Prof. Stanley On The Organ

PROF. STANLEY ON THE ORGAN

GAVE LECTURE ON THE SUBJECT BEFORE LARGE AUDIENCE

Took Place of Regular Pupil Recital--Gave History of the Instrument and Its Music

The pupils' recital which was announced for Wednesday at the School of Music was unavoidably postponed on account of the illness of some who were to take part, and as next Wednesday a program of organ music is to be given, Professor Stanley anticipated a little, and kept the large audience smiling and contented by giving a lecture on the organ which he had prepared for some future time. He made the organ a thing of life; it lived, it breathed, it had a soul. He constructed it before the eyes of the people, who watched its evolution from the reed played upon by the wind to the great organ of the cathedral, magnificent, ideal, the grandeur of whose music no man can describe. As he built up this wonderful mechanism, distinguishing it part by part, Professor Renwick illustrated the meaning by snatches of music, which left naught to be desired.

"The organ," said Prof. Stanley, "began to take its place in the beginning of the Christian era. From a combination of tubes it developed to where it had keys and a German invented the pedals. In the early days the bellows were blown by man power, an organ of 400 pipes requiring seventy men. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the men performed this work by walking up and down a board which pressed down the bellows on one side and lifted them up on the other. These men were called bellows-treaders.

"The organist in those days was obliged to be a man of great muscular strength, for the keys were broad, and the so-called 'touch' of today was impossible. He pounded the keys into music and was therefore called an organ beater. Organs were made at enormous cost. The pipes were of solid silver and high grade metal which doesn't mean anything only more or less of a string tone and more or less harshness. But, like all medieval art, into each organ went the life of its maker, into his instrument each man put his whole soul.

"Italy, where organ playing first developed, has the poorest organ playing in the world. The music is nihil; that played in Milan and Florence is more fitting for the hut than the cathedrals, where they have thrown to the winds the heritage of the fathers. 

"The foundation of an organ is the open diapason," said Prof. Stanley. "This with its mellow, rich, sonorous tone, the stop diapason with its double vibrations, the reed tone with its sound of the trumpet and the clarion, the flute tone, and several others, were all illustrated by Prof. Renwick to Prof. Stanley's explanation.

An organ is a magnificent instrument, but it goes handicapped because you get the impression of an organ from its parts. You cannot get a complete organ with less than three rows of keys and pedals and fifty-odd stops. A large concert organ is really five organs, because of the extra organ for the feet. The foundation of the organ is the bellows which should be ample, as in a trotting horse or a singer. the wood of an organ is of the finest, because there is life in the wood and it is selected for its resonance. Much of the expensive woods used by the cabinetmaker would be rejected by the organmaker. The organ in its last estate is one of the most beautiful and most sublime things in the world, but it is not for trivial jingles. The tendency in Italy is to make it a brass band, but it has come into being for greater things than this--for grandeur, for solemnity, to awaken within one the noblest emotions that stir the soul. If an earnest man feels in his prelude on Sunday that he is beginning the service, the prelude would not cover our tardy entrance into church, and the closing voluntary would not be, as some one expressed it, a musical doormat.

It certainly was not so yesterday, for Prof. Renwick did not play the people out, but after Prof. Stanley had closed his lecture, played a sonata which brought out in a grandeur of harmony all that the audience had been so interestingly told.