Thanks for the memories
Most mornings after I have walked and fed Farley the Goldendoodle, but before breakfast, Wendy and I sit reading with our iPads and coffee. I like to skim through The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Berkshire Eagle, the Portland Press Herald, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. I look at headlines, read important stories, play a couple games, and keep my eyes open for particularly interesting articles. Sometimes one pops up that I think I might twirl onto the pages of The Diapason.
On December 24, 2024, The New Yorker magazine published an article by Matthew Hutson with the title, “The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds.” It began, “A while ago, I searched for a beard trimmer in my bedroom. I spent probably forty-five minutes looking in every likely location at least twice, and every unlikely location at least once.” He carried on for several more sentences without stumbling on the idea to look in the bathroom. I have had a beard since I was a teenager (except for a brief experiment ten years ago that caused me to hide in the woods at our house in Maine until it grew back), and anything I use to take care of it is in the bathroom. Why would you have something like that in the bedroom?
There is an old joke that says there are two kinds of birds—those you can eat and those you cannot—and it turns out that there are two kinds of food-caching birds. There are larder birds that store all their loot in a single location—seven-hundred pounds of acorns were found in the wall of a house in California, deposited there by woodpeckers—and there are scatter hoarders who hide food in multiple locations. Mr. Hutson points out that while squirrels use smell to locate their caches, apparently scatter-caching birds such as chickadees, jays, tits, titmice, nuthatches, and nutcrackers use some kind of mystical GPS-like location systems to remember exactly where they hid many thousands of morsels in trees and other locations.
In our house in Maine, we have found caches of acorns, dog kibble, and pasta, left by smell-guided critters in a cold wood stove, a potted plant, and even in a pillowcase on our bed, the kind of stuff that happens when you leave a house in the woods empty for a few weeks. But while we watched exactly that list of species of birds at work in the trees along the edges of the yard, this was the first I had learned about scatter-hoarding, which, according to Hutson, was first noticed in the early eighteenth century.
I have always understood the phrase “bird brain” to be an insult insinuating a tiny mental capacity, but apparently when you take it literally, it could be quite a compliment. You would never lose your beard trimmer again. Hutson’s essay dives into excruciating detail about the research that has led to this understanding of the memory systems of birds. Imagine sitting in the woods watching a titmouse hiding food in countless locations, and then witnessing the recovery on demand; but it was a fun read, and it got me thinking about the mysteries of memory.
Finding the notes
On January 28, 2023, pianist Yuja Wang played all five of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s major works for piano and orchestra, four concertos and Variations on a Theme of Paganini in a marathon concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City that lasted four-and-a-half hours. Zachary Woolfe’s ecstatic review published the next day in The New York Times was accompanied by photos of Ms. Wang in her five dresses. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in what was a marathon for them as well, but they all had loaded music stands in front of them.
Ms. Wang had prepared for this concert by storing caches of C-sharps, A-flats, and heaven knows what else all over the piano keyboard and played what must have been hundreds of thousands of notes with an unworldly near perfection. She knew exactly where each note was. Zachary Woolfe reported that she hardly broke a sweat. Back in my playing days, a colleague joked that I knew from memory the first eight measures of more pieces of organ music than anyone else he knew. I took it as a compliment, but thinking back on it, there was a little zing to it. Like many of you, I memorized pieces for required performances in college. That is when I discovered when playing Bach’s Toccata in F Major, I’d circle back about forty measures if I played a B-flat instead of B-natural in one of the pedal solos. I could also play pieces like the Trumpet Voluntary in D Major (whoever wrote it) from memory after playing it at 700 weddings. But that piece is so formulaic that you could play it from memory even if you did not know it from memory.
Anna Lapwood, the dazzling young British organist who is taking the world by storm, is an associate artist at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where she has regular practice sessions through the night. (See Murray Somerville’s interview with Lapwood in the January 2025 issue, pages 12–15.) Rock bands loading into the hall late at night have been thrilled by her presence enough to enlist her to join their concerts. She is skilled at capturing videos of herself at the console being peppered with questions by these late-night admirers. In one, a musician catches her “cheating” by pointing at the iPad on the music desk. She countered by pointing out that each organ is different, so while the score shows on the screen, what she is really looking at are the registration points, where she is pushing which piston or drawing which stopknob.
I think that is the special memory challenge for an organist. I have friends who travel the world playing recitals on hundreds of different organs whose elephantine memories capture not only the diabolical scores of, say, Max Reger, but the piston and stop layouts of each individual organ they play. I have seen an organist come to town for several days of preparation for a recital, never referring to a score. All the hard work of registering complex music on a large organ is done without pink and yellow Post-its stuck all over the score like hanging chads. I hear them say that performing from memory is not a challenge, it is a freedom. Freedom from dividing your attention by reading what the next notes are, freedom to devote your entire attention to your relationship between the composer and the audience, leaving the free flow of artistic expression uninhibited. I do not think a cache of acorns is reward enough. I will buy you a martini after the concert.
Solace
Many of us spent hours last December following the coverage of the reopening of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, just as many of us were glued to television screens on April 15, 2019, watching the horrible fire that wrecked the cathedral but somehow spared the organ. Because of its central location, national importance, and vast history, some 900,000,000 euros were donated to make the spectacular restoration possible. French President Macron told the world that the restoration of the cathedral organ was the “cherry on top” of the entire effort. Some cherry.
Not all French organ restoration projects are so lavishly funded, as I read in the January 12, 2025, issue of The New York Times. Ségolène Le Stradic covers France for the Times, and her piece that morning bore the headline, “Hams in the Belfry: How a Cash-Poor French Cathedral Fixed its Organ.”
Saint-Flour is a town with 6,400 residents in the Cantal region of central France. The town’s Gothic cathedral, completed in 1466, is dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Florus, the first bishop of Lodève and the town’s namesake. Gilles Boyer was the rector of the cathedral when government funds for the restoration of the organ failed to materialize, and Father Boyer conceived the idea of using one of the cathedral’s towers as a space for the curing of ham, one of the region’s gastric specialties. Boyer’s idea was loosely based on the legend surrounding the town’s patron saint. According to that legend, Saint Florus escaped from bandits and made it up the hill to safety in the town, where the people welcomed him with a ham. In gratitude, he shouted, “Quid solatium!” “What a solace.” The ham-in-the-belfry project was dubbed Florus Solatium, and that name is emblazoned in red on the distinctive packages in which the hams are shipped.
Altitude, a local charcuterie cooperative of around forty pig farmers, was enthusiastic about the idea for marketing potential, and the climate conditions in the tower would be ideal for curing hams. Government and church officials approved the project, and the first hams cured in the tower went to market in 2022 priced at around $150, $50 more than the usual price, and the profits were returned to the cathedral.
All was going well until an architectural heritage inspector stepped in. He noticed a grease stain on the parquet floor in the tower, identified it as a fire hazard, and demanded the removal of the hams. By then, the hams were celebrated as a local delicacy, and the farmers, church officials, and the public protested, carrying the conflict to the attention of the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati.
Jean-Paul Rolland, Boyer’s successor as rector of the cathedral, confronted the cheeky inspector, insisting that the grease stain was on the floor before the hams were first hung, and because the building was dedicated to religious purposes, it was not up to the government to tell them what they were allowed to do. Last October Minister Dati announced that the hams would stay, provided there would be a study to determine that the hams are being matured safely, providing solace for Florus Solatium. The dispute and the marvelous quality of the hams have attracted attention across France, to the extent that the Palais de l’Élysée, the official residence of the President of France, has a standing order for the delivery of hams every three months. I guess President Macron can have some ham with his cherry.
While this story is more about the hams than the organ, the good news is that the organ has been repaired. I spent a little time while in a Google search for information about that organ but came up empty-handed. If any readers know the organ, I would love to learn about it.
The previous rector, Gilles Boyer,1 had started the cathedral’s entrance into the foodie world by installing beehives in a cathedral terrace and selling honey. Given the remarkable success of Florus Solatium, maybe they should move on to another regional delicacy, Cantal cheese, which is made from the milk of Salers cows that are fed only local hay harvested between October 15 and April 15. (Summer hay leads to a different cheese.) Cantal is a semi-hard cheese with a tangy, nutty taste. I bet it would go well with the ham. Perhaps the cathedral administration could market a cathedral charcuterie board with Florus Solatium, Cantal, Boyer’s honey, and a dab of the specialty from Dijon, about 450 kilometers to the north.
§
The Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, Massachusetts, was home to a landmark organ built by Hook & Hastings, revered as one of America’s greatest. It was originally built in 1863 as E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 322, but it was the four-manual rebuild completed in 1902 as Hook & Hastings Opus 1959 that we all loved so much. I remember hearing Gillian Weir play a recital on Widor and Dupré’s Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and Peter Sykes play at Immaculate Conception in the same week. I have carried with me the memory that while the two organs were different in character, they were similar in scope, quality, and grandeur.
Immaculate Conception, which had lately been known as the Jesuit Urban Center, was slated for closure in 2007. The building was deteriorating, but also the neighborhood had been swallowed up by the Boston University Medical Center, which had grown into a huge, important hospital, so it was no longer a feasible place to host a thriving neighborhood parish. Boston’s pipe organ community was saddened by the prospect and hoped the organ could be saved. At an event of the Boston chapter of the American Guild of Organists, a colleague suggested that we should arrange benefit concerts, and that maybe we could convert it into a museum about the pipe organ. How many benefit concerts does it take to replace a million-dollar roof? The Immaculate Conception organ has been in storage for more than fifteen years, and there are rumors that it may be resurrected.
What a challenge it must be for a town of 6,400 people to sustain a Gothic cathedral. We see in photos that the cathedral is not very large, but it is close to six hundred years old, and it must have plenty of maintenance issues. I was heartened by Ms. Le Stradic’s article in this morning’s newspaper, a gentle story of raising a modest amount of money in such a creative way showing how a cooperative community can accomplish wonderful things.
§
My father was interim rector at Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, around 2007. That church and the adjoining rectory are on a fantastic property on the beach in Provincetown, a short walk from the town’s famous bustling restaurant and bar scene. Ernie and Bob were long-time members of the church, a lovely eccentric couple who set their minds on getting a pipe organ for Saint Mary’s. That effort led to the commissioning of Bedient Organ Company Opus 42, built in 1994 with three stops and one manual. Ernie and Bob raised the money in a creative and furiously energetic campaign of collecting returnable bottles and cans. In Massachusetts, a returnable can or bottle is worth five cents. It would take 200,000 cans to equal $10,000. I don’t know the original cost of the organ, but that crazy pair must have collected 500,000 cans. I wrote in the April 2007 issue of The Diapason that I had an empty cranberry-lime seltzer can on my desk and a plastic ruler. “The volume of the can is 23.3 cubic inches. 500,000 cans would take up 11,650,000 cubic inches or 6,742 cubic feet—the equivalent of a thirty-foot by thirty-foot room with a seven-and-a-half foot ceiling—full of cans.”
Where did they find all those cans? Remember the bustling restaurant and bar scene in Provincetown? They dove in dumpsters. Really. They must have created quite a legend in any establishment on the outer Cape that redeems returnables, coming in with sacks full of cans every few days, or least after every weekend. I suppose they found a lot of other collateral treasures. I would want a shower.
Three cheers to the Ernie and Bob show for providing their church with a sweet little organ. When dad was working there, I played an evensong recital on 8′, 4′, and 2′. It felt like riding a tricycle.
Near our home in Maine there is a business called Hilltop Redemption that accepts returnable bottles and cans. I think the name invokes images of a church, or maybe a tent with an itinerant preacher. And snakes.
Nothing is forever.
There is no better place than the Organ Clearing House to witness the fragility of great institutions, where I learn almost daily of another church closing. In the last several weeks we have learned of significant changes in two important institutions in the world of the pipe organ, the closures of Saint Thomas Choir School in New York City and of Macy’s in central Philadelphia, home of the iconic Wanamaker Organ. It is too soon to know what will actually happen in either place, but there is little doubt that both will never be the same as the institutions we have loved
and admired.
This should be a lesson for us to be humble advocates of the instrument we love. Sometimes we are haughty (“No madam, the organ is not too loud. . . .”) and sometimes we are selfish (“They’ll have to buy me a new organ. . . .”) when we should be teaching the people around us and in our churches about the glories of the King of Instruments. If we don’t take good care of it, it will go away.
Note
1. I read several other articles about this story, most in French newspapers. They all gave the rector’s name as Abbé Philippe Boyer.
