I didn’t hear the quote directly, it was related to me later by my mother, but the comment made in passing from my very first mentor would mark my career trajectory. If I recall, my mother had asked him about playing the organ in Duke Chapel, and he responded “Every organist wants to play all the famous instruments around the world.” I’m quite sure that even at age five or six, I recognized the utter impossibility of such a task. Yes, I was clear that I wanted to be an organist when I grew up, but aren’t all organs more or less the same? I stuck that question, along with its “challenge,” into my subconscious mind where I could ruminate on it for exactly 15 years before I would attempt to set that challenge in motion.
When I was a young man, aged 21, newly graduated from college, I set off for Europe to see, hear, and play as many organs as possible. I had to learn how to travel. Traveling well is not intuitive. One has to learn how to catch the nuances of the culture being visited, not for the purposes of losing one’s sense of self, but to be able to navigate the culture without hardship or calling excess attention to oneself.
As I matured, I no longer needed to learn to travel; instead I traveled to learn. And therein lies the secret to why the art of travel has clicked with me. As a professional musician, when I’m at home, I learn music. Through traveling, I learn about music – how it functions across cultures, why it speaks to people, what particular historic instruments tell me about how to play, the acoustical properties of European buildings as opposed to other church buildings around the world, concert halls vs. churches and cathedrals. Perhaps most significantly, I learn who I am within the world of musicians, how to function, converse, enjoy repartee.
When I played my first historic organ, I was living in a tiny community in the Northwest corner of Germany, a region known as Ostfriesland (with its own distinctive Plattdeutsch language) in a hamlet called Buderhee. I was living and studying in a medieval Steinhaus (castle), with walls that were a meter thick, filled with harpsichords and clavichords. I was a student at the Norddeutsche Orgelakademie (North Germany Organ Academy) founded and directed by my teacher, Harald Vogel. It was wintertime when I was there, the castle being nearly impossible to heat, and heat being very expensive, so the other students and I dressed in as many clothes as possible and went about our days practicing, cooking, and talking together. Milk (still warm) came from the cows next door, and all transportation was by bicycle. Northwest Germany is extremely flat, and the winter winds seem to have a particular ferocity in that region that I will not soon forget. When traveling into the wind, it was often faster to walk the bicycle than to ride it.
The bicycling took me to the small town of Weener where we had access to a stunning 18th century organ built by Arp Schnitger. This was both our instrument for private practice and for lessons. The church had no heat in it, but as I recall, there was a space heater by the organ which made the hours of practice quite bearable. Weener’s famous organ, my entrée into historic instruments, was far more influential to me than I had anticipated; and from it, I gleaned a maxim that I have used for the rest of my life.
Nearly all pipe organs, and certainly all historic organs, have a unique personality. Whether the pipes were created in a shop, or mostly created right on the premises (as was sometimes the case in the old days), every pipe eventually gets voiced for the acoustics of the room it is placed in, with the tonal concept of the particular voicer. Each pipe is treated as a unique entity, yet made to function within the whole. How many pipes are there in the world? A billion? Perhaps more? That’s a lot of individual attention!
Anyway, the reason an organist wants to play as many historic and great organs in the world as possible is because each instrument tells a new story about the music that the player plays. Each instrument draws out a characteristic to the music that the performer didn’t know existed before hearing music within that exact context. But it’s not just the music that gets enriched with each organ’s rendering of a particular piece within a particular space; it’s also me. Each instrument enriches me with new corners of understanding, and not just understanding of music. Understanding of life. It’s as if I find more of myself each time I play an historic organ.
The aforementioned maxim is this: When I arrive at an organ for the first time, more often than not having chosen a program of music ahead of time, I have a sense of what it is I’m trying to “say,” musically speaking. I also believe I have a sense of what the composer is trying to communicate. What I don’t know is what the organ, itself, within its unique acoustical setting, is capable of saying. And given that I believe organs are imbued with a soul, the real question is not what an organ is capable of saying, but what it wants to say! Of the three of us: me, the composer, and the organ, the organ is by far the most important. I’m the least important. It’s a place of humility and also a place of great freedom. My job ceases to be one of impressing people; my job becomes one of listening to the organ, and letting her tell me what she wants to say. And like having tea with a grande dame, she’s not likely to reveal her secrets to you right away! You need to sit with her, coax a gentle conversation from her, listening carefully to how she interacts with your touch and your sense of musicianship. And your discussions with her are not about music, generally. Nor are they about technique. (That would be like discussing one’s underwear.) They are philosophical discussions about life, beauty, divinity, majesty, serenity, kindness, patience.
I began the process of learning these things while regularly spending time on the Arp Schnitger organ in Weener, and it has served me ever since. Once upon a time I had to learn how to travel, how to listen to people in other cultures, how to get by with my limited conversational skills in French, German, and Italian. But fortunately, the organs all speak to me in a language that I don’t need to translate. Like the people, they easily sense if you love them or you’re fighting with them.
But something else came from that maxim that I learned in the winter of 1979-80. I actually need to travel, to play organs around the world, so that I can continue, and continue, and continue to learn what these instruments want to say to me. Perhaps it’s somewhat selfish, but I feel that each organ makes me more of who I am.
And that is why I travel.