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In the wind . . .

January 3, 2006
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We’re going in circles.

Have you noticed? I grew up in Boston in the 1960s and ’70s in what was a thrilling time for the art of organbuilding. Charles Fisk was well into his brilliant and innovative—and sadly foreshortened—career. Fritz Noack had established his company and was building the first of an impressive succession of instruments. Churches in the area were commissioning instruments from a wide variety of American and European builders, and organists and students of the organ were delving into the relationships between these “newfangled”—or was it “oldfangled”—tracker-action organs and the music of the baroque era that had inspired the concepts behind them.

The Organ Historical Society was an important part of that revolution—America’s nineteenth-century heritage of organbuilding was being rediscovered and celebrated. We recognized how many wonderful venerable instruments had been sacrificed to make way for the “new-fangled” electro-pneumatic organs of the early twentieth century. By the time I graduated from high school there were two Fisk organs in my hometown, and I was organist of a church in the next town that has a three-manual Hook organ built in 1860. I thought I knew all I needed to know.

I was a freshman at Oberlin in 1974, the year that the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. That organ has plenty of mutations, historically inspired reeds, suspended and “unbushed” tracker action. It was tuned in Werckmeister III, an historic temperament that sounds wonderful in many keys (let’s say for simplicity, up to four sharps or flats), but when I played Widor for one of my required performances and wound up in B-flat minor, I felt it in my fillings. And of course, that performance was offered without the grace or benefit of a Swell box. Forgive me, Charles-Marie.

While I was a student at Oberlin, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland received a three-manual Flentrop organ, and I was privileged to work with the team from Holland installing it. You don’t forget the first day of an installation, when the organ in parts is unloaded from a shipping container and carried up the front steps of the church. It’s heavy work. And I’ll not forget noticing a crate that contained Celeste pipes, or realizing that I was carrying a bundle of Swell shutters. I was perhaps too naïve to realize all the implications, but that sure seemed like part of a circle.

Recently I had a lengthy conversation and correspondence with several colleagues that set me to thinking about this circle and what it means to our art. The exchange started when the organbuilding firm Juget-Sinclair of Montreal announced an open house at which they would exhibit the new organ they had built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. (Visit their website at http://www.cam.org/~sinc/.) The e-mails started flying between organbuilders John Brombaugh, Hellmuth Wolff, and Karl Wilhelm. John remembered that the first time he met Hellmuth and Karl was in Wellesley during the installation of that church’s Casavant organ. (It’s no secret that the Casavant was installed in 1964, so these guys were younger then than they are now!) John also told us that at the moment he was involved with the relocation of the organ he built for the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio (Opus 9, 1972). That congregation was moving to a new building and their original sanctuary had been sold to a congregation with musical priorities that did not involve a Brombaugh organ. The organ would be installed temporarily at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York (where it will presumably be available to students at the Eastman School of Music) until its permanent home at Sonoma University is ready.

When a new organ is finished, the builder might be proud of his accomplishment, relieved to be finished with particular complications, excited about moving on to the next project—but he is certainly not imagining that the organ he just finished will be replaced in thirty or forty years. Pipe organs seem permanent. I’ve had contact with many people who are surprised when they realize that an organ can be taken apart and moved. They thought it was part of the building. But isn’t an organ an expression of its builder’s current philosophy? While an organbuilder might hope that his work would never be replaced, would it be good for organbuilding in general if churches routinely purchased two new organs every century?

Because I had been involved in arranging the sale of the Wellesley Casavant to St. Theresa’s Roman Catholic Church in South Hadley, Massachusetts, I jumped into the conversation explaining that while the people of St. Andrew’s remained dedicated to the concept of tracker action, they felt they would benefit from having an instrument with more emphasis on fundamental tone. I added that the Organ Clearing House had relocated an instrument built by Hellmuth Wolff (Opus 17, 1976), installing it in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Durham, North Carolina. It was a coincidence that St. Paul’s previous instrument was a one-manual organ built by John Brombaugh—and rather than being replaced, the Brombaugh was moved to the front of the church where it is used as a liturgical organ.

As I was writing that letter I remembered an amusing and poignant story about Ernest Skinner, an organbuilder whose brilliant innovations in many ways defined the twentieth-century American organ. He who gave us pitman stop action, whiffle-tree Swell engines, French Horns, and vertical-selector combination actions, and who built instruments that emphasized fundamental tone, colorful orchestral solo stops, and shimmering strings was later criticized for failing to keep up with fast-changing trends, insisting that his instruments were the ideal and should not be changed. The story I refer to was quoted in All the Stops, the wonderful book about the twentieth-century American pipe organ written by Craig Whitney (PublicAffairs, 2003). (If you haven’t read this book yet, you’ve missed much. You can order it from the OHS catalogue: http://store.yahoo.com/ohscata log/crrwhallst.html.)


Whitney wrote:


Skinner was effectively frozen out of the company that bore his name, associated with it now in name only. But it was not only at Aeolian-Skinner that tastes were changing. To the romantic-orchestral organ that Skinner had built in the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1922, the young Cleveland organbuilder Walter Holtkamp added in 1933 something new and revolutionary—a small rückpositiv division designed along German classical lines. Though technically the term applied only to that part of a baroque organ that was detached from the rest and behind the organist’s back, typically in the gallery of a church, Holtkamp’s imitation was freestanding, playable via electro-pneumatic connections to the organ console, but its clear-speaking high-pitched stops were intended to produce a brighter tonality than the rest of the Skinner organ had. The addition produced much comment among organists and other builders, and it was seen as another blow to Skinner’s now old-hat notions that an organ should try to imitate an orchestra. At an organists’ convention, [Dorothy] Holden’s biography relates, Holtkamp saw Skinner standing alone, ignored now that he had gone out of fashion, and thought, ‘Now, this is a perfect shame! There stands one of the greatest figures in the art of organ-building, and all those sissies are afraid to go up to speak to him, for fear they might lose face among their peers!’ As Holtkamp told the story to Robert Bates, an organist friend, he went up to Skinner and said, “Mr. Skinner, I am Walter Holtkamp from Cleveland, and I just want to thank you for all you have meant and done for the art of organ-building through your splendid career.” Apparently, “Cleveland” was all that registered on Skinner, who was by then hard of hearing, and rejoined, “Cleveland! Say, you know, I have one of my best organs out there in the Art Museum, and some damn fool has come along and just ruined it.”1



I finished my letter to John Brombaugh saying: “Poor Skinner’s organ only lasted 11 years before Holtkamp got his hands on it. A Rückpositiv in 1933—who knew?” That was a pretty radical innovation for 1933. We raise the question, did Walter Holtkamp improve the Cleveland Museum’s organ? Who is the judge of that?

Should we alter works of art? We wouldn’t change a portrait by Rembrandt because Parisian clothing designers are featuring green this year or because it’s not stylish to put feathers in hats these days. We wouldn’t change a Shakespeare play because the word methinks isn’t part of every day speech now.
We would, however, alter an historic building by installing wheelchair ramps and elevators. Those instances where we condone such alterations often have to do with usefulness. You don’t have to consider the usefulness of a painting or sculpture. It is what it is. It’s a snapshot of an instant from another time. We can appreciate it (whether or not we like it) as an artist’s expression and we don’t depend on it for anything else.

Organs are different. A fine organ stands as a work of art, but it is also a tool to be used by contemporary artists to another artistic end. And, more than any other instrument, the organist is stuck with the instrument. If you are the regular organist of a church, all you do must be done with the existing instrument. If you are traveling to play a concert in a distant city, you must channel your creativity through whatever instrument you encounter.

When an organ is playing, the art of the builder, the player, and the composer are being combined to create yet another artwork, which is the performance itself—a virtual, temporary structure that thrills, moves, excites, or angers the listener, and that is gone as soon as the sound dies away. What’s more, it might thrill one listener and anger another. And each listener is responding to each component—the playing, the music, and the instrument. Does this view of performing music give the player license to propose alterations to the instrument, or more to my point, to replace the instrument with another?
There are of course many reasons why an organ might be relocated. Sometimes a parish has closed, either because its congregation has disbanded or merged with another. Sometimes an institution gets a new organist whose interests are different from those of predecessors. Sometimes, let’s face it, we are replacing an instrument that was never any good to begin with.

It is interesting to watch trends. We have spent a huge amount of energy relearning ancient skills, and developing new appreciations of early styles. E. Power Biggs and his contemporaries took us on virtual tours of older European organs (using the vinyl conveyances of the day). We assimilated, imitated, and built on the sounds we heard then. That work gave us greater ability to analyze and understand the components of sound, allowing us new ways to appreciate other styles. If we were devoted to the examples left by Arp Schnitger in the eighteenth century, suddenly we could appreciate and understand anew what Ernest Skinner was up to in 1920.

There was a wonderful moment at the convention of the Organ Historical Society in North Carolina in 2001 when on Wednesday, June 27, the convention visited the chapel at Duke University, home to three excellent and wildly varying pipe organs. There were three recitals—Mark Brombaugh played on the Flentrop organ, Margaret Irwin-Brandon played on the Brombaugh, and Ken Cowan played on the Aeolian. We were taken from Scheidemann to Wagner, from Liszt to Frescobaldi, from Buxtehude to Bossi all in a single day. What a dazzling display of the variety of the pipe organ and its music, and how passionately people defended their preferences as the buses took us back to Winston-Salem! I thought it would have been fun to have each of the performers play on each of the organs, but I had trouble finding supporters.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist . . .

A good friend of mine is a terrific singer whose husband is an astrophysicist. He works in a Smithsonian-affiliated lab at Harvard University using a telescope in Arizona that he operates remotely by computer. Once at a party Jane was asked what it’s like to live with such a brilliant person. “You know how they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist?” she replied. “There are lots of things around the house that really don’t need a rocket scientist!”

Now I’m no rocket scientist, but I know there’s a navigation trick called a gravitational slingshot that’s used to propel interplanetary probes through space. The vehicle is steered toward a planet and makes use of that body’s gravity to fling itself further into space. For example, on August 27, 1981, Voyager 2 used the gravity of Saturn to fling itself toward Uranus, where it arrived on January 30, 1986.2
I wonder if a gravitational slingshot could be used to break the circle and send the art of organbuilding to new places, new concepts, and new plateaus. It seems to me that many of the more recent innovations in organbuilding have been “returns” to one idea or another. When Craig Whitney described Holtkamp’s addition of a Rückpositiv as “new and revolutionary,” he was in fact referring to a concept that was some five hundred years old. We reach back through history to recreate the technology of the slider windchest and of voicing organ pipes on low wind pressures just as we reach back through history to understand again the glory of high-pressure reeds and air-tight swell boxes. We have incorporated computer technology to duplicate and enhance the registration equipment developed early in the twentieth century. We have built new organs using ancient architectural elements and we have modified those ancient elements to incorporate them in contemporary designs. But I suggest that no specific instrument or style of instrument, and the work of no one organbuilder can stand for the future of the instrument.

Igor Stravinsky assimilated all the tools of musical composition he had inherited and produced music that startled the world. And that music that caused riots when it was first performed is celebrated today as part of the wealth of musical expression. Is the future of the pipe organ based on the comparison between the instruments of early eighteenth-century Europe and early twentieth-century America or can we assimilate all we’ve inherited to create new concepts for the organ, new ways to use the organ, and new ways to listen to it?