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.
