Organs I have played

Just thought it might be interesting (for me, anyway) to put in some pictures of pipe organs I've played over the years, listed more or less chronologically.

To begin with, a little information is necessary. If you're a rank beginner, like most people, Wikipedia's treatise on the pipe organ is a good place to start. Speaking of ranks, organs are classified by the number of ranks, or complete sets of pipes they have. How many pipes is that? Since organ keyboards have 62 keys, or about five octaves, a rank is generally 62 pipes. However, the number of stops (i.e., different sounds) is often less than that: "combination stops" blend several different ranks in the high register of the organ to add brilliance, and "celeste" stops blend two stops that are deliberately tuned slightly differently to produce a pleasant vibrato-like sound. Of course, the ranks that are used in combination stops may also be used simultaneously for other purposes, but there are usually fewer stops than ranks. For example, the Salt Lake Tabernacle organ has 206 ranks, but only 147 stops. Look at Wikipedia's article on the Tabernacle organ for a list of stops.

Now, how big is big? For me, anything over about 60-70 ranks is big. This makes the Tabernacle organ a VERY big organ. If you're interested in that sort of thing, several people have made lists of the world's biggest organs. You can find links to those on Google or in Richard Elliott's wonderful site describing the organs on and around Temple Square.

Finally, you need to know something about how organs are put together. Basically, you have a wind chest, pipes, and something that connects the manuals (keyboards) with the valves that let air into the pipes. In the early days, there was an elaborate system of wooden rods and levers that connected the console to the pipes. This system is called a tracker action. In many modern organs, the action is electric (i.e., electric valves under each pipe) or electro-pneumatic (electric control of pneumatic valves under each pipe.) These electric-based systems allow the organ console to be moved around, which can be convenient. However, most organist prefer tracker actions because trackers are much more responsive to the organist's touch and the offer tighter control over exactly how the music sounds. It's worth noting that pipe organs were the highest technological accomplishment of Western society from the Late Middle Ages until the Industrial Revolution.

So why all the different keyboards? Well, different stops can be accessed from each of the keyboards. This allows the organist to quickly change from one sound to another. It also facilitates playing the kinds of polyphonic music that characterize much of the organ literature. For example, one hand would play on one manual, the other hand on a different manual with a different registration (set of stops), and the feet on the pedal keyboard, allowing three melodies to be played simultaneously, each with a different sound. This gives clarity and definition to the music. Obviously, the larger the organ (i.e., the more ranks and stops) and the more manuals (keyboards), the greater the possibilities for variations in sound. One famous organist, on first trying out a new instrument, said, "You have not presented me with just an organ - this is an orchestra!"

Also, organs differ in general sound, depending on when and where they were built. For example, the German Baroque organs that Bach played tended to use fairly low air pressure in the wind chests and had rather severe, plain-sounding pipes. The purity of this sound is well-suited to the music written by Bach and other German composers; whether the organs or the music came first is a matter of debate. On the other hand, the so-called French Romantic organ (like most of those I played in France) is characterized by very rich and varied stops, with lots of aural color and warm reed stops. The Salt Lake Tabernacle organ is a French Romantic-style organ at heart, though its huge size also allows it to be used for German Baroque music as well. There are whole books published on organ stops and how to use them, so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that choosing the registration for a given piece of music is one of the biggest challenges to an organist. You have to match the demands of the music to the resources of the organ, and to your own abilities. It's always an interesting process.

The ward chapel in Salt Lake where I grew up has a small 14-rank organ (which is actually pretty big for a Mormon chapel), and was the first pipe organ I ever played. In high school, our mostly-Mormon choir sang High Mass at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Salt Lake, and I played the organ for that. After that experience, the choir director asked me if I had ever had organ lessons. I'm sure it was painfully obvious to him that I had not! So he offered to line me up with a friend who taught organ. That is how for the ensuing summer and my first year of college, I studied with Dr. Robert Cundick, chief organist at the Salt Lake LDS Tabernacle. My lessons were actually at a little practice organ in the basement of the Assembly Hall, on Temple Square like the Tabernacle, but he did take me over to play the big organ in the Tabernacle a few times.

The actual practice organ that I played on had some pipes from Joseph Ridge's original Tabernacle organ built in Pioneer times. It was replaced by this 8-rank organ during a renovation of the Assembly Hall.

The big organ at the Tabernacle is well-known, of course. Here are shots of the organ and the console.


After my first year of college, I spent 2 1/2 years in France as an LDS missionary. One of the real highlights of my mission was the opportunity to play some wonderful and huge pipe organs in France. My first town was Orleans. One day my missionary companion and I got caught in an unexpected rainstorm. We happened to be close to the cathedral Ste. Croix and ducked inside to get out of the weather. Just as we entered the church, the organist practicing in the loft hit a big full-organ chord. The reverb time in there is on the order of 5-6 seconds, quite long, so the effect was magnificent. It's easy to see how the combination of such music and the stained glass can lift people's spirits heavenward - it certainly affects me that way. The upshot of that visit was that I was able eventually to get to know the organist and play the organ. Here is a link to a view of the interior of Ste. Croix with the organ at the rear, in front of the main rose window, the usual place for cathedral organs. By the way, the organ in Ste. Croix was built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, probably the greatest organ factor (builder) of the 19th century. The organ in Orleans is a virtual duplicate of the Grand Orgue in Notre Dame de Paris, shown here.

After Orleans, I was transferred to Bordeaux, a much larger city with numerous churches, including the cathedral St. Andre. Like many churches in the Southwest of France, the main tower is not attached to the cathedral, but stands by itself. The first time I heard the entire Brahms Requiem was at a performance here - you cannot imagine the effect that the reverberation of a large cathedral has on such a work. It's something I'll always remember. I met one of the organists here, and was able to play this magnificent organ two or three times.

From Bordeaux, I went back to Paris but was stationed out in the far Western suburbs, a town called Nanterre, which was dominated politically by the French Communist Party and was thus not very friendly to Americans. Since the Viet Nam War was in full swing in 1967-68 when I was there, I heard all kinds of obscene terms that they don't teach you in school! We missionaries were very fortunate that the mission president encouraged us to get immersed in French culture, so we all went to Midnight Mass at Notre Dame on Christmas Eve, among other things. I also had the exceptional opportunity to play the 102-rank tracker organ at the church of St. Sulpice, where Charles-Marie Widor, then Marcel Dupre were the organists for years and years. There is a long-standing tradition that anyone who wishes may play the organ at certain times of the week, so I took advantage of that. The outside of the church is totally unremarkable, but the organ! It is regarded as Cavaille-Coll's masterpiece. Having heard and played it, it's hard to disagree.

After Paris, I was transferred to the small city of Perigueux, the capital of foie gras and truffles. It's an old town, as you can see from the picture of a street near our apartment, and still has the remains of a temple to a Gallic goddess that was 400 years old when Julius Caesar conquered the town! We lived in a building built in 1415, and could see the original hand-hewn beams in our ceiling - wonderful place to live. The cathedral there is built in a Byzantine style, and really towers over the town, as you can see in this view from across the river. One day, my missionary companion and I were near the cathedral and could hear the organ playing, so we went in. It turned out that the console was on the floor rather than in the organ loft, so I went up and started talking to the priest playing it. We eventually became friends, and he allowed me to come in an hour a day at noon to play the organ. We also became what must be a very small set of Mormon missionaries who regularly ate lunch with the priests in the rectory of the cathedral!

My next stop after Perigueux, and my last town in France, was La Rochelle, a beautiful port city on the Atlantic Coast. La Rochelle was one of the Protestant "refuge cities" established by the Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestant churches in France and set aside a number of cities to be governed by Protestant city councils. Unfortunately, that tolerance didn't last very long; eventually Cardinal Richelieu and his troops besieged and conquered La Rochelle (one of my apartments there was about 50 yards from where Richelieu's headquarters had been) and the resulting departure of many of the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, enriched many other places of Europe and North America with talented people now unwanted in their own homeland. Somehow I met the organist at the chief Calvinist Temple (church) in La Rochelle, and again ended up with their pipe organ (a medium-sized one, as it turned out, about 40 ranks) for an hour a day.

The last organ I played in France was one of the best. On the way back to Paris to catch the plane home, I stopped in the city of Poitiers for several hours, having gotten a letter of recommendation to the organist of the Cathedral of St. Pierre. The organ there was built by Francois Clicquot in 1781, and is substantially unchanged since then. It is a four-manual tracker; it's possible to couple all the manuals together and still be playable - an amazing feat of engineering! The building has a reverberation time of about seven seconds, so it sounds just incredible! Here are a couple pictures:


After college and graduate school, I moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and played virtually all the church organs in that city. I also had the opportunity to play perhaps the most interesting organ in that part of the world, the 105-rank Moller organ at the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa. The church itself is built in a style best called Skyscraper Neo-Gothic. The organ is terrific, and balanced very well the 120-voice multi-state LDS choir that I was accompaning at a concert there.

I moved back to Salt Lake in 2004, and am anxiously awaiting an opportunity to play the organ in the new Conference Center downtown. We'll see.

Bach the Magnificent

You have to know that I play the organ as well as the piano. There is nothing quite so viscerally exciting as sitting at a BIG organ and turning it loose. And, like most organists, I have a bad case of hero-worship of Johann Sebastian Bach. By the way, here is a modern forensic anthropologist's reconstruction of what Bach may have looked like, based on his skull from the Tomaskirche in Leipzig, where he is buried. Put this face on a stocky 5'6" frame and you've got it!

For Christmas, Vickie gave me a course called Bach and the High Baroque produced by The Teaching Company. If you're not familiar with that company, they produce a variety of (mostly) college-level courses on tape, CD, and DVD. The subjects in the arts, sciences, theology, history, and so on, and include everything from Early Christianity to The Joy of Mathematics. The teachers are chosen for their ability to make the course material come alive.

Bach and the High Baroque is comprised of 32 45-minute lectures, all on CD. In addition to that course, our library also includes A Survey of Western Art, The Life and Works of C.S.Lewis, Understanding Linguistics, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, The Chamber Music of Mozart, and Fundamentals of Music. The music courses we have are all taught be a fellow named Robert Greenberg, who is a well-regarded composer himself, and who works with San Francisco Performances. Founded in 1979, San Francisco Performances is the Bay Area’s leading independent presenter of chamber music, vocal and instrumental recitals, jazz and contemporary dance.

Greenberg is an absolutely riveting lecturer. Because he is a composer and performer himself, he knows his subject from the inside out. But that's not all - he's funny, original, and just plain fun to listen to. Here's a sample from the San Francisco Performances site. Click to get to the link, then scroll down to see Greenberg; you'll need Real Player to play it.

Greenberg covers Bach's very interesting life in some detail, including the time his employer had him jailed for trying to quit! (Bach loved life in jail because he had time to compose.) He discusses the life of a composer in the early 18th century: for example, when Bach was in Leipzig, where he spent the last 27 years of his life, Bach was required to supervise and train the choirs and organist for all five churches in town, write music for every Sunday service, plus municipal events (e.g., a mayor's inauguration), make sure all the organs were working correctly, and, by the way, teach Latin to the 12-year-old choirboys! He also had to get in the middle of the political fights between two factions, one of whom loved Bach's elaborate style and thought highly of his compositional gifts, and the other group, who thought of Bach primarily as a teacher and wanted to make the church music rather starkly simple. That battle, by the way, is still going on for most church organists. Over his time in Leipzig, Bach wrote

• Several complete cycles of cantatas, 54-60 cantatas in each cycle. A cantata is a 20-minute-or-so, 5-7 movement mini-oratorio based on the hymn for that Sunday in the Lutheran liturgical calendar. Bach wrote nearly 300 cantatas, all told; we have only (!) about 200 of them. Click here for a list of which ones were performed each week during Bach's life.
  
• Four or possibly five Passions. A Passion is the crucifixion story set to music. We have Passions for the Gospels of John and Matthew; the rest are lost. The St. Matthew Passion consists of 78 sections and calls for two choirs, two orchestras, a boys' choir, and four soloists. A performance lasts about four hours. It is one of the world's greatest masterpieces of vocal and orchestral music, highly spiritual and deeply moving.
  
• Reams of music for his children. He and his two wives (sequential, not simultaneous!) had 20 of them, all told, of whom ten survived to adulthood. Even the exercises are masterful compositions.
• The B-Minor Mass, an incredible setting (one of the finest ever) of the Catholic Mass - and by a Lutheran composer!
  
• The Art of the Fugue, a masterful exposition of all the tricks used in writing these characteristic Baroque pieces. He uses the fugue subject (theme) forwards, backwards (in regression), upside-down (inversion), upside-down and backwards (inversion-regression), slowed down, speeded up - you name it, he shows how to do it.
  
• An incredible amount of other stuff.

And all of this while doing all the other things his contract required! Well, almost all - he found and paid somebody else to teach Latin.

Bach must have been a real challenge to work with. He had a temper and did not suffer fools gladly, nor was he tolerant of anything but a performer's best efforts in the service of God, which is how Bach defined his role as a musician. This could and did lead to problems, as Bach could play the organ and harpsichord better than any of his keyboard players (in fact, during his lifetime he was better known as an organ virtuoso than as a composer), and violin better than the violinists, plus he was a professional-level singer. In addition, his second wife, Anna Magdalena, was the leading soprano in Cothen, Bach's location before Leipzig, so he brought his own soprano soloist along and wrote many of his soprano parts with her in mind.

Having done some arranging and composing myself, it seems incredible to me that he could have accomplished so much in one lifetime. Consider writing a Lutheran church cantata, for example. He would start working on Monday for the next week's cantata, and would have to have it finished and sent to the copyists on Wednesday so the choir and orchestra could start practicing in order to sing it on Sunday! And he didn't have the terrific music-printing software that we have now. My software, called Finale, will take an orchestral score and automatically print out each part. Bach had to start with blank paper and a pen. Unbelievable! (Especially since he did it so much better than I can.)

The best part of the course, naturally, is the music. We've been listening to the course on our car stereo - it's actually becoming a reason to go for a long drive somewhere, anywhere, just so we can hear some more.

Baroque music is characterized by a highly-emotional musical superstructure built on and controlled by a very rigid formal structure. Greenberg explains and illustrates the formal structures, then plays dozens of different things to illustrate how Bach was a master of just about everything to which he set his hand.

All told, listening to this course is one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. Bach is by turns introspective, flamboyant, pensive, highly spiritual, funny, unrestrained, or tightly wound. He has an unbelievable gift for coming up with unforgettable melodies and beautiful harmonizations - all within the incredibly rigid confines of the Baroque forms.

I will never look at Bach the same way again. And my most heartfelt thanks to Vickie for getting this course for us!

Weight loss surgery

Let's face it - I'm not 25 any longer. One would think that having children in their 30's would make that pretty clear, but they don't look like they're in their 30's, and I really don't feel like I'm in my 60's (barely!) However, I have noticed that there is more of me (except for my hair) than there used to be. Quite a bit more, actually. The added weight has brought on several problems that I'm not thrilled to be facing. They include acid reflux, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, hypertension, and a near approach to Type II diabetes; the last three together are known as Metabolic Syndrome. All of them are a byproduct of the extra weight. I keep telling Vickie that in me she just has too much of a good thing. It doesn't really help.

Nor did various attempts at diet and exercise seem to do the job. I'd lose a few pounds (up to 10-12), then put them back on. Not good.

So we decided it was time to do something more dramatic: bariatric (weight-loss) surgery. It turns out that there are several ways to go. Here is the link for the National Institute of Health's site discussing weight-loss surgery.

The type of operation I'm actually having is laparoscopic gastric banding, often referred to by the brand name of one of the equipment makers, lap-band. Basically, they install a little band with an inflatable balloon around the stomach, near the top, to make a little pouch instead of a big stomach. Here's a diagram, so you can see how it works. The inflatable portion is connected by a little tube to a port that sits just under the skin in some convenient place. To tighten the band, you simply inject a little saline through the port; similarly, you can loosen the band by withdrawing saline through the port.

As a precursor to the surgery, I've been on a 1000 calorie/day diet for the last week and a half, and have lost about 10 pounds so far. After the surgery, I'll be on liquids for a week, then soft and mushy foods for a week or two, then back to relatively normal stuff - just not very much of it.

The idea of this whole thing is that you don't eat as much because the pouch gets full and your natural gastrointestinal reactions tell you that you're full - even though you haven't eaten nearly as much as you might with a normal stomach. That is supposed to basically eliminate hunger - which is for me, like for most people, a big part of why I eat.

Of course, I'll have to watch what I eat from now on. Carbonated drinks are out, for example, including champagne (I'll never miss it, since I've never even tasted the stuff.) I will have to concentrate on protein and nutritious things, and be sure not to miss taking vitamins regularly. Vickie and I have already started exercising fairly regularly, so that will continue, too. In essence, you're supposed to live a healthy lifestyle - not a bad thing for anybody. This will just help enforce it.

There is at least one more big advantage - Vickie and I will now be on the same diet, since she had the same surgery about 50 pounds ago, so cooking will be easier. We've already decided how to handle eating out: we will alternate the choice of what we eat, since the best way to eat out is to just order one meal for both of us, then split it.

My surgery is scheduled for Thursday the 26th of February. It's done on an outpatient basis, so unless something goes drastically wrong, I'll only be in the clinic about 3-4 hours. After I come out of the anesthetic, it's homeward for a nice nap.

The statistics for lap-band surgery are very comforting, as complications are rare, especially when it's done by a doctor with lots of experience. My doctor has done about 700 of these, so he knows what he's doing. Even better, all of the office staff has had the surgery, and there are numerous support-group activities. Complications occasionally do happen, but the odds are much better than for other types of bariatric surgery, and having this surgery greatly decreases my risks of having problems related to excess weight.

Wish me luck!