The corpulent contrabass and the gamelans of Kubla Khan are one thousand times more portable than the Brobdingnagian pipe organ, its immobility making martyrs of its players. Every pipe organ is different, and each one must be learned afresh. If a lifelong relationship with a treasured ’cello is a decades-long happy marriage, a recital on an unknown organ in Baltimore or Belokonsk is a one-night stand. How to commit one year in advance to repertoire for an instrument you’ve never played or seen, whose musical resources are unknown to you until you step off the plane? What of the variation in the organ’s action, its rapidity (or — horrors! — dull slowness) of speech, its probable hostility to individual approach? Let’s not discuss the onsite hours spent not on actual practice of the music to be performed, but instead on persuading — cajoling — an uncooperative instrument, racing against the clock to find the hundreds of sound combinations needed in time for the recital! Having arrived at the concert hall, look forward to no easy afternoons; the organ, being located in the busiest hall in the complex, is unavailable for rehearsal until hours appointed by the Inquisition.
My most recent submission to torture by organ pipe occurred in Russia. In the manner of the Soviet show-trials, it was cheerfully billed as my Russian debut, at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall. While my first visit to Russia was filled with sweet confirmation of my expectations — the best in dance, dumplings, vodka, women and winter — my dread of the Tchaikovsky Hall organ was not without reason. To play even Bach on this organ was like pulling the Trans-Siberian Express with a chain gang of political dissidents. There — on this broken-down musical famine — I starved, slaved and scratched, all the while painfully aware that my listeners, hearing me for the first time, were among the world’s most musically astute audiences in the epicenter of a legacy of high-octane pianists.
The solution to all of this, at least for me, is the virtual pipe organ. I’m designing a touring organ that, with sound samples from organs the world around and a modular console that’s easily movable, will give me a beautiful, enjoyable instrument through which I can achieve unimpeded expression night after night. Who can deny that an organist “on the road” shouldn’t have the same relationship with his instrument — and his audience — that the great performers enjoy?
But for now, the Soviet organ did its expression-killing duty while I fought on. Backstage after the torture, the final chance for an international incident was presented: the organ’s curator insisted that I write down and sign my impression (confession?) of the Tchaikovsky Hall organ’s beauties, in honor of its coming fifty-year anniversary. Double-checking that my passport was still where I’d left it in the dressing room, I summoned what diplomatic prowess I could muster and wrote: “To my good friends at Tchaikovsky Hall: here’s hoping that, through the liberating influence of technology, organists may be heard here for another 50 years!”
