Seated One Day...

Seated One Day ...

The American Guild of Organists, 6,000 strong and "absolutely nonsectarian," met in Manhattan last week. During the meeting outstanding members played in various churches and auditoriums, and the meeting as a whole learnedly considered its common instrument -- one which offers perhaps more potential trouble than any other in existence.

No other instrument has such a range; the highest and lowest notes of the biggest organs nudge the limits of human audibility. No other has such a variety of sounds; the $100,000 contraptions of the cinema palaces can imitate anything from a peanut whistle to the crack of doom. No other instrument has such elaborate controls; organ playing, involving several manuals (keyboards), sundry pedals and sometimes hundreds of stops, makes 20-mule-team driving an utter cinch in comparison. An organist's opportunities for musical sins of commission are almost limitless.

Generally speaking, there are three types of organists. There are those who have no objection to the thunderously schmalzy organs, full of trick sound effects, of the cinema palaces. Second are the vast majority of church organists who cannot bear the cinemorgans but will make discreet use of the variously colored "romantic" effects possible on all modern-style organs. Third are the growing number of classicists, who favor the 17th-Century style of organ used by the great Johann Sebastian Bach -- and who make modern-style organs sound as much as possible like Bach organs, or play instruments made on 17th-Century lines.

The outstanding characteristics of the Bach-type organ are brilliance of tone, clear definition of the various musical parts, absence of the variously colored orchestral effects prized by "romantic" organists.

At last week's meeting, one of the top-ranking U.S. classicists, Princeton University's young Choirmaster Carl Weinrich, who at Princeton University's Chapel plays an $18,000 modern organ as if it were Bach-type, offered modern organ compositions by Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston.

Few modern organists enjoy the sort of fame obtainable in most other fields of instrumental music. U.S. top rankers, be sides Weinrich, include E. Power Biggs of Harvard University; Ernest White of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Manhattan; Dr. T. Tertius Noble.

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