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In the Wind . . .

March 30, 2005
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John Bishop, executive director of the Organ Clearing House, graduated from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a degree in Organ Performance. He has had a 30-year career as a church musician, most recently serving for 17 years as director of music at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. His activities as an organ builder started with summer jobs as a teenager with Bozeman & Associates, and include nine years with J.G.P. Leek of Oberlin, Ohio, three years with Angerstein & Associates of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and the last 14 years as President of the Bishop Organ Company, Inc. As an organ builder, he has purchased several organs through the Organ Clearing House, with the assistance of longtime director, the late Alan Laufman. He is active in the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. For the past four years, Mr. Bishop was the author of the monthly column, “Miscellanea Organica,” in The American Organist.

The pipe organ gives us all a lot to talk about. We can trace its history back to the panflutes of the sixth century B.C. The hydraulis, the earliest real pipe organ we know of (complete with keyboard, a mechanical action controlling valves, pipes blown by air, and a regulated wind supply) was created by Tsebius of Alexandria in about 246 B.C. It’s depicted so accurately in an ancient mosaic that modern working reconstructions have been built using that image as a guide. We study the history of the instrument, comparing musical styles, voicing techniques, and mechanical innovations between regions and eras. We debate whether a certain organ is suitable for the performance of a particular piece. The organ is the subject of many scholarly books rife with numbers, charts, and appendices—comprehensible and interesting to organbuilders, but no more accessible to most organ lovers than celestial navigation or ancient Greek.

We need this minutia. Without it we would not be able to understand and appreciate the richness of the instrument. But beyond that, the instrument is a marvel, a source of joy and inspiration, in one sense un-understandable. I’ve worked in organbuilding since I was a teenager and I love those studies of numbers, history, and style. But it wasn’t the numbers that first attracted me to the organ. When you participate in a grand hymn in a great acoustic your spirit soars, not because of your awareness of the organbuilder’s proclivity with the numbers but because there is something magic about how all that sound comes from moving all that air.

It’s indescribable.

To be sure, it’s indescribable in part because we’ve done such a good job describing it—making it technically possible, but if the description overshadows the mystery we’ve lost a special something. It’s breathtaking because it’s founded on breath.

Takes your breath away

I’ve loved Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night for as long as I can remember. An art history professor at Oberlin College helped me understand it a little better than I could have just by seeing it on T-shirts, mouse pads, or coffee mugs. But I’ll not forget the first time I saw the painting itself, exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rounding a corner into a gallery I was stunned, gasping, weeping. It did not take my breath away because I could say something erudite about brush strokes or color contrasts. It simply took my breath away.

I am excited to have this opportunity to share thoughts about our grand instrument with you. I feel honored to share these pages with the many scholars who help us better understand the instrument and its music. And I hope you will join me using that understanding as a tool for ever better communication between us inside the organ world and the public of lay people upon whom we depend as both consumers and patrons—those who appreciate our playing and our instruments, those who fund the purchase and maintenance of this most wildly expensive of instruments and upon whom we depend for its presence in future generations.

I’ve heard colleagues refer to that public as “the great unwashed.” Does this imply that we are somehow better, cleaner, than those who are not familiar with the intricacies of the organ, who think that Toccata and Fugue in D minor was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, or who commit the unthinkable and unpardonable by applauding between the Prelude and the Fugue? Fully aware of our superiority we knowingly shake our heads, driving away a future organ lover with each successive wag. What’s wrong with a little misplaced enthusiasm?

A Möller’s impact

It should be our mission to share our enthusiasm with others. Last fall the Organ Clearing House was preparing to dismantle a monumental organ built by M. P. Möller in Philadelphia in the Civic Center, a truly mammoth building built in 1930 with 13,500 seats slated for demolition to make space for the expansion of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The organ was housed in chambers above the ceiling of the auditorium, 120 feet high, and had not been played in public since a convention of the Organ Historical Society in 1996, before that, not since the American Theatre Organ Society convention in 1990. By the time we were there surveying the organ, the building was full of hard-hats working on asbestos abatement, salvage operations, and the myriad details that precede the demolition of such a place. Because we were to have the support of several of the contracting firms involved for rigging, scaffolding, building crates and the like, many of these workers were aware that something was up with the organ.

Of course, we had to try to make the organ play. With the help of Brant Duddy, the Philadelphia organ technician who had for many years worked on the maintenance and renovation of the organ, we got the blowers running and the rectifiers turned on. We spent a few minutes pulling pipes to stop ciphers (there was a doozy in the bass of the 16’ Diaphone that must have been audible in Scranton) and, son-of-a-gun, it played! The consoles were on the two-acre floor of the auditorium (the same floor on which Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers had played) in front of the stage (the same stage on which Franklin Roosevelt accepted his nomination for a second term as President in front of the 1936 Democratic National Convention), below the tiers of thousands of seats (from which audiences had heard the likes of The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, and The Metropolitan Opera). As I played there came a procession of more than a hundred hard hats through the many doors into the auditorium and down the aisles toward the console as though I was accompanying some huge and bizarre Christmas pageant. It would have been perfect had they been carrying candles—we settled for flashlights and electric hand tools. They came to experience this acoustic-mechanical magic. I played the National Anthem and some measures of Widor. Someone asked for The Phantom of the Opera. I played Bach.

As our work progressed over the following weeks, many of these men and women visited us in the organ, expressing their amazement at the spectacle of all that material (16 semi-trailers full) adding up to a musical instrument. You don’t need to be in such an outlandish setting to make an impression. Show a good pipe organ to someone who has never been near one, and you’re sure to make a big impression.

What an organ.

It has 86 ranks of pipes. Twenty of them are reeds. Four of those are Tubas! Who ever heard of an organ with four independent Tubas? Three of the Tubas are in the Solo Division—Tuba Profunda, Tuba Sonora, and Tuba Mirabilis. Really! There’s a 32’ Double Open Wood Diapason that’s twenty-five inches square at CCCC and a 32’ Contra Bombarde that’s twenty-two inches in diameter—some of the largest (and heaviest) organ pipes I’ve ever seen. The lowest wind pressure is 10≤. There’s a windchest in the Great with 22⁄3’, 2’, 13⁄5’, 11⁄3’ 11⁄7’, and 1’—on ten inches of pressure! Tuners, how do you like that thought?

Did you catch the plural when I mentioned consoles? On the floor in front of the left-hand end of the stage was an elegant four-manual drawknob console. At the right-hand end, a four-manual theatre console with more than two hundred stop tablets in a variety of colors arranged on horseshoe-shaped stop rails. Because of the immense distance between consoles and pipes, and the unusual power of the organ, there is an independent tuning keyboard in each of the four chambers complete with stop controls. Added up, this is surely the only twelve-manual organ Möller ever built! (See photo: “A Twelve-Manual Organ.”)

A bipolar Möller

The drawknob console, known as the classic console, controls a very powerful and colorful straight organ with fully developed principal choruses, lots of strings and celestes, beautiful flutes, and a wide range of reed tone. Only one of the ranks of pipes in the complete roster is not included in the classic specification—an 8’ Kinura of seventy-three notes. (A Kinura is a reed stop something like a Trumpet without resonators that produces a characteristic bleating tone commonly found in theatre organs.) To get at that, you have to move to the theatre console where you also find all the toys and gadgets you could hope for, including but not limited to Song Birds I, Song Birds II, Sleigh Bells I, Sleigh Bells II, Auto Horn, Telephone Bell, Fire Gong, Steamboat Whistle, Locomotive Whistle, Siren, Factory Gong, Surf, Door Bell, Aeroplane, Chinese Gong, Persian Cymbal, Grand Crash, Glass Crash. There are a half-dozen different drums that can either tap or roll, and an array of percussions like castanets, tambourines, and Chinese Block (tap or roll). Top it off with four different tuned percussions (Harp, Celesta, Glockenspiel, Orchestral Bells) and a piano with a vacuum-powered player-piano style action, and you’ve got quite a sandbox to play in.

Before we dismantled this mighty organ I spent ten days studying it. If all goes well we will put it back together someday so we needed to learn as much as we could about it. We preserved the electro-pneumatic relays as a Rosetta stone for making the organ work again. Those automobile-sized machines that filled an entire room were the key to how the engineers at Möller made it possible for one organ to have two personalities. It’s enough of a trick for an organbuilder to conceive of a cohesive instrument—one in which choruses blend with themselves and with each other and in which reeds can both contrast and complement flues. It’s a much greater achievement to produce a single instrument that allows two styles of playing that are so radically different. I value highly the recording made by Tom Hazleton provided to me by Brant Duddy which juxtaposes Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique with Hazleton’s own Oklahoma Medley. Individually each sounds terrific—comparing the two seems nearly improbable. You can hardly imagine that both are played on the same organ.

The theatre console plays nineteen ranks of the organ--those ranks with unit actions. There are sixteen different tremolos that turn on singly or in combination. For example, a tablet on the theatre console marked Woodwinds Vibrato turns on 5 tremolos in four different chambers. The piano plays at various pitches on every keyboard. There are toe studs that control the piano’s damper and sostenuto pedals, and pistons, tablets and toe studs that play all the percussions and toys. There’s a piston (duplicated with toe stud) engraved “Change Title,” part of the razzmatazz of accompanying movies.

It took something like four hundred fifty person-days to dismantle, pack, and store this organ. Remember, every piece had to be lowered more than a hundred feet to the floor. This was all made possible by the University of Pennsylvania as part of their effort to preserve something of the heritage of this heroic building.

The organ is safely stored. The floor of the organ chamber was 120 feet above the floor of the auditorium. The organ did not speak directly into the hall, but toward the front of the hall away from the audience, above the stage, into a tone chute 100 feet wide, 17 feet deep, and 45 feet high. The organ’s sound came down that tone chute through grillework in the ceiling in front of the proscenium arch, projecting back under the organ, a change of direction of 180 degrees. From that disadvantage it filled the 400’ x 175’ x 120’ room. Eighty-six ranks make a good-size organ, but not a behemoth. This organ is a behemoth. It would be a rare church that could house it. It’s unbelievably loud. How about a baseball stadium?  I already know the National Anthem.

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