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.
