In the wind . . .

What is art?

For the last several years the Organ Clearing House has been involved in the preservation of a mighty organ. M. P. Möller’s Opus 5819 (89 ranks) was installed in the Philadelphia Civic Center in 1929–30. The Civic Center had something like 13,500 seats. It was 400 feet long, and the ceiling was 100 feet up. The organ was above the ceiling, 120 feet off the auditorium floor—the floor on which professional basketball and hockey games were played, on which the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus performed, on which national Democratic conventions were held. I’ve written about the organ before in these pages. In fact, the first column of “In the wind . . . ” (The Diapason, April 2005) included some impressions of the then recently completed dismantling project. The Civic Center was about to be demolished. It was mid-winter. There was no heat in the building. And we were hard at work above that ceiling dismantling what must be 85 tons of pipe organ. There were 162 stairs to climb to get to the organ.
The organ was placed in storage in another large Convention Center building next door. We moved it between buildings on flat-bed semi-trailers—it took 16 loads. As it is stored it occupies about 150 feet by 80 feet of floor space surrounded by a chain-link fence with a padlock on the gate (pace that out in the sanctuary of your church). And it looks about as much like a work of art as a defunct steel mill or an automobile salvage lot. There is stack after stack of wooden crates full of organ pipes—200 eight-footers and 100 ten-footers. A six-foot-high pile of Swell frames looks like a collapsed barn. All of the big metal bass pipes laid out on the floor look like a storage yard at an oil refinery. And the two huge four-manual consoles (covered with tarps) look like abandoned narrow-gauge railroad cars. Dozens of windchests and reservoirs, the dismantled blower with its 30-horsepower motor, and a vast array of theatre-organ percussions (drums, cymbals, gongs, whistles, you name it) create the illusion of some huge demonic machine that came down the River Styx.
There is very little light in the building. The organ parts are dirty, having sat in that huge industrial-style building for over 70 years with nothing but our clothing to move the dust. I walk around inside that fence and know that I’m in the midst of a monumental and magnificent work of art. Though the organ was played only twice since 1979, I did have the thrill of playing it before we dismantled it. It was out of tune, and there were plenty of ciphers, but there was no doubt that we were in the presence of something great. Anyone else looking at the heap in storage could only say, “what in the world is that?” For us, familiar with the most beautiful and ornate of church buildings, working in this setting with scaffolding, trucks and construction vehicles circling the floor, asbestos abatement enclosures, and the crash and clatter of hundreds of construction workers was something new. I had never been in a building that large except as a spectator with hot dogs and beer in my hands, and ticket stubs in my pockets. At the close of the job I found for myself a moment to be alone in the building after hours. I was loading up the last of our tools and equipment and my van was parked on the floor on the front of the stage. (To drive into the building, you used the same curving ramps that the circus elephants walked on.) I climbed up to the second balcony (Row ZZZ) and took this photo (p. 14).
The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000) offers several definitions of the word art, the first of which is “Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.” Seems to me that’s a definition that covers almost anything. Have the lexicographers punted? How does a great work of art fit into this definition? Michelangelo’s Pietà at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, depicting the crucified Christ lying across his mother Mary’s lap, is an unparalleled example of the imitation of nature using an unlikely medium. Depicting human pathos in stone is at least a contradictory effort, but critics and viewers seem to agree that the artist’s effort was successful (understatement intended!).
Georges Seurat’s masterpiece Sunday in the Park (completed 1886) (you can see at it ) was his effort to prove his theory that painting in colored dots, a technique known as pointillism, would produce colors more vivid and pure than the traditional technique of mixing colors on a palette. He believed that human eyes would mix colors better than an artist. Seurat’s dots are approximately 1/16" across. The painting is about 82" by 121"—multiplication says that there are something like 2.5 million dots. To twist this visual effect into our dictionary definition, Seurat was both counteracting and imitating nature. And note that Seurat (1859–1891) was a century ahead of his time—aren’t those dots the Victorian equivalent of pixels?
Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses that blended into their sites. Fallingwater is located in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, and was built in 1934 for Edgar J. Kaufman. It is widely celebrated as a brilliantly conceived contemporary structure imposed on a wooded setting in such a way as to create an unlikely but beautiful blend of concrete, trees, rocks, and a waterfall. You can see photos of this amazing building at . I like the word imposed here—maybe we could add that to the definition. Fallingwater is supplementing, counteracting, altering, and imposing on nature—and it is simply gorgeous.
When Christo bedecks Central Park with saffron-colored fabric is he supplementing or counteracting nature? Or is Central Park itself a work of art as it was constructed in an urban setting to imitate nature? As we walk through the world we all notice different things. I’ve wondered if an artist can be defined as someone who sees more clearly than others and has some special ability to communicate clear observations. Meidert Hobbema (1638–1709, nearly an exact contemporary of Dietrich Buxtehude) had an unusual affinity for light. Go to to see an example of his sun-lit landscapes. Any of us has witnessed such a scene—but how many of us can notice enough of the detail to retell it so effectively using paint?
How does music fit into all this? You can’t very well compose music to depict a bowl of pears in still-life. Or at least in my ignorance I haven’t heard of such a piece. There are some obvious musical depictions of nature such as the thunderstorms in Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and organists cannot overlook Olivier Messiaen’s bird calls. But outside programmatic tone-paintings, what does an orchestral symphony or a piano sonata have to do with nature?
Organ tuners and voicers are very familiar with musical overtones. I’ll give an easy example. Play tenor C of an Oboe, Clarinet, or Krummhorn. Hold it for five seconds or so—then while you’re holding it hum G to yourself. That should reinforce for your ears the organ pipe’s overtone so that when you stop the humming and keep holding the note, you’ll hear the G as clearly as if you were holding two notes. In fact, G is part of C. It’s nature. For many years I was curator of the wonderful Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1203, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. The building was open to the public, and there was a platoon of tour guides whose spiel became as familiar to us as the rising of the sun. One of the guides was a singer who loved singing arpeggios while I was tuning: “Next, la-la-la-LA-la-la-la; Next, la-la-la-LA-la-la-la.” It was predictable, unalterable, and wildly distracting. But it was a clear and accurate representation of nature’s musical harmonic series.
Remember the harmonic series: Fundamental, Octave, Twelfth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-first, Twenty-second, etc. Sound familiar? 8' – 4' – 22⁄3' – 2' – 13⁄5' – 11⁄3' – 11⁄7' – 1'. So that’s where that comes from! A principal chorus is nothing more than overtones on top of their fundamental. All of those overtones exist in every organ pipe. Start with a Gedackt 8'—strong fundamental, weaker overtones. Pierce the cap and solder on a chimney and it becomes a Chimney Flute or Rohrflöte—you get a stronger second overtone (22⁄3' and a brighter, cheerier sound.
Any musical sound has those overtones—a bell, a frying pan, a pottery bowl, an axe; all produce sounds with overtones. The first person to strike a resonant object and produce a lasting tone would have been the first to hear overtones. When do you suppose that was? And when did humans first learn to sing? If you could sing a melody of three notes, and you could also hear overtones, you might imagine trying to have two people singing the same melody an overtone apart—as in a fourth apart, as in faux bourdon. If you could do that and you were imaginative enough to be interested in counteracting nature the two of you might sing some notes in parallel motion (faux bourdon) and then some in opposite motion (counterpoint). From there, all you would have to do would be to write the rules of four-part harmony (Theory 101 and 102) and there you’d be: 371 Harmonized Chorales, Preludes and Fugues, Sonatas, Symphonies, Ballads, Rock ‘n roll . . .
The modern symphony orchestra is a grand human achievement. Starting with those basic overtones, we have driven an evolution, organizing those manipulated overtones into time—we call it rhythm—in unbelievably complex structures. There is more going on in five measures of a Brahms symphony than in the first 10,000 years of music history. And not only have we developed the music itself as imitation, supplementation, alteration, and counteraction of the work of nature, but all the myriad instruments, and the techniques to play them. A modern violinist in a silk gown with a Stradivarius under her chin is a long way from a Cro-Magnon homo sapiens with a rock in his hand!
Back to my fenced-in organ in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has quite a fleet of huge pipe organs, among them the new Dobson organ at the Kimmel Center (4-111), the recently renovated Austin in Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania (4-162, two blocks from the now demolished Civic Center), and of course, the legendary and recently revived Wanamaker Organ (6-461—think of it!). One wonders how many monumental secular organs one city can support.
The Civic Center Möller will almost certainly leave town. When it does, it will take with it a big piece of the history of 20th-century Philadelphia, from the moment when a flock of symbolic doves were released during a convention of the Democratic party, flew into the big electric fans that were cooling the stage, and were splattered all over party chairman Sam Rayburn on national television, to the tens of thousands of high school and college graduates whose commencement exercises were held in the hall.
This huge organ is an industrial machine, built in a large factory by hundreds of workers. It has miles of wire, tons of lumber and metal, and a bewildering array of gadgets and gizmos. There are dozens of ladders, walkboards, structural beams. There are more than 250 swell shutters. But at its core it’s the artistic equivalent of those hundred tuxedos and gowns on the stage at Symphony Hall with the truckload of sophisticated valuable instruments. A vast pile of lumber and metal; a vibrant, breathing work of art, imitating, supplementing, altering, and counteracting the work of nature.