Backpedaling.(All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters)(Book review)

Craig R. Whitney All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ & Its American Masters. Perseus Books, 321 pages, $17.95

Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times's assistant managing editor, proves to be a fully-fledged organist and organ expert. His other books, which include Spy Trader, an analysis of Cold War espionage, must be enviable indeed if they match this impeccably researched, humane guide to "the king of instruments"--Mozart's phrase--in our grandfathers' America.

Here, organ history centers on two contemporaneous performers: E. Power Biggs (1906-1977) and Virgil Fox (1912-1980). These gentlemen loathed each other. Fox accused Biggs of being dead "from the waist down," not specifying whether he meant Biggs's pedaling or erotic life (Fox, by contrast, was an overt homosexual whose tombstone is pink).

The English-born Biggs was the musicologist: a devotee of Teutonic organ scholarship's anti-Romantic, blandly styled Orgelbewegung ("Organ Movement"). Biggs proselytized for Baroque instruments, or copies thereof, and mechanical--not electropneumatic--key and pedal action. (To a performer trained via conventional electropneumatic consoles, a mechanical-action organ feels like life atop a bucking bronco.) The Illinois-born Fox was the showman: despising academic purism ("unadulterated rot!"), he was wild, rapturous, transcendental. And naughty: he treated his honorary doctorate as a real one, since "Dr. Fox" always attracted better restaurant and airline service than Mr. Anything could.

Think of Biggs as the hedgehog and Fox as--ahem--the fox, or of Biggs as the organ's Artur Schnabel (though eschewing Schnabel's technical mishaps) and Fox as its Vladimir Horowitz. Yet even Horowitz never essayed Fox's feats, from 1970 onwards, of big-tent son et lumiere. Amid the birth pangs of heavy metal, Fox chose the rubric "Heavy Organ." Such extravaganzas--dry ice supplied--taught huge, ecstatic, presumably cowering audiences that Bach, in the right hands (and feet), could come almost as close to eardrum perforation as any ...