Hermann's World of Orgelmusik

[pancreas]

As some of you may know, since I go on about it at length, I have been taking organ lessons. I will share my thoughts thus far accumulated.

I suppose some of this stuff is obvious when you think about it but basically the first thing you do is push a button to turn the blowers on. This then pushes air through the pipes according to which stops you've pulled out (c.f. pulling out all the stops) and which keys you've pressed.

Here is an organ, apparently from Mary Redcliffe in Bristol.



The stops are the white knobs on the left and right, which you pull out to make a certain rank of pipes sound. This one has four manuals, (i.e. keyboards), which from the bottom up are called the Choir, the Great, the Swell and the Solo. There is also another keyboard—or more precisely pedal board—by the feet, which you can't quite see in that picture.

Now, if I pull out just a Trumpet 8', say for the Solo, then the only the top manual will play, but for every note on that top manual there will be one pipe which will play the corresponding note. That's one rank of pipes (~60 notes) for every stop you pull. There are like 100 stops, so you're looking at ~6000 pipes. The thing obviously then weighs many many tonnes.

Under the manuals you have small white buttons called pistons, which are programmable buttons which automatically spit out a combination of pipes, either just for that manual (divisional), or for all manuals at once (general). The general pistons are often at the feet, and you can see a bunch of metal pistols towards the bottom in the picture, on the left hand side. Then there are, in the middle, the swell box and general crescendo pedals, which go up and down. The swell opens or closes a box which dims the sound coming from the swell ranks, so you can get a sort of expressive swelling with it. The general crescendo pulls more stops in and out as you push it up. I actually don't know what the one on the left does.

Incidentally, the biggest organ is in Atlanta, the Boardwalk Organ:



Which is insane.

Anyway, one good thing is that there are lots of easy pieces, which sound amazing just because you're playing them on an organ, but of course there are also much more difficult things. One piece I am learning requires your hands moving around on different manuals while your left foot presses certain notes on the pedal board, your right foot is on the swell pedal and then all at once, you have to release the left foot, come off the swell pedal with your right foot, kick a piston with your right foot, and then go back instantly to the pedal board much higher up with both feet. All while the fingers are moving around. You have to be like an octopus in other words.

Speaking of being an octopus, the following is the Star Wars symphonic suite, played on a Wurlitzer. Astonishing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2S72eajLzw

Here is someone playing Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor. (I've decided to learn this. I can play it on the piano already, more-or-less and it's apocalyptic at the end.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32BPYFQTVk

And lastly, here is a really funky piece I just discovered. The Hamburger Totentanz, by Guy Bovet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAXwT8F6Yww



Incidentally this is clearly a real nerd magnet. The National Pipe Organ Register http://www.npor.org.uk/ has all the specs (stops, pedals, couplers) of all the major organs in the country.

And then there's Hauptwerk, which for many £1000s you can use rig up with a computer to give you Salisbury Cathedral in your living room. They've recorded every single pipe and its accompanying acoustic, so it needs many gigs of ram to run, plus the real nerds then plug it into expensive DACs with extra pre-amps and power amps and expensive speakers and god knows what.