Why Pipe Organs Sound Scary

This video is brought to you by viewers like you, thanks for keeping it spooky. Samantha Steeleman asked why organ music is so closely associated with horror. When did this happen? Also, when were takata and feugun in D minor first used in a horror scene? So there is the easy solution. The answer to that and then there's the complicated answer, the easy answer is Hollywood, they kept using creepy

organs

for villains throughout Hollywood history, especially Box Tacot and Feugun D minor, and it's a bit stuck, it's just a of those things that originated in Hollywood and always. since the first movie

sound

tracks, it's just been there, although the more complicated answer is, uh, complicated.

Think about it for a minute, there are many cases where you can listen to organ music that is not

scary

, there is boring church organ music and then we. We're all used to hearing an organ during a baseball game, right, he also gets ideas from an elite list, so it's not really the instrument itself that's

scary

and I guess you could argue that it's a specific type of music, as everyone knows. bach's takata and fuguen d minor but not all bach music is scary not even all bach organ music is scary not even all d minor infused takata is scary the truth is the answer to this one is actually more complicated than that

sound

s and you will find out that it is not what you think, believe it or not, the villain of Beauty and the Beast also makes a lot more sense than you might originally think, we will actually come back to this, so first if you want to understand it .

To get to the heart of this then you need to understand the history of the organ, it's basically a piano in rage, you have this keyboard that is connected to a ton of tubes and in each of these tubes there are things, sometimes there is like a reed like a woodwind instrument or harmonica sometimes there is a fipple like you would see on a recorder and yes the technical term for this little hole is fipple and yes it is one of the funniest words in the English language but sometimes there's a fipple in the tube and it basically makes it whistle, so when you press a key, the air or whatever organists like to call it, the wind goes through the tubes and makes a sound or whatever organists like to call it. the organists, makes the

pipe

s speak.

Find out from this video that organists are a really strange breed, keep this in mind, so in order for air or wind to pass through the

pipe

s and make them make a sound or speak, you need something that supplies air pressure, today in Today they connect electric motors to a pump. and that's what supplies the air pressure, but a long time ago, in ancient Greece, the first pipe

organs

had an unpaid intern working with bellows to provide air for the instrument and that's one of the things about Pipe organs are old and crazy, they first appeared in ancient Greece, like in the 3rd century BC.

C., and then you hear stories about that in the year 700 AD. Organs began to spread throughout Europe, for example the first organ for which there is a detailed record was built in Winchester Cathedral in the 10th century. It was a huge machine with 400 pipes that needed two men to play it and 70 men to blow it. and its sound. you could hear it all over the city, but like I said today, they run on electric motors to supply air pressure and that's something you really have to keep in mind here. Pipe organs are extremely powerful instruments, they tend to be these huge contraptions that are literally built into the building they are in, they have entire rooms dedicated just to their function and maintenance.

They are these absolutely crazy monumental instruments that are capable of reaching incredible volumes if you've never been in a room and you hear one of these things play, it's a visceral reaction because it's not just that they're loud, but they can reach incredibly low pitches, more lower than what humans can hear, that's the 128 foot one, sorry, that's the 64 foot one and I have a problem with noise from a wall. there and in fact you can probably see the lid of the box shaking so that was 64, here's 128. Most unmusical but very fun, some of these pipes are several stories high, they have a 64 pipe feet in the Atlantic City Convention Center which is a musical instrument that is four and a half stories high and you have to remember that this beautiful interior is just the control panel of a much larger instrument, the organ itself is more than 150 tons of equipment and everything is located behind the walls in the building, so when you enter the building you don't see the 150 tons of equipment, you only see the grill that the organ speaks through, so I say these organs are powerful, I mean, they're powerful, actually, it's basically a heavy metal. rock concert in a cathedral, can you imagine two guys in the 18th century saying oh yeah, yohan, if you haven't been to saint luger kirsha in the north to hear the new schnitzkart, then you don't even understand the noise and the organ sheet music that could be packaged. nothing in the box for huda yah that's the dumbest joke I've ever made oh my gosh but these organs are not only powerful, they are extraordinarily complicated both in their construction and in what they provide to the performer in terms of harmonic capacity, which is a fancy way of saying that they are very expensive and nerds love them.

Unlike the piano, which has pedals that make people who can't articulate properly sound good, the pedals on an organ work exactly like the keys on a keyboard. That's right, organists are so rare that they not only play with both hands, they also play with their feet. There are entire pieces of music written explicitly just for the petals of the organ, because organists are feet, people do with it what they want and I. You will say that it is incredibly uncomfortable to see one of your friends play one of those pieces under pressure for his recital. I'm not saying I did a bad job, it's like being forced to watch a music video directed by Quentin Tarantino, so you're probably wondering what's up with all the rows of keys or manuals, as the feet call them, people, well , your instinct would be that each key would correspond to a certain pipe on the pipe organ, right, no, of course, no, that would be too easy. these little things called stops along the sides of the console each stop corresponds to a set of tubes called a range that is to say each little button corresponds to a certain set of tubes but instead of pushing the stops you have to pull them by pulling all the stops mean you are activating every pipe on the organ, that's where the saying comes from, you're literally going to go to 100, but remember not all pipes are the same, some have reeds, some have mouthpieces, which I can't get over. word and in the 1920s, with the era of silent films, companies like Wurlitzer began selling organs with all kinds of different instruments attached as if they could function like a piano, could play various drums, the marimba, the xylophone, orchestral bells , bells, wooden blocks, you name it, this thing had If the goal was to basically replace an entire orchestra with a single player, the other thing that's really unique about this instrument is that it has an incredible amount of percussion, from percussion tuned as xylophones, marimbas and glockenspiels to detuned percussion, drums and tambourine sounds. effects you will also notice that these wurlitzer organs have tongue shaped buttons instead of stops, that is because there is no standardization in the organ world, now there are conventions such as having stops for the lowest recorded ranges, they tend to be in the bottom of the console, but because Oregon has been all over Europe for such a long period of time that there is really no warranty and of course this all assumes that we are talking about an English manufacturer building an organ in a country English speaking.

Different bodies in different countries will be organized differently. and labeled in different languages ​​depending on where you are, you have to be some kind of genius of nature to handle everything that happens with an organ, remember that you are not just changing stops and playing three rows of manuals, you are also doing all that With the feet, some organs have a secondary pedal that can help with a vibrato effect. I guess it's crazy, so you have to be some kind of giant octopus to play these instruments. It really takes a special breed, but also. of those organs allow their players to literally do more, let me tell you this story about bach, okay, as with everything in the Western European canon, everything and everyone is surrounded by mystery and intrigue in every story, there is a point in the that jesus just shows up and from the artistic content of Lightning Bolt to these guys, you get the idea that there's a story that, when he was a young musician, Bach went to a church in a place somewhere in Germany that I can't remember now and he was able to take a prewritten melody and improvise eight part harmony, that means he played the melody and from the top of his head with both hands and both feet he was able to sit at an organ and lay down seven other melodies that created a piece of music and so He is a genius.

Blah blah blah, now you understand the story, that's really impressive because, well, practicing for an organist was very difficult back then, remember these organs require teams of people just to make a sound and then when they do, The whole city will be able to hear you practicing. your scales and cry about not being as good as the kids on youtube pianos didn't exist back then, bach was actually alive when the first pianos came out and he commented that the first prototypes just weren't as good and harpsichords just suck, they're difficult to tune and they still lack the pedals that you would really need to have that full organ sound so you could try to practice on a smaller organ but that would still require several people so there really weren't any good substitutes to be able to play that kind of thing. of harmony with their hands and feet, so they really had to do the best with what they had, so the experienced organists seemed to be these hyper-privileged musical geniuses who would be able to just play the console and apparently produce music out of nowhere no one heard them practicing the harpsichord in the back room they just showed up and bam amazing music one person could produce an eight part harmony at their fingertips it was the power of eight human voices loud enough to be heard in an entire room city, it's a pretty crazy thing if you think about it, but on top of all that, on top of everything else about organs, organs are a really religious instrument or at least they have serious Christian connotations in the West.

European history and in the Western European musical canon, so look at it this way, we're not talking about a small portable organ. These little hand-operated organs are basically a harmonica attached to a keyboard and hand pump we're talking about. These massive, expensive, intricate, extraordinarily complicated, powerful instruments that had to be designed by architects. The lack of portability made the organs perfect for churches and cathedrals and all sorts of other religious establishments throughout Europe. Also, churches were really the only ones with the money to be able to sponsor the construction of such enormous projects, but if you know anything about cathedral architecture and the psychology behind it, the organs only amplified the wonder of walking into one of those buildings. religious ones that you enter after working in the fields and everything Suddenly this monstrosity of metal and sound appears that you can hear from miles away and it is playing music from the only power you know, surely only God himself could power something so formidable, it is something quite metallic and as time went on and technology developed and everyone tried to make the design of their organs more flexible and so you could make the prettiest colors and the coolest design blow out the eardrums of everyone sitting in the front row , you know, standard religious stuff, which again meant that if you were the church organist you were kind of this lonely freak of nature who was somehow gifted enough to understand this intimidating machine and could play all the music you could play. it complied with all the old complicated rules of music theory that the church imposed and basically made this wall of an instrument make beautiful music now like we already do.

I talked about a piece of music that everyone knows was written for this instrument, it was box takata and fugue in D minor, there is a little problem with that, although Bach didn't write box takata and fugue in D minor, I really don't want to understand it. because academics aren't really sure about it, but the story involves Bach having lazy students who don't bother checking their homework and this nerd named Mendelssohn, who was the biggest Bach fan you'll ever meet, but he was also kind . He was a tough guy about copying music, yeahIf you were alive today, I'd probably have very strong opinions about magic at the meeting, I was that kind of super puritanical person when it came to copying old music, so instead of being good at my job and explaining why. bach isn't actually the author of box staccato d minor, let's just skip ahead to 19 20-ish, so the year is 1920-ish and silent movies are in, warlords are selling their organs to theaters theater by An organist accompanies movie scores and it's the fucking wild west of trying to figure out who's writing what music.

I don't know anyone who studies music in the silent film era because it's absolutely crazy, so people collect music in these catalogs to play in silent films. movies, I have a whole video about it if you want to know more, but sometimes they literally just copied and pasted classical music from Europe and just renamed the piece, put their own name on it and released it as their own original music and just looking for stuff about trying to find bach pieces in the silent film era i found this a guy, james m dohring, who went to the library of congress and physically looked at all the trade magazines he could find on music for silent films of the era, because i was only looking for bock pieces, not dakota fugue, just bach in sometimes i couldn't understand which bach had written a piece of music like we have johan sebastian bach, that bach that everyone knows, then there was the german british composer Leonard Emil Bach, then there was Carl Bach, who I'm pretty sure was from Bach. second son known colloquially as cpe bach and then there was another poor bastard named christopher bach who lived in milwaukee and this, of course, assuming that the editors were actually putting the correct names on the pieces in the first place, also assuming that they didn't just do it randomly changes the titles of the pieces for no reason, everything is a mess and trying to make sense of it only makes you want to curl up in a hot shower and wipe the spit off of the oreos and, on top of that, you would have these teachers and these professionals of industry present things like "Oh, it's good to practice the organ with the old masters like Bach, but don't play it for movies because it's pretentious and doesn't fit, plus it's too hard for most people to play well anyway, so even if the music appears in a catalog it doesn't mean it actually appeared in movies great, great, wonderful, this is good, everything is fine, everything is fine, so like I said, it's a nightmare trying to get an answer direct and above all.

That you still have to deal with shitty directors, they just don't care at all, some things never change, am I right? Like the first instance of Box Dakota and Fugue in D Minor appearing for a film I found reference to during this time period. it was for a silent movie called hoax or anne boleyn depending on where you are from it's about anne boleyn and king henry viii cutting off her head or whatever the idea is that people were ordered to play the takata and fugue like a lewd post instead of for a prelude they were supposed to play it after the movie and why were they instructed to play this particular piece of music at the end of the movie because it sounded old?

This is a movie about England in the 16th century and they're using a piece. of the music of Germany in the 18th century, they literally didn't care at all, but this is where our story really begins, so it's 1931 and movies now have sound and that means they have soundtracks, yes, synchronized sound that It goes with the image, which means that all those organists are out of work, so it's around this time that you start seeing those wurlitzers being recycled for baseball teams and carnival attractions, but it's 1931 and we have Dr. Jackal and the Mr. Hyde and for the opening credits of this film they chose an orchestral arrangement of takata and fugan D minor, but immediately after the opening credits we see dr. jekyll playing the organ, not only is he playing the organ, but he is playing another bach piece, a chorale called ish roof zudir jerezukrist or i call to you. lord jesus christ besides that, this chorale is originally in f minor, they transposed it in a minor third to d minor to match the takata and fugue that opened the movie in other words, they changed this piece of music it is playing to be in The same key signature as the opening of the movie, that's really important because it makes everything blend well and work together.

It shows that they thought about how these two pieces of music were going to fit on screen if you're watching. This classroom video tries to ignore your teacher having a stroke over the fact that they transposed a Bach piece anyway, so what's interesting about this scene is that the original novel doesn't say anything about Jekyll be a musician and much less an organist, look what they say. What they're doing is using this religious piece of music along with the instrument you're used to seeing in a church to function as a shorthand for what kind of character this guy is.

Remember the organs are powerful, they are complicated and have strong religious connotations this is a very intelligent religious individual, privileged, powerful, probably rich, that is all the information we need, we have a great idea of ​​who this guy is and the movie is just beginning In an interesting twist in this movie, you even get to see Dr. jekyll prays and tries to atone for his sins at one point just to emphasize the religious aspect see dr jekyll and mr hyde was one of the few films that existed in what was called pre-code hollywood the five years between 1929 and 1934 where the films There were sounds, but hollywood hadn't established the haze code or the film production code on censorship, what that meant was that these movies were almost taboo in terms of how scary they could be, especially a movie like Dr.

Jacqueline Mr. Hyde, who played with Freudian concepts that the public of the time would have recognized and, at the same time, had assault performances with the takata function and fugue in D minor as the opening theme of this film. It was probably the genesis of the takada and the fugue being this terrifying piece of music, for example, only three. Years later, the 1934 film, The Black Cat, would use the dakota and D minor fugan to directly convey the horror of our villain, but this time we hear it in its original instrumentation, it is as direct as possible without looking directly at the camera. and saying I'm the villain, I'm the leader of the satanic cult, you can tell by my vegeta esque widow's peak, but we also get a clever twist, not only do we hear the takata and the fugue in D minor played on an organ, we also get some other organ music during this satanic ritual instead of listening to the organ to represent pure religious music, we are listening to it in a celebration of a satanic cult, all the religious connotations have been corrupted, this powerful and complex instrument has been manipulated to serve to the satanic forces of evil, but what kind of person would do such a thing, who would have the knowledge of such a complicated instrument with the capacity and resources to house and maintain such powerful equipment and yet be so warped as to alter it to fit your own needs? personal needs and from here box takata and fugan d minor basically become the halloween theme song and anything remotely spooky is the scary music max whatever your name is what are my things doing here?

I'm talking to you, my clothes and my things are in the room, naturally, I brought them myself, so light the duke and with what you suppose light the duke, what a master a lantern, but here's the thing, look, There is much more to the organ than just this piece of music. It's still a creepy element, even if we're not listening to this specific piece of Bach music, there's something about the organ that makes it creepy, there's actually kind of a false background to this puzzle here if you really want to know what's going on. If you really want to know what makes an organ scary then you have to watch the 1962 movie Carnival of Souls, in this movie Mary Henry is traveling in a car with her friends when they are pushed off a road and thrown into a river, While the accident seems substantial, she comes out unscathed, spoilers, she's dead and, although it's not very clear, this is like an afterlife purgatory situation, but throughout the film she works as an organist at the local church and , as the film progresses, he finds that he is less able to keep up with the specific music he is expected to perform in church and slowly his organ warps and mutates into this atonal, dissonant performance that bothers the profane sacrilege minister. what are you playing in this church?

Don't you have respect? I feel no reverence and I feel sorry for you and your soullessness as she loses her connection to the world of the living, struggles to play the religious music of the church and begins to stray into something other than for people who are used to only hear. the organ in a religious setting ends up feeling eerie when it loses its soul, it can't play religious music on the organ and here we are basically given all the clues as to what makes an organ scary, it's not the organ per se, but what? who touches it? someone who comes from such a privileged background that they can house and maintain the organ and who probably through their upbringing also understands how to play it, whether through church or an upper class upbringing who is now using the instrument for their own selfish purposes, think about it if you look at this from the perspective of someone from medieval Europe, this guy has managed to manifest the power of God at his fingertips from the comfort of his own home, there is a selfish, corrupt and godless tone in his way of acting. organ and looking at it from that context is almost supernaturally terrifying, usually organists simply by the nature of the instrument end up spending a lot of time alone to work out the complexities necessary to not sound horrible in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Several times a week you take the same type of person but give them a nefarious motivation and suddenly you have this crazy, secret genius plotting in the background waiting for the perfect moment. At least this is someone who probably comes from a religion. background who has fallen from grace, i.e. the story of satan, all the power of a god without any of the good intentions, so, yes, the takata, the fugue and the D minor put that organ sound in the foreground in our minds when it comes to something spooky. Really, anything on the organ that's even remotely minor at this point evokes the same kind of fear you might have as an opera fan, for example, sure in every adaptation you'll end up watching him play the organ, but even in the Android version Weber I can hear how he uses the organ to communicate that the ghost is a dark and intriguing character, as when he is not playing it, the organ is simply sitting at the bottom of his underground sewer lair.

His modus operandi is that he's been hatching this plan since Christine was a kid, I guess he was passing the time playing Smash or something and that's what we call a gamer prank or yeah, you can also look at the villain from Beauty and the Beast, he's this evil loner who's plotting to keep everyone cursed because he likes the power the curse gives him he's plotting and he's evil and he's an organ and he has the voice of tim curry and I love him he's great davey jones and pirates from the caribbean again it's this ungodly, corrupt soul who is plotting revenge everyone is a pawn in his plans and davey jones playing the organ was probably a reference to captain nemo in 20 thousand leagues under the sea who plays the takata and fugan d minor in an organ in a submarine like one where does he get the money to finance that and two, what kind of education would you have to have to think so?

My submarine absolutely has to have an organ. He is a mysterious character who keeps to himself. He is very intelligent. He clearly comes from money and no one really knows what he has. planned is exactly the same story for the penguin in batman returns we understand it when we see his birth in an upper class family and it is the same for sweeney todd a mysterious man with a gift who seeks revenge and opens himself with an organ it is even the same for gannon in the legend of zelda, what makes organs so scary is that it takes someone with intense planning and preparation to play them properly, just making them make a sound takes an enormous amount of work and resources, whoever does it Toque has the money and power to launch it, they are loud and powerful and whoever can control it has the confidence and understanding to commit to transmitting that musical idea over a very, very far distance and they do it in complete isolation, they don't need an orchestra. they don't need help they don't need anyone an eccentric genius broken and abandoned in complete isolation to plot and plan a historically religious instrument that hasbeen corrupted by a broken mind something that may be powerful and serene that has become godless who could do that?

What's scary about organ music is not the organ, but who plays it. If you can hear the organ, it's because someone wants you to and everything is going exactly as planned. Happy Halloween, thanks for watching. I would like to thank my sponsors. for making these videos possible with a very special thanks to abe wintersheit alec kulkowski alex clinker always classy ariela giglam captain casey charlie holly christian Clara tan darren almgren edith with the hands of the man at least in thomas constantine eyeball boy for the horde google it gregory Holdenness hayden elza hayden jondro heptonian hermes quaraz I want you to tell me if my fear is justified that no one will pay attention to me if I'm honest about my ice cream addiction it was too early but the ice cream guy is valid jason kim joe engel john egbert jordan adams joseph spiros josh bachday joshua park julian dubois justin harley karen rosenell keltier looney majors ladwina elizabeth iv el cordon gwen quijinggu mia dorothy michael hubbard micro wisdom iron jauntitaron nicole Nicholas cohen Praylock progressive app store rasputin Russia's largest heat machine rafael martinez raven horn rico marzullo rick osborne ryan vick sideway tastic mr bend sky pilot taliver heath tara femira hour of power transpanic who am I wisdom manari you are loved you are valid you deserve to live you are not the exception you will call me the pumpkin queen and a small symbol of I think it's a honeycomb.

I'm not sure but thank you very much. I appreciate it.adam jensen andrew luke anna bearch anthony de donato bailey bogle ben liebschwager daniel colquitt donovan hodges emmett hussman ethan rooney isabo bisa fife fofisa mimei momiza isa jacob solis kim coletto kylo the husky matt noah gray and rxdude aka terence b um I would like it too Thanks to Samantha Stillman for her great question about organs. Diving into these little hallways of music history is always a lot of fun. I love doing it, especially when it's seasonal like Halloween. If you like what you saw here, be sure to subscribe and check out my other one. videos follow me on Twitter Twitch to answer music questions live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on Patreon but that's all I have for now, thanks for watching.