A saint of our own
Sometime in the middle of the second century Anno Domine, a young Christian woman who had made a faithful vow of virginity was married to a man named Valerian. During the wedding, she sat alone and sang to God professing her faith. The bride, Cecilia, substantiated her previous vow by appearing before Valerian with an angel protecting her. Around 180 AD, the young couple suffered martyrdom for their faith under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the time of her death, Cecilia asked the pope to convert her home to a church.
In 1585, Pope Sixtus V released a papal bull founding the National Academy of St. Cecilia, naming her as the patron saint of music. We celebrate the Feast of St. Cecilia on November 22, which is today, as I write.
St. Cecilia is often depicted in statues, paintings, stained glass, and tapestries. Typically, she is carrying a small portative organ, and often, she’s depicted mishandling it. Assuming the Saint to be of average height, the organ is 18 or 24 inches high, with perhaps 20 notes. She’s looking off to one side, and the organ droops out of her hands, a few pipes slipping loose—I imagine that in a few seconds the pipes will clatter to the ground. I’ve asked around a little, but haven’t found anyone who has a good explanation or theory for why it’s okay for the good saint to be so careless! If anyone in the Organ Clearing House did that, they’d be on a bus home pretty quick.
Musicians throughout the Christian world celebrate St. Cecilia Day, honoring her memory for professing her faith through song. Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and George Frideric Handel are among the many who composed music dedicated to the saint. Benjamin Britten was born on the Feast of St. Cecilia in 1913 and aspired to write a piece in homage to the saint, but struggled to find an appropriate Latin text. W. H. Auden wrote the poem that Britten set to music in his Hymn to St. Cecilia.
November 22 is the date of a few auspicious musical events. In 1928, Ravel’s Boléro was premiered in Paris, and in 1968, The Beatles released their album, The Beatles, known by music lovers as “The White Album.”
Singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote his own homage to St. Cecilia, released in 1970 in Simon & Garfunkel’s album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. According to the website Genius.com, Simon has said that his lyrics are a reflection on St. Cecilia as an elusive muse, depicted as a troubling lover (“ . . . you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily . . .”). I don’t know if Purcell or Handel had such struggles—both have much richer catalogues than Paul Simon—but we have heard from Benjamin Britten’s partner Peter Pears, that as W. H. Auden submitted his poem to Britten in installments, he included hints as to how Britten might become a better artist. Ouch!
Gathering horsefeathers
I was a freshman at Oberlin in the fall of 1974, and that year on November 22, the grand Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. E. Power Biggs, Charles Fisk, Harald Vogel, and Dirk Flentrop were among the luminaries who participated in roundtable discussions, and Marie-Claire Alain played the opening recital. I don’t remember the program, but I do remember the encore. She eschewed the usual fireworks and offered Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40). Mr. Biggs received an honorary doctorate of music.
The Flentrop organ was dedicated to the memory of George Whitfield Andrews, longtime professor of organ at Oberlin, and was funded by Oberlin alumnus Frank Chapman Van Cleef, whose wife had studied with Dr. Andrews, and whose family members had been students at Oberlin in every decade but two of the school’s existence from its founding in 1833 until the 1970s! After graduating from Oberlin in 1904, Van Cleef earned a degree in law at Columbia and later founded a financial management firm in New York. He retired in 1948 and returned to Oberlin. I recall meeting him during that week in November of 1974 in the hallway by Haskell Thomson’s teaching studio. We were introduced, and I thanked him for his gift. He was 94, I was 18.
Frank Van Cleef is not the first wealthy elderly patriarch to be encouraged to write a memoir. Gathering Horsefeathers is the third installment in a trilogy, a goofy history of his life with his family, replete with tales of designing houses, arguing about shrubbery, killing rattlesnakes (really?), and ultimately, rallying his family to donate the funds for the new organ. I was amused to note that early in his career, while he and his first wife were planning the construction of their first house, they lived on the twenty-second floor (looking south) of One Fifth Avenue in New York. That building is a few blocks from where we live in Greenwich Village—I can see it through my office window if I swivel my chair. Looking south provides an expansive view of Washington Square Park, and in 1928, there wasn’t much else that tall except the 57-story Woolworth Building (built in 1913) on Broadway, between Park and Barclay Streets, across from City Hall Plaza, one and a half miles away.
The story of the Flentrop organ fills the last pages of Van Cleef’s book, presumably placing the experience as a high point in his life. He tells how Oberlin president Robert Fuller (his next door neighbor) and professor of organ Fenner Douglas came to him (by appointment) one evening, inviting him to support the project. As he tells it, his son John (Oberlin ’31) was present, and later the family agreed that Frank, his four children, and their spouses would support the entire cost of the project.
My musty copy of this little book has been on the shelves of all the offices in which I’ve worked. I bought it that weekend in Oberlin because I had met the man, and I suppose I read it then. As I read today, I reflect on the dozens of people I’ve met who have given generously to fund the design and construction of new organs.
Horsefeathers? The jacket flaps explain. They’re the long hairs on a horse’s fetlocks, and they have no particular purpose. (I know that Mr. Van Cleef was a horseman because he was on horseback when he killed the rattlesnake!) In his words, horsefeathers are “something you do for the public good, something that has no use for you.”
Some old friends
Mr. Van Cleef’s gift provided a platform for the education of hundreds of organists. 1974 was the heart of the Orgelbewegung movement—the time when American organists and organbuilders were in the thrall of classic styles of organ building and playing, when so-called “factory built” organs lost favor among many. In retrospect, I think that the movement was less about the oft-repeated battle between tracker and electric actions, but the realization that the collapse of the economy in 1929 and especially the economic impact of World War II led to the diminution of artistic integrity of American organs.
The Aeolian-Skinner organ in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel was considered “second-class,” and the town was crawling with Flentrops. Including the organ in the Episcopal Church, practice and teaching organs, and the big red one in Warner Hall, there were more than a dozen Flentrops in town.
It’s a long time since I played on that organ, but I remember it vividly. It was a thrill to sit surrounded by the cases, those huge pedal pipes visible in the corner of your eye. Leaving behind all the conflicting philosophies and vitriol that gushed in those days, that organ simply sounded beautiful. Each knob you drew brought a new touch of magic. The sound was lively, the action immediate and personal. That organ was mighty important to my formation as an organist.
Harvard Square
When I was growing up in the Boston area, Harvard Square was just the place. In 1956, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. installed a three-manual organ in St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School). Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music, was the organist of the chapel, the young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs (who had taught at Longy) lived nearby, and Daniel Pinkham was Biggs’s young protégé. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall while that organ was being installed, with its (terribly) low wind pressures, exposed Great and Positiv chests, and open toe holes. Those musicians, at the core of the revival movement, must have had some fascinating conversations in that crowded loft.
My father taught homiletics at E.T.S, and when I was clamoring to have organ lessons, he took me to Alastair Cassels-Brown, the chapel organist. The Holtkamp was the second organ I ever played. The first, ironically, was the 1904 E. M. Skinner organ at the Parish of the Epiphany in nearby Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad was rector, and I was about to “baritone” out of the youth choir to join the adults. The Skinner was in dreadful condition and was replaced in 1974 with a new organ by Fisk.
I was also excited to be allowed to practice on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at Christ Church (Episcopal), Zero Garden Street, in Cambridge, the church famous for its Revolutionary War-era bullet hole and its “George Washington sat here” pew. Daniel Hathaway was the organist there and was very kind to me. Many years later, I was to maintain that organ, build a new console for it, and then arrange for its sale as the church purchased a new organ from Schoenstein in 2006. The Organ Clearing House dismantled the Aeolian-Skinner for shipment—it was rebuilt by Quimby Pipe Organs and installed in a church in Sugarland, Texas.
The Busch
After having given weekly radio broadcasts for sixteen years on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, in 1958 E. Power Biggs commissioned Flentrop to build a three-manual organ for the resonant but intimate room. Shortly after its installation, Biggs presented the Flentrop to the world through his record-breaking series of recordings on Columbia Masterworks, Bach Organ Favorites. (It’s still the best- selling series of solo classical recordings.) A few days ago, friend and colleague John Panning, of the Dobson Organ Company, posted photos of the organ on Facebook. His caption read:
Yesterday I enjoyed the opportunity to play what I consider the most influential 20th-century organ in the United States. The 1958 Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum was not the first Organ Reform instrument in the country, but E. Power Biggs’ many recordings of it brought the gospel of the Orgelbewegung to an enormous audience, including me. Even today, jaded by subsequent developments, it still impresses as a tremendously beautiful organ.
I first heard that Flentrop as a young teenager when mentors took me to hear Biggs play several recitals. At the conclusion of one of those programs, chock full of Sweelinck, Buxtehude, and Bach, Mr. Biggs sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and told us that he’d be happy to play another piece, but that he’d “run out of baroque music” (yeah, right!), and gave us Charles Ives’s Variations on ‘America.’
Calliope
In Greek mythology, Calliope was one of the nine muses, representing eloquence and epic poetry. She defeated the daughters of the King of Thessaly in a singing competition, but instead of receiving a cash prize, professional concert management, and a recording contract, Calliope turned her opponents into magpies. Calliope was the name of the ship that left Rotterdam in the spring of 1977, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed up the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Erie to the Port of Cleveland where it delivered the Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.
I was working for Jan Leek, a native of the Netherlands, who had immigrated to the United States in 1961 to work for Walter Holtkamp. When they were installing the Holtkamp in Warner Hall at Oberlin, John noted that the school was looking for an organ technician, and knew that was the job for him. I worked for Jan part-time and summers when I was a student, and as he left the school to form his own company, I worked full time with him for four years after I graduated. Jan, as a true Dutchman, was friendly with the folks at Flentrop, and we were engaged to help with the installation of the big three-manual organ at Trinity Cathedral.
It was the summer before my senior year, and the first time I had participated in the installation of a large organ. We arrived at the cathedral to meet the truck bearing the overseas container. I carried a couple things up those stone stairs that were not featured in the Oberlin Flentrop—including a tied bundle of Swell shutters. What goes around, comes around! And there was Daniel Hathaway on the front steps of the cathedral, just arrived from Cambridge to start his magnificent tenure as director of music.Daniel and I played several duo-recitals using the cathedral’s two Flentrops (there’s a fifteen-stop job on a platform that rolls about the nave), treating audiences to Beethoven symphonies (3, 5, and 6), and Rossini overtures played in Werckmeister III.
Michael Jupin had been the associate rector of the Parish of the Epiphany when Dad was rector—he was now dean of Trinity Cathedral. Pat Quintin and I were married in that church in October of 1979 with my father officiating, assisted by his former assistant, my grandfather, uncle, and godfather (all priests). For the rest of his life, Dad loved to tell the story of how I shouted registration suggestions to Daniel Hathaway down the length of the nave during the wedding rehearsal the evening before. (Yup, I did that. . . .)
The organ’s main case is twenty-five feet tall, and the whole thing is perched on a high loft. There was scaffolding and lots of heavy lifting. I was outfitted with a rig of leather straps like the flagpole carrier in a parade, so I could put the toe of a big tin façade pipe in a little cup strapped to my waist, and climb a ladder using both hands while co-workers preceded me sixteen feet above, balancing the top. My knees are almost sixty years old now, and things are different.
All the façade pipes were in place, and as we left the cathedral, we turned and looked back at the organ. The late afternoon sun was flooding the organ with red and blue light, and I burst into tears. Organs still do that to me.
And on the other hand . . .
Those Flentrop organs are terrific instruments, and they played a huge role in the history of the pipe organ in America in the twentieth century. But in those days, I also learned about the beauties of electro-pneumatic action, especially working with Jan Leek in the big Aeolian-Skinner at Church of the Covenant in Cleveland. And when I returned to Boston in 1984, I was lucky to get to care for the tremendous organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square. The regular Friday noontime recitals were an important part of my education, as each week I heard a different artist playing the same organ. Some were terrified of it, some would have rather played a tracker, and some made magic happen.
Now, more than forty years out of high school, I’ve worked with and played hundreds of instruments. Of course, some are unremarkable, but most of them bring to mind a story, a lesson learned, a mystery revealed, or simply a great place to have lunch nearby. I remember where I was the moment I grasped the concept of electro-pneumatic actions, the time the blower was running backwards, and the two times I’ve fallen. It’s fun to think back about those that stand out and how their histories are interwoven with my experience. I’ve had plenty of conversations with friends and colleagues about the organs that influenced them and played important roles in their careers, and I bet lots of readers are remembering their favorites right now. I’d love to hear your stories.
