The musician behind Dubai Airports

Gulf News

Dubai Airport CEO Paul Griffiths showcases his talent and passion for music during an exclusive interview with Gulf News. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv

Transcript

00:30I think there's a great similarity between being a musician and leading a team in a big

00:39enterprise, particularly an enterprise that is a 24-7 customer service orientated enterprise,

00:47that you're trying to pull together in both fields lots of intricate moving parts to make

00:54something that is actually a full proper coordinated effort. And when you're playing the organ

01:01or conducting an orchestra or running an airport, actually the techniques for bringing together

01:08all those disparate moving parts into something that makes sense overall is largely the same

01:14skill I believe. My musical interests were aroused when I was about 10 when my best friend

01:20at school asked me if I wanted to go and join the choir at church and being a 10 year old the

01:25first thing you say is no not really but when he said well actually you do get paid for it my

01:31attitude changed a bit. So my musical interests and my commercial interests were sort of aroused

01:37at an early age and when I went along to have an audition for the choir I was very impressed by the

01:44organ in the local church and when I saw this big instrument with all these stops and levers

01:50and keys and pedal boards and things I was immediately struck that I wanted to play the

01:57organ from that point onwards and so I had lessons and got to grips with it quite quickly. The organ

02:04actually goes right back to the time of ancient Greece and the first organ was actually powered

02:10by water and the pressure of water created air pressure which then was blown through pipes to

02:17create a sound. In modern terms the organ is really the world's first analog synthesizer

02:25because the sound is changed by bringing into operation different ranks of pipes and even a

02:33moderately sized organ would have several thousand pipes inside it of various lengths. The

02:40longer the pipe the deeper the notes and some organs in the world there are some in Australia

02:45in the UK and certainly in the US where they're most of the world's largest organs are there are

02:51pipes that are up to 64 feet in length so the actual cycles per second is so few that it takes

03:00you know pretty good ear to hear down to that sort of depth but that gives the organ its unique

03:06character and every single stop on the organ actually brings into play at those different

03:13ranks of pipes so you can change the character of the sound quite dramatically. Organs are quite

03:19complex these days they bring together a lot of science and technology you've got lots of memories

03:25to capture the different settings and whilst you're playing a piece you can change the sound

03:30of the organ quite dramatically so it's that complexity and that ability to actually bring

03:36all these different things together at one time that makes the organ such a fascinating instrument

03:42so much so it's been branded as the king of instruments because I don't think there's many

03:47other instruments where one person can create such a vast array of sounds and actually single-handedly

03:55drown out an entire symphony orchestra it's that sort of power that I think makes the organ such a

04:01fascinating instrument. This particular type of instrument has no pipes like a real organ and

04:07it's a very clever system the idea is that a recording has been made of every single pipe

04:14of a large pipe organ and there's three separate references for each note the start of the note

04:21the continuous part of the notes and the decay of the note and these three different sequences

04:28for every single pipe for every single stop are reproduced from a digital memory so if I want to

04:35pull out a flute stop and play some notes on a flute what I'm actually doing is in real time

04:41recalling from the memory of the organ the actual sound that was recorded when the organ was actually

04:48built so here's the flute stop that's a digital recording of an actual sound and then I've got a

04:59tuba stop which is nice and loud and a fanfare trumpet and then all sorts of different sounds

05:14in between from an oboe to another smaller trumpet

05:32and then you've got various other sounds some quite unique to the organ

05:45and then some very deep notes because I have 32 notes on the pedal board here which give us the

05:52sounds from the bass so and then there's some very loud reed sounds that go on the pedal as well

06:14then play a quiet combination of stops

06:31then I can gradually press more buttons

06:33until I get to my full button here which is number eight

06:45I can go from a fairly quiet setting to a pretty heavy setting and then I can couple

07:07together all the different keyboards and make a pretty big noise

07:28and this is all helped along by a very clever box of tricks under the music desk here which

07:36creates the delay environments and the reverberation you can hear

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