Buxtehude, Volume One

Dieterich Buxtehude and the Mean-Tone Organ, Volume 1
Hans Davidsson, organ
The GOArt North German organ, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden
Loft Recordings LRCD 1054

***

My first exposure to Hans Davidsson's projected complete Buxtehude cycle on this fabulous GOArt instrument (Volume 2, here) was a paradigm shift for me, one of those rare moments where something old and familiar is shown in a really new light. Having our eyes and ears thus opened to this new world, here's a further opportunity to wander around and absorb the newness of the old, and to continue our recalibration of Buxtehude's work. As with the other volume, this release mixes shorter, chorale-based works with more freestyle Praeludia and Toccatas.

(The extra notes required by quarter comma meantone are visible in this picture.)

The CD booklet is a bit more complete than that of Volume 2 (though still, rather frustratingly, devoid of a stoplist) and all these GOArt CDs are very generously allotted--this two-disc set runs to just shy of three hours total length spread over 35 tracks. I find myself more drawn to Dr. Davidsson's interpretations than I felt at first listening. My initial impression was that he was a mite stayed or lacking in energy; but given my penchant for things not being rushed, I'm coming to think he's on exactly the right interpretive track.

And again, the real star here is this magnificent organ, which the generous program lets Davidsson explore fully. The individual characters of the stops and different key signatures within quarter comma meantone tuning make for a larger and more diverse tonal world than we experience with the familiar equal temperament. Any given piece might be played in several different keys (and some exist in Buxtehude's hand in more than one), resulting, really, in several different pieces--the sonic character can be that different.


The acoustic is excellent for organ music--reverberant, but not stone-cathedral big--and the sound-capturing of the recording is first-rate. I eagerly look forward to the coming releases in the cycle, and indeed anything recorded on this instrument.

It's a GOArt World

French Symphonic Masterpieces
Hans Davidsson, organ
The 1998 Verschueren GOArt organ, Goteborg, Sweden
Loft Recordings LRCD 1054

• Guilmant: First Sonata (Symphony,) Op. 42
• Franck: Priere, Op. 20
• Widor: 2 movements from Symphony No. 6, Op. 42
• Alain: Intermezzo
• Duruflé: Suite, Op. 5

***

It is, apparently. My rapture with the recently-reviewed Volume 2 of Hans Davidsson's Buxtehude cycle recorded on GOArt's recent period recreation of a North German organ has led, naturally enough, to the acquisition of Volume 1 as well. I'll have two cents' about that shortly.

In the process of learning more about GOArt (the Goteborg Organ Art Center), I found that this North German organ was not the end of their surprises. Turns out that they are in the process of building a trio of period-faithful organs from distinct lineages. From these resources students learn hands-on about the mechanisms and sounds which played so large a part in the compositional schools in which we are still immersed today. I just can't overstate my fascination with this process, and with every detail of what has resulted from it.

The North German organ reviewed below is understandably their centerpiece, as the large and elaborate instrument was exhaustively researched and then designed and constructed in the school's own shops--an awesome accomplishment by every standard. But the North German organ was not the first instrument in the project. GOArt began with a similarly exhaustively-researched recreation of an instrument in the style of the French master, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Readers of these pages will recall that the Massachusetts firm of C. B. Fisk undertook quite a similar project at Oberlin College in Ohio in 2002; I've reviewed three... different... recordings... on this Fisk instrument, and have debated how close the firm came to hitting their mark. That another firm, this time with a university research staff in tow, would undertake the same project seems like lightning striking twice (in a good way). Then to find a recording of that instrument--one with Duruflé's Op. 5 Suite pour orgue particularly--was like a small lottery win for me.

This first GOArt organ was not built in the university's shops, but was entrusted to the Dutch firm Verschueren Orgelbouw BV from Heythuysen. After acknowledging that no existing firm was doing what Cavaillé-Coll used to do, an extensive search was undertaken and Verschueren emerged at the far end of that search. The chosen firm would obviously need to be one which was enthusiastically on board with building someone else's instrument, and with an extensive and diverse advisory board plus a university research team meddling in its operations, and the resulting collaboration bore fruit in 1998. As with the Fisk organ at Oberlin, the GOArt group researched every detail of Cavaillé-Coll's methods for constructing pipes and organ mechanisms, and the GOArt people then went to some pains to duplicate even the exact voicings of the various ranks by doing close A/B comparisons of their new pipes with the existing C-C pipework.

I think the Fisk organ at Oberlin College is a really fabulous and beautiful instrument, the outcome of a wonderful and exciting process; its a magnificent organ in its own right. But I don't really think of Cavaillé-Coll when I hear it. It's clearly French in general character, but it lacks some thing, some fingerprint that's found on all C-C's. I've speculated that the extreme lack of resonance in Finney Chapel put the Fisk people at a bit of a disadvantage, as none of C-C's famous instruments are found in such dead acoustics. I just can't help thinking that the profound intimacy of the acoustic has caused the Fisk people to voice the rough edges off the organ, edges which might have been beneficial--and certainly distinctive--in a larger acoustic. At the very least, the acoustic makes it difficult to assess how close the Fisk firm got to C-C's ideas. (The supplemental disc included with that first release addresses the question on everyone's mind: but what would it sound like in Notre Dame or St. Sulpice? But the inclusion of that disc, whereby the original recording is subjected to a computer alteration to place the organ in the acoustic of Chartres Cathedral, seems an admission of defeat. The oddity of Finney Chapel's sonic setting compared to any place we're used to hearing C-C's work is inescapable).

The space into which GOArt put their Verschueren organ was only a little more resonant than Finney Chapel, but GOArt specifically stipulated a minimum resonance they would accept and then took pains to accommodate that acoustic. This included researching what Cavaillé-Coll had to say about less resonant rooms. Turns out that C-C built quite a number of organs for private residences, which would naturally not have cathedral acoustics at their disposal, and the master had some distinct ideas about how to cope with this. Thus, GOArt's room was constructed specifically to order, including details like having the hardwood floor floating on sand, and having an insulating rubber layer between the inner and outer sections of the walls. The room is 59' X 35' X 35', so not large by cathedral standards. But it seems quite a sympathetic space for organ music, with enough resonance to help the organ blend.



Whatever the contribution of individual elements, all the research has paid off big: with this GOArt instrument, the Cavaillé-Coll illusion is very convincing indeed, quite thrillingly so. Though the instrument is relatively small--only 43 stops on three manuals, compared to 58 stops on the Oberlin Fisk--the stoplist and the voicing are spot-on. I would not be able to tell on sound alone whether this was a C-C or not (something I think I'd have little trouble doing with the Oberlin organ). GOArt's fidelity to C-Cs design is so comprehensive as to include a pneumatic-assist Barker Lever (on an instrument surely not large enough to require one, but the touch will be quite different from either electric or mechanical action) and to use mechanical combination pedals instead of the now-standard electronic pushbuttons. An electronic combination system was included, but only after the designers determined it could be added on without altering the period function or console aesthetic of the standard system in any way. Fanatical indeed. But the proof is in the pudding. I honestly can't think of what seminal thing an organ student would miss out on by playing this GOArt instrument over the actual Cavaillé-Coll. (True, they'd get Paris in the bargain, but only for a lesson or two.) The organ facade is configured in a shallow U shape, with the console in the middle and facing out into the hall, looking like a downsized version of the great organ at St. Sulpice without the statuary (and with simply-ornamented casework in sympathy with the concert hall's architecture).



As with the Buxtehude releases, Professor Hans Davidsson mans the Verschueren console for this release. Like his brilliant countryman Hans Fagius, Dr. Davidson demonstrates that he can play very convincingly in several styles and from very different periods. He brings the same deliberation to these works as to his Buxtehude, but he knows how to sound the organ to excellent effect, and he is well up for the dramatic moments. Cesar Franck's long-line Priere, which sounds almost like a 10 minute continuous melody, seems especially convincing. Likewise, in the denouement of the opening movement of Duruflé's Suite he lingers deliciously at the dissonant chords as the hands and feet move contrariwise, followed by three of the most beautiful minutes in all of music to close out the movement.

This is all a fantastic undertaking. Like the aircraft simulators I must work with in my job, I love that students at Goteborg are able to immerse themselves so effectively and completely in these worlds while never leaving the campus in Sweden. The pedagogical advantages seem palpable to me, though I think it's a really cool exercise even without the overt educational mandate. But even without a love of the process that brought us the instrument, this is a great recording of organ music. The recording itself is quiet and clean, and the performances are excellent. And the organ itself? It rocks.

Harrison's Greatest Skinner

(Sorry for another dinky picture.)

Organ of the Mormon Tabernacle
Clay Christiansen, organ
Klavier K 11044

• Louis Vierne: Finale from Symphony No. 1, Op. 14
• Robert Elmore: Rhythmic Suite--Pavane
• Camille Saint-Saens: Prelude and Fugue in B, Op. 99, No. 2
• Dmitri Kabalevsky: Variations, Op. 40, No. 1
• Felix Mendelssohn: Sonata in A, Op. 65, No. 3
• Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt--Morning Mood
• Will C. MacFarlane: Reverie
• Bach: Toccata and Fugue in d minor, BWV 565
• Bach: Arioso from Cantata No. 156 / Harpsichord Concerto in F, BWV 1057
• Robert Hebble: Rejoice!--Toccatino con Rico Tino
• Julius Reubke: Sonata on Psalm 94
• Clay Christiansen: Improvisations on All Through the Night' and 'Come, Come Ye Saints'

***

I'm a little surprised that so famous an organ as that in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City (well, famous for a pipe organ) is not better represented in the recording catalog. I have in my collection only two CDs, both by tabernacle organist John Longhurst, recorded a couple decades ago on two different labels. The instrument has been heard for years on radio accompanying the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and is featured on a much larger roster of recordings of the famous choir. But there's almost nothing in the way of solo recordings.

After seeing the organ in person at the Tabernacle, I went across the street to the institutional gift shop to see about any recordings available, and found only two of the organ solo, one of which I already had. The new one, a 2000 CD on the Klavier label, features another of the tabernacle's staff organists, Clay Christiansen, playing a variety of accepted standards--Mendelssohn, Bach, Vierne, Saint-Saens and Reubke--as well as some newer, lesser known things by Robert Elmore, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Will C. MacFarlane and Robert Hebble, plus a couple improvisations by Mr. Christiansen to finish the program off. Call me hopelessly elitist, but these newer works seem chosen more for their accessibility than their intellectual merit, though I'll allow that they let Mr. Christiansen show off some of the other tonal resources of the organ. Well, I'll give them some time: maybe they'll grow on me.



The organ was built by the Aeolian-Skinner firm in 1947, under the direction of the firm's president and tonal director, G. Donald Harrison, who considered the organ his masterwork. I've written a bit about the poignant story of Ernest M. Skinner's ouster from the company that bore his name, and his replacement by Harrison. Harrison was an employee and protegé of organbuilder Henry Willis of Liverpool; Willis was, in turn, a personal friend of Ernest M. Skinner. My sense from Dorothy Holden's Skinner biography is that Harrison's takeover of the firm wasn't really a surprise to anyone except Skinner himself; that is, perhaps Willis offered Harrison to the Skinner firm in a conscientious attempt by Willis to gain control of the firm. Whatever the truth of the allegation, the transition of the company from Skinner's to Harrison's control occurred quite rapidly. The fact was that Harrison's ideas were much more closely aligned with changing popular tastes than Skinner's, and Skinner was unable to adjust his thinking to accommodate. This Salt Lake instrument is the embodiment of what Harrison wanted the Skinner organ to become, and whatever the tempestuous lineage, it's an impressive achievement.

It's ironic that the most famous instrument still to bear Skinner's name is one which had no input from him whatsoever. Indeed, he was over a decade out of his own shop at that point. The forceful move in public taste away from orchestral imitation and toward advanced use of mixtures and mutations resulted in a kind of hybrid instrument, one with Skinner's mechanical advances and certain sonic concepts, but with Harrison's more forward-looking tonal designs. The pity is that the man who was taken under Skinner's wing and mentored could not find, or at least judiciously attribute, merit in Skinner's own work, and was apparently not able to provide custodianship--gentle or otherwise--to these forbears even as he steered the company down a new road. Indeed, he seemed to lead the charge to undo Skinner's work. And yet, the market wants what it wants.

And in a further irony--and, I suppose, an ultimate vindication of the view that Skinner's time was well and truly past--G. Donald Harrison himself was able to keep the wolves at bay only so long. The American Classic organ was fading rapidly in popular estimation year by year, and Harrison staved off the decline only a bit. The Aeolian-Skinner firm closed its doors altogether in 1971 (though Harrison was a decade in the ground by this time; Skinner outlived him). Customers wanted not a new version of the American Classic organ, but one unabashedly imitative of a North German instrument of 200 years before. In a sense, the thing that Ernest Skinner most hated was what in fact came to pass: the buying public sought out in ever-increasing numbers the European firms who were extrapolating from the state of the organ at the time of Bach's death. Those remaining firms who could adapt did so, and those who couldn't perished. From that radical rethinking, the industry stepped WAY back and moved forward from that point, thereby effectively repudiating much of what modernity had brought to the instrument.

Not surprisingly, the public determined later that perhaps a wholesale revision was not needed, so much as an adjustment. Few people are building Skinner-like instruments today, but a modern instrument like the Fisks at Oberlin or in the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, or the Dobson organ reviewed below; these are much closer to a Harrison Skinner than to the Flentrops and Marcussens and Brombaughs that were in vogue for a while in the '50s and '60s. Still, one sees things from both schools in many modern organs.

Though it's different in tonal character from Cavaillé-Coll's work, the suitability of the Tabernacle Aeolian-Skinner to the Romantic and post-Romantic French literature makes me wonder why more people have not come here to make recordings. Martin Jean's recent recordings on the Woolsey Hall Skinner at Yale of Vierne and Tournemire (plus Charles Krigbaum's Widor recordings on that same instrument) show off this music fantastically well. I'd love to see someone record all of Duruflé or some Vierne symphonies on the Salt Lake organ.

But for now we have Clay Christiansen giving us a taste of what the instrument is capable of. For that I'm grateful.

The Voice of the Gods

(Sorry for the picture. Old recording, so nothing else on the web to steal!)

Louis Vierne: Messe Solennelle Op. 16 for four-part mixed chorus and two organs
Connie Glessner, Fred Gramann, organ(s)
Choirs of Sacre-Coeur, Eglise Anglicane Saint-Michel, Eglise Americaine
Philippe Maze
Organ Works of Mulet, Tournemire, Hakim
Naji Hakim, organ
Motette CD 40081

***

When in Paris a decade ago, I attended a performance at La Madeleine (early evening on a weekday--people stopped by on their walk home from work for an hour of fabulous music; how cool is that?) that included the Messe Solennelle of Louis Vierne. Though I was already quite familiar with Vierne at that time, I had not heard this mass, and the combination of organ (famous Cavaillé-Coll) and organists (Francois-Henri Houbart and Yves Castagnet) and choir and venue and city and country captivated me utterly. Ten years later I still had not found a copy of that piece until now. When I saw it in the OHS catalog I snapped it up. Ironically, though I'm just finding it now, it was recorded 20 years ago--ten years prior to my visit.

This performance was recorded in the almost unbelievably vast Basilique du Sacre Coeur. The organ tears into the dour, dire opening chords of the Kyrie, thundering thru an acoustic which sounds like someone domed in the Grand Canyon. That acoustic is one of the star players here, and we are aware that it necessarily places huge demands on the organ builder. The challenges of having to fill with sound a space this vast must be quite an undertaking (something I thought about with the new Lynn Dobson instrument in Philadelphia's Verizon Hall, reviewed below). An organ, after all, is all about moving air, and large pipes and more pipes require more and more of it. (This is partly why an electronic organ will have trouble replicating a pipe organ: making and powering speakers which will move the volumes of air of a large pipe organ is a daunting and very expensive task--thus negating one of the expected advantages of going electric. You can get away with it in an intimate space, but vibrating the viscera of two thousand people a football field away from the source is another matter.)

The Sacre Coeur instrument is a Cavaillé-Coll originally constructed for a private residence in Biarritz (that guy was in a different line of work from me!) and moved to the cathedral in 1905, and it sounds like Cavaillé-Coll did every possible thing to get sonic horsepower out of the instrument. The reeds are brash to an almost cartoonish extreme, and the famous, shrill upperwork is there in spades. Even so, snarling beast that it is, the feeling is that it must grapple with the vast interior spaces, and the resulting sound is something different from your standard-issue organ recording, vast and mysterious and profound. This is the pipe organ at one end of the bell curve.

The organist at the Grand Organ here is Fred Gramann, someone of whom I've not heard. Turns out he hails from America originally, and studied in the late '70s with Marie-Claire Alain and my hero Maurice Duruflé. He is now the organist and Director of Music of the American Church in Paris. The Messe Solennelle features two organists at different instruments, and I do remember from the live performance I attended something of the interplay between the two performers. But the detail of that interplay is mostly lost in this vast acoustic. It's still a fabulous sound, but it seems difficult to determine different sonic sources.

In addition to the Vierne, we are treated to a few solo pieces, played by Naji Hakim, the successor to Olivier Messiaen at the organist's bench at l'eglise Ste. Trinité: a Toccata by Henri Mulet, the Prelude et Fresque of Charles Tournemire, and one of the organist's original compositions, a three-movement suite for organ called The Embrace of Fire. These seem as though they were recorded at a different time, and with different microphone placements.

For all the recordings of Cavaillé-Colls in and around Paris in my collection, this is the first time I've run across a recording in Sacre-Coeur. I saw the place when I was in Paris, but did not hear the instrument at that time. And for some reason it is not favored for recitals and recordings like those of Notre Dame, St. Sulpice and La Madeleine and St. Eustache (this last not a C-C, but magnificent just the same). So this was an especially auspicious find for me, and a thrilling addition to my collection.

A Visit to the Old Country

Wiel bleibt Wien
Waltzes of Strauss family, Joseph Lanner and Johann Schrammel
Thomas Christian Ensemble
Dabringhaus und Grimm, MDG 603 1466-2

***

Here's an unusual release. Conjuring images of Old Vienna, the Thomas Christian Ensemble gives us a collection of polkas and waltzes from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Thomas Christian plays the lead violin for the ensemble, which originally came into existence as the Vienna String Quintet--a standard string quartet plus double bass. It sounds as though most of these pieces were conceived for a small orchestra, but re-orchestrations and transcriptions were common at the time, and it's no stretch for there to be chamber versions of this music.

The performances here sound authentic and apt. Tempi are spirited, and the musicians play like a well-oiled machine. I have a number of recordings from D&G, and they're always wonderfully engineered; this is no exception.

It's wandering a bit afield from my normal mode, but this is light and high-spirited music, and it's a welcome diversion.

Paris via Philadelphia via Iowa

The Dobson Organ at Verizon Hall
Olivier Latry, organ
The Philadelphia Orchestra,
Christoph Eschenbach
Ondine Records ODE 1094-5

• Barber: Toccata Festiva
• Poulenc: Organ Concerto
• Saint-Saens: Symphony No. 3 "Organ"

***

On my layover walks around Philadelphia, I've run across the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts downtown a couple times. Looking like a huge, glass barrel laid on its side, it struck me at first like a futuristic hangar for a dirigible or the lab of a billionaire mad scientist. Or maybe a huge indoor greenspace. But no, it's a collection of performance spaces, including Verizon Hall, the new home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It took me a while to figure out that Verizon Hall was only one of several spaces under the Kimmel Center's glass roof, kind of like a traditional concert hall wheeled into the middle of the glass blimp hangar, a room-within-a-room.

I tried to get a peek inside the building last time I was there, but I could only get as far as a small ticket lobby at street level. The building certainly looks spectacular. It didn't even strike me that there might be a pipe organ in the space, so I was quietly thrilled when looking thru the Organ Historical Society's recording catalog the other night to stumble upon the inaugural recording of a new Lynn Dobson instrument in Verizon Hall, featuring the redoubtable Olivier Latry at the organ, the titular organist of Notre Dame in Paris, accompanied by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach.

An aside: I had some minimal contact with Lynn Dobson over 20 years ago when I was attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Out scouting for local pipe organs, I came across a then-new instrument by Mr. Dobson at the University Baptist Church in Dinkytown (the marquee said "A Liberal Church" and it turned out to be so). The instrument was a medium-small two-manual affair with tracker action and electro-mechanical stop action, and it spoke confidently into the fairly small space. I was intrigued enough to send a letter to Mr. Dobson asking if he were looking for assistance at his shop in Lake City, IA. He kindly and promptly replied that while he was not currently looking for help, he was considering moving his operations to the Minneapolis area and would keep me in mind.

So over two decades later I was surprised not to find that Mr. Dobson was still at work building organs, but that he was tackling something as ambitious as this new instrument for Verizon Hall. Billed as "the largest concert hall organ in America," the organ features four manuals, 110 stops and 7,000 pipes. It has both a mechanical action console in the organ case proper and a movable, remote electric-action console for use with the orchestra. This instrument would be a gigantic design and logistical undertaking for any organ firm, and is quite beyond the scope of what I thought Mr. Dobson would be up to.



I was quite wrong, it appears. The construction photos on both the Dobson Organ Company and the Kimmel Center sites give an indication of how involved the installation was, and at 32 tons and $3.7 million, it's a magnificent accomplishment by any standard.

The recording features three works for organ and orchestra, all recorded live during the inaugural concerts in 2006. It's hard to form a confident opinion on the instrument from a single recording, especially when the organ shares the stage with a large orchestra. But it makes all the right organ sounds, though it seems a bit dark for French music. For its size, it does not overwhelm with sound, which might be explained by many things: how it was recorded, the fact of full audiences for the performances, how Mr. Latry registered the instrument. It's certainly not a weak sound, but neither does it have that rumble-of-the-earth depth of a big Aeolian-Skinner, at least on recording. I'll be interested to hear it in a solo performance, either recorded or live, to see how much of this impression holds up.

Both orchestra and soloist give us note-perfect performances, and the Philadelphia Orchestra sounds great. This seems to constitute a bona fide trend of putting spectacular pipe organs back in concert halls, something of which I'm entirely in favor. A number of new and ambitious instruments have shown up on CD in the last few years, and here's another one. I've wrung my hands before about what the future has in store for the pipe organ, and each of these new installations makes me think the sky may not be falling after all.

One Mean Instrument

Dieterich Buxtehude: The Bach Perspective
Volume 2, Complete Organ Works
Hans Davidsson, Organ
Loft Recordings, LRCD 1092-1093

***

I've been unusually immersed in organbuilding philosophy lately. As detailed below, I've just finished Dorothy J. Holden's biography of Ernest M. Skinner, and now have run across this revelatory recording of an instrument (and its repertoire) that couldn't be much further from Skinner's idea and aesthetics.

Loft Recordings is releasing a complete issue of the organ music of Dieterich Buxtehude played on a recent instrument built as an authentic replica of what Buxtehude himself would have known. The organ on these recordings dates from 2000 and is the work of GOArt, the Göteborg Organ Art Center, which is a branch of the Göteborg University in Sweden. I ran across the CD--volume 2 of the ongoing series--at my old favorite music store in St. Paul, and it was the first I'd heard of the instrument or the recording series.

The instrument (which, in an unusual tactic, is described in detail not in the CD release notes but here on the recording label's website and here at the school's) is distinguished by both its design, which is faithful to every particular of period mechanism and physical and tonal construction, and also by its tuning. The organ is tuned to quarter comma meantone, which is quite uncommon today but was a standard tuning five hundred years ago. (I made a very basic exploration of the concept of temperaments a couple years ago in this post.) This method of tuning, like all temperaments, allows certain keys to be pure, or closer to pure, in exchange for the tuning errors being lumped into other keys, which then become progressively unusable. Implementing quarter comma meantone on an organ is not so simple as tuning the octave just so; rather, in order to have the popular keys reasonably in tune, enough other keys are affected that extra notes are added to each octave to help salvage the damaged keys. (So you would have, say, two different e flats to choose from, depending on which key you were playing in.) Sounds simple enough, but with an organ the extra notes means extra keys (which look like a standard keyboard mutated by radiation exposure) and extra pipes and all the mechanisms that feed them.

Well, things sound very different this way. I'm familiar with all of Buxtehude's organ output, and some of these pieces almost sound like different compositions. I love that equal temperament--which is in ubiquitous use today--was known in Bach's day but was rejected since it left NO key properly in tune, and this was deemed unacceptable. Partly this was so because nobody ever bothered to write for the key of g flat (so why not make some other key sound better at g flat's expense?), but it must also have been the case that their ears were attuned to much finer nuances than ours. As I've played the disc for several friends, some can hear something amiss and others can't. To my ear, the "off" notes sound really off, and (the whole point of the exercise) the "in" stuff sounds fabulously, gloriously IN. The end-of-piece resolutions take your breath away with their solid magnificence. I can very easily see that the inability of an instrument to do this would make for a bit of a blight.

The organist on this recording is Hans Davidsson, Professor of Organ at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and the general artistic and research director of GOArt in Göteborg. He is a specialist in historical performance practice and instrument building, and is an excellent advocate for this repertoire. His tempi are on the stately side, and he plays without a great deal of animation and electricity. This is excellent for elucidating the structure of the music and the beauty of the organ's sounds--and I am sympathetic to this approach generally--but at times Buxtehude's great multi-part Praeludia could use a touch more dash; he was, after all, the scintillating virtuoso of his day.

But if there's a criticism there, it's a small one. The use of quarter comma meantone allows the personality of these pieces to burst forth in a most unexpected way. Buxtehude's harmonic interplay takes on a very different and more inventive aspect when the individual keys have such distinct personalities. Dr. Davidsson grasps the totality of the statement which the package is making--again, a statement which might be rather new to many ears--and he makes a compelling case.

Seeing these two philosophies side by side--Ernest M. Skinner's orchestral American Classic and the North German instrument of the 17th Century--puts before you the very basic question of what an organ even is. What Ernest M. Skinner envisioned is a world away from what GOArt have created, and it's fair to ask whether they are both valid approaches. I love the American Classic for some things--for the huge sound, for the mechanical exuberance of the Machine Age, for the lushness and variety--but not for others. I think an organ without upperwork is almost a completely different instrument, and I think the period where organists played orchestral transcriptions (and thus needed orchestral imitation stops) was mercifully short. The GOArt instrument is not versatile. It does not acknowledge anything that's happened since 1700--Franck and Widor and Vierne and Leo Sowerby and Hindemith and so much more. But it brings the best of its own day to us so vividly that it's almost like going back in a time machine. It does this in a way that a modern instrument misses, in a way that validates the difficulty and expense of the exercise. We're reminded that the great musical minds of the day were not lesser than our own, and we get a little taste of the excitement that the genius Buxtehude offered to his public.

A really cool idea, an excellent recording, and great repertoire expertly played.

A Life in 250 Pages

Just finished with The Life and Work of Ernest M. Skinner by Dorothy J. Holden.

Skinner (1866-1960) was perhaps America's best-known organ builder, and the greatest practitioner of the American Classic Organ. From his shops in and around Boston he produced something shy of 1,000 instruments (both those entirely of his design and those bearing his name before he left his company) and had a profound influence on the course of organ building in this country and around the world in the first half of the 20th Century.

Holden's book covers the larger aspects of Skinner's personal life, and hits the high points of his career designing and building organs. She covers the important instruments, and details his work inventing new stops and mechanical innovations. After the fact of his ascendancy to the top rung of the American organ building ladder, the key unfolding for me was the ouster of Skinner from his own company in the early '30s. Already by this time the tide of organ design was shifting away from orchestral imitation and toward some connection to the organ of Bach's time. Skinner, who thought much of Bach's music was of interest only to academics, despised this trend. He had brought the American organ to a magnificent state of mechanical perfection and tonal flexibility, and he was understandably reluctant to say that his life's work should be abandoned and that what was needed was to step back a hundred years or more and start over.

In the late 20s he invited into his shop a young man from England who previously worked for the Willis Organ Company, one G. Donald Harrison. Skinner and Willis were fast friends, and Harrison arrived with the imprimatur of Willis; Skinner could hardly have said no, and seemed to have no desire to. Harrison came to America with more modern ideas of tonal design which Skinner allowed Harrison to demonstrate and to sell, with the result being that very quickly the paying public wanted Harrison's instruments and not Skinner's. The money side of the firm was quick to see the writing on the wall, and soon Skinner himself (who had no head for finances) was told that his only value to the firm was as a figurehead. And shortly afterward he was seen as a liability even in that role. The tide of public taste was shifting rapidly.

The worst part of the tragedy is that Ernest Skinner lived on for another 30 years, long enough to see the trickle of disapproval in his life's work become utter disparagment; he even had to sit idly by while organ after organ which he built--including many he felt were absolute artistic masterpieces--were discarded and replace with quite different instruments. Or worse, his masterworks were often gutted and re-made by the firm from which he had been ousted, the firm which bore his name. Far from helping to preserve any of his former boss's and mentor's work, G. Donald Harrison seemed to be leading the charge to correct the "defects" in Skinner's ideas. Ernest spent his final years in a kind of ongoing despair at the malicious invalidation of everything he had worked to achieve, and he died too soon to see a resurgence in interest and appreciation that almost inevitably followed. Though so many of his great instruments have been scrapped or altered beyond recognition, there are still a number in existence, and there are now several firms which specialize in restoration and preservation specifically of Skinner's work.

But the question of what the organ is meant to be is a fair one, and it's a question which arises inevitably when faced with the extremity of Skinner's philosophy (relative to the organ's long history). Skinner was building organs at a time when they were providing music for silent films, and when people attended organ concerts to hear transcriptions of the orchestral and operatic music which they would likely not hear otherwise. So the link between the organ and orchestral music was quite present in the early 20th Century, and this is an aesthetic which informed much of Skinner's innovation, both tonal and mechanical. But this tendency was a departure from the organ's history, if only in degree. Skinner's predecessors in England and France did have some orchestral-imitation stops in their organs, and indeed these instruments were often referred to as "symphonic" in character. But it's not difficult to see how a person might pursue this course and lose the historic essence of the organ in the process. Did Ernest Skinner cease building organs at some point and begin building one-person orchestras? It's a question of a degree along a scale, and many people felt that yes, he had. (It's worth noting that, whatever you called them or however you labeled, Skinner's organs worked very well and sounded all of a piece. We look at the stoplists now, especially the early ones, and see rank after rank after rank of eight foot pitch and the complete absence of mixtures and mutations, and think the sound must have been one-dimensional and block-ish, a wall of monotonous blare. But he voiced his stops for this environment, and things blended well together and produced a satisfying ensemble. Fashionable or not, he was an expert organ designer and builder, and his instruments worked very well and were the toast of the organ world for several decades.)

Another thing. I think the number of instruments he built says something important about the nature of organ building in the Machine Age. While Skinner organs were known for absolute quality of construction--he was known to lose money on occasion because he would not compromise on his materials--the assembly-line aspect of these instruments is a departure from historical practice, and there seems no way for most installations to have the kind of personal attention and detailed finishing that would traditionally have been the case. This is just an opinion of mine, an observation not backed up with any factual information. Many of these organs were quite large, and the placement of the extensive necessary machinery was often accomplished wherever there was space. This had to result in a lot of variability in how the pipes were heard, and in the focusing and aiming of the sound. Everything about these instruments was different from a North German organ of Bach's day: size, stoplist, placement, tuning, mechanics, everything. With such extensive stoplists as found on the typical Skinner organ, it's hard to believe that the voicing of individual stops amounted for much, since the pipes were often buried in swell boxes and mingled with a zillion other stops. On an historic instrument, one can often audibly distinguish individual ranks of pipes, and grasp the contribution of the sounds drawn; there is virtually no hope of this kind of intimate interface with a large symphonic organ.

There doesn't need to be a value judgment here. But there is surely a difference, and it's not absurd that these differences would come to matter to people who love the instrument and its repertoire. As one of those people, I found this a fascinating and sad book. I've had a little contact with Skinner's work in my past life, but mostly from the Aeolian-Skinner firm. And while my tastes have always run toward baroque and baroque-derived instruments, my exposure to Skinner's work caused a deep respect for all that he achieved. Holden's book has helped me to better understand the scope of that achievement.

A Coupla Pop Things

Long Road Out of Eden
The Eagles
Eaglesband.com 98268-4500-2
(20 tracks)


Kill to Get Crimson
Mark Knopfler
Warner Brothers 281660-2
(12 Tracks)

***

I graduated from high school in the spring of 1980. So, musically speaking, I was in my key formative years in the late '70s and into the '80s. I have a sister who is a few years older than me, and she was quite a music lover in high school; so I got exposed at a tender age to the art rock of the day: Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Supertramp, Yes, 10cc, Pink Floyd, Elton John and the like. I moved on from those things over time, naturally, but in pop music my ear is still rooted here in the aesthetic of 1980.

So I was interested to hear that, after 28 years, The Eagles were putting out an album of new material. After their active years from 1976-1980, they fell off the musical map (though as a staple of oldies radio stations everywhere their records have continued to sell). In 1993 they came back into the public eye with the album "Hell Freezes Over." There were three new songs on that album, but the album was really a revisiting of the music which had made The Eagles famous two decades before. They sounded better than ever; it was an album of really inspired playing and singing, though it did have a "nostalgia tour" stamp on it. Fast Forward another decade and a half, and it seems they've finally tired of revisiting the same four year period of their young lives.

(An aside: after my recent computer crash, I decided that I would make a point to buy a physical disc when I could--instead of availing myself of the convenience of downloading--and I was immediately put off by the Eagles' decision to sell the disc for the first year exclusively at... Wal-Mart! Ugh. I will drive a very long way to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club, but in this case I had to decide how badly I wanted the physical discs.

Thus were my principles compromised.

On the plus side, I only had to part with $11.88 for a double album, 20 new songs. So I may have funded the Satan of Capitalism, but not by much.)

The Eagles are renowned for a certain stylistic identity, for guitar-driven music which straddles the line between country and rock & roll. Their songs have always had a fairly strong melodic line with tight harmony vocal support, meat & potatoes instrumental playing, and the occasional soaring Joe Walsh guitar solo. But I don't think innovation has ever been their strong suit. Harmonically, the song structures of the new album are exactly what they've always done, which even at the time had not the slightest hint of daring. I didn't pay much attention to the lyrics in my earlier day, and now I've known those old songs too long to have any objectivity; so I can't tell if the lyric content of these new songs is a degradation over what they wrote before. But, in a couple songs especially, somebody had the Cliché-Mate 2000 turned up on full tilt. I love Glen Frey's voice, but he's most often singing songs which would sound a lot cooler in, say, Spanish--something that didn't remind me how bad the lyrics were. I Don't Want to Hear Anymore; No More Cloudy Days; You Are Not Alone: the titles say it all. But probably the most gag-inducing is What Do I Do With My Heart. (Yeah, it's as bad as it sounds. I don't think I've made it all the way thru yet.)

And when not hackneyed, the lyrics are often either awkwardly fitted to the music or, in the case of much of Don Henly's writing, snarlingly mean-spirited. I'm happy to hear a song from the Angry Left (I'd like to hear more of them), and I certainly have my pockets of bile for some segments of our populace (see Wal-Mart comment above, and anything I ever wrote about television and Republicans), but misanthropy doesn't make me want to jump up and sing. Mass stupidity seems an unlikely wellspring for compelling pop music. After watching some of the video content on the Hell Freezes Over DVD, I came to the conclusion that Henly was really not a pleasant person, petulant and self-important and very judgmental. His scathing lyrics here do not dissuade me from this impression.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily make for a bad song, and just under half of the set seems to hit the mark. The other half is either forgettable or cloying. The opening near-a cappella track No More Walks In the Wood screams "The Eagles are back," and there are several more tracks that invite repeated listening: J. D. Souther's How Long, the title track Long Road Out of Eden, the short instrumental I Dreamed There Was No War, Joe Walsh's The Last Good Time in Town. The South-of-the-border It's Your World Now, maybe. The rest I can take or leave. But that's still not too bad for 12 bucks.

So, for execution: A
For content: C

Mark Knopfler's latest is another matter. His history traces back to the English group Dire Straits and their eponymous first album in 1978. So he's another guy of about the same age, playing in a different corner of a similar mainstream pop music milieu. Dire Straits continued to play and record sporadically into the middle '90s before officially disbanding, but Knopfler has had a respectable career interspersed with this, both as a solo performer / band leader and as a composer for film.

The latest album is just released, and contains all original material. As a songwriter, Knopfler has no more innovative tools at his disposal than The Eagles, but he ends up somehow with a much fresher product. He has an engaging storyteller's gift, both in his lyric-writing and in his singing, and he is celebrated as one of popular music's greatest guitar players. But this release is all about his brand of mellow, tasty music, and his guitar playing is quiet and subtle throughout, yet deliciously appropriate and inspired. His singing is calm and subdued, but strangely compelling. In the fashion of Eric Clapton's best, this seems a CD with nary an iota of bullshit about it. He is a modern troubadour, doing what he seems meant in his bone marrow to do.

This one gets high marks. A.

Eine Kleine YouTube

I just can't help myself. I have to post this.

This past week I got my computer back (with most of the expensive, movable parts replaced--ugh) and had to wait several days before I got home to put my backed-up music files on the new hard drive. So I contented myself with listening to / watching things on YouTube. It's really astounding what one can find there.

This piece is not a stretch for classical music lovers--we might expect to find several versions of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit here. This one I've picked not because its my favorite interpretation--he seems to rush thru the climaxes without making a musical case for what he's playing--but because there's no production bullshit about it: just a camera pointed so that you can see what the pianist is doing.

Well, more or less. The suite of three pieces is renowned for being among the most difficult pieces to play in the entire piano repertoire, and Scarbo (the final and most difficult of the three) strikes me as being unplayable for practical purposes--or would, if I hadn't seen someone actually pull it off. I have ranked Gaspard de la nuit among my five favorite pieces of music of all time for 20 years--it's really magical, inspired music--but this is the first time I've actually seen someone play it. If I were a pianist, it would make me take up the ukulele.

The pianist here is Marco Francini, and I've not heard of him. Proof, I guess, that there are gods wandering among us. Enjoy.