“Organists always wear funny shoes,” says Ron Ebrecht, the University Organist, Visiting Instructor in Music, and WesSingers director. “If you try to play a third in tennis shoes, you can’t because you don’t have any instep,” Ebrecht reiterates. “You have to wear leather shoes that have a heel or it’s hopeless.”
It will take more than leather shoes and a heel to change the average person’s incompetence at the organ. The instrument demands an agile musician: an organist must use both hands and both feet to control the three keyboards—which contain 61 keys each—and 32 foot pedals. That adds up to 215 possible notes that may be played at any time. Add to that the organ’s 60 stops—or sets of pipes organized by the sounds they mimic, such as “flutes,” “trumpets,” or “strings”—and you’ve got an instrument that requires above-average motor skills and coordination. The organist was not the kid at band camp who caught the Frisbee with his face.
The organ currently residing in the Wesleyan Chapel, installed during recent renovations, is the building’s fourth. Wesleyan first filled the space with an 1871 Hook organ from Boston. A new organ, bought in 1917, was used daily until the University dropped mandatory chapel in 1960 and two years later purchased a Schlicker organ. Sold in 2002 to make room for the current organ, the Schlicker is now in service at the St. Lawrence church in Killingworth Conn.
Holtkamp, the country’s oldest organ building company, made the organ that current University students enjoy.
“It is the first new concert organ at any of the little Ivies in about 30 years” Ebrecht said. The Holtkamp was designed and installed to the tune of around one million dollars, the gift of a generous alumnus who has chosen to remain anonymous, and serves as a centerpiece to the 23 million-dollar renovation of the chapel, theater and pavilion.
The change was a necessary one, according to Ebrecht.
“The old organ wasn’t very good for 19th or 20th century music,” he said. “It was built at a time when people were interested in Baroque music…. and had a hard time playing modern music, it didn’t have enough wind pressure, it wasn’t really loud enough, it didn’t have enough deep bass sounds, and it didn’t have any of the computerized features which allow you to manipulate the stop changes.”
The current organ’s sixty stops allow for innumerable combinations of sounds. Each stop is controlled by a knob on the organ which, when pulled, allows air to pass through that set of pipes, or stop, when a key is played.
“Each manual [keyboard] of the organ has a corresponding chest from which sets of pipes (ranks) play when the control (stop) for each is engaged at the console,” Ebrecht said. The organist creates different combinations by pulling different knobs and engaging different stops.
“Modern composers want to change the stops as much as they want to play the notes,” Ebrecht said. “They like the flutter of constant changes.”
On the old Schlicker organ some modern pieces had required three students to make the stop changes while the organist played the keys. The new organ has features that allow an organist to program stop changes before playing the piece and to execute them with the touch of a button. Ebrecht designed it to be as “interactive as possible with contemporary music, and to be adaptable to a broad range of repertoire from 1500 to the present.”
While most instruments are built in mass quantities in standard models, every organ must be custom designed to produce sounds for the space where it will eventually play. Today this design process is done with a CAD, or Computer Aided Design, computer program. Not only is the design process high-tech, but the organ itself contain several modern technological abilities. One new feature, Total Recall, allows the musicians to record their performances on to a floppy disc. As for the more traditional hardware, the new instrument boasts somewhere between 3600 and 3800 pipes, ranging from several inches to 27 feet in length.
Josh Kaye ’04, one of five students taking organ lessons this semester, began studying in his last year at Wesleyan.
“It is an opportunity I probably won’t have after graduation,” he said. Kaye added that he enjoys experimenting with the stops on the new organ.
“The more stops you have the more expressive you can be,” he said.
In addition to current students who practice the organ, several former students also use it regularly. Some organists take their skills out into the community, playing for churches in Middletown during the semester.
The next chance to hear the organ in a public performance will be the Organ Romp. The annual Romp, a concert featuring student-composed music in addition to other pieces, is on May 6th in the chapel starting at midnight. It will be the first Organ Romp for the new organ and the first in the renovated space. If you are interested in taking organ lessons, the class is offered each semester as Music 441, a permission of instructor class taught by Prof. Ebrecht.
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