Painting to the aid of Music
A wander through the Louvre opens the ear to seventeenth-century organ pipes
Last week’s reflection, “Wabi-Sabi Bach,” explored how this Japanese aesthetic of purposeful imperfection informed Munetaka Yokota’s pipe-organ creations. A rank of irregular pipes, poured by hand with a manual casting box, pick up the signature of the maker. And, cooled quickly, they develop large, irregular crystals that make for a unique sonic signature for each pipe.
I also suggested something further: that Bach’s organ music appeals to this aesthetic of fleeting imperfection. When I spoke to Yokota-sensei, he retold a marvelous anecdote about how painting helped him through a dilemma in voicing.
To our contemporary digital and disembodied sensibilities, voicing is perhaps the most mysterious of the pipe organ arts. Even for such a bespoke product as a pipe organ, makers can wire-frame draw everything with computer-aided design (CAD). Many builders can and do shape many of the wooden parts with computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines.
But voicing the pipes remains stubbornly resistant to mass production. It can be approximated by good materials and design, but a true artisanal touch is needed for the final subtle trimming, bending, and cutting. There’s good reason why Matthew Crawford’s profound reflection on the subject, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2016), ends in the pipe organ workshop of Taylor and Boody.
Since Descartes, and later reified in the philosophies of Locke and finally Kant, the human person is presented as a self-created entity, sovereign in thought and, ideally, body. Sovereignty is a massive philosophical subject, and much contested since Foucault (see, for example, Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben), particularly under the rubric of biopolitics. What Crawford comments on is not overtly political sovereignty (though it can come to that), but rather the endless navel-gazing of modern philosophical anthropology. This impoverished vision has produced subjects who assert absolute autonomy over the world while having no knowledge of how it works.
Crawford’s solution is not political but pragmatic: craft. The physical world has certain, unimpeachable limits that push back. Effective power is not absolute, nor can it be merely asserted. It is gained through skill and experience, something Crawford explored in the equally recommendable Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. In today’s Star Wars and Matrix techno-fantasies, the only thing keeping me from god-like autonomy are limiting beliefs. No, says Crawford, molecules do not bend to our will. But they can be equally and miraculously manipulated by carefully wielded tools.
And what is a tool but a tradition, embodied? This is something the digital native has forgotten, but one which perhaps is captured in the hipster love for vinyl. Whether for purity or sound, certain audiophiles’ obsession with analog (right down to tube amplifiers) captures something of this. Our aesthetic perceptions are so much keener than our digital tools. And even if we could reproduce the sound of an orchestra to indistinguishable levels of accuracy, we still need the orchestra to make it. To say nothing of the repertoire, the instruments, and the cumulative generations of musical skill therein embodied. Traditions cannot be not copied like computer files; they are handed down. Inherited.
Which brings us to Yokota-sensei’s tale of a visit to the Louvre:
When I first got to Gothenburg I was used to 18th-century [pipe-organ] aesthetics, but my task was to recreate a very 17th-century [pipe-organ] sound. When you are designing, a sort of intellectual comprehension is good enough. But when you create a sound as a [pipe-organ] voicer, you really have to be with it. You have to sort of become the 17th-century German person. I was with this project for six years, and after four or five years I was struggling because I couldn’t get that [sound] into my blood and guts.
Intellectual understanding is insufficient. One must live into and experience the whole aesthetic. If reading was insufficient, so was hearing the actual historical instruments:
The existing 17th-century organ sounds—I didn’t trust them. Maybe they were already changed [for] 18th-century taste. Many of them are 19th-century taste then restored back to the 18th, 17th century… I can’t trust them. The very few 17th-century examples I found were usually very deep in the countryside and small organs. They didn’t have money [to refurbish], so nothing happened. Just aging. That’s it. But they weren’t enough. I really wanted to get 17th-century aesthetics into my blood.
So when one time I gave a lecture at an acoustics-related conference in Paris. I took two days’ vacation after that, and I went to the Louvre. The Nike of Samothrace is my favorite statue of all time, so the first day I spent looking at this Nike all day. The second day, there’s one picture I really liked since I was a kid, Nicolas Poussin’s Flight from Egypt. I went looking for it.
In the French painting section is one big room, and in one part, it’s all 17th-century French paintings. And then from that corner it’s 18th-century paintings. I was just looking at them without thinking, then I suddenly realized: over here is 17th-century aesthetics. And over there is 18th-century aesthetics.
I could perceive this from the painting. That subject is 17th-century—even though it’s just a portrait or something. The 17th-century painting has a background, which somehow has a more important role, as if the person is a part of nature, still living within the works of God. But in 18th-century painting, it’s not; in those portraits, the human is really the boss. And all the rest of it is just a sort of accompaniment.
So that’s one thing, subject-wise. And then technically, the type of paint is very transparent in the 17th century and then in 18th century-painting, the paint is sort of opaque. It’s not translucent. And then the contour: 17th century object contour is much more clear., there’s a clear line between human and nature. In 18th-century painting, there’s not. There’s a kind of kind of vague, fuzzy sort of contour between human and the background.
Very interesting. This is exactly applicable to the sound. When I found this difference, I was so excited, I just leapt up and thought, “OK, I can succeed with this project.” There was only one year or so left to finish this project, which was very uncertain until that point
When I wennt to Sweden and was asked to do a lot of research work on 17th-century [organs], it was not only technique, but the aesthetics, too. I thought, OK, this might be me being very Japanese. It really helps to to understand that old, forgotten culture. It’s not a pure sound, not a clean sound, but more like folk music with lots of noise in it. Like a drum has a sort of raw [sound]; then when you hit it, not only the drum vibrates, but also the snare.
So that kind of [resonance] is very effectively used for musical expression. We as Japanese like shakuhachi music, for instance. That’s a very good example, that kind of crying noise like, “waaa.” We used to utilize noise effectively in music. That tradition was lost in the West, where we trying to make the sound very clear. But in the medieval times, but maybe even into the 17th century, the organ sound has this kind of noise.
In the history of the organ voicing, the beginning of the sound is different from the 17th century, 18th century, 19th century. 19th century doesn’t have any consonants, it’s just about all the vowels. A-E-O. But the 17th-century organs have very nice consonants in it. Many different varieties, and the duration is different.
Perhaps it is an advantage to be Japanese, to revive, to disseminate, to appreciate this liveliness and playfulness. For us, Japanese aesthetics do not like to define many things too much, like in the choreography of kabuki, for instance, or Noh. The instruction says just to “choose the best, most balanced spot.” Very vague, but only the really good guys know where to go.
If you try to define it too much, people tend to apply that to different situations so that you lose the point. So that’s why [the Japanese] are afraid of that. So we just leave it to the good artist’s sensibility. The organ is very much like a product of engineering, and it was developed especially during the 19th century [in this way]. This human is trying to— “we can control the nature.” There is all this technological development, of course they wanted to take advantage of it.
But the older organ is very primitively made, so to say. It’s precise in a way, but it’s a sort of low-tech precision. The parts of an organ are very close to their natural material state. There are inevitably some variations, the texture of the wood behind of the surface. Organ builders and voicers understand this. But when they try to actually complete their work, they are afraid of leaving texture, so they tend to make it too clean.
Before, there was a sort of coexistence, a living together with nature. This is the connection to these 17th-century paintings.
I try to make organs with the minimum amount of drawing. If your drawings are too precise, too detailed, the craftsmen just try to make it precisely. So the old way is just with a minimum amount of basic drawing. Scale sticks and so on. And then the details can be decided by the craftsmen who actually can touch and feel and their way forward.
“Feel their way forward.” That’s the way of the craftsman. Like Noh choreography, “the really good guys know where to go.” The world is not a theory, but a material to work with. A medium through which to perceive. Aesthetics are not programmable rules, but a vague sense of order and appropriateness. The faults of materials become their virtues.
In this sense, Munetaka Yokota’s is a very Japanese way of building pipe organs. And as Crawford articulates, the full aesthetic sense it takes to build a pipe organ may be a way for us to see what we have to learn from the wonderful constraints and irregularities of the real world.