Podcasting the Organ
Orgelpark Symposium 2023
Remarks delivered at the Orgelpark Symposium 2023:
I'm Blake Hargreaves, I hosted a podcast for the past two years about the 21st century organ, called FutureStops, and in September last year I was the curator of FutureStops' contemporary organ music festival in Toronto.
The FutureStops podcast ran for two years, producing two episodes a month of about 30 minutes each. We interviewed composer-performers, other creators, organ builders and designers, advocates for the organ working in film, historians, and organists in historic posts. Our format was a storytelling podcast with music and narration punctuating key moments from the interviews. Many of the guests are familiar to Orgelpark including your own Trevor Grahl, as well as Claire M Singer, Adrian Foster, George Rahi, Kali Malone, Charlemagne Palestine, Ellen Arkbro and many others.
We did an episode looking in-depth at Xenakis' work Gmeeoorh, visited Halberstadt for the John Cage As Slow As Possible organ work for the birthday note change, and explored more contemporary works like Raven Chacon's work Voiceless Mass, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and Tim Hecker's Ravedeath 1972. We interviewed Canadian builders— Juget Sinclair, Létourneau, and Casavant— director Stacey Tanenbaum about her film Pipe Dreams, and James Dawson, whose documentary tells about the preservation and relocation of village church organs in the UK.
For the Festival we invited podcast guests and others to come to Toronto and perform, and created some daytime programs of talks, presentations and live interviews which were very much inspired by what I saw at the Orgelpark Symposium last year. It was important to me to have among the venues one which was not a religious institution, and Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall has a pipe organ which is a historic Canadian instrument no matter what your opinion is of 1980s neobaroque design trends. The hall was the perfect dramatic setting for the talks and portable organ performances as well.
For the program I wanted to continue a trend I began with the Cool Fest concert series fifteen years ago in Montreal, where the goal was an integrative project, to allow my Francophone and Anglophone friends making music in Montreal to meet, and to place seemingly disparate genres of music next to each other to demonstrate how compatible they really were. I was inspired by the noise music movement which a lot of people define in different ways but for me meant an open and inclusive attitude towards anything which is not mainstream.
With the FutureStops Festival I tried to do the same, pairing new creator-performers making more minimal music with classical virtuosi performing new works firmly rooted in organ concert tradition. Everything had to be 21st century in this festival, with the exception of two works composed in the 20th century but which involve a great deal of improvisation. There were sadly no augmented organs we could use in the festival, but Fujita and Sandra Boss brought their portable bespoke instruments to the lobby space at Roy Thomson Hall which was perfect for showing the public that the organ can travel. We had a talent pool which was very representative of the future of the organ; with an indigenous composer, very rare for the organ, an african-american composer/performer, two performers over the age of 70 (which might not seem like the future, but when people this age are displacing themselves to perform their works, the young people look and say 'there's could be a future in this for me'). We had a jewish presenter, a performer who was 13 years old, and people from all identities and backgrounds involved in every part of the event. This is very important in Canada and in this respect it was a real success.
The usual Toronto organ audience come out in great numbers to hear concerts which are 19th century or earlier. The hope was that by combining the classical and contemporary, we would get them to hear exciting new sounds— and also younger audiences could enjoy the palate-cleansing effects of more traditional music between their servings of weird new sounds.
What we discovered is that the classical organ audience were very confortable writing off our festival, maybe because they can always just wait for the next concert. A friend of mine sent our program to a contact of his, to be forwarded to a very rich donor to the Montreal Organ Competition, in the hopes that she might support us. This donor wrote back “It doesn't sound like our sort of festival! Actually, it doesn't even sound like an organ festival!” So classical fanbase stayed home. By contrast, the turnout of diverse, young, and new audience was incredibly strong.
We did an exit poll of the festival attendees and found:
50% of the audience had never attended an organ concert before
92% said they would attend an organ concert in the future
52% said their perception of the organ had changed as a result of FutureStops
50% said they might or would join the online community
9/10 was the average rating of enjoyment of a concert
and 78% were optimistic about the future of the organ and its music
That's optimism walking out of the concert, also very rare. The online community we asked them about is something which was built into the FutureStops concept and meant to be launched at the festival, but the funding and energy ran out and we haven't been able to populate this beautiful web 3 architecture with actual organists. I hope that maybe I can explore this further with Francesco and Rickie Lee.
Like the Orgelpark, the FutureStops podcast, Festival and online community aims to integrate the organ into mainstream musical culture, through a new presentation. We can feel our efforts being rewarded in these events, and social opportunities, (as Orgelpark's website says, it's “going out at its best”) but it's hard not to also feel impatient when we see the richness of the infrastructure we have in pipe organs around the world, and how quickly that can erode to the point where it's too late to preserve it. Jurgen's story about Laukhuff, or the story of Dobson organ builders in Randall's home state of Iowa show how quickly that can happen.
When discussing what options we have for new presentation of the organ on the podcast, many agreed we're mostly constrained by the space, and the typical space we find an organ inside of presents some modest *cough* challenges in trying to offer a new presentation. The instrument's role of supporting the worship of a source of absolute political and moral power for several hundred years does typecast it a little.
When preparing the FutureStops Festival I approached a church right next door to Roy Thomson Hall asking if we could do our closing night there, and the priest invited me to have a chat, and as I sat down the first thing he said to me was “I read in an interview you mentioning something about a millennial necro-cannibalistic ritual; there won't be any language like that in the literature of this Festival will there?” The reason for this question was, I was interviewed the year before in a sort of noise music magazine about an album of organ improvisations, and in the interview I'd explained that when I was 13 my organ teacher invited me to improvise during communion nearly every week, and that improvising live to an audience of 200 people who were lining up to metaphorically eat flesh and drink blood left me perhaps over-qualified to become a noise musician in my 20s. Calling communion a millennial necro-cannibalistic ritual was I think a misguided attempt to sort of glamourize a very pedestrian church childhood but in doing so I unsurprisingly alienated the church people I now needed as I attempted to reach out further with organ music into the mainstream musical culture. I replied to the priest both no, there wouldn't be anything which might seem disrespectful in our festival, and also that I never would have taken him for a regular reader of “it's psychedelic, baby” magazine.
It turns out I didn't really need to be trying so hard in that interview; as we've all seen, the noise music community, or new music community, minimalist, musique actuelle, the synth community, even heavy metal or goth oriented people are all making a real difference in bringing the organ into the mainstream, and as usual, when it finally starts to happen, it turns out to be a lot more mainstream than some of us might actually like. I think many artists wish for a level of success where they would have a mainstream audience big enough for their community of old diehard fans who hate, and if that's the goal, we may have already achieved it. I take the recent cancellation of a Kali Malone concert in France due to the threat of violence from a bunch of homophobic right-wing religious protestors as a sign that we're getting some things right— but it also shows us it's inevitable we'll lose some people along the way.
I think the benefit of making a podcast for me is it brings me closer to a lot of different artists, I get to know them, and the experience completely broadens the boundaries of what sorts of organ music I feel enthusiastic about and supportive of.
After improvising during those communions as a young teenager I eventually discovered other things like electric guitars, and socializing, and left the organ behind. When the organ came back into my life years later, after I'd sort of made my name as a noise music person, it surprised a lot of my friends and collaborators. When I posted on social media that I had travelled to Budapest to study modern french improvisation with a professor there some of them even replied “is this a joke?”. But one friend replied with an article inviting people to audition to be the new organist for the Ottawa Senators NHL Hockey Team. Sadly, the deadline for a demo tape was only a week away, two days after my return to Canada from my studies. And yet... once I got home I went to the church and found myself picking out the Beverly Hills Cop theme, the A Team, Justin Bieber and Dr Dre, and much to my surprise that demo tape earned me an audition including the national anthems, all the cheer music, and a medley of sports-adjacent pop songs of approximately twelve minutes. We are the Champions! What I learned in doing this is that by getting close to this music that I was usually dismissive of, I could integrate it into my understanding of what music is, and say goodbye to any resistance to it, which is really helpful when trying to advocate or promote anything.
Many of the artists I spoke with in the podcast had interesting things to say about making their music in a church as non-religious people. One way to approach the organ's challenging religious context is to treat it as a strength. The religious context has extramusical goals and missions which can supply innovation and inspiration to our music. So we have reverb, which was not originally created for the organ, but the organ benefits hugely from it.
I see in artists like Raphael and Michelangelo their works benefit from their association with the supernatural elements of the religious context. It's a distinction which elevates the work, giving it powerful themes and exciting imagery of blood and flesh, and flattens out the ups and downs in the work's qualities.
Another example could be Hermann Nitsch— I just completed my second experience participating in one of this late action artist's creations in Prinzendorf, Austria. Nitsch's art incorporates blindfolded naked crucifixions with animal entrails and blood. For an artist who began working in the context of Austria in 1955; the work seems the perfect expression. Nitsch created something which only he could create and it provides an exaggeration of the historical situation in which he found himself trapped, turning up the volume on the context from which he could not otherwise escape.
And so the organ can feel trapped in its context, and the artists who've made significant inroads in finding a new public for the instrument, like Charlemagne Palestine and Kali Malone, both borrow exaggerate this context in a way personal to themselves. Palestine gives us a spiritual experience in a bulb, which then flowers, a sort of metaphysical happening, a sermon on the mount of his personal soul. Malone, with her austere music, unadorned by event, and allusions to sacrifice, seems to be kindly wagging a finger and telling us to eat our spiritual vegetables.
Another context which can be exaggerated and borrowed from is the organ as a landmark technological accomplishment. At one time the most complex machine ever made, we've seen several artists delving deep into how they can take this technology beyond its ability to do work and into the realm of inspiring and entering into a conversation with the player.
The MIDI technology and the MIDI robots of Gamut, Maxime Denuc and George Rahi, I love because they turn the organ in on itself; an instrument which had a self-playing capability early on and threatened to replace the performer now is being played a separate robot, which has its own commands and agenda.
The complicated historical context of the organ also can inspire a real excitement in the exploration of musical form. As Kim said yesterday music is time-based, and musical form is about what we remember, and what we forget, and this can be played with and manipulated to delightful effect. I think the same is true of the organ's history. In playing the Hyperorgan nothing is off the table as far as the many genres and lives and contexts organ music has been made for.
The organ also functions as a human prosthetic, but rather than a prosthetic body part, in this case a prosthetic mouth which allows us to play seven hundred flutes and pipes simultaneously, I think it's more accurately viewed as a prosthetic for the mind. In the film Interstellar, as the protagonist walks into a hospital room to see his 100-year-old daughter, we see about two dozen of his extended descendants standing there, and hear this C major chord on full organ. The multiplied octaves and partials fit so well with the sight of all of those nieces, nephews and grandchildren. The organ voicers we heard from this morning use their craft to unite thousands of independent voices into a cohesive community... are they voicers or dictators?
The intersections between mathematics, natural physical phenomena, hand crafted speaking instruments, analog haptic synthesis experiences, acoustics, historical, political and cultural reference points, all lead to an incredibly rich experience for anyone's brain and heart just to mess around on an organ. I realize everyone here knows that already. I think that what can be learned from podcasting, or gathering here, trying to provoke the organ's destiny, is how each person's imagination has something unique to help tell the story of the context in which the organ appears, and to do it better than I did in that interview. Whether it's to respectfully support a ritual or to encourage their local sports team— the more everyone can sink into and share their unique view, and make space for others to be vulnerable about what they love about this instrument— the closer we get to achieving the critical mass which will sustain that story, and lead to satisfying conclusion of this chapter and into the next.
