Is there really no such thing as bad publicity?
I had my first real job in an organbuilder’s workshop during the summer after my freshman year in college. I’ve often told the story of my first day--I was stationed outside in the parking lot by myself with the façade pipes of an old organ, sawhorses, a garden hose, and a gallon of Zipstrip®. I can imagine the previous week’s production meeting: “save it for the new kid!” It was a tough start, but it quickly got better. I remember that summer as a series of adventures as we worked on projects throughout New England, and I’m still at it.
Along with many other firsts I experienced that summer was my first exposure to media coverage of the pipe organ business. We were working in a church building installing a rebuilt instrument and a reporter from the local newspaper came to do a story that was published under a front-page photo that showed a colleague “voicing” a large organ pipe. I knew that what he had in his hands was a dummy façade pipe (one of those I had stripped)--it was both amazing and amusing to see how serious and erudite an organ builder can look while raising a virtual languid. (Remember “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?)
Five minutes of fame
Since then I have read many such stories in local newspapers. They often get some important technicality wrong, giving us a chance for a knowing snicker, but they have great value in raising public consciousness about the instrument. Many an organbuilder has been made a local celebrity by a photo and story published in a home-town newspaper. Alan Laufman, my predecessor at the Organ Clearing House, was notorious for seeking out the press whenever he went to work in a new town. He wasn’t looking for personal notoriety, he was spreading the word.
On a wider stage, Craig Whitney, veteran foreign correspondent and assistant managing editor of the New York Times as well as organist and organ-enthusiast, has published a number of excellent and informative articles in the Times in recent memory. In his articles, Mr. Whitney’s compelling writing focuses the interest of the layperson, and his reporting skills produce content profound enough to educate the professional. His contribution to our field is immeasurable. I have had countless conversations with people who respond to hearing what I do for a living by saying, “Pipe organ builder! I didn’t know there were any of you left.” But whenever one of Whitney’s articles is published in the Times, friends and family from around the country call to be sure I know about it, and for the following couple weeks, daily conversations with new acquaintances invariably lead to, “I just read a story in the Times about that.” It’s a special pleasure to be able to respond by saying that I agree it was a good story and he really got it right. For those few days, people seem to be aware of the organ business.
This subject is on my mind these days because of a story broadcast recently on WBUR, “Boston’s NPR News Station.” On January 18, 2005, the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts was destroyed by fire. The church’s organ was lost that night, robbing the neighborhood of the distinction of being home to two pre-Civil War three-manual organs built by E. & G. G. Hook. A month or so ago, I was approached by Keith O’Brien, a local freelance writer who was preparing a story for The Boston Globe about the loss of that organ. In the course of his conversations with church officials and members, he had learned about the work of The Organ Clearing House and asked me for an interview during which we discussed the preservation of nineteenth-century instruments, their artistic and historical value, and their relevance to modern music making.
Working on that story Mr. O’Brien became aware of the Organ Historical Society convention about to begin in southeastern Massachusetts, and began preparing a subsequent story for NPR. He asked me for another interview and I looked forward to hearing what seemed to be a well-conceived story. It was to be broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition so I knew I’d hear it first thing in the morning on the bedroom radio. There it was, the pleasure of hearing organ music on the radio news. But there was that familiar theme: “I didn’t know there were any of you left.”
Most organs don’t burn up
On the surface, the story was just fine. It was nice that the Organ Historical Society’s convention was noticed and mentioned so prominently in the press. The center of the story was the “resurrection” of an organ built in 1876 for Trinity Church in Boston by Hilborne Roosevelt, now installed in Our Lady of Guadalupe in New Bedford. The organ had been little used, seriously damaged by water due to leaks in the church’s roof and tower, completely silent for decades, and made playable again by heroic volunteer efforts on the part of OHS members. I’m certain that those listening to the story were compelled by the idea of a group of enthusiasts working hard to preserve a slice of antiquity. But I doubt that a listener would understand that there is any good reason for preserving antique organs. Following several comments that included phrases like “fumbling with the keys . . . “ that did little to impress the listener about the skills of an organbuilder, the clincher for me was when O’Brien said with reference to the Jamaica Plain fire, “most organs don’t burn up--they just fade away.” Yikes! I hope I’m never inside an organ when it fades away.
Who am I, and why am I here?
The story missed the point. Or as I reflected after hearing the story, I should have made a point of making the point: We are not a small sect of aficionados preserving antique organs to satisfy our own interests. Rather, we recognize the beauty and historicity of these instruments for their relevance to modern worship and modern music-making as well as for their antiquity. It’s special to realize that a century-old instrument is durable enough for regular use. But we must be sure to point out that it’s amazing that the instrument keeps its place in our modern society on its artistic merits as well. The pipe organ is not a relic from an earlier age--and neither are we who devote our lives to it.
The website of the Organ Historical Society, <www.organsociety.org>, is worth a visit. It will keep you current with the Society’s activities, and it’s a terrific place to shop for music and books. As I thought about the story on WBUR, I remembered that the Society’s bylaws are published on the website and I took a look to refresh my memory. Here’s the relevant excerpt:
2. PURPOSE. The Society is an international organization for friends of the organ. The purpose of the Society is:
(a) To encourage, promote, and further an active interest in the organ and its builders, particularly those in North America . . .
I think some words are missing--or perhaps a better way to put it, I think some missing words are implied. I doubt that the bylaws’ authors intended that the active interest we are to further should be limited to the “friends of the organ.” I believe that it is our responsibility to our art to broadcast its relevance, its beauty, its majesty whenever and wherever we can. If the organ world is considered arcane, mysterious, or worse irrelevant, how can we assure its future?
The cost of building a new pipe organ has increased dramatically since my introduction to Zipstrip®. When I was first in the organ business a new twelve-stop organ built by a premier builder was installed in my home town for about $36,000. Today, that sum will purchase somewhere between one and two stops. Imagine a hypothetical random survey of modern organists, asking them to write down an “ideal” stoplist. I bet most of them would show more than 50 stops. That hypothetical 50-stop “ideal” organ certainly costs more than a million dollars today. Put enough of those pesky 32s in the stoplist and you will exceed $1.5 million. That’s the equivalent of at least fifty or sixty years of the salary of many of the organists I know.
Any monumental public art work is the product of vision and ambition. It’s easy to underestimate the appropriate scope of the vision. The newly hired organist of a church can play on a tired old instrument for a few weeks and mention casually during coffee hour that the church needs a new organ. That’s an observation, not a vision. The vision--the credible, mature, thrilling vision that involves a new organ necessarily includes an understanding of the capabilities and priorities of the community. Does this mean that a vision has to be realistic? Perhaps a vision is realistic only to the visionary. Everyone else sees it as a fantasy until they are persuaded that it’s possible--until they can share the vision.
Seers have everything!
Cyrus Curtis (1850-1933) was a visionary. He founded the Curtis Publishing Company which brought him fame and fortune principally through the success of The Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Our culture would still be the richer if Curtis’ contribution was measured only by Norman Rockwell’s nearly half-century (1916-1963) of cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post. (Now that’s an important patronage!) Curtis grew up in Portland, Maine where Hermann Kotzschmar, organist of the family’s church, was one of his father’s closest friends, a friendship that was close enough that the son’s full name was Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. The young C.H.K. Curtis was so fascinated and inspired by Kotzschmar’s playing that he taught himself to play the organ well enough to master four-part hymns. As he achieved fantastic financial success, he installed instruments built by the Aeolian Organ Company in his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. Aeolian’s Opus 784 was built for Curtis in 1896 and enlarged by five ranks in 1903 as Opus 943. Opus 1374 was installed in the house in 1916, incorporating Opus 943 as the Antiphonal Organ.1 But the lasting proof of Cyrus H.K. Curtis’ devotion to the pipe organ is the grand instrument he gave to the City of Portland, built by the Austin Organ Company, dedicated to his father’s friend, and known to this day as The Kotzschmar Organ. Today the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (www.FOKO.org) oversees the maintenance of the instrument and presents a popular series of concerts each year.
Was it Cyrus Curtis’s vision that the organ he named for his father’s friend would still be in prominent public use, a beloved fixture of a small city nearly a century later? (It’s a safe bet that without the municipal organ, we would not remember that Hermann Kotzschmar was the organist of the First Parish Unitarian Church in Portland for 47 years.) Was he challenging people he would never meet--those people who formed The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ when a fiscal crisis ended the city’s financial support for the organ? How often do we take such grand public fixtures for granted? And let’s take a step back. Was it Cyrus Curtis’s idea to place the organ in City Hall, or did some enterprising bureaucrat approach the wealthy native son?
Portland is the largest city in Maine with a population of only 64,000 people. The population of the metropolitan area is about 230,000.2 If five percent of American cities that size had hundred-rank municipal organs, there would be a lot more people subscribing to The Diapason. And why not? It’s simply a matter of public relations. Is there a visionary in your town? I know where to find the organs! n
