Pump Organ

In late November 2025, I became the owner of an old pump organ. I haven’t yet determined the likely date of the organ’s manufacture, by John G. Murdoch and Co. Ltd. of London, but it was likely around or not long after the turn of the twentieth century, making it at least 100 years old.

After I brought the instrument home, I set out to figure out its current condition. It played pretty well from the outset, thanks to a previous owner’s spot repair to the bellows. The reeds needed cleaning and tuning, some of the stops needed a smoother action, and two keys were sticky. But even so, the organ sounded wondrous, with its lush dance and wash of harmonics and its expressive palette of stops.

I especially appreciated all the little imperfections of its (pretty good) condition: the little squeaks of moving parts and stops, particularly resonant overtones, and little rasps and rattles. In honor of these imperfections, I decided to compose and record a set of pieces that would make use of them, in order to preserve their expressive power before “correcting” them through any future restoration of the instrument.

These five pieces are the result. They document the growing relationship between me and this wonderful instrument, on our own terms: liberated from “grids” and metronomes, and embracing the spark of imperfection as the soul of the craft.