Ein Teufel im Dom (2024)

The fruit of a successful art-science collaboration in Switzerland between organist and composer Daniel Glaus of the Bern Academy of Arts, forward-thinking Swiss organ-builders, and colleagues at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, a “wind-dynamic” organ is now installed in the famed cathedral, the Bern Minster.  Fully mechanical in construction, the wind-dynamic organ goes beyond the capabilities of traditional organs.  How deeply a key is pressed and how the organist controls the wind supply can radically affect the intonation, tonal mix, and timbre of the sound, as well as introducing Aeolian effects.  This brings acoustic organ music into contact with the electronic sound ideal that animates much of 20th and 21st century new music.

Even as one critic complained of  “considerable intonation problems…the music sounds violently out of tune and impure,” he noted that “the sliding pitch changes caused by the wind dynamics [can produce] never-before-heard sound phenomena.” This sounds very close to what Jon Cruz sees as the great power of noise:  “sound out of order [that] eludes culturally normative categories of cognition…resistant to capture.”  Noise introduces uncertainty, and thus appears whenever change is in the offing.  

The Glaus wind-dynamic organ can produce microtonal soundings, but evades the kind of systematization that has been taken as desirable by generations of microtonal composers who sought to harness traditional Western instruments, built largely to reproduce twelve-tone equal temperament, to combat what Georg Friedrich Haas has identified as the attempted colonization of our ears. Thus, this “microtonal chaos machine” challenges not only traditional modes of musical expression, but also some cherished predilections of the avant-garde as well.

“Ein Teufel im Dom” translates to “A devil in the cathedral,” a phrase whose tropes of subversion, infiltration, decolonization, and noise are certainly enough to merit the title—for my composition, for the organ, and perhaps for Glaus himself, to whom the work is dedicated, and whose usual mode of encounter with the organ is in solo improvised settings.  While Ein Teufel im Dom does not utilize improvisation, my attempts to mirror the inherent pitch instabilities of the organ by analogous behavior in the other instruments results in its own hybridities. And, as one of our commentators remarks, “Hasn't organ music been a repository of practised improvisation throughout the ages?”  

Just after completing this piece, I was working with the great conductor Peter Rundel at composer Oscar Bianchi’s wonderful young composers academy in Ticino, Switzerland. One of the academy concerts took place in the Chiesa di S. Remigio in Loco, and when I told Peter about the title, he immediately produced a photo he had taken of a painting in the Chiesa, in which a devil was prominently prancing about in the cathedral.  As it turned out, this image of a devil making mischief in church was rather common, and if the ancient stories are to be believed, there were devils making deals for souls in German cathedrals in Aachen, Munich, Fulda, and especially Trier, where the devil’s likeness was built into the construction of the organ itself, forcing him to perform for the glory of God.