Bridging generations
My mother’s maternal grandmother was born in 1884 and passed away in 1988 at the age of a hundred-and-four. We visited her each year, so I knew her well through my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Her husband (who died many years earlier) was a silk merchant. When they were first married, she joined him on trips to China, traveling on the last clipper ships. My sons were five and six years old when she died, so for six years there were five generations of our family alive at the same time. Unusual enough, but what really excites my imagination is the fact that she was thirteen years old when Brahms died. While I know she played the piano (I have her piano and her collection of sheet music), I’m certain she never heard Brahms play—but she could have. When she was born, Chester Allen Arthur was president of the United States. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Also sprach Zarathustra in 1883, Louis Pasteur administered a successful rabies vaccination in 1885, and the Apache chief Geronimo surrendered in 1886. My great-grandmother lived nineteen years after the first man walked on the moon. She lived through the Spanish-American War, and the Vietnam War, and the invasion of Grenada. She saw a lot of change.
I was about eight years old when my mother’s paternal grandmother died—she was in her late nineties. The family took care to note that her grandmother was alive during the American Revolution, so we can link 1775 to 2008 through the life spans of three overlapping family members.
I got thinking about the passage of generations last month when I wrote about the death of G. Donald Harrison, the great organbuilder who as artistic leader of Aeolian-Skinner created so many extraordinary instruments. I mentioned that his death occurred a couple months after I was born. A week or two after I wrote that column, we heard of the death of Sidney Eaton, a significant and eccentric but mostly unknown figure in the organ world. Sid lived in North Reading, Massachusetts, for his entire life, and was known to a few of us 21st-century Boston organ-guys as Ernest Skinner’s pipe maker. Sid told us stories that let us picture him in a workroom near Mr. Skinner’s voicing room, where he was available to make up the latest new-fangled pipe coming from Skinner’s fertile imagination. For example, why can’t we solder together two metal cones (wide-end to wide-end) and then solder that to a narrow tapered tube to form a reed resonator—the English Horn, voila! Sid claimed that he made the first.
Sid was 99 years old when he died, and it’s safe to say he was a little nutty. Maybe he spent too much time alone during his life, and maybe he blew on a few too many lead pipes. (Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? That was an early recording of occupational illnesses—hat-makers used mercury as an agent for brushing felt; the mercury damaged their brains.) A conversation with Sid Eaton was a little like a cubist painting—each sentence was both upside-down and inside-out, but if you stood back and listened from a figurative distance, you could tell what his point was.
I lived in North Reading for several years, and when I met Sid I felt I’d found a gold mine of organ-lore, and also the most easily accessible pipe-maker ever. I could stop at his house on my way home to drop off pipes needing repairs, reeds to be mitered, or for advice about how to treat a particular problem. But I could never assume a quick stop—Sid always had something on his fuzzy mind that would take longer than I intended. Once when I knocked, he came to his door in his birthday suit. I suggested he might put on some clothes, but he protested it was too hot. He sent me letters that were unique because he used five or six different colors of ink to accentuate his points, and wrote poems and drew pictures on the envelopes.
I loved visiting with him because he had so many stories about people I would never have met. He admired Mr. Skinner and was devoted to the memory of working with him. He knew that what they were doing was important, even revolutionary, and he was proud to be part of it.
I met Jason McKown in 1987 when he was in his late eighties and retiring from the organ maintenance business. He had cared for the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston for more than fifty years, and for those at the First Church of Christ Scientist (The Mother Church) for more than thirty. But more to my current point, he too had worked directly and personally with Mr. Skinner. He helped with the installation of the Skinner organ in the West Medford Congregational Church, West Medford, Massachusetts (Opus 692, 1928). At the same time, he started caring for the Skinner organ at the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Reading, Massachusetts (Opus 236, 1915). I took over the care of those organs as Jason retired and have been conscious ever since that the only person between me and Mr. Skinner was Jason McKown. (By the way, both of those organs still have their original leather and are played regularly.) It was a privilege to spend so much time with him, and a thrill to hear the stories he had to tell. He was present when Louis Vierne played the organ at Trinity Church, Boston, and he tuned the Skinner organ at King’s Chapel in Boston in preparation for a recital played by Marcel Dupré.
Jason’s wife Ruth was a classmate of former AGO president Roberta Bitgood. She was a church organist most of her life and she often held keys for Jason when he was tuning. The McKowns were members of Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, where they lived—Ruth was organist there for some time. In 1972 the church purchased a three-manual organ from Casavant (Opus 3178); Jason took meticulous care of the organ until his death in 1989.
Centre Methodist Church closed in 2006, and the Organ Clearing House relocated the organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia, completing the installation in November 2007. It was fun to continue my relationship with Jason in this way, and my memories of him were strengthened by the time I spent in his church last year.
I know that many of my colleagues share with me the view that the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris is an important destination for organists and organbuilders. Any organist attending Mass there can easily pick out the other organists in the congregation. They are the ones who obviously know the music being played. They are the ones with tears in their eyes. They are the ones reveling in the opportunity to hear such an influential organ, there to be inspired by the same sounds that inspired Dupré and Widor. The first time I attended Mass at Saint-Sulpice, I paid special attention to the elderly parishioners, knowing that some of them must have been there with Marcel Dupré as their parish organist. I wonder which of them told him that the organ was too loud!
The people of that wonderful church are well aware of its musical heritage. The last Mass on Sunday morning includes a spoken welcome to any organists who may be visiting, and the organ loft is open to visitors afterwards. What a wonderful feeling it is to climb the stairs to the loft knowing how many of our idolized musicians did so earlier. Think of the famous photo of Albert Schweitzer sitting on the bench next to Marcel Dupré . . .
In November 1974, the new Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall of the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. That was my freshman year, and a mighty exciting time it was. Marie-Claire Alain played the recital, and a terrific cast of characters was assembled to participate in the festivities, which included a round-table discussion with Charles Fisk, E. Power Biggs, Dirk Flentrop, and others. One evening, a classmate and I had the thrill of giving Mr. Biggs and his wife Peggy a tour of the conservatory’s facilities. I was eighteen years old and thought I knew a lot more then than I do now, but I sure remember how exciting it was to spend a few hours with someone so influential in my field.
The past becomes the future
Many of us who build and play pipe organs are purposefully informed by the past. We study the work and writings of composers, organists, and organbuilders, trying to understand how they thought and what they meant. We travel great distances to hear music played on the instruments and in the acoustics known by the composers. (I’ve written before about how Widor’s “Toccata” doesn’t sound the same at the First Congregational Church—you name the town—as it does in Saint-Sulpice.)
Ten years ago, I restored a beautiful organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook of Boston. It was informative to find the pencil marks of the original builder—they had very hard pencil leads, and they got them very sharp—as they gave insight into how precisely they worked. It was sometimes hard to see their marks under modern workshop lighting—I wondered how they did it without fluorescent tubes overhead. During this restoration project, the organ was 129 years old.
Keep the flame alive
Shortly before he died, Marcel Dupré wrote down a lot of his personal and musical memories in a simple book entitled Recollections, published by Belwin-Mills. In the author’s preface, Dupré writes that he had for years ignored requests that he write his memoirs, but that on the occasion of his eighty-fourth birthday he received so many encouragements that he acquiesced. It’s a simple small book, a quick and delightful read, and today there are two copies available at Amazon.com. Dupré tells stories of encounters with Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Guilmant, among others, and of course a great deal about his teacher and advocate, Charles-Marie Widor. While these are no more than the jotted-down memories of an old man, they are of immense historical value to us.
Here’s my confession. During all the time I spent with Sidney Eaton and Jason McKown, I never wrote anything down. I remember they each had special phrases they liked to use, and particular stories they told over and over. I remember that Sid liked eating peaches, particularly because he once offered me one that was so rotten I couldn’t imagine eating it. While I know I ate dozens of workday lunches with Jason, I can’t remember anything about what he liked to eat, or what he might have said about what Mr. Skinner liked to eat. I should have a couple notebooks full of direct recollections of Mr. Skinner and I don’t. That could have filled a whole lot of monthly columns.
I hope that this confession in writing will spur me to take advantage of the next time I realize I’m with someone who forms a meaningful link to the past. And I hope you will not miss opportunities as I have. Are you close to a former teacher who’s a generation older than you? I bet that teacher has memories of his teacher, of the installation of an important organ, of an earlier generation’s opinions about musical matters. Give a gift to those who follow you. Get it written down. Or get it on tape. There are any number of pocket-sized recording gadgets available now. Invite the maître to lunch, turn on the machine, and reap an historical document that will excite and inspire future generations.
