In the music world, organists are low-on-the-totem-pole. I first discovered this in Conservatory and found it an interesting reversal of organists’ roles in the period between roughly 1600 – 1900. During that time, virtually all composers were organists (completely the reverse of today), organists had the most sure employment possibility of all musicians (the Church), other professional musicians (excluding the folk tradition which was mostly prominent before 1600) sought employment in court orchestras or church orchestras – as the concept of a civic orchestra, or even chamber ensemble, didn’t yet exist. In short, the organist of northern Europe, most especially in the baroque era, held a highly respected role. Organists also utilized, and were custodians of, the city’s largest artistic expenditure, the King of Instruments.
By 1975, when I entered Conservatory, nearly all budding organists were concerned with solo organ literature (primarily) and choral anthem accompaniments (secondarily). Organists had developed a stigma for being solitary musicians which was not entirely unfounded. Couple that with the fact that the organ doesn’t lend itself as easily to expressive playing as does the piano or virtually any orchestra instrument, due to the organ’s uniformity of volume, uncontrollable by the force of finger-attack, and you have the recipe to be misunderstood by others in the musical world.
At first, for me, accompanying other musicians was limited to playing piano or harpsichord. For baroque music, learning how to improvise a continuo part from just the bass note and some numbers (figured bass) introduced me to a whole world of playing with ensembles and soloists, based on my ear (how it sounds), music theory, recognition of appropriate style, and a considerable amount of improvisation. Like playing jazz just from a chord chart, improvisation is scary when first attempted. Overcoming the fright is half the battle. The second half is having tons and tons of experiences and opportunities to test one’s wings.
It’s a very short bridge between harpsichord continuo accompaniment and chamber organ (portativ) continuo accompaniment. Both work from a figured bass line; but the organ, being a sustain instrument and a wind instrument (the harpsichord has plucked strings and is, therefore, a percussion instrument) needs to be voiced differently than the harpsichord. In other words, the number of fingers (voices) playing at any given moment is generally less on the organ, as that lends greater clarity to the sound.
By the time I was in my early 30s, having just started American Bach Soloists, I learned the art of organ continuo playing (significantly different from harpsichord continuo playing) by needing to do it. Diving into the deep end, as it were, and with many years of performing, I made the gradual discovery of the enormous value that working with other professional instrumentalists affords. While I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of extraordinary singers, from my days at Westminster Abbey onwards, there is something distinctly different about professional instrumentalists, most especially when a large group of them are assembled with the uniform intent of displaying mastery so as to transform the consciousness of the listener.
My introduction to the role of Organist for the San Francisco Symphony was both extremely simple and frighteningly difficult. I was relatively new to the Bay Area at the time (early 1990s), and was asked to provide the organ part for Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin which has a mere nine notes in the pedal part! That’s it! That’s all I had to do. Sounds easy, yes? Consider this: The part occurs well into the score, with only “Tacet” marked until a few cue notes are presented. The only way to figure out when to come in, during a 30 minute piece, was to follow the full orchestral score. OK. Tricky but not impossible.
Secondly, the part calls for a diminuendo from fortissimo to pianissimo. This has to be done smoothly and subtly, always within, and under, the sound of the orchestra, so as not to stick out and destroy the effect the music is having in the hall. This entails setting up a convincing decrescendo with the organ’s pistons, and listening carefully that the part is always blending perfectly.
Thirdly, as is usually the case for the organ at Davies Symphony Hall, I was offstage (underscoring the organist’s role of being secondary!), listening through headphones and watching through a small black and white television monitor. Fortunately, the video monitor at Davies Hall is in perfect sync with the conductor, but the headphones only pick up orchestral sound. The organ is always completely inaudible through the headphones due to the location of the microphones. I can only get a slight sense that the organ is playing through vibration in the floor. It is impossible to tell if I have registered the organ too loudly or softly. I’m at the mercy of the assistant conductor, sitting in the Hall during the rehearsals, to tell me. So when I’m setting up my sounds in a private practice session in the Hall, I’m only working on intuition.
Because I’m normally offstage when playing with the SFS, I don’t get a sense of my colleagues’ breathing – which is so crucial to creating a beautiful ensemble sound. SFS used to be infamous for playing well behind the conductor’s beat (Esa-Pekka Salonen corrected that habit), which meant that the orchestra could judge how to be together as an ensemble by sensing each other’s breath. With this impossibility backstage, and the organ’s slight delay, it takes nerves of steel (and a little guesswork) to get a perfect onset of the music.
Assuming backstage conversation, movement, and shuffling is minimized (or preferably non-existent), it’s fortunately quite possible to feel like I’m part of the whole symphonic endeavor. Words of thanks and praise from my colleagues, both instrumentalists and chorus members (who often get an earful of organ sound), go a long way to helping me feel connected, even backstage. And while the feeling of making glorious music with one of the world’s great symphony orchestras is certainly more powerful when I am actually onstage (as happens occasionally), even backstage, the sense of communal endeavor to affect transformation for an audience of several thousand is palpable. The experience is unique.
One of the recordings which earned us a Grammy Award, the recording of Mahler’s Symphony VIII (“Symphony of a Thousand”), was an especially stressful occasion for me. The huge work starts with an organ chord alone. (The full organ E flat chord introduces the chorus’ entry with “Veni Creator Spiritus.”) I’m quite sure we had more than 500 performers including the children’s choirs. Michael Tilson Thomas stood on the podium with baton raised, staring up at the organ pipes (where the camera is) hoping that I was ready! My job was to be ready with a full organ chord, fingers poised, trying not to freeze up, eager not to split a note that would set the piece off on the wrong footing, and anxious about a quite difficult part ahead. (Mahler VIII has a very demanding and tricky organ part.)
Fortunately, not only did it come off well (the whole piece, that is), and earned us a Grammy Award, but MTT and I became trusted friends in the process. The trust of the maestro is one of the most cherished aspects of symphony playing, second only to the joy of creating supreme beauty with treasured colleagues. So I was taken back, one day, by MTT when he asked me why it was that so many organists always have poor rhythm! He asked me this with a twinkle in his eye, so I don’t think he was describing any frustration with me; but I must admit it took me aback. I recall being flummoxed for a response at the time.
I’ve pondered that question for the many years since he asked me, and I’ve finally come up with a possible two-fold answer to his question. The first is the consequence of organists playing on so many organs which have a significant delay between when the note is played and when the note is heard, forcing the player to divorce the sound coming in the ear from the imagined sound. Normally, the brain sends a signal to the fingers to play particular notes based on input from the eyes, ears, kinesthetic memory in the fingers themselves, and somatic sense of the rhythm. The brain gets instantaneous feedback solely through the ears, from which it alters course with infinitesimal precision in the next micro-second. When the ears are necessarily divorced from that recipe because of the organ’s limitations, the other senses have to overcompensate – a very difficult thing to do, and unique to organists.
The second brings me back to the opening of this blog: Organists mostly play by themselves. They’re not forced to breathe with the music (the way brass and woodwind players are). Their arms aren’t choreographing the music either, the way string players’s arms are. So, if we don’t feel an internal pulse, don’t breathe with the music, and don’t envision the fact that ALL music is a communal endeavor, then the result leads conductors such as MTT to ask the question he did.
Organists have often immolated each other, when interpreting solo literature, rather than envisioning how a given piece of music might be performed by an entire ensemble (and conductor). Anytime one falls into the trap of listening to your own echo chamber, it’s likely that the outcome will be further and further divorced from the greater collective. In musical terms, this means that it becomes far too easy (and predictable) for organists to play in an erratic way which no conductor could ever conduct, nor an ensemble ever play. Wild freedoms of rubato and delayed accents then become unique to organ-playing and seem foreign and affected by other musicians.
It’s likely that I would have never discovered this without the good fortune to spend many years working in a symphony orchestra and with many of the world’s great conductors. Now, when I play music, most especially of the 19th and 20th centuries, I envision how my colleagues would shape a melody, or an accompaniment. It was a priceless gift that I received from ensemble playing.
Not everyone has the opportunity to work with professional colleagues in this way. But we all have the opportunity to listen to more and more orchestral recordings; and most of us have the opportunity to attend (and consequently support) local chamber ensembles and orchestras.
We’re at a juncture in the availability of live music. With the flood of recordings and YouTubes, the recording industry seems healthy, at least for the people who profit from that media (and most definitely not for the vast majority of the artists). But the future of live performance seems up for grabs, to a certain extent. The tremendous cost of maintaining opera houses and concert halls is being questioned by the younger generation. It’s not a given that these genres will continue unaffected. If we lose them, those of us who are tangential to these structures, but whose artistic expression is almost entirely reliant on how these musical institutions have formed and informed us, will have less to say, musically speaking. At a time when the world is arguably in more desperate need for the transformative aspects of music than at any other time, the choice of engagement seems to be nothing short of a mandate.
©Jonathan Dimmock, 2024