by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Dear Diary: an encounter with the Great Stalacpipe Organ, in a cave
•Bulletin Board: Next Jazz Legacy apprenticeship deadline, George Walker album from Cleveland Orchestra
•Almanac: R. Nathaniel Dett & Anton Bruckner
DEAR DIARY,
This past weekend I heard the biggest musical instrument in the world. It’s inside a cave in Virginia.
The cave is called Luray Caverns. It has high ceilings and big open spaces, but it feels very close-up in the dim lighting and with stalactites stretching down right in front of you.
Partway through the cave, you find the Great Stalacpipe Organ. Armed with four manuals, it was invented in the ‘50s by Leland W. Sprinkle (a real name), a mathematician and scientist who was involved in electronics and worked at the Pentagon.
Back then, Luray tour guides would tap on stalactites with a mallet to make sounds, even playing well-known tunes. That might’ve been what gave Mr. Sprinkle his idea. Or maybe it was his son smacking his head on a stalactite — another kind of percussion, and another version of the story.
It took three years. After making his way through the cavern with a tuning fork, Sprinkle had chosen his stalactites — they span 3.5 acres, hence the “World’s Largest Instrument” designation — shaving them down to make just the right notes. Then he connected rubber mallets to the organ by wire, so that if you press a key, a mallet strikes.
According to Wikipedia, Sprinkle himself (right) made some of the early recordings, on vinyl, while organist Monte Maxwell was responsible for later ones that are supposedly on sale in the gift shop. (I wasn’t looking very hard, but I didn’t see any — although I did see a Hermione Granger action figure…?) Listen to Maxwell’s recording of America the Beautiful here.
And the Scandinavian music collective Pepe Deluxé wrote and recorded an original composition on the instrument in 2011, becoming the first artists to do so. Listen to In the Cave here.
A helpful tour guide (who didn’t mind repeating the entire story to me after I walked in on the last few seconds of it) told me that the organ hasn’t been played in a few years. She said that it’s difficult to play — that the pedals are arranged backwards, and that there’s a three-second delay between pressing a key and hearing the sound. When it’s played for tours these days, it’s done automatically, like a player piano.
Either way, I liked hearing it. Just like this big cave feels intimate, this very big instrument has a calming sound. Looking back, I think it cast a kind of spell on the room. I don’t remember any of the numerous kids who were in attendance bobbing and weaving around, or telling their parents loudly about being bored.
Ok, with that kid, kudos for the honesty.
BULLETIN BOARD:
Applications close on October 17 for Next Jazz Legacy, a national apprenticeship program for women and non-binary improvisers in jazz that was launched last year by New Music USA and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Details here.
On November 4, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra will release a new album dedicated to the music of George Walker. The recording, the fifth on the Orchestra’s own music label, contains the Antifonys for string orchestra, the Fourth and Fifth Sinfonias, and Lilacs for voice and orchestra, featuring soprano Latonia Moore.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Canadian-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett was born on October 11, 1882 in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls). He is especially famous for his choral and piano compositions based on African American spirituals and folk songs. Among his great works is his oratorio The Ordering of Moses, written in 1932 as his thesis at the Eastman School of Music, and premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony in 1937.
Listen here to a recording from 1968 by the Talladega College Choir under the direction of Frank Harrison, the Mobile Symphony Orchestra led by William Levi Dawson, and soloists Jeanette Walters, soprano, Carol Brice, contralto, John Miles, tenor, and John Work, baritone. (Head to the 15:08 mark to hear Dett’s powerful setting of Go Down, Moses.) And click here to read an article in The Guardian by tenor Rodrick Dixon ahead of the UK premiere earlier this year.
And Austrian composer Anton Bruckner died in Vienna on this date in 1896. Among his best-known compositions are his massive symphonies, of which he wrote eleven. Watch a video of George Szell leading the Third Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1963 (Bruckner starts at 49:30).