It's alive
There’s a small category of inanimate objects that seem alive to those who appreciate and use them. A friend is an avid cyclist who rides hundreds of miles each week. He has a sophisticated bike that was custom-built for him, and he talks about it as though it is a living partner. He’s at one with the machine when he shifts gears, powers up a long hill, or throws it into a turn. The sound of the wind in the whirling spokes is like a song to him.
A parishioner at a church I served as music director owned several vintage Jaguar XKEs. Those are the sleek little two-seater roadsters with twelve-cylinder engines that date from the mid 1960s. The garage at his house was his workshop, where he had hundreds of high-quality tools hanging polished on labeled hooks. The workbench had obviously seen a lot of use, but every time I saw it, it was neat and clean—except for one time I visited, when he had one of those marvelous engines dismantled for an overhaul. Each part had been degreased and was spotless. As he talked me through his project, he handled the parts, almost caressing them with his fingers. One Sunday afternoon when he took me for a long ride, I could see how much he enjoyed his relationship with that machine. As an organbuilder, I cringe when I hear the phrase “amateur labor.” But I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to put a Jaguar engine in John’s amateur hands.
Sailboats are another great example. Our boat is made of fiberglass, but it has lots of character. Although this was only the first summer we’ve had her, I’ve noticed some fun little things she seems to like. On a port tack broad reach, she makes a little skip each time the bow rises to a wave on the port bow. I think that little skip tells me that she likes that particular motion. That skip doesn’t happen on a starboard tack, and it doesn’t happen when waves cross the starboard bow on a port tack.
And if you think a fiberglass boat can have personality, you should stand on a dock surrounded by wooden sailboats and listen to their skippers. You’d think those guys had all just been out on a first date. There’s a special term for that—boatstruck. A boat lover can go simply ga-ga at the sight of a beautiful boat. One of our friends did exactly that a few weeks ago, and it was only a few days between his catching sight of this boat and its presence on a trailer in his yard.
One of the most magical moments in any day in a sailboat is when you’ve motored away from the dock, raised the sails, gotten the boat moving under the power of the wind, and shut off the engine. The boat surges forward—in good wind, any sailboat is faster under sail than under power—and the surrounding noise changes from that of the engine’s exhaust to that of the motion of wind and water. The nature of the machine shifts from mechanical to natural power.
Harnessing the wind
That magical shift is a little like starting the blower of a pipe organ. When you touch the switch, you might hear the click of a relay, and depending on where it’s located, you might hear the blower motor coming up to speed—but you certainly hear or sense the organ fill with air. It’s as though the organ inhaled and is now ready to make music. You might hear a few little creaks and groans as reservoir springs take on tension, and while most organists ask that step to be as quiet as possible, I like hearing those mechanical noises because they remind me of all that is happening inside the instrument.
Many organists are unaware of what goes on inside their instrument when they start the blower. We’re all used to switching on appliances, noticing only the simple difference between on and off. But when you switch on that organ blower, air starts to move through the organ as a gentle breath that soon builds to a little hurricane. As each reservoir fills, it automatically closes its own regulating valve. When all the reservoirs are full, the organ is alive and ready to play. There’s a big difference between the sense you get inside an organ when the blower is running and all the reservoirs are full of pressure, compared with the lifeless state when the blower is not running.
When I’m inside an organ with the blower running, it feels alive to me. It’s almost as though it’s quivering with excitement, waiting for someone to play. I compare it to the collective inhalation of all the wind players in a symphony orchestra. The conductor mounts the podium and the players give him their attention. He raises his baton and the instruments are at the ready. He gives the upbeat and everyone inhales. The split second before air starts pouring through those instruments is like the organ with blower running, reservoirs up, and windchests full of air pressure, ready to blow air through those pipes when the organist opens the valves by touching keys.
Besides the notion that the organ is a living, breathing thing is the personality of a good instrument. There certainly are plenty of “ordinary” organs that don’t exhibit any particular personality. But a well-conceived and beautifully made instrument almost always shares its being with the players and listeners. Just as our boat tells us what it likes, so an organ lets the player know what it likes and what it doesn’t. How many of us have put a piece of music back on the shelf just because the organ didn’t seem to like it?
And besides the idea that an organ might have opinions as to what music it plays best, so a good instrument lends itself to a particular form of worship. My work in the Organ Clearing House is centered on finding new homes for redundant organs, and by extension, I’m always thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of each instrument we handle, especially from the point of view of what type of church it might be suited for.
A tale of two cities
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, California, is a peppy, active place with lots of young families. I got to know it about four years ago when they put their 1973 three-manual Schlicker organ on the market. While I am not able to visit each organ that comes across my desk, it happened that I was in California on other business, and took the opportunity to see the instrument, take measurements, and assess its quality and condition. St. Mark’s building has pseudo-gothic lines, and is built of concrete reinforced with steel (it’s earthquake country). Most of the Schlicker organ was located in a chamber on the nave wall, in the place where a transept would be. The Positiv division was in a little cubby above the choir seats in the chancel, twenty feet behind the rest of the organ, the exact opposite of traditional placement of a Positiv division.
Herman Schlicker was a third-generation organbuilder, born in Germany, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1920s. He founded the Schlicker Organ Company in 1930, and along with Walter Holtkamp, was at the forefront of the revival movement that shifted interest toward the style of classic instruments, and of course later to the powerful revolution that reintroduced mechanical key action to mainstream American organbuilding. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Schlicker built instruments with slider chests, low wind pressures, and open-toe voicing with few, if any, nicks at the pipe mouths. There are plenty of mutations and mixtures, and a higher-than-usual percentage of tapered ranks like Spitzflutes.
I felt that the Schlicker organ at St. Mark’s was not a great success because the low wind pressure and relatively light amount of deep fundamental tone meant that the organ could not project well from the deep chamber. And all that upperwork meant there was not a big variety of lush solo voices with soft accompaniments that are so important to much of the choral literature featured in Anglican and Episcopal churches. It’s a fine organ, but it was a boat in the wrong water.
St. Mark’s was offering the Schlicker for sale because they had acquired a beautiful three-manual organ by E. M. Skinner from a church in Pennsylvania. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, would renovate the Skinner and install it in the same chamber then occupied by the Schlicker. (See “Skinner Opus 774 Is Saved,” The Diapason, December 2012.) The Skinner organ (Opus 774), built in 1929, has higher pressures than the Schlicker, two expressive divisions, and of twenty-seven ranks, eighteen are at eight-foot pitch (including reeds), and there are three independent sixteen-footers, plus a sixteen-foot extension of the Swell Cornopean to produce a Trombone. That’s a lot of fundamental tone.
The people of St. Mark’s felt that the Skinner organ would be more useful for the particular liturgy they celebrate. And because of the higher pressures and larger pipe scales, there is more energy to the sound, allowing it to travel more effectively out of the chamber and across the sanctuary.
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Metropolitan New Jersey is a sprawling, bustling urban/suburban area just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Tens of thousands of people ride hundreds of trains and thousands of buses across the river to New York each day, traveling through the many tunnels. You never saw so many buses as pass through the Lincoln Tunnel during any rush hour. These are the people whose lives came to a standstill after Hurricane Sandy caused New Jersey Transit to cancel train service for two weeks. To add to the maelstrom, sixty percent of the gas stations in New Jersey were closed because fuel delivery systems and storage facilities were damaged by the storm. It took months to restore the normal massive flow of traffic.
Five years ago, I received a call from Will Moser, the pastor of the First Lutheran Church in Montclair, New Jersey, in the heart of that area. His church was home to an aging and relocated Austin organ that had, through some inexpert handling earlier in its life, passed through its period of greatest distinction. Much later in this story I learned that Will had grown up learning to play the organ, and worked as a professional organist before going to seminary. He grew up in a church in Western Pennsylvania that had a Schlicker organ, and as he matured into his ministry, he dreamed of having a Schlicker in his church. (Can you tell where this is going?)
I visited the church in Montclair and found a nice variance on the ubiquitous A-frame building. Rather than straight walls supporting the wooden pitched ceiling, the side walls are broken into roughly ten-foot sections, set in gentle parallel angles and divided by windows. The ceiling is supported by heavy beams of laminated wood. And there is a spacious balcony above the rear door—the perfect place for an organ with low wind pressure, clear voicing, and well-developed principal choruses.
It was just a few weeks after my visit to Montclair that the Glendale Schlicker came on the market, and I immediately thought of Will. With three manuals and about thirty-five stops, this organ was larger than what Will and I had discussed, but it sure seemed as though it would be a good fit. I got back on the train under the Hudson and put the specifications and photos of the Glendale organ in Will’s hands. It wasn’t long before he got to California to see the organ, and we agreed pretty quickly that the church should acquire the organ.
We dismantled the organ and placed it in storage while the people in Montclair gathered the necessary funds, and now, several years later, the organ is in place, complete, and sounding terrific. The organ’s tone moves easily and unobstructed through the sanctuary. Each stop sounds great alone and in combinations. The full organ is impressive, but not overpowering. The reeds are colorful, and the bass tones
project beautifully.
We might describe the result of the Glendale/Montclair caper as a Lutheran organ in a Lutheran church and an Episcopal organ in an Episcopal church.
When smart organbuilders design new organs, they consider all the elements that make up the physical location and acoustics of the room. They calculate the volume, and consider the lines of egress over which the organ would have to speak. They divine how much sound energy will be necessary and calculate the pipe scales and wind pressures accordingly. Each organ is designed for the space in which it is installed. I imagine that Mr. Schlicker felt that he was building an organ that would sound great at St. Mark’s. And he was building it at a time when many organists and organbuilders felt that the ideal organ had low pressure and plenty of upperwork.
Fashion conscious
I write frequently about the revolution in American organbuilding in the second half of the twentieth century. We celebrate the renewal of interest and knowledge about building tracker-action organs while simultaneously lamenting the loss of those organs they replaced. At the same time we should acknowledge that there was another twentieth-century revolution in American organbuilding that started and progressed exactly fifty years earlier. If in 1950 we were building organs with classic stoplists and thinking about tracker action, in 1900 they were building organs with romantic stoplists and thinking about electro-pneumatic action. In 1970, dozens of new tracker organs were being built and in 1920, hundreds of electro-pneumatic organs were installed. And as those electro-pneumatic organs had American organists in their thrall, so many distinguished nineteenth-century organs were discarded to make space.
What I celebrate about early twenty-first century organbuilding is that the last fifty years of intense study and experimentation have allowed American organbuilders to become masters in all styles of organ building. We have firms that build tracker organs based on historic principles, and tracker organs inspired by the idea of eclecticism. Other firms build electro-pneumatic organs with symphonic capabilities, or electro-pneumatic organs with the “American Classic” ethic. And I love them all.
Looking back over forty years, I wonder if that Schlicker organ was the best choice for St. Mark’s. I have not read the documents from the organ committee to know what drove or inspired that choice, and I don’t know the history surrounding it. But I bet that part of the decision was driven by the style of the day. Everyone was buying organs like that, whether or not history has proven them all to be the right choice. And we all wore paisley neckties.
I’d like to think that Mr. Schlicker would be pleased with the new home we’ve given his organ.
Through my travels during thirty years in the organ business, I know of many organs that were acquired by churches at the instigation of persuasive organists. Some of them were great successes. But some were under-informed mistakes based on the personal taste of the musician without proper consideration of the architecture or liturgy of the individual church. If an organ is to be a success, it needs to be a boat in the right water. You’d never wear blue socks with a pink shirt.
Organ Method XXI
Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com.
Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written the On Teaching column in The Diapason since September 2007. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
Summer break
I am writing only briefly this month just to let everyone know that I am, for the first time since starting this column, going to take a summer vacation. I won’t be writing columns for the next few months and will return in October.
When I and the column do return, I expect to resume with a few very practical columns arising out of things that some of my students, and a fellow teacher or two, have asked me about or brought to my attention recently: for example, the matter of helping students to choose specific pedalings for passages (something that I haven’t really addressed directly in the various columns devoted to developing pedal facility and technique) or the question of how to be sure, when blocking out fingerings early in the learning process, that those fingerings will work at a faster tempo. (It is interesting to me that a lot of students have this as a specific question. I have helped students think about it, but I haven’t yet written about systematic ways of approaching the matter.)
I am going to spend some of the time off working on pulling together the organ method that was partly serialized in columns a couple of years ago. (I have tentatively decided to extract and publish first a stand-alone pedal method, and then proceed later with the rest of the book.) I am very grateful to readers for valuable feedback on this, which I will now be able to digest at some leisure. (And if anyone reading this has any further thoughts about it, please get in touch.)
Over the summer, we are going to work on plans for certain enhancements or additions to the column, initially revolving around video. I will be creating several short videos dealing—in a way that includes an element of direct demonstration that a written column can’t quite manage—with aspects of the teaching, learning, and practicing process. This is a new venture for me, and one about which I am quite excited. I am also concerned that I take the time to get it right.
As always, I would welcome any communications from readers—especially during this brief break. Any feedback about recent columns, or ideas for future columns, thoughts about how to approach the video project, or other ideas about how to expand or enhance the “On Teaching” project will be greatly appreciated.
Meanwhile, enjoy the summer, and I will see you in the fall!
M. P. Rathke, Inc.,
Indianapolis, Indiana
The Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
M. P. Rathke, Inc.,
Indianapolis, Indiana
The Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
During autumn 2008 we were contacted by Kimberly Marshall, director of the Arizona State University School of Music, who spoke of a museum that would be unlike any other: the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), then being built on the northern edge of Phoenix, would showcase instruments of virtually every nation, culture, and musical style. Dr. Marshall had been retained as consultant to the museum in the planning of its pipe organ exhibit, for which she suggested a working chamber organ, with its interior parts completely visible to interested eyes, yet protected from curious hands.
This see-through instrument, dubbed “The Visible Organ” at the time of its commissioning by donors Floyd and Marie Ganassi, is the product of our intriguing and rewarding collaboration with Kimberly Marshall and William DeWalt, MIM’s president. It features mechanical key and stop action and is housed in a case of quarter-sawn white oak with walnut accents and panels of ¼-inch tempered glass. The winding is via a weighted wedge bellows, which may be fed either by a rotary fan blower or by hand pumping in the traditional manner.
The organ was designed with a total of five stops, all divided treble and bass, of which the Twelfth and Seventeenth are currently prepared. The manual naturals are grenadil with arcaded key fronts; reverse-skunktail sharps are made from ebony flanked by holly. The pedal keys are maple with walnut sharps. The iron drawknobs and bellows handle were fashioned by Louise Pezzi of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; walnut pipe shades were designed and carved by Morgan Faulds Pike of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The dedicatory recital was played by consultant Kimberly Marshall on August 8, 2010. (More information on the museum is found in the “Here & There” column of this issue; see page 4.)
—Michael P. Rathke
MANUAL
8′ Stopped Diapason
4′ Principal
22⁄3′ Twelfth (prepared)
2′ Fifteenth
13⁄5′ Seventeenth (prepared)
PEDAL
Permanently coupled to manual
Photo credit: Emil Dria
More Duphly
November’s column on Jacques Duphly and his accompanied harpsichord pieces motivated two readers to send me their welcome compact disc recordings of solo harpsichord works by the 18th-century French composer.
San Francisco-based harpsichordist Katherine Roberts Perl (www.kathyrobertsperl.com) serves up 68 minutes of Duphly favorites played on John Phillips’ superb replica of a 1707 Nicholas Dumont double harpsichord. Her chosen repertoire comprises five dance movements and the titled works La de Belombre, La Damanzy, Les Grâces, La Vanlo, La de la Tour, Médée, and La Forqueray, concluding with the composer’s most extended piece, his Chaconne in F (Dorian Recordings DOR-93169, recorded in 1996, released in 1998).
Yves-G. Préfontaine’s two-disc traversal of Duphly’s Pièces de Clavecin (ATMA Classique ACD2 2716) was recorded in November 2014 and issued in 2015. The Canadian artist utilizes a very lovely Hemsch-based two-manual instrument by Montréal builder Yves Beaupré. The extensive program, organized by keys, includes 27 works culled from all four books of Duphly’s harpsichord music.
Préfontaine also performs the lengthy F major/minor Chaconne, as does harpsichordist Medea Bindewald (on her Coviello Classics disc, cited in the November article). In comparing play-lists, I was fascinated to note the wide variance in tempi for this composition: Binewald plays it in 7 and a half minutes; Perl 8 minutes, 16 seconds; and Préfontaine 9 and a half minutes—wide enough variance that it sent me to the keyboard for my own read-through (since each of the recordings had seemed faster than I would play the piece).
I do not mean this to be critical of these fleet performances: references to Chaconne tempi in several widely-quoted sources (L’Affilard, 1705, and Pajot, 1732, for instance) suggest quick beats when these 18th-century remarks are translated into modern metronome markings. I was comforted to come across a 2007 reference to the findings of Dutch musicologist Jan van Biezen, who suggests that perhaps we read these arcane writings wrongly and points out that if we were to adjust the suggested speed to include both the back and forth movements of a mechanical device we might come closer to the more stately tempi that the music itself seems to suggest: approximately one beat equaling 78 or 79 MM (www.janvanbiezen.nl/articles.html—accessed “Tempo of French Baroque Dances,” February 28, 2016).
I have noticed for several decades that I now prefer slower tempi than I did in my younger years. Indeed students became quite used to my “I’d take that a bit slower” remark, especially when dealing with baroque music. It is a normal progression (or regression, if you wish): as we age, we move somewhat more slowly. I prefer to allow the music itself an unpressured time to unfold; the Chaconne seems to require both elegance and grace. Surely life must have moved more slowly in an age that did not have mechanized travel or instant communication. (I hope it is not too suggestive of a bad pun to conclude these thoughts with a phrase that composer Duphly might have understood: “chacun à son goût” [“each to one’s own taste”]?)
Two more mystery novels
The harpsichord is mentioned thirteen times (the clavichord only once) in author Imogen Robertson’s novel Anatomy of Murder, set in the London of 1781. This second book featuring unlikely forensic sleuths Mrs. Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther is a well-written page-turner dealing with the British aftermath of the American Revolution, skullduggery that besets the (fictional) His Majesty’s Theatre production of a new Italian opera starring a phenomenal soprano of unexpected parentage and a favorite continental castrato singer, plus the daily joys and sorrows of both titled and lower-class inhabitants of the fast-expanding and radically changing urban metropolis. (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-670-02317-2).
A visit to Half Price Books, Dallas’s mega-emporium of previously owned reading material, resulted in the acquisition of another work from the pen of Donna Leone, the American expatriate author who resides in Venice. While musical references in Willful Behavior, the eleventh of her Commissario Guido Brunetti series (2002) are less frequent than those in the works I cited in my January 2016 column, there were four that stood out in this volume: an analogy to a Haydn Symphony, a similarity to a Scarlatti oratorio, the mention of Vivaldi’s baptismal church in Venice, and a plot twist reference to Puccini’s opera Tosca. Ms. Leone continues to be both lover and patron of classical music and her books serve as welcome guides to her adopted city for any musical armchair traveler.
Semibrevity
Guest blogger Mandy Macdonald writes about Nelly Chaplin who performed on her 1775 Jacobus and Abraham Kirkman two-manual harpsichord early in the 20th century (illustrated with a picture of a similar 1755 Kirkman now in the collection of historic instruments at Musical Instrument Museums, Edinburgh). Free access is available at www.semibrevity.com, where you should also scroll down to read the amazing story of T. W. Taphouse, British collector of early instruments, who purchased his first Shudi and Broadwood 1773 harpsichord at age 19, in 1857!
The Semibrevity website continues to broaden our knowledge of these largely unfamiliar early proponents of early music on early instruments in its well-researched and beautifully illustrated postings.
Comments are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer [email protected] or 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229.