In the wind...

The start of a century Cell phones, ATMs, airplanes, power At 10:24 a.m. on October 15, 1947, plants, railroads, and thank goodness, Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager flew icemakers just kept on running. However the X-1 experimental aircraft faster than accurately that moment was defined, it the speed of sound. That’s 761.2 miles was meaningless—a randomly identified per hour at 59-degrees Fahrenheit. It milestone amongst the multitude. was quite a technological achievement. Then we worried about what we call You have to generate a lot of power to those years. The oughts? The Ohs? move a machine that fast. But there was Shifting from ninety-seven, ninety-eight, a spiritual and metaphysical aspect to ninety-nine to oh-one, oh-two, oh-three that feat. Engineers were confident that seemed impossible. I managed, and so they could produce sufficient power, but did you. they were not sure that a machine would survive the shock wave generated by a Centennials machine outrunning its own noise. They The twentieth century started with- supposed that the plane would vaporize, out the computer-induced hoopla, but or at least shatter, scattering Yeager-dust I suppose that our heroes—Widor, Puc- across the landscape. cini, Saint-Saëns, Dvorák, and Thomas In his swaggering ghost-written Edison—watched in suspense as the autobiography, Yeager, he casually men- clock ticked past the witching hour. tions that he had broken ribs (probably The real upheaval happened more than Cass Gilbert’s ’s 8 Spruce Street garnered in a barroom brawl) and had thirteen years later. On May 29, 1913, to rig a broomstick to close the cockpit Ballets Russe danced the premiere of water more than 700 feet up. Just think (Episcopal). Three blocks west on the hatch. He took off, flew the daylights out Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at of that: pulling up to the curb in a shiny corner of 10th and Fifth Avenue stands of the thing, and landed, pretty much Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Stravinsky new 1913 Chalmers Touring Car, and Church of the Ascension (Episcopal). just like any other flight. By the noise, had used traditional and familiar instru- stepping in an elevator to go up fifty- Both are “Gothicky” buildings—Grace and by the cockpit instruments, he knew ments and all the same notes that people seven stories. Those folks in Kansas is whitish with a tall pointed spire, while he had broken the sound barrier, but to were used to, but the way he arranged would have flipped their wigs. Ascension is brownish with a stolid Yeager’s undoubted pleasure and later the tonalities, the maniacal organization The Woolworth building is still there square tower with finials. Both have comfort, the worries of the skeptics of rhythms, the angular melodies, and a hundred years later. Like The Rite pretty urban gardens. Both are prosper- proved untrue. the radical orchestration set the place of Spring, it’s a staple in our lives, and ous, active places. And both have radical in an uproar. The bassoon that played it seems a little less radical than it did new 21st-century organs. Invisible barriers those haunting melismatic opening solos a century ago. After all, a few blocks Taylor & Boody of Staunton, Virginia, Remember Y2K? As the final weeks could have been used to play continuo away at 8 Spruce Street, by the foot of is coming toward completion of the of 1999 ticked by, residents of the world in a Bach cantata the same day. Legend the , the new tallest installation of their Opus 65 at Grace wondered if we would survive the magi- has it that the audience couldn’t contain residential building in the Americas Church, where Patrick Allen is the cal, mystical moment between Decem- itself and there was wild disturbance. (seventy-six stories and 876 feet), Organist and Master of the Choristers. ber 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. Of How wonderful for a serious musical designed by Frank Gehry, towers like a In 2011, Pascal Quoirin of Saint-Didier, course, the world has survived some composition to stir people up like that. maniacal grove of polished corkscrews. Provence, France, completed installa- twenty-five changes of millennia since I haven’t seen people so worked up Gehry took the functional aesthetic of tion of a marvelous instrument at Church we started to count time, but this would since the Boston Bruins failed to win the the glass-and-steel Seagram Building of the Ascension, where Dennis Keene is be the first time with computers. The Stanley Cup. (375 , designed by Mies Organist and Choirmaster. myth that computers would not be able van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, built Both of these organs have as their to count to 2000 had us hyperventilat- Everything’s up to date in in 1958), and gave it a Cubist ethic by cores large tracker-action organs based ing as we ran to ATMs to grab as much Kansas City twisting the surfaces to create the sig- on historic principles—and Principals. cash as we could. People refused to About five weeks before Stravinsky nature rippling effects. And both have large romantic divisions make plans that would have them aloft tried to ruin the theater in Paris, the How poetic that the Woolworth inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth- in airplanes at that horrible moment, Woolworth Building designed by Building and 8 Spruce Street, opened century ideals. Both are exquisite pieces supposing that cockpit computers would Cass Gilbert was opened on Lower almost exactly a century apart, stand just of architecture and furniture, and both fail and planes would fall from the sky. in , April 24, 1913. a few blocks apart, trying to out-loom have been built by blending the highest The collapse of the world’s economy was Like Stravinsky, Cass Gilbert used a each other. I took these photos of them levels of traditional craftsmanship with predicted. Public utilities would cease to traditional vocabulary—the prickles while standing in the same spot on City modern materials and methods. function. Nuclear power plants would and arches given us by the Gothic Hall Plaza. At Church of the Ascension you can overheat, and soufflés would fall. cathedrals. But Rodgers & Hammer- Frank Woolworth made a fortune in play the core organ from a three-manual As the clock ticked closer to midnight stein’s “gone and built a skyscraper retail, the Sam Walton of his day. F. W. mechanical keydesk, and the entire on New Year’s Eve, we waited breath- seven stories high” was not as high as Woolworth stores dotted the country, instrument from a separate four-manual lessly. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…some- a building ought to go. Cass Gilbert making goods of reasonable quality electric console. At Grace Church, the times it causes me to tremble…eleven, went fifty-seven stories—792 feet; the available to residents of small towns. whole organ plays from a four-manual ten, nine, eight, seven…all good children building remained the tallest in the However, I doubt that anything sold detached mechanical console, and con- go to heaven…four, three, two, one… world until 1930. Gilbert hung those in his stores would have been found in tacts under the keyboards allow access Humpf. classic Gothic features on a high-tech his houses. His principal residence, also to electric couplers and the few high- I have no idea how the venerable structure and startled the world of designed by Cass Gilbert, was at the pressure windchests that operate on astronomers settled on how to organize architecture and commerce. corner of Fifth Avenue and 80th Street electric action. the calendar and define our concept of Besides the technical achievement of in , across the street from the A more detailed account of the time. I imagine a committee of bearded supporting a massive structure that tall, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among organ at Church of the Ascension has and wizened wise men gathered in a pub, the building had thirty-four newfangled dozens of priceless artifacts was a large been published (see The Diapason, throwing darts at a drawing of a clock. elevators. The engineers executing Gil- three-manual Aeolian organ. Woolworth November 2011) and no doubt, we can However they did it, they didn’t fool us. bert’s design had to figure out how to get was one of Aeolian’s prime customers, expect one about the Grace Church and, rare among that heady clientele, he organ—so I’ll limit myself to general could play the organ. observations, and let the organbuild- His estate Winfield (the “W” of F. W. ers and musicians involved speak for Woolworth) on Long Island boasted the themselves. I admire the courage and first full-length 32-foot Double Open inventiveness exhibited in the creation Diapason to be built for a residence of these two remarkable instruments. organ. Now that would shake your cham- I expect that purists from both ends pagne glasses. of the spectrum will be critical, or at Woolworth’s funeral was held in the least skeptical of these efforts to bridge Fifth Avenue mansion. Frank Taft, artis- the abyss. But I raise the question of tic director of the Aeolian Company, was whether purism or conservative attitudes on the organ bench. are the best things for the future of our instrument. We study history, measure The twenty-first-century pipe organ pipes, analyze metal compositions, and There’s a lot going on here in lower study the relationships between ancient Manhattan. South of Union Square at instruments and the music written for , Broadway stops its disrup- them. We have to do that, and we must tive diagonal path across the city, and do that. assumes a more reliable north-south ori- After finishing the restoration and entation, forming the border between relocation of a beautiful organ built by Greenwich East Village and Greenwich E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 466, 1868) West Village. On the corner of 10th for the Follen Community Church in and Broadway stands Grace Church Lexington, Massachusetts, I wrote an

18 n THE DIAPASON n SEPTEMBER 2013 WWW.THEDIAPASON.COM By John Bishop

Christ, Claremont, California, has • Cass Gilbert used 500-year-old been released on iTunes. Buy it. This iconography to decorate a technologi- is a smashing recording of wonderful cal wonder. playing on a really thrilling organ. It’s • Frank Gehry gave the familiar sky- a big, three-manual instrument with scraper a new twist. mechanical action and a wide variety of • Taylor & Boody and Pascal Quoirin tone color. The recording has long been have morphed seventeenth- and eigh- a favorite of mine—I transferred it from teenth-century languages into twenty- the original CD to my iPhone and listen first-century marvels. to it in the car frequently. • Timothy Tikker painted for us a por- The first piece on the recording, Tiento trait of the march of time. Woolworth Building, street-level detail de Batalla sobre la Balletto del Granduca by Timothy Tikker, was commissioned by Organists are very good at lamenting essay in the dedication book under the the organbuilder to showcase the organ’s the passage of the old ways. Each new title, The Past Becomes the Future. In it extraordinary collection of reed voices. translation of the bible or the Book of I wrote about the experience of working The piece opens with a statement of a Common Prayer is cause for mourning. on such a fine instrument, marveling measured dance, familiar to organists I won’t mention the introduction of new denomination introduces a new hym- at the precision of the workers’ pencil who grew up listening to the recording hymnals. (Oops!) nal—the end of the world as you know lines, and the vision of conceiving an of E. Power Biggs, and proceeds in a We recite stoplists as if they were the it. So, learn the new hymnal, decide for instrument that would be vital and dignified fashion from verse to verse. I essence of the pipe organ. We draw the yourself what are the strong and weak exciting 140 years later. I saw that proj- picture a large stone hall lit by torches, same five stops every time we play the points, and get on with it. ect as a metaphor for a combination of with heavily costumed people in parade. same piece on a different organ. And we Chuck Yeager broke the sound bar- eras. And I intended the double mean- But about three minutes in, things start criticize our colleagues for starting a trill rier, and kept flying faster and faster. ing for the word becomes. The past to go wrong. It’s as though someone on the wrong note. On October 15, 2012, at the age of 89, not only transfers to the future, but it threw funky mushrooms into one of the I don’t think Igor Stravinsky cared a Chuck Yeager reenacted the feat, fly- enhances the future. I could carry the torches. An odd note pokes through the whit about which note should start a trill. ing in a brand new F-15 accompanied play on words further by misquoting the stately procession—you can forgive it by a Navy captain. But imagine this: it title of a popular movie, Prada Becomes because you hardly notice it. But oops, The end of the world as we know it was the same day that Austrian Felix the Devil! there’s another—and another—and Together we have witnessed many Baumgartner became the first person Another tense of that use of the word pretty soon the thing has morphed into doomsday predictions. I’ve not paid to break the sound barrier without at become is familiar to us from Dupré’s a series of maniacal leaps and swoops close attention to the science of it, but airplane! He jumped from a helium Fifteen Antiphons: I am black but as the reeds get more and more bawdy. it seems to me that the Mayan calendar balloon at an altitude of twenty-four comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem. We Tikker established a traditional frame has come and gone in the news several miles, and achieved a speed of 843.6 don’t typically use the word that way in on which he hung a thrilling, sometimes times in the last few years. A predicted miles per hour as he fell before deploy- conversation, but if you read in a Vic- terrifying essay on the power of those doomsday passes quietly and someone ing his parachute. Both men lived to see torian poem, “she of comely leg,” you’d Rosales reeds. takes another look at the calendar and another day. know exactly what it meant! announces a miscalculation. Maybe the A Taylor & Boody organ with multiple New threads on old bones world will end. If it does, I suppose it will pressures and expressions, powerful Speaking of the ballet… • Igor Stravinsky used an ancient end for all of us so the playing field will voices on electric actions, and seething Recently, renowned organist Diane vocabulary of notes and sounds to cre- remain equal. symphonic strings—the end of the world Belcher mentioned on Facebook that ate revolutionary sounds. The same old But we can apply this phrase, the end as we know it. Embrace the thoughtful- the recording she made in 1999 (JAV sharps and flats, rhythmic symbols, and of the world as we know it, to positive ness and creativity that begat it. And for 115) on the Rosales/Glatter-Götz organ every-good-boy-deserves-fudge were developments in our art and craft as goodness’ sake, stop using archaic words in the Claremont United Church of rejigged to start a revolution. the twenty-first century matures. Your like comely and begat. ■

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