Pipe organs can be seen as the paragon of the union between technoscience and the art of music. Sounds, and consequently music, need some sort of material basis to be created – be it a specific instrument, an everyday object or the human body.
Focusing on the materiality of sound – on the science and technology of its machines and corresponding ways of knowing and interacting – Science and Technology Studies (STS) provide adequate tools to examine a highly technical instrument such as the organ and its modern developments in relation to specific cultural settings. The organ can be seen as technological artifact (Pinch & Bijsterveld, 2004, p.638) or, more precisely, as artistic technology, “i.e. as a special kind of technology that is meant to produce aesthetic experiences” (Peters, 2009, p.6), thus bridging the gap between music and technology. Special attention is drawn to innovations and adaptations of the organ in attempts to recreate authentic pipe organ sound at home. In terms of co-production a STS perspective also takes into account other seminal actors in the network of sound generation, propagation and reproduction such as space, which, as we shall see, plays a major role in the (re-)production of pipe organ sound.
Considering their long history and the multiple changes experienced over the centuries, “organs have stories to tell about the times in which they were built that go far beyond the music that was played on them” and can hence be seen as “historical and aesthetic mirrors” of their time (Snyder, 2002, p.1). Organs convey clues about why and how they “were designed and built, how they were meant to sound, and how they were part of musical practices” (Peters, 2009, p.5). What makes the cases selected for this analysis particularly interesting is that, more than other instruments, the organ usually remains in one place throughout its life and becomes an integral part of the location’s architecture; even if examples like the Compenius organ remind us that some organs travelled and that the instrument was never solely intended to be played in a religious context (Snyder, 2002, p.5).
Settings, or boundaries, within which these techno-artistic artifacts are developed and used, play an important role for this analysis. Virtual organs can basically be played anywhere – in both public and private settings – while the home pipe organ discussed here could in principal be used for small home concerts but never has – it is a private instrument for the personal pleasure of the organist only. So the present cases are examples for a digital or ‘online’ instrument and an acoustic or ‘offline’ instrument that can both be played either for an audience or privately. Focus will be on the purely private use at home.
But settings or boundaries are relevant not only in a spatial context. Pipe organs almost demand some basic understanding of the physics of sound. As Snyder pointedly writes: “One can play the piano for a lifetime without ever giving much thought to the length of its strings, but one cannot sit down at an organ bench without being immediately confronted with the lengths of its pipes” (2002, p.10). The crossing of boundaries, fusing the two worlds of music and technoscience, helps explaining the emergence of different technological trajectories leading to sound fidelity. Discussing the development of the synthesizer and the changes made by Robert Moog, like connecting it to a keyboard of conventional design, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco have introduced the notion of boundary shifting. People like Moog, who was a trained electrical engineer with a strong penchant to music, not only
change identities, transgress boundaries, and move from one world to the other—say, from engineering to music—but they also apply the knowledge, skill, and experience gained in one world to transform the other. We call such people “boundary shifters”—people who cross boundaries and in so doing produce a transformation (Pinch & Trocco, 2002, p.314).
Successful innovation, it is argued, depends, at least partly, on allowing or even encouraging and facilitating such boundary shifting.
People involved in building, restoring, tinkering with, and playing the organ, seem to be predestined to this kind of interdisciplinary work. Analyses of the North German Baroque Organ project and the restoration of the Hinsz organ in Roden for instance showed that the research of craftsman, scientists, musicians and others did “not restore something that was already there, but can be seen as a form of continuous artistic innovation” (Peters 2009, p.16). The ‘restoration’ of original pipe organ sound at home can be understood in similar terms.
References
- Peters, P. F. (2009). Retracing old organ sound: Authenticity and the structure of artistic arguments. Krisis. Journal for contemporary philosophy, 2009(1), 5-19.
- Pinch, T., & Trocco, F. (2002) Analog Days. The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press).
- Pinch, T., & Bijsterveld, K. (2004) Sound Studies: New Technologies and Music. Social Studies of Science. 34(5), 635-648.
- Snyder, K. J. (2002). The organ as a mirror of its time: North European reflections, 1610-2000. New York: Oxford University Press.
