Your Daily Dose of CHRISTMAS!!!

A harpsichord will have around 61 keys. Some more, some less.

A piano famously has 88 keys…but not always. The Bosendorfer company makes pianos with up to 97 keys.

A pipe organ can have as many as 200 keys…and adds in a full set of pitched foot pedals, and a set of controls called “stops” that control specifically where the air that makes all that sound goes.

The amount of coordination needed to perform pretty much anything on a pipe organ amazes me.

In all my classical music listening, I generally have never much devoted a lot of time to the various keyboard instruments. I love the piano, and yet music for piano represents very little of my casual listening. I generally am not much of a harpsichord fan, so unless I’m listening to a larger work that includes it in the ensemble, I almost never hear it. And then there’s the grandest of the keyboard instruments, the pipe organ.

These gigantic, grandiose instruments really are amazing things. No single musical edifice is better suited to filling a space with sound than the pipe organ; in terms of spaciousness, the pipe organ can really only be matched by the modern orchestra. Pipe organs are, of course, immobile; once built, that’s where they stay. The best chances to hear a pipe organ are obviously in church settings, though many concert halls do have one; not all, though, and many orchestras have to travel to a nearby large church if they want to perform a piece that calls for organ.

This first video is really new! It was uploaded just a few days ago and popped onto my feed Sunday morning (I continue to believe that of all the social media algorithms, YouTube’s is the best at providing stuff that I might find interesting). The music itself is a French carol called “Quand Jésus naquit à Noël”. This is a carol dating from the 1700s, as far as I can gather, and it is absolutely lively and downright joyous. Also note the instrument here: this is not the modern pipe organ with powered transfers and stops helpfully labeled with the names of instrument groupings. This instrument is the real deal: the stops are the ones you push in or pull out, depending on the need (hence the phrase, “pulling out all the stops”), and you can see the bellows working behind her. This is simply wonderful stuff.

Here, for contrast, is the modern organ in action, in a piece called “A Christmas Fantasy”. It’s very nice…but I have to admit, my preference lies with the earlier work on the vintage instrument.

By the way, my preference stated above is in no way meant to disparage the modern organ! Each organ is different, after all; each is made for its space, and you can often look up some information about them. Case in point!

You know what? Let’s revisit the artist from the first video above. What a great random suggestion by the YouTube algorithm! Sometimes that thing just nails it.