Organ Reform Meets Japan's Reformation Day
Kusakari's uncannily refined, historically informed pipe organs
I’ve certainly heard a great deal of Bach while attending Japanese church services. This may be attributed, at least to some degree, to the fact that I work at a Lutheran college. Chapel several times a week always includes a prelude to accompany the lighting of the candles, and a postlude to attend to their extinguishing. The audiovisual ritual bookends a sacred time set apart for the hearing of God’s Word, song, and prayer.
Much of the time this music is Bach.
Reformation Day
And so when I attended the annual Reformation Day worship at Ichigaya Lutheran Church, I came with certain expectations. The sanctuary boasts a beautiful Aubertin instrument, with exquisite cabinetry, corners decorated with scroll work, topped by golden spires. The sun rules the right side, moon and stars the left, echoes of the cosmic harmonies evoked by the king of instruments; a new creation each day it plays.
But the prelude was, in fact, not Bach. Always eager for authenticity, the Japanese service had to open with Luther’s Iconic Erhalt uns Herr bei deinem Wort. But as Bach did not compose a prelude for that tune, Heinrich Böhm’s composition led off. Böhm’s chorale partitas greatly influenced the young Bach, who likely studied with the master during his student days in Lüneberg.
Neither was the postlude the expected BWV 720, a commentary on Ein Feste Burg, but a clearly modern interpretation:
Perhaps the organist had tired of the usual songs. But perhaps the repertoire is rather deeper than I had imagined.
Japan’s pipe organ preferences have imprinted heavily upon the baroque. The identification of organ music with Bach is nearly complete. So much so that it is nigh unthinkable that any organ built here would lack a core set of stops to play his music.
It just so happened, too, that Japan’s “Pipe Organ Boom” (look forward to a forthcoming article) coincided with the waning days of the Organ Reform Movement, and the rise of historically informed instruments. Builders had exhausted the postwar rebuild in Europe, where fashion was turning modern again. Except in Japan.
Perhaps conceived as an antidote to the high-tech boom, Japan’s pipe organ preferences are anything but. Probably 99% of them are fully mechanical, or could be. They may have a stop or two that are electric, or a computer that controls the presets. But inside, it’s rods and tracker boards all around; thousands upon thousands of minutely adjusted manual parts.
The same week of the Reformation festival, I had the chance to visit the ongoing rebuild of the organ at Tachikawa’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church. It is the largest instrument of one of Japan’s premier builders, Tetsuo Kusakari, and built to the exacting standards of the eighteenth century.
Kusakari invited me to visit the rebuild, where he is assisted by the former head of Fisk organs in Boston, Steve Dieck, and Danish voicer of reeds, Jonas Berg, who trained a Flentrop. They made an international dream team of organ experts, well more than one hundred craftsman years of experience between the three of them. Also in attendance was French ethnologist Marie Baltazar (whom I met at Bar Fuga), eager to learn how Japanese craftsmen have adapted the organ arts.
The answer is: not much. Far from criticism, this is a high compliment. As in so many things, these Japanese builders have perfected the existing tradition to an incredibly high level. I’ve already spoken of Munetaka Yokota, who worked for more than thirty years outside Japan. Kusakari is the opposite: he has spent less than a year apprenticing abroad, first in the US, and then Holland. He is mostly self-taught. And yet his creations reach a sublime level of craftsmanship.
As an enthusiast in the early 1970s, Kusakari had already built a “portativ” in his Tokyo bedroom when he went on an organ tour of Ostfriesland led by organ doyen Harald Vogel. There he was inspired to set out on his own, and built (still in his bedroom) his first full instrument, a positive organ, with instructions from Karl Borman’s “Heimorgelbau.” After demand for renting out that instrument grew, he built another. And another.
Kusakari’s work in Tachikawa expresses a very Japanese notion of “authentic,” right down to the step-bellows. An electric blower is used most of the time, of course, but the possibility of manual action is important, for it gives the sound an expressive variety deemed lacking without.
Like Munetaka’s work, Kusakari’s oozes a sort of rustic refinement: all is visible; all is comprehensible. And yet it is subtle and mysterious.
Back to Böhm. We know that by the time he left Lüneberg, Bach was an all-but-certified organ expert. He must have spent his nights and weekends crawling around that great organ in St. Michaelis Church.
Well, Kusakari did the same. Much persistence brought him once again in the early 1990s to Harald Vogel in Ostfriesland. There he spent several weeks with notebooks, calipers, and measuring tapes, learning from the past, preparing for his future.
Crawling around those instruments just like the young Bach, Kusakari brought back and embodied the “authentic” northern German school of organ building right here in Japan.