Last spring I had the privilege of interviewing Munetaka Yokota, pipe organ researcher and builder. (You can read more about that encounter on this substack.) His embodied knowledge makes him an unofficial “living national treasure.” Though he spent most of his working life in America, then Sweden, Yokota-sensei brings a profoundly Japanese aesthetic to the art of organ building, particularly to the fabrication and voicing of the pipes.
During our many hours of conversation (or rather, lessons), Yokota-sensei became most animated when speaking on this topic. For quite a long time, it had been assumed that older pipe organs sounded richer because they had “aged” — a vague but evocative term that wrapped up many dreams inside its broad envelope. There’s an intuitive truth to the assumption: parts wear out and metal does indeed fatigue, and all this must have some effect upon a pipe organ’s sound.
After his apprenticeship with John Brombaugh in Eugene, Oregon, Yokota learned better. The machine age had been a boon to pipe organ builders’ economies of scale. Prices plummeted and sizes soared. By the first half of the twenties, Moeller in Hagerstown, Maryland, had a staff of 500 and was shipping an organ a day; Wurlitzer in North Tonawanda, New York even more.1
A mighty organ wind shouted wealth and power. Thus, the belting Brobdingnagians of Macy’s flagship Philadelphia store (28,750 pipes in 464 ranks on 6 manuals, by Wanamaker), and the even more gargantuan Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in nearby Atlantic City (33,000+ pipes, 1235 stop tabs on 7 manuals) dubbed “The Sonic Mount Rushmore.”
Subtlety, this is not. The Atlantic City organ’s 64’ low C pipe alone weighs 3,350 pounds (ca. 1,520 kg), and had to be bent sideways to fit. It sounds at an inaudible 8Hz, more felt than heard, “like a helicopter hovering over the building.” Other ranks were fed by the 625hp motor to an ear shattering 100” of wind pressure, an order of magnitude higher than Bach could ever have imagined.
Such feats of engineering and mass production required regular materials and predictable strength, something coal heat and steam power were very good at providing. Consistency was key, along with strength and durability for transport and installation. So we should not fault these makers for fulfilling what was clearly a massive demand from a newly wealthy public in search of gaudy entertainment. In addition to churches, theaters and circuses were major customers.
Despite the volume, the tone left something to be desired. When put beside their historic, hand-made counterparts, those perfect diameters of uniform materials sound piercing and flat. Even with correct alloys, pipes poured and rolled in hot factories cool slowly, leaving behind a fine, regular metal grain. When shaved to proper thickness, “they take the best part away,” as Yokota-sensei told us at his workshop.
The secret to the older pipes lies not in their perfection, Yokota-sensei told us, but in their flaws. When making his renowned Centennial Organ for Chico State University, Yokota used spent rounds from the Los Angeles police department’s firing range. The bullets were well contaminated by copper, gunpowder, and who knows what else from their plunge into and afterlife in the dirt. When melted and mixed with the requisite quantities of tin, antimony, and the like, Yokota — along with most makers of the organ reform movement — spreads the alloy manually.
In his case, he pushes a “casting box” of sakura (cherry) wood, joined in Japanese fashion, across a ten-ton slab of California granite. In this way the metal cools rapidly, forming large, irregular crystals with complex resonances. The manual control also minimizes the need of planing the metal to the proper thickness. Each pipe bears the signature of its maker, its tones and overtones bearing witness to the human steps that pushed along the box.
It’s an aesthetic familiar to any Japanese: wabi-sabi (侘寂), an untranslatable term that evokes a sense of asymmetry, roughness, modesty. The characters are old. “Wabi” originally meant something like a hermit’s isolation in nature, but sounds like “Japanese beauty” (和美). “Sabi” points to “leanness,” but implies “sabishii,” a particular kind of sadness associated with the ephemeral nature of things.
In aesthetics, it is a kind of pleasing imperfection, the irregularity of a natural forest, harmonious but not uniform. Japanese aesthetic loathes the formally perfect, the permanent, the unchanging. It rather loves the ephemeral, the fleeting (see my comments in this article), the barely graspable uniqueness. Even mended pottery is more satisfying after it is fixed, an art unto itself called kintsugi where the mends become the highest mark of beauty.
This roughness is what Yokota found in Europe’s old pipe organs. And it’s what he seeks to capture in his own contemporary creations, most recently the “Reformation Organ” at Miyazaki Lutheran Church, which has enough low pressure bellows to be pumped manually. Even if they’re technically useless in this age of nearly silent electric motors, there’s something in all that space, and in their idiosyncratic shape, that adds character to the sound.
As a practicing musician and innovator of instruments, J. S. Bach would probably have loved the sonic possibilities and economies that industrial instruments could produce. And Japan, as a globally leading industrial economy, is certainly no stranger to mass production or behemoth size. Nor is there a technocratic society so obsessed with uniformity and perfection than Japan. (How else do you explain shudankodo — 集団行動, as expressed in synchronized walking?)
Japan has a lot of pipe organs. More than any non-Western country by a large margin. And many of them were built expressly to play Bach’s famous fugues. But as any student of his music knows, it’s far from linear. There’s a stumbling genius to it all that’s just beyond grasp, a messiness that resolves brilliantly into a fleeting order, before returning to, as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out, an “eternal braid.”
The organ as a piece of technology is certainly a fascination. But perhaps what draws many Japanese to Bach is the wabi-sabi style of his music. Right down to the organ pipes.
Please stay tuned. This is just a tiny corner of what I’ve discovered and hope to share in a much larger piece to come on “Japan’s Pipe Organ Boom.”
I own this information to Steve Dieck, former president of Fisk Organs, Boston. I had the pleasure to interview him at length in June 2022.