Vintage Organs
The Otherworldly Sounds of the Clavioline, From Musical Saw to Wailing Cat
By Ben Marks — The insides of our heads are a tangle of hooks. They get this way when a pattern in a piece of music sends a hook down our ear canal and into our temporal lobe, where it may remain lodged for anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours. Having a song "stuck in one’s head," as this condition is called, is generally not painful, although tunes like “It’s a Small World” and “Call Me Maybe” have been shown to be harmful to one’s mental health. "John Lennon’s co-composer may have been an...
Pulling Out All the Stops to Save a 40-Ton, 100-Year-Old World's Fair Pipe Organ
By Ben Marks — Deep beneath San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, in a windowless bunker called Brooks Hall, a 40-ton pipe organ gathers dust. Known variously as the Exposition Organ and Opus 500, the century-old instrument was a mechanical and musical wonder when it was unveiled in 1915, the seventh-largest organ in the world. "The city of San Francisco, this pretentious fishing village, has never respected its own heritage or history." Back then, thousands of people a day attending the Panama-Pacific...