[throwaway0b1]

As someone who is both an organ nerd and... I'll say very religiously conservative (although that's only relevant to some points), a couple things people in this thread might find interesting:

- If you're looking for pipe organs and are in the US, check out https://pipeorgandatabase.org/ . It's very comprehensive, has stoplists for most organs, and has pictures for many of the larger ones.

- I see quite a few people calling organ music boring, particularly in association with church music, and I'd like to challenge that assumption. Off the top of my head, a handful of things that come to mind:

(1) Hymns are meant to be sung with, usually by people who are not trained singers. That leads to significant limitations for the accompaniment. That said, there is a lot more variation in preludes, postludes, etc.

(2) Organ is hard. Being able to play boring hymns well with a week or two of preparation can easily take 2-3 years of daily practice, even with previous background on piano.

(3) Many recordings fail to capture the full magnitude of organ music. To repeat something that I think is a bit oversaid, but is accurate nonetheless: the building is the instrument. The building is the instrument.

(4) One thing that it's hard for me to tell is how much of the difference of opinion is that I have unusual tastes in music, and how much is that a lot of people haven't had the opportunity to hear good organ music played by a good organist.

(5) Yes, you can be expressive on organ. Yes, it's hard. Depending on the song (and the composition itself plays a big role here - don't think that a composer can't be expressive) that may come across in rubato, opening/closing the swell box (and potentially others), articulation, manual changes, etc. (I've heard just a few pieces with people one foot on the swell pedal for most of the song. They were very impressive, although I suppose a lot of that comes from the perspective of an organist. It's also very hard. See point 2.) Also:

(6) Choosing registration in and of itself is kind of an art (and a lot of fun, especially on big organs). There are so many different timbres you can get on an organ that it's really beyond comparison to most other instruments; using this alone it's easy to express everything from mournful to bombastic fanfare.

That became more of a jumbled mess than I intended, but hopefully there's something of interest to some of you.

[jacquesm]

Lovely comment! Thank you, agreed on all points, especially 'the building is the instrument', an organ played with the church in which it is housed in mind and various parts 'speaking' into different parts of the building can make all the difference between a boring performance and an outstanding one.

Oh, and then there are such exotic ones as the ones that speak through conduits on the other side of the church (and good luck managing that trying not to get confused when the sound reaches you...).

[Doxin]

re point 3: It's really hard to overstate how impressive the sound an organ makes is. I've had the pleasure of being in a proper old-timey church with a proper old-timey organ when the organist decided to play a couple songs.

It felt like the whole building was shaking. Imagine that, meter thick walls being shook by sound. It was impossible to talk to anyone, even at centimeters away. It's not simply that organs are loud, which they are, They also simply fill the air with sound. To call the experience soul-shaking would be an understatement.

I can totally see why people would associate organs with god. When the organist stopped playing the silence was absolutely deafening.

[throwaway0b1]

Also: I have easy access to a few pipe organs (mostly small, but not all of them), so if anyone has questions feel free to ask; general organ questions are also welcome, of course.