Kimberly Marshall is a professor at ASU’s School of Music. Her specialty is the organ, one of the world’s oldest instruments.
Marshall is editing a forthcoming book called the "Encyclopedia of the Organ," and one of the reasons she’s passionate about the organ is that she sees it as more than an instrument.
Marshall told The Show that the organ is many things: a work of extraordinary physical architecture, and a story of power, and the people who wield it. And some of the most significant characters in that story were women.
Full conversation
KIMBERLY MARSHALL: The first recorded organist in history was a woman. Her name was Thais, and she was the wife of the inventor of the hydraulis, which is the first type of organ that we have records of. If we move on into Roman times, we see women playing the hydraulis in mosaics that document gladiatorial events.
SAM DINGMAN: This might be tricky, but could I ask you to kind of describe the sound that the hydraulis might have made? I mean, I’m guessing there aren’t any recordings of it, but what do we know about how similar that sound would have been to the sound we might be hearing in our heads when we think about a church organ?
MARSHALL: Yeah, that’s a great question. And of course, many people have tried to answer it. We do have accounts that the instruments were very loud. They were played outdoors, obviously for the gladiator events and things. So they must have made quite a noise.
DINGMAN: So that kind of very front-and-center presence is — I’m speaking very generally here, of course — but not the kind of thing that we associate with women throughout history. Oftentimes, women have been more relegated to behind the scenes and not been celebrated for taking up space in that way. Am I right in assuming that it would have been significant for women to be in a place to make this much noise in public?
MARSHALL: Yes and no. Once the Roman Empire fell, the organ was lost in the West. And it wasn’t until the eighth century that a diplomatic team from the Byzantine emperor went to visit Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, who was the king of the Franks. And they had, as part of the gifts that they bestowed upon the Frankish king, an organ.
And this set the court at Aachen completely into astonishment. They had never seen anything like this — even though, of course, the Romans had had the technology, but it had been lost. It made such an impact that then the court at Aachen decided, “We have to be able to build organs.”
It would be as if China sent an iPhone to us, right. We had nothing like that kind of technology.
DINGMAN: Boy, it’s so interesting to think of the organ as tantamount to something like an iPhone, but I hear what you’re saying: that it at the time, it was not just a sonic marvel, it was a technological marvel.
MARSHALL: It really was. We often say it was the computer of the Middle Ages, because only the most educated monks — usually, because they were literate and they preserved this information — were able to build organs, and they usually were patronized by kings.
And by the 13th century, we have the head of the Franciscan order saying that the organ and only the organ is the instrument of the church. We have to remember that the organ is an institutional instrument.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, given the amount of space that an organ takes up and just the visually overwhelming nature of it — leaving the sound of it aside — it’s very interesting to think of the idea that institutions would kind of organize themselves around having this phenomenal structure.
MARSHALL: Exactly alongside that, though, there was the cultivation of small instruments that might only have two rows of pipes that would be used for home devotions. And women were very involved with this side of things. In 1460, we have a reference to Bianca de Medici, — obviously a very powerful, important Florentine family — and she played for the Pope and his entourage when they visited Florence in 1460.
She would have been 14 years old at that time. It’s an interesting confirmation, I think, that a woman would be playing the organ as part of her hospitality to a visiting dignitary.
DINGMAN: What drew you personally to not just studying the organ, but playing it?
MARSHALL: All of the colors.
DINGMAN: You’re talking about the colors of the sound?
MARSHALL: Yes, exactly. We say that the most important stop on any organ is the room in which the organ sits. Because you can take an organ out of Notre-Dame and put it somewhere else, and it will not sound very impressive. Or you can take a very small organ, and then you put it in the right sort of acoustic and hall that’s really meant to enhance the sound of that instrument, and it will bloom.
DINGMAN: What do you think is the importance for people, not just of understanding all of the remarkable religious history, sonic history of the organ, but also the role that women played in establishing it?
MARSHALL: I think first of all, they were supporting their families. Like the earliest organist was supporting her husband by playing the instrument he created. I think that they were really helpmates. We have women developing skills and being able to play the organ in different contexts. More recently, in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have a plethora of women who are concert artists, able to stun the public with their virtuosity, able to improvise, able to record, to make recordings.
Marie-Claire Alain, the French organist, is the most recorded organist in history — not most recorded female organist, but most recorded organist. And she was a great advocate also for the music of her brother. So she’s sort of including that aspect of being a helpmate, an advocate for the instrument. So I’m very excited to be representing that long tradition, as are the many women across the world who are playing the organ, who are teaching the organ, who are trying to share this wonderful culture.
DINGMAN: You know, I have this sense hearing you say all of this Kimberly that you were talking about how for you, you were really drawn to the wide range of sonic coloration that you could make with an organ. And just in unspooling that history of women’s relationship to the organ over the centuries, you’re also talking about the different tones of women’s relationship to society and culture.
MARSHALL: I think that’s very perceptive. I really think that the organ is sort of a symbol for a community, for things working together to make a musical result, or maybe even just a cultural result that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.
