One Mean Instrument

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

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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.