Last fall, I had the pleasure of taking David Yearsley’s course on Music Journalism. Within discussions of style, diction and structure, Yearsley’s classes taught close analysis of journalistic delivery and choice of words. Unlike most of my English classes, where professors struggle to hook the attention of non-majors and majors alike, Yearsley pulls his students’ personalities into the class, creating a parallel between our learning of a journalist’s writing, character and opinion in the context of our own work.
In the fall, we each wrote nine articles, including a book review and an obituary. For my live music review, I chose to attend my first organ concert, a part of the Midday Music concert series, where I saw Yearsley’s partner, Annette Richards, perform a series of enchanting Bach pieces in Anabel Taylor Chapel. Writing about music I was so unfamiliar with should have been challenging, but because of the way the class had sharpened my writing skills, it flowed with the magic that the Bach scores had borne in the space. The Washington native’s class had such an impact on me, it inspired me to apply to write for the Cornell Daily Sun as an Arts and Culture writer; I thought it fitting to spin this inaugural piece on my second ever organ concert, Midday Music for Organ with David Yearsley, “World-Famous in Organ Playing — the Highly Esteemed, Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach,” last Wednesday Sept. 25.
Before beginning his performance from the organ loft 20 feet up, Yearsley addressed the packed audience of about 90 people with an overview of the selected arrangements. He explained that their title was taken from the opening of Bach’s obituary, included in a music journal of the time. Standing an inch and a half taller in his organ shoes optimized for the active feet of an organist, he gave detail to the pieces he was about to play, including the reception of Bach in his time, casting us back, with the stately posture of Cornell’s Baroque organ, to the 17th and 18th European obsession with the “wondrous machine.” Or, as he described it in an interview on Friday, the “mysterious, magical, innovative, technologically advanced piece of machinery.”
Prior to turning heel and trotting off to the organ console tucked amongst the pipes above, Yearsley recounted a disparaging contemporary remark that this music was “pleasing to the eye but damaging to the ears.” For his part, Yearsley instead suggested that the works were “demanding to play, and demanding to listen to, but all the more uplifting as a result.”
A scholar of Bach’s music, Yearsley also teaches the course on organs with Professor Richards. He described to me how deep Bach’s body of work goes: “Being a Bach guy, there is so much of it, and it is all of such intensely mind blowing quality, there is not enough time to get everything out of it for me, but I’m trying.” He continued, “that program is challenging stuff, and I’ve played that music before, but coming back to it, especially on an organ like this, it gives you something new each time.” For the audience as well. The organ can change its range and quality of sound based on which stops are pulled out, imitating the flute, viola di gamba, obo, trumpet and more. “Its basically a premodern, preindustrial synthesizer,” the longtime faculty member aptly put it. That range of sound is on full display during the Chapel concerts; you can clearly hear the dynamics of the sound change between pieces as stops are tinkered with, tones shifting to become more whole or opaque, more glittery or bulky. This can be observed in the amplitude as well, when certain stops are moved, more pipes play and the sound emboldens.
Thanks to a video screen below, the audience could see Yearsley sat in front of Richards, who stood joyfully observing to his back left, maneuvering the stops between pieces. Sometimes they pulled only a few registers, and sometimes the entire board of 31 stops was reoriented, creating a vastly altered soundscape. Being able to see the performance from above on the screen was helpful to gauge how the instrument was being played, but I have to agree with Yearsley that it detracts from the overall experience of an organ concert. “I always feel like it distracts, I don’t mind being filmed, but it’s more freeing to be alone up here as those organists were,” Yearsley laments. The colors were less vibrant, and a viewer couldn’t even see him scurry across the pedal board through precise footwork, controlling much more than the screen gives away. He describes playing alone: “To come up here when no one else is around, you feel like you’re in your own world, and so you feel a little protected, and also like you can just do the music you want to do.” For Yearsley, to try to bring an organist down from the Baroque organ’s chamber is neither in the spirit of history nor education. The focus, which should be on the sound, blurs.
Completed in 2011, this organ is a “fantasy reconstruction of two historical organs,” Yearsley explains, with one inspiring the mechanism of the stops and the pipes, and the other giving the casing, the wood frame that surrounds the instrument. The organ’s organs, so to speak, its insides, are based on an instrument built in 1708 for a palace in Berlin, but bombed in World War II. Before its destruction, the instrument was thoroughly documented and recorded so that it could be reconstructed three centuries later in upstate New York. Built using funding raised by the “indefatigable” Richards and techniques and tools of Bach’s era, Cornell’s Baroque organ is a historical goldmine.
During the interview, I had the pleasure of again hearing the raw, raised power of the organ’s magnificent, awe-inspiring sound, demonstrated in a moment’s flash from Yearsley’s years of training, into the deft action of his fingers and feet, vibrating through any number of the 1,847 pipes and into the resolute vessel of the chapel, resounding at once into my ears. Hearing it a first time is insurance that you won’t forget it’s potency. Listening again is magnetic: I will be back at future Midday Music for Organ performances. The next public display is in the Chapel at 12:30 on Wednesday Oct. 9. Annette Richards will play, marking a year since I first went. If you want to go deeper, take Richards and Yearsley’s highly popular course MUSIC 2244: The Music, Art and Technology of the Organ. It’s offered every fall semester.
I’ll let my invaluable teacher finish this article for me. He describes the value of Cornell’s organ collection: “To encounter an organ like this is to encounter history, the more you know, the more fun it is. That’s true with most things. To know that this comes from a certain tradition and was used by different musicians over several centuries ignites the imagination and inspires one. There’s lots to know, and I don’t know nearly enough, but I keep trying.
“These organs, when bombs don’t fall, last. We hope it will be here for a long time, and our successors appreciate it as much as we do.”
Aidan Goldberg is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].