Reviews

Hammond plays Bach : welcome, sacrilege!

by Paolo Veronesi

Playing Bach on the Hammond organ? More than sixty years after the Sacred Congregation of Rites (Roman Curia) flatly rejected the use of the electromagnetic organ in churches (see yours truly’s article in Arte organistica e organaria , July-September 2008)? In defiance of even basic philological considerations? With an instrument that was modern in its time, between 1935 and 1975, and in the last twenty years of its life wasn’t even that modern anymore, and hasn’t been manufactured for nearly forty years (even though hundreds of thousands of people, scattered around the world, continue to play it)? What does Daniele Toffolo, an organist from Sesto al Reghena in the province of Pordenone (our Central Europe), do? A forty-year-old omnivorous man who divides his time between teaching, performing concerts, accompanying choirs and soloists, serving as organ player in churches, composing, designing, serving on organ commissions and preservation committees, and all the while, not content, giving a nod to jazz? Does he plan to revive the baroque fad of the early 1970s with the electric and electronic instruments of the time, perhaps harking back to Walter/Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach , the album of partitas and suites reworked with the Moog and overdubs? Was there a need for such a repechage? Or does Toffolo want to capitalize on the trend for “contamination” to stir up some steam around himself? It’s a rehash of the past, one might say. On the other hand, that of the respect due to Bach and Music with a capital M, what impudence!

And with that, we’ve given voice and food to the Baal of pedantry and academia, to the Beckmesser of the moment (they thrived even in Wagner’s time, and in truth, they’ve never been lacking), to his malignity cloaked in more or less scientific arguments and devotion to great and therefore intangible art. We’ll see how quickly and easily those objections prove to be inconsistent. Having said what can be said, in principle , against Daniele Toffolo’s Hammond plays Bach , we can begin to examine this work more closely. ” In principle,” it is written in italics to underscore an important fact: those who turn up their noses at cases like this always do so based on general assumptions. Everything changes, however, when one delves into the flesh. The best approach is that of the Martian coming to Earth for the first time: ignorant of history, presuppositions, schools of thought, divisions, and controversies, he contemplates what he sees and hears without conditioning, armed with a sharp mind, long ears, and excellent eyesight. If I put Toffolo’s CD in the player and pretend to be a Martian—that is, if I free myself of all worries, prejudices, and fears of going against what I imagine to be the prevailing opinion—I hear first of all that Bach sounds good on the Hammond, very good, in a way that—dare I say—is organistically relevant. Toffolo, among other things, does a great and refined job of constructing the registers with the Hammond’s harmonic formants. I know it’s a Hammond, I feel it: I’ve long been familiar with the huge contraption with the motor inside, full of valves and other paleo-electronic paraphernalia; I can recognize its smell from a distance. But damn, that Chicago watchmaker, Laurens Hammond, was a genius and thought it through in the best possible way: the organ’s sound is all there; and when the 32′ bellows under the Plenum, I defy anyone to argue that “it doesn’t sound like an organ.” The second perception that comes to me is an unusual ease in mentally representing the structure and plot of Bach’s pieces: I follow the lines of counterpoint effortlessly, I “see” them, and I fully appreciate their marvelous interplay. This is something I’ve never experienced before while listening.

Hammond, an “immediate” voice

It is precisely from this last aspect that Toffolo’s work stems, paying close attention to a characteristic of the Hammond sound: the immediacy of emission. In the pipe organ, emission, the bringing of air into the sounding bodies, is more or less slow (more than one variable, as is well known, comes into play: type of pipe, period of construction, materials, intonation, any artifices at the mouth), never as immediate as in the “electrophone,” to quote Corrado Moretti’s irritated term. As in the classical organ, transients of attack are appreciated: not the “spit” of the pipe but the keyclick , the noise caused by the contacts under the keys and pedals. As in the pipe organ—of course, with mechanical transmission—the transient is sensitive to the player’s touch. But everything arrives with a suddenness, a freshness, a clarity, and therefore a sharpness unknown to the aerophone. It’s a technical fact, banal if you like, and certainly coincidental (Laurens Hammond, the inventor, wanted to emulate the pipe organ as much as possible), but it changes the perspective. In practice—we say this roughly, but not by much—it’s about having an essentially organ-like sound in your hands with the immediacy of a harpsichord . With all due respect to the academy, a whole new world opens up. Toffolo realized this and enjoyed it, immediately discovering how to capitalize on the starting technical condition: thanks to his Hammond RT3 (the liturgical version of the B3 / C3 / A100, with a complete concave-radial pedalboard and additional sounds for the 32′ and 1′ pedalboard), he has developed a legato-staccato that truly lies halfway between an organ and a harpsichord approach. Strengthened by this new performance method, and the ability to carefully dose it thanks to a remarkable sensitivity of the fingers (and thanks to the singular character of the Hammond keyboards which, as much as they articulate and detach, equally blend and round the passages), Toffolo has brought the clarity of his phrasing to unusual levels. It is enough to listen to the “violinistic” variations of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor , and those of the fast tempos of the Concerto in A minor.Transcribed by Vivaldi, to fully appreciate the clarity of the arpeggios and scales. Indeed, a clarity of phrasing reminiscent of the harpsichord, but with the sounds of the organ, and with the roundness of the organ and its sustained voice. The fever of discovery is evident in the embellishments: Toffolo delights—the fact is incontrovertible, if you listen carefully—in such immediate force of emission that trills, mordents, and gruppetti sound crisp, multiplied in the rapid and bristling progression of the notes. Sometimes, perhaps, he overdoes it, holding a trill too long or “snatching” a fast passage, almost turning it into a glissando (it only happens once, and we won’t tell you which one…): the thrill of discovery, indeed, can take over. But the organist doesn’t stop at the joys of the keyclick and the note that gushes forth without latency. He uses—with caution—the final weapon in the Hammond arsenal: percussion. And let us not think so much of the enjoyable arpeggiated accompaniment, similar to a vibraphone, in the transcription of the Largo from the Concerto BWV 1056 , in which the percussive attack “on the second harmonic” (4′) openly evokes a pizzicato string. Let us think above all of the fourth of the Partita diversi above “O Gott, du frommer Gott” . And of the Vivace from the Triosonata No. 3 , a praiseworthy singular interpretation of a wonderful piece, as we will see shortly. Here the percussion at the attack of the note is used as a sort of super-transient: which happily projects the typical effect of the electromagnetic instrument onto the logic of classical organ; and, at the same time, it respects the tradition of the latter which has assigned to this effect – in complete antithesis to the intentions of the inventor-builder – the function of attack and articulation of the long sound, not of independent and imitative sonority of struck string instruments (three names above all: the jazz-bluesman Jimmy Smith, the rock keyboardist Keith Emerson, the rock-blues organist Brian Auger).

Experimental and “didactic” approach: the medium favors the message

From the perspective outlined above—and always with all due respect to the purist-philologists—the Hammond organ proves, in Toffolo’s work, to be a valuable teaching aid : as we’ve seen, it restores to the listener the full audibility of the sound construction, harmonic masses, and above all contrapuntal lines. With phrasing, moreover, that is delightfully and paradoxically “baroque.” This is why the academic objection is pointless: can we imagine that Bach, a systematic experimenter with the formal structures of music and the sonic means for making thought audible, would have shaken his head and turned away, holding Toffolo’s RT3 in his hands? Let’s pause for a moment on the scene: Johann Sebastian, a solitary and voraciously curious craftsman, an alchemist in the sound workshop, who doesn’t turn on the Hammond generator, annoyedly refuses to touch it and proclaims: “My Preludes and Fugues should be performed only on Silbermann organs or similar, even three centuries from now, because I conceived them exclusively for the silvery sonority of the North German organ. And please, no concave-radial pedalboards if anyone ever thinks of building them: only straight pedalboards.” Ridiculous even to think of it, considering Bach and who he was; and considering also that we’re talking about an era in which people still wrote, often generically, for Klavier , for keyboard, without imposing the use of the organ, the harpsichord, or even the fortepiano. We have no doubts: in the presence of the wooden “barge”, the man from Eisenach (previously instructed in electricity, otherwise it would have been a runaway, but with his tail between his legs…) would have immediately turned on the power, extracted the drawbars , tested the sound improvising, opened his small, slitted eyes wide and then turned to Toffolo: ” Bitte , lock me in the study and throw away the key”.

Still on the subject of the Martian, listening and relistening to Toffolo’s recording, I realize that the unique delivery doesn’t just yield greater intelligibility. Inevitably, the RT3’s voice and attack intersect with the performer’s personal aptitudes: Toffolo, having tapped into the ability to touch and phrase with the organ’s voice and the harpsichord’s readiness, uses it to accentuate the traits of his style, his approach to Bach, ultimately to heighten the encounter with Bach’s texts. The rapid, clear articulation of his phrasing impacts every aspect. First and foremost, Toffolo, an organist with a marked interest in Romantic literature, has a penchant for slightly disrupting the metronome-like tempo with which Bach has generally (and respectably, we might add) been played for decades. With extreme caution and the art of dosage, in this case too: rubato and sforzando, vaguely “jazzy” anticipations and delays move the performance where they can illuminate the “affective” charge of Bach’s discourse; and where it is not too risky to believe that ancient performance practice itself, in the wake of a consolidated “theory of affects”, tended to indulge in slight deviations from exact rhythmic measure. The immediacy of emission, with the relative “harpsichord-like” gap between notes, favors this approach because, by contrast, it lays it bare. It’s simple: if there is no latency in pronunciation, when delays or anticipations are made, the compensation due to the imperceptible ex ante or ex post coda is missing , therefore the agogic shift becomes more marked. Here then is the full-round rendition of the “pomposo” in the opening piece of the disc, the Prelude in C major BWV 547 . Here, as elsewhere, Toffolo plays on the contrast between sforzando and appoggiaturas, on the one hand, on the climaxes and thematic “anaphoras” (repetitions), and on the other, on the precise ternary rhythm of the cadential and resolutive sequences. A similar argument, mutatis mutandis , applies to the following celebrated chorale, “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme ,” with its truly processional tempo. Here, among other things, the Hammond’s oft-cited clarity of emission shines through, revealing—here in a truly magical way—the Bachian miracle of the chorale’s insertion into the texture of the upper voice: the interplay of lines is disarmingly clear and plastic. More “didactic” than this… Similarly, but in a different expressive key, the frank emission of the RT3 allows Toffolo to make the Air on the IV string an album sheet immersed in a crepuscular and rarefied concentration (and let’s face it: philology or not philology, the page seems to ask – humbly – to be interpreted in this way).

Bach the craftsman, mathematician, heroic

We’ve already spoken of the astonishing clarity with which the Hammond-Toffolo duo conveys rapid sequences (scales, arpeggios, etc.) to the listener, but it’s essential to recall the album’s final track, the aforementioned Partitas diversi above “O Gott, du frommer Gott .” If the lacework of Bach’s Baroque lexicon is so evident on this album—for the reasons we’ve seen—in the large, complex polyphonic constructions, imagine what happens when the texture dries up into essential two-part structures: the clarity is almost exorbitant, and Toffolo here instinctively indulges it, resuming, after much stealing and appreciating, the narrowest meter. This multiplies the sensation of mathematical order, and at the same time of “craftsmanship” from the boîte-à-musique , which often emanates from 17th-18th century Germanic instrumental literature, and especially from Bach’s.

 

Then, perhaps even more prominently on the disc, is Bach’s “heroic” and dramatic dimension. We left it for last because it is the essence of the pro-Romantic Toffolo’s interpretation of Bach, as well as the benefit that comes from Hammond playing Bach (and from Toffolo playing Hammond , exploiting its characteristics of emission and voice). And also, undeniably, the salt and pepper of Bach the organ composer, son of Buxtehude and the fiery, capricious, and pressing North German toccata style. This dimension completely permeates the ninth track on the disc, the third movement ( Vivace ) of the Triosonata in D minor, BWV 527. For this piece, one of the most moving pieces of Toffolo’s recordings, we can compare it with a twin performance on the Hammond organ, which anyone can find on YouTube by typing “hammond domein” into the search engine . The piece is played here on a beautiful A100 by Rein De Jong, a talented and versatile Dutch musician. De Jong chooses a very fast and “angry” tempo—he says—to compensate for the fact that the key of D minor sounds a bit “deaf” on a Hammond organ. Perhaps he’s exaggerating, but he’s not entirely wrong: on many harmonic components (i.e., on the different pitches of the real range), the “Ds” of the electromagnetic are slightly less tonic than other notes. These are imperceptible differences that nevertheless contribute to the overall color. The execution is impeccable, the mastery of phrasing admirable with such a high metronome, and the embellishments textbook. The meter is precise and fluid, from the pedal ostinato to the two upper voices. This is Bach, the brilliant German craftsman, with the mechanism of a cuckoo clock at his head. The Bach of trinate and “violinistic” sequences that even Toffolo, as we’ve seen, extols where their spirit is the guiding spirit of the text. Let’s see what the Friulian does here: he chooses a more moderate tempo (in keeping with the statistical norm for performances of the piece in question) and lets the accents slide back and forth, emphasizing the agogic and melodic-harmonic tension inherent in this masterpiece. He makes the phrase soar by lengthening the strong beats and tightening the weak ones, thus emphasizing the sense of inexorability and forward march. The magnificent Bachian “tercet” (pardon the jazz term), the same one that towers in the Passacaglia in C minor , is pure boldness here. It is Bach, it would seem, who tells the canons who pay him to go to hell and escapes to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude: the trills performed by Toffolo are crackling and daring compared to the nonchalant ones.De Jong’s Vivace almost evokes the young organist from Eisenach’s sneer at his employers. A youthful air of defiance, however, is underpinned by the relentless effort of the march, conveyed by the pedal that always proceeds slightly late. This Vivace in Toffolo’s hands could serve—we apologize for the irreverence—as a refined soundtrack for the scene of Don Quixote advancing across the Iberian plateau at the height of his dreams of conquest. One may agree with the performer and his approach or disagree; but the performance certainly does not leave one indifferent: such a lively Vivace is not heard every day. And while it embodies Toffolo’s freedom of spirit and anti-academic style, the instrument contributes greatly with its freshness of emission: the organist uses it liberally to pull the strings and move the flow without compromising—indeed, enhancing—the clarity of the play of mirrors, the thematic material’s pursuit between one voice and the next. Toffolo believes that only the Hammond can accomplish so much, and he’s probably right. Here, Toffolo and Hammond truly play Bach together .

Bach and Leslie: Why? The “Case” of BWV 565

Last but not least, the mockery of mockeries: not Bach’s to the canons, but Toffolo’s to the purists. A gesture Glenn Gould would have appreciated. The deed occurs, needless to say, in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 , the universal icon of organ music. Overall, the piece, in Toffolo’s performance, blends all the characteristics we’ve mentioned so far: from the pressing pathos that we dare call “funky” for the tension it expresses (see the precipitous effect of the opening: quick bite, suspension, descending scale in accelerando, brief pause, weighty thump on the tonic) to the almost “crunchy” clarity of the counterpoint and variations in the Fugue; from the skillful distribution of rubato and other metrical “exits and re-entries” to the contrast between a sanguine sense of impromptu and the swift, regular spirals of perpetual motion; between the inexorable, theatrical forward movement and the celestial mechanics translated into a dance of automatons. But all this isn’t enough for Toffolo to feel satisfied, and he screws up: several times in the Toccata and then in the final cadence of the Fugue, where the tension resolves into dramatic chordal masses, the Friulian can’t resist and sends the rotor and the trumpet of the Leslie into fast , moving the appropriate selector to the Tremolo position. Is this the stuff of ’70s progressive rock, when pseudo-baroque paraphrases were made with the Hammond and Leslie in a pop key? Intentional provocation? The latter is definitely there, without a doubt. But let’s try to get into the Martian role this time too: away with the memory of the musical aesthetics of rock bands, away with the whining that feeds on it (“the tremolo of the Leslie playing Bach? Noooo… Is that Bach or is it Pink Floyd?”). The Martian knows nothing about the last half-century of terrestrial musical customs. He hears the sound moved by the rotary amplifier for the first time and doesn’t associate it with anything; neither black gospel musicians nor long-haired men on stage come to mind. And what does the Leslie do? Exactly: it moves the sound. The real question is therefore: does it make sense to occasionally move the sound in this way, making it pulsate, in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor ? Does it serve any purpose? Does it enhance the dramatic and theatrical character mentioned above or not? Ultimately: assuming it is an irreverent excess, and that it determines a sonic expansion and contrast not foreseen in the text, do those expansions and contrasts bring out something from the text itself? The listener can answer as they wish, but no one should doubt the Martian legitimacy of these questions.

The real goal: to question Bach

Because ultimately, the purpose of Toffolo’s work is this: to interrogate Bach, to search like a diviner for any nuclei of latent energy in his music, yet unexamined or only partially illuminated. That is, to apply Bach’s eminently and doggedly exploratory attitude toward music to the performance of Bach’s music. To this end, Toffolo employs an unusual means, considered improper by philology; but precisely the virtuoso unusualness of the means, the departure from the practices associated with the use of the canonical instrument, guarantees the feasibility of a journey of research and discovery. Toffolo does not intend, with respect to organ jurisprudence and its customs, either to “do something different” or to attempt to reproduce them with a heterodox sonic medium. Rather, he uses the Hammond organ as an optical instrument that establishes new perspectives on the observed object and redefines it. And so much for what Roland Barthes called the “spirit of the letter.” So, assuming that Daniele Toffolo’s Hammond plays Bach is a sacrilege, we can calmly welcome it with a heartfelt welcome. And then enjoy this rigorous and inventive Bach, playful and compelling, presented on a record that is as debatable as one might like (and we believe Toffolo intended it to be that way, debatable) but with a strong and precise soul.

And as for the Hammond, one can have one’s say, but not without asking a question: is a Hammond better for Bach than an industrial Italian organ with electric drive from the 1920s to the 1970s? This writer has repeatedly seen soloists from beyond the Alps, French, Austrian, and German, rise from their seats at the end of a concert, cursing whoever could have conceived such instruments, which transform the contrapuntal texture into a shapeless glob of sound. If Bach is still performed on those organs, would it be considered illicit and irreverent to do so on a Hammond RT3 with its immediate and clear voice? The burden of answering lies with the intellectual honesty of philologists, with anyone who loves Bach and is willing to address the question with Martian chastity of mind.