The Thrown Stick
On a church built for words, a child’s verdict, and an answer that took the room twenty years to give
My father built things for a living. He was a general contractor, and in the 1970s he did some work for the organist of Riverside Church in Manhattan, who thanked him the way people sometimes thanked my father — not with money but with access. He invited the whole family to the church for a private tour. I was young. I remember the scale of the place arriving before the place itself did: the doors, the dark, the cold mineral smell of stone, the ceiling that kept going after my neck had given up.
“My son loves music.” said my father when we met the organist at the entrance to the church. “Well,” he said, “this whole church is an instrument!”. He took us up to the organ loft. And somewhere near the beginning of the visit he told us a thing that has outlasted almost everything else from that day. In earlier times, he said, organ builders would walk into a finished church, throw a stick onto the stone floor, and listen. By ear — by the sound of that one dry strike and what the room did with it — they would decide where the organ should stand and how it should be voiced. Modern churches, he said, used advanced acoustic methods.
I remember being puzzled by this in a way I couldn’t articulate. The puzzle would articulate itself within the hour.
He told us what he was going to play — in my memory it is the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, though I hold that lightly, the way this series has learned to hold what memory hands it — and he suggested we listen for a few minutes from the organ loft, and then descend into the body of the church and listen from below while he continued. So we did: down out of the loft and into the vast dim sanctuary, the music pouring down after us.
And something was wrong with it.
I did not have the words for what was wrong, but I could hear it with the terrible clarity of someone too young to doubt his own ears. The music was not being carried by the room. It was being taken by it. The space seemed to subtract from the sound rather than multiply it — the grandeur going in, something smaller coming out, the edges eaten, the mass swallowed. I had expected — the building had promised, with all that stone and height — an immersion. What arrived was a kind of blur.
My father leaned down and asked me what I thought. I told him. He couldn’t hear me over the organ and asked me to repeat myself, so I did, loudly.
“It sounds muddy!”
At that exact instant, the organist stopped playing.
My four words went down the nave like something fired. I heard them travel — actually heard them carry, clean and whole, the full length of that enormous room, arriving intact at my parents, at my sisters, and, for all I knew, rising undiminished to the loft itself. From somewhere in the church I heard my mother’s exasperated sigh, which also carried beautifully. My sisters’ gasps, and then their giggles: perfect fidelity. Then silence, which the room delivered best of all.
I want to mark what the building had just done, because it took me decades to see it. The church had been built so that words would cut through everything — and so it took the one sentence I most wanted to vanish and transmitted it flawlessly to every soul in the room. The architecture convicted itself in the act of embarrassing me. A room that mudded Bach had carried muddy like a laser. My verdict and its proof arrived together, in the same four words.
The organist came down. Pleasantries were exchanged; everything seemed fine; perhaps, I told myself, my voice hadn’t reached the loft. But as we were leaving, he and I arrived at a doorway at the same moment, and he bent slightly toward me, a sly grin visible on his face, and said, quietly, “It does sound a little muddy, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I’m just a kid,” I said.
And then he explained. The church, he told me, had been acoustically optimized for the voice — engineered so that a sermon could reach every seat, every word distinct — and this had been done intentionally at the expense of the music. “The acoustic panels were never sealed, so they absorb sound rather than reflect it. It was the 1930s…” he said, as if that should have helped explain the decision, but, at the time, I had no idea why that would have mattered. The advanced methods had aimed the whole building at speech. “Most people,” he said, “just wanted to hear the words.”
I looked back at the interior — that immense vaulted vastness — and saw it, suddenly, as a giant megaphone. I felt something I can only call empathy for the building: all that stone, all that height, all that capacity for wonder, bent to the delivery of announcements. “That’s crazy,” I said. “You can hear words anywhere. You can read words. They cut through everything.” And then, with the unearned certainty of my age: “I wish they hadn’t done that. I guess people just want to be told what to think. I wish I could be here if they had made it more for music.”
“Me, too,” he said, and smiled.
In the car my parents yelled at me. I tried to tell them about the doorway — that the organist agreed with me — but they were not interested in the doorway. The instruction I received, and was told to carry forward into all future rooms, came from my mother: “Next time, THINK before you open your mouth.”
I have been turning that sentence over for most of my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it from my mother. It asks you to insert a checkpoint between what you experience and what you say — to route the ear’s verdict through the committee before releasing it. It is excellent advice for getting along, and I have mostly failed to take it. What I could not have explained then is that I hadn’t spoken instead of thinking. I had spoken from inside the hearing itself, before the committee convened — and I had been right.
Here I owe this notebook a correction, of a kind its readers will recognize by now.
I have written in these essays before about an organ tuned to its building, and a child who wandered a church while it played and found that the sound changed with where he stood — that the room gave one thing to one position and withheld it from another. I told it as a single afternoon. I have since understood that it was two afternoons, nearly twenty years apart, and that my memory had quietly welded them at the seam — granting the child’s visit the gift that belonged to the adult’s, keeping the wonder and dropping the two decades in between. I have done this before; readers of the essay about a certain poem will recognize the workmanship. Memory, in my experience, is less an archive than an editor with strong opinions about what a story needs.
What the child actually received was the mis-tuning — the room bent away from music — and a wish.
What follows is what happened to the wish.
Almost twenty years later, in the mid-90s, my father left me a message to call him.
“You’ll never guess who I ran into. Remember the organist from Riverside? He asked about you, and I told him you’re a composer. He doesn’t work there anymore — but he said they just did a huge acoustic renovation, and he thought you’d be interested. He gave me the number of the organist. He said you can call.”
I called.
By then, composing was what I was. I had studied at Juilliard and at Aspen, and privately with Charles Jones — a name too few people say aloud, a profound teacher to me and to many others, and I say it here on purpose. I had been commissioned, granted, performed; I had co-founded a chamber group in the city. And I was restless. My friends were increasingly visual artists, and something in their way of working — the live, rigorous traffic between making and speaking, neither one illustrating the other — resonated with me in a way my own musical world had stopped doing. I had begun, cautiously, to let the boundaries of “composition” move: to consider that the acoustics of a given space might not be the container of a piece but one of its materials. I was becoming less sure I was a composer and more sure I was after something wider. So when the new organist asked whether I’d like to come hear Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor in the renovated room, I said yes — and I brought a notebook.
The renovation, I learned, had undone the megaphone. The special porous tiles that had made the room so obedient to speech — the very engineering the first organist had described to a child in a doorway — had been sealed, coat upon coat, and the stone surrendered back to reflection. The room that had spent sixty years absorbing music had been made to answer it.
My parents came with me. As we approached the building my mother turned to me and said, with a sly smile “Remember what I told you.” I laughed. She touched my arm. “I’m serious.”
We were the only listeners. The organist took the loft and I followed with my notebook; my parents took a pew. I told the organist I wanted to hear the beginning of the piece from where he sat, and then hear other parts in different locations. “Good idea.” he said. It was near sundown, and outside, wind was driving broken clouds across the Hudson, so that the light in the church spent the next twenty minutes switching like weather.
I should confess the notebook’s original plan. I had arrived with a hypothesis — borrowed from a comment by the first organist almost twenty years earlier — in which the church was to be understood as a single colossal instrument: I had refined it to a resonant oscillator, a machine of wave mechanics that I would walk through and diagram, node by node, like an engineer surveying a substation. I had the vocabulary ready. The building dissolved it in roughly three minutes.
The loft. The piece opens with the theme alone in the pedals — eight bars of bass, unaccompanied, in the lowest pipes the instrument owns. Standing beside the console I discovered that this register does not arrive through the ears. It comes up through the floor. The lowest frequencies had bonded with the building’s steel bones and were climbing them, and my chest — this is not a figure of speech — was sounding. Somewhere in those first bars my tidy model met the fact it couldn’t hold: I was not an observer taking readings of a resonating chamber. I was a resonating chamber inside a resonating chamber inside a resonating chamber, and the innermost one was taking no notes. What kept me there, I wrote later, was not analysis but my unwillingness to reduce what was happening to it.
The stair. Through a heavy oak door and down a winding stone stairwell, the music compressed violently — mid-voices slapping off the close walls, the sound squeezed into the narrow vertical dark with me. Then out, past the carved chancel rail, and the field blew open — the whole acoustic space unfolding at once — and at that same moment the clouds outside broke, and amber and gold came through the western glass and lit the sanctuary end to end. I make no claim that the building arranged this. I only report that it happened together, and that together is how I received it.
The apse. The variations were cascading upward now, rapid scales climbing into the organ’s highest registers, and I walked forward into the chancel and backed into the curved polygonal apse behind the altar, where the newly sealed stone gathered those high voices and focused them, like a lens, straight down the center line of the church. Under my feet was the marble labyrinth patterned on the one at Chartres. The light was flashing now — crimson when the sun clipped out of the racing clouds, cold blue when it vanished — and the shadows moved across the labyrinth so that the floor itself seemed to undulate under the climbing scales. I stopped writing around here. The notebook has a line that trails off.
The nave. Then the full organ — the plenum, staggering blocks of chords — and I stepped down and began a slow walk along the center aisle of the nave, a hundred yards of it, pillar by pillar. The walk took four minutes and timed out, without my planning it, against the final grand variations. Riverside’s nave runs straight, with no transepts branching off it, and in that long unbranched channel the renovated stone did the thing I have been trying to describe since: the music ceased to have a location. It no longer came from the loft. It radiated from the pillars as I passed them, from the vaults, from the air itself, which had gone dense and almost liquid — sound with no point of origin, the room speaking from everywhere at once. Overhead the clerestory windows strobed as the clouds ran past the sinking sun, and shafts of colored light cut through the rising dust of the nave, vanished, reappeared. I was walking through the piece the way you walk through weather.
The back wall. I reached the rear gallery beneath the great tower as the fugue arrived — two subjects racing each other upward — and here, where the long waves ran the length of the nave and met the flat stone and compressed under the vaults, everything the building had been gathering came to its accumulation point. The sun went down while I stood there; the color drained out of the high glass and the vaulting went a deep, solemn violet. The final chord came — enormous, minor, saturating — and then the grand pause, and then the last crushing resolution, and then the organist lifted his hands.
The room went dark and silent. Except that it did neither.
The church held the chord. For a long moment the building kept what it had been given — the whole accumulated charge of the piece suspended in the stone — and then released it: a vast, roaring ring, sourceless, wordless, slowly decaying back into the walls that had made it. I stood frozen at the back of the nave and listened to a room have the last word.
The child at the doorway had made a wish: to be there if they ever made the church more for music. It took the building twenty years to answer, but buildings keep time differently than we do, and the answer, when it came, was complete. Somewhere behind all the sealant and the acoustics, the oldest method had been restored — the thrown stick, the ear, the alignment you find not by calculating a room but by walking it and listening to what it does with what it’s given.
And I think often about the symmetry the two visits make. On the first, the room — built so that words cut through everything — took the one sentence I wanted back and delivered it perfectly to everyone I loved. On the second, the room had been given back to music, and when the music ended it went on sounding: no words at all, and nothing I would have taken back.
I stood in the violet dark while the ring died away into the stone, my notebook shut, my parents somewhere behind me in the pews. And I finally did what my mother asked. I kept my opinion to myself.
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