A matter of perception
In the March 2009 issue of The Diapason, I wrote:
Busy organists might be playing on dozens of instruments each year, but there are also many examples of lifelong relationships between players and their “home base” organs. Marcel Dupré played hundreds of recitals all over the world, but he was Organiste Titulaire at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 until 1971. He succeeded Charles-Marie Widor, who had held the position since 1870. So for more than a century that great Cavaillé-Coll organ was played principally by two brilliant musicians. What a glorious heritage. Daniel Roth has been on that same well-worn bench since 1985. I first attended worship in that church in 1998 and vividly remember noticing elderly members of the congregation who would remember the days when Dupré was their parish organist. I suppose there still may be a few. I wonder if any of them cornered Dupré after church to complain that the organ was too loud!
Ladislaw Pfeifer of the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel in Springfield, Massachusetts wrote,
Dear Mr. Bishop,
In your most recent Diapason article, you wondered if any of Marcel Dupré’s parishioners ever thought that he played too loud. That made me immediately recall a story that Robert Rayfield (organ dept. at IU—long time ago) enjoyed telling. He attended Mass at Dupré’s parish with some friends and Dupré was improvising the postlude in a manner worthy of The Church. Rayfield and his companions were ecstatic and then they noticed a woman kneeling in prayer trembling with her hands over her ears. The postlude ended and her hands came down. One of Rayfield’s companions approached the woman and asked why she covered her ears. She made a dramatic gesture, shook her head and said, “C’est épouvantable et c’est comme ça toutes les semaines.” “It’s terrible and it’s like this every week!”
I thought I was joking when I wondered if parishioners thought Dupré played too loud. What one thinks is sublime and inspiring, the other thinks is horrible—an imposition.
Marcel Dupré’s improvised postludes were instantly created, never to be heard again, brilliant art works. I imagine that they were sometimes furious, sometimes joyful, always complex, and yes, often very loud. The Cavaillé-Coll organ in St. Sulpice is a mighty instrument. Those visiting organists, schooled in the bewildering languages of musical expression, were transfixed and thrilled. The above-mentioned woman felt assaulted.
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Architect Frank Gehry has created some fascinating designs—buildings rife with curved lines and wavy spaces. The Experience Music Project is an interactive museum in Seattle, Washington, commissioned by Paul Allen and dedicated to Jimi Hendrix. You can find a fine photo gallery at <http://www.flickr.com/photos/heritagefutures/sets/72157604116603161/>. I visited the EMP several years ago and found the building to be daring, unique, challenging, and complicated—I loved it. A colleague who lives in Seattle shared the local comment that it looks as though the Space Needle (next door) got undressed and threw her clothes in a heap, a sentiment that reminds me of the nickname given to another of Gehry’s controversial designs—the Disney Hall organ in Los Angeles as a “large order of fries.”
How do we react to innovation? I was organist of a suburban Congregational church when the United Church of Christ introduced The New Century Hymnal. Our parish purchased the new hymnal with a program of memorial gifts, and the old copies of the Pilgrim Hymnal were given to a hurricane-ravaged church in Mississippi. The congregation loved some of the hymns that were new to them and loved the fact that some “old chestnuts” that were missing from the Pilgrim Hymnal were present in the new one. They grappled with the altered words of Christmas carols (Good Christian friends, rejoice; Let every heart prepare Christ room; O come in adoration, Christ is Lord), and the modernization of language (Nearer my God to you . . . ). But the general reaction was positive, and we had lots of fun exploring together. During this months-long conversation I came across a printed review of another new hymnal that complained bitterly about the sacrilege of changing words in familiar hymns, of favorites being expunged, and of complicated new hymns being introduced. I published it in the parish newsletter, leaving for last the fact that it was a review written sixty years earlier about the then new Pilgrim Hymnal!
I pointed out to our congregation that somewhere, some distant congregation was the first to sing O Come, All Ye Faithful. Was it a disappointment for them that the processional hymn they were used to had been replaced?
We read that Mozart’s music was generally accepted with alacrity by his contemporary audiences, but Beethoven made his audiences work hard to understand the twists and turns he was adding to the language of music. Early twentieth-century composers like Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky caused furors with their music—a riot broke out during the premier performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. One account said the trouble started at the opening of the piece because audience members started disagreeing loudly about the unorthodox use of the bassoon.
What is the purpose of art? And when is art at its best? Is art (music, sculpture, painting, theater, literature) supposed to please us with beautiful sights and sounds? It’s a joy to walk through the Impressionist galleries in a great museum, savoring paintings of water lilies, gardens, dancers, and poplar trees. It’s a joy to hear a performance of Mozart symphonies and piano concertos. There’s no struggle, no challenges, no dissonance to the eye or ear, just beautiful images and sounds washing over you.
Or is art best and most meaningful when the artist takes us somewhere we haven’t been before? Picasso insisted that we look at a subject from many directions at once. We know it as cubism, and scholarship over the years has taught us what Picasso was up to when he apparently distorted images. But I’m sure that many people have been troubled by his innovative images.
The great thing is that we don’t have to choose. We can enjoy the beauty of an old Dutch landscape painting—snazzy bits of sunshine poking through gnarly leafy trees, nymphs bathing in springs, swans, clouds, a hint of a breeze. Or we can be moved and troubled by a raspy grumpy contemporary image that we don’t understand and fail to appreciate. My wife Wendy and I once saw an exhibition of German portraiture from the 1920s, and another of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the same afternoon at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was quite a jolt to move from the angular, dark, and spooky images of wealthy Jewish society in pre-Nazi Germany to the sumptuous and gleeful work of Tiffany with dazzling daffodils shown in stained glass.
We can hear the classy rhythms and rhymes of Cole Porter, or we can absorb the edgy, sometimes scary images of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Weill’s Mahagonny and Porter’s Let’s do it were written one year apart.
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Let’s go back to the French woman with her hands over her ears. Why do people go to church? Is it to find comfort in the familiar litanies and rituals or is to be challenged to understand the most difficult issues of our humanity? Much of organized worship is predictable. Because of the nature of my work, I think I visit as many churches as anyone. It’s interesting to compare the Sunday bulletin from Congregational churches in Los Angeles and New York, or Brunswick, Maine and Norman, Oklahoma. For the most part, they could be interchangeable. Look at Christmas Eve bulletins from around the country and you find the same hymns in the same slots. For many people the quiet surroundings and the familiar prayers and stories provide a shelter from the tumult we face in day-to-day life. Too bad it has to be disrupted by some renegade organist sitting in a little booth forty feet up in the air.
But isn’t the church at its best when the preaching, the music, and education programs respond to the most difficult theological, social, even political issues of the day—when parishioners are challenged, when they leave the church troubled and questioning?
Just like the art museum or the concert hall, it’s both. The church comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comforted. I grew up in the Episcopal Church. My father is a priest and a music lover, and my musical life started with piano lessons and singing in the choir. As a kid I loved the pageantry of processions and sacraments. It was a beautiful brick-gothic church building with rich dark-stained oak carvings and decoration. There’s a Fisk organ in the rear gallery that was built when I was in high school (troubling to think that the organ is thirty-five years old now!). When I visit that building today I’m greeted by the familiar surroundings—it even still smells the same. But it was during the turmoil of the 1960s that that parish really grew. Dad came out against the war in Vietnam and led church members in civil rights protests. Of course some members were furious, withheld pledges, even left the parish, but that period of struggle was a catalyst for the parish’s growth.
If at least part of the role of the church is to challenge us to face difficult issues, then so should its musicians be encouraged to express their spirituality and emotions in the context of worship. We all love the old chestnuts. Church wouldn’t be church without rugged crosses, dewy roses, housed sparrows, and still small voices. But while we shouldn’t go out of our way to annoy the parishioners with bombastic music, we can lead them to higher places by challenging them with less comforting masterworks, especially if we make an effort to help them understand the music. A few words in the bulletin or newsletter can go a long way.
I don’t suppose that Dupré wrote notes in the newsletter explaining the music for next Sunday. Perhaps Madame would have reacted differently if she knew what was going on. I wonder if she had any idea that her parish organist was considered first a prodigy and then a genius by the wide world of organists. Did she realize that the music she was enduring was revolutionary? Did she know that there were international guests in the organ loft every Sunday, there to experience the work of the master? Could she pick out the plainsong melodies from the blazing mass of organ sound? Did she recognize the chorale melody in the heart of the improvisation? Did she understand the significance of the modal harmony? I don’t think so.
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As I write, André Isoir just burst into the noble opening of Widor’s Sixth Symphony. (G minor is a wonderful key!) This may not be sacred music, but it is certainly spiritual, and I suppose it was first played at St. Sulpice in Paris where Widor was organist for so long. Those poor women kneeling in prayer at the close of the Mass—their beads must have gone flying as Widor plumbed the depth of that great organ.
(A scene in a novel by Patrick O’Brian has the crew of a British naval warship being called to battle stations by the ship’s drummer who “woke the thunder in his drum.” I love that phrase, and it always comes to mind when a heroic organ starts to play.)
Marcel Dupré became organist at St. Sulpice upon Widor’s retirement in 1934 and remained at that post until his death in 1971. Olivier Messiaen (who was a student of Dupré at the Paris Conservatoire) was appointed organist at La Trinité in 1931. He “kept the bench” until his death in 1992. That’s a total of ninety-eight years. Allowing for vacations and concert tours, let’s call it forty-eight hundred Sundays. Think of those two innovative, dynamic, and highly spiritual musicians holding forth on opposite sides of the Seine for all those years. What a body of thunder created through the inspiration of faith. The world of the organ, in fact the world of music was changed forever by their genius and diligence. I’m sorry it was so hard on Madame, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
