BY ROBERT JAMES STOVE
Robert James Stove obtained a High Distinction in his Monash BMus last year, and is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012). When not writing or playing the organ, he is gainfully employed as a school-crossing supervisor, in which role he was photographed by ABC Radio National’s Jeremy Story-Carter (as pictured above, supplied). Here, he writes about experience recording his new organ album released July 2.
“Laws are like sausages: it is best not to see them being made.”
Alas, Otto von Bismarck seems never to have uttered that aphorism so often ascribed to him. Yet, the aphorism haunts the mind when one records a CD of one’s own organ performances.
Because for many of us, it’s perhaps best not to witness CDs being made, either.
The whole procedure will horrify sentimentalists, and it strips away whatever glamour might hitherto have accrued to the CD production industry, although there are compensations.
Chief compensation is the public goodwill into which it taps. Gradually, YouTube has been so colonised by musical incompetents that not the slightest prestige now pertains to uploading a performance there. As the analphabetic blogger is to prose, so is the tone-deaf YouTube exhibitionist to music.
In welcome contrast, the very fact of making a CD has become an almost transgressive declaration of serious intent. Whenever to acquaintances I have mentioned being in the throes of CD recording, I have been congratulated upon my implied tenacity of purpose.
Released today, my production is called The Gates of Vienna: Baroque Organ Music from the Habsburg Empire. Here’s hoping that a title which includes the magic words ‘Vienna,’ ‘baroque’, ‘Habsburg’, and ‘empire’ will countervail the sales-deterrent factor notoriously afflicting the word ‘organ’.
Here’s hoping, also, that music-lovers who shy away from organ music in general might find this release more attractive than a gigantic boxed set of organ repertoire would be. I’ve taken great trouble to incorporate in the CD’s annotations much general historical background, notably the 1683 battle for Austria’s capital that gives the disc its name (and its cover design). Some of the pieces included are recording premières.
While I conceived of the project in 2015, I reached February 2018 before overcoming the financial and time-management shadow falling between the intention and the act. After completing my bachelor’s music degree in 2017 – and reaching comparative prosperity through my employment as school-crossing guard and substitute organist – I discerned that if I awaited a better opportunity to implement the CD project, I would be delaying forever. One may think of it as a pregnancy that took three years to culminate in actual birth-pangs.
How I envy drummers, clarinettists, and above all guitarists! They can record in almost any venue, even the scuzziest teenage bedroom. The organist has no such luck, since organists, by definition, must play organs housed in specific – usually ecclesiastical – buildings. Which means not only acquiring permission from clergy and music-directors alike, but borrowing organ-lofts’ spare keys, pursuing curators for such keys, and (since recording will almost invariably occur after dark) brandishing a torch to prevent embarrassing stumbles in pitch-blackness while attempting to locate a light switch, preferably without thus triggering the security alarm’s barbaric yawps.
It also means dealing with ambient noise scarcely credible within what is meant to be a house of religious devotion. The list of extraneous sounds confronting my – brilliantly skilled – producer, Thomas Grubb, included:
- the organ’s own motor;
- a bell being rung;
- delighted schoolchildren’s shrieks from a nearby playground;
- ostentatious rosary-recitation from visitors who simply had not noticed or lacked sufficient English to read the signs announcing that a recording was being made;
- a flock of screeching seagulls;
- planes and helicopters taking off;
- trains arriving and departing;
- one obsessive, nocturnal motorcyclist audibly determined to emulate Evel Knievel.
Digital microphones compel a terrifying focus upon fine details. Analogue recordings concealed and forgave far more. (Hence the thumps, squeaks and page-turns now audible in CD remasterings of many ancient classical LPs. Hence, too, the 78-rpm epoch’s relaxed technical attitude, which enabled Artur Schnabel and Alfred Cortot to leave on their piano recordings finger-slips in a profusion unthinkable now.)
This means that one must correct not just each wrong note, but each even slightly insecure-sounding right note. Can you imagine how many insecure-sounding right notes an organist, however experienced, plays during sessions 15 hours long? In a live performance, you might well not notice them (though the organist would) yet no such near-misses elude the draconian mics.
Amid such fatigues, expenses, grandeurs, and miseries, would I do it all again?
On balance, yes. The recording producer is almost as effective in social and artistic levelling as is the Grim Reaper. Every musician, however confident, tends to hate recording processes. So one arrives at a state of curious egalitarianism, knowing that even the awesomely assured pianist Vladimir Horowitz required back-room titivation to remove fluffs, before his ‘live’ 1965 Carnegie Hall recital could be unleashed upon the world.
Perhaps the most appropriate comparison is with the marathon runner, who, even if the last to cross the finish line, has achieved something about which athletics’ armchair ‘experts’ stay forever clueless. To adapt Rudyard Kipling’s quote concerning England: What do they know of CDs who only CD players know?
The Gates of Vienna, recorded in the Melbourne suburb of Mentone, is available from 2 July via www.arsorgani.com. Robert’s album features works by composers from the 17th and 18th centuries including Johann Jakob Froberger, Georg Muffat, Gérard Scronx, Jan Zach, and others. You can also listen digitally on Spotify.
Did you enjoy the read?
If you did, shout Robert James Stove a coffee, or even treat him to a fancy meal to celebrate his new release. Here he is, playing the organ of St Aloysius’s, Caulfield, in a picture captured by Chris Steward:
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