Some thoughts on owning pipe organs
The organ has been sitting in the rear gallery for a hundred years. The organist climbs the stairs every week, turns on the blower, and starts to play. The tuner comes a couple times a year, otherwise no one thinks much about it. It sounds great, but many assume it is part of the woodwork, part of the fabric of the building. They have no idea how complex it is or how delicate its components can be, but when something goes wrong with it, it can become a hot issue in a hurry.
The people of a church are often astonished when faced with the cost of a major organ repair. Any other system or machine in a church building is at least a little like our systems at home. We are used to maintaining furnaces, air conditioners, and plumbing and electrical systems. Those things are bigger and more costly in a church building than they are at home, but they are not mysteries, and while most of us do not have elevators in our houses, it is not hard to grasp the concept of maintaining one.
When an organ ciphers, it is easy to guess that something is wrong. A note or group of notes is sounding continually—we know the organist isn’t doing that. Dead notes in a stop or two, or even on an entire keyboard, will annoy the organist, but they are not going to bother the sleep of a person in a pew. When a leather gusset on the corner of a reservoir bursts, you would hear a rush of wind from downstairs. Sometimes the leather flaps, imitating a bilabial fricative, and while funny for a moment, it is not conducive to worship.
The organist of a church in Boston once called me in a panic. “I’ve wrecked the organ.” He had turned on the blower, and six schwimmers (wind regulators built into the bottom boards of windchests) blew at once. The leather had reached its critical end, and when one blew, the bursts of wind pressure throughout the organ caused the rest to blow in succession. He heard “bang, bang, bang. . .,” leaving a sound of rushing wind. It was not his fault, but the organ was out of commission for weeks while I took the schwimmers to my workshop and replaced the leather.
I have dealt with several situations in the past few weeks where a little bit of planning could have averted a crisis and raised awareness of the condition and value of the organ. As I have the privilege here of writing to a group of organists, I thought it would be useful to put down a few thoughts about the responsible care of a pipe organ. I have shared many of these thoughts in previous issues, but I am inspired to repeat following recent tumult.
It is usual for an organist or music director’s contract with a church to include the musician’s responsibility of supervising maintenance of any musical instruments owned by the church. Of course, the organist would arrange for the organs and pianos to be tuned in a timely fashion and to submit appropriate estimates for the cost of that work to the person or board responsible for managing the church’s budget, but it is less usual for an organist to help a church look ahead to inevitable major repairs.
Any organ with electro-pneumatic action needs to be releathered every seventy or seventy-five years, sometimes less. It is typically the organ technician who breaks the news after noticing that individual notes are going dead with increasing frequency, and the people of the church are startled by a huge expense they could have been planning for. If you are an organist of a church that owns an electro-pneumatic-action organ, find out if the actions have been releathered. If the leather in the organ is forty or fifty years old, sit down with someone from the property committee, finance committee, clergy, or whoever is the right person at your church and tell them about organ leather. Your maintenance technician will be able to give you advice about the condition of the leather and how much it might cost. Give the church a chance to plan with twenty years notice. When a church learns that an organ needs to be releathered imminently, they often decide to ditch the pipe organ, unable to spare hundreds of thousands of dollars in short order. Your forethought could well guarantee the future of the instrument.
Most tracker organs do not have complicated, intricately leathered actions, but there is usually leather on wind supply components such as bellows and winkers (wind stabilizers). Don’t discount the potential for expensive repairs. The bellows can be enormous, especially in large vintage organs when they are sitting on the floor under the mechanical-action chassis. You can do a fingernail test. If you can pick little pieces out of the leather with your fingernail, the leather will need to be replaced soon. You can also look for cracks in the leather along the hinges or in the gussets, the soft places at the corners. We have worked on double-rise reservoirs twelve feet long and six feet wide, complete with feeder bellows for hand pumping underneath. A thing like that can weigh a thousand pounds, and sometimes the organ must be dismantled entirely to get it out for restoration.
In those larger nineteenth-century organs, the pedal key action is typically under that huge bellows, and if the pedal stops are divided on both sides of the organ, there is a “pedal cross” that transfers tracker action from front-to-back to side-to-side. When a leather nut slips in that contraption, you have to move the bellows to get under it, and again, sometimes removing the bellows means you must dismantle the organ—because of one leather nut? If you are releathering that bellows, you should restore the pedal key action underneath at the same time. You do not want to bury those 150-year-old leather nuts again under that huge bellows.
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When it is time to releather the organ, take care when choosing who should do that work. A local service technician might be well able to replace a pouch or two during a service call, but might not have the skills and precision or the facility needed to replace thousands of pouches, getting the spacing and spring tension right, providing you and your church with an organ that performs effectively, reliably, and artistically. Make a point of visiting a workshop known for high-quality leather work to gain a visual memory of what such work looks like. You will be able to tell in a glance if someone is doing substandard work.
Out with the bad air, in with the good air
In some churches, the organ blower is hidden in a nasty, dirty room full of cobwebs and piled high with detritus. I have seen signs for a 1966 church fair, folding chairs, sacks of rock salt for clearing ice and snow, boxes of broken glasses, and old office equipment. Dust is an enemy of any pipe organ, and if it is possible for the organ blower to take in anything but clean air, the operation of the organ can be seriously compromised, especially if someone goes into the room to move stuff around just before or while the blower is running, causing airborne debris. A leg of a fly will stop a reed pipe from speaking, a fleck of sawdust will get caught in the armature of a windchest magnet and cause a cipher, folding chairs on top of a static reservoir will raise the wind pressure and spoil the tuning and the voicing.
While I advocate for a clean blower room, I add that there is a protocol for cleaning it. Seal off the blower intake and shut off the power to the motor so it cannot be started inadvertently. Clean the room thoroughly, wait twenty-four hours for dust to settle; clean it again, and wait another twenty-four hours. Then it would be safe to start the motor without danger of it feeding even tiny specks into the organ. Your organ technician should supervise that work. To further ensure that the organ’s air is clean, you can fit a filter to the blower intake or even the door of the blower room.
Another common mistake churches make regarding dust damage is failing to protect the organ when sanding and refinishing floors or other renovation work. Airborne dust will damage the organ, even if it is not apparent right away. Reed pipes are particularly sensitive to airborne dust. Sometimes we recommend removing all the reeds from an organ, sometimes the baggie trick is sufficient. We put a baggie on the top of the resonator of every reed pipe so dust cannot float in. We cover the entire organ with two layers of plastic, so when the project is finished, we can remove the outer layer, which will raise dust again in the building, then remove the clean inner layer once the dust has settled. When a church is planning renovation in proximity with the organ, it is the organist’s duty to raise the importance of protecting the organ, and your organ technician will be able to advise you.
When a church is closing . . .
Here at the Organ Clearing House, we hear every week about churches that are closing and are interested in selling their organs. All too often, they have waited until it is too late, saying that the building has been sold and the closing is in a couple months. Recently, an institution was in touch asking to sell two pipe organs because building renovation was starting in three weeks. Three weeks? I cannot sell an organ in three weeks. (In fact, I did.) I routinely tell clients that in the business of selling existing pipe organs, a year is like a lightning strike.
If your church is about to close, I bet there have been three years of committee meetings to come to that decision. Expect it to take that long for a church to decide to acquire an organ. If you are the organist of a church that is discussing closing, bring the organ into the mix right away. If the decision is to close the church after Easter in two years, you can advertise that the organ will be available after Easter 2027. It is far better to get started selling an organ soon rather than too late.
Want some assurance?
The first and most important part of pipe organ maintenance and ownership is the insurance policy. Find out who in your church is responsible for that, and raise the issue. On October 23, 2018, the First Baptist Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts, burned to the ground, and all that was left of the 1872 E. & G. G. Hook Opus 635 was a puddle of molten metal on the basement floor. That church was a few blocks from where I had the workshop of the Bishop Organ Company in the 1980s and 1990s, and I maintained the organ for many years. It was also the home parish of my friend John Boody of Taylor & Boody Organbuilders, where his grandfather had been pastor.
There are not many insurance agents or adjusters who understand pipe organs, and it is important to single out the organ in the church’s policy. It is usual for an insurance agent to ask for a statement of the replacement value of the organ, which is always a much bigger number than what was paid for the organ initially. A recognized pipe organ builder or consultant can provide that statement, which typically includes photos, specifications, and documentation of the instrument. If the policy accurately reflects the replacement value of the organ, and there is damage to part of the instrument, there is a basis for negotiating what percentage of the instrument must be repaired or replaced.
For a little more assurance, be sure there are no pests in the building, especially near the organ. I have found raccoons, squirrels, mice, rats, moths, bats, even cats in organs. An organ in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, had an infestation of house flies. We thought they were dead and started vacuuming them up, but realized they were dormant because we could hardly tell the difference in sound when we shut off the vacuum—it was humming full of thousands of flies, awakened by the warmth and noise of the vacuum. Hans Steketee, then president of Flentrop Orgelbouw, visited John Leek’s workshop. When John talked about how many reservoirs we releathered, Hans asked if we were putting mice in the organs.
Excepting the building itself, the pipe organ is likely to be the single most valuable thing owned by a church, more than the roof, the parking lot, and the HVAC systems. It is also the least understood. Once I was presenting a proposal to the board of trustees of a church whose chairman wanted me to cut to the chase. “What’s this unit going to cost.” I asked him not to consider the organ a unit, comparable to a furnace, but as a work of liturgical art. It should be on the list with communion silver, paintings, statues, and stained glass, not a sump pump or an elevator.
A furnace has a simple function. It responds to a thermostat. When the temperature in a building drops below the thermostat setting, the furnace kicks in, and it turns off when the desired temperature is achieved. In a big building there might be several layers of sensors, but that is the basic principle. The pipe organ, any pipe organ, is a mechanical entity, but its operation is much more subtle. The goal of the organ builder is to eliminate the machine so there are no mechanical hitches between the musician’s imagination and artistry—and the listener’s ears. Does a swell shutter squeak? Does a windchest primary action click? Is a key sluggish? Does a pipe speak a little slowly? A large organ might have 10,000 valves and actions, and it is impossible to achieve perfection, but a beautifully built or beautifully restored fifteen-ton organ defies physics and becomes an instrument for
artistic expression.
Every organ needs an advocate—someone who understands its strengths and faults. Every organ needs someone who can speak up for it when something is going wrong.
Another old friend
We learned recently about the passing of Joan Lippincott, beloved teacher of thousands of organists and admired recitalist and recording artist (see “Nunc dimittis,” July 2025, page 6). I was not her student, but we were friends. While I am sorry for her loss, I am grateful for her profound contributions to our art. One of my favorite recordings is hers, Sinfonia: Organ Concertos and Sinfonias by J. S. Bach (Gothic G-49130), a brilliant collection of Bach’s music for organ and orchestra, drawn from seven of Bach’s cantatas. Joan played the marvelous Fritts organ in the Miller Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary with a superb orchestra playing historically accurate instruments. It is a lively, thrilling, spontaneous performance, and I often play it in my car or office to hear beautiful playing on a beautiful organ.
Twenty years ago, Wendy and I lived in a condominium in a converted warehouse on the waterfront in the Charlestown (Boston) Navy Yard. One of the building’s concierges had never known a “pipe organ person” before, and she was a big fan of my work. When I came home one afternoon she greeted me with big news, another pipe organ person had moved into the building. It was Joan and Curt Lippincott. They lived on Cape Cod and purchased that apartment because of its proximity to Logan Airport, a ten-minute taxi ride rather than a two-hour drive. It was fun to share social hours with Joan and Curt, and fun for the concierge who thought ours was the only building in the Navy Yard with two organ people as residents. I treasure those memories and offer my good wishes to the wide world of her students who gained so much from her thoughtful teaching and personal care.
