Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring, there is a decent contingent of symphonic and "theatre" (yes -re) organ people who want something that moves us and maybe erodes some of the concrete work elsewhere in building. Misc tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzpQHz2dGX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VN5DGw3OvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm_vvBuH2ts Also,…
>Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring
There's a software that I used to emulate a pipe organ (and also harpsichords). I used it for years and it has a library with a lot of historical organs around the world: https://www.hauptwerk.com , as far as I know this is the only commercially supported PC/Mac software dedicated to this.
If you want to learn more about pipe organs from a completely different viewpoint, this series where a pipe organ is gradually rebuilt by an extremely talented and enthusiastic amateur is great fun! LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER - I BOUGHT A WHOLE CHURCH ORGAN - Part 1: The Organ Removal https://youtu.be/8PwwRR8deHk
Came here to plug this. It was a great watch, and hearing a classic pipe organ connected to a midi arpeggiator is so cool
Also, he builds his own midi interface for the pipe organ (iirc with arduino), which is quite a cool thing to watch. And realizing that the mechanics of it all are fundamentally simple, but complex due to being repeated on a physically massive scale
The pipe organ is surely one of the most majestic & grand instruments, and I long for the day its most frequent use won't be drab church hymns. It's capable of so much more. It's also difficult to get exposure to. You've basically got make friends with a church music director to let you play theirs. That's not easy, especially as a queer self-taught musician—no religion, no music degree won't get you too far. It's a…
I mean I wouldnt look at this like organs are somehow gatekept : theyre just fucking expensive so you have to get in with the institutions that own them to be able to play em.
Anna Lapwood demonstrating the features of a pipe organ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzK-tYFGQx4 Edit: Although she didn't explain how they "programme" the buttons. Presumably by adjusting something in the guts of the organ.
The system for storing and recalling stop combinations ("registrations") is called a combination action [0]. On a modern instrument, it's generally built with electronics, including a solid-state memory. It's also user-programmable. Usually, this is done through a "set" button: the organist holds down the set button and then simultaneously presses the button ("piston") that they want to program. The current state of…
Some years ago, I was assisting at an Organ recital on new year's eve at my city's main church, the last piece was supposed to be Elgar's pomp & circumstance march no.1, arranged for two organs.
We programmed all the combinations for that one and all the other pieces on the day before(there were lots and lots).
Fast forward to the end of the recital, I take away the sheet music for the penultimate piece and activate the first combination for the march. The organist raises his hands and starts playing -- and all we hear is a principal 8' only, completely wrong sound. Somehow, all prepared combinations had disappeared! He managed to perform the piece somehow, but the recital's supposed climax ended a bit underwhelming.
Sadly, we never found out, why the combinations vanished (most likely, they were saved to another bank and we didn't notice, or somebody else switched banks/erased them accidentally, before the recital started).
Nerve-wracking indeed :(
Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring, there is a decent contingent of symphonic and "theatre" (yes -re) organ people who want something that moves us and maybe erodes some of the concrete work elsewhere in building. Misc tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzpQHz2dGX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VN5DGw3OvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm_vvBuH2ts Also,…
> Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring Huh?
I generalized. To be specific, the interesting part of liturgical and most classical organ music requires an advanced understanding of harmony and nuance that the typical average citizen of the Earth will rarely accumulate the hundreds to thousands of hours that it takes to appreciate in context. For most people, it's like watching 2700 ELO chess masters play without a commentator: hard to appreciate. On the other hand, for me organs are really fun to listen to so I will put up with classical and liturgical music even if it kind of puts me to sleep and because I've listened to it enough that I can deal. Frankly, sometimes the best part of the typical liturgical organ experience is during the time they are tuning the organ before the audience arrives. I can listen to individual pipes beating against each other and the tuning process a lot longer than I can handle something like Jean Guillou's Improvisations for Christmas.
More power to the folks who can stomach classical organ music though. You guys pay the bills for the rest of us who want to hear melodies we recognized.
However, the organ (particular symphonic organ and theatre variants) are frankly pretty adept at translations of music that is rhythmically and familiar to popular music trends of the last 60 years. In this case, the listener doesn't have to be nearly as intimately familiar with the trends of music between the 1700s and before the date their grandparents were born.
The sound track of Interstellar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(soundtrack)
Basically, the exception which proves the rule. I sincerely doubt most folks could name other titles which prominently feature organ as a focal instrument in a work. There's more, of course, but Interstellar tends to be people's first example.
> Basically, the exception which proves the rule.
Exception can only weaken the rule, although it might still statistically hold well enough to be called a rule.
Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring, there is a decent contingent of symphonic and "theatre" (yes -re) organ people who want something that moves us and maybe erodes some of the concrete work elsewhere in building. Misc tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzpQHz2dGX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VN5DGw3OvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm_vvBuH2ts Also,…
> Although most organ music played for liturgical or academic reasons is terrifyingly boring Huh?
I think that was laziness or shorthand. It's not inherently boring but it's a highly specialized instrument within a specific ethnic music tradition. It's fairly opaque and difficult to evaluate what is "good" within that tradition if you were raised without exposure to it.
A lot of the musical interest in organ music comes from either its contrasting strengths compared to other western art music instruments, or nuanced harmonic relationships specific to the theory of the music tradition it's embedded in.
Organ music tends to be for organ nerds, basically. It's not that it's bad or boring, but what's exciting about it isn't something you can easily pick up just by listening to organ music.
The pipe organ is surely one of the most majestic & grand instruments, and I long for the day its most frequent use won't be drab church hymns. It's capable of so much more. It's also difficult to get exposure to. You've basically got make friends with a church music director to let you play theirs. That's not easy, especially as a queer self-taught musician—no religion, no music degree won't get you too far. It's a…
As an amateur pianist trying to learn organ specifically to play "drab" church hymns, I can say that while I admire the complexity and scope of the organ, At the same time, I don't find the organ particularly interesting musically. I just don't think it "sounds" great. I think this explains the lack of popularity of organ more than anything else. In my free time, I would much rather listen to piano music than organ m…
> At the same time, I don't find the organ particularly interesting musically.
Find different organ music!
I can do without Buxtehude, say. But I would rather listen to Duruflé and Howells then basically anything else.
The system for storing and recalling stop combinations ("registrations") is called a combination action [0]. On a modern instrument, it's generally built with electronics, including a solid-state memory. It's also user-programmable. Usually, this is done through a "set" button: the organist holds down the set button and then simultaneously presses the button ("piston") that they want to program. The current state of…
Some years ago, I was assisting at an Organ recital on new year's eve at my city's main church, the last piece was supposed to be Elgar's pomp & circumstance march no.1, arranged for two organs. We programmed all the combinations for that one and all the other pieces on the day before(there were lots and lots). Fast forward to the end of the recital, I take away the sheet music for the penultimate piece and activate…
Opposite happened to me. There’d been a performance of the Messiah in our church on Saturday night. I played for the main Communion service the next morning and everything was fine until the (quiet) Agnus Dei setting. Punched the General as per usual, started to play, and the Solo Posaune blared out. I almost fell off the bench with shock.