Recording the Organ, Part II: Microphone Placement

by Joseph Horning

A skill of great value to most organists is the ability to make recordings of music on the organ. As students we have teachers and colleagues to give feedback on our playing, but when formal study ceases do we stop learning new works? Most organists are continually learning new music and reworking old pieces for performance in concert and/or church. We rely primarily on our own musical taste and experience, of course, but who is listening to us--objectively and with complete attention--when we grapple with the often difficult and complicated process of working up a piece on the organ? A tape recorder will give us an excellent idea of how we're doing--if we use one. Robert Noehren reports that he records about half of his practicing, enabling him to listen to and analyze his playing.1 Why don't more organists use tape recording as a learning tool? Many say they would like to, but either they "don't know how to do it" or think "it's too much of a production" to be practical.

 

The purpose of this article is threefold:

1) to give organists a set of basic tools and techniques with which they can, easily and quickly, make diagnostic tape recordings of their own playing;

2) expand on the above with more advanced techniques to achieve recordings suitable for mastering on cassette or CD;

3) give professional techniques, some unique to recording the organ, which can help organists who are working with sound engineers achieve the highest quality recordings.

The information in this article comes from the author's personal experience, research on the subject, experimentation based on the research, and in-depth interviews with some of the leading professional sound engineers who specialize in recording the organ and who have generously shared their knowledge and techniques:

Michael Barone, Pipedreams

John Eargle, Delos International

Frederick Hohman, Pro Organo

Michael Nemo, Towerhill

Jack Renner, Telarc International

David Wilson, Wilson Audiophile.

The footnotes give either background information to supplement the text, or specific information on sources of items mentioned in the text.

Selecting Microphones

The function of the microphone is to convert sound energy into electrical energy which can be recorded. There are two basic types: dynamic and condenser. Dynamic microphones are generally lower in quality and price, and they are not recommended for the rigorous challenges of organ recording.2 Condenser or electret condenser microphones do require a power source (usually an internal battery) and can give very high quality recordings at a quite reasonable price. Some of the experts recommended less-expensive condenser mikes marketed by: Audio-Technica, Beyer, EV, Nakamichi, Shure and Sony.

Frequency Response

Since the frequency of low CC of a 16' pipe is 32 cycles per second (or Hz), the minimum microphone frequency response you need for organ recording is 30-15,000 Hz. For quality microphones, the frequency response specification is given like this: 30-15,000 ±3.5 dB, or 20-18,000 ±3.0 dB. The first spec means that from 30Hz (just below 16'CC) all the way up to 15,000Hz (which approaches the upper limit of hearing), sounds recorded by the microphone will be within a range no greater or no less than 3.5 decibels from the mean, which is pretty good. The second spec indicates a higher quality microphone, which at a low limit of 20Hz "hears" well down into the 32' range (low CCC of a 32' pipe is 16Hz), up through the range of human hearing and which, at ±3.0 dB has a slightly flatter (better) frequency response curve than the other microphone. Some pro mikes respond down to 5 Hz, which is lower than CCCC of a 64' stop!

Polar Response Pattern

Another key microphone characteristic is the polar response pattern, which simply refers to the direction in which the microphone "listens." An "omnidirectional" microphone picks up sounds equally in all directions--top, bottom, left, right, front and rear.3 On the other hand, a "cardioid" (sometimes referred to as "unidirectional") microphone is directional--it responds to sound from a broad angle in front of the microphone and rejects sound from the rear. While there are other response patterns (hemispherical, supercardioid, figure of eight, etc.), these are subsets of the two main types. Both omnidirectional and cardioid microphones can make excellent organ recordings, and in certain situations one may be preferred over the other.

It should be noted that you don't necessarily have to choose between the two types when purchasing a microphone, however, if you get a microphone with interchangeable "capsules." The Nakamichi CM-100 condenser microphone, an excellent microphone which the author uses, has a list price of $150 with a cardioid capsule, and an interchangeable omnidirectional capsule is available for $30.4 Since you may need both omnidirectional and cardioid pickup patterns, depending on where you are recording, microphones with interchangeable capsules are most attractive (see Fig. 1).

Stereo vs. Mono Mikes

Of course you want to make stereo recordings, but should you use one stereo microphone or two monophonic microphones to do it? In general, you have a great deal more flexibility with two monophonic mikes. A "stereo" microphone is simply two mono microphones in one housing. There are two categories: the big, high-quality and very expensive professional version and the small, inexpensive and generally inferior amateur version. The former type is too expensive for amateur recording, and the latter usually doesn't have sufficient frequency response for organ recording.5 However, a mid-priced "stereo" microphone can be a convenient solution for personal recordings made with recorders which have a single stereo miniplug microphone input (more details on this follow).

PZM Microphones

One of the best microphone values, and an excellent choice for personal recordings of the organ, is the "pressure zone microphone" or PZM from Radio Shack (catalog no. 33-1090B) which sells for $60 each.6 The Radio Shack PZM is a low impedance condenser microphone with a 1/4" phone plug. The advantage of the PZM mike is that it allows great freedom in placement (you can tape them to walls, or lay them on the floor or on top of the console--no microphone stands required), they have excellent clarity and frequency response. The pickup pattern is "hemispherical," which means that they are omnidirectional above the plane upon which they are lying (see Fig. 2).

Plugging the Mikes In

On one end of the cable is the microphone and on the other end is a plug. Making sure the microphone plug is electronically and physically compatible with the recorder input is a challenge which requires forethought and planning. Professional equipment--microphones, mixers and recorders--use a low impedance (150 to 600 ohm) system that usually announces itself by the presence of a "balanced" 3-wire XLR plug. This allows long cable runs without hum via XLR extension cables.

Semi-pro microphones (such as the Nakamichi CM-100 mentioned earlier) also use the balanced low impedance system. The microphone itself has an XLR plug (see Fig. 3) and the supplied microphone cable has an XLR on one end and a 1/4" phone plug on the other. This cable is, in effect, an adapter which converts the balanced XLR to an unbalanced 1/4" phone plug. Phone plugs used to be the standard for microphone inputs on home audio gear7 and continue to be the standard on semi-pro equipment. If you need to extend the cable for proper microphone placement, use XLR 3-wire extension cables (the kind with a male plug on one end and a female plug on the other).8 This will prevent hum, whereas the less-expensive shielded extension cables with 1/4" phone plugs on either end will quite possibly cause hum.

The Stereo Miniplug Input

If your recorder9 has a single, stereo miniplug mike input, you have a potential problem. In order to use two mono mikes with 1/4" phone plugs, you need a "Y" adapter with two 1/4" female mono connectors on one end and a stereo male mini (3.5mm) plug on the other (see Fig. 4). This is not an easy item to find, but trying to "create" one from the various plugs and adapters commonly found in electronics stores is a recipe for disaster--it is virtually guaranteed to cause hum (see Fig. 5). The Hosa Company markets the correct part (model YMP-137)10 through independent audio/electronic supply stores.

Another solution, if your recorder has a single stereo miniplug input, is to purchase the best semi-pro stereo mike which terminates in this kind of plug. The Audio-Technica AT822 is a high-quality mike of this type with a frequency response of 30-20,000 Hz. It sells for a pricey $350,11 but it does plug right in and works well. The "under $100" stereo mikes don't have sufficient bass response for organ recording.

As an alternative to using the stereo miniplug microphone input, you can use a mixer and go directly into the "line" inputs.12 The "mixer" solution--which we will discuss shortly--is required if the recorder has no microphone inputs at all.

Cassette vs. DAT

There are basically two choices for a recording medium: cassette tape and digital audio tape (DAT). We will ignore a myriad of other systems such as the digital cassette, the digital minidisc, the recordable CD, 1/4" reel to reel, and recording on "hi-fi" videotape as they are either marginal, impractical or inferior.

Everybody is familiar with cassette tapes. They are great for making personal "analysis" recordings because the tape itself is inexpensive, you can listen to the results in the car, etc. While the original recorded cassette can sound great on playback, the inherent noise level of the medium makes it a less good choice if your goal is to make master tapes for release on cassette or CD.13

Because of its superior quality, digital audio tape (DAT) is an excellent medium for personal analysis recordings and more ambitious projects as well.14A home DAT or portable DAT recorder will cost a minimum of $550, and professional portable models cost from $1500 to $4000. DAT 120-minute tapes are about $10 each.

Cassette "Deck" Challenges

There are some challenges to using home cassette decks--the A.C. "plug into the wall" models which are a component of a home stereo system--for location recording. As virtually none of the newer models have microphone inputs, a "mixer" is required between the mikes and the "line" inputs on the recorder (this is also true of home A.C. DAT decks). Further, few newer cassette decks allow you to plug in headphones and listen to playback, and of those which do very few have a volume control for the headphones. This is mandatory for playback in the field, but a mixer solves this problem too, as we shall discuss. Also, many low-to-midpriced cassette recorders suffer from excessive wow and flutter distortion, which is particularly annoying on the sustained tones of the organ. The bottom line: it is not a good idea to purchase an A.C. home cassette deck for location recording. If you own an older model with microphone inputs and a headphone output with volume control, you are all set (see Fig. 6). However, if you own a newer model cassette deck without these features, we'll show you how to make the best use of it.

Portable Location Recorders

Battery-operated portable recorders designed for high quality music recording--with mike inputs and full headphone capabilities--are not a common item.15 The Sony Walkman Pro series has two cassette recorders: the WM-D3 at $250 and the WM-D6C at $350.16 These are quality cassette recorders. The rugged WM-D6C especially is a fine recorder and a good value. They will do well for personal analysis recordings. Their performance must be compared with the Sony TCD-D7 DAT portable, however, which at a "street" price of $550 makes substantially superior recordings. All three of these Sony recorders have a single stereo miniplug input for the microphone, stereo miniplugs for the line inputs and outputs, plus a headphone jack and volume control.

Using an Audio Mixer

Suppose that you have a perfectly good home cassette deck or home DAT deck without mike inputs. You want to do some analysis recording with it, and you don't mind unhooking it and taking to the church. In addition to the microphones, you will need a mixer to convert the microphone's output into a "line" input the recorder can use. I will confess to "mixer paralysis"--I didn't understand the button-laden beasts and steered well clear of them. This was a mistake I finally rectified, as Rudy Trubitt points out in his excellent book written for the beginner titled Compact Mixers:

Beneath its dizzying array of controls, a mixer actually has some important similarities to a home stereo receiver. A stereo receiver has controls that let you switch between different components of your hi-fi system, and also enables you to set overall volume, the balance between left and right speakers, and tone controls to shape the overall sound. A mixer does many of these things as well, and in addition allows you to control and combine or mix sounds from many different sources [such as two or more microphones] at once.17

For stereo recording, mixers need controls called pan pots. Inexpensive "mixers" designed for the party DJ market. including those sold by Radio Shack, lack this essential feature. Michael Barone and other audio professionals recommend the Mackie MS1202 compact mixer, which is specifically featured in Mr. Trubitt's book. It is priced at $299, which is very inexpensive for a fully professional mixer.18 I have found mine to be small, light weight, easy to use and of excellent quality (see Fig 7).

A mixer will also enable you to listen to playback in the field from recorders which have no headphone volume control or no headphone output at all. Simply run a patch cord from the line output of the recorder to the line input of the mixer. This is very simple to do and gives new utility to recorders with neither headphone volume control nor headphone output (see Fig. 8).

Setting the Record Level

To achieve the cleanest recorded sound, you want to record the loudest sections of the music at the loudest level possible on the tape without causing distortion.19 To set the recorder properly, simply play the loudest section of the music to be recorded at a given session20 and adjust the record level so you get the appropriate reading on the VU meter.21  The "appropriate reading" on the VU meter is different for different mediums.

With DAT, you never want the level to exceed 0dB on the DAT recorder's VU meter, so--while the loudest chord is being held--advance the record level control so that the meter reads 0dB.22 Once the level is set, you don't need to touch it again for the duration of your recording session.

There are three different kinds of cassette tape: Standard (Type I), Chromium Dioxide or CrO2 (Type II), and Metal (Type IV).  Type II tape can accept a louder signal than Type I without distortion, and Type IV can accept a louder signal than Type II. The record level should be adjusted with Type I tape so that the peak level is 0dB on the VU meter. With Type II the peak level should be +1dB and with Type IV it is +3dB. Note that these last two settings will have the peaks in the red of the VU meter, and that's fine as long as no audible distortion results.

When choosing cassette tape, skip the somewhat noisy "standard" tape and try the CrO2 (Type II) tape recorded with Dolby B sound reduction. This is a good compromise on price and compatibility,23 and it gives excellent quality on playback. There will be a switch on the recorder which you need to set at "CrO2" or "Type II" or "High Bias," which are three ways to refer to this one kind of tape. Depending on your situation, you may also want to experiment with "metal" tape (Type IV) and Dolby C, which, all other things being equal, gives the highest quality on cassette.

Listening to Playback

One of the requirements for location recording is a good set of headphones. The best designs have circular padded cushions which completely surround each ear and provide some degree of acoustic isolation. You are shielded from noise in the room, and people in the room are less likely to be annoyed by playback from your earphones. Quality headphones provide a lot of sound for a reasonable price. The Sony MDR-V600 dynamic stereo headphones the author uses have clean, lifelike sound with a frequency response which extends well down into the 32' range.24 Priced around $100, they come with a clever screw-on adapter which converts the integral stereo miniplug to a 1/4" stereo phone plug (see Fig. 9). This is very handy as small portable recorders have a miniplug headphone output, and mixers and other audio gear have a 1/4" phone jack.

Stands and Safety

Anyone who can imagine a tall microphone stand crashing down amidst a sea of pews appreciates that basic safety rules must be followed at all times to protect life and property. Use only a stable microphone stand and if necessary, weigh down the base with sandbags.25 Attach the mike cable(s) to the top of the stand with cable ties,26 allowing a bit of slack between the cable tie and the mike, so the weight of the cable doesn't pull on the mike. Run the microphone cable down the stand and either tie it around the base of the stand or preferably attach it securely with a cable tie. Then if the cable gets an unexpected jerk, the force will act on the relatively stable base of the stand and not on the very unstable top.

Microphone stands for organ recording should ideally allow you to position the microphones 20' or more in the air, which precludes many less-expensive audio stands. Audio engineers often use heavy-duty motion picture lighting stands adapted to accept the 5/8" thread which is the audio industry standard.27 Michael Barone recommends, in levels of increasing capability and cost: 1) Shure microphone stands, 2) Bogen light stands, 3) the Ultimate Support system.

If the public is in the room, the microphone cables must be taped down to the floor lengthwise with 2" masking tape so no one trips. These precautions are necessary because no recording is important enough to risk injuring someone, and we live in a very litigious society.

In Part II we will look at one of the most critical aspects of the art of recording--microphone placement.

Notes

1.              Correspondence of September, 1995.

2.              Dynamic mikes don't require a battery. If the microphone you are considering requires a battery, it is not a dynamic mike.

3.              Omnidirectional microphones tend to become more directional--and less omnidirectional--above 3000 Hz, so it is important to point them toward the sound source. Because the response from the sides and back of the mike begins to fall off above 3000 Hz (pitches at and above 3000 Hz are an important component of the harmonics of most 8' voices), you get enough directionality to maintain a clear sense of left and right.

4.              For a list of dealers, contact: Nakamichi America Corporation, 955 Francisco St., Torrance, CA 90502, (310)538-8150.

5.              A frequency response no lower than 50 Hz, which is typical for inexpensive stereo mikes, won't pickup the bottom octave of a 16' Bourdon.

6.              Crown International of Elkhart, Indiana, manufactures a full range of PZM mikes for the professional.

7.              Home audio recorders no longer have microphone inputs, and portable amateur recorders often have a single stereo miniplug input for the microphones.

8.              XLR extension cables cost about $16 per 25' or $47 per 100'.

9.              Such as the Sony Walkman Pro or the Sony DAT portable (TCD-D7).

10.           For availability contact: Hosa Technology, Inc., 6910 E. 8th St., Buena Park, CA 90620.

11.           For availability contact: Audio-Technica, 1221 Commerce Drive, Stow, OH 44224.

12.           In most cases there will be two RCA jacks for the left and right channel inputs, and you will use a standard RCA male-male patch cord to connect the mixer to the recorder. But on some portable recorders you may find a stereo miniplug line input, in which case you need a patch cord with two RCA male connectors on one end (for the mixer) and a male stereo miniplug on the other end (for the recorder).

13.           There is no escaping the fact that the cassette started life as a lowly medium for dictation. The ultra-slow 17/8" per second tape speed and the narrow tape width cause a certain amount of hiss despite the best efforts of tape recorder designers and Dolby® noise reduction systems.

14.           Because DAT is digital and cassettes are analog, comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges. All cassette recorders have measurable wow and flutter distortion from tape speed fluctuations, whereas DAT machines generally have no measurable wow and flutter. The frequency response, signal to noise ratio, dynamic range and overall distortion specifications of the best cassette machines are not as good as even the less-expensive, amateur DAT recorders.

15.           There are some less expensive (approx. $100) portable cassette recorders by Aiwa with a stereo mike input and a headphone output. They have neither Dolby noise reduction for the record function nor a record level control (AGC only), very important features for reasonable quality with cassettes.

16.           These are "street" prices--the lowest purchase price I could find--not list prices.

17.           Rudy Trubitt, Compact Mixers, published in 1995 by Hal Leonard Corporation, 7777 W. Bluemound Rd., P.O. Box 13819, Milwaukee, WI, 53213, page 3.

18.           Available from the "Pro Audio" department of Guitar Center stores nationally. Inquire at 7425 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, CA, 90046, (213) 874-1060 for a list of locations.

19.           This technique maximizes the "signal to noise ratio." The "signal" is the music and the "noise" is the tape hiss and amplifier hum. Since the noise is at a more-or-less constant low level, the louder the music level the more it stands out from the noise. While softer than the loud sections, the quiet portions of the music will also sound as clean as possible.

20.           If the session extends over several days, use one level setting based on the loudest piece. The only exception would be a program with one or two loud pieces and many softer ones. I would consider using one level setting for the loud work(s) and a louder recording setting for the softer pieces, as this will maximize clarity among the latter group.

21.           The recorder's "VU" meter allows you to set non-distorting recording levels consistently. It has numbers in decibels (dB), with a range of positive numbers (+1, +2, +3, etc.) "in the red" above zero dB and a range of numbers "in the black" below (-1, -5, -20). The range of numbers below zero dB is where most recording takes place. The meter can take two forms: an older style needle which swings on a pivot throughout the meter's range, and the newer style LEDs which illuminate (no moving parts to break).

22.           This is generally true, but also consult the recorder's instruction manual.

23.           Not every tape player, especially in cars, has a setting for Metal (Type IV) tape or Dolby C noise reduction. Playing metal tapes and/or Dolby C tapes in a machine set up for Type II tape and Dolby B will result in a significant loss of fidelity.

24.           They are also excellent for listening to organ CDs on a portable CD player--you can pick up many nuances that you might miss when listening via speakers. The claimed frequency response is 5 to 30,000 Hz.

25.           Fully sealed 15# sandbags in a "saddlebag" configuration for this purpose are available from motion picture equipment supply houses and some professional audio supply houses.

26.           The Lowel-Light Company, 140 58th St., Brooklyn, NY 11220, phone (800) 334-3426, makes secure and inexpensive reusable plastic cable ties which are available in larger photo stores. Velcro cable ties are also available.

27.           The author uses the Lowel KS stand ($135) which will extend to 8' (see footnote 26). The Lowel KP extension pole ($58) allows 5' of extension, and you can use several of those (sandbags are essential if you use extension poles). On the very top you need the Lowel Tota-Tilter T1-36 ($25), a 1/4-20 to 3/8 screw thread adapter (available in most photo stores) and a special 3/8 to 5/8 screw thread adapter thread available from Alan Gordon Enterprises, 1430 Cahuenga Blvd., LA, CA 90028, (213) 466-3561. The microphone holder screws into the 5/8" thread.

 

Other articles in this series, and by Joseph Horning, etc.:

Recording the organ part 2: Microphone placement

Chorale Preludes of Johannes Brahms

Recording the sound of a pipe organ in church

Microphone arrangement for recording a pipe organ

by George Taylor

The late 20th century has not been kind to church acoustics. Good homes for organs are becoming increasingly scarce. Existing ones are under siege, as acoustically fine churches are spoiled all around us by misguided renovations often made, curiously, in the name of acoustical improvement. And sadly, what is usually offered today by architects for an organ environment in new buildings falls woefully short of the mark. While the problem is hardly a new one, it has never been more severe. Increased wealth and shifting tastes, especially toward comfortable interior furnishings, have lent the trend increasing force. The result is that poor church acoustics have become perhaps the greatest impediment to fine organ building in America.

For as long as anyone can recall in the organ building business, there have been battles over church acoustics with prospective customers. Organs are more sensitive to their surroundings than other instruments. Thus inordinate amounts of time have been and are being spent educating parishioners in the fundamentals of liturgical acoustics—not only for the sake of their investment in an organ, but for improvement of the entire worship environment. Looking back on it, we don't seem to have gotten very far. Sound absorbing carpets, pew cushions, and flimsy construction are far more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago, and ignorance of what is missing pervades the church. It would be easy to lose heart, for the road has become a lonely one. Yet, the occasional reminder of hearing an organ and congregation singing in a great space somehow keeps organ builders pressing toward the goal.

One can hardly blame parishioners for not understanding what constitutes proper acoustics in a church. Most have never encountered any good examples, let alone worshiped in them regularly. Two hundred years ago the accepted techniques of construction and furnishing for buildings, be they public halls or private homes, would have tended to create a favorable acoustical setting for organ music. In America today we seldom experience such naturally resonant spaces. Prevailing influences on architecture from cost cutting to modern building materials, aesthetic taste and energy conservation have so reshaped our aural expectations that if by chance a reverberant space appears, people hasten to tame it with acoustical absorption. Hopefully, a return to once assumed but now forgotten acoustical values can be brought about through education. To this end we can ask what makes a proper acoustical space for an organ and why it is so difficult to have one built and to keep it unspoiled.

The basic acoustical needs of an organ are simple enough. Apart from the musical quality of the instrument itself, two factors stand out as crucial to success. The first is the requirement that the room support and carry the sound of the organ well. The second is proper placement of the organ within the room.

Organ music, like choral and congregational singing, flourishes in reverberant spaces. Even one stop voiced by an amateur can sound full and beautiful in a lively, reflective space, while many ranks in a dead room strain to create a similar effect. Organ tone should linger in the room for between two and four seconds, decaying gradually without discernible echoes. It is not enough, however, to make the space merely reverberant. The response should be well balanced for all frequencies from 32 cycles to 8,000 cycles (corresponding to the organ's bass and treble pitches), so that the music is neither shrill, monotonous, nor muddy, but rather warm, full, and clear. Note that organs have a wider frequency spectrum than the human voice, and that therefore acoustics which are adequate for singing may not support the highest and/or lowest frequencies of the pipes. Meeting these acoustical standards from an architectural standpoint requires close attention to the shape and volume of the space, to the materials used to create it, and especially to the way the materials are used.

An organbuilder is usually called on to propose an organ for an existing church. Discussions almost always include suggestions from the builder for acoustical improvements. To foresee where these proposals may lead, an examination of the acoustical ideals of new buildings is helpful, for the same principles apply to renovations.

To determine a suitable shape for a church, one begins with examples of existing churches which are known to work well acoustically. Many of the best are older buildings which have proven their merits over the years. Organs developed in Europe where churches were generally rectangular in floor plan, often with transepts and side aisles. These buildings were tall in proportion to their floor area. Music developed freely above the heads of the congregation in space which had no other practical value than its spiritual power in music and vision. These churches were also relatively narrow, a significant feature in reflecting organ music off side walls, thereby blending and focusing the tone in a particular direction rather than allowing its energy to dissipate. Opposing walls were rarely completely parallel but were so shaped as to diffuse sound evenly rather than permit problematic flutter echoes and encourage  certain frequencies at the expense of others.  Vaulted ceilings, uneven plastered walls, chandeliers and other furnishings and molded details usually insured proper diffusion. Church architects today ignore these time-honored principles at great risk.

Sturdy material such as masonry and plaster characterize the construction of the best traditional churches. These materials have sufficient mass to reflect sound energy evenly. By comparison, weak panels of thin modern materials which drum when struck (for example, large expanses of glass, or gypsum board and plywood on widely-spaced studs) are no friend to organ tone.

Designing and building an outstanding space for an organ does not need to be prohibitively expensive. Architectural style is not so important, so long as the boundaries of shape and materials are heeded. A sympathetic architect who is not afraid to learn from successful models should have little trouble presenting a compelling design based on a simple shape. The wise use of ordinary construction materials can go a long way toward holding down costs. For example, concrete block and gypsum board can be used effectively, so long as they are made to be firm reflectors of sound. In the case of block this means sealing its pores. Old-fashioned plaster makes a fine interior coat. Several layers of gypsum board firmly anchored to a stronger wall behind work well.

Height in a church, on the other hand, does not come cheaply. It is exactly here than many a promising design is cut down to size, leaving the church acoustically and architecturally crippled. Organ music suffers from the loss.

Today's overriding concern with the conservation of heat regularly takes precedence over church acoustics on several counts. Thermal insulation, sound absorbent by nature, is most often installed just behind thin inner walls. Making such walls acoustically reflective does involve additional cost, but the problem can be solved if a solution is desired. Furthermore, people wish to save on fuel bills by avoiding high ceilings. They do not respond well to the suggestion that they might lower their thermostats instead.

This brings up the whole issue of comfort, which has become such a threat to liturgical acoustics. In the Middle Ages, significantly at the very time when organs first flourished, such furnishings as a church might have had were practical but hardly comfortable. Heating was unknown. Since then a standard of comfort has gradually replaced this, and with it has come the ubiquitous use of sound-absorbent fabrics for seats, floors, and sometimes even walls. The trend has now gone so far that the willingness to sit on a well-designed wooden seat in a cool church is fast disappearing, even among those who gladly spend an afternoon sitting on hard bleachers at a sports event. Curious, isn't it that while it would rarely occur to anyone to place sound absorbing materials near an organ, it is thought desirable to surround with fabrics the congregational singer, whose musical contribution is so much more to be encouraged and prized. Are we not becoming a nation of ever more effete church-goers, confused in our values, because there is no one teaching us otherwise? Could it be that our forefathers might have appreciated certain spiritual qualities of life more than we? We would do well to reflect on the remark that there is by nature something harsh and bracing about liturgical acoustics, not unlike the Gospel.

There are, of course, churches in which excessive reverberation needs to be controlled. Too many organ committees have been led to crusade for reverberation as an end in itself. The issues are not that simple, for there are many other factors touched on here which contribute to the warmth, resonance, and clarity of a church's aural environment. In planning for an organ the advice of a qualified acoustical consultant can be invaluable.

While the subtle pitfalls of room acoustics can never be completely avoided, they can be greatly minimized by obtaining experienced opinion. Many acoustical consultants are competent architects in their own right, capable of designing superior halls. Their advice should be sought in the early stages of design and then followed, not ignored by architects and contractors as is often the case. One caveat is in order: to be successful the acoustician must appreciate the difference between liturgical acoustics in which a congregation participates in making music and concert/lecture hall acoustics, in which an audience is there only to listen. Thoughtful review of the consultant's experience with other churches should reveal sensitivity to this point. With good liturgical acoustics the organ's needs will almost certainly be met.

Fortunately, there is no conflict between acoustical requirements for singing and for organs. This is hardly surprising, since a fundamental element of the best organ tone is its vocal quality, especially in the principal stops. It is this singing of organs which evokes in the layman the urge to sing. No other instrument has this unique evocative quality. On the other hand, organ tone is not limited to the vocal. It is also instrumental in character, and at times even imitative of other instruments. It is this dual nature of organ sound, both vocal and instrumental, which makes it endearing and broad in its musical appeal.

Many argue that clarity of the spoken word cannot co-exist with reverberant acoustics. This is one place where technology has come to the aid of music, for with a carefully-designed sound system it is now possible to maintain a high degree of intelligibility even in rooms which are extremely reverberant. Here again the advice of a knowledgeable consultant should be sought.

Assuming that every effort has been made to provide good acoustics for the church, the question of placing the organ within the room then arises. The importance of placement cannot be overestimated. Occasional compromises may be considered where acoustics are exceptionally fine, but they are still compromises.

Like a preacher or choir, an organ should project its sound directly to the hearer, not around corners. No minister would think of preaching without facing the congregation. The strange notion popular early in this century, that organs belong in chambers beside the church, has been recognized for its error. Any obstruction such as an arch or rood screen which separates organ from congregation is suspect.

Ideally, organs should face the long axis of the building. Clarity is lost when the organ is made to speak sideways across the width of the church, for in order to be heard in the nave it will have to be made unnaturally loud nearby. This leaves two options, namely, placing the organ on the front or back wall of the church. Of these two a rear gallery is usually the preferable location, for it puts organ and choir near the ceiling in a place otherwise unused except for windows and tower walls. Because organs are architecturally imposing, it is difficult to locate them discreetly in front of the church. Where possible that end is better reserved for the sacraments and proclamation of the word.

Organs sound best when they are placed high in the church. Sound which comes from above enjoys advantages over sound produced on the level of the hearer. Its dispersion is more even in the space. The tone is not absorbed so quickly as it travels back through the congregation. Also its steep angle of incidence on side walls discourages confusing echoes. For these same reasons public address loudspeakers are placed high above the heads of crowds. Many wonderful organs have been placed just under a ceiling which provides immediate reflection of the tone downward. The sound gains presence and focus from this phenomenon which we call early reflection. Like a pulpit soundboard the ceiling keeps the sound energy from being dissipated overhead. This effect is so prominent that pipes nearest the ceiling will sound closer to the floor than pipes below them in the same organ. Without a reflector above it an organ takes on an ethereal quality which can be quite beautiful but is musically less precise.

The pipes of the organ need a shallow wooden case around them. The case is the first reflector for the tone, a miniature room in itself. Its job is not only to protect the pipes, but to restrain and blend their many sounds into music and direct it into the church.

These then are a few guidelines for effective placement of an organ in a proper acoustical environment. There will always be exceptions, and organbuilders will forever strive to overcome their acoustical problems for the sake of their art. It is still the responsibility of churches and architects to provide the best possible environment for this peculiar craft, so costly in time and money, and so rewarding in its musical power. A church can ill afford less, for it will live with the results of these decisions far into the future.

An heretical view of acoustics

by Jack M. Bethards

 

In the world of music at large the organ is often considered an outcast, a curiosity, or at best an antique. One reason is that much of the organ world is thought to be more concerned with sound for its own sake than with music. This characterization may be unfair, but it is partly our own fault. Organ builders and organists are notorious for demanding acoustics with exceptionally long reverberation times. True, much choral and organ music (often that written for the church) sounds best in a resonant environment, but this fact has often clouded our thinking . . . and the music! A great deal of music played on the organ is not served well by overly long reverberation because clarity is lost. Too much reverberation can blur form, harmonic structure, rhythm, articulation, and dynamic contrasts. Although it is hard for organ devotees to admit it, a resonant acoustic that is excellent for orchestral and other music can also serve the organ well.

 

There are two reasons for the dogmatic insistence on long reverberation times. First, it is a natural reaction to the discouraging trend toward studio-like acoustics in modern church architecture. In order to gain any reverberation at all, we have become used to asking for the moon. Ask for five seconds and be happy with one and a half is the usual formula. Unfortunately, however, this strategy often backfires, leaving organ advocates with little credibility among architects, acousticians and those who pay for buildings.

The second reason is that organs in highly reverberant rooms make a spectacular sonic effect. It is said that any kind of noise sounds well in a stone cathedral. But what does this mean? Does it mean that the overall result is musical? Or does it mean only that the sound itself is exciting, dramatic, rich with color? All too often the latter is the answer. Likewise, amateur singing sounds fine in the shower as does student trumpeting in an empty gymnasium. But these, of course, are illusions. What is being perceived as music is often nothing more than exaggerated sound. More is required of an acoustical environment to make satisfying music.

What is a good acoustic for the pipe organ?

It is commonly believed that all organs are enhanced by a very long reverberation time. We must differentiate among general types of organs (and the music played on them) and their acoustical environments. First, consider the cathedral organ. Although no music is successful when all clarity is lost through excessive reverberation, certain branches of the organ and choral repertoire--particularly that written for grand churches--require a reverberation time that is greater than that required for other forms of music.

At the other extreme is the high pressure theater organ. This type of instrument is far more successful in a studio or heavily draped theater. Otherwise the detail is lost. Their unique ability to create accent and to carry complex rhythmic patterns is partially defeated if reverberation is too great. Special purpose venues for these two extremes of the spectrum are not our concern here. This article deals instead with acoustical requirements for organs in the middle ground that are required to perform an eclectic repertoire in typical American churches and in multi-purpose concert halls.

Amount of reverberation

Too much is just as bad as too little. The lower limit of reverberation is easy to determine. It is the point at which music sounds dry, dull, and lifeless. This lower limit is higher for organ than for other instruments primarily because organ pipes are simply on or off. There is little that can be done to shape their tone. Some organ builders strive to improve the flexibility and responsiveness of the pipe organ; however, it seems unlikely that this can be achieved to the degree it is found in other instruments or in the human voice. Therefore a reasonably resonant acoustic is necessary for the church or concert pipe organ.

It is more difficult to determine the upper limit of reverberation. When does reverberation stop adding warmth and grandeur and start adding confusion? There are five determinants:

* When there is so much overlap of sequential sounds that musical line and structure lose definition despite the most careful articulation by the player; in other words, when the player's ideas get lost in the process of transmission to the audience. At that point the performance becomes an impression of sounds rather than a projection of musical ideas. (Those satisfied only with impressions of sounds are much like the early Hi-Fi enthusiasts who favored recordings of locomotives!)

* When the player loses control of rhythm.

* When it becomes impossible to create accent, which on the organ is accomplished more through durations of silence and sound than it is by increase of loudness.

* When sudden changes of dynamic level are obscured.

* When sharp contrast in tone color is clouded.

All of these musical situations, and others, caused by excessive reverberation are not tolerated by most musicians. Unfortunately, however, they are sadly disregarded by many in the organ profession, much to the detriment of their credibility in musical circles. We are sometimes willing to sacrifice ten minutes of music to get five seconds of sound at the end of the last chord!

Quality of reverberation

Frequently, the total amount of reverberation time is the only consideration in specifying ideal organ acoustics. But we should be far more interested in the quality of reverberation than in its duration. There are three qualitative elements that seem most important to me as an organ designer:

* The intensity (power curve) must be as high as possible. I was first made aware of this in visiting some of the great churches of France. There was a quality of reverberation there quite different from even the best reverberant rooms in this country. Why this is so must be the subject of another enquiry; however, the nature of this quality is vitally important. What I found was that the intensity of sound stayed quite high throughout the reverberation period and then trailed off rather quickly. This produced a most satisfying, rich, warm sound. In other buildings with an equal duration of reverberation, but with quickly decreasing intensity, the result is a disturbing confusion. I attribute this to the changing nature of the sound during the reverberation period. My conclusion, based upon much observation, is that it is far better to have a short, intense reverberation period than to have a long, weak one. The charts below show this concept.

      A measurement which may be more valuable than reverberation time (RT) in expressing this quality of intensity is early decay time (EDT). This is the time it takes a sound to decay by 15 decibels, whereas RT measures the sound until it decays by 60 decibels. Obviously EDT is measuring the first and most intense part of the reverberation. A high sound level during the first seconds and a total reverberation period extending very little longer than the EDT describes my ideal reverberation characteristic in a more precise way. Exact numbers, of course, vary with each situation; however, the idea of a           ratio of EDT to RT is true in all cases.

* The decay of sound should be smooth. A series of fast echos (much like clapping one's hands at the top of a deep well) are called flutter echos. These often occur in buildings with parallel walls located close together or with domes and barrel vaults which have a focal point at a sound source. These are extremely deleterious to musical effect. They can be so serious as to confuse performers while irritating the listeners. Sometimes they can be sensed throughout the room, but often they are localized. This characteristic of reverberation, a yodeler's delight, is ruinous to music, or for that matter, clarity of speech. The quality of reverberation that we seek is a sound dying away, not a sound being reiterated.

* The room should sound the way it looks. The eye leads the ear to expect a certain amount of reverberation. When it is either more or less, even the amateur listener detects that something is wrong.

Frequency response

Reverberation time is such an issue that other related characteristics are sometimes overlooked in specifying acoustical design. Frequency response is one of the most important of these. I find it far easier to work in a building with a smooth frequency response than one where there are peaks and valleys along the spectrum. The amount of reverberation should progress evenly through each frequency range. The bass should have slightly more reverberation than the mid range and the treble should have slightly less. One of the great faults of most buildings is the inability to support the deep bass of the organ. The unfortunate tendency of many buildings to also exaggerate treble makes bass seem even weaker. Bass is, after all, one of the characteristics that makes the organ the king of instruments. However, if low frequency reverberation is overemphasized, the heavy, often slightly slow speaking bass of the pipe organ becomes ill-defined. Similarly, if there is an overbalance on the high end, it is difficult to avoid shrillness.

Dispersion

The sound producing area of a pipe organ is large. Sounds of different color and intensity emanate from various places within the organ case or chamber. If a room is shaped in such a way that sounds coming from different points are focused to particular listening areas, it is impossible to achieve good ensemble. The ideal acoustic disperses sound evenly throughout a room. Acousticians and architects can achieve this through the application of various shaped dispersion elements.

Distribution

Sound should be distributed evenly throughout the listening area. Organ builders encounter many rooms which have hot spots and dead spots. Some of these may involve loudness, others may emphasize certain frequencies. The first concern in good distribution is correct placement of the organ. Whether free-standing or in a chamber, an organ must have adequate communication with the listeners. Once that is achieved, the architect and acoustician can eliminate sound traps and provide proper reflective surfaces.

Presence

Reverberation that appears to be happening at a distance is not very satisfying. The listener should be immersed in the reverberant field, otherwise the effect is similar to listening to music coming from the next room. It is most often desirable for the organ to sound as though it is located in the same room as the listener, even if it is in a chamber. Many points of organ design are involved in this issue but acoustical factors are important as well. The chamber opening to the listening room should be as large as possible. The chamber should not be overly deep nor wider or taller at the back than it is at the front. Finally, the organ should occupy enough space so that the chamber does not possess its own reverberant field. If the sound being projected into the listening room comes with a built-in echo or hollowness, the result is more confusion. It must be noted that in some liturgical settings the opposite of presence, a sense of mystery, is valued. It is much easier to produce this quality in a chamber than in a free-standing case. Thus, a chamber can, in some circumstances, be advantageous. 

Background Noise

Because the organ is a "sostenuto" instrument lacking the percussive attack possibility of most other instruments, control of background noise is especially important since most background noise is also of a sustained nature. I refer especially to air handling equipment. Many types of organs have as one of their great virtues an extremely wide dynamic range. If background noise is not under control, the softer end of the organ's range is lost.

Loudness

Obviously, all of the qualities listed above which contribute to a warm, resonant sound require adequate loudness. This is a question of organ design. If an organ does not have the sonic energy to excite the reverberant field of the room, all of the efforts of acousticians and architects will be to no avail. The organ builder must design the instrument to fit the acoustical size of the listening room without being overbearing. All too often acoustical size is confused with the number of stops. Sound output has a great deal more to do with stop selection, layout, scaling, wind pressure, voicing, and finishing. In most cases, it is best to keep the organ as small as possible to achieve the musical and acoustical results desired.

Placement of the Organ

Placement of organ pipes is a critical element in acoustical design. If sound is not projected properly from its source, even the finest acoustic will not save the instrument. Proper placement and the tonal design of organs to fit various placement situations should be the subjects of a lengthy article, however a few summary comments are in order here. Although high, side organ chambers are often very successful in churches where the organ's role is primarily accompanimental, it is generally true that the best placement for an organ is directly behind and above the other performing forces. The organ should speak down the central, long axis of the room. This often poses a problem especially when inserting a pipe organ into an existing space. Usually, the difficulty is finding height for the organ. The lowest point of the sound opening should start one to two feet above the heads of the farthest "upstage" row of choristers when standing. This is often as much as 15¢ above floor level. The top of the tone opening should be a minimum of 18¢ above that. For some types of organs it should be more. If adequate height is not available, there arises the challenge of how to present the organ visually. Traditionally, organs are narrow and tall. Short, squat ones tend to look ridiculous. Since the organ is known as the king of instruments and produces a fittingly noble sound, a "Punch & Judy" pipe display is inappropriate. There are no easy solutions. If a compromise must be made, the musical result must always be favored over the visual one. Sometimes it is best not to show pipes at all and let the instrument speak through grilles.  A smaller instrument is often the best solution. It will open far more options for good placement than a larger one. A well placed organ is an acoustically efficient organ.

Summary

Over the years I have found it most comfortable to work in buildings with a moderate acoustic. It is depressing to face a totally dry environment where the organ's tone is given no help at all; however, it is equally frustrating to deal with an overly live building where all of one's efforts in careful tone regulation are lost in a musical muddle. Approximately two and one-half to three seconds of intense, smooth reverberation (when the room is occupied) combined with even frequency response, good dispersion, distribution, and presence, as well as limited background noise yields the ideal atmosphere. A few examples from my experience that come quickly to mind are Old South Church in Boston, First-Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, the University of Arizona (Holsclaw Hall) in Tucson, Severance Hall in Cleveland, the Boston Symphony Hall, and many of the famous 19th-century town halls throughout England. In other words, this writer's ideal for organ sound is the same as that for a first class symphony hall of the more reverberant type. Such an environment provides warmth for organ tone combined with clarity of musical line.

 

Jack Bethards is president and tonal director of Schoenstein & Co., Organ Builders of San Francisco. This article is based on a paper he presented in a forum with acoustical engineer Paul Scarbrough at the 136th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Norfolk, Virginia, in October, 1998.

Graphs by Paul Scarbrough, Acoustical Engineer, Norwalk, CT

John Bishop

Location, location, location

Near where I live there’s a long hill with a sweeping curve on a two-lane U.S. highway. It’s often snow-covered, or worse, covered with black ice, that spookiest of road conditions where a sheet of invisible ice lurks to deceive the unwary. Just about halfway up the hill there’s an auto body repair shop. When I drive by I wonder if the proprietor chose the site because it would take just a few seconds for him to get his tow truck onto the road. His location must be a primary source of his success. When we place a pipe organ in a church building, we should remind ourselves of this basic wisdom. Not that the organ is preying on the unfortunate for its success, but that good placement is simple wisdom. It doesn’t make much sense to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an organ that is hindered by poor placement.
The organ should be placed where it can be best heard, where it can best lead, where its visual presence is most inspiring. The placement of the console or keydesk should allow the organist a view of the choir, the altar, pulpit, center aisle—all the places in the building where things might happen that would affect the player’s timing, response, and participation in the flow of worship. Also, the experience of the congregation can be enhanced by their ability to see and interact with the organist as a worship leader. One church where I served as music director had the organ console placed in an awkward hole in the chancel floor, out of sight for most of the congregation. There was a wonderful woman in the congregation who habitually sat in the little area where eye contact with the organist was possible. Every time I started a hymn, she’d nod or shake her head to let me know whether or not she liked that one. It was a ritual that I really enjoyed.

What’s Wright for one . . .

Frank Lloyd Wright is revered for his visual designs. But when touring his buildings, one is struck by their impracticability. Houses have built-in severe furniture such as chairs with stiff upright backs and flat seats. Because Mr. Wright abhorred clutter, he designed houses without closets. We visited Taliesin West, the architecture school and enclave built by Wright on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. There we saw many examples of Wright’s imposition of his opinions on those who would use his buildings. I was particularly impressed by the auditorium, intended for performances of music, with very dry and close acoustics, and permanently installed seats and music racks for the performers. As a church musician, you might try that the next time a brass quintet comes to play—nail some chairs and stands to the floor and see what reactions you get.
In my work with the Organ Clearing House, I am often involved in determining the placement of an organ. Sometimes we are charged with placing an historic organ in a new location, and must deal with the constraints of floor space as it relates to the “traffic” of the leaders of worship. Sometimes we are consulting with churches that are planning new buildings, working with architects to help see that the building will have a good place for an appropriate organ. Any organbuilder can tell war stories about working with architects—and I expect that many architects have equivalent organbuilder stories. Several years ago a church engaged me as consultant. They had completed and dedicated a new building and were ready to discuss commissioning a new organ. Large gifts had been announced to begin a fund, and I was told how their architect had prepared a place for an organ. The drawings showed a figurative organ façade on the wall of the church and a location for a console. But the façade was on an outside wall. The architect showed some photos of organs he had copied from a book on liturgical architecture that showed façade pipes in various artistic arrangements on the wall of a church. When I told him (in front of the organ committee) that there would necessarily be an eight- or ten-foot deep room behind the façade, he admitted that he was not aware of that. I suppose the books to which he had referred left out that part. There was simply no place in the room where a pipe organ could be installed, and the parish was deeply disappointed.
A study of organ history allows us three rules for good organ placement:

1. The organ should be in the same room in which it will be heard.
2. The organ should be as high as possible on the center of the long axis of the room.
3. The organ should be in the same location as the choir and any other musical ensembles that would ordinarily perform with it.

Rules are made to be broken. The one about “the same room” is referring to organ chambers. Sound waves do not bend. They travel in straight lines. If an organ is placed in a deep chamber on the side wall of a chancel, most of the congregation will necessarily be hearing reflected sound rather than direct sound. Following my rule number one, this would be a recipe for an unsuccessful organ, but we’ve all heard wonderful instruments in situations like this.
Placing an organ as high as possible on the center of an axis implies that the instrument is either at the rear of the room, or front and center. When combined with rule number three, placing the organ in the back means that the choir is in the back also. This is a classic, traditional situation shared by the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and virtually all of the great churches in Paris. But many American congregations prefer the placement of the choir in the front of the sanctuary where they can be direct participants and leaders of the liturgy. St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York famously has the organ placed in chancel chambers above the choir stalls. Attend Evensong there and I promise you will not be distracted by the disadvantages of the placement of choir and organ.
Or walk two blocks east and three blocks south to St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, where you will find organs placed in the chancel, rear gallery, and above the dome, all played from one console, accompanying the choir seated in the chancel. Again, broken rules lead to terrific sound. The organ placed front and center in a church sanctuary is common enough, but it is often the source of discontent. The fair question is raised, are we worshiping the organ or the cross? Somehow, hanging a big cross in front of the organ doesn’t help. Other parishes find that the organ façade behind the altar provides a magnificent inspiring architectural background for worship.
The examples I’ve cited are all traditional settings. The challenge today is that contemporary styles of worship, various new technologies, and new methods of construction provide us with countless situations where traditional standards do not apply. If in the past, the architect and organbuilder would discuss the concept of optimal placement of the organ in a building, now those meetings include sound and video consultants. Public address equipment and enormous video screens are becoming part of church architecture, dominating forward sight lines and conflicting with the placement of the pipe organ. Should the placement of microphones influence the placement of a pipe organ in the hope that the sound of the organ will not be carried by the P.A. system? What’s next? I suppose they will institute instant replays with color commentary like a televised football game. (That reminds me of Peter Schickele as P.D.Q. Bach and the Beethoven’s Fifth Sportscast.) Organbuilders will shake their heads, but, like wedding videos, these things are here to stay.

The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get.

Technological advances make things easier for us. People of my parents’ generation celebrated the introduction of refrigeration. My grandfather pointed out that his lifetime spanned travel by horse-drawn carriages, the introduction of the automobile, mechanized flight, and men walking on the moon. I have a love-hate relationship with the computer on which I write this column, but don’t suggest I should try to do without it.
I have friends who resist new technologies. One says he’ll never own a cell phone, one doesn’t even own a telephone answering machine. It’s very hard for me to be in touch with these people because my acceptance of cell phones, fax machines, and e-mail leaves me impatient. The seven seconds it takes for a document to open on the computer can seem like a long time. But I suggest that as we accept all these things and put them to use, we need to pay attention to their effect on our lives. Just because we have a cell phone in our pocket doesn’t mean we have to answer it if we’re talking in person with a friend (a recent newspaper etiquette columnist fielded a question about cell phones in public restrooms). Or we ask if anyone really believes that video games are enhancing the intellectual development of our children.
Enrico Caruso made quite a name for himself without the use of microphones. I doubt that the operas of Mozart or the plays of Shakespeare would have become so popular if their contemporary audiences couldn’t understand the words. The dramas of Aristophanes (448–380 BC), Euripides (440–406 BC), and Sophocles (496–406 BC) were enhanced by glorious amphitheaters whose acoustics would baffle the best modern audio consultant. Ten years ago I restored an organ for a small church in Lexington, Massachusetts, which enjoyed the legend that “Emerson preached here.” How did the congregants hear him without the tinny P.A. system on which they now depend? Or how did Phillips Brooks make such a name for himself preaching in the cavernous Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston without electronic enhancement—or without a jumbo-tron, for goodness sake? I just don’t believe they couldn’t be heard. We ask the simple question, why can’t we build buildings like the amphitheaters in Delphi or Athens or the grand stone churches of Paris? Simple answer—too expensive. A high ceiling means better acoustics (this doesn’t apply to amphitheaters!), but a modern building contractor can tell you the cost of each additional foot of ceiling height in a public room. We seat 400 people in a room with a 20-foot ceiling and soft walls, add carpeting and cushioned pews, and we get acoustics similar to those of our living rooms at home.
In order to be able to hear, we create artificial acoustics—microphones for speakers and singers and digital 32' stops so we can pretend we’re in a “real” building. I’m not suggesting the abolition of technology in worship. As I said earlier, it’s here to stay. I am suggesting that we consider its use and effect on what we do. If we are installing public address equipment, let’s be sure it’s of good quality, well installed, and that we know how to use it. Where’s the dignity of public worship if the opening words are “testing, testing . . . ” or the ubiquitous call that defines the early 21st century, “Can you hear me?”
What does this have to do with organ placement? Plenty. Among the designers, consultants, and contractors involved in the creation of a new church building, the organbuilder is likely to be alone in making an effort to filter the list of conflicting technologies. This can mean that the organbuilder is perceived to be backwards, resisting change, insisting that the old ways are best. A visitor to an organ shop might note the beauty of old-world craftsmanship, but that same visitor might find the organbuilder to be old-fashioned as he defends proper placement of the organ in a committee meeting.
Good organbuilders are informed by the past. They study the work of their predecessors and try to emulate them in their work. And organbuilders are among the strongest proponents of the way things ought to be made and the way things used to be made better. Take a look at a handful of woodscrews taken from an organ built in 1860 or 1915 and you’ll forever disdain the dull-threaded, shallow-headed, crooked-shafted, out-of-center junk they sell at Home Depot. But we don’t make friends of the architects, the acousticians, the audio consultants, or the members of the organ committee if we are known for disdain of things modern. I don’t mean we have to accept microphones without question, and I certainly don’t mean we have to incorporate video screens in our organ façades. We should look for any opportunity to inform or enlighten our clients about the factors that lead to a successful organ installation. We should encourage the design and construction of buildings that enhance sound rather than absorb it. And we should always be looking for balance between the ancient world that fostered our craft and the modern world in which we live.

Anton Warde

The author can be reached at .

From Ochsenhausen, Biggs and company moved on to the jaw-dropper of all the Baroque places they would visit: Ottobeuren. Like a great white ship plowing across the sea of agriculture that surrounds it for miles, the Benedictine monastery at Ottobeuren begins to rise from the horizon of the Allgäu region many kilometers before one arrives at its portal. As Biggs later wrote to David Oppenheim, in a letter dated December 26, 1955, “It’s really quite a feather in our cap to have the Fantasy heard in—of all places—Ottobeuren, for this is just about the most remarkable example of rococo [anywhere], with a magnificent organ and spacious echo.” The “Fantasy” here is not by Mozart but by Bach: his Fantasia in G Major, BWV 572, for which, as Biggs wrote in the album notes, “the baroque splendor of Ottobeuren affords a perfect acoustical setting.”
Not the least of the rococo furnishings in the vast swirl of the church’s interior are the two extravagantly ornate choir organs completed by Karl Riepp in 1766 and renovated by the firm of Steinmeyer in 1914 and 1922.1 For this particular piece by Bach, the French accent of the larger, “Trinity” organ (four manuals, 49 registers) suits perfectly. And the recorded performance Biggs delivered as the ninth cut on the 1956 “Eight” album was a jaw-dropper in its own right. The coda alone, with fiery manual flourishes over the chromatically descending buzzsaw of a 16' Bombarde “to an insistent dominant,” was itself worth the price of the album. Among countless recorded performances of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue (including certainly his own rather plain one in Volume Five of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop), the performance he achieved at Ottobeuren on Friday, August 12, 1956, remains a stunner, easily the equal of its amazing setting. (See photo: Biggs at Riepp console, Ottobeuren.)

Recording cut short at Ottobeuren

Riepp’s “Trinity” organ stands on the “Epistle” side of Ottobeuren’s broad chancel, his smaller “Holy Ghost” organ on the “Gospel” side. On Steinmeyer’s many trips past the high altar under the gaze of visitors to the basilica (a three-star destination—“worth a journey”—in the Michelin Guide) to position and then to adjust his microphone, which he and Biggs had decided should be hung on the opposite side of the choir, in front of the lesser organ, Steinmeyer remembers feeling that decorum required him to genuflect at each pass. Had he failed once to do so? The sudden failure of a critical part in the Stanis-Hoffman oscillator that afternoon brought the Ottobeuren recording session to a cruel halt just as Biggs was moving from Bach to Brahms. It meant that for the rest of the tour they would have to perform a tricky, manual monitoring of cycle-control during each session, a major nuisance.2 (See photo: Finished too soon at Ottobeuren, page 27.) Ironically, they would soon receive this note from “boss” David Oppenheim, posted two days before the breakdown: “I am happy to hear that the Mozart trail is proving to be a negotiable one and that the equipment has settled down to doing its job.”
A half hour’s drive farther to the east on Saturday morning, August 13, brought them to a third example of baroque splendor, the monastery church at Irsee. The recording log entry for that visit consists of only one cryptic line: “the famous Irsee wobble.” And so they pressed on to examine organs at “Mozart sites” in Landsberg and Augsburg that weekend (not yet recording any) and arrived in Oettingen in time to dine bei Steinmeyer on Sunday evening. There, at the midpoint of their odyssey, they could slow the pace for two days, enjoy three nights of the Steinmeyer family’s hospitality, view the Steinmeyer organ shop—and finally get some laundry done.

An all-time favorite organ for Biggs

While the travelers recuperated from their two-week whirl of new places, Oettingen served as a point of departure for two day trips. On Monday, August 15 (the date Biggs had originally proposed for beginning the whole journey!), Steinmeyer took Biggs “down the road” to examine a 1948 Steinmeyer at the church of St. Georg in nearby Nördlingen, one of a trio of much-visited medieval towns along the Romantische Strasse. Biggs played some Brahms and Ritter on it, which they recorded to give themselves a chance to practice the “work-around” on the hobbled oscillator—nothing very inspiring for Biggs that day.
Tuesday, August 16, however, would present Biggs with one of the highlights of the trip. That morning, after another short drive from Oettingen, they came to the small monastery of Mönschsdeggingen, very much off all beaten paths. Here Steinmeyer introduced Biggs to an organ that he would later number among his 20 favorites of all time: the little seven-rank liegende Orgel (horizontal organ) of 1694, built by the Saxon (Lausitzer) Paulus Prescher (then working in Nördlingen). The instrument lies on, and partly below, the floor of the chancel, centered between the choir stalls on either side. In the manuscript of an unpublished (and undated—but probably post-1970) essay about his best-liked organs, Biggs wrote, “The pipes point away from the player “en chamade,” like so many guns on a battleship; the organ [thus] gains wonderful tone projection and accent.”3 It is precisely these qualities of course that Biggs most appreciated in any organ; and we hear them in full measure in the tuneful Little Prelude and Fugue in F-major, BWV 556 (accompanied, unfortunately, by a faint whistle that sometimes bedeviled the Ampex). Biggs’s choice to pluck this music from his portfolio that morning was a small stroke of programming genius, as fitting for the Prescher instrument as the selection of BWV 572 had been for the Riepp at Ottobeuren. Biggs must have carried a vast library of sheet music with him; but where did he keep it all? Steinmeyer has no recollection of any supply beyond the slender folder Biggs brought with him each day.

From Oettingen to Salzburg

Nine days remained before Biggs was to appear for his concert with orchestra at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, now rescheduled for the evening of Friday, August 26. After that initial “pass” through Salzburg, another week of Mozart-touring would follow, before a return for the sonata project in Salzburg Cathedral that would begin on Monday, September 5. On their way to the first Salzburg engagement they would spend August 17 and 18, Wednesday and Thursday, recording (along with pieces by Brahms, Reger, and Purcell) Mozart’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, at both Ulm and Augsburg. (Condensing geography for the Mozart album, Biggs locates the prelude at Ulm, played on the Cathedral’s Walcker organ, and the fugue in the Pfarrkirche, Heilig-Kreuz, Augsburg, played on another Steinmeyer.) The party of four—Hanne Steinmeyer had joined the expedition at Oettingen—spent the afternoon and evening of Friday, August 19, playing (and recording to their hearts’ content) the automated musical instruments in the collection of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, to which Steinmeyer had persuaded “Verwaltungsdirektor Bäßler” to give them free access. There Biggs filled two reels of tape with such mechanical novelties as “Vierundzwanzig Trompeten und zwei Pauken,” followed by five more reels with numerous takes of the organ sonatas of Josef Rheinberger, his perennial favorite among “later” composers. He played the Rheinberger on the large Steinmeyer in the Festsaal of the museum.4 By noon on Saturday, August 20, the group had reached Innsbruck and environs where, for the rest of the weekend, they would explore possibilities for recording and make final arrangements to do so at Fügen, at Absam, and in Innsbruck’s famed “Silver Chapel” the following week, when they were to pass through the area again.
On Tuesday, August 23, the quartet reached Salzburg and settled in for the three days before Biggs’s Mozarteum “debut.” Between practice sessions with the orchestra for Friday’s concert, Biggs and Steinmeyer made a half day’s excursion eastward into the Salzkammergut for a recording session of little consequence at Bad Ischl; and later in the week Biggs recorded Brahms, Mozart, and motorcycles in the Church of St. Cajetan at the center of Salzburg, on the single most “authentic” Mozart organ he would find in his travels. In one of his notes, Biggs muses that he was hearing music exactly as Mozart had (except for the traffic noise), complete with the annoying sound of church’s strangely unmusical bell.

Playing Bierdeckel in Passau

With the Mozarteum engagement behind them, and with all arrangements completed for starting to record the sonatas a week later, the travelers set forth once more on the morning of Saturday, August 27. Steinmeyer drove them 200 km. northward, to the easternmost corner of Bavaria where, in the picturesque city of Passau, “piled” on an ever narrower tongue of land at the confluence of the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz, they would keep their 3:00 p.m. appointment to record Brahms chorales and Mozart’s dramatic K. 608 on the huge 1928 Steinmeyer organ in Passau Cathedral, another grand baroque space. After dinner on their second evening in Passau the four of them played “if you drop the coaster, you drink!” at a local Gaststätte. (See photo: Bierdeckel game in Passau.) The next morning, the Steinmeyers found themselves delivering curt messages between the two Biggses at breakfast: from Peggy, “tell Biggsy, please . . . ,” and from Biggs, “Well, please tell Peggy . . . .” Had one or the other dropped the beer coaster too often and downed too many draughts the previous evening? Had Peggy finally had enough of living out of the single suitcase they shared between them—only a fraction the size of the collection of gear they hauled around every day? Had all those noisy takes of K. 608 on “the world’s largest church organ” simply driven her over the edge? Steinmeyer has no recollection of the issue that morning but remembers that relations warmed again soon enough—probably long before lunchtime.

Repairs at Lambach

In any event, no visitor could stay angry for long at their next Mozart stop, on Monday, August 29: the monastery at Lambach, Austria, 100 km. southeast of Passau. “It is a beautiful place,” Biggs wrote, “with the courtyard buildings painted a jonquil yellow so that the whole place seems filled with sunshine whether or not the day [is] bright.” After the trip, Biggs remembered it as one of their happiest sojourns, despite some frustrating moments:
In the process of recording, we somehow dropped a minute screw vitally important to our equipment. [Steinmeyer: “Nothing less than the screw that held the recording head in place!”] After several fruitless hours of search for it we gave up, and returned disconsolate to the hotel. Next morning we were greeted by the smiling Abbot. He “couldn’t sleep” he said, and had arisen at four and searched the floor foot by foot by candle light and—minor miracle—he had found the missing part. Later that day, the microphone cable parted, necessitating metallic connection. A monastery soldering iron was produced, plugged in at the altar (where often is to be found the only electrical outlet) and repairs made right there.5
(See series of photos: Soldering at Lambach, pages 28–29.)

Up the valley of the Inn

On Tuesday, August 30, the travelers’ path led them southwestward, again toward Innsbruck. By the end of the week, Biggs needed to reach Feldkirch, at the extreme western tip of Austria near the border of Liechtenstein, where he was to play a concert on Saturday, September 3 (the second of the five that the American embassy in Vienna had arranged for him). On the way to Feldkirch, they would carry out plans laid the previous week for recording sessions at Fügen, Absam, and Innsbruck—located in a convenient row along their route up the valley of the Inn. In the parish church at Fügen (famed for Franz Gruber’s first performance of his carol “Stille Nacht”), Steinmeyer recalls everyone’s amazement at finding the seven-year-old son of the organist playing the “Mozart organ” with the virtuosity of a seven-year-old Mozart himself. (See photo: Another young Mozart?) Playing a handsome eighteenth-century organ in the Pilgrimage Church of St. Michael at Absam, Biggs recorded BWV 555, the last of the four “Little Eight” for which he had wanted to produce more “authentic” realizations than the ones he had carried home in 1954. And at the Silberne Kapelle in Innsbruck he competed with ceaseless traffic noise to record Mozart’s Adagio “for glass harmonica,” K. 356 (included in the Tour album), played on the chapel’s Italian organ of 1580, as well as music by Italian composers (never released). On the day after the recital in Feldkirch, Sunday, September 4, the Microbus with its precious cargo would retrace the long route eastward through the Alps to Innsbruck and then on to Salzburg. During that 350-kilometer grind across half of Austria, Biggs must have savored some sense of triumph at all that had fallen into place for the climactic week to come: a prestigious Mozart orchestra, an expert Mozart conductor, and permission to record in the most splendid of all Mozart spaces.

“An experience never to be forgotten”

On Monday morning, September 5, when Biggs and his team of “amateurs” carried their recording gear into Salzburg Cathedral (see photo: Arrival in Salzburg, page 30), they found a crew of hyper-professional engineers from Philips already at work, officiously setting up their fancy two-track equipment to record the project in stereo. Next to these Profis in their starched white laboratory coats, Georg Steinmeyer remembers feeling like a brash upstart.
That day he would be placing the microphone for the last time. As planned, he and Hanne would now peel away from the venture and go about the business of their move to America. With everything “set to record,” the two Steinmeyers wished the two Biggses Lebet wohl, sped away in the Microbus (without that load, how it could fly!), and reached Munich that evening. On September 11, Steinmeyer found time to send his friends a letter:
Dear Biggses, finally I have the time to write to you after being away from Salzburg almost a week. We arrived safely in Munich on the 5th in the evening. . . . On the 6th it took us from 8:30 a.m. until 4:20 p.m. to get through the whole visa procedure. With the baby it was not too much fun. We went back to Oettingen on the same evening, since a letter from Estey Organ Corporation was waiting for us. . . . We are finishing our packing at the moment and shall ship our trunks probably next week.

He went on to explain that Estey wanted him to come immediately, that the airline tickets the company had sent were expected any day, and that he would thus surely not be available to drive the Biggses from Salzburg to Frankfurt at the end of their Austrian circuit.
In Salzburg, meanwhile, Biggs found himself in his element:
There in Salzburg Cathedral, with acoustics on the same ample scale as Ulm, in the organ gallery where Mozart himself had once played the Sonatas, we recorded all 17 of these enjoyable works. The orchestra (the Camerata Academica of Salzburg) duplicated that used by the composer, and the director was Dr. Bernhard Paumgartner, leading Mozart authority. To complete the picture of authenticity, as far as possible only the organ stops in the present instrument that derive from the organ Mozart played were used. . . . The drama of recording there in the darkened cathedral through long evening sessions, with the Cathedral Square cleared of all traffic by the Salzburg police, is an experience never to be forgotten.6

Rehearsing during the day, the players mastered each piece so well (reading scores provided by Biggs) that they needed no more than a take or two in the evenings, and rarely an insert. The Diapason’s reviewer wrote, “The authentic atmosphere captured here apparently inspired all concerned to great heights—the results approach perfection itself!” And the reviewer for The American Organist agreed: “Playing and recording are uniformly excellent. . . . I feel increasingly indebted to Mr. Biggs for his outstanding contributions of this type.”
That the recording taken with a single microphone, placed by one who felt himself almost an interloper at the scene, should have been chosen by Columbia over what the crack team from Philips had produced still makes Georg Steinmeyer beam with pride. “Of course,” he concedes, “Columbia may not have had the means at that time even to process a stereo recording.” And yet it seems likely that Philips could easily have provided a monaural version if Columbia had asked for one. In any event, Columbia Masterworks was happy enough to release what the “Biggs team” had produced, with no further ado. And the reviews seem to have justified their decision.

“Salzburg Festival Tempo”

All in major keys, the sonatas differ from the two Fantasias, in their unsettling key of F minor, as day does from night:
Every one perfect in form, all seventeen are nonetheless quite varied in character. Some are of rare expressive beauty, as if for Christmas. Many are for festival occasions, particularly those with trumpets, oboes, and kettle drums. . . . It was in fact a remark of Dr. Paumgartner that led us to rechristen these engaging works “Festival” Sonatas. For Dr. Paumgartner accepted a compliment on his choice of tempo (in the C major Sonata that opens our recording) with the remark, “Yes, that’s the Salzburg Festival Tempo!”7

How grateful the un-churchy Biggs felt to be given a designation for these works beyond the customary “epistle,” or “church,” or even “short”! “Having noted their church origin,” he mischievously wrote, “one may as well forget it, for here is music to be enjoyed not only on Sunday but all through the week!”8 Finally, Biggs the connoisseur of “tonal clarity in the midst of reverberation” offers this characteristic observation:

It is worth noting how very cleverly Mozart writes for the spacious length of Salzburg Cathedral. Themes are strong and chordal in outline, so that the sound of orchestra and organ may pile on itself with fine effect yet without confusion.9

The measured tempo of the Paumgartner/Biggs performances sets them favorably apart from other recorded realizations of the pieces, especially considered as a collection. Most of the others sound almost frenetic by comparison, too over-energized to be enjoyed for more than one or two sonatas at a time. The graceful “swing” of the 1956 readings lets the seventeenth sonata fall as refreshingly on the ear as the first. Like Biggs in solo performance, these players seem to be listening closely to the music as they perform it. We can bet that the compliment by “someone” about the tempo Paumgartner set came from Biggs himself.

Homeward with his trophies

With the seventeen sonatas literally in the bag by the end of the day on September 9, the Biggses set off on Saturday, September 10, to keep their three remaining Austrian concert engagements (September 11 at St. Florian’s, near Linz, September 16 at Klagenfurt, and September 17 at Graz) and to continue exploring Mozart sites along the way. The far-flung concerts Angelo Eagon had arranged would take them, almost amusingly, to the most distant corners of Austria. For the one at Feldkirch, they had already journeyed far to the west. Now it would be 150 km. north, to the Monastery of St. Florian, for a recital on its “Bruckner” organ, then down the Danube to Vienna (200 km.), and finally to the southeastern provincial cities of Klagenfurt and Graz, close to the Yugoslavian border. The concert at Graz cathedral, on September 18, would place the Biggses 15 hours of travel time distant from the plane they were to board in Frankfurt for the flight home on September 21, according to calculations scribbled by Biggs as he planned their schedule for the final days.
Biggs kept the Ampex and all 84 tapes with him as the journey continued; but he must have sent the oscillator and all its accessories home at some point, possibly already from Linz following two post-Salzburg recording sessions: one at Kremsmünster on the way to Linz and one at St. Florian’s (in both cases, music of Brahms and Bruckner, none of it ever released). To avoid a repeat of the previous year’s nightmare (tapes long delayed in shipping and customs), Biggs wanted to bring his trophies home this time as part of his personal luggage. And it seems to have worked. Although he would still have to pay duty on the tapes’ contents, and leave them in the possession of U.S. customs in Boston for a week, payment could wait, it appears, until a final determination was made (by him) of the extent of the value of their contents.10 In the meantime he would have them to edit.
For travel from Salzburg to St. Florian’s and on to Vienna, the Biggses were accorded the services of an embassy car (a 1952 Plymouth station wagon) and driver. (After Graz, we can hope that they traveled by train, since it would have been more comfortable by far than by automobile, given the roads of the day and the mountainous terrain to be traversed. Steinmeyer points out that today’s ubiquitous car-rental agencies were unknown in the Europe of 1955; his own two rentals had been by special arrangement with dealers.) On their way from St. Florian’s to Vienna via Melk, Krems, and Klosterneuburg, the Biggses stopped to view Mozart’s reversed initials on the organ case at Ybbs, carved by him at the age of eleven. Biggs snapped a picture (see photo: Mozart’s initials at Ybbs, page 29), made his own pencil-tracing, and later began one of his essays about the trip by citing this curiosity:

M A W 1767—So reads the penknife signature on the organ case of the little church in the . . . town of Ybbs, on the Danube. Apparently Mozart was fond of inverting the order of his name—to Mozart Amadeus Wolfgang—and to announce himself as “Trazom.”11

As they had begun their tour with music-making at Kirchheimbolanden, so would they end it. On September 6, Biggs had received a sudden, irresistibly cordial invitation to return to Kirch-heimbolanden and play a recital there on the eve of the flight home from Frankfurt. He happily assented—in part, perhaps, because he liked the symmetry of it. On that flight home, he may have begun to compose the essay that added the symmetry of one last, very Biggsian, justification for his latest recording venture, now completed:

But why travel 15,000 miles with some 850 pounds [Biggs here ups the weight by 200 pounds!] of electronic equipment to record all this music? The spice of curiosity and the search for authenticity are the reasons, coupled with the conviction that the union of modern recording techniques with the arts of the classic organ builders is a particularly invaluable coincidence of the new and the old. By this happy coupling we hear music with new character and authenticity and we learn of organ building arts that have become almost forgotten.12

“Fifty miles of tape” Two weeks later, on October 8, he could already send this report to David Oppenheim:

I’m ploughing right into the 84 tapes, which are now safely through customs . . . and know that we have safely in the bag all items for the expected groupings: 1) All the Mozart music (“Down the Mozart Trail”), 2) the Bach “Eight little fugues and preludes” on eight historic European organs, 3) the Brahms “Eleven Chorale Preludes,” Opus 122 and some Bruckner—in eleven European Cathedrals.13

And on October 30 Biggs would write to him once more:

At last I’ve sorted out some fifty miles of tape and ploughed through stacks of photographs of last summer! And, as soon as convenient to you, I’d like to bring down the following for your consideration.

In “the following,” however, Biggs had replaced the Brahms and Bruckner with a program he proposed to entitle “Musical Fun in the Munich Museum,” with the sounds of all the automated instruments: “I think you’ll be tickled when you hear them,” Biggs wrote to Oppenheim, “In fact, you’ll grin from ear to ear at the ‘Twenty-four Trumpets and Two Kettle Drums.’” Oppenheim may have smiled, all right, but probably more at Biggs’s enthusiasm than at the prospect for any profit from the release of such a recording.
It would take less time to get the Bach album ready for release than the three-LP Mozart compendium simply because most of it was ready to go. Biggs had brought recordings of all eight of the little preludes and fugues back with him the previous year. But four of them dissatisfied him. He had wanted to replace these with versions to be played on more appropriate organs as he happened upon them on the Mozart trip. Notably, he tried each one of the four on only one organ, found the results pleasing, and put the piece away for the rest of the trip. The four replacements were these: No. 1 played on the Andreas Silbermann organ at Ebersmünster (replacing the big Schnitger in Hamburg), No. 2 played on the 18th-century Fuchs/Mauracher organ at Absam, Austria (replacing a modern Flentrop at Amstelveen, Holland), No. 4 played on the small Prescher organ at Mönchsdeggingen (replacing a modern organ in Hilversum, Holland), and No. 5 played on the Gabler organ at Ochsenhausen (replacing the Schnitger at Stein-kirchen). The others heard on the final LP, all recorded in 1954, were No. 2 at St. Jakobi, Lübeck, No. 6 at St. Jan’s, Gouda, No. 7 at Neuenfelde (hence no need for another Schnitger?), and No. 8 at Lüneburg (on the “Böhm” organ once played by Bach). Rounding out the album (some choice for “filler”!) would be Bach’s G-major Fantasia recorded at Ottobeuren.
Barbara Owen has rightly written that this album (fully entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, “played on eight classic European organs,” and released as ML 5078 in April of 1956, three months ahead of the Mozart collection), “deserved more attention than it received at the time.”14 Despite the sense one often has of hearing the music through a tunnel (or from the vestibule or outside a window) the easily discernable variety with which the nine organs speak makes for a rich collection. This album stands apart from the other three in the 1955–56 quartet in demonstrating how enormously different, yet uniformly appealing, older organs can sound from one specimen to the next.

“Bitten by the multi-track bug”

Until he heard an organ recorded in stereo, Biggs had not grasped the value of binaural recording for the instrument. He had assumed that any solo instrument would benefit little from spatial expansion. What he could not have known was that the space itself into which an organ speaks, more important for that instrument than for any other, would be precisely what stereophonic miking dramatically expands. It was, in fact, just before he began to edit his monaural Mozart recordings in late September that Biggs happened to experience the revelation of stereophonic sound. October 1 found him once more typing an excited note to David Oppenheim:

It’s certainly dangerous to go to the Hi-Fi Fair! One gets bitten [by] the multi-track bug! I didn’t believe that dual track recording meant much with the organ, but some of the demonstrations are very convincing. There are wonderful possibilities with some of the places we know in Europe.

Within two years, Europe would indeed provide the locus for Biggs’s first recordings in stereo. By then, he and Peggy would be exploring “Flentrop country” in their own VW bus, coming to know as many early instruments as they could find, and capturing Bach on the Schnitger/Flentrop organ at Zwolle for Bach at Zwolle, KS 6005, released in July 1958 as one of Columbia Masterworks’ earliest stereophonic LPs. For Biggs, real Bach country would have to wait at least another decade—but how it already beckoned to him!

Perhaps like Mozart

It should be easy enough to forgive E. Power Biggs (if forgiveness is in any sense required) for marketing himself and his instrument as successfully as he did. For the fundamental motivation behind his entrepreneurship was his own pure joy at music-making—and on the pipe organ no less! Yes, he made a living at it, and by all accounts a handsome one. But Biggs was one of those lucky few for whom the remuneration for “what they do” would also have been largely beside the point. The point for him was the music: making it the way he liked to make it, and sharing it on its own terms—as he saw those terms—with anyone who cared to listen. That legions became willing to pay good money to listen simply gilded the lily.
For Biggs, the music and the instrument were “the things,” and the church association of both nearly nothing. It must have been with some sense of identity with Mozart that he wrote for the A.G.O. Quarterly, “Once Mozart’s years as an organist at Salzburg were past, he did not seek a church position. Yet all his life he played organs all over Europe, and he did so for no other reason than that it gave him pleasure.”15 So, too, did Biggs “never again seek a church position” once he no longer needed one, and so too did he play organs all over Europe as much because it gave him pleasure as for any other reason.
Whether valid or not, the appearance of a kind of perpetual youthfulness in Mozart’s genius may have come to influence Biggs in his own development; for one can easily argue that he became more youthful in the application of his own special genius the older he grew. It is as if a Bach-like younger Biggs became more and more a Mozartean older Biggs. Whether Mozart enjoyed his own music-making more, or less, than Bach did his, no one can say. But the flourishes of exuberance that repeatedly erupt in his music—certainly in those “festival sonatas”—allow us to infer that Mozart might now and then have let out a whoop of glee at what he was creating, while we imagine Bach permitting himself merely a quiet smile of satisfaction (even as we may agree that Bach surely deserved to jump for joy at the excellence of nearly every bar he composed). Despite those seemingly “contrived-to-be-Bach-like” Biggs countenances that glare at us from so many of the Biggs/Bach album covers, we know that Biggs himself found a level of joy in his own music-making that seems to have been most akin to what convention, rightly or wrongly, imagines for Mozart. We know that Biggs, at least, saw in him the most joyful of music-makers and felt a kinship.

A third coming of the Biggses

After leaving Salzburg, Georg and Hanne Steinmeyer would not see their friends again until the day, one year later, when the Biggses’ Studebaker convertible, top down, rolled into the driveway at their first apartment in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a sunny day in October, 1956 [editor’s note: 50 years ago to the month, of this issue of The Diapason]. Biggsy and Peggy had “motored” (as one did in those days) across Massachusetts on “The Mohawk Trail” from Cambridge to the Berkshires, to view the fall foliage and to deliver a special housewarming gift. From the back seat of the Studebaker Biggs produced a brand new Columbia phonograph, the latest model, and from the trunk a set of his current albums—foremost among them, of course, the ones Steinmeyer had helped him make.
Georg Steinmeyer still marvels at the magic of that record player: “It sounded absolutely wonderful to us. We listened and listened and listened. It was such a treasure—like nothing else we knew.” None of the excellent stereo equipment he has owned since has delivered quite the same level of psycho-acoustical excitement. We understand! The intervening decades have produced countless fine recordings of the same music played on the same, and similar, instruments. Technically, they sound ten times better than those old mono LPs—yet not one-tenth as thrilling.

 

Anton Warde

It is amusing to trace the metamorphosis of what was to have been little more than a concert tour of Europe in the spring of 1954—one already fiendishly long and tightly scheduled—into a recording venture without precedent. As the itinerary took shape for his first serious European tour, Biggs looked forward to becoming acquainted with many notable organs along the way (although it also seems clear that he had not yet developed any really visceral interest in historic organs per se, perhaps because he had not yet experienced the right one).1 By the end of January 1954, however, the idea of getting to know historic organs in Europe seems to have advanced to “actively recruiting” them for an exciting but still vaguely conceived purpose: a recording project of some kind—someday, somehow—that might link composer, instrument, and landscape.
Barely back in Cambridge after a month of concerts in California, Biggs headed straight for New York in the first week of February to test his “boss’s” interest in such a project. It was surely in this conversation—probably when Biggs spoke of “scouting” instruments—that David Oppenheim, director of Columbia Masterworks, made the innocently momentous, and in Biggs lore now famous, suggestion: “Take with you a small tape recorder and let it run while you play.”2 Oppenheim then continued, “Be sure to record one [same] piece everywhere. This will make [possible] an immediate comparison of all the different instruments you play.”3 Recalling this conversation two decades later, Biggs wrote, We visualized, as I remember, some little miracle-box about the size of a portable typewriter. For advice, we turned to the engineering staff of Columbia. After they had a good chuckle, they explained to us some recording facts of life. And by the day of air embarkment for Lisbon, our little typewriter-sized recorder had blossomed into 500 pounds of Ampex equipment. Excess baggage charges to Lisbon alone were astronomical.4
At twenty years’ remove, Biggs’s memory seems to have confused (or perhaps intentionally conflated) the relatively modest—if by no means trivial—162 pounds of equipment carried in 1954 with the much heavier and more sophisticated hardware they brought with them on the Mozart tour, one year later.5 In any event, Vincent Liebler, director of recording operations at Columbia Records, the engineer who must have been chief among the chucklers that day, agreed to oversee the creation of custom recording equipment suitable for use in the field. Liebler would try to have it ready a month before the Biggses’ departure in mid-April.6

More than “snapshots” of sound

The broadcaster in Biggs had leapt at the idea of capturing some “snapshots” of sound from Europe to insert in his Sunday morning programs. And, of course, he knew he would always have the D-Minor Toccata up his sleeve (like Bach, he imagined) to serve as the common denominator for Oppenheim’s “one piece” assignment. On the train back to Boston, Biggs must have rejoiced at the prospect of the recording equipment that he and Oppenheim had just commissioned. We can imagine his excitement to have been greatest of all at Oppenheim’s suggestion, before their conversation had ended, that they consider trying to do some formal recording already that spring. Oppenheim had even proposed that they contact Philips of Holland, Columbia’s affiliate on the Continent in the 1950s, to solicit their suggestions for possible locations and their assistance, perhaps, in making such recordings.
Biggs spent the weekend putting together repertory for three LP’s worth of Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Hindemith. And on Monday morning, February 8, he sent the plan to Oppenheim with these lines: “It was fine to see you last week, and I think things are working out in a very exciting way. . . . It’s possible that Philips may know of some particularly magnificent organ along our route, and if so, I’ll make plans to record anywhere that you or they suggest.” And then he added, “If this ‘formal recording’ does not take place, we could take all this material in our stride ourselves.” With this, we have the first indication that Biggs was prepared, with the help of his wife Peggy, and using the equipment that Columbia was compiling for him, to act as his own producer and recording engineer in Europe regardless of what Philips decided to do (which, as it turned out, would be little).
In the same outgoing mail that Monday, Biggs sent Liebler a copy of his itinerary and quickly received this acknowledgement:
We will start investigation of the power facilities in these various cities, and from that we can determine what type of power supply to incorporate in your new tape equipment. We will do everything possible to expedite this equipment so that you will have it around the middle of March. However, it is entirely in the hands of Colonel Ranger, who is building the equipment. . . . As for your coming down to go to school, this can only be done when the equipment is ready, and I believe the best place for this schooling will be in Colonel Ranger’s office in Newark, N.J. I will keep you informed of our progress during the next few weeks.7
Progress on the equipment went slowly, however. And it appears that “Colonel Ranger” may have turned the whole task back to Columbia’s engineers at some point with the advice that they simply purchase a standard Ampex 403 and modify it for battery operation. The equipment that Biggs had expected to pick up in mid-March would be barely ready by mid-April, uncomfortably close to his day of departure. In the meantime, the ever-alert audiophile in him had caught wind of a smaller Ampex that was supposed to be introduced before long.8 On April 5, however, Liebler wrote to dismiss that possibility and summon Biggs to New York for a lesson in using his new equipment:
We will be looking forward to seeing you early Monday morning, April 12th. We are doing everything possible to get the equipment in at that time. It seems that most of this equipment is not generally available across the counter, and it has become necessary to send out scouts to pick up the units that we want. . . . We can find nothing regarding a new light-weight Ampex portable being released around April 15th. The one we have settled for is the lightest two-unit Ampex available, and it should give you professional results. The power battery supply has been assembled especially for this Ampex. . . . I am looking forward to seeing you on Monday for lesson # 1.
With a long list of pre-departure errands still to be run in the few remaining days before the Biggses’ flight from Boston, lesson #1 in New York City probably remained the only lesson. But the electrical technician in Biggs—his original calling, after all—no doubt felt confident that no further schooling would be needed. As he and Peggy prepared to depart on Sunday, April 18, “the notes of his Easter morning CBS broadcast still echoing in his ears,” Biggs dashed off this quick note to Oppenheim: “Here we go! The equipment is certainly wonderful, and we are going to make every effort to make the most of it. Unfortunately, overweight payments to the airlines [for its 162 pounds] will come to about a thousand dollars, around the circuit, but there is just no alternative.”9 Oppenheim immediately cabled this (undated) reply to Biggs in Lisbon, his first station on the “circuit”:
SORRY ABOUT EXTRA TRANSPORTATION COSTS FOR EQUIPMENT WILL GLADLY PAY HALF OF COST OUTRIGHT AND OTHER HALF ADVANCED AGAINST ROYALTIES GREETINGS DAVID OPPENHEIM
Wonderful as Biggs judged the equipment to be, he nevertheless needed to cable New York for advice from time to time. Two weeks into the tour, S. E. Sorensen, one of the engineers at Columbia Records, responded to some of Biggs’s queries with this letter directed to him en route in London:
Dear Mr. Biggs: We are delighted to hear of your good progress. Keep it up. . . . Regarding the -1/2db level when playing the standard 1000 cycle tape, we feel that this is nothing much to be concerned about. Leave well enough alone. . . . Your difficulty with fuses may have been caused by starting the generator without its normal load. . . . We found it safer to leave the Ampex tape machine switch ‘ON’ and then starting the generator. In this way we are not subjected to a high voltage starting surge. . . . We are sending you five fuses immediately via this letter. Should you require more please advise. . . . We are all anxiously waiting to hear your recordings. We will report our comments at the first opportunity. . . . Best of luck from us all here in New York.10
And seventeen days later, he wrote this to Biggs in Copenhagen:
Dear Mr. Biggs: From your letter of May 17, we have concluded your principal trouble to be in your basic battery supply. Your entire success hinges on the use of good if not perfect batteries. For your future protection specify and order at least four (4) batteries connected in parallel for 12-volt operation. . . . Regarding your problem with the frequency meter, we can only confirm your suggestion of maintaining the 60 cycle reed at the 60 cycle point and by a very careful anticipating of the adjustment maintain it at its maximum excursion. Other than this we cannot advise you. . . . We have not yet listened to your recordings. We are looking forward to this experience. . . . Lots of luck.11
Between the laconic letters from Sorensen, however, came this upbeat and amusing note from the boss himself, dated May 13, mailed to Frankfurt, and addressed to both of the Biggses:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Biggs: I just want you to know that I am delighted that you are making such progress and that we can offer you both contracts as recording engineers upon your return to the United States. I am certainly looking forward to hearing the results of your work, and I trust that there will be some tapes on the way within short. . . . Please try to do a little relaxing, at least three minutes a day, and think of us here in the United States, from time to time, glued to our television sets watching the great Washington circus, of which you no doubt are made more than aware. . . Excelsior! David [Oppenheim]
(Oppenheim’s “Washington circus” surely refers to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which Oppenheim and his wife, the actress Judy Holliday, must have followed with keen interest, given Holliday’s investigation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, four years earlier.)

700 “takes” and counting

Recording at every opportunity “around the circuit” between 40 concerts and broadcasts in eleven countries, Biggs filled 65 reels of tape (of the 71 they carried) with more than 700 individual “takes.” Peggy Biggs quickly became her husband’s expert monitor of meters and keeper of recording logs—not to mention his chief assistant in hauling all the equipment. The hardware to be carried in and out of every recording venue included the 58-pound Ampex 403P (P for portable—in two units, luckily), to which Columbia’s engineers had added circuitry and accessories to regulate the potentially unsteady 110 volt AC power produced by the special motor-driven generator they had designed (a 64-pound device that would in turn receive its power from a minimum of two—but ideally four—full-sized, lead-acid automotive batteries to be rented on the ground at each stop along the way), a twelve-pound microphone, and finally a utility bag containing several pounds of tools and connecting cable. Upon his return, Biggs wrote to Liebler, “Very many thanks for all your interest and wonderful cooperation in the whole venture. We both acquired blisters on our hands from lugging the stuff around, but it was fun.”12 (See photo: “Recording engineer” Peggy Biggs, 1954, on page 22.)
Philips played only an indirect role in the 1954 project. Its home office in Baarn, Holland, served first as the receiving station for a shipment of blank 3M tape from New York (sent from there, presumably, because the Ampex had been calibrated for the characteristics of that tape alone) and later as the depot through which most of the completed reels were shipped back to New York. Philips did no recording with Biggs until the following year when (as we shall see) its white-smocked engineers recorded the Mozart sonatas in Salzburg Cathedral alongside Columbia’s two “engineers in mufti,” Georg Steinmeyer and Peggy Biggs.
For the previous six months, Biggs and Steinmeyer had corresponded about concert arrangements (set, finally, for Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Munich, in that order), as well as about recording possibilities, car rental, and organ itinerary. Three years had passed since Steinmeyer had last seen the Biggses. Home in Oettingen again by the end of 1951 (after completing his one-year apprenticeship at Aeolian-Skinner in Boston and an adventurous auto tour of the United States), Steinmeyer first worked on his father’s project to restore the large Steinmeyer instrument at Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche following its wartime destruction. It was there that he made the acquaintance of the “light of his eyes”: a young Nürnbergerin named Hannelore. For better or for worse, the Biggses’ schedule would place them in Steinmeyer’s responsible hands a scant five days after his wedding on May 8; and the bride and groom would in effect “honeymoon with the Biggses.” Steinmeyer’s last letter to the Biggses before their arrival had included this poignantly couched request concerning his bride:
If Hanne can get a few days off because of our wedding, would you mind if I ask you if she can join us for a few days? Hanne speaks English fluently since she is a German language teacher at an American school and since she has a diploma as an interpreter for English. She also loves music—and I think, besides all that, she is a nice girl. But I don’t know how much luggage you have and if you like to travel with a stranger. You will have so many impressions and so much to do, to see, and to hear on your trip that I would understand if you like to travel alone with me. Please do not hesitate to write me what you think. It is rather arrogant to ask you such a question—but I hope you will forgive me and see it as a matter which happens when people are in love.13
The Biggses sent an enthusiastic affirmative of course; and at their first recording session (in Heidelberg) Biggs would even tape an interview with the newlyweds.

Bringing the Mercedes to its knees

Steinmeyer stood waiting at the gate in Frankfurt when the Biggses’ flight from Berlin landed, shortly after noon on Thursday, May 13. He had made the five-hour drive from Oettingen that morning in the Mercedes 180 that Biggs had agreed to rent for the week, and had brought with him the two heavy, 12 volt, 125 ampere-hour, automotive batteries that Biggs had asked him to rent along with the car, for powering the AC generator. Half an hour before landing, the Biggses had flown over Eisenach, the town of Bach’s birth, and a destination beyond easy reach by Westerners in the years of the Cold War. Steinmeyer thus became the first to be told, under hugs and over handshakes, the story that Biggs would retell again and again, and eventually include in the booklet that accompanied The Art of the Organ:
On our way to Heidelberg from Berlin, we flew to Frankfurt, passing over Eisenach and gaining an unforgettable picture of this city, with its red roofs clustered together and sheltered by the hills. At this moment we were just one mile from Bach’s birthplace, yet with no chance to visit this historic spot. For we were in the Russian controlled area of East Germany, and—fortunately—one mile up in the air. Flying down the “corridor,” following the concert in Berlin, the pilot had allowed us to go up to the cockpit to watch the historic city of Eisenach approach. As the little village appeared ahead and passed gradually beneath the plane, the pilot asked my wife, “Were you born there?” “No,” Peggy replied, “but a friend of ours was, almost three hundred years ago.” “Must be an old friend,” was the pilot’s comment.
As the travelers claimed their baggage—more a matter of freight—Steinmeyer discovered that he had not been wrong to worry about how much his guests would bring, for when the combined weight of the recording equipment, the passengers, and their normal bags had been added to that of the two huge batteries in the trunk, it was enough to bring the Mercedes to its knees. At this point, Biggs was still carrying 56 reels of tape in metal containers (15 of the original 71, imprinted with Purcell in England and Sweelinck in Holland, had already been shipped homeward). In letters to his European contacts before he came, Biggs had almost laughably minimized the size of the tape recorder he would bring, still calling it “our own little amateur machine” long after he knew it would amount to far more than that. His aim, no doubt, had been to minimize fears of disruption and to deflect in advance any fees that some authorities might have been tempted to levy for formal recording. As late as March 11, for example, only five weeks before his departure and even as Columbia’s engineers were adding yet more weight to the Ampex, Biggs had appended this seemingly casual postscript to one of his letters to Steinmeyer: “P.S. We hope to bring our own amateur tape machine (instead of a Leica), and we hope to take a few musical snapshots of some of the organs we play.” Of course, he may not have been completely disingenuous in minimizing the nature of the equipment at that point, for we know that he was still hoping for the sudden introduction of a new lightweight machine by Ampex.

Rural color at Amorbach

If the weight of the recording equipment had come as one surprise to Steinmeyer, nothing had prepared him, either, for the countless hours they would all spend using it. To him (and no doubt to Peggy—not to mention to Hanne), the number of takes in each recording session seemed endless. On the long Sunday afternoon at Amorbach alone, they recorded 45 takes, averaging five apiece for each of the nine variations in Pachelbel’s partita, Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan. It is not that Biggs would flub his playing, Steinmeyer explains; rather, he simply wanted the luxury of several options from which to assemble (like Glenn Gould) one best version of each piece. And given the nature of the instrument, of course, he liked to carry away more than one set of registrations to have at his disposal when the time came to edit. Yet to Steinmeyer it often seemed that each new take was as good as the last—provided that no one had slammed a door or dropped a broom or sneezed or buzzed past the church on a motorcycle. Biggs’s final directives penciled in the margins of the recording logs (kept during the sessions by Peggy in small spiral notebooks and later typed up with more generous space for Biggs to add his editing notes) show that he nearly always combined two or three takes to make the definitive one: usually the beginning of one take, the middle of a second, and the final bars of a third (the latter, often, for nothing more than a better-sounding die-away). As he edited the Pachelbel partita recorded at rural Amorbach (for The Art of the Organ) Biggs delighted in retaining the peal of the abbey’s bells at one point and the crow of a rooster before one of the variations.
When scheduling recitals, Biggs liked to have at least one full day to get to know each instrument. On the days between the concerts in Heidelberg’s Heiliggeist-Kirche on May 15, Frankfurt’s Gnaden-Kirche on May 17, Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche on May 19, and Munich’s St. Markus-Kirche (the church of Karl Richter) on May 21, Steinmeyer drove the Biggses to various instruments of note in the same countryside that they would be exploring more thoroughly one year later—although none of them knew it then—with the “recorder set on Mozart.” For now, however, the focus was on recording Johann Pachelbel, Nuremberg’s native son, and on adding more Bach D-Minors to the growing collection. Biggs recorded in four south German locations on the 1954 trip: in Heidelberg on Friday, May 14, playing the Bach Toccata (5 takes) and various pieces by Pachelbel (14 takes) on the 1948 Steinmeyer organ in the Heiliggeist-Kirche; then in Amorbach on Sunday afternoon, May 16, playing the Pachelbel partita (with its total of 45 takes) on the 1782 Stumm organ in the Abbey Church there; next in Nuremberg on Tuesday, May 18, playing further pieces by Pachelbel (22 takes) on the large 1952 Steinmeyer organ in the St. Lorenz-Kirche; and finally in Weingarten on Thursday, May 20, playing another Bach D-Minor (5 takes) and more pieces by Pachelbel (15 takes) on the 1737 Gabler organ in the vast Benedictine Abbey that looms on a bluff above the town.

The day at Weingarten

The log of their day of recording at the Baroque basilica of Weingarten, the largest church of its kind north of the Alps, offers a typical glimpse of both the frustrations and the satisfactions Biggs encountered while taping in the field. Through Steinmeyer’s “connections” (since he himself had been a member of the team that had just completed a major renovation of the organ), he had been able to gain access for Biggs to the fabled instrument for most of that Thursday. Steinmeyer had booked rooms at a small hotel only a few hundred feet below the abbey’s pompous façade, and Biggs, who had long ago learned that the dress of an English gentleman caused doors to open more briskly before him than did lesser attire—especially in places like Weingarten—wore his best pin-striped suit that day, complete, as always, with vest-pocket handkerchief. No public performance had been scheduled for Weingarten, but he dressed for the day as if he were to give one. (See photo: Biggs at the console at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
By shortly before 11:00 a.m., the equipment had been set up in a sunlit gallery to the south of the organ, and Biggs had finished exploring the resources of the imposing but gently voiced instrument, the prospect of which may be the most famous in all the world. (See photo: Ready to record at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
Peggy had donned her earphones, and Steinmeyer had taken his post at the main entrance to urge silence from entering visitors. Biggs drew his registration for Pachelbel’s Toccata in D Minor, and barked, “Take one!” In Peggy’s log, we read: “Take 1—with one note clock struck 11.” Then, “pitch variation at end of this—but no indication on dials”; and further, “Take 2—with door crash and mob of people.” Nevertheless, the combination of these two takes, plus one “insert” to make a repair, became Band 1, Side 2 of The Art of the Organ. (See photo: Peggy Biggs records at Weingarten, May 20, 1954, page 24.)
Despite the hazards of trying to make a formal recording under informal circumstances, Biggs reveled in the luxury of spending the better part of a day with the fabulous instrument. As the afternoon wore on, Steinmeyer recalls, the sun streaming through the great west window at Biggs’s back grew uncomfortably warm, but he played on and on. “We recorded until ten minutes to six,” Biggs wrote in his album notes, “and had microphone and all equipment down by six for the Monks’ Evensong.” In an article he would soon write for High Fidelity Magazine, Biggs promised hi-fi buffs that they, like him, would marvel at “the rich carpet of sound that rolls from the Weingarten organ.”14 And in that essay his own early electrical training would give him an elegant metaphor to explain the character of that sound: Gabler would never voice a pipe to the upper reaches of its tonal capacity. To achieve full and yet mellow sonorities, he would instead make stops of double pipes—two pipes speaking, one might say, in parallel. This produces a rich “amperage” of sonority on an unforced “voltage.”15

Back to the lowlands

After the concert in Munich that ended their week with Steinmeyer, the Biggses and all their equipment—minus the batteries, of course—flew off to continue six more weeks of recitals, broadcasts, and recording sessions. They traveled to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, then southward again to Paris in anticipation of a recital at Notre Dame that had been scheduled for Sunday, June 13. Immediately upon their arrival, however, on June 10, they learned that the event would have to be cancelled because of the sudden death of cathedral organist Count St. Martin. In one respect, the cancellation in Paris proved fortuitous for Biggs. For it enabled him to add still more days to the free time that had already opened in his schedule when Vienna and Salzburg proved barren of opportunities to perform that year. Upon learning of the cancellation, he wasted not a moment before cabling the new friends he had made in Holland and northern Germany two weeks earlier, to let them know that he would return even sooner than anticipated to take advantage of their readiness to help him explore further—and further record—the organs that had beguiled his ears first: those of the Dutch and German north.16
We, too, can be grateful for that expanded week of “study time” for Biggs. For it was in those ten days between June 11 and June 22 that he deepened his appreciation of the organs that would determine more than any other the course of his own aesthetic development: the sparkling Schnitgers at Steinkirchen and Neuenfelde, the robust “Böhm” organ in Lüneburg (a note survives from the organist there authorizing him to record as long as he wished on the evening of June 15, provided he played any composer but Böhm!), the bright “Buxtehude” instrument in the Jakobikirche of Lübeck, the 1736 Moreau organ that so “splendidly disturbs,” as Biggs put it, the vast space enclosed by the cathedral at Gouda, and the modern Flentrop at Amstelveen. Given Biggs’s predilection for clarity and “Apollonian individuation” in every realm of aesthetics, we can easily understand that he would be “bowled over” (a favorite expression of his) by what he heard—and felt beneath his fingers—while playing these organs. To him, the music seemed to spring from the instruments as if from living organisms. In them, he had found at last “the welcome feeling of on-the-beat accuracy” at his fingertips for which he had been waiting a lifetime.
Near the end of their journey, during a week of appearances in Iceland, the Biggses received good news from Vincent Liebler:
Just a line to let you know that we finally cleared the first shipment of tapes containing reels numbered 1 thru 8. I checked them with Mr. Oppenheim and they appear to be well recorded. If all the rest of the places have been recorded as well, I am sure you have achieved an excellent batch of material.17
Buoyed by Liebler’s report, a gleeful EPB and Peggy amused themselves on the final leg of their Loftleidir flight to New York by estimating “the total weight of pipes, wind chests, consoles, and other music-making material” that the Ampex had recorded: “Our guess was that the equipment had gobbled up the sounds of some two or three million pounds of organ weight. No wonder we became enormously fond of the machine!”18 Most of what the tapes had captured, of course, would be deemed unusable for one reason or another; recording on the fly had guaranteed that take after take would be marred by some great crash or other non-musical blemish. But there would be enough wheat among the chaff to enable two albums in 1955, while leaving some of the choicest material for cuts on the “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” LP that would be released one year later as a companion to the Mozart set of 1956.

“May we start urgent inquiries?”

Biggs had hoped to begin editing his miles of tape the moment he got home. A letter to David Oppenheim dated July 5, the Monday after his return, provides a wealth of insight into his view of the trip, his hopes for the projects, and his tally of recording-related costs—in 1954 dollars:
It was nice to chat with you by phone on our return to New York last week, and here’s the promised outline of the music done and the places in which we recorded. . . . First choice for release, undoubtedly, is the three-record set Sweelinck-Buxtehude-Pachelbel, which carries out the idea of European music recorded in the very places in which these chaps lived and worked. It also brings an impressive list of famous organs and other notable cities. . . . I feel quite sure we’ll be ahead of any competitors, both in the musical plan and choice of places, but I guess we do have to move fast, in order to be first in the record market with the idea. . . . All tapes—nos. 1 through 71 plus six small tapes—should be here by now. . . . If they have not arrived, may we start urgent inquiries? . . . I have to bring down the Ampex that we used. It runs, but evidently went out of adjustment in the last week of the trip. If it can be adjusted, perhaps I can bring it back here [to Cambridge] and do a lot of the preliminary editing right away. . . . I’d like to discuss the general financial arrangement for the whole project. Air excess ran to just over $1000.00. Direct costs of handling equipment—taxis, some long distance car trips, contributions to churches, battery rentals, and other inescapables (which I have all itemized) add up to another $1589.00. There are also bills on hand for $1730.00 from Columbia Records for cost of equipment, all incidentals, and for tape shipments.
But where were those tapes? They had not arrived, and an anxious Biggs typed this note to Liebler, on July 8:
Since everything hinges on getting the rest of the tapes safely over here, and as soon as possible, I thought you’d like these [attached] complete details of the shipments. . . . I’m coming down to see David Oppenheim next Tuesday, and I will bring the Ampex machine for examination. . . . If there’s a studio free, I could even start work on editing some of the tapes—before seeing Oppenheim at 3:00 p.m. . . . On the other hand, if the Ampex can be restored to condition, and if I may bring the tapes back here, we can do all the preliminary editing without taking up any more of your studio time. . . . Although we can make a start with what we have, we do need all the tapes in order to extract the musical sequence of compositions we’re after—so here’s hoping your cables produce speedy shipments!
Liebler’s cables did produce speedy shipments, but the frustration had only begun. Declaration papers incorrectly prepared by Philips caused the shipments to be held in customs for weeks. At the end of August, fully two months after his return to the U. S., Biggs was still struggling to get his tapes. On August 29, he wrote to Jay Goeller at Columbia Records to announce that he would make a special detour to New York City on his way home from Toronto within a few days, specifically to retrieve more of the tapes:
I’ll pick up the tapes you already have, Nos. 61 through 63, 71, and 6 small tapes, plus the bulk shipment of 15 through 44 which surely should be delivered by then. If it isn’t, we’ll just have to badger the customs people, for they have had the tapes for six weeks now and it is outrageous that they should be held up this way.
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