This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is Gerlinde Gniewosz who I worked with while she was at Yahoo! She could write about so many things including her globe trotting or her recent initiative – developing educational courses and tools for mobile devices. But I not at all surprised she writes about something far more challenging.
“When I was 5, my parents offered me a choice – to learn the piano or the organ. The organ with its flashier buttons won. From that day a life-long experience started – from early panic attacks at having to learn new pieces each week to daily torture sessions to a passionate hobby and now an occasional joy.
As my first instrument, my parents bought me an electronic Yamaha. It looks a bit like an upright piano, except that it had two keyboards, 1.5 octave pedal board and many colorful buttons. The presets (or ‘stops’ in pipe organ speak) had generally similar labels to what one finds on traditional pipe organs, but sounded different given the quality of audio electronics in those days. The big difference was the ability to set a beat to play along with – Rock, Bossa Nova, etc. Later in life when I performed at Eisteddfods and in concerts, I quickly learned that this beat was my biggest risk and fear – one wrong note and I was out of beat, and everyone in the audience could tell.
However, my Yamaha had one very nice technology feature that I occasionally took advantage of. It had an output and an input socket. I discovered, that with the right cables and a cassette recorder, I could record what I played. The true brilliance came when I could then reverse the process and have the cassette played back through the speakers of the organ. This meant that I could sit back and read a book whilst the organ did my daily practice for me, with my parents none the wiser!
My music teachers typically always had a top of the range electronic organ. The one I did my final Licentiate Diploma upon was a Kawai with three keyboards and 2.5 octave pedal board. The registration options were almost limitless. For complex registration changes, one could fully automate everything including the ‘when’. However, this did mean one had to play the same speed every time, otherwise the registration change would occur at the wrong moment. It can be somewhat disturbing for the audience to have the registration suddenly change to full pipe organ sound during a quiet Adagio.
Time and distance have taken me far from my trusty organ at home, but I have always found an organ to play around the world. This has allowed me to observe how technology has continued to help them evolve.
Early pipe organs required someone to manually operate the bellows to get air through the pipes. Technology played its first big role with electrically operated bellows. With a simple on-switch, the organist can play the organ without anyone else’s assistance. I still love the sound of switching a large organ on and off – hearing the bellows fill up with air with a loud swish and then deflate with a long sigh.
The next major technology-led improvement has been great for delicate fingers. Early organs – like the one I played in a small Lutheran church in the middle of Sydney - operated on a mechanical or ‘tracker’ action . One sits immediately below the pipes and the more ‘stops’ that are pulled out (ie on), the harder it is to press a key down, because it is in direct proportion to how many pipes need to receive air. These tracker organs are, in my opinion, perfect practice organs, because they are very good at strengthening the fingers. In the late 1800s electro-pneumatic action was introduced. This essentially meant that by pressing a key down an electric current would open a valve under a pipe. This has had two derivative impacts (i) fingers don’t need to be as tough and strong anymore and (2) the organ console does not have to be located directly under the pipes. This latter impact means that when sitting at an organ for the first time, not only does one have to get used to its unique layout, but also one has to get used to the time delay in the sound, due to the distance that the sound waves have to travel. I recently played on one church organ in London where, due to the console being located 20 meters away from the pipes, there was already a 1-2 second lag between pressing the key and hearing the sound.
Next came the influence of microprocessors. Today there are electronic organs that mimic the sounds of pipe organs almost perfectly. A very good friend of mine recently took me to the Wyvern showroom, as he is in the process of purchasing one of their organs. BTW – the photo of me is in his apartment in central London where he designed and installed a real pipe organ. In this showroom, I was able to play on their Concerto organ. It is amazing to see how far technology has progressed in electronic organs from my first Yamaha practice organ. The Concerto organ looks and feels like a pipe organ, but that is not where the technology truly excels. Each note can be electronically tuned/ regulated for pitch and volume, as well as transient tones such as chiff and other extraneous pipe noises. And even more amazing is that it can even mimic the direction from where the individual sounds are coming from, so it feels like one is sitting below real organ pipes.
It is always interesting to see how technology continues to influence organs. However, two things technology has not changed: (1) the genius of Bach’s organ music and (2) the fact that I still cannot physically carry around an organ - sorry, electronic keyboards do not count in my definition of an organ!”
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