Musical taste mischief and organ-tuning

Two more episodes in “Fixing Things with My Dad,” in which we were co-conspirators:

Episode 1:

When a childhood friend of mine got married, I played organ for the wedding. New church, but old electronic organ, the kind that organist friends of mine refer to as an “appliance” and/or a “toaster.” Really can’t compare with big old pipe organs.

The happy couple scheduled the wedding for right before Christmas in order to make it possible for me to do the job (I didn’t insist, but my friend really wanted me to play—so as I had planned to fly back for Christmas, I had no excuse).

A couple of days before the wedding, I went to practice and “try out” the organ. Besides possessing funky imitations of the real thing, it was badly out of tune. The next day, Dad came with me and we tuned it. He was an electrician and he possessed a good ear—and tuning the thing consisted of turning the screwdriver in the right direction for each note in each stop that was out of tune.

So the wedding was beautiful—duh!—and, as I’d worked out which stops to avoid, the organ sounded respectable. Many people came up to me afterward to tell me that that organ had never sounded so good. Funny what tuning does (even when people don’t know that that’s the issue).

Episode 2:

Mischief. The organ I played throughout high school and college was a good pipe organ. Not huge, but a very good sound. It also had a tremolo setting, which gave the organ a vibrato kind of sound (while shaking the organ loft). The mechanism that created the effect was perhaps ill-advised in this installation.

And most, if not all, of the great organ literature doesn’t call for whole-organ tremolo (though certain stop combinations create a pleasing effect for solo lines). Whole-organ tremolo is a sound effect native to certain worship music styles—but not native to my Scandinavian Lutheran church.

A wedding was to be held there, and the organist (bride’s preference—funny how that works) for the event was fully steeped in the tremolo-organ (Hammond, etc.) tradition. In a small town, we knew these things.

Our main organist wasn’t happy about it—Mrs. E. expressed her concern to me about the dreaded use of the tremolo.

So Dad and I took it into our hands… Even though it’s a pipe organ, the switches for the stops are electronic, and it was a small matter to put a piece of paper over the switch contact to prevent the tremolo from working.

After the organist had practiced on the organ, she encountered Mrs. E. and told her that the tremolo wasn’t working. “Oh, really?” After the wedding, the tremolo was miraculously restored, if thenceforth unused.

Bad, bad, bad. An entire wedding without tremolo organ. How righteous can one get?

Faced with the same instance now, I don’t think I would take action. Then, though, Dad and I were of the same mind, and it was frighteningly easy to act on it. We could; we did.