In the recent documentary “It Might Get Loud,” Jack White of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and seemingly endlessly multiplying projects, builds a guitar with little more than a piece of wood, some string, a coke bottle and an amplifier.
Watching the scene, it’s hard not to be reminded of that music class we all had in elementary school where we were taught that we could make musical instruments out of household products. Remember the tissue boxes with strings stretched over them?
Of course, if my experience is any indicator, this project was not terribly successful for most of us. Making a really functional musical instrument, whatever the medium, requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of time.
Still, there are people out there who work tirelessly to create non-traditional instruments to play their music, or just for the sake of having created them. For instance, we’ve all seen drum kits made of recycled materials — but let’s set our sights higher.
About two hours from Washington, in Luray, Va., you will find an instrument of this kind which stretches over three-and-a-half acres. It is, according to the owners, the largest musical instrument in the entire world. Located inside Luray Caverns, one of the largest cavern formations in the United States, it is called the “Great Stalacpipe Organ” and, despite the rather melodramatic name, it is a fascinating instrument.
The organ, as far as the average guests in the caverns are concerned, is manifested only by an organ console in one of the formation’s largest chambers. However, a careful inspection reveals hundreds of wires trailing away from the console and into the cavern in all directions.
The instrument is electronic and it works by sending tones down these wires to various hammers that strike carefully-designated formations in the caverns whose tones are then transmitted back by microphones throughout the cavern. In other words, the organ literally plays music on the natural rock of the cavern itself.
Leland Sprinkle, a Virginia native, built the organ over a three-year period in the mid-1950s, according to the cavern’s automated tour. He explored the cavern extensively, measuring the tones of various formations (altering a few) to find all the necessary pitches for a full organ. Sprinkle then had a custom organ console made to his particular specifications by Klann Organ Supply of Waynesboro, Va.
Since then, the organ has made its way into the recorded medium. In the mid-’60s, the gift shop at Luray sold a vinyl LP of music played on the organ and visitors can now purchase CDs and, shockingly, cassette tapes of the instrument playing (searches on various Web sites unfortunately yielded no results for purchasing the wonderfully ‘60s LP).
The recordings in the gift shop really point to what the organ is today. Rarely played for visitors directly, we can only hear it as a recording in the room that houses the organ console. Instead, this massive, fascinating instrument is simply another part of the overwhelming kitsch of the Luray Caverns experience.
Perhaps it is that lowbrow appeal of the whole thing that is inspiring a new generation to go, whether for the comedy or the nostalgia. If you’re willing to make the trek out to the Shenandoah Valley, the organ is really something worth seeing — a monument to our collective love of music.
As both Jack White and your elementary music teacher have tried to teach you, music can be found everywhere you look and almost anything can be a musical instrument. The strange dream of Leland Sprinkle and its bizarre actualization make for one of the most undeniable and compelling examples of that fact.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
