New Taylor & Boody organ for Yale

Symposia held April 7–9 by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Herbert L. Huestis is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, where he studied organ with David Craighead 40 years ago. After a stint as a full-time church organist, he studied psychology and education at the University of Idaho, where be obtained his Ph.D. in 1971. He spent time as a school psychologist, and was subsequently lured back into the organ world and took up pipe organ maintenance with his wife Marianne and son Warren. For some years he has specialized in reed voicing, and as he approaches retirement spends more and more time tuning pianos. Ironically, his interest in temperaments comes from developments in piano tuning, where 19th-century tuning styles have been recovered in the manner of a lost art.tt

In 1993, over 30 organ builders met in Tempe, Arizona to discuss the significance of “The Historical Organ in America” and to ponder the future of historically informed organ building. Twelve years later, a new Martin Pasi organ in Omaha’s St. Cecilia Cathedral is the realization of a future that could only be a matter of conjecture a decade ago. Pasi’s Opus 14 is a magnificent achievement--musical, spiritual and architectural. 

In 2005, from April 7-9, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music and the Westfield Center held a symposium entitled “The Organ as Mirror of Religion and Culture--Temperament, Sound and Symbolism.” This symposium was also sponsored by the Schola Cantorum of St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, Nebraska.  The new Pasi dual temperament organ made these far-reaching discussions possible in a way one could only dream of a decade ago.

I must admit that since dual temperament is a rare undertaking in organ building, I thought of it as an experimental and possibly excessive luxury. After a thorough acquaintance with this fine instrument, its setting and its players, I find that dual temperament is extremely practical in its application to church music, both old and new. This was a big surprise. After attending the symposium, I felt that it was possible to reflect on three aspects as they relate to the new Martin Pasi organ: philosophical, metaphysical and practical. 

My first impressions in this magnificent cathedral were hardly philosophical. I marveled at the sound of the organ, the splendid acoustic and the phenomenal artistic decoration and design of the church. This is truly an extraordinary space, where the celebration of both sonic and visual art is evident throughout the building. Once my ears were filled with the vocal sound of the organ, I felt purity and harmony beyond expectations. The effect of meantone tuning is visceral. It calms the nerves and soothes the soul! Whatever understanding of “temperaments” I carried into this space evaporated in a sense of sheer sound and harmony. So much for reading about temperaments in the context of western civilization and pouring over comparative charts. Pure sound is pure sound!

The rather complex symposium entitled “The Organ as Mirror of Religion and Culture” opened April 7 with a recital by Kevin Vogt, director of St. Cecilia Cathedral Schola Cantorum. Interspersed between organ selections was a reading of John Dryden’s “Ode to Saint Cecilia” given by Marie Rubis Bauer, also an organist of the cathedral. The immediacy and impact of the music and spoken word set the stage for discussions of philosophy and culture which followed. A presentation called “The Organized Cosmos” was made by Quentin Faulkner (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), followed by discussions of philosophy and organ music. Calvin Bower (Notre Dame University) gave a talk entitled “Sign, Reference, and the Communion of Saints: First Steps Toward an Aesthetic of Sacred Music,” which emphasized the “transcendent” nature of church music. Music, at the moment of its inception in the church, “transcends” for a brief moment the worlds of temporal and spiritual reality, residing for a transient period of time in both spheres. This is the “communion” or the magic of the moment--pretty heady stuff for a lowly organist and scribe.

That evening, we repaired to a concert by Hans Davidsson (Eastman School of Music), David Dahl (Pacific Lutheran University, emeritus), and Kevin Vogt, which featured works by Matthias Weckmann, J. S. Bach and David Dahl. The ancient philosophers believed in the melding of the mind and body, and I had no doubt that the combination of beautiful vocal tone and purity of tuning in the organ had a complex physiological and psychological effect. One’s attention was drawn so forcibly to the organ that time was forgotten. The music of Matthias Weckmann came to life as if it had been composed yesterday. Bach’s works took on a whole new meaning. 

Friday, April 8, Hans Davidsson offered several presentations on the subject of “The Harmony of the Spheres,” which explored what he called “sacred geometry” or the patterns of construction that organ builders knew throughout the ages. He explained that these “building blocks” enabled the building of cathedrals and organs in times past, much like cow barns in our own time, built by common folk without the aid of drawings or architects. Organ building had a practical, intuitive nature that made it possible for builders to construct monumental organs without the aid of drawings or architects, just like the cathedrals that housed them and the stained glass that adorned them.

With these thoughts fresh in our minds, we attended Solemn Vespers with improvisation by Susan Ferré in alternation with Gregorian chant. Again, inspiration came from well-established patterns and style  (like “barn building”). There was an uncanny ease with which the improvised musical examples fleshed out the philosophical discussions we had just heard. It seemed that the Westfield Center folks were on the same wavelength as the academics.

Metaphysical aspects of the organ were further explored by Fr. Anthony Ruff of St. John’s Abbey. Along these lines, a unique presentation on “The Organ as Symbol” was made by Charles S. Brown. Curiously, he also took up the metaphor of barns, and took the participants on a “Pilgrimage through Round Barns.” This rather far-reaching discussion of the symbology of the organ touched on discussions of eschatology, folk religion and masks in aboriginal cultures. All this did not lose sight of the organ as a unique instrument, embedded in a very long history of western civilization. Panel discussions gave the opportunity for much storytelling. Many participants were able to give an account of their own unique experiences of “organ encounters,” some rather touching.

Temperament was a significant subject of formal presentations. On April 9, Ibo Ortgies gave a synopsis of his study of tuning as it pertains to the works of Dietrich Buxtehude and his contemporaries. He presented a picture of 17th- and 18th-century performance practice that was extremely compatible with meantone tuning and did not at all support the idea that “well-tempered” tuning was necessary for the performance of this music. In fact, a central part of his thesis seemed to refute the notion that Buxtehude had the Marienkirche organ retuned in well-temperament. In his words, that seemed not to be the case, despite the fact that it was widely assumed to be true.

Along these same lines, Hans Davidsson made presentations on the new four-manual 17th-century North German organ at Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden. This is now the largest meantone organ on the continent, and goes a long way to support Ortgies’ thesis that meantone tuning was far and away the most common tuning clear through the 18th century. Along with these insights, Bruce Shull of Taylor & Boody Organbuilders gave a presentation on the newly discovered Bach/Lehmann temperament, which opens up new avenues for the appreciation of Bach’s music. This audience, already committed to early music, was able to appreciate such information and insight and see its application in the daily recitals and musical examples of the symposium. 

These presentations stretched the mind of every listener in preparation for a concert of new music for the organ by Robert Bates. I confess that I was apprehensive about modern music performed on a meantone organ. How could contemporary music work on an organ that captured the tuning of the 17th and 18th centuries? Bates presented works by Arvo Pärt, Gyorgy Ligeti, Joan Tower, Naji Hakim, and his own Chromatic Fantasy and Charon’s Oar. Would he explore the dark, dissonant side of meantone tuning? With this question in mind, I discovered the genius of an artist committed to beauty and yes, the “metaphysical” properties of this organ in our time. The concert was followed by a reception and listeners could regain their poise. This was a not-to-be-forgotten experience!

There was still an unaswered question: Was a dual temperament organ a luxury in the worship service? A number of participants stayed an extra day to find out. St. Cecilia Cathedral is a very large church, and the two services were filled with many families, young children, a seeing-eye dog, and, fortunately, a group of nuns from the entire community. The music was simple, straightforward and traditional. Kevin Vogt played the service, and I marvelled at his ability to shift effortlessly between the meantone and well-tempered divisions of the organ, depending on the nature of the music. Modal compositions came to life in meantone tuning--not surprising, but what a rare opportunity to hear “ordinary” church music with such an “authentic” flavor. The simplest psalms and congregational responses jumped off the page with fresh meaning and inspiration. In this sense, it underscored the absolute practicality of dual temperament. Tuning that makes ordinary church music appeal to hardened traditionalists surely deserves to be called a practical application.

So there it was: philosophy, metaphysics and practical application--all explored through in-depth lectures and discussions, elegant performances and appealing church services in less than a week. These events came together smoothly through the efforts of all the individuals who contributed so mightily to this fine symposium. They included Quentin Faulkner, George Ritchie, Susan Ferré, Hans and Ulrika Davidsson, David Dahl, John Koster, Bruce Shull, Roger Sherman, Ibo Ortgies, Kevin Vogt, Marie Rubis-Bauer, Charles Brown, Calvin Bower, John Koster, Gene Bedient, John Brombaugh, Fr. Anthony Ruff, Robert Bates and of course, Martin Pasi, organbuilder.

The 2016 EROI (Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative) Festival will explore historical, conceptual, and practical aspects of the interaction between organ and voice from October 26 through 28 at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Titled “Breath for Singing: The Organ and the Human Voice,” the festival also features the premiere performance of a new hymn commissioned for the conference, with text by Yale theologian and poet Thomas Troeger and music by internationally recognized composer Nico Muhly.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Intervals, tuning, and temperament, part 2
Last month I wrote about some of the fundamentals underlying the art of keyboard temperament: aspects of the nature of musical sound and of intervals, the overtone series, and the so-called circle of fifths. This month I want to discuss keyboard temperament itself, using last month’s column as a foundation. I will talk about why temperament is necessary, what the major approaches to temperament have been over the centuries, some of what the different systems of temperament set out to accomplish, and about how different temperaments relate to different historical eras. Next month I will also discuss the practicalities of tuning and a few miscellaneous matters related to tuning and temperament.
As I said last month, my main point is to help students become comfortable with tuning and temperament and to develop a real if basic understanding of them, regardless of whether they are planning to do any tuning themselves. Before describing some of the essential details of several tuning systems, I want to review how we discuss tuning and how our thinking about tuning is organized, so that the descriptions of different temperaments will be easy to grasp.
1) For purposes of talking about tuning, octaves are considered exactly equivalent. (This of course is no surprise, but it is worth mentioning.) The practical point of this is that if I say, for example, that “by tuning up by a fifth, six times in a row, I get from C to F#” I do not need to say that I also have to drop the resulting F# down by three octaves to get the simple tritone (rather than the augmented twenty-fifth); that is assumed. To put it another way, simple intervals, say the perfect fifth, and the corresponding compound intervals, say the twelfth or the nineteenth, are treated as being identical to one another.
2) Intervals fall into pairs that are inversions of one another: fifth/fourth; major third/minor sixth; minor third/major sixth; whole tone/minor seventh; semitone/major seventh. For purposes of tuning, the members of these pairs are interchangeable, if we keep direction in mind. For example, tuning up by a fifth is equivalent to tuning down by a fourth. If you are starting at C and want to tune G, it is possible either to tune the G above as a fifth or the G below as a fourth. It is always important to keep track of which of these you are doing or have just done, but they are essentially the same.
3) When, in tuning a keyboard instrument, we tune around the circle of fifths, we do not normally do this:

but rather something like this:

going up by fifths and down by fourths—sometimes up by fourths and down by fifths—in such a way as to tune the middle of the keyboard first, thus creating chords and scales that can be tested.
4) In tuning keyboard instruments we purposely make some intervals impure: that is, not perfectly (theoretically) in tune. When an interval is not pure it is either narrow or wide. An interval is wide when the ratio between the higher note and the lower note is greater than that ratio would be for the pure interval; it is narrow when the ratio is smaller. For example, the ratio between the notes of a pure perfect fifth is 3:2, that is, the frequency of the higher note is 1½ times the frequency of the lower note. In a narrow fifth, that ratio is smaller (perhaps 2.97:2), in a wide fifth it is larger (perhaps 3.05:2). Here’s the important point—one that students do not always realize until they have had it pointed out: making an interval wide does not necessarily mean making some note sharp, and making an interval narrow does not necessarily mean making some note flat. If you are changing the higher note in an interval, then raising that note will indeed make the interval wider and lowering it will make the interval narrower. However, if you are changing the lower note, then raising the note will make the interval narrower and lowering it will make the interval wider.
5) Tuning by fifths (or the equivalent fourths) is the theoretically complete way to conceive of a tuning or temperament system. This is because only fifths and fourths can actually generate all of the notes. That is, if you start from any note and tune around the circle of fifths in either direction, you will only return to your starting note after having passed through all of the other notes. If you start on any given note and go up or down by any other interval, you will get back to your starting note without having passed through all of the other notes.1 For example, if you start on c and tune up by major thirds you will return to c having only tuned e and g#/a♭. There is no way, starting on c and tuning by thirds, to tune the notes c#, d, d#, f, f#, g, a, b♭, or b. Tuning is sometimes done by thirds, but only as an adjunct to tuning by fifths and fourths. Any tuning system can be fully described by how it tunes all of the fifths.
6) As I mentioned last month, tuning two or more in a row of any interval spins off at least one other interval. For example, tuning two fifths in a row spins off a whole tone. (Starting at c and tuning c–g and then g–d spins off the interval c–d). Tuning four fifths in a row spins off a major third. (Starting at c and tuning c–g, g–d, d–a, a–e spins off the interval c–e). The tuning of the primary intervals—pure, wide, or narrow—utterly determines the tuning of the resulting (spun-off) interval. For example, tuning four pure perfect fifths in a row spins off a major third that is wider than the theoretically correct 5:4 ratio: very wide, as a matter of human listening experience. Tuning three pure fourths in a row (c–f, f–b♭, b♭–e♭, for example) spins off a minor third that is narrower than the theoretically correct 6:5.
So, what is temperament and why does it exist? Temperament is the making of choices about which intervals on the keyboard to tune pure and which to tune wide or narrow, and about how wide or narrow to make those latter intervals. Temperament exists, in the first instance, because of the essential problem of keyboard tuning that I mentioned last month: if you start at any given note and tune around the circle of fifths until you arrive back at the starting note, that starting note will be out of tune—sharp, as it happens—if you have tuned all of the fifths pure. The corollary of this is that in order to tune a keyboard instrument in such a way that the unisons and octave are in tune, it is absolutely necessary to tune one or more fifths narrow. This is a practical necessity, not an esthetic choice. However, decisions about how to address this necessity always involve esthetic choices.
There are practical solutions to this practical problem, and the simplest of them constitutes the most basic temperament. If you start at a note and tune eleven fifths, but do not attempt to tune the twelfth fifth (which would be the out-of-tune version of the starting note), then you have created a working keyboard tuning in which one fifth—the interval between the last note that you explicitly tuned and the starting note—is extremely out of tune. If you start with c and tune g, d, a, etc., until you have tuned f, then the interval between f and c (remember that you started with c and have not changed it) will be a very narrow fifth or very wide fourth. The problem with this very practical tuning is an esthetic, rather than a practical, problem: this fifth is so narrow that listeners will not accept it as a valid interval. Then, in turn, there is a practical solution to this esthetic problem: composers simply have to be willing to write music that avoids the use of that interval. This tuning, sometimes called Pythagorean, was certainly used in what we might call the very old days—late middle ages and early Renaissance. As an esthetic matter, it is marked by very wide thirds (called Pythagorean thirds) that are spun off by all of the pure fifths. These thirds, rather than the presence of one unusable fifth, probably are why this tuning fell out of favor early in the keyboard era.
The second-easiest way to address the central practical necessity of keyboard tuning is, probably, to divide the unavoidable out-of-tuneness of the fifths between two fifths, rather than piling it all onto one of them. For example, if in the example immediately above you tune the last interval, namely b♭–f, somewhat narrow rather than pure, then the resulting final interval of f–c will not be as narrow as it came out above. Perhaps it will be acceptable to listeners, perhaps not. Historical experience has suggested that it is right on the line.
In theory, what I just called the “unavoidable out-of-tuneness” (which is what theorists of tuning call the “Diatonic Comma” or “Pythagorean Comma”) can be divided between or among any number of fifths, from one to all twelve, with the remaining fifths being pure. The fewer fifths are made narrow—that is, “tempered”—the narrower each of them has to be; the more fifths are left pure (which is the same thing), the easier the tuning is, since tuning pure fifths is the single easiest component of the art of tuning by ear.2 The more fifths are tempered, the less far from pure each of them has to be; the fewer fifths are left pure, the more difficult the temperament is to carry out by ear.
Temperaments of this sort, that is, ones in which two or more fifths are made narrow and the remaining fifths are tuned pure, and all intervals and chords are usable, make up the category known as “well-tempered tuning.” There exist, in theory, an infinite number of different well-tempered tunings. There are 4083 different possible ways to configure the choice of which fifths to temper, but there are an infinite number of subtly different ways to distribute the amount of out-of-tuneness over any chosen fifths. From the late seventeenth century through the mid to late nineteenth century, the most common tunings were those in which somewhere between four and ten or eleven fifths were tempered, and the rest were left pure. In general, in the earlier part of those years temperaments tended to favor more pure fifths, and later they tended to favor more tempered fifths. The temperament in which all twelve fifths are tempered and the ratio to which they are all tempered is the same (2.9966:2) is known as equal temperament. It became increasingly common in the mid to late nineteenth century, and essentially universal for a while in the twentieth century. It was well known as a theoretical concept long before then, but little used, at least in part because it is extremely difficult to tune by ear.
In well-tempered tunings and in fact any tunings, the choices about which fifths to temper affect the nature of the intervals other than fifths. The most important such interval is the major third. The importance of the placement of tempered fifths has always come largely from the effect of that placement on the thirds. Historically, in the period during which well-tempered tuning was the norm, the fifths around C tended to be tempered so as to make the C–E major third close to pure, in any case almost always the purest major third within the particular tuning. This seems to reflect both a sense that pure major thirds are esthetically desirable or pleasing and a sense that the key of C should be the most pleasing key, or the most restful key, on the keyboard. In general, well-tempered tunings create a keyboard on which different intervals, chords, and harmonies belonging to the same overall class are not in fact exactly the same as one another. There might be, for example, major triads in which the third and the fifth are both pure, alongside major triads in which the fifth is pure but the third a little bit wide, or the fifth pure but the third very wide, or the fifth a little bit narrow and the third a little bit wide. It is quite likely that one of the points of well-tempered tuning was to cause any modulation or roaming from one harmonic place to another on the keyboard to effect an actual change in color—that is, in the real ratios of the harmonies—not just a change in the name of the chord or in its perceived distance from the original tonic.
In equal temperament, all intervals of a given class are in fact identical to one another, and each instance of a chord of a given type—major triad, minor triad, and so on—is identical to every other instance of that chord except for absolute pitch. Next month I will discuss ways in which the esthetic of each of these kinds of temperament fit in with other aspects of the musical culture of their times.
The other system of tuning that was prevalent for a significant part of the history of keyboard music—from at least the mid sixteenth century through the seventeenth century and, in some places well into the eighteenth—is known nowadays as meantone tuning. (This term was not used at the time, and is now applied to a large number of different tunings with similar characteristics.) In a meantone tuning, there are usually several major thirds that are unusably wide and one or more fifths that are also unusable. In fact, the presence of intervals that must be avoided by composers is greater than in Pythagorean tuning. However, this is in aid of being able to create a large number of pure or nearly pure major thirds. This was, perhaps, as a reaction to the earlier Pythagorean tuning with its extremely wide thirds, considered esthetically desirable during this period. The mathematics behind the tuning of thirds tells us that, if two adjacent thirds are both pure, say c–e and e–g#, then the remaining third that is nestled within that octave (see above), in this case a♭–c, will be so wide that no ears will accept it as a valid interval. Therefore only two out of every three major thirds can be pure—that is, eight out of the twelve—and, if they are tuned pure, the remaining major thirds will become unusable. This, of course, in turn means that composers must be willing to avoid those intervals in writing music. It is striking that composers were willing to do so with remarkable consistency for something like two hundred years.
The distribution of usable and unusable thirds in meantone is flexible. For example, while it is possible to tune c–e and e–g# both pure, as mentioned above, it is also possible to tune c–e and a♭–c pure, leaving e–g# to be unusable. In the late Renaissance and early Baroque keyboard repertoire, there are, therefore, pieces that use g# and piece that use a♭, but very few pieces that use both. There are pieces that use d# and pieces that use e♭, but very few pieces that use both. There are many pieces that use b♭ and a few that use a#, but almost none that use both. There are very few keyboard pieces from before the very late seventeenth century that do not observe these restrictions. This is powerful evidence that whatever was accomplished esthetically by observing them must have been considered very important indeed.

An important project is happening in Göteborg, Sweden. In August, 1998, along with about 100 organists from all over the world, I attended the International Organ Academy of GoArt: Göteborg Organ Art Center, at Göteborg University, Sweden. This has become a major center of research, organ-building, teaching and performing. A recent visit there last year was the occasion to observe progress on the building of a four-manual, 54-stop, mean-tone organ after the style of the late-17th century in North Germany. The organ will be unveiled at the biennial International Organ Academy in Göteborg, August 5-18, 2000. For the background and purposes of GoArt, see the article by Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra (The American Organist, July, 1996) and their Web-page (URL: www.hum.gu.se/goart/organac.htm); here I will summarize briefly.

The Göteborg Organ Art Center is the brainchild of Hans Davidsson, a GU music faculty member and brilliant young organist and musicologist, working under the inspiration of Jacques Van Oortmersson and Harald Vogel. It was begun in January 1995 as an inter-disciplinary center for organ research and performance bringing together the strengths of the Göteborg University Musicology Department and the School of Music. It is now an independent center in the GU administrative structure. An international panel of musicians advises GoArt, including Jean Boyer, Pieter Dirksen, Frederick K. Gable, Ludger Lohmann, André Marçon, Kimberly Marshall, Hans van Nieuwkoop, Jacques Van Oortmersson, William Porter, Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra, Kerala Snyder, Axel Unnerbäck, Joris Verdin, and Harald Vogel.

GoArt's stated objective is to cover the entire spectrum of the art of the organ by linking the efforts of musicologists, performers, and organ builders, in order to study historic instruments, documents, music and performance practice issues. This blurring of traditional lines has led to a center that is bursting with energy and creativity and whose impact on the organ world is already keenly felt.

This multi-disciplinary approach has produced a number of tangible outcomes:

* the establishment of archives containing musical sources on micro-film, photographs and other media;

* education and research, with the emphasis on historically informed and discerning music-making;

* a wide-ranging collection of instruments, drawing inspiration from the many golden ages of organ playing;

* in-depth studies of the relationships between organ art and history, aesthetics, ideology and liturgy;

* dedicated well-rounded artistic training aimed at producing musicians who are able to balance intuition with intellect;

* the reconstruction of instruments on scientific principles which will serve as primary sources of information about performance practice.

The current six-year long project is entitled "Changing Processes in North European Organ Art: 1600-1970 - Integrated Studies on Performance Practice and Instrument Construction." This integration of performance, literature, and musicological research is linked together by the instruments--the hallmark of GoArt--valued as an indispensable research tool in the organ performance. This collection of organs in various styles includes a mean-tone organ by John Brombaugh in the Haga Church (2 manuals and pedal; 21 stops); a 19th-century French style organ built by the Dutch builder Verschueren (3 manuals and pedal; 43 stops, featured in the 1998 GoArt Organ Academy) housed in the recital hall of the School of Music; a "Father" Henry Willis organ built in 1871 housed and in the Örgryte Church (3 manuals and pedal, 31 stops); an instrument inspired by the Swedish Baroque style built by Gustavsson (2 manuals and pedal; 16 stops); and a pedal clavichord reconstructed by Joel Speerstra after the Gerstenberg instrument in Leipzig. (This is used to explore the connections between clavichord and organ techniques.)

Housed in the Örgryte Church, the organ currently in production is the aforementioned North German style mean-tone organ, using the work of Arp Schnitger as a primary model but also incoporating aspects by earlier builders such as Scherer and Fritzsche. Visually, it uses as a model the now defunct Schnitger organ of the Lübeck Dom. Tonally, the new organ is inspired by the organ of St. Jakobi, Hamburg, but also incorporates aspects of the organs of the Aa-Kerk, Groningen and St. Cosmae, Stade.

Some of the most sophisticated research into historic organ-building methods is being carried out and put into practice jointly by scientists of the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Göteborg and Master Organbuilders at GoArt (Hans Van Eeken, head draftsman; Mats Arvidsson, responsible for construction of the organ, excluding organ pipes; and Munetaka Yakoto, research and organ pipe production). The collaboration among these scientists and artisans has yielded new thoughts and discoveries in air-flow, acoustics of the room and the organ chamber, and materials and pipe construction.

One of the most interesting achievements of this project has been the retrieval of pipe making methods that were used until the time of the Industrial Revolution. The scientists at the Chalmers Institute were able to ascertain the formula for many metal alloys used by Schnitger and others. Organologists explored church records and the annals of builders of the time in order to re-construct the method of casting pipe metal on sand. This affects the cooling process of the pipe metal, thereby affecting the molecular structure, and ultimately the quality of the metal and the sound. Quite possibly this is the first time these techniques have been used since the early 18th century, and the people at GoArt are convinced that this old technique is, in part, responsible for the special sound quality of historic organs. More information on the North German organ, including the stop-list and a description of the church in which it is housed can be found on the GoArt web site: http://www.hum.gu.se/goart/w3b.htm#ngorp.

But all of this research could be mere mental gymnastics were it not brought to life by a vital and informed faculty in performance best displayed at the biennial GoArt conferences. In order to promote the next International Organ Academy, allow me to recall a few events from 1998.

This two-week course had several themes: one week devoted to "Aristide Cavaillé-Coll and the French Symphonic Organ," another to "The North German Organ" with special emphasis on the chorale fantasia, and an extended weekend symposium on "The Organ and Liturgy." The schedule was grueling yet rewarding, especially if you were willing to participate fully. Sessions began usually at 9 am and carried through until the late evening. It was not possible to attend everything, but a mere perusal of the program tells one of the richness of our legacy. Four primary kinds of meetings call the academy together (98% of which are done in English): master-classes, lectures, workshops, and recitals. Among some of the more engaging pedagogical experiences of the last academy were a session on Froberger by Ludger Lohmann of Stuttgart, a class on Alain by Jacques Van Oortmerssen (Amsterdam), an exploration of Franck's chorales by Jean Boyer (Lyon), and a class on Italian Baroque music by André Marçon (Bern).

The workshops were a cross between master-class and lecture and allowed listeners to focus on specific aspects of research as it relates to performance practice. Kimberly Marshall devoted two of her sessions to the genesis of early liturgical music for the organ and the music of Jeanne Demessieux. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra unveiled some of her latest discoveries in the pedagogy of improvisation in the late 18th century. André Marçon led a detailed analysis of Frescobaldi's "Fiori Musicali" and alternatim practice in Baroque Italy. William Porter gave an insightful workshop on "Generating Principles of the Late 17th-century North German 'Praeludium'."

The lectures are too numerous to list but were nonetheless provocative and memorable. Jesse Eschbach, on the verge of the publication of his new book on Cavaillé-Coll, discussed the organ builder's thoughts on modernizing Classical and Post-Classical organs. Jean Ferrard discussed Cavaillé-Coll's relationships with Lemmens, Loret and Franck. Pieter Dirksen (a brilliant young musicologist who has recently published a book on the keyboard works of Sweelinck) spoke about Lübeck and Bruhns and the final stages of the North German chorale fantasia. Kerala Snyder explored Bach and the Lutheran liturgy and the unlikely topic of the connections between the French tradition and Buxtehude. Fenner Douglas gave a withering and yet very accurate appraisal of the neo-classic renovations that happened to historic French organs in the 1950s-70s.

And now to the heart of the matter--performance. Were it not for this aspect, GoArt may be little more than a meeting for musicologists. But in these two weeks, I heard fine organ playing on beautiful instruments.

In the Haga Church (Brombaugh mean-tone organ) André Marçon opened the academy with a moving performance featuring music of the Italian baroque. While the instrument is built in the North German style, the transparent colors of the principals admirably revealed the subtle singing quality of this repertoire. Marçon is steeped in this period, and displays his acumen beautifully through intelligent, colorful and expressive articulation and phrasing.

One of the great moments of the entire Academy was to hear William Porter on the same instrument, this time playing music of 17th-century North Germany. Two variation sets of Scheidt ("Vater Unser" and "Io son ferito lasso") were among the highlights of this program. Porter's playing of this music is rivaled by few others. Gauging each tempo correctly, using old fingering practices to expressive ends, discovering the beauty of the simplest of registrations, and knowing the architecture of this music are among the reasons why his playing is so remarkable. The program closed with a riveting performance of the Bruhns "Praeludium in G," but not before he improvised a chorale fantasy on "Gelobet sei Gott" that made one think it was Buxtehude at the organ!

The French symphonic organ was a featured instrument at this year's academy. Generous in scaling and voicing, even though the Verschueren organ is housed in a recital hall of limited acoustic, the organ is nonetheless colorful and brilliant without being overwhelming to the listener. The sounds of the montres and strings were particularly convincing. Jean Boyer's performance of Messiaen's La Nativité was one of the memorable moments of these two weeks. Boyer is an extremely intelligent man (as he displayed to us in his teaching and lecturing), and this intelligence is wedded to a musical soul. Ludger Lohman gave a stellar performance of the Vierne Fifth Symphony and Kimberly Marshall gave a wonderful overview of some of the great works of Demessieux. I regret missing a performance by Hans-Ola Ericsson of Livre du Saint Sacrament of Messiaen (the recital BEGAN at 11pm!!) but reports from reliable sources the next day glowed with unanimous approval. Apparently the audience was spellbound for the 21/2 hours of this event.

Director of GoArt, Hans Davidsson, apparently possesses all of the important gifts of the complete artist/teacher: intellect, creativity, vision and musicality. These were demonstrated throughout the conference but particularly as he was featured in a recital of the Third Part of Bach's Clavierübung, in the Bethlehem Church. This performance revealed a deep understanding not only of this great music, but also of the theology that lay behind it. It was a profoundly moving event.

Curiously, the recitals that seemed to encourage the most discussion afterwards were not organ recitals at all. Joris Verdin, harmonium player and organist from Belgium, completely amazed everyone by his subtle and expressive playing on the GoArt French harmonium. While this instrument was well-known and used by French organists in the 19th century it has since fallen out of use, especially in the United States where the harmonium uses a different wind system than the European version. The subtle nuances that he was able to achieve with this instrument were nothing short of miraculous and brought to life music which sounds little more than hum-drum on the organ. Equally noteworthy was an evening spent in the Gunnebo Castle in nearby Molndal. It was a marriage of sensations: there the audience sat in an 18th-century home listening to a music of the period played on a replica of an 18th-century double clavichord. The featured performers, Joel Speerstra and Ulrika Davidsson, played music of late 18th-century Germany while Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra improvised a charming sonata in late 18th-century style using the principles she had discussed only days before in her lecture. Here was a real unity of architecture, sound, music and knowledge that exemplified what GoArt is able to achieve.

GoArt is currently engaged in a number of publications, perhaps the most significant being a massive tome called The Organ as a Mirror of Its Time, edited by Kerala Snyder. This book, which will be available in the Fall 2000, traces the significance of the organ in western culture, particularly as building styles were affected by and helped shape liturgical practice, improvisation, and the secular music aesthetic. The specific foci include the organs of the North German Masters, Swedish organ-building practices and the French and German organs in the 19th century. Chapters on the organ reform movement and the latter-day performance practice movement are also included. Among the contributors are the current GoArt planning board and faculty.

Information on the upcoming GoArt International Organ Academy (August 5-18, 2000) may be found at http://www.hum.gu.se/goart/w-100b.htm. The focus will, of course, be the North German Baroque Organ and the conference will unveil the new instrument currently being finished. Performers and clinicians will include Harald Vogel, Daniel Roth, Ludger Lohmann, David Yearsley, Rudolf Kelber, Yuko Hayashi, Lynn Edwards, Pieter Dirksen, Paul Peeters, William Porter and many others. Contact information: Organ Academy, School of Music, Box 210, SE-405 30 Göteborg, Sweden; ph +46-31-773 52 11 or -773 52 06; fax +46-31-773 52 00; e-mail [email protected]

http://www.hum.gu.se/goart/w-109.htm#fee

In a time when the organ seems to be on the periphery of musical performance, and as awareness of the instrument even among the musically informed is at an all-time low, the Göteborg Organ Art Center has positioned itself to be a catalyst in the midst of this crisis. Their solution does not provide a single-style agenda, nor a bag-full of tricks meant simply to "thrill" audiences. Rather, its broad base reminds us of the richness of the legacy that has been given us and calls our attention again to the depth and breadth of the largest of all instrumental repertoires.

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center www.pekc.org. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Intervals, tuning, and temperament, part 3
In the first two columns on tuning I did not refer at all to names of temperaments—neither the rather familiar terms such as “Werckmeister,” “Kirnberger,” or “Vallotti,” nor less familiar ones such as “Fogliano-Aron,” “Ramos,” or “Bendeler.” It can be interesting or useful for a student to learn something about these historical temperaments; however, there is a reason that I have avoided framing my discussion of temperament with these established tunings. It is much more useful for students to grasp the principles that underlie any keyboard tuning. It is then possible for the student to both understand any specific tuning system—historical or hypothetical—and to invent his or her own, and also to understand some of the practical and artistic implications of different tuning approaches.

Underlying tuning principles
1) It is impossible for all twelve perfect fifths on a normal keyboard instrument to be tuned absolutely pure. This arises out of the mathematics of the fundamental definition of intervals, and it is an objective fact. If you start at any note and tune twelve perfect fifths pure, then the note that you come back to—which is supposed to be the same as the starting note—will be significantly sharp compared to the starting note.
2) Therefore, at least one perfect fifth must be tuned narrow. Anywhere from one to all twelve perfect fifths can be tuned narrow, as long as the overall amount of narrowness is correct.
3) The need to narrow one or more fifths is an objective need, and doing so is the practical side of keyboard temperament. The choice of which fifths to narrow and (bearing in mind that the overall narrowness must add up to the right amount) how much to narrow them is subjective and is the esthetic side of keyboard temperament.
From these principles it is possible to understand, or indeed to re-invent, any of the historical temperaments, each of which is of necessity simply a way of approaching and solving the issues described above.

Major historical tunings
1) Pythagorean tuning. This is the simplest practical approach, in which eleven fifths in a row are tuned absolutely pure, and the remaining fifth is allowed to be extremely narrow: so narrow that human ears will not accept it as a fifth and it has to be avoided in playing.
2) Well-tempered tuning. In this approach, the narrowness of fifths is spread out over enough fifths that the narrowed fifths sound acceptable to our ears. Practical experience suggests that this means over at least three fifths. The fifths that are not narrowed are left pure. All intervals and thus all chords and all keys are usable.
3) Meantone tuning. Here the tuning of fifths is configured in such a way as to generate pure or relatively pure major thirds. When this kind of tuning was in very widespread use (primarily the 16th and 17th centuries), this was a widely and strongly held esthetic preference. In order to generate a large number of pure major thirds, it is necessary to tune a large number of unusable intervals, both thirds and fifths—actually more than in Pythagorean tuning.
4) Equal temperament. In this temperament, each of the twelve perfect fifths is narrowed by exactly the same amount. In this tuning, alone among all possible keyboard tunings, each specific instance of each type of interval—perfect fifth, major third, and so on—is identical to all other instances of that interval.

Tuning intervals
When two close pitches are sounding at the same time we hear, alongside those notes, a beating or undulating sound that is the difference between the two pitches that are sounding. If a note at 440hz and a note at 442hz are played at the same time, we hear a beating at the speed of twice per second. If the two notes were 263hz and 267hz the beating would be at four times per second. This kind of beating sounds more or less like a (quiet) siren or alarm. It is so much a part of the background of what we hear when we listen to music that most people initially have trouble distinguishing it or hearing it explicitly. Normally once someone first hears beats of this kind, it is then easy to be able to hear them and distinguish them.
These beats are a real acoustic phenomenon. They are not psychological, or part of the physiology of hearing: they are present in the air. If you set up a recording in which one stereo channel is playing one pitch and the other is playing a close but different pitch, then if you play those two channels through speakers into the air, they will produce beats that can be heard. However, if you play them through headphones, so that the two notes never interact with one another in the air but each go directly to a separate ear of the listener, then no beats will be created and the listener will hear the two different pitches without beats.
Notes that are being produced by pipes or strings have overtones. When two such notes are played together, the pitches that mingle in the air include the fundamental and the overtones. Any of those component sounds that are very close to one another will produce beats if they are not in fact identical. It is by listening to these beats and comparing them to a template or plan (either no beats or beats of some particular speed) that we carry out the act of tuning.
For example, if we are tuning a note that is a fifth away from an already-tuned note, then the first upper partial of the higher note is meant to be the same pitch as the second upper partial of the lower note. (For a discussion of overtones see this column from July 2009.) If these overtones are in fact identical, then they will not produce any beats; if they are not quite identical they will produce beats. If the goal is to produce a pure perfect fifth, then beats should be absent. If the goal is to produce a narrow perfect fifth, then beats should be present—faster the narrower a fifth we want. In tuning a major third, the same principle applies, except that it is the third upper partial of the higher note and the fourth upper partial of the lower note that coincide.
Listening for beats produced by coinciding overtones is the essential technique for tuning any keyboard instrument by ear. Any tuning can be fully described by a list of beat speeds for each interval to be tuned. For example, in Pythagorean tuning the beat speed for each of the eleven fifths that are tuned explicitly is zero. (The twelfth fifth arises automatically.) Any well-tempered tuning can be described as a combination of fifths that have beat speeds of zero and fifths that have various moderate beat speeds. In equal temperament, all the fifths have beat speeds greater than zero, and they all reflect the same ratio, with higher notes having proportionately higher beat speeds. In most meantone systems, major thirds have no beats or very slow beat speeds, while those fifths that are tuned directly have beat speeds that are similar to those of well-tempered fifths.
These beats have a crucial effect on the esthetic impact of different tuning systems. For example, in Pythagorean tuning, while all of the perfect fifths are pure (beatless), all of the major thirds are very wide and beat quite fast. This gives those thirds, and any triads, a noisy and restless feeling. A triad with pure fifths and pure thirds—a beatless triad—is a very different phenomenon for a listener, even though it looks exactly the same in music notation. Other sorts of triads are different still: those with a pure major third and a narrow fifth, for example, or with all of the component intervals departing slightly from pure.

Temperaments throughout history
General tendencies in the beat structure of different temperaments may explain some things about the history of those temperaments, why they were used at different times, or at least how they correlate with other things that were going on musically at the time when they were current.

Pythagorean tuning
For example, Pythagorean tuning was in common use in the late Middle Ages. This was a time when the perfect fifth was still considered a much more consonant or stable interval than the major or minor third. Thus it made sense to use a tuning in which fifths were pure and thirds were wide enough—buzzy enough—to be almost inherently dissonant.
(But it is interesting to speculate about the direction of causality: did Pythagorean organ tuning suggest the avoidance of thirds as consonant intervals, or did a theory-based avoidance of those intervals suggest that a tuning with very wide thirds was acceptable?)

Meantone tuning
The rise of meantone tuning in the late fifteenth century corresponded with the rise of music in which the major third played an increasingly large role as a consonant interval and as a defining interval of both modal and tonal harmony. A major triad with a Pythagorean third does not quite sound like a resting place or point of arrival, but a major triad with a pure third does. During this same period, the harpsichord and virginal also arose, supplementing the clavichord and the organ. These new instruments had a brighter sound with a more explosive attack than earlier instruments. This kind of sound tends to make wide thirds sound very prominent. This may have been a further impetus to the development of new tuning systems in those years.
Meantone tuning, since it includes many unusable intervals, places serious restrictions on composers and players. Modulation within a piece is limited. In general, a given piece can only use one of the two notes represented by a raised (black) key, and must rigorously avoid the other. Many transpositions create impossible tuning problems. Many keys must, as a practical matter, be avoided altogether in order to avoid tremendous amounts of re-tuning.
Some keyboard instruments built during the meantone era had split sharps for certain notes, that is, two separate keys in, for example, the space between d and e, sharing that space front and back, one of them playing the d#, the other playing the e♭. Composers do not seem to have relied on it more than once in a while to write pieces in which they went beyond the harmonic bounds natural to meantone tuning. These split keys were probably intended to reduce or eliminate the need to re-tune between pieces, rather than to expand the harmonic language of the repertoire.
Meantone was no easier to tune than what came before it, or than other tuning systems that were known theoretically at the time but little used, since by limiting transposition it placed significant harmonic limitations on composers and improvisers, and thus made accompaniment more difficult. Yet it remained in use for a very long time. It seems certain that whatever it was accomplishing esthetically must have seemed very important, even crucial. Many listeners even now feel that the sonority of a harpsichord is most beautiful in meantone.

Well temperaments
In the late seventeenth century, composers and theorists began to suggest new temperaments that overcame the harmonic restrictions of meantone. These were the well-tempered tunings, in which every fifth and every third is usable as an harmonic interval. In order to achieve this flexibility, these tunings do away with most or, in some cases, all of the pure major thirds. This change can be seen as a shift from an instrument-centered esthetic—in which the beauty of the sound of the pure thirds was considered more important than perhaps anything else—to a composer-centered esthetic and philosophy, in which limitations on theoretical compositional possibilities were considered less and less acceptable. There were strong defenders of the older tunings well into the eighteenth century. It is interesting that in one well-known dispute about the merits of meantone as opposed to well-tempered tuning, the advocate of the former was an instrument builder (Gottfried Silbermann) and the advocate of the latter was a composer (J. S. Bach).
The crucial esthetic characteristic of well-tempered tunings is that different keys have different harmonic structures. That is, the placement of relatively pure and relatively impure intervals and triads with respect to the functional harmonies of the key (tonic, dominant, etc.) is different from one key to another. (An interesting experiment about this is possible in modern times. If a piece is recorded on a well-tempered instrument in two rather different keys, say C major and then E major, and the recordings are adjusted by computer so as to be at the same pitch level as one another, then they will still sound different and be easily distinguishable from each other.) Their differences are almost certainly the source of ideas about the different inherent characters of different keys. Lists of the supposed emotional or affective characteristics of different keys arose in the very late seventeenth century, at about the same time that well-tempered tuning took hold.

Equal temperament
In equal temperament, which became common in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, every interval with a given name and every triad or other chord of a particular type is the same as every other interval, triad, or chord of that type. Part of the appeal of this tuning in the nineteenth century was, probably, its theoretical consistency and symmetry. Many people have found the concept of equal temperament intellectually satisfying: it does not have what might be thought of as arbitrary differences between things that, theoretically at least, ought to be the same. Equal temperament took hold in the same era of organ history that included logarithmic pipe scalings—another theoretically satisfying, mathematically inspired idea. During this same time, designers of wind instruments were working to make those instruments sound the same—or as close as humanly possible—up and down the compass. This is another manifestation of a taste for avoiding seemingly arbitrary or random difference.
On an equal-tempered keyboard, the computer experiment described above would result in two indistinguishable performances: it is not possible to tell keys apart except by absolute pitch. The rise and dissemination of equal temperament also coincided with a general worldwide increase in travel. In a world in which equal temperament and a particular pitch standard (say a′=440hz) will be found anywhere and everywhere, a flutist, for example, can travel from Europe to America or Japan or anywhere and expect to be able to play with local musicians.
It is also likely that the general acceptance of equal temperament helped lead to twelve-tone and other atonal music by promoting the idea (and the actual listening experience) that all keys and all twelve semitones were the same.
In equal temperament, no interval is pure, and no interval is more than a little bit out of tune. This is a tuning that, just as a matter of taste or habit, appeals strongly to some people and does not appeal to others. I have known musicians with no training (or for that matter interest) in historical temperaments who could not stand to listen to equal temperament because they found equal-tempered thirds grating; I have known others who can accept the intervals of equal temperament as normal but who cannot tolerate the occasional more out of tune intervals of well-tempered tuning.
At the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website there are links to several resources describing and comparing historical temperaments and discussing further some of what I have written about here.