It is Now Time to “Pull out all the Stops!”- The Cool Story Behind a Common Phrase.

When we say we are going to “pull out all the stops,” we are saying we are going to go to the greatest degree we can to make the thing we are doing the most impressive we can make it.

I think many will, like I originally did, think its origins had something to do with removing Stop signs in order to go forward at an impressively fast speed.

You could think that, but you would be wrong.

The phrase comes from playing a pipe organ.

Pipe organs play sound by pushing air through its pipes and across its valves to produce incredible sound. Stops, little dividers, were placed in the organ to moderate the amount of air that got pushed through the pipes. It helped when an organist wanted to play something quieter, and not so booming. When all the stops were pulled out of the organ, it played at its most powerful.

An organ played in this way is not only loud, but will often cause the room it is being played in to vibrate. The listener does not just hear the music, they feel the music. It did not hurt that organs themselves were works of art.

The most famous organ piece which is played with all the stops pulled out is Toccata in Fugue by Bach:

(Do yourself a favor, if you can, listen to this piece with the volume all the way up.)

Their is a reason this piece is remembered. It is incredibly powerful.

I was lucky enough to hear this piece played on a great church organ. Standing in the church; you felt the raw power of the music auditorially, viscerally and tactilely.

To this day, it is a singularly impressive experience and has stuck with me.

When a piece like this was played in the 18^th and 19^th century, its audience did not have surround sound speaker systems, THX sound, movie theaters, or bass enhancing subwoofers.

There frame of reference was a much quieter world. Even if they were patrons of the opera or of symphonies, these activities, while still impressive, were quitter than today. (Older instruments could not be tuned as tightly as we can tune them today, and thus did not play as loudly as they do now.)

The pipe organ was just as powerful then, as it is today.

There was nothing comparable to experiencing a pipe organ which had pulled out all the stops.

I would argue there still isn’t.