Journal 2013.2014Die jährliche Hauszeitschrift der Konzertdirektion

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Though it is not yet widely known, justice will eventually be done to the remarkable,
circuitous story of how the youngest addition to the list of the world’s great organs –
the Touring Organ – came into existence as an innovative, adaptable, and boundarycrossing
hybridization of all that is good in the pipe organ. The rise of a humanist technology
out of the heart of evil (the Marshall & Ogletree digital organ was born to replace
the pipe organ destroyed at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City on 9/11); the
exhilarating confrontation of academic and religious concepts of the organ; and the
re-examination of all we know about digital sound, sound installation, and amplification
are but a few of the broad and diversely interrelated themes that define this remarkable
happening. At its heart this is an example of what it takes to change classical music in
the present, not merely in a vague future still safely in the distance beyond next season’s
ticket sales and touring schedule. What is required to make this change is exactly the
same as to play a satisfying improvisation: vision, acceptance of risk, and organization.
That a company on behalf of one artist would take this risk is increasingly rare, but Konzertdirektion
Schmid continues to be as visionary a force as it has been for decades.
The organ is often referred to as the King (or Queen) of Instruments, but today it is in
reality the Classical Music of instruments. Like much of the institution of classical music,
the organ is slow to change, expensive, resistant to genres not of its own, and an institution
governed by traditions only now beginning to be questioned. Its hallways – are they
cloisters? – are jealously guarded. But the changing cultural tides, organ-community
insularity, and bias or apathy among mainstream audiences are an unprecedented
Cerberus of problems. It is an assault against which most organists are not equipped
to fight. They cannot be: if by “organ” we only mean “pipe organ”, then it is almost
impossible for any organist to maintain a brand identity in a way that is competitive on
the world stage.
then it is almost impossible for any organist to maintain a
brand identity in a way that is competitive on the world stage.
I have loved the pipe organ since I was 4, and have spent almost 28 years playing it –
from the tiny instrument in my Pennsylvania hometown, already 100 years old when I
first touched it in 1985, to the great organs at Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall,
Disney Hall, Berlin Philharmonie, the Mozarteum, and many more. Just as in life, however,
you cannot change something by loving it, and the pipe organ remains incompatible
with today’s infrastructure of relevant, commercially sustainable music-making.
The musico-commercial infrastructure revolves around, and will only increasingly depend
upon, strong brands, especially where soloists are concerned. The challenges the pipe
organ presents to any organist hoping to be part of this infrastructure are such selfdefining
characteristics of the instrument that even to consider them problems is practically
to take a de facto argument against the pipe organ itself; but problems they nevertheless
are. Firstly, every pipe organ is different, in ways both so fundamental and so
intangible as to defy description. As an example, take just four of the organs I’ll play this
fall at Auckland Town Hall, the San Francisco Symphony, the Kennedy Center Washington,
and Berlin Philharmonie – all so completely different not just in musical character, size,
and personality, but in their actual mechanical and tone producing systems as to barely
be recognizable as members of the same instrumental family. By dint of definition it is
impossible to realize an ideal vision of a musical work, let alone to create the magic of a
night capable of standing in memory of every ticket buyer, when the instrument on which
the evening turns is different in every case. Harder to estimate, but even more stressful,
is the expense of the time and energy involved in learning new instruments night after
night – building and rebuilding works again and again with different and usually less than
satisfactory materials – under a day-to-day schedule of relentless international touring.
Secondly, every pipe organ of a certain size is immobile. And here we realize that the
pipe organ, in its physical immobility, is its own metaphor for resistance to change. It
literally isn’t going anywhere.
The degree of control over tone, speech, rhythm, and a
thousand more expressive parameters, are tangible in this
instrument in ways for which the organ builders of
the early 20th century would have happily sold their souls.
My hand does not tremble to write that the organ of my dreams is not a pipe organ, but
a digital organ. The tasteful cough and the uncertain, usually averted glance of the skeptic
is encountered at this point, when the classical ideology that “acoustic equals good,
but amplified bad” rears its graying head. Viewed from the cloisters of the traditional
organ, this is heresy; let it be, for when seen in the centuries-long history of organ building,
the digital organ is more ally to tradition than threat. The advances that have given us the
“eclectic” contemporary pipe organ (viz. Disney Hall, Suntory Hall, Berlin Philharmonie,
etc.) all depend upon the application of the computer for the generation of music at the
hands of the organist. This is true whether by “generation” we mean the system used to
vibrate air or, equally important, the system used to control the movement of the organ’s
keys and stops and, therefore, its response to the performer. Hardly one organ is to be
found in any significant hall in Europe or America without a digital console control system
– even in a quasi-historic organ like that at the Mozarteum – and the musical potential
of new controls made possible by these systems has already been taken for granted
in the organ technique taught in many conservatories since the mid-1990s. At 32, I am
already old enough to have experienced much of the music world’s distaste for the
digital organ’s adolescence. But considered in light of even the last 200, let alone 1800
years of the organs’ history, the progress charted in that adolescence has been wildly
prodigious. In fact the “electronic” (by which we might mean the pre-1971 analog, as
‘well as the still-experimental 1971–2000 digital) organ is an instrument whose lifetime is
already behind us.
In the instruments of Marshall & Ogletree, the visionary Needham, Massachusetts builders
of the touring organ, a leap has been made which has the potential to redefine everything
we think about the organ in general, let alone any preconceived concepts about
what a digital organ can (or, usually, can’t) be. The degree of control over tone, speech,
rhythm, and a thousand more expressive parameters, are tangible in this instrument in
ways for which the organ builders of the early 20th century would have happily sold their
souls. The great advances made by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, E. M. Skinner, Henry Willis, and
the other great organ builders of the 20th century were all in the interest of increasing