The ONLY instrument with NO LIMITS

[Music] did you know that the loudest instrument in the world is also the heaviest tallest one of the oldest and hardest instruments in the world to [Music] play well the pipe organ is all of that and more it pushes the most limits out of any instrument out there I was able to experience this firstand at the Elon Concert Hall in Hamburg which houses one of the world's most extraordinary AR [Music] organs I'm not an organist but I got to spend time on this organ and the experience taught me as a Pianist composer something I never learned in the thousands of hours I spent at my piano in this video we're going to dig into the amazing features of the organ and how it can help you shape your understanding of Music in a way that no other instrument or experience can this video is made as part of my creative residency at the Elon part one what even is a pipe organ I was able to get the best and most direct information about organs from Philip kly one of the world's leading organ Builders the most important feature of a pipe organ are the pipes actually and that's what we sort of see here around us and basically every single node is created by a single pipe really the most exciting feature about a pipe organ that's the separation of providing the instrument with the energy from playing the instrument Philip kly and I met in the lice Hala the other major Concert Hall in Hamburg where he's currently building a new organ if you're playing a trumpet you're producing the energy yourself if you're playing a violin you're sort of creating the energy yourself to produce the sound only pipe organs are different there are some somebody producing the energy and somebody else playing the instrument Mozart said that to him the pipe organ is the queen SL the king of instruments just because of that at the beginning there were sort of people pumping big ballows so one person was having fun and three four people were doing hard work with big instruments in earlier times eventually these organ blowers were replaced by electric motors so one can say that the pipe organ is the world's first synthesizer or El El ronic instrument but this is hardly an impressive fact compared to all of the other things about the organ which brings us to part two so what exactly are the extremes of the organ let's start first with sound the organ is the loudest non-amplified instrument in the world it can get as loud as an airplane during takeoff it also has the largest frequency range covering sounds as low as below 20 HZ all the way to as high as has 16,000 Hertz this also pushes the limits of what the human ear can actually hear these extremes make sense for where these organs are played which are some of the world's largest Cathedrals and concert Halls so to accommodate these spaces and also compete against the sound of a full Orchestra organs are built to be massive and the crazy thing is that they're built into a building which makes the organ Inseparable from the structure itself the pipe organ is part of the building so it's like an individually built instrument for one location and it only fulfills his task on one location I mean you cannot take that instrument and transfer it to a different place that means there's no actual way of calculating the size of a pipe organ but just to give you an idea of the scale of size we're talking about here the heaviest single Organ Pipe is recorded at a whopping 1675 kg that's similar to the weight of an elephant and the longest Organ Pipe is over 19 M long which is the length of a full-sized basketball court another extreme is how you play the organ because I'm a Pianist of course I have a head start in terms of playing the keyboard but here you have to use multiple keyboards plus manage the stops so far I I don't know what stops to use these control which pipes are activated which essentially changes the tone of the notes you're playing by switching between higher and lower octaves and adding different layers of harmonics such as fifths you can mix and match sounds to create different textures and colors so you're essentially dealing with sound design kind of like how a producer decides which parts are played by what instrument 16 foot is one of the lower so now we have like this like this plus the lower one W on one key this means you can play on a piano while you're doing all of this you're using your feet to play the [Music] Baseline besides playing the instrument itself a difficult yet fascinating thing about the organ is how you experience the sound in real time this brings us to the next topic Acoustics part three how playing the organ makes you a better listener there's a saying that the most important stop on a pipe organ are the Acoustics for example if you sort of play very fast uh what what sort of arrives at the ears of the audience might be musical lines that are so dense that you can't read them anymore because of reparation time so of course large churches and Cathedrals have the longest Reverb time concert Halls will have more clarity but still the organist has to deal with the fact that the sound is coming from a very far away distance compared to other instruments there's so much resonance after you play the note which I'm not used to at the piano this doesn't last very long I think experiencing this made me play slightly slower and more deliberately where I'm actively listening to the sound being produced with every keyboard press instead of just relying on muscle [Music] memory another thing that forced me to listen was the fact that I had to control the starting and ending points of every single note that I played I don't have the luxury of having a sustain [Music] pedal it's not a keyboard instrument I think I mean it is but you know what I mean if if it was a piano I'd start but I don't really feel like doing that just doesn't feel appropriate so far I haven't had that much time on the organ because also to practice on an organ you have to be in the space itself it's not something you can just practice in your home or in a practice room that being said I experienced a shift in my piano playing after just a few hours of practicing on the organ during this time I was practicing this piece of mine and you can hear that the general pacing for it was on the quicker side when I tried playing this at the organ I was immediately overwhelmed by all of the stops and I didn't know of course how to use my feet but as I got a bit more used to the instrument I started to notice details about my playing style that I never thought about my writing style can be quite percussive and none of that really works on the organ I feel like my playing has has more consequence as a Pianist I'm so used to this immediate reaction time and I'm in touch with the instrument on sometimes a very physical level I think playing on the organ just now exposes some strange habits I have at the piano that work on the piano maybe but it's more of a tactile thing I can feel my way through volume whereas here I [Music] can most important ly I started to notice a significant shift in my listening I started to understand what it feels like to listen to The Sound Source coming from across the hall and how not to rely so much on my physical touch on the keyboard this made me listen ahead listen thoroughly and consider the space I'm playing in instead of feeling like I was a small sound generator in the middle of the hall I had to learn how to embrace the space of the entire Concert Hall it's hard to put into work how this affected my playing overall but I did notice some subtle changes once I returned back to the piano I allowed more space in between the phrases I relied Less on muscle memory and I felt My overall pacing was much more composed sometimes we make the most improvements away from our main instrument even if you don't end up playing on a pipe organ yourself even just imagining yourself playing on a much more massive instrument in a very reverberant space can perhaps make you listen and play differently if you enjoyed this check out my other videos I've been making as part of my creative residency at the El FL M thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nahre Sol

Views: 362,481

Keywords: piano, music composition, harmony, music theory, nahre sol, classical music, improvisation, pianist, film scoring, jazz, modern music

Id: -_oaIgQF-e4

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024