In the wind…
May 2012
Who do we think we
are?
I was a few weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday in February
of 1972 when my wisdom teeth were taken out.
I don’t know whether oral surgery was that much more cumbersome in those
days, or if my teeth presented some special problems – but I do know I had to
spend two nights in a hospital, and I lost the school vacation to the
experience. Because of the pain and
perhaps a sense of rebellion, I stopped shaving, and for forty years I was
never without a beard. Through an
eighteen-year first marriage, two kids growing up, and many life-long friends,
it wound up that the only people in my life who had seen me without a beard
were my parents and my siblings.
In the first week of January this year, Wendy and I attended
the wedding of a close friend and colleague.
It was a lovely three-day event in a picturesque village in
Vermont. There were about a dozen other
guests and together we had a lovely time.
It was a dressy affair and there was an excellent photographer present,
and a week or so later we were invited by email to a website to see (and
purchase) photos. They were great photos
and everyone looked terrific in snazzy clothes, but I had to admit that I
looked older in the photos than my internal picture of myself. That beard was so white.
I shared my thoughts with Wendy and we agreed to experiment.
Several years ago with the help of a
hotel concierge I found a wonderful place for haircuts in New York. It’s a men’s-only salon that offers drinks
and all sorts of nice perks. I made an
appointment with my favorite stylist, Lyuba, and when I sat in her chair she
asked, as she always does in her strong Russian accent, “what are we going to
do with you today?” When I said we’re
going to take off the beard she gave a little shriek. They brought me some whiskey, and off it
came. She finished up with a luxurious
old-fashioned straight razor shave, and I went out into the evening.
The salon is on 46th Street between Third and
Lexington Avenues and I walked the crowded sidewalks down Lexington to 42nd
Street, and into Grand Central Station to take the “6” train to our new
apartment in Greenwich Village. I
continually touched my cheeks and chin, getting used to new sensations. The feeling of cool air on my face was novel
and strange. But by far the biggest
sensation of change was that no one around me knew anything was different. It was rush hour and I must have walked past
sixty-thousand people in those five minutes, and although I knew something was
radically different, not one person noticed.
Wendy laughed out loud when I walked into our
apartment. A few days later there was a
family outing with my parents and two of my siblings – lots of ribaldry about
who in the family I look like. And a
couple days later I stopped shaving. I
retreated to our place in Maine so, as Wendy teased, I could hide in the woods
while it grew back.
I’m better now that the beard is back.
Looking back on the experience, it’s funny to think that
what I actually look like doesn’t fit my image of myself. Since I was a teenager I’ve known myself as a
person with a beard, as has everyone around me.
Without a beard I am myself, but I don’t look like myself.
§
We are a community of organists and organbuilders,
professionals in a niche market. It’s as
though we’re proprietors of a unique boutique.
What is our image of ourselves?
When we look into a proverbial mirror who and what do we see? Are we who we think we are?
How many of our customers like us because they think we’re
quaint? I’m reminded of these questions
every time I’m at a social event and meeting people for the first time. In those situations it’s inevitable that
someone asks what I do and their response is swift and predictable: “Pipe organ
builder? I didn’t know there were any of
you left.” It’s almost comical how often
I hear that, exactly word for word.
During the second half of the twentieth century, much of our
effort and talents were focused on the past.
We studied and emulated the instruments that were played by the “old
masters.” We researched and emulated how
the “old masters” played, and we programmed thousands of recitals that included
nothing written within the last two or three-hundred years.
Make no mistake as you read this. I believe strongly that movement was
essential to the future of the pipe organ.
Without all that creative energy, without all that fresh understanding
of the heritage of our instrument, there would not be the high level of
excellence and competency in today’s American organbuilding. And it’s hard to imagine how we would be
experiencing the music of Bach unfiltered by the careers of artists like Gustav
Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, or E. Power Biggs.
That half-century was a modern Renaissance in the truest sense of the
word.
Yesterday I heard a story on National Public Radio about
actors who have researched the accents, pacing, and delivery of Shakespeare’s
plays as they were produced during his lifetime. A recording was played of Sir Lawrence
Olivier delivering the famous “to be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet followed
by one of the modern actors doing it according to this research. The research seemed to be saying the accent
was close to that of modern Ireland (whatever that is), and the delivery was
very quick. It was interesting enough,
but I couldn’t help wondering how in the world they think they know what a
sixteenth-century actor sounded like?
I’ve lived in Boston most of my life, a city renowned for
its famous accent, but as a Bostonian, I know there are least five distinct
“Boston” accents. How do we decide on an
authentic accent for Stratford-on-Avon in 1595?
And I’m not sure we can claim to know how fast a sixteenth-century
Shakespearean actor spoke, any more than we can claim to know how fast Bach
played the “little” Fugue in G Minor. The value of the research, both for
Shakespearean accents and Bach’s tempos, is whether it adds to the vitality of
the performance.
Walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York any day
of the year, and you walk into a mob scene.
The soon-to-be-replaced steps at the main entrance on Fifth Avenue have
a carnival atmosphere, the big entrance lobby is jammed with tourists from
dozens of different countries, and the galleries are all a-swirl with people
gawking at the artworks. People used to
go to organ recitals that way. There are
plenty of historic accounts of huge enthusiastic crowds at concerts in
municipal auditoriums and churches alike.
Just a couple months ago in this column I reprinted the account of the
dedication of the big Skinner organ in the ten-thousand seat Municipal
Auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922.
The place was jammed, the aisles were full, thousands of people were
turned away, and the police gave up trying to control the crowd. When was the last time you saw something like
that at an organ recital?
I don’t have the statistics at hand just now, but I remember
reading that it was sometime in the 1960’s that the cumulative attendance at
live performances of classical music in the United States was surpassed for the
first time by attendance at professional sporting events. I doubt that even the recently announced
scandal-driven suspensions of coaches and players of the National Football
League’s New Orleans Saints will contribute to a reversal of that development.
§
It’s the twenty-first century now. We’ve survived the transition from one
century to another. Remember how uptight
everyone was about Y2K? Airplanes would
crash, ATM’s would run dry, clocks would stop, and heaven help anyone depending
on a computer. January 1, 2000? No big deal.
And what were we going to call the first ten years of the century? The oh’s, the aughts? Now we’re about to enter the teens. No big deal.
In the nineteen-twenties, American pipe organ builders
produced more than two thousand organs a year.
Companies like Skinner and Austin built a new organ each week – M.P.
Möller had many years during which they shipped a new organ each day!
I’ll go out on a limb and make an educated guess: American
organbuilders have not produced two thousand organs in the last thirty or even
forty years combined. Since 1960
companies like Fisk, Noack, Dobson, and Andover have each built between one and
two hundred organs. Taylor & Boody
has just signed a contract for Opus 70.
Möller built fewer and fewer new instruments each year until finally
closing in 1992. Aeolian-Skinner closed in 1972. Year for year, the American market for new
pipe organs is less than five percent of what it was a hundred years ago.
In fairness, these numbers need some interpreting. Today’s organbuilders have a much higher
percentage of projects rebuilding older organs than those of a century
ago. Thousands of nineteenth-century
masterpieces by builders like Hook, Jardine, Hutchings, and Odell were replaced
by the new-fangled electro-pneumatic jobs built by Skinner, Austin, Kimball,
and their competitors. Today we are much
more likely to be renovating organs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
than building new instruments. And some
of the markets for new organs a century ago are simply gone, such as the
municipal organ, the big-money residence organ, and the cinema organ. Utterly outside the market for church organs,
Wurlitzer and Aeolian built thousands of instruments for movie theaters and
private homes. Last year’s Oscar-winning
movie, The Artist, about the quantum
shift from silent movies to talkies never gave a hint about the collapse of the
market for theater pipe organs!
But however you analyze the numbers, we can’t escape the
fact that the market is wildly different today.
And we who love the organ are responsible for its place in our cultural
heritage for the coming century.
So how do we see ourselves?
Who is our audience? What is the
future of the pipe organ in America? Are
we condemned to crying in our beer as we lament the good old days like the
enthusiasts of steam railroads?
What is our image
of ourselves?
·
Are we coconspirators in a quixotic
adventure?
·
Are we hanging on the glories of past ages?
·
Is our range of expression limited to those of
our predecessors?
·
Are we playing to each other from positions of
expertise assuming that the general audience will be moved vicariously?
Answer those questions relative to the price of a new
organ. We live in the age of the
“million-dollar” organ. That’s what it
costs to commission a new instrument with three manuals and forty or fifty
stops, and that’s not a very large organ.
That’s a mighty amount of money for a church to spend on a musical
instrument in a society rife with poverty and other social needs. Are we presenting ourselves, and our music,
to the public and to our congregations in a way that’s worthy of expecting
laypeople to justify coming up with that kind of money?
§
That was a mighty negative list of questions. I offer them as challenges. I challenge you to think about your work,
your interests, your plans for future repertoire and performances with those
questions in mind. A great performer is
a great communicator. When you perform
you share your convictions about your art with those who come to hear.
We refer to public performances of organ music as recitals. The dictionary says that a recital is a
performance of music by a solo musician or a small musical ensemble. But if we embody the root of the word, recite, what are we offering to the
listener? In that sense of the word,
there’s no implication of originality, or even passion. Don’t recite, communicate.
I think that one of the attractions of viewing a work of
visual art in a museum is that you are free to interpret it any way you
want. You might be influenced by the way
it’s hung, the way it’s lit, or the architecture of the gallery, but when you simply
view the painting or statue you’re on your own.
Music doesn’t work that way.
The only people who can appreciate a piece of music at that level are
those who can read a score and understand the piece in silence. That experience is not available to the casual
listener. When you listen to a piece of
music you are influenced by the performer.
It’s therefore up to the performer to decide what kind of experience to
provide for the consumer. It’s up to the
performer to give the listener a good experience.
§
You might not think so from reading this so far, but I’m
optimistic. In this world of instant
communication, flashy digital equipment, and dwindling intellectual content in
much of the public discourse, I think I see a refreshment of public appreciation
for things that are real, that have depth of expression, and that feed people’s
cultural hunger. I’ve written often of
my celebration of the ever increasing numbers of genius young organists whose
pedagogic abilities are such that the technical demands of the most complex
music simply dissolve, allowing the listener to hear the music un-bumped. There are dozens of players like that today,
performers with old-world work ethics who are willing to devote themselves to
routines of practice and diligence that we used to be able only to read about,
shaking our heads. And the best news is
that many of them are now the teachers of tomorrow’s generation of masterful
performers.
The Organ Historical Society was founded in 1956. In its nearly sixty-year history, the OHS has
had a huge influence on how we view the heritage we’ve inherited from our
predecessors. Over the same period of
time we have studied and adored the music and instruments of various epochs of
European history. We are much the richer
for all of that. We have a strong
community of outstanding organ building firms.
We have a rich crop of brilliant musicians who are finding new and
exciting ways to use the pipe organ.
The past has informed us, but the future is a blank
slate. Let’s be sure we know who we are.
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