When I was a kid . . .
KLH and WCRB
I grew up in the rectory of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector. Prominent on the shelves on the living room wall nearest the street was a KLH Model 24 “Hi-fi” and a collection of LPs. Dad wrote his sermons in the living room on Saturday nights using a typewriter set up on a card table facing the speakers of the KLH, listening to the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) on classical radio station WCRB. It was well understood that one entered that room on pain of death.
Once, a thief broke into the house, and the KLH was among the missing items. The police recovered a cache of stuff they thought might be ours, and asked my mother over the phone for details that would help identify it. She remembered that there was a Joan Sutherland recording on the turntable, and that turned the trick. The cache was returned with the record intact. Dame Joan saved the day.
WCRB was, and still is, the classical music radio station in Boston. When I was a kid, it was at 1330 AM and 102.5 FM (like so many things, those numbers have changed). The AM side was important because the Ford Falcon only had an AM radio. The theme music for WCRB’s afternoon rush-hour program, Drive Time, was the last movement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, op. 7, no. 6 (B-flat major), in a recording featuring Pierre Cochereau with a big orchestra. I thought his cadenzas were thrilling, but later realized they were “of a period,” romantic and virtuosic, un-Handelian. We heard that piece pretty much every day, singing along, and carrying the earworm through supper. WCRB was such a part of our family life that I played that concerto on my senior recital at Oberlin as a gift to my parents. I used a three-stop Flentrop chamber organ on the stage of Warner Concert Hall joined by a string quartet of friends and wrote my own cadenzas—a decidedly un-Cochereau-esque performance.
Richard L. Kaye was the manager of WCRB, and ultimately the chairman of its board of directors. He hosted a program called WCRB Saturday Night, which came on after the BSO concert, in which he presented humorous takes on classical music and introduced the Boston audience to British comedy. It was at his hands that I learned of the King’s Singers, Florence Foster Jenkins, the “Bricklayer” letter (www.lectlaw.com/files/fun28.htm), and heaps of other hilarity. Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…”) was a favorite, and Monty Python a staple.
Mr. Kaye’s greatest contributions were marathon fundraisers for the BSO. Each year WCRB would devote an entire weekend to the effort, featuring interviews with orchestra members and giving the audience the chance to make pledges in return for prizes, very much a model for the now ubiquitous NPR fund-raisers. One tee-shirt bore the phrase, “Beethoven Lives: 1770–1827.” I’m guessing that was Beethoven’s bicentennial year. There were contests for musical limericks and puns, with symphony tickets as prizes. One of my entries as a 16-year-old was “Of Korsakov only between movements.” I didn’t win. I’ve read that Richard L. Kaye was responsible for raising more than $3,000,000 for the BSO—in 1974 dollars.
Vinyl
My parents’ collection of recordings included lots of the favorite classical symphonies, and Dad subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, a mail-order record company with a “disc of the month” club. Two or three randomly selected discs would arrive in the mail each month. They were heavy on the baroque, which was fine with me, but I remember one in particular that featured the late McNeil Robinson and the choir of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Times Square in New York City. While I don’t remember the programming, I do remember that Neil improvised on that smashing Aeolian-Skinner organ between choral pieces. As a young pup of an organist, I was in the thrall of the sound of that organ and of the very idea that someone would create a piece of music out of thin air like that.
In those days, Gerre Hancock was organist at Christ Church (Episcopal, now Christ Church Cathedral) in Cincinnati. That was dad’s home parish, and he had gotten his hands on a couple LPs of “Uncle Gerre” leading the church’s annual Boar’s Head Festival. The “Title Song” was the Boar’s Head Carol, with organ improvisations between verses, and again, I was thrilled with the sound, the concept, and the power of that music. I feel lucky to have grown up to know both of those organists, and you can bet I told them both about how their recordings helped inspire my career.
Organs I knew
Ernest Skinner’s Opus 128—that’s an early one. It was built in 1905, the year that Robert Hope-Jones joined the Skinner Organ Company as vice-president, and it was in our home church. It was the first organ I played, and I thought it was pretty great. But from the beginning of my “organ awareness,” I knew it was in poor condition. It made all sorts of strange groaning and dying sounds, it had heaps of dead notes, and it ciphered.
I have a vivid memory of the organist leaving the bench during a service, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), fetching a ladder, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), setting the ladder, and climbing to the chamber to pull a pipe, quelling the cipher, still wearing his black cassock—then repeating the solemn farce in reverse to return the ladder to its hook. Looking back on that, I’m sure he was delighted to stage that piece of theater. The Skinner was replaced by a two-manual tracker organ by C. B. Fisk (Opus 65) a few years later (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_65).
As a treble chorister, I was itching to take organ lessons. Dad was adjunct professor of homiletics at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he arranged for me to have lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown, professor of sacred music and chapel organist at the seminary, where the chapel organ had been built by Walter Holtkamp in 1956. That organ is just as old now as Skinner #128 was when I first played it. (Yikes!) It has electro-pneumatic action, a slider chest for the Great, and a Ruckpositiv, unusual for American organs at that time. Melville Smith was the organist when the Holtkamp was installed—he was also director of the nearby Longy School of Music. A young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs lived in the neighborhood, and his disciple Daniel Pinkham was also around. They were all leaders of a great revolution in organ design and playing, and I love to imagine evening conversations in that little organ loft during the installation.
I rode my bicycle seven miles from home in Winchester to ETS for those organ lessons (when I was a kid . . . ). When I drive those narrow busy roads today, I can hardly believe I survived then—in the days before helmets.
A couple years later, my lessons moved to the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home of a three-manual Fisk organ built in 1972 (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50). John Skelton, a former student of Alastair, was the church’s organist, and he was my teacher through my graduation from high school in 1974. I was given practice privileges there, which was mighty convenient, as the church was just two blocks from our home.
George Bozeman was an organbuilder in the area, and his wife Pat was a member of the choir at the Parish of the Epiphany. George was one of several musicians in the area who encouraged my enthusiasm. He was organist of the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which has a marvelous three-manual organ built in 1860 by E. & G. G. Hook (http://database.organsociety.org/SingleOrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041). He offered me the chance to serve as his assistant, covering for him when he was away on organbuilding trips. It was about an hour walk or fifteen-minute bike ride from home (when I was a
kid . . . ), and I loved playing and practicing on that grand instrument. There was a Dairy Queen along the route. The Woburn Unitarian Church was across the square, home to another large three-manual Hook—that’s the one that was relocated through the Organ Clearing House to the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin, Germany—Die Berliner Hook.
William H. Clarke had been the organist of both those churches in Woburn through the 1860s and 1870s, oddly shuttling back and forth between the two. He was responsible for the installation of the organ in the Unitarian Church in 1870 and was the great and good friend of George P. Kinsley, the head voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Sometime just after that, Clarke moved to Indianapolis to start his own organ building company, taking Kinsley with him. Among the few dozen organs he built was a ten-stop job for the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, where my parents bought a summer home in 1969. That church only operated in the summer, and I was organist there for four summers. That was only a twenty-minute walk.
The First Congregational Church in Yarmouthport has a two-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I played on a lot, practicing in bare feet, and playing recitals once in a while. The pastor’s name was Carlton Cassidy—we called him “Hopalong.”
Biggsy
My father’s teaching position at the seminary came with a parking space. Harvard Square, a favorite haunt of our family, was a couple blocks from there. I loved the record department at the Harvard Coop (now Barnes & Noble) and spent all the money I could spare. It seemed that every time I went there, E. Power Biggs had released another recording. I snapped them all up, racing back to the KLH for hours of listening. One of my favorites was Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto as arranged for organ by J. S. Bach (BWV 596). Biggs recorded that, along with chorale preludes by Ernst Pepping, on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, Holland. I played it on a recital in 1972—I was 16 and never did get those pesky descending thirds in the fugue—and have played it dozens of times since. The organ in Zwolle was built in 1721—it’s 295 years old—and that contemporary music is just as viable there as Bach’s, which was written when the organ was new. Thanks to E. Power Biggs, I learned as a teenager that the pipe organ is all about timelessness. (I can play those thirds now!)
MBTA Commuter Rail trains run from Winchester to North Station in Boston. From there it was easy to take the Green Line subway to Boylston Street where I loved hanging out at the Boston Music Company and Carl Fischer’s, where George Kerr ran the organ music desk. He was a patient guide to an enthusiastic young musician on a tight budget, sharing stories of the famous musicians who came and went from his desk and offering me freebies—most of which I realized later was second-rate stuff he couldn’t sell.
I bought Biggs’s editions and collections from George, dutifully dating each purchase. On March 4, 1970, I bought Festival Anthology for Organ ($3.00), and Treasury of Early Organ Music ($3.50), and on December 27, 1970 (Christmas money?), I bought A Treasury of Shorter Organ Classics ($2.00). Forty-six years later, they’re still on my shelf, chock full of my youthful fingerings (whose hands were those?) and naïve observations. Over the decades I’ve played from those volumes countless times, I treasure their presence in my library, and I can hardly express all I learned from Biggs through his publications and recordings.
I was surrounded by a group of organists who encouraged my interest in the organ, especially by taking me to concerts. I heard Anton Heiller and Fenner Douglass play the (first) Fisk organ at Harvard University, and thrill of all thralls, Biggs playing on “his” Flentrop organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall). One evening we heard him play all sorts of early music—Sweelinck, Bruhns, Buxtehude. At the conclusion of the published program, he sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and said to the delighted audience, “I’m happy to play another piece, but I’ve run out of baroque music!” (Baloney!) He gave us Charles Ives’ Variations on ‘America.’ I had never heard anything so cool. I’m guessing that was early in 1972, because the older of my two copies of “The Ives” is dated April 2, 1972. I must have been on the train to Carl Fischer’s the next weekend.
A favorite post-concert haunt of organists was The Wursthaus (long gone) in Harvard Square, an old-fashioned, old-world place that served beer by the bucket and classic soggy German dishes by the greasy pound. I sat with groups of organists at big round tables after concerts, and I recall one evening when someone noticed there were nine people present who played for area churches that had organs built by C. B. Fisk, Inc.
A few years later, in the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the magnificent Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated on St. Cecilia Day, capping a week-long festival of workshops, round-table discussions, and concerts. Biggs was there as participant and to receive an honorary degree, and a classmate and I were deputized to meet Mr. and Mrs. Biggs and show them around the Conservatory. He asked us to demonstrate the practice organs for him (his fingers had been ravaged by arthritis) and answered our questions patiently and generously, moments an eighteen-year-old would never forget. When we were finished, he asked if there was a place to get a beer. Oberlin was a dry town then, but my friend and I walked the mile to Johnnie’s Carry-Out on the township border, and brought beer back to their room at the Oberlin Inn. I shared the story with my girlfriend Amy who was still back in Winchester finishing high school. She didn’t believe me, so she went to a record-signing event at the Harvard Coop, and asked Biggs if he knew me. “Oh yes, the bearded one.” Hah! Told you.
The summer of 1976 (I was twenty) was my second stint working for Bozeman-Gibson & Company. That summer, the company moved from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Deerfield, New Hampshire, and my co-worker John Farmer (now an active organbuilder in North Carolina) and I installed a new one-manual organ in the chapel on Squirrel Island, just off Southport Island and Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The only way to reach the island was by ferry, a small privately operated thing like a lobster boat. We caused quite a spectacle carrying the organ parts from the rented truck down the dock to the ferry and stacking them among the other passengers. It took three trips. That was lovely foreshadowing, as Wendy and I have had a house in that area for fifteen years, and we often sail around Squirrel Island.
Before the trip to Squirrel, Farmer and I took the organ on a detour to Boston where we installed it in the crossing of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in preparation for the 1976 American Guild of Organists national convention, where Barbara Bruns played a Handel Concerto with the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra. I had my AGO convention debut that week as Farmer and I played the organbuilder parts in a piece for organist, organbuilders, and electronic tape by Martha Folts. We stood inside the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel in Boston with the score on a music stand, slapping at square rails and rollerboards, stirring up a fine racket!
The highlight of the 1976 convention was “AGO Night at the Pops” at Symphony Hall with Arthur Fiedler, the Boston Pops, and E. Power Biggs. For one of his signature “Pops Extras,” Fiedler addressed the thousands of organists present, inviting us to sing along with the “next number,” and launching the orchestra into the introduction of “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah. Lord, what a thrill. Biggs played a Rheinberger concerto with the orchestra in what I believe was his last public performance. He died on March 10, 1977.
§
I was lucky to come up playing a fleet of wonderful organs, both new and old. In those days, new organs were being sold like fried dough at the State Fair, and I was treated to more than a dozen dedication recitals during those years. I was fortunate to live in that area where so many talented people were doing so much interesting work in and around organs. They were generous to me with their time and interest in my development. I’m grateful to them all and have tried to pass on the torch in their names to young people I meet who are interested in the organ.
It’s sobering to realize how many of those organs were new—some brand new—when I first knew them, and they’re all over forty years old now. Their leather, like mine, is showing signs of age.
