Pulling stops by hand?
I had my first organ lessons in 1968 with Alastair Cassels-Brown, who was organist and professor of music at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the western edge of Harvard Square. The school merged with Philadelphia Divinity School and was renamed the Episcopal Divinity School. The campus was closed and sold to Lesley University in 2018.
The organ in Saint John’s Chapel there was built by Holtkamp in 1956 and sported exposed Great and Positiv divisions, the Positiv being located at the rail of the tiny organ loft in a modified Rückpositiv layout. It had the gorgeous, thick-cut ivory keyboards, built in England, that were common to Holtkamp organs, and there was a combination action with a setterboard that had rows of toggle switches with the stops on one axis and the numbered pistons on the other. Alastair preserved his “house” piston settings by hanging the gummed reinforcements for three-ring binder paper on the switches that should remain “on.” He allowed me to set my own pistons provided I returned his settings before I left.
I often rode my bicycle to my lessons, about eight miles from home in Winchester on Route 16 winding through Medford and Somerville. When I drive that route today, I am horrified by how narrow the road is and how congested and aggressive the traffic is. I had my life in my hands. After two years Alastair recommended that I should study with John Skelton, newly appointed organist at First Congregational Church in Winchester (a couple blocks from home, so no more dangerous bike rides), where C. B. Fisk Opus 50 had been installed the year before. What a privilege for a fourteen-year-old to learn and play on such a beautiful organ. That organ also had a setterboard combination action, nicely secreted in a cabinet that opens to the hallway behind the console where the vertical tracker action to the organ overhead is serviced.
My home church, the Parish of the Epiphany, where my father was rector, commissioned C. B. Fisk Opus 65, installed in 1974. Those two Fisk organs are colloquially known as Winchester Old and Winchester New. Come to think of it, Winchester New is over fifty years old.
I was in high school when organbuilder George Bozeman, Jr., invited me to join him as assistant organist at First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, adjacent to Winchester. When he was in town, we were often both there at once. But as he was often on the road installing and servicing organs, I was the convenient and regular substitute. The organ there is a beauty, E. & G. G. Hook Opus 283 (1860) with three manuals and thirty-three stops. I was probably sixteen years old when I started there. No one told me the key action would be heavy on a big, bulky, three-manual mechanical-action organ, that the increased distance between the keyboards would be an issue, that registering everything by hand would be demanding, or that the twenty-seven-note flat pedalboard would be confusing. I just played.
Registering the organ was not quite only by hand. There was a primitive system that consisted of iron pedals for “Piano” and “Forte” combinations for both Great and Swell. The combinations were set at the factory. There was also an iron pedal for the Great to Pedal reversible. I imagine that today, those heavy pedals would remind me of a StairMaster.
The church in Woburn is huge, a wood-frame building with a tall steeple. The sanctuary is on the second floor—you climb a lot of stairs to get there—and it has a very high, unsupported ceiling. One winter Sunday, there was a terrific rumble as snow slid off the roof. When the service was over, we found that the pastor’s car had been totaled.
Go west, young man.
Having grown up in the Boston area, I thought I was going west when I started at Oberlin in September 1974. A friend who grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, thought he was going south for the winter. We were both wrong.
When I got to Oberlin, I was introduced to the sparkling new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall in the Conservatory of Music. The dedication of the organ was on November 22, Saint Cecilia’s Day. At that time, freshmen did not have lessons in Warner Hall; each week we had a lesson in the studio and one on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Finney Chapel, but what a thrill to step up to the Flentrop the following year. It still had that new-car smell. There were no combination devices at all. No one told me that the flat, thirty-note pedalboard would be tricky to get used to, that registering the organ alone would be an issue because some of the stopknobs were out of reach, or that playing a large organ with a sensitive wind system would be something to get used to. I just played.
The fiftieth anniversary of the dedication of that wonderful organ was observed last November, and I was thrilled to be there, gathering with old friends to celebrate a landmark instrument and hearing it with more experienced ears. Maybe the new car smell is gone, but it sure has held up well.
While I was a student there, I started working for John Leek, the curator of organs and harpsichords for the conservatory. I worked part time when school was in session, added the summer of 1977, and after I graduated I worked full time with him until 1984. John had an active organ maintenance business, and I was exposed to a wide variety of instruments with myriad different proprietary control systems. It is worth noting that before the widespread acceptance of solid-state systems, each builder made all their own parts. A glance at a black porcelain toe stud, and you would know who built the organ (Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner). A glance at a nickel-plated expression shoe with rubber buttons sticking out, and you would know who built the organ (Casavant). Blindfolded, hear the “ka-chunk” of the combination action, and you would know who built the organ (Austin). And speaking of expression pedals, a glance at a solid maple pedal with a curved top surface, and you would know who built the organ (again, Austin).
Organists and organbuilders grew to lament the homogeneity of pipe organ controls once many organ companies used Harris knobs, expression pedals from Organ Supply Industries, and solid-state systems by SSL/SSOS or Peterson. Fair enough. But remember that when Mr. Skinner or Mr. Austin were running their eponymous companies, they had hundreds of people working in their shops with all imaginable skill sets under one roof. Today, very few organ companies have more than twenty-five employees who would be spread pretty thin if they had to manufacture every part of every organ. Instead, we have specialty suppliers who manufacture and distribute a wide variety of useful parts. Think how much time it would take for a small shop with eight or ten people to make thirty toe studs for a large console.
Some of today’s smaller workshops have evolved specialties and are available to assist builders of new organs. There are companies that specialize in wiring console controls, building and restoring organ pipes, even a couple that work on reed pipes only, and the Organ Clearing House specializes in pipe organ logistics—the packing, loading, trucking, and hoisting of organs and their parts.
While working with John Leek, I had my first encounter with a Skinner remote combination action. It was a roomful of mystical clackety-bang machinery in a basement, a miracle to behold. Skinner started making them around 1912; Saint Thomas Church in New York City had one of the earliest ones. It was an electro-pneumatic, mechanical binary computer. Imagine the parishioner arriving at church in a horse-drawn carriage or a 1912 Cadillac and witnessing the organist operating that sophisticated machine, causing dozens of knobs to jump in or out at the touch of an ivory button.
John and I releathered that machine and recovered the rubber-cloth pneumatics that made the thing go. We were both learning, and it was a thrill to get it working like new again. It sure did take a lot of trips running up and down the stone stairs.
Off to the races
In the early 1990s I had a more dramatic encounter with such a machine when it was my job to install the first solid-state control system in the double organs (Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner) at Trinity Church in Boston. The rector and organist insisted that the organ would never miss a Sunday, so I purchased a four-manual console, made new stopjambs with identical knob layouts, made all the chamber wiring connections with cables with telephone connectors, and mounted the panels of the SSL system wired with their connectorized cables, adjacent to the chamber junction boards. We wired the console outputs (keyboards, pedalboard, stopknob, coupler tablets, pistons and toe studs, and expression stages) with connectorized cables, and wired corresponding connectorized cables to the junction boards in the basement room.
After the 6:00 p.m. service on Sunday evening, I breathed deeply and took a hack saw to the original console cable that contained around 500 conductors, and we were off to the races. We spent the week swapping out the consoles, plugging in all the new cables, making them neat with cable clamps, and with another deep breath, turned on the power and started testing things. We discovered that one of my people who had done a lot of the wiring had trouble distinguishing between the violet-with-blue/blue-with-violet pair (notes 41 and 42, e′′ and f′′) and many of them were reversed. I do not remember the exact number, but there were over 100 cables to check. The last glitch was the polarity of the expression machines. In those days, SSL systems had negative outputs for key actions, but positive outputs for stop actions. In Mr. Skinner’s organs, all outputs were positive, and all returns (grounds) were negative, so we had to separate the return wires for stop actions throughout the organ to correct the polarities. I do not remember the details, but we had the polarities of the expression motors reversed, and we had to replace a few smoky transistors.
Trinity Church has long offered lunch-time recitals on Fridays, and that week Brian Jones, organist at Trinity, would play the recital as he knew the organ well enough not to need a lot of practice time. I am sure we were picking up tools as he sat down to play.
Thirty-five years later, I cannot believe I had the nerve or energy to pull off that stunt, but to prove it, I saved an eighteen-inch piece of the original console cable complete with my hack saw marks. It has been in my office ever since to remind me of the immense challenge we faced and met that week.
Remembering all that as I write, I am reminded of a parallel story at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston, a massive four-manual organ with eight divisions and 240 ranks. I installed a new SSL system there, but since we were not restoring the console, it could stay in place, and as we finished each division, we could swap over without interrupting the use of the rest of the organ. When it was time to swap the console onto the new system, we could not manage completion in time for the usual Wednesday evening service, so while the entire organ was playable, there was no combination action, a lot of knobs for no pistons. Thomas Richner, the organist, scheduled music that he could register by hand without a lot of fancy changes, and two of us registered the postlude, Theodore Dubois’ Fiat Lux, figuring we could ad-lib it. After all, you can play that piece as a long crescendo. We started him out on a gentle sound and chuckled as the organ grew louder and louder, building to the impressive roar of full organ while Tom kept shouting, “louder, louder,” and we grabbed handfuls of stopknobs.
The first time there was a lightning storm in Boston after that job was finished, we learned that the crescendo and sforzando memories, complicated settings with sixty stages of crescendo memory and over 250 stop controls, were vulnerable. My sharp assistant Rhea memorized the setting, and whenever there was a storm, she would go straight to the church and reprogram it.
The cutting edge, a century ago
Wendy and I lived kitty-corner across Broadway from Grace Church in New York, New York, for over ten years. While we lived there, Taylor & Boody installed a grand four-manual instrument there—it was fun entertaining our friends from Virginia in evenings during their stay. The Skinner Organ Company installed Opus 707 at Grace Church in 1928. Ernest Mitchell, a great friend of Lynnwood Farnam, was organist there at the time, and I am sure Mitchell and Farnam spent many evenings together with the new organ. I am equally sure that because of their friendship, Farnam had significant input to the design of the console. Though the Skinner organ is long gone (the Taylor & Boody organ replaced a 1961 Schlicker), the original console is on display in Music Director Patrick Allen’s office. While it sports the elegant design of any Skinner console, it bristles with unusual ingenious controls. Since it was a double organ (Chancel and Gallery) with eleven divisions (counting the two-rank Echo above the crossing with Quintadena and Vox Humana), there are two rows of coupler tablets above the top keyboard. It was surely one of the most elaborate consoles built by the Skinner Organ Company, but one feature stands out for me, the programmable crescendo. What an ingenious concept for an organ console almost a century ago.
A drawer slides out from under the bottom keyboard to reveal an array of metal sockets, one for each stop, and a harness of wires with plugs attached, labeled with little paper rings (like the reinforcement stickers on that Holtkamp organ I described), each marked with the stage of the crescendo mechanism. The organist would sort out the wires and plug them into the stop sockets in the desired order. Shazam!
One piece of the original Skinner organ is still in use, the lowest twelve notes of the 32′ Open Wood Diapason, located in the rear gallery. While the Taylor & Boody organ was in process, the pipes and windchest were restored, a new wind supply was built, and the notes were wired as an extension of the new 16′ Open Diapason. The 32′ octave is at the opposite end of the building from the new organ, but the sound is omni-directional, and the effect is grand.
Ernest Skinner and Aristide Cavaillé-Coll were both great innovators of mechanical registration aids. Study the composition pedals above the pedalboard of the fantastic console at Saint-Sulpice in Paris for a lesson in the musical thinking of a mechanical genius. Remember that Cavaillé-Coll did not have electricity to work with. All of his brilliant inventions depended on mechanical and pneumatic actions, and his inventive mind was not limited to pipe organs. A website operated by the French government tells that Mr. Cavaillé-Coll invented the circular saw blade. How’s that for useful? I am waiting for the United States government to publish a website on the life and work of Ernest Skinner. I’d be happy to help writing.
