Voix Celeste
As baroque instruments play out
Of tune, just notches away
From unison, the way
Organ pipes veer swiftly from
A desperate rapport,
Clarion stars crossed
In the cacophony of assorted
Sounds, planets that have lost
Their ways, their hums,
Their euphony, their whirl,
Bodies shun all systems
In their race to curl
Around the blossom of a voice,
The harmony of its skies
Conjoined finally
In our plan to humanize.
June 4th, 2023
Kaiholu
Credits
The Voix Celeste, French for “celestial voice,” is a stop on an organ consisting of pipes slightly out of tune. It is the ghost in the machine, and wails like a banshee. A set or rank of untuned pipes is matched with a tuned rank in order to produce a vibrating or beating effect, the way soldiers must break step on a bridge to prevent the vibrations from destroying the bridge, or the way a singer’s voice can shatter a glass: resonance can be a snowballing effect that creates a force between frequencies, like reading between the lines, where the real message isn’t what is said but what is implied.
At one point in history, the Steinway piano had strings which were voiced slightly differently to create a frisson, what the Lincoln Center piano wizard Tali Mahanor calls a “zingy-zang,” a human quality to the sound of the strings.
I studied organ on the four-console organ in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York; my teacher was the organist there at the time, Charles Courboin. He had been the organist for the great Wanamaker organ in Philadelphia. The organ was a Kilgen, with four keyboards and 7,855 pipes. The diapason and bourdon pipes are thirty-two feet long. It had at the time around 142 ranks and 99 stops.
By the time the last pipe in a large organ has been voiced, the first pipe is out of tune again, so the gorgeous, ominous blare of the sound is caused by conflicts between tuned and untuned pipes.
Pythagoras’s music of the spheres was a joint resonance of the heavenly bodies which kept the universe in suspension; to lose the original force that gave a spin to all the celestial objects would cause the ailing disk to fall out of suspension.
We float in a push and pull universe of frequencies, desperately seeking harmony.
The Vox Humana is another organ stop. The dueling frequencies of the heavens, or of an organ, come together in our human voice. Our unison is one form of the entropy, the merging of heavenly bodies into stillness, which underlies existence in a quantum system.
As Cathy points out, the stained-glass window above the organ pipes is a window into that universe, an older version of a Webb Telescope photograph.