In the wind…
November, 2005
Why is there air?
Forty years have passed since Bill Cosby raised this
question in his recording by the same name.
The record (remember those black vinyl discs?) was released in 1965 and
the title cut referred to his days as a Physical Education major at Temple
University. With tongue in cheek he
teased philosophy majors, observing that they wandered around campus mulling
over such fundamental questions. I no
longer own a turntable and couldn’t refresh my memory so I paraphrase his
response:
“Any Phys-Ed major knows that. There’s air to blow up basketballs, air to
blow up footballs…”
I was in elementary school at the time, and my friends and I
thought that was the funniest thing ever, but forty years later the Wyman School
has been converted to condominiums and I think I have a more sophisticated
reading of what Mr. Cosby was getting at.
As our lives and society grow ever more complex we often lose track of
the fundamental questions that drive what we do.
What are the questions?
Ours is a field rich with people who “caught the bug” – who
were excited, even enchanted by the pipe organ early in life. I’ve heard plenty of those personal
stories. One colleague told me how when
he was very young his family traveled clear across the country to attend a
wedding. The trip itself was a huge
experience for him, but he had never seen such a large and ornate church
building, and when the organ started to play he knew what he wanted to do with
his life. Another friend told that when
he was shown inside a large organ as a child the concept of the apparently
contradictory relationship between the organ’s industrial interior and its
glorious sound led to his important career as an organbuilder. My own introduction to the instrument was a
natural succession – the organist of the church I grew up in (my father was the
rector) was a harpsichord maker and the community of instrument builders was
well represented in the choir. My
childhood piano lessons led to organ lessons and why wouldn’t I have a summer
job in an organbuilder’s workshop? Was
there in fact anything else one might do?
A wonderful world has grown up around the pipe organ, a
world full of talented people dedicated to both the study of what has preceded
us and to innovation. It’s a complicated
subject with a very deep history, myriad technical issues, and elusive artistic
concepts that drive the whole thing. The
instrument itself is tangible – you can build it, touch it, feel it, play it,
care for it. But the basic concept is
more difficult to explain. This is not
like the admiration directed toward the first person to eat an artichoke or lobster,
rather it is the understanding of the collective contributions of countless
people through the ages. The intertwined
relationship between the instrument, its music, its builders, and its players
is like those quirky philosophical questions about trees in the forest, smoke
and fire, chickens and eggs – or Bill Cosby’s why is there air? Any organbuilder knows the answer to that
question: There’s air to blow organ
pipes, air to leak through worn gaskets, air to cause ciphers. We are the heirs of erring air. (Remember E. Power Biggs talking about
pumping the bellows of an 18th century British organ – “handling the handle
that Händel handled.”)
However lofty our introduction to the pipe organ, once we
are engaged in our careers we often move from one deadline to another somehow
forgetting that original inspiration. We
may know the thrilling sensation of a huge Swell box opening, allowing the
sound of powerful reeds to gradually join the choir procession during a
festival service. (If the procession is
slow and in the middle of the service, we could use the Swell box to gradually
join a gradual Gradual!) But what do we
have in mind if we are in an organ chamber struggling to get a Swell motor to
work properly – technical issues, skinned knuckles, and holed leather, or that
spectacular procession, banners a’flying?
Try whistling a hymn tune as you work – I recommend Westminster Abbey!
The struggle between art and commerce is well defined and
frequently written about. A friend who
loves to paint recently put it succinctly when she said she simply doesn’t have
the time for it. Who was it that said,
“time is money?” At what point does the
thrill of creating a monumental pipe organ become a battle between time and
money?
I recently stumbled across a quotation from Daniel
Barenboim: “Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and
one toward the future, toward eternity.”
Did Mr. Barenboim forget the past as a third face? Aren’t great works of art at least informed
by the past? Certainly pipe organs are.
There’s a debate in the world of pleasure boats between the
merits of wood and fiberglass hulls. A
purist might say there’s nothing like the sound of water slapping against a
wooden hull. But there are many
arguments in favor of fiberglass boats. Does
this debate actually confuse questions of personal preference or convenience with
whether or not it’s a good boat?
The debate between the merits of mechanical and electric
keyboard actions has been raging for more than fifty years. It seems to me that one can argue that the
debate couldn’t really get started until electric and pneumatic actions were
well-developed and prevalent so there was strong basis for comparison. I’ve said many times that the result of the
debate is that our organbuilders are producing excellent instruments using all
kinds of actions. The questions
surrounding the construction of organ cases, the design of wind systems, or the
deployment of stops in divisions are just as fundamental as those concerning
keyboard action. Let’s debate the relative
merits of balanced or suspended tracker key actions, or whether the keyboards
of electric action instruments should be pivoted in the middle or at the
end. My point is I want to play and
listen to good organs, well conceived and beautifully made. Just as I’ve had great days sailing in both
wooden and fiberglass boats, I’ve been thrilled by both tracker and electric
action pipe organs.
When I say I’ve been thrilled by both tracker and electric
action pipe organs I have also to say that I’ve equally been disappointed by
both.
One thing that sets the pipe organ apart from other
instruments in my opinion is the extraordinary variety from one example to
another. I know that a clarinetist
recognizes countless differences between clarinets, but how can one compare a
three-rank continuo organ with a mighty two-hundred-rank job in a huge church? The experiences they produce are worlds apart
as is the music that can be played on them?
(I’ve noticed that we often talk about what music an organ can play – as
if there would not be an organist involved.)
What’s really funny is how we try to mix those experiences. Widor’s famous Toccata is a staple of the modern organ repertory and it’s played
as often on ten-stop organs as on those of the scale for which it was conceived
– many, many more than ten stops. And it’s
not just about the number of stops but more important, the acoustics of the
room. I remember vividly the first time
I played that piece in an appropriate acoustical setting. It was in Lakewood, Ohio in a cavernous
church building with a marble floor. It
was a Wicks organ of only moderate size but the way the harmonies rolled around
the place helped me understand the piece more fully. Of course, this was after I had played the
same piece in perhaps dozens of small, dry rooms on dozens of small, dry
organs.
It seems to me that our love affair with pieces like that
has led us toward an artificial world.
We know that thirty-two foot stops add a lot to large-scale organ music,
so we add artificial thirty-twos to organs in churches that do not have space
for them. Ideally, we design organs using
mathematical formulas that have been proven through the ages. The Golden Section, for example, is a classic
system of ratios that defines the proportions of countless structures built
over thousands of years. There’s a
pleasing naturalness when an instrument is conceived well in relationship to
the room it graces. Hearing thirty-two
foot tone in a building with a fifteen foot ceiling leaves one somehow confused.
An organist’s work is often defined by the struggle between
tradition and innovation. Christmas is
coming. Are you preparing for the tenth,
fifteenth, twentieth Christmas in the same church? How do you program innovative exciting music
without disappointing the expectations of tradition? Think of the congregation that was first to
sing O Come, All Ye Faithful (there
must have been one). Did anyone go home
that day grumbling that the organist didn’t understand the value of
tradition? One piece that struck me at
first hearing as a future chestnut is John Rutter’s Candlelight Carol. Easily
singable, absolutely beautiful, text full of meaning – I wonder if that’s what
people experienced when they first heard In
dulci jubilo some seven hundred years ago.
I had a parallel musing the first time I visited St. Sulpice
in Paris. I wondered how many of the
older people in the congregation would remember Marcel Dupré as their parish
organist. It’s a stretch, but it’s at
least possible that a few of them remembered Widor – it was fewer than
sixty-five years after his retirement.
Think what those people must have experienced in the way of musical
tradition when so much of what they heard from the organ was improvised!
One of my greatest professional struggles has involved
wedding music. It’s the privilege of the
parish organist to be a part of so many celebrations. I played for more than four hundred weddings
at one church. It’s a thrill to be able
to share one’s skills to enhance such an occasion. I didn’t keep proper records but I would be
fascinated to see a spreadsheet that showed a statistical analysis of the music
I played at all those weddings. At what
percentage of weddings did I play Mendelssohn, Wagner, or Schubert? How often did a couple listen to eight or ten
choices before lighting up when I offered Jesu,
Joy of Man’s Desiring the evening they were choosing music? It’s very likely that the only time a couple
actually chooses what will be played live on a pipe organ will be their
wedding. How does an organist introduce
creative and meaningful music into a wedding service without disappointing the
expectations of families and their friends?
When I was first an independent organbuilder I had as an employee a
young woman who worked for me for nearly ten years. She was both a terrific worker and a close
friend. She had many opportunities to
hear my reports of “last Saturday’s wedding” when I would regale her with the
trials of the wedding organist. (Maybe
there’s a movie title in that sentence.)
It is a great regret of mine that she formed such an impression of my
feelings about weddings that when she got married she asked someone else to
play the organ.
Is the future of the pipe organ better assured if we sustain
tradition or if we find exciting new ways to use it? How do we strike a balance between those
concepts? Are consumers of organ music
always going to be happy with old favorites? How do we find, write, create those pieces
that will become tomorrow’s chestnuts or
are today’s chestnuts good enough to last?
And if we find such a piece, how do we introduce it in the place of
something else?
What is the future form of the pipe organ? Can its builders stay faithful to ancient
forms while continuing to be innovative?
What is the future of the economics of organbuilding? Will churches, schools, concert halls always
be willing to commit to such enormous expenditures? Does our society value artistic expression
enough to justify that? How do we share
our passion and enthusiasm in the interest of the future of our art? Do we assume that a strong future for our art
will add to the cultural wealth of society?
How can we sustain the wealth of the heritage of our instrument in the
world of the sound-bite, the mega-byte, the Big Gulp®, the Big Mac®, the
Playstation®, VCR, DVD, or PCD. With
music education in public schools in decline, who will be the next generation
of organists and who will be the next generation of music lovers?
We are stewards of a glorious heritage. It’s essential that we find new ways to
communicate that wealth. We must be
informed by the past, but we shouldn’t dwell on it. As we are informed by the past, we are better
able to inform the future. How many ways
can we read the phrase, The Past Becomes
the Future?
