Mark Steinbach: The Organist

Brett Warnke.  “Steinbach to Play at Wickford Festival,” Southern Rhode Island Newspapers, Time Out.  Published July 13, 2010.

Providence—The bright summer afternoon light lanced through Sayles Hall’s wooden rosettes.  Ascending a narrow staircase I could feel the music through the walls.  All 3,000 tubes of Brown University’s famed mechanical organ seemed to exhale as Mark Steinbach, the perched shoeless player, concentrating,   tickled the keys. 

Steinbach, a lecturer, instrument curator, and Brown University teacher was preparing for his upcoming performance.  The Kansas-born organist will play for fifty-minutes at  St.Paul’s Episcopal Church at 55 Main Street, South Kingston; his 2pm concert will be held during Wickford’s Annual Art Festival (July?-?).   

Wearing black ankle highs and a maroon t-shirt he smiled and greeted me but immediately his attention returned to the organ.  “This organ dates from the Impressionist era when notes were muddled and nearly indistinguishable from one another…I just look at it and think, ‘This organ is so 1903.’”  The man cannot sit still.  Steinbach is taller than average but, he has the lithe, compact build of a yoga instructor.  He leapt from his lotus squat at the organ, swung open a slim door, and nimbly scaled two stairs.  “This,” Steinbach said forlornly, “is the organ chamber!”  The anatomy of tubes, pipes, and wiring seemed to be his second-self.  As he pointed to pipes imbedded in a wooden frame my rear rubbed up against a wire.  A deep, ornery, bowel-blast came from the adjoining tube.  “And what did you have for breakfast?” Steinbach said with a grin.          

Before I could finish scribbling a sketch of the pipes he continued, “Now, St. Paul’s organ is different than this beast.  That one is technically considered the ‘oldest organ in use in a church.’  Different than Brown’s, it’s designed in a Baroque style so the listener can hear-- each—distinct-- note.”  He explained the pre-Christian organs in Greek and Roman ampitheatres and detailed how in older organs the air was pumped into the tubes by hand.  The oldest organs in Europe dated from only around 1300 AD.  Apparently, the Christian Medievals remembered the bad old days in pagan Rome where—forced into the arena for bloodsport with slaves and beasts—the organ honked out music to die by.    

 My writing’s furious pace started to cramp my digits.  Thankfully, Steinbach suddenly paused and sat down facing the organ, “You’ve heard of ‘pulling out all the stops?’”  I thought about my achy fingers.  “Well, these knobs above the keys are stops—they control the loudness and tones of a pipe organ.”  He briefly paused.  “I just love the organ.  I can’t sit still.  It’s like dancing!  My feet.  My legs.  I dance on the organ!” 

But when discussing composers and the selected works he would be performing, Steinbach slowed down.  For now, his tentative program includes works by Jean-Philip Rameau, J.S. Bach, Philip Glass, and Mozart.  Steinbach is excited to perform Rameau’s obscure sprightly work about a chicken.  “It’s hilarious!  Look,” he points with one hand while the other jigs between keys, “Co-co-co-co-co-dai!”  He tells me about lesser known pieces and how they are lost to Time.  Bach, for instance, was criticized by his contemporary Adolf Scheibe for being “turgid and sophisticated” and wasn’t known for funny stuff. Yet his pieces could warm the heart of even the most leathery cynics, like pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran who once said, “Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.”  Steinbach agreed. “Oh, Bach… a musician is always looking for new composers to keep the [musical] language fresh, but Bach is the parent you keep going back to.“  Steinbach mentions an obscure humorous tune Bach wrote, “Coffee, coffee, I must have/If you want to enchant me/Give me some coffee.”  “He must have been a caffeine addict,” Steinbach said.  Remembering a J.M. Coetzee’s quote, I recited it to Steinbach:  “Why is it to Bach and Bach alone I have a longing to speak?”  Steinbach eagerly nodded, “Exactly.”

Some new organ music Steinbach will perform is two parts in a “radical” five moment work called “Dance” by Philip Glass.  Since “Glassworks” release in 1982, the New York composer’s mathematical precision and his repetitious, shifting, and evolving patterns have met with both hostile assault and wild praise.  Steinbach played a thrilling minute of, “Mad Rush,” my favorite Glass piece, before stopping to point out, “Glass is like Bach.  At first he sounds so simple, but if you look closer, he offers endless surprises.” 

Steinbach had nothing but compliments for the cutting-edge rhythmical patterns in Glass’s major period.  “His work is a free trip.  And you can take the word trip however you want it!  It works on you over time….it sets up expectations.  After playing for twenty-five minutes—halfway through—I’m physically exhausted.  It’s so consuming; it plays with your concentration.  By page thirty four I’m on a runner’s high and by page thirty-five I’ve reached nirvana.  And yet by page forty-one I’m sad that it’s ending.”     

But Steinbach insists that organ music be heard live.  “Can you hear this on a CD?”  He kicks the pedals emitting the tube’s hushed whisper, like a portentous gas leak.  “Unless you’ve got a thousand speakers you haven’t heard it.”  My lungs nearly collapsed as he slammed the keyboard in riot, like a discalced Roderick Usher, “Can you hear this on a CD?!”