1. Introduction
Recent years have seen a notable increase in interest among organists and scholars in old Mexican organs. Each year congresses, tours, and study trips of various kinds bring organists, organ historians, organ builders, and general enthusiasts to Mexico from Europe as well as North and South America. As we learn more about the old Iberian and Ibero-American organ repertory, the numerous1 old Mexican instruments surviving from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and perhaps even the seventeenth centuries, built as they are in styles closely related to Iberian organs, become ever more important to our understanding. Yet for the vast majority of organists, a study trip to Mexican organs remains impractical, especially as the number of old organs in Mexico that are actually in playing condition remains small, and of these, not a few are in relatively inaccessible locations. Therefore organists interested in this area must depend heavily on recordings.
The organist who buys a compact disc in hopes of learning something about the Iberian tradition of organ music must proceed with caution, however. The history of Mexico’s organs has been just as complex as her politics, and just because an old Mexican organ is today in a state of repair sufficient for the making of a recording does not necessarily mean that the recorded sounds will have a great deal to do with either the way the organ was originally conceived or how its sound may have evolved over time. Therefore, it seems useful to describe in some detail what is presently known about one of the old Mexican organs of which some recent recordings are available.2 As will be seen, this, the organ in the village church of San Jerónimo in San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya (also known as Tlacochahuaya de Morelos) in the state of Oaxaca, presents us with a history and a set of questions which, while they are of course specific to this particular instrument, can also be considered as generally characteristic of the kinds of issues one faces when one starts to think about how an old Mexican organ might have originally sounded and been played. As we formulate our questions we shall try to describe in some detail what is known about the history and present-day state of this instrument, which is currently one of the better-known old organs of Mexico; and this, in turn, will enable us to make a few comments about the larger picture regarding old organs in Mexico.
2. The Church Building
As is common in Mexico, we possess only fragmentary documentation concerning the Tlacochahuaya church and its organ(s). As their history is intertwined let us review what is known. Tlacochahuaya lies about 12 miles east of Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the state. We know that the church was originally built in the 1550s and ’60s as part of an extensive network of Dominican complexes intended to promote evange-lization in Oaxaca. The present structure conforms to the original dimensions of 11 by 45 meters. (The ratio of 1:4 is reflected in the interior, the roughly square crossing at the front, to which a shallow sanctuary is attached, and the equivalent baptistry/gallery area at the back being separated by a nave of roughly double their length.) The church’s cruciform shape is original. The present church walls are also almost certainly original3 but at least up to the 1660s they were spanned by wooden beams and a wooden roof. There are no external buttresses, which might be expected had vaulting originally been contemplated. Nevertheless, sometime between ca. 1660 and 1803 San Jerónimo was given its present brick vaults. Over apse, crossing and choir, they are domical, constructed of diminishing rings: the barrel vault of the nave is made with bricks placed on edge, set on the axis of the nave.4 It could well be that the vaults date from a major renovation during the 1730s, since in the west façade, which is not original to the church, the weather-damaged legend, se [ac]abo de renobar esta [por?]tada primero de agosto de 1737aos can still be made out above the main door. The two west towers, each of which contains stairs to the gallery (one is currently blocked off), would then seem to date from that time, as probably would the elaborate decorative painting of the interior.
This implies that the gallery at the west end of the original wooden-roofed church must have had a ceiling that was a good deal lower than the present one, especially since the walls of the choir area were raised at the time the vaulting was added (accounting for the unusual proportions of the church’s façade). The floor of the loft, likely of wood, was also lower, as is confirmed by the original bell-tower, which still stands on the south side of the nave. Halfway up its stair is a blocked-off doorway, apparently the original way to the old gallery, which would have entered the church at a level lower than the present gallery floor. Not only would this gallery have been lower, it would have been darker, for it would have lacked the present large west window. This space, by the way, must have served, until Tlacochahuaya was secularized in the eighteenth century, as a coro from which the friars sang their offices, for to this day it contains a large, four-sided lectern of the type used to hold large choir books. Perhaps it also included choir stalls, and perhaps, as in nearby Yanhuitlán, there was an indigenous choir that sang polyphony.5
It must also be noted that Oaxaca suffered a major earthquake in 1714. Perhaps there was damage to the Tlacochahuaya church that needed repair. A nearly simultaneous major rebuilding project, completed in 1733, was carried out at the largely destroyed Oaxaca cathedral6 and might have acted as an impetus towards renovations in Tlacochahuaya.
The overall layout of the Dominican complex in Tlacochahuaya is also worth mentioning here, since it tells us much about the friars’ daily routine, including musical practices. In a departure from the usual custom of placing the convent on either the south or north side of the church, the convent in Tlacochahuaya is for unknown reasons located to the east, behind the apse. As a result, it was not possible to have the usual entrance leading directly from the second floor of the convent into the choir loft,7 which gave the friars easy access to the choir area for the performance of the monastic hours. Instead, the early bell tower in Tlacochahuaya seems to have served this purpose. The two stairwells in Tlacochahuaya’s west towers,8 leading up from the main floor to the choir, can then be seen as an indication of a stronger indigenous participation in music making in the later years of Dominican control.9
3. The Organ: History
Now we may turn to what we know of the changes this organ has undergone; and while we may not possess a full record of them, it is already clear that, as with so many old organs, it may be misleading to speak of the Tlacochahuaya instrument in terms of a single date or a style that relates exclusively to one period or another. And if we are to make real use of what we know about its present state we need to know as much as we can about which parts of that state date from when, and what has happened to them over time.
We might remind ourselves that as far as the present state of the organ is concerned, we are not dealing with a “restoration” in the conservation world’s currently accepted use of the term. In fact, there is presently no organ in Mexico that can be considered to be “restored,” if restoration means that after a thorough and thoroughly documented historical study a conscious plan has been carried out to return a given organ either to its original state or to a designated moment in its history, conserving all old material, replacing irrecoverably damaged or missing old work with the best possible working reproductions of it, taking care to make all changes as close to reversible as is mechanically feasible, making available full documentation regarding the intervention, and so on.10 Rather, we are dealing with an old, working organ that has been altered many times in the process of repeatedly repairing and updating it—which is of course the way almost all work on extant organs has been carried out for hundreds of years, with the exception of a relatively few interventions in historically important organs during our own time.
Let us begin with the existing disposition of the organ. The stops are divided, those in the left column extending from C (short octave) to c1 and those in the right column from c#1 to c3 (21 and 24 notes, respectively). The names here assigned to the stops appear on paper labels from the 1990 renovation; we do not know what they were originally called. Additional information supplied by the authors appears in brackets. (See Stoplist 1 on page 25.)
The disposition exhibits a Mexican penchant for keeping pitches low. In the left hand, pitches do not rise above the twenty-second (here a 1/2'), and even that register breaks back an octave in the tenor. In the right hand, there are no pitches above the twelfth (here a 11⁄3'), and, once again, the register breaks back an octave. The absence of higher pitches may be due to the fact that the chest, and hence the phonic conception, was originally that of a 4' organ. The doublings of the Flautado and Octava in the right hand conform with a Spanish practice (as, for instance, described by Pablo Nassarre11) of strengthening pitches depending upon the acoustics of the church building. The lack of compound stops has been discussed elsewhere.12
The largest pipe of the Bardón is marked with the date 1735. This is practically the only concrete piece of evidence we have about the organ’s chronology; but even so, we cannot really be sure of what it tells us. It is often assumed that the Tlacochahuaya organ predates 1735, and that the 8' Bardón and the reed stops constitute a 1735 modification to an earlier, more compact version of the organ that perhaps sat on a table. If we start from this assumption, we will immediately note that the pipe of the Bardón rank standing on tenor c is marked with a crusader’s cross—with which Mexican builders often signified the first pipe of a rank—and we will say that the register was originally a 4' rank and that 1735 marks a moment of major change in the organ’s nature, in which its fundamental pitch dropped by an octave. It would follow that the grooved toeboard upon which the bass octave of Bardón pipes now rests, which extends out beyond the edge of the windchest, was made new at the time of the renovation. It is usually assumed that the reed stops were added at the same time, and while this certainly makes sense, there exists no external evidence in support of this idea; nor need we assume that both reeds were installed at the same time. We can say, however, that at the time(s) the Bajoncillo and Clarín were added, the present stop action was not in place and the stops were still worked by extensions of the sliders at the sides of the case, for there are slots for all the present sliders, including the reeds, plus one on the left, presumably for a now-removed Tambor (Drum), and one on the right which still holds the slider that controls the Pájaros (Birdsong). The Bajoncillo stands at the front of the chest, in the place the façade Flautado basses would have occupied had they been side by side with their treble equivalents.13
The surviving old pipework (which constitutes about half the number of flue pipes in the organ) is homogenous, and, since it coincides with the chest’s toehole spacing, there is no real reason to assume that it is anything but original, or at least contemporary with the wind-chest. The disposition previous to the hypothesized c. 1735 intervention, then, would be assumed to have been as shown in Stoplist 2.
Minus the Tapadillo, this coincides exactly with the dispositions of the table organs at San Andrés Zautla (1726) and San Pedro Mártir Yucuxaco (1740), both in the state of Oaxaca. In addition, the disposition of the organ in San Pedro Quiatoni (1729) is identical to that of Tlacochahuaya, except for the reeds.14 Indeed, Quiatoni’s Tapado also started out at 4¢ pitch and was changed at some unknown time to 8' pitch. We shall return to the implications of these and other similarities among these organs.
Nonetheless, the notion that the 1735 date marks a modification to a pre-existing table organ, rather than the date of the organ’s original conception, raises some difficult questions. As we have noted, there are miters on the sides of the case, which indicate that extensions of the sliders once passed through them and served as the stop action. While old table organs were often so arranged, this neither demonstrates that the original construction was much before 1735 (the organ in San Dionisio Ocotepec, Oaxaca, of 1721 was built with such extensions) nor that at one time it sat on a table (the Ocotepec organ’s case extends to the floor). An examination of the Tlacochahuaya case also shows that the configuration of miters constitutes an adaptation of the case, since they are cut not into the case itself, but into boards that were themselves inserted into the case. When this was done is also unclear.
The type of key action in the Tlacochahuaya organ is also relevant to our thinking both about the date and the type of the hypothesized original organ—that is, whether it was built as a table organ or as a freestanding positive. We are dealing with two possible actions here: on the one hand, the actual key action, which is a suspended action without a rollerboard (no table organ with a rollerboard is currently catalogued in Mexico); and on the other hand, a pin action.15 Essentially, a pin action allows the keyboard to be placed above the pallets, more or less at the level of the sliders, so it can be seen as a height-saving measure. Table organs with pin actions would seem to be particularly suitable to Oaxaca, then, in two regards: first because frequent earthquakes required that churches be built relatively low to the ground; and second, because in Oaxaca’s villages resources were limited, so churches and their organs were often small.
What are the odds, then, of the Tlacochahuaya organ’s originally having had a pin action? Among the eleven existing table organs in the state of Tlaxcala, six have rollerboard-less, suspended actions like Tlacochahuaya’s, and five have pin actions.16 In Oaxaca, however, the pin action definitely dominates: only one (Santa María Peñoles) of the fourteen known table organs certainly had an action like Tlacochahuaya’s. On the other hand, there are no known floor-standing organs with pin actions in Oaxaca, or anywhere else in Mexico (supporting the idea that pin actions were meant to save height). Given that the conversion of a pin action to a suspended action would have required an extensive and complicated reworking of the fundamental structure of the organ, it would seem likely that the Tlacochahuaya organ today contains the type of key action with which it was first built, and that the odds therefore do not favor its having been first built as a table organ. Here, the floor of the original choir loft being lower means that, in spite of there having been a lower choir ceiling before the 1730s renovation, a floor organ could still have fit in the space.
If we turn to the two reed stops, the notion that they were added to the organ also implies some serious work to the windchest. Indeed, an ingenious construction in Tlacochahuaya does allow the grooveboard for the Clarín to pass in front of and under that of the Flautado. But this means that if the organ had a previous incarnation without the Clarín, accommodating the new stop meant not only making a new toeboard and slider, and drilling out the table, but the grooveboard of the façade Flautado also would have had to be rebuilt. Accommodating the Bajoncillo would have been a little easier since there could easily have been empty space beside the treble pipes of the Flautado, but the table still would have had to be drilled and a slider made.
From the point of view of organ construction, then, to achieve the present version of the Tlacochahuaya organ from the hypothetical earlier one, whether table- or floor-standing, would have required some very elaborate rebuilding. But other factors also speak against an earlier version of the organ. The similarities among the Oaxacan instruments we have mentioned extend to the design of their upper cases, suggesting that they were all built in the same shop, or at least belonged to a “school” of organbuilding practices. It is quite possible that the organs are all variations on a basic “model” that was produced in quantity: indeed, various parts of the Quiatoni organ are labeled “San Pedro,” which could suggest that the builder was constructing several similar instruments at one time. Thus, even if the Tlacochahuaya organ had an earlier version, it would seem to have been originally built only a few years before its rebuilding in 1735. This is possible, though such a thoroughgoing revision of a nearly new instrument would have required unusual circumstances.
But there are other possibilities. Perhaps the Tlacochahuaya organ was rethought as it was being built, employing roughed-out components that were semi-mass-produced and kept ready to finish in the shop. Or, maybe the organ was ordered “like that in San Pedro Quiatoni, but with a Clarín in the façade and a Bajoncillo.” In either case, we could suppose that the builder made some clever adaptations using a stock model of a 4' windchest already on hand, and the organ was delivered as a new organ that already had its 8' foundation and reeds. And perhaps the organbuilder fitted the new organ into an already framed-up case that had to be raised to accommodate the façade Clarín, which might account for the inserted boards that have the slider miters, as well as for the double row of ornamental cartouches above the keyboard (unusual for an organ this size). In the end, all we can say is that there are several plausible scenarios here, and at present we lack sufficient evidence to make a firm choice among them.
It is worth pointing out that the Tlacochahuaya organ is the only one of the above-mentioned group of organs to have a basic but complete Iberian-style reed ensemble. The placement of a Bajoncillo inside the case is likewise unusual (the more common interior reed in Oaxaca—either just in the bass, or in both bass and treble—is a Trompeta Real, invariably at 8¢ pitch). We do not know enough about Mexican organ music from the period to say whether this was due to budgetary or esthetic considerations. The first documented occurrence of façade trumpets in Mexico seems to be the Jorge de Sesma organ that was built in 1689 in Madrid for the cathedral of Mexico City. Façade trumpets, then of relatively recent invention, might have taken some time to reach a place like Tlacochahuaya, in which case the right-hand reed stop would date at the earliest from shortly before 1735; but, if we assume the organ was reconstructed from a complete, reedless original, either or both reeds could have been added at any point between 1735 and the installation of the existing stop action, as well. Whenever they were installed (in an adaptation of an existing almost-new organ, as original to an organ built in 1735, or as a modification to the organ after 1735), the reeds would have marked a dramatic change in the sound of the music, and the impulse that caused them to be included represents a change in the local musical esthetic—the dating of which carries large implications for our understanding of the history of this organ and the way music of a given period was played on it.
As we have mentioned, the slots in the sides of the case suggest that the present stop action postdates the reed stops; and we have demonstrated that there existed in Oaxaca freestanding organs with a lower case that used extensions of the sliders protruding through the case as the register action. In fact, if, as is often assumed, the organ case was painted at the time the church was vaulted, then we have additional evidence that the stop action came later, for the scribe marks for the stop action’s miters are still visible—on top of the case painting.
Having been fitted into a pre-existing case, the stop action occupies insufficient space and its parts are too small to develop leverage enough to move the sliders easily. To compound the problem, the connections between the traces and the (too short) levers on the rollers are secured simply by loose-fitting nails. All of this results in so much resistance and slack in the system that changing the position of a stopknob in no way guarantees that the corresponding slider will have budged. Everything about the stop action suggests improvised workmanship, which is inconsistent with the rest of the organ, as well as with surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stop actions in other Oaxacan organs.17 It would seem reasonable to assume that the stop action is a relatively recent, cosmetic addition and that it may well represent the last major alteration the organ endured before the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The nails, which are inclined to fall out at inopportune moments, could be later still.
With Mexico’s war for independence from Spain (1810–1821), political events began to exercise significant influence on the history of the organ in Mexico. Since independence, Mexican politics have been characterized by frequent periods of instability punctuated by civil wars, not to mention political and military incursions from Europe and the United States. Such an environment was hardly conducive to the culture of the organ, for which the most important single political event of the period is probably the suppression of religious orders and the nationalization of ecclesiastical property that began in 1859. For the organ in general, this meant less funding for new building as the relationship between church and state as well as the ownership of church properties remained unresolved through the third quarter of the nineteenth century as chaotic governments quickly succeeded one another. While organs of first-rate workmanship were sometimes built and older instruments were repaired after 1859, an irreversible slide had begun, fueled by political and ecclesiastical conflicts, lack of funds, shifts in spending priorities towards more secular projects, and social instability; and the coup de grâce was delivered in the form of the 1910–1920 revolution, during which many organs, reportedly including that of Tlacochahuaya, having become increasingly decrepit from lack of maintenance, were rendered unplayable by occupying armies and subsequent vandalism.18 Changes in liturgical practice since Vatican II (1962–65) have established tastes unsympathetic to the revival of older forms of ecclesiastical music, and today in the overwhelming majority of Mexican churches the organs, whether functional or not, are regarded as mere curiosities—where they are recognized as organs at all.
4. The Organ: Renovation
Such was the state of the Tlacochahuaya organ until 1990–91, when the organ was disassembled, cleaned, and thoroughly rebuilt. The project was under the direction of the North American organ builder, Susan Tattershall. The Mexican builders José Luís Falcón and Joaquín Wesslowski collaborated. We need only focus on two aspects of this work as Tattershall has published a fuller account of it.19 We need to think, however, about what happened to the pipework and the bellows.
Luckily, about half of the pipework in Tlacochahuaya is old (in the Tapado, for instance, 20 of the 45 pipes are new, and all but one of these is in the treble). The extant pipes were repaired and the ranks were completed with new work by Joaquín Wesslowski.20 The new pipework in Tlacochahuaya was finely made to replicate the old, which has not always been the case with modern-day interventions in Oaxaca’s organs. The Oaxacan habit of numbering all pipes from 1 to 45 facilitated the relocation of pipes that had been moved. Notwithstanding that pipes are sometimes reused (and lengthened or shortened) and can carry several numbers, and that the presence of breaking registers can complicate the reconstruction of an organ’s disposition, similar organs in the area confirm Tattershall’s conclusions in this regard.
Naturally the question arises as to what alterations the pipework may have endured over the years. The organs at San Andrés Zautla and San Pedro Quiatoni provide a useful comparison, for both organs are practically complete (the Quiatoni organ is unplayable), including almost all their pipework, and the Quiatoni organ gives every evidence of being largely in its original (1729) state.21 As we have noted, both are in many ways similar to the Tlacochahuaya instrument. In all three organs all the principal ranks are of almost the same scale and have mouths 1/4 of their circumference. Cutups vary and some in the Tlacochahuaya organ show signs of adjustment, but it is safe to say the originals averaged around 1/4 in the bass, increasing to 2/5 in the treble. The similarities are apparent in the following table, which compares the diameters of the 4¢ façade ranks at Tlacochahuaya, Quiatoni, and Zautla, to which, for interest’s sake, we have added the Yucuxaco organ’s 4¢ façade rank.22 The Yucuxaco organ is about two pipes narrower than the other three, though its scales follow a similar pattern; again, we wonder if all of these organs could be by the same builder.23 (See Scale chart 1.)
There is every indication that at least in terms of its grosser measurements, the Tlacochahuaya pipework reflects early practice and that pipes were not substituted after “classical” (i.e., derived from Iberian baroque practice) organ building ceased to be practiced in Oaxaca around 1900. Furthermore, the principal chorus stands substantially as it was designed, and the proportional strength among its ranks probably does not deviate far from the classic-period organbuilders’ intentions.
Not enough study of Oaxacan reed stops has yet been made to determine whether the present duckbill shallots and tongues (in both stops) reflect local 18th-century practice. Their similarity to Spanish and Mexican reeds of the time, however, suggests that they do. Admittedly, neither of the reed stops at Tlacochahuaya works very well; the quality is uneven and the pipes speak far more slowly than do 18th-century Spanish and Portuguese examples. Indeed, they speak so slowly and irregularly that playing the kind of fast passages and repeated notes called for in Iberian Tientos de clarínes, Tientos de batalla, etc., is virtually impossible.
As we have noted, the stopped 8' rank was rebuilt from a 4' one; both of the two lowest octaves are numbered as if they were the first octave, so presumably the lowest octave was added to a pre-existing stop—which just possibly could have come from another organ, or from an existing supply of pipes in the builder’s shop. (An extension was built on the topboard to hold the lowest eight pipes.) It conforms in mouth shape, scale, etc., with other similar eighteenth-century Mexican stops. The diameters of the C-pipes are compared with those of the similar stop at San Pedro Quiatoni in the following table. (See Scale chart 2.)
Tattershall describes making what was essentially a newly built bellows to replace the pre-1990 winding system, which, unless something happened after Fesperman and Kelemen photographed the organ, must have been intact, although not functional, at the time of her work; and she suggests that this older winding system had in turn replaced one that had been behind the organ. This of course assumes an altogether different earlier location for the organ, the bellows of which then would have been rebuilt when the organ was given its present location at the side of the gallery. She bases the theory that the bellows was once behind the organ on the claim that the old right-hand stops, which protruded through the side of the case, could not be reached had the bellows been at the side; but this is not true, for experimentation demonstrates that the miters on the right of the case are perfectly accessible to anyone standing at the organist’s right (the Pájaro stop is still worked this way). There is really no evidence to suggest that the bellows was ever behind the organ. Most importantly, Tattershall believes the pre-1990 bellows to have been of 19th-century construction and she did not preserve it. She describes it as “a set of internal frames, onto which an enormous hand-sewn bag of cowskin had been tacked with upholstery nails. . . . When open, it looked like an enormous smithy’s bellows, though rectangular . . . A tell-tale strip of white fuzz and old glue around the rim of the bellows covers made it clear that the cowhide arrangement was a later creation . . .”24 But later than when? For, as nobody knew in 1990, this is neither a smithy bellows nor a 19th-century type of organ bellows, but a kind of organ bellows that was in use at least from the early 16th century (a Spanish example of which was recently documented by Gerard A. C. de Graaf in a little organ from the 1520s in Salamanca Cathedral’s Capilla Dorada).25 It is not impossible that the old Tlacochahuaya bellows was revised in the 19th century, but nevertheless it represented a type of Iberian bellows with a long history and it could have been made at any time during the organ’s existence—or earlier, given that it could have been brought from another location during a revision in the Tlacochahuaya organ. As only its weights are preserved, we are unlikely ever to resolve the questions about the old bellows’ date and provenance, which are raised by de Graaf’s description of the Capilla Dorada organ. Bellows of the Capilla Dorada type survive in other locations in Oaxaca,26 however, and study of them could help to clarify the issue.
This in turn opens the question of the organ’s earlier windpressure(s). Today the organ speaks on 84mm, achieved by two 1990 wedge bellows weighted by the old but undatable weights.27 Some people have suggested this may be too high, and the organ at San Andrés Zautla, whose principal pipes are virtually identical to those at Tlacochahuaya, and which was rebuilt by Tattershall in 1998 with newly made wedge bellows, speaks on only 73mm.28 But the matter of Tlacochahuaya’s wind pressure remains speculative, for if it were lower than 84mm the reed pipes would behave even less satisfactorily than at present; so all we can say about the pre-1990 winding system is that it was of the Capilla Dorada type, its provenance is undeterminable, and it may have endured several revisions over at least the past 280 years.
Another factor influencing the organ’s sound is that the case presently has no back, and in 1990–91 the organ was voiced on the assumption that this was the way it had always been. However, most old organ cases in Oaxaca have backs, and a pre-restoration photograph of the organ by John Fesperman’s Smithsonian Institution team29 shows a panel, unfastened at the top, leaning against the wall behind the organ. At least one performer has experimented with installing temporary backs, and whether the back of the case is open or closed makes a discernible difference in the organ’s sound. The age of the panel in the Fesperman photograph is of course indeterminable.
The organ’s keyboard is evidently not original. The keys are stamped with numbers in the manner of a pre-fabricated keyboard of the 19th century. That it was not built specifically for Tlacochahuaya is made completely clear by its numbering: the lowest key begins with the number 5. The keys for C, C-sharp, D and E-flat were discarded in adapting it to the short-octave chest. Accordingly, the highest key is numbered 49. The octave span, 165mm, is characteristic of late 19th-century pianos and harmoniums.30
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