User Interface
In his book Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, wrote about the special relationship a violinist has with his instrument:
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 my brain and my beating heart.
(Regular readers here will no doubt recognize this quote, as I cited it in the July 2007 edition of this column.)
This is a beautiful image of an artist inseparably entwined with his instrument. Any thoughtful and caring musician would wish to have that kind of relationship. But Mr. Steinhardt doesn’t want to share his thrall. He continues,
Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the timpani—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.
As I pointed out last July, the bassoonist puts the instrument in his mouth. You don’t get more personal than that. While at first read Mr. Steinhardt’s affair with his instrument is beguiling, when I think about it a little, it takes on an elitist sense that is less attractive. I’ve never been a fan of claims that one instrument is more difficult to play than another, or that one is in any sense better than another. While it’s okay for a musician to feel a little chauvinism, each instrument has its place in the rainbow of musical sound, and each has technical challenges for the player to overcome if there is to be true music-making, true art, unfettered by physical limitations.
A timpanist has just as personal a relationship with his instrument as the violinist. The orchestral timpanist caresses the skin of his instrument, puts his ear to it, fiddles with the screws that adjust the pressure of the head so the sound will be perfect when he raises its thunder at the behest of the conductor. A modern orchestral hall is likely to include a special work station for the timpanist with equipment for soaking and preparing the skins, analogous to the “reed room” reserved for those who play and fiddle with the instruments with single and double reeds.
Besides the range of technical challenges facing musicians, there are also intellectual and spiritual challenges. We get used to an instrument, learning its strengths and weaknesses, learning how to make it project best to the listeners, learning how to mold it around the music we are playing. Organists must not only master the instrument, but also the relationship of the instrument to the room. The pipe organ is a spatial instrument, one that relies on its room for resonance and projection, as well as physical beauty. And the keyboards are the connection between the instrument and the player.
User interface is a phrase recently added to our lexicon. We never thought of the steering wheel of a car as a user interface, or the tiller of a boat, the handle of a shovel, or the knobs of a radio. But as soon as computers became everyday devices, user interfaces became ubiquitous.
Our keyboards and pedalboards are the user interfaces of the organ.
I’ve made thousands of service calls in 35 years of caring for organs, and I’ve learned to notice a lot about organ consoles—especially as they reflect the habits and preferences of the local organists. Many are obvious. In churches where I’ve cared for organs for many years, I know what kind of candy or cough drops the organist prefers. Some have remarkably consistent habits over decades, the sounds echoing endlessly over those hallowed (cherry) Halls. The organist who is particular about his fingernails keeps a nail clipper next to the keyboards. Some organists are paper clip junkies—the hymnals are loaded with them, and the floor under the pedalboard is littered with them. When such an organist calls to report that two adjacent keys are sticking, I know instantly that there’s a paper clip caught between them. One organist I knew actively hated paper clips and was abusive in his comments about people who rely on them. “They make such a mess of the hymnal.”
I know which organists put sugar in their coffee—it’s unmistakable in the spills on the pedal keys, spills that are often the cause of dead notes in the pedals as the sugar retains dust that fouls the contacts.
But some of the local organists’ habits and preferences are subtler. I notice that many organists have what I call a “home key.” When sitting down to try a new instrument, they play five-note scales up and down or chords in their home key. If that organist has played on the same instrument for many years, you can see signs of the home key in the way the console is worn. That home key is usually C major. But one organist I know is focused on G, a fact made obvious by the wear of the pedal keys.
It happens that many of my favorite pieces are in E-flat and B-flat major and in F minor. Does that mean that the tonic, dominant, and sub-dominant notes of those keys are more worn on instruments I play frequently? Notice the notes that are common between those keys. I suppose I’m inclined to play the tonic and dominant notes with more élan—and I suppose that end-of-the-piece flourish wears the notes more than an everyday scale.
It’s only the most sophisticated and innovative organists who wear the top eight notes of the pedalboard as much as the bottom eight.
The Organ Clearing House is working on the relocation of a 90-year-old Casavant organ, and yesterday I took the manual keyboards to the workshop of a colleague who specializes in renovating and restoring keyboards. He produces much of the cow bone that is used in keyboards around the world, obtaining animal “quarters” from slaughterhouses, boiling and bleaching the bones, and milling them into eighth-inch-thick blanks to be turned into key surfaces. He sells some of the finished bone to those who make keyboards, and uses the rest of it in his own restoration projects. His workmanship is much sought after. Keyboards are pretty much all he does. There are keyboards everywhere in his shop, and the ambient smell is reminiscent of the dentist drilling out a cavity in your tooth.
So we talked about keyboards. He made interesting comments about how keyboards wear, mentioning as an example that the accompaniment manual on a theatre organ is likely to be especially worn in the tenor octave. We talked about pitfalls of keyboard construction—where a sharp edge or corner is liable to injure a player’s fingers. (Once playing on a new organ, I cut a finger seriously enough that I had to leave the console to find a bandage in the middle of a service.) We talked about how different materials used for the playing surfaces absorb moisture more easily. An organist with naturally oily skin will be less comfortable playing on plastic keys than on bone or ivory. And the keyboards played by an organist with naturally oily skin get dirtier faster. This is not a criticism, just an observation.
There is huge variety in the design, size, style, and feel of pipe organ keyboards. As a student at Oberlin, I often practiced on a tiny three-stop “practice machine” built by John Brombaugh. The keyboards were smaller than what I was otherwise used to. The distance between the front of the naturals and the front of the sharps seemed impossibly tiny. The edges and corners of both naturals and sharps were keen—not so as to be dangerous, but so as to be obviously different from other styles. The tracker action was precise—you might say horribly precise—the “pluck” of the keys was both distinct and delicate. While intellectually I know that “pluck” is caused by resistance of the wind pressure against the pallet with the unmistakable little “whoosh” you feel when the air rushes around the released pallet and essentially blows it open, as I play I feel it as a physical click. These characteristics of that practice organ provided a terrific pedagogic medium. The keyboards demanded exact accuracy. If you were in the least way unintentional, the notes came in clusters instead of chords and scales. If you could play a passage musically and accurately (are the two separable?) on that instrument, you could play it anywhere. Reminds me of the legend of Abraham Lincoln practicing oration with pebbles in mouth.
That’s a wonderful way for a keyboard to feel, and wildly different from the keyboards of an elegant electro-pneumatic instrument. Organs built by Ernest Skinner have terrific keyboards. They have large, even gracious playing surfaces. Sharp keys are tapered front to back, allowing plenty of space for piston buttons without having the distance between the keyboards be too great. There is a carefully constructed and regulated “pluck” known affectionately as “tracker touch.” This is created by a spring that toggles as the key travels down and up, producing an accurate and subtle “click” in the motion of the key.
In the Skinner keyboard, the pluck is mechanically unrelated to the making of the contact—the function that actually makes the organ note play—but it’s essential that the keyboard be adjusted and regulated so that the relationship between the pluck and the action point is consistent from note to note. If it’s not, your carefully issued scale cannot possibly be even.
Keyboards can be decorated with lines scored in the surfaces or polished to smooth perfection. They can have light-colored naturals and dark-colored sharps, or the reverse. The playing surfaces are typically made of exotic materials—cow bone, ivory, ebony, boxwood, fruit wood (pear is especially nice)—because of the qualities of hardness and stability that is consistent with tight and close grain. It’s amazing to think that the amount of friction that can develop between human fingers and a hard surface like ivory or ebony can cause wear, but anyone who has played on an organ that’s been used frequently over 30 or 40 years is familiar with the “dips” worn in the keys. It’s especially common in the “hymnal” range of an organ keyboard, cº–c2. In my experience, organs in seminary chapels are the most heavily used—it would be usual for there to be two or three services each day—and there I’ve seen holes worn right through the ivory key covering. And once you’ve worn through the ivory, you tear through the wood very quickly and the edges of the ivory around the hole are as sharp as knives.
Keyboards are typically made of soft, straight-grained wood—spruce and basswood are favorites. Boards are glued together to make a “blank,” a solid panel the width of the keyboard. The boards should be chosen as “slab” grain—when you look at the ends of the boards, you see that the wood is cut so the lines of the growth rings are parallel with the tops of the keys, not the sides. As wood warps away from the center of the tree, keys made with slab grain wood can only warp up and down, not side to side. Such warping affects the regulation of keyboard springs and contacts, but makes it impossible for the keys to warp into one another and bind. This matters.
The keyboard frame comprises two “key cheeks” (the side rails of the frame that protrude to form the ends of the keyboards), and usually a front guide rail and a balance rail. The keyboard blank is fitted to the frame. The layout of the keys is drawn on the board, and the positions for guide and balance pins are marked. The holes for the pins are drilled through both blank and frame. Some craftsmen drill the balance pin holes through the top of the keyboard blank and into the frame, then drill the guide pin holes through the bottom of the frame into the bottom of the keyboard blank. This keeps the guide pin holes from going through the top of the key where you would most likely be able to see a hint of them through the keyboard covering. The surfaces of the naturals are glued on the blanks, sanded flat and given a round of polishing, the keys are cut apart, the sharps are glued on, and everything is polished. Sounds simple? Trying putting wet glue between an ebony sharp and a basswood key body and then tightening a clamp to help the glue set. The glue acts as a lubricant and the ebony sharp slides sideways. Many hours of filing, fitting, buffing, regulating, and adjusting complete the picture.
A well-made keyboard is a work of art, a vehicle for the relationship between the player and the instrument. It should feel familiar and welcoming under one’s hands, and should provide smooth, accurate, and flawless response whether the instrument has mechanical or electric keyboard action.
Take care of your keyboards. When I tune your organ I can tell how serious you are by how you keep the console. Is your console a combination between desk and boudoir, loaded with personal googahs and enough office supplies to run a university? Or is it the musician’s beloved seat where the intimacy of the relationship with your instrument is fostered and nurtured? Don’t bring food and drink to the organ console. Spills will seriously affect the responsiveness of your keyboards. Crumbs will attract critters—and critters will set up house in the console making their nests from felt stolen from keyboard bushings. It is absolutely common for the organ technician to find dirty little trails left by generations of mice running across the keyboards inside the console. One pictures Daddy Mouse saying to Mommy Mouse, “If he plays that Widor one more time . . . ”
Clean your keyboards—not just the top surfaces, but the sides of the keys as well. Use a paper towel or soft cloth rag, moisten it, put a tiny bit of mild soap on it, wring it out with all the force you can muster, and wipe the keys clean. Use a second rag, slightly moist, to remove any soap film, but remember that excessive moisture may spoil the glue that holds on the ivories. You’ll feel refreshed the next time you play.
Aeolus was a mythical Greek deity who was cited by Homer in The Odyssey for giving Odysseus a bag of captured wind to help him sail back across the Ionian Sea to Ithaca. The keyboard puts the captured wind at the player’s fingertips. We may not be placing our instrument between our brains and our beating hearts and lovingly stretching our arms around its neck (does Mr. Steinhardt ever feel like strangling his beloved?). Instead, we are doing nothing less than conjuring the very wind by wiggling our fingers. Nice work.
