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cosmolinguist"Is that organ connected up to those pipes?" whispered a voice behind me to her companion before the organist came out on stage. (I think it was the same voice that was humming along with the "Dance of the Flowers" theme a bit later.)
I'd just been thinking I'm woefully unexposed to pipe organs, but that made me feel better: I am a veritable expert! I've seen in a few churches but they've often gone unused while I was there. My mom's church recently realized that the tiny closet jammed full of pipes could be cleaned out, straigthened up, sent away to Hungary or something for repairs or replacements, and reassembled to beautiful and stunning effect in the church's balcony. So now every Sunday the pastor's wife haltingly plays familiar hymns on one of the more lovely things I have ever seen. I thought of that as I looked at the shiny elegant pipes of this one in the shiny elegant Bridgewater Hall.
We had pretty good seats: fourth row, almost center, just like my friends and I try to get when we go to the movies. And for some reason I was surprised that they'd put the organ right in front of the screen, facing it, as if that wasn't the ony sensible place for someone who planned to improvise live organ accompaniment to a silent movie. But it meant I had as good as view of the music as I would of the movie.
I've seen more than enough silent movies to know that I usually have to be staring at the screen pretty intensely to follow along: not just to read out the words (though that's often a challenge, it wasn't this time on such a big screen!) but also to follow along with who's actually saying whatever it is I'm trying so hard to read, and what else is going on, which can be surprisingly difficult with no sound cues at all (did he hug her? or hurt her? are they shouting? or laughing?), even — or especially — the nonverbal ones. Since I didn't expect to have much extra attention to spare for the organist, I was glad that he played something before the movie started. It was a perfect choice; a great organ piece and a great scary piece and something comfortingly familiar to an audience that Andrew suspected was all Lloyd Webber fans (someone behind us was heard to say "Why aren't they talking? Their mouths are moving!"): Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
It was surprisingly hard to hear it with fresh ears, despite not knowing it as well as I think I do. Everyone knows the first bit, even if they don't think they do (recently Andrew's been telling a story about Dave Sim saying classical pieces all have the wrong names. They should be things like "An Opera Singer Whose Head is Shrinking for Some Reason I Forget Just Now: Feee-gaa-row! Fi-ga-ro! Figaro figarofigarofigaro!... And everyone's favorite: the little duckling catching up with his family at the end of the cartoon: [sings Blue Danube Waltz] da da da da-da! Quack quack! Quack quack!" Toccata and Fugue is like that, it's the one you hear when We Finally See the Monster. DA DA DA! Da da-da-da-DA DUM!")
But once you get past that bit it's another beast entirely. And it's surprisingly easy to hear it with fresh ears, especially when I'm seeing it as well. I think I may well have only heard it before, and while I know it's played on organs and I know what organs look like and are (I know the pipes are connected up!), I realized that I can still be surprised that all those noises are coming out of a single musical instrumemnt that is played by a single person. I could easily believe, when my eyes aren't telling me otherwise, that it's played by lots of booming horns and flittering flutes and hoozits and thingies and other alien instruments that haven't even been invented yet.
Parts of it made me think This is space music!. It still sounded like the future ... maybe the seventies' or eighties' idea of the future, but that's still pretty cool considering I'm talking about the nineteen-seventies or -eighties. Andrew has told me that Carl Sagan, when debating music for inclusion on Voyager's golden record to represent humanity to whatever may encounter our little ship, said that including J.S. Bach would be just showing off; I grinned as I always do when I think of that.
The other great thing about pipe organs, that I also knew but appreciated more last night, is what a physical instrument they are. I play clarinet, where you just move your fingers about a quarter of an inch at a time and though you can wave your upper body around a bit if you want to be dramatic, you're still stuck with that weird look on your face, thanks to embouchre! I play guitar, which is basically sedentary despite the attempts of people like Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix to make it not look that way. That is why rock guitarists always have such constipated looks on their faces when they're playing those ridiculous solos; they're dying to be wild and crazy but their instrument dictates quite precise fingering and you can only get so expressive when, no matter how many big amplifiers are behind you, your contribution extends to, at the most, bending the strings a bit. I play piano, which is a bit like organ and allows for more movement and flourishes than the others, but only to the degree that pianos are otherwise like organs: not as much as you'd think. Organs have layers of keyboards! It hurts my head to look at in the same way 3-D chess boards do. They have all those stops, to help you change the sound from a single flute to a gaggle of hoozits in a flash, and thus this seems in itself another complicated instrument to learn and integrate. And the pedals! Any instrument you have to play in stocking feet wins points with me.
Sometimes last night, the organist played with just his feet, and besides making a particularly thrilling and dramatic sound, this was just great to watch. He put his hands on the bench to either side of him, probably just to balance himself as his legs flailed around, sometimes quite wildly, but I thought it had quite a dramatic flair as well as whatever pragmatic value it had. You don't often see musicians doing an impression of a Riverdance dancer, I imagine, and if you did you wouldn't often hear such great music as he was playing at those times.
And when all four limbs got into it, it was really something to behold. He was, from my view of his back, quite still a lot of the time, but many of the dramatic bits evoked chords that didn't just sound but looked dramatic, hands and feet jumping to and then freezing in whatever odd arrangement provided the necessary chord, before moving on to another, often very different, position for the next chord or run or whatever. Especially because he was improvising, this gave the impression that the movie's scary bits were scaring him, causing him to jump or freeze just as it was meant to do to its audiences. It was a marvelous effect, especially since I knew well this was hardly frightening him: he'd told us this was the fifth time he'd improvised to this movie in two weeks, and his fiftieth in the last five years or so.
Even without being told I would have known that; he was obviously skilled — he made it look easy and I know enough about improvising to know that it never is — so much so that I often forgot for a little while that the music was live because it was so well integrated into the movie. It may be a backhanded compliment for a musician to be so good he is hardly noticed, but it is a true one, and anyway this meant there were many pleasant realizations (often when I caught, out of what passes for the corner of my eye, the moments of sudden flailing) that he was really there.
I'd just been thinking I'm woefully unexposed to pipe organs, but that made me feel better: I am a veritable expert! I've seen in a few churches but they've often gone unused while I was there. My mom's church recently realized that the tiny closet jammed full of pipes could be cleaned out, straigthened up, sent away to Hungary or something for repairs or replacements, and reassembled to beautiful and stunning effect in the church's balcony. So now every Sunday the pastor's wife haltingly plays familiar hymns on one of the more lovely things I have ever seen. I thought of that as I looked at the shiny elegant pipes of this one in the shiny elegant Bridgewater Hall.
We had pretty good seats: fourth row, almost center, just like my friends and I try to get when we go to the movies. And for some reason I was surprised that they'd put the organ right in front of the screen, facing it, as if that wasn't the ony sensible place for someone who planned to improvise live organ accompaniment to a silent movie. But it meant I had as good as view of the music as I would of the movie.
I've seen more than enough silent movies to know that I usually have to be staring at the screen pretty intensely to follow along: not just to read out the words (though that's often a challenge, it wasn't this time on such a big screen!) but also to follow along with who's actually saying whatever it is I'm trying so hard to read, and what else is going on, which can be surprisingly difficult with no sound cues at all (did he hug her? or hurt her? are they shouting? or laughing?), even — or especially — the nonverbal ones. Since I didn't expect to have much extra attention to spare for the organist, I was glad that he played something before the movie started. It was a perfect choice; a great organ piece and a great scary piece and something comfortingly familiar to an audience that Andrew suspected was all Lloyd Webber fans (someone behind us was heard to say "Why aren't they talking? Their mouths are moving!"): Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
It was surprisingly hard to hear it with fresh ears, despite not knowing it as well as I think I do. Everyone knows the first bit, even if they don't think they do (recently Andrew's been telling a story about Dave Sim saying classical pieces all have the wrong names. They should be things like "An Opera Singer Whose Head is Shrinking for Some Reason I Forget Just Now: Feee-gaa-row! Fi-ga-ro! Figaro figarofigarofigaro!... And everyone's favorite: the little duckling catching up with his family at the end of the cartoon: [sings Blue Danube Waltz] da da da da-da! Quack quack! Quack quack!" Toccata and Fugue is like that, it's the one you hear when We Finally See the Monster. DA DA DA! Da da-da-da-DA DUM!")
But once you get past that bit it's another beast entirely. And it's surprisingly easy to hear it with fresh ears, especially when I'm seeing it as well. I think I may well have only heard it before, and while I know it's played on organs and I know what organs look like and are (I know the pipes are connected up!), I realized that I can still be surprised that all those noises are coming out of a single musical instrumemnt that is played by a single person. I could easily believe, when my eyes aren't telling me otherwise, that it's played by lots of booming horns and flittering flutes and hoozits and thingies and other alien instruments that haven't even been invented yet.
Parts of it made me think This is space music!. It still sounded like the future ... maybe the seventies' or eighties' idea of the future, but that's still pretty cool considering I'm talking about the nineteen-seventies or -eighties. Andrew has told me that Carl Sagan, when debating music for inclusion on Voyager's golden record to represent humanity to whatever may encounter our little ship, said that including J.S. Bach would be just showing off; I grinned as I always do when I think of that.
The other great thing about pipe organs, that I also knew but appreciated more last night, is what a physical instrument they are. I play clarinet, where you just move your fingers about a quarter of an inch at a time and though you can wave your upper body around a bit if you want to be dramatic, you're still stuck with that weird look on your face, thanks to embouchre! I play guitar, which is basically sedentary despite the attempts of people like Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix to make it not look that way. That is why rock guitarists always have such constipated looks on their faces when they're playing those ridiculous solos; they're dying to be wild and crazy but their instrument dictates quite precise fingering and you can only get so expressive when, no matter how many big amplifiers are behind you, your contribution extends to, at the most, bending the strings a bit. I play piano, which is a bit like organ and allows for more movement and flourishes than the others, but only to the degree that pianos are otherwise like organs: not as much as you'd think. Organs have layers of keyboards! It hurts my head to look at in the same way 3-D chess boards do. They have all those stops, to help you change the sound from a single flute to a gaggle of hoozits in a flash, and thus this seems in itself another complicated instrument to learn and integrate. And the pedals! Any instrument you have to play in stocking feet wins points with me.
Sometimes last night, the organist played with just his feet, and besides making a particularly thrilling and dramatic sound, this was just great to watch. He put his hands on the bench to either side of him, probably just to balance himself as his legs flailed around, sometimes quite wildly, but I thought it had quite a dramatic flair as well as whatever pragmatic value it had. You don't often see musicians doing an impression of a Riverdance dancer, I imagine, and if you did you wouldn't often hear such great music as he was playing at those times.
And when all four limbs got into it, it was really something to behold. He was, from my view of his back, quite still a lot of the time, but many of the dramatic bits evoked chords that didn't just sound but looked dramatic, hands and feet jumping to and then freezing in whatever odd arrangement provided the necessary chord, before moving on to another, often very different, position for the next chord or run or whatever. Especially because he was improvising, this gave the impression that the movie's scary bits were scaring him, causing him to jump or freeze just as it was meant to do to its audiences. It was a marvelous effect, especially since I knew well this was hardly frightening him: he'd told us this was the fifth time he'd improvised to this movie in two weeks, and his fiftieth in the last five years or so.
Even without being told I would have known that; he was obviously skilled — he made it look easy and I know enough about improvising to know that it never is — so much so that I often forgot for a little while that the music was live because it was so well integrated into the movie. It may be a backhanded compliment for a musician to be so good he is hardly noticed, but it is a true one, and anyway this meant there were many pleasant realizations (often when I caught, out of what passes for the corner of my eye, the moments of sudden flailing) that he was really there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 05:31 pm (UTC)my inner thirteen year old homo is laughing right now.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 05:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 08:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 08:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 10:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 06:35 pm (UTC)/cartoon geek
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 06:40 pm (UTC)When we made crystals in high school most of them were alum and so our teacher said we could eat them so someone tried one and I wondered if his head would shrink.
But anyway, thank you; (almost) all pedantry is appreciated here at
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-19 01:46 am (UTC)