The Organ as Synthesizer

Organ music, wrote John Milton in the 1630s, "could dissolve me into ecstasies and bring all heaven before mine eyes." Until the 20th century, most music lovers would have agreed. Despite the revival of interest in Baroque music, the organ's role in modern musical life has been marginal. One reason is the declining importance of the church itself. Another is that organists by temperament seem to be among the most staid of musicians. In the past few years, though, a new excitement has been stirred by organ playing and composing, thanks largely to the talent of a brilliant German organist and unorthodox composer named Gerd Zacher.

From Zacher's organ at the Folkwang Academy in Essen come some of the most adventurous and innovative sounds heard in a time beset by strange noises. Playing music by such avant-garde composers as Mauricio Kagel, Georgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Ernst Krenek and, naturally, John Cage, Zacher treats the organ as though it were a giant musical synthesizer, capable of taking sound back to its primeval sources and building music anew. That is exactly how Zacher feels about it.

Vary the Flow. Faced by the tattered state of tonality at the start of the 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg sought a new direction through the tight formations of serialism. Later on, other composers began an exploration of the resources of raw sound. Gerd Zacher is still doing just that. In normal practice, each organ pipe receives a steady and unchangeable supply of wind from the bellows and each produces only one single tone. What Zacher worked out was a way to vary the flow of air and thereby produce a family of tones from a single pipe, in much the same way that different sounds are drawn from the flute by blowing hard or soft. By opening up new musical pipelines, as it were, Zacher has encouraged many experimental composers to rethink the possibilities of writing for the organ.

Zacher's new technique is not confined to the keyboard. His most dramatic trick is to turn the organ blower off while playing. How this sounds can be heard in Kagel's Improvisation Ajoutee, a chilling evocation of chaos included in a Zacher LP just released in the U.S. on the new Heliodor/Wergo label. At the climax of the work, as the supply of air begins to deplete, a cascade of falling pitches and fading sounds engulfs the listener in a musical-mystical doomsday. "It sounds," says Kagel, "as if the organ were exhaling her soul." For Ligeti's equally iconoclastic Etude No. 1, Zacher hooked a vacuum-cleaner motor to the organ pipes to achieve a tiny flow of air and precisely the "pale, unearthly and strange" tone color specified by the composer.

Zacher's offbeat passion for the organ comes naturally. All the way back to the great-uncle who lost a church job at the turn of the century for playing the then revolutionary Max Reger, Zacher's family tree has been heavy with organists. His reputation as both an avant-garde and a classical player was established during twelve years as chief organist at red brick Wellingsbuette Church near Hamburg. He moved to his new and prestigious Essen post only two months ago. In recent years he has performed at nearly every one of Europe's major contemporary-music festivals, cut seven records and composed several organ works of his own.

Much of the music played by Zacher these days is what is often called "wallpaper music," because it is largely concerned with surface textures and shapes. Ligeti's Volumina, for example, would go beautifully with white plastic furniture and the spare squares of Josef Albers. The work consists of dissonant clusters of notes produced by leaning on the keys with the butt of the hand and the forearm. Volumina radiates the same waves of contrived unreality as Ligeti's Atmospheres, which defined the mood of outer space conclusively on the sound track of the film 2001. As an experiment, Volumina recalls the way Cage and Henry Cowell, in the 1930s, used to beat the prepared piano with their fists and elbows for new sonority. Like Cage and Cowell, the "Zacher school" seems as fond of grotesquerie as grace. And even grotesquerie has its place. It was Berlioz, after all, who ordered the violinists to rap on their strings with the wood of their bows in the Symphonie Fantastique, a very avant-garde thing to do in 1830.

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