Photos by Chris McIntosh

Music

The Pipe Organ Master

Peter Krasinski has taken his love for the behemoth instrument all over the world

“ I think one of the most wonderful things about organs is that they’re all different,” says Krasinski (’80, STH’98), who can identify the year and maker of every pipe organ he’s played as easily as some people rattle off automotive models. “Every pipe organ is built for a specific place, room, people. You have theater organs, concert hall organs, church organs—to me, the attraction is the variety. If you were to ask me who my favorite pop singer is, I couldn’t tell you, because I love so many of them. I don’t even have a favorite color.”

If variety is the spice of life, then Krasinki’s life is abundantly seasoned. He travels to concert halls across North America, Europe, and Asia, playing alongside silent films to bring them to life. He is the house organist for four venues in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He’s won a number of prizes, including the highly regarded First Prize in Improvisation in the American Guild of Organists National Competition. Krasinski is a conductor too—he’s led professional musicians both domestic and international. And recently, he’s taken those skills to the silver screen: Krasinski appears in the Oscar-nominated 2023 film The Holdovers, as a choir conductor and organist (for which he earned a Screen Actors Guild membership). 

The throughline for all of Krasinski’s ventures is music. Music pervades his life; it’s the lens through which he views the world.

“So if you ask, ‘Why music?’ I think it’s impossible not to love it,” he says. “I think it’s always been a big part of my life, and I think the people who played the organ were just fascinating to me.”

The call of the pipe organ

Growing up in Quincy, Mass., Krasinski heard music everywhere. “I used to tell my mother that I could hear the subway underneath our feet, and I would sing along with the vacuum cleaner—things like that,” he says with a warm smile. Perhaps it’s in his genes: Krasinki’s mother was an amateur cello player, and his father, he jokes, “played the radio really well.”

Peter Krasinski travels across North America, Europe, and Asia, playing the pipe organ alongside silent films. In both images, he plays at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Mass.

As soon as Krasinski could reach the keys on the piano, he started playing. He switched to violin when he was nine, and by junior high school he’d joined the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra (known today as the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras).

At the same time, he sang in the choir at his local church, Bethany Congregational Church in Quincy, where he was transfixed by its pipe organ. Once, before service, he asked the organist, Agnes Ruggles Allen, if he might try it out. She told him to come back at the end of the mass, and when he did, Allen let him play a single note.

“It was thrilling,” says Krasinski, who would go on to help restore, and eventually play, Bethany’s organ.

He followed that spark for the rest of his life. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music education and organ performance as well as a master’s degree in sacred music from BU. “The fun thing for me, as an organist, is that I never dislike any kind of organ music,” Krasinski says. “The pipe organ is very special because it’s so real. It’s an actual, physical thing that’s making the sound from many different places in a room.”

Krasinski plays in three settings: liturgies, concert halls, and theaters. There’s sometimes a fourth setting too: Krasinski plays the pipe organ in BU’s George Sherman Union during school and college convocation ceremonies each year.

But it’s in theaters where Krasinski’s musicality really shines. Theater organs, he says, were invented to accompany films before they had sound of their own. The term “silent film” is a misnomer in that way: Original audiences always experienced movies accompanied by live organ, piano, or orchestral music.

When movies with their own integrated sound were introduced in the 1920s, theaters across the country fired their in-house musicians in favor of the more fashionable talking pictures. Though it was shoved to the margins, the practice never really died out, Krasinski says, and in the 1970s and ’80s, when VHS tapes enabled audiences to watch movies from their living rooms, studios again hired musicians to play over silent film recordings for at-home viewers. This created another wave of popularity (and work) for silent film accompanists—one that likely crested with Italian composer Giorgio Moroder’s 1983 musical take on the science fiction silent film Metropolis, Krasinski says.

Krasinski’s approach to this accompaniment is “unique in that world,” he says. By that, he means it’s entirely improvisation. No two performances are exactly alike.

“I’ve played in venues where I played the same movie twice in a row—in fact, three times in a row—and the management has said that it was different every time,” he says. “Why is that? It’s because we’re different, not just every day, but every minute of the day. We’re changing. If we’re alive, we’re changing beings.”

Krasinski does have a consistent approach to each new film he accompanies, though. First, he memorizes the movie—the major plot points, the characters, any unexpected or important moments for sound (“like a gunshot going off, or something,” he says). Then he memorizes the instrument at hand. And since each pipe organ has its own quality and sound, this can sometimes lead to standout moments.

Here, it’s important to understand something about pipe organs. They’re wind instruments—they produce sound when wind is forced through the pipes. That wind, and the flow of it, is controlled by the musician at the helm. As the musician presses certain keys, valves open up underneath the corresponding pipes, allowing air through and creating a sound.

An organ can contain hundreds of pipes, which are grouped into specific sets. These sets have their own unique sounds designed to mimic other instruments, like flutes, trumpets, or horns. The musician can control the sets by pulling specific knobs, known as stops.  

So, ahead of a recent performance of the German horror film Waxworks, Krasinski was sitting at the console of the organ, methodically going through its various tones and capabilities. One particular stop, meant to sound like an English horn, was misfiring.

“It was making this awful sound,” he says. Tuners immediately jumped in to fix it, but Krasinski, thinking quickly, asked them to leave it be.

“And later on, I did this movie, and one of the characters [the pot-bellied Caliph Harun al-Rashid] was extremely unpleasant. During the entire movie, I avoided that stop and that [note].” When the character appeared, Krasinski let it rip. The audience went wild.

“My organist friends were like, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ It was magic.” He adds, after a hearty laugh, “I enjoy taking on those different roles as a storyteller, using the organ as an instrument to do that.”

From accompanying films to being in one

In 2021, Krasinski accepted a job as a long-term substitute music director at Saint Mark’s School in Southborough, Mass. Soon, he learned that a movie would be filmed on campus—did the school know anyone who could play a choir leader?

That film, The Holdovers, is set during winter break at a New England prep school in 1970. Krasinski’s job was to act as choral director, leading his students into “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Ever the teacher, Krasinski asked director Alexander Payne for two minutes before the crew started filming, to warm up his young actors and learn the hymn. Afterward, they did a few takes.

Krasinski appears in the opening of the film The Holdovers, which was filmed at Saint Mark’s School in Southborough, Mass. Titlesfromfilms

Imagine Krasinski’s surprise, then, when he heard his own voice at the beginning of the film. That warm-up? Payne caught it and ran with it. What audiences hear is Krasinski, unfiltered, sharing his love of music.

“Can I hear the opening word, ‘O’?” Krasinski’s gentle voice emerges from the dark screen, followed immediately by the sound of a boys choir chiming in, elongating the vowel. “Ohhhhh,” they all sing. “Very good!” he congratulates them.

Krasinski, in his role as the choir director, instructs his students to breathe in, breathe out, sing the opening chord. He reminds them to pay attention to the words they’re singing. He fiddles with the balance of high, middle, and bass voices. After they run through the first verse, he congratulates them again: “Really great, especially that ‘t’ at the end—all together. Very, very good. Excellent.”

For most viewers, it’s an actor playing his character to a T. But it’s just Krasinski, delighting in his roles as a teacher and a lover of music, first and foremost.