It’s a colorful world
A couple years ago I was driving across Virginia to visit a church whose people were hoping to acquire a pipe organ. My destination was a tiny hamlet across the Rappahannock River from Tappahannock (nice ring to it). I left Richmond on Route 360, passing through Mechanicsville and Central Garage, Virginia. I drive a red SUV with Massachusetts plates, and I drive pretty fast (there are so many organs to sell!), and I think I brightened the day of the state trooper who showed up behind me, lights a-flashing. After he was so thoughtful as to award me with a little certificate, a memento of my visit to the Old Dominion State, I drove away reflecting that he must have thought me to be as stereotypical as I found him—a beefy, red-faced, tobacco-chewing, drawling Bubba in a Smokey-the-Bear hat, and a bearded, fast-talking Northerner (worse, an Easterner), in a big hurry in a bright red car. In this age of maturing political correctness we are cautioned about profiling—but I know that both of us were profiling that day.
Later that afternoon, after I met with the good people of the little church, I came back across the Rappahannock (a beautiful active river) and was disappointed to be joined by another vehicle with flashing lights. I was relieved of the temptation for further profiling when this time the Smokey-the-Bear hat was topping an attractive young woman with a star on her chest. (Wait a minute, I guess that noting that she was attractive gets me in more profiling trouble!) This was a much more pleasant encounter for me, but the result was the same—another little award requiring future attention. And by the way, after all that, no sale. Too bad, because I had just the organ for them.
Academia brings us two more conflicting stereotypes. There’s the absent-minded professor whose command of his subject is unassailable but who is otherwise so scattered-brained that he’s likely to forget to wear socks to class, and there’s the authoritarian, autocratic professor who terrifies his students into learning—they never forget what they’ve learned, but for years after they lie awake at night reliving the horror of being called upon in class. My mother tells of a family member, a distant cousin of several generations ago and Harvard professor of mathematics, whose speech pattern featured what we generally call a “Lazy-Ell.” He had an expensive gold pocket watch that hung on a gold chain from his vest pocket, and while lecturing it was his perpetual habit to twirl the watch vigorously around his fingers on the end of its chain. Predictably, the watch took flight one day, soaring across the classroom and smashing into pieces on the floor. The professor calmly said, “Gentlemen,” (profiling aside, there were only gentlemen studying mathematics at Harvard in those days) “that was an example of a puh-fect peh-wah-boh-wa.”1
As a student at Oberlin, I had both types of professors. The two extremes were a professor of physics and a professor of music theory. One memorable physics class had this teacher sharing thoughts about the transfer of energy from one mass to another. There was a golf ball on a little tee on the heavy desk in front of the class. He grabbed a five-iron, stepped up on a chair and climbed onto the desk (he did have socks on). As he nattered on about energy, he nonchalantly approached the golf ball, made a wicked back-swing, and took out the fluorescent light fixture over his head. He sure did transfer energy from the club, and I still wonder if he did it on purpose, exploiting the humor of the unexpected.
The music theory professor did have a funny side, but not if you were the one he was teasing. He was diminutive and elderly, completely bald, and sarcasm dripped from every word he said. My first encounter with him was the two-semester powerhouse, “An Introduction to Four-Part Harmony.” He was the author of the textbook and the course was an Oberlin institution. Without question, what I learned from him that year is still the foundation of my understanding of the structure and motion of music, but at what expense? Early in the course I figured I had it made when the professor announced that he thought organists were “theory-prone” because the bass-line of a piece of music drives the harmonies, and organists are all about bass lines. At the same time, this guy had it out for singers who he freely maintained were barely musicians. He started one class by attacking a tenor (who incidentally now has an impressive international career, appearing in all the great opera houses of Europe) whom he had seen in the library listening room with headphones on, accusing him of learning his scores from recorded performances. The poor kid was humiliated—I have no doubt that he remembers the incident more clearly than I do.
My triumph in that class came when he was returning a graded exam. A week before the exam, he had offered one point of extra credit for each composer’s life-span dates we could write down. I had the highest grade—95% for the exam plus forty-five composers. This runs in my family—my father can recite all forty-four American presidents both in chronological and alphabetical order.
I’ve never forgotten that comment about bass lines. Right now I’m listening to a recording of Widor’s Sixth Symphony played by André Isoir. What majesty comes from the bass line in the opening measures! And in that narky place where the main melody in the manuals is accompanied by bouncing octaves in the pedals, the bass line gives an entirely different feel. Think of the depictions of storms in romantic orchestral music (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Rossini’s William Tell)—those thundering bass lines evoke visual images of boiling, murderous storm fronts rolling across the sky.
The power of the bass line was never clearer to me than when I played a recital with brass players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. It was First Night, Boston’s fantastic city-wide New Year’s celebration. There were more than 2500 people in the church. The organ is by Aeolian-Skinner—it has more than 235 ranks, and I figured I was the king of the hill. But when Chester Schmitz first put his tuba to his face I knew I had a tiger by the tail. It was exhilarating to be riding in Chester’s bus. We played a predictable program of brass-’n-organ favorites (Fireworks, Voluntaries, Canzonas), and the wind was blowing in my hair the whole time. Chester could generate enough energy through his instrument to dwarf the thirty-horsepower blower of the mighty organ. His tone was clear and present, his intonation perfect, his sense of the motion of music breathtaking.
It takes four to play a trio
Small baroque ensembles are usually “music plus one.” A piece might be scored for two violins and “basso continuo”—the “basso” comprises a bass instrument (usually viola da gamba or violoncello, sometimes bassoon) and keyboard (usually harpsichord, sometimes organ). The keyboard player doubles the bass line and fills in harmony above. There are thousands of pieces like this—duets, trios, quintets—all with those elaborate bass lines, written by Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini, Telemann, Bach, Handel, you name ’em.
Last night we went with friends to a small local jazz café to hear our friend Bert Seager play with his trio (piano, bass, drums). It was a shabby little room with a low ceiling on the ground floor of a strip-mall bank building, next door to a beauty salon—a far cry from the wedding-cake opulence of the Mother Church. The food was ordinary, the drinks okay (they didn’t have the bourbon I asked for), the music fantastic.
A trio like that has, in a sense, three bass instruments. In some jazz trios, the piano is primarily rhythm and accompaniment. In this piano trio, the instrument has many functions as soloist, accompanist, percussionist, and of course, lots of bass. The bass fiddle (mostly pizzicato) gives a rolling bass with lots of intervals filled in to become scales. And the drums (in this case played by an inventive young Peruvian) were a vibrant presence above, below, and through the music. I was struck by the functional similarities between this and the baroque basso continuo.
The work of these guys is nothing like the standard barroom Girl from Ipanema kind of jazz that accompanies the swilling of whiskey sours. Their music is unique, innovative, colorful, and poly-rhythmic. Though we’ve heard Bert play jazz standards in other venues, most of what they played last night was his original music. One started as a sort of 5/4 version of a Bach prelude (Well-Tempered Clavier), morphed into a complex driving thing in which each player had a significant solo, then returned to the relative simplicity of the beginning. You can find Bert’s music at <www.bertseager.com>. The website opens with a perfectly beautiful classically inspired piece called Three Candles.
Color my world
If organists are theory-prone, they are also (or should be) color-prone. Our instruments offer us rich palettes of tonal color. Like a painter mixing colors to show the cathedral in fog or in sunshine, so we draw stops, figuratively mixing paints to anoint each piece with exactly the right hue. My experience as an organbuilder allows me to connect the physical shape, construction, and material of an organ pipe with its tone. I’ve created associations between the look of a Gemshorn pipe and the sound I hear from it, and I’m fascinated by how the slightest alteration of dimensions or metal thickness can alter that sound.
John Leek of Oberlin, Ohio, was my mentor in the craft of organbuilding. He also built wonderful harpsichords, and I recall my fascination when I realized how different the tone of a string could be depending on how far from the nut the plectra hit the string. (The nut is the wood rail attached to the pinblock that lifts the string away from the tuning pins—the other end of the speaking length of the string from the bridge, which is glued to the soundboard.) If the point of pluck was close to the nut the tone was more nasal, further away it would get rounder, fuller. (It’s awkward to describe tone colors, like arguing whether a certain wine is fruity or nutty.) In a harpsichord with two eight-foot “ranks,” the contrasting tone colors resulted from the fact that the rows of jacks were necessarily in different spots along the length of the strings.
Watch a guitarist carefully—watch his fingers on the strings go closer or further away from the bridge and hear how that affects the tone. Watch a cellist or violinist—again, the closer to the bridge, the more bright or nasal the tone.
Last night in the jazz café, I was mesmerized watching the drummer pulling different timbres from his instruments. It would be a sorry generalization to assume that each drum has one sound—smack it with a stick and sound comes out. But here those principles of tone production from harpsichord and violin strings were right in our faces. He could work a single snare drum with two sticks, moving from the center of the head to the edge, to the rim, to the hardware on the side, and draw out a rainbow of colors.
I noticed that one of his cymbals had three little holes drilled in it, seemingly in random locations, and wondered if they had to do with attempts to perfect its tone. Was there a nasty little zing to the sound that a skilled craftsman could eliminate by drilling a hole? And as he played on that cymbal I noticed how different the tone was at the center than at the edge. If he did a light roll starting in the middle and moving to the perimeter he produced a subtle kaleidoscope of tone.
The bassist gave a great account of himself—always rhythmic, always exploiting and driving the direction of the harmonies, often filling in intervals with colorful ruffles of notes, sometimes stepping forward to play and improvise on the melody. He would lean forward, seemingly embracing the instrument, to reach high notes and put his pizzi-fingers closer to the bridge. He would stand straight, throwing his head back to let free the full sound of instrument. And the three of them were in constant contact with each other, celebrating a sneaky unexpected move with a grin or a wink or showing a moment of disbelief as one took off toward new horizons.
All this talk of color reminds me of a brief scene in my favorite story, the twenty-one volume epic tale of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, ship’s surgeon and secret agent Stephen Maturin, written by Patrick O’Brian, a story that spans more than twenty years of the Napoleonic Wars. Jack plays the violin, Stephen the cello, and as they sail the oceans of the world they play their own versions of the great works of chamber music. In Post Captain, the second novel of the series, Jack has been injured in a battle and Stephen has prescribed some nasty medications. It was a stunning battle in which Jack’s ship roundly defeated a French squadron, and as a result Jack was promoted from Commander to Post Captain. Jack and Stephen had attended a party at the home of an Admiral whose wife (known to Jack as “Queenie,” a sort of nanny from his youth) was showing off a recently acquiring breezy, somewhat salacious painting of an “as of yet unrepented” Mary Magdalene:
[Jack] had gone to bed at nine, as soon as he had swallowed his bolus and his tankard of porter, and he had slept the clock round, a sleep full of diffused happiness and a longing to impart it—a longing too oppressed by languor to have any effect. Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie’s picture saying, “Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green, and this blue, instead of those old common notes?” It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the ’cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour!2
What a lovely image—perhaps for Jack the result of too much marsala, but for organists an inspiration to exploit the depths of the instrument. You will fill the seats at your recitals if the audience knows they can expect the unexpected. A little musical wink as a humorous note or two gets soloed out, a zig when it might have been a zag, a hint of the pompous, the shy, the frightened, the regal. Your scholarship is the foundation of your music-making, not its principal purpose. Organbuilders are on a constant quest to create the sounds, to squirt the paint from the tubes onto the palette—the organists draw those squirts of paint together, blending the colors, scooping them out of the organ case or chamber, and applying them to the canvas, which is the acoustics of the room and the ears of the listeners. Make the most of it.
