My mother was a church musician, a conductor, and an organist, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t listening to her play the organ. At sixteen, I had my first church job, and, by graduate school, became composer-in-residence at the Church of the Ascension in New York. I kept a church job until I was forty, even as provost of the New England Conservatory, as I just loved the repertoire and activity, and I’ve written a lot of music for the church.
The organ is one of the oldest instruments continuously used in the Western music tradition, much older than the violin. The Greeks invented what we now call the pipe organ. Probably only flutes, harps, and drums have been used as long as that. By the late Middle Ages, the mechanical action organ was the most complex thing made by humans; now it’s the railgun, a space weapon. It’s an enormously complicated mechanical thing, the pipe organ.
Now, most organs, including the organ at Aspen Chapel, are electro-pneumatic. The electronics make it simpler in effect, but the organs of the Baroque and Renaissance periods were mechanical. You would have to have a constant source of wind at a constant pressure—not so easy to achieve mechanically! A modern version of that kind of organ—Wellesley College has a really beautiful one—needs two people to stand on the bellows in order to play it. One person at a time steps onto the bellows and gravity pulls the person down, which forces air into the pipes. That’s one complication.
The other is that every single sound that the organ makes, every pitch, is a different pipe. A piano keyboard has eighty-eight keys; a typical organ keyboard has sixty-one, so that’s sixty-one pipes for each rank. An organ will have up to four hundred sets of pipes, each producing a different kind of sound. Some are made of wood, some are tin, or steel, or aluminum; they’re different shapes, and the air entering the pipe can be done in different ways to make different kinds of sound. When you touch a key on the organ, the force of your touch has to be transmitted through a series of levers to the pipe, wherever the pipe is, and it has to open an air valve that allows air to flow into the pipe to make the sound. You hit a piano key, and a hammer flies up and strikes the string right above it. In an organ that may have thirty thousand different pipes, however, a separate mechanical set of levers has to attach to the key to every single one of those pipes, and has to act almost instantaneously. Now, imagine designing that action in 1400!
Unlike a piano, there might be two to seven different keyboards in an array, along with pedals for your feet and knobs to pull because you have at least a hundred different ranks of pipes and you want different combinations of them to be sounding throughout the composition. Now, all of that can be done electronically by hitting a button. On the organ at the Aspen Chapel, when you depress a key, you’re creating an electronic impulse, which is being sent to the pipe, and so it’s mechanically much easier.
The player of the pipe organ cannot alter the sound. If you’re playing the violin or the flute, or if you’re singing, you have infinite control over the loudness, over the intensity and color of the sound. On the organ, every single pipe is going to sound the same every time you play it. The player must combine them and choose from the hundred different colors, deciding which layers they will use at each moment, and in which combination, which takes tremendous imagination.
In virtually every case, a pipe organ is designed for the space—a church, a concert hall, or, in the silent film era, for a theater. Every room has a different acoustic property of reverberation, and that will affect how the organ sounds.
It is this unique combination of the instrument and the architecture that produces the theatricality of these spaces—spirituality as theater. To set one particular scene, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, visited the US in 1981, the first time the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church had ever been here. All of the Roman Catholic cardinals in the US agreed to come—all of them—as well as leaders in Reform and Orthodox Judaism and the Eastern Orthodox Church, imams, the Dalai Lama, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and, of course, heads of Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches. We planned a procession so the leaders could all come to their seats at the altar, but they entered from different areas of the church. We used a Lutheran hymn, “Lasst uns erfreuen,” or “Let Us Rejoice,” whose text is Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Sun: “All creatures of our God and King.” It’s about all of nature rejoicing, which lends itself to trumpets so well, so we had little groups of live trumpet players accompany each set of dignitaries to their seats during this fanfare.
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is one of the largest church buildings in the world, and the great western doors are only opened on Easter Sunday, and only in the morning. So after everyone had been brought in with all of these trumpets, there’s a rank of pipes called Trompette en Chamade. Only the largest organs have them. The pipes are mounted horizontally, sticking out into the room, which gives a much, much brighter sound. Famously, the Trompette en Chamade of the organ at St. John the Divine was considered way too loud. It’s never used, so almost none of us had ever heard it. We had the great western doors open at the moment of sunset. Robert Runcie is a very imposing figure with his miter, his headdress, on, and with the setting sun right behind him, we unleashed the attack trumpets with a deafening sound. It was a pretty great coup de théâtre.
A very significant organist of our time was Olivier Messiaen at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris. Being a church musician as well, he wrote a lot for the organ. We did something fun with ACES (Aspen Center for Environmental Studies) last year: Messiaen was also famously a birder, and he went all over the world listening to birdsong and then incorporated it into his music. Aspen Music Festival invited him multiple summers, beginning in 1959, and he would head our composition program. One of his greatest works is called “Catalogue d’oiseaux” [Catalog of Birds]. We told him that he should go to Moab [Utah], a few hours’ drive away, to hear the birds in the mountains there, which are completely different from the ones in Aspen. He made a work called “Des canyons aux étoiles” [From the Canyons to the Stars] between 1972 and 1974. It’s a portrait of his morning in the canyons, listening to birds, and his evening, when he was back in Aspen and looking at the stars over the mountains.
Then, in 2025, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard set up a piano outside and played Messiaen’s bird music at four different times of the day, incorporating what Messiaen heard in Aspen, accompanied by the actual birds. One of the performances was timed for daybreak, so that you were hearing the music as the first birds were singing. The last one was at sunset, with the last birds in the sky. It was one of the most poetic concert presentations I think we’ve ever done.
The pipe organ remains significant today. It has a very particular acoustic sound, and there’s just nothing like it. The sound is the same even if, now, the air is being controlled by an electric bellows fan, and the impulse to open the valve is being transmitted electronically from the keyboard—the essence of how the sound is produced remains as it was a thousand years ago. In the late twentieth century, organ use faded with the invention of the completely electronic organ, in which there are no pipes, just the imitation of the sound of them. But suddenly, now, all the major new concert halls being built around the world are incorporating pipe organs again because the sound of it is just so superior to the electronic version.
Kali Malone’s upcoming organ composition for AIR at the Aspen Chapel is so interesting because you have a very vital new voice in composition who is also interested in these ancient possibilities of one of the oldest instruments in the tradition. She is finding a completely new voice for that instrument that is expressive of what she wants to create as an artist. So, to me, that’s proof that the organ is in good shape, because each generation makes of it what their generation needs.
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Kali Malone’s Concentric Circles of The Choirs of Angel will premiere at the Aspen Chapel on July 30, 2026, as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Learn more about the performance here.
