We’re working on it.
This is a lovely moment to be writing. It’s about 7:00 on a Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting at the dining table in our house in Maine, with a nice view down the river. It’s 19 degrees and snowing, with wind from the northeast at eight-to-ten. Wendy left here yesterday for an important engagement in Providence, bugging out a day early to beat the bad weather. I’d say I’m alone in the house, except Farley the Goldendoodle is here with me. A half hour ago, I lit the dining room woodstove, so it’s nice and cozy. To complete the lovely scene, there’s a boat coming up the river. Did I mention that it’s snowing?
The Damariscotta River is a tidal estuary, 12 miles from the Gulf of Maine to the bridge between the villages of Newcastle (where we live) and Damariscotta. We’re about eight miles up from the ocean. The river is fully tidal—the water rises and falls an average of about ten and a half feet, twice a day—and it’s renowned for aquaculture. Farmers raise mussels and oysters in large waterborne plots that they rent from the towns. Mussels grow underwater hanging from ropes, and oysters grow in half-submerged flat baskets that float on the surface, and the farmers tend them using 20 to 25 foot skiffs with outboard motors.
One summer, our daughter, Meg, worked for an oyster farmer. It was back breaking work, leaning out of boats to turn those baskets, and digging in the mud for the natural oysters. The farm was just down the road, so she could come home for lunch, muddy and tired, but happy with the dozen oysters she’d share with her mother. She tanned dark brown and went back to school strong and slim. But catch my key word there. Summer. If you’re going to work on the water, you might as well be out on a boat in the sunshine. The magic ends when that little boat is churning upriver against a bitter wind during a snowstorm, whitecaps breaking over the bow, covering the farmers in freezing salt spray. It’s much nicer work to be sitting by the fire, writing.
In 1993, the poet Donald Hall wrote Life Work, a slim book of musing about what it means to work at what matters to you.1 Early in his career, Hall was on the faculty at the University of Michigan, living a suburban life of cocktail parties and dealing with the mechanics and minutia that are the workings of a large institution. His marriage failed, and he took a lifetime risk, leaving the security of tenure and pension and moving onto the rural New Hampshire farm where his grandparents had lived to focus on writing. He supported himself writing reviews, magazine articles, and several books, while working endlessly on his poetry. He describes how a brief poem would travel through scores, even hundreds of drafts. He also describes the repetitive annual routine of his grandfather’s farming—how the changing seasons drove the succession of work days through plowing, planting, harvesting, milking, haying. His grandfather’s unfailing work ethic was inspiration to a lifetime of writing.
In Life Work, Hall wrote about his friendship with the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986). Moore is best known for monumental bronze sculptures located across the world. He worked in the abstract, creating small-scale clay models as he explored shapes, and increasing the scale as he passed through multiple “drafts” of each work before committing them to the eternity of bronze. Hall reflected on artists’ passion, as they devote their lives to their work. Creating monumental sculpture in bronze requires immense dedication, and handling the materials involved is heavy physical work. Is that harder work than the dogged pursuit of a poet, demanding of himself hundreds of drafts of an 80-word poem?
The other day, I stacked this year’s cord of firewood in the usual place along the north wall of the garage. It had been delivered by a dump truck and was in a knee-high pile near the stack site. It took me two hours to move two tons of wood from below knee level on to a stack with more than half of it above waist level.2 That work was like Donald Hall’s grandfather’s chore of tossing forkfuls of hay into the loft of the barn, a necessary seasonal chore. Some of that wood is burning in the stove now.
Henry Moore moved tons of clay from table height to the extremes of height of his largest pieces. I suppose he carried clay in buckets up ladders. His hands would have been iron-hard like those of the hay-pitching farmer.
Back to work
Michelangelo’s famous marble statue,
David, is about 17 feet tall and weighs nearly 12,500 pounds. I love the (perhaps) apocryphal quote from Michelangelo when he was asked how he accomplished such a masterpiece: “All I did was chip away the stone that didn’t look like David.” That leads me to wonder what the original stone weighed. Was it twice as much, three times as much as the finished statue? Let’s say it was 30,000 pounds—fifteen tons. First, that rascal was cut from a hillside in Carrara near Italy’s Ligurian coast, then moved almost 90 miles to Florence. That would be enough of a challenge today with heavy trucks, hydraulic lifting equipment, and modern highways. Imagine it with ox-drawn carts, levers, and muddy, rutted hilly roads.
And once that mighty stone was in place, Michelangelo had to remove 17,500 pounds of marble chips. Popeye had nothing on him for hands and forearms. He would have had stone chips in his eyes and fierce aches and pains at the end of the day. It’s meaningful to appreciate this work of art from that point of view, that the result of such extreme physical labor would be the emergence of the monumental, elegant, sensual figure taking life under the tools of the master. Just how did he know which chip was part of David and which wasn’t? There are some pretty sensitive areas there that would be a shame to whack with a chisel.3
I wonder if he knew that the immense toil of quarrying and transporting that stone and chipping away almost nine tons of marble to reveal that image would leave five centuries of viewers in awe, moved to tears by the beauty, majesty, and humanity of that image.
The work of life
When you visit the Noack Organ Company in Georgetown, Massachusetts, you’re greeted by a display of photographs of all the instruments built by the firm. They’re currently working on Opus 162 for St. Peter’s Church in Washington, D.C. Fritz Noack retired in 2015, and Didier Grassin is the active leader of the company. Didier reports that he has been responsible for the last three Noack organs, and that the first “real organ” built by Fritz Noack was Opus 9, so Fritz’s career spans 149 organs. What a remarkable achievement. Think of that in terms of tons of tin and lead, hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber, perhaps tens of thousands of sheets of sandpaper. You know why you need more sheets of sandpaper? Because you wear it out with elbow grease.
In a 50-week year of 40-hour weeks, a worker produces 2,000 person-hours. If there was an average of seven people in the Noack shop over the years, that would make 14,000 person hours each year. Opus 9 was built in 1962, so Fritz’s career spanned 53 years during which he produced 149 organs in 742,000 person hours. Let’s guess that a quarter of those hours (185,500) were spent on service, maintenance, tuning, rebuilding, and other work not related to the numbered organs. That would mean that 556,500 hours were spent building 149 organs—an average of 3,735 hours per organ. I suppose that some took fewer than 2,000 hours, and a few probably took 10,000 or more.
That’s a staggering amount of work and a splendid heritage. The display of photos on the workshop stairway shows the development and maturation of an artist as well as the progression of styles of expression in American organ building. Nice going, Fritz.
Stop to think.
Have you ever been in the presence of a new monumental organ? Have you touched one, played one, or just sat alone in the room gazing at it? Every surface is made smooth by the hands of a craftsman. Hand-turned drawknobs gleam. Maybe there’s an exquisite bit of marquetry on the music rack, and snazzy carvings on the key-cheeks. Tilt back and look up at the tower crowns. They might be 30 feet off the floor, but every one of the myriad miter joints is perfect, ready for close-up inspection.
Have you been inside such an organ? Row upon row of gleaming pipes, each row a unique voice waiting to be called
on. Precise matrices of mechanical parts, some massive and powerful for stop actions, some feathery and light for keyboard actions. Or if the organ uses electricity in its actions, you’ll find neat bundles of wires, carefully obscured, carrying the complex signals that are the music.
I spend a lot of time around pipe organs. Some are ordinary, unremarkable, and some are downright awful. But those instruments add to my appreciation, my awe of an organ produced by true craftspeople. The Organ Clearing House is frequently engaged by other firms to assist in the installation of new instruments. We always regard that as a special statement of trust, as we are allowed an intimate look into the ways and work of the individual firm. Often the paperwork and specifications that precede a job are beautifully crafted, forming a prelude to our relationship with the instrument itself.
As thrilling as it is to see a finished organ, working with an instrument in pieces is the best way to appreciate what goes into it. Once when we were delivering a new instrument to a church, unloading thousands of components from a truck and laying them out on blankets across the backs of the pews, a parishioner commented to me, “Watching this for three minutes has told me more about why the organ is so expensive than hundreds of hours of committee meetings.”
We select organ parts in the correct order, carry or hoist them to their spot in the loft, lay them out and screw them together. Perfect. Just like it was made that way! After the many thousands of hours spent making all that stuff, it’s a touch of magic to put it all together in its final location. In 1977, I had the privilege of helping install the new Flentrop organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, a three-manual organ with Rückpositiv and a tall mahogany case perched on a beautiful loft. In those days, I was the 21-year-old brute who did some of the heaviest lifting, so I was in the thick of it as we installed the gleaming polished façade pipes. That’s a special kind of work, handling 700-pound polished pipes, 30 feet off the marble floor. Leaving the church at the end of that grueling day, we turned to look back at the instrument. The façade pipes were bathed in the deep tones of blue and red as the afternoon sun poured through the stained-glass windows, and I burst into tears. Some tough guy.
The philosophy of that organ was grounded in the heritage of eighteenth-century northern European instruments. Careful planning was involved in determining pipe scales, case dimensions, wind conveyance, and mechanical action. But don’t forget for a moment that the splash of sunlight sparkling on the polished tin and gold leaf was part of the plan. It was making music before the blower was hooked up.
Flentrop Orgelbouw was founded in 1903 by Hendrik Flentrop (1866–1950). His son, Dirk (1910–2003), grew up working for the family firm and assumed leadership control in 1940. During his tenure, the firm produced around 250 organs and restored more than 100 instruments, another wonderful example of a life’s work devoted to the organ.
Somebody play.
Once an organ is built, we need someone to play it. In the last several years, the editors of The Diapason have been recognizing rising young stars through the program “20 Under 30.” These brilliant young artists are chosen from fields of more than 100 nominations, all of which reflects the extraordinary level of musicianship and artistry from the younger generations of organists. It seems to me a thrilling upswing in this noble art, which is essential to ensuring the future of the fabulously expensive art of building organs.
Recently, Stephen Tharp posted a tidbit informing us that he had played his 1,500th organ recital. Now in his mid-40s, Stephen is a consummate artist, dazzling audiences with rich and thrilling performances. He serves as artist-in-residence at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, where his full-time job is to practice many hours every day, always working on music to feature in the next tour. That work is comparable to Donald Hall’s multiple drafts of each poem—hundreds of hours of intellectual and artistic toil, always developing new pedagogic skills to further the freedom of artistic expression. It takes countless repetitions and hundreds of hours of knuckle busting nit picking to absorb and express a complex score. It takes motivation, diligence, fervor, and devotion to take a program of music from the printed page and pass it through an organ, turning it into audible art. It’s a life’s work to build a repertory and to nourish a creative soul capable of such sophisticated expression.
Recently, I watched the BBC documentary, Simon Rattle: The Making of a Maestro, an hour-long look into the development and career of that brilliant musician. (You can find this easily on YouTube: just search “Simon Rattle Documentary.”) His love and ability as a musician was the force behind the rejuvenation of an entire city. Under his leadership, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was established in a terrific new performing arts center, transforming the town and its population. What an eloquent example of the power of music.
That leaves the rest of us.
I’m no Simon Rattle. The fate of the city doesn’t hang on my success. I’m also not the old-time farmer, doggedly moving from one chore to the next at the behest of the seasons. I’m fortunate to work in a field that I care about. And I value the examples of geniuses around me, and the geniuses that came before who helped define all the expressions of humanity—the Humanities. Writers, painters, sculptors, philosophers—artists in general have collaborated to form the human condition.
Sometimes the organ seems to us to be the center of the universe, and for many of us, it is the center of our universe. But in reality, it’s an eloquent part of a much larger whole, perhaps using its noble voice to speak for other artists. We are not living in normal times, and we are not the first society to have that experience. In response, we are called to “hold fast to that which is good,” to proclaim the necessity of the arts in our lives. We do that by living artistic lives in whatever capacity we can.
Leonard Bernstein famously said, “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Substitute strife, confusion, injustice, or anger for the word “violence,” and follow the great artists who have paved the way for us. And be sure you’re paving the way for those who follow in any way you can.
Notes
1. Published by Beacon Press.
2. I know it was two tons because I guessed three, Wendy doubted it, and I googled it!
