In part 1 of this essay I introduced the three constituent elements of beauty according to Thomas Aquinas: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. And we examined the first element, integritas, or integrity, as it relates to electronic organs.
Do Thomas's two other aspects of beauty have something to tell us about the nature of electronic organs?
Consonantia - consonance or proportion.
Proportionality is a common problem with electronic organs, and I think a big strike against many of them. One of the reasons that a parish might be attracted to an electronic organ is because of their ability to acquire a "larger" instrument than the realities of a pipe organ would allow. The perceived advantage of an electronic instrument is that it has greater versatility than a similarly priced pipe organ. There would be more variety of tone color, perhaps even an additional manual, and more "toys" for the organist. But in reality, the tonal scheme is too "big" for the space it is trying to fill.
Too often we see these extra elements in the electronic organ blown way out of proportion. The gimmicks and flexibility allow it to sound like an English "cathedral" organ one minute, and a North-German-style instrument in a historic temperament the next. This is just disingenuous. Just because you've decided against a traditional pipe organ doesn't mean that the congregation should be sonically disoriented by hearing many hundreds of stops, and several different style organs in the same space. This is a bridge too far, as is the MIDI harpsichord that comes standard. The increasing technicization of the electronic organ makes this kind of variety a selling point, but it destroys the consonantia of the instrument.
(Really, who would have any reason to use a harpsichord coming through those same loudspeakers? Absurd!)
Is it possible to build a real pipe organ out of proportion with its space? Absolutely! But it's much easier to do this with an electronic installation.
Claritas - "the power of a thing to reveal itself to the mind"
Pipe organs are very physical installations. The placement of pipes in some kind of chamber in relationship to the placement of the choir (or other instruments) and to the rest of the worship space (or hall) is all navigated with great care. The resulting layout also has implications for how the organ looks from the "outside".
In electronic instruments there is no need for any substantial physical or visual design. On the contrary, most electronic organ installations go to great lengths to hide their loudspeakers from view. And because loudspeakers are more easily placed than ranks of pipes, these sounds can be generated from locations that would be unrealistic for pipes. This is a principle that creates great cognitive dissonance and works against the element of claritas. ("That sounds like a room full of pipes!" "It's not, it's just a couple loudspeakers.")
In the very worst cases, claritas is confused by placing loudspeakers behind a facade of fake organ pipes. (I'm still thinking about the purely electronic organ here, but I think that a hairsplitting discussion of "hybrid" organs is also probably worth our time.)
Pipe organs, with few exceptions, have their pipes on display to some degree. The Werkprinzip of North German organ design meant that the claritas of an instrument was fully visual as well as auditory: the divisions of the organ could be fairly easily seen and understood.
An Americanized version of the Werkprinzip occurred with many 1950s and 1960s organs by Holtkamp, and I have a real soft spot for these instruments. Though others may find them too angular and passé, I find them distinctively beautiful. They make my heart skip a beat. Two that I would single out for particular praise are the organ at Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College, Syracuse Univeristy and Battell Chapel, Yale Univeristy.
Different styles of organ facades have been in use throughout different periods of organ building. But in every period of organbuilding, the organ's facade has remained a facet of pipe organ construction. Unenclosed pipes of polished metal usually adorn the case of the organ and serve as a visual cue to the location and size of the instrument. (The Fisk at Benaroya Hall, Seattle is a late-twentieth century organ that also uses wood pipes in the facade.)
This is an important element in this discussion because organs are truly inspiring instruments. And, after hearing fine organ music, one of the first ways that young organists are inspired to study the instrument is by seeing one.
With the electronic organ, however, there are no pipes of any type to see. And if there are pipes on display it just furthers instrument's inherent dishonesty.
There is no claritas in the electronic organ.
The emperor has no clothes, and he is not beautiful.
Labels: electronic organs, Fisk, Holtkamp, organs, Thomas Aquinas
I found myself in All Souls Church on All Souls Day, but interestingly I was the only soul around.
I was at All Soul's Unitarian Church in Indianapolis. I see elsewhere on this blog a record of my intention to play this organ in the summer of aught five. It took me four years, but I am just now getting around to spending some time with this instrument.
I admittedly have a soft spot for these Holtkamp organs, having played a wonderful 1959 Walter Holtkamp, Sr. (designed with help from Fenner Douglass) at the Episcopal Parish of St. Peter's in Lakewood, Ohio. The Indianapolis instrument is four years younger, but shares many similar qualities.
The Indianapolis instrument does benefit tremendously from a complementary acoustic and is made more versatile with an enclosed swell division.
As a post-1974 graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Holtkamp organs played a relatively minor part of my "official" education, but for earlier students things would have been quite different:
You might be interested to know what Sinden.org visitors have been looking for lately:
- panda - The ever popular "panda" has brought more people to Sinden.org than the fact that we sell diphthongs.
- mypipes.org - is close behind, probably because I'm the number one Google result for it at this point.
- Holtkamp martini organ - If you have a Holtkamp and you have a martini, you have the makings of a good time.
- UK teen modeling - None to be had here, sorry. Unless you mean that picture of William Crotch. That's actually UK pre-teen portraiture. Very different. But I'm sure you'll keep finding your way back after this.
- Victoria Osteen pictures - Absolutely not. Never have, never will. Unless someone caught her hitting a flight attendant on camera. That would be fun.
- Grandpa Val's Beef Jerky - Ah yes. All admirer's of Grandpa Val and his delicious beef jerky are welcome here. Do I start a fan page?
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 19th 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
weirdgifted 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
I completed my first Sudoku puzzle today. It was pretty neat.
It struck me as being fun. But it also struck me as being sort of like registering an organ.
The rules of the game are simple: complete the puzzle so that the numbers 1-9 appear only once in every row, column and 3x3 grid.
This is just like registering an organ by setting up a limited number of pistons and divisionals. This part of the organist's craft often doesn't have much to do with music. It has everything to do with logic. Like Sudoku.
The original Sudokuish registration model seems to be the old Holtkamp switchboard. There, your generals have to be registered so well that their content can also serve the divisionals. (On early combination actions, divisional pistons could not be set independently of their corresponding generals). You might need a really loud sound, but that sound might also have to double as a cornet and accompaniment, and to use that you might have to take off the Great to Pedal coupler.
Tangent: And why is it, exactly, that we have to settle for a limited number of pistons? I mean, if we were able to stick a 60 gig iPod in the organ (for what, $400?) and program it to store the combination action, we would have like a gajillion and a half memory levels.
Wait, if I just hit a divisional piston here, how am I going to get that coupler on? or, how can I register the pedal so that it will balance both this soft sound and this stronger one? or, I want to pull on the Hautbois, but it sounds like a vomiting giraffe, etc.
I am going to assume that a lot of people have stopped reading at this point because either 1) they don't care about Sudoku, or 2) they don't care about organ registration, or 3) they don't care about either, or 4) they were offended by the giraffe comment, or 5) they have suddenly and unexpectedly lost power.
Look, I really like organs and if I want to talk about registering them in relation to a logic puzzle, well, that's what I'm going to do! Deal with it! If you'd rather read a Sudoku blog, well, that option is available to you. If you want to read an organ registration blog I'm afraid you're out of luck.
Sorry, I took kind of a harsh turn there, but maybe I'm a little overworked. I mean, try registering something by Herbert Howells. There's a lot going on. It's like a puzzle, and the possibilities are endless.
I guess the only real difference is, unlike Sudoku, there's more than one "correct" solution.
And no answer key.
Unless you count B-flat.
Elsewhere: I see that the Episcopal Church has redesigned their website. This should make trying to find stuff there a little less like trying to complete a Sudoku puzzle.
June 1928
The present building was completed and a 32 stop, 3 manual organ built by the Vottler/Holtkamp/Sparling Company of Cleveland was installed in the church. This instrument was a gift of the Carl Edson family.
September 1959
A new instrument of 34 stops (43 ranks) distributed over three manuals and pedal built by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., was installed at a cost of approximately $42,000. This instrument was envisioned by St. Peter's organist and director of music, Professor Fenner Douglass, who worked closely with Mr. Holtkamp in designing an organ which would reflect the essential elements of the Organ Reform Movement as it took shape in mid-twentieth century America.
July 2001
Some refurbishing of the organ's wind sysem and a complete replacement of the memory system with technology designed by Solid State Logic Corporation of Alexandria, Virginia was unddertaken by the Holtkamp Organ Company of Cleveland. the cost of this work was $16,100 and it was funded from the Music and Light Fund of St. Peter's Church. The replacement value of the St. Peter's instrument is well in excess of $340,000.
The above material was prepared by John M. Russell
Specifications of the current organ
Recit
8 Rohrflöte
8 Dulciane
4 Gedackt
2 Principal
1 1/3 Larigot
III Zimbel
8 Dulzian
4 Schalmey
Great
16 Quintadena
8 Principal
8 Gedackt
4 Octave
4 Spitzflöte
2 Octave
IV Mixture
8 Trumpet
Positiv
8 Copula
4 Principal
4 Rohrflöte
2 Octave
2 Blockflöte
II Sesquialtera
III Scharf
Pedal
16 Subbass16 Quintadena (Gt.)
16 Gedackt
8 Principal
8 Gedackt
4 Octave
4 Flute
IV Mixture
16 Posaune
8 Trumpet (ext.)
4 Trumpet
couplers
Recit/Great 8, Recit/Great 16, Positiv/Great, Recit/PositivRecit/Ped, Great/Ped, Positiv/Ped
The organ is entirely unenclosed.
Labels: Holtkamp
The below specification is printed on the glossy Holtkamp advertisment which serves as this month's feature article in The American Organist.
This 1927 instrument at St. Peter's, my former church, was completely unknown to me. (Currently, St. Peter's has a very nice Walter Holtkamp, Sr. instrument from 1958.)
(The American Organist has really gone downhill if it allows an advertisement to take center stage, and, as of this writing, the Holtkamp website appears to be four years out of date.)
Pedal
16 Diapason
16 Bourdon
8 Cello (Gt)
8 Flute (Sw)
IV Choralbass (Ch)
16 English Horn (Sw)
Gt to Ped
Sw to Ped
Ch to Ped
Great
16 Violone (TC)
8 Diapason
8 Flute Symphony
8 Second Violin
8 Cello
4 Klangflote (Sw)
2 Flautino (Sw)
Gt 16
Gt 8
Gt 4
Swell
8 Geigen Principal
8 Stopped Diapason
8 Violin
8 Vox Angelica
8 Echo Choir (Double enclosed)
4 Flute
16 English Horn1
8 Horn1
Sw 16
Sw 8
Sw 4
Choir
16 Contra Dolce (Gt)2
8 Viola (Gt)3
8 Concert Flute
8 Ludwig Tone4
8 Viol d'Amour (Gt)3
4 Orchestral Flute (Gt)3
III Harmonics (Gt)3
2 Dulcitone (Gt)3
Ch 16
Ch 8
Ch 4
Couplers
All manuals to ped
Sw to Gt, Ch to Gt and Sw to Ch each at 16, 8 and 4
1. These order of these two reeds was switched in the published specs but I can't imagine why.
2. Borrowed from which stop on the Great? There's nothing at 16 pitch!
3. How these stops are borrowed from the Great is sort of a mystery.
4. Ahh, Ludwig Tone, how I long to play upon thee!
Labels: Holtkamp
Things to see and do in Indiana this summer:
Bedford - Blue Spring Caverns. "As you glide silently over the quiet waters of Myst'ry River in a custom boat tour, the natural wonders of this subterranean world pass before your eyes."
- Columbus - Architecture Tour. "In 1991, the American Institute of Architects surveyed 829 of its members. They ranked Columbus 6th among U.S. cities in architectural quality and innovation. Only Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Boston were ranked higher."
- French Lick - The Indiana Railway Museum. "You will ride aboard historic pieces of rail equipment on a 1 3/4 hour, 20 mile round trip, which will take you through portions of the scenic Hoosier National Forest, the 2200 foot Burton Tunnel, and past impressive limestone cuts."
- Indianapolis - play the 1962 Holtkamp organ at the Unitarian Cathedral. With Bradley's permission, of course.
- Richmond - Hoosier Hill. The highest point in Indiana (it's pretty close to the Ohio border). Dare I dream? Maybe not this summer . . .
- St. Meinrad - Saint Meinrad Archabbey. ". . . a thriving community of 120 monks who make new the Benedictine tradition in the 21st century."
Labels: Holtkamp
Walter Holtkamp, Sr. organ at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Lakewood, Ohio.
Labels: Holtkamp
BLOOMINGTON, IN - Sinden.org has recently learned of the purchase of a Holtkamp Martini on eBay.
The Martini, so named because it's design was developed on a napkin over cocktails, was apparently offered for sale by Penn State. Indiana University was alerted and proffered the highest bid.
Delivery was not included in the cost of the instrument, so it hasn't arrived yet. You can rely on Sinden.org to keep you updated on this developing story.
Tangent: From this Holtkamp webpage, "Here are a selection of recent Holtkamp Organ Company Projects." Yeah. Here is a selection of excellent grammar review materials from which to choose.
Labels: Holtkamp
©MMXVII Sinden.org: a site for fun and prophet