A journey inside the pipe organ at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall

For three years, its big tin Cheshire grin has taunted me — its 89 pipes looming over the Kennedy Center Concert Hall like a silent stand of gleaming trees.

I’ve been able to hear the Rubenstein Family Organ in action only once — last year for the fifth movement of Mahler’s “Resurrection,” performed by the National Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. Apart from that, it has remained a transfixing fixture of the hall’s background — the strong, silent type, awaiting its moment.

I’m not a big fan of waiting around for moments, so in the interest of finally experiencing the sound of this magnificent beast in full, I invited myself along in mid-June for one of its periodic tunings, dutifully performed by the organ’s longtime technician, David Storey.

Storey, 67, has been tweaking and tuning and “voicing” — or adjusting the tone of — the organ’s pipes since its installation in 2012, when it replaced the struggling “Filene” organ that had occupied the space since 1972. Storey was there when three fully packed tractor-trailer trucks first pulled up from Montreal hauling the new 20-ton instrument, manufactured and installed by Casavant Frères, a Montreal-based firm that has also crafted pipe organs for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and the transformed Palais Montcalm in Quebec.

On the day of my visit, Storey was addressing several upper “ranks” (or, complete sets) of reed pipes — i.e. pipes sounded by the activation of a thin brass strip against an internal brass tube (or “shallot”). It’s a task that should take about four to five hours. Tuning the entire instrument — which happens in August, just before the season opens — can take three to four days.

This is because an organ of this size and scale has many, many, many pipes — 4,972 of them to be precise. Enter the organ through a hidden passageway tucked into a side office, descend down a ladder into its belly, and you find yourself surrounded by pipes — no two the same.

Some are the “reed” pipes Storey was here to tune — tapering tubes of tin and lead, their surfaces spotted from a reaction between the two metals when melted together. Some are square towers of yellow poplar, big enough to stand inside and producing ponderous, bolt-shaking lows. Some are the size of a knitting needle. The preponderance of the organ’s pipes are simple “flue” pipes, which force air through a small notch called a “fipple.”

Storey clutched a fistful of tools and tuning wands as well as a pair of industrial-grade headphones to shield against occasionally deafening test notes sounded by his talented assistant, the organist Christian Cang Cuesta. He also held a bound journal, where he meticulously logs the tunings and fluctuating temperatures inside the instrument.

It’s easy to get lost in the terminology and technicality of Storey’s work — a line he’s been in for decades and which scratches a very particular professional itch. He loves the detail and precision involved in keeping the organ sounding pristine, but he also clearly enjoys the instrument’s brute sonic force, its majestic scale and its dazzling colors.

“Instead of having a five-crayon box, this is like having the 250-crayon box,” Storey says.

Here’s how it works.

When an organist presses a note, pushes a pedal or pulls one of the console’s 104 pull stops (which correspond to groupings of pipes called “stops” — as in “pulling out all the stops”), those actions are translated into digital signals by an onboard computer. This data transmits to a distribution hub inside the organ, which then decodes the digital information, translates it to electrical signals and triggers a system of magnets that open precisely the right valves to the right pipes at the right moment. This all happens in less time than it took me to type the first letter of this paragraph.

Meanwhile, highly pressurized “wind” is generated by several large rotary fans in the subbasement — more precisely calibrated “squirrel-cage” fans of the sort you might find in a forced-air furnace. This air is blown into a system of metal ducts and distributed by a league of bellows into the organ’s five “divisions” — large sections of pipes correlated to the console’s four keyboards (or “manuals”) and pedalboard. Two of these divisions — the Swell and the Choir — are known as “expressive” divisions, the volume of their ranks regulated by a concealed system of wooden louvers that open and close like vertical blinds.

At its loudest, the organ can reach 150 decibels — a “hot knife” through the proverbial butter of the average symphony orchestra (which can reach jackhammer levels of about 110 decibels). But the purpose of a true symphonic organ is to complement an orchestra, not overwhelm it.

Perfection comes down to the tiniest details — i.e. tuning a pipe might involve extending its “speaking length” by a fraction of an inch, or barely adjusting its reed — but when it’s right, it’s right.

“The sound is big enough and powerful enough that it excites the air that you breathe,” Storey says. “You can feel it in your lungs. It’s a thrilling sensation.”

All that remains of the hall’s former Filene organ — donated by Kennedy Center trustee Catherine Filene Shouse at the urging of The Washington Post’s classical critic at the time, Paul Hume — is a stop of “regal” pipes and a heap of bad memories.

“When a conductor stares at an organist, it’s a feeling of death,” recalls the NSO’s longtime resident organist William Neil, whose 31-year history with the orchestra goes back to the days when Mstislav Rostropovich was its music director and conductor.

Neil is recounting his white-knuckling through a 2007 rehearsal of Saint-Saëns’s organ-heavy “Symphony No. 3” under visiting maestro Lorin Maazel, who was none too pleased about the Filene organ’s many “ciphers” — i.e. pipes sounding with no key pressed. In this case it was a “monster trumpet stop.”

At that night’s performance, organ tech Irving Lawless was stationed in the darkened Swell division with a flashlight and an edict to physically yank any troublesome pipes that spoke out of turn. (Which you can do! They pop right out.)

The 4,000-pipe Filene organ was the final instrument constructed by the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company of Boston, and it made its Concert Hall debut in February 1972, its housing an afterthought squeezed into architect Edward Durell Stone’s designs for the hall. It wasn’t long before the organ attracted a sizable chorus of critics and calls for an upgrade.

In 2001, Post contributor Cecelia Porter described the “subdued stops” of the Filene as “more appropriate for a church than a concert hall.” (Sixty-one of these German-made reed pipes from the former instrument live on as the Filene Heritage Stop — a buzzy little stop that Storey says sounds like “a bee in a bottle.”)

Then there were the ciphers: “Think of a football referee blowing his whistle during a quiet passage in your Requiem, and you’ll get the idea,” Post classical music critic Anne Midgette wrote in 2009.

Neil recalls its “low-pressure and transparent” sound as the sonic equivalent of “a harpsichord in a Mahler symphony.” A 2008 assessment by organ builder Lynn Dobson determined the Filene organ was “in such an unusable condition” that it was “not worth saving and it really should be replaced.”

Four years and $2 million later, funded by Kennedy Center board chairman David Rubenstein, it was hallelujahs all around. Installation commenced in August 2012, and the new organ was described in one Post article as “a godsend — even if God took his time sending it.”

And like any godsend, it can feel like a small miracle to hear the organ in use.

Though the Rubenstein does receive semiregular use by organizations such as the Choral Arts Society of Washington, the Washington Chorus and occasional performers brought to the hall by Washington Performing Arts, it lately has maintained a conspicuously low profile in NSO programming.

In the past, notable guest soloists have taken a seat at the organ as part of the discontinued Rubenstein Family Organ Recital Series, which ran from 2013 to 2016. In 2013, Cameron Carpenter played the final movement of Saint-Saëns’s “Symphony No. 3,” and Neil played the entire piece (a feat he repeated in 2019). In 2014, organist Paul Jacobs played Francis Poulenc’s “Organ Concerto,” and in 2017 he returned to premiere Christopher Rouse’s “Organ Concerto” (an NSO co-commission).

But post-covid, we’ve barely heard a peep.

While no such series or solo appearances are scheduled for the 2023-2024 NSO season, the orchestra does plan to revive its “Organ Postludes,” a popular series of short organ recitals that follow select Thursday night performances. Three are planned for the coming season. The NSO is also hoping to highlight the organ with at least one program in the 2024-2025 season.

Organ fans will also have opportunities to experience it in an orchestral setting this season, first in October when maestro Gianandrea Noseda leads a performance of Ottorino Respighi’s three beloved Roman tone poems, two of which prominently feature pipe organ. And on April 18 and 20 conductor Simone Young will lead a performance of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” — a showcase of those 32-foot pipes if ever there was one.

When I ask Cang Cuesta what it feels like to play the organ, he compares it to dancing.

“It engages your body in a way that other instruments don’t,” he says. “It really just feels like you’re floating.”

And when he sits at the organ to offer a short demonstration, I realize too late that I’ve forgotten to buckle in.

He rips into the closing three or so minutes of the Allegro first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s 1878 “Organ Symphony No. 6” — a jubilant, ecstatic passage that seems to coil upward even as its low notes rattle the boards of the stage. As he holds the sustained chord at the conclusion, the music turns physical: I can feel pipes from the Great division registering across the hair on my forearms; I can feel the pedaled contrabass in my teeth. It’s as though an invisible storm were blowing through the hall.

When it’s over, the handful of us listening all draw a deep breath, as though something massive had been lifted off us.

It seems unfathomable that Cang Cuesta’s hands blurring across the tiny-seeming console keyboard could produce the column of sound rising from the multistory structure just behind us, but such is the magic of this instrument — an awe-inspiring collision of cutting-edge technology and cave man physics, a beast capable of unleashing wild beauty.