BY RACHEL BRUERVILLE, OPINIONS EDITOR
For three years, a cathedral organ has been resting, waiting, in silence.
Its musician David Heah has relied on a digital organ to fill the space of Adelaide’s historic St Peter’s Cathedral.
“There are many fine digital instruments out there that do a very good job at replicating the sound of a pipe organ…but nothing can compare with the sounds and range of dynamics that a real organ can produce,” David says.
“Being in touch with the instrument is like working with a symphony orchestra; drawing the different voices of each rank of pipes together, with their unique colours, to paint a musical picture.”
So it’s understandable that David is looking forward to the first Sunday in December: when this day arrives, he’ll perform the very First Chords on the venue’s newly restored cathedral organ.
Fittingly, the date also marks the beginning of the cathedral’s 150th birthday celebrations. But how do you bring to life a run-down organ with more than 3,000 pipes, anyway?
David, who is also an engineer, sheds light on the process. His musical upbringing saw him start playing piano as a 5-year-old before joining the St Peter’s Cathedral choir a few years later. But it wasn’t until he was in Year 12 that, between his final exams and commencing university studies, he approached the cathedral’s Organist Emeritus, the late Dr David Swale, for organ lessons.
After becoming an organ scholar and an assistant organist in the following years, David commenced as the official cathedral organist in January 2018. Now, he accompanies the choir in rehearsals and plays for services throughout the week, preparing multiple mass settings, motets, anthems, psalms, hymns, and postludes – “plenty of music turnover”.
But he’s also responsible for the upkeep of the cathedral’s pianos, three chamber organs, and the newly restored cathedral organ. Here, David gives us some fascinating context to this huge organ restoration project, and insight into the world and the mind of a cathedral organist.
Thank you so much for chatting with us, David. How long has this organ restoration project taken?
The process really began in 2009, when we called for quotations to undertake the restoration work. We received tenders from companies in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The UK firm of Harrison and Harrison was selected, and we agreed that work would commence when time and funds allowed.
In 2016, a significant fundraising effort commenced, and the process of sending about 16 tons of pipe organ half way around the world and back again began. Not many musical instruments need hoists and scaffolding to take down, but a cathedral organ does!
The organ builders came out from the United Kingdom in July 2017, and took around five weeks to disassemble the instrument. It sailed to the UK, and after about eight months in workshops, receiving a lot of TLC, was shipped back to us earlier this year. Reassembly commenced in July, taking about eight weeks. This was followed by another five weeks to tune and voice a little more than 3,300 individual pipes.
How involved have you been throughout the whole restoration process?
My background in engineering and project management meant I landed myself a job as a co-project manager from the get go! This gave me a unique insight of being able to provide both technical and logistical support, as well as some musical oversight.
That said, so much of this work has been in restoring the instrument to the intent of the original 1929 concept; the evidence is very much there in the way the pipes have been crafted and shaped. In a sense, the organ told us what needed to be done; we just made the arrangements!
Does your engineering background give you more insight into the restoration process?
I have a few careers and hobbies that tie together well. Unlike the other organists before me, I actually studied petroleum and mechanical engineering; my day job is as a reliability engineer.
Engineering also fuelled my interest in steam trains (or perhaps it was the other way around?). On my weekends off from the cathedral, I drive heritage steam trains. If people think of a steam train, they normally think of the melodic sounds of a steam whistle, and I collect those too! Each has a unique voice and chord, and the way they produce sound is just like the flue pipes on a pipe organ.
Engineering has certainly helped me when contributing to the restoration process. I have always had an interest in how things work, and being able to see the parts of the organ laid bare, stripped down, and then reassembled has really helped my understanding of how I work with the instrument as a musician. So much of the instrument is hidden away in the organ chamber and not visible, so having the rare privilege of getting inside the instrument, and seeing its inner workings, has been a very rewarding experience.
Do you think there is a need or demand for more newly composed organ music?
The published organ repertoire is huge. I feel like in the eight or nine years I’ve been learning, I have only scratched the surface of what’s out there.
That being said, if the organ is to maintain a position as the ‘king of instruments’ into the 21st Century, we need to keep moving with the times. Sadly, so many people think of the organ as only being good for accompanying hymns and playing the same few pieces one typically hears at a church wedding.
In a sense, that is part of the reason I feel a real weight of responsibility as the cathedral organist: we have a unique position to offer different repertoire to a huge cross-section of the community every week, in a public, accessible space. Part of this is through learning new works, part is through increasing and expanding my skills as an improviser, and part is providing a space to educate the next generation of organists who will be needed to take over the organ benches at hundreds, if not thousands of churches around Australia in the coming years.
So, in that sense, we absolutely need to reinvigorate and expand the repertoire, and newly composed pieces can help fill this void. We need to continue to expand and develop the broader community’s understanding of what the pipe organ can do, continue to challenge ourselves as musicians, and inspire the next generation to take up the instrument.
What are you most looking forward to about playing the new organ?
To have the opportunity to bring the organ ‘home’ and play the ‘first chords’ on the restored instrument is a real gift, and an immense honour.
I had my very first organ lessons on this instrument, and I can remember being astounded at what it could do – even then in its tired state. I have to pinch myself occasionally and remember that almost every week I have the great honour to play, in my very biased opinion, one of the finest instruments in Australia, speaking into one of the most iconic buildings on the Adelaide skyline. That’s pretty special and something I will never take for granted.
I am really looking forward to sharing this beautiful instrument with the thousands of worshippers and tourists that come to the cathedral every year. From a boy chorister to a cathedral organist, I’m living the dream.
Listen to the organ’s First Chords from 5.45pm December 2 at St Peter’s Cathedral. It also marks the launch of Festival 150, celebrating 150 years of the cathedral.
Disclaimer: Our writer Rachel Bruerville presented this story as a collaborative piece between her role with CutCommon and her new role as St Peter’s Cathedral administration assistant. (And she’s a composer, too – talk about multi-talented…!)
Images courtesy St Peter’s Cathedral.
