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For today’s Global Hit we’re going inside a pipe organ. The organ is at Alice Tully Hall, one of New York’s premier concert venues. Alice Tully Hall reopened last year after a long refurbishment. Its Swiss-built organ was removed during that process – in 2006. Now the instrument is finally being returned to its home onstage. Here’s The World’s Alex Gallafent. Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. We’re going inside a pipe organ for today’s Global Hit. The organ is at Alice Tully Hall, one of New York’s premier concert venues, located at Lincoln Center. It re-opened last year after a long refurbishment. The hall’s Swiss-built organ was removed during that process back in 2006. Now the instrument is finally being returned to its home onstage. The World’s Alex Gallafent has the story.
ALEX GALLAFENT: The Alice Tully Hall organ is in pieces. There are crates of piped metal, sections of turned wood. And, deep within the belly of the organ case, Walther Schaeffer is putting them all together.
WALTHER SCHAEFFER: One after the other, we put in.
GALLAFENT: It’s a jigsaw. It’s a puzzle.
SCHAEFFER: Yeah, it’s a great puzzle with thousands of pieces.
GALLAFENT: Schaeffer works for Kuhn, the Swiss firm that built the organ in the early 1970s. One by one, he clicks curved wooden slats into position. Each slat is carved with holes to accommodate the pipes, some of which are big, some not so big. They’re very small. These pipes are very small.
SCHAEFFER: No, this is very small.
GALLAFENT: That’s unbelievable, you just blow through it. Well, not that unbelievable. After all, at its simplest that’s all an organ is, wind passing through pipes. But then again, it’s so much more than that. Just ask Peter Batchelder, who knew the hall’s benefactor, Alice Tully herself.
PETER BATCHELDER: Not closely personally, but she very specifically asked me to make sure that I took care of this organ after she died. So I’m still here, taking care of it.
GALLAFENT: Batchelder made that promise when he was 30 years old. Now he’s 62.
BATCHELDER: It’s part of my life. It’s been in my life most of my life.
GALLAFENT: He hates it when it gets out of tune. Hates it when dust gets inside and mucks up the sound. Hates it when anything gets in the way of an organist making it sing the way an organ is supposed to sing.
BATCHELDER: You get one of the most beautiful sounds in music because unlike a flautist who has to get the same on an even scale, from the same tube, high notes, low notes, and the middle notes, loud notes all have to come from the same diameter tube. Every pipe is sound specific, and the diameter and the mouth width and the voicing is just right for that note.
GALLAFENT: Batchelder has built a career tuning and maintaining organs across the country. He says the Alice Tully instrument was intended to be a jack of all trades.
BATCHELDER: It was supposed to do everything. It’s not authentic anything except 1975.
WERMAN: But it excels at playing music from the 18th and 19th centuries. Things such as this Bach fugue, played here on a different organ. It’s not so great at the big ticket organ music you might hear in an English cathedral, partly because the organ’s not big enough, and partly because the hall isn’t reverberant enough. Indeed one of the complaints about the old Alice Tully Hall, before its refurbishment, was that it made the organ sound dry and flat. It’s hoped that the new hall will be more welcoming. Which room is this?
SCHAEFFER: This is the pedal division. A pedal division. And now we put pipe to pipe inside and then we compare two things. It’s the pitch. Higher and lower and the other is the color. Ah, oh, ee, oh.
GALLAFENT: Walther Schaeffer is talking about the work of a particular person, the voicer. Peter Batchelder explains.
BATCHELDER: By cutting away metal and adjusting the windway and adjusting the positions of the various mouthparts so that the windstream hits it exactly right, and then adjusting the pitch, they make the pipes sound differently. Louder, softer, brighter, faster, slower to speak. And then they have to make sure that pipe matches the pipe next to it, then they have to make sure that that set of pipes balances with another set of pipes with which it will be used and no two people do it the same way.
GALLAFENT: By all accounts, one of the best voicers in the business is Dieter Rufenacht. A couple weeks after Walther Schaeffer showed me around, Rufenacht reports that most of the over four thousand pipes have now been installed. And many have been voiced.
DIETER RUFENACHT: It’s not finished yet, but maybe a few notes of one of the main stops of the instrument.
GALLAFENT: Rufenacht shows me how the different lengths of pipe work together and the key principle here is that if you take a pipe and halve it in length, you get the same note, only higher up.
RUFENACHT: When I depress the same note, just the same key, 8 foot, 4 foot, 2 foot. Here we have even a 1 foot stop. Can you hear that? Or even this one. Okay.
GALLAFENT: Do people write for that note?
RUFENACHT: Not for this stop especially, but listen. And now the piccolo. Without that, you see, it’s very sharp, very clear, very brilliant. It brightens the sound.
GALLAFENT: The pieces fit. Dieter Rufenacht recently retired from Kuhn, the Swiss organ-building company. But he came back for this job. The Alice Tully Hall organ is special for him too. Rufenacht was part of the original team that built it back in the 1970s, when he was just starting out.
RUFENACHT: I was here from the beginning, from ‘74. It’s like, that’s life. The earth is round, you start at one end and there is no end. You arrive at the same point after a certain time. So maybe it’s a good conclusion of my professional life.
GALLAFENT: And a good start for the organ’s renewed musical life. Its first public hearing is set for November. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.
WERMAN: You can see a slide show of the Alice Tully Hall organ at TheWorld.org. That’s our program today. Our theme music, which was definitely not written for a pipe organ, was composed by Eric Goldberg. I’m Marco Werman. From the Nan and Bill Harris studios at WGBH, have a great weekend.
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