The lights are out and it is cold in the sanctuary of Alice Millar Chapel. Far away Anne Carper is playing the giant pipe organ, the sound washing over the whole of the chapel. It rushes over the wooden pews, rolls to the altar and the empty pulpits and rises to the vaulted ceiling. The sound is overwhelming, like holy thunder. Sitting on a balcony before four keyboards, Carper, a Music sophomore, looks impossibly tiny as the instrument towers above.
“Since I began the organ, it’s turned from an interest into a fascination into a life,” says Music freshman Tracy Figard.
Figard, a violin major, took an organ job at the Winnetka Bible Church in August. “I took up the organ about the same time I got the job,” she says. “This whole world opened up to me in organ.”
That’s when everything changed. Within a few months of coming to Northwestern, she asked about minoring in organ performance. She was told the administration could not support a minor in organ at the time. During Winter Quarter she tried to double-major and considered dropping the violin major entirely. But she was not given permission to make the switch. She sensed something was wrong, she says.
On Jan. 27 School of Music Dean Toni-Marie Montgomery called most of the school’s graduate and undergraduate organ majors to a meeting telling them the organ program was to be cancelled. The 108-year-old organ major is slowly dying in an immense and bitter dispute between organ students and Music School administrators.
Administrators say the organ major was petering out — that nothing could have saved it from slipping interest.
“Over the past eight years, undergraduate enrollment has totaled eight students,” says Vice President for University Relations Alan Cubbage. “The program . . . for whatever reason has not enrolled many students in the past decade.”
Despite low undergraduate enrollment in NU’s organ program recently, six graduate students have come in the last three years, say organ students. Students also say all three master’s students intended to stay to pursue their doctorates.
NU’s historic program has spawned countless successful organists. Doctoral student Ross Updegraff says this trend has continued to the present day.
“There are recent grads with really good church positions and undergrads succeeding in national competitions,” he says.
“I’ve beaten (students from programs like Yale University and the Eastman School of Music) in competitions,” says Music senior Colin Lynch. Lynch earned an honorable mention in the Augustana Arts/Reuter Undergraduate Organ Competition in March 2003, and won the George Markey Memorial Pipe Organ Scholarship in 2001 and 2002.
NU organ students also say they have no trouble finding work.
“We all have church gigs,” says Carper, who is the director of music and sacred arts at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Evanston. It’s a common refrain among the students, who say they are in high demand.
Some organ students worry further about how the closing will affect sacred music in the Chicago area. Music senior Nick Fennig says NU was leading Chicago’s organ- and church-music world. The closing of the program means that the city will not offer as many opportunities for organ education, some organ students say.
“This was the only place you could get a doctorate (in Chicago),” says Music graduate student Greg Ceurvorst.
Organ programs’ vital signs are mixed nationwide. In the last 10 years, undergraduate programs at the Manhattan School of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music were cancelled, according to statistics from the American Guild of Organists, the national professional organization for organists. Yet others have commissioned and built new organs. Arizona State University completed a new organ in 1992 while NU Dean Montgomery was the director of ASU’s School of Music.
And although there are fewer organ majors in the United States today than in 1986, the drop has not been steady. Data collected by the Higher Education Arts Data Services, an organization sponsored by U.S. music and art schools, reflect an uneven decline. Numbers for the 1986-1987 school year, the earliest obtainable by PLAY, show 521 graduate and undergraduate organ students; there were 601 in the 1993-1994 school year, and 548 in the 2002-2003 school year.
Individual organ programs are also usually small, due to popularity of other majors and the fact that many organists study other instruments. Larry Smith, chairman of the organ department at the University of Michigan, said that the school has only eight organ undergraduates, although there are 27 graduate students and 12 elective students. Michigan has 973 music students, while NU had 623 during the 2002-2003 school year.
In an age of bottom lines for universities, organ departments may be easy targets. While the organ program was not the Music School’s smallest department (the school currently has five harp students), the organs must be tuned monthly, with two major tune-ups every year.
That upkeep can prove expensive, even in the professional arena. University Chaplain Timothy Stevens, who holds services at Alice Millar, says that the ongoing repair project on Alice Millar’s organ will be expensive, although he did not release figures. New leather is being put into the organ’s pipes. The electronics console — not updated since the organ’s installation in 1964 — will be worked on next.
“For my budget it’s a lot of money,” he says. NU covers four-fifths of the expenses, but “it’s still a lot of money.”
Because of the expense of keeping an organ, some new churches are choosing not to purchase one, says Stevens.
“It’s probably part of a huge cultural shift in the kind of music that churches want to do,” he says. “In the short run, a pipe organ is … an expensive thing. The upkeep is large. Some churches are switching to just guitar and keyboards. We’ll see if those moves (to other instruments) are satisfying in the long run.” Still Stevens says many churches are retaining their organs. “I hope churches will come back to recognize the importance of the organ. There’s a spiritual dimension to it.”
The monstrous instrument looks impossibly complicated from up close. In addition to four keyboards, there are nearly 100 knobs, and 15 floor pedals — 12 wooden, three metal. Carper’s small stature makes it tricky for her to play both pedals and keyboards simultaneously. As she plays, her combination of arm and leg movements make it look like she is boxing to the music.
The six thousand pipes on the balcony rise like a forest and tower overhead. Glass plates block much of the sound from reaching Carper’s ears. Playing without them would deafen her.
Only a few modern touches separate her from the organ players of centuries ago: a small, tired Apple computer that has the settings for different pieces in its memory; the HAL 9000-style red light that shows the organ is on; a beige telephone; and Carper’s black cell phone.
Carper stares intently at the sheet music as she plays, the fluorescent lights giving her eyes a beatific glaze.
New programs hoping to bring back the popularity of the organ are in effect, says James Thomashower, executive director of the AGO, who cited the children’s program “Pedals, Pipes and Pizza” as an example.
And despite the end of NU’s organ program, some alumni say they are confident that the instrument will continue to thrive.
“A lot of people come to the organ later in their musical development,” says NU alumnus Dr. John Obetz, who teaches organ performance at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Mo.
“The fact that there are not many undergraduate students does not raise any red flags. Undergraduate enrollment may be down, but the organ is not dead.”
The Alice Millar basement holds the remains of a former organ workshop. Old and spare pipes litter the floor. Pedals and keyboards pummeled by years of use are piled in corners and against walls. The heart of the o
rgan, the chaplain says, “is the size of a small car.” It’s a gigantic electric fan that blows air up the length of the building, a journey of two stories.
Inside the organ is a jungle of tubes. They run at dizzying angles in every direction, snaking across the floor and hanging like a canopy from the ceiling.When tuners come to tune the organ and make repairs, they must duck constantly and weave their way through. It’s hard to see anything inside: The repairmen must feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale, walking around inside this sleeping animal.
Figard remains committed to the organ in spite of her disappointment, and the fact that as a non-major she will only be able to take half-hour lessons from faculty. She plans to keep practicing and to get her master’s degree in organ from another university.
Other organists say they are trying to move on. “We were so distracted by the drama,” Carper says. “Every time I sit down at the organ I think about what’s happened.”
In the end it proved to be too much. Before the close of Winter Quarter, she dropped the organ component of her major to concentrate on music education. She will still give her junior recital next year.
The master’s students and graduating seniors will go elsewhere to continue their studies. The doctoral students will continue with a new adviser, though no one has been named yet. And NU’s organ major will be gone in two years, disappearing into the past like distant music fading into the air.
Marley Seaman, a Medill senior, is a PLAY writer. He can be reached at [email protected]