An Instrument of Education : CSUN’s new pipe organ may teach students a thing or two about music before the electronic age

A pipe dream is about to come true at Cal State Northridge. Moreover, it looks as though one of the most important dreamers will be around to enjoy it.

When students return in the fall, they will discover a new, 16-foot-tall pipe organ perched atop an 11-foot pedestal in the student union building. Technicians from the J. W. Walker Organ Co. of England spent the early part of the summer assembling the instrument, putting the 900-plus pipes in their proper places and tailoring the sound for the specific acoustics of the reverberant hall.

While the organ is a source of great pride for Jerry Luedders, chairman of the music department, it arrives at an awkward time. Because of this year’s reduction in state support for education--a casualty of the recession and the budget crisis in Sacramento--Luedders was faced with the prospect of laying off many of his part-time, adjunct instructors. Among their number is Samuel John Swartz, the school’s sole professor of organ and the man who helped design the new instrument.

But thanks to savings brought about by an early retirement program and the willingness of many full-time teachers to take on extra courses, the program is in better shape than it appeared earlier this summer, and the mass layoffs will not be taking place at this time (though Luedders is making no predictions about the spring). Thus the mood should be upbeat Sept. 12, when Swartz--who is also university organist at the University of Redlands--will perform the first in a series of inaugural concerts.

“The first concert will include music of the baroque, right up to the most recent avant-garde compositions, just to show the flexibility of this wonderful instrument,” said Swartz, who has been teaching at CSUN since 1981.

The need for such an organ has been apparent to Luedders since he arrived on campus six years ago. “I did my walk through the facilities in the first week or so,” he said. “I arrived in the organ room and said to the organist, ‘Where is the performance instrument?’ He said, ‘This is the performance instrument.’ ”

What Luedders discovered was a 30-year-old, “very limited” organ, which had to be rolled across a patio into the school’s small recital halls in order to be played. He found this surprising, particularly considering CSUN’s music department had recently been ranked among the top 20 university music departments in the country by an independent survey.

But he turned his attention to other matters until 3 1/2 years ago, when Swartz asked if there was any money to add a few more ranks of pipes. Not really, Luedders replied. But it was time to raise the money for a new instrument, he said.

Aside from $20,000 in seed money--which came from state equipment funds--the $180,000 cost of the organ and pedestal was raised from private sources, including the American Organists Guild and the CSUN Arts Council. Swartz considers that a considerable bargain; he noted that the school saved money by modifying a standard small-organ design rather than having the instrument custom built.

While the student union may seem an odd place for such an instrument, Swartz and Luedders like the location for several reasons. First, since the university has only a small, 200-seat recital hall, many musical performances already take place in the student union building. With the organ there, joint concerts featuring the instrument and various ensembles can be easily arranged.

Furthermore, the location fits nicely with Luedders’ long-held idea of “taking music to the people rather than bringing people to the music.” The chairman acknowledges some problems with the arrangement, including the music department’s limited access to the building; he noted students will probably do some of their practicing “in the wee hours of the night, after the building closes.”

But he loves the fact that non-music majors will be exposed to the sounds of the organ on a regular basis. “It’s an important thing for students to see that music is an integral part of student life, and that there are multiple forms of music,” he said.

Finally, Swartz appreciates the room’s flexible seating, ranging from 900- to 1,500-seat capacity. “We can configure the audience any way that’s advantageous to the performance,” he said. “I can see, for example, doing a poly-choral work by Monteverdi and having various players all around the room, and then having the organ as one of the ensembles in the front.”

Such flexibility “is historically authentic,” he added. Cathedral seats “were not nailed down in Venice in the 16th or 17th centuries.”

Historical authenticity is also a hallmark of the organ itself. Unlike the partially electric organ students have been using, the new one is a traditional tracker-action instrument. Its only electric component is the blower that forces air into the instrument.

“It’s important for our students to see, to work with, to experience an instrument that could have been built in the 14th or 15th Century,” Swartz said. Only such an organ, he said, can provide a subtle enough response to allow students to experiment with authentic performance practices from earlier eras.

“With an electric-action organ, the keys on the console where the organist sits and plays are electric switches,” Swartz said. “You push down a C, and you’ve opened a circuit, which sends electricity to a magnet underneath a pipe named C and opens it.

“With a tracker organ, there are physical, mechanical connections between the key and the opening of the pipe. So there’s a great deal more sensitivity from the keyboard. It’s somewhat like comparing manual steering and power steering on a car. If you drive nothing but power steering, manual steering is going to feel very rough. But you do feel everything the car does.

“The proximity to the sound-producing part of the organ--that is, the pipes--gives the player a much more immediate feeling,” he said. “You never see a violinist playing with gloves on. They want to be in direct contact with their strings. It’s the same thing here.”

Of course, Swartz wants direct contact with the organ--and he’s confident he will continue to enjoy it. Even if his position is eliminated in the spring, he believes that he and his fellow music teachers will be reinstated sometime in the future.

“Pendulums tend to swing from one side to the other,” he said. “Music is essential to the quality of life, and people will realize that when it’s no longer as accessible as it has been. This is an enormous tragedy that people may have to live with for a while before they realize what they’re missing.”