AGOS =

AMERICAN GUILD OF ORGANISTS AND SIMULACRISTS

This cover is but the confirmation of what has long been patent reality. Was it a matter of time? There is no shortage of those who have no difficulty in believing that a bundle of wires, tuned buzzers, batteries of speakers, cleverly digitalised 'sound samples', in short, an impressive synthesiser all gussied up in impressive organ-like cabinetry is an organ. Where is the organ? It isn't there. The sound electronically or digitally produced through speakers cannot, thanks to the laws of physics, sound 'just like' sound produced by wind breathing through pipes. The former is, at best, equivalent to an awfully good recording whilst the latter is the real instrument that the intellectually honest person knows it to be. One is an organ, the other is a synthesiser, an organ simulacrum. Sorry, but what comes through speakers cannot sound like what comes through pipes. It isn't physically possible. It does not an organ make.

Those who own these very clever imitations become so accustomed to what they are hearing that, to them, it really does sound 'just like' a Cavaille-Coll, or, at the flip of a switch, a Clicqout! What they are hearing sounds, in their minds, just like what they do not hear. And, for a somewhat smaller fortune than an organ would cost, they get what they imagine to be eighty ranks of 'organ' to play with. They get to sit at this oh-so- impressive console and put it out of their minds that all they are 'playing' is tuned buzzers sounding through speakers.

Still, there are many who will insist that the bastard digital organ, a frankenstein if there ever were one, can lay claim to the same legitimacy as the organ itself. And yet, its conception, continued development, its marketing, and purpose is based on deception, the suggestion that it is or sounds like what it isn't.

Is this any wonder? We live in an age of intellectual dis-honesty which permeates large facets of our lives. It is manifest in the denial of humanity and personhood to the yet-to-be-born, moral ambiguity and ambivalence in sexual mores, fakery of all sorts that has edged real and admirable human craftsmanship into near extinction. We love lies. We live with them daily. We are bedazzled by 'technology', and anything that can claim its parentage is guaranteed widespread adulation, regardless of its objective intellectual, moral, and cultural worth.

Sorry! 'Digital organs', as they so impertinently and presumptuously call them, are no organs at all. They are fakes, synthesisers, simulacra. The real technological marvel is an organ - and musicians with integrity know it.

The AGO demonstrated long ago that it has no intellectual spine. The honourable CharlesW asks 'where does AGO stand?' The answer is 'it doesn't!' This is a coup, a triumph, of the highest order for the organ simulacrum industry, masters of deception - and the AGO has swallowed it. This is not unlike treating an unprincipled poseur to a state banquet and Buckingham palace or the White House.

Interesting that you should bring up architectural fakery. You are right - it has a very long pedigree. One grimaces especially at those architects who, having little real understanding of the physics behind older styles, classical, gothic, or whatever, put up their facades which would come crumbling to the ground were they not actually supported by hidden steel structures. Too, they misuse elements of those styles, pasting them here and there to give the impression that something is what it isn't. I've even seen on several of the newer buildings at Rice University architraves which come to rest on the outer edges of cornices! Ralph Adams Cramm, who built the original Rice buildings a hundred years ago, would never have done something so architecturally illiterate.

Still, I'm not accepting that fakery here justifies fakery there. We are all called to intellectual honesty. I, for one, find it extremely repellent. Too, faux marble may be considered a work of art. While it is intended to give an impression, it is not intended to fool anyone into thinking that it is real. It's pretty obvious that it isn't. Not so, the organ simulacrum, whose entire raison d'etre is deception.

Ergo, is a painting simulacra?

What if it's done by an elephant, or a computer, or a hack painter?

A moment of confused identity...but, lifting my self-imposed ban on being in discussions where the word, SIMULCRA, appears as I have made my living with them and pipe organs both...and respect both equally.

The AGO demonstrated long ago that it has no intellectual spine.

You didn't know it was full of...us organists?

I do not mean at all to disparage my friend, Noel. His contributions to church music and education are well known and worthy of praise. Still, I can't quite accept that making one's living from a given pursuit necessarily legitimises that pursuit or its products. Being a salesman or an employee in other facets of such an industry requires certain gifts of 'selling stuff' which may be totally unrelated to that 'stuff's' worth or integrity. Indeed, a professional salesman may work this week for company A, and find himself lauding company B's products a month from now.

An extreme example of this axiom is the well-known fact that the tobacco industry is subsidised and protected in this country, in spite of the evils attendant upon the use of its products, because poor Virginia farmers (not to mention slick businessmen and -women in their posh quarters) rely on it to 'make a living'. It never occurs to anyone that they should very well find another means of support for their poor little unprincipled selves.

A simulacrum is a thing that is an imitation of and substitutes for something else. It is simply calling a thing what it is. This ought not be offensive to an intellectually honest person - unless he or she has a vested interest which is threatened by candid reality. Sorry! These digital synthesisers simply are not organs. Their relationship to an organ is that of a simulacrum. Managing to get them on the front cover of The American Organist doesn't alter that bald reality.

The AGO's blessing of the organ simulacrum industry is music to their ears, and they will no doubt chortle with unblirdled glee all the way to the bank with its fruits. Meanwhile, this does nothing at all for organs.

This is nothing more than a matter of intellectual and moral honesty.

What we need in this country is a real guild of real organists and real church musicians.

What we need in this country is a real guild of real organists and real church musicians.

We don't exist in the numbers we once did. That limits our influence.

Meanwhile, this does nothing at all for organs.

As a practical matter, I have played whatever they had wherever I worked. It is difficult to get anyone to think long term. When you tell a pastor that a pipe organ can be repaired in 100 years and used for another 100, they don't think that far ahead. The building may be closed or abandoned by then. The priest's tenure may not extend beyond the next 5 years. Passing problems along to a successor is the easy way out. I have heard some of them say issues are something the next pastor can deal with. Given all this, buying the digital is easier - I don't think it is really cheaper - than making the commitment it takes to buy a good pipe instrument. We live in the throwaway society and it affects everything, including organs.

what a tired old subject.

What we need in this country is a real guild of real organists and real church musicians.

Start with the 'musicians' part and the organists will follow.

...refers to them as "toasters."

I've heard that before.
It's cute, but not, I think, as potent and unarguable as 'simulacrum'.
This much is sure: if these pernicious folk and their fake organs succeeded in making 'toast' of the organ building craft, they'd shed nary a tear as their bank accounts swelled.
A pox upon their house.

Who really wants another NPM?

Heaven forbid!!!
I did say real organists and real church musicians.

Quote form the article:
"Someone asked "where are the pipes"
Answer: They are in France.
wow

Couldn't agree more, Salieri. We need more pastoral stability in order to truly build anything worthwhile that won't just be swept away due to the whim of the next boss.

I said the exact same thing to...

And he said?
___________________________

And, Salieri is quite right -
except that I would not want it to be thought that the only derelicts in the nuclear family are 'revolving fathers and baby daddies'. There is no shortage of derelict mothers. And, the last I heard, the sole voice in the murder of unborn children is the mother's - whether the father likes it or not.

True, Jackson: but we don't have women priests... Though, I suppose a comparison could be made between the crisis of motherhood in the nuclear family and the "good sisters" abandoning the formation of children in Catholic Schools and Parochial Catechetical Programs.

Well, in that case, TAO should have found something else to put on the cover!
This is an undoubted coup for the organ simulacrum industry - like inviting an unworthy tyrant to a state banquet at Buckingham palace and the White House (which has happened in the case of a certain oriental communist in the not-too-distant past).
SHAME! PHILISTINES!

I am a long-time AGO member. Over the years, I have watched them cave on nearly every moral or social issue along with their left-leaning, liberal Protestant members. AGO now supports all the degeneracy and decadence one would find in any ECUSA church. My local fellow members were quite shocked when I told them there was a snowball's chance in hell my parish would support some items in their code of ethics that we appropriately label as sin.

No, AGO is not Catholic and never was. ECUSA, yep they, for the most part, have drunk the Kool-Aid the liberal left promotes. There are other Episcopal bodies outside ECUSA that adhere more closely to traditional Christian practices. We have some of them in my area and I give them high marks - no pun intended - for holding to their beliefs.

I cannot but affirm Charles' estimation of the AGO. It isn't what it started out as. It isn't and for many years hasn't been just a guild of serious organists. It long ago opened its membership to the most tenuous of organ amateurs and afficianados. It even considers theatre organ buffs to be worthy of membership! Nowadays, it even prevaricates on what an organ is, has long ago accepted advertisements from those who are the nemesis of organbuilding - why, it even seriously debates whether their synthetic instruments are organs at all. It has no scholarly integrity and its journal, TAO, is most likely the most boring and worthless (most of the time) journal published by any learned society on this earth. Once in a while there may be an article of serious or scholarly interest - most of the time not. And now, philistines that we are, we even sell our cover to the highest bidder - even to organ builders' existential nemesis.

It isn't likely that I'll renew my membership next year.

The American Guild of Organists is no longer what it says it is.
An organ is an organ.
No pipes speaking by wind = no organ.
It's that simple.

Yellow square. Head for the shelters. ;-)

>> No pipes speaking by wind = no organ. It's that simple.

OK (raising flame shield) ..... so no one is to ever have a digital camera, or take pictures on their phones, because no film to be developed = no photographs.

Maybe it is that No pipes speaking by wind = no *pipe* organ. No argument there.

As I have indirectly noted before, very few of us actually buy the church instruments we play. Whether pipe or digital, it is what it is. We play it if we want to work there. So yes, I prefer the pipe organ and am lucky enough to have one. Other organists may not be so fortunate, but do the best job they can with what they have.