Yesterday was Easter. I’ve spent the last three weeks roaring around New England in a flurry of organ tuning. As I moved from church to church I had the feeling that organ tuners get to see and smell more lilies than anyone besides florists. Each place I went had a more glorious display than the last. It’s a treat to witness the excitement of preparation in so many parishes and a privilege to play a part in that excitement by working to see that organs are at their best.
I think of all those sanctuaries now, the morning after. There’s a particular aroma—the mingling of white lilies and candle smoke. That aroma in turn mingles with the springtime sunshine as the sexton clatters around the nave straightening hymnals and gathering the bulletin inserts that name the donors and memorials for “this year’s Easter flowers.”
The organist left on vacation last night, to return in ten days to a choir room piled high with choral music left from the Holy Week services and the task of planning the music for the next liturgical cycle (dare I say that it’s only 32 Sundays until the beginning of Advent?). One of the trumpet players left behind his music stand and his check—we’ll hear from him soon. Otherwise, things will be quieter until Pentecost and Church School Sunday.
As for me, I lost my last mixture-tuning brush under a rackboard on Good Friday afternoon—I need to make a new batch. My car is full of tools, cleaning supplies, and the hardware store bags that supplied a dozen miscellaneous improvised repairs. There’s a long list of non-organ-repair phone messages on my desk, and heaven knows how many e-mails.
In the last few weeks I’ve visited about 30 organs. I’ve oiled blower motors, un-stuck keys, tuned reeds (lots of reeds!), replaced pouches, adjusted tremulants, regulated actions, cleaned keyboards, vacuumed under pedalboards (I always keep the pencils I find), and removed potted plants from the tops of consoles. I’ve removed the remains of moths, flies, mice, and one bat from critical locations in organ chambers. I’ve stood in the nave and listened to balances between organ and choir, and I’ve played passages for organists so they can hear their registrations. I even did a lunchtime music store errand for an organist—we are a full-service organ company!
A busy season of maintenance visits is a fine time to reflect on the majesty of the pipe organ. Each one is different. Each has its quirks. Some pipe organs are mediocre, nondescript, even poor. A fine pipe organ of any style, description, or size is an artistic treasure. In the February 2006 edition of this column, I posed the rhetorical question: which is better, tracker or electric action? There is no limit to how this question might be answered, but if I would propose a correct answer to my own rhetorical question, it would be: “A good organ is a good organ—a poor organ is a poor organ.”
I suppose the next question is how do you define a “good” organ? I’ll give it a whirl and I’ll be pleased to hear what you readers have to add.
1. A good organ is the product of an organbuilder’s artistic vision and philosophy, not the product of mass-production. Many instruments built by large firms certainly are good organs—as long as the leadership of the firm conceives their products as artistic creations.
2. A good organ is designed and built to be a credible vehicle for the presentation of great compositions of organ music. (I’m not addressing the question of whether every organ should be able to present many different styles of music.)
3. A good organ is compatible with its surroundings. It must be of a size and scale appropriate to the room it’s in. It must add to, not detract from, the architecture of its home.
4. A good organ has mechanical and structural integrity, which is synonymous with comfort and ease of playing, reliability of performance, and economy of maintenance.
5. A good organ has the metaphysical qualities necessary to excite the senses and move the emotions of both players and listeners.
These are all relative qualities, difficult to describe, easy to debate. How do we define good? What makes a good bottle of wine? What constitutes a good sermon, a good college course, or a good day? I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it. What makes a good meal? One that “does the job” by filling you up, or one that presents a subtle combination of flavors—perfectly cooked and beautifully presented—that goes beyond simple nutrition or satiation to reveal the philosophy and artistry of the chef? Can this analogy apply to the organ?
The rapid advance of digital sound creation and reproduction has complicated this debate. In his editorial letter published in the April issue of The Diapason responding to the February 2006 edition of this column, Dr. Christoph Tietze wrote, “I believe that the almost universal acceptance of electric action is partially responsible for the growing acceptance of electronic instruments today, for it is only one step further from fooling the fingers to fooling the ear also.” I suggest that fooling the fingers is hardly the point. How the music-making happens is between the instrument builder, the composer, and the performer—perhaps an unholy alliance, and certainly often an ongoing argument. The effective performer is free to add comment to the music but that presentation is always subject to the listener’s judgment. It should make no difference to the listener whether the keyboard is electric or mechanical—what does matter is whether the performer is comfortable with the instrument, whatever it is. As long as we have different performers, it must be acceptable to have different instruments.
Another reader responded to Dr. Tietze’s letter by carrying the debate a step further saying, “all art is, to a certain extent, fakery . . . There are some awful pipe organs . . . and it is [unreasonable] to claim that for all time and everywhere on earth, NO electronic organ would be better than such.”
As an advocate of the pipe organ, I am disinclined to compare them with digital substitutes. And I reject the idea that all art is fakery. Rather, I say that real art is real, and imitation or substitute art is fakery. One might say that a digital musical instrument is analogous to a print of a famous painting. It might be a very good print—I took a look at the online store of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and saw a print of a painting by Mark Rothko for $175—but it’s still a print.
As I scrolled through the MoMA catalogue, I didn’t see any copies of poor art. The marketing people have chosen outstanding art to reproduce and offer for sale. I can understand replacing an ugly original painting with a reproduction of something excellent. Does that describe some purchases of electronic instruments? If so, the person I’m most disappointed in is the builder of the inadequate pipe organ.
My analogy has a serious flaw. It’s easy to say that I’d rather view an original artwork than a reproduction, but while I have been in a few private houses that have original masterworks on the walls, I realize that such luxuries are not available to many of us. An original masterwork might be worth a million times the price of a reproduction (the MoMA store sells reproductions of Monet’s Water Lilies for $17.95). This ratio does not apply to pipe organs and their substitutes. If a pipe organ cost a million times as much as a digital one, perhaps even I would have second thoughts.
While I accept that some churches choose to replace pipe organs with substitutes, I do not accept the claim or even intimation that “you can’t tell the difference.” Of course we can tell the difference. We might choose the substitute anyway, but we can tell the difference. We can tell the difference between fresh-squeezed orange juice and frozen concentrate. We can tell the difference between a burger from the backyard grill and one from a fast-food joint. We can tell the difference between a live symphony orchestra and a recording of one. We can tell the difference between real flowers and plastic flowers.
We’ve all heard the economic arguments comparing pipe organs with electronic instruments. Does it take two, three, even four electronics to produce a combined life expectancy equal to that of a pipe organ? Depends on the organ. We often hear the claim that a pipe organ will last a hundred years between renovations. But consider this story. For the past twenty years I have maintained a large tracker-action organ that was built in the early 1970s—it was just over ten years old when I first tuned it. Since then we’ve replaced the original solid-state combination action and drawknob motors, the slider motor controls, and the leather of the schwimmers. When the largest pipes of the 16' Posaune collapsed, we repaired and reinforced the resonators and built new supporting racks. And when the original “space-age” lubrication of the sliders turned to glue, we took all the pipes out of the organ, cleaned and lubricated the sliders, and retuned everything. The total cost of these repairs far exceeded the original price of the organ. In most ways this is an excellent instrument, but if it was not owned by a parish that is truly committed to having a fine pipe organ, it could well have been replaced by a substitute.
I’m fortunate that my work keeps me in constant contact with the best (as well as the worst) pipe organs. For example, I’ll be in New York City this weekend where I’ll have to cull a long list of wonderful opportunities to experience great music in worship. There’s nothing quite like the experience of singing hymns in a huge church with a thousand souls in the congregation, a brilliant choir, monumental organ, and imaginative organist. I confess that I’m often unable to sing because of the lump in my throat. The organist improvises an interlude, the swell boxes open, the choir adds a descant, and I melt. Feel free to accuse me of sentimentality when I sling an old cliché, that’s what it’s all about.
It’s a natural extension of such an experience to want to try to emulate it at home. Visit the church of St. Sulpice in Paris and realize what Widor had in mind as he wrote his music. That famous Toccata wasn’t intended as a five-and-a-half-minute machine-gun volley of virtuoso notes, but a series of long rolling chords, four to a measure. Because so many of us revere it as a masterpiece, we play it on whatever organ we have, in whatever acoustical environment—but it’s a distortion of scale.
A musical instrument should reflect the scale of its surroundings. A somewhat sassy example is to be reminded that bagpipes were conceived as outdoor instruments. Appropriate scale is critical to the success of a fine pipe organ. Designing a pipe organ is a balancing act—the struggle (it’s almost always a struggle) to achieve balance between the musical needs of the parish, the available space, the available budget, and the builder’s philosophy. Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator on ABC television’s 60 Minutes, once said he’d been eating working-day lunches in New York restaurants for decades and had never once been surprised by a check that was lower than he expected. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine and nearly impossible to remember the organ project where there was both enough money and enough space!
In my opinion, including a digital 32' stop in a modest pipe organ in a modest building is a violation of scale—the building cannot support the development of that very special sound, and it sounds out of place. In other words, if the real thing wouldn’t fit, the fakery doesn’t belong. Likewise, we frequently see a digital instrument that emulates a pipe organ with 30 or 40 stops, installed in a sanctuary that seats fewer than 200 people. A pipe organ of 10 ranks would be plenty, but the buyers are beguiled with the grand specification and the resulting impressive console. With all due respect, I wonder if it’s necessary to be able to play the music of Widor in every church building. It’s the musical equivalent of stuffing a grove of 20-foot-tall plastic lilac and cherry trees into a sanctuary with an 18-foot ceiling. It’s out of scale, so it’s out of place.
I know that digital instruments are here to stay, and I know that many churches are delighted to own them. I’ve been working in and around pipe organs for almost 35 years, and I expect I’ll always be advocating the pipe organ. But I agree with one thing said by the reader who responded to the response—there surely are awful pipe organs out there. My last word to the buyers and builders of pipe organs today: the future of our passion depends on excellence. Keep buying and building the best organs you can.
