The Musician Behind Dubai Airport (or, Colin Pykett makes the New York Times)

[KB7DQH]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/middleeast/the-musician-behind-dubai-airport.html?_r=1

The Musician Behind Dubai Airport
By CHRISTINE NEGRONI
Published: September 28, 2011


DUBAI — The afternoon sandstorm outside Paul Griffiths's home in Dubai gave the usually blue sky a rusty haze, but listening to the rush of notes coming from the electronic pipe organ in his living room was to feel transported to the Europe of an earlier century.
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Christine Negroni

Paul Griffiths is the CEO of Dubai Airports and a semi-professional organist.
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A British citizen who has spent eight years living in the east, Mr. Griffiths is only a part-time musician. Full time, he is the chief executive of one of the busiest airports in the world.

Mr. Griffiths is responsible for Dubai International Airport, through which 47 million passengers passed in 2010. He also is overseeing construction of the $34 billion combined passenger and cargo airport, Dubai World Central, being built 30 kilometers, or 19 miles, away on the other side of the emirate. Mr. Griffiths predicts that in four years, Dubai will eclipse London Heathrow as the world's busiest hub for air traffic.

"It's an achievable goal," he said during an interview this summer, though in the past he has described the effort as "working on a very difficult jigsaw" without a picture on the box.

His training as a concert organist gives depth to his confidence. "When you're playing the organ," he said, "you are thinking about what you are doing with your feet because you are playing the bass part with the pedals." At the same time, "you're thinking about where your fingers are going," since "multidimensional thinking" is critical for tackling complex arrangements, be they musical or logistical, he added. "Conducting an orchestra and bringing things together into a single performance is sort of what we do in the airport," he said.

Mr. Griffiths's typical day begins at 6 a.m. when he checks his e-mail and catches up on what happened overnight. Meetings with airline representatives and airport suppliers, working on design plans and making visits to construction sites can run well into the evening.

That a man immersed in the very practical business of transport would be so well versed in the organ is not surprising to Colin Pykett, a physicist and organ expert in England. "An interest in the organ does have a natural synergy with an aptitude for the natural sciences and engineering," Mr. Pykett said.

Mr. Griffiths said: "In aviation you've got lots and lots of working parts, working together in close formation. Your brain is probably wired in a particular way to be able to understand how that fits together." The organ is a complex machine that in its earliest days was considered a marvel of engineering. "No other instrument is built on such a scale," Mr. Pykett said. "The organ reigned supreme as the most complex piece of human ingenuity — possibly equaled only by the clock — until almost the end of the 19th century."

Still, the pipe organ remains a nonportable exception in the era of the jet aircraft. That meant that when Mr. Griffiths left his job as director of Gatwick Airport in 2007 to accept the new post in Dubai, he would no longer have easy access to church pipe organs.

"Pipe organs are large contraptions," said Hugh Banton, an organ maker in Cheshire, England. "They belong to the church or the concert hall and the organist comes around to it. They never bring the organ with them. It's always been that way, that's the nature of organs."

It was not the nature of Mr. Griffiths, however. So Mr. Banton handcrafted a digital pipe organ and supervised its installation in the Griffiths's home in 2009. "It's probably the only one like that in Dubai, I'm sure," Mr. Banton said.

While organs are commonly linked to the Christian church, historians believe the instrument was first developed by a Greek living in Egypt in the third century B.C. Over time, the organ's association with European churches eclipsed its Middle Eastern origins.

Mr. Griffiths's organ occupies a dominant position in his living room. Here, he plans to hold concerts featuring Eastern and Western music and take advantage of the fact that his airport has further enhanced Dubai's status as a crossroad. "The culture which defines the place is an amalgam of East and West," he said.

Eric
KB7DQH

[AnOrganCornucopia]

Perhaps he could find a quiet corner somewhere in the terminal facilities at the new airport (a dedicated quiet departure lounge?) in which to install a large organ!

I seem to recall reading that one former organ scholar of St George's Windsor is these days to be found in the left-hand seat of a Singapore Airlines A380...

Reminds me also, famous stargazers Bernard Lovell (of Jodrell Bank Telescope fame) and Patrick Moore (The Sky at Night) are both organists too - both remarkably still around, Lovell at 98 and Moore at 88.

Of course, in a quite different but nevertheless high pressure environment, we've certainly had one organ-playing Prime Minister...