Klarinet Archive - Posting 000313.txt from 2000/08

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] My memory /Tony Pay`s Weber
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 18:33:02 -0400

Mark Charette wrote that, in the bad old days,
>... the standard pitches were _all_
>over the place - literally and geographically.

>If I may be allowed to speculate a bit, I might partially blame it on the
>organs installed in many towns. The organs were expensive, so whatever pitch
>they were tuned to originally might affect the town's pitch standard. Organs
>last a _long_ time if kept in reasonable repair, and the cost of retuning
>all the pipes every time someone said there should be a new standard would
>be prohibitive - especially if the new tuning was lower than the organ's
>tuning!

A drastic re-tuning involves heavy construction work, and can ruin an organ,
but pipe organs are made to be tuned, and must be tuned periodically. Organ
pipes work similarly to clarinets. You can pull the pipe footings out or
push them in, or adjust the effective total length of the pipes by means of
tuning collars at the tops of the pipes.

You're right, though, in the sense that on an organ with several thousand
pipes, some of them huge, re-tuning is a major hassle, involving ladders,
catwalks and tools. It's hardly feasible for the organist to re-tune the
whole compass between pieces just because a soloist in the first piece plays
an A=430 clarinet and a soloist at the second service plays an A=452 trumpet!
Seasonal re-tuning is done at least twice a year on most organs. Most
organists wouldn't try to tune a whole organ. Like piano tuning, it's a job
best left to a professional. However, church organists can and often *must*
re-tune a few of the worst offenders between services.

That's because some pipes are made of wood and some of metal, some are
conical, some are cylindrical and some are square, and some have wood or
metal shallots (reeds) and some don't, while the temperature of the building
varies in different areas of the pipe chambers. Builders rate their pipes to
play at a certain pitch at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but the idea of maintaining
a constant 70-degree temperature throughout the pipe chambers is a pipe dream.

People out in the audience generally have no idea of what's behind the facade
pipes and the decorative grillwork. There's a whole forest of thousands of
pipes back there, and depending on the compass of the organ, the pipes can
range from 1/16" long to 64' long. Yes, there are at least two organs, one
in the old Atlantic City Civic Hall and the other in Australia, with speaking
ranks of 64' pitch, down to approximately 8 Hz. [CCCCC], although usually
that pitch, when present, is a resultant, formed from a 32' rank paired with
a 23-1/3' quint rank to produce an acoustic bass. Organ mavens disagree
about whether or Adolph Hitler ever got the 128' pitch rank he wanted, which
would be sub-audible to humans but would shudder the building impressively.
This rank, if it ever existed, is now lost, but think about tuning something
that height, with a scale at least as wide as a municipal storm drain.

The intonation of a normally large organ can go shockingly out of whack
within only half an hour or so, especially in mid-winter, when the custodian
forgets to warm the pipe chambers in advance and turns on the heat just as
several hundred warm human bodies suddenly pack themselves into *part of* a
building that starts out frigid. The air inside tiny pipes in a "flower
box" up front, where they warm up fast, can swiftly crawl a good (or bad!)
quarter tone out of pitch with the tree-sized monsters hidden in the rear.
While turning pages for my uncle the organist, who had perfect pitch, I
frequently heard him mutter words not ideally associated with church, as the
pitch started to rise here and slip there. Often the practical solution
(aside from pulling the loudest and thickest harmonic mixtures, with loads of
tremolo, so that anything too off-key gets buried in the reverberating
overtones) is to keep a thermometer near the organ bench and avoid pulling
the crankiest stops once the air temperature rises to a certain degree. Talk
with organists after they've just done playing and half the conversation will
revolve around which parts of the organ were useless today -- never mind
which ranks haven't worked for sixteen years because some budget committee
won't vote to get them re-leathered. Y'all think we've got problems -- try
playing 7,000 temperamental wind instruments at once. I don't think
anybody's ever got all 33,000+ pipes working at the same time on that
Midmer-Losch monstrosity in Atlantic City, not that anybody would want to
listen to all of them bellowing in unision, even if the wind chests could
supply them all with enough hot air.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~
August 13 is the ancient Roman Festival of Hecate. To make sure I would
greet this important day with appropriate ceremony at thirteen o'clock, Ms.
Shadow Cat walked across my face at 1 a.m., on her way to turning over my
water glass into the bed. I think I will reward her with a special treat by
working on my altissimo this week....
~~~~~~~~~~

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