by Erik Espe
The music blasts out of more than 4,500 pipes and echoes off the church's 93-year-old walls. Robert Bates, Stanford University's official organist, is practicing on the church's 32-foot-tall Fisk-Nanney Organ. The instrument has a powerful, bright sound that has given the organ a name around the world.
"It's big. It's monumental. It's world-famous," Bates says of the organ, as he sits in a tiny room perched in the upper rear of the choir loft.
A specialist in 17th-century French organ music, Bates is a former Stanford graduate student in musicology.
This Sunday, he'll give a dedication concert at Stanford to mark the arrival of the university's newest and smallest organ: a 9-foot-tall Renaissance-style chamber organ, built by Paul Fritts and donated to the church by alumnus Claude Brinegar. Bates has been practicing on the Katharine Potter-Brinegar Organ (named after Brinegar's late wife) almost every day to prepare for the Sunday concert.
The hand-carved organ is built from walnut, oak, ebony and maple woods. Nearly all of the 429 pipes are made of wood, giving the instrument a sweet, delicate sound reminiscent of the late Renaissance. Bates can also pull a switch to make the organ sound almost exactly like a recorder.
What attracts Bates to organ playing is the variety: No two church organs ever sound alike, he says. Now, with three organs under the same roof, Bates is working in what he calls an "organ player's paradise." Every work day, he wakes up in his San Carlos home and heads to the Stanford church to play one of three organs.
As the official university organist, Bates performs hundreds of services a year. He supplies musical accompaniment for nearly every wedding and memorial service (including David Packard's earlier this month) that passes through Memorial Church.
Bates landed the job last fall. He received his Ph.D. in musicology in 1986, and has worked in the church as an organist since 1985. He has won top prizes in organ performances around the country, and two of the highest prizes offered by French conservatories: the Prix d'Excellence and the Prix de Virtuosite.
Bates has loved playing the organ since his junior high school years in Detroit, when his hometown church organist started giving him lessons. "I have just kept going since then," he says.
"What first attracted me to the organ was the power of the instrument," he says. "What kept me interested was the variety. Every good organ is different than every other one. In your life, you'll never be able to play all of them.
"The organ has the biggest repertoire of any instrument because it goes back so far, to the late medieval period. There is so much music to learn, you can never learn it all."
Landing the university organist job was a dream come true for Bates. The church already had two organs before the arrival of the Potter-Brinegar Organ. The Murray-Harris Organ was built in 1901 (two years before the dedication of the church) and has a clean, smooth, romantic 19th-century sound. Not as shimmering or powerful as the Fisk-Nanney Organ, Bates finds the 3,702-pipe instrument ideal for accompanying soloists and choirs. "It has an English cathedral sort of sound," he says of the organ that survived the 1906 earthquake.
Bates knows of few churches in the United States that have as many organs as Stanford's Memorial Church--and even fewer with as many organ tuning systems.
"We're the only church in the world where we have four different tuning systems that can be heard in the same building," he says.
Organs operate under different tuning systems. With the Fisk-Nanney organ capable of playing two systems, and the Murray-Harris and Potter-Brinegar organs capable of playing one each, the arrival of the new organ enables a listener to hear four different historical tuning systems in the same building.
"It's so rare to have three world-class organs in the same building," he says. "Organists come from all over the world to play them."
Dedication of the Katharine Potter-Brinegar Organ
What: A concert by Robert Bates featuring Spanish music from the 17th century and Renaissance music by Dutch, German and French composers
When: 2:30 p.m., Sunday, April 21
Where: Memorial Church, Stanford University
Cost: $7; free for Stanford students
Information: 723-3811
Public recital by David Yearsley
What: Stanford's acting university organist in 1994, Yearsley will perform works by Praetorius, Hassler, Handel, Scarlatti and J.S. Bach.
When: 8:15 p.m., Saturday, April 20
Where: Stanford Memorial Church, Stanford University
Cost: $7; free for Stanford students
Information: 723-3811
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