the score and called it “Serenade.”

Listen
You’re at home or in your office riffling through your music library planning the next four or five weeks of preludes and postludes. You open one volume after another, glancing at the titles and the first couple measures. What do you hear? Do you have a memory of the sound of the piece the last time you played it? Do you remember the sound of another player’s performance that particularly impressed you? Or are you simply rattling through a catalogue of titles without hearing anything?
Have you been organist of the same church for years, playing the same forty or fifty standard pieces again and again? Do you use the same registrations each time you repeat a piece? And when you play that piece on a different organ, do you draw the stops by name as if you were at your home instrument, making the appropriate substitution of 4? Rohrflöte for 4? Koppelflöte? Close enough? Not if the caps of the Koppelflöte are loose so the speech is poor.

Listen
Organists have a special privilege in that they are free to “orchestrate” the pieces they play in the same way the symphonic composer can choose between an E-flat clarinet and an English horn to play a particular melody. To simply draw stops by name without listening critically to how they balance, how they complement the composer’s intentions, or your own feelings and moods of the day is to deprive yourself and your listeners of the feature that distinguishes the organ from virtually all other musical instruments—the wealth of tone colors possible by thoughtful, creative, inspired choice of registration. The organist who doesn’t consider registration as important a musical element as melody, harmony, and rhythm is missing a dimensional opportunity.

Listen
Many church organists only play on the organ at their home church. If you’ve been playing the same organ and only the same organ for years, you may have fallen into habits of registration. Take an afternoon to reacquaint yourself with your instrument. Invite a colleague to your church. Ask him to play a couple contrasting pieces so you can hear the organ “out in the room.” Listen to a few of the pieces you play most often using “your” registrations. Try lots of different registrations and listen critically. Take a piece that you’ve always played on principals and try it on reeds. The brilliant harmonics of reed voices might help an important inner voice sing out. Work hard and specifically to understand the listeners’ impressions of the instrument. Walk around the church as the organ is played, or stand near the console to remind yourself of the impression you get while playing and then walk out into the church and listen to how the impression might be different. You might be surprised at how your conceptions differ between playing and listening to the same organ.

Last week I read in the newsletter of the Boston AGO chapter that Dr. Thomas Richner passed away on July 12 at the age of 96. [See p. 10, and Lorenz Maycher’s interview with Thomas Richner in The Diapason, November 2005.] He was organist at the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist in New York for many years, and at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston where it was my privilege to care for the spectacular Aeolian-Skinner organ (#1203, four manuals, 237 ranks).
When I knew Tom Richner he was in his early eighties—spry, energetic, and a touch wily with a sly sparkle in his eyes. He loved a racy joke, he loved a tasty lunch, he was a master of the double-entendre, and he was as devoted to his work as a church musician as anyone I’ve known. He called me “Pee-pee”—come to think of it, he called everyone Pee-pee. And everyone called him “Uncle T.”
Tom Richner was an inspired organist, pianist, and teacher. It was a treat to watch him prepare a piece at the organ—a tiny man seated at a behemoth of an organ console choosing gorgeous tones from the vast array available in that huge organ. He listened. He never took registrations for granted, but tried countless combinations before settling on just the right sound. I remember his unusual choice of the Choir Tuba—a very powerful and brilliant Trumpet rank—with the box closed as the voice for the cantus firmus of Bach’s chorale prelude, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. His rationale? It’s the only reed in the organ that will trill fast enough! (He played that piece at quite a spiffy clip.)
It was my sense that he could draw as large a variety of tone from the single “rank” of piano strings as he could from the Aeolian-Skinner organ. He specialized in the piano sonatas of Mozart, which he knew intimately, and his playing was as colorful as I’ve heard. I have a copy of his dissertation, “Orientation for Interpreting Mozart’s Piano Sonatas,” in which he combined meticulous scholarship with his love of the music, sharing the insights gained from many decades of study and performance.
He had a home in Port Jefferson, New York that housed a beautiful Steinway piano and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner unit organ—as I remember it had about twelve ranks. Several times he asked me to tune the organ, and I installed a solid-state combination action. Driving from Boston to Port Jefferson involved taking a ferry from Bridgeport, Connecticut across Long Island Sound. Tom had an invariable habit of stopping for breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant along Route 95 in Rhode Island. The first time I made the trip with him we agreed to meet at the HoJo’s. I got there first and told the hostess I wasn’t quite sure I was in the right place. When I described Tom to her she looked at her watch and said, “Oh no, he’s not due for about ten minutes.” Sure enough, there he was ten minutes later, so regular in his habits that a restaurant staff could tell time by his arrival! When the waitress came to take our orders she only asked me what I wanted. She knew perfectly well what he would order.
When we left the restaurant, I was to follow him to the ferry slip. It was all I could do to keep up. Remember the speed of those Bach trills.
When I was wiring the combination action in his house organ, I had the great treat of being a “fly on the wall” as he gave a piano lesson to a graduate student. She was a young Korean woman preparing a Mozart piano concerto for an important competition. The lesson lasted more than four hours. It was all done from memory, and as I sat quietly inside the organ soldering away I heard the two of them analyze, criticize, and transform her performance. During that afternoon, Tom barely touched the piano. He sat in a comfortable chair listening with his eyes closed, jumping to his feet periodically to interrupt her with a fresh point. I consider that piano lesson one of my richest musical experiences.
I loved hearing Tom tell stories about musicians and organbuilders. He was eloquent describing David McK. Williams leading the choir of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York in oratorios on Sunday afternoons. Williams directed from the console while playing wonderful transcriptions of the orchestral accompaniments—but what impressed Tom so much was the sense of theater. The seamless flow and exquisite timing of the service and the magical meltdowns from fortissimo to quiet nothingness stuck out his memory as powerful influences on his own musicianship.
He also loved to tell a story about G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner who was planning a new antiphonal division for the organ at Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist when Tom was the organist there. Tom asked about the possibility of enclosing a few echo stops with their own set of shutters inside the expression chamber of the Antiphonal organ, providing a double expression. Replied Harrison, “wouldn’t that be gilding the lily?” In that exchange, organist and organbuilder were exploring possibilities, pushing boundaries, creating the machinery that would produce a stunning musical effect.
The composer orchestrates his music, deploying a vast collection of timbres and personalities to produce just the right effect. The organist interprets a piece of music by deploying the sounds of the given instrument. He listens carefully and chooses voices with thought and discrimination. And the congregation is reminded of the majesty of the organ. This matters.

Notes 1. Frank Rippl, “OHS 52nd National Convention, July 11–17, 2007, Central Indiana,” The Diapason, February 2008, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 24–29.

Since the beginning of this century, the recital calendar of The Diapason has included numerous listings for Ken Cowan. A native of Thorold, Ontario, Canada, Cowan was first taught organ by his father, David Cowan; he subsequently studied with James Bigham, with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Thomas Murray at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has held organist positions at St. Bartholomew’s, St. James Episcopal Church, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia; during his college years he was on the roster of associate organists for the Wanamaker Grand Court organ in Philadelphia. He presently serves as Assistant Professor of Organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey; Rider University has honored him with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.
A featured artist at the 2004 AGO convention in Los Angeles and during the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis (as one of several players during a concert recorded for Pipedreams), Ken Cowan has also performed at many AGO regional conventions, as well as at conventions of the Organ Historical Society and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. His discography comprises numerous recordings (for the JAV label) on Skinner instruments, including The Art of the Symphonic Organist, recorded on the 1921 Skinner organ at the Parish Church of St. Luke, Evanston, Illinois. (Note: John Speller’s review of this recording in The Diapason praised Cowan’s choice of repertoire, demonstration of the organ’s colors, and skill with buildup and decrescendo, calling the disc “one of the finest I have heard in some time.” See The Diapason, August 2004, p. 14.) With Justin Bischof, he recorded Aaron David Miller’s Double Concerto for organ with the Zurich Symphony Orchestra, on the Kleuker organ in the Tonhalle in Zurich (Ethereal Recordings). Cowan’s repertoire is broad, but favors nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, from Bossi to Liszt, Wagner to Widor, Dupré to Roger-Ducasse, and much in between. He is associated with transcriptions, yet these do not dominate either his recital programs or his recordings. As a performer he seems relaxed, taking any difficulties in stride. Ken Cowan is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

JR: Let’s talk about your DNA! Your father is an organist, and other grandparents were too, correct?
KC: Yes, two grandmothers and great-grandmother Cowan. Thurza Cowan was an organist, and I think she must have been pretty good too, because the repertoire that is still sitting around my house in Canada shows she played some really difficult things.

JR: Were those the days when you had to have a pumper?
KC: A little bit after that, I think it was. She played a Woodstock organ. I saw a picture of the old console, and it looks like a theatre organ console. But it would have been electrified, I think.

JR: And your grandmothers?
KC: My father’s mother and my mother’s mother both played, each as a local parish organist.

JR: Did your grandmother teach your father?
KC: No, actually; that’s not our family’s habit. My father studied with a local organist named George Hannahson, actually a very good player; the brothers Hannahson did a lot of the church music in the area. Except for the things that my dad showed me to get me started at the organ, I think everybody in my family who learned an instrument always studied with somebody outside the family.

JR: Were your first lessons with your father?
KC: He got me started with the instrument. He didn’t teach me piano, so we always had it in mind that I would eventually find an organ teacher outside of our house.

JR: Did you insist on organ lessons, or did he suggest you should take them?
KC: No, it was me. He insisted that I study the maximum amount of piano possible before I ever touched the organ. Ever since I was three years old, I would hang around the organ bench, and I knew what all the stops were. I knew the difference between a Lieblich flute and a Rohr flute when I was little—before I could play anything. And I was the token key-holder in the family—if the reeds needed to be tuned, I would be carted down to the church. The arrangement was that if I was well-behaved in church, he would play whatever my favorite organ tunes were before we would go home. I still remember that.

JR: So what were your favorite organ pieces when you were a wee lad?
KC: They were a little different from what they are now! (laughter) Probably mostly little songs that I knew how to sing at the time. Or wedding pieces and old campy hymns, I used to like those too—and I knew all the words. Somewhere I have a tape of myself singing along, I think—locked away! Anyway, I was fortunate that there was a really nice Casavant organ from the ’20s in the church where my father played, a three-manual organ, so it was great just to get to know registration on a nice instrument first. And we always had a lousy piano—which is still there, actually! So to have this really nice organ—I couldn’t resist but to learn how to play it—or try.

JR: How old were you when you started playing the organ?
KC: I knew how to play a hymn on the organ, but I really started to learn pieces around eighth grade, so twelve or thirteen. I knew how to play the piano pretty well by then. In fact, I got a lot more interested in piano after I realized how much I really liked playing the organ. I learned about some organ pieces that had been arranged for piano—I remember one was the Liszt B-A-C-H—I guess if you don’t realize that it’s a hard piece
. . . . So I improved a lot as a pianist after I decided I wanted to try to become as good an organist as I possibly could, and realized at that time, too, that piano was the key, at least for a lot of it. A couple years after that, studying some Bach and other things, I heard music of Dupré for the first time. So I went along for a while just learning all the pieces that made me think “oh, that’s a really neat piece!” It wasn’t the most logical progression, but it worked out all right.

JR: What was your first recital like?
KC: First recitals on the organ—I was 13 or 14. At that time it was mostly playing the Widor Toccata, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor—I used to work on lots of Bach pieces when I was in high school, so I always programmed that. I could practice the same pieces quite a lot, unlike now where there are piles and piles of things to get through in a short amount of time. But at least when I began performing I was confident that “I’ve been playing this Bach piece for a few months, it’ll probably be all right.”

JR: What was your first church position?
KC: I was sort of the perpetual assistant organist! I worked that way alongside my dad for the last year or so of high school, so I guess outside of any kind of familial supervision was when I went to college. I was assistant at St. Clement’s Church—and that was being thrown into the deep end of the pool, because Peter Conte was the organist at that time and of course ran a pretty tight ship, and still does there. I stayed at St. Clement’s the whole time I was in college in Philadelphia, and worked for a couple years at St. Mary the Virgin, and then at St. James Madison Avenue, and then at St. Bartholomew’s.

JR: You had said that when you were first studying, you weren’t sure about a career. At what point did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?
KC: I think that when I went away to college I knew pretty well that music was going to be what I would do primarily. And I never had any doubt that certainly I’d always be involved in music in my life. But I guess I was brought up in a casual enough way that no one ever said “You must be a musician.” And there are plenty of other interesting things out there to do! So it was by the time I went away to Curtis for college. I was fortunate that they were willing to take me in, and it was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate, in every place and with everyone with whom I’ve studied—I really made some lucky choices.

JR: At this point, could you identify who your big influences are?
KC: I think now it’s sort of a conglomeration. But there’s no one that I’ve ever studied with who hasn’t been an influence, and recordings are very valuable too. I remember when I was in high school—even though it wasn’t a complete immersion in music like college, I remember clearly what I learned from James Bigham, who was my teacher at that time—a major influence and a masterful player and teacher. At Curtis, of course, I was studying with John Weaver, and he had a different approach to teaching and was demanding about what was to be expected week to week.
My experience at Curtis was great. I still remember bringing in—I think it was my second year there—the Liszt Ad nos, and I was trying to be conservative, in the sense of not using countless general pistons. At that time the organ at Curtis Hall had just twelve general pistons, so I learned it using only one level, and I thought, “well, that’s a bit of restraint here”—a mere twelve generals, with lots of divisionals. I finished playing through it, and we talked about the music, and John Weaver said, “Now, I just should tell you, that when you’re approaching the registration of a piece like this, you can’t always count on having a dozen general pistons. I just bet that through use of more divisional pistons, I could work out all the registrations for this piece with no compromise whatsoever, on six general pistons.” And the amazing thing is—that he could! He was really impressive in that way, because, having decades of touring experience, he’s mindful that there weren’t always multiple memory levels. So he was very encouraging about people not being a slave to a computer combination action. For example, if you hit a piston for a chorale prelude registration that had a flute here and a cornet there, you’d be asked—“Can’t you remember these stops? Why do you have to hit a piston?”
Then of course, Thomas Murray is sort of a wonder in his own way. I enjoy just watching him at an organ—how he approaches the instrument, how to choose registrations—musically and registrationally always doing the most with the least, and loving every minute of it. I think a lot of people associate him with “oh, and he hits 500 Swell pistons.” Actually he doesn’t; he uses the fewest number to get the greatest effect. I didn’t realize that until really watching.
Martin Jean began teaching at Yale the same year I began studying there, and he was a really interesting person to study with as well. I had lessons with him for a semester at Yale while Tom Murray was on sabbatical; in addition to a coaching here or there at other times, students in the Yale department were free to coach with faculty outside of their own studio. Martin was full of curiosity about compositions and their possible interpretations, so I would always leave lessons with him pondering many possibilities. And I remember along the way I had a few lessons with McNeil Robinson, and he, in terms of how to learn a piece of music in a really thorough way, is just masterful. But you don’t have to study with someone for five years to get something immensely valuable, that you’ll never forget.

JR: Were you fairly confident with your registration ability before you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray?
KC: I guess I was. Since I was a little kid I was fascinated with how stops were built, what the different ones did, the difference between the various colors, and so on. And there were enough nice instruments around that I pretty much understood how that worked—also, my dad was good at registration himself; that helped. If you’re around someone just an hour a week, that’s different than being around somebody all the time—as an aside, you can at any point say, “hey, how come you would do this, as opposed to something else?” And then Jim Bigham, with whom I studied in high school, just has an amazing imagination for registration and a huge instrument at Holy Trinity Lutheran; that was another great stroke of good fortune for me.

JR: When you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray, did you work more on interpretation, or did they spend a lot of time with registration?
KC: A little of everything. Tom Murray in particular is very attentive to registration; even if he doesn’t change something radically, he is very sensitive to the finest details. Even if you can row your own boat to start with, I’d say to study with Weaver is to learn his system of managing a big instrument. He’s quite amazing in that he can register an entire recital in a couple of hours, and it will sound as though he’s played the organ for a long time, just because he’s so clear about exactly what he’s going to do at every point in a piece. Tom Murray is known as this “orchestralist,” who gives each color in an instrument its best opportunity to shine, so just to watch him do what he does is really an education!

JR: At Curtis, you were required to play pieces from memory. How many pieces have you memorized?
KC: Oh, probably hundreds. I think from year to year there are pieces—especially pieces that I learned when I was in high school—that I find I can usually play without really thinking about it much at all. From year to year I’ll carry around a few recital programs’ worth of repertoire, at any given time, and I try to keep on expanding that. During school semester, for example, there’s just not time to practice the number of hours a day that I’d love to, so I’ll always practice technical things on the piano, even if I don’t touch an organ. I find that to maintain a few hours of music is manageable, but it takes a lot more time to be constantly learning dozens of pieces.

JR: Do you have some favorite pieces? Desert island pieces?
KC: I’ve always loved Bach, and I think as is the case with so many people I ended up playing the organ because of the music of Bach. As things have gone, I’ve gotten into a lot of repertoire that is far from Bach—I’ve always loved symphonic organs, orchestral transcriptions and that sort of thing. But I think I could do just fine with some of the great works by Bach.
Now as far as what’s fun to play in a concert, on, say, a particular type of organ—for Skinner organs, they’re great at something English Romantic; the Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue is a fun piece to play because it relies quite a lot on the interpreter, as does Liszt, Reubke, Reger—if you hear three people play the same piece by Liszt, or Reger, or Reubke, it will sound completely different, as I think it should.
Many people who play those pieces think that it couldn’t possibly be done any other way than their own, because they require a very strong interpretive perspective, but in reality there are of course many possible interpretations. I love playing transcriptions, because on an American symphonic organ, you really push the instrument to the edge of what it’s able to do, and that’s always kind of fun. And historically it’s been controversial because for much of the twentieth century the attitude of most organists was “why would you do such a thing? Go learn some more legitimate organ pieces!”

JR: It’s nice stuff!
KC: Yes, there are so many great pieces that weren’t originally composed for the organ. I think once you do learn most of the standard organ repertoire, it’s fun to look beyond it a little bit and see how an instrument can work at interpreting something else. I have to confess, too, that I started listening to records of transcriptions when I was in high school. I have old recordings by George Thalben-Ball, for example, and I still remember getting two recordings of transcriptions by Tom Murray and Thomas Trotter, I think both made in the ’80s, and so I thought, “Wow! That instrument sounds great—and very expressive. Wouldn’t it be fun to learn how to do that?”
Anybody who gets into this kind of orchestral stuff might be pigeon-holed with “Oh, all he plays is Wagner,” or, “All he plays are transcriptions,” which of course I don’t think is true of anybody who does. One of the keys to having success with transcriptions, though, is to know when it’s a good idea not to play something, because one of the pitfalls about the organ is you cannot bring exactly the same program to every instrument, or else you’ll win some and lose some. I find as with some of the big Romantic works, a transcription can sound great on an ideal instrument and it can sound like a dismal failure on the wrong instrument. I hope to usually be a good judge of when’s the time, and when’s not the time, to play a particular part of the repertoire.

JR: How about the future of this instrument with young people?
KC: I’m always glad when I know someone is bringing kids to a recital. And in a way, it’s a good reason to think about programming very carefully. Every once in a while I’ll play a program that might get a little too—mature for the newcomer.
If I were only playing for myself, I could go on for days listening to very intense-sounding organ music. But I’m not just playing for me; though I guess some people would say you should always be playing as though no one else is there—but someone else IS there. (laughter) So I am usually quite cognizant of the fact that there may be some young person there who’s never heard an organ recital before.

JR: Do you ever program a specific piece with children in mind?
KC: If I know they’re going to be there, yes. Things that are very effective with kids are pieces that are programmatic and tell a story, or pieces that really are “visual” in how the instrument is used. Kids immediately get a kick out of the fact that there are all these different colors and that wow, the organist plays with his feet, and beyond that things like Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre are great for kids, because they understand—they can tell what’s going on in the story as it’s going along. Of course, that’s a transcription, but there’s George Akerley’s A Sweet for Mother Goose nursery rhyme suite—that would be just the thing. I’ve heard some people do things like Carnival of the Animals and so on—that’s another work that’s not originally an organ piece, but can certainly get children’s interest in the instrument. And they all love the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!

JR: How do you plan a program? Fast–slow, or loud–soft, or keys?
KC: Having interesting key relationships can be nice, particularly if you segue from one piece to the next. More importantly, just not flogging people with the same kind of piece over and over again is a good rule of thumb. For example, I wouldn’t play half a program of, say, a prelude and fugue by Bach, followed by a preludium by Buxtehude followed by Prelude and Fugue on the Name of BACH, and so on—but contrasting forms, contrasting styles. I’ve never been much into the philosophy that “we should always go in chronological order.” It’s more a question of how can you give a good psychological flow to it? I guess that’s the right way to describe it. And it’s different on recordings, too. I think how you listen to a recording is a little different. In a concert, you can go from fast and furious to very intimate, to scherzo, back to this, back to that. On a record, if you do exactly the same thing, you end up with people constantly adjusting the volume control.
Programming is a constant challenge. And then the trap is, when you find a combination of things that you think works really well, to then be able to get out of it. I remember reading an article years ago about Glenn Gould’s thoughts on why he stopped playing concerts; he said he was feeling that sometimes he settled in on the same small number of pieces, the philosophy being, “well, the Beethoven worked in Toronto, it’ll probably work in New York, too, so I’ll play it again!” And again, and again—and so on it goes. Trying something new, even if it means going out on a limb, is a good idea, I think.

JR: You’ve long been an Organ Historical Society convention favorite. How did that get started?
KC: Good fortune, I guess! When I was working at St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, I think it was 1996 the OHS had their convention in Philadelphia; at that time we were doing an Evensong at St. Clement’s as part of the convention, and they wanted Peter to play something, and he was already going to play a recital at the Wanamaker Store, so he said, “I’ll play the prelude, and why don’t you have my assistant play a short program after the Evensong?” I think there was some trepidation at first; “who is this guy?” I guess they liked it. And one thing led to another there; I’ve been back several times since.

JR: Yes, including in 2007 with your wife! Tell me about her, and how you cooked up this scheme.
KC: We met in graduate school; she went to Yale too. While we were students there, I had always liked an old recording I had of Jascha Heifetz and Richard Elsasser playing the Vitali Chaconne, as arranged by Leopold Auer. So on one of JAV’s Skinner series recordings, Joe Vitacco asked me to go out to Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian in Detroit, and I checked out the organ and it’s a great instrument—huge sound, and very mellow sound. I thought this would be a good accompanying organ, and that it would be neat to try and do a violin piece. So I asked Lisa to come along then, and that was the beginning of playing together. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asked to play duo programs together, so we’ve always been on the lookout for good repertoire that has been written for violin and organ, and things that transcribe well. We’ll often do an early piece, maybe something that’s contemporary written for those instruments; from the Romantic period, Rheinberger wrote some violin and organ works. I’ll often transcribe a concerto accompaniment for the end, and do a violin concerto as a violin and organ piece. And then we’ll usually do a solo piece each, too.

JR: The review of the OHS convention in the February 2008 issue of The Diapason mentions Lisa playing behind a screen.1
KC: We did the Karg-Elert Fugue, Canzona and Epilogue, for organ and violin, and a quartet of women’s voices is included at the end. I think Karg-Elert may have started this tradition himself, but there’s been a long practice of putting the violinist and the singers either offstage or in the Swell box. And at this particular church it worked, because you could open the door behind the Swell box and there was a hallway in behind. So everyone crammed in behind the chamber and you could have this diminuendo to nothing at the end. It was very unexpected color coming out of the organ chambers suddenly! It was a lot of fun, and everyone was a very good sport about the whole thing. The instrument was a Kimball organ, and certainly played repertoire well, but maybe accompanied even better. So it was nice to show that side of things.

JR: At the AGO convention in Minneapolis you played some new works. Do you play new pieces from memory?
KC: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. One of the things I’ve been working on this week is memorizing them. I find if I have a deadline, it doesn’t take long to get things like that learned. I probably spent a week or so learning each of the preludes and fugues. But then the question is—what do you want to do with it? There’s no question that I play a piece better after a year than after a week. So the rest of the time is spent just trying to refine things and get a clear interpretation, especially with brand-new pieces. The composer Henry Martin is a pianist and is probably known for composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and he teaches jazz and music theory at Rutgers, Newark. The reason for the commission was that Michael Barone really liked his piano pieces, and so commissioned him to write a couple for organ. Not knowing what his musical taste is—of course, when you learn a piece like that, I found I was initially sort of cautious in an interpretive sense—if it’s not written in the score, well, is it OK to do something? Well, he has a great imagination, and is a good sport about everything. That was actually nice to discover. Interpretive freedom is good! So I really liked them—they’re difficult, but I think will make nice pieces.

JR: Teaching versus performing—do you enjoy the balance that you have right now?
KC: Absolutely! I think it would probably be hard for me to only teach, because you end up living musically only through your students, instead of being able to do something yourself—so you need an outlet. On the other hand, it’s great to work with other people—it’s so satisfying and exciting when students work very hard and get a lot better, and you can help them along their way. This year, it was only the second time in recent memory that I didn’t play Easter Sunday some place. So before cooking dinner for family, I went to Trinity Church where two of my students play, and I had a better time listening to them accompany the Easter service than I would have if I’d done it myself! I’ve always been interested in teaching, so I have no regrets there at all.

JR: Tell us about your position at Westminster. Do you teach service playing, or does your teaching concentrate just on recital literature?
KC: Mostly my colleagues Alan Morrison, Matthew Lewis, and I end up concentrating on creating some kind of structured program of study for each student. I do at times make students learn hymns and accompaniments as part of their lessons. I find that you can teach somebody about as much about creative possibilities at the organ through hymns and accompaniments, at least from a registration point of view, as from anything else, because so often with a lot of the primary parts of the repertoire—Bach, Franck, Vierne, and so forth—you frequently follow convention or instructions for registration; in service playing you have a blank slate, and can really get acquainted with the organ in a more individualistic way.
The school’s strong emphasis on choral training provides a great background for developing graduates who can become very effective church musicians. There are classes in improvisation, courses in organ literature, there’s a class on accompanying at the organ, which is primarily a service playing course. Then the sacred music department offers courses on the history of church music, theology, choral pedagogy and management of programs, worship planning, and congregational song. A broad range of guest lecturers in the organ and sacred music departments address other specific topics. It could be a masterclass on organ playing or literature on some occasions, or frequently guest perspectives on the general field of church music in America.

JR: Do you see any consistent patterns of problems among your students?
KC: Nothing that applies to everybody. In fact, that’s one of the fun challenges of teaching—it’s all problem solving, but everybody’s a different case. For example, some students don’t learn pedal technique in a structured way, and I’m surprised that students coming in at the graduate level sometimes don’t understand very much about registration—that can be a big project. But that’s certainly not unique to everybody; some of them are great at that. Nuanced registration is a hard thing to teach in a short time. And if you encounter people who are trained to do only one thing in a particular situation, it can be a real challenge to make them more curious and sensitive to the precise character of each stop or chorus on different instruments, and how they combine with others. Then comes the issue of how to control the instrument in the context of a complex piece if they’ve never been trained to manage a console with a combination action.

JR: Do you have responsibilities at Westminster besides teaching?
KC: I also am the coordinator of the organ and sacred music program. That involves plenty of meetings, planning, and discussions with other faculty about how to proceed with programs and curriculum. In the past year we have revised the entire curriculum in organ and in sacred music. This year began the implementation of those revisions, which is a big undertaking, but a necessary step to try to keep the program from getting behind the times. Of course, I’m not doing that on my own, but I certainly have to stay involved with how things develop. And then another task for sacred music at Westminster will be to find a faculty member to succeed Robin Leaver, who just retired. Hopefully we’ll soon be looking for the next teacher of sacred music there, but in the current economic climate, universities can be tentative about filling vacancies. Always something, you know! It’s the sort of place where I can stay there until ten o’clock every night and have plenty more to greet me the next morning.

JR: Are you ever able to go hear other organists or other concerts?
KC: Here and there. There’s not as much time as I’d like there to be, because I’m often away weekends, when a lot of great concerts happen. Going to conventions and so forth, I can hear a lot of things in a short amount of time, just to keep track of who’s doing what. And then the nice thing living between New York and Philadelphia is oftentimes there will be good concerts on week nights. Plus, Princeton has some really good music series right in town. So whenever possible, I attend performances.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned?
KC: For Westminster, keeping the department growing stronger is a priority. As far as playing goes, it’s asking myself, what do I want to play now that I haven’t played before? And I’ve got lined up some recordings that I’ve been promising to make and that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I’ll just keep chipping away at them. A new CD on the big Schoenstein organ at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, was just released this February on the Raven label. That disc has German Romantic repertoire (Reger, Reubke, Karg-Elert) and a transcription of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz #1. But otherwise it’s a question of just balancing responsibilities out—and finding some time for fun, too.

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

At arm’s length
In recent months I’ve read three books about the violin, violinists, and luthiers: Stradivari’s Genius by Toby Faber (Random House, 2004), Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and The Violin Maker by John Marchese (Harper Collins, 2007). Faber is a publisher; he traces the history of six instruments made by Antonio Stradivari. Steinhardt is the first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writing about his lifelong quest for the perfect instrument. Marchese is a journalist and amateur musician writing about Sam Zygmuntowicz who is a revered luthier in Brooklyn, New York, and Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson Quartet, chronicling the process of the commissioning, creation, and delivery of a splendid instrument. I recommend any and all of these as excellent reads for anyone interested in musical instruments.
There is much overlap between the three books. Each includes a pilgrimage to Cremona, the Italian city where the world’s best violins were built by generations of Guarneris, one of whom taught Stradivari, the local boy who eclipsed all others by building close to 2,000 instruments in a 70-year career, some 600 of which are still in use. Each discusses and compares theories about what makes Stradivari’s instruments stand out. Each poignantly describes the intimate relationships between the player and his instrument with rich use of sexual and romantic metaphors.
Arnold Steinhardt gets right to the point. Five pages into his book he writes,

    When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between by my brain and my beating heart.

Lovely images, aren’t they? You can daydream about how the human musician and mechanical instrument become one. The organist and organbuilder in me delves into the possibilities. But wait! Steinhardt’s next sentence puts me in exile:

    Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say.

He completes the exclusion:

    To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

My envy of Steinhardt’s relationship with his instrument is at least a little assuaged by the beauty-salon simile—I can picture a sticky, brittle, slightly singed concoction that smells of chemicals, or Madeleine Kahn as Lili von Shtupp in Mel Brooks’s riotous film, Blazing Saddles, rebuffing an advance saying, “not the lips.” Some intimacy. Harumph. And what about the risk of simply being jilted?
In The Violin Maker, Eugene Drucker speaks of his instrument “under my ear.” He uses the phrase a number of times, his reference to the immediacy of what the violinist hears. After all, the instrument is barely an inch from the player’s ear. I reflect on how powerful a violin’s sound can be, and wonder what long-term effect that has on the player’s hearing, but Drucker clearly considers it an advantage. In contrast, it’s common to hear an organist complain about the instrument being “in my face, the Zimbel in the Brustwerk is unbearable.” That Zimbel is intended to be heard from 50 feet away—not 30 inches; how we sacrifice for our art! A tuner will tell you that sitting inside a heavy-duty expression box tuning a high-pressure Tuba is not an experience of intimacy with music “under your ear.” Tuners, identify with me—it’s the worst when you stand up to tune the bass in octaves. When you get to bottom G, the three-foot tall tenor G is necessarily right in your ear. At least when you’re tuning a powerful reed en chamade, you can duck!
Come to think of it, the fact that the tuner climbs ladders inside the instrument somehow separates the organ from the violin!
An intimate friend
My violin trilogy refers continually to the intimacy between the builder and the player of a violin. They spend hours together discussing the ideal, and as the craftsman works on the new instrument, the client’s recordings are playing in his workshop. Given the business of organbuilding—committees, contracts, deadlines, and delays (Christmas of what year?), how often do organbuilders and organists truly work together to create exactly the work of art that will be the true vehicle for the player? If I had a nickel for each time I’ve told an organ committee that the organ should be built for the coming generations and not for the current organist, I’d have a lot of nickels.
How many organists tell of their relationships with their instruments in such colorful loving terms? Because organists cannot take their favored instruments along to distant gigs, they must make peace, love, war, or at least a truce with whatever organ they encounter.
As a church organist I have had two long-term relationships with single instruments. One was a 10-year stint with a terrible organ that seemed to want to stop me from everything I tried to do. I could hardly bear it. The other was more like 20 years with an adequate instrument, comprehensive stoplist, good reliability, and a few truly beautiful voices. It didn’t stand in the way of what I played, but neither did it offer much help. I have been fortunate enough to have several extra-organic affairs with instruments I love. These experiences have allowed me the knowledge of what it’s like to play often on an organ that’s truly wonderful. I’m willing to indulge in expanding Steinhardt’s metaphor to a monumental scale. Rather than tucking a loved one under my chin, I or my fellow organists can become one with a 10-ton instrument and with the room in which it stands.
Steeple chase
Ours is a picturesque seacoast town with 19th-century brick storefronts and several distinctive steeples. One of those, the white one on the top of the hill that can be seen from miles away, is leaning to the left (allowing jabs of political humor) and threatening to fall. Because the cost of rebuilding the steeple far outstrips the resources of the parish, townspeople have mounted a public save-the-steeple effort. We’d hate to have to see all those postcards reprinted. Last Sunday I participated in a benefit recital that featured the church’s lovely little William B. D. Simmons organ (1865?) played by six different organists. It was fascinating to hear how different the organ sounded as the occupant of the bench changed. Each player offered a favorite piece, each player placed different emphasis on different voices, and each had a different approach to the attack and release of notes. And by the way, the steeple fund was satisfactorily increased.
In a simple rural setting, it was clear to me that even though Steinhardt refers to arm’s-length relationships with instruments other than violins (and I suppose violas, though he doesn’t mention them), an organist can in fact have an artistic tryst with an instrument. But with the violin trilogy in mind, a comment made that day by one of my colleagues set me to thinking. Noting that only a few stops on the Swell have complete ranks (most start at eº), that the keydesk is a little awkward, and that there is very little bass tone, she commented that the organ is limiting. And she’s right—it is, but it’s perfect for the music its builder had in mind. If you meet the organ on its own terms, you’ll get along much better. We cannot and should not expect to be able to play the same music on every organ, and when we try, the results are less than artistic.
A place for everything, and everything in its place
In the weeks after Easter I participated in several events that involved different groups of organists. Holy Day post mortems dominated the conversations, and a common thread was how many of them had played “The Widor” for the postlude. I knew that most of these musicians play for churches that have 10- or 20-stop organs, and I reflected that playing the “The Widor” on any one of them would be a little like entering a Volkswagen in a Formula One race. Widor wrote his famous Toccata for his lifelong partner, the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, a magnificent instrument with five manuals and a hundred stops—but more to the point, a huge instrument in a perfectly enormous building rife with arches, niches, and statues. (By the way, Widor’s was a common-law relationship with his instrument. According to Marcel Dupré’s memoir, he was appointed temporary organist at St. Sulpice in 1869 and was simply reappointed each year until his retirement in 1933. He served as temporary organist for 64 years!) The sound of the organ rolls around in that building like thunder in the mountains. In such a grand acoustic, the famous arpeggios of “The Widor” that cost organists’ forearm tendons 128 notes per measure are rolled into the grand and stately half-note rhythm that is in fact the motion of the piece. Eight half notes in two measures make a phrase of the melody. If you play it on a 15-stop organ in a church with 125 seats, your listeners hear 256 notes per musical phrase—an effect achieved by pouring buckets of marbles on a tin roof.
Proportion is an essential element to all art. Classic architecture follows classic proportions. A great painting or a great photograph is celebrated for the balance and proportion of its composition. A great piece of music is an architectural triumph with carefully balanced proportions. The best sculptors knew how to stretch the proportions of the human form so a monumental statue would seem in correct proportion when viewed from ground level. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketch Vitruvian Man is a vivid illustration of how an artist/scientist worked to understand natural proportion, and we print it on neckties and lunch boxes to prove how dedicated we are to correct proportions.
In modern suburban life we grow used to seeing McMansions—houses that belong on 40-acre estates—crammed together on cul-de-sacs. It’s really not the houses that are out of scale, it’s the fact that they are twice as wide as the distance between them that bothers us.
In my opinion, playing “The Widor” on ten stops is simply a violation of proportions and can hardly be a rich musical experience—and I have to admit that I’ve done it myself many times. Note my use of quotes. We refer to this chestnut as though dear Charles-Marie only wrote one piece, just as “Toccata and Fugue” means only one thing to many people—you don’t even have to name the key or the composer before your mind’s ear flashes a mordent on high A.
Trivializing the monumental
Recently one of my second cousins died in an auto accident. It’s a very large family, Nick was an extremely popular guy, and at his funeral my parents and I wound up in the last row of a long narrow sanctuary with a low ceiling. (Okay, I admit that my father and I were planning a quick escape to get to the Boston Red Sox Opening Day game—the Red Sox won!) The three-manual organ was in chancel chambers a very long way from us. But the organbuilders in all their wisdom had foreseen the difficulty and included a small exposed Antiphonal division at the rear of the church. I glanced at it and guessed the stoplist: Gedeckt 8', Octave 4', Mixture III. Logical enough—I’ve suggested the inclusion of just such a thing in many situations. A little organ sound from behind adds a lot to the support of congregational singing. During the prelude the organist used that Antiphonal Gedeckt as a solo voice accompanied by enclosed strings in the chancel. Trouble was, from where we were sitting, you couldn’t hear the strings—they were too far away. And when he launched “The Widor” as the postlude, the effect was downright silly. What we heard from our seat was that huge piece being played on three low-pressure chiffy stops with a subtle hint of a bass melody from far away. (By the way, the organist was a friend. He and I shared a wink when I went forward with my parents to receive Communion and we had a fun phone conversation a few days later, so I expect he’ll chuckle when he reads this!)
Arnold Steinhardt sees a bassoon “at arm’s length,” but think about it—one end of the bassoon is in the player’s mouth. You don’t have that kind of a relationship with a violin. I wonder what he thinks of the organ. I’d love to have that conversation with him. I’ve heard of orchestral conductors who claim the organ is expressionless because you can’t change the volume of a single note, but I’ve heard organ playing so expressive as to take your breath away. I look forward to hearing lots more organ music played with expression, chosen in proportion to the instrument and surroundings of the day. Join me, dear colleagues, in promoting the organ as the expressive instrument that envelops you and moves the masses with its powerful breath.