It’s all about the wind.
Wendy and I have a neat little sailboat named Kingfisher. It’s nothing fancy, just twenty-two feet long. It’s a catboat with a single sail, gaff rig, and broad beam—it’s not quite half as wide as it is long. It’s a shallow draft boat with a centerboard, so there’s no headroom below; we either crouch or sit. But sleeping on board is comfortable because of the broad beam. There’s a two-burner stove and plenty of space for storing food and drink, and maybe most important, there’s a head.
The art of sailing is a thrill. We hoist a 450 square foot sail, and adjust the angle of the sail to capture the wind. With the wind abeam (directly from the side) or abaft (from behind), the catboat is at its fastest. Where we sail along the Maine coast, sometimes the wind is steady for hours, even days at a time, and others it comes in fits and starts, puffing first from one direction and then another. Whether we set the sail and settle back for a five-mile tack, or have to fiddle constantly with lines and rudder to keep moving, the art of using the wind to make our boat go is an immense pleasure. And it’s free. Reading aloud is a great pastime for two people in a sailboat—Moby Dick is a family favorite. Keep those harpoons handy.
When we’re getting ready to go out for a few days, we think up menus, shop and cook, freeze things, and stow everything carefully in the icebox on board. Wendy is a great provisioner. We freeze plastic bottles of water, which adds to our refrigeration, and allows us to drink ice-cold water while under way—essential and delightful in full exposure to sun and wind. Goldendoodle Farley comes on board, we raise the sail, and set out across the water. We typically have an itinerary that involves anchoring in the remote coves of islands, so we sail for five or six hours, cover twenty or twenty-five miles, ease into the cove (we can go close in because of the shallow draft), and drop the hook. We row to shore to stretch our legs, and give Farley a chance to do his doggy stuff. After a half hour of that, we row back to the Mother Ship, just as the sun crosses the yardarm. No gin and tonic tastes as good as the first few sips on board after a day on the water. (We always carry fresh limes!)
It seems like a great adventure, crossing wide expanses of water. I love it when the wind blows at twelve or eighteen knots—perfect for us to have a snappy active ride, but still easy to control. The last sail of last season, taking Kingfisher to the boatyard for the winter, sons Mike, Andy, and I sailed twenty miles in twenty-five-knot wind. It was pretty wild, and I was very glad to have Mike along, young and strong, and a very experienced sailor—a lot more agile than his nearly sixty-year-old father.
We’re really not taking much risk. We’ve finished our third season with Kingfisher, but we’ve never gone more than ten miles from land. And, along with the modest comforts I’ve described, Kingfisher has two pieces of equipment that bring comfort and safety to simple sailors like us. Under a hatch in the cockpit deck, there’s a 20-horsepower Yanmar diesel engine that gets about three hours per gallon. We carry twelve gallons of fuel, enough to cruise at six knots for a day and a half when becalmed. And there’s a GPS loaded with marine charts for all the areas we go, accurate to within a few feet, and marked with all the submerged rocks, reefs, shipwrecks, and other hazards that would so quickly change our day. How’s that for wild adventure? We’re combining an ancient, simple technology with some of the latest electronic gizmos.
I often think of the earliest sailors who developed the art of sailing, and dared to cross oceans in the days when most people thought the earth was flat. Egyptian urns more than four thousand years old are decorated with pictures of sailing ships carrying cargo across the Mediterranean Sea. And think of Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521), born a hundred years before Orlando Gibbons, the Portuguese naval officer commissioned by King Charles I of Spain to look for a westward route to the Spice Islands (Maluku Islands). He discovered and named the Strait of Magellan, a snaky waterway that cuts between Tierra del Fuego and the South American mainland, and entered what he named the “Peaceful” (Pacific) Ocean. Imagine that, with no Yanmar, no flush toilet, and no GPS. He did find the western route to the Spice Islands but was killed in a sea battle and didn’t return home.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, sailing ships were 250 feet long, had more than two dozen sails, hundreds of lines and blocks to operate them, and carried crews of 800 or more. Sitting on board, out in the Gulf of Maine, I often reflect how similar the fundamentals of sailing are to the foundation of organ building—it’s all about controlling the wind!
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Supreme refinement
Meanwhile, on dry land, engineers and tinkerers were refining another, more complex machine, a machine that not only relied on wind, but one that included a mechanism for the creation of its own wind. With tens of thousands of moving parts, the pipe organ was the most complex machine of the day.
The greatest of these tinkerers was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Born into a family of organbuilders in Montpellier, France, in 1811, four years before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Cavaillé-Coll had little formal education. But apprenticing with his father as a teenager, it was clear that he was gifted in mathematics and physics as well as the musical arts.
From his earliest days in the workshop, he was fascinated by wind. One of the first of his many inventions was a system for controlling the wind in a harmonium, where the left foot pumped heel-to-toe to raise the wind, and the right operated a rocking pedal that would either apply lesser or greater pressure to the top of the bellows, thereby affecting the pressure. Unlike typical organ pipes, the pitch of harmonium reeds is not affected by wind pressure, so increasing and decreasing the pressure created a pure control of volume, something never before achieved in a wind-blown keyboard instrument.
In Toulouse, in 1832, the expressive capabilities of Cavaillé-Coll’s poïkilorgue attracted the attention of the great composer Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), and a year later Rossini encouraged the twenty-two-year-old organbuilder to move to Paris. I suppose he was aware that there was a competition underway to award the contract for building a monumental organ for the Basilique-Cathédrale de Saint-Denis. Cavaillé-Coll submitted a plan and was awarded the contract just a few days later.
We know very little about Cavaillé-Coll’s personal life, but from this episode, I surmise that he was an exceptionally compelling young man. He must have displayed supreme confidence without effort and must have had complete mastery of his topic.
The old-guard competitors must have been flabbergasted, even furious, but the officials making the decision were real visionaries, taking what must have seemed a huge risk by giving such important work to someone so very young with essentially no qualifying experience. Perhaps Cavaillé-Coll was so apparently able that they didn’t feel a risk.
Imagine a 22-year-old being awarded the contract to build a major cathedral organ today—consider the hubris of the applicant, and the foolhardiness of the officials. Then imagine the project complete, universally celebrated as an unqualified success, bound to endure and to influence musicians for centuries. It’s improbable in the extreme.
The organ was completed in 1840, and is still regarded as a triumph in organbuilding. It comprises 70 stops, 88 ranks, and 4,479 pipes. There are 20 ranks of reeds, and more than a dozen harmonic ranks, both flues and reeds. There are two real 32-footers, and the Grand-Orgue includes a Principal Chorus based on Montre 32′, though the Montre “only” starts at tenor C. By most modern measures, this is an immense and sophisticated organ, but the fact that it was finished 176 years ago by a 29-year-old organbuilder is other-worldly. I mean, for crying out loud, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll went from building a one-stop harmonium to a 70-stop timeless wonder in less than ten years.
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In 2011, in celebration of the great organbuilder’s 200th birthday, and the 150th anniversary of his uncontested masterpiece, the hundred-stop job at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, where Widor and Dupré combined for a hundred years of service, British filmmaker Fugue State Films produced a comprehensive documentary, The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll. This marvelous film comes in a boxed set of three DVDs and two CDs, with a program booklet that includes photos and specifications of all the featured organs. It’s available for $150 from the catalogue of the Organ Historical Society: www.ohscatalog.org/orofca1.html.
If you’re a serious student of the pipe organ, you should own this, and watch it more than once. Invite your friends. It’s better than a ball game! If it seems like a lot of money, compare it to a couple volumes of the Bach Organ Works, or a restaurant dinner for two. And if you buy and watch it and are not moved and impressed by the brilliance of that organbuilder and the beauty of his instruments, then probably you’re not much of a student of the organ! (Wow, did he really say that?) Of course, there are stuffy segments—most of us given a chance to talk smart about pipe organs would sound stuffy on television—but the cinematography is gorgeous, the sound quality is vibrant and lively, the playing is terrific, and the whole thing is stuffed with tons of information about an incredible musical genius.
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It’s all about the wind.
Starting with the player-controlled variable wind pressure of the poïkilorgue when he was a teenager, and throughout his career, Cavaillé-Coll devoted huge amounts of energy and time to the control of wind in his instruments. Like the advances in the technology of sailing ships, he recognized that the ability to control the flow and pressure of wind was everything to the pipe organ. And his early masterpiece at Saint-Denis was chock-full of wind gadgets. His seminal innovation was the ventil, which draws its name from the Latin ventus, which means, simply, “wind.” (Did you ever wonder why that’s used as a brand name for an organ blower?)
The theory is simple. He separated the stops of a division into two families placed on separate windchests. The foundation stops (principals, flutes, and strings) were on one chest that had constant winding, and the reeds, mutations, and more powerful upperwork were on a chest that was not winded until the organist pressed a pedal at the console opening a valve. The organist could then set up a basic registration of foundation stops and draw a selection of the reeds and upperwork in preparation. The 1840 organ at Saint-Denis included ventils on all five divisions, giving the organist an unprecedented expressive control over the instrument. A flick of the ankle, and tons of powerful reed pipes leap into action. (There’s a 32-footer in the Pedal!)
In the program book that accompanies The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll, those stops affected by ventils in all the featured organs are listed in red. Your fingers will just twitch as you imagine what you could do with all that power! And as they do, imagine yours as nineteenth-century fingers that have never pressed General 10, or switched on an electric blower.
In the film, Pierre Pincemaille, titulaire of the organ at Saint-Denis, shows us that the organ built at the very beginning of Cavaillé-Coll’s career (did I mention he was just 29 when the organ was finished?) is fiery, dramatic, colorful, and thrilling—even to our ears, which are accustomed to the effects of solid-state combination actions, pneumatic and electric swell motors, and the ubiquitous Sforz button, so badly and baldly overused by many.
Whistle a tune.
Another essential development pioneered by Cavaillé-Coll is the emphasis on melodic color. Responding to the relatively weak treble ranges of the organs of his day, he made two basic innovations in the interest of providing stronger melodic range toward the top of the keyboard. One was to further develop the existing concept of harmonic pipes, those pipes with double lengths that are blown extra hard to emphasize not the more delicately achieved fundamental tone of their full length, but to “overblow” the pipes to achieve the first overtone—the octave higher. Most any organ pipe will sound an octave higher if blown hard enough. (Don’t try this without the ability to retune the pipe when you’re done. Or, as they say, “I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home!”) A Harmonic Flute pipe, with a hole bored halfway up the resonator, is actually speaking an octave higher than its length implies. The hole helps “release” the overtone so the octave is achieved without the sense of excessive force. And since increased wind pressure is required to overblow a pipe, the harmonic pipes are louder.
The second trick was to divide the windchest in halves or thirds lengthwise, and providing higher wind pressures to the higher ranges of the ranks. For example, the pipes of stops on a division from low CC to tenor F# might be on three inches of pressure, from tenor G to soprano C on four inches, and five inches of pressure for the rest of the range. We can imagine that Cavaillé-Coll was thinking of orchestral wind instruments—how an oboe or trumpet player might simply blow harder to achieve the higher pitches.
Using these two innovations provided Cavaillé-Coll’s organs with characteristic singing treble ranges. Think of the soaring melodies of the slow movements of Widor’s organ symphonies, and you’ll understand how the great organbuilder inspired the following generations of musicians. And in a passage typically played on full registrations, I think of the melody in B-flat minor toward the end of the first movement of Widor’s Fifth Symphony. Working with the huge organ built by Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in 1862, Widor was confident that the powerful tune starting on a high D-flat and continuing in the top two octaves of the keyboard would sing out over the bubbling left-hand accompaniment and solid moving half-notes in the pedal.
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And the pièce de résistance . . .
As he progressed from one monumental organ to the next, Cavaillé-Coll was using air in greater volume and higher pressure. His organs were equipped with rows of bellows that were supplied with pressure by feeder-bellows underneath, operated by the powerful legs of human pumpers who steadied their bodies leaning on iron rails above. As the organs grew larger in physical size, the mechanical keyboard actions had greater distances to travel. And as each division would likely have two windchests, one for the foundations and one for the reeds and upperwork, the action for each individual note had to operate two pallets. The predictable result was heavier key action—intense resistance to the motion of the musicians’ fingers. To counteract this, Cavaillé-Coll incorporated the ingenious device invented by Charles Spackman Barker, known widely as the Barker Lever. It’s a pneumatic assist for the tracker action of a pipe organ, which uses the organ’s own air pressure to do the heavy work of pulling pallets open and of coupling manual actions.
We’ve all seen the photos of Dupré and Widor playing on the huge console at Saint-Sulpice, all five keyboards moving simultaneously. Without Mr. Barker’s machine, that would have been impossible. Walking through that organ, seeing the myriad trackers running every which way, and thinking of the number of pallets being opened by each finger, we realize that Cavaillé-Coll’s use of the Barker was the final touch necessary to make his monster organs go.
In The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll, there are several excellent demonstrations of the operation of the Barker Machine. It’s quite a spectacle in a complicated piece.
Let’s stop and remember that the organ at Saint-Denis was built in 1840 (did I mention that Cavaillé-Coll was only 29?), and the organ at Saint-Sulpice was completed in 1862—right in the middle of the American Civil War. Cavaillé-Coll’s genius produced these huge sophisticated machines, among the most complex ever contrived, not for making war, not for transportation, not for manufacturing, but for making music! What a worthy cause. What an essential effort. And what a great gift to the generations that followed him.
