Unterorgan
Unterorgan was commissioned by the Scott Family Amazeum children's museum to be installed as a feature in the museum's new building expansion "The Hangout" designed by Modus Studio.
The designated space for the work was a series of open cabinets (of curiosity) situated high above floor level in the building's main gathering space. The site, dubbed "The Bluff" included the cabinets and a small balcony play space where the back of the cabinets were were visible through glass cabinet doors.
The Amazeum wanted an artwork that would expend beyond the limits of the cabinets and generate curiosity from below and from above.
Unterorgan was inspired by my love of that most magnificent and complex of musical instruments, the pipe organ. Every Wednesday of my primary school years I listened to Chuck Schiller, organist and fourth grade teacher at St. Paul First English Lutheran School in New Orleans, play the massive pipe organ, and over the course of six years must have heard the entire organ catalogue of Bach, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Mendelssohn and company.
Also influencing the concept is the construction of an organ. The various boxes neatly suggested designing the various organ components within the cabinets; the blower, the wind trunks, and reservoir, and chests, console, and controls ensconced in the boxes, all of them bursting forth, physically interconnected, and functional.
Before proposing the organ I enlisted the collaborative expertise of my brother-in-law Dennis Hamm, a Grammy nominated musician with research interests and work in harmony and human emotion. He agreed to compose nine short harmonic experiments exploring the 7 diatonic modes that the organ would play at the top of each hour daily between 9am and 5pm. Dennis selected the 14 notes that the pipes were designed to create, all white keys on the piano, ranging three octaves from D3 to G5.
In order to accomplish playing the compositions the organ was proposed as a "player" instrument, meaning that the music is physically programmed (hand painted) onto a permanent 35-foot material roll that is read in real time by the instrument each hour, causing the appropriate pipes to speak. After the final interlude of the day the roll rewinds itself and resets for the following day. My artist friend and electronics mastermind Eugene Sargent came on board to engineer the electronic complexities of the work.
The work on Unterorgan was completed in two-and-a-half months and debuted to the public on November 7, 2026.