I have a guilty secret: I love to listen to and play pipe organs! I even like to look at them; they bring back memories of the bad old days when I used to pretend to be an insider into church --things.
Well; music was, on one hand, a way for the Christian community to render what they call worship, that is, to praise god and generally have a great time doing it. It was a way of bringing beauty to a holy place and offering it, which took the place of bringing in dead animals (or worse, live animals, and killing them right there). Well, these days, of course, only cats do that sort of thing. On the other hand, music was also an effective way of keeping the faithful interested in staying within the Christian community, and if I had a nickel for every atheist who kept rationalizing why they continued to call themselves Christians simply to keep hearing the wonderful music and singing and so on, well, I'd have an awful lot of nickels.
Unfortunately, I am not a very good organist, simply because I can't do the pedals. (For those who don't know, the pedals are an entire keyboard, with big fat keys you play with your feet. It is the bass line that is played this way, and unless you can do it without looking at your feet, it is too hard to do. But that doesn't stop me from making a sortie into the College chapel and playing the organ however I can. (The professor who first gave me the OK to play the chapel organ is retiring soon, and I may be forbidden to fool with the thing by the younger brigade.)
The music software I use (let's call it Finale, though I actually use a less expensive product called Print Music) gives me an alternative to actually playing the organ. I enter the notes in, as always, and the program plays it back. It does have an Organ voice, but the organ voices it has are, let's see:
- Drawbar organ, essentially a Hammond Organ, but of course they can't use the word Hammond without violating trademark;
- Rock organ, the kind of thing that Procul Harum used to feature. These are varieties of Hammond-like organs, all the way to synthesizers. This particular voice is a very specific sound, which is actually terrible.
- Church organ, a pipe organ sound,
- Reed organ. These were organs driven by a pedal bellows, and the sound was made by beating reeds essentially like the reeds in a harmonica. The word harmonium probably conveys the idea a lot better.
The very first video I uploaded to YouTube several years ago, actually October of 2008, was of one of my favorite Bach organ fugues: BWV 545 in C major. This was a fugue I discovered in my grad school days, as played by E. Power Biggs. E. P. Biggs, a well-known organist of the sixties, who emigrated from England about the same time as Virgil Fox, but was a much more mainstream organist, had been a favorite of mine from my teen years, ever since I was given an E.P. of him playing some of my favorite pieces. The C major fugue isn't as well known as the famous D minor fugue (that goes with the Toccata), the C minor fugue (that goes with the legendary Passacaglia), the G minor fugue (that goes with a Fantasia, I believe), and the great A minor fugue (which goes with a Prelude, which I don't much care for). Being a fugue in a major key, it is a contrast to all the others I have mentioned. Still, to know it is to love it. I have learned that it is popular in Germany, and is often played at weddings. Here is my early video of it, with a slide show featuring photos of lovely organs, old and new. The speed is very, very fast; I didn't know how to control the speed very well at that time; in fact I think it has so many views simply because of its great speed. (Most of the views are, I believe, from Germany.)
Now an organist really has very little control over the sound he or she makes, because the keys of an organ are simply switches: they turn air on, and the note sounds. In other instruments, the player has real-time control over the volume of the sound, by varying the bow pressure, the breath, and so on. Not so in an organ; the most you can do is to control a set of louvre blinds that cover up some of the pipes partially, a poor way to put expression into the sound, at best. However, an organ is set up to allow any voice to go with any keyboard. As you probably know, there are at least two, and often more keyboards on an organ, and each of them can be assigned different voices.
On my software system, I can't really connect anything except Church Organ to any of the lines of music (staves). I mean, there's nothing to prevent me from assigning anything at all to any stave, including Electric Guitar, but I want it to sound like an organ. All I could do --and I certainly did this-- was to copy certain portions to a duplicate staff or staffs, and make them an octave higher or lower. This actually takes place in an organ as well.
There are two main kinds of pipe in an organ: flute pipes, and reed pipes. The flute pipes have the traditional organ sound that is the round, smooth sound you usually associate with an organ. There are both soft and loud flute ranks. (A rank is the entire set of pipes all of the same sound. A single rank is like an entire organ in itself. Because there are multiple ranks of pipes, each with a different sound, an organ is really a multiple instrument.)
The reed pipes have that slightly snarling sound you hear in the last verse of a hymn, for instance, when the organist is really pulling out the stops. They're supposed to sound like trumpets, and they do, if you have a good imagination! There are softer reed pipes, that imitate oboes, for instance.
An organ accompanying a congregation is generally made to sound rounded and mellow (flute pipes). But an organ playing a solo is usually set up so that one voice is a little distinctive (a reed pipe, possibly), and the other voices soft and mellow (flute pipes). This really works well in an organ piece; so well that organists accompanying congregational singing like to do that as well, with a somewhat raucous voice playing the tune, and more mellow --flute-- sounds playing the rest of the notes. Whether you like that is all a matter of taste, I suppose. Some organists think they're accompanying the congregation, while others --possibly unconsciously-- think the congregation is accompanying the organ.
As you can see, having just one sound --Church Organ-- to play every line of music was a lot less than satisfactory. I ended up rewriting pieces for an orchestra, or at least a wind ensemble. Well, sometimes that worked, other times it was just not satisfactory.
Recently, of course, I bought the sound library I keep telling you about. I could only afford one of the many libraries the company offers, the Garritan Personal Orchestra, or GPO. They also sell an organ library (also $150), a World Sounds library (also $150, on sale), an Instant Orchestra (not really individual instruments, but whole combinations of sounds, which I don't really understand very well).
To my delight, the GPO contained organ sounds!!! A limited number, to be sure, but almost a dozen organ voices, in contrast to the essentially single voice I had used thus far! So, of course I had to re-do the Fugue in C major, and this is the result. (As happens increasingly frequently, YouTube accused me of having pirated a recording, and I had to refute this claim, which I succeeded in doing. But sometimes they come right back and accuse me again, especially if the commercial client insists.) To go with the music, I picked a dozen or so photographs of organs from the Web. This is probably illegal, and it would be very illegal if YouTube merchandized it. So the minute YouTube's commercial sponsors start sniffing around this piece, I'll have to take it off the air:
I hope you enjoy that as much as I do; the organ sounds are still limited, since they are intended to be used in an orchestral context. The pace is also a little more reasonable, and not the mad headlong rush of the original video from 2008.
Very recently, of course, I featured another video in this blog, the chorale-prelude BWV 659 (Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland). The apostrophe stands for the missing "t" in the word kommt, which translates as "O come!" The imperative mood is indicated by words that usually end in t, such as "Sehet!" See, or behold, "Jauchzet, frohlocket!" Rejoice and be merry, as in the opening words of the Christmas Oratorio.
The A minor fugue that I mentioned before, was first introduced to me as played by the great French-Swiss musician and physician Albert Schweitzer. As you probably know, Albert Schweitzer was a musician who was unexpectedly inspired by the possibility of going into "darkest" Africa to help the unfortunate citizens of the portions of that continent that had been occupied by the French. He actually went into medical school and qualified himself as a doctor, and spent several decades working in a hospital in Lambarene. (He is known to have acquired five doctorates: in Music, Medicine, Theology, Law, and Philosophy. At least the Music and Medicine doctorates were earned fairly; some of the others I consider of questionable provenance.)
The fugue is in 6/8 time. Many pieces in 6/8 time are either lively jigs, or quiet pastorales. This fugue is neither, it is a stately, massive piece that occupies this particular time signature like a gothic cathedral. There is a strong sense of rotation; if I were to make a movie of the Universe turning in its mad waltz through time, this is the piece I would pick to accompany it, not any of Strauss's sunny dance compositions. Here is a performance of the original fugue from YouTube. The organist is Ton Koopman, a well-known Dutch conductor, clavierist and Bach scholar.
One day I was fooling around with MIDI files of the A minor fugue, and happened to set it going, in a lighthearted moment, with Marimba sounds. My wife, who is normally left quite unimpressed by organ music, immediately perked up. "I really like that," she said, and I had to agree. The percussive sounds of a marimba articulated the complex polyphony quite well. So I captured the performance (somehow performances that use drums get messed up in my software) with difficulty, and uploaded the fake video to YouTube. Here et es:
Finally, here's advanced look at what I'm working on now. I only have a few bars completed.
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