This book consists
of biographies of five men, Britishers
G. Donald Harrison and Edward George
Power Biggs (his public called him "E.
Power Biggs", his friends and intimates
called him "Jimmy"(?) or "Biggsy,"
and Virgil Fox called him "Honey"
to his face and "dried owl shit"
behind his back), and Americans Ernest
M. Skinner, Virgil Fox and Charles Brenton
Fisk. It has been said that the problem
with biography is that it always has
an unhappy ending — the hero dies.
Mr. Whitney, New York
Times Assistant Managing Editor and
amateur performer, is a fine author,
and he makes these lives and their endings
heroic and meaningful in the best literary
sense. Of course many other people move
through these pages — Flentrop, Holtkamp,
Silbermann, Johann Sebastian Bach, John
D. Rockefeller, Dr. Robert Schuller,
Isaac Stern, Albert Schweitzer, Catherine
Crozier, Jean Guillou, Dr. Orpha Ochse
— some playing major supporting roles,
some only walk-ons with a single line.
All of these people
spent much time in Europe examining
historical organs so as to understand
the fundamentals of organ construction,
and how and why the British organs with
which they were most familiar were as
they were. But Yankee ingenuity resulted
in technical and mechanical advances
which produced organs improved over
their models and by the twenty-first
century American organ builders were
making installations in Europe.
A graphic artist makes
a drawing on a piece of paper and can
show it to anyone anywhere. A composer
of music writes music, but has to hire
a hall and musicians and then get people
to come to the hall to hear his music.
A craftsman whose art is building organs
has to find a hall, find a huge sum
of money, hire dozens of skilled workers,
then find music, find a player, and
then get people to come to the hall
and hope they give him some of the credit
instead of it all going to the composer
and performer. In a pursuit so thankless
obviously we only encounter fanatics,
people of astonishing fortitude and
willingness to sacrifice themselves
and perhaps others as well. You might
object that Biggs and Fox were not builders
but performers, but they are included
because they interacted with builders
and had an enormous impact on the creation
of public taste and hence the building
of — as well as the playing of — organs
in the USA and elsewhere.
Apparently Mr. Whitney,
along with nearly everybody, does not
understand the question of equal temperament
versus unequal temperament. It’s probably
the most difficult question in all music.
I feel some of his statements require
correction and elaboration.
Equal temperament is
not just "making it possible to
play music in all keys" and unequal
temperament is not just "some keys
being unavailable" and Johann Sebastian
did not demand equal temperament, instead
he railed against it. Das Wolhtemperierte
Klavier does not translate as "The
Equal Tempered Keyboard" but as
"The Well-Tempered Keyboard,"
meaning an unequal temperament in which
all keys are "usable" but
the varied personalities of the keys
remain and can be used to heighten the
drama in the music. That is what Bach
set out to prove in the WTK,
and although the work at once became
the cornerstone of keyboard instruction
to this very day, this point of it has
been consistently misunderstood, and
the 48 preludes and fugues, performed
exclusively in equal temperament as
they have been for nearly 200 years,
fail to shine in their full glory which
is only revealed when they are played
on an unequally tempered instrument.
One of the best "well tempered"
temperaments is "Silbermann Mean
Tone" which Mr. Whitney says Bach
"did not like" but I think
he is mistaken in this.
It is impossible to
tune a twelve key scale perfectly in
tune in any key. If you have separate
black keys for, say, C#
and Db, then you can tune one
and only one key perfectly in tune.
With equal temperament, every key is
out of tune. With unequal temperament,
some keys are nearly in tune, the rest
of the keys are pretty much out of tune,
but each key has a personality, and
in Bach’s WTK these personalities
are perfectly expressed in the music
of the preludes and fugues. When the
work is played in equal temperament,
these tonal personalities are lost.
The works are still works of supreme
genius, of course, but an aspect of
them has been sacrificed, and only in
unequal temperament — "well
tempered temperament" — can
that aspect be recaptured. I am firm
in my belief that unequal temperament
of this kind should be used for all
European music through Schubert, that
only maybe with Chopin and certainly
with Schumann do you actually require
equal temperament, but I am roundly
denounced by most authorities on this
point.
Equal temperament works
so well on the pianoforte because the
stiff steel multiple strings of the
notes are out of tune with themselves
and with each other — hence the sounding
pitch of each key is indeterminate,
hence a small deviation is not conspicuous.
There is no point in tuning a modern
Steinway in Silbermann Mean Tone temperament
because you could hardly hear any improvement.
The difference is only audible in instruments
of purer tone, such as harpsichords
and organs. Perfectly tunable instruments,
such as the violin and the human voice,
match pitch with whatever instruments
they’re playing with, but a violinist
once told me he found it easier to play
on pitch with an unequal tempered harpsichord.
Mr. Whitney finishes
off his book about all the fights and
squabbles over what makes a good pipe
organ with the observation that nowadays
in the USA it has been accepted that
organs are as different as people and
should be different from one another
and that organs of many different styles
are presently appreciated and enjoyed.
Some organs have been built which very
effectively combine the various styles
into a single instrument, and he even
describes an organ that has some ranks
which are tuned in equal temperament
in the same case with ranks that are
tuned in unequal temperament so the
organ can play older music as authentically
as modern music. One thing all the people
in this book agreed on is their dislike
of electronic "organs" or
synthesisers; even Virgil Fox, who frequently
played electric organs in public, never
really liked them. But one of the points
of this book, one that I think the author
did not intend to make, is that they
all lost on that one. The digital electronic
synthesiser, that most American of all
kinds of organ, is here to stay and
the electro-pneumo-mechanical pipe organ
is going the way of the buggy whip,
the button hook, and the honest democratic
election. The temperament problem was
solved 20 years ago in my Yamaha DX7s
keyboard synthesiser. I can select mean
tone temperament, Silbermann Mean Tone
temperament, or equal temperament with
a keystroke and make the instantaneous
comparisons upon which my opinions are
based. I think when everybody can do
that, they’ll agree with me, but that
won’t happen in my lifetime.
Paul Shoemaker
