When I lived in Chicago, my wife and I would, whenever we could, see movies at a theater called the Music Box. Opened in 1929, the main auditorium has a ceiling painted to look like the night sky, a red velvet curtain that reveals the screen — and an organ. The organ is hard to miss: a massive brown Kimball console, right up there by the stage, with multiple keyboards and a half ring of red, white, black and yellow stops. Before films on weekends, a spotlight will beam and the house organist will play. On occasion, he will even accompany a silent film.
Organs used to be a central part of the moviegoing experience. Before the talkies took over, live musicians supplied the soundtracks for films. Unlike an orchestra, a single player on an organ could improvise and adapt to action onscreen. And the instrument, unusually versatile, could passably imitate a chicken’s squawk or a clap of thunder. It could be everything.
A friend of mine loves a different organ: the kitschy Wurlitzer at Organ Piper Pizza, a restaurant in Greenfield, Wis., where he went as a kid and now takes his own children. There were once more than 100 such “pizza and pipes” parlors in the United States, but now there are only three. These organs certainly err toward the silly; there are neon lights involved, and diners are probably not asked to leave if they request the theme from “Indiana Jones” over a Bach fugue.
Less silly are the more orthodox pipe organs that purists prefer, the analog constructions that represent something more profound for old institutions. Like the gleaming gold instrument, built by the premier 20th-century organ maker Ernest M. Skinner, at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall. Or the massive organ at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan, proudly declared to be the largest in New York City.
I am neither a player nor an expert, but you don’t need to be either to appreciate the organ. Scholars date the first one back to hydraulic systems in Ancient Greece; it’s speculated that European churches adopted them a thousand years later to wake dozing attendants. The pipe organ is massive and ornate. Whether used for worship or whimsy, you see it and know it means something bigger. The sound rattles. It hits you like a brick. It can be louder than an arena concert. In a capable organist’s hands (and feet), it induces fear or awe — but it can do so much more as well, reflecting “every shade of human emotion: love, anger, hate, sorrow, surprise, humor, ugliness, the sinister and national idioms,” as Skinner once put it.
When I was just 2 or 3 years old, my parents took me to mass at a tiny chapel across the river from our apartment in Arlington, Va. Before long, I demanded to be seated not in the pews but in the back of the room, next to the organist, Bob. My parents introduced me to Bob and let me sit on his bench as he played. I wanted shiny shoes, just like his. (Another demand they kindly accommodated.)
I know it wasn’t the organ’s actual sound that lured me — perhaps it was its sheer size and power. Or maybe I liked the comedy and entertainment of a man playing keyboards with his hands and feet. Were I more religious now, I might say that I felt it moving me toward God. The sound that came from the pipes was different from anything I’d heard before: dour and honking, a tremulous grumble that came from all around me. I was in awe of the instrument, and understood instinctively that it meant something important to history, to the world around me.
Organ music used to be everywhere, and that legacy continues in certain ways: It’s still at the church and the ballpark. You still hear it at the carnival. Thanks to Halloween, the organ can be heard through the entire month of October. But churchgoing is down. M.L.B. games don’t always feature live organists anymore the way they did decades ago. “The Phantom of the Opera” ended its record-breaking run on Broadway in 2023. And do kids even pay attention to the music on merry-go-rounds?
Pipe organs are often building-size. Because they produce sound by channeling air through thousands of pipes, some as wide as trains, maintaining them comes at a steep cost. The National Cathedral’s 86-year-old organ, which has more than 10,000 pipes, started to undergo a restoration last year that will take five years and cost $14.5 million. Those are the kinds of costs that many churches and concert halls would rather not pay. So nowadays, encountering the organ can feel like discovering something from a world that has been lost.
But even if an organ is harder to find now than it once was, it is worth seeking out — especially because of how far out of the way it might lead you. You might end up discovering a new theater or pizza parlor, or even knocking at some enthusiast’s house. Even the smaller, electronic forms of the instrument are too big, too loud, too finicky and too intrusive to appear somewhere without intention. And once you do see it, the organ is a portal. It can take you anywhere. Toward a time that has passed, right in plain sight.
The organ collapses the distant and the near: In it, the works of the Renaissance and the disco era all still stand and operate today. The past, the organ reminds us, is not so fleeting. It’s still around to wake you up as soon as you stop paying attention.
Chris Almeida is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek and The Ringer.
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