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Organists, more so than other musicians, are immediately in contact with others when they sit down to play their instruments. In halcyon days past, organists communicated with calcants (bellows pumpers) and assistants. And in France, beginning in the late 19^th century, organ lofts were crowded places. A couch and cigar-smoking spectators would not have been out of place (or visible to the worshipping congregation). Today, things are different. Motors have replaced calcants and combination action has largely replaced human assistance at the console. American architecture and rigid puritanism among church leadership has led to the decline of lounge-furniture and tobacco (or other?) smoke near the organ console. The organist of today, however, is still very much in dialogue with the organ builder.

Though he may not be physically present, the organ builder's vision and skill have left a unique instrument on which the organist may perform. The uniqueness of each organ is at once limiting ("Dude, why is there no trumpet on the Great?") and freeing ("Wow! A thunder pedal!"). The organ builder tries to fill a space with sound. It's up to the improviser to fill a space with music.

For the improviser, each organ can either be an inspiration or a challenge. Most organists -- whatever their professed skill in improvisation -- will improvise to some degree when sitting down at an instrument for the first time.

American organ building has littered the country with a collection of organs as diverse in style as they are in quality. I can be really pretentious and drop a lot of names here (like Aeolian Skinner, Austin, Brombaugh, Berghaus, Casavant, Dobson, Fisk, Flentrop, Goulding & Wood, Holtkamp, Hope-Jones, Noack, Roosevelt, Schlicker, Schoenstein, Taylor & Boody, Wicks, Wilhelm, Wolff, ) but I'd rather not do that. Instead, I'd rather take a more post-modern approach.

Though the improviser must relate to a specific instrument with memories of all the other instruments he has known, he ultimately must work with the instrument on its own terms. More than that, the improviser must relate to the instrument as it exists in reality, not in some idealized abstract theoretical vacuum.

• Stops: The improviser starts with the stops. These are what will be heard in the improvisation. Everything that follows is about expressing, manipulating, combining, articulating these stops. Ultimately the stops must be heard by the improviser -- and I mean this in two ways. The first is that the improviser should take care to hear all stops on the instrument, including the Quintadena Celeste. Surely the organ builder included it for a reason. The second is that the improviser must learn to hear all the stops for what they are and the inherent expressive capabilities they possess. This is at once an acquired skill and taste. I knew I was an organist when I hear detail in the 8' Principal. I knew I was weird gifted when I could convince myself that each note had a special evocative quality. (I knew I was a graduate student when I studied a Bach Partita, but this is another matter)
• Instrument details: On a very general level, the improviser reacts to the surface details of each instrument. The effectiveness of the swell pedal(s) (if there are any), the ease with which stops may be changed (either by hand, or with combination action), the console lighting, etc.
• Acoustic environment: This author has been tempted to imitate a cliché of Messiaen's improvisations (staccato repeated chords on the 8' foundations), but without being in La Trinité in Paris, he just won't get the same effect.
• Tuning: This is a reality that a lot of organists just won't deal with. There are times, however, when certain stops disagree with the rest of the organ so much that the perhaps should not be used in combination with it. There are other times, however, when a quirk of tuning has temporarily created an interesting color or temperament that should be exploited.
• Behavior: Sometimes organs act up. At Lake Delaware Boys' Camp the tremolo was stuck on the Swell for a few days. That dictated what kind of sounds that division would produce, so I used it with that in mind. When I saw Pierre Pincemaille improvise on "March of the Kings" at St. Denis in Paris on Three Kings Day, 2004, he encountered a nasty cipher on the rickety old Cavaillé-Coll. After hacking at it for a while, he decided it just wouldn't come up, and so he masterfully improvised around it -- just to show that he could. Moments later, he grew bored and was hacking away again with all the stops drawn.

It is with this kind of awareness that the improviser must approach the instrument if he is to use it successfully.

Did I really write all this pompous stuff? Geez, who am I, Dupré?

Finnish language tangent: Urkujenpolkija is Finnish for calcant.

Labels: Holtkamp