Culture Station Bangalore, March 20, 2011
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The world's oldest playable pipe organ is located in the Basilica of Valère in Sion, Switzerland A Veeramani
Pulling pipe organ
While the king of instruments has turned mute across the country, there are a few who are trying to revive the pipe organ, writes Elizabeth Soumya
I
n early 2003, a man in Hyderabad set out on what seemed to be an impossible quest. There were no assurances that he’d even find what he was looking for — to revive pipe organs. He, Commodore TMJ Champion, a retired naval officer, organist and a determined restorer, met Tapan Kumar Das, that year. Das listens to Tagore and doesn’t play the pipe organ. Yet Champion’s search ended withhim. “He had been looking all over India. When he contacted St. John’s Church in Kolkata, they gave him my contact,” says Das, the great grandson of the founder of Kolkata-based Hurry Brothers (set up in 1850), a firm responsible for assembling church pipe organs in India and the only pipe organ repairer in the country. Together, Champion and Das breathed life into the pipe organ of St. John’s Church in Secunderabad. Built in September, 1908, the church’s ancient pipe organ was in a state of disrepair for over two decades — its keyboards stiff, its pedals caught, termites attacking the woodwork and its bellows torn. Restored to its former glory, the pipe now has been heard since August 2003. But not all pipe organs in the country are as fortunate. Champion, who has helped restore close to 15 organs so far, says he has been witness to abject cruelty meted to these traditional instruments. He has seen close to twenty pipe organs being dismantled and discarded. “While other pipes stand decaying, unused and mute in a silent testimony,” he rues. India once had over 200 pipe organs. The number today is somewhere around 80. Almost all of them are ensconced within India’s churches spread all over the country. On a recent trip, Champion says he was surprised to come across an organ in Mount Abu, Rajasthan and another in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. The birth of most of these instruments spans between the last quarter of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th century. They were all imported from abroad and assembled here. Some of the pipe organ builders responsible for these instruments included companies such as Conacher & Co, UK, William Hill & Sons, UK, Misquith & Co, Madras, Hill & Bird London, Evinton & Sons, London, W Richardson, London, and Hurry Brothers, Calcutta. Post independence, bad times were upon these souvenirs of the British era — few knew how to maintain, tune, leave alone restore them. Andrew Bhagyanathan, who has been playing the organ for 35 years, laments that people with technical know-how about the instrument today are missing. The handful, who have honed home-grown tricks to maintain pipe organs and pianos, are merely “fire fighting” and could go wrong, he says. The church where Bhagyanathan currently plays the organ, St Andrews, Bangalore, had its 130-year-old pipe restored in 2007 by Christopher Gray, managing director, Midland Organ, Hele & Company Ltd, UK. Gray, a musician of repute, an expert organist, who also has a Masters in organ historiography, is currently in In-
to save the
Presents from the past MUMBAI Christ Church, Byculla Emmanuel Church, Grant Road St Andrew's Church (Kirk), SB Singh Road Wesley Church, Causeway Gloria Church, Byculla Holy Name Cathedral, Wodehouse Road
BANGALORE St Marks Cathedral, MG Road St Andrews, Cubbon Road All Saints Church, Richmond Town St Johns, Frazer Town
MYSORE St Philomenas Church
BELGAUM St Mary’s Church, Cantonment
SHIMLA Christ Church, The Mall (biggest pipe organ in India)
PUNE St Marys Church, Stavely Road St Pauls, Station Road
DELHI St Stephen's Church, Fatehpuri St. James' Church, Kashmere Gate Cathedral Ch.of the Redemption, North Avenue (List includes organs not in use)
A Veeramani
dia on a twenty-day work stint. He has been travelling to India twice a year for eight years now and has been responsible for restoring instruments in Bangalore, Chennai and Goa (Bangalore — St Andrews, Chennai — St Mary’s, St Andrews, Zion Church, Egmore Wesley Church and will also stop over to look at pipes in Pune (St Marys Church and St Pauls) this time. The state of pipe organs in Gray’s motherland, England, is very different from that in India. Europe continues to have organbuilders and players. While there are around 35 companies that build pipe organs in the UK, Germany could have hundreds, he says. A reason why the pipe organ’s music still lingers on in the continent is its cultural relevance there. Every village in the UK has a pipe organ, testifies Gray. Its music spills over from the pews and has found a place in secular and recital music — therefore it’s not unusual for schools and concert halls to have pipe organs. In India on the other hand, its ethereal sound is synonymous with church music (the only exception perhaps is Tata Theatre, Nariman Point, Mumbai). Since the basic structure of the organ has remained the same over the years, with the only ‘upgradation’ perhaps being introduction of electric actions in the instrument, Gray acknowledges that he finds the instruments in India no different. A common problem is keeping rodents and squirrels away, he adds. The Pipe organ restorer Christopher Gray plays the instrument at St Andrew’s, Bangalore big ordeal however is the fact that many organ parts just can’t be found in India and need to people hearing what he calls is ‘the king of inbe sourced or ordered to be made in the UK. Every part required Das builds himself. This struments’ — the only instrument where one first involves deft meandering through cran- needs to use both hands and feet and can singlenies in Kolkata — that people wouldn’t even handedly be an entire orchestra. While he isn’t know exist — scouting for raw materials. Even formally teaching anyone, he says, he does guide those who show interest in learning it. The though he can create valves, leather nuts, predecessor puffers etc, there aree parts predecessor for for most organists is the parts that that have have piano, to be sourced from abroad. piano, so so it it might be a good place abroad. And And The origins of the pipe organ can for this includes pipes. Pipe for young young aspirants to start. AcPipe voicvoicbe traced back to the hydraulis in cording to Champion, organing and repairing just can’t cordin st can’t Ancient Greece in the 3rd century ists learn first-hand be done in India forr the ists must m the BC, in which the wind supply was maintenance of the inlack of infrastructure ma ure created with water pressure. By strument. and know-how. It could str uld the sixth or 7th century AD, He was best known during his lifetime (1685As for the future of take as long as 25 25 bellows were used to supply 1750) as an organist, organ consultant, and that rare breed of oryears for someone too t organs with wind. Beginning in the composer of organ works. gan restorers, the only learn pipe voicing, 12th century, the organ began to After taking a short-lived post way to pick up the explains Champion. evolve into a complex instrument in Weimar in 1703 as a skills is perhaps old While tuning can capable of producing different violinist, Bach became organist school apprenticetake five days or timbres. By the 17th century, most at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt ship of sorts which more, restoration (1703-1707). His relationship of the sounds available on the could take as many as can take five to six with the church council was modern classical organ had been 10 years. Gray himself months and work on tenuous as he often shirked developed. From that time, the has worked full time larger instrumentss his responsibilities, preferring pipe organ was the most complex with an organ builder can even take twoo w to practice the organ. When a four-month leave man-made device, a distinction it before starting his own years, says Gray. be was granted to him, to travel to Lubeck to retained until it was displaced by company and in India, is Restoration is alsoo aa com familiarise himself with the music of the telephone exchange in the late assisted by Chennai-based steep endeavour. While assi While Dietrich Buxtehude, he returned long 19th century. Samson the pipe in St John’s, Sams Bharathy, who he ’s, SeSeafter was expected, much to the says he’s passing on skills to. cundrabad, was restored says he ored at at aa Pipe organs are installed in dismay of the council. Tapan cost of `1.35 lakh, the 83-year-old Tapan Das Da worked under the 83-year-old churches, synagogues, concert guidance German instrumentt in guidance of of his h uncle till the latter’s in St St Mark’s Mark’s halls, and other public buildings death rather sceptiCatherdral, Bangalore, death in in 1999. 1999 Das Das remains r ore was was restored restored and are used for the performance with the help of Swiss experts at the cost of `50 cal about future of repairers in India, though he of classical music, sacred music, lakh. Releathering of bellows can cost around confesses it would be wonderful to have an asand secular music. In the early `50,000 and major restoration work can run into sistant to reduce his work load and that he’d love 20th century, pipe organs were lakhs of rupees depending on the nature of to train someone. “Kiss Ko Sikhayga?,” he asks. installed in theaters to accompany And even the loudest instrument is met with work, says Champion. films during the silent movie era. Bhagynathan believes that the path to re- cold human silence. covery for the organ should begin with more e_soumya@dnaindia.net
Heads bowed in Grateful memory Seth Schiesel There is a bit of Owsley in me. You see, my father, a strait-laced middle-class Jewish kid from Los Angeles, enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. That same year, in that same town, a brilliant renegade named Augustus Owsley Stanley III spent three weeks in the university library’s organic chemistry stacks learning the secrets of synthesising lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. Before long, Owsley was creating mass quantities of the purest acid the world had ever known. By the time my father graduated from Berkeley in 1969, the world had changed and my dad along with it. I was born just a few years later after my father, by then a politically active hippie, moved to New York and married a young working-class black woman from Bridgeport, Conn. Such a story would have been quite literally unthinkable before the social upheaval of that time engulfed America. And Owsley connected some of the dots. Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It
was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon. And certainly not least, it was Owsley who originally financed, inspired, amplified and dosed the great American rock band, the Grateful Dead (more about that in a bit). On Tuesday evening my father, Jonathan, sent me an e-mail about Owsley. “Owsley Stanley,” my dad wrote. “Didn’t know his first name was Owsley. Just knew that the first few hits of acid were called Owsley. Went with friends to see Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, or so I was told. They laughed when I told them that I didn’t know who she was. Had just started U.C. Berkeley and had taken an Alternative Course in creative writing and another course on Gandhi. Dropped the Acid and well what is time and space anyway. The second hit of Owsley was back in Santa Monica where I walked a stairway to the clouds above, or was in the process of doing that when gentle hands pulled me back from the cliff. Rainbow Bubbles streaming across the room from the sounds of the Grateful Dead.”
all stops
THROUGH THE AGES
Johann Sebastian Bach
It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon
Owsley “Bear” Stanley (L) is seen beside the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia in 1969 There was certainly a dark side to the 1960s drug culture. But many people, including my father, considered LSD positively transforming. “Before Acid, my neck was so strong and with the drug coursing through me the concrete chipped off and WOW, I could see and hear and feel so much. Just a reflection of pre-acid American culture chipping off; one chip for repression, another chip for anxiety, another chip for
ignorance, another chip floating away carrying my image of short hair, plaid shorts, tennis shoes and high ankle socks.” Given the family history, it may seem a surprise that I actually didn’t learn about Owsley, LSD and the Grateful Dead from my father, or even while I was growing up in Woodstock, N.Y., the renowned hippie town. For that I had to wait until I met the other kids at one of the nation’s
most exclusive elite boarding schools, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. By the time I showed up as a 14-yearold in 1987, Andover, as the school is known, had been a Grateful Dead hotbed for at least a decade. Not coincidentally, LSD was readily available on campus. That fall one of my 10th-grade classmates, Liza Ryan, received a new teddy bear from her father. She named it Owsley. (Owsley’s nickname, known wide and far, was Bear.) Before long she and I and many of our schoolmates were on our way to becoming the last, final generation of true Deadheads. Soon I learned about how Owsley designed some of the first modern rock amplification systems for the Grateful Dead, culminating in the over-the-top (literally) “Wall of Sound” in 1974. As I started collecting tapes of Dead performances, I learned about how Owsley was probably the first sound engineer in the world regularly to record and archive every performance by a band straight from the soundboard. Naturally, the first Dead album I ever bought is known as “Bear’s Choice.” I attended my second Grateful Dead concert, on July 9, 1989, in the company of a famous New York City acid dealer named Mountain. I was 16. Mountain, who was probably in his 50s, told me that he had known Owsley back in the day, and that he was one of the most extraordinary people on the planet. By the end of that show I was on the bus, as they say. And by the time Jerry Garcia died in 1995, when I was 22, I had seen the Dead more than 90 times. So there is a bit of Owsley in me. And if modern popular music means anything to you, there is a bit of Owsley in you too. The New York Times