I am neither a player nor an expert, but you don’t need to be either to appreciate the organ. Scholars date the first one back to hydraulic systems in Ancient Greece; it’s speculated that European churches adopted them a thousand years later to wake dozing attendants. The pipe organ is massive and ornate. Whether used for worship or whimsy, you see it and know it means something bigger. The sound rattles. It hits you like a brick. It can be louder than an arena concert. In a capable organist’s hands (and feet), it induces fear or awe — but it can do so much more as well, reflecting “every shade of human emotion: love, anger, hate, sorrow, surprise, humor, ugliness, the sinister and national idioms,” as Skinner once put it.
When I was just 2 or 3 years old, my parents took me to mass at a tiny chapel across the river from our apartment in Arlington, Va. Before long, I demanded to be seated not in the pews but in the back of the room, next to the organist, Bob. My parents introduced me to Bob and let me sit on his bench as he played. I wanted shiny shoes, just like his. (Another demand they kindly accommodated.)
I know it wasn’t the organ’s actual sound that lured me — perhaps it was its sheer size and power. Or maybe I liked the comedy and entertainment of a man playing keyboards with his hands and feet. Were I more religious now, I might say that I felt it moving me toward God. The sound that came from the pipes was different from anything I’d heard before: dour and honking, a tremulous grumble that came from all around me. I was in awe of the instrument, and understood instinctively that it meant something important to history, to the world around me.
Organ music used to be everywhere, and that legacy continues in certain ways: It’s still at the church and the ballpark. You still hear it at the carnival. Thanks to Halloween, the organ can be heard through the entire month of October. But churchgoing is down. M.L.B. games don’t always feature live organists anymore the way they did decades ago. “The Phantom of the Opera” ended its record-breaking run on Broadway in 2023. And do kids even pay attention to the music on merry-go-rounds?
Pipe organs are often building-size. Because they produce sound by channeling air through thousands of pipes, some as wide as trains, maintaining them comes at a steep cost. The National Cathedral’s 86-year-old organ, which has more than 10,000 pipes, started to undergo a restoration last year that will take five years and cost $14.5 million. Those are the kinds of costs that many churches and concert halls would rather not pay. So nowadays, encountering the organ can feel like discovering something from a world that has been lost.