Organ for the Senses

In 2016, San Diego’s Parkeology director Kate Clark and composer Samuel Dunscombe began brainstorming as to how this massive instrument’s potential might be further uncovered, planning a concert that would highlight qualities that hadn’t been explored. These discussions resulted in the Parkeology event, Organ For the Senses, sonically archived here. Local and regional experimental composers were invited to develop works with the aim to explore all acoustic and physical aspects of the organto shine a light on the old to reveal something new. Michael Pisaro’s “Secular Reason” takes as its mission to reveal the full dynamic and timbral range of the instrument’s 5,017 pipes – from ground rattling full-spectrum fortissimi to the extreme delicacy of a single flute stop – while Dunscombe’s work “An Inside-Out Map of the Spreckels Organ” aims to reveal the deepest inner working of the instrument by taking pan-perspectival field recordings from deep within its bowels. Steve Flato’s “Face South Toward the Storm,” which draws inspiration from the 100 years of recurrent weather patterns an outdoor instrument such as this must inevitably face, speaks to the organ’s endurance as a physical structure, augmenting the organ’s acoustic sound with live electronics to create a rich fog. And “Artificial Horizons” (Liu, Oram, Regnier) zooms out to show us the organs place within the larger space of Balboa Park, with a particular emphasis on the flight path that runs directly above it.