Whisper to a Roar, With 6,019 Pipes

Eighty feet above the limestone floor of L.A.’s new cathedral, John Ourensma crouches over a row of organ pipes. Pulling one out of its wooden rack, he narrows its cone-shaped base with a brass tool that looks a little like a candle snuffer. Replacing the pipe, he pulls a walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Try it now,” he says. Suddenly a blast of air sends a shatteringly loud middle C into the confines of the narrow workspace.

The voice of John Panning, who is seated at the organ console near the altar, crackles back at him: “That sounds cleaner, fuller. Can you move on to C sharp? It seems to have some kind of a speech defect.”

One note at a time, “voicers” are adjusting the 6,019 pipes of Opus 75, which is what Dobson Pipe Organ Builders calls the instrument it has built for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Four Dobson experts, working in teams of two--one man among the pipes in the organ case, one at the keyboard console--started in May, testing and retesting about 61 pipes a day. And even after the cathedral opens on Sept. 2, they will still be climbing among the organ’s five “floors” of layered pipes and listening intently from the cathedral floor, making final adjustments.

For the voicers, and the 15 other workers at the Dobson shop back in Lake City, Iowa, this is the final step in a five-year process. It began in 1997 with a set of basic specs from the Los Angeles archdiocese. About half the pipes in the $2-million organ were built in Iowa (others are hand-me-downs; the rest were built in Germany); all of it was assembled and pre-voiced in the company’s plant and then transported to Los Angeles and lifted into place. By last September, the steel-framed organ case--six stories high, 20 feet across and 10 feet deep--was on the front wall at the right-hand side of the church. By the end of April, the biggest, heaviest pipes, which is to say the loudest and deepest, were in place, and the organ’s black cherry-wood-and-organ-pipe facade--designed with cathedral architect Jose Rafael Moneo--was finished.

Now it’s summer, and all but 1,000 of the pipes are installed. When the voicers turn the organ over to the archdiocese, says Dobson Pipe Organ Builders founder and president Lynn Dobson, Our Lady of the Angels should have an instrument for all seasons.

“What we’re trying to do is make an organ that will play a broad range of organ literature as well as meet the demands of the Mass,” Dobson said. “This instrument really does become a new interpretation of what the ideal organ can be.”

Manuel Rosales, himself an organ builder and the archdiocese’s consultant on Opus 75, is cautiously optimistic.

“You buy an organ at great risk,” Rosales says. “It’s too early to tell the final result, but the imagination and skill that have gone into it have been the highest caliber.”

At first, the archdiocese wasn’t sure it wanted a new organ for its new cathedral. St. Vibiana’s, L.A.’s cathedral starting in the late 1800s, was closed after the 1994 Northridge earthquake but the organ survived largely intact. Originally built in the 1920s, it had been refurbished as recently as the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1987. Why not just reinstall it at Temple and Grand? But it soon became clear that it wouldn’t make much of an impression in a building meant to hold five times as many people as the old cathedral.

The archdiocese asked four organ makers to submit ideas for a new organ, using as many pieces from the old one as possible. A five-member committee tapped the Dobson company, a small firm that had never participated in such a high-profile project.

“They chose us,” said Dobson, “based on the creativity of our concept.”

Rosales calls Opus 75 three organs in one--the first based on the “rich, smooth velvety orchestra voices and deep bass pipes” from the original St. Vibiana’s instrument. The second based on “clear, lighter-voiced pipes” that also came from the old organ, and the third the “triumphal Dobson organ,” which adds or increases fanfare pipes, reed pipes, bass and brass.

Just as important, the company found a way to fit the old and the new into just the right size box: They met the space requirements set by Moneo.

In a way, an organ is a simple thing. The pipes--made of tin, lead-tin alloy or wood--create sound in much the same way as a kid blowing air through a whistle or across the top of a Coke bottle. Holes at the bottom let the air in, and slots on the front direct where the air exits. The pitch is essentially a function of how long the pipe is; its width and shape control the tone, or “color.” The amount of air helps determine volume, and the airflow is generated by blowers and controlled by keys, pedals and uber-keys called stops.

A very small organ has one “manual” or keyboard, controlling one set or rank of pipes. Typically, 61 keys and 61 pipes create a basic instrument, roughly comparable to a piano in range, with each key and pipe producing a different pitch but a similar tone quality.

To move up from basic, and to produce sounds of different color, additional ranks of pipes of different shapes and sizes are required. You can add a rank that sounds like flutes, for example, or one that combines sounds to suit Baroque or Romantic music.

As the ranks multiply, so do the number of stops. The organist can close and open the stops--via knobs on the console--shutting off some ranks entirely, combining others or even, theoretically, “pulling out all the stops” and activating every pipe in every rank at once.

The cathedral organ’s 6,019 pipes are divided into 105 ranks with 104 stops. It has four manuals and 32 foot pedals. All that makes it above average in size, with plenty of color, to allow it to play many kinds of music for many purposes.

It’s not the largest L.A. organ; that honor goes to the instrument at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, with more than 20,000 pipes and 325 ranks, one of the 10 largest in the world.

And it isn’t designed like another new organ coming soon to Los Angeles, at Walt Disney Concert Hall just up Grand Avenue. That organ, says Rosales, its builder, is mainly meant “to blast.” It requires bigger and more expensive bass pipes, and it will cost about $1 million more than the cathedral instrument, even though it won’t be much larger when it comes to the number of pipes and stops.

In the end, though, the instrument isn’t just the pipes, the keys and the sound design, it’s how it all the works inside a particular building.

“Organs always reflect the acoustical environment they’re in,” says Rosales. “The cathedral is unusual in its rich, big space, which will provide a great sounding board. An organist’s job is to make the most it can of the acoustic of the space it lives in. That’s what the voicers are doing right now.”

From the pews in the nave of the church, Opus 75 is all elegant burnished wood and a striking asymmetrical assemblage of gleaming pipes. But if you’re climbing hand-over-hand up ladders behind the facade, things are a little less elegant.

On a midsummer day, with the temperature about 80 degrees in the organ case, another of the voicers, Bill Ayers is working on the pipes meant to sound like traditional solo instruments, wedging his arms into cramped spaces, sometimes working and reworking one pipe over and over.

“Every pipe is its own individual thing,” Ayers says. Right now, the issue is loudness. “We’re listening to hear if each pipe is at the same volume as we progress up the keyboard.”

Around him, the cathedral is dead silent, even though there are signs of unfinished work everywhere: pews and the baptismal font yet to be installed, flooring to complete. Technicians are working on the sound system and the lighting. The Dobson contract, however, specifies that all such activity must stop by 2:30 p.m. each day so that the tuning teams can work.

As the voicers work to control the organ’s volume, they’re also listening for other ways the pipes can be out of whack. The notes may sound squawky, raucous or fuzzy. “The voicer makes a pipe sound elegant or refined, robust and brilliant,” says Rosales.

There are about a dozen options when it comes to making things right. Most of the pipes are “flue” pipes, essentially a metal tube that the voicer can reshape to some degree. He can increase or decrease the size of the air hole (smaller equals softer sound; larger equals louder) or alter the slot through which the air exits, which modifies color and can also affect volume. Adjusting a metal disc inside the pipe redirects air toward the slot, which affects how quickly the pipe “speaks.” And if the pitch isn’t spot on, the voicer can roll a strip of metal up or down at the top of some pipes, or slide a sleeve placed around the top of other pipes to tweak its length.

“Voicing sounds simple,” says Panning, “but it isn’t.” It has to be mastered through apprenticeship, and voicers rely only on their ears, no other instruments, to get it right.

The work is both delicate and rough. The pipes can be easily damaged, and making one change sometimes throws the pipe into an opposite error.

At the beginning of the tuning process for Opus 75, what the voicers heard wasn’t what they’d hoped for.

“The decibel level was too low,” explains Dobson. “We had to raise the wind pressure considerably. All the work that was done in the shop had to be redone. Luckily we were in the ballpark.”

The problem, he says, was the deadline.

“In an ideal situation,” he says, “we would wait to start work until the building was finished.” In other words, the organ wouldn’t be finalized until the instrument’s makers could hear and test real acoustics in a real space, complete with roof, walls, windows and, in this case, people in the pews. But that would have meant no organ for the opening of Our Lady of the Angels, an outcome that wasn’t acceptable to the archdiocese.

“The cathedral didn’t even have a roof above it when we brought in test pipes,” says Dobson. “We had to guess how many decibels each pipe had to put out.”

In fact, working out the balance between what is optimal for the organ and what is possible in the cathedral, has required fancy footwork throughout the process. Take the issue of the placement. Acoustically, the best location for an organ is on a building’s central axis, facing the listeners. But that wasn’t where Moneo first wanted it.

“Originally, the organ was on the side in the transept area and was not visible from the whole room,” said Dobson. “We had a lot of discussion about that. It wasn’t easy to suggest changes, but Moneo was willing to listen.”

The organ isn’t winning all the battles. The cathedral is built for speech as well as for music, and the two aims compete. Organs love long reverberation time, but too much reverb and you’ll get a garbled homily. Dennis Paoletti, the cathedral’s principal acoustical consultant, has put speakers in the overhead lighting fixtures to keep voices clear, and he has cut down on reverberation by placing baffling material in the ceiling and the tapestries that hang on the cathedral’s walls.

You can hear the organ well, says Rosales, but adjustments “remove the feeling that the sound is filling the room. The beauty of a large room is its ability to enhance subtlety. That’s long gone because of the need for speech intelligibility.”

By early August, the voicers are about two-thirds of the way through the pipes, with enough completed to sound out a few tunes to test their work. Rosales is happy: “An organ in a setting like this cathedral needs to play very softly and very powerfully and everything in between. If it doesn’t roar and shake the building as well as quietly ‘sit’ behind someone who is praying, it’s a failure,” he says. “This organ can certainly whisper. I have no doubt that it will be able to roar.”

And the way the sound is shaping up justifies the decision to put a new organ in new cathedral.

“The full sensual experience of hearing music made by an organ--it’s more than just sound,” Rosales says. “It adds a dimension that we respond to.”

As the days speed by toward the cathedral’s opening, the Dobson team refuses to be rushed. They’re still sounding one pipe at a time and comparing that one with all the pipes they’ve voiced so far. And they’re still contending with the changing acoustics as the Paoletti teams continue to work at cutting down reverberation and muffling noise from the air-conditioning.

“We can’t be finished until we’re finished,” says Panning. “It’s an artistic endeavor. Our business manager would like us to be able to say we’re going to be done at such and such a time. But in the end the most important thing is that it sounds right. We have a good idea of how long that will take. It ends up taking what it takes.”

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Instrumental Differences

*--* Instrumental Differences The new organ at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is bigger than average and is highly versatile. Southern California boasts two of the 10 largest in the world. A few points of comparison: Pipes Ranks Manuals Cathedral of Our Lady of the 6,019 105 4 Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles First Congregational Church of Los more than 20,000 346 5 Angeles, 540 S. Commonwealth Ave., Los Angeles Crystal Cathedral, 12141 Lewis St., approx. 18,000 273 5 Garden Grove Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles 6,600 104 5

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