The MIDI-fied Large Hot Pipe Organ

Ant writes: The Large Hot Pipe Organ is the world's only MIDI controlled, propane-powered explosion organ. The LHPO's pyro-acoustic explodo-rhythmations will throbbatize your earholes and dance-ify your booty and make you realize what 'Industrial Music' REALLY means!" I don't know about dance-ifying my booty, but I would love to play with this thing for a few days.

Comments

Re:Bach must be rolling over in his grave

[Kaufmann]

Yeah, he was actually a baroque composer, actually one of the first.

Um, no. Although Bach's music bears much more resemblance to what's usually thought of as "Baroque art" than his predecessors' (one might point to Nietzsche's thesis regarding the perpetual delay between music and other art forms), he was certainly not one of the first composers of the period. The first important Baroque composer preceded Bach by more than an entire century, in fact: Claudio Monteverde lived from 1567 to 1643. And, as opposed to the Protestant polyphony of Bach's work, Monteverde composed nothing but vocal music, and took homophony to its limits, both in strongly Catholic sacred music and in profane pieces.

even if now his pieces seem somewhat simplistic in their patterns

There's nothing simplistic in the Art of the Fugue. Just listen to the Ricercare (or better yet, play it yourself; the full extent of its grandeur can't be comprehended if not by reading the piece. It's abstract music, like that of Beethoven's last works.)

But back then, this was the new thing. It was rebel territory. "Wow! Tonality!"

You have your history backwards. The tonal system was established in the late sixteenth century; all production since then (and, indeed, until Schoenberg methodised atonality with dodecaphony) was tonal. (What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists, although even Wendy Carlos has re-recorded the classic Switched-On Bach in uneven temperament - and what later came to be called the Bach-Rameau tonal system.)

When I mentioned classical music, I was including baroque composers in that category as well, even if they're a bit too early. For the purposes of this article, the same thing applies to Bach as it does to all other composers for the organ. Whatever.

My point was that neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven nor Mahler thought of their music as "classical" at the time; it was simply contemporary music. The distinction between the "popular" or "contemporary" and the "classical" only came into being recently, with the rise of much simpler and shorter forms: jazz, blues, rock, whatnot, which differ significantly from the much more complex "classical music". (And although the relative number of musicians proficient in this style has never really suffered from a significant drop, it evidently hasn't been able to accompany the growth of the populational explosion of the 20th century; therefore, most music done today is the much "trendier" "popular music".)

Re:Bach must be rolling over in his grave

[Kaufmann]

If you're interested in learning more about the topic, a good place to start are the Classical Music Pages, light reading with the "layman" in mind. You can even try your hand at composition: here is a rather complete list of introductory sites on the topic.

Trimpin's fire organ

[goingware]

It happens that just Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon the sound artist Trimpin demonstrated a fire organ in St. John's Newfoundland as part of Sound Symposium 2000.

I was quite fascinated by it. It had a really mysterious, ethereal sound.

Foreplay/Long Time

[wowbagger]

I want to hear Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time", or "Get Organ-ized" on this...

Wonder if Mr. Sholtz reads /. ....

Re:Philistine!

[antdude]

The big booms frighten me :). My subwoofer was going nuts!

Anti-armor musical instruments?

[The Vekster]

... also useful for small short-range artillery strikes! Simply insert shells into pipes and play!

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Even worse...

[MostlyHarmless]

The opera Mephistopheles (sp?), by I-forget-whom. In the prologue, the people say their lines, the devil does his thing, the angels say stupid stuff like "we are the angels that flit about that flit about that flit about we are the angels that..." ad nauseum, to throw some latin into this already academic mix. Everyone goes into a big medley, and you kind of forget about the devil who is absent from this part... until he tears onstage screaming "FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTT TTTTT!!!!!" That part right there has the organ already going full blast with the theme phrase... imagine that with an explosive organ!

Yes, music is full of pieces that could be imporved dramatically merely by the addition of a few explosives.

Funny, that seems to apply to most of life too :-)

Re:Big Bass Boom

[Shoeboy]

Credible sources?
ZikZak has INCREDIBLE sources. He gets his info is direct from the mouth of God. He's wrong about the American Civil War though, the war fought between Lincoln and the Confederate States was the Spanish Civil War.
It's an easy mistake. God was up late last night drinking warm Pabst.
--Shoeboy

Re:Best piece of classical music

[Kaufmann]

Oooooh. Good pick - it's my favourite from The Planets, which is admittedly uneven - but I think the following are also contenders:

• Bruckner's Symphony no. 5. Almost Baroque in pomp; an architectural masterpiece.
  
• Berlioz's Requiem. The work because of which he became known for writing for 500 performers.
  
• Mahler's Symphony no. 8. Written for an orchestra of 150 performers, two choirs and organ. Mahler was the ultimate musical megalomaniac. Fits perfectly.
  

Re:Big Bass Boom

[carlos_benj]

This has nothing to do with those nutty "gun-lovin americans"

I like those guys better than those gutty "nun-lovin americans"!

Every year the Wichita (Kansas) Symphony does an outdoor concert at the conclusion of the 'River Festival' that includes the 1812 Overture. A battery of cannons is supplied by a Fort Riley artillery crew. Very impressive.

Re:BTW, here's proof !

[Amphigory]

Bullshit. That was Jefferson.

--

Crazy MIDI Man

[Jim Tyre]

One truly shudders when one thinks what the Crazy MIDI Man could do with this puppy. ;-)

Apparently, he's still looking to share his free falling sky-diving life with just the right woman.

Off topic or otherwise, this is a must-see site.

Big Bass Boom

[thogard]

Is this thing related to the real cannons needed to do the 1812th correctly?

Re:Big Bass Boom

[CocoLapin]

IIRC, Tchaikovsky wrote the piece in honor of the Spanish-American war. or should that be War with a capital W?

Well, you don't recall correctly. Actually Tchaikovsky composed it on a patriotic mood. He found inspiration in the defeat of Napoleon's army during the invasion of Russia. The russian campain happened in 1812 hence the name of the overture. This is also because of Tchaikovsky's source of inspiration that you can hear the russian's national anthem in the 1812 overture. This has nothing to do with those nutty "gun-lovin americans" :-)

Re:Big Bass Boom

[Shoeboy]

IIRC, Tchaikovsky wrote the piece in honor of the Spanish-American war
YDRC. The Spanish-American war was not fought in 1812, it was fought in 1764 between the Brits and American colonists on one side and the French and their Native American allies on the other.
The war fought in 1812 was the American Civil War which was fough to stop the fiendish expansionism of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm. This is not to be confused with "The war of 1812" which was fought in the 1950's against the North Koreans and Chinese.
Read some fucking history.
--Shoeboy

Re:Big Bass Boom

[Tiro]

They've got the cannon-symphony 1812 Overture duet going here in San Antonio too, every New Year's at Ft. Sam Houston.

Heh, I'd bet all the good forts do it

Re:Did anyone try the mp3s?

[antdude]

I downloaded the MP3s since I am on a 26400 modem connection :). Damn, my Klipsch Promedia speakers were overworked [grin].

pictures

[purefizz]

Okay, those pictures are almost surreal! I feel get this Fritz Lang Metropolis "people-eating machine" look-and-feel. That just looks scary!

Seeing as it's explosive, does this thing give of a massive shockwave, or is the energy many directed vertically?
Oracle announces $199 Linux Net-Boxes!

Alas, no mp3's nor real-audio :-(

[BlueUnderwear]

It would be fun to compare it to the other organ...

Did anyone try the mp3s?

[antdude]

Sheesh, too much bass :). Although the music wasn't interesting or a keeper for me.

For the Literate of Slashdot....

[fudboy]

I don't know about you guys, but I am instantly reminded of Faust (Goethe) and the Walpurgisnacht Festival, towards the climax in the second book. This is truly one demonic instrument! For those of you with more contemporary (geeky) literary leanings, this is the same festival as takes place towards the end of the Illuminatus trilogy, dressed up as a sort of Euro-Woodstock.

:)Fudboy

I guess I'm just a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta...

History of the "Flame Organ"

[Anonymous Coward]

About 15 years ago, I attended a very weird lecture sponsored by the "Visual Music Alliance" in Los Angeles. The presenter was a very eccentric UCLA professor who studied the history of "visual music." He traced the history back as far as the ancient Greeks, who had concerts accompanied by a "light organ" which had little candles behind colored pieces of glass with a shutter, to project colors on a screen. But the one thing of this lecture that most impressed me was his tales about the Flame Organ. Apparently, back in the 19th century, in the heyday of pipe organs, there were quite a few flame organs. These were usually made with transparent glass tubes, and flammable gasses would be fed into the tubes, ignited by a sparking electrode under the organist's control. Different gasses that burned in different colors would be used in different tubes, the effect was as much visual as musical, and the colors were said to be quite vivid. He says that Wagner was particularly enamored by the flame organ, and there is still one remaining vintage flame organ, Wagner's personal machine, in the Wagner museum (wherever the hell that is). Considering the long history of this device, I'm not impressed with the new "hot pipe organ." Stuff like this has been done before, and better, by groups like Survival Research Labs. Its just another huge emitter of greenhouse gasses.

Another fire organ

[danakil]

A french artist has a site describing his own fire organ, you'll find some impressive pics there. He has several instruments (including drums) working this way. The site is :

http://perso.club-internet.fr/orguafeu (there's an english version)

And you'll find there a picture of the 1st fire organ, created in the 18th century !

Best piece of classical music

[Weryk]

What would be the best piece of classical music to play on this thing? I'm voting for Mars - The Bringer of War by Holst...

Re:geez...

[carlos_benj]

Ummm. Hate to mention this, but your Wrongco Hedge-O-Matic at 4 feet thick wouldn't hold a candle to Weryk's 4 meter thick subwoofer. Unless a metre is smaller than a meter.

Hunk of burning love.

[fjordboy]

This would certainly change my church service.

Bach must be rolling over in his grave

[MostlyHarmless]

Actually, Bach would have loved it... P.D.Q. Bach, that is. :-)

What they really should do is put a couple of famous pieces up there, like the Tocatta and Fugue... the famous one from Phantom of the Opera. If they had that sort of thing in the Rennaisance(sp?), it would have been enough to make composers drop classical music altogether.

Re:Bach must be rolling over in his grave

[carlos_benj]

Thanks! I never expected this conversation under this topic. How refreshing (even if you do come across like a 'pompous git'). I enjoy "classical" music but must confess an abyssmal lack of knowledge about it. Although I have always thought that "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it."

My favorites are Bach, Beethoven and Copeland, the three B's of the..... Oh, no, wait.....

Re:Bach must be rolling over in his grave

[CausticPuppy]

What Bach did create was equal temperament - admittedly a great innovation, at least for instrumentists

Actually Bach's tuning system was based on Andreas Werckmeister's, who came up with a mathematical well-tempered (although not true even-tempered) scale in the year that Bach was born.
Bach didn't write for an even-tempered tonal system.
Bach's tonal system was designed to keep the 3rds in 5ths in near perfect intonation in the tonic and closely related keys. Even temperament means every key is equally out of tune-- and the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at.
Today we've all gotten used to hearing slightly flat "perfect" intervals though.

Differences among temperaments [WAY OT]

[YU Nicks NE Way]

the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at

Not quite. The equally-tempered 12-tone "major third" is just a trifle sharp (ratio = 1.2599+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.25). The 12-tone "perfect fifth" is, by contrast, a trifle flat (ratio 1.4983+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.5) Helmholz (1890 -- yes, the physicist) describes the 12-tone third as "bright and metallic", and I like that terminology.

As to whether Bach would have shuddered at the sound, I dunno. Helmholz, like many modern Western musicologists, was a bit of a snob about temperament in general. The pure temperament is what comes "naturally" from a vocalist or a performer on an unfretted instrument, and the resonance of the chords is stunning. On the other hand, equally tempered scales have a unique and interesting sound of their own.

Besides, for pure dissonance, the 12-tone scale is unmatched: the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, at the square root of two (1.41421+) is truly wonderful. For many years, it was used by American (US + Canada; I don't know about Mexico, but I assume so, since we use the same rail stock...) freight train klaxons, precisely because it is so hair-raising.