The faithful heed that booming voice

With a show business smile and a striped shirt he might have borrowed from Larry David, John West could be a well-fed Westside screenwriter.

Instead he’s dedicated, in his own way, to the much more august art of the pipe organ. “Fifty years ago, the organ was the biggest thing going,” West said this week. “It could shake the earth and rattle the walls.”

But the rise over the last half a century of electronic music -- electric guitars, synthesizers, home computers that download songs -- has put West, a professional organist, on the defensive.

“They’re going to hate me for this,” he said, glancing conspiratorially around the lobby of the Westin Bonaventure. “But the organ has to be a better show. We need to do a better sales job.”

Right now, West’s concern is widespread in the city, because more than 2,100 members of the century-old American Guild of Organists have been holding their biennial convention at the hotel. The organ, which Mozart famously called the king of instruments, is struggling to hang on to its throne, and the men and women who play it are struggling as well.

The mammoth new organs at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels might suggest otherwise, but the outlook for journeyman organists looks increasingly cloudy. Once, nearly every church in America had a pipe organ and a salaried employee to play it. Now, bowing to public demand, even the legendary Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove are shifting toward pop-based “praise music,” often accompanied by electric guitars and keyboards.

No one has compiled statistics on this trend, but Gregory Eaton, a church organist in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., echoed a sentiment expressed by many convention-goers. “Fundamentalist Protestant churches are getting rid of the organ altogether. They have whole ‘praise bands’ these days, with winds and brass. But that’s also reaching into the older mainline churches -- Episcopal, Methodist, you name it.”

“The church is a mixed blessing,” said John Michniewicz, an intense young organist from Connecticut. “It gives the organ tons of exposure. But people associate the organ with funerals and guilt.”

Indeed, the most popular organ music at many churches occurs during Halloween-themed “Pipe Screams” concerts, which bring kids out in costume to hear the gothic strains of Bach’s famous toccata.

“I always say it’s very unfortunate that the king of instruments finds itself home-based in the church,” observed Robert C. Tall of Los Angeles, the convention coordinator and a competitive bodybuilder as well as an organist. “It would be wonderful if its home were truly in a concert hall or a university setting, because then it wouldn’t have to have the dual role of acceptance by a religious community. But as we find its diminished use in the church, we really need to explore new ways it can be used, and that’s what these conventions are about.”

More than 60 workshops, from classes on improvisation to how to burn and produce your own CDs, were offered at the Bonaventure this week. One seminar was designed to help traditional organists hone their skills to play the unfamiliar rhythms and harmonies of contemporary or gospel-oriented music in order to become part of a praise music service. Meanwhile, organ builders, record companies, even manufacturers of church robes and companies that make music-publishing software exhibited their wares in a downstairs ballroom.

Each morning, the participants, who hail from all 50 states and 17 foreign countries, including Iraq, have been bused to recitals and services at nearly 20 churches and synagogues as far afield as Claremont and as near as the downtown cathedral. Wednesday night banqueters were addressed by “Frasier” star David Hyde Pierce, who is also a dedicated organist, and Thursday night the participants attended a special concert at Disney Hall to hear the formal debut of the hall’s organ.

Some attendees have boarded buses at 7:30 in the morning and stayed up until midnight at cash-bar receptions, discussing their favorite organs around the world, their love of composers like Franck and Dupre, or the reflective qualities of glass versus stone.

The Fourth of July concert at the Hollywood Bowl was a hit for many. “Where else would you get 2,000 organists singing ‘Sesame Street’ tunes?” asked Travis Powell, the fresh-faced organist at a Roman Catholic church in Dallas. “It was a great way to start the conference.”

Few of these musicians recall the 20th century organists with outsized personalities who once brought fame to their profession, like the flamboyant Virgil Fox, who performed in a cape and rhinestone-studded shoes, or the aristocratic E. Power Biggs. But as a group, they do seem to exemplify Craig R. Whitney’s observation in his recent book, “All the Stops,” that “for most Americans these days, an interest in the organ is an eccentricity.”

William Berg, who plays at a Catholic church outside Chicago, agreed, calling the organ the loneliest instrument. “It’s not like there are four organs and we all play together,” he said. “And it’s not like it was in Bach’s time, when there was one who pumped, one who pulled stops and one who played.”

Actor Pierce, who enrolled at Yale intending to become a professional organist, recalled Tuesday that “my improvisatory skills have turned church services into soundtracks for an Alfred Hitchcock movie. When I got stuck, I pulled out more and more stops and got louder and louder. I remember seeing looks of absolute terror on the faces of the choir.”

Like Pierce, many of the players discovered their instrument as children while attending church and, even when discussing the secular world, slip into religious language. “That which is wholesome will last,” asserted Hartford, Conn., church organist Jason Cherneski.

“The church, as an institution, has embraced an entertainment mentality: Sit back and enjoy the show,” he added. “Instead of a giving of oneself.”

Still, John West maintains that organists have to do whatever it takes to keep from being further marginalized. West is both organist and artist in residence at Bel-Air Presbyterian, Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s longtime church. His evening recitals, he said, can include friendly speeches, flashy programs with catchy themes (the “New York, New York!” program includes music from “Oklahoma!” and “Cats”), video images, even PowerPoint projections on a huge screen. “I’m not engaging the purists,” conceded West, who fell for the organ as a 13-year-old at an A.M.E. church in Oakland. “I’m engaging the culture. I know I’m getting 400 to 600 people at my concerts.”

Yet it may be that the solitude necessary to play this difficult, ancient instrument, the earliest examples of which predate the Roman Empire, is what makes its practitioners especially excited to leave their turrets at least once every two years.

Jenna Kemper, a young flutist attending the convention to recruit for Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, said she thinks organists tend to have more fun.

She was struck one night by a cash bar at the Bonaventure still going strong a few minutes before midnight, a sight she said would be hard to find at a flutists’ convention. “No,” she said flatly, they’d be back in their rooms -- “still fingering.”