PULITZER PIPES: NEW MUSIC FOR THE ORGAN
The church where I went as a kid didn’t have a very impressive organ or organist, so that was not the source of my initial attraction to the instrument. My friends and I were impressed with the fact that it was the instrument Lon Chaney played during the unmasking scene in The Phantom of the Opera.
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There’s something about the organ–you either love it passionately or you hate it. There seems to be little in between. An organist in control of a truly spectacular, well-maintained instrument feels much like a car lover on a clear road in a well-tuned Ferrari. Playing the organ, the “king of instruments” as Bach liked to call it, is unique because it involves all four limbs in an extremely physical manner and because it is the only instrument that allows you to be a one-man orchestra–manipulations of the organ’s various pipe ranks make possible every conceivable timbre across the entire sound spectrum.
The two largest and most ambitious pieces on this program were Ralph Shapey’s Variations for Organ and Alan Stout’s Study in Density and Durations, overlong pieces that appear to ask essentially the same question: how loud can we make the organ go before the roof caves in? Stout was unquestionably the winner in his timbral exploration of the upper and lower limits of the instrument, brilliantly performed by Kenneth Sotak. There were moments so loud I could have sworn I was at O’Hare. There is some value to discovering the limits of an instrument, but that should be done on the composer’s or the organist’s time, not an audience’s. Stout must have been rather dogmatic about the registration, but the complicated effects seemed to be largely for their own sake, without reference to musical meaning, shape, or substance.
