In the wind…
September, 2013
The Start of a
Century
At 10:24 am on October 15, 1947, Air Force Test Pilot Chuck
Yaeger flew the X-1 experimental aircraft faster than the speed of sound. That’s 761.2 miles per hour at 59-degrees
Fahrenheit. It was quite a technological
achievement. You have to generate a lot
of power to move a machine that fast.
But there was a spiritual and metaphysical aspect to that feat. Engineers were confident that they could
produce sufficient power, but they were not sure that a machine would survive
the shock wave generated by a machine outrunning its own noise. They supposed that the plane would vaporize,
or at least shatter, scattering Yaeger-dust across the landscape.
In his swaggering ghost-written autobiography, Yaeger, he casually mentions that he had
broken ribs (probably garnered in a barroom brawl) and had to rig a broomstick
to close the cockpit hatch. He took off,
flew the daylights out of the thing, and landed, pretty much just like any
other flight. By the noise, and by the
cockpit instruments, he knew he had broken the sound barrier, but to Yaeger’s
undoubted pleasure and later comfort, the worries of the skeptics proved untrue.
Invisible barriers.
Remember Y2K? As the
final weeks of 1999 ticked by, residents of the world wondered if we would
survive the magical mystical moment between December 31, 1999, and January 1,
2000. Of course, the world has survived
some twenty-five changes of millennia since we started to count time, but this
would be the first time with computers.
The myth that computers would not be able to count to 2000 had us
hyperventilating as we ran to ATM to grab as much cash as we could. People refused to make plans that would have
them aloft in airplanes at that horrible moment, supposing that cockpit
computers would fail and planes would fall from the sky. The collapse of the world’s economy was
predicted. Public utilities would cease
to function. Nuclear power plants would
overheat, and soufflés would fall.
As the clock ticked closer to midnight on New Year’s Eve, we
waited breathlessly. Fifteen, fourteen,
thirteen…sometimes it causes me to
tremble…eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven…all
good children go to heaven…four, three, two one…
Humpf.
I have no idea how the venerable astronomers settled on how
to organize the calendar and define our concept of time. I imagine a committee of bearded and wizened wise
men gathered in a pub, throwing darts at a drawing of a clock. However they did it, they didn’t fool
us. Cell phones, ATMs, airplanes, power
plants, railroads, and thank goodness, icemakers just kept on running. However accurately that moment was defined,
it was meaningless – a randomly identified milestone amongst the multitude.
Then we worried about what we call those years. The oughts?
The Ohs? Shifting from
ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine to oh-one, oh-two, oh-three seemed
impossible. I managed, and so did you.
Centennials.
The twentieth century started without the computer induced
hoopla, but I suppose that our heroes Widor, Puccini, Saint-Saens, Dvorak, and
Thomas Edison watched in suspense as the clock ticked past the witching hour. The real upheaval happened over thirteen
years later. On May 29, 1913, Ballets Russe danced the premier of Igor
Stravinski’s Rite of Spring at
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Stravinski
had used traditional and familiar instruments and all the same notes that
people were used to, but the way he arranged the tonalities, the maniacal
organization of rhythms, the angular melodies, and the radical orchestration
set the place in an uproar. The bassoon
that played those haunting melismatic opening solos could have been used to
play continuo in a Bach Cantata the same day.
Legend has it that the audience couldn’t contain itself and there was
wild disturbance. How wonderful for a
serious musical composition to stir people up like that. I haven’t seen people so worked up since the
Boston Bruins failed to win the Stanley Cup.
Everything’s up to
date in Kansas City.
About five weeks before Stravinsky tried to ruin the theater
in Paris, the Woolworth Building designed by Cass Gilbert was opened on Lower
Broadway in New York, April 24, 1913.
Like Stravinsky, Cass Gilbert used a traditional vocabulary – the
prickles and arches given us by the Gothic Cathedrals. But Rogers & Hammerstein’s “gone and
built a skyscraper seven stories high” was not as high as a building ought to
go. Cass Gilbert went fifty-seven
stories – 792 feet – the building remained the tallest in the world until
1930. Gilbert hung those classic Gothic
features on a high-tech structure and startled the world of architecture and
commerce.
Besides the technical achievement of supporting a massive
structure that tall, the building had thirty-four new-fangled elevators. The engineers executing Gilbert’s design had
to figure out to get water more than seven hundred feet up. Just think of that, pulling up to the curb in
a shiny new 1913 Chalmers Touring Car, and stepping in an elevator to go up
fifty-seven stories. Those folks in
Kansas City would have flipped their wigs.
The Woolworth building is still there a hundred years
later. Like Rite of Spring, it’s a staple in our lives, and it seems a little
less radical than it did a century ago.
After all, a few blocks away at 8 Spruce Street, by the foot of the
Brooklyn Bridge, the new tallest residential building in the Americas
(seventy-six stories and 876 feet), designed by Frank Gehry, towers like a maniacal
grove of polished corkscrews. Gehry took
the functional aesthetic of the glass-and-steel Seagram Building (375 Park
Avenue, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, built in 1958), and
gave it a cubist ethic by twisting the surfaces to create the signature
rippling effects.
How poetic that the Woolworth Building and 8 Spruce Street,
opened almost exactly a century apart, stand just a few blocks apart, trying to
out-loom each other. I took these photos
of them standing in the same spot on City Hall Plaza.
Frank Woolworth made a fortune in retail, the Sam Walton of
his day. F.W. Woolworth stores dotted
the country, making goods of reasonable quality available to residents of small
towns. However, I doubt that anything
sold in his stores would have been found in his houses. His principal residence, also designed by
Cass Gilbert, was at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 80th Street in
Manhattan, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among dozens of priceless artifacts was a
large three-manual Aeolian Organ.
Woolworth was one of Aeolian’s prime customers, and rare among that
heady clientele, he could play the organ.
His estate Winfield (the
“W” of F. W. Woolworth) on Long Island boasted the first full-length
thirty-two-foot Double Open Diapason to be built for a residence organ. Now that would shake your champagne glasses.
Woolworth’s funeral was held in the Fifth Avenue
mansion. Frank Taft, artistic director
of the Aeolian Company, was on the organ bench.
The Twenty-First
Century Pipe Organ
There’s a lot going on here in lower Manhattan. South of Union Square at 14th
Street, Broadway stops its disruptive diagonal path across the city, and
assumes a more reliable north-south orientation, forming the border between
Greenwich East Village and Greenwich West Village. On the corner of 10th and Broadway
stands Grace Church (Episcopal). Three
blocks west on the corner of 10th and Fifth Avenue stands Church of
the Ascension (Episcopal). Both are
“Gothicky” buildings – Grace is whitish with a tall pointed spire while
Ascension is brownish with a stolid square tower with finials. Both have pretty urban gardens. Both are prosperous active places. And both have radical new twenty-first
century organs.
Taylor & Boody of Staunton, Virginia are coming toward
completion of the installation of their Opus 65 at Grace Church where Patrick
Allen is the Organist and Master of the Choristers. Pascal Quoirin of Saint-Didier, Provence,
France has completed installation of a marvelous instrument at Church of the
Ascension where Dennis Keene is Organist and Choirmaster.
Both of these organs have as their cores large
tracker-action organs based on historic principles – and Principals. And both have large romantic divisions
inspired by nineteenth and twentieth-century ideals. Both are exquisite pieces of architecture and
furniture, and both have been built by blending the highest levels of
traditional craftsmanship with modern materials and methods.
At Church of the Ascension you can play the core organ from
a three-manual mechanical keydesk and the entire instrument from a separate
four-manual electric console. At Grace
Church, the whole organ plays from a four-manual detached mechanical console,
and contacts under the keyboards allow access to electric couplers and the few
high-pressure windchests that operate on electric action.
A more detailed account of the organ at Church of the
Ascension has been published, and no doubt, we can expect one about the Grace
Church organ – so I’ll limit myself to general observations, and let the
organbuilders and musicians involved speak for themselves. I admire the courage and inventiveness
exhibited in the creation of these two remarkable instruments.
I expect that purists from both ends of the spectrum will be
critical, or at least skeptical of these efforts to bridge the abyss. But I raise the question of whether purism,
or conservative attitudes are the best things for the future of our
instrument. We study history, measure
pipes, analyze metal compositions, and study the relationships between ancient
instruments and the music written for them.
We have to do that, and we must do that.
After finishing the restoration and relocation of a
beautiful organ built by E. & G.G. Hook (Opus 466, 1868) for the Follen
Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts, I wrote an essay in the
dedication book under the title, The Past
Becomes the Future. In it I wrote
about the experience of working on such a fine instrument, marveling at the
precision of the workers’ pencil lines, and the vision of conceiving an
instrument that would be vital and exciting a hundred-forty years later. I saw that project as a metaphor for a
combination of eras. And I intended the
double meaning for the word becomes. The past not only transfers to the future,
but it enhances the future. I could
carry the play on words further by misquoting the title of a popular movie, Prada Becomes the Devil!
Another tense of that use of the word become is familiar to us from Duprés Fifteen Antiphons, I am black but comely, O ye daughters of
Jerusalem. We don’t typically use
the word that way in conversation, but if you read in a Victorian poem, “she of
comely leg,” you’d know exactly what it meant!
Speaking of the
Ballet…
Recently, renowned organist Diane Belcher mentioned on
Facebook that the recording she made in 1999 (JAV 115) on the
Rosales/Glatter-Götz organ in the Claremont United Church of Christ, Claremont,
California has been released on iTunes.
Buy it. This is a smashing
recording of wonderful playing on a really thrilling organ. It’s a big three-manual instrument with
mechanical action and a wide variety of tone color. The recording has long been a favorite of
mine – I transferred it from the original CD to my iPhone and listen to it in
the car frequently.
The first piece on the recording is Tiento de Batalla sobre la Balletto del Granduca by Timothy Tikker,
was commissioned by the organbuilder to showcase the organ’s extraordinary
collection of reed voices. The piece
opens with a statement of a measured dance, familiar to organists who grew up
listening to the recording of E. Power Biggs, and proceeds in a dignified
fashion from verse to verse. I picture a
large stone hall lit by torches, with heavily costumed people in parade. But about three minutes in, things start to
go wrong. It’s as though someone threw
funky mushrooms into one of the torches.
An odd note pokes through the stately procession – you can forgive it
because you hardly notice it. But oops,
there’s another – and another – and pretty soon the thing has morphed into a series
of maniacal leaps and swoops as the reeds get more and more bawdy. Tikker established a traditional frame on which
he hung a thrilling, sometimes terrifying essay on the power of those Rosales
reeds.
New threads on old
bones.
·
Igor Stravinski used an ancient vocabulary of
notes and sounds to create revolutionary sounds. The same old sharps and flats, rhythmic
symbols, and every-good-boy-deserves-fudge were rejigged to start a revolution.
·
Cass Gilbert used five-hundred year old
iconography to decorate a technological wonder.
·
Frank Gehry gave the familiar skyscraper a new
twist.
·
Taylor & Boody and Pascal Quoirin have
morphed seventeenth and eighteenth languages into twenty-first century marvels.
·
Timothy Tikker painted for us a portrait of the
march of time.
Organists are very good at lamenting the passage of the old
ways. Each new translation of the bible
or the Book of Common Prayer is cause
for mourning. I won’t mention the
introduction of new hymnals. (Oops!)
We recite stoplists as if they were the essence of the pipe
organ. We draw the same five stops every
time we play the same piece on a different organ. And we criticize our colleagues for starting
a trill on the wrong note.
I don’t think Igor Stravinski cared a whit about which note
should start a trill.
The end of the world
as we know it.
Together we have witnessed many doomsday predictions. I’ve not paid close attention to the science of it, but it seems to me that the Mayan Calendar has come and gone in the news several times in the last few years. A predicted doomsday passes quietly and someone takes another look at the calendar and announces a miscalculation. Maybe the world will end. If it does, I suppose it will end for all of us so the playing field will remain equal.
Together we have witnessed many doomsday predictions. I’ve not paid close attention to the science of it, but it seems to me that the Mayan Calendar has come and gone in the news several times in the last few years. A predicted doomsday passes quietly and someone takes another look at the calendar and announces a miscalculation. Maybe the world will end. If it does, I suppose it will end for all of us so the playing field will remain equal.
But we can apply this phrase, the end of the world as we know it, to positive developments in our
art and craft as the twenty-first century matures. Your denomination introduces a new hymnal –
the end of the world as you know it. So,
learn the new hymnal, decide for yourself what are the strong and weak points,
and get on with it.
Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier, and kept flying faster
and faster. On October 15, 2012, at the
age of 89, Chuck Yaeger reenacted the feat, flying in a brand new F-15
accompanied by a Navy Captain. But
imagine this, it was the same day that Austrian Felix Baumgartner became the
first person to break the sound barrier without at airplane! He jumped from a helium balloon at an
altitude of twenty-four miles, and achieved a speed of 843.6 miles per hour as
he fell before deploying his parachute.
Both men lived to see another day.
A Taylor & Boody organ with multiple pressures and
expressions, powerful voices on electric actions, and seething symphonic
strings – the end of the world as we know it.
Embrace the thoughtfulness and creativity that begat it. And for goodness sake, stop using archaic words
like comely and begat.
Frank Gehry's 8 Spruce Street
Woolworth Building, street level detail.
