Tan shoes and pink shoelaces . . .
You can spot him a mile away. Red checked pants, a striped shirt, paisley tie, and a cute little wool cap with a pom-pom—a veritable cornucopia. All the colors are too bright and they all clash with each other. How do we know they clash? I know there’s a physical reason—the physics of light, that is. Mix two cans of paint with the same ingredients, and put a few drops of a tint from the other end of the spectrum in one of them, and voila! They clash. But spectrographic explanations aside, I’m reminded of the comment made by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart while hearing an obscenity case in 1964: “. . . pornography is hard to define . . . but I know it when I see it.” No question, those pants and that shirt clash.
A polka-dot vest, and man, oh man. . .
Organ-folk are quick to make judgments about clashing styles or poor taste. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a friend or colleague make a knowing and snide comment about the tacky decorations of a church interior, I’d have a lot of nickels. I’m not sure I know from where this predilection comes, but it’s strong and prevailing. The funny thing is that while the comments are delivered in a sardonic tone, sometimes accompanied by a little sniff, they’re usually right. Seems that most every time I hear such a comment, I agree with the sniffer. I wonder if others hear me making comments like that.
Tan shoes and pink shoelaces. . .
You catch a glimpse of a church building out of the corner of your eye from a fast-moving train, and you know without thinking about it that the architect got the proportions wrong. Simple rules and mathematical ratios were worked out millennia ago to define good proportions. A building façade that’s twice as tall as it is wide simply doesn’t look as good as one where the width is three-fifths of the height. In round and rough terms, that’s the Golden Section—the builders of the Parthenon used it, Leonardo da Vinci drew and defined it, and Arp Schnitger used it. Frank Gehry has gone as far away from it as he could, the theory being that if all the lines are curved, proportions don’t apply. (Oops, there I go with a snide judgment—in fact, I like the looks of most of his buildings.)
A big panama with a purple hat band.1
Last week I participated in a conference presented by the City University of New York Research Center for Music Iconography, and the Organ Historical Society. “Organs in Art/Organs as Art” included many interesting discussions of how the pipe organ appears as visual art. The schedulers grouped several papers on pipe organ design into one day, providing a fascinating overview of how organbuilders struggle with design issues. In one sense, a pipe organ is a furnishing in a room. But because the organ is likely to be the largest and often the most complex design element within an architectural space, there are all sorts of possibilities for clashing designs and ideas. This struggle has been going on for centuries—there are many places where a Baroque organ was imposed on a Romanesque church, for example. And today we see modern organs with ornate classical designs placed in simple contemporary rooms. Is the mixing of architectural styles on a monumental level necessarily the equivalent of that clash of plaid and stripes?
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I’ve been reflecting on modern church buildings, especially about how many new churches are built and decorated as though they were private homes. The ceilings are low, flat, and plain, perforated in some sort of geometric pattern with recessed light fixtures—as if upside-down prairie dogs would poke out their heads to look around. Windows are plain, perhaps in wan pastel tones. Plush carpets absorb the nasty shuffling sound of the congregation coming and going along with the carefully prepared music and spoken words, so public address systems are installed to overcome the lack of resonance and the worship takes on a clangy, brash tone of voice. Door hardware is straight from Home Depot, and fancy electronic lighting controls adorn the walls by each door.
These fixtures give the place a look of utility and efficiency, completely ignoring the idea of creating a place conducive to worship. The efficient-looking fixtures are often accompanied by a squad of volunteers who run around before each service plugging in microphones and taping notes to the walls about which switches should never be touched, This means you!
From outside, the building looks like a ranch house. Steeples are made of aluminum in factories and arrive at the construction site on trucks. The spire, originally serving as a symbol of closeness to God, has become a decorative element stuck on the roof, a pro-forma icon.
Many buildings that fit this description do not have pipe organs, or even the facsimile of pipe organs. And I suppose it’s not up to me (or us) to make judgments about that. But when such a building does get a pipe organ, it can be exciting for the organbuilder to design an instrument that instills the sense of worship that the building otherwise lacks. The pipe organ makes the place be a church. And because there’s precious little in the way of architectural expression with which to clash, the organbuilder can have a field day introducing splendor without fear of upsetting the natural laws.
I know of many instances where an attractive, decorated organ case brings beauty to a plain building, creating a sense of worship in a drywall box. But above all, it’s the responsibility of the worship leaders, clergy, musicians, and lay people alike, to create that sense, whether in a thrilling stone building with Gothic arches or in a glade under a sunny sky.
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A few weeks ago I was riding the Broadway Express “1” train in New York, when a woman toting an electronic keyboard and a milk crate got on board. The doors closed with the ubiquitous New York electronic voice braying, “Stand clear of the closing door, please,” the milk crate became a podium and with an artificial boom-chicka-chick snare-brush background, that familiar strain from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 147, Jesu bleibet meine Freude filled the air. At one end of the car a cell phone rang with the opening mordents and scales of BWV 565: beedle-deeeee, duddle-duddle-dut-daaah—beedle-deeee, dut-dut-dut-daaah. Such trivialization of such magnificent music. The subway car resonated with cheapness that originated in the mind of one of music’s greatest liturgists. Another cell phone proclaimed the eight-note chaconne of the Taco-Bell Canon.
I got off the car three stops early and waited for the next train. I chide myself for sounding like an old fogey, but I really dislike the trivial use of such grand literature.
Commercial classical radio stations seem only to have a half-dozen recordings. I know it’s not literally true, but as I travel around the country tuning in to the local station in a hotel room, I get the sense that if Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, and a few war-horse piano pieces were banned, there would be no more commercial airing of good music.
Barnes & Noble is a symbol of the homogeneity of our cultural lives. There’s no denying that those big temples of literature with snazzy espresso bars and overstuffed chairs attract people to bookstores like never before. Twenty years ago we might have dreamed about a chain of 75,000 square-foot bookstores with 200-space parking lots and escalators. But the fact is, the books they stock and feature are all bought centrally, so avid readers in Washington, DC and Cheyenne, WY are seeing the same things. If the buying-gurus of the massive chains don’t think a book will sell, it may not get published. The commercialization of literature gets in the way of freedom of expression.
Likewise, I think it easy to draw the conclusion that there are only a couple dozen decent pieces of organ music. I go in and out of many church buildings and always look at last week’s bulletin to take notice of what’s being played. It’s remarkable how homogeneous the programming of church music has become. Many of us lament the trend of churches seeking alternative forms of musical expression, but repeat my exercise with commercial classical radio and remove Carols for Choirs from every music library in the country, and a mighty number of church musicians would have no idea what to do for Christmas.
Take away Purcell, Stanley, Pachelbel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner and there would be no more wedding music. I know that the bride’s mother always insists on the same music, but let’s use some imagination here. Challenge yourself. Plan an entire year of preludes and postludes without repeating a single piece. If you play Toccata and Fugue (you know the composer and the key without being told) every six weeks, you may unwittingly be contributing to the onward march of praise bands. It’s a great piece, but isn’t there something else to try?
We lament the dilution of the centuries-old tradition of the pipe organ, but we fail to champion new ideas, new expressions, or new thoughts that make the music in our church different from others.
Back to Frank Gehry with his bendy rulers. Never was an architect so imaginative as to design whole buildings with no straight lines. His Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles is a kaleidoscope of forms and shapes that challenges and delights my eye. Contrary to the traditional forms of concert halls, I find it hard to relate the shapes of the interior spaces to those of the exterior. And the organ—man alive, what a wild conception. I’m sure there are plenty who think it’s horrible, but I love the fact that he was willing to stretch the boundaries and produce a new form. During my first visit to the instrument, I was fascinated to hear colleague Manuel Rosales describe the design process—his insistence that the organ must work as a traditionally conceived musical instrument, common somehow to the experiences of a broad range of players. But while the great classics of the literature sound stunning, the phantasmagorical façade cries out for new forms of expression.
It is our responsibility to present the pipe organ, even in its most traditional forms, to the public of the twenty-first century in such a way as to inspire modern minds, which are apparently so easily satisfied by homogeneity—by Big Macs, Barnes & Noble, and, God forgive me, Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
