Relentless

The organ was one of the earliest recorded manufactured instruments, and is said to have been invented in the third century B.C. by an Alexandrian engineer called Ctesibius, who attached an air supply to a set of pan-pipes. (Interestingly, he is also credited with inventing the first mechanical clock!) Since that time, the basic principles of an organ have remained fairly similar: a set of bellows pumps air into a box which is attached to a set of pipes. When a note on the keyboard or pedal board is pressed, the pressurised air is released into a pipe and produces a note. Each note requires at least one dedicated pipe, but to create more variety, organs use a number of different pipes for each note, some of which are entirely hollow, whilst others pass the air over vibrating reeds. The organist activates the combination of pipes he wants to use by means of a series of knobs (known as stops), which control which sets of pipes are in operation, and so the performer can blend the sound quality of the music rather like choosing colours from a paint palette. Unlike a piano, however, the keys on the organ are not touch sensitive, and so the only way to change the volume is by means of two large pedals, one of which opens and closes panels in front of the pipes, and the other, depending on its position, automatically activates louder or softer pipes.

It is weird to think that, until the 20th century, all of this was quite literally done by levers, and perhaps this in itself makes the organ such a mysterious entity. It is hard to fathom how such a simple premise can result in a sound which, at full power, may reach volumes approaching 140 decibels (db). A jet engine reaches about 100db, a pneumatic drill approximately 125db, and even a gunshot is only just about 140db, but in a church, depending on the acoustics, each sound can reverberate through the building for more than a second, quite literally creating a travelling soundscape for the seated listener. As the source of that sound is frequently behind the congregation, there is often a curious sensation during an organ recital of being trapped in a vortex, a sensation further amplified by the visual experience of a Baroque church’s almost unnatural height-to-width ratio – a ratio which, unlike most dwelling places, is entirely out of proportion to the size of a man. Truly, if the Church wanted to offer a theme park experience of personal insignificance in an unfathomable world, they could do little better than this.

However, there is a darker side to the sound of the organ – and I’m not just referring to the effect that wielding all of this power has upon the organist. The devil may indeed have all the best tunes, but it seems he also likes to have the best instruments, and stories abound of organ makers doing deals with him in exchange for a particular sound. Perhaps the most famous refers to Joseph Gabler who, when building the Weingarten organ, was unable to find exactly the right timbre for the vox humana (which is supposed to emulate the human voice).
Having therefore sold his soul to the devil, he proceeded to capture and kill a young virgin and use her blood to coverthe pipes. The resulting sound is certainly one of the most extraordinary features of the organ builder’s art, but in truth, to the modern ear, it actually sounds rather like the Hammond organ in Procul Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ (which may indeed be the most truly occult thing about it). But before you go dismissing this as just another fanciful piece of Baroque storytelling, it may be worth remembering that, by some strange coincidence, the organ at Weingarten Abbey sports 6,666 pipes…

Satanic contracts aside, the pipe organ has a much deeper secret which has only recently been revealed. Whilst it is well known that some of the pipes producing the very lowest notes can actually shake the building and produce the lowest humanly audible sounds, recent studies show that they can also set up slower vibrations, known as infrasound. At such low frequencies (below 20Hz), the sound is not actually heard, nor is it usually felt as vibrations through the floor or the fabric of the building. Instead, it is the organs in the human body that can start to vibrate in sympathy, resulting in strange physical and psychological sensations. In one study, test subjects reported feeling squeezing of the chest and neck, and being held by a ‘presence’, whilst in another, listeners at a concert reported ‘an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety, and even shivers down the spine’ when a low-frequency vibration was applied to the space. In fact, it is widely conjectured that infrasound may well be thecause of apparitions and hauntings, whilst recent studies also suggest that brief exposure to such frequencies can release endorphins that give a natural feeling of happiness and well-being. Thus the pipe organ, unbenknownst to its original designers, actually appears to stimulate psychological responses in the congregation which correspond to the heavenly and infernal teachings of the Church – the first example of subliminal advertising, perhaps.  

Almost oblivious to its own greatness, this ‘King of Instruments’ (in the words of Mozart) is the only visually inanimate purveyor of music before the invention of the radio. With the organist hidden in his loft, there is no external suggestion of activity, no movement of finger or mouth to be discerned. In the days before automation, unless you were one of the bellows operators pumping furiously to keep this leviathan sated with air, the calm mystery of its thousands of levers, trackers and valves would be total. Even if we risk our neighbour’s censure and crane our heads to look behind us from the pew to the organ pipes some 40ft above, our attention is largely drawn to the frozen Baroque fantasy of gold ornamentation – at every turn a leaf, a flower, a vine, the subtle drapery showcasing the carver’s art, and, watching over this orgy of extravagance, the most elegant angels and saints. Where is the instrument itself?

It is there, offering a glimpse of a few of its numerous simple ranks of plain pipes beneath the effusions of decorative distraction. All of uniform colour, symmetrically laid out in order of length, at last in this palace of fancy we find an element of control – the sturdy regulation of Enlightenment thinking underpinning the hedonism – and it is here that we find the Baroque organ’s other secret, for its visual manifestation is also a symbol of its musical aesthetic.

Whilst the Baroque period in music (c.1600-1750) is inevitably associated with the highly ornate, at its heart lay a movement aiming for a greater simplicity and directness of style. In contrast to the music of the Renaissance, which was largely concerned with surface beauty, Baroque composers wrote their works from the foundations up, first creating clear and simple structures which were then ornamented. Thus, just like seeing the structured and organised pipe work surrounded by gilded embellishments, so too do we hear the grounded, inexorable harmonies of the Baroque style supporting its ingenious and colourful surface flourishes, a balance which reached its zenith in the music of JS Bach.

Far less esteemed in his lifetime for his compositions, Bach was famous instead as a virtuoso organist and, in a field where many (including Handel) were manually dexterous, he was feted most particularly for his deft footwork. In Johann Sebastian Bach: his life, art and work, Johann Nikolaus Forkel notes:

‘Whenever it suited him, he could realise such astonishing, exciting, and lively chords at the organ through the use of his feet alone (whether or not he was playing anything else with his hands) that another could never quite imitate him even by playing with the hands… he ran over the pedal-keys with such agility that his feet seemed to be winged.’

It is easy to forget that organists have to choose which combinations of pipes best suit the character of the music, and that this has to change radically from instrument to instrument depending on their capabilities and the building’s acoustics.
The equivalent would be a conductor needing to assign the
notes of a symphony to different members of the orchestra each time he performed it with a different orchestra or in another hall. Yet here too, in his choice of sound palette, Bach was a widely acknowledged master. Forkel writes:

‘His method of registration was so unconventional, that many organists and organ builders were horrified when they saw his selection.
They believed that such a combination of voices could not possibly sound well, but they marvelled when they later noticed that it was exactly in this way that the organ sounded its best.’

But even to this day, the most important part of an organist’s arsenal is his ability to improvise, and I am quite certain that if a time machine is ever created, Bach’s organ improvisations will be the first stop on the musical grand tour. In Bach’s enormous oeuvre for organ we experience the widest variety of moods and forms, from grandeur to joy and simplicity to despair, and it may well be true that all human life and emotion is represented there. Most of us will, at some time, have thrilled to the famous opening of the Toccata and Fugue in d minor which opens with such an arresting flourish that, at times, it quite literally seems like an improvisation, and then it temporarily subsides as it turns into one of the most important styles of Baroque writing – the organ fugue. Here, starting with just one melody, others quickly join in to entwine themselves around each other and form a musical edifice no less grandiose or complex than the magnificent buildings in which they are usually heard.

This is extravagant music, but how much more extravagant would it be to have heard it as an improvisation at Bach’s own hands, to experience the frisson of the moment of creation itself?

The true glory of the organ, whether Baroque or Romantic, picturesque or utilitarian, lies not with the instrument, the builder, the carver, nor the architect, but with the performer. The organist may well record the music of others for our convenience, but his true nature, the seat of his artistry, is as a live improviser. Go and experience it, if only once, and feel that infinite instant, where time and place cease to exist, as the organist becomes the master of the moment.  

Hand-pumped organ:

J.S.Bach - Toccata e Fuga BWV 565-Karl Richter: