JULIAN RHODES' DREAM ORGANS
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This page last revised 6 January 2001
Having thus swiftly dispatched the inevitable, let us move on to a chronological survey.By this time Percival Godliman had pulled out all the stops.
(Ken Follett: 'Eye of the Needle, 1978)
(At a dinner party)
Trimalcho... roared for a slave to come and carve. The carver appeared instantly and went to work, thrusting with his knife like a gladiator practising to the sound of the hydraulic organ.
(Petronius: 'Satyricon', c. 60AD)The organ is the Church of God, comprising the contemplative and the active souls.
(Origen, PG, c. 240AD - presumably referring to the different kinds of organ pipes)In effect, this organ [i.e. the tongue] resembles the brazen-piped instrument which, using air produced by bellows, produces under the artist's fingers those harmonious sounds we all know.... Art has learned from nature the ingenious process of making this delightful music... See how the lung functions like the bellows, compressed and dilated, not by men's feet but by the thoraic muscles... Then, the will forces the air onto the teeth, as the air is forced into the bronze pipes... and thus the lyre, the cithara and the brazen-piped instrument give forth, by the use of air or the touch of fingers, a pleasing and rhythmic melody. But the inflected voice can be produced only by the organ we have been discussing.
(Origen)The Muses are themselves Nymphs. They are said to inhabit springs of water... it is customary to offer them a sacrifice, not of wine, but of water and milk. And it is right that this should be so, for the movement of water makes music, as demonstrated by the hydraulic organ.
(Servius: commentary on Virgil's seventh Eclogue, c. 400AD)Your voices are sweeter even than the voice of the organ, and by your art the empty theatres echo to the music of the cithara...
(Theodoric the Great: a proclamation, c. 500AD)The twelve smith's bellows are the Patriarchs and the Prophets. Through the twelve bronze pipes, that is to say the Apostles, it sends forth a mighty noise, as it is written: 'Their noise is gone out through all the Earth' (Psalm 19)... The thousand paces signify the perfect number ten, the number of the Words of the Law that go to make up this voice.
(Hrabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mainz, c. 800AD, on the supposed organ of the Hebrews, which could be heard from a distance of 1,000 paces.)As soon as they had sat down to a meal, the bird who had spoken to them last year flew down and perched on the prow of the coracle, stretched out its wings, and made a noise like some great church organ. St. Brendan surmised that it had a message to impart.
(Anon.: 'The Voyage of St. Brendan', c. 950AD)When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, "To Him we shall return."
(Jalalu'ddin Rumi (d. 1273): a poem from the 'Masnavi',
as translated by R.A. Nicholson in 'Eastern Poetry & Prose', 1922)As organ music sweetly strikes the ear,
So from this Vision there comes to my eyes
The shape of things the future holds for you.
(Dante Alighieri: 'Paradise' (The Divine Comedy), c. 1315)Dryfat: The organs of the body, as some term them.
Mrs. Purge: Organs! fie, fie, they have a most abominable sound in mine ears; they edify me not a whit, I detest 'em. I hope my body has no organs.
(Thomas Middleton: 'The Family of Love', act 3 scene 2)Prince Henry:
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
(William Shakespeare: 'King John', act 5 scene 7)Alonso:
O, it is monstrous, monstrous:
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
(William Shakespeare: 'The Tempest', act 3 scene 3)Nevertheless, I shall not abandon the task in despair. Indeed, I hope that this new thing may turn out to be of admirable service in tuning for me some reed in this great discordant organ of our philosophy - an instrument on which I think I see many organists wearing themselves out trying vainly to get the whole thing into perfect harmony. Vainly, because they leave (or rather preserve) three or four of the principal reeds in discord, making it quite impossible for the others to respond in perfect tune.
(Galileo Galilei writing to Marcus Wesler about his astronomical theories in 1612)(About a book by Slawkenburgius)
How the communication was conveyed into Slawkenburgius's sensorium, - so that Slawkenburgius should know whose finger touched the key, - and whose hand it was that blew the bellows... we can only raise conjectures. Slawkenburgius was played upon, for aught I know, like one of Whitefield's disciples, - that is, with such a distinct intelligence, Sir, of which of the two masters it was that had been practising upon his instrument, - as to make all reasoning upon it needless.
(Laurence Sterne: 'Tristram Shandy', 1760)I followed them to the foot of the throne on which Enoch sat. I could not bear the sight of the fire which radiated from his eyes... I was afraid that my ears would not be able to bear the noise of his voice. But his voice was more gentle than that of celestial organs.
(Jan Potocki: 'The Manuscript found at Saragossa', c. 1810)I organed, my gossip managing the bellows.
(Thomas Carlyle, 1827)The words 'My dear Anette - my darling' echoed in her heart like the most charming language of love: they stirred her soul like organ music, fell as gently on her ear as the divine notes of the Venite adoremus had fallen in her childhood.
(Honore de Balzac: 'Eugenie Grandet', 1833)To this inquiry the invisible chorus replied, in a strain that sounded like the voices of many choristers singing to the mighty swell of the old church organ--a strain that seemed borne to the sexton's ears upon a wild wind, and to die away as it passed onward; but the burden of the reply was still the same, `Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!'
(Charles Dickens: 'The Pickwick Papers', 1837)The silent organ loudest chants
The master's requiem.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882: 'Dirge')This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms
...
Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies!
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 'The Arsenal at Springfield', 1845)La mer, la vaste mer, console nos labeurs!
Quel démon a doté la mer, raque chanteuse
Qu'accompagne l'immense orgue des vents grondeurs,
De cette fonction sublime de berceuse?
La mer, la vaste mer, console nos labeurs!
(The sea, the great sea, consoles us for our labours.
What demon endowed the sea - that hoarse contralto,
Accompanied by the immense organ of the roaring winds -
With the sublime task of singing lullabies?
The sea, the great sea, consoles us for our labours.)
(Charles Baudelaire: 'Moesta et Errabunda', c.1855)Grands bois, vous m'effreyez comme des cathédrales;
Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent râles,
Répondent les échoes de vos De profundis.
(Great woods, you terrify me like cathedrals.
You roar like an organ, and in our condemned hearts,
Those chambers of eternal mourning in which
Death-rattles vibrate from the past,
Reverberate the echoes of your De profundis.)
(Charles Baudelaire: 'Obsession', c.1860)(Arthur Clennam pays a visit to the old clarinet player)
There were so many lodgers in this house, that the door-post seemed to be as full of bell-handles as a cathedral organ is of stops. Doubtful which might be the clarionet-stop, he was considering the point, when a shuttlecock flew out of the parlour window, and alighted on his hat.
(Charles Dickens: 'Little Dorritt', 1857)The cathedral chimes had at once a sadder and a more remote sound to me, as I hurried on avoiding observation, than they had ever had before; so, the swell of the old organ was borne to my ears like funeral music.
(Charles Dickens: 'Great Expectations', 1861)The folk in our part of Russia are a devout lot, zealous in all matters relating to the church. What is more, they have an artistic sense that is all their own: ecclesiastical grandeur and euphonious, 'organ-like' singing constitute the most exalted and purest of their enjoyments.
(Nikolai Leskov: 'A Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk', 1864)The pines, as symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to sing as they swayed continuously to and fro.
(Gustave Flaubert: 'Sentimental Education', 1869)Such conversation paused suddenly, like an organ when the bellows are let drop.
(George Eliot: 'Middlemarch', 1872)His concentration on the game was so intense that he actually forgot to spit, an omission which occasionally produced organ notes in his chest.
(Guy de Maupassant: 'Boule de Suif', 1880)...as impersonal and anonymous as the organ itself, whose inventor is unknown...
(J.K. Huysmans: 'A Rebours', 1884)Instantly Sylvie seated herself upon a tiny mushroom, that happened to grow in front of a daisy, as if it were the most ordinary musical instrument in the world, and played on the petals as if they were the notes of an organ. And such delicious tiny music it was! Such teeny-tiny music!
(Lewis Carroll: 'Sylvie and Bruno', 1889)The dim roar of London was like the Bourdon note of a distant organ.
(Oscar Wide: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', 1890)And in the midst of all these sounds of lamentation he heard the buoy shrieking out at sea, rhythmically, like a tragedian reciting with pauses, as if taking a breath, or letting the last words die away before he allowed a new one to come streaming out. It was a solo for Titan with an accompaniment of tempest, a giant organ with the easterly wind tramping the bellows.
(August Strindberg: 'By the Open Sea', 1890)He stood there in a king's raiment, and the Glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their carven niches seemed to move. In the fair raiment of a king he stood before them, and the organ pealed out its music, and the trumpeters blew upon their trumpets, and the singing boys sang.
(Oscar Wilde: 'The Young King' from 'A House of Pomegranates', 1891)That Trilby was just a singing-machine - an organ to play upon - an instrument of music - a Stradivarius - a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood - a voice, and nothing more...
(George du Maurier: 'Trilby', 1893)(Effi is riding in a carriage by the sea)
"By the way, can't you hear anything?"
"No."
"Can't you hear something like music?"
"Organ music?"
"No, not organ music. In that case, I should think it would be the sea. But it's something else, an extremely delicate sound..."
(Theodor Fontane: 'Effi Briest', 1895)...as he played the opening bars, he heard behind him a creaking of the wicker chair... and [he] easily arrived at the conclusion that there must be in the wicker chair osiers responsive to certain notes of the violin, as panes of glass in church windows are observed to vibrate in sympathy with certain tones of the organ.
(John Meade Falkener: 'The Lost Stradivarius', 1895)The clarion call of someone's voice rang out like the tones of a stopped diapason of an organ.
...the organ notes, faint as a bee's hum, rolled in as before.
(Thomas Hardy: 'Jude the Obscure', 1896)
A Hope-Jones Tibia, perhaps....and to hear the grinding roar and churn of the pebbles like a great organ playing all the night.
(John Meade Falkener: 'Moonfleet', 1896)[Two women were] squashed sideways by the open drawers of their respective writing-tables, like people playing a perpetual duet on two organs with all the stops pulled out.
(Howard Overing Sturgis: 'Belchamber', 1904)Sir Ethelred opened a wide mouth, like a cavern, into which the hooked nose seemed anxious to peer; there came from it a subdued rolling sound, as from a distant organ with the scornful indignation stop.
(Joseph Conrad: 'The Secret Agent', 1907)The evening atmosphere thickened. It trembled under a mighty organ-like voice... the network began to sway and murmur, and timid and doleful sounds winged down. They merged in an organ-like swell... The bright red huntsmen with horns upraised would elicit melodic organ swells from the zephyrs.
(Andrei Bely: 'Petersburg', 1916)I decided to return to the hotel and wait for her there; the manager himself came forward and pressed a button, whereupon a personage whose acquaintance I had not yet made, known as 'lift' (who at the highest point in the building, where the lantern would be in a Norman church, was installed like a photographer behind his curtain or an organist in his loft) began to descend towards me with the agility of a domestic, industrious and captive squirrel.
(Marcel Proust: 'Within a Budding Grove' (In Search of Lost Times) 1919)Our imagination being like a barrel-organ out of order, which always plays some other tune than that shown on its card...
(Marcel Proust: 'The Guermantes Way' (In Search of Lost Times) 1920)A mass of something purple, so huge that he took it for a heather-covered mountain, was his first impression... The purple mass looked for a moment like a plump of organ pipes, then like a stack of rolls of cloth set up on end, then like a forest of gigantic umbrellas blown inside out.
(C.S. Lewis: 'Out of the Silent Planet', 1930)
Does Lewis here coin the definitive collective noun for organ pipes - a 'plump'?Mona's heart was beating hard in her throat. There was no knowing what was going to happen next... Then gradually the panic fear passed away and its place was taken by a profound peace. Then the peace gave way to a curious tense thrilling, like a great organ-note sounding in the soul.
(Dion Fortune: 'The Goat-Foot God', 1930s)Consequently in the most telling scenes, where an author would normally pull out the tremolo stop and tread on the loud pedal, only curt, brief Anglo-Saxon may be used, for no-one employs elaborate English when in extremis.
(Dion Fortune: introduction to 'The Sea Priestess', 1938)...and I heard the great tides of the skies come up and go by in their rhythm of musical colours. They were like the notes of an organ, and they were like wheeling beams of light.
(Dion Fortune: 'The Sea Priestess', 1938)His voice was sombre now, like a great organ rolling its notes from a high cathedral nave.
(Arthur C. Clarke: 'Childhood's End', 1954)...this Peace Hall in pre-cast concrete with the cracks in the corners and the picture of Lenin. Why did they have that silly frame thing all round the picture? Bundles of organ pipes sprouting from the corners and the bunting all dusty. It looked like something from a fascist funeral.
(John Le Carré: 'The Spy Who Came In From the Cold', 1963)The great organ snuffled and groaned like an animal gathering breath, before giving forth its magnificent voice in a Bach fugue.
(P.D. James: 'An Unsuitable Job for a Woman', 1972)Olivia listened to them talking out there. Douglas' voice, firm and manly, rose above the rest. When he spoke, the others confined themselves to murmurs of agreement... It was almost as if Douglas were playing a musical instrument of which he had entirely mastered the stops.
(Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: 'Heat and Dust', 1975)The lawyer apparently is acting on orders from Beirut and he's playing Fawzi like a calliope.
(Thomas Harris: 'Black Sunday', 1975)The city was nearer now. Their rocking descent swept his gaze up and down Chu's towers, which lifted like silvery organ pipes out of the Council Hills, fading into purple grey.
(Frank Herbert: 'The Dosadi Experiment', 1977)Erika wants to buy accessories until we have an entire torture kit. We can then play a deux on this private organ. But no organ sound is to reach the outside world. Erika is concerned that the other students might notice something.
(Elfriede Jelinek: 'The Piano Teacher', 1983)They had entered a cavern of lights, a cavern of crystal... Huge spiked stalactites hung as menacingly as the burnished sword of Damocles... Others suggested giant chandeliers, or the pipes of a celestial organ...
(Wilbur Smith: 'The Leopard Hunts in Darkness', 1984)His fingers brought readouts and monitor screens to life like an organist extracting notes from stops and keys.
(Alan Dean Foster: 'Aliens', 1986)(About a recording of rock music)
Power chords tumbled out of the speakers like avalanche boulders: rumbling, deafening, threatening, finally picking up melodic content and terminating as a sustaining organ tone - a fugue performed by an E. Power Biggs on acid.
(Jonathan Kellerman: 'Time Bomb', 1990)Calls went out and alert tones blared like a bass key on an electric organ.
(Patricia Cornwell: 'Postmortem', 1990)Some beautiful flute music grew louder and louder... Everyone except the royal family was playing her own little glass flute. They played a wonderful waltz, and the notes from the glass flutes were so delicate and pure, they sounded like the notes from the very smallest pipes on a church organ.
(Jostein Gaarder: 'The Solitaire Mystery', 1990)Lamboglia placed his hands on the table, fingers splayed as though on the keyboard of an organ.
(Michael Dibdin: 'Cabal', 1992)The sound, both heard and felt, was eerily beautiful, [Kirk] realized, like George's song played on the lowest-pitched pipes of a massive organ.
(Margaret Wanderer Bonano: 'Star Trek - Probe', 1992)'Adrian Chambers knows all the organ stops of delay,' I tell him. 'It is a tune he plays without much effort.'
(Steve Martini: 'Prime Witness', 1993)He remembered when the kids at school would laugh at him, making fun of his gasping struggles for breath... Even at home his sister would giggle when his brother jeered, "Hey, play something from the Beatles on that pipe organ, huh?"
(Ben Bova: 'Death Dream', 1994)"And they made a homicide against this guy with nothing more than somebody seeing him coming out of her apartment?" I asked, letting an organ stop of sarcastic disbelief creep into my voice.
(Andrew Vachss: 'Footsteps of the Hawk', 1995)The resonant sound oscillated up and down inside a frequency window known as the hydrogen band. It sounded almost like a musical instrument, an unlikely cross between a piccolo and a foghorn, and vaguely like a church organ in dire need of a tuning.
(Dean Devlin, Ronald Emmerich and Stephen Molstad: 'Independence Day', 1996)To his left the shelf petered out underneath a series of enormous stalactites that descended into the darkness like so many organ pipes.
(Philip Kerr: 'Esau', 1996)The USBank Corporate Center soared sixty stories above downtown, topped by a crown that looked like organ pipes playing a hymn to the god of money.
(Patricia Cornwell: 'Hornet's Nest', 1996)Viewed from the other end of the room, the books rose and fell in a sinuous sequence, rather like organ pipes or ordnance survey contours.
(Freya North: 'Chloe', 1997)He crossed to the metal-doored cupboard, fitted a key into it, turned it anticlockwise twice. Both doors fell open. A line of shotguns like black organ-pipes. Pennard took one down.
(Phil Rickman: 'The Chalice', 1997)The offices of Lawrence, Cameron and Thomas are located on the eighteenth and nineteenth floors of Hundred and Twenty Broadway in Lower Manhattan. It's one of those Roaring Twenties testaments to boom capitalism; the skyscraper equivalent of a Wurlitzer organ.
(Douglas Kennedy: 'The Big Picture', 1997)"They didn't stop because they saw the light," Nadine said, an orator's organ-stop in her voice, speaking to the whole room.
(Andrew Vachss: 'Choice of Evil', 1999)(Mountaineering)
Beyond the bridge, depending from a U-shaped depression in the wall, rose what looked like a gnome's upside-down castle, or a pipe organ carved from ice: a frozen waterfall spread out in many thick columns... Now it seemed that Tilde and Franco were going to scale the pipe organ... He struck the pale grey ice of the pipe organ's massive base with his ax. The ice tinkled, spun off a few chips.
(Greg Bear: 'Darwin's Radio', 1999)...he finally found her, still stuck half-way out of the window near the front of the bus. He put his hands on her big churning thighs and tried to yank her free, to little effect. How was he going to do this? It was like trying to pull a pipe organ away from a church wall.
(Peter Blauner: 'Man of the Hour', 1999)
