The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism by Tiffany Kwan Ng A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music and the Designated Emphasis in New Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Richard Taruskin, Chair Professor James Q. Davies Professor Abigail T. De Kosnik Professor Steven Feld Summer 2015 The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism Copyright 2015 by Tiffany Kwan Ng 1 Abstract The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism by Tiffany Kwan Ng Doctor of Philosophy in Music with a Designated Emphasis in New Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Richard Taruskin, Chair This dissertation examines modernist twentieth-century applications of the pipe organ and the carillon in the United States and in the Netherlands. These keyboard instruments, historically owned by religious or governmental entities, served an exceptionally diverse variety of political, technological, social, and urban planning functions. Their powerful simultaneous associations with historicism and innovation enabled those who built and played them to anchor the instruments? novel uses in the perceived authority of tradition, church, and state. This usage became particularly evident after World War II, when Philips Electronics and the engineers and musicians whose careers were shaped by the military-industrial complex and the Cold War used the organ and carillon to present alternative visions and performances of their research, knowledge, and services. The organ served as a vehicle for innovation for early electronic music and sound synthesis pioneers in three ways. First, it provided a model for an efficient user interface for new synthesizer technologies that found both musical and military communications applications. Second, the pipe organ became the first instrument to be electronically simulated on a commercially viable basis. As a result, the first federal legal proceedings to define the successful simulation of musical sound centered on the electronic organ. Electronic organs also helped shape a historicist ?neo-baroque? movement that was, in part, both a reaction to and an outgrowth of their commercial success. Third, inventors in the field of electronics, particularly military electronics, turned to organ building to satisfy a desire to connect with historicist ideas about craft and tradition. They became leaders of the Organ Reform Movement after World War II, dedicated to reviving aspects of Baroque organ building. I build on Richard Taruskin?s critique of ?historically informed performance? as itself a form of modernism in order to elucidate previously overlooked relationships between Reform organ building, organ recording artists, the military-industrial complex, and cold war politics. The carillon served as a vehicle for international exchange after World War II, facilitating the sharing of soundscape and landscape design ideas between America and the Netherlands. In the 1950s, the people of the Netherlands donated a carillon to the United States as a sounding symbol of political harmony between the two allies. However, the resulting political squabbles and the disharmony and decay of its bells tolled the ineffectiveness of this instrument of diplomacy. In the following decade, Philips Electronics took inspiration from suburban American corporate research parks to construct a techno-cultural complex in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This International Style park used the Dutch carillon?s sonic and visual symbolism to re-center the perceived core of Eindhoven and of civic authority onto Philips? campus. 2 An important part of the broader history of postwar expansion and the military-industrial complex are the science-fiction, mystery, and filmic spinoffs and sonic imaginaries associated with these reinvented carillons and organs, and the way such narratives cross the boundaries between high art and popular culture. The institutions and donors that built carillons often justified them with utopian rhetoric about creating community, public music, and elevating general musical taste. However, a vein of dystopian fiction about bells in literature, opera, film, and television counterbalanced that discourse. The realm of fiction ties together this dissertation?s overarching themes of historical revival, technological innovation, modernism, and military electronics research. i Acknowledgements I wish to thank many people for their help in the researching and writing of this dissertation, and I find that I must thank them in no particular order, as they were all important. The only clear first is that my tremendous gratitude goes to my dissertation committee members for their invaluable guidance, mentorship, inspiration, and patience: Richard Taruskin, James Davies, Abigail De Kosnik, and Steven Feld. Each of them has opened new worlds of ideas to me and transformed me for the better?Taruskin by always, always challenging me and believing in me, Davies by pointing me towards the most essential questions and most productive approaches, De Kosnik by helping me see the big-picture questions in new media studies and beyond with lucidity, and Feld by helping me find a critical approach to campanology and think out of the box. For my research in the Netherlands, I thank Frits Elshout for granting access to the Flentrop Orgelbouw archives, Dries Duynstee and Cora Habraken-Versluis for the rare privilege of accessing the Philips Company Archives, Joep van Brussel for access to the Koninklijke Eijsbouts archives, Rainer Sch?tte and Loek Boogert for access to the Archief Nederlandse Klokkenspel-Vereniging, Philips carillonneurs Bertus Oomen, Arie Abbenes, and Rosemarie Seuntiens for their firsthand accounts, and Jed Wentz for a generative discussion about Leonhardt. Sometimes my research in the Netherlands felt like an Indiana Jones crusade, as I rushed to visit archives on the brink of closing due to government disinvestment. For those saves I thank Rik Hendriks at the Nederlands Muziek Instituut (which thankfully survived) and Sylvia Derksen of Muziek Centrum Nederland (whose holdings have been relocated to the University of Amsterdam). Derksen was kind enough to set aside the materials I requested even while she was working hard to close and preserve the archives, so I could do my research after the MCN had closed its doors. For the American stage of my research, I think Robin Austin, Frank Della Penna, and Dave Hunsberger for telling me about Frank P?chin Law, David Lassman for his invaluable help navigating the National Park Service Archives, Joy Banks and Jennifer Beam for access to the Archives of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America and the Anton Brees Carillon Library, Stephen Carney for access to the archives of Arlington National Cemetery, and Randal Brandt for directing me to numerous bell tower murder mysteries. Margaret Pan generously hosted me during my research at NARA. Jeffrey Bossin, Matthew Buechner, Kris Fallon, Jeanine Grenberg, and Anicia Timberlake brought various carillon references in popular culture to my attention. I am tremendously grateful to Davitt Moroney for allowing me unfettered access to the Holtkamp and later the Noack organ in Hertz Hall and for his mentorship to me as a keyboardist-scholar, and to George Cooper and the rest of his Holtkamp team for patiently explaining the Holtkamp?s workings to me even as they were disassembling it. These encounters sparked my interest in reevaluating the neo-baroque. I also thank William Porter and Erica Johnson for inspiring and encouraging me as scholar-musicians, Tina Fr?hauf for believing in my work, my friends Ingrid Chen and the Graduate Assembly team for unforgettable companionship, and many more individuals I likely have forgotten to name. For help getting through the writing process itself, I thank Vera and Joey and Flocke Brink for sharing their delightful home, and Dillon Niederhut and Rachana Vajjhala for going out of their way to assist. Lisa Robinson and Lara Wolfe made it possible for me to file on time. Thank you, mom and dad, for a lifetime of love and support. ii Wonderful library staff made my research possible at the following libraries and archives: the University of Utrecht Library, Regionaal Historisch Centrum Eindhoven, Bibliotheek Eindhoven, National Archives of the Netherlands, Nederlands Muziek Instituut, Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archief Stichting van de Arbeid, Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, Nationaal Beiaardmuseum, the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, the GCNA Archives, the Anton Brees Carillon Library, the archives of Arlington National Cemetery, and the University of California Libraries. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the generous scholarships and grants that have supported my research and writing: grants from the UC Berkeley Department of Music, the UC Berkeley Graduate Division, and the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Ronald Barnes Memorial Scholarship of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, the E. Power Biggs Fellowship of the Organ Historical Society, the best paper scholarship of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, and the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellowship at St. Olaf College. 1 Introduction ?My organ pieces are written for synthesizer.?1 -Karlheinz Stockhausen A talking organ for women telephone operators, countercultural youth screaming for the organ works of Bach, diplomats panicking on both sides of the Atlantic over guano-coated carillon bells, and a carillon lending Baroque gravitas to a museum of technology. It may seem peculiar to consider these sundry twentieth-century histories in America and the Netherlands together. Yet a look farther back into the history of the organ and carillon can reveal their shared origins and provide a basis for understanding the following four chapters. In this dissertation, I argue that the organ and carillon in the twentieth century were powerfully shaped by the repercussions of the two world wars, and this because of their simultaneous appeal as ingenious technological devices and as cultural symbols of the European Baroque. As the most outwardly technologically advanced of musical instruments, the organ served as an interface for new sonic and vocal synthesis technologies. But its Baroque associations also served to hide an underlying relationship between the military-industrial complex and dramatic transformations in American organ building, which resulted in devices such as the early vocoder and the brilliant technological sheen of postwar neo-baroque organs. The carillon, on the other hand, became an instrument of cold war diplomacy between the United States and the Netherlands. As a civic and religious symbol of the Dutch Baroque, it provided a musical-architectural means of affirming the two countries? international relations. Its power to produce the soundscape of the Dutch city center also became a primary tool through which Philips Electronics displaced the symbolic center of its home city of Eindhoven, the Netherlands onto its new American-style suburban research campus on Eindhoven?s periphery. Although initially successful, this combination of Dutch soundscape design and American urban planning proved problematic and thus short-lived. These keyboard instruments shared something important besides their seemingly antiquated and churchly associations?they were both put to technological and modernist uses during the twentieth century because they are portrayed as at once perpetually old and yet perpetually new. They are indelibly associated with a European musical past, yet their size and complexity have led everyone from engineers to politicians to reinvent them to suit new electronic and social ideals. As a result, they have often been on the leading edge of music technology, from the nineteenth-century application of pneumatics to organ action to the preoccupation of early sound synthesis developers with simulating bell sounds. While this dissertation explores the reinventions of these instruments in the twentieth century, innovations have been ongoing since the sixteenth century, when they first co-existed in the Netherlands. From that time onward, carillons in the Netherlands called the faithful to church from towers, while organs led them in song once they filed inside. A church?s organ, clock, and automatic carillon were the most advanced pieces of technology most people were likely to encounter. Organ builders were involved in the early design of carillon keyboards and actions and again became involved in the nineteenth century, and the organist-carillonneur became a 1 Martin Herchenr?der, ?From Darmstadt to Stockholm: Tracing the Swedish Contribution to the Development of a New Organ Style,? in The Organ as a Mirror of its Time: North European Reflections, 1610-2000, ed. Kerala Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 306. 2 standard church position during the Baroque period. For the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the instruments were seen as complementary. In the twentieth century, keyboards became the interface of choice for electronic music technologies developed for commercial production. Moreover, various experimental keyboards were developed to promote alternate temperaments, including R. H. M. Bosanquet?s ?generalized keyboard? (1875) and Adriaan Fokker?s 31-tone organ (1950). Keyboards were the vehicle of both commercial technological experimentation and optimization and of rebellion against musical standardization, while simultaneously developing a kind of hegemony over the development of new electronic instruments and techniques for playing them. The rapid proliferation of keyboard designs during the twentieth century belies the fact that for much of their history, keyboards looked quite different from their modern counterparts, and this is where I locate the earliest links between the organ and carillon. Until the thirteenth century, they were mostly diatonic, admitting only a B? to accommodate Guido de Arezzo?s hexachordal system. They accumulated chromatic keys over time. Some early organ keyboards were not played with the fingers, but with the fists, like carillon keyboards. These organ keyboards comprised large sliding levers, up to 12 cm in width and 70 to 90 cm in length.2 Thus the appearance of organ and carillon keyboards, their playing technique, their architectural scale and the centrality of architectural resonance to their sound, their churchly associations, and their technological associations (frequently appearing at world?s fairs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) have linked the two instruments since the Baroque period. Figure 1. The keyboards and pedalboard of Nicholas Faber?s Halberstadt organ, built in 1361 and enlarged in 1495, as i l lustrated in Praetorius? Syntagma Musicum (Wolfenb?ttel , 1620). ?Historical keyboard building? and the technology and urban expansion race that followed World War II, although rarely linked in historical narratives, were mutually influential. They shared key players, instruments, concepts, and ideologies that I will highlight in terms of the perpetual redesigns and new uses to which the organ and carillon were put.3 Richard Taruskin?s critique of the Early Music movement will serve as a linchpin for my argument. His influential claim that 2 Ferdinand J. De Hen, ?Keyboard,? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, ed. Douglas Earl Bush and Richard Kassel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 288. 3 Much could be written on the topic about harpsichords and clavichords as well. 3 ?historically informed performance? is modernism in Baroque disguise also applies here to keyboard construction?to the materiality of instruments themselves. Many of the organs and carillons discussed in this dissertation, with their sometimes inventive nonmusical usages, were modernist inventions parading in Baroque garb. Chapter 1 introduces the early twentieth-century electrical engineering perspective that the organ keyboard is the most efficient of all musical user interfaces, and traces its effect on the development of encrypted World War II communications devices and its role in shaping early sound synthesis technologies. While male organists continued to dominate the profession during the 1930s, female virtuosi recruited from the ranks of telephone operators pioneered the performance of electronic vocal synthesis using organ-like consoles. The Voder, as the instrument was called, became the prototype for vocoder technology that protected the highest levels of Allied communications. While the Voder was still being developed for demonstrations at major expositions, the Hammond Clock Company was defending itself in court against allegations from the Federal Trade Commission that its instruments were falsely claiming to emulate pipe organs. One of the first major battles over the ontology of electronic music was being carried out by a clock inventor, a physics professor, professional musicians plus a college English class subjected to blind listening tests, and legal professionals. Not until 1962 would composers and performers reverse the direction of emulation, as avant-garde composers Mauricio Kagel, Gy?rgy Ligeti, and Bengt Hambraeus found ways for organist Karl-Erik Welin to explore the electronic-sounding timbral possibilities of pipe organs (and blow a few fuses in the process). The intersection of liturgical tradition and technological innovation in the organ shaped an American neo-baroque organ building style (an approach translated but distinct from a European Baroque revival movement called the Orgelbewegung) into a musical and interface aesthetic that is maligned today for ?mistaking? a cold, inhuman technological aesthetic for Baroque sobriety. However, the boost that World War II gave to scientific and technological research and education, in tandem with its cultural diplomacy initiatives, brought Dutch and German Orgelbewegung ideas to America and gave them a distinctly technological character. Therefore, a European approach to Baroque historicism combined with a technology-smitten American building practice to produce instruments that combined Baroque stop lists with electronic sonic and visual aesthetics and machinery haptics under the ever-treacherous label of ?historical authenticity.? The counter-revolution, one might say, began with those who initially sought to join the neo-baroque ranks. From within the movement emerged its own backlash, an artisanal, craft-oriented building practice that paradoxically owed its very existence to the military-industrial complex. Chapter 2 focuses on several of the most influential organ builders to pioneer an ?anti-technology? return to the Baroque, who came of age in World War II research facilities or during European studies funded by cold war cultural diplomacy initiatives. The appeal of engineering a complex instrument is what drove electrical engineers to develop and improve on electronic organ sound and subsequently to explore the instrument?s craftsman past, while in the process importing social structures and systems of research from the military-industrial complex into the organ shop. The chapter concludes that the approaches of celebrity organists E. Power Biggs and Virgil Fox to promoting historically informed and anti-historical technological versions of Bach organ performance, respectively, shared much more than their rivalry suggests. Chapter 3 explores the use of the carillon in constructing suburban corporate space in Eindhoven, the Netherlands after World War II. On the outskirts of the city in which it had been 4 founded and which it had fundamentally shaped, Philips Electronics anchored its International Style suburban research park on a new carillon and UFO-shaped technology museum in 1966. As the quintessential sound marker of historic Dutch city centers and market squares, the carillon allowed Philips to symbolically de-center ?downtown? Eindhoven (het centrum) onto its own American-style suburban research campus on the periphery of the city, and to ring out the company?s de facto role as church and state there. This suburbanization of the carillon and museum was intended to recreate the massive public draw of the Philips Pavilion and its presentation of Edgard Var?se?s Po?me Electronique at the 1958 Brussels World?s Fair. The complex attracted many visitors, but the historical pull of the carillon?s symbolism and Dutch expectations for public music would eventually triumph. As Philips went global in the 1980s and left Eindhoven struggling to develop a post-company-town identity, the carillon was moved to a historic church in the city center. Finally, chapter 4 recounts the story of how the Netherlands? postwar gift of a carillon to America to symbolize international harmony resulted in all kinds of discord?musical, political, social, and spatial?in and around the planned location of Washington, D.C., and thus how the use of a neo-baroque ?instrument of diplomacy? proved ineffective. In fact, Washington?s traditional and electronic carillons became soapboxes for cold war containment rhetoric rather than symbols of peace, despite the fact that the carillon had served as one of the grandest unrealized icons of peace after World War I. The Dutch effort to construct a democratic musical instrument to represent the full diversity of its people and businesses simply gave a sonic hearing to the impossibility of total representation within an instrument historically developed to amplify the institutional, regulatory messages of church and state. Today?s frequently used metaphors of taste and blend in discussing organ timbre have a legal precedent in the language that came to dominate the Federal Trade Commission?s proceedings of 1936-7 against the Hammond Clock Company. ?Much like an antipasto is a collection of bold delicious flavors that one would never food-process into a finished meal,? organ historian Jonathan Ambrosino reflected in 1998, ?so too it seems that in some recent eclectic organs, the trees seem larger than the forest, and the ensemble ends up as a come what may concatenation of disparate elements.?4 He characterized the sound of Romantic orchestral organs as ?beefy? and neo-baroque organs as having slimmed down to ?lean cuisine tonal design.?5 I hope that this dissertation offers material that is both tasty and bold, taking as its topic two instruments often considered by musicologists to be the province of hyperspecialists, and endeavoring to link them to broader histories as far-flung as military electronics, urban planning, cold war diplomacy, and atomic bomb research. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4 Jonathan Ambrosino, ?Present Imperfect: A Perspective on the Past Century of American Organbuilding,? The Tracker 42, no. 3 (1998): 33-34. 5 Ibid., 34. 5 Chapter 1: A Media Archaeology of Electronic Keyboards In 1936, engineer and electronic organ inventor Benjamin Miessner of Miessner Inventions, Inc. gave a talk entitled ?Electronic Music and Instruments? at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers in America.1 This lecture, which to today?s readers may seem ahead of its time in taking spectral analysis and other electronic sound analysis methods for granted, extolled the keyboard-pedalboard combination and the stop-drawing system of the large pipe organ as key components of a musical interface that offers maximal ?musical utility? in terms of frequency, amplitude, harmony, and most importantly, timbral variety. The organ?s user interface, he argued, takes nearly full advantage of the musician?s ?physical limitations? as the player?s four limbs ?are worked to their utmost for manipulation of the various controls? to perform highly complex music with a minimum of manpower. Efficiency and utility were his highest ideals for an instrument. This widely shared progressive engineering attitude towards the organ, which Miessner prematurely believed had reached the late stage of a development that had begun in the late nineteenth century and already matured, would lead from the use of the pipe organ as simulator of other instruments, to the organ as low-bandwidth encrypted communications device, and full circle to the pipe organ as, paradoxically, simulator of the electronic synthesizer. The seeming irony of such an arc, in which an instrument becomes a preferred simulation of its simulacrum, points to the fundamentally ambiguous nature of the pipe organ as an ?acoustic? instrument with an ?original? form. In Any Sound You Can Imagine (1997), Paul Th?berge discusses the ubiquity of electronic keyboards modeled and named after the organ, but he does not consider why the organ was preferred over other potential models such as the piano. I argue that the organ has so often served as a namesake because it has always embodied the concepts of the electronic keyboard. First, starting with the Gothic Blockwerck, the organ?s principles of timbral production and modification employed the same fundamental concepts on which additive sound synthesis would be based in the twentieth century. Second, the many layers of remove between the player?s fingers and feet and the sounding pipes have invited elaborate mechanics and later, electronics, into the instrument?s action, thereby detaching the organist?s physical movements from actual sound production?a characteristic of the organ dating from the fifteenth century that is also implicit to electronic keyboards. Third, as synthesizers produce sound with the aid of electricity, the mechanism required to send air to organ pipes has always meant that organ sound was never the product of just one individual?s exertions but rather a joint product with bellows treaders, and by the late nineteenth century had become the joint product of human and engine-driven force. Finally, the organ concept of a keyboard interface detached from specific sounds and thus able to actuate different musical colors invited the use of organ-like interfaces to control new electronic sound production technologies. The varied sounds of synthesizers could have been accessed via any number of interfaces (think of the short-lived Theremin), yet most inventors chose 1 Miessner?s chosen audience suggests that radio as an institution supported the development of electronic instruments even before Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry established the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concr?te at Radiodiffusion Fran?aise in 1951, following earlier experimentation. 6 to actuate them via keyboards.2 The organ provided the model for twentieth-century synthesizers because the aforementioned four concepts were inherent to it. This chapter will trace the use of the organ as interface through several twentieth-century moments of slippage between acoustic and electronic, many of which sparked impassioned outcries from those determined to police the liminal zone between pipe organs and electronic ones. I will examine the ?scientific? values underlying Miessner?s optimistic 1936 overview of electronic organ building, followed by the logic of organic synthesis underlying the portentous 1937 lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against the Hammond Company over its right to brand its electronic keyboards ?organs.? Inventor Homer Dudley?s Voder will offer a wartime interlude in which I consider his use of the organ interface for this watershed vocal synthesis device. The chapter will conclude in 1963 with the pivotal premiere of three avant-garde organ works commissioned by Radio Bremen from Gy?rgy Ligeti, Bengt Hambraeus, and Mauricio Kagel that use the organ like an electronic device. This belated compositional development in Europe may seem surprisingly distant for a meaningful conclusion, but it was late in coming because churches resisted radical musical change even while universities, radio stations, and other institutions had been enabling the avant-garde to flourish for decades. The Organ and User Interface Optimization Emily I. Dolan?s article ?Towards a Musicology of Interfaces? ably articulated the interface-centered approach I have been trying to develop for the history of the organ. She begins by examining Ernst Bloch?s 1930s essay ?Magic Rattle, Human Harp,? in which he described a prehistoric time when the musical tone ?was linked quite specifically with the instrument producing it? Thus the original rattle rattled as the thing it was; the rattling sound is merely its verb.? However, humanity?s invention of more elaborate instruments meant that ?the ringing and tinkling broke loose from the ringing brass and tinkling bell,?3 engendering a mediated relationship between note and object?one that positioned the human voice as primal and unique in its inseparability of sound from material. Dolan then questions the common assumption that music is an art whose medium is sound, for ?in that idea lies a host of additional assumptions, practices, and conventions. We do not, for example, consider light the medium of painting (or of cinema).? Instead, she argues that this assumption stands in for the technologies that have been bypassed. Yet it would make just as much sense to talk about the media of music as consisting of the wood, metal, wires, reeds, pipes, valves, speakers, magnetic tape, vinyl, and circuits that we use to produce and record sounds. After all, sound is the effect produced by the battery of physical media. Much of the scholarship today that takes technology as its subject seeks to replace sound with the instruments and bodies that produce it?. Can we speak of canons of instruments just as we speak of canons of musical works? ?. What I want to do 2 In 1940, G. T. Winch and A. M. Midgley argued in ?Electronic Musical Instruments and the Development of the Pipeless Organ? that there were three main families of electronic instruments: monophonic instruments, percussive piano-like instruments, and organs. By 1964, in Das Elektrium: Beitr?ge zur Kl?rung der Frage Orgel-Orgelimitation, J?rgen Kuhl noted in ?Wesen und Problematik der Elektrophone? that most electronic instruments that used non-keyboard interfaces, such as the Theremin, were never widely adopted (41). 3 Emily Dolan, ?Toward a Musicology of Interfaces,? Keyboard Perspectives 5 (2012): 1. 7 here is simply contemplate a few places that might serve as jumping off points for a deeper investigation, and to contemplate the paths of inquiry that open up when we think about various moments in the history of music from the perspective of interfaces. In particular, I am interested in the keyboard interface [italics added], which has endured and proliferated for centuries: what follows are some first steps towards exploring the ways in which the keyboard is imbricated with the very idea of Western Art Music. The article proceeds to examine various musical innovations (realized and unrealized) with keyboards, from the minds of Berlioz to Bay Area instrument inventor Don Buchla, arguing that ?the keyboard served to regulate the very idea of invention and innovation.?4 In accepting Dolan?s invitation to inquiry, I turn to an influential new media studies work on interfaces from the same year, Alexander Galloway?s The Interface Effect (2012). He conceptualizes interfaces not just as the physical components that Dolan brings to light, but also as cybernetic zones of creativity where flesh meets the synthetic, as charged zones that are expressive of ideologies, and as contact zones overlooked to the point of invisibility. His preface specifies that the book is about keyboards and other interfaces, ?or rather, about none of these things in particular and all of them simultaneously.? This is a book about thresholds, those mysterious zones of interaction that mediate between different realities. The goal of this book is twofold, to define the interface, but also to interpret it. Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a result of whatever kind. For this reason I will be speaking not so much about particular interface objects (screens, keyboards), but interface effects. And in speaking about them I will not be satisfied just to say an interface is defined in such and such a way, but to show how it exists that way for specific social and historical reasons. Interfaces themselves are effects?but at the same time interfaces are themselves effects of other things, and thus tell the story of the larger forces that engender them.5 This preface could easily introduce an article on keyboard instruments, and becomes even more suggestive when the author proposes the name ?the control allegory? for his project.6 As this chapter will show, the organ as interface was embraced by twentieth-century inventors for the specific way it offered control over sound color. Like Dolan, Galloway warns that ?interfaces are [usually] assumed to be synonymous with media itself,? and his theorization of interfaces helps us distinguish the organ?s physical material from its sound. He proposes an alternative understanding of interfaces through ?the remediation or layer model of media?wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media.? To give an example from music technology, computer users of the modular software music studio Reaktor can view the ?back? of a virtual music equipment rack, and click and drag on a complex system of virtual patch cables to connect virtual effects units, even though the same reconfiguration tasks could be accomplished onscreen without all the vintage-looking visual clutter. Reaktor?s vintage-fetishistic interface is a formal container for a previous media format that was once more familiar to users. ?Like the layers of an onion,? Galloway surmises, ?one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down?it is a very short leap from there to the idea of the interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an ?agitation? or generative friction between different formats.?7 4 Dolan, 7. 5 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Maiden, Mass.: Polity, 2012), vii. 6 Ibid., ix. 7 Ibid., 31. 8 The pipe organ interface is perfectly suited to remediation processes because the relationship between note and object is as distant as any Bloch described. The Organ: An Encyclopedia (2006) defines the action of an organ as ?the technology by which the performer is able, by pressing a key, to activate a motion from the keyboard through the windchest to a now-open pipe, at which point the pipe sounds.?8 The article defines ten different kinds of actions on a gradient of increasing mediation, from mechanical to pneumatic to electrical. Invention of the latter types occasioned agitated protests because they divorced the organist?s actions thoroughly from sound production. An electromagnetic action opens and closes the pipe?s pallet according to the binary principle of ?on? or ?off??the principle underlying computer circuits and code?without directly translating the player?s movements to the pipe?s gradual speech.9 That divorce between fingertip or toe and sound, however, allowed inventors to place electronic sound production technologies at the terminus of the key signal, remediating the organ as an electronic instrument housing a simulacrum of the pipe organ inside familiar, user-friendly surfaces. Galloway devotes a large part of his study to examining the ideologies of interfaces. ?The interface is above all an allegorical device,? he argues, ?that will help us gain some perspective on culture in the age of information. For this reason, we now look to the ?deeper? realm of software, the realm below the screen, with an eye to the possible ideological construction of this hidden electronic kingdom.?10 He employs a software studies or critical code studies approach to read computer code for cultural meaning. Later, I will take an analogous sonic approach in my comparison of the similarities between the components of pipe organ sound and Hammond?s additive synthesis in the age of Taylorism. First, however, the Taylorist ideology suggested by Miessner?s idealization of the organ interface invites critical study. The propitiously named Benjamin Franklin Miessner (1890-1976) was a radio engineer and prolific inventor. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Electrical School in Brooklyn, he worked at a naval radio station in Washington, D.C., where he invented the ?cat whisker? detector for reception of radio waves. He left in 1911 to work with John Hays Hammond, Jr. and Fritz Lowenstein on wireless control of torpedoes, while also developing a superheterodyne radio system. After pursuing electrical engineering at Purdue University, he returned to the Navy in 1916 as Expert Radio Aid for Aviation. In the 1920s, he established an acoustical research laboratory and invented a new sound recording and reproduction system at the Brunswick Balke Collender Company. Later that decade, he founded Miessner Inventions, Inc. His career proved him a pioneer researcher in electronic musical instruments and receivers, phonography, radio dynamics, directional microphones for aircraft and submarines, and aircraft radio. The music industry remembers him best for his improvements to the Wurlitzer organ and electronic piano; he also worked with telecommunications giant Stromberg-Carlson on its electronic carillon. By the time he retired, he had been granted over two hundred patents in the U.S. and abroad.11 Miessner?s impressive biography is not atypical for an electronic organ pioneer. An amateur musician, his collection of materials on electronic instruments, from patents to foreign 8 Lynn A. Dobson, Fredrick L. Mitchell, John E. Sperling, Richard Kassel, ?Keyboard,? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, ed. Douglas Earl Bush and Richard Kassel (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. 9 The relay and switch system, an electrically based means of turning a toggle switch on or off, was used in the earliest computer systems. (Richard Kassel, ?Relay and Switch Systems,? The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 459). 10 Galloway, 54. 11 Purdue University Libraries, ?Inventory To The Benjamin F. Miessner Collection, 1906-1978,? 2008, http://collections.lib.purdue.edu/fa/pdf/msp2_miessner.pdf. 9 bibliographies, numbered in the thousands. His talk for the Institute of Radio Engineers denigrates all instruments at the expense of the organ: in the modern age, he held that only the organ interface?s efficiency is an appropriate basis for innovation. He expresses bafflement that while the latest technologies improve the other arts and even everyday life, musicians insist on wresting sound from primitive inventions. One musician scrapes a horsehair bow across strings of gut, and the older his instrument is, the more he prizes it. Another blows lividly through a brass tube or a wooden pipe; another hammers on the drum of the aborigines. Another, sometimes with terrific physical exertion, pounds on a keyboard to rouse his audience through the physical vibrations of struck strings and huge soundboards through an elaborate system of levers. Another with aggregations exceeding 10,000 pipes, some as long and large as a forest log, and with hundreds of other complicated and bulky appurtenances, produces the sounds of the organ.12 Miessner argues that the principles of these sorry instruments have long been fully explored, as can be seen in instrument exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His indirect museumization of non-western (?aboriginal?) music highlights Ferdinand De Hen?s observation that ?keyboards with levers do not appear in original musical cultures other than Western?13 as well as Dolan?s call to explore ?the ways in which the keyboard is imbricated with the very idea of Western Art Music? and perhaps even constitutes a ?canon of instruments? exerting an interface-based hegemony of its own. Determined to smash idols in the name of innovation, Miessner then argues that no instrument is ?sacred? to music. Most instruments of the orchestra suffer ?serious musical limitations? on their range of frequency, power, timbre, tonal characteristics, and musical texture.14 By contrast, the organ offers a single individual control over all such parameters and polyphony, while the piano with its single keyboard and sound color is second best. By his standards, ?the usefulness of a musical instrument resides in its versatility [italics original]? of timbre as an all-purpose sonic machine that minimizes human effort.15 (Ironically, the emphasis on timbral variety reveals that his reference point for the organ was the Romantic orchestral type popularized by Ernest M. Skinner in the 1920s, with its seemingly endless color combinations and consoles of endless stops, evoking a past Romantic musical and mechanical sublime rather than a musical future.) Admitting that his is a ?scientific? perspective, Miessner suggests that ?we, as scientific workers, may here well inquire as to what constitutes the musician?s basis for a satisfactory musical instrument.? And he inevitably finds his predetermined answer, quoting a Var?sian statement by Stokowski on his need for ?any desired timbres and for new timbres; for creating any frequency, any duration, any intensity, any combination of counterpoint, of harmony, of rhythm.?16 In other words, modern musicians require electronic instruments (the sound generators of infinite possibility of which Edgard Var?se was still dreaming) to emancipate them from the limitations that arise from their instruments? primitively direct connection between human energy input, physical material, and sonic output. 12 Benjamin Miessner, ?Electronic Musical Instruments,? Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 24, no. 11 (November 1936): 1427-28. 13 Ferdinand J. De Hen, ?Keyboard,? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 288. 14 Miessner, 1429. 15 Ibid., 1430. 16 Ibid., 1430-31. 10 Yet even the organ needed serious modernization. It functioned inefficiently on ?multiple quality generation? in which ?individual generators consist of wind-blown organ pipes of differing output tone quality.? Why build one pipe per note and color when a few electronic components could do the job?17 Inventors like Oskar Vierling and Laurens Hammond were developing instruments that would slash such inefficiencies. The sanguine Miessner saw the perfected organ of the future just a decade or two away: The ideal instrument is one which can make any sound, known, unknown, or conceivable; to do this we must provide a generator for periodic vibrations embracing the whole audio spectrum of frequencies. We must be able to select from this generator at will any desired single frequency, or many single frequencies simultaneously, whether harmonically or inharmonically related, or whether in narrow or wide continuous bands. We must further be able to emit these frequencies in any desired sound amplitudes and envelope shapes, even though, in a given sound, all the components require different shapes of envelope. We must be able to control the emission of these sounds by some suitable playing technique and apparatus. [italics added] With such an apparatus we shall be able to synthesize any possible sound, continuous, damped, transient, musical or nonmusical, for we have all the elements of sound, and means for putting together any desired combination of these elements in any desired time-amplitude relationship. Looking ahead ten or twenty years we are now at work on such an instrument.18 By ?we,? he is referring to his own company, and his prototype is, of course, an electronic organ (Figure 1). The multitude of sonic possibilities offered by the ideal modern instrument means that only the most efficient of interfaces, one that employs all limbs with a minimum of effort, one that relies on already highly developed musical skills, can constitute the creative contact zone in which modern man meets machine. Miessner?s scientific opinion of the organ is that its ?versatile? sonic concept is modern but its materially inefficient means of sound production must be updated with electronics, and that its interface already meets his strict Taylorist conditions of human efficiency while enabling access to the instrument?s future expanded parameters. The organ interface must replace all other musical interfaces because it embodies the ultimate in efficiency and timbral control. Figure 1. Miessner electronic organ with four banks of reeds and dual e lectrostatic pickup (Miessner, 1459). 17 Ibid., 1436. 18 Ibid., 1462. 11 Women Play Prototype Organs of War In the years leading up to World War II, European organists, most of them male, were practicing for hours daily on pipe organs that would soon be imperiled by Axis bombardments or Nazi metals requisition. In America, three hundred women, enough to form a small battalion, were practicing three to four hours a day on organs that synthesized speech. In the employ of Bell Laboratories, these virtuosic former telephone operators were mastering the initial prototypes of an encrypted communications technology that would be co-refined with Alan Turing and prove key to the Allied victory. A former Navy man, Miessner must have considered it perfectly natural that this new talking machine?s interface consisted of a small organ keyboard with pedals. Electronic and acoustic engineer Homer W. Dudley developed the first electronic voice synthesizer by thinking about the human vocal tract as a radio station. The vocal cords transmit a steady carrier signal, and the mouth, throat, and sinuses modulate and shape that sound into speech.19 Specifically, they shape the carrier sound into formants that we recognize as vowel sounds, which are then sculpted by plosives and glottal stops into recognizable words. His Bell Labs invention, the vocoder, performed analysis and synthesis. It divided a vocal signal into ten frequency bands, each of which was measured to determine the voltage required. This information was further reduced by a low-pass filter and transmitted, and the receiver used a fundamental pitch and an unvoiced noise signal to resynthesize the voice. He coined the term vocoder as a portmanteau of ?voice? and ?encoder.? Figure 2. Homer Dudley?s illustration of the vocal system as a carrier circuit, reprinted from his article ?The Carrier Nature of Speech,? The Bell System Technical Journal 19, no. 4 (October 1940): 497. During initial public demonstrations, Dudley kept his anticipated commercial application a mysterious secret: by using a vocoder to transmit a skeleton specification of speech over the transatlantic cable, he planned to increase the undersea cable?s bandwidth tenfold. Every home 19 Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks (Chicago: Stop Smiling, 2010), Kindle edition. 12 would have a vocoder. Dudley was not to become a household name, however, because satellites and fiber-optic cables would render increased transatlantic cable bandwidth moot. His concept of speech compression would reemerge in the communications arena with the advent of mobile phones, but without his name or the interfaces he developed for it.20 The history of organs for speech synthesis predated Dudley. But unlike previous talking machines that imitated biological forms such as mouths (Figure 3) or female heads (Joseph Faber?s 1845 Euphonia) or the human vocal apparatus (like Dayton C. Miller?s 1920 ?talking organ pipes? that could say ?mama? and ?papa?),21 his patent diagrams for the vocoder show that it bore no resemblance to the biological. How would the vocoder?s various parts of speech be actuated and assembled into words by a human operator and given pitch inflections to convey contextual meaning? Dudley followed the lead of Faber, who had controlled Euphonia from a seventeen-key keyboard, and AT&T predecessor J. Q. Stewart, whom he cited as building the first electric speech keyboard in 1922: he placed Miessner?s interface of choice, a small organ keyboard with pedals, between the operator and the machine. A player would be able to control the vocoder with fingers, arms, and feet, relocating vocal production from the throat to the extremities. Dudley named his talking machine the Voder, a portmanteau for ?voice operation demonstrator.? Figure 3. Apparatus for imitating vowels, developed by Marage in Paris , consist ing of art i f ic ial larynxes, mouths, and nasal cavit ies driven by a bel lows and motor as lungs. Reprinted from Dayton C. Miller , The Science of Musical Sounds (New York: Macmillan Co., 1916), 244. Newspapers described the Voder?s organ interface with fascination (Figure 5). Attending an early demonstration in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute (which shared its namesake with Miessner and stood not far from where Euphonia had debuted), Lawrence Davies wrote for a New York Times front page feature that the Voder was played from ?a keyboard somewhat similar to an old-fashioned parlor organ,? where ?with the aid of a dexterous operator [using] organ-like keys and 20 Dudley had a number of commercial applications in mind for this organ-controlled vocoder, which he called the Voder. He visited MGM Studies in Hollywood to market it as ?a scientific aid to movie stars,? one that might resuscitate thin-voiced silent film stars whose careers had nosedived with the advent of talkies. He offered the Voder to airbrush unattractive voices and help tone-deaf actors sing (like an early version of Auto-Tune, but one that provided a vocal stunt double rather than re-tuning an actor?s actual voice). Although he failed to convince Hollywood, his postwar Sonovox vocoder would find some success there and on the radio. Bell Labs also hoped after the war that the Voder would be purchased to give injured soldiers new voices along with their prostheses. (Tompkins, chap. 10.) Indeed, surviving recordings of the Voder are reminiscent of the famed artificial voice of Stephen Hawkings, but more singsongy. 21 Dayton C. Miller, The Science of Musical Sounds (New York: Macmillan Co., 1916), 252. Quoted in Henk Badings, ?Electronische Muziek,? AO Reeks no. 689 (13 December 1957): 13-14. 13 a foot pedal?the electrical device exercised its ?vocal cords?.?22 The Chicago Daily Tribune devoted an entire paragraph to technical explanation: The Voder resembles an oversize typewriter, with a pipe organ keyboard. Instead of musical notes the keys sound speech tones?.The machine has 10 white keys which when pressed turn on vowel sounds. One other white key controls volume. Alongside the operator?s right hand are three black keys which make the consonants, ?k,? ?p,? and ?t.? Under the left wrist is a key that changes the sound from consonants to vowels. The right foot presses a treadle for vocal inflections. A knob turns to the left for a masculine voice and to the right for a feminine voice. The operator modifies the sounds by pressing more than one key at a time, like the player of an organ.23 With all this hand activity, operators sometimes wore translucent sleeve protectors called ?Cuff-Ettes.?24 Figure 4. Homer Dudley?s schematic circuit of the voder, reprinted from his article ?The Carrier Nature of Speech,? The Bell System Technical Journal 19, no. 4 (October 1940): 509. Initially, Dudley utilized the Voder?s musical-instrument-like appearance to lull his audience into familiarity the better to astonish them. As Jacob Smith summarizes in ?Tearing Speech to Pieces: Voice Technologies of the 1940s,? The Hopewell Herald described how the audience was enjoying what they thought was a pipe organ playing ?The Bells of St. Mary?s?, when they suddenly ?sat bolt upright?: ?Some dug at their ears, certain their hearing was playing them false. Others sat in puzzled wonder. For the pipe organ suddenly burst out singing the words of the chorus.? After making a musical instrument speak, Dudley next animated the sounds of industry: ?While the audience was still gasping, a recording of a locomotive just chugging out of the station obediently puffed out the words: ?I?m ? a ? train. Watch ? me ? now. Here ? I ? go. Here ? I ? go. Here ? I ? go!? An electric power hum followed, chilling the audience with the high-pitched monotone ?I am power. I light your houses. I run your street cars. I work for you. I am power!?25 22 Lawrence E. Davies, ?Machine That Talks and Sings Has Tryout; Electrical Voder Will Speak at Fair Here,? New York Times, January 6, 1939, 1. 23 ?Machine Talks in 23 Human Voice Sounds,? Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1939, 10. 24 Tompkins, chap. 1. 25 ?Versatile Daddy of Pedro the Voder ?Goldarnedest Thing You Ever Heard?,? Hopewell Herald, February 28, 1940, 3. Quoted in Jacob Smith, ?Tearing Speech to Pieces: Voice Technologies of the 1940s,? Music, Sound & the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 189. 14 The organ, an instrument whose church clients had in recent decades been overtaken by expositions, theaters, municipal venues, and concert halls and had thus come to be associated with popular entertainment, was now giving eerie voice and intelligence to the omnipresent inhuman force, electricity, that invisibly powered the modern age. The limitless versatility that Miessner had prophesied for the organ by ventriloquizing Stokowski now went beyond musical timbre to self-reflexively giving voice to machines. The female operators of these instruments used their self-taught modified organ skills to enunciate phrases in a male voice, at last realizing the ideal of the ?vox humana/voix humaine/voce umana? stop as the timbre closest to the human voice. Dudley refocused later demonstrations away from keyboard performance to vocal performance. The next year?s New York Times jokingly noted that the Voder ?can also sing. The research experts have not seriously considered, however, the matter of developing it into a prima donna capable of attracting the notice of Edward Johnson, manager of the Metropolitan Opera. It takes a year or more to train an operator?To develop into a passably good singer would require an operator with a strong sense of musical tones and values.?26 As astute readers may have noted from the foregoing newspaper excerpts, the Voder?s performers were rarely identified, and later demonstrations focused audience attention away from the keyboard to the synthesized voice. Who were these keyboardists and why was their labor, intelligence, and agency erased? The speculation that the Voder could become a prima donna identifies gender as the issue at stake. Smith?s article uses the Voder and its postwar successor, the Sonovox, to discuss the ?erasure of female labour in the cultural industries.?27 Unlike the Euphonia, its passive female head pictured with a male keyboardist, these two forms of the vocoder were overwhelmingly operated by women, the Sonovox specifically for female audiences in 1940s woman?s films. Smith argues that ?these speech technologies were shaped by notions of gender at every point in their implementation,? for although after the war, ?overt simulation of the body was disappearing from [talking] devices themselves,? it was nevertheless ?returning in the gendered discourses and practices that surrounded them.?28 The Voder was gendered male with the name ?Pedro,? but it was controlled?and its apparent consciousness provided?by women. As with any musical instrument, it could take a year and a half just to become adept at Voder performance, and no expert teachers were available to speed the learning process. Dudley deemed telephone operators the most coordinated candidates with the best-trained ears for the new profession of Voder virtuoso. Thus, women temporarily defied a gendered division within the musical labor force. Three hundred highly disciplined operators pioneered the skill of playing the Voder, and an elite group of twenty-four made the final cut to perform at coming world?s fairs. The 1939 Christian Science Monitor was one of the few newspapers to focus on these women, publishing a photograph of them waving to the camera.29 American organists, most of whom were male (Claire Coci?s rise to fame that year was exceptional), were never seriously considered for playing the most modern organ of all, a job that went to women with extensive experience in multitasking, rapidly switching, comprehending hundreds of voices all day, and responding politely but efficiently to them. The operators practiced daily to develop a periodically changing repertoire including simple 26 ?Voder Talks for Experts: Sings, Drawls and Recites at Public Speaking Conference,? The New York Times, April 20, 1941, 45. 27 Smith, 184. 28 Ibid., 203. 29 ?Going to Golden Gate Fair,? Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 1939, 4. 15 salutations, nursery rhymes, renditions of Protestant hymns and swing tunes, the birthday song, and a nostalgic ?Auld Lang Syne? for the closing day of the 1939-1940 New York World?s Fair. Figure 5. Article from Popular Science showing a woman at the Voder keyboard. Alden P. Armagnac, ?Pedro,? Popular Science 134, no. 4 (April 1939): 72. Figure 6. Image from same Popular Science article showing the keyboard. Reports effaced the women even while highlighting the machine?s male nickname. At the fair, the New York Times described in typical fashion ?a young lady at the keyboard? with no name, but gave agency to ?this actor, popularly known as Pedro the Voder, [who] will perform at intervals daily.?30 At the Eastern Public Speaking Conference in 1941, the Times named Dr. J. O. Perrine as the man explaining the Voder while ?a young woman operator pushed the controlling keys? to make Pedro talk and sing ?Home on the Range.? Again, Pedro was assigned the nameless woman?s agency 30 ?Preview is Given at Phone Exhibit: Guests of A. T. and T. Hear Voder, Artificial Man With a Voice, at the Fair,? New York Times, April 28, 1939, 20. 16 and intelligence, for he himself ?attended? the luncheon, and ?sang, answered questions and spoke in Latin, French and Italian, as well as English,? and gamely answered, ?It?s all Greek to me,? when asked to explain the meaning of ?his? words.31 The operator?s final phrase highlighted her relationship as puppeteer to the passive machine, but her pointed message eluded the reporter. Unusually, Davies? lengthy front-page special did recognize the agency of the operator and the impressive amount of labor and discipline required of her, and even named and described operator Helen Amelia Harper. He included a photograph focused as much on her as on the interface (Figure 7). ?Mrs. Harper?s fingers moved across the keyboard and her foot worked a pedal to change the pitch,? he recounted. ?Even those operators who have been manipulating the keyboard for a year or more still spend three or four hours a day in practice. Two of them, seated at different keyboards, would find it possible to carry on an extended conversation.? In describing this hypothetical Voder duet, Davies envisions women rather than machines communicating with each other. He did unquestioningly accept Bell Labs?s gender assignments, according to which speech and music were ascribed to women and the sounds of machinery (which Dudley had performed at the Franklin Institute) and animals went to male performers. ?With Mr. Watkins at the keyboard,? his report continued, ?Voder took a ?barnyard stroll,? reproducing domestic animal sounds; visited an airport and represented the noise of a motor warming up, and then mimicked a locomotive.? Dudley himself was known for the merely semi-articulate ?Greta Garble Effect,? in which he alternated between English and Swedish with exaggerated pitch changes, ?often landing on the last syllable with both feet.?32 Even when operating cutting-edge technology, women continued to be subject to sonic strictures on what was socially acceptable to articulate and in what manner, and to the expectations that domestic music making involved pleasant repertoire evocative of leisure rather than labor.33 In other rare reports that recognized some female agency, their skills were limited to attractiveness, social grace, and the appeal of domestic music making. The Times printed an article the day after Davies? predicting that ?tens of thousands?will visit the World?s Fair and stand transfixed as skillful girls play upon keys and make electrical circuits respond with pleasantries scarcely distinguishable from those that come from living lips.?34 Typically, as women developed their controlling skills, it was ?Pedro? whose agency was described to be growing: ?As the operators develop skill the voice becomes more human.?35 Although hidden from view, the digital dexterity, quick-witted responses, and acting skills of these telephone operators were key to drawing millions of curious visitors to the Voder, especially when compared to the awkward and disheveled Faber?s disastrous Euphonia tour with P. T. Barnum. The Voder was hardly an attraction in itself; it was a Stephen-Hawking-sounding amplification device for the voices of twenty-four women.36 31 ?Voder Talks for Experts: Sings, Drawls and Recites at Public Speaking Conference,? New York Times, April 20, 1941, 45. 32 Tompkins, chap. 1. 33 Davies, 1. 34 ?My God, It Talks,? New York Times, January 7, 1939, 7. 35 ?New Machine Creates Speech By Pressing Keys,? Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1939. 36 Completing the erasure of female labor, an AT&T television commercial from 2006 narrated AT&T?s history of voice technology research using actual and fictional voice technologies as narration voice-overs. The hands playing the Voder in the opening shot, presumably creating the Voder voice-over, are the hands of a genderless automaton (Smith, 203). It appears that Pedro?s giant two-dimensional New York World?s Fair visage overshadows his women operators even today. The commercial may be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEp6ca9Ppks. 17 Figure 7. S. S. A. Watkins and Helen Amelia Harper give one of the f irst public demonstrations of the Voder at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on January 5, 1939. (Associated Press) (?Machine Talks in 23 Human Voice Sounds,? Chicago Daily Tribune , January 6, 1939, 2). The elision of female agency also enabled a singularly curious expression of xenophobia and Luddite anxiety in the Washington Post. The oft-repeated quip that Pedro had ?a slight electrical accent? inspired one reporter to more-than-metaphorical fear of the exotic device. Pedro had been named smugly after Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II, whose allegedly ignorant reaction to receiving a telephone call for the first time at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 was said to be, ?My God! It talks!? The Post?s article on ?The Pedro Peril? beseeched the Bureau of Immigration to see to ?deporting Pedro, or Voder, or whatever is the name of this latest and most fearful gadget to come out of Bell Telephone laboratories.? Joining thoroughly in erasing the women operators, the alarmed journalist raved that ?it can do [tricks with the spoken word] in any language known to exist. Pedro is neither man nor woman but it can whisper of love in accents of heavenly sweetness. Pedro has no soul but it can speak with the tongues of angels.? He enumerates the intended advantages of the machine, but with the caveat that all this would be very nice, if we had guarantees that Pedro would be content with the role of docile household stooge. Consider, however, that Pedro can promise more than Hitler ever dreamed of promising, and can promise it more persuasively. He can outrant Mussolini, he can argue down Stalin, he can outshriek anybody?This latest enfant terrible of science comes close to being the perfect potential dictator, not merely of these United States, but of all of this much bedeviled universe.?37 This McCarthyish paranoia about a ?docile household? servant gone rampant in the global theater of war encapsulates an unintentional misogyny-by-proxy arising from conflation of the operators? apparently hypnotic rhetorical skills with the arrival of true artificial intelligence, today commonly known as AI. The organ had become the instrument of modern man?and woman?indeed. 37 ?The Pedro Peril,? The Washington Post, January 9, 1939, 8. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5:-:S; . Watkins and Mrs. Helen Harper at keyboard demonstrating electrical device for makinl!--Vocal ?sounds and turning them into speech. -, rrcss Wirephoto.] (Story on page I.) 18 Figure 8. The Voder was personified as ?Pedro? and given an abstract, two-dimensional gold face vocal iz ing vis ible sound waves at the 1939-1940 New York World?s Fair . Its semi-embodied male identity dwarfed that of i ts female operator. (Manuscripts and Archives Divis ion, The New York Public Library, ?American Telephone & Telegraph Exhibit - The Voder,? New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed August 14, 2015, http://digitalcol lections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-9002-d471-e040-e00a180654d7) The Voder was a central Bell Labs attraction at the ?World of Tomorrow? exhibit at the New York World?s Fair (near the Ford Pavilion?s own futuristic electronic organ, the Hammond Novachord), and at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. But although such bonanzas had purchase on the public?s imagination of the future, the military had the means to materialize the future. To understand the vocoder another way, it took a coded message, scrambled it, and transmitted it to a receiving vocoder that reassembled the signal in the right order. In other words, it was a cryptography device. During World War II, the vocoder was put to work scrambling classified government and military phone communications after the Germans cracked the A-3 Bell Labs scrambler. The National Defense Research Committee commissioned Bell and Westinghouse to develop an unbreakable phone system in November 1942, when eighty percent of the Bell Labs budget went to funding military research. In January 1943, Alan Turing arrived at Bell to work with Dudley on the vocoder, adding a random noise source to encrypt the signal. The first link for the meaninglessly-named SIGSALY (called Project X at Bell Labs) was established on July 15, 1943 between the Pentagon and the basement of Selfridges, to which Churchill?s bunker was connected. A worldwide network of twelve SIGSALY terminals shuttled the highest level of classified messages across the Figure 1 World?s Fair, New York, 1939 Figure 2 The Voder 184 2:2 Autumn 08 MSMI Jacob Smith ? Tearing Speech to Pieces operators who manipulated its complex interface of keys, knobs, and foot-pedals in order to produce a voice (figure 2). The Voder was one of several voice technologies to have a significant impact on radio and film production during the 1940s, and it received extensive coverage in the popular press. In this essay, I examine the cultural life of these mid- century ?talking machines?, with a focus on a device called the Sonovox that was used on radio advertisements and in two much-discussed Hollywood ?women?s films? of the 1940s: Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) and Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949). Like the Voder demonstration at the World?s Fair, the Sonovox was operated by women, and in fact, these speech technologies were shaped by notions of gender at every point in their implementation. An examination of these 19 Earth between Roosevelt, Churchill, and other leaders. The terminals were gargantuan and expensive, the vocoder itself weighing forty tons. General Eisenhower was said to have seen one and grumbled, ?You can make a whole lotta bullets with all that copper,? viewing it as potential materiel just as the Nazis were eyeing organ pipes and bells.38 Although the Third Reich did requisition many instruments, it was only the ghost of the organ interface that became materiel within the American military-industrial complex. Random noise was the key to SIGSALY, and it came from twelve-minute SIGGRUV random noise disks. As the receiving terminal reassembled the signal, it also subtracted the noise. These disks had to be playing at all times during vocoded conversations in perfect synchrony on both ends, coordinated by crystal-controlled railroad clocks, otherwise the signal disintegrated into garble.39 The Muzak Corporation recorded SIGGRUV disks throughout the war, making an initial press of over 1,500 records. Its slogan ?Muzak fills the deadly silences? was eerily appropriate as it abandoned recording crooners in favor of excited electrons in vacuum tubes, although Dave Tompkins notes that, ironically, ?the randomness of SIGGRUV opposed the nature of Muzak?s ambience and repetition.?40 Muzak had gone from manufacturing regularity to manufacturing the unpredictable. The New York Times had seen in the World?s Fair Voder a triumph of industry over academia. ?College professors who still cherish the wrong idea about industrial research[ers] look upon them as hirelings whose sole function it is to make money for their corporation employers,? it gloated, ?but here they are hearing [italics added] with a thoroughness and success never before even remotely matched.?41 In wartime, vocoder development joined an acoustic arms race that encompassed communication, radar, and weapons. An imprisoned Alexander Solzhenitsyn worked on vocoder research for the Kremlin at Marfino in 1949. Stalin?s vocoder was ultimately cribbed from Bell Labs using equipment confiscated from European sound technology manufacturers like Philips, a Dutch company whose postwar keyboard building is the focus of chapter 3.42 Remarkably, German vocoder development shades seamlessly from and back into organ building (the musical kind). In the early 1930s, both Siemens and the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut f?r Schwingungsforschung, under the direction of Karl Willy Wagner, were developing vocoders. (The Institute?s associated Staatliche Akademische Hochschule f?r Musik was where the Trautonium had been developed.) Wagner?s employees included Fritz Sennheiser, founder of the famed audio equipment firm, and physicist Oskar Vierling. Vierling invented several significant keyboards at Hertz: the Electrochord electric piano in collaboration with Miessner (perhaps before Miessner concluded that the piano was only second best), and two electronic organs, including the three-manual Kraft-durch-Freude-Grosston-Orgel, which used vacuum tube oscillators (Figure 9).43 This instrument was performed at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where the large Olympiaglocke bearing the German imperial eagle clutching the Olympic rings (a bell that will 38 Tompkins, chap. 2. 39 Ibid. 40 Tompkins also notes that another code name for SIGSALY was ?the Green Hornet,? after the radio serial whose Theremin theme used Rimsky-Korsakov?s ?Flight of the Bumblebee.? Unintentionally, ?the Green Hornet code name was actually a vocoder being called a theremin?the first and only double-crossing of the two devices.? 41 ?My God, It Talks,? New York Times, January 7, 1939, 7. 42 Tompkins, chap. 3. 43 Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) was a large state leisure organization in Nazi Germany and became the world?s largest tourism operator in the 1930s. 20 reappear in chapter 4) was also rung for the first time. In 1942, Vierling established his own classified Laboratory Feuerstein for speech privacy research. A week after Victory in Europe Day, Turing followed intercepts of vocoded test transmissions to Feuerstein, and the lab was later raided by the Allied Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM). TICOM allowed the lab to continue its research into vocoders, acoustic torpedoes, a Speech Stretcher, and the like, but Vierling was arrested in August.44 Although his career would recover, his contributions to music history ended then. Figure 9. Joseph Goebbels f ingers Oskar Vierl ing?s Kraft-durch-Freude-Grosston-Orgel at the 1936 Grossen Deutschen Rundfunkausstel lung (Great German Radio Exhibit ion) (Source: ?El d?a anterior??, A quo delirio [blog], Apri l 13, 2013, http://www.orlansi lva.com/2013_04_01_archive.html) However, fellow Hertz scientist Harald Bode enjoyed a lengthy career spanning three generations of electronic music and claiming over thirty patents in Europe and North America. His Warbo Formant Organ (1937) foreshadowed later limited-polyphony synthesizers, and his touch-sensitive Melodium organ was showcased with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Adapting to the wartime shortage of materials, he disassembled his Melodium to build the Melochord organ (1947), which was featured regularly on Munich Radio; the Cologne Electronic Music Studio special-ordered one in 1953. Bode entered more conventional organ building in 1950 with a series of Polychord electronic organs, and upon his emigration to the U.S., he joined the famed Estey Organ Company for six years. His career culminated in influential work for Wurlitzer and Robert Moog.45 The acoustic arms race ended along with the war, but innovations on the vocoder took on a new significance in the entertainment industry. The wartime dissolution of the organ interface into massive SIGSALY terminals proved irreversible. Instead of producing speech from scratch, Dudley?s next vocoder-based invention, the Sonovox, received and recreated human speech, and was thus actuated by vocal cords instead of keys. Dudley?s demonstration at the 1939 Acoustical Society of America meeting included removing the pitch content of a singing voice. Vocal operation was returned from bodily extremities to the vocal tract, and musicality became just another optional speech parameter. This spelled the end of the careers of the female Voder virtuosi, and the organ interface was returned to the realm of men, even as women were advertised as the best behind-the-scenes precision manufacturers of pipe organs (Figure 10). Pioneering electronic musician Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter but, as a woman, able to have a closer link to her Voder predecessors), synthesizer inventor Robert Moog, and the band Kraftwerk would all develop innovations on 44 Tompkins, chap. 8. 45 Douglas E. Bush, ?Bode, Harald (1909-1987),? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 70-71. 21 Dudley?s artificial speech research. Today, the vocoder is best known as an accessory for electronic music?a musical instrument baptized by fire in the military-industrial complex. Figure 10. Excerpt from a ful l-page advertisement in the Diapason (September 1, 1951) for the W. H. Reisner Manufacturing Company, Inc. The advertisement declares that ?through the years, the Reisner Company has sought to el iminate al l possible human error in the manufacture of its e lectrical action parts for the pipe organ,? seemingly implying that the women pictured are superhuman manufacturing automata. As the foregoing history has shown, the Voder was not so much a ?wartime interlude? as a key episode in the development of the organ interface at the hands of engineers. The next chapter will survey organ builders who emerged from the military-industrial complex in the second half of the twentieth century, but for now it is best to return to another crucial organ building development of the 1930s. The organ underwent dramatic transformations over the course of the twentieth century thanks to its conceptual basis as a sound generator interface that offers minute control over frequency and timbre. It thus became the first instrument to be mass-produced as an electronic synthesizer. The Hammond Clock Company began producing its eponymous electronic organs in 1935, and by 1936 claimed to have sold 567 organs to churches and funeral homes.46 Total sales within the first three years numbered around five thousand. Instead of pipes, the organ used small rotating electromagnetic discs, one per note, and added higher overtones by ?borrowing? other tone-wheels via drawbars; these overtones, whose volume could be controlled, were tempered and did not quite correspond to the natural harmonic series.47 46 Advertisement by Hammond Clock Company in the Diapason (August, 1936). 47 Thaddeus Cahill?s Telharmonium (1906) also used rotating tone wheels, but each tone generator with its fundamental and seven overtones was as tall as a grown man. The entire instrument required thirty boxcars for transport. Its use of telephone wires, which were ill suited to carrying musical sound and needed to prioritize phone calls, to distribute its music also contributed to its failure. It is fascinating, however, that these early regular electronic organ broadcasts were 22 Two court cases tested the electronic organ. In Germany, Ahlborn-Orgeln successfully resisted demands that it rename its instrument from Orgel to Elektrium, but not without sustaining damage from the highly critical book Das Elektrium: Beitr?ge zur Kl?rung der Frage Orgel-Orgelimitation (1964), in which Wolfgang Adelung proposed that people were exceedingly protective of the pipe organ because it sounded like the human voice in church?in other words, like the soul?the most sacred of musical sounds.48 (His comment was of course inspired by the vox humana and not by the Voder.) Decades earlier in America, the Federal Trade Commission sued Hammond in 1936 over its right to claim that its instrument equaled the musical capabilities of pipe organs for a fraction of the cost; the case hinged on a blind test where listeners were asked to distinguish between a Hammond organ and a pipe organ.49 Remarkably, the very nature of the pipe organ as a kind of additive synthesizer allowed it to be manipulated during the test so that lay listeners could not tell the instruments apart. After serving as the prototype for early synthesizers, the pipe organ was quickly overcome by its own simulacrum, and the legal system was enlisted to patrol the resulting demilitarized zone. Alfred Reichling?s essay ?Kopie-Reproduktion-Imitation? for Das Elektrium even accused the electronic organ of carrying out an ?illegal border crossing? (eine unzul?ssige Grenz?berschreitung).50 Figure 11. Advertisement (reprint) for the Hammond Organ in the Diapason (January 1937) (Source: Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) sent over a system designed for human voices, in light of the organ?s long relationship to vocal sound. Cahill used keyboard master switches to connect the musician to telephone reproducers, basically setting up the organ interface in front of phone technology. 48 ?Aber auch ein Grund daf?r, da? sich die Orgel ?ber Jahrhunderte hindurch trotz mancher zeitweiliger Anfeindungen im kirchlichen Raum gehalten hat, ist die ?hnlichkeit ihrer Klangerzeugung mit der der menschlichen Stimme, die ja den obersten Rang In der gottesdienstlichen Musik einnimmt. Beider Klang entsteht durch (komprimierte) Luft, das ?????a (pneuma = Atem, Wind), mit dem Im ?bertragenen Sinne auch die menschliche Seele bezeichnet wird? (Wolfgang Adelung, ?Das gegenw?rtige Verh?ltnis der Orgel zu Ihren Imitationen (Elektrien),? in Das Elektrium: Beitr?ge zur Kl?rung der Frage Orgel-Orgelimitation [Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1964], 14). 49 United States of America before Federal Trade Commission, Docket No. 2930 in the matter of: Hammond Clock Company: Complaint, Feb. 1937. 50 Alfred Reichling, ?Kopie-Reproduktion-Imitation,? in Das Elektrium, 27. 23 On Trumped-Up Charges of ?Reverse Simulation? The Hammond Organ gained its renown at the hands of popular music keyboardists like Fats Waller, its first great jazz proponent, who used its apparent sonic faults to fashion a signature new jazz sound. The lineage continued with Count Basie, Ethel Smith, and Matthew Fisher in ?A Whiter Shade of Pale? (1967) to Barbara Dennerlein?s virtuoso MIDI-enhanced footwork; the instrument became central to jazz, R&B, rock, reggae, and even progressive rock. The Hammond was defined so well as an instrument in its own right that when its artifact ?key click? onset was removed, popular demand led to its reintroduction; the Hammond started to remediate older versions of itself. Contrary to popular belief, however, the Hammond started not in bars or clubs at the hands of its early African-American innovators. It began its life in churches and homes, for mostly white musicians and listeners. The threat that its electric tone-wheels posed to pipe organs led in less than two years to a legal complaint filed against the Hammond Clock Company, as it was then known. Laurens Hammond, who had invented the instrument with John M. Hanert and consulting church organist W. L. Lahey, was summoned before the FTC to face charges that advertisements for his popular instrument were making false claims about its comparable quality and superior value relative to pipe organs. Figure 12. Full-page advertisement for the Hammond Organ as a solution to ?your organ problem? in the Diapason (September 1, 1936) (Source: Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) The proceedings of this federal trial, held from 1936 to 1937, offer an exceptionally early outline of electronic music debates that continue to this day: musical elitism versus democratization, the relationship between empirical sonic data and subjective aesthetic judgment, and conflicting attitudes towards sound synthesis and simulation. A close reading of the trial briefs and exhibits, held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington D.C., and an examination of Hammond?s advertisements will show how federal judicial proceedings, as much as commercial demand, pushed the Hammond Model B Organ out of the spaces of institutions and domestic interiors, and into the vernacular spaces of popular music. The court was deeply concerned with the meaning of sound ?synthesis? as an ?organic? process, and furthermore with the moral dimensions of electronic emulation. The proceedings lay a discursive basis for a legal conceptualization of electronic instruments that is based as much on 24 visualizing the physical measurements of sound as on hearing sound, that locates proof of aesthetic experience in empirical data, and that privileges the expert ear over the consumer?s ear. However, the FTC?s final ruling stopped just short of deciding the underlying question of whether synthesized instruments can (or theoretically might) fully emulate or replace their referents. And both sides seemed to miss the fundamental paradox of the pipe organ?that the FTC?s critique of the Hammond could be applied to pipe organs themselves because the pipe organ provided the conceptual basis of additive synthesis. On September 6, 1936, the Hammond Clock Company of Chicago was served a notice to appear on October 30 before the FTC in Washington. The company had achieved instant commercial success, selling 2,666 organs and generating $2.3 million in sales. Its customer base included an impressive variety of churches, mortuaries and cemeteries, universities, and private residences of automotive industry moguls, as well as the odd synagogue, U.S. battleship, and Indian Maharajah (Table 1). Its list of professional musician buyers was none too shoddy: George Gershwin, Max Steiner, Serge Koussevitsky (who was ?delighted? with the Hammond?s role in the Boston Symphony Orchestra?s performance of Liszt?s ?Faust? Symphony),51 and the London Royal Opera House, to name a few. The affordability of the Hammond had allowed it to achieve commercial success that began with churches but quickly expanded into the realm of entertainment: restaurants, skating rinks, radio stations, and Hollywood studios. Table 1. Examples of Hammond Organ customers presented in respondent exhibit . A signif icant number of private residences with Hammonds belonged to Detroit automive industry moguls. (Source: ?Memoradum Regarding Nature of Hammond Organ Customers,? Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) Examples of Hammond Organ buyers as of May 8, 1937 1,131 churches, including a 1200-seat Catholic church in Paris and 10 synagogues 272 mortuaries and cemeteries 108 schools and colleges, including the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, the U.S. Naval Academy, Boston University College of Music, Waldenwoods School of Sacred Music, and Kobe College (Japan) 24 music teachers and conservatories, including Jesse Crawford (famed theater organist and later Hammond advocate) 6 opera houses and auditoriums, including the San Francisco Opera Association, Hollywood Bowl, and London Royal Opera House 51 radio stations 4 film producers: Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios, Columbia Pictures, Vitaphone Studios 8 composers, including Max Steiner, George Gershwin, and Sigmund Romberg 18 orchestra conductors, including Serge Koussevitsky 29 professional musicians and organists 14 theaters 71 hotels, restaurants, and ballrooms 21 skating rinks 23 hospitals 28 fraternal organizations 800 individuals for their private residences, including Mrs. Max Dreyfus (wife of arranger, songwriter, and president of Chappell & Co., then the world?s largest music publishing firm), Errett Lobban Cord (American transport mogul), Mrs. Walter Ansel Strong (wife of former Chicago Daily News owner and publisher), Henry Haven Windsor, Jr. (editor of 51 ?Opinion testimony on a matter of art, especially of music, is an unreliable guide,? Brief for Respondent, p. 85, RG 122, National Archives. 25 Popular Mechanics), Mrs. D. P. Hoover (wife of Hoover Company vice president), Sir Yeshwant Rao Holkar (Maharajah of Indore), and American automotive leaders and inventors Vincent Hugo Bendix, Carl Breer, Charles T. Fisher, Charles Franklin Kettering, William Knudsen, and M. L. Pulcher 3 military installations: The U.S.S. Saratoga, the U.S.S. Henderson, and the U.S. Submarine Base at Groton, Conn. The FTC?s complaint centered on Hammond?s advertising. It accused Hammond of falsely claiming that the instrument superseded the pipe organ for a fraction of the cost (with its ?infinite variety of tones? that produced ?real organ music?), that this ?deceptive, misleading and false? advertising hurt pipe organ builders engaged in interstate trade (hence the federal intervention), and that sorting out the truth of Hammond?s claims was a matter of public interest. The FTC list of disputed claims included: the Hammond ?produces the entire range of tone coloring necessary for the rendition, without sacrifice, of the great works of classical organ literature?; ?an infinite variety of tones, covering the flute, diapason, string, and reed families, are instantly available to the organist?; ?its introduction means that real organ music of unbelievably beautiful quality is now possible in any home at an expense no greater than that of a good piano?; ?many organists agree that it is comparable to pipe organs which cost as much as $10,000.?52 Laurens Hammond (represented by Williams, Bradbury, McCaleb & Hinkle) adopted an initial legal strategy of arguing for an objective, scientific basis for his aesthetic claims. In doing so, he sealed his own fate. ?The questions of artistic and esthetic opinion are supported and endorsed by a wide and typical variety of expert musicians [whose judgment] can be verified by scientific demonstration,? he insisted, but his ill-chosen scientific proof consisted of using an oscilloscope to display the electrical current before it activated the tone-wheels. ?The sound or tones had been short circuited in his pictures,? the trial attorney criticized, and the silent demonstration of the organ?s electrical input rather than its sonic output impressed no one.53 In response, the Commission (represented by William T. Kelley, Chief Counsel, William T. Chantland, trial attorney, and Bryan A. Jacques, attorney) recruited a professor of physics and acoustics to measure and compare the overtones of pipe organs and Hammond organs. It was hoped that this scientific data would corroborate the subjective opinions of the witnesses called to testify against Hammond. Having proposed the use of empirical data as evidence instead of hewing to theoretical arguments, Hammond would find it increasingly difficult over the course of the trial to defend his advertising claims. University of Texas at Austin physics professor Dr. Charles Paul Boner was the perfect expert witness. Having started playing organ at the University Baptist Church in 1921, he was conducting research on the physics of traditional and experimental organ pipes and with his students had constructed a large organ in the Physics Building, on which he gave popular recitals and recorded in theater organ style for local radio show ?Organ Reveries.? He developed a UT program in architectural acoustics and became internationally known for the acoustic design of auditoriums, 52 Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Docket No. 2930, in the matter of: Hammond Clock Company,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 1998, ?Complaint,? pp. 2-3, RG 122, National Archives. 53 ?The ?30 Tests?,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 46, RG 122, National Archives. 26 consulting on some eight hundred buildings and the design of many organs. (During the upcoming war, his career would take on national importance, beginning with sonar research at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory for which he won multiple military awards, establishing a UT Defense Research Laboratory for naval ordnance after the war, and advising Washington on Cold War atomic energy issues.)54 His influence will return in chapter 2, for organ builder Otto Hofmann studied with Boner before igniting a new phase of the Organ Reform Movement. Boner brought his newfangled ?tonal analyzer? to produce the requested evidence. Much as the dial on a radio allowed one to tune in to different wavelengths, the dial on the tonal analyzer allowed one to tune in to a particular frequency in a signal and observe its amplitude. Thus one could isolate each overtone of a given pitch. By analyzing pipes made by Wicks (and later by Kimball and Reuter) and the corresponding Hammond sounds in the home of organ designer and former New Jersey Senator Emerson Lewis Richards, Boner found that organ pipes in the diapason, string, and reed families all contained significantly more overtones than the Hammond?s corresponding stops (Figure 13). He elaborated on this finding repeatedly in his testimonies. Figure 13. Charles Boner?s charts comparing the spectra of an organ pipe?s sound (left) and corresponding Hammond tone (r ight). Note that the pipe produced thirteen overtones measurable by Boner?s tonal analyzer, while the Hammond spectrum displays only four frequencies. (Records of the Federal Trade Commission, Appendix No. 4, ?Docket No. 2930, in the matter of: Hammond Clock Company,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 1998, RG 122, National Archives) His result was hardly surprising. The Hammond Organ operated on the principle of what is now commonly known as additive synthesis: its seven tone-wheels generated sine waves at the frequency of the fundamental and first six partials. After the sixth, there was nothing more to measure. Boner became one of the rare critics of organ interfaces when he complained that ?if [the 54 Melvin Oakes, ?In Memoriam: Charles Paul Boner,? University of Texas at Austin Physics Department History, accessed 26 July 2015, https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/utphysicshistory/UTexas_Physics_History/Charles_P._Boner.html. 27 Hammond] had 30 or 40 drawbars nobody but an octopus could play it.?55 The Commission conceded that an organ?s flute stops resembled sine tones, and therefore could be convincingly simulated by electronic means.56 However, diapason and string stops were especially overtone-rich, and thus Hammond?s sweeping claims that the product made ?an infinite variety of tones, covering the flute, diapason, string, and reed families? were patently false. The evidence produced by the tonal analyzer was purely visual, so Laurens Hammond changed his tune. His attorney argued that listening to the Hammond Organ could provide the only form of admissible evidence, while representations of sound were effectively illegible because human auditory perception was still poorly understood. Raw overtone data could not be interpreted meaningfully because of the ear?s varying sensitivities to different frequencies. In a demonstration of the inadequacy of visual data, Boner was shown the overtone chart of an unspecified sound. He could not determine ?whether it was a musical sound, a desirable sound, or not.?57 The defense trumpeted that ?the professorial mind is undoubtedly prone to analyze a problem in such minute detail that it loses sight of the broad general principles? [Boner] has collected a mass of data which he admits he cannot interpret in terms of what the ear hears.?58 No amount of scientific evidence was sufficient to contradict sensory experience, and the machine ear of the tonal analyzer lacked the cognition processes that would link it to human perception. Hammond?s attorney extended this epistemological line of reasoning to argue that legislating aesthetic judgment, which was subjective and constantly changing, was absurd and no business for legal proceedings. To demonstrate the changeability of musical taste, he asked witness Mr. Burhman, a professional organist, ?All organists say that the Bach Chorales are good music, don?t they?? ?I would not say that they do, no,? he replied. ?Then there is some disagreement on that point?? ?Some of them are too dumb to know,? he responded in exasperation. ?All organists would accept Widor?s Toccata as good music, would they not?? ?I would not. It is just a lot of noise to me.? ?Well, you consider Handel?s Concerto good music!? ?I would not, but other organists that are even at the top rank think they are fine. Marcel Dupr? is playing one of the things today on his concert tour, but I would not listen to it?. I know a lot of [organists] would not put Widor?s Toccata on their recitals today, although they would have done so fifteen years ago.? ?So that it [sic] is a matter that changes with time!? ?Everything improves with time.?59 What counted as ?real,? and what counted as ?good,? seemed murky at best. If beauty were to be legislated, it would limit future art to imitation. Reviewing the FTC brief today, one is struck by the colorful and seemingly arbitrary metaphors used by witnesses to describe the tonal color of 55 ?Dr. Boner?s Testimony in Rebuttal,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 85, RG 122, National Archives. 56 A sine tone is a pure tone with a sinusoidal waveform that consists of a single frequency. Sine and cosine waves are the most basic building blocks of more complex waves. Pure sine waves are not found in nature, and the first one was created by Hermann von Helmholtz using the ?Helmholtz siren.? 57 ?The Evidence in This Case Divides Itself into Two General Categories, the Auditory Tests Furnish the Only Basis for a Correct Decision,? Brief for Respondent, p. 29, RG 122, National Archives. 58 Ibid., 33. 59 ?The registration used by Porter Heaps in playing the pipe organ during the Thirty Selection Test was a satisfactory registration,? Brief for Respondent, p. 69-70, RG 122, National Archives. 28 organ stops: Humpty Dumpty, Cats and Dogs, Harmonics Screaming Disapproval, Muddying of the Waters, Falsely Prophetic, Lifeless Corpse, Burps, Icing on Cake, Like a Tomato, and mystifyingly, Onions.60 The futility of basing a legal decision on such testimonies does give the trial a hint of the surreal. Even as machine ears were disqualified from the proceedings, neither could all human ears command respect. The opposing sides sought to frame the debate in terms of elitism and democracy.61 While Hammond argued that laypeople should provide testimony, the Commission argued for the sole use of expert musician witnesses. The trial attorney quoted prominent organ composer Leo Sowerby?s critique of the ?hooty, monotonous, and lifeless? instrument in The American Organist magazine: The danger to the supremacy of the organ?is the fact that many clergymen and members of the church music-committees have so little knowledge of music or of the organ itself as to be easily misled into thinking that this instrument is actually serviceable as an organ. I have heard it used to accompany services, particularly as an accompaniment for congregational singing. We have but little sense of what is fitting or consistent if we build beautiful churches, in which we make use of age-old liturgy, and adorn it with the music of the great masters, and then are content to attempt to assist in God?s praise with such an instrument as this!62 This unwitting flock did not know any better, and perhaps sang the worse for it. A similar critique in the magazine dismissed the validity of congregational approval of the ?electrotone? organ. A man in defending himself for praising an electrotone instead of an organ for his church, replied, when taken to task for it: ?We have made exhaustive investigation and find there are as many people willing to praise it as to condemn it.? To which the proper reply is that we can also find as many people willing to praise beer as to praise the church. It is not the number of people consulted about any subject but their fitness to be consulted.?63 The experts agreed: Electronics did not just simulate?they dissimulated. The defense?s rebuttal attacked antiquated organ elitism. His attorneys portrayed Laurens Hammond as an ?inventive genius?64 and paragon of the ?old-fashioned individualism upon which this country was founded and upon which it achieved the most rapid progress known to the history of the world? as he strove to democratize an elitist art.65 ?The pipe organ is held in reverence as the ?King of Instruments?,? he warned, highlighting the feudal nature of the nickname. ?Due to the majestic tones which emanate from an organ, the organist obtains a superiority complex as to his art and as to his instrument. Pipe organs are traditionally the most high priced of musical 60 ?Opinion testimony on a matter of art, especially of music, is an unreliable guide,? Brief for Respondent, pp. 86-87, RG 122, National Archives. 61 See Paul Th?berge?s incisive critique of the much-touted power of synthesizers to ?democratize? music making in Any Sound You Can Imagine (72-73). 62 Leo Sowerby, The American Organist (January 1936), quoted in ?Argument: Expert Opinion Testimony,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, pp. 51-52, RG 122, National Archives. 63 The American Organist 22, no. 4, 1939, quoted in FTC. 64 ?Epilogue,? Brief for Respondent, p. 127, RG 122, National Archives. 65 Hammond?s attorneys also recounted how the demonstration of the Hammond Organ at the U.S. Patent Office on April 24, 1934 created a ?real furore of excitement and enthusiasm,? attracting clerks, examiners, commissioners, and officials from throughout the building (?Foreward,? Brief for Respondent, pp. 1-2, RG 122, National Archives). 29 instruments?organ music could be played only by the select few.?66 Why call on such delusionally biased experts bent on maintaining the Old World status quo, when 2,666 customers offered commonsense evidence of the Hammond?s affordable emulation abilities? The defense was even able to quote a report from the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee on ?Technological Trends and National Policy,? in which Congress was informed that the electronic organ was ?a recent achievement of our electrical research laboratories? and ?may mark the beginning of mechanization of many of our other musical instruments.? In fact, ?it has already revived interest to a very marked degree in [a] hitherto expensive, and one might almost say declining, branch of musical art.?67 The defense concluded that it was time to replace the sacred sublime of the church organ with the technological sublime of the Hammond: If any organist were to set up a different one of these 263,000,000 different possible combinations on the Hammond organ every five minutes and did this for eight hours every day throughout the year, it would take him about 7,500 years to try out all of the different combinations!68 Yet the Commission pressed onward and upward from the authority of experts into the realm of Christian morality. Its rhetoric grew impassioned as it argued that the Hammond?s imitative nature ?debauched?69 and even ?prostituted?70 a sacred instrument to unwitting ?churchmen naturally incline[d] towards faith in their fellowman.?71 This equation of synthesis and simulation machines with female promiscuity, however, gave way to what would prove the trial?s unusual central metaphor. The ?synthesis? in ?sound synthesis? came to be interpreted literally and organically, to the point that it was understood in terms of food and drink?and not just beer, cake, tomatoes, and pungent onions. Richards, the former Senator who made a comfortable living as a lawyer, was a witness carefully selected to side with the FTC and subjected to nearly three days of cross-examination. He had designed the Atlantic City Convention Hall organ, the largest in the world based on number of pipes (about 33,112), built by the Midmer-Losh Organ Company from 1929 to 1932. When Hammond first attempted to produce scientific proof of his advertising claims, Richards dismissed physical measurements of sound as ?largely a matter of baloney to us. We are interested in music; we are not interested in tearing the tone apart electrically to see what it is made of.?72 Employing a sausage metaphor, he argued that both synthesis and its lack were meaningless, and analysis merely did violence upon musical sound. But as the trial attorney coopted Hammond?s evidentiary approach, the proceedings grew deeply concerned with defining musical sound in measurable terms. Explications of the physics of sound dominate the trial attorney?s brief. He argued that an effectively 66 ?The Testimony of Witnesses Was Biased for a Readily Explainable Reason,? Brief for Respondent, p. 40, RG 122, National Archives. 67 Subcommittee on Technology, ?Technological Trends and National Policy,? submitted at the Seventy-Fifth Congress, First Session, House Document no. 360 (June 1937), 320. 68 ?It Is True That With the Hammond Organ ?Any Tone That Is a Sustained Tone Can Be Produced On This Marvelous Instrument?,? Brief for Respondent, p. 101, RG 122, National Archives. 69 ?Conclusion,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 96, RG 122, National Archives. 70 ?Effect of Rebuttal Testimony,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 90, RG 122, National Archives. 71 ?Sales Methods,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 92, RG 122, National Archives. 72 ?Professorial Scientists Frequently Fail to Understand the Meaning of an Innovation, or to Realize Its Economic and Sociological Effects,? Brief for Respondent, p. 35, RG 122, National Archives. This distrust for the ivory tower and Boner?s ?pettifogging criticism? (38) compounded the image constructed of Laurens Hammond as a self-taught inventor. 30 synthesized sound must include all of the overtones of its referent sound, no matter how many. Perhaps because physics seemed too dry, food metaphors were served up to make it digestible. Richards about-faced from the baloney accusation and compared Hammond?s tone-wheel synthesis to chemically analyzing a tomato, then assembling and mixing those elements to try to produce a tomato. ?The elements simply do not synthesize,? he concluded, as if Hammond were expecting an organ(ic) creature to slouch out of a sea of primordial frequency goop. The trial attorney extended this organic metaphor to drinking cocktails: If you wanted to drink a Martini cocktail, you would drink it as the bartender made it. You would not drink the gin first, the vermouth next, the melted ice next, and wind up by sucking the lemon peel last. That is just about what you are compelled to do with the Hammond, try to taste and swallow the various separate ingredients before they are mixed, i.e., take the ingredients separately into your music tasting apparatus, which is your sensitive hearing organs, and then, therein, try to make yourself believe that they are one fused tone. In an organ pipe you receive into your ears a musical cocktail already completely blended from its various ingredients and harmonics.73 [italics added] The ?martini testimony? offered sound as a liquid solution, partials as liquors, and listening as a form of imbibing or consumption. It would indeed be unpleasant to consume a tomato or a martini in its component parts. Fortunately for Hammond, our vocabulary for isolating and describing component tastes is no better than it is for timbres. Hammond replied that ?the cocktail analogy is excellent? the individual harmonic ingredients are measured and mixed together electrically and emerge from the instrument as one sound.?74 Summoning the metaphor of electrical currents and flows, he argued that ?mixing? happened prior to perception. But the food testimonies proved so effective in characterizing sound synthesis as failed alchemy (or at least as a terrible bartender) that the (frankly mediocre) defense attorneys had to struggle: the Hammond Clock Company ?was not selling deleterious drugs; it was not making claims of impossible cures; it was not selling adulterated food,?75 they insisted against continuing accusations that Hammond ?was selling poison advertised and labeled as ?sugar?.?76 The trial attorneys had successfully coopted Hammond?s recanted argument that a measurable reality undergirded his advertising claims, and then produced damning charts of discrete overtones. To top it off, they used a metaphor of liquid, taste, and healthy ingestion to reintroduce subjective judgment to the interpretation of this data. Taste was the arbiter of sound quality judgments?why, just as Hammond had said. I would like to juxtapose this trial with Emily Thompson?s work on the Edison Company?s Tone Tests. These publicity events, staged from 1915 to 1924, challenged audiences to differentiate between a concealed live singer (almost always female) and a recording of that singer. Thompson?s history reveals that changing definitions of audio ?fidelity? and ?real music? were constructed by the very technologies they purported to evaluate.77 Similarly, the Hammond case hinged on blind listening tests to be carried out at the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories directed by Walter Sabine, a 73 ?Brief of Attorneys for the Commission,? p. 15, RG 122, National Archives. 74 ?There Are Numerous Specific Misstatements in the Trial Attorney?s Brief,? Brief for Respondent, p. 113, RG 122, National Archives. 75 ?Foreward,? Brief for Respondent, p. 4, RG 122, National Archives. 76 ?The Trial Attorney?s Brief,? Brief for Respondent, p. 109, RG 122, National Archives. 77 Emily Thompson, ?Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877-1925,? The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (1995): 131-171, doi:10.1093/mq/79.1.131. 31 key player in Thompson?s history of architectural acoustics and listening who had used organ pipes to do acoustic measurements.78 At Hammond?s audacious suggestion, his invention was instead pitted against the massive $70,000 Aeolian-Skinner organ at the University of Chicago?s Rockefeller Chapel. This great American symphonic organ was renowned for orchestral stops like the string stops and French horn. He brought in organist Porter Warrington Heaps, a former pupil of Marcel Dupr?, who had achieved fame?and notoriety?for being the first organist to systematically explore the Hammond?s musical possibilities and publicly introduce the instrument in a New England church service on June 23, 1935. Heaps? career would continue to feature electronic organ spectacles, culminating in the 1949 Chicagoland Music Festival, where he gathered fifty-three electronic organs to perform together in Soldier Field.79 The ?auditor-witnesses,? all conductors or organists, heard Heaps perform fifteen brief selections on both the Skinner and the Hammond (Table 2). After hearing each selection twice, they guessed on which organ each had been performed. They chose correctly more often than not, casting doubt on Hammond?s claims that the instruments were indistinguishable. Still, Hammond protested the results on two counts. First, as professional musicians, the witnesses detected certain ?tip-offs, which are not of a musical character,? such as the surround sound of the Skinner relative to the Hammond?s loudspeakers, the variability of the Skinner?s tremulants and out-of-tune pipes relative to the Hammond?s precise tremulant and tuning, and the Hammond?s quicker attack (part of the attack-decay-sustain-release or ADSR envelope model of a synthesized musical tone, in which the attack defines how quickly the sound reaches full volume after a key is depressed).80 He claimed that neither spatialization, vibrato, tuning, nor envelope were elements of sound synthesis, a claim that the FTC would ultimately reject, citing attack and spatialization as key synthesis components. 78 In making a larger argument about the development of acoustic architecture, Emily Thompson notes that Sabine worked with organ pipes. For the acoustic design of Boston Symphony Hall, he developed a formula that related expected reverberation to the total surface area of materials in a room. He did so by traveling to acoustically successful concert halls, analyzing their surfaces, and performing a series of reverberation tests with an organ pipe. 79 Porter Heaps later claimed that he too had questioned Laurens Hammond?s focus on marketing to churches. He recounted that when Laurens demanded that a Chicago radio station stop broadcasting performances of popular music on its Hammond Organ, he urged Hammond to make selling instruments his main objective, without regard to the repertoire being played on them. (James Welch, ?Porter Heaps Versatile 20th-Century Organist,? The American Organist 24, no. 6, June 1990: 84-86) 80 ?The ?Thirty Selection Test?,? Brief for Respondent, p. 47, RG 122, National Archives. 32 Table 2. Repertoire examples from the auditory tests conducted at Rockefel ler Chapel, the University of Chicago. (Source: Records of the Federal Trade Commission, Appendix Nos. 1 and 6, ?Docket No. 2930, in the matter of: Hammond Clock Company,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 1998, RG 122, National Archives) Combined repertoire from the bl ind l istening tests , with t it les given as printed in the FTC brief Bach ? Chorale 98 Demarest ? Sunset Mendelssohn ? Sonata 2 Dvorak ? Largo, New World Symphony Hymn 411 ? Alleluia Mendelssohn ? Wedding March Hark the Herald Angels Sing Tchaikovsky ? Largo, 5th Symphony Dubois ? Grand Offertory Schubert ? Impromptu Bossi ? Chant du Soir Mendelssohn ? Nocturne Borowski ? Suite #1 Bo?llmann ? Chorale and Piere, Suite Gothique Handel ? Concerto Widor ? Andante, 4th Symphony Borowski ? Meditation, Suite #1 Mark Andrews ? Sonata Franck ? Piece Heroique Dubois ? Grand Chorus Schubert ? Unfinished Symphony Tchaikovsky ? Andante, 6th Symphony Wagner ? Wedding March, Lohengrin Secondly, Hammond objected, ?if there is such ?public interest,? it certainly would have been proper to have representatives of the general public take the tests.?81 Emphasizing the nature of music as commercial entertainment subject to a separate set of aesthetic standards, he stated that ?music is a commodity designed for the consumption primarily, not of experts (who simply manufacture the commodity), but of the great rank and file of the listening public.?82 A University of Chicago English class took the ?Thirty Selection Test? the next evening. To his relief, their success rate was not much better than chance. (Figure 14) 81 ?The Real Meaning of the Results of the Thirty Selection Test,? Brief for Respondent, p. 56, RG 122, National Archives. 82 ?Foreward,? Brief for Respondent, p. 19, RG 122, National Archives. 33 Figure 14. Combined results of the auditory tests conducted on expert musicians and on University of Chicago students who were presumed to have a passing acquaintance with organ music through attendance at Rockefel ler Chapel. (Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Docket No. 2930, in the matter of: Hammond Clock Company,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, ?Brief for Respondent,? box 1998, RG 122, National Archives) Unfazed, the trial attorney turned the ?Thirty Test? into a question of simulation rather than identification. As in orchestration, the art of playing the organ involves knowing how to build traditional combinations of stops called ?choruses.? Heaps was accused of planning ?perverted registration[s]? on the Skinner organ weeks in advance to render it unrecognizable, with witnesses citing the registrations given in specific editions of music to prove the organist?s deception.83 The trial attorney alleged that the ?respondent?s trick organist-employee? used the loud and tubby ?Flauto mirabilis? flute stop on the Skinner to drown out the overtone-rich French horn, which was a difficult sound to synthesize, during the Andante of Tchaikovsky?s Fifth Symphony.84 Moreover, Heaps closed all three swell boxes during the Handel Organ Concerto, dimming the higher 83 ?The ?30 Tests?,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 64, RG 122, National Archives. 84 Ibid., 58-59 and 71. 34 frequencies of the mutations and reeds to resemble the frequency range of the Hammond, and anyway did not touch sixty-three of the Skinner?s stops.85 And the Hammond was played primarily with flutes, whose sine-wave-like nature was easiest to synthesize. That the respondent refused to have a chromatic scale played on the Hammond was seen as the final straw. Back in the courtroom, trial examiner Horner questioned Richards, ?Then you mean that the pipe organ simulated the Hammond organ, and not the Hammond organ reaching the qualities of the pipe organ?? ?This is correct, if your Honor please,? he confirmed.86 It was this ?reverse simulation? that the trial attorney framed as prostitution and debauchery. The results of the student listening test were meaningless and even immoral, because the sacred real and the commercial simulation had been swapped. Thompson observed that Tone Test performers were chosen who could consistently give performances that sounded like their own recordings. Therefore, the concept of high-fidelity recorded sound was a constructed one?the concept was constructed through the comparison that was supposed to prove its existence. Traversing the permeable boundary between vocal sound and organ sound, we see that Heaps similarly used the symphonic Skinner organ?designed to imitate the orchestra?to instead imitate an imitation of itself, the Hammond. Like Edison?s new consumers, the college students had been taken in. It was a risky call for the trial attorney to put imitation center stage. Although the mediocre defense never argued it this way, Hammond had demonstrated in Rockefeller Chapel that imitation was not a quality (or vice) inherent to his invention, but rather, inherent to the American orchestral organ itself. (?American orchestral organ? here refers to the symphonic instruments popular in the early twentieth century.) The Commission was already biased against the Hammond as a machine to be pigeonholed with phonographs and radios rather than instruments: its brief misquoted Hammond?s advertising that ?any sustained tone can be produced on this marvelous instrument? as ?any sustained tone can be reproduced [italics added] on this marvelous instrument.?87 (The respondent was quick to object that the Hammond did not reproduce, nor was it akin to phonographs and radios, and therefore was a ?real? instrument.) Ironically, the Commission also criticized the Hammond renditions of the Skinner ?viole d?orchestre? and French horn stops, failing to notice that Skinner and other American pipe organ builders had designed these stops to evoke ?real? referents. ?[Our] organ in the Capitol Theatre is designed to be a substitute for the orchestra in the truest sense,? Ernest M. Skinner wrote in the early 1920s. ?The French Horn, English Horn, Clarinet, ?Cello, Oboe are all exactly duplicated.?88 Today, a look at the Thirty Test shows that such orchestral imitations were necessary to much of the era?s pipe organ repertoire: works by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Wagner?all transcriptions, another type of copying. Consider that the vox humana stop had been prized for imitating the human voice since at least the late Renaissance. The organ is always already simulating, but Hammond?s apparent crime was to offer a simulation once removed. In fact, the pipe organ itself was the world?s first device for additive synthesis, which builds sounds by adding together waveforms that are usually harmonically related. The Gothic organ was of 85 Ibid., 74. 86 ?Argument: Expert opinion testimony,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 36, RG 122, National Archives. 87 ?It Is True That With the Hammond Organ ?Any Tone That Is a Sustained Tone Can Be Produced On This Marvelous Instrument?,? Brief for Respondent, p. 100, RG 122, National Archives. 88 ?Resources are as ample as those of the finest symphony orchestra?: ?The Capitol Theatre Organ, Boston, Mass.,? Stop, Open and Reed 1, no. 4 (1922). 35 the Blockwerk type, composed of inseparable ranks of pipes. It had only one sound, the full or plenum sound popularly associated with the organ today, and lacked the stops that by the late fifteenth century would allow the organist to break the plenum into discreet sonorities and play them alone or in various combinations. Each key of the Blockwerk organ activated a fixed set of principal and flute stops at different pitch levels?fundamental, octave, fifth, and so on up, usually called eight-foot, four-foot, and two-foot stops in reference to the physical dimensions of the pipes. Hammond?s method of stacking sine waves corresponding to the harmonic series neatly mirrored this method of plenum sound production.89 Admittedly, each of the component ranks of a pipe organ?s plenum had its own overtones, making its sound more rich and complex, but the conceptual basis was shared. The Hammond wasn?t new?it was an electronic Blockwerk. However, Boner?s charts and the trial attorney?s seductive sensory language equating synthesis with flavor blinded the FTC to the similarity, leading to incorrect comparisons: How utterly the Hammond misses out on nearly one-half of the necessary harmonics, when compared with only the 8?, 4? and 2? stops, which ?a pipe organ of any size whatsoever always has.?90 A further irony of the trial was its origin. Although not formally listed, one of the complainants that initiated the suit was Wicks Organ Company, inventor of the popular Direct-Electric Action and Direct-Electric Windchest?for which Boner worked as occasional consultant, and which claimed to have lost $200,000 of business to Hammond in less than two years.91 Wicks? electrical actions eliminated the traditional limitations on wind pressure and arrangement of the pipes, but would eventually come in for critique in the increasingly historically informed 1950s for their ?absence of intimate connection between player and organ, lack of control over pipe speech, and voicing problems caused by lack of tone channels,? issues debated hotly in the pages of The American Organist, The Diapason, and Organ Institute Quarterly.92 A company whose business it was to electrify the pipe organ was being defended against the electronic organ. Victory belonged to the accusers. On July 9, 1938, the Federal Trade Commission issued a cease and desist order to the Hammond Clock Company forbidding it from making the advertising claims cited about variety of tone color, ?real? organ music, and relative monetary value. The only successfully synthesized sound would be a sound that contained all overtones measurable in the acoustic referent, regardless of whether those overtones were within the range of human perception (in effect validating Boner?s electronic ear). Crucial to the history of music technology, however, is that the FTC limited its remarkably farsighted complaint only to the present limits of science and technology: That a musical sound can be synthesized either electronically or by other means is a theory that has not been proven, nor has that result been achieved by any means yet known to science?.Counsel is not wise enough to 89 The Telharmonium was another early analog example of electronically driven additive synthesizers. 90 ?Argument: What the Tonal Analysis Tests Prove,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 27, RG 122, National Archives. 91 ?Public Interest and Injury to Competitors,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, p. 95, RG 122, National Archives. 92 John Sperling, ?Windchest, Direct-Electric,? The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 636. 36 predict what its possibilities are for the future, nor is the Commission?s complaint drawn on that basis. It has to do with representations made as to the instrument as the time the complaint was written.93 So the FTC chose to leave the elephant in the room?the legitimacy of electronic instruments was left to the market to decide, and if necessary, a future court could address the question when sound synthesis technology had fulfilled its potential. The Hammond Organ?s status as a ?musical instrument? and, more fundamentally, as an ?organ,? remained untouched, but Hammond would have to put its publicity department to work. Although the ruling generated a murmur of negative press for the company, entrepreneurial Laurens Hammond transformed it into a triumphant vindication. On July 13, the New York Times reported the ruling and the reasoning behind it, but the next day, a Times article ?Sees Use of ?Organ? Vindicated? quoted Laurens Hammond that the FTC had ?vindicated the company in its designation of this instrument as an ?organ?.? Semantics are, after all, the real basis of public outreach. The fact that Hammonds could be called organs, although never actually questioned in the first place, became a new promotional tool to sell the instruments based on ideas of authenticity?precisely what Hammond had been trying to do all along. Hammond in fact doubled down, changing his company?s name to Hammond Instrument Co. and later to Hammond Organ Co. But the injunction to avoid certain marketing comparisons with pipe organs, as well as the increasing anxiety about protecting liturgical music from mechanization, encouraged Hammond to pursue another market: popular music. Religious anxieties about electronic music were becoming increasingly inconvenient for Hammond. Even the trial attorney?s concluding statement was rife with righteous indignation: When such sweeping claims are made, respondent assumes for its child the fullest obligation to enter the holy places alongside the organs of the great cathedrals and churches of the world in Europe and America, and there to produce the Messiahs, the Hallelujah choruses, the processionals and recessionals in all of their varied awe-inspiring original grandeur and solemnity. This instrument becomes a pretender to the kingly heritage of the most regal and most ancient of complete musical instruments?. No longer can or should respondent be left to foist upon church committees or others with uncertain musical attainments, under high pressure salesmanship this musical maverick, (suited, if for anything, chiefly for the jazz and night clubs), as an instrument capable of producing the classical pipe organ music of great composers without sacrifice of quality.94 Electronic music belonged not in high ?holy places? but downtown in ?jazz and night clubs,? and he noted with alarm that Hammond was taking the hint. Hammond ?fell from his high Olympus or Parnassus of devotion to the ?artistic and esthetic? in the musical art?into the mart of commercialism?He boasted of his instrument?s fitness for night clubs and dancing, and added, ?And I am pursuing that course personally, to make money, I am betting on the forte attack as being more popular in the end?.?95 This prescient statement foreshadowed how that quick attack, the non-musical ?tip-off,? would become part of the signature Hammond sound.96 93 ?Description of Instruments? and ?The Mechanical Tonal Analysis Tests,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, pp. 16 and 21, RG 122, National Archives. 94 ?Conclusion,? Brief of Attorneys for the Commission, pp. 98-99, RG 122, National Archives. 95 ?Brief of Attorneys for the Commission,? p. 5, RG 122, National Archives. 96 Interestingly, the question of attack resurfaced nearly three decades later in the 1964 German case against Ahlborn-Orgeln, which argued that the electronic organ?s fast attack was only suitable for dance music. The case against Ahlborn likewise noted its lack of comparable overtone richness relative to pipe organs; while flute tones resembled sine waves, principal stops had richer spectra that could not be convincingly synthesized (Adelung, 15). Adelung also described blind 37 So it was the FTC that helped push the Hammond organ from churches and homes into spaces as symbolically distant as jazz and funk, from the white and often female performers shown in its advertisements (Figure 15) to the diverse and mostly male keyboardists who would make the instrument famous in popular music venues. Although Laurens Hammond had claimed that the fast attack did not count as a musical quality, it was that very aspect of sound synthesis that he successfully ?betted? would forge a new secular identity for his instrument because of its suitability for syncopation, rhythmic playing, and fast tempi. In its first fifty years, the company sold over two million instruments, fulfilling the fate that Miessner had predicted for it in the modern age.97 From vox humana to Voder, from Gothic additive synthesis to a Hammond simulating a pipe organ, the organ and its interface present a mise-en-abyme of simulation. The infinite loop ran some cycles of absurdity, as acoustician, engineer, and organ builder Lawrence Irving Phelps noted in a prominent 1969 critique. ?It seems the electronic inventors are finding it hard to know what to do next,? he mocked, championing the craft-based, Baroque-facing Organ Reform Movement. ?In America, they are now adding ?pipes? to resonate the sound produced by loudspeakers. In recent issues of Instrumentenbau-Zeitschrift, I have seen articles about two electronic instruments with rather elaborate cases. Next, they will try tracker action, and maybe even real wind.?98 Organs continued to provide the interface of choice for electronic music, from Edwin Welte?s contemporaneous Lichtton-Orgel (1934-6), to Pierre Schaeffer?s diary sketch for an organ based on gramophone turntables (1948), to toy manufacturer Mattel?s Optigan (c. 1970).99 That ouroboros-like history has since been lost from the English language.100 From the mid-1970s, the electronic organ and keyboard synthesizer became similar enough that today?s organ-like electronic keyboards are no longer called organs. However, they were developed with organ interfaces before they were rebranded; Rocky Mount Instruments offered samples of theater organs in its RMI Keyboard Controller (1974), one of the earliest polyphonic synthesizers, opting to name the instrument directly after its interface and discard the churchly associations of its electronic parent company, the Allen Organ Company. The incredibly varied uses of electronic organs ranged from church, jazz and pop, and light entertainment, to domestic music making and amateur engineering through ?do-it-yourself? listening tests in which non-musical ?tip-offs? such as loudspeaker distortion gave the Ahlborn organ away even to layman listeners (18). Although history does repeat itself, this strikingly similar case probably resulted from the boom in electronic organ building following World War II, when many German organs needed to be replaced and materials were scarce. 97 The Hammond Organ did not entirely part from highbrow music, as German observer Karl Bormann noted during his 1963 organ tour of the U.S.: ?Legal contradictions can live in American souls. In the neighboring family home with a Hammond-Elektrium [sic] I found collections of hymns and folk songs, the multicolored books of technically sophisticated Karg-Elert compositions and all kinds of ?Charakterst?cke? with exact registrations for the Elektrium?People spoke knowledgeably of early music.? (?Reiseeindr?cke aus den USA Chicago, 31. Mai 1963,? in Das Elektrium, 59.) 98 Lawrence Irving Phelps, ?Thoughts on the Future of the Organ,? ISO-Information, Journal of the International Society of Organbuilders 1 (February 1969). 99 Hugh Davies, ?A History of Sampling,? Organised Sound 1, no. 1 (1996): 3-11. 100 Whether the organ has always imitated continued to be a question in Germany during the Ahlborn case. Walter Supper?s chapter for Das Elektrium, ?Mi?verst?ndnisse unserer Zeit,? sought to refute claims based on the fifteenth-century writings of ?der mi?verstandene Praetorius? that the organ has always imitated: ?Nicht selten wird das Elektrium als Imitation der Orgel damit verteidigt, da? selbst Michael Praetorius die Orgel als Imitation der andern lnstrumenta ausgegeben habe. Es sei an die oft zitierte Stelle seiner Organographia (1619) erinnert: ?Wiltu eine Trummel / Trummet / Posaun / Zinken ... etc. h?ren / so kannstu dieses alles ... haben: Also da? / wenn du dieses Instrument hast und h?rest / du nicht anders denkest / du habest und h?rest die andern lnstrumenta alle miteinander?.? (Das Elektrium, 63) 38 assembly kits, appealing to home tinkerers from the 1930s to the present.101 Even today?s technology industry leaders, such as Microsoft Research scientist and composer Jaron Lanier and Dubai International Airport chief executive Paul Griffiths, are fascinated with their home organs as hybrid technical and musical manifestations of their interests.102 Figure 15. A young gir l is shown playing the Hammond Organ in an unidentif ied magazine advertisement. (Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) Some decades later, organist Virgil Fox would meet with withering disapproval from pipe organists for his massive electronic traveling organ, which he inaugurated at Berkeley High School?s auditorium and which soon catapulted him to stardom. Today, simultaneous fascination and scorn amongst organists for Cameron Carpenter and his forty-loudspeaker International Touring Organ shows that the organ is still as sensitive an instrument as it was in Hammond?s time. By the FTC?s standards, the sampled sounds issuing from Carpenter?s high-fidelity speakers count as legitimate equivalents to the organ. But in the end, this trial was never really about sound synthesis, and it never was about the law. It was about policing border crossings at the interfaces that Galloway termed ?an ?agitation? or generative friction between different formats,? ignoring the fact that ?it is media all the way down.?103 101 An interesting direction for future research might be the relationship between organ, harpsichord, and clavichord DIY assembly kits and their relationship to other popular kits at the time, such as those for radios or for geodesic domes popular with the 1960s counterculture. 102 Christine Negroni, ?The Organist Behind Dubai Airport,? New York Times, September 28, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/middleeast/the-musician-behind-dubai-airport.html. 103 Galloway, 31. 39 Figure 16. A typical ful l-page advertisement for the Hammond Organ, designed for publication in Casket and Sunnyside (May 1936) and American Funeral Director (June 1936). The FTC had tried to embalm the Hammond Organ as a l i turgical dead end, but it was reincarnated in the realm of popular music. (Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) PFEIFEN KLATSCHEN LACHEN: When the Avant-Garde ?Burned the Organs? Contemporary observers might have expected that electronic organs, like other well-remembered twentieth-century electronic instruments, would inspire new music from the avant-garde. In the Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, G. T. Winch and A. M. Midgley wrote in ?Electronic Musical Instruments and the Development of the Pipeless Organ? (1940) that ?one of the most promising possibilities is the increased scope which will be offered to musicians in modes of expression. Present-day composers are striving to express new ideas, but with traditional musical instruments they are limited to the chromatic scale and the tone colours which are available and which have remained sensibly the same for many years.?104 They highlight the infinity of possible new tone colors and alternative temperaments possible with electronic organs, presenting R. H. M. Bosanquet?s 1875 ?generalized keyboard? enabling all temperaments as a model nearly five decades before Moog synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos would in Computer Music Journal.105 Remarkably, Winch and Midgley believed that the limitations on new music for organ were purely an engineering problem, and that musicians were simply waiting to embrace these new technical features. They hardly imagined how firmly entrenched musical skills and sounds are against the adoption of new instruments, and how much resistance the church posed to experimental organ composition. Instead, observers had to wait until the fateful 1963 Radio Bremen concert for avant-garde composers to make pipe organs sound electronic?inventing a compositional style (inadvertently pioneered by Porter Heaps) that did not depend on the organ?s style of construction at all. 104G. T. Winch and A. M. Midgley, ?Electronic Musical Instruments and the Development of the Pipeless Organ,? Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers 86, no. 522 (1940): 517-47. Research Laboratories at General Electric, Co. were used for preparation of the paper, showing how common the development of electronic organs was at electronics firms. 105 Wendy Carlos, ?At the Crossroads,? Computer Music Journal 11, no. 1 (1987): 29-43. 40 The innovations of Darmstadt reached the organ slowly, sequestered as it was from experimentation in churches and homes, or busy with other innovations as it was in popular music.106 By the 1960s, however, avant-garde composers were finally starting to explore the resemblance of the organ?s sonic design and interface to additive synthesis and electronic keyboards, thereby completing the cycle of simulation. After decades of electronic instruments modeled after the organ, organ composition could now model the techniques of electronic music. In 1963, three groundbreaking organ works by Ligeti, Hambraeus, and Kagel were premiered?albeit as sound recordings broadcast by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation.107 Studying the watershed Bremen ?concert? and its repercussions can deepen our understanding of the avant-garde?s relationship to non-university-based new music institutions from radio stations to churches, the technical visual aesthetic of graphic scores, and how ideas about the body of the improvising organist clashed with the performance strictures of modernism and the disembodiment of sound synthesis.108 My analysis of Ligeti?s Volumina will juxtapose its conceptual filtering basis with the performance of bodily effort and strain to understand how Ligeti used the organ to paradoxically reembody electronic music and to open an interpretive space for skilled keyboard improvisation within a precise visual score. As Martin Herchenr?der fascinatingly recounts in ?From Darmstadt to Stockholm: Tracing the Swedish Contribution to the Development of a New Organ Style,? Ligeti?s monumental first original organ work built on the additive synthesis and filtering concepts he had learned in the electronic music studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and remediated with orchestral instruments in Atmosph?res (1961). Atmosph?res is scored for a large orchestra of eighty-eight players, each with a separate part. In the opening bars, marked pp and dolcissimo, each member of the fifty-six-person string section plays one note of a massive cluster traversing the space from E?2 to C?7. According to Richard Taruskin?s description of the electronic music techniques underlying this non-electronic sound, the cluster is the closest equal-tempered approximation available to the electronic studio?s white noise, the simultaneous sounding of the whole [audible] frequency spectrum. And Ligeti proceeds to modify the chord precisely the way (the only way) that white noise can be processed in the studio, by filtering it. Section by section the instruments drop out morendo, dying away by gradual decrescendo to silence, so as to avoid articulating the narrowing of the ?bandwidth? until only the cellos and violas are left.109 A larger cluster arrives and then decays ?into a kind of shimmer, in which all the instruments move from sustained tones to oscillations between two tones; but as the full cluster is maintained at all times, the apparent melodic activity produces no discernable change of pitch content. One is 106 See Hermann Busch and Martin Herchenr?der?s ?The German-Speaking Lands? in Twentieth-Century Organ Music (2013), ed. Christopher S. Anderson, for a lengthier discussion of how the organ and organists remained isolated from experimental composers even after World War II. 107 Martin Herchenr?der, ?From Darmstadt to Stockholm: Tracing the Swedish Contribution to the Development of a New Organ Style,? in The Organ as a Mirror of its Time: North European Reflections, 1610-2000, ed. Kerala Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 303-21. 108 In the 1950s and 1960s, electronic music studios at radio stations such as Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Radiodiffusion Fran?aise (RDF), and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) provided the primary space for research and composition. It is telling that Radio Bremen supported organ composition rather than an electronic studio, yet ultimately premiered three electronics-influenced compositions. 109 Richard Taruskin, ?Chapter 4: The Third Revolution,? in Music in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, n.d.), accessed 20 July 2015, http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-004011.xml. 41 reminded of what chemists call Brownian motion.? Subsequently, Ligeti employs his micropolyphony technique, ?tiny close-spaced canons that cannot be heard as such because of the pitch saturation, but which guide the composer?s hand toward fashioning a typically shimmering texture.? At rehearsal K, he slowly ?broadens the bandwidth? of a small cluster by adding enclosing semitones. Ultimately, the piece dies away in the glow of piano resonance. It would be a challenge to predict this initial band-pass filtering technique or any of the other sonorities emulating electronic music processes simply by looking at the score, which employs traditional notation without revealing the conceptual use of that notation as analog filter. Departing radically from that score, Ligeti foregrounded the electronic concepts underlying Volumina sonically and visually with graphic notation, making the organ-as-machine a yet more explicit metaphor than the orchestra-as-machine. The clean lines and diagrams of Volumina?s score explicitly charted frequency against time under a title evoking mathematical space.110 Reminiscent of Atmosph?res, Volumina?s startling four-limbed opening cluster (this time marked ffff) extends across the entire manual range and the upper octave of the pedals, indicated by a completely blackened staff. At rehearsal 4, the frequencies in the manuals are gradually filtered down towards a notch at about middle C, to disappear over the unchanging pedal. The filtering is clearly visible from the tapering of the black notation. At the climax that begins at rehearsal 36, a highly distorted three-dimensional ?warp and weft? of wavy lines across the entire range of the manuals and pedals guides the organist in performing ?quick, continuous, aperiodic, very dense, labyrinthine movement in irregular rhythms, with both hands over the entire range of the manuals. Also clusters ad lib. (with palm, arm, elbow),? at fff using ?very loud registration.? The result is surreally familiar, as if a scientist had put an impossibly sensitive microphone to the excited particles of Ligeti?s micropolyphony. This immensely amplified Brownian motion sounds less like a shimmer than an aural assault. The work ?dies away in a long, seemingly never-ending diminuendo of a sustained cluster after the fan motor has already been turned off,? as Herchenr?der vividly describes, performing the inhumanity of the synthesizer?s potentially never-ending tones.111 It seemed that Miessner?s dreams of an electronic organ had finally been fulfilled in an instrument that had existed all along. The pipe organ itself fulfilled his description of ?a generator for periodic vibrations embracing the whole audio spectrum of frequencies [from which we are] able to select ? at will any desired single frequency, or many single frequencies simultaneously, whether harmonically or inharmonically related, or whether in narrow or wide continuous bands.?112 By this time, graphic notation had revealed a paradox in the avant-garde?s proclamations. By requiring new interpretive skills, graphic scores seemed to return creative agency to the performer. John Cage used new graphic notations to represent chance-based compositions that seemed to relinquish the composer?s agency entirely to random factors. However, Douglas Kahn has incisively critiqued Cage?s hypocrisy: his pieces eliminated the performer?s and composer?s habits and training, 110 I employ the important but often overlooked distinction between place as referring to a specific physical locale and space as referring to a potentially more abstract area that may or may not have a physical basis in the world. Holly Watkins? argument in Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought (2011) that mathematical space serves as a contemporary metaphor for music theory can be applied to two of Ligeti?s four 1960s compositions for keyboard, entitled Volumina and Continuum. As if to complete his project, the latter piece for harpsichord realizes the fourth electronic technique that Ligeti employed in Atmosph?res. In Bewegungsfarbe, discrete sound events occur so quickly that they merge into a continuous sound. 111 Herchenr?der, 303. 112 Miessner, 1462. 42 as evidenced by his precisely specified, tightly controlled, and clich?-intolerant graphic scores.113 Taruskin highlighted this modernist disdain for musicians? deeply ingrained style- and instrument-specific skills when he wryly noted that Leonard Bernstein opened his 1964 Cage concert ?with four ?improvisations? by the orchestra that elicited mainly Kreutzer e?tudes from the strings, fanfares from the brass, and ?Rite-of-Spring? arpeggios from the winds,? missing Cage?s point entirely. Tradition, training, and the building blocks of musical form were relics of the past; the graphic score was meant to enforce unpatterned chance. This was the atmosphere in which Ligeti, Hambraeus, and Kagel wrote for organ. Historical conventions that relied on keyboardists? skills had been banished by the avant-garde, be they the fluid time of Louis Couperin?s unmeasured preludes, the figured bass and the ornaments that required embodied motor memory and pattern recognition, or the notes in?gales that relied on expressive judgment and tactile knowledge of rhythmic convention. However, these three composers experimented with the intense physicality of manipulating the organ to achieve new sounds, exemplified by the two-forearm cluster that announces Volumina. They connected with the organ in the embodied ways that had characterized these earlier notations. And thus their notations ushered back some of the musical skills that modernists had exiled. Take for example Ligeti?s score at rehearsal 37, before the blower is famously turned off mid-cluster, with the shocking effect that the organ dies away in an eerie whistle. The passage begins with a chromatic cluster held by the feet in the lowest depths of the pedals, and gradually ascends into the manuals on the next page. Within the ascent are smaller left-and-right movements (up-and-down in frequency terms) on the pedals during which the feet subtly change the width and pitch center of the cluster. Ligeti?s notation, a thick, wavy line that snakes across the staff, is a variable thickening and timbral enrichment of a physical monophony. His system indicates pitch relative to the dimensions and positioning in space of the instrumentalist?s body. The aforementioned ?warp and weft? notation looks like a grid beset by three-dimensional turbulence. Beyond the usual x- and y-axes, the turbulence introduces a z-axis of visual depth that the organist physically translates into internal cluster movement, resulting in a dramatic frenzy of flying limbs that becomes one of the piece?s most memorable live spectacles, different every time. Like the opening of Atmosph?res, this passage cannot be mentally sight-read for its music, in this case because it notates only the movements that produce sound, not the sound itself. One must learn the score with one?s body to find out how it sounds. Thus the performer?s unique physicality (Swedish organist Karl-Erik Welin?s, at the premiere) is heard in the music?the width of his hands, the length of his forearms, even his shoe size?all audible in a way that is different for each musician. Via the sheer physicality of extended organ technique, Ligeti reintroduced the individual into the music at a time when avant-garde notation demanded mechanistically slavish realizations. Recounting his reasons for composing for organ, Ligeti described the organ as a ?gigantic artificial limb? with which he wanted to ?learn to walk again.?114 Emboldened by Atmosph?res, his graphic score for Volumina illustrates his use of the pipe organ to simulate electronic synthesizers and to use the organist?s physical movements as a proxy for pitch content, creating a kind of cyborg via the organ interface where flesh meets the synthetic. 113 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 114 Gy?rgy Ligeti, ?Die Orgel sprengt die Tradition,? Melos 33 (1966): 311. 43 With a mathematical title, scientific-looking score, and electronic-sounding output, Volumina?s visual, textual, and sonic sheen of modernity prompted a Time magazine journalist to pair Gerhard Zacher?s recording of the work with the International Style furniture developed by designers like Le Corbusier and Gerrit Rietveld and with the sleek spaceship interiors of Stanley Kubrick?s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.115 The journalist had replaced Atmosph?res, famously employed in the soundtrack in place of Alex North?s original score, with its even more electronic-sounding successor. Time?s comparisons to interior design seem to domesticate Ligeti?s transgressive work (Figure 17). But it was the overall metaphor of modern technological convenience that linked the two. In 1964, Walter Supper had already written regarding the value of the Elektrium that new inventions require time to be judged good or bad. ?The present does not always change for the worse,? he mused guardedly. Praising the ?manpower?-saving qualities of ?the housewife?s helpful resources like food processors, refrigerators, [and] vacuum cleaners,? he put noisy household appliances in dialogue with electronic organ music.116 Kubrick?s sets, designed by Tony Masters, Harry Lange, and Ernie Archer, represented consumer fantasies of an effortless automated future lifestyle, and the organ was perfectly compatible with these visions. As early as 1929, the Los Angeles Times? showcase house of the future, the Villa Aurora, had featured a pipe organ amongst its modern household conveniences. Figure 17. Futurist ic interior design at Space Station V in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The station featured a Howard Johnson?s restaurant and Hilton Hotel . In a similar fashion, Bengt Hambraeus?s Interferenzen foregrounded its experimentation with perceptual acoustics in its title and graphic score, and used the organ?s unique ability to sustain tones in order to emulate synthesized sounds. Yet the demands it placed on the organ?s wind supply often resulted in a continual fluctuation between electronic emulation and mechanical revelation of the instrument?s lung-like sound source, moments in which the lifelike machine threatened its own reembodiment and vocalization. Interferenzen opens with a cluster in the manuals, covering the tritone between B4 and F5. Played on the ghostly ?gap? registration of 16?, 4?, and 2? flutes (without the expected 8? in between), the sonority pulsates and shimmers with beats (periodic variations in volume) enhanced by the fluttering of the tremulant. These beats result from summing together unison and harmonically related frequencies that are slightly out of tune, and thus depend on the inexact tuning of non-electronic ?tone generators? like pipes. In the second system, an unpredictably alternating F?4 and D?5 sound like electronic blips on a spinning radar against this pulsating sonority, which by this point has been filtered down into an open fifth. Subsequent interludes of 115 ?Music: The Organ as Synthesizer,? Time, June 8, 1970, accessed October 26, 2011, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909337,00.html. 116 Supper, Das Elektrium, 60. 44 distinct pitches and passages requiring intense winding, such as the tutti clusters on the second system of page 10, remind the listener of traditional finger-based performance and of the organ?s ?breathing,? respectively, both pointing to the human element of the electronic-like sound. The most embodied approach of all, Kagel?s graphic score for Improvisation ajout?e employed dance notation, under a self-deprecating title that pointed simultaneously back to the organ?s history of virtuosic improvisers and forward to the status of sheet music as a technical instruction manual that encoded the body of the organist in its symbols of feet, hands, and vocalizing lips. No longer was the score presented as the locus of the work itself; like Andy Warhol?s seven-painting Dance Diagram series (1962), it instead suggested absent bodies and improvised movement while also evoking the instructional materials of modern life, from home appliance manuals to airplane safety cards. The whistling, singing, coughing, talking, laughing, and shouting required of the organist and two registrants, along with several dancers, gave physical presence to a normally hidden instrument.117 By notating the noise of the action without pipe speech, Kagel even reembodied the interface by sounding the machine itself. The use of passages from Improvisation ajout?e in Kagel?s 1968 experimental film Hallelujah, produced by Westdeutsches Fernsehen of Cologne in the same year that 2001 was released, further emphasized the relationship between organs and bodies. Kagel was so keenly aware of the ample space that his graphic score left for improvisation that he issued a new edition six years later specifying performers? actions more clearly. The original score calls for two registrants doubling as vocalists. They constantly push and pull stops with enough autonomy that sometimes the organists? part is not heard because no wind is going to certain ranks of pipes. In a sense, these ?added? performers are the stars, and the keys depressed by the organist function as containers for the exploration of un-notatable timbres, the core of the piece. Like Ligeti, Kagel notated movement, but as an artist practicing across music, film, and theater, he adapted techniques from other arts. His compositional sketches began with serialist-inspired tables of all the permutations of stop combinations, and next a list of ten unorthodox ways to play the manuals. Only afterward did he develop textures and figures. The primacy of gesture evident in his sketches loaned itself to dance notation. Movements are shown for the right hand, left hand, and feet in the appropriate octaves step by step (Figure 18). The typesetting in particular calls to mind the ballroom dance notation in commercial manuals of the 1930s and 1940s that Andy Warhol was returning to the spotlight. Figure 18. Measure 79 of Mauricio Kagel ?s Improvisation ajout?e (1968 revised edit ion). 117 The organ keyboard and its player have traditionally been concealed in a loft in church or behind a partition. 45 Warhol painted his famous Dance Diagram series in early 1962, the same year that witnessed the Bremen premieres in May. Looking at these paintings is to experience incompleteness. Much as sculptor Patrick D. Wilson has argued for a category of furniture completed by the human body like the chair (one might even place musical instruments in this category), Warhol?s paintings of numbered footsteps and movements outlined with arrows remind their viewers that dance notation is incomplete without moving bodies. I have watched museum visitors concentrate on these paintings and sheepishly shuffle their feet, unable to resist completing/performing the work. By taking instructional material as its content, the series seeks to undermine the idea of art for art?s sake and to problematize the concept of notation itself, incomplete without a body to perform it. Kagel?s score takes up that symbolism. However, his notations just as readily evoke the simplified illustrated aesthetic of contemporary technical manuals, eliding the body of the organist with the modern machine. Underlying every performance emphasizing human bodies is a conception of the organist as cyborg, using the organ to extend and enrich human vocalization and choreography. Kagel further emphasized the primacy of the body through other media. Improvisation ajout?e is part of his 1969 television film Hallelujah with Gerhard Zacher at the organ (before Time associated Zacher with Kubrick). The film opens with an exposition of the human vocal mechanism that recalls the organ?s windchest, and later realizes this parallel with choristers exerting their lungs to blow into organ pipes (Figure 19). Numerous bare feet play the pedals wildly in close-ups, and it is clear that the music is merely an outcome of movement rather than the goal that shapes movement. Finally, the hierarchy between registrants and organist is overturned as they forcefully use Zacher?s arms to play. There is no score, only celluloid: vision and sound are the work itself. Because Improvisation ajout?e exists across multiple media, the score no longer has pride of place.118 In its stead is the understanding that the breathing machine and human body are mirrors. Figure 19. Performers blowing short, high-pitched organ pipes parade clockwise around a performer blowing a 4? pipe in Mauricio Kagel ?s experimental televis ion f i lm Halle lujah (1968). (Westdeutsches Fernsehen) The subversion of such a staid old instrument made a rare avant-garde splash. On a spring day in 1962, Welin played a massive manual and pedal cluster on the Marcussen organ of the G?teborg Concert Hall. The opening of Volumina so strained the organ that multiple fuses blew, rendering the instrument unusable for the immediate future. The Radio Bremen premiere concert, organized by the station?s new music department, was just days away. The event had recently been expelled from its intended venue, Bremen Cathedral, because the church feared a scandal, and the plan to record in G?teborg and play back the recordings 118 Schnebel quotes Kagel as writing in a letter that one of his intentions was ?to destroy the conventional majesty of [all this] royal blah-blah? (Heile, 43). 46 for an audience in a room of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation qua the world premiere had backfired when Welin pushed organ technology beyond its limits. Welin completed the recordings in two other Stockholm churches in time for the playback premiere, but rumors that ?the avant-garde had made the organs burn? were flying.119 Intensifying public interest, Welin performed the Bremen commissions repeatedly and made recordings. These works at last paved the way for other composers to experiment, and completed the twentieth-century cycle of pipe and electronic organs remediating each other. ?My organ pieces are written for synthesizer,? Karlheinz Stockhausen told Herchenr?der with certainty.120 Radio Bremen?s commissions used the organ to bring the body of the performer and the body of the machine together with the concepts, sounds, and illustrations of electronic innovation. In an odd convergence, practitioners of the Organ Reform Movement and historically informed performance came to speak of the best-crafted traditional tracker action keyboards as extensions of the keyboardist?s fingers. The organ had passed from simulacrum to talking machine to a kind of living cyborg. I do not mean ?cyborg? in its science fiction usage, but rather as Donna Haraway redefined it in ?A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century? (1991) when she observed that our use of electronics already made ?cyborg? available as an identity for all who sought to fight social constraints on their self-definition?an invitation Walter Carlos had already taken in transitioning from a male to a female identity with her customized Moog synthesizer as her unchanging extension.121 119 Herchenr?der, 315. 120 Ibid., 306. 121 Donna Haraway, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 149-81. 47 Campanological Coda At the outset of this chapter, I quoted one of Emily Dolan?s proposed questions for a ?musicology of interfaces?: ?Can we speak of canons of instruments just as we speak of canons of musical works?? The logic of reactionaries against electronic organs, who defend their selectively crafted canon of keyboard instruments, ignores the physical evidence that organs have throughout their history served as automata alongside playable instruments. The parallel history of the carillon brings this irony into sharp relief. The engineers who sought to maximize human musical output by virtualizing the organ also took an avid interest in reducing the physical resources required for the carillon, that other keyboard instrument of architectural scale. The connection they saw has a history of several centuries. The earliest organ keyboards resembled and were played like carillon keyboards, and the earliest carillons were developed by clockmakers and organ builders in the Low Countries?the two main areas of expertise employed in inventing the Hammond at Hammond Clock Co. Influential French organ builder Aristide Cavaill?-Coll introduced the first carillon stop to his organ-building practice after 1878,122 enabling organists to simulate automatic carillons in a genre of pieces appropriately named Carillon. And one of the standard demonstration passages for Hammond salesmen simulated bells (Figure 20). Figure 20. An arrangement of the Westminster Chimes for Hammond Organ in ?Sales Instructions: Hammond Organ Percussion Effects ,? Bulletin No. 17 (Records of the Federal Trade Commission, ?Respondent?s Exhibits - 2930,? Docketed Case Files 1915-43, box 2002, RG 122, National Archives) 122 Cavaill?-Coll?s carillon is a mixture stop found on secondary manuals (usually the Positif) that uses three wide-scaled ranks. Highly regarded examples may be found at St.-Ouen, Rouen and at St.-Etienne, Caen. Charles Mutin recommended that it be drawn with an 8? Bourdon and played staccato. (Jesse E. Eschbach, ?Carillon,? The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 93). Although Eschbach writes that it is ?unclear? how Cavaill?-Coll would have encountered a concept of Dutch origin, the carillon was common in present-day northern France. Cavaill?-Coll visited French founder Am?d?e Boll?e?s carillon at 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and had a limited correspondence with him, but he had very likely encountered carillons long before. His travels in 1844 took him through Nijmegen, Haarlem, Utrecht, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, all cities with fine Baroque Hemony and van den Gheyn carillons. When he arrived later in Birmingham, he described the action of the organ ?as stiff as those made for carillons? (Douglass 187) to Callinet, but diplomatically elaborated to Utrecht organ builder B?tz that ?the action is rather badly built and poorly installed? (188), so as not to insult his culture?s main instrument of civic pride. 48 Miessner, having helped develop electronic carillons for Stromberg-Carlson, was perfectly aware that electronic keyboards existed along a continuum with mechanical ones, with no clean break. He carefully limited his article to a narrow definition of electronic instruments, excluding those that are electrically energized, ?for then obviously we must discuss such well-known instruments as pipe organs with electromagnetic valve actions and electric blowers? organs with electric action, [and] carillons with electromagnetic hammers.?123 Some of those instruments, particularly electronic bells, had no keyboard and simply played themselves. This chapter has argued that the distinction between pipe organs and electronic ones, though materially real, is in its discursive form largely a twentieth-century construction, and that the convergence that occurred during that century was implicit to the instrument. The circular historical relationships of the organ and carillon to musical automata are strikingly similar. Although electronic carillons were vociferously opposed by carillonneurs for taking away their rightful duty to give musically expressive human performances, the carillon actually originated as an automaton, and the ?performances? of automatic drums to tell the time were often prioritized over human performances during the Baroque.124 This type of mechanical recorded music produced live, not recorded, results, as Nick Seaver theorizes regarding the ?re-enacting piano,? Luc Rombouts regarding automatic carillons, and Jonathan Ambrosino regarding the player pipe organ.125 It was the phonograph, Ambrosino argues, that changed the definition of recording to ?an electronic reproduction of an encoded performance? heard through loudspeakers rather than from the instrument.126 In that light, when the fully electric theater organ ?took the qualities of the automatic barrel and band organs, tailored them to providing soundtracks for silent films, and put them back in the hands of live players,?127 organ builders were mirroring the arc of the carillon?s history in taking labor away from machines and assigning it to humans. In neither case could subsequent attempts at re-automation be accepted without a fight. As grand instruments of the church, organs and carillons have suffered similar critiques when simulated, too. Adelung compared the Elektrium to electronic bells: ?A similar case [is found in] the ?bell pealing? on tape. The cheapest imitation! ? [sic]?128 The Netherlands, proud ally in America?s midcentury Organ Reform Movement and home of the non-electronic carillon, has itself boasted three major electronic organ makers: Eminent, Johannus, and Philips, maker of the discontinued Philicordia. Electronic composer Dick Raaijmakers developed the Philicordia at the Philips Lightbulb Factory in the 1960s, prototyping the AG7400 at Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (which also produced the first portable cassette recorder.) The Philicordia quickly took over sixty percent of the home organ market share and was sold in America at J.C. Penney department stores. It is to the Philips Lightbulb Factory and to Raaijmakers and his associates that we will turn in chapter 3. 123 Miessner, 1428-9. 124 Luc Rombouts, Singing Bronze: A History of Carillon Music (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2014), 126-27. 125 Nick Seaver, ??This Is Not a Copy?: Mechanical Fidelity and the Re-enacting Piano,? differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, nos. 2-3 (2011): 54-73. 126 Jonathan Ambrosino, ?Player Pipe Organ,? The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 418. 127 Dobson et al, ?Action,? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 12. 128 ?Ein ?hnlicher Fall wie bei den ?Glockengel?uten? auf Tonband. Das ist billigster Ersatz! ?? (Adelung, 21). 49 Chapter 2. Techno-Temporal Convergence: The Electronic Neo-Baroque ?Finding organ pipes in an electronic organ factory is like finding birdshit in a cuckoo clock,? Virgil Fox sneered in one of his famously colorful dismissals, evidently before he gained his widest renown as a flamboyant organ virtuoso by touring with electronic organs and massive loudspeaker arrays.1 Despite the shortage of materials to build pipe organs after World War II, the backlash against electronic organs and even against earlier American styles of pipe organs was accelerating in the 1950s. The Federal Trade Commission had ruled in 1937 that the Hammond did not produce ?real organ music,? and highbrow-art musicians were judging carefully with their ears. Former enthusiast Serge Koussevitsky had praised the Hammond for its performance in Liszt?s ?Faust? Symphony, but by 1939, he had soured on the instrument, which did not offer enough power for his Tanglewood rendition of Saint-Sa?ns? ?Organ? Symphony. ?Koussevitzky was thoroughly disgusted with the electronic device,? organist E. Power Biggs reflected in his notes, ?and announced, ?Next year we shall give Beethoven?s Missa Solemnis and for that occasion I must have an organ?.?2 With Biggs? help, the two-manual Aeolian-Skinner organ Koussevitsky had installed in 1940 in the Tanglewood ?Shed? featured a disposition that would have puzzled organists of the previous decade and quaintly bemused organists of the next. Its abundance of warm, sweet flutes and strings was reminiscent of Skinner?s famous orchestral organs, perfect for the performance of orchestral transcriptions, but the timid presence of a cold, sparkling upperwork on every manual and pedal gestured towards the rendition of Baroque polyphony. (A single thirty-two-foot pipe on C3 was Koussevitsky?s ticket for the Saint-Sa?ns, Strauss? Also Sprach Zarathustra, and other works needing an aisle-shaking organ rumble.) Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1002 was a transitional organ, awkwardly bridging the long nineteenth century and the blossoming of the postwar Early Music movement. By the 1960s, organists would demand austere ?neo-baroque? instruments, light on fundamental and heavy on high mixtures and aggressive reeds, to perform Baroque music while scoffing at the weak-kneed orchestral frivolities of yesteryear. How did the pendulum swing to such an extreme? There is a frequently told origin story for the neo-baroque aesthetic and the so-called Organ Reform Movement that promoted it, and this chapter seeks to re-evaluate some of its underlying assumptions. The usual narrative traces the ideas of the Organ Reform Movement to continental Europe, where Albert Schweitzer?s impassioned advocacy of Bach?s organ music helped spark the Orgelbewegung, which Richard Taruskin calls ?one of the earliest harbingers of the twentieth-century ?early music? boom? and was already going strong in the 1920s.3 British organ builder G. Donald Harrison is seen as a primary vector for the second stage, carrying the ideas of the Orgelbewegung to America and transforming organ building from the inside by taking over Ernest M. Skinner?s company; the 1940 Tanglewood organ is a product of that takeover. Carl Weinrich and several other American organists promoted Bach performance during those interwar years. After World War II, 1 Craig R. Whitney, All The Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), Kindle edition, 254. 2 Biggs? notes, typewritten on his private letterhead, dated January 1977, in Biggs papers. Quoted in Whitney, 94. 3 Richard Taruskin, ??Alte Musik? or ?Early Music??? Twentieth-Century Music 8, no. 1 (2012): 20, doi:10.1017/S1478572211000260. 50 British-born E. Power Biggs sparked the American Organ Reform Movement as we know it, championing Baroque-style tracker-action organs after his revelatory visits to historical organs in Europe in the 1950s. Excellent accounts of these events already grace the literature, such as Uwe Pape?s The Tracker Organ Revival in America (1977) and Orpha Ochse?s The History of the Organ in the United States (1975). However rich these narratives are, they frame the Organ Reform Movement as a relatively insular story from the pipe organ world. I have painted the usual sequence of events in the broadest of strokes because my goal is not to controvert it, but to broaden its context beyond churches and conservatories to the culture of wartime and postwar America at mid-century. Seen in this broader perspective, the movement was also driven in America by the technological cultural regime that began with World War II, by the spread of new structures of research and knowledge beyond the military-industrial complex, and by Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives that transformed organ music at American universities. This context allows us to understand the organ world?s postwar return to the Baroque as a modernist response to World War II, rejecting emotional Romantic excess. By bridging the worlds of the neo-baroque organ and Cold War technology, I also seek to deconstruct the exaggerated dichotomy between them, promoted by organists and organbuilders eager to differentiate their work from the electronic organs to which they were strangely similar, and by Biggs and his archrival Fox, from whose cult of nineteenth-century virtuosity Biggs sought to distance his own veiled Romanticism. Important for the practice of music, this broader contextualization also allows us to recover midcentury neo-baroque organs from the dustbin of history, re-evaluating them (as a recent issue of the Dutch journal Het Orgel has done for postwar Orgelbewegung instruments) on their own terms as products of a Cold War research culture, rather than trashing them for their historical inaccuracies?inaccuracies that today?s Reform builders and leading organ teachers usually attribute to early ignorance rather than new scientific knowledge. At a moment when institutions like the University of California, Berkeley are replacing major neo-baroque instruments with tracker organs that meet today?s exacting ?historically informed? standards, I wish to point out that a significant proportion of today?s much-championed Baroque organ craft is a product of the technoculture that neo-baroque organs exemplified, and thus a product of today. This chapter builds, as many writings have, on Taruskin?s trenchant critiques of the Early Music movement and historically informed performance (HIP), collected in Text & Act (1995). Taruskin argued that HIP is, despite its name, a modern creation premised on the novelty of unfamiliar historical instruments: ?To put my thesis in a nut-shell, I hold that ?historical? performance today is not really historical; that a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around; and that the historical hardware has won its wide acceptance and above all its commercial viability precisely by virtue of its novelty, not its antiquity.?4 Anything labeled ?historical? is still inevitably a product of its time, and the ?historical hardware? represented by these synthesizer-like neo-baroque organs are postwar technologies that merit closer examination. 4 Taruskin, ?The Pastness Of The Present And The Presence Of The Past,? in Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 102. 51 Engineering the Organ ?The organ appears to possess a fatal appeal to ingenious but not necessarily musical minds,? Biggs groused in his documentary-style ?talking dog record,? The Organ: An Aural and Visual Guide (1958)?an interesting critique from someone who had left the British officers training corps in 1922 to embark on a promising career as a young electrical engineer.5 The field of electrical engineering came into its own in 1882, when the Technische Universit?t Darmstadt founded the world?s first electrical engineering department, followed in America by the University of Missouri, Cornell University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. As the field grew in the early twentieth century, driven by developments in radio, the cathode ray tube, the magnetron, and by the 1940s, computers, so did the interest of engineers in organ building. The first patent in the U.S. for an electric action for the organ was taken in 1869 by Hilborne Lewis Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore), a man widely recognized in his time amongst electricians for inventing crucial parts of the telephone, but known amongst organists as having built some of the country?s largest organs to date with his brother Frank. From the Telharmonium?s telephone line broadcasts to the vocoder?s encrypted wartime communications, the organ was thoroughly enmeshed with telephone engineering during the first half of the twentieth century, and Biggs was correct that such involvements could be dead ends. In the 1930s, organ building even occurred at the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT). Its Paris office, probably the Laboratoire International de Telephone et Telegraph, developed an electronic organ using a radio-frequency beat system of tonal generation.6 But ITT soon refocused on the defense industry in what would prove shadowy ways; its subsidiaries worked for the Third Reich and later with the CIA?s machinations in Latin America.7 In 2007, it became the first major defense contractor convicted for violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.8 It had long ago abandoned organ research fulfill the even more ?fatal? stereotypical image of a sinister global conglomerate. Nonetheless, some of the ?ingenious minds? drawn to the organ had a deep and lasting effect on the direction of the Organ Reform Movement. Engineers with a musical bent flocked to the organ and shaped its development as both a pipe and an electronic instrument. Otto Hofmann studied physics and music at the University of Texas at Austin and collaborated with physics professor and organ expert Charles P. Boner on acoustics research and the rebuilding of older organs. His first independently designed organ, built in 1956 for Matthews Memorial Presbyterian Church in Albany, Texas is generally cited as the first American-built postwar tracker organ, with pipes from Dutch organbuilder D. A. Flentrop.9 His contemporary Lawrence Irving Phelps, also an engineer and acoustician, would gain even greater significance in the Organ Reform Movement as an 5 E. Power Biggs, ?The Record: An Introduction,? in The Organ: An Aural and Visual Guide, compiled and discussed by E. Power Biggs with the sounds of many modern and historic organs, Columbia Masterworks DL 5288, 1958, 33? rpm. 6 Benjamin Miessner, ?Electronic Musical Instruments,? Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 24, no. 11 (November 1936): 1452. 7 Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2003). 8 ?ITT Corporation to Pay $100 Million Penalty and Plead Guilty to Illegally Exporting Secret Military Data Overseas,? U.S. Department of Justice, last modified March 27, 2007, http://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/March/07_nsd_192.html. 9 Richard Kassel, The Organ: An Encyclopedia, ed. Douglas Earl Bush and Richard Kassel (New York: Routledge, 2006), s.v. ?Hofmann, Otto (1918-2001).? 52 influential builder, spokesperson, and author. Phelps studied electronics at the Massachusetts Radio School and engineering at Northeastern University, and went to Holtkamp Organ Company in 1949 to work as a voicer. Predating Marshall McLuhan in deciding that the medium is the message, he viewed the organ as a physical medium that had to be engineered as carefully as its sound was designed. ?Convinced that the organ was not an end in itself, but merely a means of musical communication,? writes Robert Cavarra, ?he became motivated by the precept that effectiveness and function were more important than the mere quality of sound.? Applying a modern ?form follows function? philosophy to studying historical organs, he became ?convinced of the logic and efficiency of certain design principles? such as balance and clarity, values that the Romantic organ was seen as having failed to uphold. If balance, especially from bass to treble, and clarity of ensemble were central to musical artistry, they should likewise be applied to the engineering of the organ console and parts?the medium.10 Phelps? published writings were the first to introduce the concepts of the Orgelbewegung in English, alongside radical theories (now widely accepted) about the effects of windchest design on pipe speech. At the height of his career, he established a department for mechanical action organs at Casavant-Fr?res in 1960 and became president in 1971, marrying renowned organist Gillian Weir the next year. Espousing craft, he scorned electricity and sound synthesis, as conveyed in his 1969 article ?Thoughts on the Future of the Organ?: I often tell my young voicers, when they ask how they can tell if they are producing a good sound, that if they think it can be duplicated electronically, it is a bad sound and will not be acceptable. I have often warned organbuilders and amateurs who pick up the occasional contract by appealing to a certain reactionary element still to be found here and there in America, that the kind of [orchestral] sound they are producing is contributing to the myth that the sound of an organ can be imitated electronically because it is a sound that one does not really need pipes to produce. Strangely enough, thick, opaque [eight-foot-heavy] sound is still being produced with new pipes here and there in America. It is only to people to whom this type of tone is still acceptable that electronics seem an admirable substitute, and it is only to those who still produce this kind of tone that electronics offer serious competition.11 Noting that even the revolutionary technology underlying the Hammond and its competitors had been based on the Romantic, imitative American orchestral organ (against which it was directly pitted in the Federal Trade Commission?s 1937 blind listening tests), Phelps warned that the public taste for electronic organs could only be extinguished by a return to the Baroque organ?s disposition, which featured principal and mixture stops that did not simulate other referents?a precarious logic, considering that Baroque organs also featured dulcians, krummhorns, and other stops meant to evoke early reed instruments, not to mention flutes and vox humanas. ?My answer to modern technology and electronics is more modern technology and mechanical action,? Phelps declared epigrammatically in 1969 before the International Organ Festival at St. Albans. ?Mechanical-action instruments for musicians and electronic instruments for the rest. To this I say a hearty Amen!?12 He must have elicited a cheer at the time, but because of his technical background, he could also come across as highly pragmatic about the limited production capacity of craft Reform workshops relative to demand: 10 Robert Cavarra, The Organ: An Encyclopedia, s.v. ?Phelps, Lawrence I(rving) (1923-1999).? 11 Lawrence Irving Phelps, ?Thoughts on the Future of the Organ,? ISO-Information, Journal of the International Society of Organbuilders 1 (February 1969). 12Ibid., ?Trends in North American Organ Building? (lecture, International Organ Festival, St. Albans, June 28, 1969). 53 The advent of the electronic so-called ?organ? has been, in a way, a major blessing, for if we organbuilders had been required to provide instruments for those several thousand churches now using electronic substitutes, how ever would we have met this need? I have no idea how many churches have electronic instruments, but suppose, for sake of discussion, there are 5,000?[that] purchased them not so much because they were less expensive than a pipe organ but only because they were available immediately and as it seemed the modern thing to do? Where would the required 100,000 ranks of pipes come from? ? Furthermore, in my own business, we obtain many more contracts to replace existing electronic instruments with new pipe organs than the number we lose in direct competition with electronic manufacturers. While this is to some extent related to the rapid, even planned, obsolescence of electronic instruments.13 Mechanical-action builders could count on churches to buy an electronic organ as ?the modern thing to do,? regret its rapid obsolescence, and send their next order for a Reform organ. Given his sometimes acerbic writings, it may seem a stunning about-face that in 1982, Phelps became director of custom organs for the electronic organ giant Allen Organ Company. But the proof was in the pudding: despite the cavernous divide constructed through discourse and oftentimes bitter business rivalry, some organ builders still circulated freely between the worlds of electronics and craft, which thanks to their engineering training were not so far apart. Of the ?ingenious minds? discussed in chapter 1?Harald Bode, Oskar Vierling, Benjamin Miessner, and Charles Boner?none became deeply involved in established pipe organ companies except for Bode, who straddled the worlds of electronic organ building and military electronics at Loewe-Opta in Berlin during the war before joining the American organ building business. Likewise, in the following decades, at least two men linked organ building with the Space Race, creating a broader context of defense research for the Organ Reform Movement?s continued growth. Richard ?Rick? Radcliffe was a senior technician with satellite technology company Space Systems Loral (SSL), which served government and commercial customers, before working for Schlicker, the first major American builder to produce tracker organs, and then going into business independently. And the high-profile career of Winston E. Kock spanned organ building to NASA electronics. A 2004 talk at Bletchley Park by Hans-Joachim Braun attempted to weigh his achievements: ?From electronic organ designer to NASA chief of electronics? could be a popularised abstract of Kock?s professional life. But a phrase like this might be misleading. It could insinuate that there was a spectacular development from something relatively simple ? designing an electronic organ ? to a prestigious high tech appointment, one of the most distinguished an electronic engineer in the United States could get. It has to be pointed out, however, that both fields, electronic organ design and NASA research, can be described as ?high tech?; designing electronic organs in the late 1920s and early 1930s was no less demanding than NASA electronics in the 1960s.14 Kock?s book The Creative Engineer: The Art of Inventing, published by Plenum Press in 1978, is part lucid engineering overview, part inspirational book for interdisciplinarians of the Cold War era, and part autobiography. It lavishes many pages, diagrams, and photographs on his contributions to electronic organ design, from his media-hyped electrical engineering thesis project at the University of Cincinnati, an organ that produced sound with tiny neon tubes, to his formant research, which had broad scientific applications and improved organ sound synthesis. After the war 13 Ibid. 14 Hans-Joachim Braun, ?Music Engineers: The Remarkable Career of Winston E. Kock, Electronic Organ Designer and NASA Chief of Electronics? (lecture, 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics), Engineering and Technology History Wiki, http://ethw.org/images/8/8e/Braun.pdf, 9. 54 made double-triode valves cheaply available, he replaced the neon tubes with valves, and his patented technology went into production by the Baldwin Piano Company, meeting with surprise acclaim in a 1947 issue of The American Organist.15 Baldwin even funded his year at the Indian Institute of Music in Bangalore, where he researched instrumental timbre and acoustics. Like Miessner, the young engineer had developed a fascination with the organ as the greatest model of musical efficiency (via its interface) and inefficiency (the fact that each key-timbre combination required an individual pipe). For a creative engineer, the organ problem was irresistible: it held the greatest promise for building a multifaceted musical extension of man, to co-opt McLuhan?s language again. Kock presented himself as a thoroughly American organ builder and engineer. The Creative Engineer omitted that the Kraft-durch-Freude-Grosston-Orgel played at the 1936 Berlin Olympics was an improved version of the Kock-Vierling electronic organ he designed on the formant principle at the Heinrich Hertz Institute as a graduate student. He also omitted the electrically generated bell sounds he presented at the National Socialist Party Rally in Nuremberg.16 Instead, he focused on his wartime radar and underwater sound research at Bell Labs, where he rose to Director of Acoustics Research in 1951. In the midst of his antisubmarine research at the Bendix Corporation, NASA recruited him in 1964 to direct its new Electronics Research Center, its brief venture into aerospace electronics necessitated by its fundamental dependence on electronics (a substantial portion of its purchases) and its need for internal expertise during the Apollo era. Kock was one of the elite to watch the launch of Apollo 11 from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in 1969, sending Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. In the meantime, a large number of organs were produced over three decades using his technology, and they rivaled the Hammond with their superior reed and string imitations until digital technology superseded analog. Although Kock?s musical career had given way to defense acoustics and aeronautics, he continued to collect appreciable royalties from Baldwin, and in retirement he proudly reprinted a 1933 concert program in The Creative Engineer proving that he had performed Bach?s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) at the Cincinnati College of Music. Following in the fictional footsteps of Jules Verne?s genius inventor-organist Captain Nemo, SSL and NASA men found cultivating the organ and especially Bach irresistible. Although Kock did not develop ties to the Organ Reform Movement, the movement?s sense of urgency was driven partially by graduate research that ended up fueling defense and Baldwin Organ production alike. The interest of these engineer-organ builders in acoustics, sound production, and vocal synthesis framed the terms of organ building in alternative ways, away from training in craftsmanship towards scientific research and experimentation. Men who were organ builders by trade responded with interest. The development of the reform was in fact partially shaped by an influential physics book. In the late 1920s, as young Walter Holtkamp realized that he would soon need to take over his father?s organ building company in Cleveland, he turned not to redoubled apprentice duties in the shop, but rather to exacting study of Dayton C. Miller?s The Science of Musical Sounds (1916). Miller was a physicist (chairing the physics department at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland from 1893 to 1936), astronomer, acoustician, and flautist whose 1,700-item flute collection is now the pride of the Music Division at 15 Rowland W. Dunham, ?A Successful Electrotone,? The American Organist 30 (May 1947): 158. ?My prejudice against electrotones has been rather decided in the past,? he wrote. ?It did not seem possible that the sounds and playing details of an organ could be approached by such a method. This Cincinnati experience changed my opinion completely.? 16 Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 141. 55 the Library of Congress. The topics of his book ranged from waveform analysis of an excerpt from Donizetti?s Lucia di Lammermoor to his experiments using wooden tibia organ pipes to synthesize vowels, eliciting ?ma-ma? and ?pa-pa? from his experimental instrument. According to Joseph Sittler, young Holtkamp?s study of the behavior of sound waves contributed to his rejection of the Romantic organ chamber, which stored the pipes in an adjoining space, in favor of completely open and exposed pipework within the room in which it was to be heard.17 This change was presented as an aid to the performance of Baroque polyphony, while simultaneously yielding the asymmetrical modernist architectural designs for which Holtkamp became famous. As the single most influential organbuilder in the years after World War II thanks to prestigious institutional commissions from Oberlin College and Syracuse University, Holtkamp brought Miller?s scientific, technological thought to the beginnings of the Organ Reform Movement. Sonja Petersen?s article ?Craftsmen-Turned-Scientists? The Circulation of Explicit and Working Knowledge in Musical-Instrument Making, 1880-1960? argues that during the second half of the nineteenth century, trained craftsmen such as piano makers published educational books ?in hopes of establishing a fixed canon of explicit knowledge. This canon, elucidating physics and acoustics to an audience of craftsmen?was intended to replace the craftsmen?s working knowledge.?18 As instrument making was transformed from a craft into an industry, such books allowed scientific methods and knowledge to circulate beyond the scientific community to musical instrument builders. Knowledge that was standardized, formalized, and explicit became necessary in an industrializing field, but still required complementation by working knowledge, which sociologist Douglas Harper defines as (1) learning by doing, mostly informally during childhood?for example, when playing with materials; (2) knowledge of materials, a sensory skill in understanding the characteristics of materials and how they react; and finally (3) kinesthetic sense, a specific ability to control the body while working with materials and tools.19 While such books represented the ?scientification of a craft by a craftsman,? the books by Miller and Kock represented a scientification that came directly from the scientific community rather than from a craftsman serving as its messenger.20 Miller and Kock had to first gain working knowledge in order to reach their scientific conclusions, which then reached organ builders like Holtkamp and organ composers like Henk Badings.21 Having gained an explicit theoretical understanding of the acoustic phenomena he had previously known from his craft, Holtkamp changed organbuilding in a way that directly affected what performers played, how they played it, and how they registered it. The direct, unmediated sound of Holtkamp organs and lack of dramatic swell capabilities virtually ruled out Romantic repertoire and Anglo-American playing technique, and they constructed the Baroque tonal aesthetic as bright and stark, driven by undampened buzzy reeds and aggressive tuttis, and varied through abruptly terraced dynamics. In now-unfashionable midcentury recordings of Holtkamps, 17 Joseph Sittler, ?A Biographical Sketch of Walter Holtkamp?s Evolving Tonal Philosophy,? Holtkamp archives. Quoted in John Allen Ferguson, Walter Holtkamp: American Organ Builder (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), 22. 18 Sonja Petersen, ?Craftsmen-Turned-Scientists? The Circulation of Explicit and Working Knowledge in Musical-Instrument Making, 1880-1960,? Osiris 28, no. 1 (January 2013): 212. 19 Ibid., 216. 20 Ibid., 219. 21 As late as 1957, Henk Badings published an organ photograph from Dayton Miller?s The Science of Musical Sounds (1917) in the popular Dutch magazine AO-Reeks (?Elektronische Muziek? special issue, no. 689, 13 December 1957, p. 14) while working on electronic music at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. 56 one can hear the performative result of the mutually dependent relationship between organbuilders and the engineering community. The technology-inspired approaches of neo-baroque builders are today often chalked up to ignorance and hypocrisy. In The Organ: An Encyclopedia, multiple articles present the use of electric action and electric blowers in neo-baroque organs as bemusingly ironic, when it can also be understood as a logical result of the scientification of organbuilding.22 Electricity was systematically used because even artisanal craftsmen with engineering knowledge were driven by modernist values of optimization. Similarly, the neo-baroque tonal aesthetic is waved off today as an ignorant caricature of certain genuine Baroque organ characteristics, but as Jonathan Ambrosino argues, this impression arises from the misleading use of terms such as ?Romantic,? ?Classic,? and ?neo-baroque? to describe twentieth-century styles of American organ building. ?Everything about Walter Holtkamp?s work was a revolt against what had come before; no facades, no case, Spartan consoles, fluorescent rather than incandescent voicing, and a strict emphasis, through inter-voice and inter-manual balance, on a certain period of organ literature, primarily that of Bach,? he points out, proposing ?anti-romantic? as a substitute for ?neo-baroque? and ?anti-heroic? to describe the style of playing it encouraged, no longer suited to C?sar Franck?s Pi?ce h?ro?que or Wagner transcriptions.23 Dutch organist and harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, who taught many of the leaders of America?s postwar Organ Reform Movement, similarly sought to clarify the terminology in a 1980 television interview by explaining HIP as ?style-less? (stijloze): Leonhardt: [Earlier HIP] was also a style-less way, with another meaning for ?style.? Interviewer: You see it also as ?style-less?? Leonhardt: Yes, it is diametrically opposed to the ideas of the Baroque people [barokmens] to have an attitude?but to free you of nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical ideas?concerning interpretation?was indeed perhaps a necessity. And the young generation today, that has already grown up without the impressions of the nineteenth century making so strong an impression?so that it?s not that necessary anymore.24 To borrow Taruskin?s phrasing, this so-called historically informed practice of building and playing was ?the most modern style around.? Holtkamp?s use of ahistorical elements like electricity, circuitry, and other wartime innovations was the perfect embodiment of the postwar technological reworking of the Baroque. Interestingly, this ?anti-romantic? tonal aesthetic focused on the characteristics of organ tones that were central to the FTC proceedings against Hammond and that would anchor early discourse about sound synthesis. Ambrosino?s characterization of the instruments by Holtkamp contemporary Joseph Whiteford, Harrison?s successor at Aeolian-Skinner, provides a pithy summary. Whiteford?s organs, like the Opus 1388 now in the Crystal Cathedral, are seen today as inconsequential collection[s] of those tonal features prized by the neo-classicists of the 1950s: chiff, thin-toned modified French reeds, the so-called Baroque reeds Aeolian-Skinner had introduced after World War II, disagreeably high-pitched mixtures, and tremendous reduction of fundamental tone? Chiff became an end in itself, often destroying the very clarity it was supposed to aid?high-pitched mixtures began to dominate the ensemble 22 See Richard Kassel?s article on ?Bellows? (62) and Alfred F. Sefl?s article on the ?Blower? (71). 23 Jonathan Ambrosino, ?Present Imperfect: A Perspective on the Past Century of American Organbuilding,? The Tracker 42, no. 3 (1998): 27 and 32. 24 Gustav Leonhardt, interview, Dubbelportret, NOS, September 9, 1980. Transcribed in Dutch by Jed Wentz in e-mail message to author, October 14, 2012. 57 without clarifying anything. The intense, thin chorus-reed tone was in its way just as opaque?the excessive blare and reduced fundamental made for great distortion in chord clusters without ever being melodic; the blare now obscured the notes.25 Like the key-click (inappropriate to orchestral transcriptions) that came to define the Hammond, chiff allowed anti-romantic organs to speak quickly at fast tempi, string-like legato be damned. While the orchestral organ delivered a deep, thick fundamental, having the anti-romantic center of gravity high in the treble register was like fully pulling out a drawbar on a Hammond to maximize its bright harmonics. And while Hammond struggled to convincingly synthesize non-flute stops such as reeds, Holtkamp and Whiteford substituted ?high-decibel? for ?convincing.? None of this is to argue that the anti-romantic disposition was developed in response to the Hammond, but rather that it developed within the same discursive environment as electronic organs?a scientifically literate environment in which sound could be construed as an ADSR envelope, as a fundamental with carefully metered harmonics, and as a signal measured in decibels. Holtkamp did come close to constructing the neo-baroque sound as a synthesized sound in 1940 when he laid out five principles for future organ building. Of interest is his fourth point, that ?the central idea of the contemporary organ movement, as I see it, is the re-establishment of a series of related pipes or tones; in effect a more or less complete harmonic series for each key as the basis or unit of consideration.?26 In John Ferguson?s summary, ?the texture of organ tone must be enriched through reducing the number of fundamental or unison-tone registers and increasing the number of registers of overtone pitch.?27 Holtkamp conceptualized effective tonal design as the FTC conceptualized true sound synthesis, defined by the presence of the complete harmonic series. In a strange echo of the FTC proceedings, Holtkamp nicknamed his game-changing small practice organ the ?Martini? in honor of the cocktail consumed at a 1948 dinner with Fenner Douglass, Arthur Poister, and Grigg Fountain at the Oberlin Inn.28 Over thirty of these improved unit organs were being used at schools and a few churches by Holtkamp?s death in 1962, training students even without an engineering background to hear this synthesizer-like emphasis on upper partials as central to organ tone. By now, the ?early? Early Music movement is widely understood as the jacket-and-tie-sporting?but still rebellious?wing of the 1960s counterculture, as elaborated in ethnographies by Kay Shelemay, Tamara Livingston, John Haines, and others.29 I would like to put that perspective in dialogue with Fred Turner?s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2008). Turner?s book reveals ?a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture.? He points out that ?since the 1960s scholarly and popular accounts alike have 25 Ambrosino, 31. 26 Walter Holtkamp, ?Present-Day Trends in Organ Building,? Proceedings of the Music Teachers National Association (1940), 402. 27 Ferguson, 46. 28 Ibid., 60. 29 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ?Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds,? Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (2001): 1-29; Tamara E. Livingston, ?Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory,? Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (1999): 66-85; John Haines, ?Antiquarian Nostalgia and the Institutionalization of Early Music,? in The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, ed. Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 73-93, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765034.013.011. 58 described the counterculture in terms first expressed by its members?that is, as a culture antithetical to the technologies and social structures powering the cold war state and its defense industries.?30 However, contrary to the perceptions of many in the counterculture of the 1960s and of many scholars since, the two worlds had a great deal in common. They shared a celebration of intellectual work, of technology, and of collaborative work styles. Both reveled in the economic and technological abundance of post-World War II America. The research laboratories of World War II, and the military-industrial-academic bureaucracies that grew out of them, were far more flexible, entrepreneurial, and individualistic places than many remember today. By the same token, certain elements of the counterculture embraced the ideas, the social practices, and the machines that emerged inside the world of military research even as they vocally attacked cold war bureaucracies. Even as they sought to find new ways to live psychologically and socially integrated lives, some members of the counterculture turned toward the heart of technocracy itself in search of tools and models for their work.31 Turner pinpoints the publications of Stewart Brand, particularly the Whole Earth Catalog, as a widely influential means of sharing of ideas between the counterculture, particularly those he terms the New Communalists, and the ?military-industrial-academic bureaucracies.? Likewise, I am arguing that historically informed organ building, as a form of countercultural rebellion, also manifested the influence of the military-industrial-academic complex, a relationship that seen in this light does not invite the usual sense of irony. Individuals who helped shape the Organ Reform Movement from within or without came from strong engineering backgrounds or thought in ways shaped by the scientific texts of their day. The combination of organbuilding and engineering (all of which, at the time, was seen as having potential defense applications) was emblematic of its time, and surprising to us today mainly because of the discursive distinction constructed by those who have carried the Organ Reform Movement into the present tense.32 The Cold War Fulbright Effect Dutch Orgelbewegung leader Flentrop Orgelbouw attributes the fact that the U.S. is its biggest foreign customer to the Fulbright Program, which began sending American students to the Netherlands in 1949. ?Encouraged by Flentrop?s assistance and famous hospitality,? the company?s centennial booklet Flentrop in America relates, ?many eager young ?musical pilgrims? (organists, teachers and organ builders)?visited and investigated many old organs but also came to know the new Dutch organs.?33 As director Dirk ?Dick? Andries Flentrop saw it, those bright-eyed 30 Fred Turner, From Counterculture To Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, And The Rise Of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3. 31 Ibid., 16. 32 Even today, defense funding is a significant driver of computer music research at institutions such as Stanford?s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the University of California, Berkeley, where the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) receives research monies from the Department of Defense. Following a system begun during the cold war, such academic research centers are allowed to freely pursue their research with the understanding that the intellectual property can be claimed by the DOD. For more on CCRMA and cold war research, see Cyrus C. M. Mody and Andrew J. Nelson, ??A Towering Virtue of Necessity?: Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford,? Osiris 28, no. 1 (January 2013): 254-277, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671380. 33 Flentrop in America: Flentrop Orgelbouw 100 jaar, 1903-2003, introd. Cees van Oostenbrugge (Zaandaam, the Netherlands: Flentrop Orgelbouw B.V., 2003), 14. 59 Fulbrighters then turned away from American ?large-scale industrial production? of organs, and instead imported Flentrops to galvanize American organbuilders into a more substantive return to the past than the still self-consciously modern styles of Holtkamp and his contemporaries. Congress established the Fulbright program in 1946 at the instigation of Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) to facilitate cultural exchange between Americans and people from other countries. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State administered the expanding set of fellowships. Senator Fulbright himself was not a musician, only remarking once publicly on pipe organs. Although the Fulbright is still highly visible today as a prestigious grant for music and many other disciplines, it gained governmental traction at the time because it improved America?s still-shaky international reputation for the arts and intellectualism. Perhaps because of the fellowship?s importance in academia, musicologist Kailan Rubinoff is one of only a few scholars to contemplate that geopolitical facet of the Fulbright?s history: For the United States, fostering technological developments and spreading American culture and values are understandable in light of Cold War politics: the Fulbright program, like the Marshall Plan, complemented military and foreign policy goals while promoting a favourable image of America abroad. In this regard, the Netherlands was designated a key strategic country ?. Fulbright and other cultural exchanges between the USA and the Netherlands, including the sponsorship of touring artists, reached a peak in the 1960s, becoming an important form of cultural diplomacy. As the historian James C. Kennedy remarked, cultural exchange ?would turn out to be a long-term commitment in the first decades of the Cold War, when the political and military ties of the Atlantic Alliance seemed to require parallel cultural ties.?34 The Fulbright strategy used the arts and education to cement relations with American allies and to promote intellectual exchange between countries united against the Eastern Bloc. It was this diplomacy funding that provided the primary vector by which a vast institutional material change reached American universities and conservatories, and trickled down to churches, transforming organ education and liturgical practice. The change occurred quite rapidly. As early as the mid-1950s, Ambrosino notes, ?organists now demanded something more like what they had experienced in studying with Hetimann, Walcha, and Heiller on the one hand, Dupr?, Langlais, and Marchal on the other.?35 Between 1955 and 1988, fifteen Fulbrighters also traveled to the Netherlands to study with one teacher, Leonhardt, and untold others to seek instruction elsewhere. Many became prominent organists, harpsichordists, and early music specialists and scholars, including John Fesperman (1955-6), Alan Curtis (1957-8), and Anthony Newcomb (1962-3).36 Imported Dutch examples of organ building further accelerated the demand for historically informed instruments. Journalist and organist Craig Whitney recounts that with Biggs?s Harvard Flentrop organ fresh on their minds, churches imported 200 tracker-action organs by European builders in the 1960s. But by the end of the decade there were twenty-seven American builders like Noack, Fisk, and Schlicker producing tracker instruments?166 of them?over the same period. ?Tracker enthusiasts cheered for the young organists studying in Europe on Fulbright grants, and absorbing the ?truth? about organ style,? the organ historian Orpha Ochse wrote? ?Established organ companies were pictured by 34 Kailan R. Rubinoff, ??The Grand Guru of Baroque Music?: Leonhardt?s Antiquarianism in the Progressivist 1960s,? Early Music 42, no. 1 (2014): 30, doi:10.1093/em/cau026. (Quote from James C. Kennedy: ?Cultural Developments in the Dutch?American Relationship since 1945,? in Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations [Albany: SUNY Press, 2009], 935.) 35 Ambrosino, 32. 36 Ibid. 60 the most extreme tracker backers as insensitive factories that built look-alike machines loaded with unnecessary accessories that only served to distract the performer and divert attention from the music itself.?37 Although Biggs was past his student days in 1954 and recording in Europe on Columbia Records? dime, he too suddenly felt the need to stop playing in unquestioned Anglo-American ways, and to instead come to terms with the mass of European instruments and conduct a kind of media archaeology of the organ: ?For the first time, I became aware of the enormous reservoir, the sum total, of the art of the organ in its building and tonal aspects from five or six centuries?Many things thus suddenly came into focus?the importance of tracker action, of articulate voicing, of the organ case, of the windchest, and so on and on; and particularly the complete interaction of playing action and pipe sound.?38 Organists now had to understand what lay behind the keyboard interface and have that hardware replicated in America. Institutional change began with the Fulbrighters. As they took professorships and influential church posts, they replaced prominent American orchestral organs or early neo-baroque instruments with imported European tracker organs. Their own students, some also converted by Fulbright experiences, then brought about similar changes in churches. Organ builders took note, traveling to Europe and returning to build Baroque-style tracker organs. Performance halls in institutions across the country filled with organs producing a dramatically new ?old sound.? With Flentrop and others as tour guides and Leonhardt and others as teachers, Fulbrighters and others traveling to Europe institutionalized American organ culture in a new way, a way not shaped by the demands of church doctrine or the entertainment industry, but rather by academic and musicological knowledge. Ambrosino breezily traces the many historically conscious builders who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to ?two principal roots: Charles Fisk and the FAN Club of Fisk-Andover-Noack, on the one hand, and John Brombaugh, on the other.? Obviously, this new academicism was not welcomed by the builders and performers it discredited, and it evoked mixed feelings even in its leaders, like Fisk, who resented the burden of history and knowledge (that musicologists are ever hoping musicians will embrace). ?We?re afflicted with a love for antiquities?we know too much,? he lamented at the 1980 Greensboro College Organ and Church Music Conference, in reference to the exacting requirements of different historical national styles. ?If we could go back to being as na?ve as we were twenty years ago, that would be very nice. We could still think that we could solve all these problems in one organ.?39 As a modernist at heart, Holtkamp was especially displeased with the academic, backwards-looking attitude occasioned by the postwar ease of study in Europe. After inaugurating a Holtkamp organ in Corpus Christi Church, New York in 1956, newly anointed Fulbrighter Leonard Raver was warned by Holtkamp ?to remember that he was an American and to come back an American. ?We don?t need to be converted,? was [Holtkamp?s] admonition.?40 Holtkamp?s son and successor to the business became an outspoken opponent of the musicological investments American organ students developed at European instruments. Walter Holtkamp, Jr.?s 1995 retrospective article for The American Organist, ?The Organist, the Organbuilder, and the Musicologist: The Human Imperative for Change? critiqued the relationship 37 Whitney, 219-220. 38 Ibid., 163. 39 Fenner Douglass, Owen Jander, Barbara Owen, and Charles B. Fisk, Charles Brenton Fisk, Organ Builder. (Easthampton, Mass: Westfield Center for Early Keyboard Studies, 1986), 2:157. 40 Ferguson, 86-87. 61 between organists, organbuilders, and musicologists. Organists ?have spent years perfecting their skills.? Organbuilders live ?a lifetime of unrelenting concentration, utterly idiotic attention to details, and an almost saint-like patience with the foibles of our collaborators?the organists.? While these two professions have carried on a ?creative love/hate relationship for about 500 years, these newcomers, the musicologists, have only been with us for the past 50?The musicologist is a product of our times and our preoccupation with the past.?41 This unwelcome third wheel comes in two categories, ?those who root about in dusty tomes? and are ineffectual and harmless, and meddlesome ?musicological activists [who] use their research and the extrapolations from that research to inform, perhaps even coerce, players how to play, and builders how to build.? But he admitted that the musicologist ?is a devil of our own making. In a world that has played the same for 50 years and more, the musicologist has promoted the changes in performance that have permitted us to continue playing that literature. Since the literature has not changed, the styles of playing that literature must change to feed our human need for variety.?42 And ultimately, the Fulbright was to blame, for ?young American organists, fresh from Fulbrights in Europe, [had] tried to ?jump start? the American organ industry into mechanical key action by introducing the European mechanical instruments in our country?. [Then] the musicological activists arrived to propose period-specific instruments and even the outright copying of old instruments.?43 For an Organ Reform Movement scion, Holtkamp, Jr. disdained history, or at least held it in great suspicion. ?As organists fell in love with the past, most organists stopped composing,? he rued, pleading with organists to compose new music again.44 Organbuilders were suffering the same fate: ?I am not sure I think the attempt in our country to reproduce old European instruments will finally be a rewarding endeavor?.Copying is not a creative activity?What composer of any consequence is trying to write new Bach preludes and fugues??45 Yet his firm?s big postwar break reveals an irony to his frustration, for his father owed his postwar importance to the prestige of his first major university commissions by Syracuse and Oberlin, and to a more limited degree, the influence of his correspondence with Dick Flentrop. Yet even this more enlightened postwar historicist movement could not, by definition, enact a true return to the past. The ?enormous reservoir? of Baroque organ technology that Biggs encountered on his famous 1954 European tour was not as old as he assumed, and for that material mass to spread via government-funded fellows to universities and further via students to churches simply occasioned more twentieth-century organ building. In fact, Biggs? initial revelation of the ?baroque? was a nineteenth-century sound. ?How magnificent are the sonorities of Sweelinck?s music as heard in his own church!? he marveled at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. ?One seems never to have heard the music before.?46 But the Oude Kerk instrument was a replacement installed in 1742 by Johann Caspar M?ller and rebuilt in 1869 by Christian Gottlieb Friedrich Witte, long after Sweelinck?s death in 1621. At the Hauptkirche St. Jacobi in Hamburg, Biggs played not the Arp Schnitger instrument Bach had 41 Actually, musicologists were intervening as early as 1909, when a meeting of the International Musicological Society in Vienna issued regulations for organ building based on historical models. 42 Walter Holtkamp, Jr., ?The Organist, the Organbuilder, and the Musicologist: The Human Imperative for Change,? The American Organist 29 (July 1995): 34. 43 Ibid., 35. 44 Ibid., 36. 45 Ibid., 37. 46 Whitney, 161-62. 62 auditioned on in 1720, but one from which the Germans had requisitioned the largest pipes during World War I, and which had been removed in advance of the church?s destruction in 1944, to be reconstructed by Emanuel Kemper according to then-current notions of Schnitger?s style. Those were the sounds presented widely for the first time to the American public on Biggs? ?talking dog? record as the European Baroque. In just a few decades, a cold war diplomacy initiative helped transform the sound of the American organ and fostered a generation of organbuilders, teachers, and performers. Fittingly, it was a former Manhattan Project engineer, who came of age testing detonation devices for the atomic bomb, who led this second stage of the reform. Charles Fisk: From the Manhattan Project to Organ Building As a nine-year-old New England choirboy, Fisk was taking notes on Biggs? struggle to separate the pipe organ as a concert instrument from its audience-thinning churchly associations. The ambitious young Biggs wrote to himself in 1931 that ?herein lies the great disability of the organ?it is a mere prostitute to the church?bought for so much to attract people to the orthodox teaching,? seeing the instrument as a whore because it served a purpose and was not art for art?s sake. (Perhaps the FTC?s attorneys took their cue from him, although they took a pass on his language linking disability with religion.) Biggs was impatient with service to the church and aspired to a concert career, but even his concerts disgruntled him: ?Organ recitals are still essentially church services,? he underlined unhappily in the Boston Evening Transcript review of his Harvard recital.47 When he failed to show up for work one day at Christ Church across from Harvard Yard, the boy Fisk scribbled in his diary, ?Mr. Bigs wasnt [sic] there.?48 Shortly thereafter, Biggs was fired. But they would collaborate in Cambridge another three decades thence, this time to change history. As Ambrosino recounts, even rival organbuilders would quickly acknowledge the importance of the tracker instrument Biggs commissioned from Fisk to replace the 1932 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Harvard?s Memorial Church, noting that ?in 1967, Phelps?while still the artistic director of Casavant?call[ed] the Harvard Fisk the most important new organ project of its day.?49 Fisk was born in Washington, D.C. in 1925 and raised in Cambridge. By high school, he had distinguished himself as a prodigy in electronics and physics. Late in World War II, the tender eighteen-year-old was drafted and sent to J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the Manhattan Project as an electronics technician. He was then transferred to the bomb physics division of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he did testing on the detonation device for the atomic bomb. Afterwards, he studied physics and engineering at Harvard, pursued cosmic ray research at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and started a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at Stanford University. To all appearances, he was destined for a brilliant career within the military-industrial complex. After a few weeks at Stanford, however, Fisk had had enough. His childhood as a chorister who liked to tinker with hi-fi equipment haunted him, and he feared that his research into high-energy physics would haunt him for other reasons. So he transferred to the Graduate School of 47 ?Organ music, well played, can be as engrossing,? Boston Evening Transcript, November 13, 1935, in Biggs papers. Quoted in Whitney, 86. 48 Whitney, 86. From Biggs papers. 49 Ambrosino, 31. 63 Music, doing coursework and studying organ with Herbert Nanney. ?With his clear-framed glasses, tousled brown hair, and plaid shirts, Fisk looked like a university teaching assistant in physics who had somehow wandered onto the organ shop floor,? was Whitney?s endearing description.50 Despite looking out of place, Fisk felt at home and chose a future building organs, not playing them. Fisk?s ascent in the organ world was as dynamic as his ascent in physics. He apprenticed at Holtkamp, which he called ?the most avant-garde American organ builder at the time,? and in 1955 became a partner in the young Andover Organ Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts.51 By 1958, he had purchased the company and renamed it C. B. Fisk, Inc. ?He collected a staff of people like himself,? Whitney observed, ?bright minds with a burning sense of curiosity about how a mechanical instrument could be brought to sound like a living, breathing organism.?52 His likeminded team of craftsmen, artists, and researchers had been assembled ?often by asking prospective hires less about what they knew of organs than about whether they had ever taken a car apart.?53 Fisk loved cars for the same reason he loved organs, expressing ?wonder that a thing made out of bolts et cetera can seem to be so truly alive.?54 Fisk stayed true to his passion for electronics by rebuilding many electric actions in his company?s early years. But as the market changed, driven by Fulbrighters and Biggs converts, he started making research trips to Europe and reached out to Flentrop. With Flentrop consulting, his firm built a two-manual tracker organ with Dutch tonal design for Mount Calvary Church, Baltimore in 1961. While the New Communalists were adopting the open, flexible, collaborative structures of the military-industrial complex, Fisk was adapting the collaborative systems of research and knowledge from the national laboratories to his organ shop floor. Although he demanded much of his employees, he paid them little and redirected the company?s earnings back into research for the production of new instruments. He ran the shop more like a research-intensive laboratory or a freewheeling interdisciplinary university research center fueled by federal funding, rather than a business supported by its earnings, and worked as if against time for a cause far greater than his personal livelihood or those of his employees (and indeed the enemy, Virgil Fox, was at the gate?literally, as he established himself in the late John Hays Hammond, Jr.?s nearby Hammond Castle Museum in 1975). Fisk?s leadership approach even mirrored the collaborative relationships amongst his team of scientists at the Manhattan Project. He engaged his employees daily in ?brainstorming,? day-to-day discussions about how to improve organ building, and his style of teaching involved collaborative dialogue, not instruction.55 Fisk was using the new?the postwar technoculture?to reanimate the old. Eventually, Fisk would come to regret his laser-like focus on research at the expense of his employees? personal welfare. In early 1983, forced to spend a month at Massachusetts General Hospital, he summoned project manager Steven Dieck to his bedside to confess his awareness that he underpaid his workers, and ?apologized for spending the money instead on research and experimentation.?56 50 Whitney, 223-24. 51 Ibid., 225. 52 Ibid., 223-24. 53 Ibid., 233. 54 Charles B. Fisk, ?The Organ?s Breath of Life,? The Diapason 71 (1979): 18. 55 Ibid., 228. 56 Ibid., 232. 64 Despite such later regrets, Fisk?s company built the first large American tracker organs since the nineteenth century, became the first American reform builder to gain international renown, served as a beacon for the first postwar generation of reformers, and pioneered a new reform stage of historical eclecticism. In 1964, his organ for King?s Chapel in Boston was the first three-manual tracker organ built in the country this century, designed in English style for organist and composer Daniel Pinkham. At Biggs? recommendation, Harvard inaugurated his four-manual organ (breaking the previous record) with an Italian baroque positive division in 1967, training the ears of a new student generation with an ensemble of powerful 8? unison foundation stops that finally signaled the end of the strident, synthesizer-like early neo-baroque aesthetic. After an alliance with Flentrop, Biggs had by now became homegrown Fisk?s greatest champion. In 1981, a daring North-German style tracker organ for Wellesley College flaunted its ?uncompromising authenticity? with quarter-comma meantone temperament and split chromatic keys.57 But it was Fisk?s 1979 instrument for House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota that was his magnum opus, and an intentional stylistic departure from the instruments just described. This organ, built beneath a historic carillon tower and again beating Fisk?s Harvard record, pioneered a new historically-informed eclecticism that acknowledged the American expectation that organs play different styles of music, not just the styles to which the local old instrument had been suited for centuries, as in historic European churches. The organ combined deeply studied styles from the North German Baroque, French Classical (really a misnomer for French Baroque), and French Romantic, all tuned in a mildly unequal temperament Fisk developed to still allow the performance of nineteenth-century chromaticism.58 The literalness to history that dogged Holtkamp, Jr. was no longer the law, even among reformers. Fisk?s instruments, central to the educations of many organists, took the reform in a new, more creatively eclectic direction. There is still one curious connection to be explored between Fisk and ideas emerging from the military-industrial complex. During the twentieth century, new electric blowers and regulators enabled a steady and unchanging organ tone, one more like the Hammond than the Baroque organs that had relied on human bellows treaders. Fisk championed freer wind supplies, and his influential essay ?The Organ?s Breath of Life? became a classic of the reform era.59 As usual, his language emphasized that the miracle of the organ was that it was a machine that acted like a living organism, one that reacted and breathed and to which its human players should be able to connect seamlessly. ?The organ is nothing but a machine, whose machine-made sounds will always be without interest unless they can appear to be coming from a living organism. The organ has to seem to be alive,? his article began, oblivious to the storm of responses he would occasion. ?Some people think of the human body as a machine?For the organ, the ultimate source of life is of course the player.? He argued that wind is one of the primary characteristics that ?foster[s] the as-if-alive quality,? and that the fashion for perfectly steady wind was in error. ?The standard test for the wind system of an organ is to draw all the stops, hold a note in the treble, and repeat a thick chord in the bass,? and if 57 Owen Jander, ?Remembering Charles Fisk: During his Adventure with Opus 72?the Wellesley College Organ,? C.B. Fisk, Inc., http://www.cbfisk.com/charles_fisk/memorials/jander1. Fisk and Jander developed the instrument over the course of a decade, with the help of two trips to Europe organized by organist Harald Vogel that focused on Friedrich Stellwagen?s organ at the Jakobikirche in L?beck and the Compenius organ at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark. Dom B?dos de Celles? treatise L?art du facteur d?orgues (1775) served as a primary reference. 58 Fisk?s historical models and sources for the House of Hope organ included Silbermann, Stellwagen, Cavaill?-Coll, the Scherers, and Dom B?dos de Celles. 59 Fisk, ?The Organ?s Breath of Life,? 18-19. 65 the sound does not flinch, the test is passed. ?Yet, when we apply this test to the best instruments of ages other than our own, we find scarcely one that passes it.? He pointed to the Schnitger organ at Steinkerchen in Germany, which ?would positively tip over? during such a test. Yet ?it seems alive. You even seem to hear it breathing,? and the resulting negative and positive pulses that begin and end each note ?mark [italics original] the comings and goings of an inner part [in polyphonic music], instead of simply masking it.? Fisk?s crusade was to replace the standardized, utterly predictable behavior of the electricity-driven modern pipe organ with the unpredictability of an organic life form with which a player had to interact and negotiate. His musical rationale was that Baroque polyphony could finally be rendered with clarity, and he wrote with the righteousness of someone who knew he was on the right side of history, whose beliefs would ?become canon.?60 To return to Turner?s argument, while scientists and elements of the counterculture ?began to imagine institutions as living organisms, social networks as webs of information,? and embraced a ?cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system,? Fisk was conceptualizing the organ and organist as a closed system that would finally generate authentic information?experiential and sonic?about Baroque performance practice.61 It was as if Fisk could never again accept that postwar technology was antithetical to life, as if he was forever rejecting the apocalyptic terms of the Manhattan Project for the utopian terms of the benignly artistic man-machine.62 The military-industrial complex provided an affirming intellectual context for some of his most influential ideas. Having selected a likeminded team, Fisk established a legacy that continued beyond him. In 1992, architect I. M. Pei?s new home for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra included a Fisk whose action was mostly mechanical, but with a servopneumatic device of the company?s design. In Whitney?s account, the device ?made the organ not a machine but almost a living organism, an instrument that was subtly responsive to the player?s every nuance of touch. Jean Guillou, a virtuoso French organist and composer, paid this new Fisk ?servomechanism? the ultimate tribute with a Gallic pun: It was a ?cerveau-m?canisme,? a ?brain-mechanism,? he said, that brilliantly and precisely transmitted the organist?s thought to the valves and the pipes that express it.?63 This cyborgian rhetoric was exemplary of the ideal of seamless man-machine hybrid that had come to characterize HIP organ (and carillon) discourse, thanks in part to Fisk. Phelps? early McLuhanesque reform notion of the organ as a medium, Holtkamp?s efforts to rid the organ of the mediation of its 60 Charles Fisk to Mark Stansbury, 22 October 1971, C.B. Fisk, Inc., http://www.cbfisk.com/sites/default/files/cbf_writings/cbf_writings_03.pdf. 61 Turner, 4-5. The idea of a closed system was articulated by Paul Edwards to explain cold war thought. Turner explains that during the cold war, ?the planet was transformed into a closed informational system for purposes of military command and control. Cognitive psychologists in turn began to imagine that the brain was a form of digital hardware and its actions a form of software, that thinking was a type of computing and memory simply a matter of data retrieval. Together, such analogies supported what Edwards has called a ?closed world discourse?.? (17) 62 Fisk was not alone in his career switch from the military-industrial complex to the construction of public musical instruments. In 1988, young electrical engineer Keith Donovan joined Texas Instruments, Inc. to design night-vision systems for Abrams tanks. ?I don?t have any moral problems about what I was doing. I felt like I was helping save solders? lives,? he told IEEE Spectrum in 2005. ?But, you know, tanks kill people.? Although he had no prior interest in carillons, in the mid-1990s he became the sole electrical engineer for the Verdin Company, building and installing electronics to automate the carillon company?s bell and clock installations. (J. Kumagai, ?Keith Donovan: The Tintinnabulator,? IEEE Spectrum 42, no. 2 (February 2005): 32.) 63 Whitney, 236. 66 chambers and cases to achieve a transparent International Style look and sound, had both given way to the absence of mediation?human and machine were simply one. In a moment whose importance hearkens back to the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, when Californian wines beat their French counterparts in a blind test, Lausanne Cathedral ordered an organ from Fisk in 2001. Echoing the FTC?s fixation on food metaphors to malign Hammond, an offended Swiss organbuilder sniffed that the instrument would have ?the flavor of hamburger.? A Swiss official found himself defending the selection, telling 24 Heures that ?we were convinced not only by the quality of Fisk?s organs, but also by the scientific spirit of the enterprise.?64 This new record?the first American pipe organ in a European cathedral?made it clear that the Organ Reform Movement?s legacy could hold its own against that of the Orgelbewegung?through its historical expertise, and just as importantly, through its science. As Ambrosino noted, the ?F.A.N.? club led by Fisk had its counterpart in the group led by John Brombaugh, who carries on the new eclecticism to this day. Brombaugh, born in 1937, did his graduate studies in electrical engineering and acoustics, as was the cold war fashion, at Cornell. Like Fisk, he used his engineering training thoroughly in his early career, spending a year at Baldwin working on the electronic organs Kock had pioneered. He received seven patents for his work on electronics between 1964 and 1968, including designs for delay lines and artificial reverberation for electronic organs, chiff generators to achieve speech ?perfection in electronic organs? that was clearly defined by neo-baroque fashions, and a means of mounting percussive systems in such organs to simulate the theater-organ sounds of bells, bars, and plucked or struck strings at different rates of decay.65 To his contemporaries, the young Brombaugh might have seemed more of a Winston Kock than a reformer. Even during his apprenticeship with Fisk (1966-7) and German builders Fritz Noack and Rudolf von Beckerath in historical building practices, he was being assigned electronic organ patents. Pivotal to Brombaugh?s reorientation was listening closely to Biggs?s recordings on tracker instruments at home and abroad. Despite, or perhaps because of, his success in electronics, he commenced in the 1960s with leading the ?second generation? of reformists, building tracker instruments that brought together German, French, and Italian Baroque stops, flexible winding, and unequal temperament (but initially with electric stop controls, as at Lorain). Born on the eve of World War II, Brombaugh was a product of the American science and engineering race, and it was thanks to the organ?s engineering appeal that his new eclecticism is now an icon of historically informed organbuilding. The ?Fox Touch? and ?Electric Power Biggs? There is no entry for ?Fox, Virgil? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, where one would expect it to fall between ?Fowkes, Bruce? and ?Frame.? Countless obscure organ terms and builders are lovingly defined in this expansive reference tome, yet not a sentence acknowledges Biggs? greatest and most colorful competitor. Why this historical lacuna? Should an organist be written out of history for defying the ideology of the Organ Reform Movement? 64 Ibid., 240. 65 John B. Brombaugh. Electronic organ with chiff. US Patent 3,333,042, filed October 2, 1963, and issued July 25, 1967. 67 While esoteric debates about winding, pressures, actions, scalings, key measurements, dispositions, breaks in mixtures, and so on were being carried out in academic institutions, organ shops, conferences, and specialist journals, the rivalry between Biggs and Fox gave a public face to the Organ Reform Movement and its critics. For his voluminous contributions to the recording industry, Biggs became the only organist with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Fox counted his countercultural stardom at venues like the Fillmore East (as well as pop appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and Mike Douglas Show, where he dueled with Liberace) as ample proof of his own cross-demographic celebrity status. For Whitney, ?Virgil Fox was a polarizing figure, and at the opposite pole was his leading rival, E. Power Biggs. Their vividly contrasting artistic personalities would come to symbolize the radically different approaches to the instrument that also divided the leading organbuilders of the day.? These archenemies embodied the ?twentieth-century American struggle for the soul of the organ.?66 My final argument in this chapter is that the seemingly immense divide between Fox and Biggs, like the divide between electronic organ building and the neo-baroque or between the counterculture and the military-industrial complex, was bridged by modernist attitudes that the two held in common. Whitney?s summary is one of many that perpetuate a clear-cut dichotomy constructed by Fox and Biggs themselves?particularly by Fox, whose audience-rousing rejections of the score-worshipping HIP ?purists? did much to publicize and caricature reform ideology and orthodoxy. Ambrosino has issued one of the few critiques of the Biggs-Fox Baroque-Romantic dichotomy, which turns out to have been convenient and simplistic?Biggs was a romantic player who, at the end, had certainly mastered an anti-romantic clipped manner: the ?hot-stove? style. But even in to the 1950s, Biggs? persistent legato in Bach, vocal phrasing and overall elegance was no more ?authentic? than Landowska?s Pleyel harpsichord?[He was] a musician who knew how to strike a public posture. As for Fox, Ambrosino points to ?his orchestral conducting counterpart ? another organist, Leopold Stokowski? to suggest the tradition he epitomized. ?If Biggs was a romantic player with classic attachments, Fox was an essentially romantic player with ultra-romantic attachments, with the American classic specification as his registrational point of departure.?67 While both were trained in an essentially Romantic style, their shared focus on Bach drove them to differentiate themselves through, for Biggs, leading a campaign for a more ?historically informed? (essentially, more modernist) style of Bach performance, and for Fox, a campaign to bring Bach to life through the technological sublime. Contrary to popular belief, Biggs never quite left behind his Romantic style, and Fox could play Bach with as much detached articulation as he pleased. Fox and Biggs were already alike in chafing at their field?s nearly obligatory church organ duties, and both successfully sought career alternatives in the latest technological solutions.68 Biggs became a prolific recording artist who, by insisting on being his own sound engineer and editor, applied the latest audio technology innovations to capture historic organ sounds and bring them to new generations for whom attending a live concert was merely one listening mode in a hi-fi world. 66 Whitney, introduction, n.p. 67 Ambrosino, 33. 68 The antagonistic series of letters between John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Fox over his spotlight-stealing behavior while leading liturgical music at Riverside Church services is colorful reading in itself. 68 Later, Fox found his salvation from the church and its limitations on his performativity by touring with electronic organs, filling youth venues with walls of ear-splitting glorious organ sound where elderly church concertgoers would never dare set foot. Both organists made it their main crusade to bring Bach to the general public, to the point where Fox led congregational singing at some of his psychedelic ?Heavy Organ? concerts. The church responded to Fox?s uncooperativeness in kind. In 1953, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. warned Fox in a letter against continuing to act like a rival soloist to the other musicians during services at the Riverside Church he had co-founded with preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick. ?Suppose you tell your cook you want your eggs soft boiled and she persists in serving them to you hard boiled and when you speak to her about it, she tells you she knows how eggs should be cooked and in what form they are most appropriate for your table. Would you not feel that since you were paying her salary, you should have the eggs as you wanted them irrespective of her judgment in the matter??69 he demanded in frustration. Following on the legacy of the FTC, metaphorical food fights continued to break out over organ timbre and volume, all boiling down to whether the organ was a church or concert instrument. Although both Fox and Biggs fled the church into the arms of technology, it was former engineer Biggs who became a master of technology even as he was hailed a master of the Baroque. ?He is especially good at mathematics and science and, in my opinion, should do very well in this direction,? Hurstpierpoint College headmaster A. H. Coombes had said of the young Biggs as he embarked on his short-lived electrical engineering career.70 As an organist, Biggs put that mathematical mind to work with gusto. Previously, organs had sounded unsatisfactory on recordings and broadcasts because microphones could not capture their full frequency and dynamic range. Listeners missed the high and low extremes and dynamic contrasts that made the organ glorious rather than irritating, registrations that sounded balanced in the hall emerged unbalanced from loudspeakers, and tech-savvy organists had to turn legato into staccato passages for polyphony to be heard.71 If the organ as an instrument includes the architectural space in which it resonates, then half the instrument was lost on dry recordings because microphones had to be placed close to the pipes. Biggs realized that the improved recording technologies available after World War II could solve those problems. Microphones could now capture a wider frequency and dynamic range, and just as importantly, could be placed far back from the organ pipes to capture a church?s magnificent reverberant acoustics.72 One might dub the man ?Electric? Power Biggs to describe his galvanizing organ playing and the means by which he made it known.73 The young Biggs had prided himself on mastering a panoply of styles and championing edgy music from Charles Ives to Howard Hanson to Roy Harris. ?I?m very anxious that these Bach 69 Quoted in Whitney, 141. 70 E. Power Biggs Collection, American Guild of Organists Organ Library, Boston University School of Theology (?Biggs papers?), letter dated March 15, 1922. Quoted in Whitney, 81. 71 Harry Ellingham, ?Broadcasting Organ Recitals,? The Musical Times 80, no. 1156 (June 1939): 417-19. 72 Biggs wrote that ?for about a thousand years organs have inhabited cathedrals and other spacious auditoriums, and with a consequent independence the instrument refuses to be thrust into the present day ?acoustically treated? studios. Resonance is the priceless ingredient which gives the organ and its music character and splendor. The measure in which this essential quality can be transferred to records is the measure of the records? excellence.? (Barbara Owen, E. Power Biggs, Concert Organist [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 90.) 73 I thank Richard Taruskin for telling me about this nickname, which he heard used by Joel Newman at Columbia University. 69 recitals shall not label me a ?specialist.? I revel in all organ literature and play Sowerby, Vierne, Widor, Karg-Elert, etc. with as much gusto as J. S. B.,? he wrote to The American Organist in 1937 while performing Bach?s complete organ works on the Harvard Germanic Museum instrument (one of those awkward transitional neo-baroque Harrison organs) (Figure 1).74 But as he reinvented himself as a Baroque performer, he also reinvented himself as a recording and broadcasting engineer and entrepreneur. ?The organ has been thoroughly abused and discredited in its use on the radio. With the technical progress of broadcasting, as of recording, organ tone can now be transmitted faithfully, and the time seems ideal for a really striking series of organ concerts, covering the finest compositions of the very large repertoire,? he wrote enterprisingly to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1941. He proposed that she sponsor a weekly radio program at the Germanic Museum organ. She graciously sponsored this and many more of Biggs? radio ventures. Figure 1. Expressionist poster engraved by Crawford Livingston for E. Power Biggs? twelve-concert series of Bach?s complete organ works at the German Museum at Harvard University, 1937-1938. Biggs is i l luminated in a shaft of l ight that draws more attention to the pipes than his f igure. (American Guild of Organists Organ Library) On Sunday, September 20, 1942, Mr. Biggs decidedly ?wasnt [sic] there? at church, for at 10 a.m. he was inaugurating his live WEEU-AM radio show with a Baroque program featuring Handel?s Organ Concerto No. 2, Daquin?s ?The Cuckoo,? Bach?s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and his own transcription of the aria ?Sheep May Safely Graze? from Cantata No. 208. His well-loved series, especially welcome during the war, ran for sixteen years. In 1945, he broadcast the complete organ works of Bach, but also persuaded Charles Ives to dig out his organ scores from his barn. On July 4, 1948, Biggs introduced America to Variations on America and made it one of his signature pieces.75 He was no Baroque ?purist? yet, not even by the time he had achieved national fame. 74 Owen, E. Power Biggs, Concert Organist, 42. 75 Whitney, 103-4. 70 Biggs continued to advance as a sound engineer who used the newest technologies in the service of the past. In 1945, the New York Times marveled that ?he is forever conducting experiments to achieve the best microphone pick-up and is now getting such good results that [radio] listeners throughout the nation, and the world for that matter, have written their appreciation.?76 The problem with organ concerts had not been with the ears of listeners, but with the technical ignorance of organists. Biggs? sound engineering could reach the level of obsession, as Whitney recounts. Better nothing at all, Biggs believed, than music that was not the real thing, as he made clear to Eastern Air Lines, United Airlines, and Delta Airlines in identical letters sent on April 17 of 1963. ?May I please suggest that the canned music you inflict on your captive audience during the half hour or so of loading is really most unwelcome. As you must know, it?s just musical drivel, from which, unfortunately, there?s no escape,? he fumed. ?You really should have no music at all during the period.?77 Accustomed to perfecting his own soundscapes in church, he sought to engineer the modern consumer airline soundscape to adhere to his ideals about attentive listening and music as autonomous art. As important to the Organ Reform Movement as his Harvard broadcasts were Biggs? recordings of historic European organs, for which he again enlisted the newest technology. For his first recording tour to Europe in 1954, his producer at Columbia Records proposed that he bring a small tape recorder. He and his wife Margaret brought five hundred pounds of tape recorders, cables, microphones, and generators instead. In 1957, Flentrop accompanied them on their second tour and marveled at their enterprising attitude. This time, they had jammed a Volkswagen minibus with ?178 reels of tape, two 28-pound Ampex speakers, a 29-pound Ampex 350 tape recorder, a Telefunken condenser, microphones, 500 feet of microphone cable, 200 pounds of power units, and much else.?78 Biggs was his own performer and his own roadie, although he rather came to regret it on that trip. In 1974, he was still striving towards newer, better ways to reproduce the glory of organ sound on home stereos. He released a quadraphonic record of four Bach toccatas and fugues played simultaneously on the four separate organs in Freiburger M?nster, which could be played together from a general console in the chancel.79 For this singular effort, he as usual did much recording and editing himself, and the result is a massive, Frankenstein-like organ surround sound in which each note is doubled across multiple octaves and the thickened textures are positively chewy, requiring mostly staccato playing. In place of a Baroque organ record, Biggs gave his audiences a Romantic sublime produced from neo-baroque organs built in the 1960s. Sometimes, his technological zeal directly contradicted the logic of reform: to record Handel?s organ concertos on an instrument from the composer?s time, he had an underground power line laid to the Parish Church of St. James and had the pipes cut short to match the pitch of the London Philharmonic?essentially vandalizing a historical instrument for the sake of a historically-informed recording project. 76 T. R. Kennedy, Jr., ?Triple Keyboard Expert,? New York Times, August 5, 1945, 45. 77 Whitney, 175-76. 78 Ibid., 165-66. 79 E. Power Biggs, Bach: The Four ?Great? Toccatas And Fugues / The Four Antiphonal Organs of the Cathedral of Freiburg Played Simultaneously By E. Power Biggs, Columbia Masterworks MQ 32933, 1974, quadraphonic LP. 71 Figure 2. Album cover of Columbia Masterworks? quadraphonic LP Bach: The Four ?Great? Toccatas And Fugues / The Four Antiphonal Organs of the Cathedral of Freiburg Played Simultaneously By E. Power Biggs (1974). The tower suggests t imeless monumentality, while the inset photographs emphasize that the four-channel recording feeds the ear with four different organ signals s imultaneously. For several years, Biggs even aspired to film production to bring the organ beyond church to the masses. In 1945, he wrote to Walt Disney proposing an animated short for which he would play Christmas organ music. He was evidently inspired by Stokowski conducting his orchestral transcription of Bach?s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for the opening sequence of Fantasia (1940), the first film to use surround sound after Disney took inspiration from research at Bell Labs. In 1950, Biggs sketched a film about Bach for the composer?s bicentennial, recruiting the Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood to write the script.80 Neither venture succeeded, and Biggs stuck with the recording industry from then on. As if to one-up Stokowski, his 1955 album Toccata in D Minor (A Hi-Fi Adventure) repeated the famed work on fourteen different organs in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and England. This ?High Fidelity survey of historic instruments as a Study in Organ Tone and Construction,? as the back cover proclaimed, was sure to satisfy the geekiest of connoisseur listeners and hi-fi enthusiasts.81 In the twilight of his life, Biggs sought to engineer the impossible: in 1976, he sketched plans for a record that would combine his playing at St. Thomas Church in New York with the corresponding choir of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, a ?reverberation of 3,000 miles? that would allow consumers to listen to two continents via microphonic ears.82 This techno-geographic fantasy of simultaneity was never realized, but the ailing Biggs could look back on a long and highly successful career pioneering the use of new media to promote the old medium of the organ through its technical, scholarly, and musical appeal. I have already quoted from the LP that proved most important to the Organ Reform Movement, definitively titled The Organ and issued by Columbia Masterworks (DL 5288) in 80 Rev. Phillips Endecott Osgood was rector of St. Mark?s Church in Minneapolis, known for his fiery oratorical skills as well as his membership in the Minnesota Eugenics Society (Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 124). 81 E. Power Biggs, Toccata In D Minor (A Hi-Fi Adventure), Columbia Masterworks ML 5032, 1955, LP. 82 Whitney, 184. 72 1958.83 This ?aural and visual guide? featured Biggs? voice expounding on 125 excerpts played on historic and new organs. The Organ Reform Movement?s conversation about organ tone, mechanics, registration, and performance technique was now accessible to the general public. The ideology of his manifesto was clear: he dismissed electronic organs as being ?well adapted to nightclubs? but ?inadequate for presentation of organ music.? The best organs offered a tracker connection that made the keys ?an extension of one?s own fingers??that hybrid man-machine analogy again. The deluxe production came packaged with a thirty-nine-page bound album featuring illustrated articles by Biggs, Flentrop, Metropolitan Museum of Art musical instrument curator Emanuel Winternitz, Biggs? producer John McClure, and a foreword by Albert Schweitzer, instigator of the Orgelbewegung himself. In 1969, Biggs issued another audiobook, The Organ in Sight and Sound, with another essay by Flentrop.84 Figure 3. The i l lustrated book accompanying E. Power Biggs? LP The Organ: An Aural and Visual Guide (1958). On a dime, Biggs could turn from being an engineer to a Luddite, even on his first audiobook. ?The organ appears to possess a fatal appeal to ingenious but not necessarily musical minds,? he wrote in his introduction. In the nineteenth century, the organ, previously as responsive as a harpsichord, was turned into something approaching a machine. Its measure came to be volume and number of stops. Voicing ideals were based largely on imitation of the orchestra. Pneumatic and electric actions provided the player with a set of telegraphic ivories instead of the sensitive keyboard of direct tracker action. Attacking the twentieth-century mutual relationship between the organ and telecommunications innovations, Biggs shot down the concepts of ?telegraphic? keys, orchestral simulation, and the organ as machine in favor of the Baroque organ as extension of man. Yet even the cyborg ideas he promulgated remained modernist and bound up with the technological and cybernetic ideas of his 83 E. Power Biggs, The Organ: An Aural and Visual Guide, compiled and discussed by E. Power Biggs with the sounds of many modern and historic organs. Columbia Masterworks DL 5288, 1958, 33? rpm. With articles by Biggs, Emanuel Winternitz, Dirk A. Flentrop, and John McClure, and foreword by Albert Schweitzer. 84 E. Power Biggs, The Organ in Sight and Sound, Columbia Masterworks KS 7263, 1969, LP. 73 time. By denigrating the ?fatal appeal? of the organ to the engineering mind, Biggs was erasing his own history. There is no doubt that Biggs came to epitomize the straitlaced performance that characterized postwar constructions of HIP, but his style was not as resolutely anti-romantic as his rivalry with Fox portrayed him. He had trained to play in the dominant Anglo-American style, with overlapping legato and ample crescendos and decrescendos with the swell, and he relished nineteenth-century repertoire and new music alike. His signature renditions of Ives? Variations on America were zany and capricious. It was really after his European tours and resulting hit album releases that his articulation changed to fit HIP expectations. His touch became increasingly staccato. His formerly steady tempi became positively motoric?the famous opening of Bach?s Toccata in D minor resembled a finger etude by 1971, and near-jauntiness replaced the drama of the Fugue.85 The most shocking diminished harmonies of the Fantasia & Fugue in G minor (BWV 542) would arrive right on the beat, matter-of-factly and without fanfare, yet Biggs kept his touch surprisingly legato, revealing a continued allegiance to Romantic performance.86 It seems clear that he was aiming for the ?style-less? style that Leonhardt would later articulate, oriented more towards the nineteenth century (in his attempt to reject it) than towards the Baroque (in his attempt to affirm it). His unrelenting use of plenum registrations on Bach albums tires the ears, and the moto perpetuo of his playing at times suggests the ?organ as machine? metaphor that he despised. ?Anti-romantic? goes farther in explaining this expressive performer?s turn towards the ?click-track Baroque,? or even more disparagingly, the ?sewing machine Baroque? that Fox considered the death of Bach performance. Nevertheless, Biggs continued to revel in his pre-neo-baroque interests. He acted the theater organ showman in 1973, wowing audiences at the ?mighty Wurlitzer? in Radio City Music Hall and wrapping up his concert with an over-the-top performance of John Philip Sousa?s ?The Stars and Stripes Forever? with ten pianos. Even when he looked the ultimate academician with his pedal harpsichord, the albums he released on it were of all things, two volumes of E. Power Biggs Plays Scott Joplin (?After 25 years with Columbia Records, E. Power Biggs is in Rags!? was a suggested advertising slogan).87 Biggs was romantic, Biggs was popular, but most of all, Biggs promoted a modernist style of neo-baroque performance practice because it brought him the concert and recording career that the church could not. While Biggs styled himself in the suits of an English gentleman, finished with a folded pocket square, Fox swished about in a luxurious red-lined cape and rhinestone-studded organ shoes. Biggs retained his British accent, while Fox used terms of endearment with everyone he met. Whitney encapsulated Fox?s flamboyant comportment with an anecdote from the Riverside Church, where his celebrity demeanor was seen as a poor match for the sober services he was supposed to play: 85 E. Power Biggs, Bach: Great Organ Favorites, recorded between 1960 to 1971, CBS Masterworks MK 42644, 1989, CD. 86 E. Power Biggs, Bach: Toccata & Fugue, Passacaglia & Fugue, Pastorale, recorded 1960, 1964, and 1971, Sony Classical SBK 46551, 1991, CD. 87 Whitney, 180-81. The LP was released in 1973 by Columbia Masterworks (M 324950). 74 Dr. Norris L. Tibbets, one of the most dignified senior ministers at Riverside, was once startled by a greeting from Fox at the organ console, ?How good to see you, Honey!? Dr. Tibbets replied, offended, ?I?m not your honey, and kindly never address me that way again!?88 Yet both organists were affecting European aristocracy through their sartorial branding, and the Illinois-born Fox was especially keen to emphasize his European musical pedigree. He studied at the Peabody Conservatory with Dutchman Louis Robert, former organist of the famed 1738 Christian M?ller organ at the Grote of Sint-Bavokerk in Haarlem?albeit just for one year, during which the prodigy played five recitals by heart, completed his diploma requirements, and achieved the school?s highest examination grades. He out-Dupr?d Dupr? in mastering detached playing even before his first lesson with the articulation-obsessed Paris Conservatoire teacher.89 And he always cited Wilhelm Middelschulte, one of the world?s leading Bach performers, as the single most important influence on his style, despite the fact that the German organist had taught him in high school in Chicago.90 For the rest of his life, Fox publicly traced his lineage to the German Bach school, even as he sometimes used that authority to take liberties with his Bach interpretations. In 1975, he laid claim to the legacy of the early Orgelbewegung (kept at a safe distance from its American counterpart) as the first chairman of the Albert Schweitzer Music Award, established calculatingly by his closest associates. Fox saw no use in cultivating a public profile as an HIP proponent when he could simply be a Bach champion. His opponents skewered his ?inauthentic? Bach renditions, and he gladly encouraged this unwitting assistance with branding his ?red-blooded Bach,? which under his messianic slogan ?Bach lives? brought the organ to life as Fisk aspired, albeit in a decidedly different manner (Figure 4). However, his recordings were rarely entirely Romantic in style, often demonstrating a knowledgeable investment in his contemporaries? anti-romantic performance practice ideas. Having already cemented his anti-HIP notoriety at Bill Graham?s Fillmore East and Winterland Ballroom venues with electronic ?Heavy Organ? concerts, he gave his stump speech to a screaming audience at his 1973 ?Heavy Organ at Carnegie Hall? appearance. ?I?m here to tell you that if the greatest music in the world is lined up on this side, and then Bach, still greater, on this side, he?s not going to be under a dusty case in a museum next to a comb that some dead queen wore in her hair three thousand years ago. Not on your life!? Yet what followed this opening salvo against the ?purists? who ?talk about it and can?t do it? was a steady, dignified performance of the chorale prelude on ?Wir glauben all? an einen Gott? (BWV 680) with a top-heavy neo-baroque plenum, using a staccato detachment in the manuals (brought into even sharper relief against his legato pedalwork) that would have made a reformist?s eyes water. His performance elicited screams and whistles, although it clearly made use of the ?hot stove style? he had scathingly referenced. The subsequent chorale prelude on ?Nun freut euch, lieben Christen? (BWV 734), though at breakneck speed, again reflected neo-baroque registration and staccato articulation. It was not until the third Bach selection, his transcription of the finale ?Wir setzen uns mit Tr?nen nieder? from the St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), that he discarded HIP altogether. 88 Whitney, 140. Not all church authorities disliked Fox?s demeanor, of course?having helped the Crystal Cathedral in southern California design its Ruffatti organ, Fox died a well-loved man in that megachurch. At a public celebration of his life there, televangelist Robert Schuller memorably opened his eulogy, ?Well, Honey?? (213). 89 Whitney, 125-26. 90 Richard Torrence, ?Organs on Broadway! Honoring Virgil Fox,? The American Organist 39 (September 2005): 66-67. 75 Figure 4. 1971 poster for ?Heavy Organ? at Winterland, San Francisco. Pablo Lights provided l ightshows for many of Fox?s Rodgers Organ concerts unti l i t was replaced by Revelation Lights in 1972. The poster cleverly combines psychedelic imagery with the design of a Gothic rose window. Fox?s ploddingly slow, legato performance, enlivened with a subtle tremulant, unabashed crescendos and decrescendos, orchestral colors, and frequent manual changes, brought a dramatic theater-organ sensibility to the St Matthew Passion. The theater organ also underlay his signature Bach showstopper, ?Come Sweet Death? (every Bach program and record liner gave Bach?s titles in English). In 1939, he had transcribed Stokowski?s Philadelphia Orchestra arrangement of ?Komm, s??er Tod, komm selge Ruh? (BWV 478) from the RCA Victor disc, and perfected otherworldly registrations for it on Philadelphia?s gargantuan Wanamaker theater-style organ over the course of eight visits. The organ?s 6,000-pipe string division ?wraps its sound around you?and squeezes,? a fan explained of the performance, which earned a standing ovation from the organists gathered for the American Guild of Organists convention.91 The style that Fox was accused of foisting on Bach, now dismissed as ahistorical or as a Romantic affectation, was inspired by the more recent style of silent film accompaniment than by Chopin. The ?hot stove? staccato touch and the connected legato that ?squeezes? could coexist without special note on Fox?s programs. In fact, some of his Bach performances might today be judged more historically ?correct? than Biggs? in using more flexible ideas about tempi and registration to emphasize structural contrasts. Taking a postmodern approach, Fox employed either interpretive style as it suited him. Although Fox did not align himself with HIP, he espoused the same cause c?l?bre as Biggs to bring forth Bach?s organ works from the church to the general public. He verbally introduced each piece in concert, and his opening speech was usually to the effect of ?I honestly believe that Sebastian Bach is glad you are here!?, emphasizing the Lutheran German?s familiarly Anglo Rufname as if he were alive. His pep talks used the same strategy that Early Music performers had adopted to educate 91 Whitney, 126-27. 76 audiences to appreciate unfamiliar sounds.92 Bach became as central to Fox?s brand as his flamboyant outfits. Of the more than sixty records he released over the course of his career, many contained multiple Bach works. At his Heavy Organ concerts, psychedelic light shows were distinguished by ?Bach?s stern features popping up occasionally,? as fellow electronic organist Carlo Curley recounted.93 While Fox claimed to be diametrically opposed to the ?purists,? he was actually mainly opposed to limiting performance to a single style that located the work in the notated score, as he told his Heavy Organ audience: I am at open warfare with a gang of creeps who call themselves purists?These oddballs call [the Fugue in G Minor (BWV 578)] the ?Little? Fugue. They put on an eight- and a two-foot stop; you don?t know what that means, but it?s just a boop on one end and a boop on the other, and they sit there playing their little typewriters like note-pushing nobodies during this piece.94 Fox used the metaphor of the typewriter to scornfully emphasize the importance Early Music practitioners placed on score studies and the interpretive limitations that such textual fidelity occasioned.95 He sometimes respected those limitations, and sometimes ignored them in favor of showmanship. For him, the work of art was not in the text?mere mechanical encoding?but in personal interpretation and reception. Like Biggs, Fox saw the church as a stuffy, irritating impediment to his concert career. And like Biggs, he turned to technology for a solution. But lacking his rival?s technical expertise, Fox found his biggest career break in the production of a totally different kind of technological musical sublime. And he went a step further by extending his reach far beyond churchgoers to the youth counterculture, of which the Early Music movement was a bespectacled counterpart. By this time, Hammond and Baldwin had ample competition in the electronic organ market. A major competitor arose from oscilloscope leader Tektronix, a company founded in 1946 during the postwar research boom. Founders C. Howard Vollum and Melvin J. Murdock introduced two major innovations, the first time-base triggered oscilloscope and later the plug-in oscilloscope. During a brief downturn in 1957, Tektronix invited its engineers to propose new products. Rodgers Jenkins (an organ enthusiast) and Fred Tinker (who knew little about organs until invited by his church as an electrical engineer to chair its electronic organ selection committee) proposed to build electronic organs. Although the board rejected the idea, Vollum, a theater organ enthusiast, and Murdock helped them start their own business. The Rodgers Organ Company became the second manufacturer of solid-state oscillator-based organs, completing their first instrument with vacuum-tube amplifiers in 1958. In 1962, Rodgers introduced solid-state amplifiers, producing the first all-transistor organ. 92 Fox did not trace his mini-lectures to the Early Music movement, of course. ?I?ve always talked to my audiences,? he told the New York Times in 1974. ?Years ago I was playing a concert at a church in Augusta, Georgia. The third piece was the Fantasy in G minor of Bach, and I said to myself, ?My God, these 3,000 Georgia crackers won?t have the slightest idea of what?s going to happen. I have to tell them.? That was a milepost in my earth-existence. I even played much better. By talking, the artist can get rid of himself, get rid of his nerves.? (Richard Dyer, ?Who Is the World?s Best Organist? Ask Virgil Fox,? New York Times, September 29, 1974, 34.) 93 Carlo Curley, In the Pipeline: Memoirs of an International Concert Organist (London, HarperCollins, 1998), 77. 94 ?Virgil Fox Heavy Organ,? YouTube video, 9:42, from an early 1970s performance, posted by ?ShandyHall,? May 3, 2008, https://youtu.be/gIPCx3Te-BA. 95 In ?My Credo,? Music Journal 25, no. 2 (February 1967), Fox elaborated on his opinion of score fidelity, ?Art, literature, drama?they are all involved in a common set of changes which I call a preoccupation with the letter rather than with the essence of the law? (25). 77 It is little known that Fox shared Biggs? hatred for electronic organs, especially since he accepted invitations to concertize on Hammond Organs and even released Virgil Fox Plays the Baldwin Organ in 1966. But when the Rodgers Organ Company offered to pay him to tour with one of their models, he gamely loaned his brand name to the product and got on the road in 1966 with the three-manual ?Virgil Fox Touring Organ? (or ?Black Beauty,? as he fondly called it) and light shows by David Snyder. He called the instrument a ?Heinz 57 varieties? in the New York Times as if to flaunt its lack of good taste and its popular appeal.96 ?I do not cram down the throats of the concert-going public morsels of choice music that have been shrunken and dried by dull, lifeless, and colorless interpretations,? he proclaimed in Music Journal.97 The FTC?s food metaphor was back with a vengeance. Fox accused the ?purists? of determining that concertgoers were better off ?eating their spinach? instead of serving up the ?mashed potatoes? they actually liked.98 He called Biggs? HIP style about as interesting as ?dried owl shit?: it wasn?t even edible.99 Figure 5. Page from a 1970 Fil lmore East program advertis ing Virgi l Fox?s upcoming ?Heavy Organ? al l-Bach concert ?on the world?s heaviest travel ing cathedral organ? on December 1. Bil l Graham was quoted by Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle as quipping, ?Maybe the kids are ready to move on from John Sebastian to Johann Sebastian.? (Only the former appeared at Woodstock, though.) (Courtesy of Len Levasseur, http://www.virgi l foxlegacy.com/pressbook.html) 96 Whitney, 191. 97 Fox, ?My Credo?: 25. 98 Whitney, introduction, n.p. 99 Ibid., 192. 78 Fox used his newfound mobility to go after the youth counterculture that had risen during the 1960s, presenting a vision of Bach as a living, breathing technological spectacle. On December 1, 1970, he gave his first ?Heavy Organ? psychedelic concert at Bill Graham?s downtown New York rock venue, the Fillmore East (Figure 5). The ?Church of Rock and Roll? was more accustomed to vibrating with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane than Bach. Yet Fox?s all-Bach ?clean trip? packed the house to its 2,650 capacity, and 600 more disappointed youths were turned away at the door.100 The repeat show drew an audience of 2,000, including a fair number of non-hippies, since the already high prices had been raised. Each subversive in their own ways, Early Music listeners and countercultural youth collided in a marijuana-enfolded Bach festival. The audience encountered not a historical image of Bach, but Bach as audiovisual rock spectacle. Fox kept the volume at earsplitting levels with Black Beauty?s 1,800-pound console, sixteen amplifiers, 134 loudspeakers in thirteen or fourteen cabinets and two bass cabinets.101 Dry ice billowed out from beneath the pedalboard, and after the encore, smoke again engulfed Fox and his keyboard. It looked as if his virtuosity had actually brought the organ to life, short-circuiting the ?machine? in the process, while inadvertently coopting the 1962 rumors that the avant-garde had ?made the organs burn? in Sweden.102 Not content to stop there, Fox upgraded in 1975 to a five-manual Rodgers touring organ, the ?Royal V,? with a complex interface that visually suggested the machine?s endless possibilities. In 1977, he switched to a four-manual Allen touring organ that he dubbed ?The Aristocrat.? Its 150 stops, 12 computers, and 2,700 watts fed into about 600 loudspeakers, and he used it for the rest of his career.103 Figure 6. The record jacket of Virgi l Fox?s Bach Live at Fil lmore East (MCA Records MCA-28, 1971) gives nearly equal visual emphasis to Fox, the Rodgers e lectronic organ controls , and the l ight show by Pablo Lights. 100 The idea of offering Fillmore East audiences a ?clean trip? was mostly the teetotaling Fox?s own invention. His reaction on the first night, per Whitney: ??Is that marijuana?? he gasped, clapping a handkerchief over his face? (194). Fox was, however, well known to indulge in chocolate and ice cream. 101 Even Fox?s followers thought he set the Rodgers Organ?s amplification too high. ?It sounded ugly, loud, and definitely ?electronic.? Virgil was mostly to blame?It was like a hammer that bludgeoned,? recalled Ted Alan Worth (Whitney, 188). 102 Martin Herchenr?der, ?From Darmstadt to Stockholm: Tracing the Swedish Contribution to the Development of a New Organ Style,? in The Organ as a Mirror of its Time: North European Reflections, 1610-2000, ed. Kerala Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 315. 103 Carlo Curley was also touring at the time with a four-manual Allen Organ (1976) with 380 loudspeakers in fifty cabinets (The Organ: An Encyclopedia, s.v. ?Electronic Organ?). 79 The move to electronic organs firmly inscribed the binary between Fox and his electronics and Biggs and his tracker organs. Fox?s association of lavishly expressive playing with personal flamboyance could particularly offend social conservatives, even those who subscribed to Biggs? semi-Romantic Bach style. A disturbing account by William F. Buckley, Jr. of the first night at Fillmore East recorded that ?at one point during a prelude, I am tempted to rise solemnly, commandeer a shotgun, and advise Fox, preferably in imperious German, if only I could learn German in time to consummate the fantasy, that if he does not release the goddam vox humana, which is ooing-ahing-eeing the music where Bach clearly intended something closer to a bel canto, I shall simply have to blow his head off.?104 The Boston Globe critiqued the ?spermy? lighting effects in this ?mixture of showmanship, Bach, lights, slightly tattered virtuosity, [and] homoerotic fantasies,?105 while the New York Times described his mini-talks as ?homey-eccentric.?106 The dominant organ discourse had switched from food to sexuality, an arena in which HIP?s Biggs subscribers could quietly claim the higher ground.107 Of course, the $5,000 rockstar-size concert fees that Fox now commanded, magnitudes more than any other classical organist, proved that plenty of listeners were buying into his ?homey? performances. The Hell?s Angels were amongst the 6,500 attendees at his 1973 Wolf Trap Farm concert in Virginia, simultaneously embodying American criminal masculinity and homoerotic appeal.108 (In 1969, the gang had achieved musical notoriety in California for turning the Rolling Stones? Altamont Free Concert, intended as a ?Woodstock West,? into a fatally violent chaos.) As with Fox?s easy adaptation of different musical styles, he also switched effortlessly between ?homey? and churchy. His Heavy Organ concert at Carnegie Hall was a combination of religious revival, rock concert, party, and church choir rehearsal, in which he glorified God via the proxy of a Bach throwdown (with an invisible Biggs) and Bach celebrity worship. Fox even led his audience in singing Christmas carols, the most secularized of hymns?in vocal harmony, with all the verses, hinting that the counterculture and classical music fans had converged on the hall to engage in reverentially attentive listening to his surprisingly understated, steady-tempo interpretation of Bach?s Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor (BWV 582).109 Biggs had brought religious gravity to the Early Music crusade, and Fox was bringing religious righteousness to his conversion of young Bach fans. Fox?s final commercial recordings were two volumes of The Fox Touch (1977), recorded on the five-manual Ruffatti organ that he helped design for the Crystal Cathedral. Architect Philip Johnson designed the megachurch entirely in glass after tiring of the metallic orthodoxies of the International Style. By this point in his career, the ?Fox touch? was almost entirely legato, and his 104 William F. Buckley, Jr., Cruising Speed: A Documentary (New York: G. P. Putnam?s Sons, 1971), 51. 105 Quoted in Richard Dyer, ?Who Is the World's Best Organist? Ask Virgil Fox,? New York Times, September 29, 1974, 19 and 34. 106 John Rockwell, ?Music: Virgil Fox Plays,? New York Times, January 16, 1976, 21. 107 However, the language of masculine sexuality has been applied to the organ since at least the first half of the twentieth century. In 1941, E. M. Skinner viewed changes to his orchestral organs as attempts to ?sterilize? and ?tonally castrate? them (Whitney, 73). Walter Holtkamp remade the neo-organ into what Ambrosino describes as ?lean cuisine tonal design? (34)?he rejected the dandy for Howard Roark, the blended orchestra for the brassy clarity of his new polyphonic ensemble. In the contrast between Skinner and Holtkamp, one sees the change from the nineteenth-century gentleman of artistry and nonspecialist good breeding to the postwar scientist and modernist designer, from the tonal coloristic shimmers of Renoir?s piano-playing girls to the austere clean lines and sober color palette of Edward Hopper?s Nighthawks (1942). 108 Whitney, 197. 109 The Christmas carols sung were ?The First Nowell? and ?It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.? 80 interpretations altogether idiosyncratic. His final artistic statement foregrounded an aggressively anti-historical style, acknowledging the essential modernism at the heart of all Bach performance, no matter how ?historically informed.? The neo-baroque organ had advanced through Phelps? idea of the medium as the message (the typewriter organ), to Holtkamp?s ideology of unmediated sonic and visual transparency, to Fox?s attempted erasure of the organ as medium. He presented his all-too-human interpretations as the sole message?despite the fact that his medium was the latest organ technology around. Perhaps he believed that he had at last completely differentiated himself from the recording-savvy organist whose career strategy, style, and Bach advocacy he had long shared, but Biggs and Fox still had it in common that they had remade Baroque performance in their own images. Switching On Bach Although the organ is stereotyped as a churchly instrument distant from secular life and resistant to the avant-garde, this chapter has shown the ways in which organbuilding and performance were driven in the 1950s and 1960s by secular postwar trends even as organists and builders drew on the Baroque past for aesthetic authority. Following the serialism promoted at Darmstadt (which would hardly have found a place in church), the neo-baroque embraced the alternate rationality exemplified by Bach?s fugues. The shrill, chiffy neo-baroque aesthetic was based less on listening to surviving Baroque instruments than on a rejection of the American organs of the long nineteenth century, heavy on 8? fundamental and legato orchestral simulations. Hence the neo-baroque construction of Bach?s sonic aesthetics as those of the electronic synthesizer, exemplified by Walter Carlos? 1968 hit album Switched-On Bach. This record featured painstakingly orchestrated Bach arrangements for her (then his) customized Moog keyboard synthesizer and stayed in the Billboard Top 40 pop chart for seventeen weeks (Figure 7). (Like Fox?s absence from The Organ: An Encyclopedia, little scholarship exists on Carlos? album relative to its tremendous impact.) Needless to say, Columbia Records? tongue-in-cheek follow-up release Switched Off Bach (1972), with the same track list played by Biggs, Zolt?n Rozsnyai, Pablo Casals, and Glenn Gould, had fewer takers.110 Having ruffled the binary between the neo-baroque and modernism, and between Fox and Biggs, I now look briefly to their legacy in a present that perpetuates, and perhaps still economically depends on, that binary construction. 110 Glenn Gould did, however, enthusiastically endorse Carlos? work: ?Carlos?s realization of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs?live, canned, or intuited?I?ve ever heard.? (Quoted on the record sleeve of Carlos? LP The Well-Tempered Synthesizer [1969].) 81 Figure 7. The cover of Wendy Carlos? a lbum Switched-On Bach (1968), Columbia Masterworks MS 7194, depicts the master himself in a powdered wig using a Moog synthesizer. The Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America (APOBA) officially ?does not welcome membership of firms that build electronic organs or combination electronic/pipe organs,? thus excluding some of the oldest and largest organ companies, including Austin, Wicks, Reuter, and Cornel Zimmer.111 Yet even Fox was clever enough to do an about-face from deeming the combination of organ pipes and electronics as akin to ?birdshit in a cuckoo clock.? Ambrosino put a fine point on the long-established blurring of ?real? and ?electronic? organs in 1998. ?Even these three labels?tracker, electric, combination?must be considered suspect,? he warned in The American Organist. ?Even the term electronic now means many things where it merely used to imply the worst. The organ world has become as complex as modern life.?112 In reference to the growing dominance of MIDI technology in pipe organs, he pointed out that ?MIDI, despite its nice clothes and good breeding, is merely the electronic organ in fashionable, flexible clothing.?113 The dependence on solid-state electronics was not even worth mentioning. He concluded (not without regret) that ?twenty-seven percent of organs built in 1996 had some form of electronic augmentation? The issue is not whether we are winning the battle against electronic organs, but rather the moment at which we lost the battle. When the Allen Organ Company builds a third of the world?s church organs, and at last count they had more than 600 employees and take in tens of millions of dollars a year?more than the entire American pipe organ industry put together?I am sorry, but the battle is lost.? This chapter has suggested that the battle was lost at the beginning of the twentieth century, when an influx of electrical engineers and telecommunications researchers championed the advancement of the organ as their cause. But I would also suggest that the battle was won long ago, because the organ has defined high technology since medieval times, and is continuing to fulfill that role through new tracker-based innovations such as the ?hyperorgan,? which Randall Harlow defines as ?an organ with extended capabilities that seamlessly blend the electronic and acoustic worlds along 111 Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America, ?APOBA Principles Concerning the Use of Electronically Generated Sounds,? adopted March 2000, http://apoba.com/downloads/apoba_position_regarding_electronic_sounds.pdf. 112 Ambrosino, 23. 113 Ibid., 35. 82 the lines of other hyper instruments developed by Tod Machover and researchers at the MIT Media Lab.?114 In 2014, National Public Radio featured thirty-two-year-old Juilliard alumnus Cameron Carpenter?s third album If You Could Read My Mind on First Listen, temporarily allowing listeners to stream the album online for free in advance of its release.115 Carpenter?s branding sells his homoerotic sex appeal, pale Mohawk-punk fashion sense (enlivened with deceptively childlike touches such as impossibly virtuosic pedalwork performances in dinosaur sneakers), and of course, his reincarnation of Fox?s technological sublime. His custom International Touring Organ by Marshall & Ogletree, which he debuted at Alice Tully Hall enhanced with a dramatic light show, presents the spectacle of nine cabinets, each with four vertical speakers, and four large additional speakers looming in the background.116 His music video of Bernstein?s Overture to Candide uses extreme low-angle shots to emphasize the mass of technology that he controls with a touch of the fingertips or toes.117 By carrying out yet another ?illegal border crossing? as the Elektrium was accused of doing in 1964, Carpenter may also be writing himself out of organ history and its reference works.118 Mentions of him are studiously avoided in professional organist and organbuilding circles, except when a reason to chortle or groan is needed. Yet this very silence reveals a long-standing truth: the pipe organ is always already a machine, invented by ?ingenious minds,? and today?s new eclectic style and its rebellious critics are all products of a moment of American history dominated as much by the military-industrial complex as by the counterculture that spun off the Early Music movement. In that light, I dare to act as one of the ?musicological activists? Holtkamp, Jr. so resented, and voice a plea to preserve the elder Holtkamp?s midcentury neo-baroque instruments. Those organs are irreplaceable representations of a cold war style in which scientific research collided with historical research. Unsatisfying as they sometimes are to play, they are not examples of a mistaken baroque, but of modernism through and through. The new historically informed organs that, in our search for a more direct connection to the past, are replacing those Holtkamps today, will themselves eventually be viewed as products of their time. Promoting the preservation of these instruments will not be easy. Richard Kassel has noted the challenge posed by their lack of repertoire: ?If the neoclassical aesthetic means taking older ideas and viewing them through new eyes to produce a new synthesis, then this term applies to these organs?but not the music associated with them. The best composers remained faithful to the sonorities they knew (Olivier Messiaen) or the liturgical setting they worked in (Hugo Distler); there was no major organ school that depended on the neoclassical organ per se.?119 Because those organs 114 Randall Harlow, ?Recent Organ Design Innovations and the 21st-century ?Hyperorgan?,? (doctoral thesis, Eastman School of Music, 2011), http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/Harlow%20-%20Recent%20Organ%20Design%20Innovations%20and%20the%2021st%20Century%20Hyperorgan.pdf. 115 Tom Huizenga, ?First Listen: Cameron Carpenter, ?If You Could Read My Mind?,? NPR Music, 16 August 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/08/16/339595914/first-listen-cameron-carpenter-if-you-could-read-my-mind. 116 Anthony Tommasini, ?Organist Introduces New Partner in Concert: Cameron Carpenter Performs on His Touring Instrument,? New York Times, March 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/arts/music/cameron-carpenter-performs-on-his-touring-instrument.html?_r=0. 117 Cameron Carpenter, ?Cameron Carpenter ? ?Candide?: Overture,? YouTube video, 5:39, produced by Sony Music Entertainment in 2014, posted by ?cameroncarpenterVEVO,? https://youtu.be/zq_cy-ztcHc. 118 Alfred Reichling, ?Kopie-Reproduktion-Imitation,? in Das Elektrium: Beitr?ge zur Kl?rung der Frage Orgel-Orgelimitation (Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1964), 27. 119 Richard Kassel, ?Neoclassical Organ,? in The Organ: An Encyclopedia, 366. 83 combined different national historical styles, organist-composers found it difficult to escape those separate traditions or combine them into a new aesthetic. While no repertoire calls for neo-baroque organs, we need those instruments to know what builders and players of that era wanted pipe organs to feel and sound like. In 2012, Allan Kozinn pointed out that performers of early music and electroacoustic music face the same problem: they require outdated technology that is difficult to obtain. For example, the characteristic sound of the Philip Glass Ensemble was the acrid whine of a Farfisa electric organ, a staple of 1960s garage bands. Mr. Glass adopted the Farfisa almost by accident. As he put it in a 1980 interview, he needed a portable keyboard and found some used Farfisas, ?all in Queens, in knotty?pine basements, under stairwells.?120 There are probably no mother lodes of Farfisa organs to be found anymore. Kozinn imagines a world in which recently outmoded instruments, victims of rapid obsolescence, are preserved: If I were a period?instrument maker looking for expansion ideas, I would keep an eye on this. I?d buy up and recondition old?fashioned metronomes, Farfisa organs, Buchla and Moog units, Atari computers and every generation of Mac I could find. I?d warehouse spare parts and archive hardware schematics and software code? Someday specialists in 20th? and 21st?century music may decide that the sampled sounds of antique technology just aren?t good enough. And someone should be ready to supply the real thing. Perhaps we could add neo-baroque American organs to Kozinn?s list. Figure 8. University Organist and musicology professor Lawrence Moe at Holtkamp?s three-manual e lectropneumatic O?Neil l Memorial Organ (1958) in Alfred Hertz Memorial Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. This organ, replaced by a Noack tracker organ in 2013, is in storage and for sale as of this writ ing. The photograph by Ansel Adams, which captures Holtkamp?s famed modernist design, was made for the centennial of the University of California. (Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside) 120 Allan Kozinn, ?Electronic Woe: The Short Lives of Instruments,? New York Times, June 8, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/arts/music/new-music-works-with-surprising-problem-dated-instruments.html. 84 Chapter 3. The Philips Electronics Caril lon: A Civic Symbol for Corporate Campanology On Friday, September 23 at approximately 4 p.m., work will be halted in all Philips branches, so that by all means necessary, ear-witness may be borne to a direct sonic reportage of the presentation of the festival gift in Eindhoven. ?Also in Limburg, a festival for the 75-year-old Philips: Eindhoven a city of pleasure for two days,? Limburgs Dagblad, May 13, 1966, 131 September 23, 1966. It was a clear Friday afternoon when Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken (Lightbulb Factory) employees around the Netherlands leaned eagerly towards their office radio transceivers to hear the sound of bells.2 In Jacob Oppenheimpark in Eindhoven, the southern city where Philips opened its doors in 1891, employee L. de Windt was signing over a new sixty-one-bell carillon in a stand-alone tower to the Philips Board of Directors in order to commemorate the company?s seventy-fifth anniversary. The boldly modernist belfry housed the first five-octave carillon in the Netherlands, where the instrument had been developed four centuries previously. Each of the bells was lovingly emblazoned with a repeating Philips logo?a pair of four-point stars?and the first-person inscription, ?Eijsbouts goot mij voor het Philips-personeel in Nederland? (Eijsbouts cast me [italics added] for Philips employees in the Netherlands). The 7,100-pound bass bell, which sounded B?3, was further humanized with the name Gerard after co-founder Gerard Philips (1858-1942), and the next (a C3 because the typical European carillon?s short octave omits B3 and C?3) was named Anton, after his brother Anton Philips (1874-1951), responsible for the business?s global growth (Figure 1). Figure 1. The repeating Phil ips logo and the named bass bel ls Gerard and Anton in the Phil ips Cari l lon. (Photos: Tiffany Ng, 2012) 1 ?Op vrijdagmiddag 23 september plm. 16 uur zal het werk in alle Philips-vestigingen worden stil gelegd, opdat allen middels een rechstreekse geluidsreportage oorgetuige kunnen zijn van de aanbieding van het feestgeschenk in Eindhoven.? 2 At this time, Philips had over sixty branches employing approximately 80,000 workers, according to the Limburgs Dagblad, May 13, 1966, 13. 85 Figure 2. Frits Phil ips tr ies out the cari l lon keyboard. (Hendriks, 144) Far from being financed by upper management, this impressive instrument of corporate self-congratulation was donated through a 0.2% voluntary salary contribution by 72,116 factory workers, now presumed to be listening raptly through the Philips PTT system.3 After de Windt signed the carillon over to Director Frederik ?Frits? Philips, an inaugural concert featured the premiere of Freek Schorer?s Concerto for Carillon and Orchestra. In tandem with renowned carillonneur Leen ?t Hart many stories above, Schorer conducted the employee brass band Philips Harmonie in their new scarlet parade uniforms at the foot of the tower (Figure 3). A hot-air balloon festival, torchlight procession, and ?Chinese? fireworks display topped out the evening. Figure 3. Leen ?t Hart premires Freek Schorer?s Concert for Cari l lon and Orchestra with the Phil ips Harmonie under the composer?s baton on September 23, 1966. Rising on a sprawling grassy field at the heart of Strijp, a largely Philips-owned industrial and residential district beginning in but extending mostly beyond the Eindhoven ring road, the modernist steel-and-concrete architecture of the Philips Carillon looks strangely out of place in the history of Dutch carillons (Figure 4). Its closest architectural relative is the Netherlands Carillon outside Arlington National Cemetery, a postwar Dutch gift to America covered in the next chapter. 3 PTT was the abbreviation for the Dutch Postal, Telegraph and Telephone Company. The private Philips PTT system had been specially connected to a distant municipal audio switching center near Amsterdam (PTT Hilversum) in order to broadcast the occasion to all of its domestic offices. 144 145 De Philipsbeiaard, het geschenk van de 72.116 personeelsleden in Nederland aan hun jubilerende werkgever, krijgt een plaats in een moderne klokkentoren op steenworpafstand van het Evoluon. Frits Philips is er duidelijk zeer verguld mee! De talrijke concerten worden druk bezocht, maar toch zal de 5-octaafs beiaard in 1986 worden verplaatst naar de St. Catharinakerk in het centrum van Eindhoven, een gigantische en geheel door Philips bekostigde operatie. Reden: de staalconstructie van de toren dreigde het te begeven onder het gewicht van 15 ton van de 61 klokken. Daarbij komt, aldus stadsbeiaardier Arie Abbenes, die de beiaard nog steeds tweemaal per week bespeelt, dat het instrument nu veel beter tot zijn recht komt. 146 147 86 Since the development of the carillon as a Dutch keyboard instrument during the seventeenth century, brought to its Baroque apex by bell founders Pieter and Fran?ois Hemony, scholarly patrons like Jacob van Eyck, and organ builders and organist-carillonneurs, the carillon has become the most visible and audible symbol of church authority, civic authority, and public life in the Netherlands. It was and remains intrinsic to the time-honored and ?traditional? experience of the Dutch urban soundscape. So what was it doing in a suburban corporate park? Figure 4. The Phil ips Cari l lon and the Evoluon (Stri jps Weekblad , Apri l 26, 1973). Sounding from Gothic towers, the carillon has long been associated more with the historic sonic architectures of bustling Dutch city centers than with their quiet, ?modern? suburban peripheries. The carillon?s main associations are, in the first place, with the principal town church from which it played sacred music, especially Psalms, and called the faithful to worship. Secondly, it has long provided a ?commercial? soundtrack for the weekly bustle of buying and selling on market squares. Third, carillons often adorn city halls, from which they play secular music and would have communicated information from fire alarms to tax collection, depending on the city. At once evocative of church, market, and civic centers, each type of carillon served as a mass communication device intrinsic to the experience of a noisy urban soundscape.4 Ironically, Philips borrowed a neo-baroque signifier, the carillon, in order to engineer a consumer vision of a hypermodern technological future. For several reasons, a new suburban carillon could evoke the past for its listeners even as it evoked modernity. Surviving Baroque-era carillons are the primary means by which most Dutch people have heard an instrument in now-exotic mean-tone temperament.5 Their imprecise automatic mechanisms play halting musical phrases as often as every quarter-hour, reminding the public of their centuries-old clock mechanisms. (Figure 5) Thanks to the historic architecture that houses them, carillons are often paired in the popular imagination with the Baroque, and occasionally with fin-de-si?cle decadence and decline.6 Thanks to Philips, an 4 See historian of the senses Alain Corbin?s Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (1998) for a fascinating account of the similar roles of non-carillon bells in the French countryside. 5 Many Baroque carillons have been preserved because they were a point of civic pride and intercity rivalry in terms of architecture, tower height, number of bells, sophistication of automatic mechanism, and quality of condition. The carillon?s centrality to civic pride and intercity rivalry in the Low Countries has driven and still motivates its proliferation there, except during the carillon?s temporary nineteenth-century decline, when the value placed on pianistic virtuosity and expressive dynamic range as well as the decline of knowledge about bellfounding and carillon maintenance relegated the instrument to the status of primitive curiosity. 6 The carillon?s association with fin-de-si?cle decadence and decline comes mainly from Low Countries literature, such as Georges Rodenbach?s Le Carillonneur (1897) and Bruges-la-Morte (1892) upon which Erich Wolfgang Korngold?s 1920 87 archetypal piece of seventeenth-century cultural patrimony now set the stage for a futuristic Philips ?Evoluon? museum of science and technology, a sibling structure that opened across the street to even greater fanfare the next day. What use did Philips Electronics hear in a Baroque keyboard instrument for constructing the techno-utopian future that it wanted to sell to the world?7 Figure 5. City cari l lonneur Frank Deleu reprograms or ?pins? (versteekt) the automatic cari l lon drum, cast by Antoine de Hondt in the mid-eighteenth century, in Bruges (photo courtesy of Frank Deleu). The carillon and Evoluon were complementary audiovisual icons on a rationalized landscape, reflecting and connecting the binaries of past/future and labor/corporation. Yet the idea of the carillon as a ?grassroots? gift is misleadingly simplistic. At a calculated intersection of the Baroque and the modern, Philips used this gift strategically to design a parkland nexus of music-historical revival and techno-utopian publicity. Through music, architecture, and urban planning, the park combined the powerful historical meanings of the carillon and its music with a futuristic techno-cultural edifice in order to symbolically legitimate Philips? self-appointment as both church and state in Eindhoven. The city had been a ?company town? par excellence since the turn of the century, and after devastating midcentury German bombardments, Philips had almost singlehandedly reconstructed it.8 Its new techno-cultural edifices focused, rationalized, and humanized a city designed on the one hand to function as an efficient machine for industrial production, and on the other hand to project an image of what director Frits Philips termed maatschappelijk verantwoord opera Die Tote Stadt is based, and Harry Mulisch?s 1956 novel about the last day of the world, Het Zwarte Licht. Although the latter is set on August 20, 1953, the protagonist?s carillon concert symbolizes a glorious Dutch past, not the murky present. Mulisch took inspiration from his visit to the 1661/1662 Hemony carillon of St. Bavo Church in Haarlem. 7 I have James Davies to thank for suggesting that the Philips Carillon and Evoluon be considered together. 8 Eindhoven?s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development was dominated by three industries: Philips, DAF Trucks, and the cigarette factory Karel I, all of which have left their traces on the architecture, cultural edifices, and urban planning of the city. Besides Philips, Karel I founder Henri Jacob van Abbe is responsible for the remaining highbrow cultural building in the city, the famed Van Abbemuseum, established in 1936. 88 ondernemen (corporate social responsibility) into the civic and religious realms of laborers? everyday lives.9 Inspired by Frits? plan to build on the phenomenal success of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World?s Fair, this futuristic park also obscured the inevitable outcome represented by the firm?s adoption of the American corporate campus model?that Philips was decentering itself into a global capitalist corporation, and would abandon Eindhoven in the 1980s. The history of the Philips Carillon demonstrates a continuing Dutch skepticism towards building these traditionally church and civic instruments on suburban corporate property, try as a company might to decenter the city onto its liminal parkland campus. In this chapter, I will explain the carillon in terms of Philips? cooptation of an instrument that served as a nationalist symbol of postwar Dutch reconstruction, the alternative political geographies and distributions of power that the company used it to foster, the neo-baroque performances that served it, and the eventual failure of its modernist designs to reshape urban cultures of listening. For a brief time, a musical yesterday and technological tomorrow came together in Eindhoven, marking a heyday for the company town. The novel placement of the carillon, its eventual dismantlement, and its ultimate relocation to the city center traces the postwar success, decline, and renewal of Eindhoven. The city would begin a precipitous downturn in the 1980s, but by 2008, it became ?the most inventive city in the world? in terms of patent intensity.10 The Caril lon and ?Rebuilding Optimism? Wederopbouwoptimisme (Rebuilding Optimism), the period that began some years after the war?s end, numbered carillon building amongst its priorities. A boom in construction resulted in forty-three carillons from 1958 to 1966, a period of just eight years, and fifteen of those were heavy carillons, accounting for two-thirds of all new heavy carillons produced in the country between 1945 and 1990. According to the authors of 45 Years of Dutch Carillons, 1945-1990, this extraordinary installation rate was driven by Eijsbouts? traveling carillon campaign (which allowed audiences to see the normally hidden performer and the bells, which were based on seventeenth-century Hemony models), by improvements to bell tuning and profile technologies that enabled ever expanding sounding ranges, and by the concerted efforts of the Dutch Carillon Guild?s advisors to nurture small projects into large ones.11 Community carillon groups, local boosters of a distinctly Dutch variety, often provided the catalyst to build. In the wake of the war?s devastation, those involved in carillon campaigns felt a desire not just to restore, but also enlarge surviving instruments, and to replace lost carillons with greater ones. According to Luc Rombouts, the new instruments represented a loudly defiant nationalist answer to the German bell requisitions. Approximately 65,000 bells had been sent to Germany to be melted into artillery, historical bells of a certain age excepted. About 175,000 bells in total were seized throughout Europe, and only a small fraction 9 According to his son, Frits Philips elaborated on the concept of maatschappelijk verantwoord ondernemen in the policy document ?Basic considerations for industrial policy,? published in the 1960s. Quoted in Steef Hendriks? Evoluon: 40 Jaar Boegbeeld van een Ambitieuze Regio (?s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands: Heinen, 2006), 7. 10 William Pentland, ?World?s 15 Most Inventive Cities,? Forbes, July 9, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/07/09/worlds-15-most-inventive-cities. 11 Loek Boogert, Andre ? Lehr, and Jacques Maassen, 45 Years of Dutch Carillons, 1945-1990 (Asten, the Netherlands: Nederlandse Klokkenspel-Vereniging, 1992). 89 returned.12 But in the end, the widespread rallying cry ?Wie met klokken schiet, wint de oorlog niet? (Who shoots with bells wins not the war) had proven true. A New Corporatocracy Neither church nor state, Philips seemed an unlikely candidate to bring the final year of the carillon building boom to its culmination. The September 9 edition of the Philips Kourier company organ described its upcoming carillon inauguration with pride: At 3:45 p.m. on September 23, over five hundred guests are expected at the site at the Jacob Oppenheimstraat in Eindhoven, in order to witness the transfer of this sounding gift (klinkend geschenk) from the staff to the Philips Board of Directors. On the premises where the event takes place, three temporary grandstands are placed for guests. Should the weather be a spoilsport, a large tent will be erected in the immediate vicinity of the bell tower. The official part of the meeting will commence at about 5 p.m. with a ten-minute carillon concert and the premiere of celebratory music for carillon and band, composed for the Philips Jubilee by Freek Schorer. The carillon and Philips-Harmonie will premiere this work. After presenting an update to the invitees following the sparkling tones of the proud carillon, there will be an informal gathering.13 Moreover, the article revealed that the ceremony and nationwide broadcast would stage Philips as a quasi-governmental entity: Two Philips flags mark the entrance to the festival grounds. Around the clock tower flutter the Dutch flag and the eleven county flags to underline the national character of the ceremony. A sound system in the field will ensure that the course of events, not only in the stands but also outside, is shared, so thousands of interested people have a chance to tune in. Philips would mark the inauguration of a techno-cultural complex (featuring an instrument that normally sacralized and officialized city centers) with a display of its company flag flying alongside provincial and national flags. With Prince Bernhard present to activate the opening sound and light show by entering a punch card, this banner spectacle represented the fungibility or even equivalency of company, province, and state in Eindhoven. The nationwide broadcast of the event, which temporarily linked public and private communication infrastructures, further confirmed the Evoluon?s national importance as a symbol of Dutch progress and Philips? apparent leading role in serving the public good. The city itself was thoroughly involved in the three-day anniversary celebrations. The people of Eindhoven contributed the two clock faces on the Evoluon?s Technical Mast, perhaps already believing that the company that invented their city should have the trappings of government.14 More impressively, the carillon and museum were anniversary gifts financed in part by Eindhoven taxpayers: the tract on which they were built, Jacob Oppenheimpark, was a gift from the city worth 350 million euros in today?s currency.15 Even the shops in the city center closed their doors at 4 p.m. 12 Carla Shapreau, ?The Pillage of Europe?s Bells,? Musicology Now (blog), March 23, 2015. http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2015/03/the-pillage-of-europes-bells.html. 13 ?Beiaard luidt feestvreugde in: Plechtigheid in veel bedrijven te beluisteren,? Philips Koerier, September 9, 1966. 14 Hendriks, 30. 15 ?On January 10, 1964 Mayor Witte (1909-1972) presented a beautifully situated 55,000 m2 plot to Philips as a gift from the municipality on the occasion of the upcoming 75th anniversary. (A present then valued at 350,000 euros, 90 on the day of the Evoluon?s inauguration ?as an expression of gratitude to the industry, to which the shopkeepers owe their prosperity,? as described in the Eindhovens Dagblad.16 Two hundred shop windows were instead devoted to Philips products. In contrast to such inaugural pomp and circumstance, an undated 8 mm amateur film by Theo Hagenberg shows the lifting of the bells by crane into the bell chamber as a day in the park for local families, who arrive on foot, bicycle, and car to watch proudly from their picnic blankets (Figure 6). The carillon indeed served local workers as a recreational destination, at least on days when it was not serving Philips? national concerns. Figure 6. Locals watch as the bel ls of the Phil ips Cari l lon are l i f ted by crane into the belfry. The dedication of the Evoluon took place one day after the consecration of the carillon. A jubilant employee parade to the inauguration grounds, with smiling participants sporting birthday hats and following a marching band, carried a portrait of Anton Philips and two portraits of Frits (Figure 7).17 Visitors gaped at the Evoluon?s otherwordly concrete dome, 253 feet in diameter and held in place by 105 miles of rebar. Behind it spread a circular reflection pool, mirroring the museum?s geometrical form and doubling its horizontal footprint. Another Hagenberg film shows a festive parade on foot and truck to the site, a kermis fun fair, a marching band and color guard performance, rising hot air balloons bearing ?75-jaar PHILIPS? (75 years of Philips) banners, and the momentary intrusion of a military aircraft, all interspersed with shots of the carillon tower. which in 2006 has increased to about 20 million.)? (Op 10 januari 1964 overhandigt burgemeester Witte (1909-1972) een fraai gelegen grondstuk van 55.000 m2 aan Philips als geschenk van de gemeente ter gelegenheid van het komende 75-jarig jubileum. [Een cadeautje met een toenmalige waarde van 350.000 euro, die anno 2006 is opgelopen tot zo?n 20 miljoen.]) (Hendriks, 15). In fact, Frits recalls that the mayor would have preferred ?a new head office? on the plot instead (45 Years With Philips, 234). To its credit, Philips set aside 700,000 euros for a new ice rink and music center, but that was far less than the 14 million euros spent on the Evoluon. 16 ?Winkels in centrum sluiten op jubileumdag om vier uur: Tweehonderd Philips-etalages,? Eindhovens Dagblad, September 10, 1966. 17 ?Philips 75 jaar (1966),? YouTube video, 2:06, from a Polygoon Hollands Nieuws broadcast on 16 May 1966, posted by Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, 15 May 2012, http://www.beeldengeluid.nl/media/5547/philips-75-jaar-1966. 91 Figure 7. Employees sporting a panoply of birthday hats parade with a marching band to the Evoluon inauguration grounds on September 24, 1966, carrying a portrait of Anton Phil ips and two of Frits Phil ips. (Polygoon Hollands Nieuws) Frits Philips, Jr. described the Evoluon as a gift to Philips employees for helping make Philips a global company?ironically the very reason Philips would later abandon its Eindhoven manufacturing facilities.18 He also described it as an opportunity to promote the Philips brand, save money that would otherwise have gone to exhibiting at World?s Fairs, and allay the suspicions of the general public, including sixties youth, by demonstrating that business and science worked together for the greater benefit of humanity. Eindhoven University of Technology physics professor Jan Frederik Schouten, a former pitch perception researcher at Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium, had proposed that the function of these exhibitions would be ?the removal from men?s minds of the fear of the irresistible march of technology, by putting the general public in touch with this technology and its development and by showing what a beneficial influence it has had and is still having on food, health, shelter, communications and education.?19 Frits had hoped that this propaganda, aimed at the average educational attainment level of a sixteen-year-old student, would help transform the counterculture?s attitudes towards big technology firms.20 Although I find it doubtful that countercultural youth were much impressed by the cultural complex at Jacob Oppenheimpark relative to how their American counterparts received Virgil Fox?s technological Bach sublime, we will see later that Philips? electronic music and sound laboratory helped bring the musical avant-garde and popular tastes closer together in the Netherlands than in other countries. One rationale for why Philips appropriated a neo-baroque musical symbol for its techno-futurist landscape may be found in the layout of Eindhoven itself and its relationship to the seventeenth-century Dutch city plan. From the time of its establishment in 1891, the burgeoning company transformed this sleepy village near the Belgian border into an industrial powerhouse. Over the course of the twentieth century, Philips literally shaped the Eindhoven cityscape. Early on, it sculpted neighborhoods, infrastructure, and even the family life of its employees. As the number of workers ballooned from 2,000 in 1914 to 20,000 in 1929, the company became a housing entity, building entire neighborhoods like the four-hundred-house Philipsdorp (Philips Village) where Edgard Var?se would live in 1957 and 1958 with his wife Louise at Gagelstraat 38. These were the 18 Philips estimated that 100,000 employees lived within driving distance (Hendriks, 14). Furthermore, the site was directly adjacent to both the urban inner ring and at entrances and exits of the A2 motorway. (17) 19 Frederik ?Frits? Philips, 45 Years With Philips: An Industrialist?s Life (Poole: Blandford Press, 1978), 235. 20 Hendriks, 5. 92 first houses outside the center city to be connected to the sewer and water supply networks, marking them as progressive and desirable.21 Philips parks (like the Philips de Jonghpark in Strijp), schools, recreation centers, and parishes were built to accommodate the new residents and to quiet strife between Catholics and Protestants suddenly living and working in close proximity. As Philips controlled worker housing, it likewise controlled and optimized the demographic makeup of its workforce. For example, families relocating from the less industrialized province of Drenthe were required to have at least three daughters older than fourteen years of age to meet Philips? demand for young female employees while maximizing the occupancy of worker housing. Through hiring and managing housing demand, Philips actively crafted the profile of Eindhoven?s population. (Figure 8) Figure 8. New construction in Eindhoven (1920-1990), differentiated by type of c l ient (corporations, municipality, individuals) (Source: Ad Otten and Elisabeth Kli jn, Philips ? Woningbouw 1900-1990: Fundament van Woningstichting Hertog Hendrik van Lotharingen [Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 1991], 243) The shape of the Philips city is visible even today. Mila Davids has shown that Philips aggressively leveraged its economic power to finagle special infrastructural connections, discounts, and permit exemptions from the municipality. After struggling to reconfigure the old center city around its first factory, even covering parts of the river with concrete, Philips raised a new factory complex on the northwestern edge of town, Strijp, where the carillon would eventually stand. The Strijp complex represented a major departure from Philips? first attempt at reshaping an existing urban landscape to suit its manufacturing needs. (Figure 9) Roads, railways, and utility lines were designed from scratch to efficiently coordinate the workings of factory buildings, energy supplies, and the transport of laborers, materials, and products. Philips provided its own water supply, drainage, and paved its own roads to suit company purposes.22 21 Mila Davids, ?The Fabric of Production: The Philips Industrial Network,? History and Technology: An International Journal 20, no. 3 (2004): 279, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0734151042000287005. 22 Andries Heerding, The History of N.V. Philips? Gloeilampenfabrieken (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 93 Figure 9. Drawing by E. Stoot of the new Phil ips complex (c. 1902). Note the contrast between Phil ips? organized manufacturing plants in the foreground and the organic depiction of the old city and bel l towers in the background. It was during the 1920s expansion that Philips became synonymous with innovations in sound as well as vision. Although it had made its name with incandescent lamps, its factories started to manufacture radios, amplifiers, gramophones, and sound film equipment as Philips expanded its product lines. Its first radio broadcast receiver, ?het Roggebroodje? (the Rye Roll) model 2501, began production in 1927. Its separate plate-shaped loudspeaker, developed by engineer Roelof Vermeulen, became iconic of the first commercially available radios. As Philips branches opened around the country, it even optimized its own corporate transmission of sound via PTT and Telex communication systems.23 And that was merely the first stage of Philips? city-building. After the Germans bombarded Eindhoven during World War II to weaken Dutch manufacturing, the company rebuilt the city yet again in its own image, since the municipal government lacked the necessary resources to meet the urgent demand. When many previously unindustrialized regions of the Netherlands were being industrialized through national recovery initiatives, Philips took upon itself to remake Strijp into a suburban research park in the image of architect Eero Saarinen?s sprawling Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, with its own electronic music studio predating Max Mathews? Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center by two years. Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium, commonly called NatLab, had previously served as the Philips Physics Laboratory. After the war, when Strijp?s focus shifted from manufacturing to research and development, ?Room 306? became home to NatLab, where Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt produced what was arguably the world?s first commercially successful popular electronic music albums. With Strijp?s suburban research park so clearly distinguished from the dense urban center of Eindhoven, this American-style, suburban, compartmentalized landscape presented a novel instance of land use in the Netherlands. It mirrored the new French technopolises based on Silicon Valley models, such as Grenoble, Toulouse, and Sophia-Antipolis. Rosemary Wakeman has argued that each of these cities, with its ?uniform composition, its rational analysis and arrangement of space, 23 The Philips telephone exchange was fundamentally integrated into the national system, to the degree that Philips used private leased lines from the PTT, Philips started using Telex two years before PTT, and Philips employees even sorted, stamped, and delivered mail directly to PTT trains. By 1965, most Philips branches were connected by private Telex infrastructure; Mila Davids notes that ?messages from, say, Philips-London or Paris to Philips-Japan or South America still passed through Eindhoven? (283), making the construction of two communications towers at Jacob Oppenheimpark for public education even more symbolic. 276 M. Davids the Emmasingel factories, railway tracks were installed in the cellar as well as on the ground level. These tracks were connected to the railway track on the factory terrain, which in turn connected to the public railway (see Figure 2). The cellar reached 2.40 metres outside the building next to the railway, enabling a direct transfer of goods from trains into the cellars.18 Elevators moved (half)products and labourers between the factory floors. Sand and building materials needed to construct the Emmasingel complex were supplied via a temporary connection to the tramline. In 1908, Philips obtained a perma- nent connection to the tramline Eindhoven?Den Bosch and to the railway infrastruc- ture. Th minister of Pub ic Works gave permissi n for the construction of the so-called Philips company railway, and also permitted the enlargement of the line in 1912. Philips was obliged to take care of drainage and road pavement where the line would run.19 As noted above, transport networks were even more a key design variable in the Strijp complex. Almost all buildings, situated along broad and straight roads of equal width, were connected to the company railways, which had four marshalling tracks and were connected to the public railway network. The transport facilities on the complex had also been important when during the First World War large supplies of raw materials, intermediate goods like lamp holders and fuel were stored, while the export of lamps stagnated, and a number of warehouses were built on the Strijp complex.20 Figure 2 Drawing of the Philips Factories by E. Stoot, about 1902. Notice the Railway Lines. Source and copyright: Philips Company Archives PCA: A 6507-1. Do wn loa ded by [U niv ers ity of Ca lifo rni a, B erk ele y] at 1 1:2 0 2 7 F ebr uar y 2 012 94 and its symbolic architectural form[,] located scientific practices within the cultural and territorial orbit of provincial utopia.?24 These alternative cities for a scientific elite?with their cafes, clubs, and concert halls?were designed to place science at the heart of a totalized mode of existence, which would prepare ?a new culture that integrated the sciences, technology, and the arts in the spirit of enterprise.?25 The carillon?traditionally an urban centering technology that marked civic, religious, and market life?now worked for Philips to decenter life to Eindhoven?s high-tech periphery. In pursuit of this goal, the Evoluon?s cafes and carillon concerts presented technology and business as the highest pursuit of the cultural elite?as well as of the manual laborers who supported their innovations. Philips had long shaped Eindhoven?s urban fabric and daily rhythms. Now it usurped the carillon?s historical symbolic power of regulating time, ordering space, and determining the music heard by its citizens to legitimate itself as church and state. Tellingly, not until 1969 did Eindhoven itself build a city hall with a much lighter carillon, as if struggling to catch up three years later with the de facto municipal leadership.26 The newly dedicated area of Jacob Oppenheimpark presented a remarkable vista of contrasts: a boldly horizontal museum and radio tower built by a corporate entity to educate the public while promoting the company; facing it, another feat of engineering and musical prowess, a ?grassroots? carillon meant not to engender consumer desire, but to solidify through sound the unity of a community of laborers?the embodiment of hundreds of small individual sacrifices in working-class philanthropy. Unlike the mushroom-like Evoluon, reveling in its seemingly endless horizontal park space, the tower took on a medieval typology: vertical, compact in its footprint, and stretching upward as if to claim sonic authority over as much land as possible. On one level, then, this dramatic visual dissonance between the Evoluon and the carillon might be interpreted to represent cooperation or submerged conflict between Philips and its workers. On another level, that dissonance merely symbolized harmonious cooperation in the sense that both structures were triumphs of engineering, and the Philips research-oriented model was mirrored by Eijsbouts? research into the use of technology to improve bellfounding. Yet the Evoluon kept its noise inside for paying visitors, while the carillon projected its sound outward ?for free.? The Philips internal document ?Aantekeningen over het Evoluon? (Notes on the Evoluon, n.d.) describes the permeable interior sonic design of the museum: The bustle of the roads to the Evoluon, the sound of jet aircraft flying overhead, not to mention sometimes the music of the Carillon outside penetrates through the Evoluon in some places and influences the atmosphere.27 24 Rosemary Wakeman, ?Dreaming the New Atlantis: Science and the Planning of Technopolis, 1955-1985,? Osiris 18 (2003): 255. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655295. 25 Pierre Laffitte, ?C?l?brer les 20 ans de Sophia,? Symival 14 (1989): 10, as quoted in Gian Franco Elia, ??Sophia-Antipolis: Quandla sagesse quittela grandeville,?? in ?Technopoles et M?tropoles,? Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 46 (March-April 1990): 6. Quoted in Wakeman, 262. 26 The Stadhuisbeiaard has forty-eight bells (four octaves), the lowest bell weighing just 1,000 kg. The carillon was also cast by Eijsbouts and inaugurated on September 18, 1969 during the opening of the new City Hall itself. 27 ?Het geroezemoes van de verkeerswegen om het Evoluon, het geluid van overvliegende straalvliegtuigen en niet te vergeten soms de muziek van het Carillon dringen van buitenaf op sommige plaatsen in het Evoluon door en bepalen mede de sfeer.? (Philips Electronics, ?Aantekeningen over het Evoluon,? n.d., PDF document, p. 29, Evoluon Downloads, http://www.dse.nl/~evoluon/downld-e.html) 95 When considered sonically, the structures represent differing ideologies and intended audiences: one centered on the pleasure of providing public music with echoes of the sacred to local everyday life; the other centered on immersing one-time customers in an overwhelming visual, sonic, and interactive environment that prepared them to become even better consumers of technology. The sounds of airplanes and the carillon alike became part of this all-encompassing approach to lifestyle branding. Even in this totalized environment, Philips did not exercise decision-making control over everything in the belfry. Carillon performances did not necessarily line up with the company?s aims and objectives, and thus duplicated the loose historical relationship of municipally owned carillons to their church towers. During the seventeenth-century Protestant Reformation, cities had taken over unwanted church carillons and established them as islands of relative musical autonomy. The city nominally controlled the carillon but lacked reason or expertise to regulate the stadsbeiaardier?s (city carillonneur?s) programming. By installing an instrument whose traditional model gave so much artistic autonomy to one person, the workers initiated two decades of public music that had little to do with the Philips business, except perhaps marginally during the obligatory Muzikaal Spektakels (Musical Spectacles). During these biannual events ?for the ears and the eyes? as Philips?s first carillonneur Bertus Oomen described, the carillon and the Philips Harmonie were reunited for festivities and fireworks, and international competitions for carillon performance and composition (and even listening) were sometimes held to attract further public attention, funded by the Stichting Beiaadiersawardsfonds (Carillonneurs Awards Foundation). But even these events were about promoting the carillon as an embodiment of Dutch culture, not about promoting technology. By constructing an essentially unregulated soundscape around the Evoluon, Philips employees undermined a standardized corporate culture. British exhibit designer James Gardner observed that standardization when he met Frits Philips in Eindhoven to be recognized for his work on the Evoluon.28 ?At Eindhoven they were corporation men,? he recalled, ?trained to operate in rectilinear buildings furnished with modular filing cabinets, lined up as at a military parade under numbers.?29 In linking modern isomorphic architecture directly to the habitus of white-collar managers, Gardner?s description illustrates the regulated life into which carillon music introduced a sense of sonic unpredictability. 28 Gardner was designing a company museum for Royal Dutch Shell when Louis Kalff invited him to design the exhibits for a museum ?to shoehorn the people of the Netherlands into the twentieth century? (312). During the interwar period, he had worked as jewelry designer for Cartier, and during World War II he served as Chief Deception Officer at the British Camouflage Training School before embarking on the career in exhibition and museum design for which he is best known. (?The Art of War,? The National Archives [United Kingdom], accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/artists/gardner_james.htm) 29 James Gardner, James Gardner: The Artful Designer: Ideas Off The Drawing Board (1993), 336. 96 Figure 10. Program of the 1973 Musical Spectacle on Dutch Queen?s Day featuring performances on the cari l lon and travel ing cari l lon by Ype H?weler, Piet van den Broek, and Bertus Oomen, the Phil ips Harmonie, a Gavioli barrel organ, the group Tasteful, an exercise activity , a l istening contest , and ?Chinese? f ireworks. The pairing of the carillon and Evoluon were meant, nevertheless, to showcase Philips as a technology company. The museum name ?Evoluon? evoked ?evolution? as a geleidelijke ontwikkeling (gradual development). Its exhibits traced the ?necessity? of technology across cultures from prehistoric times to the rosy present.30 Philips offered ?a picture of the evolution of science and technology and their impact on society,? in part to address countercultural opposition to mechanized electronics corporations. The choice of the name ?Evoluon? at once appropriated the countercultural desire to live according to its constructions of natural, instinctive human behavior, and framed Philips? products and business-driven research in terms of a natural, holistic teleology. The same year that Stewart Brand was campaigning in America for NASA to release its now-iconic satellite photo of the sphere of Earth seen from space, the museum enclosed a miniature ?whole earth? of technological benefit within its flattened concrete sphere. NASA?s ?whole earth? image would become a countercultural icon, but the commercial angle of Philips? presentation of the globe limited its cultural effect. The Evoluon?s technology-driven teleology, a linear ?progress?-oriented model of historical unfolding disguised as a loop, used the vertical carillon as a foil for the Evoluon?s modernity. The museum welcomed the soundscape of the seventeenth-century city into its interior, where the ringing of bells was framed by the ?evolution? of human communication culminating in Philips radios?the only exhibit expressed through the exterior form of the building, a thin mast. (Figure 11) An American-style Ham station ?PE2EVO,? which employed the world?s only full-time amateur radio operator, transmitted on various bands, Morse code, and Telex from the museum?s 61-meter Technical Mast?a slim, efficient version of the carillon tower, housed in the same concrete and steel 30 The Evoluon exhibit ?Measuring Time Then and Now? was donated to the National Carillon Museum in 1989, when the Evoluon closed its doors as a museum to become a conference center. The display included the sections ?De onrust? (The unrest), ?De stemvork? (The tuning fork), ?Het kwartskristal? (The quartz crystal), ?Dit is de juiste tijd? (This is the right time), as well as a water clock, a DCF77 atomic clock radio receiver, frequency counters, and a globe from the sextant display. Gardner designed the exhibit to demonstrate the progression of time-telling from ?Pendulum to atomic? (Gardner, 329). 97 materials and inspired by the mast of an aircraft carrier.31 (Figure 12) Thus the carillons of yesterday and tomorrow faced each other, one audible to the community and visitors and one audible to lone hobbyists worldwide; one a historical one-way communication system and one a modern two-way communication system. (Both types of operators were, incidentally, coded as male in popular culture?the amateur radio enthusiast and the Dutch carillonneur.32) Figure 11. Two kinds of communications towers under construction. (Source: Hendriks, 28-29.) Figure 12. The world?s only ful l-t ime amateur radio operator, Karel Geense, at PE2EVO (left) . On right are QSL cards, written confirmations for ham operators who successful ly made contact with PE2EVO. (Source: Hendriks, 94-95.) This radiophonic metaphor for carillon sound was hardly new. Sammy Danna has described how the Eiffel Tower also served as a ham radio transmitter in 1908, when Lee DeForest set up his equipment and ?amazed throngs of persons who heard the voice and lengthy phonograph music program reportedly from as far away as 500 miles.?33 The iron lattice tower had likewise been intended to house a carillon cast by the French foundry Paccard, but plans were changed when it was 31 Hendriks, 10. 32 The amateur radio station seemed most of all to transmit enthusiasm for American culture. It displayed a copy of a ?Wouff Hong,? which Wikipedia describes as ?an object from the folklore of radio amateurs in the USA.? 33 Sammy Danna, ?DeForest, Lee,? in The Guide to United States Popular Culture, ed. Ray Browne and Pat Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 2001), 224. 28 29 94 95Het amateur-zendstation PE2EVO. Het wordt permanent bemand door Karel Geense, de ?enige beroeps-zendamateur ter wereld? en blijft tot laat in de jaren ?80 operationeel. Als schriftelijke bevestiging van een gerealiseerde verbinding sturen zendamateurs elkaar een QSL-kaart, QSL is een oude telegrafiecode voor ?ik bevestig de ontvangst?. 98 deemed structurally unfit to support the weight of the bells?a lesson Philips would have to re-learn in the medium of steel.34 The Philips Carillon also served as a musical automaton, and in that capacity, it performed how corporate innovation could enrich cultural performance and the built environment, and even humanize it with dynamic expression. A carillon?s automatic play was a tremendous source of seventeenth-century civic pride in the carillon-as-technology. Its massive pinned drum worked much like today?s music boxes to play melodic phrases on the hour, half hour, or even quarter hour. The more complex and virtuosic its melodies and accompaniment and the smaller the subdivisions it was capable of executing, the better. In our interviews, retired Philips carillonneurs Bertus Oomen and Arie Abbenes emphasized the Philips automatic play?s unprecedented expressive ability to sound the individual notes of the hour chimes either softly or loudly, a feature allegedly pioneered by Eijsbouts.35 Adding to the harmony of technology with nature depicted in the Evoluon, the carillon depicted the harmony of technological research with musical progress. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Philips? impressive instrument of corporate self-congratulation had been donated by its workers, not the upper management. However, the international Philips leadership did give its own campanological performance. As Frits Philips remembered in his biography 45 Years With Philips: An Industrialist?s Life (1978), The next day [after the Evoluon?s inauguration], our family received a surprise present. We were told that all our managers outside Holland, 141 in all, had personally given it, and in the afternoon Sylvia and I with all our children stood in front of De Wielewaal to receive it. We had no inkling what it was to be, and our imaginations were running wild. A tractor appeared, towing a cart on which a carillon was mounted, which at once began to chime. It was given to us to be placed near our home. The names of all the donors were on the bells, and we were delighted with this present. Every day we enjoy it all over again, when it plays a tune every hour on the hour. And whenever we walk through the woods, the carillon in the distance has a magical effect.36 The carillon emerged in Eindhoven as an ideal corporate gift in the 1960s and 1970s, but within a distinct musical-mechanical hierarchy. Carillons for the people would be played by a musician. Private carillons for the benefit of company leadership would be played by automated mechanisms. Technology companies could be completely honest with themselves: Their carillons rang for the mechanized present, not the Baroque past of stadsbeiaardiers that Jef Denyn had revived in Belgium during the long nineteenth century. From Pavilion to Parkland Caril lon The Evoluon?s relationship to its musical-architectural predecessor highlights the message of the museum?s intended global, not just local, impact. The 1966 carillon and Evoluon were direct successors to the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World?s Fair. Each installation continued the 34 Frits Philips considered the Eiffel Tower such an outdated symbol of the past that he insisted on the impossible from his engineers, who claimed that a concrete roof for the Evoluon was impossible: ?I would have none of it. Philips would hardly create an up-to-date image by building in the style of the Eiffel Tower.? (45 Years With Philips, 234-35.) 35 Arie Abbenes (retired carillonneur, Philips), in discussion with the author, October 4, 2012; Bertus Oomen (retired inaugural carillonneur, Philips), in a Skype interview with the author, September 18, 2012. 36 45 Years With Philips, 236-37. 99 company?s strategy of producing musical-architectural spectacles to reinforce its image as an innovative electronics firm; each equated technology with the arts and social good. Figure 13. Atomic publicity poster for the Phil ips Pavil ion and Edgard Var?se?s ?Po?me Electronique? (1958) at the 1958 Brussels World?s Fair . (Source: Sebastian Jordana, ?Virtual Electronic Poem, Le Corbusier back from the past,? February 28, 2009, ArchDaily , February 28, 2009, http://www.archdaily.com/15512/virtual-electronic-poem-le-corbusier-back-from-the-past.) Like the Evoluon, the 1958 pavilion famously attracted visitors to the first major postwar world?s fair with masses of concrete and curves and an immersive indoor multimedia installation (Figure 13). Nearly two million people entered its strikingly modern hyperbolic paraboloid form to hear more than four hundred spatially distributed Philips loudspeakers playing Var?se?s landmark work Po?me Electronique amidst a sea of projected images and colored lights. At the entrance and exit, they heard architect/composer Iannis Xenakis? Concret PH, a piece that manipulated the sound of burning charcoal, its name referencing parabolo?des hyperboliques as well as the building?s medium of reinforced concrete and the music?s corresponding medium of musique concr?te. Figure 14. John Cage (supine), Mauricio Kagel, and Henk Badings with others at the Phil ips Pavil ion in 1958. Each of those three composers has written pieces for cari l lon. (Source: Richard Taruskin. ?Chapter 2: Indeterminacy,? in Music in the Late Twentieth Century , New York: Oxford University Press . http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-002002.xml) 100 Var?se created his eight-minute piece at Philips NatLab (then under the direction of Henk Badings) with Dick Raaijmakers? technical assistance while living within earshot of bells in the Philips Village. The work opens with a sample of a deep, tolling bell, then combines ?primitive? sounds and images with novel electronic ones. This progression used music and sound reproduction technology to establish the Evoluon?s entire teleological sonic world in miniature, and sacralized that corporate mythology with a tolling bell.37 Visitors were then ushered back out into the Heysel Exhibition Park to hear, not just more bells, but a veritable war of bells. Two carillons?a traditional bronze Belgian carillon and an electronic Carillon Americana from the Schulmerich Company of Pennsylvania?rang out in competition with each other from inside the same Vatican Pavilion tower (Figure 15), while the Dutch Pavilion?s traditional carillon played nearby, and automatic carillons rang from the simulated Belgian village Vrolijk Belgi? and from the dome of the French pavilion. The Carillon Americana offered an affordable solution to the postwar shortage of bronze by amplifying the sounds of tiny tubular bells into deeper bell-like sounds. Outraged Dutch, Belgian, and French carillonneurs signed a pledge not to play the new instrument despite the payment offered; instead, they demonstrated playing the Belgian bells for free. The two Vatican Pavilion instruments were deadlocked over how far the carillon could be taken as a marvel of technology before it no longer met the definition of a musical instrument. Meanwhile, Var?se?s entirely virtual bell tolled on from all directions, indoors. Figure 15. The Vatican Pavil ion at the 1958 Brussels World?s Fair , with the Schulmerich Cari l lon Americana?s loudspeakers mounted above the tradit ional Belgian cari l lon such that both are vis ible. Moreover, the conflicted design history of the Evoluon echoed that of its 1958 predecessor. Retired engineer Louis Christiaan Kalff, designer of the Roggebroodje radio and bowl-like loudspeaker, conceptualized the ?mushroom?-like building, but the design of the Evoluon was executed by young architect Leo de Bever. The question of authorship grew murky between them, 37 This confluence suggests ties between ?autonomous? modernist music and corporate strategy. To analogize ? la Fred Turner, writings about the Philips Pavilion mistake applied for autonomous art; they lionize Le Corbusier for insisting on Edgard Var?se to the consternation of corporate executives, but miss how the grand scale of the spectacle was a direct response to corporate directives to ?demo? Philips products such as its loudspeakers and video projectors by creating ?effects of sound in space, therefore of movement, of direction, of reverberation and echoes, which until now have never been used in electronic installations? (quoted in Taruskin, chapter 4). Po?me Electronique is remembered as a maverick masterpiece incomprehensible to its funders, but functionally, it served them splendidly as a piece of large-scale advertising. 101 like the roles of renowned architect Le Corbusier and his project manager, Iannis Xenakis, in the design of the Philips Pavilion.38 But the resemblance of the Evoluon?s form to the Roggebroodje?s loudspeaker certainly suggests that the inspiration came from Kalff.39 Miniature plastic Evoluonradios, radios shaped like the museum, could even be bought off the shelves of the souvenir shop, which brought Kalff?s design full circle. Philips radio production framed the rest of its products and innovations, even its buildings. (Figure 16) Frits Philips, Jr. quotes media theorist Marshall McLuhan?s phrase ?the medium is the message? to explain the Evoluon, a ?flying saucer, ready to take off anytime yet still firmly ?grounded,? ? as a playful yet pragmatic embodiment of Philips? history of innovative electronics.40 Figure 16. The Evoluonradio and Rye Radio, designs both inspired by Louis Kalff (Hendriks, 140) Despite the phenomenal and storied success of the Philips Pavilion, the company decided never again to spend millions building and dismantling a temporary structure. Withdrawing from 38 Frits Philips recounts that Kalff sketched three possibilities for him on the back of a menu: ?a kind of flying saucer on legs, a cube balancing on one edge and a ball-shaped structure? (45 Years with Philips, 234). Leo de Bever, lacking an official title while working for his father?s architectural firm, tells a different story: He ?illustrated a futuristic exhibition park having a number of buildings, each in the form of a mathematical body. A cube at one point, a sphere, a cone, a pyramid?and also something strongly resembling a mushroom. Kalff immediately estimated that the realization of all the buildings would be too expensive, but he was enthusiastic about the idea. In particular, the well-defined ellipsoid spoke enormously to Kalff. Previously he himself had thought of such a shape, but as a box with a fairly flat bottom shell and upper shell, separated by a circumferential strip of glass several meters high. Two nearly identical ideas met and therefore the ?click? happened quickly.? (Hendriks, 15-20) 39 Engineer Roelof Vermeulen actually developed the pancake-shaped ?Meesterzanger? (Master Singer) loudspeaker that accompanied Kalff?s ?rye roll? radio. At NatLabs, Vermeulen encouraged Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt to pursue electronic music composition. 40 ??een schotel, klaar om elk moment te kunnen opstijgen, maar tegelijkertijd stevig ?geaard?. Marshall McLuhan?s credo ?The medium is the message? bleek ?op het lijf geschreven? van dit aansprekende gebouw? (?a dish, ready to take off at any time yet still firmly ?grounded.? Marshall McLuhan?s credo ?The medium is the message? fits ?like a glove? for this stunning building). Frits Philips, Jr., quoted in Hendriks, 6. 102 world?s fairs altogether, it invited the world to Eindhoven instead. ?Aantekeningen over het Evoluon? summarizes the rationale: Our company has competed several times at World Expositions and related events. Thereby the participation amounted to an expenditure of several million [guilders] [about 3 million euro], while after a few months, the exhibit was dismantled again. With the 75th anniversary in sight, our group has no longer participated in the years leading up to 1966 [Seattle, New York, and preparations for Montreal]. The capital thus saved was reserved. Engineer [Frits] J. Philips put forward the idea to open a permanent exhibition at the 75th anniversary. This idea was realized in the Evoluon.41 Even as Philips experimented with using the carillon to create a new suburban Dutch city center, it experimented with using its museum to bring people the world over to Eindhoven?an ambitious attempt to construct an alternative World?s Fair destination. Oomen?s Sunday concert programs were regularly advertised in newspapers and on the radio. Despite the tower?s unprecedentedly modern appearance, he told me in our telephone interview that his repertoire conformed to ?what everyone was playing at the time.? He performed a mix of classical music transcriptions (such as opera excerpts), folk and popular music arrangements, improvisations, Flemish Romantic compositions, and accessibly modernist Dutch music, thus replacing Var?se?s austerely modernist bell of mythology with an accessible carillon potpourri.42 Representative of his audience-friendly approach was his published composition Tema con capitomboli (1971) featuring a theme in descending pairs of perfect fourths (Figure 17) followed later, true to its name, by tumbling scalar passages. A not-to-scale maquette of the carillon made to publicize its design even featured a tiny version of Matthias van den Gheyn?s (1721-1785) autograph manuscript of the Preludia voor beiaard, the most popular seventeenth-century music for carillon surviving today (Figure 18). In its Platonic form, the Philips Carillon remained a ?Baroque? keyboard instrument, the sound of the city center. Figure 17. Bertus Oomen, Tema con capitomboli (1971) (Donemus) 41 ?Ons Concern heeft een aantal keren meegedaan aan de Wereldtentoonstellingen en verwante manifestaties. Daarbij betekende de deelname een uitgave van enige miljoenen, terwijl het getoonde na enkele maanden weer werd afgebroken. Met het 75-jarig jubileum voor ogen heeft ons Concern in de laatste jaren v??r 1966 hieraan niet meer meegedaan. Het zo bespaarde kapitaal werd gereserveerd. Ir. F.J. Philips heeft de gedachte naar voren gebracht om bij het 75-jarig bestaan een permanente tentoonstelling te openen. Deze gedachte werd in het Evoluon gerealiseerd.? (PDF document, p. 3, Evoluon Downloads, http://www.dse.nl/~evoluon/downld-e.html) 42 Bell Labs, ?Daisy Bell,? Var?se?s bells, the Philips Carillon: (Dutch) futures always seem to begin with bells. 103 Figure 18. Maquette of Phil ips cari l lon and close-up of score on music stand. Currently on display in St. Catherine?s Church, Eindhoven. Attendance at the Evoluon far exceeded expectations. By the time it closed its doors in 1989, it had attracted ten million visitors, and gained many more televisual ones. Almost every British television viewer had seen some part of the film Evoluon by the ?Carillon Film? company, because it was broadcast daily on the BBC from 1968 to 1972 as a trade test color film for people to adjust their color television sets.43 Various websites claim that Philips commissioned this wordless short film from Academy Award-winning director Albert Haanstra, although he is uncredited. It features visitors interacting with different types of exhibits and foregrounds the Evoluon?s futuristic soundscape, meant to immerse people in tomorrow?s sounds. The film?s emphasis on sound without words communicates the museum?s experiential and interactive focus, and debunks what Gardner described dismissively as the typical museum experience of ?silent, echoing halls; [a] sanctuary for artifacts of the past, hermetically sealed in glass cases.?44 Jaap Hofland?s space age pop soundtrack features a Latin percussion section, the close vocal harmonies of De Moonliners, and playful pastiches of big band jazz, funky jazz, and science-fiction music with a Theremin and novel musical effects, all constantly punctuated by onscreen diegetic museum sounds. Level two of the Evoluon was devoted to vibrations and sound, as well as light and lighting, so the final segment of the film features visitors playfully engaging with exhibits by, for example, vocalizing into oscilloscopes and trying out different types of organ pipes. (Figure 19) The Evoluon was presented as a fundamentally sonic environment, and yet the only sound missing from the film seems to have been the carillon, perhaps because only Low Countries audiences would understand the spatial significance of its music. 43 Trade test color films were broadcast by BBC2 during intervals when no regular programming had been scheduled, to provide color broadcasting in these intervals for use by television shops and engineers to adjust their television sets. (?Trade test colour films,? Wikipedia, access June 15, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_test_colour_films) 44 Gardner, 313. 104 Figure 19. On the left is the Evoluon exhibit ?The Grammophone People,? which makes a humorous and creepy paral le l between sound reproduction and human vocal production and advertises the gramophone as appropriate for high society. On the r ight is an exhibit explaining how the gramophone works. (Hendriks, 98-99) A Labour Caril lon? Efficacious as the carillon proved for Philips strategy, as we have seen, it was loudly trumpeted as having come into being through the agency of 72,116 Philips workers. Furthering the parallel between Philips and the municipal government, the impetus to build came from the company?s employees, as much as the civic Wederopbouwoptimisme impetus to build came from community carillon groups. Through the energies of employee L. de Windt and probably many others I am not yet able to identify, Philips employees learned of their proposed gift with the salary distribution of March 1965.45 The campaign slogan proclaimed, ?Let the festival bell of the Philips Employee Congratulatory Fund Foundation ring? (Laat de feestklok luiden van de Stichting Philips-personeel Felicitatiefonds). Posters, banners, publications, and broadcasts exhorted workers to donate by April 15. They did so in droves. Loyal employee rhetoric suffused newspaper coverage, best summarized by an inscription that would decorate the foot of the tower: ?These bells are cast, this tower was built by Philips employees in the Netherlands, both as a gift and as a memorial?one that audibly and visibly expresses what can be achieved by joint endeavor?transferred in the jubilee year 1966 to the 75-year-old publicly held company.?46 The tower was proudly designed in-house by Philips employees: A.L. de Haas and J. Noteboom of the Philips Architects- and Engineers-Bureau. On presentation day, work was halted around the country so that workers could bear ?ear-witness to a direct sonic reportage,? in the words of the Limburgs Dagblad quotation that introduces this chapter.47 Young employee representatives Margriet Cokkelkoren and Bouke Zwerver presented Frits with a certificate to sign as witnesses stood proudly in the bleachers wearing their Sunday best (Figure 20.).48 For the first time, the glorious sounds of carillon bells and the Philips Harmonie rang out from Philips loudspeakers across 45 Such a gift would probably have been made earlier for the fiftieth anniversary, had World War II not brought Philips low, especially during the occupation of the Eindhoven factories. 46 ?Deze klokken zijn gegoten, deze toren is gebouwd in opdracht van Philips? medewerkers in Nederland, e?n als geschenk e ?n als gedenkteken - dat hoorbaar en zichtbaar vertolkt wat door gezamenlijke inspanning kan worden bereikt - overgedragen in het jubileumjaar 1966 aan de 75-jarige N .V.? 47 Limburgs Dagblad, May 13, 1966, p. 13. 48 ?Philips. Op 23 september 1966 wordt ter gelegenheid van het 75 jarig bestaan van??, gahetNA, Nationaal Archief, http://proxy.handle.net/10648/68a03dc8-1ad9-102f-85b3-003048976d84. 98 99 De weergave van muziek met behulp van een elektromagnetisch opneemelement. In een perspex grammofoonplaat met een diameter van 90 cm zijn vier groeven gegraveerd, ??n monogroef, een linkerhelft en een rechterhelft van een stereogroef en een volledige stereogroef. De opstelling laat zien hoe de mechanische trillingen door de opneemkop worden omgezet naar een elektrisch signaal, dat op zijn beurt - na te zijn versterkt - via luidsprekers wordt omgezet in hoorbare trillingen. ?The Grammophone People? 105 the country in an extraordinary show of collective worker gratitude to the company that had apparently provided for their every need. Figure 20. Employee representations Bouwke Zwerver and Margriet Cokkelkoren watch as Frits Phil ips s igns a cert if icate accepting the gift of the cari l lon tower. (Collection Spaarnestad, National Archive of the Netherlands, http://proxy.handle.net/10648/6c63d302-1ad9-102f-a76c-003048944028) Frustratingly, such rosy narratives were all Eindhoven?s public and private archives yielded to my research in 2012. Philips promoted its policy of corporate social responsibility through the harmony of a well-tuned carillon and the Philips Harmonie, both managed by the Philip De Jonghe Ontspanningsfonds (Recreation Fund), and published reports dripped with the requisite sentimental idealism. A single dissonant voice came from a newspaper called De Waarheid (The Truth, a name that arouses equal suspicion). This organ of the Communist Party of the Netherlands bitterly called out the hypocrisy of philanthropy at what the article alleged was an exploitative monopoly, ?Three quarters of a century of ?social consciousness? from a monopolistic company? (Figure 21).49 De Waarheid opened its report on the carillon by enumerating Philips? ?many thousands of products, from vitamin tablets and insect repellant to electronic control devices for the Starfighters;50 from Beethoven?s Ninth Symphony (on gramophone record) to firing equipment for tanks and cannon, from naval appliances and refrigerators to engines for missiles and large vessels.?51 This damning list implicated Philips lifestyle and household products in the expansion of an amoral cold war military-industrial complex. 49 ?Driekwart eeuw ?sociale bewogenheid? van een monopoliebedrijf,? De Waarheid, p. 5, May 20, 1966. 50 The Starfighter was a U.S. Air Force combat aircraft, used from 1958 to 1969 during the Vietnam War. 51 ??vele duizenden producten; vanaf vitaminetabletten en insektendodende middelen tot electronische besturingsapparaten voor de Starfighters; vanaf de negende symfonie van Beethoven (op grammofoonplaten) tot vuurleidingsapparatuur voor tanks en kanonnen; vanaf scheepsapparaten en koelkasten tot heteluchtmotoren voor raketten en ruimvaartuigen.? 106 Figure 21. ?Three quarters of a century of ?social consciousness ? from a monopolist ic company,? De Waarheid , May 20, 1966, 5. The article is headlined by an image of Philips? glazed International Style high-rise headquarters, labeled ?Where the welfare profiteers are found?.? De Waarheid accused Philips of faking the new postwar Dutch social contract between workers and companies by coercing workers to participate in a gesture of collective goodwill towards the Board of Directors. It asked if the management shouldn?t have given something of value to the workers instead. Indeed, we might question today why Philips appeared to celebrate its workers, but celebrated itself by spending, as another newspaper estimated, nearly sixty million guilders on new buildings and a three-day festival.52 De Waarheid insisted that Philips? rhetoric about ?social conscience? and ?caring for people? never seemed to reach higher levels than when it sought to squeeze workers for the greatest possible profits.53 Philips was playing a game of ?Listen to my words, but look not to my deeds!?, a hypocrisy that tainted the carillon itself, just another Philips-branded amplifier for false messages of social harmony. According to Kees Schuyt, Ed Taverne, and Klaas van Berkel, one of the most profound postwar shifts in Dutch society was in the relationship between capital and labor. The tension or antagonism between employers and employees was replaced with the ?reason and harmony? of consensus-based deliberation, and a new Stichting van de Arbeid (Labor Foundation) embodied this relationship.54 But one suspects that while Philips employees wished to celebrate this harmonious relationship with their employer, the fast-globalizing corporation viewed such a ?social contract? as a barrier to productivity and international competitiveness in an international marketplace. Hence the Philips ?gift? of a multilingual museum was made to Dutch and international consumers and not really for the benefit of the workers (as the article pointed out), while the employees gave the carillon to the Board of Directors and not, ironically, to the community. The carillon?s function for the board was not musical (directors did not inhabit the nearby worker housing) so much as a symbolic 52 ?Philips-jubileum kost een kleine zestig miljoen,? unidentified newspaper in an Eindhoven scrapbook, September 9, 1966 (Regionaal Historische Centrum Eindhoven). 53 ?Het moge zijn dat de Philipsleiders graag de mond vol hebben over ?sociale bewogenheid? en ?zorg for de mens?. Deze eigenschappen hebben bij hen echter nooit een hoger peil bereikt dan wat strikt noodzakelijk is om werkers tot de grootste mogelijke prestaties te bregen en maximale winsten uit hen te kunnen persen.? 54 Kees Schuyt, Ed Taverne, and Klaas van Berkel, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective. 1950: Prosperity and Welfare (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 86. h_[amWhj [[km ?ie<_Wb[ X[me][d^[_ZhMWd [[d cedefeb_[X[Zh_C\*12* ' G?#C#GJ ' *2j)"MWd edp[ l[hibW]][l[hiC_ ]WWj _d i[fj[cX[h p_Cd 0.'CWh_] X[ijWWd ^[h'\\ [d' Ke[d ^[j <_dZ^el[di[ ][c[[dj[X[ijkkh _d *12* WWd >[hWhZji l[h]kdd_d] l[hb[[dZ[ jej l[ij_]_d] lWd [[d ?ijeec\WXh_[aj_ 5[ l[hlWWhZ_]_d] lWd ]be[_bWcf[d pWb d_[cWdZ l[hce[Z** ZWj ^[j i<^Wc[b[ X[Zh_C\C[ WWd Z[ K_3_"_FE!> MFFI ;< Dh8Wd ^[j ^ee\Z lWd ^[j [rc[[dj[cki[kc Z[ [nfei_j_[ ?Iki'i_iW^[ Wh<^[ebe]_[ mehZ[d ][^ek'Z[d( ;WWhedZ[h ce[j mehZ[d l[h'ijWWd [[d kd_[a[ X_CdW 0)) dkc'c[hi eclWjj[dZ[ j[djeedij[bb_d]lWd leehm[hf[d Z_[ Wbb[ [c[[dj[cki[kc c[C( Zhi( 9( AWdi[d [[d a[ki j[^[XX[d ][cWWaj k_j Z[ i<^Wj lWdakdijleehm[hf[d( ?[j _d_j_Wj_[\leeh Z[p[ cWd_\[ijWj_[ m[hZ Zeehch N_Ci[dX[[a ][dec[d( I[[Zij^Wdi ijWWj lWij ZWj Z[ [nfei_j_[eea mehZj el[h][dec[d Zeeh ck'i[W _d ['c[[dj[cki[kc(;[ ]kbZ[di leeh Z[ ikbjWdA< >IFhe[d[ ce][d bej[d lWdZ[ >ehjpWa'ijWc [d [da[b[ GJG'\_]kh[d ^kd bkij[d [d edbkij[dk_jl_[h[d edZ[h Z[iakdZ_][ b[_'Z_d](8Wd Z[ [d[ aWdj mehZj [h _d Z[aebecc[d l[[b feb_j_[a ][ib_CcX[Zh[l[d WWd Z[ WdZ[h[ aWdj p_Cd[h Z[ f[h_eZ_[a[ ]_\j_][ Wdj_'he[d[ p_<^ p[b\ edjcWi'a[hj(8bi WWd ^[j [_dZ[ lWd Z[p[cWWdZ ikbjWd ?Wc[d]ae[Xe[mededWc[di Z[ ?#dZed[i_i<^[ h[]['h_d] [d Wbi feb_j_[a fheZkhe[d[ ZWj Wb?[j XbWZ ^[[\j dWc[b_Ca [[d Whj_'a[b ][fkXb_<[[hZ lWd ^WWh h[ZW<'j[kh Nebj[hi mWWh_d Z[ WWdife'h_d] mehZj ][][l[d WWd ;[d ?WW]ec Z[ ikbjWd j[ l[hm[baec[d c[jhe[d[7P[a[h ^[j XbWZ m_b d_[j pd \_Wj][l[d WWd Z[ ceehZfWhj_C[d "[[dc_d_ckc WWd ib_Cc edjXh[[aj dW'jkkhb_Ca d_[j cWWh ^[j l_dZj Z[edjm_aa[b_d] je<^ m[b fei_j_[\(#d ^[j X[mkij[ Whj_a[b ijWWjb[jj[hb_Ca3 ??e[m[b Z[ ^k_Z_][ h['][h_d] de] ce[j bWj[d p_[d _d^e[l[hh[ p_C Z[ X[ibWWdZ[ mWdehZ[[d Z[ ][l[ij_]Z[ X[bWd][d]he[f[dm[ha[b_Ca j[ b_C\ m_b aWd c[d dkWb m[b p[][d ZWj Z[ ae[hi lWd#dZed[i_b [[d ie<_Wb_ij_i<^[ pWbp_Cd( ??[ >he[jj[ jd[j Z[ ][d[hWWbif[j?Je<_Wb_ic[ pedZ[h WjeecXec _i[h a_dZ[hm[ha X_C ;_j _i ZWd _CJeU<_W^ic[ c[j ed][a[dZ[ c[di[d'ibW<^j_d][d c[j edZ[hZhkaa_d]oWd Z[ Z[cehe[d[p_<^ d_[j j[ a_Ca p[jj[d eea d_[jicWa[bep[h [d m[[hp_dm[aa[dZ[h(Ke<^ ce[j[d m[ de] [l[d l[hZ[h]hWl[d _d Z_[ fkj(?[j XbWZ l_dZj dWc[b_Ca ZWj Z[^k_Z_][ he[d[ [deea iecc_][ GJG'\_]kh[d pe X_C'pedZ[h l[[b ef^[\ cWa[d el[h?d[kjhWb_ij_i<^[ bWdZ[d _i ZWj [[dl[[bp[]][dZ[ k_jifhWWa( M[hijWWjc[d c Z_[ ^e[a edZ[3 ?d[kjhWb_i'j_i<^ ( [vd ][de[]Ze[d_d] ][l[dWWd Z[ 8c[h_aWWdi[ _cf[h_Wb_ij[d[d [l[djk[[b WdZ[h[ _cf[h_Wb_ij[d7?[j Zeeh [d Zeeh p_[a[ lWd Z[h[Z[d[h_d] Xb_Caj mWdd[[h ^[jWhj_a[b j[lh[Z[d k_j[[dp[j ZWjZeeh Z[ edjm_aa[b_d] _d #dZed[i_bZ[ leehijWdZ[hi ?lWd ^[j 8c[h_'aWWdi[ efjh[Z[d _d M_[jdWc ^[jWh]kc[dj k_j ^WdZ[d "][ibW][dmehZj ZWj ^[j m[ij[d [[d ZWcce[j efm[hf[d j[][d ^[j efZh_d'][dZ[ he[d[ he[d[ [[d :n tli<' i(?.-n!h iin'(''P"1,1t.'.l Nntt1?111il ?Jnll?!ll !u?q "'!tt1plPt1?d it!! " -,_,,k lhl"" l\\1tiu11"' i.'opiiul " -111 f?!S!0 ?? 1?; l? 111d ,pk-11d1.! Of\?hlt1?1?t111nl 1'?11!111?' t.hc?t. \\ill _,,_1111p<'tc fot h1 ,:t pin??' " II ht lh' 111.111\' 111t111?? 11011'! of ?_?ur? ltti),< t. 111'111111i11I ,?it,-. 11'h1? N.1th.>11,1I Pcot?'i2 n <'.,111ll?J11 ?JI 1 o[ thP hi1?l1t"JI 11111Sil';ll qnalit ,\', t11 Ii<' ctcd ;i_o; n J\'""I. l\11ti.111al ;\l.:1111n inl 111 C\Jtlllll<'lllOl.lllOll <_If 1 fll' <;,11?11'i<"C'> ,111d t55 and storm, a period in our JustOf)' which Dr. Charles \V. Eliot has so aptly characterized as do1ninatclglll(ll'illlt lo'll Ill<., II . l , \lit? l\h?111t111.d \\'ill Ill' t 111? t :1111\1011 ti t?' II, " 1 ? I . I I . . I 11111111?111 ?1 111101".1 111 1 t ns .11 " , sl11n?t1111? to ht? p1n\'1th?d. <_ll t In !i?l 1. . ?. . ? ?It\' ln?ll " th<' 111?.t, :111d IS .I 1111h I ; ? ? I t I I ? \\'\'ll' ltt <'llo.;I , :''1lllll'\\h:I( 111111\' 11:\11 I'll tll '> Q ', _ -;111<1 t11111?d In s111111d tin? pitch 111 1'? tl:.il. 't'h1s will h1? 1itti11i.:\\ 111-;1?1ih?:d nu.I 11at1?d " ' l'h1? ll1?\I ol th1? \lh1?s" i11 h1_i11?)1- ol - l 'lllll'?l 1'11\\\'\S \\'llh \\'hlllll \\\'\\\'IC :1ss< t_ . in - th1? g11?al :-;t111ggl<'. nud ;1it1?r tlus, 111 11.;c1?11di11g chi 11111a I i1? S<'a ll'. ,.a,?1_1 t ?'.. 11_1 l I'.'-' t'ni,111 "?ill ht? r1?pr1?s1?11t1?d hy its 111d1vulu.1\ h1?1l. tla? h??lls allott1?tl tn lh1? ing to th 111 th<' " ?ar. th?? s??1?n11rs'' or tone projectors are hidden under a false roof on top of the structin-e as the govern- ment stipulated that nothing must alter the physical appearance of the Amphitheater. Only the console, located in the Trophy Roo3 on the second floor, can be seen and this can be wheeled onto the Amphitheater stage for special occasions. The carillon will be played each day at retreat; not to exceed one hour eafh Sunday between the hours of 1300 and 1700; for funeral services held in the Arlington Amph- itheater proper (The pla,ying of the Carillon at all other funerals in the cemetery is prohibited); on Easter Sunday, Memorial Day, Indeyendence DB\Y, Armistice Day, and such other occasions as ma,y be authorized specifically Quartermaster General; and on all occasions where patriotic organizations are holding services at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier in memory of the Unknown Soldier and/or The Unknown Serviceman, 4 150 protected (from bronze carillons) or cause ?considerable antagonism to the Dutch.?73 After AMVETS Commander Winston Burdine took the liberty of sending a telegram to Queen Juliana warning of ?potentially tragic results,? the Queen herself had Ambassador van Roijen convey ?Her Majesty?s express wish for a timely coordination of programmes satisfactory to all parties? and her satisfaction that American authorities had taken steps to ?prevent a possible mutual interference.?74 Schulmerich?s telegram, which also indicated that annexation of the Nevius Tract into the cemetery (as desired by yet other contentious parties) ?would result in two carillons in our National Cemetery,? must have struck the bemused royal as odd, accustomed as she was to a soundscape cluttered with bell towers and to whom having more carillons was a sure sign of cultural prestige. Schulmerich probably feared ?interference? far less than the opportunity for listeners to make an unfavorable comparison between the instruments. Figure 16. James Lawson gingerly pokes out a forty-minute concert on the AMVETS cari l lon keyboard at Arl ington National Cemetery fol lowing the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Lawson was the only veteran to use the G.I. Bil l to study at the Royal Cari l lon School ?Jef Denyn? in Belgium. He spent a summer playing this instrument before taking up the University Cari l lonneur posit ion at the University of Chicago. (Paul Hume, ?Sound of True Bells Peals From Arlington?s Cari l lon,? The Washington Post , August 30, 1953: C6) The AMVETS instrument did in fact join the martial soundscape of the cemetery. In 1954 when President Eisenhower led a ceremony and in 1958 when the Unknowns were enshrined, Princeton?s Bellmaster Bigelow concertized on it. At the latter event, high-decibel sounds periodically punctured a quiet backdrop. As the caskets of the Unknowns were borne by horse from the Capitol to the Amphitheater, an artillery battery at the Washington Monument boomed salutes every minute as silent crowds watched from sidewalks. Twenty screaming fighter jets and bombers flew the missing man formation once the procession entered the cemetery. President Eisenhower?s presentation of Medals of Honor to each Unknown was followed by a twenty-one-gun salute and a three-part volley, finishing with Taps.75 Later, the AMVETS carillon would also accompany anniversary pilgrimages to John F. Kennedy?s grave. Leen ?t Hart wrote a ?Prelude Solennel? for traditional carillon in memory of the slain president and premiered it there, earning a letter of thanks from Jacqueline Kennedy. (At the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Lef?vere would 73 George J. Schulmerich to former President Harry Truman, October 19, 1954 (NPS). 74 Telegram from Dr. Winston E. Burdine, AMVETS Commander from 1958-1959, to Queen Juliana, December 18, 1958. Letter from Ambassador Jan Herman van Roijen to Burdine, January 6, 1959 (NPS). 75 Poole, 202-3. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sound of the True Bells Peals From Arlington's CarillonBy Paul HumeThe Washington Post (1923-1954); Aug 30, 1953; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post (1877-1995)pg. C6 151 premiere his own memorial work.76) But by 1963, the electronic carillon seems to have been overshadowed as a live instrument. Like a music box, it only plays automatic tunes today. Unfortunately, as the carillon proved a poor instrument of diplomacy, the Netherlands? musical ?diplomat? himself proved uncooperative and distrusting of Americans. Timmermans enlisted the Embassy, the Committee of Netherland Music at the Consul General in New York, and the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) to organize an American concert tour for him following the dedication. All GCNA members received notices in early February 1954 of the upcoming dedication in West Potomac Park and that Timmermans would be available. Yet on March 31, Dr. Herman J. Friedericy had to write sternly from the Embassy that the lack of immediate response did not mean that the GCNA was not interested, and that his expectation that the Embassy would organize and publicize his tour was unorthodox at best.77 He advised Timmermans to accept the assistance of University of Chicago carillonneur James Lawson, whom the GCNA had asked to act as a ?clearing agent? for his concerts.78 Other communications had to be circulated assuring Dutch officials that Timmermans? tour was his own responsibility. Even Dutch representatives in America grew competitive over the greatest symbol of their ?unity.? A confidential telegram from van Roijen to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on February 26, 1954 noted the refusal of a Dutch office in New York to participate: I have observed that the Netherlands Tourist Office New York (ANVV) has never provided any publicity regarding the carillon or the plans for it, nor does it intend to do anything at this point. The rumor about that might arise from the fact that van der Laan campaigned for establishment of a Dutch carillon in New York some years ago. It seemed that everyone was at war over bells meant to keep the peace. The Bells The carillon bells were realized according to the original vision, each dedicated ?to that group from Dutch society or that part of Dutch territory which has donated it,? as detailed lovingly in photographic the booklet Description of the bells of the carillon: Presented to the people of the United States as a token of gratitude by the people of the Netherlands (1960) produced in two runs for the dedication of the carillon.79 Although Dutch representatives such as the Queen, Kortenhorst, and in 1995, Prime Minister Wim Kok hewed to expressions of gratitude and friendship and pointedly eschewed talk of politics when presenting the various stages of this gift, the bells themselves conveyed a remarkably diverse variety of messages, from messages of peace, even from the Dutch Army, to the Dutch Navy?s militaristic and colonial rhetoric. (Table 1) 76 Helen Dewar, ?Kennedy Assassination Observances Set Sunday,? The Washington Post, November 19, 1964, A33. 77 ??doch dat het bepaaldelijk niet op de weg van de Nederlandse overheidsinstanties ligt een tournee te organiseren en propageren.? 78 Harvey Spencer, GCNA President, to James Lawson on February 24, 1954, file 1908, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Code-archief 1945-1954, 2.05.117, National Archives of the Netherlands. 79 Description of the bells of the carillon: Presented to the people of the United States as a token of gratitude by the people of the Netherlands (Utrecht: N.V. Drukkerij v.h. L.E. Bosch & Zn, 1960). 152 Table 1. The f i fty bells of the Netherlands Cari l lon as of 1995. Data on the f irst forty-nine bel ls is taken from Description of the bel l s o f the cari l lon (1960), including the English translations. This instrument transposes three half steps. Note that the lowest bel ls form a tradit ional cari l lon short octave so that the pedalboard begins with B?2-C3-D3, fol lowed by the remaining bel ls in chromatic sequence. Pieter Hemony published a treatise arguing that C?3 and even D?3 were unnecessary for cari l lons ( in the meantone temperament of the t ime) in De on-noodsakeli jkheid en ondienstigheid van ci s en dis in de bassen der klokken : vertoont uyt verscheyde advysen van ervaren organisten ende klokken-speelders (1678). However, the short octave was not widely adopted in the United States, which only began building cari l lons in the twentieth century. Pitch Dedicatee, followed by selected inscription excerpts in parentheses G2 (connected to B?2 pedal and key) Netherlands Antilles A2 (connected to C3 pedal and key) Province of South Holland (?We are with you, free America? B2 (connected to D3 pedal and key) Province of North Holland (?My bell / tolls the gratitude / of free Holland?) C3 Province of Overijssel (?unity is built on harmony?) C?3 Province of Gelderland (?With all our might / we shall defend our freedom) D3 Province of North Brabant (?freedom can be suppressed / but it will rise again?) E?3 Province of Groningen E3 Province of Utrecht (?we fought / to free the seat of Holland?s unity?) [Utrecht is viewed as a seat of unity because the provinces united there in 1579 against Spain] F3 Province of Limburg F?3 Province of Friesland G3 Province of Zeeland A?3 Province of Drenthe A3 The Mining Industry B?3 Commerce (?Be moderate; / Investment comes before profits?) B3 Industry C4 Merchant Marine C?4 Finance (?If you own money, it obeys and follows you / If money owns you: Obey it and it will swallow you.?) D4 Aviation (?Holland is prepared / for new times?) E?4 The Navy (?From the days of Admiral De Ruyter to the present time: / -- We still roam the seas as the lion the jungle.?) [?Zij lopen door de woeste zee, als door het bos de leeuw? is from Waar dat men zich al keert (Wherever you look) (1616) by Adriaen Valerius, another patriotic geuzenlied from the war against the Spanish.] E4 The Army (?If possible / hoist the flag / in peace. / If it has to be / do your work well / and resist bravely.?) F4 The Air Force (?Keep tyrants from our borders?) F?4 Civil Servants (?Army of peace?) G4 Women?s Organizations (?Free women, / help us build / a better world in a new age?) A?4 Roosteren, a village in Limburg on the front line A4 Transport (?Time and distance vanish, / mankind goes ever faster; / but if this does not bring peace / it does not help us.?) B?4 The Middle Class (commentary: ?one of the pillars of Dutch society?) B4 The Trades C5 Communications (?may nations and peoples meet because of your flight.?) C?5 The Fishermen D5 The Farmers E?5 Horticulture E5 The Arts (?The breath of God is in their work and shows us, / how they create for us out of 153 nothing.?) F5 The Sciences F?5 Education G5 The Commercial Arts A?5 Sport (?The same purpose makes us a unity: / It is the game which unites us.?) A5 The Students (?The future works with both head and hands / for the common wealth of all free nations.?) B?5 (highest original octave dedicated to the youth) ?We twelve are jubilant in swift and joyful tones: / the high voices of the youth of the Netherlands.? B5 Princess Margriet, born to Queen Juliana in exile in Canada C6 All Youth (?Suffer less than we do, / do better than we did: / Bring peace!?) C?6 Youth D6 Youth E?6 Youth E6 Youth (?Both of these you will learn: / to blossom, and to defend yourself.?) F6 Small Children F?6 Small Children G6 Small Children G?6 Princess Marijke (?I am the smallest, / the purest.?) A6 Added in 1995 (?1945-1995 / Freedom ? Friendship / The Netherlands ? The United States?) 1960: Conclusion without Resolution On May 5, 1960, a full eight years after Verheul?s dishwashing revelation that the Netherlands should offer a ?sounding gift? to the U.S., and exactly fifteen years after the liberation, the Netherlands Carillon Tower was finally dedicated. Its modern frame rose over the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Arlington, Virginia, just over the Potomac River from the National Mall. Charles T. Chapman, carillonneur of the Singing Tower in Luray, Virginia inaugurated the 49-bell instrument with a program that opened with a virtuosic Flemish Romantic work by Staf Nees and then featured Dutch folk songs, plus a few American pieces, including two by Dutch-born American contemporary composer Johan Franco (Figure 17). The press highlighted Valerius?s hymn ?Wilt heden nu treden? because of its association in America with Thanksgiving Day and thus its reinforcement of the message of Dutch gratitude. Remarkably, this was the polysemous hymn that had allowed ?t Hart to remind his countrymen of the Dutch war for liberation against the Spanish while assuring the Gestapo that he was heralding the Thousand Year Reich, and whose American meaning now allowed it to be taken as a sign of cross-cultural friendship. Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton accepted the extraordinary gift of 61,403 pounds of bell bronze and a tower of 230 tons that ?signif[y] the high level of harmony between the peoples of the Netherlands and the United States of America.? 154 Figure 17. Charles Chapman?s program at the Dedication Ceremony, May 5, 1960 (GCNA Archives) Chapman?s selection of Dutch folk songs seemed less calculated to convey momentous meaning, or in fact any meaning at all. ?De winter is vergangen? is a song about two lovers in spring. Of fifteenth-century Dutch origin, it is still popular in the Low Countries but mostly known abroad as a German lied. The Christmas song ?Er is een kindeke geboren? probably struck the Dutch attendees as curiously out of season. ?Mamma, ?k wil een man h?!? is a humorous song (minneliedjie) in dialogue form, in which a girl insists to her mother than she wants a young Boer for a husband, not a French, German, Spanish, or English man. While sometimes presumed to be a song from the Netherlands, it is an Afrikaans song, and was thus inadvertently another reminder from the Americans to the Dutch of the colonial territories they had lost.80 The popular labeling of the song as Dutch reminds us today of the colonial erasure of South African authorship, ringing out that day over a cemetery that had only recently stopped segregating its burials. Rhetorical Moves Politicized rhetoric inevitably surrounded the Netherlands Carillon like a halo, or perhaps more like a miasma. The bells themselves proclaimed the most idealistic message, as ?spoken? by the inscription of the province of North Holland (which includes Amsterdam): ?You brought 80 S. P. E. Boshoff and L. J. du Plessis, ?15. Mama, ?k wil een man, h?!? in Afrikaanse volksliedjies. Deel 2. Minneliedjies. Pretoria, Amsterdam: J.H. de Bussy, 1921, http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/bosh002afri02_01/bosh002afri02_01_0020.php. 155 deliverance / after the fearful dark / of hunger, pain and shame: / My bell / tolls the gratitude / of free Holland.? The Atlantic geographical imaginary of freedom represented by the tower was even inscribed by maps on the smallest bell showing the location of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and of New York City?formerly New Amsterdam?in America. In a similar vein, Queen Juliana?s widely quoted 1952 dedication speech offered a humanitarian vision of empowering the weak through music: ?To achieve real harmony, justice should be done also to the small and tiny voices, which are not supported by the might of their weight?So many voices in our troubled world are still unheard. Let that be an incentive for all of us when we hear the bells ringing.? Truman responded that ?no gift could be a better symbol of [our] harmonious relations,? but these were words that journalist Ed Bruske would later label ?the hollow tolling of diplomacy.?81 Unlike the Queen, Truman heard politics in the bells: ?The Netherlands is an important member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And now Dutch armed forces are preparing to enter into the European Defense Community. It is only through this kind of effort, it is only through unity with other nations, that any one of the free nations can make itself secure against the threat of war in the future.? Speaker Martin gently reinterpreted the West Potomac Park carillon: ?When we consider the motives which prompted the Netherlands people to make us the gift of this carillon, we understand more readily why one of these bells is dedicated to peace. While I would not want in any way to detract from the harmony of the bells, which is the secret of the perfection of this carillon, I do hope that it will be the sound of this bell of peace which will ring the loudest.? Like Truman, he presented the instrument as a tool of musical containment propaganda, declaring that the carillon ?will ring out a constant reminder to the American people that?their aspirations for the free future of mankind are shared by their Netherlands brothers.? He then played metaphorically on the word ?instrument.? ?By virtue of having been the first nation to deposit their instrument of ratification of the treaty establishing the European Defense Community, [the Netherlands] are in the forefront of the nations pressing for a stronger foundation for the common defense of western civilization. As we listen to the harmony of these bells, let us not forget the harmony of purpose and striving which links our two great peoples,? he declared, broaching cold war military-political issues and the protection of ?western civilization,? never once mentioned in Dutch correspondence regarding the carillon. Thus America heard an enharmonic respelling of the international harmony the Dutch had wanted both nations to hear in the carillon?s performances. The United States Information Service in the Hague reinforced the political rather than emotional symbolism of the carillon with its May 4 advance news release for the 1954 dedication: ?It is believed that ultimately a tower will be built as a lasting arrangement with the goal of a monument that ?symbolizes for the United States and the world the democratic ideals as embodied in the five freedoms.?? In official propaganda, the rhetoric of the unbuilt National Freedom Shrine accidentally became elided with the Dutch gift. But the most strident political rhetoric came from Truman, using the cemetery?s AMVETS electronic carillon as a pulpit. The Los Angeles Times report on the 1949 dedication, ?Truman Asserts World Peace Split by Reds,? summed up the real content of the ceremony. ?Until the captive peoples of the world emerge from darkness,? he warned, ?they cannot see the hand we hold out in friendship. While they are made to respond to our handclasp with a mailed fist, we have no choice 81 Ed Bruske, ?Budget Knell May Toll for The Gift Bells: Devoted Carillonneur Rings Changes To Preserve Gift of The Netherlands,? The Washington Post, March 6, 1981, B1-B2. 156 but the stand ready in self-defense.? Although far out of earshot of the amplified instrument, the Soviet Union received a clear warning in his ominous syllogism, ?Much as we trust in God, while He is rejected by so many in the world we must trust also in ourselves.?82 A few Americans did write letters to their newspapers perceiving harmonious international relations in the Netherlands Carillon. In the Dallas Morning News on July 25, 1954, a proud commentator noted that the Dutch were not criticizing America for its ulterior motives but had instead given ?a mighty carillon as a token of their thanks?: The Netherlands did not say that America really was serving only America when our troops came to drive the hordes of Hitler out of Holland. The Dutch did not say that we were overlate in coming and probably made a good profit out of the whole business. They did not indulge in envy that Dutch cities were in ruins, whereas no American soil was harmed by bomb or cannon fire. And they could have said these things as others are saying them now?.God be thanked that the Dutch, at least, do not hate us. And, God willing, the bells shall have such a house as shall let all the world know how deeply we appreciate a brave and gracious friend. A Memorial Forgotten Under Piles of Pigeon Poop The aforementioned musicologist Smijers, also Chairman of the State Commission for Bells (Rijkscommissie voor Klokken en Klokkenspelen), told the Committee in early January 1952 that sending a carillonneur to America was ?completely superfluous? (volmaakt overbodig).83 So it was the bell experts themselves who failed to understand the need in America to demonstrate this little-understood instrument. Unfortunately, he was also the one who recommended the prickly Timmermans at the February 13, 1953 meeting. So after the triumphant inauguration of the Netherlands Carillon following a nine-year saga, it went silent. Very occasionally, its music heralded important state and other occasions. During the West Potomac Park phrase, Chapman provided a ?fanfare of bells? for the inauguration of Eisenhower?s second term, after he took his oath (Figure 18).84 Lawson performed on the completed carillon for the 1961 Regional Convention of the American Guild of Organists. Chapman gave a concert on Veterans Day in 1963, a few hours after Kennedy led the wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Yet if not for a certain Frank P?chin Law, the carillon might have gone directly into decay and become unplayable not long after its inauguration in 1960. Only in 1963 did Law obtain National Park Service (NPS) approval for himself and some twenty other carillonneurs to give concerts for a modest $100 honorarium, including his student Frances Rodgers, first woman to play that carillon. By 1970, they were able to perform forty-five concerts per year, less than one per week, following Law?s standard language that ?all recitals must include some music familiar to the general public? and his suggestion that the programs commence with the Dutch anthem and end with the American one. He sent summer concert schedules to Queen Juliana every year, and received over 82 ?Truman Asserts World Peace Split by Reds,? Los Angeles Times, Dec 22, 1949, 1. 83 Werk-Comit? ?Klokken voor Amerika? secretary H. B. Verwayen to the committee, January 6, 1952 (d?Ailly Papers). 84 ?Capitol Carillons to Announce The Moment of Inauguration,? New York Times, January 13, 1957. 157 10,000 tulip bulbs in 1964 to plant around the tower.85 Impressively, with so few resources, he had been able to attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of listeners to summer Sunday and holiday concerts. Starting in 1969, he also played during the warm months (probably at his own expense) to a total of 20,000 to 30,000 people on Tuesdays before the sunset review by the U.S. Marine Band at the Iwo Jima Memorial. He closed each time with the Marine Hymn, ?Eternal Father Strong to Save,? which had been heard from the Coast Guard Band at Kennedy?s 1964 funeral before the lighting of the eternal flame that still burns within the sonic horizon of the bells today. Law was uniquely qualified as a carillonneur and veteran to advocate for the Netherlands Carillon. During World War II, he was stationed in England with the Eighth Air Force as a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. On missions to Germany, he often flew over the Netherlands and saw firsthand the ?utter devastation of Dutch cities, towns and villages?a most sickening sight that I shall carry with me forever.? To explain his outrage over the American government?s neglect of the carillon, he often described his ?feeling of compassion and utter sorrow?for the people of Holland? during those missions.86 ?Tragically speaking, Arlington Cemetery has now been filled with graves right to the edge of the tower. We have a moral obligation of the greatest magnitude to keep this carillon played on a regular schedule,? he wrote, elevating the carillon?s importance via its neighbor. Law served as carillonneur of a similarly liminal instrument in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where he faced the classic carillonneur?s dilemma of performing for multiple audiences and authorities. There, he played the Washington Memorial National Carillon in a private denominational church entirely within a public park that became a National Historical Park in 1976. The question of the carillonneur?s role has long been a complex and fraught issue. From the seventeenth-century Reformation to the present day, Dutch carillonneurs were employed by a secular municipality and yet played in prominent church towers. Many present-day American carillonneurs struggle to persuade their institutions to support concerts for a public considerably broader than the specific population their institution aims to serve. Employed by the NPS in Arlington, Law sounded the Netherlands Carillon not just across parkland, but also across the dual political and tourist landscape of national memorials and a national cemetery. He skillfully balanced these contrasting, even contradictory, responsibilities in Arlington and Valley Forge. Law found supporters for the Netherlands Carillon from a surprising variety of sectors. The strong support he found in the Arlington Ministerial Association came from his yearly performances for the Easter Sunrise Service of his own arrangements (a half hour prelude, an antiphon during the ceremony, and a half-hour postlude with open tower visits) as well as his own piety. (He claimed for the rest of his life that these services, starting in 1962, were the only performances on the carillon at that time, although this contradicts the historical record.) Keen to avoid the appearance of commercialism, he graciously accepted low-key corporate sponsorship for the concerts from Isuzu, Mitsubishi, and Televizier over the years. Yet Law could not stem the carillon?s decay from neglect. In 1969, he delivered a painstakingly handwritten twelve-page report on the ?most harrowing experience I have had with the 85 Tulips would form an increasingly important part of the landscape symbolism. In 1973, the Netherlands Carillon Gardens were dedicated around the tower, with each of forty-nine tulip beds representing each bell and its segment of society. 86 Frank Law to (probably) the National Park Service, July 5, 1969, Records of the National Park Service, Congressional Communications, ?Netherlands Carillon-NECA Administration. Law, Frank [Director Carillonneur]? folder. 158 Netherlands Carillon since its activation in 1962,? when he had to stop mid-recital because the return spring on the lowest bell had broken. The letter recounted his long involvement with the instrument: After the carillon went silent, he could not ?properly recall the number of letters I wrote to the Department of the Interior and [my] Pennsylvania Congressmen telling of the disrespectful neglect of this instrument.? Representative Richard Schweiker (R-PA) finally arranged for Law?s formal appointment in 1962. An article by Paul Hume, music critic of The Washington Post, asked ?What good are bells if they aren?t jingled?? and misrepresented the carillon as totally unplayed.87 Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), future Vice President under Lyndon B. Johnson, read Hume?s article into the Congressional Record and helped Law increase the number of concerts. In a statement to the press, Humphrey focused on the lack of a deliberate, planned soundscape for the cemetery: ?To pass up the opportunity of adding the sound of carillon to the sights and memories of Arlington Cemetery is to slight a rich opportunity,? especially as millions would visit Kennedy?s grave in the coming years.88 Figure 18. Netherlands Embassy press secretary A. de Vries ( left) with Charles T. Chapman during his December 5 rehearsal for the inauguration of Eisenhower and Nixon?s second term (United Press) . In 1970, Law found an especially crucial ally in journalist Hark Burchard, who wrote humorous yet scathing articles about his efforts to resuscitate the dying instrument: ?Law went 12 rounds with the bells of the Netherlands Carillon yesterday afternoon. He won eight, drew three and lost one, and called it his best match of the summer with the balky bells. He also drew an unusually heavy crowd of about 600 persons, some of whom may have come to see whether the huge, rusty belltower would collapse during the tolling of such heavy numbers as the ?Battle Hymn of the Republic.??89 Astutely, Burchard made the case that, even in its forlorn state, the carillon still 87 Paul Hume, ?What Good Are Bells If They Aren?t Jingled??, The Washington Post, December 29, 1963, G6. Frank Law took strenuous issue with Hume?s implication that the carillon was not played at all, as he was indeed playing occasional concerts, but a closer reading suggests that he wanted to dismiss the article because it proposed that the Department of the Interior hire Washington Cathedral carillonneur Ronald Barnes to play weekly concerts. In total, Hume wrote four articles on the carillon for the Post between 1953-1964, one of which was musically relatively substantive. 88 ?Senator Would Awaken Silent Arlington Carillon,? The Washington Post, December 31, 1963, B4. 89 Hank Burchard, ?Arlington Bells Toll Grudgingly for Carillonneur,? The Washington Post, July 5, 1970, C1 and C3. The article?s passage on guano is also memorable: ?Pity the people who were downwind when Law?s efforts dislodged a 159 attracted die-hard fans: ?When the [Battle Hymn] ended, the tower still stood, as did?barely?the small group standing by in the cabin to give Law moral support. These few had by then developed the camaraderie shared by those who have faced death together.? His voice proved central to Law?s rescue operation. Starting on September 6, his first sensational article on the topic in the Sunday Washington Post caused an uproar with its image of a bell encrusted in guano (Figure 19). His opening salvo aimed directly at the government: Carillonneur Frank P. Law will attempt to give a concert?it is not modesty that leads the Valley Forge, Pa., musician to describe it as an ?attempt,? but long and sad experience. He expects the carillon?s control mechanism to break down, as it often does, and he is not entirely confident that the 127-foot tower itself won?t fall down. To put it bluntly, the carillon?is a gift?that has been treated as an unwanted white elephant by the government of the United States. To emphasize the instrument?s absurdly makeshift operation, he narrated that ?Law went to the carillon yesterday with tape, oil, coathangers, bandages, glue and chewing gum, trying to patch up the worn-out clavier (keyboard) and other controls.? Figure 19. ?Besides being unsightly, the pigeon droppings distort the sound and eventual ly the uric acid they contain wil l permanently damage the bel ls .? (Hank Burchard, ?Bells Will Ring Today?If Tower Doesn?t Crash,? The Washington Post , September 6, 1970, C1 and C3.) Burchard also sought to embarrass the government with Law?s colorful remarks, recording that the carillonneur?s inspection was punctuated by the following remarks, among others: ?This thing is terribly neglected?It is certainly no credit to our government?this is a national disgrace?huge mass of unplayable metal?what must cloud of dried pigeon droppings from the bottom rack of bells. It was the more unfortunate that most of them were looking up at the tower when the cascade came down.? He also had choice words for the tower?s cladding plates, ?which are of a color and condition reminiscent of those knocked-out Panzer tanks that have been sitting as monuments in the village squares of Europe these past 25 years.? 160 the Dutch think of us?this pigeon dung is incredible?it something isn?t done soon, the carillon will be beyond repair.? While carillonneurs acknowledge themselves to be a breed apart, fussy and somewhat given to eccentricity, it should not be thought that Law was exaggerating. His assessment?is supported not only by fellow members of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, but by engineers, representatives of the Royal Netherlands Embassy, and the National Capital Park Service. The article was quickly sent by alarmed Embassy charg? d?affairs Jacques E. Schaap, counselor for cultural affairs, along with two others and a sobering five-page report by Leen ?t Hart, now Director of the Netherlands Carillon School, to Minister Luns. It was ?t Hart who finally informed the Dutch authorities that the bells were badly out of tune precisely because they had been ?cooperatively? cast. His report enumerated a full seventeen problems, including the clappers, which ?because of their poor quality [are] unusable for good tone production. They themselves cause damage to the bells.? Schaap grieved that ?because a very large number of visitors to the National Cemetery must endure the dilapidated state of the belfry, the carillon threatens to lose entirely its significance as a symbol of the gratitude of the Dutch people to the United States. More painful is that many visitors find themselves of the opinion that the neglect of the monument is due to indifference on the Dutch side?. I would urgently recommend an initiative on the Dutch side to rectify the defects of the carillon and bell tower as much as possible.?90 Fanning his concerns, the Post published a follow-up editorial that ?the way in which the Netherlands Carillon has been treated?graphically told by Hank Burchard on Sunday?comes close to being a national scandal?.The rudest thing a country can do is to ignore a gift that comes from the hearts of another people.?91 Like the Philips Carillon, the modern shell constructed for a Hemony-style new Baroque masterpiece failed. Before NPS refurbishments, the acoustics were so poor that Law claimed that ?not even an amateur architect would have permitted such a foolish design.?92 The enameled steel plates covering the 127-foot tower had not stood up to Washington?s polluted, corrosive atmosphere; ?the enamel has bleached from bronze to gray and is blistering and peeling everywhere.?93 Of the 15,000 bolts, untold numbers threatened to loosen due to the corrosion around them. Carillonneurs avoided playing the lowest three bells (which could also be swung electrically) from fear of endangering life and limb. George Washington Memorial Parkway Superintendent Floyd B. Taylor had nearly secured an appropriation for a major renovation in 1969, but President Nixon?s order to halt all ?non-essential? civilian construction spending had dashed those hopes. Meanwhile, the Embassy had received ?countless letters? from Dutch visitors expressing their dismay, and even the Dutch government was ?acutely embarrassed?.because of the uneven quality of the bells.?94 Schaap went on record that ?in their zeal to cast the finest possible bells, the foundries seem to have competed rather than cooperated.? Burchard quoted Hume that the situation was ?a scandal, an insult to the 90 Charg? d?affaires Jacques E. Schaap of the Netherlands Embassy in Washington to the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 10, 1970, file 9359, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Code-archief 1965-1974, 2.05.313, National Archives of the Netherlands. 91 ?It Tolls for Thee,? Washington Post, September 7, 1970. 92 Frank Law to (probably) the National Park Service, July 5, 1969 (Records of the National Park Service, Congressional Communications, ?Netherlands Carillon-NECA Administration. Law, Frank [Director Carillonneur]? folder). 93 Hank Burchard, ?Bells Will Ring Out Today?If Tower Doesn?t Collapse,? The Washington Post, June 8, 1970, C1-C3. 94 Ibid. 161 people of the Netherlands and this country. This neglect is unspeakably callous.? Only Queen Juliana was spared from the storm; although Law wrote every year about the scheduled performances, he tactfully refrained from explaining ?how they have been received.?95 His respect for what the Netherlands Carillon stood for outweighed the prospect of disillusioning her. But through Burchard, his press humiliation campaign worked where all other efforts had failed. Nothing sparks action as quickly as bad publicity and the need to do damage control. The next day, Schaap wrote again to Luns, informing him that the NPS had raised its hoped-for allocation to $300,000 for a complete restoration of the tower and also assuring him that the Post article quoting ?t Hart that forty bells needed to be recast was incorrect (?t Hart had stated that ?a number of bells? needed recasting, but American carillonneurs and technicians have since insisted that only a complete recasting can redeem the instrument). Less than a week later, Eijsbouts was writing to the Ministry defensively protesting ?t Hart?s alleged recommendation. The press catchphrase ?tons of pigeon dung? ricocheted through administrative circles, as did the idea that ?the bells cast by three foundries in the Netherlands have never formed a harmonizing whole due to the lack of correct tuning and timbre.? By September 21, the order was given to draw up a comprehensive restoration plan to be undertaken over five years, with emphasis being placed on the restoration as a ?joint Dutch-American action? and that the U.S. would commit to providing ?the necessary resources for regular maintenance.?96 Schaap continued to respond to letters of concern regarding ?t Hart?s supposed recommendation. Meanwhile, the Dutch press was becoming an echo chamber for the scandal; the Gelderlander published an article ?Netherlands carillon in Arlington is close to collapsing? on September 9 with sensational subheadings like ?Shame? (Schande), ?Recasting,? which repeated the misquoted recommendation, and ?Nightmare.? Burchard got his big break, too. On September 11, he published the triumphant headline ?Carillon Repair Is Slated,? reporting that National Capital Parks had announced a $300,000 project to save the carillon that would get underway before the end of September. The announcement ?came in response to inquiries from House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford and two fellow Republican representatives from Western Michigan, all of whose districts have large numbers of voters of Dutch descent. The congressmen learned of the carillon?s dilapidated state from Sunday?s editions of The Washington Post.?97 Representative Jackson Betts (R-OH) would also write to the NPS, piling onto the concerned political voices. On September 10, De Telegraaf had already scooped the Post, publishing ?Americans won?t let our carillon crack (barsten): Minister withdraws ?1.8 million for restoration.? But alarms continued to go off; even in April 1971, a reprint of Burchard?s articles in the UC Riverside quarterly carillon newsletter Randschriften sent the Minister of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work scurrying to Minister Luns with concerns that critiques of the bells would be interpreted as the Dutch government admitting shortcomings in its carillon industry, and that the public was being led to believe that the government would undertake the tremendous expense of a total recasting.98 One day before the anniversary of Kortenhorst?s ?Bells for America? New Year?s Eve address in 1951, the carillon again became an urgent concern at some of the highest levels of government. 95 Ibid. 96 Memorandum from Hr. Jonker to ?Chef DCV via DCV/VM,? September 21, 1970, file 9359, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Code-archief 1965-1974, 2.05.313, National Archives of the Netherlands. 97 Hank Burchard, ?Carillon Repair Is Slated,? The Washington Post, September 11, 1970, B1 and B9. 98 Minister of Culture, Recreation and Social Work C. G. Eckhart to Minister Joseph Luns, April 28, 1971, file 9359, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Code-archief 1965-1974, 2.05.313, National Archives of the Netherlands. 162 On December 30, Luns wrote to the Minister of Culture, Recreation and Social Work requesting that a technical specialist be sent to evaluate the work needed for the carillon. Luns received encouraging news of the improvements (especially with regards to pigeons) in mid-March. But then the opportunity for squabbling presented itself again amongst the bellfounders. Andries Heero van Bergen wrote to Luns pointing out that Smijers, van der Elst, and Timmermans had inspected and approved the bells in 1954. He had warned Smijers that the sharply differing timbres of the three sets of bells would draw criticism, but Smijers nevertheless insisted on dividing up the job. Illogically, van Bergen then argued that the government ?take on not one bellfounder, but all three founders in consultation with each other to undertake the present necessary restoration of the neglected carillon.?99 The Embassy had meanwhile received his brother Harmannus Tjapko van Bergen?s letter zealously defending his fellow bellfounder?s work in capitalized words.100 Everyone still wanted a piece of the pie. To Law?s relief, the tower was cleaned and repainted and the large bells screened off from roosting pigeons in 1972, and in 1973 the carillon and transmission were refurbished and the cheap keyboard replaced. The out-of-tune instrument would be performed regularly thanks to Law?s persistence, although its troubles were not over. Dutch correspondence and press repeatedly indicated awareness that Americans lacked a strong carillon culture, hence the provision of automatic playing capabilities for the Netherlands Carillon (Figure 20) that clanged out melodies ranging from the patriotic ?Wij willen Holland houen? (H. W. van der Mey and Adr. P. Hamers), ?Wij leven vrij,? and the Star Spangled Banner, to an arrangement of ?Au clair de lune,? a profusion of Christian hymns and songs, and multicultural fare including a few African American spirituals, the Mexican song ?Cielito Lindo,? and ?El Cuando,? perhaps Argentinian.101 In Timmerman?s report on his American tour for the Dutch Carillon Guild newsletter, he recounted that ?the carillon in the U.S. has a major competitor in the so-called electronic carillon, which is as much a carillon as a Hammond Organ is an organ.?102 While correct, he failed to understand some of the motives for building electronic instruments. Law had promoted the playback of carillon tape recordings made by Memorial Chimes from towers too small to house real carillons to increase general public awareness,103 and even tried to transform Schulmerich from the inside by playing its Arlington installation, helping it acquire a real demonstration carillon for its foundry, and publishing Schulmerich?s For Bells Only: Musical 99 A. H. van Bergen to Minister Joseph Luns, March 31, 1971, file 9359, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken: Code-archief 1965-1974, 2.05.313, National Archives of the Netherlands. 100 Harmannus van Bergen established his foundry in Greenwood, South Carolina after exhibiting two carillons at the 1939-1940 New York World?s Fair and finding himself unable to return after the outbreak of World War II. 101 The automatic play was partially electric. A hard plastic band with holes moved over pegs on a rotating cylinder, and the pegs touched an electrical device that actuated hammers to strike the outer rims of the bells. (?Netherlands Carillon Tower To Be Dedicated In Washington, D.C., On May 5, 1960. For release at 1 p.m. on April 8, 1960,? The Netherlands Information Service [Anton Brees Carillon Library]). 102 Timmermans contradicted himself, however, by reporting that ?the position of the American carillonneur is different from that in the Netherlands. His playing is considered an art?. The churchgoers listen before or after the church service in their cars or in the park.? (?Enige indrukken over klokkenspelen in Amerika door F. Timmermans,? Mededelingen: Nederlandse Klokkenspel-Vereniging 6 [1952]: 15-18.) 103 Frank Law to ?All Members of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America,? July 8, 1961 (The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America Archives). 163 Selections for Carillons & Handbells (1982) to address the generally overlooked needs of two-octave carillons. Law?s attitude towards the promotion of the carillon profession was unflinchingly pragmatic and free of artistic posing or attitudes of superiority common amongst his colleagues. His invitations to play in Arlington emphasized that ?I am not asking anyone to ?play down? to the public, but I am asking that you take your audience into consideration. No concert is to include totally unfamiliar fare [only].? Adapting one?s repertoire and adjusting one?s attitude towards carillon simulacra were equally important to Law for public outreach. Timmermans seemed to have forgotten that fake carillons had played a crucial role in the Low Countries in saving bells from Nazi requisition. For example, carillon recordings were blared from a belfry in Ath, Belgium to fool the Germans into believing that the various bells hastily gathered into a single tower formed a carillon, which thus held protected status. Figure 20. ?Recorded selections ? Automatic Tapes? (Records of the National Park Service, ?Netherlands Cari l lon-NECA. Interpretation & Information. History: General? folder). Over the years, Law fiercely protected the Netherlands Carillon against continued hazards. After funding for the 1981 recital series was cancelled, Law went on the warpath and did an interview with Charles Kuralt for CBS News. Two foundations were established to support the carillon, one under the leadership of architect Joost Bok?s son. Law continued to make ardent supporters during the two-hour ?open tower? recitals, played by himself and others, even enticing visitors with complimentary hot cider to his ?Festival of Carols? Christmas concert. His fans 164 included a couple that lived in a nearby apartment building and ?listened to every single recital,?104 and support came from local ministers, businesses, and Dutch radio and television magazine Televizier/Avrobode. In one of the highlights of his career, Queen Beatrix, Prince Klaus, and their party visited the playing cabin during his recital for them on April 19, 1982. The Netherlands Carillon reached its present state in 1995, when Prime Minister Wim Kok presented a fiftieth bell to President Bill Clinton at a White House ceremony on February 28 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation. This token enlargement was part of the larger retuning of the carillon, sponsored by the Stichting Nederlands Carillon Washington D.C. 1956-1995, a foundation led by the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. and supported by Dutch business leaders, the Netherland-America Foundation (which also supports Fulbright scholarships), and the Dutch government. Clinton received the bell as a post-cold war symbol in his acceptance speech. ?The Prime Minister comes here at a very important time,? he said eagerly, ?when we are seeking to work together to meet the challenges of the post-cold war era,? amongst which he listed ?a more integrated, more secure Europe? that included ?a democratic Russia,? the ?indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,? and expanding trade between their nations. In one sense, the carillon?s containment function had been fulfilled, but in another sense, none of Clinton?s issues pertained to the anniversary bell. The Dutch proved themselves again uninterested in making geopolitical statements using the carillon. Kok responded, perhaps in an underhanded rebuke, ?You said three words about this bell?indeed, this is one of the smallest ones we have. But it?s number 50?number 50 in a row. And this symbolizes?with the words ?Freedom? and ?Friendship? on it, it symbolizes how grateful we still are and have remained.?105 On May 4 (Memorial Day in the Netherlands), Ambassador Adriaan Jacobovits de Szeged led a delegation to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (flowers were also laid on graves of Dutch soldiers interred there after World War II); this was televised on AVRO Televizier, which had taken part in the campaign. The next day, the fiftieth Bevrijdingsdag, the retuned and expanded fifty-bell carillon was inaugurated with a concert by American Ed Nassor and Dutchman Jacques Maassen, as well as by the American Choir and U.S. Military Band. A day-long ?The Bells of Freedom? celebration marked the ?close political, economic, social and cultural ties? between the countries and honored American veterans who participated in the liberation,106 culminating in an eponymous musical by Dutch composer Edwin Schimscheimer performed by a Dutch and American cast at the National Theater.107 As for the historical record of this instrument, perhaps because the bellfounders? collaboration proved so disastrous, there is no trace of their records to prove or disprove their efforts to coordinate with each other. All three foundries were required to turn over their company archives on the ?Bells for America? project to the government, but an inquiry with the Koninklijk Huisarchief at which a listing showed those materials led nowhere. False rumors abound in the U.S. that the foundries retuned cast-off bells for the diplomatic gift, and the mysterious loss of their 104 Frank Law to John Byrne, Superintendent of the Department of the Interior, April 20, 1981, Records of the National Park Service, Congressional Communications, ?Netherlands Carillon-NECA Administration. Law, Frank (Director Carillonneur)? folder. 105 ?The Bells of Freedom: U.S. Holland Liberation Celebration,? HollandUSA 11 (1995), published by the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the United States: 1-8. 106 Ibid, 3. 107 Edwin Schimscheimer had distinguished himself by that time through three selections in Eurovision and the Dutch award for best film score in 1994. 165 records affords little reassurance about their contributions. One rumor is correct, however?only the total recasting of the complete set of bells could make this carillon sound like a unified whole ?Voice of the Netherlands.? Figure 21. Getting re-involved with its aesthetic cari l lon sibl ing, Phil ips Electronics chimed in on the celebration of transatlantic democracy as a corporate sponsor by replacing the original Phil ips Lightbulb Factory f loodlighting on the tower (HollandUSA , vol . 11, 1995, published by The Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the United States, 16, National Park Service Archive). The Nevius Tract remains contested real estate. In 1999, a turf war broke out amongst Marine Corps veterans and politicians over the proposal of a stainless steel Air Force Memorial with a star-shaped floor plan to be built between the carillon and Iwo Jima Memorial. Detractors roared that such an incursion onto what the Corps held to be sacred Marine space would occur ?over my dead body.?108 (It was built elsewhere.) The Iwo Jima Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial? all these monuments and many more stand tall and silent in Washington, D.C. For much of its mottled history, the Netherlands Carillon has teetered on the brink of silence too. And when it has sounded, it has rung out a distinctly dissonant transatlantic geographical imaginary. 108 Larry van Dyne, ?Over My Dead Body,? The Washington Magazine (November 1999): 149-51. 166 Figure 22. The Marine Corps War Memorial and the Netherlands Cari l lon. Behind the cari l lon is Arl ington National Cemetery. (Photo: Tiffany Ng, 2013) Although I mentioned at the outset of this chapter that two carillons were presented in North America as Dutch gifts?the other to Victoria, British Columbia?the exchange was not entirely one-way. Very belatedly, the U.S. shipped a ?carillon? as a World War II memorial to Margraten, the Netherlands. On this U.S.-administered land near the Dutch-German border, AMVETS proved Dutch stereotypes right regarding the American preoccupation with convenient, affordable electronic carillons by dedicating an electronic carillon in the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial on September 12, 1994.109 During my visit in August 2015, I watched Dutch visitors pause in surprise when the softly tinkling Westminster Quarters marking the hour were followed by several short arrangements such as the hymn ?Eternal Father, Strong to Save.? After peering up at the tower and seeing no bells, they quickly moved on. This considerably less 109 According to the AMVETS website, ?AMVETS and the The Robert R. McCormick Foundation have installed and dedicated carillons in Europe and North Africa as follows: Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur Mer, France; Epinal American Cemetery, Epinal, France; Manila American Cemetery, Republic of the Philippines; Netherlands American Cemetery, Margraten, The Netherlands; Somme American Cemetery, Bony, France; Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France; North Africa American Cemetery, Carthage, Tunisia; Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, Seringes-et-Nesles, France; Cambridge American Cemetery, Cambridge, England; Brookwood American Cemetery, Surrey, England; Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, Belleau, France; Florence American Cemetery, Florence, Italy; Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, Hombourg, Belgium; Brittany American Cemetery, St. James, France; Lorraine American Cemetery, St. Avold, France; Saint Mihiel American Cemetery, Thiaucourt, France; Ardennes American Cemetery, Neuville-en-Condroz, Belgium; Flanders Field American Cemetery, Waregem, Belgium; Nettuno, Italy and Suresnes American Cemetery, Suresnes, France.? (AMVETS, ?Carillon Program,? accessed June 25, 2015, http://amvetsnsf.org/carillon). 167 substantial gift showed a lack of understanding of Low Countries carillon culture and its history by unintentionally sneaking the postwar Amerikaanse gevaar (American threat) into Dutch borders. The dedicatory performance by Capt. Mark E. Dodds, USAF, was followed by the Mechels Vocal Ensemble and the Band of the United States Air Forces in Europe, as well as a flyby. Americans could hardly have made a less fitting campanological gift to the Dutch to memorialize the fallen of the Second World War, but of course the Dutch participants said nothing. Figure 23. Excerpt from the program booklet of the inauguration of the AMVETS cari l lon at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, the Netherlands (September 14, 1994). A Modern Musical Antidote The reception of the Philips Carillon changed dramatically between 1966 and the end of the cold war, and the decades after World War II in America can also be characterized by their changing soundscape as recorded in the meanings that listeners perceived in bells. In a New York Times editorial on March 10, 1960, a nameless writer?probably contracted by Schulmerich?explained that the announcement of plans for an AMVETS Pearl Harbor carillon adds another note to our growing awareness of the sounds of civilization?We hear the disappearance of familiar noises and the appearance of strange, new ones. We read regularly about the pros and cons of efforts to utilize the sound waves to soothe office workers, of the effect of music to calm jittery dental patients, of the neuroses that can be traced directly to the increasing clangor that permeates everyday living. Then there are the ?sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not,? which have become an increasingly important part of the sound stage we know as Earth. We learn of this in the great increases in the numbers of concertgoers and operagoers, of those playing musical instruments, of hi-fi and stereo addicts. And now the news about the set of bells to be installed at Pearl Harbor on next Memorial Day is a reminder that the carillon, giving forth sounds that we associate with yesterday, is making an appearance in many buildings devoted to many varied pursuits of today [italics added]?. Perhaps in our modern day and age the electronic carillon may become an antidote to the nerve-racking [sic] sounds of traffic, the blasts of jet flights, the swoosh of rockets, the clatter of construction, the blaring of radio and television sets and the general hubbub and din of our daily activities. And perhaps, as the voice of the bells is heard throughout the land, tensions will ease, jumpy nerves will be soothed and serenity replace neurosis as the national characteristic. A LIVING MEMORIAL The AMVETS Memorial Carillon is an ongoing program that is truly unique ... a living memorial to our Nation's deceased veterans. The history of the program dates back to 1948 when AMVETS sought an appropriate memorial to honor those who had given their lives in World War II. After studying the tributes presented by other organizations and groups memorializing the dead of other wars, AMVETS decided that a "living" memorial, a carillon whose bells, symbolic of Thomas Jefferson's historic words, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," tolling as a constant reminder, would be the most appropriate. A carillon would not only affirm that the sacrifices made by those who died were not in vain but would also serve to remind us of our legacy and of our debt to those who fought to preserve freedom throughout the world. The first carillon was installed at Arlington National Cemetery. Accepted by an Act of Congress in October 1949, this carillon was dedicated by President Harry S. Truman on December 21 , 1949 with his now immortal words, " ... As these bells ring ... honored dead rest ... freedom lives ... " This particular carillon was so well received that AMVETS established a continuing carillon program. In addition to Arlington National Cemetery, AMVETS carillons are located at 48 other locations, including the carillon that is being dedicated here today. A replacement carillon w as dedicated at the Harry S. Truman Library on December 21 , 1986 exactly thirty-five years after President Truman dedicated the first AMVETS Carillon. This dedication marke the very last event that honored President Truman during the lOOth Anniversary of his birth. Others are located at the memorial erected in tribute to the memory of the 1,177 crew- men of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa; the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts; the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas; the State Capitol building in Salt Lake City, Utah; Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and at AMVETS National Headquarters in Lanham, Maryland. Additional AMVETS carillons are located at Fort Smith, Arkansas; Bushnell, Florida; Normandy, France; Decatur, Georgia; Honolulu, Hawaii; Camp Butler, Illinois; Chicago, Illi- nois; Danville, Illinois; Peoria, Illinois; Quincy, Illinois; Rock Island, Illinois; Marion, Indiana; West Lafayette, Indiana; Chalmette, Louisiana; Jackson, Louisiana; Crownsville, Maryland; Bourne, Massachusetts; Augusta, Michigan; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Marquette, Michigan; Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; Springfield, Missouri; Buffalo, New York; Calverton, New York; Montrose, New York; Northport, New York; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Salisbury, North Carolina; Dayton, Ohio; Sandusky, Ohio; Fort Gibson, Oklahoma; Eagle Point, Oregon; Manila, Republic of the Philippines; Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; Florence, South Carolina; Houston, Texas; Quantico, Virginia; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The carillon loca ed at AMVETS N tional Headquarters was designated s the AMVETS National Memorial Carillon o July 4, 1976, in comm moration of our Nation's 200th Anni- versary. AMVETS invi es its supporters and members to enroll the name of an immediate relative, who is now deceased and who served with honor in the United States Armed Forces, in the Nation