Thar she blows!
I know I share with many organbuilders the sense that the organ is alive. Stand inside an organ chamber when the blower is off and all is silent—unliving. Turn on the blower. The reservoirs fill, the swell shutters give a little twitch, and the instrument seems to quiver expectantly, ready to sound. We normally don’t notice air. We don’t bump into it when we walk. We don’t feel its resistance when we gesture with our hands. But we do notice it when it’s in motion—we call that wind. Reflecting on the nature of wind, we typically refer to blowing wind, as in “it’s blowing a gale out there.” But a sailor knows that the effect is often just the opposite. If there’s a low pressure cell up north, all the high pressure air south of us rushes by to fill the gap. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. Another interesting case is the classic sea breeze that occurs when coastal land is heated by the midday sun causing updrafts. You can’t have a vacuum without an enclosure, so when all that air rushes skyward, the cooler air over the water rushes ashore to take its place. Again, the wind is caused by air being drawn.
Wind n. 1a. Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air, parallel to or along the ground. b. A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan . . .1 The organ is all about wind—air in motion. Because the organ and the piano have similar keyboards, many people assume that they are a lot alike. In fact, they could hardly be more different. The tone of the piano is created by a hammer striking a metal string. The vibration of the string creates the sound, the length and tension of the string determine the pitch, and the impact of the hammer causes the attack. The fact that a great pianist can produce cascades of notes without the sensation of hammering is at the heart of the art—the art of both the instrument and the player. I’ve often marveled during piano performances when a scale or arpeggio gives the impression of falling water rather than hundreds of hammers hitting strings. Here the art surpasses the mechanical—or the mechanical enables the art.
In nature, wind is caused by air being drawn. Of course, the wind in a pipe organ emanates from a blowing device, usually a rotary blower. But when I play, I think it’s fun to imagine the air as being drawn out from the top of the organ’s pipes, originating in my body, leaving my fingertips to make the sound. That imagined sensation is the heart of the player’s phrasing. Remember your teacher encouraging you to breathe with the music? Once again the art surpasses the mechanical. The huge mechanical entity that is the pipe organ in effect vanishes, leaving only the player and the sound of the music.
The sound of the organ is produced by columns of air vibrating in the organ’s pipes—or in the case of a reed stop, by the vibration of a brass reed or tongue. The physical production of those sounds is analogous to the flute whose sound is produced by the player blowing across an open hole (like the top of a bottle), or a clarinet whose sound is produced by the vibrating reed. Whether you are vibrating a column of air by splitting a sheet of air against the edge of a hole or with a vibrating tongue, you need air in motion to do it.
We measure organ air pressure in inches using a manometer. In its simplest form, a manometer is a U-shaped tube filled with water so the level of the water is even on both sides of the tube (gravity does a good job of leveling). When you apply air pressure to one end of the tube, the water in that end is blown down forcing the other side up and you use a ruler to measure the difference. If an organbuilder forgets to bring a manometer to a job, he can make one using flexible plastic tubing as found in a fish tank, a rough piece of wood, and a few staples.
The other measurement we take of organ air is volume—considered as a factor of an amount of air in a specified period of time. In the case of a pipe organ it’s meaningless to say, for example, 1,000 cubic feet of air, because when described that way our thousand cubic feet is sitting still and won’t make a peep. Instead we say 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM), which describes a volume of air in motion. And, 1,000 CFM doesn’t mean much unless you also assign a pressure value. So you might purchase an organ blower that can produce 2,000 CFM at 4? WP. That would be adequate for an organ of about 25 stops with low wind pressure. If you needed 2,000 CFM at 10? WP, you would need a more powerful blower. Some organbuilders use the term windsick to describe an instrument in which the wind supply is not adequate for the job. Now you’re an expert.
I’m inspired to write about organ air by the engraving that hangs over my desk. It’s reproduced from L’Art du Facteur d’Orgues, the 18th-century French treatise on organbuilding written and illustrated by the good monk Dom Bedos de Celles—it depicts a large organ in cross-section. On the left side of the image, which is the back of the organ, there is a young gentleman working a set of three large manually operated multi-fold bellows. He walks down the row, pushing down each lever, in turn raising each bellows. The bellows are connected together with a tripping mechanism—when one nears empty, the next one starts to fall, and the young gentleman circles back around to fill the first again. He’s wearing a jacket with some 20 buttons, breeches that buckle at the knee, and stockings that cover his calves from the top of his buckled shoes.
Back then you couldn’t play a note on an organ without someone to pump. I imagine that there were plenty of very bored organ-pumpers. But remembering that mechanical or electric organ blowers are essentially a 20th-century invention—how many of us would have volunteered hours to pump while Buxtehude, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, or Widor was practicing? Maybe rival organists tried to infiltrate “enemy” organ lofts by embedding their choir boys in the other’s pumping squad: “What’s that Bach up to this week?”
The great Cavaillé-Coll organ in the church of St. Sulpice in Paris was built in 1862. It has about 100 stops—a very large organ by modern standards and downright huge for the days of hand-pumped organs. Charles-Marie Widor’s tenure as organist there started in 1870 and ended with his retirement in 1934 (he was hired as a temporary fill-in and never given a permanent appointment!), so we can assume that there was a magical Sunday when Widor played the organ for the first time supported by an electric blower. That must have been liberating for the organist.
When organs were pumped by hand, organists were acutely aware of how much wind they were using. The more stops you drew, the more air you used and the faster the pumper had to work. Surely more than one young gentleman quit in protest. Think of Bach’s pumpers dealing with those huge arpeggiated diminished chords midway through the Toccata in D Minor that start with bottom D of the pedalboard, the third biggest wind-consuming note of the organ. Imagine the master playing those soon-to-be famous chords with arms outstretched and head thrown back, reveling in the sonic experience, while the pumpers raced from bellows to bellows, trying to keep up with the demand: “Nice work,” he said, “here’s an extra ducat for your trouble.”
I have had personal experience with this phenomenon. At the time I graduated from Oberlin College I was working with an organbuilder in Ohio named Jan Leek, a wonderful man who was trained in the Netherlands and who shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with me. We restored a 19th-century organ in a church in Bethlehem, Ohio—a project that included the restoration of the original hand-pumping equipment. Garth Peacock, a member of Oberlin’s organ faculty, played the dedication recital, which included some pieces and a hymn to be played with the organ pumped by hand—and I was the pumper. The pump handle stuck out of the right-hand side of the organ case where pumper and player could see each other. As we got into the hymn, Peacock caught my eye and winked. He drew stop after stop, filled in manual chords, then added doubling in the pedals, using all the wind he could, chuckling as I flailed the pump handle up and down. I know he did it on purpose.
My other favorite organ-pumping story happened after I completed the restoration of the 1868 E. & G. G. Hook organ (Opus 466) for the Follen Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. That project also included the restoration of the hand-pumping gear, and more than one parishioner felt clever commenting that the organ could be played even during a power failure. And sure enough, one of the first times the restored organ was played in concert there was a power failure and someone from the audience volunteered to go forth and pump.
Those who know me well—and probably some casual acquaintances—know that I love the epic series of novels about the brilliant captains of the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, especially captains Horatio Hornblower (written by C. S. Forester) and Jack Aubrey (written by Patrick O’Brian). Many a turnpike toll-taker has chuckled as my lowering car window emits a hearty “belay there” (audio books have accompanied me for tens of thousands of miles of pipe organ adventuring). Both epics are full of musical allusions, such as when Captain Hornblower rounds Cape Horn in a gale after lengthy adventures in the Pacific, and the groaning of the timbers of his ship Lydia “swelled into a volume of sound comparable to that of an organ in a church.”2
Captain Jack Aubrey, an accomplished amateur violinist as well as a brilliant fighting sea captain, shared hundreds of evenings making music with his closest friend, the equally able cellist and ship’s surgeon (and prolific intelligence agent) Stephen Maturin while traveling through 360º of longitude and twenty novels. Their evening concerts (typically enhanced with toasted cheese and marsala) pepper the active story with allegory while giving the reader a chance to understand the musical tastes of the day. It’s a delight to read how these determined warriors reveled in playing chamber music or improvising on favorite melodies as they sail around the world. On several occasions they discuss the effect of all that damp salt air on their instruments, and Jack Aubrey is smart enough to leave his precious Amati violin at home, distinguishing it from his seagoing fiddle.
In Post Captain, the second book of the series, Captain Aubrey returns to shore at a dramatic and complicated moment in his life. Heavily in debt, badly wounded after a violent sea battle, and thrilled with his new promotion to post-captain as a result of his victory, he is confined to the Duchy of the Savoy in London, a sanctuary where debtors were protected from arrest. After learning the boundaries of the Savoy from his innkeeper, he goes out walking:
Wandering out, he came to the back of the chapel: an organ was playing inside, a sweet, light-footed organ hunting a fugue through its charming complexities. He circled the railings to come to the door, but he had scarcely found it, opened it and settled himself in a pew before the whole elaborate structure collapsed in a dying wheeze and a thick boy crept from a hole under the loft and clashed down the aisle, whistling. It was a strong disappointment, the sudden breaking of a delightful tension, like being dismasted under full sail.
“What a disappointment, sir,” he said to the organist, who had emerged into the dim light. “I had so hoped you would bring it to a close.”
“Alas, I have no wind,” said the organist, an elderly parson. “That chuff lad has blown his hour, and no power on earth will keep him in. But I am glad you liked the organ—it is a Father Smith.3 A musician, sir?”
“Oh, the merest dilettante, sir; but I should be happy to blow for you, if you choose to go on. It would be a sad shame to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind.”
“Should you, indeed? You are very good sir. Let me show you the handle—you understand these things, I am sure . . . ”
So Jack pumped and the music wound away and away, the separate strands following one another in baroque flights and twirls until at last they came together and ran to the final magnificence . . . ”4
The next day while writing a letter to Stephen to share the news of his promotion, Captain Aubrey recognized the depth of his humor:
. . . in the Savoy chapel I said the finest thing in my life. The parson was playing a Handel fugue, the organ-boy deserted his post, and I said “it would be a pity to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind,” and blew for him. It was the wittiest thing! I did not smoke it entirely all at once, however, only after I had been pumping for some time; and then I could hardly keep from laughing aloud. It may be that post-captains are a very witty set of men, and that I am coming to it.5
That reminds me of E. Power Biggs’s quip after recording Handel’s organ concerti in the 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the instrument that Handel played in St. James’ Church, Great Packington, Warwickshire, when he recalled “handling the handle Handel handled.” I’m long-winded today. I’ve got lots more to say about organ wind, and I’m running out of space. So join me here next month for Thar she blows—some more.
