The Spice of Life

I started playing the drums in the school band in fourth or fifth grade. Mrs. Franklin (I think) was the band teacher at Nisswa elementary school, and I remember announcing to her on a whim that I was maybe interested in playing in the band. “Maybe? Or you’re interested?” she asked. So I had to commit. And when she began suggesting instruments I picked drums without hesitation. A couple years later, in 7th Grade, I made a friend on the first day of Mr. Aarestad’s band class who had much jazzier “moves” than I had ever heard, and I was immediately smitten, dying to learn what he knew. That started a lifelong friendship that involved exploration of contemporary drummers, as well as listening to all kinds of music. (Music featuring drums was the gateway drug, but we quickly moved into more classical realms, a shift that has stayed with me, the tail that wagged the dog become almost nothing but tail—tho I retain an appreciation for drums and drumming.)

Any focus on drums, especially with any kind of a jazz bent, leads inevitably to the great Buddy Rich, still considered probably the greatest drummer ever. But we listened to other people as well: Peter Erskine with Maynard Ferguson, Sonny Payne with Count Basie, Ed Thigpen with Oscar Peterson—as well as Nigel Olsson with Elton John and Liberty DiVitto with Billy Joel, anything with Steve Gadd, many others. Despite my big band orientation, one group I didn’t listen much to was Glenn Miller—maybe because my focus was so centered on drumming, and Miller was a more horn-oriented group. But along the way I ended up with a couple Glenn Miller recordings, both from the late 50s with bandleader (and drummer) Ray McKinley. I loved the more upbeat songs, and I especially remember loving a particular version of Miller’s longtime hit Kalamazoo.

Like all good obsessions, my fascination for the 1959 recording of Kalamazoo waxed and waned, but I remember listening carefully to it years ago and the appreciation of that study has stayed with me. 45 years later, I find myself zoomed in on it again. In addition to an updated arrangement (updated from his original '40s hit recording), and the letter-perfect execution by the band, I’m realizing that I’ve underestimated the drumming in the song—more than that, I'm thinking I've spent years missing a very different approach to drumming with a big band.

I remember reading that Buddy Rich himself expressed admiration for how Ray McKinley “drove” his big band, tho McKinley's approach is different and less ostentatious than anything I’ve heard Buddy attempt. Having said that, and before I discuss how I think this is so, it’s worth noting that the existing video clips of Ray McKinley at the drums make him seem much more circus showman and “entertainer” than Buddy’s more serious, all-business approach. McKinley raises his hands theatrically and does little wiggling flourishes (a '40s equivalent to a modern rock drummer twirling his sticks) and throws his arms out to the sides to no earthly purpose except to *look cool* to audiences of the time. It’s a showier version of what you might see on Lawrence Welk. So his approach to the drums was evidently NOT about avoiding ostentation. But—and I’m using Kalamazoo as my Exhibit A—his actual drumming is much more in a supporting role than Buddy’s. And his silly moves on video do not erase a really stellar performance on vinyl. 

There are stylistic things. His drums sound fairly low-pitch and are not loud, sounding like the calfskin heads and gut snare wires of 30 years previous. (Pictures show McKinley sitting at the kit with a steeply angled snare between his knees, very Chick Webb.) Where modern drums are individually miked, McKinley's kit seems just to be captured by the mikes set up for the other instruments. This contributes to the sense of his drums as a supporting, background role. He drives the band not with his ride cymbal but with a strong hi-hat swing, the cymbals held fairly loose by the foot and manipulated with the left hand while the right hand plays the rhythm. This technique harks back to the earlier era from which the Miller band came—again, like Chick Webb or Gene Krupa with Benny Goodman. By contrast, most drummers of the early ‘60s had shifted more to ride cymbal patterns as a foundation—and you hear that with any modern version today of the old songs: nobody drives a band with the hi-hat. His bass drum, instead of marking each quarter note quietly seems almost absent until needed for an emphasis. And this makes its use much more striking (it could be that without individual mikes you only hear the bass accents). Backbeats on the 2 & 4 are reserved only for climaxes, and then just for a bar or two. Emphasis.

I’m trying to decipher how or if these elements contribute to the success of the recording. Chicken or egg, there’s a clear sense that this driving and time-keeping is for the band’s benefit, enabling THEM to do the swinging. I think that’s the whole banana: his drumming is almost entirely focused on facilitating THE BAND swinging hard, whereas Buddy’s playing and drive are overwhelmingly front-and-center. Whereas one finishes a Buddy Rich song (let’s use the Sammy Nestico tune Ya Gotta Try from his “Class of ’77” album) with a breathless awareness of how hard Buddy has driven the band, you finish Kalamazoo with an awareness of how hard the band has swung the tune. You just naturally want to dance to it, where with Buddy you just stare in amazement.

Drums are an ostentatious instrument. Especially in modern times, the drummer is often center stage, encased in a large, imposing kit that makes a high proportion of the band’s noise. I think many aspiring drummers are drawn specifically to that noise and ostentation, and our own playing reflects this (like the high school girl who wants to sound like Mariah Carey—yes, I’m showing my age—by putting too much sugar on everything she sings, until it’s all sugar and no substance). I think I’ve always had a tendency to overplay, and I’m naturally drawn to the Buddy Riches and the Dave Weckls rather than the Elvin Jones or Art Blakey types. And maybe as I get older I begin to see the error in this thinking. While I don’t think anyone would consider the drums absent from McKinley’s 1959 Kalamazoo, he plays a more obviously supporting role than what Buddy Rich would have provided, and I think the song benefits from this. His playing is exquisitely musical, his time keeping deliciously metered, and the drums are used almost entirely to keep the band together and to accent. He steps up as needed—much like the trumpet section hits very specific notes at very specific times. And where I want to accent *everything* the band is doing, he lets THEM do the work and he accents either 1) what will help them hit their marks, or 2) points where the brass punches need a little extra for maximum effect. I’m used to Buddy emphasizing or underpinning everything, such that it’s almost like his band is supporting HIM. Which, as the named artist and the one people buy tickets to see, maybe they are.

All this calls into question my own approach to the instrument as being a constant, driving presence in any song, whereas McKinley seems to see the drums as a spice, an instrument intended to speak occasionally for emphasis. Is this an actual tectonic shift in how jazz was conceived or played? Or is it just the difference between the drummer as sideman versus the drummer as headliner? Ed Thigpen as part of the Oscar Peterson Trio is present at just about every moment, he and Ray Brown and Oscar sharing the microphone like the Andrews Sisters. He’s neither retiring nor just present for emphasis. Yet he’s not the star of anything either. I guess I struggle with how to place Ray McKinley who is doing (very competently) what drummers-as-sidemen always do, but driving from the very back seat in the bus, as it were. (And the whole discussion kind of sidesteps the different roles of the jazz drummer and the rock drummer.)

For decades I’ve read interviews with drummers talking about what the music needs and about playing what’s appropriate for the song, and I mostly dismissed that as lip service (tho guys like Steve Gadd or the late Jeff Porcaro have in fact played on recordings covering a huge range of styles). But nowhere have I heard someone drive a big band as skillfully as Ray McKinley without drawing any attention to his playing (at least not sonic attention). (Maybe it’s because he’s also the band’s singer, and that makes for attention enough. Fair question.) But I find myself asking why the song hits its marks so well, and how it does so when it avoids all the drumming conventions I instinctively favor? And that makes me ask what makes any song successful, and of course there's not one answer. But finding a different answer than what I'm used to seems like opening a door into a new room.

(This video does not very effectively support my thesis. The drums are at least as prominent here as any other instrument, and there's a strong emphasis on flash. But it does show Ray McKinley's style and musicianship.)

 

I'll Take Mine Medium Rare

Mendelssohn: Rarities

The Craighead-Saunders organ of Christ Church, Rochester, NY
David Higgs, William Porter, Hans Davidsson, Jonathan Wessler, Thatcher Lyman, Stephen Kennedy, organ; Christ Church Schola Cantorum, Stephen Kennedy, Director

Loft Recordings, LRCD 1119 (2013)

1. Allegro moderato maestoso [March] in C Major, MWV W44 (David Higgs) 2:55
2. Andante con moto in G Minor, MWV W15 (Thatcher Lyman) 1:30
3. Präludium in C Minor, MWV W28 (Thatcher Lyman) 3:39

Sechs Sprüche (Op. 79) (Schola Cantorum)
--4. Spruch #5, Im Advent, MWV B54 1:42
--5. Spruch #1, Weihnachten, MWV B42 1:41
--6. Spruch #2, Am Neujahrstage, MWV B44 3:04
--7. Spruch #4, In der Passionszeit, MWV B50 1:58
--8. Spruch #6, Am Charfreitage, MWV B52 1:44
--9. Spruch #3, Am Himmelfahrstage, MWV B55 1:44

10. Präludium in D Minor, MWV W2 (Jonathan Wessler) 5:38
11. Allegro in B-flat Major, MWV W47 (Stephen Kennedy) 3:00
12. Andante in F Major, MWV W30 (David Higgs) 3:20
13. Andante [with Variations] in D Major, MWV W32 (David Higgs) 5:41

Aus tiefer Noth schrei ich zu dir (Op. 23. No. 1), MWV B20 (Schola Cantorum, David Baskeyfield, organ)
--14. Choral (“Aus tiefer Noth”) 1:12
--15. Fuga (“Aus tiefer Noth”) 4:54
--16. Aria (“Bei dir gilt nichts den Gnad’ und Gunst”) 4:04 (Scott Perkins, tenor)
--17. Choral (“Und ob es währt bis in die Nacht”) 2:47 (Katherine Evans, alto • Robert Strebendt, tenor • Daniel Pickens-Jones, bass)
--18. Choral (“Ob bei uns ist der Sünden viel”) 1:30

19. Nachspiel in D Major, MWV W12 (Hans Davidsson) 5:36
20. Andante in D Major, MWV W6 (William Porter) 3:47
21. Allegro [Choral and Fugue] in D Minor/Major, MWV W33 (William Porter) 8:41

22. Verleih uns Frieden, MWV A11 (Schola Cantorum) 5:26 Pamela McGary, violin I, Manyui Cheung, violin II, Boel Gidholm & Kyle Miller, viola, Rosemary Elliott, violincello I, Colin Stokes, violincello II, Steven Seigart, organ

***

Not all of these pieces are unknown, but none of them are in regular rotation. Especially with the organ pieces, only the most comprehensive recordings will have all of these, and a couple I've never heard before. This recording has bubbled insistently to the top of my list of favorite acquisitions of the past year. Not for its newness, but for performances that belong on the topmost of top shelves. It's one of those recordings that sticks deep in the musical brain and I find myself thinking about it even when I'm not listening to it. Even six months after I acquired it.

Part of it--much of it--is the organ. The Craighead-Saunders organ in Christ Church of Rochester, NY is part of the Eastman School of Music. Built by GoArt's Munetaka Yokota and named after two of Eastman's most prestigious teachers, David Craighead and Russell Saunders, the instrument is an almost exact copy of a 1776 organ by Adam Gottlob Casparini in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Eastman website hints at a pretty large-scale research process involving some of the greatest organ builders in this country and in Europe over a period of six years that resulted in this organ. It's not a large instrument, 31 stops on two manuals and pedal, but it speaks with tremendous immediacy and intensity, and with its unequal temperament it simply makes delicious sounds. It's one of those very rare instruments where combinations of stops result in something more than the sum of their parts, and the tutti is almost other-worldly.

The organ is really more Bach than Mendelssohn, in that it represents the technology and tonal world of Bach's time. Though the original dates from a couple decades after Bach's death, this instrument is very much along the lines of what Bach would have known. Mendelssohn hails from a century later and the Romantic era of Chopin, but he was one of the first performers to champion Bach in concerts. And among Mendelssohn's varied output he wrote pieces like his Preludes and Fugues (three for Organ, six for Piano) that very much tip their hat to Bach. But I think more interesting than the question of whether the instrument here is appropriate for Mendelssohn (it surely is) is the question of how well it works with this music. And the proof is vibrantly before us here. These are just glorious sounds, period; the fact that they have some authenticity is purely a bonus.

(An aside: I'm reminded, as I've said elsewhere, of E. Power Biggs's recording of the three Hindemith Sonatas in the late '50s on the then-new Flentrop organ at Harvard's Germanic Museum. This was another instrument that very much owed its vision to the instruments of Bach's time, and yet here was Biggs playing a contemporary German-American composer on it to thrilling effect. The lesson there seemed to be that great sounds make for great music, even if the sounds aren't necessarily exactly what the composer had in mind. I've always wondered what César Franck would sound like on that Flentrop--or on this Craighead-Saunders instrument, for that matter. Less-than-authentic, surely, but I'd venture that the result would be quite compelling just the same. Robert Delcamp's 2007 Naxos CD of Widor pieces on the fabulous, tempered Martin Pasi instrument in Omaha gives us a tantalizing glimpse of this mixing of worlds.)

But it's not all the organ. The CD is about half organ and half choral music. And the choir is also a revelation. I can't find much information about the Christ Church Schola Cantorum beyond its being formed in 1997 by director Stephen Kennedy to sing at regular church services. But there is undoubtedly a deep talent pool around one of the country's greatest music schools, and the small choir is miraculous. Their intonation is perfect and they blend like, well, like an organ. I am admittedly extremely fussy about solo voices, and the soloists here seem adequate or better; but the blend of the whole ensemble is among the very best I've heard anywhere. Really first rate.

Two pieces stand out for me. One is the Allegro in d minor (Chorale and Fugue), the second from his unnumbered Three Little Pieces. The review piece from the Gothic website says this is Mendelssohn's longest single movement for organ, and was apparently culled from duty in his Sonatas for that reason. I have several other recordings of the piece, and Director (and here organist) Kennedy just gets more brilliantly inside this intriguing work than anyone else has managed to do. And the d minor key is one to which the organ's unequal temperament is especially congenial. About halfway thru the piece Mendelssohn shifts gears, moving from a Toccata-like opening (via a pedal solo) to a grand chorale statement in D Major on full organ. This leads to a fugal treatment to finish out the piece. That chorale statement is verily the poster child for what an organ is supposed to sound like: grand and glorious and stately and moving--every time I get to this passage I find myself adding a notch or two to the volume knob. As a piece of music it's incredibly satisfying, and as a demonstration of this particular organ it's perfection itself.

The other piece is a little-known cantata for choir and organ and strings called Verleih' uns Frieden. This is another piece that's not entirely unknown, but (as the album title suggests) it's... rare. Unlike Mendelssohn's other cantatas, Verleih' uns Frieden is apparently the composer's own entirely, not having a chorale melody as an underpinning. Lest we think all the good melodies were already taken at this point, Mendelssohn here gives us something that sounds like it wrote itself, a perfect melody like Danny Boy wrapped in a simple setting of absolute perfection. It's so fluid and effortless that it sounds like was formed with the earth and we just discovered it later. I have another recording of the piece, but again this particular combination of organ and choir gives us something greater than the sum of its parts. 

A note about stylistic things. The choir is here accompanied by the organ (organist Steven Seigart) and a sextet of strings--and, apparently, a bassoon, though none is credited. Throughout the whole CD, there is a sense of intimacy and control. No tremolo is used on the organ, and ensemble singing is all done without any vibrato. I have a very strong preference for this treatment, and it contributes to the kind of locked-in sound that temperaments make possible, and which vibrato, especially in ensemble singing, obliterates. But in Verleih' uns Frieden the strings also play without any vibrato. In a piece of Romantic music this is nothing short of a revelation to me! I'm so accustomed to (and continually irked by) contemporary string players' constant waggling vibrato that its absence here is striking. It not only allows players to minutely tune to each other, but it paradoxically makes the ensemble sound tighter and yet make each voice distinctive.

This is a philosophical matter. For the last 100 years, it seems, the use of vibrato is a ubiquitous convention in both singing and string playing; one generally has to get into baroque period performance for strings and even back to Renaissance music with singers (or popular music) to get free of the convention. And I certainly can't make an absolute case for the practice one way or another. I can only say that my ear responds much more readily to vibrato-free tones, and it's a rare circumstance that I feel benefits from more than the sparest use of the device. (I've long thought that my love of harmony, which is primary to my love of music in general, is at the root of this; harmonic precision is impossible without absolutely precise pitch control.) I'm aware that this string treatment will not be to everyone's liking. To those accustomed to contemporary practices, this may sound a bit raw. But I for one will cast my vote for this every time.

Anyway. This is my vote for Album Of The Year. Kudos to all involved for producing something quite special and satisfying.

La Condo Engloutie

Donald Fagen: Sunken Condos
Reprise Records (2012)

***

I occasionally find myself sucked into the vortex of musical genres. I suppose it's something to do with collecting, or with immersion in any subject matter that can be dissected. Maybe it happens to wine people or beetle enthusiasts or film buffs or avid readers. Music is like language, the assemblage of discreet, (presumably) abstract sounds into a cohesive whole that gets assigned some agreed-upon meaning. But musical "meaning" is an elusive thing. Music involves such a degree of abstraction--indeed, music without lyrics is almost completely abstract--that it's difficult to talk about how or why a thing "works" musically. I haven't studied music theory, though my sense is that compositional "rules" are more a collection of accepted things, looked at and assigned over-the-shoulder, as it were, than actual constrictions. Better maybe talk about conventions than rules. As in many fields, a genius can write her or his own rules, and the conventions shift to accommodate; it's this stretching and breaking and subsequent rewriting of the rules that constitutes progress. Or at least movement (since without meaning there can be no "progress" per se).

When I insert a CD into this computer to add it to my iTunes library, the program automatically queries the CD Database (CDDB) and downloads the metadata--song titles, album name, artist and composer, etc. And genre. This data--virtually everything except song title and artist and album name--is almost always wrong, subtly or wildly, which drives me crazy and causes me to have endless hours of editing waiting for my down time. But that's another post. Probably almost half of my music collection is organ music, and like any music lover I am naturally attuned to the the myriad subgenres of my areas of interest. But the CDDB, not surprisingly, never EVER gets this stuff right.

Anyway. I think about this as I listen to Donald Fagen's latest solo album (from late 2012), Sunken Condos. Fagen is, of course, one of the two brains behind Steely Dan. After a bunch of albums in the '70s and '80s, SD disappeared from the scene for about 15 years, and then released a couple albums in the 2000s that picked up right where they left off. And in the interim Donald Fagen produced a couple solo albums in very much the same sonic vein.

I was going to put in a phrase there like "Steely Dan, the jazz-rock fusion group from the '70s up to the present day noted for their sophistication" but here I am faced with this genre problem. What the hell do you call them? Fusion? Well, not in the Weather Report or Return to Forever vein. They're certainly popular, but Pop doesn't work, and they're not Rock and Roll in the Rolling Stones mold. Jazz is the wrong term, as--if we are going to honor the conventions--the term implies improvisation; there is very little improvisation involved on a SD or Donald Fagen record. In fact, it's hard to imagine a more tightly-controlled music than this. To whatever extent a genre requires spontaneity, SD should not be in that genre. There ARE solos, of course, but these are closely circumscribed. The Dan's live shows are more free-flowing, but even then musicians are kept on a short leash. And their particularity in the studio is the stuff of legend. It's a sonic world that would pretty quickly devolve into something else if others were allowed to run too freely. But not to worry, folks not being allowed to wander unsupervised in Donald Fagen's world does not mean stagnation or boredom or lack of interest. There's a sameness to all this, yes, but because the substance is so rare we cannot get too much of it. (And it's a testament to something that it all stands up so well to repeated listenings--Donald Fagen's solo tracks are among the most revisited in my library.)

I've been on a quest, for years, really, to find more music in or near the genre of Steely Dan. And I've consistently failed in that quest. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, so that particular tonal and instrumental and milieu rather set my ear and is reflected in my sonic sense of home (at least for this kind of popular music): Roland Orzabal (another particular favorite), Supertramp, Doobie Brothers, Eagles, Bee Gees, ELO, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel, The Police, Steve Winwood. And much of the newer stuff I've come to love does not deviate so far from this sonic world, even if the genre business might make categorizing a bit sticky: Mark Knopfler, John Mayer, KT Tunstall, Keane, Coldplay.

But none of these artists is doing what Steely Dan does, especially in the Dan's final four or five albums (since, say, The Royal Scam), when the substance I think of as "Steely Dan" was firmly set. Whatever we call it, Donald Fagen's solo albums belong very much in the same genre bin as Steely Dan's work. This is not surprising, of course, and it shows Fagen's huge influence in SD's sound and aesthetic. So this makes a new Donald Fagen album almost impossibly precious, because there's only a handful of albums of this genre and we're unlikely to see much (or any?) more.

If we can't define the aesthetic by assigning a genre, how else might we summarize it? What, exactly, makes up their unique sound? Well, I don't have much more success coming at it from this angle. It's partly a harmonic thing--they employ a really sophisticated harmonic palette, one you're much more likely to find in jazz than in anything pop-related. Especially in SD's last few albums and in Fagen's solo work, there's nary a normal chord progression to be found. Listen to "Maxine" from Fagen's first solo album, 1982's The Nightfly, with its fantastic storytelling piano intro; or "The Night Belongs to Mona" from 2006's Morph the Cat (among many other viable candidates). Utterly engaging and perfectly musically logical, even if you can't figure out why it should be so (which is exactly what I thought / felt when I first listened to Debussy's Preludes). The fact that you won't hear this anywhere else convinces me that nobody else *could* write it.

There's also a craftsmanship element to this music, an obsessive precision about every single thing one hears. There's never a note out of place, and everything is exquisitely recorded with meticulous attention (they won a production Grammy for Gaucho in 1980, I think, and they've stayed with this close-miked, everything-upfront sound that's almost like having the music piped directly into your brain). I'm quite aware that for many people there's no value in never hitting a wrong note nor in extraordinary precision. Music isn't about this to them; instead it's supposed to be an emotional flood from the heart. I respect this, and perhaps my affection for SD's / Fagen's precision is more reflective of my personal quirks. I've always preferred recorded music to live, as the studio gives a musician a chance to think out their music and get it right. Again, this is surely not everyone's priority. But it's an inescapable element of this specific sub-genre. Even 30-year-old albums continue to yield surprises and reward careful listening. And the more careful listening I do, the more I yearn to explore other players in the same sonic neighborhood--and the more I'm struck by how there isn't anybody else in this neighborhood.

Their lyrics are often ironic, oblique, sometimes sardonic, and they frequently tell a little story. It's very urban world, one of courtship and drugs. Again, they kind of write their own genre.

Fagen says his first three solo albums (The Nightfly, 1982; Kamakiriad, 1993; Morph the Cat, 2006) were conceived as a trilogy, with shared themes. That little chapter wrapped up with Morph the Cat, he says, and Sunken Condos stands on its own. But (not to dispute the artist himself) I don't know that the listener finds any meaningful connective tissue between those three albums. The Nightfly looks backward while Kamakiriad looks into the future. But Morph the Cat? Pretty much present day, like Sunken Condos. In any case it's all very much the same sonic world (I'll often play his albums jumbled together, tracks appearing alphabetically rather than by album, and there's little to mark songs stylistically by album or age. It's all of a piece). Fagen writes by telling stories, by introducing us to characters and places and events.

Thematically, Sunken Condos's songs visit familiar territory. There are songs about love in the autumn years (always with a much younger woman, a topic first explored in 1980 with Hey Nineteen)--Slinky Thing, The New Breed, Planet d'Rhonda; about city life--Miss Marlene, Out of the Ghetto (a cover of an Issac Hayes tune); and a couple retro-fantasies--The Good Stuff, Memorabilia. And there's the delicious Weather In My Head, ranked #21 on Rolling Stone's 50 Best Songs of the Year.

The CD relies on the production efforts of multi-instrumentalist Michael Leonhart, though the sound is pure Fagen. This interview with Fagen and Leonhart gives some indication of how an album like this is assembled, and I'm interested in how they appear to "audition" a bunch of people, people they've kind of let into their sonic world to play, and they select those who "get it"and let the others go. What a nerve-wracking thing for a musician! It's like Woody Allen auditioning the guy who gets to try to play him in Allen's next film: who can be Allen as well as (or perhaps better than) Woody Allen?

Lastly, a few specifics. Inevitably, some songs grow on one with repeated listenings. After the home run of Weather In My Head, I'm particularly taken with Miss Marlene, a catchy and slick tune that wraps around a haunting story. And--in a very Steely Dan detail--the haunting bit is two lines buried in the middle of the song and rather oblique at that. The song sounds like one thing but is really something else. Lovely. Also Planet d'Rhonda and Good Stuff. Since the tunes don't necessarily come right to mind--at least not without repeated exposure--it's something in the vibe that tickles the brain and makes me crave to hear them again and again.

I was surprised that horn player Leonhart was actually the drummer for the album (after the magnificent Keith Carlock on the last couple albums). He lays down an excellent and almost drum-machine-basic groove here. But the drummer in me wants to nitpick just a little: the kit sounds as if played with great precision and a feather-touch. I can't help wishing for a bit more energy or force. That part of it sounds, well, geriatric.

That bit of utter trivia is about the only criticism I can find. The rest of it is pure gold, every bit of it.

My Idea Of A Horror Story

I bought a DVD in Hong Kong of the fantastically brilliant Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman playing Chopin and Schubert. I have a number of Zimerman's recordings, and he is inarguably one of the greatest piano talents on the planet. He's especially fantastic with Debussy and the works of his fellow countryman, Chopin.

He has also become famous for interrupting his U.S. concert performances to speak out angrily against this country's military aggression. Normally very taciturn, he has a couple times declared a boycott of U.S. performances, first in 2006 until George W. Bush was out of office, and later altogether. Also in 2006 he criticized the U.S. extra-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay, and in 2009 he stopped a concert in Los Angeles to denounce President Obama's continuation of a missile shield in his country.  "Get your hands off my country" he said in a quiet but angry voice. A number of people got up noisily and stormed out of the hall, some shouting obscenities. (This fact itself astounds me; who is so unable to brook criticism of a controversial political-military decision by their country that they publicly shout obscenities at a resident of the other country who objects to the policy? How perfectly Bill O'Reilly to impulsively shout an obscenity-laced objection in a packed auditorium.) It seems some in the audience cheered him, while others "told him to shut up and keep playing."

I'd boycott this place too if my very legitimate frustrations were treated thus.

But reading all about this I learned of an even more horrific factoid. It seems he has an even more tangible and personal reason to hate this country with the fire of a thousand suns. Like many of the greatest pianists, Zimerman routinely travels with his own personal Steinway, but unlike most pianists he is a master technician and has personally altered and finely adjusted his instruments. Into this china shop let us introduce the bull of the TSA:

"Shortly after 9/11, his piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York's JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument."

They WHAT??!  You've GOT to be kidding. Some coven of strutting, high-school dropout martinets don't like the smell of a crated, $120,000 Steinway D Concert Grand shipped in from Poland and they have it destroyed?! "Just to be sure," one of the reports said of the TSA agent. Sure of what? That you're a weapons-grade imbecile? I am just absolutely speechless at this. Just getting fired for that would be nowhere near penance enough, even if the country paid to buy him another (and I can find no mention that it did). An artist of this caliber has a connection to his musical instrument we cannot begin to fathom. Would a TSA agent be allowed to destroy a Stradivarius violin that they thought "smelled funny?" Do they get to kill your dogs if they think there is cocaine in the digestive tract? Couldn't they quarantine the instrument and call in a Steinway technician?

To have such a thing destroyed on a whim is unforgiveable; I'd be on a lifelong personal vendetta against any and all who were involved. At the very least they should be subject to extraordinary rendition and free housing in the secret, black-ops prisons we seem unable to function without.

Meanwhile, I'm off to buy a couple more of his albums to help fund his recovery.

The Idea of Genius

(A young Gould, with the original chair but before he took to raising the piano on blocks.)

I've been thinking the last few days about the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (the Wikipedia summary is excellent). (I also seem to have forgotten that I started this topic a year ago in this post.)

For those not familiar with his story, he is one of history's most gifted and eccentric musicians, someone who burst onto the scene in 1955 with a revelatory recording of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. He was 23 years old at the time. He was immediately hailed as a phenom and the Goldberg recording took off in a fashion then unheard-of for a classical release. An otherwise obscure work suddenly became mainstream, and Glenn Gould became a household name overnight. His manner of playing was, and remains, immediately recognizable: dry and dynamically-constrained (especially his Bach) with a kind of spare, puritan beauty, and with an astounding faculty for counterpoint. His was a very un-luxurious--un-romantic--approach to the piano for the time (not to say unemotional), and he revolutionized how we think of Bach on a modern grand piano.

He is renowned for his almost obscenely wide-ranging and exhaustive musical mind--and we'll come back to this--but also for his eccentricities. Indeed, more people probably came to know of him by his oddities than by his brilliance with what is after all a fairly obscure musical specialty. I feel a bit like a brain-cell-killing People Magazine article talking about his tics and mannerisms and his very odd career path, but in the final analysis they are extraordinary things, unavoidable aspects of one of history's most significant and noteworthy musical personalities. They are part of his story.

One of his oddest traits was his hostility to performing in public. He came to feel there was something competitive and gladiatorial in live musical performance, and so in 1964, at age 31, he renounced playing concerts, and he kept this resolution for the rest of his life. But for the few years where he graced the concert stage, he presented quite a spectacle (which, of course, played some role in how he viewed the music-consuming public).

If his playing were not so transporting, his manner at the piano might suggest some form of mental illness. He could not keep himself from vocalizing audibly and swaying precariously while he played; he often conducted himself and others if either hand were not in use, and he could not keep still when he was not playing; his posture at the piano was most unorthodox: he insisted the piano be raised a few inches on wooden blocks, and he sat on a low, folding wooden chair with the legs chopped off, and he slouched in the chair so that his nose was not far above the keyboard (this chair, which was originally altered by Gould's father, traveled with him everywhere, eventually coming to look like something salvaged from a junk yard--very odd indeed in Carnegie Hall! When it finally fell into splinters, he was bereft and unable to play properly, and he eventually commissioned an almost identical custom-made replacement, which he used until his death); the chair would creak distractingly as he swayed around during the performances, and between the squeaking and the singing his recordings all sound as though a brilliant pianist kept a disturbed friend at his side for the performances; his appearance was almost comical, as he slouched on his child's chair with his legs crossed and pedaled in his stocking feet, often with the wrong foot--his clothing was ill-fitting and often dirty and unkempt, and he played at least one concert with mismatched shoes; he was a legendary hypochondriac, traveling everywhere with a huge cache of pills and wearing a heavy topcoat and hat and scarf and mittens even in the hottest weather.



This list can go on and on, but it takes us ultimately in the wrong direction, I think. What remains to us after his death from a stroke in 1982 (at age 50) is a legacy of really extraordinary recorded performances. The recordings are of piano music, primarily, ranging from the pre-Baroque up to really compelling advocacy of contemporary composers. But he also left quite a bit of writing, and he worked in radio and television as well. One of his passions was for experimental radio quasi-documentaries (which he called "contrapuntal radio"), and he was one of the first people to see the possibilities of the new and emerging technological media.

He was particularly innovative with his own recordings. His rejection of concertizing stemmed in part from his conviction that recording was going to revolutionize how we consume music. It seemed quite reasonable to him that we might assemble our own favorite Mahler symphony by cobbling together individual movements from different recordings according to our preferences. And he was one of the first to record many takes of a work, or a part of a work, and then assemble a "perfect" version from the bits and pieces. This is, of course, commonplace today. The recording studio (or radio studio or television studio) enabled him to experiment almost without limit, and gave him absolute control over what was put forth to the public.

In the end it's his piano work which has set permanent hooks in me. So many of his recordings--of Bach particularly, but of other composers too--set the bar for the repertoire he tackled, and many remain the gold standard decades later. He had an ability--unique, in my experience--of seeming to portion his brain off into however many segments as he had lines or parts to play, and to give each line what seems like top billing. He simply does counterpoint better than anyone else. Whatever his approach, whatever the admixture of composer and performer, his musical output remains absolutely compelling. To watch him playing on video is to observe complete mastery. More than mastery: his command of the piano itself makes this technical part of the process seem the least of his challenges, and I don't know that I've ever heard or seen a single incorrect note from him (I say this not because I think it should be anybody's priority, but because it shows something of how seamlessly he melded with his instrument).

He came from quite unextraordinary circumstances, showing signs of his odd, savant-like personality from a pretty young age. He rarely strayed far from Toronto, especially once he stopped concertizing, and as time went on he lived more and more of a hermit's life where he interacted with people mostly over the telephone and tinkered with his technology in his own spaces. But it's hard to find fault with his approach when it yielded the results it did.

So here's a tip of the hat to one of my favorite geniuses.

***

There are a whole host of videos on YouTube with which to make one's introduction, and I'll just finish up with a few of my favorites.

Here's one that shows how he thinks and speaks about Bach. He had a pretty dense and high-flown way of talking and writing, but his understanding of his subject matter is always encyclopedic. I'm especially amazed at how he plays while he's talking, and in the same four-brained way!



And here's one where he plays the first movement of Bach's Sixth Partita:

The Adventures of Wunelleberry Finn

Twice in my life now I've had this same experience.

I'm walking or driving in a city not my home and I dimly become aware that there is music wafting through the air, though exactly what it is, and where it comes from, I cannot say. Waking up to it, I try to walk toward the source of the sound--which always involves a bit of trial and error--and I realize the source is a long ways away, blocks away.

The sound, it turns out, was coming from a steam calliope atop a riverboat.

The first time, Susan and I were driving, windows down, through downtown Louisville during a free day while I was sitting reserve. The sound was, of course, like an organ; it grabbed my attention immediately, and I just had to pull over and track the source down. I expected an outdoor organ in a plaza or something, but eventually found myself at the pier where the Belle of Louisville was docked. That outing resulted in a great river cruise and a lengthy talk with the ship's captain (and a hush-hush tour of the facilities).

I caught on quicker the second time. I was further away this time, and the sound was not immediately identifiable, especially amid the music-heavy sonic backdrop of New Orleans. But as I started toward the river, and the Natchez which was docked there, my experience in Lousiville came back to me. Because the sound waves must come around and over the buildings, everything one hears from five blocks away is indirect and weakened and altered. Surreal, even. It's only when you get up close that you realize how much power is behind the sound--no pipe organ would be audible outdoors five windy blocks distant.

This scenario seems to uncover a particular emotional maladjustment in me. When I first made it to the scene yesterday, I found myself so choked up that I could not speak. In fact, it was all I could do not to blubber and have tears streaming down my face. Why? I'm really not sure. In this case, I think it has something to do with what New Orleans has been through in the past two-plus years (that post to follow shortly). There is a sense of the city putting on its best face for visitors even in its handicapped condition, and here is the Natchez loudly proclaiming that the city is not down and out. Or maybe it's just the very powerful nostalgic pull of this setup. A steam-powered, sternwheel riverboat calling patrons in exactly the same way as it did a hundred and fifty years ago--visions of Huck Finn and Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. There are few things in our modern world that connect back to what used to be as directly and powerfully as this. (The steam railroads seem the same way to me; I think these machines, so expensive at the time, carried the banner of the society's technological capabilities, and advertised the leading edge of advancement that characterized the times in an age of change.)

Today I found some lunch in a little bar across the street from the Natchez, and about midway through my meal the calliope began again to play. Same scenario all over again. I quickly finished up and walked across the street to stand in the shade of a tree and watch as patrons lined up with their tickets. The keyboard is in a little cabinet up on the roof next to the steam whistles, and it's wired so that colored lights activate for each key, illuminating the plume of steam that escapes from each whistle as it's played. I can't tell quite the scope of the keyboard--maybe 40 notes or so--and either by custom or because it's what the instrument can do, there are lots of band pieces and operatic transcripts, all played with an oom-pah left hand. (Is there a "standard" calliope repertoire?) The whole sound is quite quirky with some notes being slow to come on speech and then sliding up to pitch, and the instrument overall being only marginally in tune (same as the Belle of Louisville). Some notes and chords are rather painful, and the highest notes of the keyboard can be reluctant to speak and are piercing and shrill; you could hear some of those notes for a couple miles, I think. The overall effect is absolutely characteristic: unmistakably musical, but part brutal violence and part humor, like an old, fat heavyweight boxer dancing in a tutu.



The similarity with the organ is unavoidable. I wonder how the whistles are activated, mechanically or with electric valves? Does the instrument ever get tuned? (Is there a point when its "environment" is so radically changeable?) Or are the whistles just built to "close enough" standards? What was the genesis of the calliope? Have there ever been "serious" ones? (Steam whistles to play the equivalent notes of large organ bass pipes would take a huge amount of steam).

I'm sure Wikipedia has a section. But for now I'm happy just to relay the experience, another of those travel perks my job affords me that make a lasting impression, like a happy scar. [Later: of course, I found information online, including many sound files of both these calliopes plus others at Steamboats.org.]

(Due to a business-as-usual snafu at Sprint, I'm unable to bring any of my own photos to the party. I expect to be free of this situation--and to begin bitching about AT&T's business-as-usual snafus--quite shortly.)

Photoblogging: Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City, Utah. Elevation: 4227 feet MSL.

(The view out my hotel room window to the Southeast.)

(And to the Southwest. Mountains everywhere.)

I've never been here before, in spite of my criss-crossing the area many times in my career. I've waved as I passed many times, over the top of Vegas into Los Angeles, but SLC was always just a blip on the horizon to the North.




I was quite prepared to dislike the place, actually--it being the hub of a prominent religious movement--in much the same way that I suspect I won't be able to stomach Rome: I'm afraid it's not possible for it to be beautiful enough to compensate for all the misery it has dumped over humanity over the centuries--and that continues to flow from the place. But the dilemma here is that our hotel is a block from the Mormon Tabernacle, one of the world's miraculous acoustics and the home of maybe the single most famous organ in America. This instrument, from the Aeolian-Skinner firm (after the departure of Ernest M. Skinner) and the work of G. Donald Harrison, is a sonic miracle, one of those rare and serendipitous pairings of time and place and circumstance. I'll talk a bit more about it over at the music blog, where I reviewed a recording I picked up in the museum gift shop.





Anyway, I couldn't really be two blocks away and not go and see the place, so I stuffed my disgust and vowed to keep my mouth shut and walked over. It turns out to be a charming and unusual space, located inside the walled compound of the Mormon church headquarters. The tabernacle is a stand-alone structure with a striking, shiny metal roof, and is smaller than I expected, especially inside. But it's a unique space, with the organ in an absolutely glorious setting, prominently at the front of the hall, and the strange, domed roof arching above it like a cloudy sky. The organ is so gorgeous that it kind of takes your breath away. Walking around, the acoustics remind me of a huge Imax theater, with everything seemingly audible everywhere. They do a little acoustic demonstration where you can hear an actual pin dropped up on the stage from anywhere in the Tabernacle.





I didn't know what to expect, wandering past the guard post into the compound itself, into the jaws of the lion, as it were. Everyone I encountered within the walled compound was extremely friendly and helpful (and they all had name tags in case you wanted to address them properly). They all greet you as if they had known you all your life, which is superficially pleasant but a little disconcerting. It was a bit Disney-scary being approached by young women in pairs, dressed in simple cotton dresses, with "Sister XXXX" on their nametags, telling me that my glasses are very cool or encouraging to take as many photos as I liked. My wife chided me: "Maybe they're just really friendly people." Me: "They're in a walled compound; they're wearing name tags. They probably are actually friendly people. But they have an agenda."

Well, so did I. I came to see the organ, and there it was. Mission accomplished.



The rest of the campus, which seems about equally to include impressive office buildings and church buildings of various eras, was beautiful and spotless. It all looks expensive and official; clearly the coffers into which flows the money of the faithful are somewhere nearby. Tour groups wafted here and there, each led by very professionally-dressed tour leaders with name tags, many speaking in foreign languages.

The rest of SLC is charming, and quite a change for a flatlander like me. The city sits in a large bowl, surrounded by mountains to the East and West, and there is a sense of existing in rather than on the land. Most everything is clean, and people throughout the city were friendly. It reminds me of Denver in that there's a proliferation of outdoor shops and ski shops and skate shops; it seems a youthful, outdoor kind of city. I found a beautiful shopping area with a buzillion restaurants a couple blocks down from the hotel, one of the entrances to which goes thru a defunct Union Pacific railroad terminal. Cool. Within the limits of my meager photographic skills and my little 1 megapixel cell phone camera, here's a glimpse.

Organic Matter

This is another one of those posts that no one in their right mind will read. But I started typing and this is what came out. I'll just think of it as a diary entry.
***
I became interested in the pipe organ during my early days at college. I was playing my drums that first year for one of the jazz ensembles at the University of Minnesota, and it was my intention at that time to make a career out of drumming. But after that first year, my interest in drumming faded a bit, and I began exploring classical music. This was not entirely out of the blue; my years in concert band had exposed me to a mixture of classics and pops music, and I had listened in some detail to Beethoven symphonies and to the Star Wars soundtrack during my pre-college years. But I was drawn to the sustained, lugubrious sounds of the organ. In spite of not having been in a church for nearly a decade, I knew that this was the sound I craved, and I remember actively seeking it out, and thinking it was strange to be doing so. I can only speculate that exposure to the organ as a child planted the seeds which now sprouted. I've always been captivated by harmony--my love of it is at the very center of my love of music--and the organ is a harmony machine. Also, I'm drawn to the dark in music, and organ music is usually somber and lugubrious, or tormented; just my kind of stuff. Anyway, I followed my nose in this way and, young machinery geek that I was, began checking out books from the university library about the history and construction of the organ, and I began buying albums of organ music to hear the reality of what I was studying in theory.

You cannot study the organ without bathing yourself in the music of Bach. And it very quickly transpired that his genius rather towered over my original subject matter, and so while I continued to study the organ I also immersed myself for the next decade and more in the music of J.S. Bach. But the instrument boasts a rich history, extending well beyond even the unfathomable genius of Bach, and after I had explored this great musical flowering from the North of Germany and the Netherlands--Sweelinck, Bruhns, Buxtehude, Scheidt, Pachelbel, and, of course, Bach--I eventually wandered into the next great dynasty in organ composition, France in the mid-19th Century onward. I find myself still stuck in exploration of this French school, nearly 30 years later.

I've been living with these composers and their ideas now for a long time. But the instrument itself still captivates me. A while back I wrote about a CD I purchased of a new organ at Oberlin College, an instrument built by one of America's most iconic pipe organ builders, the firm of C. B. Fisk of Gloucester, MA. (The late Charles Fisk is a fascinating study in himself. After studying nuclear physics at Harvard, he opened his organ shop in 1961 and amassed an impressive list of very innovative and progressive instruments.) Apart from being a large instrument designed and built for an academic concert hall, this Oberlin instrument--their Opus 116--has the further distinction of having been built, as an experiment, according to the tonal principles of France's greatest organ builder, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899). Cavaillé-Coll is responsible for nearly all of the famous instruments in Paris's great churches (Notre Dame, St. Sulpice, St. Clotilde, la Madeleine, St. Trinité), and many others, and he played an integral part in the flowering of this great compositional school from Cesar Franck onward to the present day. While the Fisk organ at Oberlin is not a copy of any particular Cavaillé-Coll instrument per se, it utilizes his ideas of what sounds ought to be represented in an instrument of this size--its stoplist--and it makes use of Cavaillé-Coll's technical specifications--wind pressures and pipe scalings. The idea, as I understand it, was to build a new instrument for a large American space that is a reasonable stab at what Cavaillé-Coll might have built. It's a fascinating idea, if one cares about these things, an experiment played out in a very elaborate and expensive arena.

That particular CD had a further twist. In addition to the works of Charles Tournemire played on this new instrument (a man with whom I've been near-obsessed now for nearly a decade), a second disc was included where the recording engineers ran the digital data from the original recording thru a computer process which gave the organ an artificial acoustic. In effect, the computer was used to put the Oberlin organ into the acoustics of Chartres Cathedral (the acoustic at Finney Chapel is quite dry, and not at all like any acoustic where the existing Cavaillé-Coll instruments are found). The very idea of this, and the details of how they accomplished it, were incredibly captivating to me--and still are (and are covered a bit more in that earlier post).

Now I've acquired another couple of CDs over this past week that put me in mind to chew on all these ideas again. The first is a program of the organ works of Cesar Franck played on this Oberlin Fisk organ (though without any acoustic processing). Another organist recording another composer, captured by another recording engineer and released on another label--these all help to give a fuller picture of exactly what the instrument is like. (And I ordered yet another disc of this instrument--with yet another performer--but it's on backorder.) And this new recording brings some confirmation to my suspicions from the first recording. Well, it does and it doesn't. I have quite a number of recordings of the organs of Cavaillé-Coll, and my familiarity with them and my love of their sound was my primary motivation for going to Paris a decade ago: to see and hear these instruments first-hand. And I have to say that my first recording of this Fisk "copy" of Cavaillé-Coll's work just didn't sound particularly like the C-Cs I have heard. Not even with the signal processing, however fabulous and effective that part of the exercise was. Don't get me wrong: it's a great-sounding instrument and a magnificent musical accomplishment in its own right. It sounds fantastic in this French repertoire, though the room is maybe a bit unfortunate. But I just don't think in some kind of blind test I would have any confusion about which was the Fisk and which was the Cavaillé-Coll. The performer on this new CD, Haskell Thomson, registers the organ in a way that makes the C-C illusion more convincing than it was the first time around, which then begs the question of what HIS recording would sound like if acoustically processed. But still, I think I would not be fooled. That raises many questions about what details big and small are really responsible for Cavaillé-Coll's signature sound: the stoplist? The building itself? The materials used in the pipes? Or is it a matter of the very subtle voicing of the individual stops?

(C.B. Fisk's Opus 116 at Oberlin College)

I also got two other discs of French repertoire which feature one of America's most musically noteworthy organs, the 1928 Ernest M. Skinner organ at Woolsey Hall at Yale University. Skinner (1866-1960) is the most famous organ builder this country has produced, and instruments which bear his name can still be found across the country. But most of those organs came from his firm after it had been purchased by the Aeolian company and became the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, by which time Skinner was no longer involved. The whole process which saw Skinner build a successful organ building firm which was then taken over by others and Skinner himself ousted is an interesting and sad story. Skinner hired into his firm the brilliant G. Donald Harrison from the Willis organ firm in England, who rather quickly assumed control of the firm; and Skinner--whose name was on the stationary--quietly went away (Skinner, already in his 60s by this time, went on to form another company with his son, which didn't get very far off the ground).

Harrison's most famous instrument is probably the great 1947 Aeolian-Skinner at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City--another really iconic American organ--but his influence was already being felt by 1928 when the Skinner Organ Company was contracted to renovate and extend the existing instrument at Woolsey Hall at Yale. Harrison is celebrated as one of the organ world's bright lights, but I think Ernest Skinner is generally thought to be one of those eccentric geniuses, like Cavaillé-Coll a generation before or, a generation later, Charles Fisk. There are industrious and very talented people everywhere and in all fields, but the spark of genius is reserved for only a few.

The connective tissue in all this is that Cavaillé-Coll and Skinner built instruments which in some key ways can be compared to each other (which can't meaningfully be done between Cavaillé-Coll and, say, one of Bach's favorite builders, Gottfried Silbermann; their instruments are simply too dissimilar). Both built sonically powerful instruments for large spaces, both built what we might call "symphonic" organs, and both utilized modern technology to bring versatility and flexibility for the performer to what is essentially an old, conservative instrument. So here I have in front of me a collection of fantastic French pieces played on the original Cavaillé-Colls for which they were written, and also played on a present-day American copy of a Cavaillé-Coll as well as on one of America's greatest historic instruments from the last century.

There's just a lot of stuff here to sink one's teeth into. To listen to these instruments back-to-back is to face really basic questions about what in the organ's sound is appealing, what auditory components make up that sound, what things make it better or worse, and what role the room's acoustics play. A large symphonic organ may have as many as 10,000 pipes, and a couple hundred distinct timbres available to the organist, and these things have a cultural and historic component.

(Maybe the greatest organ in France: the Cavaillé-Coll of St. Sulpice, Paris)

One of my first and lasting impressions with the work of Cavaillé-Coll was his unexpected method of bringing power to the sound of his instruments. Organs are composed of two kinds of pipes, called flues and reeds. Flue pipes make sound by blowing air over a cutting edge, causing the column of air in the pipe to vibrate, like a flute. Reed pipes make their sound by air causing a reed at one end of the pipe to vibrate, like a saxophone or clarinet. The reed pipes on an organ tend to be the loudest, and Cavaillé-Coll voiced his big reed stops to be quite obnoxious in their tone. Played by themselves, they sound just this side of noise. But as a foundation for a large body of stops being played simultaneously, the brashness imparts a huge majesty and harmonic richness that is quite unexpected. The idea of achieving something of transporting beauty by way of some rather ugly elements is ingenious (like the painter Chaim Soutine, whose crude globs of paint nonetheless form, if one steps back a bit, a moving image). Likewise the high frequency upperwork. Organs sound so rich because they don't have to rely, as most instruments do, on the natural occurrence of harmonics; pipes can simply be built to SPEAK the notes you might otherwise hope would show up as harmonics. And again, Cavaillé-Coll was not shy about this. These bright, high frequency flue pipes (referred to as "mutations" and "mixtures") are loud to the point of being shrill. Again, without the ensemble beneath them, they are quite painful to listen to; but added on top of a mass of more conventional organ sound, they take your breath away with a richness which is like a whole sonic universe opening before you.

(The 1928 Ernest M. Skinner at Woolsey Hall, Yale University)

Skinner hugely modernized the mechanics of the organ, but took a more conventional approach sonically. His sounds are all more urbane and controlled, and even the powerful ones are more tightly reined in. There is nary an ugly sound on a Skinner organ. But his technical advances enabled him to employ a scale of pipe and wind pressure to make the rather conventional timbres absolutely huge. Smooth, but overwhelming in absolute power. All sound is waves of air, but with a Skinner organ you physically feel the air move, in your gut and on your skin. The full tutti is not just loud, but overwhelmingly, inside-your-head loud, and yet absolutely musical. The pedal flue pipes on Skinner's work sound like the voice of the Earth itself: impossibly deep and fundamental, and so smooth as to be almost more felt than heard. It's an example of him not doing new things so much as doing the old things so much better than those before him as to make it a new thing.

How fabulous to be able to compare these things apples-to-apples. Cavaillé-Coll, like Bach in a different realm before him, was the end of a long line of development, the culmination of a cultural phenomenon. Skinner was the greatest practitioner of what became known as the Classic American organ, but its roots were not nearly so deep or so wide-reaching as those of Cavaillé-Coll's work. He took a thing rooted in long tradition, and kind of struck out in his own, bold way. There's something wonderfully American in that. In my casual methodology, I don't doubt that I'm not always accurate in identifying what I'm listening to. It's an interesting exercise for me to try and figure out the what and how and why of something which has long captured my imagination, and at these times I have a little pang of regret that I did not pursue the career in organ building which I flirted with for a while in my 20s. But only a little one; life is good, and even from this distance the organs are rich and magical.

In the end, though I of course love them all, I have to say that the Skinner organ at Yale is my favorite of these instruments. I surprise myself even a bit with this judgment. But this instrument does everything very well, and puts its own stamp on in the process. And it is Skinner's genius that his stamp complements and augments the artistry of the composers and players. The Yale organ has an ultimate majesty that leaves me, well, I was going to say speechless but I've still managed five pages trying to put words to it.