How many times have you heard or listened to a pipe organ? It’s a spectacular instrument—it can produce the lowest of rumbles and the brassiest of trumpets; it fills entire buildings with music; and to play you have to master all combinations of sounds on multiple keyboards and pedals. Organs have historically been linked with church, which means that they are usually associated with hymns or the very-old-timey baroque mastery of Bach. This combined with how it’s the least portable of instruments means it’s an instrument of very limited scope and exposure. The pipe organ: magnificent but unknown.

Organs have spread somewhat into concert halls. Several notable orchestra venues include them. Davies Hall for the San Francisco Symphony, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, even the old Royal Albert Hall in London (for more, others have blogged about good lists of concert hall organs). Unfortunately, one brand-new concert hall, which isn’t even finished yet, is not joining in. Stanford’s own Bing Concert Hall will be pipe organ free.

The reality of the instrument is that it’s hugely expensive to install and maintain, not to mention that only a handful of people play it. Plus, the instrument favors a wetter acoustic—rooms that are huge with long reverberation times. The Bing Hall will only seat 844 people, which is on the smaller end of the spectrum. Stanford’s Memorial Church is actually more ideal for the organ sound, and it has plenty of organs (five, currently). There aren’t bad reasons for no organ in the new hall.

But MemChu’s organs aren’t as friendly to the variety of music possible in a concert hall. The church has: three tiny organs that work mostly for chamber music, an amazing baroque organ perfect for Bach solo recitals, and an old romantic beast that can play church music fine. An orchestra just would not fit in the organ loft (which is located behind audiences anyways) and most instruments that might try to accompany the organs would sound bad because the acoustics have too much echo.

So yet again, logistics and economics trump art, restricting the king of instruments to a narrower set of musical opportunities. Don’t expect to hear Mahler’s second symphony in full on the farm. If you just can’t wait to hear some pipe organ music though, I highly recommend any and all recitals in Memorial Church. As one of the oldest of instruments, the repertoire for it is vast and stunning. It is not a musical opportunity to pass up.

An example of organ and orchestra music.