It is paradoxical in the organ world that the most widely-researched and famous old organ type, the north European baroque, is represented by relatively few examples that have survived in unaltered condition, while the most widely-diffused and perhaps the commonest old organ type, the Ibero-American organ, remains relatively strange and unknown, even among organists and organ historians. In fact, organs in the style of Spanish and Portuguese baroque instruments were built throughout Latin America from the seventeenth to the first part of the twentieth century. No one knows how many of these organs survive today, but it is increasingly obvious that there are a great many. As of today, several hundred have been documented in Mexico alone, though many parts of that country remain to be investigated. Very old organs (some apparently from the sixteenth century) have been found in Perú and now instruments are appearing in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and other countries. Most of these organs are unplayable and in total disrepair; but on the other hand, a large number of the known examples appear never to have been significantly altered from their original states. The result is an immense repository of historic instruments which only now are beginning to be recognized as supremely important parts of their national patrimonies. Restoration projects are beginning to be undertaken, concerts are played, old music is discovered, and the history of the organ and its literature is turning out to be very different from what it was imagined to be even fifteen years ago. Naturally, with the increased attention comes increasing risk that precious instruments will be thoughtlessly altered in the name of restoration, while the urgency grows daily of saving important instruments in imminent danger of being junked or of succumbing irreversibly to decay.
It is against this background that nearly a hundred organ historians, organ builders, restorers, curators, organists, and officials of cultural institutions convened in the Mexican city of Oaxaca from November 29 to December 3, 2001, for a congress, "The Restoration of Organs in Latin America." Organized by the Instituto de Organos Históricos de Oaxaca (known as "IOHIO", pronounced "yo-yo") under the direction of Cicely Winter and Edward Pepe, the meeting centered around the old baroque-style organs of the state of Oaxaca, of which fifty-one have presently been discovered and six restored to playable condition.
The congress felt to all the participants like a very important event, both from the standpoint of defining issues and proposing solutions relating to preservation of this organ heritage and from the standpoint of establishing an international community of experts and interested parties concerned with the Ibero-American organ. Connections were made and projects discussed which will be influential in the preservation of organs all over the Americas. There follow some highlights and impressions from the congress's proceedings.
The congress
The congress opened at the IOHIO offices on Thursday afternoon, with welcoming speeches by representatives of IOHIO (Cicely Winter and Ed Pepe) and of the sponsoring Mexican cultural institutions. These included the National Institute of Anthropology and History and the Cultural Foundation of Banamex, which has underwritten a number of organ restorations and research projects. The remainder of the sessions were held in a beautifully restored hall of the Biblioteca Burgoa, which houses an enormous collection of Oaxacan colonial archives in a former Dominican convent next to the spectacularly decorated church of Santo Domingo (the two organs of which disappeared in the last century). Everywhere careful planning, attention to detail, and concern for the comfort and enjoyment of the participants were evident; clearly this congress was a major item on the agendas of all the sponsoring institutions, which were fully aware of the cultural importance of its concerns.
Friday, Sunday, and Monday were devoted to presentations and discussions while Saturday was given over to an all-day field trip in two luxuriously appointed buses which took us to five villages with five organs--three restored and two derelict but reasonably complete. Evenings were given over to concerts, while the midday breaks involved long lunches and a crash course in the justifiably famous Oaxacan cuisine. There was plenty of time at meals, on the buses, and in the delightful cafés that surround Oaxaca's main square for intense informal discussion. It is hard to imagine that any participant could have left Oaxaca without a lot of new friends and a head spinning with music and new information--and an enormous sense of gratitude to IOHIO and all its hard work in putting together such a congenial, successful and glitch-free event.
The participants
Participants came from thirteen European and American countries and included many internationally-known names among the organ builders, performers, and experts. Among the foreign organists, organ builders, and organ scholars were Federico Acetores (Spain), Michael Barone (U.S.A.), Guy Bovet (Switzerland), Lynn Edwards (Canada), Henk van Eeken (Netherlands), Elisa Freixo (Brazil), Roberto Fresco (Spain), Cristina García Banegas (Uruguay), Enrique Godoy (Argentina), Gerhard Grenzing (Spain), Laurence Libin (U.S.A.), Christoph Metzler (Switzerland), Piotr Nawrot (Bolivia), Pascal Quioirin (France), Susan Tattershall (U.S.A.), and your reporter. Our Mexican colleagues included Eduardo Bribiesca, Gustavo Delagado, José Luís Falcón, Horacio Franco, Mercedes Gómez Urquiza, Daniel Guzmán, Eduardo López Calzada, José Suárez Molina, Aurelio Tello, Victor Urbán, María Teresa Uriarte, Alfonso Vega Núñez, Alejandro Vélez, and Joaquín Wesslowski.
The official languages of the congress were Spanish and English, and simultaneous translation of the presentations made them accessible to speakers of either. While many of the participants' names were known to one another, it was new to realize that all brought to the congress major expertise in Ibero-American organs. It was possible to perceive for the first time the full scope of understanding of a topic that had always previously been relatively obscure and difficult of access.
The organs
Dispositions of the three restored organs used for the five evening concerts appear below. The reader should bear in mind that the original chest of the cathedral organ does not exist and there is doubt as to whether the old parts of the chest at La Soledad are original. Thus, both dispositions are reconstructions, and neither is entirely typical of what might be called the Oaxacan style. The Soledad disposition is especially unusual, though the restorer points to evidence for its almost bizarre-seeming pitches on the surviving old parts of the windchest.
The Tlacochahuaya organ, on the other hand, with its breaking high-pitched stops and duplications of 4' and 2' principals in the right hand, seems to conform more closely to a style in which a fair number of Oaxacan organs appear to have been built. (More extensive research on the many unrestored organs will be necessary to confirm this theory.) It was originally a 4' organ, the reeds and 8' stopped register having been added in 1735.
Current research suggests that eighteenth-century Oaxacan organ dispositions did not stress color-stops and mixtures to the degree that, for example, Pueblan or Castilian organs did, but instead were dominated almost exclusively by a plenum made of separately-drawing, virtually identically scaled principal ranks, within which breaks and duplications of treble octave pitches gave each of the four octaves of the keyboard its own tone color. Quint-sounding ranks were few in relation to octave- and unison-sounding ones.
When polyphony is played on such an ensemble it can sound as though each voice were being played on a different registration. Nevertheless, there are possibilities for solo-accompaniment sounds between treble and bass halves of the keyboard, which facilitate the playing of Iberian medios registros. As in Spain and Portugal, in Oaxaca façade trumpets were almost universally added to extant organs of any size in the first decades of the eighteenth century. At the same time, the Tlacochahuaya organ was given its 8' foundation stop, composed of covered pipes.
