Pulling Out All the Stops

John Santoianni steps up to Duke Chapel's Aeolian Organ and hits a low F note and the entire chapel rumbles. It's a reminder that even in the midst of the chapel's famed awe-inspiring structure, its four organs will always command attention.

Santoianni is leading eight visitors through an organ crawl, although at the start he notes, "We actually won't be crawling." He will, however, lead the visitors through quite a squeeze for the next two hours as they walk up winding staircases and crowd together in cramped quarters to see the chapel's pipe organs up close.

The tour, which is open to the public twice a semester, provides a rare look at the mechanics of the organs and a quick education on the amazing physics of sound and music. It also provides an inside look at the history of the instruments and some anecdotes about them.

For example, Santoianni, the Ethel Sieck Carrabina Curator of Organs and Harpsichords at Duke, tells about the time the Aeolian Organ got a little fussy earlier this year during a chapel celebration. A metal weight about the size of a pencil eraser got stuck on top of a pipe, creating a cipher - a note that won't stop playing. The sound continued until the organ was turned off, he said.

The tour begins at the organ built by Dirk A. Flentrop of Holland. The instrument looks - its 66 stops are named in Dutch - and sounds like Dutch-French organs of the early 18th century and was built to play works by composers such as Bach and Couperin, Santoianni says. The Flentrop has about 5,000 speaking pipes, four "manual" keyboards and a pedal board - a keyboard for the feet - that spans the width of the organ and, according to Santoianni, is best played wearing thin-soled shoes that allow the organist to feel the pedals.

"In many ways, pipe organ's technology has not changed much since the 1750's," he says. Air is blown into a pipe to produce a particular pitch. The pitch depends on the pipe's size, shape and material. In Duke Chapel, organ pipes range from pencil-sized to about 32 feet long, some are cylindrical and others are rectangular, and some are made of wood such as mahogany or sugar pine and others of metal including tin and lead.

Electrically powered blowers replaced hand-operated bellows in the late 19th century. "The blower on Duke's Aeolian organ is "probably more powerful than my first car, at around 35 horsepower," Santoianni says with a laugh.

Organists pull out "stops" on either side of the keyboard to select particular groups of pipes, depending on what type of sound they want to achieve. For example, he says, some groups will imitate a trumpet, others a flute. The organ's keys control pallets that regulate the air into the pipes. Once a key is pressed, the corresponding pallet is opened and the pipe "speaks."

Tuning these pipes takes up much of Santoianni's time. "My job is very hands on," he says. "The pitch of organ pipes is affected by air temperature and changes in temperature affect the way the air moves through the pipes and thus, the pitch."

Tuning the instruments, he says, is therefore most difficult when the weather is changing.

The next organ on the tour was the Brombaugh, built in 1997 and elevated in a swallow's nest gallery on the north wall of the chapel. As he played a Renaissance Spanish piece, Santoianni explained that the Italian Renaissance-style organ was built to play music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods, and, accordingly, is tuned in mean tone - it favors certain intervals, chords and keys, while others are unusable.

Then it was on to see Duke Chapel's smallest organ, the portative, also known as the baby Flentrop. Before the Flentrop Co. would build the massive 5,000-pipe organ for the chapel, it wanted to use the tiny organ to test the chapel's acoustics, Santoianni said. The chapel failed, and chapel officials had two coatings of sealant placed on all interior chapel walls before the company was satisfied.

"That was an incredible job," Santoianni said.

Santoianni says he is most often asked how he got to be a curator. Having come from a family of machinists and engineers, and possessing two degrees in the organ, he is an expert in the instrument's mechanics and a skilled organist.

The last organ on our tour was the Aeolian Organ. Built in 1932 and containing about 6,900 pipes, this organ is the oldest, largest and loudest of the Duke organs.

Despite, or perhaps owing, to its magnificence, the Aeolian has experienced a variety of mechanical difficulties, Santoianni said, as the cipher problem earlier this year indicated. Age and wear have caused some notes in the organ to be unplayable, particularly as the leather for the pipe valves has deteriorated, a fact hidden by the mastery of university organist Robert Parkins and associate university organist David Arcus.

The organ crawl is offered twice a semester, and is limited to eight people. For information on when the next one will take place, please contact Duke Chapel, 684-2032.

Written by Shari Metzger