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Home > Music > Organs > Flentrop > A Historical Perspective
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by Professor Fenner Douglass, University Organist, 1976
Of all the musical instruments in our heritage, the organ lends
itself most readily to historical inquiry and investigation. The
organ has yielded to countless modifications and has been adapted
to an extremely wide range of practical uses from before the time
of Christ to the present day. For example, viewed from the perspective
of size, organs have been made small enough to fit inside a clock
or to carry on one arm and large enough to control the speech
of more than 10,000 pipes. In terms of musical functions, the
organ has served a multitude of purposes, being used for entertainment
at dances or circuses, for folk music played in the open air,
or for the accompaniment of singing. The most lavish and musically
productive organs were developed under the ægis of the Western
Church and within the acoustical spaces of Gothic buildings. It
is that particular facet of the instrument’s historical
and technical development that has inspired the new Flentrop instrument
in Duke University’s great neo-Gothic Chapel.
The art of organ building was highly advanced by the 15th century,
a period which witnessed the earliest flowering of independently
composed organ music. This is evident from the study of early
organs in Gothic churches. As an example, there is the magnificent
1636 Saenredam painting [link to picture of Church of St. Bavo]
of a Gothic organ in Haarlem’s St. Bavo Church. The painting
shows an instrument that was already centuries old and yet of
an architectural grace and beauty not to be exceeded in later
stylistic periods. There is little doubt that the tonal structure
and tuning of these early instruments were in harmony with the
sophisticated musical requirements of their time.
The ancient organs surviving from any musically productive period
provide the means for understanding that music, and there are
still many antique instruments that can be studied. But it is
ordinarily very difficult to discover their original qualities,
because restoration in the strict sense was unknown until recently.
Numerous renovations have altered ancient instruments, giving
them fuller sonority, stronger wind, a different tonal palette,
or perhaps only a facelift. Some early facades of Gothic and Renaissance
organs have survived, but virtually nothing remains from their
interior. One notable exception is found in the Church of San
Petronio in Bologna, where a late-15th-century organ was surrounded
a century later by a new outer shell in baroque style, simply
to bring it cosmetically up to date. The instrument itself has
remained undisturbed inside. The breathtaking old Gothic instrument
of Haarlem in Saenredam’s painting survived only until the
early 18th century, when the wealthy burghers endowed their church
with a magnificent new organ of monumental dimension situated
on a new gallery. This organ, played by Handel and Mozart, exists
today even though it has been subjected to several internal purges
designed to modernize it.
The placement of great organs in Gothic buildings eventually
proved to be a problem with musical implications. The rood screen
position and the side wall on the nave favored in Renaissance
times lost their practical appeal as the instruments grew bulkier
and heavier. The “grandes orgues” of the Golden Age
in the 17th and 18th centuries had only one easy and accessible
location — the “liturgical west end” over the
main entrance. This was not necessarily the ideal acoustical vantage
point for music; the side wall of the nave near the crossing could
offer greater clarity. But large baroque organs with their 16'
and 32' pedal sections were simply too massive to be supported
elsewhere in the building. To be sure, the transept offered similar
space (as at Reims cathedral, where the west windows were especially
numerous), but there were obvious acoustical drawbacks there.
Hundreds of new galleries of wood or stone were constructed, under
which the faithful still pass today and upon which the instruments
were erected that inspired the organ’s greatest treasure
of composed music.
It is an error to generalize by referring to modern organs as
“baroque” or “romantic.” A “baroque”
organ must have been constructed during the historical epoch we
choose to identify as the Baroque Era, roughly between 1600 and
1750. A “romantic” organ derives only from the 19th
century. Organs of the present century might be called “postromantic,”
“neoclassical,” “neobaroque,” or nondescript.
But in fact neither “baroque” nor “neobaroque”
tells us much of anything about the sound of a particular instrument.
There were marked contrasts during the 17th and 18th centuries
among instruments being made in Italy, Spain, France, Germany,
or even tiny Holland. So, an instrument of today which draws its
inspiration from prototypes of that period would properly be labelled
“French classical” in style, or “mid-17th-century
Northwest German,” and so on. Unquestionably, the most respected
builders of this century will continue to emulate the noble sounds
of organs surviving from past epochs by creating instruments that
bring back to life the music of the organ’s great masters:
Sweelinck, Scheidt, Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, Couperin, Bach, Franck,
and many others.
Clearly, as the organ has changed in the last 500 years, so have
musical taste and liturgical requirements. The instrument was
influenced by continuous crosscurrents of musical practice over
widely separated areas of Europe. During the 17th century, for
example, there was an important exchange between people of the
Low Countries and Italy, and thus there are stylistic traces of
Frescobaldi’s art in the music of the North German composer
Buxtehude. However, Italian organs differed markedly from German,
and both were unlike instruments being built in Paris; but all
three types are classified under the general category of
“baroque.”
Innovation in organ building was dramatically hastened by the
Industrial Revolution. Organs no longer had to be manufactured
in the churches and could be built in factories, where mass production
was a feasible economy. The most progressive organ builders of
the 19th century were fascinated by the applicability of various
inventions to the organ, and displayed their latest models at
frequent industrial exhibitions. Great value was attached to scientific
data, standardization, and absolute evenness of dynamic power
over the entire range of pitches. The aim was for uniformity where
previously the irregularity of the handmade product had prevailed.
International standard pitch was established (1859), and equal
temperament was universally accepted. The organ was made to imitate
that most nearly perfect of all instruments, the symphony orchestra.
Many years earlier, the 17th-century LeBègue had published
charming little pieces called “Simphonie,” but now
the romantic “simphonie” was born, resembling a major
orchestral work of many movements. The first and greatest creation
of this new genre was published by César Franck in 1862.
The most innovative contrivance since the invention of stops
was developed by George Barker. His pneumatic machine was applied
for the first time by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll at St. Denis
in 1841. The player’s fingers were no longer required to
exert all the energy for pulling the pallets. Pneumatic motors,
tripped by the player in depressing the keys, did the actual work
of operating the mechanism. This was most welcome on large organs
and for coupling divisions. A hundred stops could now sound all
at once while the resistance of the keyboard did not change at
all. The instrument had grown with the times. Still basically
a tracker, or mechanical action instrument, it had been transformed
by pneumatic assistance to a modern marvel. But the majority of
instruments built in the 19th century were small to medium in
size, from about 5 to 25 stops on one or two manuals with pedals,
and such organs did not need the aid of the Barker machine.
Pneumatic assistance was a reasonable expedient rooted in the
timely demand for great sonority. The source of energy was the
instrument’s own wind supply, utilized for a new purpose.
But once electricity became integral to organ design, drastic
changes occurred. At this point the internal relationships so
important to the musical function of any instrument were thrown
askew, and organs of all sizes would ultimately be the victims.
The step was relatively simple from pneumatically operated actions
in large organs to electro-pneumatically operated actions. In
1868, when the first large electro-pneumatic instruments appeared
simultaneously in France and the United States, they did not differ
markedly from their pneumatic models. But by the first decade
of the 20th century, electric cables and contacts had bean introduced
as substitutes for all the traditional mechanical connections
within organs of all sizes. Thus the instrument was granted freedom
from all its previous limitations, paving the way for gross transmutation
and abuse. To understand the hideous impact of electrical energy
on organ building, just imagine a violin with an electrically
operated bow or better yet, a pianoforte with electrical wires
connecting the keys to the hammers, thereby enabling the player
to remain on stage with his keyboard and pedals, while the rest
of the instrument might be elevated above the heads of the audience
or quite out of sight, connected only by a cable. Fanciful and
foolish as it seems, this was precisely the plight of the organ.
As soon as electricity made possible the physical disembodiment
of the organ’s functioning parts, persuasive argument appeared
for doing the surgery. Architects were quite comfortable removing
the instrument’s increasing bulk to enclosures and chambers,
while leaving the player and console in view. The detached console,
innocently introduced in tracker organs, was discovered to answer
the problems of the player-conductor. A special course was introduced
to curricula in Church Music: “Conducting from the console.”
A typical violation of natural laws for music making was the immense
Skinner organ installed in the 1920s in Cleveland’s new
Severance Hall. The console, connected by a flexible cable, could
be rolled on or off stage, while the wind supply was in the basement
and the pipes and mechanism high above the proscenium arch. As
he played among the members of the orchestra or chorus, the organist
heard nothing of the organ, nor did most of the audience for that
matter. The pipes’ sounds travelled over their heads to
the back rows of the balcony, and the hapless player fingered
aimlessly over his keyboards and pistons.
There was fascination in the discovery that a single player could
control an instrument whose parts were located in remote corners
of a great church. The Antiphonal, Echo, Dome, and Tower Organs
had their day. But even more depressing to the instrument’s
fading capacity was the fact that the ancient art of organ building
was all but given over to electrical engineers, amateurs, and
sloppy repairmen. Anyone could concoct an instrument from supply
house parts. Even the “reputable” builders destroyed
fine old mechanical action organs of the last century, replacing
them with electro-pneumatic or direct electric action instruments
with a life expectancy of about 40 years at best.
In this sorry state the organ had clearly lost its physical identity
and its historical relationship to the literature. Meanwhile,
the rediscovery of early music was slowly gathering momentum during
the second and third decades of this century. A few American organists
in the 1930s travelled to hear ancient European organs. Like Albert
Schweitzer, they were touched with their magic, but none could
find the real key to the performance of the music of the great
masters. It was not until after World War II that the great wave
of musical tourists and Fulbright scholars made the circuit through
Germany, Holland, France, and Italy. These zealots came home demanding
a change — and change they achieved. Their unfocussed search
for authenticity, mingled with reluctance to forego “modern
improvements,” brought forth an odd series of strangely
distorted instruments best characterized as “all-purpose”
or “neoclassical.” Despite the unmerciful lack of
sonority and blend in such organs, a widespread belief still lingers
that somehow the musical features of myriad styles of organs should
be evoked to season the tonal soup of a great new type —
the 20th-century eclectic organ.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the eclectic approach
in organ building, whether tracker or electro-pneumatic, separates
the instrument conclusively from its historical relationship with
music. This is the very precious affinity that we continually
urge European Monument Commissions to preserve. While the “back
to tracker” movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s
may answer partially the musical need for recapturing certain
techniques in organ building, it also illuminates the larger issue
of whether or not the organ literature can long survive in the
shapeless and rude tonal world of the modern eclectic organ.
When architect Horace Trumbauer addressed himself to the question
of style for Duke University’s new chapel, completed in
1932, he created a masterpiece of period architecture, emulating
related stylistic elements of English and French Gothic churches.
The building was no artful deceit. It was the real thing, right
down to every hand-carved detail of stone construction. When access
to the new organ gallery was recently cut through from the spiral
stair at the core of the pier in the rear of the church, the cut
material was not reinforced concrete, but stone.
Following the example of the building, it might have been suggested
in 1932 that the plan for Duke Chapel’s first organ should
reflect the “period” approach. There were hundreds
of European instruments in ancient churches to serve as models:
neo-Gothic 19th-century instruments, baroque organs of all types,
and even a few from the 15th or 16th centuries. But, as we already
observed, the time was not right in the 1930s. No one was then
prepared to forego modern comfort for deeper insights to a musical
world long lost to the American ear. It was in fact a stroke of
rare good fortune that when enlightened donors of the 1970s offered
Duke a monumental new organ, the best international level of understanding
in organ building had already settled firmly on the period concept.
How fitting and artistically consistent that Duke Chapel should
become the musical sounding board for an organ rooted solidly
in the great liturgical traditions. The need for a seasoned artist-builder
was met with the choice of Dirk Flentrop, a native Lowlander experienced
in the restoration of ancient instruments, and a man with a lifetime
of exposure to the crosscurrents between French and German national
styles.
There was no whimsical trait to the new Flentrop organ. Like
the modern harpsichord of surpassing quality, a violin, recorder,
or pianoforte, it owes its physical outline, its interior layout,
materials and techniques of construction, even its decoration,
to an established historical prototype for which a great literature
exists. The intention is to reproduce music of a particular period
and scope as faithfully as might be possible in the 1970s. The
organ will clearly sound its best for the music of Johann Sebastian
Bach and his contemporaries, but no one should be surprised to
hear it used for works of Sweelinck or Titelouze, whose music
is more than a century older than Bach’s, or for works of
Mendelssohn or Franck, more than a century later. The instrument
was freed from virtually all corruptive influences deriving from
periods later than the early 18th century. Thus, a musician will
not expect to change stops electrically, to set pistons before
playing, to couple the manuals without a commensurate response
in the key action, to open or close Venetian swells, to operate
distant antiphonal divisions, or to find console measurements
in conformity to the latest standards of the American Guild of
Organists.
Indeed, countless costly “sacrifices” have been made
to produce a true “period” organ. Just as Trumbauer
required the piers of the building to be made of stone rather
than concrete, so also is this organ made only of solid wood,
rather than plywood, steel, fiberglass, or plastic. To achieve
resonance, musical articulation, balance in the wind, cohesion
of ensemble, and a rich visual presence, the instrument has been
given a self-supporting mahogany case, solid conduits for the
wind, cuneiform bellows, suspended key action, wooden rollers,
cedar trackers, oak stickers and squares, a gallery of solid oak,
and hand-carved decorative pipe shades finished with gold leaf.
The architectural proportions of the two cases are the result
of a tonal design appropriate to the size and acoustical properties
of the Chapel’s interior space. In other words, all decisions
on materials, scalings, and distribution of pitches among the
stops within the case and on the organ front are incapable of
being separated from their effect on the external appearance of
the whole. Likewise, the gallery, which was designed and constructed
in Durham, articulates harmoniously with the physical requirements
of the classical concept governing the organ, built in the Netherlands.
Architecturally and acoustically, the gallery is an extension
of the instrument itself. To achieve such a just adaptation of
all the parts to one another has called forth the combined talents
and foresight of the University Trustees, the campus administration,
the organ builder and his entire force of artisans, the University
architect, the musicians, the acousticians, the architect of the
gallery, and a host of engineers, stone workers, contractors,
carpenters, carvers, and painters. What place would there be in
such a scheme for lack of unity or concessions to the sapless
meagerness of the all-purpose approach?
Let the future determine the durability of the basic æsthetic
thrust. After 50 years, the instrument will hardly be broken in.
For the present, we thank the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation for
demonstrating that the organ is more than a replica from a glorious
past. It is an instrument for contemporary expression. Because
of the Foundation’s generosity, the first work composed
for the new instrument is Iain Hamilton’s A Vision of Canopus.
Like the organ for which it was written, the work’s internal
structure is basically simple, but enriched with intricately related
textures relying on the organ’s extremely wide range of
dynamics and timbre.
Irving said, “In America literature and the elegant arts
must grow up side by side with the coarser plants of daily necessity.”
Let this organ remind us that there was in the Pythagorean quadrivium
a place for music, and among the fine arts, for architecture.
As this instrument is heard for services and concerts week after
week it will convey to its students and the outside world a message
immune to timely fashion, that “the adaptation of things
in the natural world to the uses of life” may occasionally
produce a lasting and beautiful work of art.
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