A pipe organ is like a living creature; its bellows are "lungs" that breathe with each performance. If the Ocean Grove Great Auditorium organ -- one of the nation's largest -- were to celebrate its long life with a birthday cake this week, it would have to blow out 100 candles.
When the organ was inaugurated on July 3, 1908, an audience of 8,000 overflowed the hall for a performance by Mark Andrews, a British-born organist and composer who had settled in Montclair.
Every summer since, the instrument has thundered and whispered, accompanying singers in Christian services and stirring listeners in classical recitals.
On Thursday, Gordon Turk -- the resident Ocean Grove organist since 1974 -- will lead a centennial concert at the Great Auditorium that will echo the pomp, circumstance and poetry that has soaked season after season into the seaside hall's wooden frame.
The evening also will celebrate a bigger and better instrument, with last year's addition of a rear "echo" division of 950 pipes, bringing the total to 10,823.
Turk has worked hand in hand with organ curator John Shaw, who also began his tenure in 1974. The pair has led the instrument's restoration and expansion, an ambitious process that Turk called a "long crescendo."
If there's a ghost at the party, however, it will be that of the organ's builder, Robert Hope-Jones. An eccentric genius, he had designed the Worcester Cathedral organ in England, but came to America trailing controversy.
Many of Hope-Jones' innovations in organ design raised contention in his day, though many would become standard.
Depressed from business troubles and homosexual scandals, Hope-Jones committed suicide on the sixth anniversary of his Ocean Grove masterpiece.
His demise came at the end of a gas pipe in an upstate New York rooming house. An inventor to the end, he constructed an apparatus that burned off excess fumes to protect the neighbors.
A musical masterpieceSeven years earlier, however, Hope-Jones counted Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) among the investors in the Hope-Jones Organ Co., based in Elmira, N.Y.
The Ocean Grove organ cost $27,000 in 1908 (about $600,000 today). Hope-Jones donated half the amount in an agreement with the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association -- the Methodist group that founded the town in 1869 and had the Great Auditorium built in 1894 -- that let him use the organ as a demonstration instrument.
Hope-Jones always put more into his instruments than the customers were paying for, contributing to his lack of financial success. But he had the courage of his convictions. While building the Ocean Grove organ, he told the New York Times it was "of a remarkable construction" and brimming with "devices never before used," including revolutionary electronics. The materials entailed 40,000 feet of sugar-pine lumber, with the largest pipe 32 feet tall, made of lead and weighing 1,100 pounds.
The Ocean Grove organ was a hit from the start. The first summer included performances by Edwin Lemare, a famed organist and composer. A convention of organists drew 200 players from around the country, and the organ was featured in a vast performance of Mendelssohn's oratorio "Elijah."
But not everyone residing near the Great Auditorium were enamored of the afternoon recitals. In 1909, a group complained to the Camp Meeting Association about how performances of "The Storm" fantasia "interrupted their naps."
In the middle of some nights, Hope-Jones himself could be heard in the auditorium trying out tones that haunted him in his dreams. Tinkering away from the keyboard, Hope-Jones sat on a stool in the bottom of the organ chamber. The stool remains there a century later .
'LIKE A BIG CELLO'
The sound that 100 years of listeners have heard in Ocean Grove is a mix of "the rich, spacious instrument and clear but warm acoustics, not as reverberant as a cathedral," Shaw said.
"Hope-Jones was smart. The building is a big part of the instrument. The auditorium, virtually all wood, is like a big cello, so he used the ceiling like a giant sounding board."
Shaw's role as curator is a volunteer position long balanced with a career in school facilities management. He can trace his ties to the organ back to Hope-Jones. When Shaw was a Pennsylvania teen summering in Ocean Grove in the early'50s, veteran curator Earl Beach, part of the original Hope-Jones Co. crew, gave him tours of the organ's "guts." And he remembers the sound hit him "viscerally, like rock'n' roll hit other boys."
Turk, 59, recalls auditioning nonchalantly for the resident organist position. Since then he has developed a bond with the instrument that belies the fact that this is a summer job. The Ocean Grove hall is neither air-conditioned nor heated, and the organ's leather bellows must stay closed in the cold.
A musical masterpieceOne of Turk's joys are the listeners. Not just "the pipe-organ cognoscenti," he said, "but also the visitors who don't have a clue. I love being able to show them that organ music isn't limited to bad church music or old scary movies. Hearing Bach on a great instrument in the right acoustic can be an overwhelming experience. When listeners tell me how surprised they were at it being so thrilling, well, that's why I'm still here."
There are weekly Ocean Grove organ recitals in July and August, with Turk sharing the bench with organists from across the United States and Europe. Among the most frequent guests has been Michael Stairs, organist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He agrees with Turk that this organ's most uncommon quality is its versatility.
"Ocean Grove's organ sounds wonderful in all kinds of solo music, as well as behind a 400-voice choir," said Stairs, who joins Turk and the Philadelphia Brass for Thursday's concert. "And the recent restorations have the original work in mind. I think Hope-Jones would give his blessing."
Refurbishments have come from donations, but the Camp Meeting Association spends $18,000 a year for maintenance, including a dozen two-man tuning sessions each summer. The organization's CEO, Scott Hoffmann, insists the instrument is "the heart and soul of the Great Auditorium."
The new "echo" gallery, which enables antiphonal and ethereal effects akin to surround sound, is the most extensive addition in the instrument's history, the $200,000 cost funded by an anonymous donor. There also has been serendipitous re-gifting. An organ enthusiast in North Jersey, directed by his wife to finally clear their garage, returned 55 original pipes given to him when they were pulled from the hall in the'60s.
"Much of the restoration we've done has been recovering from ill-advised alterations and Band-Aid jobs," Shaw said. "Those responsible at one time were less interested in historical character than in keeping costs low."
The organ also runs smoothly these days because Turk gets off the bench and down to the organ chambers, insisting that "knowing what's going on inside helps me know how to bring the music out."
Proof that Turk knows how to bring the organ to life can be heard on an album of "French spectaculars" made for the Dorian label in 1998. He plans a new series of recordings this fall. What has him most excited, though, is a July 31 concert of organ concertos by Poulenc and Guilmant. In 34 years, he has played the organ with an orchestra only a few times.
The Great Auditorium seats 6,700; when recitals draw 300 to 500, the hall can look empty. But, Turk said, that is far more people than attend organ recitals in a church. And attendance is increasing.
"Listeners are recognizing that we have a rare treasure here.
"It's true that a pipe organ is as individual as a person," Turk added. "Unlike, say, a piano, organs come in myriad sizes and builds, and they each have their own sonic personality. We have formed a relationship here with this organ as if it were a living thing."
Bradley Bambarger may be reached at bbambarger@starledger.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment