Light On Dark Water

Stained Glass and Organ Music

I listen to a lot of recorded music. Too much, really. That
overused word “addiction” could perhaps be
legitimately applied to my habit, and I find it useful but very
painful to give it up or at least cut it way back for a while,
which I often do during Lent. And my tastes are very
wide-ranging. But there’s one kind of music of which there
is little or none among my recordings: organ music.

I’ve always found the organ to be, frankly, rather
tiresome in recordings. Even a good recording and a fairly decent
home stereo just can’t do it justice. It’s an odd
instrument. It can sound more notes simultaneously than the
piano, and unlike the piano it can hold them for a long time.
This, in combination with the similarity in tone among these
notes, can result in a muddled quality. Its majesty can easily
tip over into pomposity, and pomposity into something almost
silly: because it’s so big and complex, and its elaborate
mechanism is so slow to react (in comparison with other
instruments), it can have a sort of dancing-elephant quality.

But in its proper environment—say, in the Cathedral of
the Immaculate Conception in Mobile—it is matchless. I
found myself thinking today at Mass that it is not the organ
alone but the combination of the organ and its building which
constitute the instrument. I know almost nothing of the complex
lore of these instruments, but I wouldn’t be surprised to
learn that what I just said is a commonplace.

Toward the end of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous
Strength, Jane Studdock is beginning to feel a renewed
interest in the Christianity in which she was raised. She
remembers the stodginess, the “stained glass
attitudes” of the Christians she knew, and then
“…in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she
remembered what stained glass was really like.” Something
like that happens to me whenever I hear the cathedral organ. Gone
is the pompous blare that I remember hearing from my stereo
speakers, gone is the dancing elephant: in their place are golden
majesty and glory, the sound we might hear if the sun himself
could sing. It’s a sound that is felt as well as heard, but
it isn’t so loud as to be punishing and destructive, like
live rock music. It does not crush, but exalts.

Stained glass and organ music have been unfashionably
“churchy” for some time now, but there is a reason
why Christendom, having invented them, remained attached to them
for hundreds of years. It’s mainly the unfortunate
propensity of mankind to become bored and to seek novelty that
has made them fall out of favor. But plainly we have not come up
with anything better, and it’s time we encountered them
again.