Word: organ
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Casting about for something new with which to attack mouse sarcoma 180. Dr. Richard Lewisohn of New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital decided to try spleen extract. The functions of the spleen, an organ in the upper left abdomen, are not wholly understood but one of them is to disintegrate red blood corpuscles and set free their hemoglobin. It has been observed that when bits of cancer are transported by the bloodstream to colonize elsewhere in the body, the spleen is seldom affected. Spleen extract had been tried against cancer before, without success. Dr. Lewisohn decided that...
Greatest composer of organ music who ever lived was portly, quick-fingered 18th-Century Johann Sebastian Bach. His 30-odd organ fugues and numerous choral preludes and sonatas are still regarded as the organist's Bible. But if Bach walked into a present-day church while his music was being played, he would hardly recognize...
Since Bach's time the organ has grown out of all knowledge. Modern organs, used in cinema palaces as well as in churches, can reproduce the sound of an entire orchestra, can imitate anything from a train whistle to cathedral chimes. By pulling and pushing little buttons, modern organists can produce tremulous vox humana, whooshing swell-effects, can make their gigantic instruments do everything but prance up & down the aisles. Some organists love to put a modern organ through its tricks; others sigh for the good old days when an organ was just an organ, point nostalgically...
Black-haired Organist E. Power Biggs, of Harvard's Germanic Museum, does not have to sigh for the good old days. In the museum's peaceful, arched Romanesque Hall is an organ, the only one of its kind in the U. S., built to the precise specifications of Bach's period.* Last week Organist Biggs, with his facsimile organ, started the second half of a cycle of concerts which will include all of Bach's organ works, played exactly as they might have sounded to Composer Bach himself...
Listeners and critics have acclaimed Biggs's playing on the Bach organ as a revelation. Its pipes, unlike those of the modern organ, are all out in the open, visible to the audience. (Pipes in modern organs are, as a rule, enclosed behind shutters; those visible to the audience are often dummy pipes good only to look at.) The Bach facsimile requires from one-third t01/20th the wind pressure demanded by a modern organ, and has a correspondingly limpid quality of tone. Unlike the modern organ it cannot increase or diminish the volume of tone. The "swell" mechanism...