Category: Music

Flentrop Organ at St. Mark

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This last weekend, I had the opportunity to travel to Seattle, WA and hear a concert by Thomas Joyce, assistant organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral and then listen and play around with the organ. This trip was organized by my teacher, and I definitely felt like the odd man out on this trip; all the other students have had four or five years experience, while I am still playing children’s pieces. Still, I’m glad that I had the opportunity to get up close to this beautiful instrument.

This organ was built by the Dutch organ builder D.A. Flentrop in 1965, and is particularly noteworthy as one of the first large all-tracker (mechanical) action organs built in the 20th Century, and became important in the movement towards traditional organ building practices. It was also the largest organ that Flentrop had built (4 manuals, 55 stops). My descriptions cannot possibly do the organ justice, you need to visit the cathedral in person to truly understand how large the organ appears. The cathedrals ceilings are 85 feet high, and the organ is on a gallery about 20 feet up. That puts the organ at somewhere between 45-55 feel tall. When I think about what was involved in getting all of those mechanical linkages to work across a span of that distance…

A complete stoplist is available from the St. Mark’s Website. Of note are the trompettes en chamade (horizontally mounted), the Rugwerk division that hangs over the balcony of the gallery (according to Joyce, the gallery was made large enough to fit a full orchestra and choir! I’d like to see that.), 32′ flue and reed pipes, and the small, intimate Brustwerk division. I’m still learning the conventions of the organ world, but I think this instrument is built with more of a French romantic tonal pallete in mind. This works really well with the large amount or reverberation that the cavernous unfinished concrete cathedral has.

That’s all technical stuff. Which I don’t even have a solid handle on. I can only really speak to the aesthetics of looking and listening to it. I can tell you that the sound is as overwhelming as the size of the instrument. Joyce played a concert of mostly 19th and 20th century music, and on big dissonant chords, the sound became almost viscerally threatening. On the other hand, it was capable of very tender soft moments as well. I loved its Schalmei, a small reed stop, as well as its string stops (the way that this effect is achieved is by having two pipes playing the same pitch slightly out of tune with each other. It sounds much better than that might suggest).  Visually, it is staggeringly beautiful. Everything is in perfect proportion, and the pipes are covered in unusual oxidation patterns (the story goes that the pipes were constructed with higher-than-normal levels of copper, then soaked in urine to change their color). I don’t know about the historical correctness of inverse-colored keys on the console, but it looks cool too.

If anybody ever gets the chance to hear this instrument, I reccomend it.

Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting in a Room

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

This semester, I have been taking a class on Minimalist music. I will be posting occasionally on what I hear as I work through a recording syllabus. They will be in the category Minimalism.

“I Am Sitting in a Room” (1969) has a simple premise at heart. A man records a short phrase on a tape machine. He takes it into an empty room, then runs the tape, over-dubbing the tape with the loop echoing around the room, then repeats for 40 minutes.

This process, this set of actions is simple, yet it yields extremely interesting and, yes, beautiful music. As the loop repeats and builds upon itself, the words become less distinct. Consonants become muddled, then disappear altogether. The reflections off the walls break the contrast of the clear tones produced by speech, they become dull and blend together. High freqency tones die out, and these mellow, deep tones (not unlike a Rhodes keyboard) become the “song.”

I started listening to this piece with the expectation that I would not like it. I am generally wary of music, especially avant-garde music, that is dependent on a single technological process to make it distinctive, but I was blown away by the distinctly musical patterns and tones that emerged from the repetition. It was also the case that every time I thought that I could skip the rest of the recording, I heard a new, unpredicted, pattern.

These patterns became important in minimalist music. The repetition we usually associate with the style likely came from other inspirations, however when the style first began to emerge, there were many composers experimenting with tape loops and phasing, most notably Steve Reich with Come Out (1966) and Piano Phase (1967). This piece can also be considered in the context of other composers that were investigating the potential of computers and recording technology to make music, such as Terry Riley and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Alvin Lucier (1932-) is an American composer and recordist. His music explores the possibilities found in psycho-acoustics, sound installations, and electromagnetically created sound.


Kitka

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Skip to 1:20

I was driving on the highway back home, and flipped on the radio. I start hearing these pleasant, but otherworldly harmonies coming from the radio. I could tell that it was women singing, but I really had no point of reference. It didn’t sound like any Western music I knew, but it didn’t sound like anything else either.

It turns out that I was listening to All Things Considered interviewing the members of Kitka, a female vocal ensemble based in the Bay Area that sing and arrange music in Eastern European folk styles. I am interested in looking further at what that means musically, but I thought I’d share the videos that they have on Youtube.

Great Voices

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Above: “Le Soleil et La Lune” by Charles Trenet

In 2010, NPR is going to do a recurring series about the world’s best vocalists. Of couse, that’s a highly subjective and ultimately crazy goal, but in the time being, they’ve got an interactive tool to help them pare the list down with biography, photos, and audio samples of 150 candidate vocalists. It’s been fun for me to play with and find new people to listen to, such as Charles Trenet (French pop) above and Chavela Vargas below (Mexican ranchera). Go play with it!

Below: “La Llorona” by Chavela Vargas

Musical Moment of the Day

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The main chord progression from Radiohead’s “Everything in it’s Right Place”…

…is the same as the string riff in Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul.”