Never has an organ sounded so—well, so not like an organ. When most envision this grandest of instruments, they embrace impressions of robust liturgical sincerity: their imaginations recall the massive, gleaming splay of pipes; their ears await crystalline tones, as firm and supple as cathedral arches. They think: line, counterpoint, hymn, fugue—music bathed in divine light, possessed by something healthy and holy.

Not Ligeti. No, Ligeti's organ music is the Antichrist of the organ repertoire, managing in just three mature works to reverse, subvert, and override every facet of the organ archetype. His first large work for the instrument, Volumina, drops a hydrogen bomb on the tradition with its opening gesture, a chromatic chord using every note and every stop of the organ. Indeed, on first rehearsal the piece actually destroyed its instrument.

Harmonies, the first of Ligeti's Two Studies for Organ, is a much more modest piece than Volumina, lasting less than seven minutes (compared to the latter's nearly 15), and occupying a roughly similar sound world for its entire length. But in a certain way it's even weirder, a more ad-hoc-radical-chic cousin. Written in 1967 (five years after Volumina), it carries out one of Ligeti's most persistent fascinations—the fascination with exploring that moment "when good machines go bad."

In the case of Harmonies, Ligeti envisioned a "consumptive" organ, an organ with a severe pulmonary handicap. The technical translation of this condition was the wish to make the organ do something it shouldn't be able to do—play microtones, "get in between the keys." Working with the Hamburg organist Gerd Zacher, Ligeti decided that this odd end of deliberate debilitation would best be achieved by sabotaging the organ's motor. Hence Zacher disconnected it and hooked a vacuum cleaner up to the wind chest. The resulting effects invert everything expected of the organ, transforming it from a polyphonic kingdom into a foul and frightening wind blowing through some impossibly macabre Romantic night scene, like incidental music for a nightmare. With cold, tinny chords (specific notes are almost impossible to decipher), the organ slowly wheezes up and down in ever-growing dynamic waves; in a fashion similar to Ligeti's "micropolyphonic" music, all transitions happen with extreme subtlety, creating an even ghostlier sound surface. Eventually the sound fades into oblivion over a low pedal.

There's something fascinatingly double-faced about this music: on the one hand, it testifies to Ligeti's authentic experimental spirit, his lust for new sounds and new techniques to make those sounds, and in this sense one might acknowledge him as progressive. But, on the other hand, there's a bit too much glee in Ligeti's undoing of a fabulous machine: the 1995 recording of Harmonies offered Ligeti "the most tidily-built organ I've ever come across," and he seems to have relished a new solution to crippling the organ's air-supply. "We removed the (precision Swiss) stone weights from the wind-reservoir; and I pressed down with all my weight, changing my upper-body position as [the organist] played..." Progressive? Of course? Utopian? Hardly...

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